Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Penrose (2004: 784):

Why, according to (b), is the omnium not perceived as actual ‘reality’ by an experimenter? The idea is that the experimenter’s states of mind also coexist in the quantum superposition, these different individual mind states being entangled with the different possible results of the measurement being performed. 

The view is that, accordingly, there is effectively a ‘different world’ for each different possible result of the measurement, there being a separate ‘copy’ of the experimenter in each of these different worlds, all these worlds co-existing in quantum superposition. Each copy of the experimenter experiences a different outcome for the experiment, but since these ‘copies’ inhabit different worlds, there is no communication between them, and each thinks that only one result has occurred. 

Proponents of (b) often maintain that it is the requirement that an experimenter have a consistent ‘awareness state’ that forces the impression that there is just ‘one world’ in which R [the collapse of the wave function] appears to take place. Such a viewpoint was first explicitly put forward by Hugh Everett III in 1957 (although I suspect that many others had, not always with conviction, privately entertained this kind of view earlier — as I had myself in the mid-1950s — without daring to be open about it!).

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, the experimenter's states of mind are meanings, and the quantum superposition of mind states is the superposition of meanings that constitute the potential of the quantum system. In this formulation, potential construals of experience as meaning are mistaken for actual construals of experience as meaning.