Decoherence according to MWI is a continuous process, not a discrete one. So it is indeed like the inkblot drawing, and you can’t actually count the worlds. The amplitudes blobs of the wavefunction in configuration space are really like the ink dots in the inkblot drawing, sometimes fully disjoint, sometimes fully connected, but also sometimes barely connected in a way that you can’t tell if they are one or two. Sure if you define a precise rule to tell apart “one blob” and “two blobs” using various metrics and a threshold, you’ll be able to count them. But that rule will be arbitrary, and i could define another and end up with another number, and both would be as valid.
That’s how I understand MWI, and if I can understand someone disagreeing with it, I really don’t see how you can call it “non-sense”.
To unambiguously count the number of blobs requires a precise rule, but you could change the rule and the number of blobs would be different according to the new rule. That much is indeed not nonsense.
But when we talk about “the branch containing this instance of you”, we are talking about something that definitely exists, and whose existence is not just the result of how you define things. That’s why it’s nonsense to treat it as if its very existence results solely from an arbitrary division of the universal wavefunction.
Decoherence according to MWI is a continuous process, not a discrete one. So it is indeed like the inkblot drawing, and you can’t actually count the worlds. The amplitudes blobs of the wavefunction in configuration space are really like the ink dots in the inkblot drawing, sometimes fully disjoint, sometimes fully connected, but also sometimes barely connected in a way that you can’t tell if they are one or two. Sure if you define a precise rule to tell apart “one blob” and “two blobs” using various metrics and a threshold, you’ll be able to count them. But that rule will be arbitrary, and i could define another and end up with another number, and both would be as valid.
That’s how I understand MWI, and if I can understand someone disagreeing with it, I really don’t see how you can call it “non-sense”.
To unambiguously count the number of blobs requires a precise rule, but you could change the rule and the number of blobs would be different according to the new rule. That much is indeed not nonsense.
But when we talk about “the branch containing this instance of you”, we are talking about something that definitely exists, and whose existence is not just the result of how you define things. That’s why it’s nonsense to treat it as if its very existence results solely from an arbitrary division of the universal wavefunction.