As I lay bedridden this week, knocked out by my second dose of the Moderna vaccine, I decided I should blog some more half-baked ideas because what the hell? It feels therapeutic, I have tenure, and anyone who doesn’t like it can close their broswer tab.

So: although I’ve written tens of thousands of words, on this blog and elsewhere, about interpretations of quantum mechanics, again and again I’ve dodged the question of which interpretation (if any) I really believe myself. Today, at last, I’ll emerge from the shadows and tell you precisely where I stand.

I hold that all interpretations of QM are just crutches that are better or worse at helping you along to the Zen realization that QM is what it is and doesn’t need an interpretation.  As Sidney Coleman famously argued, what needs reinterpretation is not QM itself, but all our pre-quantum philosophical baggage—the baggage that leads us to demand, for example, that a wavefunction |ψ⟩ either be “real” like a stubbed toe or else “unreal” like a dream. Crucially, because this philosophical baggage differs somewhat from person to person, the “best” interpretation—meaning, the one that leads most quickly to the desired Zen state—can also differ from person to person. Meanwhile, though, thousands of physicists (and chemists, mathematicians, quantum computer scientists, etc.) have approached the Zen state merely by spending decades working with QM, never worrying much about interpretations at all. This is probably the truest path; it’s just that most people lack the inclination, ability, or time.

Greg Kuperberg, one of the smartest people I know, once told me that the problem with the Many-Worlds Interpretation is not that it says anything wrong, but only that it’s “melodramatic” and “overwritten.” Greg is far along the Zen path, probably further than me.

You shouldn’t confuse the Zen Anti-Interpretation with “Shut Up And Calculate.” The latter phrase, mistakenly attributed to Feynman but really due to David Mermin, is something one might say at the beginning of the path, when one is as a baby. I’m talking here only about the endpoint of the path, which one can approach but never reach—the endpoint where you intuitively understand exactly what a Many-Worlder, Copenhagenist, or Bohmian would say about any given issue, and also how they’d respond to each other, and how they’d respond to the responses, etc. but after years of study and effort you’ve returned to the situation of the baby, who just sees the thing for what it is.

I don’t mean to say that the interpretations are all interchangeable, or equally good or bad. If you had to, you could call even me a “Many-Worlder,” but only in the following limited sense: that in fifteen years of teaching quantum information, my experience has consistently been that for most students, Everett’s crutch is the best one currently on the market. At any rate, it’s the one that’s the most like a straightforward picture of the e