First, I did not mean your personally when I was talking about dilettantes who learned from other dilettantes. I meant the people who read the QM sequence as their only in-depth math-free introduction to QM and took it as a self-evident truth, compartmentalizing away everything EY said about guessing the teacher’s password and such. Again, as EY keeps saying, a belief feels like truth from the inside, so it is extremely hard to argue with such people. I am well aware that this applies just as much to me, as to everyone else, having been burned by false beliefs before multiple times.
I agree that under ’t Hooft FoP gotten better, though it is still more philosophy than physics, hence my reservations.
At no point do I commit myself to measuring decoherence rates using units of velocity. [...] To you, standing outside the lab, there wouldn’t have been world-splitting until some portion of that information propagates to you; again, at finite velocity.
I find these two statements in contradiction. If you can measure the degree of decoherence and pinpoint when something is, say, “50%-decohered”, then you can take two observers at two points in space who measure it and calculate the propagation velocity as (x2-x2)/(t1-t1). If you cannot do that, then propagation of decoherence is not ontologically fundamental and is just a feel-good picture.
But these complications do not affect my main (in fact, sole) point: world-splitting in MWI is not global and instantaneous.
My point is that it makes no sense at all to talk about the “world-splitting process” as anything in any sense “real”.
Now, I do not expect you to agree with me, that is why I tried to drop the issue. And the reason I do not expect you to agree with me is a pragmatic one (pun intended): actions speak louder than words. And by “action” I mean an experiment differentiating between our points of view. That’s why I asked you how such an experiment would look. Until this is settled, we can continue back and forth with little hope of coming to an agreement. It might or might not work out better in person, though my observations of metaphysical debates between some rather smart people makes me skeptical that it would.
First, I did not mean your personally when I was talking about dilettantes who learned from other dilettantes. I meant the people who read the QM sequence as their only in-depth math-free introduction to QM and took it as a self-evident truth, compartmentalizing away everything EY said about guessing the teacher’s password and such. Again, as EY keeps saying, a belief feels like truth from the inside, so it is extremely hard to argue with such people. I am well aware that this applies just as much to me, as to everyone else, having been burned by false beliefs before multiple times.
I agree that under ’t Hooft FoP gotten better, though it is still more philosophy than physics, hence my reservations.
I find these two statements in contradiction. If you can measure the degree of decoherence and pinpoint when something is, say, “50%-decohered”, then you can take two observers at two points in space who measure it and calculate the propagation velocity as (x2-x2)/(t1-t1). If you cannot do that, then propagation of decoherence is not ontologically fundamental and is just a feel-good picture.
My point is that it makes no sense at all to talk about the “world-splitting process” as anything in any sense “real”.
Now, I do not expect you to agree with me, that is why I tried to drop the issue. And the reason I do not expect you to agree with me is a pragmatic one (pun intended): actions speak louder than words. And by “action” I mean an experiment differentiating between our points of view. That’s why I asked you how such an experiment would look. Until this is settled, we can continue back and forth with little hope of coming to an agreement. It might or might not work out better in person, though my observations of metaphysical debates between some rather smart people makes me skeptical that it would.