Probability, preclusion and biological evolution in Heisenberg-picture Everett quantum mechanics

Abstract

The fact that certain “extraordinary” probabilistic phenomena — in particular, macroscopic violations of the second law of thermodynamics — have never been observed to occur can be accounted for by taking hard preclusion as a basic physical law, i.e. precluding from existence events corresponding to very small but nonzero values of quantum-mechanical weight. This approach is not consistent with the usual ontology of the Everett interpretation, in which outcomes correspond to branches of the state vector, but can be successfully implemented using a Heisenberg-picture-based ontology in which outcomes are encoded in transformations of operators. Hard preclusion can provide an explanation for biological evolution, which can in turn explain our subjective experiences of, and reactions to, “ordinary” probabilistic phenomena, and the compatibility of those experiences and reactions with what we conventionally take to be objective probabilities arising from physical laws.