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This is a blog on why we believe and do what we do, why we pretend otherwise, how we might do better, and what our descendants might do, if they don't all die.
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At SciFoo Camp last weekend, famed quantum gravitist Lee Smolin mentioned that he’d noticed a correlation between these beliefs:
Many worlds for quantum mechanics,
Anthropic arguments in physics, and
Conscious computer-based AIs could be built.
This correlation seems intuitively right, but puzzling. Any explanation for why it exists other than the obvious, that some people tend to be right about everything?
Added: Lee and most who came to the particular SciFoo session where he made this observation disagree with these beliefs, yet were creative sharp physicists, hackers, sociologists, etc.
Explain This Correlation
Bohm's ontology is far cleaner than the MWI ontology. The trouble with MWI is that is cannot explain why we observe the reality we actually do (how does our subjective experience emerge from the wavefunction?).
It comes down to a matter of levels of abstraction. If you think reality only operates on a single level (reductionism) then you'll go for MWI. If on the other hand, you think reality is best divided into different levels of abstraction, you'll be sympathetic toward Bohm.
An analogy might be the relation between deduction and induction; if deduction is just a special case of induction, does that mean we can dispense with the notion of deduction? By analogy, if the particle is somehow just a part of the pilot wave, can we dispense with the notion of the particle? I lean towards a 'no' answer in both cases.
This is a bit like asking why the elite intelligentsia of 1900 believed in Fabian socialism, eugenics, and the objective existence of atoms (which was an issue at the time). The common theme would be that these ideas look like the best available answer to some important question. But the details are a mass of historical contingency.