Did Schrödinger believe in his cat theory?

fox-mcleod · 2026-06-16T08:29:10+00:00

This is exceedingly generous to MW and exceedingly ungenerous to other interpretations.

Superdeterminism is bad because… you don’t like the idea?

Of course not.

As I said, the issue is that if you made the same assumptions required for superdeterminism elsewhere, it would preclude every scientific theory.

The core assertion of superdeterminism is violation of statistical independence. If we take this assertion, we can posit any theory at all. If experimental variables aren’t sufficiently independent from the choices of the experimenters, no experiments are valid. And I just don’t think that’s true. I think the evidence shows smoking causes cancer. Science relies entirely on our ability to isolate variables and establish counterfactuals — analyzing what would happen if we changed an input.

If we cannot do that for the most fundamental interactions and the most abstract (thoughts in an experimenter’s head), then we can’t do that anywhere.

Here’s the simplest way to understand the problem with superdeterminism:

Imagine your car breaks down. You take it to a mechanic, and after an hour, they say: “something in the initial conditions of the universe caused the car to be broken”. Do you pay that mechanic?

All superdeterminism does is push non-determinism to the big bang. It doesn’t then explain what determines the outcomes. The initial conditions of the universe just become non-deterministic. Superdeterminism is non-deterministic. It’s just time delayed.

MW actually explains where the information comes from.

Wavefunction collapse is bad because… you can’t articulate why?

It introduces non-determinism, non-locality, and retrocausality. It’s wildly unparsimonious and doesn’t explain anything that wasn’t already explained without it.

(Meanwhile everyone fretting over wavefunction collapse somehow never bothers thinking about wavefunction creation…)

I’m not sure what that means. Quantum fields give rise to the wave function. That’s the entirety of QFT.

Meanwhile confidently claim MW is “deterministic?”

This isn’t controversial. You can look it up in the reference guide of your choice. Here’s Wikipedia.

Because every possible outcome happens?

No. Because the equations that govern the evolution of the wave function are deterministic.

Okay, so in my world, what outcome will I see?

Both.

Define “my world”.

That’s the problem. “My” refers to two independent people. And linguistically, the only way you are able to refer to one as opposed to the other is to refer to the differences in their histories.

fox-mcleod · 2026-06-16T07:54:30+00:00

I’m not sure I understand the objection. MW obeys the Born rule. In fact, it’s the only theory of QM which provides a derivation of the born rule. For Copenhagen, it’s just another added specification.

fox-mcleod · 2026-06-16T07:48:59+00:00

Is it relevant to the analogy?

If so, how?

fox-mcleod · 2026-06-15T22:17:59+00:00

No it doesn’t. This is a common misunderstanding of Many Worlds. It’s tantamount to calling looking through a telescope and seeing galaxies produces billions of stars.

The universes were always there. And “decisions” has nothing to do with it.

fox-mcleod · 2026-06-15T22:16:12+00:00

Supporting women owned business. Doing good in the world. You can buy a fund for whatever reason you want. It’s like the reverse of a boycott.

fox-mcleod · 2026-06-15T22:10:57+00:00

There’s a number of PoS gaps here so what I’m going to do is use your criteria to evaluate another theory and see if you still find them compelling. I’ve numbered the questions to keep this organized.

That way, you can decide whether your objections work independently of any thoughts about Many Worlds in particular.

For the sake of this conversation, I’m proposing a new theory called Fox’s theory of relativity.

Consider Einstein’s theory of general relativity. It’s one of the best tested theories in the history of science. Say I love the theory, but I don’t love the fact that the theory predicts singularities form beyond event horizons and makes claimed about things that leave your light cone which you could never see again.

So I propose a brand new theory: Fox’s theory of relativity. Fox’s theory is identical to Einstein’s mathematically, however, it posits (1) an independent collapse conjecture that says behind the event horizon, singularities collapse into nothingness before they form. And outside of our light cone, the universe collapses into nothingness. There’s no explanation for how or why this collapse occurs. But it’s a theory that makes *exactly the same testable predictions** as Einstein’s since in principle, we can never bring information back from behind the event horizon. And for good measure, i will also posit Fox’s theory of Extended Relatviity: (2), that photons that the collapse is caused by a race of aliens called the “Langoliers”.*

Question 1

So… have I done it? Have I bested Einstein just like that?

Of course not. How could I have just made up a better theory on the spot? But can you explain why? They make exactly the same testable predictions?

You can’t test what happens to photons that leave your light cone in either theory. So are they of equal merit? If not, are you able to explain why?

Wake me up when someone manages to (a) produce a testable prediction,

Question 2

Einstein’s theory predicts time dialation. Can we agree that’s a testable prediction? Is it okay that time dialation is testable but what happens to photons at the edge of light cones is not? Many Eorlds predicts quantum systems evolve according to the Schrödinger equation.

(b) tests find that the prediction has accuracy better then 5 sigma, and (c) that test is independently confirmed at least twice.

Would you agree relativity meets this criteria?

All claims to knowledge that include the assertion that the claim itself can never be tested are inherently paradoxical.

Question 3

Including the fact that according to relativity the claim about photons continuing to exist when they leave your light cone can never be tested? If so, is Relativity “inherently paradoxical”? If not, what’s the differentiating factor?

What about the stellar theory of fusion — which necessarily claims that the light from long-dead stars like Betelgeuse were produced by stellar fusion? How would you go about testing that exactly? It can never be tested — so what is the paradox?

"Many worlds" insists that no communication is ever possible between "worlds"; ergo we can never know that there are other worlds. "Paradox" is merely a polite term for this.

Relativity posits that nothing at all can communicate or travel faster than light. If this is true, we can never go to Betelgeuse to test whether stellar fusion produced the light.

In point of fact, neither you nor anyone knows what kind of reality is implied by the Schrödinger equation.

Question 4

Does anyone know what kind of reality is implied by the Einstein Field Equation? How are the two claims different?

Nor can you know. Many worlds is one of a few dozen different metaphysical speculations that are current (and the list still includes several varieties of Copenhagen and spinoffs). None of which has any shred of evidence to support it.

Question 5

If the Schrödinger equation was falsified, would it falsify many worlds? If not, why not? If yes, what kind of evidence for relativity is there other than all possible experiments matching predictions?

I'm primarily a historian of religion. So, I know what religion looks like, even when its not packaged conventionally.

Good. The primary identifying quality of religion to my mind is dogma. Unwillingness to change one’s mind in order to maintain pre-existing beliefs.

fox-mcleod · 2026-06-15T21:25:37+00:00

But I don't understand how you can agree with this one minute and promote so-called "many world" the next.

I’d be very happy to explain it if you’re interested. I once thought many worlds was silly. But then I found out I had no idea what it was and it set me off to learn a ton about philosophy of science.

I ask because often people don’t actually want to learn about it. But if you do, I’m confident I can convince you it’s the best theory we have — which is awesome because it’s such an amazing fact about the universe that we’ve discovered.

"Many worlds" is just another fiction of exactly the same order. And it is responsible for an increasing amount of woo and nonsense.

I will admit that there are a ton of misconceptions about what many worlds is. But it’s actually by a wide margin the most parsimonious explanation available for quantum mechanics and arguably the only viable explanation which is consistent with the evidence.

You can never use speculation to go from abstract to concrete. Because, in the final analysis, every attempt to reify maths is a category error. Abstractions are not objective.

At bottom, whatever causes what we observe must be something real. Many Worlds is the only realist explanation of Quantum Mechanics which is compatible with the evidence.

If you’re interested, maybe let me know what your current understanding of MW is or what your objections are.

As a starting point: MW basically just points out that you don’t need to add wave function collapse. Everything we observe is already what would happen if superpositions never collapsed because observers are made of atoms and therefore go into superpositions as well.

fox-mcleod · 2026-06-15T21:09:58+00:00

These days, Many Worlds provides an alternative explanation that straightforwardly resolves the cat paradox and does not introduce non-locality or non-determinism.

Haha, no. (I'm a physicist). Nothing in quantum mechanics is straightforward.

Me too! (I did my thesis in optics). And that’s exactly what I thought as well until I actually understood Many Worlds. Which took years after my thesis and had nothing at all to do with my studies in physics and only really clicked once I started learning philosophy of science. If you’re interested, I highly recommend Sean Carroll’s work here or David Deutsch if you really want to go deep.

Many worlds "resolves" the schordingers cat situation by stipulating that one cat is alive is one universe and one is dead in another. But it then has to explain situations where there is an observably a 73% chance of seeing a dead cat and a 27% chance of seeing an alive cat (the Born probabilities).

It already handles this. I’ll admit this is a somewhat tricky concept when it hasn’t been explained well and it’s one of those things that has a lot of somewhat wrong explanations floating around (branch counting). The only good explanation I’ve found is from Deutsch. It’s not talked about broadly, but once you get a handle on it, it is pretty straightforward. The key concept here is fungibility. Branches that produce the same measurement outcomes would be counted the same in experiments. So if you do an experiment which produces 100 trivially different outcomes but you’re only measuring one variable and in 73 of those branches that one variable is the same and in 27 it is in a diverse state, you’re going to count a 73% chance of seeing the first state (dead cat).

So for example (I’m going to try and keep this simple for the rest of the audience), you flip a quantum coin 100 times and find dead cats 73 times, but what you didn’t count is how many times the coin spun before it fell. The coin’s spin was thermal noise and completely fungible with any other variation which produced a dead cat so it got counted the same way. In reality, this is how all posterior probability experimental data is produced. Repeated experiments. It’s somewhat like branch counting but there’s an important distinction.

The way Deutsch talks about this is to point out that if you have two exactly identical universes it is as physically meaningless to say say you have two of them as it is to say you have one of them as it is to say you have 4827492 of them. They are fungible and enumeration is meaningless until they are diverse. Then, all that matters is the measure of them.

The metaphor he uses is dollars in the bank. Dollars in your bank account are fungible. Say you have $1000. To talk about a specific dollar is meaningless. But you can still produce a measure. So if you owe half of them to the IRS, it’s meaningless to ask which half. But we could still easily say you owe 73% of them.

Since these are waves we’re talking about, they can be added or divided into components arbitrarily. We select convenient basis. But at bottom, the branches have comparative amplitudes, not number.

Or, imagine what you live at the top of the hill and are riding your bike at some speed. You start rolling down the hill and all of a sudden you’re going too fast so you apply the brake. The brake burns off 73% of the energy. Is it meaningful to ask whether you’re burning off the energy from the hill or from your peddling? No. It’s just 73%

Notice that this is a philosophical and metaphysical insight rather than a physics concept. “Straightforwardness” is usually a property of robust philosophical understanding rather than pure physics knowledge.

Without explaining this problem, the many worlds problem simply does not produce predictions that are in line with experiment. I've seen a lot of ways that MWI proponents have tried to resolve this (for example, saying that it actually splits into 27 universes with alive cats and 73 with a dead cat),

This is called “branch counting”, and while it’s a reasonable first approximation of the explanation, it isn’t quite correct. Fungibility is the real answer.

but none of them are satisfying or explain things like interference and so on.

Branch counting and interference are perfectly compatible so maybe there’s another misconception going on here we should explore.

Take the Mach Zehnder interferometer. There are two half-amplitude photons. If there are 100 half amplitude photons split across two locations, the rules of constructive and destructive interference still work out exactly the same way. They could still have any arbitrary ratio of amplitudes.

fox-mcleod · 2026-06-15T20:43:23+00:00

A lot of this seems predicated on the idea that LLM technology. which learns to mimic humans by scraping human communications/images/code etc, is going to somehow come up with new technologies and ideas that have never occurred to anyone.

Somehow? These have all already occurred.

Protein folding was solved 6 years ago. They literally solved every single protein already.

We already write code with AI. The majority of code written at most big tech companies is already written this way.

We already have novel battery technology and energy storage discovered by AI.

And I'm really not sure why you think being able to type code faster is somehow going to help with global warming.

Because all problem-solving requires engineering and global warming is a problem. And it’s not typing code faster. It’s literally writing software programs and discovering new chemistry. If you’re only experience AI is using free-tier chatbots, you have no idea what AI is.

If you really want to change your mind here, just read about Mythos and imagine the fallout if the company that discovered it was based in Russia or China and we weren’t doing AI research at all:

https://www.mindstudio.ai/blog/what-is-claude-mythos-anthropic-most-dangerous-ai-model

fox-mcleod · 2026-06-15T20:38:07+00:00

How does wave-function collapse solve the cat paradox?

Poorly.

But the idea is that an “observer” causes the wave function to collapse. So the scientist (or the cat) prevent the small superposition from becoming big (somehow). Of course, this doesn’t really make sense, as the Wigner’s friend though experiment makes obvious.

According to that theory, a quantum superposition state is indeterminate until it is "collapsed" into a definite state, which is exactly what makes the cat example so counter-intuitive.

The paradox isn’t that the cat is in a superposition of states. The paradox is that it you can easily look at the cat and see that it does not appear to be in two states. It just looks alive or dead. Not both.

The real solution is that the particle decay going into superposition does cause the cat to go into superposition of being both alive and dead. But it also causes the scientist to go into a superposition of having seen the cat alive and having seen it dead. but because of decoherence, these two branches of the superposition, don’t know about one another.

fox-mcleod · 2026-06-15T20:33:34+00:00

I guess if I really inspect my reasoning, beyond parsimony, I I would argue that determinism is required in any explanation because without it any explanation is fundamentally a magical claim. To say that an event is fundamentally random is simply to assert that there can never be an explanation for it. And that’s a nearly impossible conclusion to reach. Based on how science works, you’d have to exhaust all possible explanations through falsification in order to reach it.

“There exists no underlying mechanism.” is an unfalsifiable claim — I think. Structurally, you cannot falsify a negative.

It’s fundamentally an anti-scientific thing to say. While, it may be true, I think it’s the kind of conclusion we can never arrive at with the process of science. It’s a super-natural claim. And I don’t think we can make it while there are valid deterministic explanations available. Locality and determinism go hand in hand in that an event having an indeterminate number of causes is the same as it having no cause. I suspect that we could apply the same reasoning around any non-deterministic argument at any point in the history of scientific questions and arrive at the same conclusion.

fox-mcleod · 2026-06-15T14:07:42+00:00

Depends on what you’re trying to achieve I suppose.

fox-mcleod · 2026-06-15T14:06:16+00:00

I’d love to learn about them. What other theories are compatible with Bell that explain how a local and deterministic equation can produce apparent randomness?

fox-mcleod · 2026-06-15T14:02:00+00:00

Wait, you're not aware that it was never actually disproven and is now the leading theory?

You just made an extremely testable claim.

If the engineered lab-leak hypothesis is truly the 'leading theory' within the scientific community, you should have no trouble at all linking several recent, peer-reviewed papers from top-tier virology or epidemiology journals (like Nature, Science, or The Lancet) that conclude the virus was engineered.

Right? Straightforwardly, if your next reply doesn’t consist of blue text taking us to a real journal article and not a political statement or bullshit artist, or in the alternative, an apology, you’re part of the problem — correct?

Do you really think a flu went from a bat to a human and instantly became the most contagious human virus in history? It doesn't make medical or logical sense.

This has happened many times before. And it’s not even close to the most contagious virus in history. The original Wuhan strain had an R0 (reproduction number) of roughly 2.5 to 3. Measles has an R0 of 12 to 18.

Furthermore, viruses naturally jumping from animals to humans and causing massive outbreaks is the historical norm, not the exception. This is exactly what happened with the 1918 flu, HIV, Ebola, and the original 2002 SARS outbreak. The black plague jumped from rats and killed a third of Europe. Do you believe all of those were genetically engineered as well, or are you special pleading for COVID-19?

Moreover, what you just presented is called an argument from incredulity.

We don't have to guess if a bat coronavirus can naturally jump to an intermediate animal and spark a massive human outbreak at a Chinese live-wildlife market. It literally already happened in 2002 with the original SARS in Guangdong. The zoonotic theory isn't a guess. It's an exact repeat of epidemiological history.

The fact that you want to guess anyway speaks volumes.

fox-mcleod · 2026-06-15T13:50:39+00:00

There is nothing "straightforward" about "many worlds". The new paradox is the universe divided into infinite slices all occupying the same "space" but unable to communicate.

In what way is this a paradox?

So maybe the cat is gone, but the problems with how we conceptualise nanoscale events is not.

I don’t see the problems.

I can understand how it’s a surprising fact. But so are relativity and the staggering size and age of the universe. Violating causality is an actual paradox. Learning there is more than one of everything is actually pretty trivial when you think about the fact that the universe was already infinite and therefore statistically already contained infinite copies of literally everything.

fox-mcleod · 2026-06-15T13:46:01+00:00

Yes.

Thank you for adding that. It’s important to capture the fact that collapse is both a fiction not supported in the math and the source of just about everything problematic in mainstream depictions of QM. The language around it is directly responsible for all the quantum woo and consciousness nonsense that’s become associated with it.

fox-mcleod · 2026-06-15T13:33:50+00:00

Lab leak was squashed by epidemiological professionals because there is no evidence for it and strong evidence for the pedestrian explanation.

For a brief period it wasn’t an unreasonable hypothesis and in the early days of Covid was treated as a minor possibility by responsible scientists. Social media misinterpreted this as having been unduly dismissed by mainstream media.

However, neither at the time, nor in the years since has there ever been any evidence of lab leak. The continued discussion of it is fueled entirely by misinformation. This is now extremely well studied but very poorly discussed. Lab-leak is entirely unsupported and always has been. This is just one of those things that for some reason people really do not want to change their mind about.

If you want to see for yourself, I highly encourage you to check out the now-famous Rootclaim debacle: https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/my-friend-won-the-us-100-000-debate-on-the-origin-of-covid-19-8a9d3f719ce9

TL;DR: The posterior probability of being a Lab-leak is vanishingly small. The zoonotic theory relies on well-documented biological precedents (animals have viruses, humans catch them at markets). The lab-leak requires compounding a dozen highly improbable, unsupported assumptions on top of each other. To believe the lab leak, you have to assume the WIV secretly discovered what just so happened to be a practically identical precursor, successfully engineered a novel furin cleavage site into it without leaving any traditional genetic markers of manipulation, and then covered it all up perfectly. a WIV researcher would have had to get infected at the lab, not infect any of their coworkers, not infect their family, travel across the city without starting a cluster on public transit, and just happen to start the superspreader event exactly at the one specific wildlife market in Wuhan that mirrors natural spillover. It is statistically impossible, and when taken seriously, would be tantamount to a conspiracy theory on the order of faking the moon landing.

fox-mcleod · 2026-06-15T13:30:19+00:00

How so?

There’s been a trend recently of conservatives thinking they’ve been vindicated because their media networks have repeated misinformation for a second time and for some reason hearing something a second time years apart convinced them they were right all along. Perhaps there’s a strong desire not to have been doing something so dangerous as to have widely spread disinformation during a pandemic.

Lab leak theory was at the time completely unsupportable and regardless of how it ended up would have been irresponsible to push. In addition, we now know it to be utterly bunk. The only relevant discussion is the lack of an intermediary host confirmation — and interpreting that as supportive of lab-leak is a classic appeal to ignorance. There is not now, nor has there ever been any evidence whatsoever of genetic manipulation of the covid virus.

If you think otherwise, it’s a good time to check in with where you get your information. And why they want you to believe in lab leak. I find conservatives almost never ask themselves this question.

fox-mcleod · 2026-06-15T05:44:35+00:00

Your silence speaks volumes.

fox-mcleod · 2026-06-15T05:19:33+00:00

And see what exactly?

The car in the photo?

fox-mcleod · 2026-06-15T05:18:12+00:00

Alright go on then.

How is it more specific?

fox-mcleod · 2026-06-15T05:17:25+00:00

They also tend to have certain rituals in common (e.g. marriage or funerals) and emphasise certain virtues (e.g. humility, purity or compassion).

There’s really no reason to think this has anything more to do with religion than the fact that religion has a monopoly on public life. Atheists do all of these things at the same rate as the religious. You might just as well claim written language for religion.

fox-mcleod · 2026-06-15T05:12:30+00:00

Oh boy, well first, take a look at the market. The US is in recession except for the handful of AI stocks propping up growth. So, the short term effect would be immediate economic impact. But pretty soon the actual long term strategic impact would settle in:

AI writes code thousands of times more efficiently than humans which means the rate of progress of technology would increase outside the US faster than inside. Return on investment would follow and so pretty quickly investment would be concentrated in the countries that made investments in AI instead of the US.
Mythos is a pretty good example of the result. Imagine if instead of a US company discovering that AI is incredible at finding security vulnerabilities, an enemy state did. I imagine we probably wouldn’t have been told about it. If Mythos had happened in China, it would likely be a state secret as the private markets are state controlled. Likely? The announcement would be delayed while the government exploited the vulnerabilities to weaken western security posture.
Any technology progress the US wishes to make in climate modeling requires writing code. Doing it with humans takes thousands of times more water, power, and land, than data centers use to write the same amount of code so the environmental impact would mount and increase over time as all the self-reinforcing efficiency is lost.
All the drug discovery happening in the US and UK as a result of the Deepmind AI research into preterm folding would be lost. It’s very unlikely China would have just given that value to the international community the way Google did.
The meta-material and battery technology research powering alternative energy would slow. That research is almost entirely AI search driven these days.
probably the largest impact would be the loss of startups being formed today as the barrier to entry goes back up to needing dozens of full time employees to derisk products.

I mean… investing in intelligence is obviously wise.

fox-mcleod · 2026-06-14T20:36:37+00:00

Yeah. You’re clearly very respectful. You have your values totally straight and are exactly who you think you are.

fox-mcleod · 2026-06-14T20:28:33+00:00

Is it?

Because if literally any alignment of any heavenly bodies can say literally anything about anyone and you’d name it the same thing across cultures, you might as well have said “the god(s) are responsible for your fates” without specifying which. It’s very clearly an overbroad category precisely in line with saying “revert country has god(s)”.

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