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Suekdccia
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- What is von Neumann's branching of possible worlds?
In the Many Worlds Interpretation's wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation), it says, at the "Reception" part:
"(...) On the other hand, the same derogatory qualification "many words" is often applied to MWI by its critics, who see it as a word game which obfuscates rather than clarifies by confounding the von Neumann branching of possible worlds with the Schrödinger parallelism of many worlds in superposition"
I have not been able to find anything meaningful about "von Neumann branching of possible worlds". Do you know what does this mean?
Is it referring to von Neumann's proposal that a "splitting" exists in the mind of the conscious observers every time a measurement is made (similarly to what Many Minds Interpretation proposes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-minds_interpretation)?
(This is indicated in Gary Drescher's book "Good and Real: Demystifying Paradoxes from Physics to Ethics":
"To accommodate his unwillingness to accept a splitting of mind, von Neumann denied the entire splitting of the physical world, postulating instead a quantum collapse at just the point where conscious observation occurs")
"(...) On the other hand, the same derogatory qualification "many words" is often applied to MWI by its critics, who see it as a word game which obfuscates rather than clarifies by confounding the von Neumann branching of possible worlds with the Schrödinger parallelism of many worlds in superposition"
I have not been able to find anything meaningful about "von Neumann branching of possible worlds". Do you know what does this mean?
Is it referring to von Neumann's proposal that a "splitting" exists in the mind of the conscious observers every time a measurement is made (similarly to what Many Minds Interpretation proposes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-minds_interpretation)?
(This is indicated in Gary Drescher's book "Good and Real: Demystifying Paradoxes from Physics to Ethics":
"To accommodate his unwillingness to accept a splitting of mind, von Neumann denied the entire splitting of the physical world, postulating instead a quantum collapse at just the point where conscious observation occurs")