Let me pull the money quote from the article:
“The tradition handed down through the generations says that a new physics theory comes up with new experimental predictions that distinguish it from the old theory.”
This is superficially correct, but I think it’s irrelevant. Quantum theory is already a theory with well-established laws. None of the contending interpretations of those laws—many-worlds, collapse, hidden-variables, and so on—are theories, and none of them propose new laws (suggesting that there might be a law we don’t know doesn’t count). They’re all attempts at models, and they all suck. Models should have explanatory power; none of these add any explanatory power.
The real reason some people don’t care about Many Worlds isn’t that they’re irrationally wedded to Copenhagen (although some people are). It’s that both Copenhagen and MW suck so badly that the only way to stick to one is to be irrationally wedded to it. Back when all we had was Lorentz’ equations there were tons of possible ways to explain them; as soon as Einstein proposed a fruitful model all of the other explanations vanished (well, as soon as the fruitfulness became obvious).
I feel that I’m equivocating, though. I used the term ‘fruitful’, which hides the meaning “producing experimental results”. I suppose that makes me a devotee of Scientism as opposed to Bayesianism. I have much reading to do on this site, and I’m thrilled to have the opportunity. Thanks for interacting with us.
“The latter, since there are no Garden of Eden patterns in physics.”
Thank you for your excellent job of communicating (and the GoE link decreased possible ambiguities, too).
How do we know that there are no Garden of Eden patterns? That is a very interesting claim. In attempting to reverse-engineer it, I remembered that according to quantum theory, each wavefunction is nowhere zero. Thus, any collection of particles could tunnel into place over any distance in any organization you could possibly specify. Is that the key to the proof?
At any rate, I’m “sticking to my guns” about many-worlds not affecting the desirability of average utilitarianism. The sum over all direct results of my actions over all worlds is still overwhelmingly determined by already determined macroscopic causes not known to me, NOT by as-yet undetermined quantum decoherences splitting worlds; my probability computations are dominated by unknowns, not by unknowables.
I’m not arguing that average utilitarianism is wrong; I’m just saying that MW doesn’t seem to appreciably affect its desirability.