Emily Adlam
speaker
1,263 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 20 Jul
Emily Adlam’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The thought is that in an Everett-style universe, if you take these sort of barbaric branches seriously, then perhaps the Dutch book argument should not have the same force because you could act in this irrational way and then there could be just some weird freak event and you'll be given...
You won't lose money, even though you technically should, given the way the bet was set up.
And the thought is that if you don't have some prior reason for ruling out that kind of possibility or seeing it as very unlikely or having a reason to disregard it, then you don't get to use these constraints of rationality and then you can't use them to constrain the branch weights in a way that would give an argument for the probabilistic treatment of them.
Yeah, I think this comes down to a question about what sort of justifies the use of idealizations of various kinds.
And I think in the background of this argument is I thought that what justifies the use of idealization is that with high probability, what really happens is going to be like close to what the idealization suggests.
And so the worry is that if you don't have that probabilistic concept sort of in at the get go, then you don't have a good reason to think the idealization is telling you anything useful and so you shouldn't be using it.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a real sense in which the branching structure is...
can be extracted out in a way that doesn't necessarily depend on an idealization but then there's a question about whether it can be given any particular kind of interpretation in terms of what we should expect to experience or see and so i think uh in some sense those those two objections are closely connected to each other they're both trying to understand to what extent are we justified in interpreting this mathematical structure in a certain way yeah okay
Yeah, and I think there's a central core of a good idea in cubism because I think it's based on the observation that quantum mechanics is a formalism that we have designed for ourselves to use in certain contexts.
And of course, that's true.
One should take that into account when thinking about quantum mechanics.
I think cubism just...
takes it to an extreme that becomes incoherent.
You know, I think the case I like to think about, and a central commitment of cubism is that two different observers can assign different quantum states to the same system and neither of them can ever be judged right or wrong.
And in particular, two different observers, there's no restrictions on that, so they can assign orthogonal states to the same system and neither of them can be right or wrong.
And so if you imagine a situation where you and I assign different states to the system, you might think we could just measure the system and find out who's right.
The cubists can't allow that that procedure will allow us to determine who was right.
So either they have to say it's impossible for us to talk to each other and find out what the measurement said.
So that leads down the route of all these intersubjectivity problems.
The alternative is to say that we can do the measurement and we can both share the results, but we're just not allowed to use the result of the measurement to conclude anything about what the correct state of the system was.
Showing 161–180 of 1,263 · page 9 of 64
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