The problem of confirmation in the Everett interpretation

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• Emily Adlam (Department of Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics)
• Wednesday 03 February 2016, 13:00-14:30
• Seminar Room 2, Department of History and Philosophy of Science.

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I argue that the Oxford school Everett interpretation is internally incoherent, because we cannot claim that in an Everettian universe the kinds of reasoning we have used to arrive at our beliefs about quantum mechanics would lead us to form true beliefs. I show that in an Everettian context, the experimental evidence that we have available could not provide empirical confirmation for quantum mechanics, and moreover that we would not even be able to establish reference to the theoretical entities of quantum mechanics. I then consider a range of existing Everettian approaches to the probability problem and show that they do not succeed in overcoming this incoherence.

This talk is part of the CamPoS (Cambridge Philosophy of Science) seminar series.

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