Neither R or T happen, so there is no “limited perspective” that could give you R or T if neither the events R or T ever happen at all.
If R or T never happen from an external perspective doesn’t really matter to us though.
If we accept many worlds as true for a second, then it follows that the total quantum states describes quite a lot, your exact configuration is somewhere within the total state. But crucially, your exact configuration is dependent on other configuration. At a large scale you depend on your parents having existed. So you can only perceive the parts of the total state where your parents existed, because any parts of the state where they didn’t exist does not contain a you to perceive.
But this is also true for much smaller scales. From this, “collapse” is just your loss of vision into parts of the universe that you cannot be, and quantum uncertainties you can see is really just any quantum states that are not conflicting with your existence (where “you” is this very very specific configuration of you, so anything that alters your at all differently is in conflict with you)
So sure, R might never happen if you want to say that, but R becomes what you can observe once you’re dependent on R, so it is reasonable to describe R as having happened from your perspective.
On your point about the lack of mathematical rigour to all this, I do not deny it, and am not well placed to resolve it, but just as how my arguments are mathematically unhelpful, I’m not entirely sure an actual mathematical solution would help much in a verbal discussion, as I suspect there would be a range of valid mathematical models which could be argued to line up with the range of philosophical interpretations, and without external observations we’d not be able to distinguish between them, but maybe that’s defeatist, we’ve gotten this far after all, maybe we’ll find a way to pin things down further.
If R or T never happen from an external perspective doesn’t really matter to us though.
I am not sure what you mean by “an external perspective.” The point is that R or T never occur in physical reality, so you have to then explain how it is that we actually perceive R or T if it’s literally something that doesn’t occur in the real world.
If we accept many worlds as true for a second, then it follows that the total quantum states describes quite a lot, your exact configuration is somewhere within the total state.
There is no “your exact configuration” if Many Worlds is true because discrete objects like “you” don’t even exist.
At a large scale you depend on your parents having existed. So you can only perceive the parts of the total state where your parents existed, because any parts of the state where they didn’t exist does not contain a you to perceive.
This analogy, again, doesn’t work. My parents existing could be said to be R and my parents not existing can be said to be T, and if I have a limited perspective where I only see R (due to the anthropic principle) then it naturally follows I would see R and not T, so that explains why I see one and not both.
But this is not applicable to Many Worlds at all because Many Worlds does not claim two events happen and that a limited perspective makes us just see one of them. Many Worlds claims no events happen. You cannot take the subset of the null set and get a non-empty set from it. The rest of your comment, again, stems from this misconception, which I did try to clearly address in my previous comment yet it still seems to not be understood.
To address the second half of your comment, how do I explain “something apparently happening” when nothing ever happens?
Many worlds might claim no definitive events occur, but it does claim that states become mutually dependent and interact, that’s all we need to perceive something occurring. What we perceive as events do not need to line up with “real” events outside our environment.
If you can emulate the universe on a computer, then you can also (with enough processing power) instead randomly generate universe states, either way you’ll eventually generate redbob, either way redbob exists, even if he’s just a pattern of numbers he doesn’t get to know that. Do events exist if the universe is just randomly generated numbers? Of course not, but redbob still thinks they do.
Given all that, events do not need to be “real”, they just need to look real from our perspective.
Edit: to be clear, not supporting nutty concepts like we’re in a simulation or a random number generator, just using them as thought experiments to prove that eventless systems can emulate the appearance of events and states internally
Bob is a scientist, they have hooked a computer to the R vs T experiment and when R occurs the screen flashes red.
When the screen flashes red, red photons collide with Bob’s skin and eyes, signals enter their brain and they observe a red screen, and they remember it.
After all that, the collection of atoms describing Bob, their state, contains lots of dependency on that red screen, they are redbob, their state could only exist in a universe where that screen was red.
So, given the state of redbob, I think it’s reasonable to say that perceived R.
Neither R nor T has actually happened, but the state of redbob I described cannot ever have observed T, they can only have observed R. So they only exist in a limited subset of the full universal quantum state, they coexist with a red screen and with R because they must.
There’s of course a second state of matter that is the scientist observing T. Bluebob.
An outside observer of the universe might insist neither R nor T has occurred, that both Bobs are equally real, that the quantum soup contains it all.
But if you are redbob, you have still observed R.
We are all redbob all the time.
But why do we sometimes observe quantum superpositions, why do we not see a fully classical universe?
If we imagine putting Bob in a quantum tight box, then instead of asking him what he saw we ask only questions that don’t require us to know which bob he is (and the only link is carefully designed to not change even slightly in response to the massive differences between redbob and bluebob), then we get to be the outside observer, our quantum state is indifferent between the bobs so our perspective encompasses them both. We can prove this is distinct from simply not knowing which Bob is in a classical box, because unlike the classical box, we really are able to manipulate a soup of all the states we’re not dependent on.
Bob is a scientist, they have hooked a computer to the R vs T experiment and when R occurs the screen flashes red. When the screen flashes red, red photons collide with Bob’s skin and eyes, signals enter their brain and they observe a red screen, and they remember it. So, given the state of redbob, I think it’s reasonable to say that perceived R.
These are all classical assumptions which Many Worlds denies. Again, you keep repeating classical descriptions to explain Many Worlds. I do not know how I can explain it as I’ve already went over this several times. You do not get discrete events out of the Schrodinger equation, there is no “redbob,” there is no photons colliding with Bob’s skin and eyes. None of this happens if all you have is the Schrodinger equation.
If R or T never happen from an external perspective doesn’t really matter to us though.
If we accept many worlds as true for a second, then it follows that the total quantum states describes quite a lot, your exact configuration is somewhere within the total state. But crucially, your exact configuration is dependent on other configuration. At a large scale you depend on your parents having existed. So you can only perceive the parts of the total state where your parents existed, because any parts of the state where they didn’t exist does not contain a you to perceive. But this is also true for much smaller scales. From this, “collapse” is just your loss of vision into parts of the universe that you cannot be, and quantum uncertainties you can see is really just any quantum states that are not conflicting with your existence (where “you” is this very very specific configuration of you, so anything that alters your at all differently is in conflict with you) So sure, R might never happen if you want to say that, but R becomes what you can observe once you’re dependent on R, so it is reasonable to describe R as having happened from your perspective.
On your point about the lack of mathematical rigour to all this, I do not deny it, and am not well placed to resolve it, but just as how my arguments are mathematically unhelpful, I’m not entirely sure an actual mathematical solution would help much in a verbal discussion, as I suspect there would be a range of valid mathematical models which could be argued to line up with the range of philosophical interpretations, and without external observations we’d not be able to distinguish between them, but maybe that’s defeatist, we’ve gotten this far after all, maybe we’ll find a way to pin things down further.
I am not sure what you mean by “an external perspective.” The point is that R or T never occur in physical reality, so you have to then explain how it is that we actually perceive R or T if it’s literally something that doesn’t occur in the real world.
There is no “your exact configuration” if Many Worlds is true because discrete objects like “you” don’t even exist.
This analogy, again, doesn’t work. My parents existing could be said to be R and my parents not existing can be said to be T, and if I have a limited perspective where I only see R (due to the anthropic principle) then it naturally follows I would see R and not T, so that explains why I see one and not both.
But this is not applicable to Many Worlds at all because Many Worlds does not claim two events happen and that a limited perspective makes us just see one of them. Many Worlds claims no events happen. You cannot take the subset of the null set and get a non-empty set from it. The rest of your comment, again, stems from this misconception, which I did try to clearly address in my previous comment yet it still seems to not be understood.
To address the second half of your comment, how do I explain “something apparently happening” when nothing ever happens? Many worlds might claim no definitive events occur, but it does claim that states become mutually dependent and interact, that’s all we need to perceive something occurring. What we perceive as events do not need to line up with “real” events outside our environment.
If you can emulate the universe on a computer, then you can also (with enough processing power) instead randomly generate universe states, either way you’ll eventually generate redbob, either way redbob exists, even if he’s just a pattern of numbers he doesn’t get to know that. Do events exist if the universe is just randomly generated numbers? Of course not, but redbob still thinks they do.
Given all that, events do not need to be “real”, they just need to look real from our perspective.
Edit: to be clear, not supporting nutty concepts like we’re in a simulation or a random number generator, just using them as thought experiments to prove that eventless systems can emulate the appearance of events and states internally
Bob is a scientist, they have hooked a computer to the R vs T experiment and when R occurs the screen flashes red.
When the screen flashes red, red photons collide with Bob’s skin and eyes, signals enter their brain and they observe a red screen, and they remember it.
After all that, the collection of atoms describing Bob, their state, contains lots of dependency on that red screen, they are redbob, their state could only exist in a universe where that screen was red.
So, given the state of redbob, I think it’s reasonable to say that perceived R.
Neither R nor T has actually happened, but the state of redbob I described cannot ever have observed T, they can only have observed R. So they only exist in a limited subset of the full universal quantum state, they coexist with a red screen and with R because they must.
There’s of course a second state of matter that is the scientist observing T. Bluebob.
An outside observer of the universe might insist neither R nor T has occurred, that both Bobs are equally real, that the quantum soup contains it all.
But if you are redbob, you have still observed R.
We are all redbob all the time.
But why do we sometimes observe quantum superpositions, why do we not see a fully classical universe?
If we imagine putting Bob in a quantum tight box, then instead of asking him what he saw we ask only questions that don’t require us to know which bob he is (and the only link is carefully designed to not change even slightly in response to the massive differences between redbob and bluebob), then we get to be the outside observer, our quantum state is indifferent between the bobs so our perspective encompasses them both. We can prove this is distinct from simply not knowing which Bob is in a classical box, because unlike the classical box, we really are able to manipulate a soup of all the states we’re not dependent on.
These are all classical assumptions which Many Worlds denies. Again, you keep repeating classical descriptions to explain Many Worlds. I do not know how I can explain it as I’ve already went over this several times. You do not get discrete events out of the Schrodinger equation, there is no “redbob,” there is no photons colliding with Bob’s skin and eyes. None of this happens if all you have is the Schrodinger equation.