Are GRW tails as bad as they say?

Philosophy of Science 66 (3):71 (1999)
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Abstract

GRW models of the physical world are criticized in the literature for involving wave function "tails" that allegedly create fatal interpretive problems and even compromise standard arithmetic. I find such objections both unfair and misguided. But not all is well with the GRW approach. One complaint I articulate in this paper does not have to do with tails as such but with the specific way in which past physical structures linger forever in the total GRW wave function. By pushing the total proposal towards either the "Many Worlds" approach or the Bohmian approach, this feature diminishes extant GRW claims to preferability. I suggest, however, that the problem here is just an artifact of the particular and ultimately optional genre of collapse mechanism chosen by GRW

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Alberto Cordero
CUNY Graduate Center

References found in this work

Mind, Brain and the Quantum.Michael Lockwood - 1990 - Mind 99 (396):650-652.
Philoophical Consequences of Quantum Theory.James T. Cushing & Ernan McMullin (eds.) - 1989 - University of Notre Dame Press.
Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity: Aristotelian Society Series.Tim Maudlin & Lawrence Sklar - 1994 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45 (3):933-934.
Quantum Mechanics. Historical Contingency and the Copenhagen Hegemony.James T. Cushing - 1996 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 27 (2):353-358.

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