Related papers: Branch-counting in the Everett Interpretation of q…
Probabilities may be subjective or objective; we are concerned with both kinds of probability, and the relationship between them. The fundamental theory of objective probability is quantum mechanics: it is argued that neither Bohr's…
I argue that the Oxford school Everett interpretation is internally incoherent, because we cannot claim that in an Everettian universe the kinds of reasoning we have used to arrive at our beliefs about quantum mechanics would lead us to…
The interpretation of the squared norm as probability and the apparent stochastic nature of observation in quantum mechanics are derived from the strong law of large numbers and the algebraic properties of infinite sequences of simultaneous…
The subjective Bayesian interpretation of probability asserts that the rules of the probability calculus follow from the normative principle of Dutch-book coherence: A decision-making agent should not assign probabilities such that a series…
I provide a simple derivation of the Born rule as giving a classical probability, that is, the ratio of the measure of favorable states of the system to the measure of its total possible states. In classical systems, the probability is due…
The predictions of quantum mechanics are probabilistic. Quantum probabilities are extracted using a postulate of the theory called the Born rule, the status of which is central to the "measurement problem" of quantum mechanics. Efforts to…
I propose a new class of interpretations, {\it real world interpretations}, of the quantum theory of closed systems. These interpretations postulate a preferred factorization of Hilbert space and preferred projective measurements on one…
Everett's interpretation of quantum mechanics was proposed to avoid problems inherent in the prevailing interpretational frame. It assumes that quantum mechanics can be applied to any system and that the state vector always evolves…
At present, there are two possible, and equally plausible, explanations for the physics of quantum measurement. The first explanation, known as the many-worlds interpretation, does not require any modification of quantum mechanics, and…
In recent papers, Zurek has objected to the decision-theoretic approach of Deutsch and Wallace to deriving the Born rule for quantum probabilities on the grounds that it courts circularity. Deutsch and Wallace assume that the many worlds…
It is often objected that the Everett interpretation of QM cannot make sense of quantum probabilities, in one or both of two ways: either it can't make sense of probability at all, or it can't explain why probability should be governed by…
Modal interpretations have the ambition to construe quantum mechanics as an objective, man-independent description of physical reality. Their second leading idea is probabilism: quantum mechanics does not completely fix physical reality but…
A persistent focus on the concept of emergence as a core element of the scientific method allows a clean separation, insofar as this is possible, of the physical and philosophical aspects of the problem of outcomes in quantum mechanics. The…
We show that it is possible to explain the quantum measurement process within the framework of quantum mechanics without any additional postulates. The key concept of the theory is decoherence, which appears as an inherent characteristic of…
The inherent difficulty in talking about quantum decoherence in the context of quantum cosmology is that decoherence requires subsystems, and cosmology is the study of the whole Universe. Consistent histories gave a possible answer to this…
Attempts to derive the Born rule, either in the Many Worlds or Copenhagen interpretation, are unsatisfactory for systems with only a finite number of degrees of freedom. In the case of Many Worlds this is a serious problem, since its goal…
Decoherent histories quantum theory is reformulated with the assumption that there is one "real" fine-grained history, specified in a preferred complete set of sum-over-histories variables. This real history is described by embedding it in…
An Everett (`Many Worlds') interpretation of quantum mechanics due to Saunders and Zurek is presented in detail. This is used to give a physical description of the process of a quantum computation. Objections to such an understanding are…
Traditional interpretations of quantum theory in terms of wave function collapse are particularly unappealing when considering the universe as a whole, where there is no clean separation between classical observer and quantum system and…
At the time of publication of H. Everett's Relative-State Formulation (1957) and DeWitt's Many-Worlds Interpretation (1970), quantum mechanics was available in a more modern and adequate version than the one used by these authors. We show…