Many Minds and Single Mind Interpretations of Quantum Theory

Michael Lockwood

Michael Lockwood

Euan J. Squires

Inge Svein Helland, Harish Parthasarathy

The purpose of this part of the book has been to sketch a new, and in our opinion quite promising, attempt to understand parts of quantum theory and general relativity theory from a common basis. One important background for us is that relativity theory is developed by the mind of a single person, while quantum theory, in the way that it has existed up to now, is a patchwork of contributions from many different persons. Empirically, both theories have been verified to an impressive degree, but the foundation of and interpretation of quantum theory has been the source of much confusion. The book [ 5 ] is an attempt to develop the epistemic side of a new foundation, and from this propose a new interpretation: In every application, but also more generally, it is connected to the mind of a single actor or to the joint mind of a group of communicating actors.

Jeffrey Alan Barrett

Alexander R. Pruss

The Traveling Minds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is a no-collapse interpretation on which the wavefunction evolves deterministically like in the Everett branching multiple-worlds interpretation. As in the Many Minds interpretation, minds navigate the Everett branching structure following the probabilities given by the Born rule. However, in the Traveling Minds interpretation (a variant by Squires and Barrett of the single-mind interpretation), the minds are guaranteed to all travel together—they are always found in the same branch. The Traveling Forms interpretation extends the Traveling Minds interpretation in an Aristotelian way by having forms of non-minded macroscopic entities that have forms, such as plants, lower animals, bacteria, and planets, travel along the branching structure together with the minds. As a result, while there is deterministic wavefunction-based physics in the branches without minds, non-reducible higher-level structures like life are found only in the branch with minds.