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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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal · Emily Adlam & David Wallace: The Quantum Interpretation That Divides Physicists · 20 Jul 2026 podcast

So the place where I slightly disagree, Kurt, is it's not that I think these epistemological problems are slightly less problematic than Emily thinks they are.

I think these epistemological problems are solvable in a completely satisfactory way with no residue.

I'm entirely happy with their solution inside Everett.

Arguing for that was the main theme of an earlier phase of my intellectual life.

what I was saying in this context is that even persuade me that what I see as satisfactory philosophical solutions here don't work.

Um, I am much more inclined to think, well, we need to think harder about the philosophical issues of epistemology and probability so that we can work out how we can solve them inside the formalism than, um,

to think we should abandon that formalism.

And to some extent, I mean, at that level, it becomes inevitably inconclusive.

I mean, there's a matter of one's sort of priors as to what's likely to break, which is kind of what we're talking about.

There's also a matter of division of labor.

I mean, my, and this is a disagreement between me and Emily, my feeling is even if it were true that we need to make large and thoroughgoing modifications of the formalism of quantum mechanics,

This is not something within the skill set of the typical, even highly technically minded philosopher of physics.

So in terms of what do philosophers have to contribute to the measurement problem, it's more likely to be in the space of exploring the

somewhat more philosophical moves either at emily's kind of minor modification quasi-relational explorations or um the more sort of flat flatly let's um uh let's let's explore everett but i don't want to give the impression that i think these are profoundly difficult problems that we don't know how to solve but we can expect to be able to solve i think they're solved just fine thanks

Perhaps it's more interesting to talk about what's different between these two ways of doing things.

There is an enormous difference, in my view, between approaches which lead to at least quasi-tractable tests of the return of quantum mechanics and theories that are intended to be modifications of the formalism of quantum mechanics in ways that are undetectable.

So if you think about dynamical collapse theories where, you know, the collapse of the wave function, Schrodinger's cap resolving into a live or dead but not both, is something that's really supposed to happen as a matter of microdynamics.

It's

premature and i think not really the point to look at those theories and say well what would the world be like if they're fundamentally true that you want to think of those theories as ways of parameterizing the space of what it what of what claps might look like if one of these theories turns out to be right experimentally that's a crack opened into new physics that would probably look different from anything we can imagine the point of those of those theories in the forms we have now is

is to let us do experiments or work out what experiments we could do and try to test those theories.

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