My opinion follows directly from the logical consequences of the mathematics. It doesn’t matter who wrote it or whose opinion it is. I do not believe these things because I can cite someone saying something. I don’t need to cite anything at all. I can walk through the paradox from scratch and show the logical implications of it.
People who obsessively cite things are people who don’t know what they’re talking about, because they cannot put anything into their own words, so they have to reference people who they believe are justifying it for them. I need to do none of that because I understand the math, I’ve written extensively on it, including a whole book, and so my views do not need to rely on a single person, as I can derive it all from scratch in my own head.
I don’t know why, but I find this concept hard to explain to people. Everyone I talk to treats everything as a constant citing-game where nobody just talks about things in their own words, showing they comprehend the argument themselves, and deal with it on its own merit. They treat arguments as just a bunch of loose references with no overall cohesion.
The only thing interesting about Bub is the criticism that Many Worlds resolves the paradox and showing it has its own internal inconsistency, but I already thought Many Worlds is incoherent for a lot of other reasons, anyway, so no, it didn’t particularly change my views on this subject. I’d recommend you read Bell’s “Quantum Mechanics for Cosmologists” as well as well as Tim Maudlin’s “Can the World be Only Wavefunction?”
Both of those had already convinced me the interpretation made no sense. Even if no one has shown any problems with Many Worlds, I’d probably still hold this opinion, because if your only alternative to a preferred foliation is an entire multiverse… I’d just find a preferred foliation simpler.
But, yes, that is really the current state of the academic literature. You have to pick one of the four:
Don’t care about inconsistencies
Multiverse
Quantum mechanics is wrong.
Preferred foliation
It kind of misses the big picture to focus on Bub’s point specifically. We need to put it in the broader context and show that the current state of the academic literature, the published papers at the moment, really do restrict us down to those 4 choices. Since we are restricted down to these four choices, I’d need much more than one argument to be rebutted.
As for Bub’s point specifically, no, he basically “solves” it through Copenhagen, although his take on Copenhagen is very similar to RQM. Both of which I categorize in
#1, as well as “shut up and calculate,” because all of them allow for inconsistencies but don’t view it as a problem either because they don’t care or they don’t think it’s important. Frauchiger and Renner openly point out that Copenhagen is inconsistent, and he doesn’t ultimately deny it but just drops the requirements of consistency.
My problem with allowing inconsistencies is that it clearly reduces to a kind of solipsism. Bub himself admits that his viewpoint doesn’t allow you to “stitch together” different perspectives into a single unified objective reality, because they contradict with each other. But he denies that this kind of objective reality exists, but claims it is not “solipsism” because “perspectives” aren’t the same as “minds.” This is, again, basically an identical viewpoint expressed by RQM.
But this is also why I eventually abandoned RQM. I started to doubt it when I read Rovelli’s paper “Relational EPR”
Consider a simple Bell pair, Alice is given one half, Bob the other. Alice measures hers, and, think of it like the universe rolls a dice at that moment and that decides its outcome. But, since Rovelli says it is local, this means no dice roll occurred for Bob’s yet, since Alice’s measurement cannot influence Bob’s. The issue is, if Bob measures shortly after Alice, then the universe would do a dice roll for Bob’s outcome, but since Alice’s is already decided, unless Bob’s has a way to non-locally know Alice’s result, then Bob’s must be randomly chosen independent of Alice’s, yet we know in practice they are dependent.
Rovelli escapes this by saying that the issue is that we are trying to consider what happens in Alice and Bob’s perspective at the same time. We have to treat them as entirely separate realities that cannot be “juxtaposed.” Alice measures her particle, a dice roll happens, but nothing ever happens on Bob’s side until Alice travels to Bob and interacts with it herself, and then the dice roll occurs, meaning she is carrying the measurement outcome with her, so of course when it does occur, the information is locally available to make them agree.
But, do you not see what happened? You have to deny that, from Alice’s perspective, there really is anything going on for Bob until Alice arrives at Bob. From Alice’s perspective, it is as if Bob doesn’t even exist in her reality.
Personally, I believe in a kind of “no-solipsism” postulate, which says that the mental states for other observers must be definite regardless of my own observing of them. That is to say, I must be able to admit that your mind exists, and is really thinking of something right now, even when I am not looking at you. Abandoning that to me seems like solipsism, and that is ultimately what Rovelli and Bub do, indeed Rovelli has a paper “On the consistency of Relative Facts” which basically responds to a criticism that they are not inconsistent saying that you have to consider all observers in basically separate realities they do not have to be consistent with one another and cannot communicate or influence each other.
I feel like this is just a philosophical trick and I remain unconvinced of it. It to me feels like people are reaching for incredibly bizarre metaphysics and philosophical arguments to escape an obvious conclusion from the empirical data.
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https://misskey.favskey.online/play/a3mavg85mjrm7x54
