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Re:Not even wrong: Why does nobody like pilot-wave theory? [... by n4r9 on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @05:27AM (#14956003)
In short the problem is that there's no explanation for why you only experience a single branch, and no explanation of why the probabilities associated with those branches are given by the Born rule.

Although there are many versions of MWI, the general claim is that a single axiom (a unitarily evolving wavefunction) is sufficient to explain our observations of the universe. Without getting into what it means to "explain" something, it seems fair to demand that a sufficiently intelligent agent with no prior knowledge of our physics should be able to predict what the theory says about their future observations. However no one would be able to make any experimental predictions based on the above axiom. There's nothing there to suggest that if the agent becomes entangled with a quantum system then they would only experience a single branch of the entanglement. Even if you add that in, there's nothing to suggest which branch the agent will experience (this is roughly the preferred basis problem). Even if you add that in, there's nothing to suggest with what probability the agent will experience that branch.

You could always add in the above as additional axioms. You could postulate some physical content to the Born-rule, or to something weaker from which to deduce the Born rule. But this would break the illusion that MWI requires fewer axioms. Instead, a great deal of energy has been expended into deducing the Born rule purely from that single axiom. There have been many very clever attempts at this, but none convincing enough to settle the matter.

Re:Not even wrong: Why does nobody like pilot-wave theory? [... by AgentME on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @02:50PM (#14961194)
>there's no explanation for why you only experience a single branch

Isn't that obvious given that the particles of your brain can't interact with the particles of your brain in physically-different branches?

>it seems fair to demand that a sufficiently intelligent agent with no prior knowledge of our physics should be able to predict what the theory says about their future observations. ... Even if you add that in, there's nothing to suggest which branch the agent will experience

Don't you get that same problem with other interpretations that instead assume interactions can have a truly random result on some probability distribution?

Re:Not even wrong: Why does nobody like pilot-wave theory? [... by n4r9 on Thursday August 10, 2017 @06:19AM (#14978218)
> Isn't that obvious...

Not immediately obvious to me. An agent could calculate the entangled state of themselves (including brain particles), the system and the measuring apparatus. This overall entangled state would in principle be pure, although the agent's own reduced state would be in a superposition which could be written in one of an infinite number of ways. What the agent should expect to experience in this situation is not at all clear, to me.

> Don't you get that same problem with other interpretations...

Most other interpretations have an explicit postulate relating physical probabilities to parts of the mathematical formalism. The agent can use this to make predictions about future observations.