[ExI] Bell's Inequality

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Wed, Nov 30, 2016 at 5:56 PM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> But experiments do have only one outcome, as experienced and observed by
> the experimenters.  Any alternate worlds are immeasurable and may as well
> not exist.
>

### If you were to say that only the observed experimental outcomes exist,
then you imply there is something qualitatively different between the part
of the wavefunction we do experience and the parts that we don't. What is
this je ne sais quoi that makes the world you see real but collapses all
the other worlds predicted by QM into the realm of imagination? There is no
physical entity known that is capable of this feat AFAIK.

But the other worlds actually *are* measurable - we can calculate from
first principles the distribution of outcomes for increasingly more complex
quantum systems, and when we probe parts of the distribution in repeated
experiments, the predictions tend to agree with outcomes to 7 significant
digits or so. So, we can't "see" the alternate worlds but sure we can
measure them.

There is another wrinkle for the Copenhagen believers - imagine that you
can ab initio calculate the distribution of outcomes in an experiment that
generates conscious observers with some probability, let's say 1/2. You do
the experiment repeatedly, and indeed in 1/2 of the experimental runs you
generate observers and verify they are conscious by talking to them. In the
other half of experiments you do not generate observers, just inanimate
assemblages of matter.

As a Copenhagener you believe that your conscious observation of the
experiment collapses the wave function, making one of the two possible
outcomes real. So by observing a conscious observer you make him real and
consign the inanimate outcome to the never-happened not-my-problem heap. By
the same token, by observing the inanimate outcome you make it real and
consign the conscious observer to the quantum mists.

But will the imaginary conscious observers you generate by the dozen in
half of your experiments take their ghostly status lying down? What if they
insist on making their branch of the wave function real? Who is gonna stop
them? They are conscious and predicted by the wave function, not just
figments of our imagination. Sure you can't see them but then that's no
reason to deny their existence. Only the wave function decides what is
potentially real and what is not. If observers sit on both sides of the
QM-predicted outcomes, then even a Copenhagener would be forced to admit
both outcomes are real.

Rafal
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