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Can the Many-Worlds-Interpretation Be Probed in Psychology?

Published by International Journal of Quantum Foundations on December 24, 2016

Volume 3, Issue 1, pages 17-23

Heinrich Päs [Show Biography]

Born in Bremen, Germany, Prof. Heinrich Päs studied physics and philosophy at Bremen University and at the University of Heidelberg, where he obtained his PhD for research carried out at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik. He held postdoc positions at the University of Valencia, Vanderbilt University, University of Würzburg and University of Hawai’i. In 2007 he was an assistant professor at the University of Alabama before he joined Technische Universität Dortmund as a professor of theoretical physics. Prof. Päs works mainly on neutrino phenomenology but has recently broadened his research area to various aspects of the foundations of space, time and the quantum measurement process. His research was on the cover of the Scientific American as well as New Scientist magazine. He is the author of the popular science book “The Perfect Wave – with Neutrinos at the Boundary of Space and Time” (Harvard University Press 2014).

A minimal approach to the measurement problem and the quantum-to-classical transition assumes a universally valid quantum formalism, i.e. unitary time evolution governed by a Schroedinger-type equation. As had been pointed out long ago, in this view the measurement process can be described by decoherence which results in a “Many-Worlds” or “Many-Minds” scenario according to Everett and Zeh. A silent assumption for decoherence to proceed is however, that there exists incomplete information about the environment our object system gets entangled with in the measurement process. This paper addresses the question where this information is traced out and – by adopting recent approaches to model consciousness in neuroscience – argues that a rigorous interpretation results in a modern perspective on the von-Neumann-Wigner interpretation — namely that the information that is or is not available in the consciousness of the observer is crucial for the definition of the environment (i.e. the unknown degrees of freedom in the remainder of the Universe). As such the Many-Worlds-Interpretation while being difficult or impossible to probe in physics may become testable in psychology.

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Posted in Volume 3, Issue 1, January 2017 Tagged Original Paper

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