Talk:Many-minds interpretation

message: The article says: "However Albert and Loewer suggest that the mental does not supervene on the physical, because individual minds have trans-temporal identity of their own. The mind selects one of these identities to be its non-random reality, while the universe itself is unaffected. The process for selection of a single state remains unexplained. This is particularly problematic because it is not clear how different observers would thus end up agreeing on measurements, which happens all the time here in the real world. There is assumed to be a sort of feedback between the mental process that leads to selection and the universal wavefunction, thereby effecting other mental states as a matter of course. In order to make the system work, the "mind" must be separate from the body, an old duality of philosophy to replace the new one of quantum mechanics.  In general this interpretation has received little attention, largely for this last reason."
I challenge the objection that "different observers ... end up agreeing on measurements ... all the time here in the real world"!  It seems that, in contrast to the most basic predefined facts which are agreed to in advance, many practical observations (and interpretations of observations) differ from each other somewhat and are not perfectly repeatable.  Some inconsistency seems to be the rule.  We tend to dismiss this as the result of randomness, noise, measurement errors, etc.  Those things seem real enough, but may not be the whole story.  Possibly a component of the inconsistency is more fundamental, a result of different minds (and bodies, and measurement devices, and measured systems) interacting and themselves changing over time, further confounding agreement.  The many minds interpretation may suggest why "observer bias" or "differences of opinion" seem inevitable in so many areas.  Can we actually completely agree on anything, even just with ourselves over time?  This question also applies to the many minds interpretation itself, which might just offer the only way out.  --Parsiferon 01:44, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Do we really agree on observations? 

message: The following statement from The central problems section is definitely out of place here.
:At the primary pragmatic level orthodox QT deals with the problem of causation by using the facts that: choices are causally efficacious in the physical world independently of their causal roots and that those causal roots are, in principle, untracible solely in the physical world. Hence we are both entitled to, and required to, take these choices as primary variables, whose physical effects are specified, but whose origins must, to the extent that they can be traced, involve also non-physical variables. If this pragmatic structure is imbeded in an objective one-mind-per-person ontology then the rules must be specified that fix the particularness of each person's choices.
I am removing it, because regardless of whether it means anything or not, doesn't address what is the central problem addressd by many-worlds or many minds.
--CSTAR 16:20, 15 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  Indeed the quote is meaningful, and regardless whether one agrees with it or not, proposes as an empirical problem the connetcion between observation and mind. Clear. I made  some minor copyedits with the introductory sentence. --CSTAR 22:05, 15 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hermeneutics and the central problems

message: The concept was first introduced in 1970 by H. Dieter Zeh
The idea of many minds was suggested early on by Zeh in 1995.
The article is completely inconsistent about the date at which Zeh started many minds.  A reference would help -- even one!!!
--Michael C Price 10:43, 15 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Zeh dates 

message: I've temporarily moved some text here for clarification:
:One problem with [Everett's] approach is that it is not clear how one is to maintain a constant view of the universe given that macrorealm selection has to be random in order to maintain the statistical nature of QM. That is, if the macrorealm selection is entirely random, no consistent history should exist, the outcomes of past actions would have only minor influence on current ones. Everett never addressed this problem in any depth, although there have been a number of attempts since. Many-minds is one such attempt.
First, wouldn't a criticism of Everett's theory be better placed in its own article?  Second, I am not clear what the alleged deficiency of Everett's MWI refers to.  Is that we see subjective indeterminancy whilst the equations are deterministic, or is it that you don't see how the Born probability law emerges, or is it how come we have a consistent memory of the past?  All of these issues were addressed by Everett and elaborated on by his sucessors.  Of course not everyone is happy with the answers he gives, but that is true of most aspects of most interpretations of quantum theory. --Michael C. Price talk 21:46, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The basic reason for mentioning this here is that the reader is otherwise left without any reason for many-minds even existing.The argument is one of the primary ones from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, you can read it here, under 6. There are other problems that could be mentioned as well, but this one is the most "focused" because one proposed solution is to move the problem out of physics and into evolutionary theory -- weak IMHO. You're right, these objections have been addressed, but it definitely wasn't Everett who did it, most of the explanations date into the 1980s, which is the same time frame as many-minds. Maury 13:24, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi Maury, thanks for removing my duplicated paragraph (more tired than I realised!).  Everett definitely did address the three issues outlined above in his original 1957 paper; whether and how much elaboration it requires, within the MWI framework, is a matter of opinion.  Thanks for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy link (still digesting it); they make the interesting point that there are really two, quite different MMI versions, which is the impression I get as well. --Michael C. Price talk 15:30, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Clarification required