Monday, July 10, 2017

The main problem of MWI is the concept of probability


Now it is my turn to present the counter arguments against many worlds. All known derivations of Born rule in MWI have (documented) issues of circularity: in the derivation the Born rule is injected in some form or another. However the problem is deeper: there is no good way to define probability in MWI.

Probability can be defined either in the frequentist approach as limit of frequency for large trial numbers, or subjectively as information update in the Bayesian approach. Both those approaches are making the same predictions. 

It is generally assumed by all MWI supporters that branch counting leads to incorrect predictions and because of this the focused is changed on subjective probabilities and the "apparent emergence" of Born rule. However this implicitly breaks the frequentist-subjective probability relationship. The only way one can use the frequentist approach is by using branch counting. Let's have a simple example.

Suppose you work at a factory which makes fair (quantum) coins which land 50% up and 50% down. Your job is quality assurance and you are tasked with finding the defective coins. Can you do your job in a MWI quantum universe? The only thing you can do is to flip the coin many times and see if it lands about 50% up and 50% down. For a fair coin there is no issue. However for a biased coin (say 80%-20%) you get the very same outcomes as in the case of the fair coins and you cannot do your job.



There is only one way to fix the problem: consider that the world does not split in 2 up and down branches, but say in 1 million up and 1 million down branches. In this case you can think that in the unfair case the world splits in 1.6 million up worlds, and 400 thousand down worlds. This would fix the concept of probability in MWI restoring the link between frequentist and subjective probabilities, but this is not what MWI supporters claim. Plus, this has problems of its own with irrational numbers and the solution is only approximate to some limit of precision which can be refuted by any experiment run long enough.

So to boil the problem down, in MWI there is no outcome difference in case of a fair coin versus an unfair coin toss: in both cases you get an "up world" and a "down world". Repeating the coin toss any number of times does not change the nature of the problem in any way. Physics is an experimental science and we test the validity of the theories against experiments. Discarding branch counting in MWI is simply unscientific

Now in the last post Per argued for MWI. I asked him to show what would happen if we flip a fair and an unfair coin three times to simply run through his argument on an elementary example and not hid behind general equations. After some back and forth, Per computed the distribution \(\rho\) in the fair and unfair case (to match quantum mechanics predictions) but the point is that \(\rho\) must arise out of the relative frequencies and not be computed by hand. Because the relative frequencies are identical in the two cases \(\rho\) must be injected by a different mechanism. His computation of \(\rho\) is the point where circularity is introduced in the explanation. If you look back in his post, this comes from his equation 5 which is derived from equation 3. Equation 3 assumes Born rule and is the root cause of circularity in his argument. Per's equation 7 recovers the Born rule in the limit case after assuming Born rule in equation 3 - q.e.d.