“Here’s a question from a layman: if untold trillions of new universes are being created all the time, where is all that energy coming from to create them?”
Well, you’ve got the same problem with a single world: Where did the energy for our ‘single’ Universe when ‘it was created’ came from?
The problem here is that you assume that universes are created which did not exist before; in this case you indeed need to take the energy from somewhere. But as I understand, they never did not exist (beware of double negation!). They already existed before the split took place in your personal memory.
But somehow I still can’t buy into this thing; where is the symmetry? Why do splits happen into the future, but not into the past?
Of course, we evaluate the past according to the information we retrieve over time (that’s the whole point of Bayes/Markov, isn’t it?). In this way you can say, that with every bit of information/evidence, our memory makes a split into the past. In this way ‘fresher’ memory gets mixed up with ‘decaying’ memory and thus we get a different/more diffuse image of the past.
But it doesn’t sound the same like the ‘future’ splits. We don’t have a fresh memory of the future; taking the example of lotteries. We don’t remember their outcome seconds before.
“So reductionism is wrong—a thing can be more than the sum of it’s parts (since “thing” includes action).”
The problem with this statement is that you don’t define what you mean by sum. I for one cannot imagine what the term ‘fingers + palm + thumb’ is supposed to mean. Apparently by sum you don’t mean arithmetic sum, but something different. Perhaps by ‘sum’ you mean something like ‘put those ingredients into a beaker, shake it a little and then see what you get’.
And of course, if you defined ‘sum’, you’ll need to define ‘more’ (and ‘less’) in this context. Perhaps you’ll see that it’s about the language and how we use it. We overload many words to mean different things and too often we use the special meaning of a word in a context where it doesn’t belong.