Don't Look Now, Cont'd

But perhaps I was too eager to embrace the extravagant claims made for GoogleQ.

Sean Carroll, Professor of Natural Philosophy (!) at Johns Hopkins, is a brilliant expositor of the state of modern physics.  For Great Courses, he has given a whole set of lectures on the "Many Worlds Interpretation" of quantum mechanics, which he seems to embrace.  According to that interpretation, when a wave function assigns a set of probabilities to the position of a particle, each position that has any probability assigned to it actually exists as a location for the particle in some real world!  This undermines, if it does not eliminate, the role of "measurement" and "observation," and hence of consciousness, in fixing "what is actually happening" as opposed to "what is predicted to happen."  Measurement and observation certainly do not depend upon the existence of a human observer.  Schrodinger's cat is actually alive in one world, actually dead in another.

And so I feel so much better now that we are back on solid empirical ground (sarcasm).