Quantum Wildlife

David Wallace wrote an article about reductionism, emergence, and worlds in the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics that’s enlightening and more accessible than his earlier writings:

Decoherence and Ontology (or: How I learned to stop worrying and love FAPP)

Ultimately, though, that a theory of the world is “unintuitive” is no argument
against it, provided it can be cleanly described in mathematical language. Our
intuitions about what is “reasonable” or “imaginable” were designed to aid our
ancestors on the savannahs of Africa, and the Universe is not obliged to conform
to them.

I especially enjoyed figure 2 and footnote 14.

Wallace also has a latest update on the program to derive Born probabilities from decision theory:

A formal proof of the Born rule from decision-theoretic assumptions

I tend to think of Wallace’s as the most orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics, it’s just that people don’t know it yet.

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