Right so if i understood just the tiniest bit: decoherence over time from the noisy environment eventually causes superposition of many states to "decay" to just one state.

 

I wonder if the mechanism is through elimination of certain probabilities, or adjusting the global set of states so that fewer states become more probable, and many states become less probable?

 

So when the double slit experimenter sticks his measuring device at the slits, he essentially introduces a large influence on the electron and forces it into pretty much one state/location. But even before then, the electron is gradually decohering due to the environment (probably mostly air molecules, other em radiation).

 

So observation is like: the more something is affected, the fewer states/positions it will likely assume. Or the more something is measured, the more definite it becomes. But if we measure it gently enough (like from the environment - probably not enough to glean anything useful) it might not lose all its states. So like uncertainty, if we measure a location of a particle very gently, we only know a very rough estimate of location, but we don't disturb its momentum as much.

 

I hope I'm making sense.

Absolutely your catching on I didn't see anything out of place in your last post.