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Marc Geddes's avatar

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.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

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.

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