Here's a more in-depth explanation of what I mean. When the formulas for Quantum Physics were discovered a century ago, they made little sense. You could not t

Here's a more in-depth explanation of what I mean. When the formulas for Quantum Physics were discovered a century ago, they made little sense. You could not think of a photon or an electron, for instance, as being a "little billiard ball" anymore, but neither it was a classical wave as in sound waves. For instance, the well-known double slit experiment shown that every single electron passes through both slits (otherwise there wouldn't be an interference pattern on the other side) but confusingly, when we "measure" the electron's position—that is, when any kind of sensor interacts with it—we only find it in one position. The result of the measurement is not deterministic, meaning there is a probability distribution on where we will find the electron, and it "prunes" any other path that was not measured, changing the results of the experiment, with respect to not measuring its position. This puzzled the scientists for the longest time. After a century of scientific inquiry, what seems to be the case (to many physicists and to me—although IANAP) is that what we call "electron" is only an emergent phenomenon. What really exists underneath is the wave of "amplitude" (for lack of a better term) propagating through spacetime. Moreover, what's really real is not a single wave of amplitude for a single electron, but an amplitude distribution in the exponentially huge space of all possible waves / particles in the entire universe ("configurations"). A single particle with a definite position and momentum is not "real", it's just a partial, approximate multiplicative factor in this amplitude distribution. That is, in the space of all configurations (a huge-dimensional mathematical space) the amplitude distribution may approximately factor (multiplicatively) into 1. a particle being here and moving this way, and 2. everything else. When that happens, then we see it as a particle being definitely there and we can call it "particle A". But A has no physical reality, it's just an aspect of the amplitude distribution, and so may "disappear" and reappear in other places as the complex amplitude distribution evolves over time. This explanation (or "interpretation") that gives physical reality to the amplitude distribution is called Decoherence and is the modern take on Everett's Many Worlds. It explains almost all observables, without introducing ill-defined, non mathematical concepts like a waveform collapse—which incidentally will not stand the test of bigger and bigger quantum systems, hence my comment. The only observable which is still not explained are the Born probabilities. But they are likely to be a byproduct of another emergent system, that which we call "consciousness". For example, when the amplitude distribution does not factor anymore into A times everything else, but there is A_1 going left and A_2 going right, why do I find myself in one of those two sub-distributions with probability that depends on the sum of the squares of the amplitudes of each wave? Currently there is no physical explanation for it. The formulas don't event mention "you", obviously. It's possible that if/when we find out what consciousness is (what "you" is), it will also be apparent why the Born probabilities appear as they do. If anybody is interested in more of this, or if my explanation was lacking (very likely), I highly recommend The Quantum Physics Sequence by Eliezer Yudkowsky: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hc9Eg6erp6hk9bWhn/the-quantum-physics-sequence https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hc9Eg6erp6hk9bWhn/the-quantu...