So I wonder why people care about MWI as anything more than an (admittedly very nice) intuition pump for studying QM.
MWI says (in part) that we don’t have to make wave function collapse an integral part of the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics. Since, historically, wave function collapse has been a part of the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, that seems sufficient reason to care about MWI.
I think you’re equivocating on “mathematical formulation”. We want theories to predict the future. The algorithm that assigns probabilities to your future observations is the same, and equally mysterious, across all interpretations. MWI does raise the tantalizing possibility that the Born rule might not be part of basic physics—that it might somehow emerge from a universe without it—but AFAIK this isn’t settled yet.
MWI says (in part) that we don’t have to make wave function collapse an integral part of the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics. Since, historically, wave function collapse has been a part of the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, that seems sufficient reason to care about MWI.
I think you’re equivocating on “mathematical formulation”. We want theories to predict the future. The algorithm that assigns probabilities to your future observations is the same, and equally mysterious, across all interpretations. MWI does raise the tantalizing possibility that the Born rule might not be part of basic physics—that it might somehow emerge from a universe without it—but AFAIK this isn’t settled yet.