Comment by mitthrowaway2
12 hours ago
But we're not in one of them. We're in all of them. Yours is a misunderstanding of how it feels to be in a quantum superposition. There's no component of the wave function in which Schrodinger's cat experiences anything other than being alive or being dead. There's no component in which it feels like it's in some ghostly combination of both outcomes. Both components of the wave function exist in superposition, and to the extent that they are decoherent, they do not interact and do not even notice that they have company. I don't mean this only as an academic statement; it's also true of you and me, at this very moment.
It's a bit like:
"Doc, I feel pain in my toe."
"No, sorry, the math says you don't."
"Okay, but like... I do."
"Sorry, you're just not good at accepting math!"
Not a perfect analogy, of course, but people have competing intuitions of what to do when the map fails to match the territory. MWI abandons the latter, most prefer the former.
If that isn't absurd, then I don't know what is.
I think the alternatives would be more absurd:
- That humans can't be put into quantum superpositions, or
- That a human being in a quantum superposition of two states A and B would feel at all to that human like being in a quantum superposition of two states A and B, when neither of those states is "a human feeling like they're in a superposition of two states A and B".
Follow this to its conclusion, and you end up with a superposition of A and B meaning: "the universe is in a superposition, containing a component where a human believes that they're in state A, and a component where a human believes that they're in state B. Within both branches, the human thinks their wavefunction collapsed in that state". This is exactly the way that all interpretations of QM already understand things to work with particles in superpositions.
There's the handwaving.