Monday 22 August 2016

Are quantum decoherence and Everettian approaches to the measurement problem necessarily distinct?


As I understand it, there is a large contingent of physicists who believe that the measurement problem is "solved" by decoherence, without, for example, needing to postulate the existence of "many worlds." Yet at the same time my understanding is that in the decoherence picture there is only unitary evolution of the wave function, and that while the appearance of collapse is explained, the global superposition of states still in fact exists, and whether or not multiple states within the universal wave function observe the same appearance of collapse (but to different eigenvalues) is a question that is left completely unaddressed.


Therefore my reading of the decoherence picture is that it is virtually identical to an Everettian approach, except that it purposefully ignores an obvious interpretational consequence of its description. Is this true, or do decoherence-based approaches somehow argue that there really is only a unique observer within the universal wave function that observes a collapse to unique eigenvalues, and that there is some form of symmetry breaking that allows this to happen at the expense of all the other potentially conscious components of the universal wave function?




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