31 ms·
I just had a funny thought. I don't know if it makes any sense, but it's funny to think about it. This is all made with my tongue firmly in my cheek, I don't kn
by mikk14 7y ago
I just had a funny thought. I don't know if it makes any sense, but it's funny to think about it. This is all made with my tongue firmly in my cheek, I don't know nearly enough about the topic to have any sort of confidence on what follows, so hold your downvotes :-)
Let's assume MWI is correct. This means that, as far as I understand, the Schrodinger equation imposes that for each quantum event there is a forking in two worlds: one per possible state (cat alive/dead). The implication is that there are (infinitely) many world branches that go from the beginning to the end of time. Since there is no collapse, each of these branches must be superdeterministic by definition: that's how we picked the branch, we identified a sequence of forks in the Schrodinger equation by picking the result.
"I" can live only in one of these branches: there are infinitely many "I"s, but the one I am in right now is one of them. I'll be in my branch until I die (many other "I"s will branch off me). Since every "I" lives on a branch, every "I" experiences the universe as superdeterministic. Thus, if we assume MWI is correct, the result for any possible "I" is indistinguishable from superdeterminism.
It gets funnier. If what I said it is true, MWI and superdeterminism are indistinguishable. However, one presupposes the creation of branches, while the other does not. Thus one is more parsimonious than the other, and should be preferred. Or, in other worlds, by assuming MWI is true, we prove that it is false and that superdeterminism is true.
- AgentME 7y agoI believe your understanding of MWI is close enough, but I don't think your use of "superdeterminism" is correct. Superdeterminism is an attempt to give a local explanation for seemingly-non-local quantum phenomena. MWI is a specific local explanation for quantum phenomena, so there's no reason to add in a superdeterministic explanation for non-local phenomena, because there are no non-local phenomena in MWI that need any explaining away. I think you might be slightly mixing up superdeterminism with determinism (which is compatible with MWI).
- mikk14 7y agoFair enough! My defense would be that, given that we picked a given branch from Big Bang to end-of-time, technically we picked a branch that had encoded all results of all forkings in the beginning, which is my understanding of superdeterminism. But as I said, I know too little about this to marry any opinion.