Dustin: “Good God, he’s even making up his own contradictions now.”
That is a meaningless comment, and adds nothing to this discussion. The whole point I believe, of Caledonian’s argument is that the statement “MWI -is- collapse” is not a contradiction, so long as the differences in the theories/interpretations of QM can never be substantiated with experimental evidence, ever, because the theories themselves don’t allow for it, rather than we just haven’t seen those experiments yet.
That said, I don’t think that’s the case with MWI. If you are saying something about reality that supposedly is true, and has an effect on the rest of reality, I find it unlikely that if it were true, it wouldn’t eventually result in experimental evidence that proved that.
But if it can not be shown that MWI would result in experiments that explicitly differentiated it from non-local collapse, than Caledonian’s point remains valid, or at least valid enough that there’s no reason to be nasty about it (Eliezer, Dustin).
I am interested in the answer to John Maxwell’s question as well.
In that vein, let me re-ask a question I had in a previous post but was not answered:
How does MWI not violate no-faster-than-light-travel itself?
That is, if a decoherence happens with a particle/amplitude, requiring at that point a split universe in order to process everything so both possibilities actually happen, how do all particles across the entire universe know that at that point they must duplicate/superposition/whatever, in order to maintain the entegrity of two worlds where both posibilities happen?