David Wallace

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1,940 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard May 2025 last heard 20 Jul

David Wallace’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal · David Wallace: Why Many Worlds Is the Only Consistent Interpretation · 29 May 2025 podcast

is something that applies to alternative possibilities or where only one thing can happen.

And at a slightly more detailed level, probability seems to emerge ultimately because of some fundamental indeterminism or because of some relevant ignorance of initial conditions.

Um and there's no indeterminism in Everett and there's no not at the fundamental level and there's no relevant ignorance of initial conditions, so goes this objection, we just don't understand how there could possibly be probability.

in a theory of difference.

That's that that th th that so that's how I put the case in the other direction.

So different people have quite different kind of starting points here.

Um I mean as a small like personal story on this, uh a lot of my work in the

early mid two thousands was about these decision theory approaches to quantum mechanics, to Everettian probability.

And I got invited at various points to give talks to kind of quantum information groups, quantum foundation groups, mostly talk to physicists on these ideas.

And I found it was quite difficult to get physicists to be e physicists even who are sympathetic to many worlds theory, to be concerned in the first place that there was any problem of understanding why mod squared amplitude was probability.

And over a w a period of time practising giving talks of that kind to that audience, I got better at trying to persuade them in the first half of the talk.

That there was a problem.

only to spend the second half of the talk persuading them that after all there wasn't a problem.

And eventually it dawned on me there was a quicker way to get to the same solution.

Um so I started to sort of think it was perhaps less useful use of my time to, you know, confuse and then unconfuse physicists if they weren't very worried about the probability problem in the first place.

But but philosophers are very, very worried about the probability problem.

So certainly internal to philosophy, this is

Very hotly contested.

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