2010/01/17 by Ruth E. Kastner, R. E. Kastner, Kastner, R. E. +2
Arts and Humanities · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Origins and Evolution of Life #Philosophy and History of Science #Popular Physics (physics.pop-ph) #Quantum Mechanics and Applications #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #physics.pop-ph #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1001.2867
Discussion expanded and revised; Prof. John Cramer added as co-author
openalex publication_date 2010/01/17 · arxiv created 2010/03/04 · arxiv updated 2010/04/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The attractive feature of the Everett approach is its admirable spirit of approaching the quantum puzzle with a Zen-like "beginner's mind" in order to try to envision what the pure formalism might be saying about quantum reality, even if that journey leads to a strange place. It is argued that the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics (TI), appropriately interpreted, shares the same motivation and achieves much more, with far fewer conceptual perplexities, by taking into account heretofore overlooked features of the quantum formalism itself (i.e. advanced states). In particular, TI does not need to talk about brain states, consciousness, or observers (rational or otherwise). In its possibilist variant ("PTI"), it shares the realist virtues of treating state vector branches as genuine dynamical entities, without having to explain how or why all of their associated outcomes actually happen (they don't), how to account for a plenitude of counterpart observers in some coherent notion of trans-temporal identity of the bifurcating observers (observers don't bifurcate in TI), nor how the certainty of all outcomes could be consistent with any coherent theory of probability, let alone the Born probability (the Born probability emerges naturally in TI). In short, TI is precisely the one-world interpretation Kent is looking for in his (2010).