MWI is qualitatively like atheism, but the weight of evidence on your aside (as compared to the next fundamentally different alternative) is so dissimilar that you should have qualitatively different beliefs about what updates may occur in the future. I guess there is also a qualitative difference; there are very many hypotheses as simple or simpler than theism which are equally “consistent” with observation, while there are relatively few as simple or simpler than collapse. Again, this is not to say that MWI isn’t overwhelmingly likely, but if we were to discover some evidence that its predictions stopped working in the high entanglement limit, some form of collapse is a reasonably likely departure from the simplest model. If we were to discover some evidence for say the intelligent design of life on Earth, a Christian god is still a spectacularly unlikely departure from the simplest model.
I don’t feel that the weight of the evidence is much different. For both atheism and MWI, I basically have Occam’s Razor plus some stretching on part of the opposing theories. “The way the world is underneath our observations” is really hard to get any hard evidence on.
Occam’s Razor doesn’t just tell you which option is more likely—it tells you how much more likely it is. The hypothesis that God exists is way, way more complicated than the alternative (I would guess billions or trillions of bits more complicated). The hypothesis that collapse occurs is more complicated than the alternative, but the difference isn’t in the same ballpark. Maybe you doubt that it is possible to concisely describe collapse, in which case we just have a factual disagreement.
MWI is qualitatively like atheism, but the weight of evidence on your aside (as compared to the next fundamentally different alternative) is so dissimilar that you should have qualitatively different beliefs about what updates may occur in the future. I guess there is also a qualitative difference; there are very many hypotheses as simple or simpler than theism which are equally “consistent” with observation, while there are relatively few as simple or simpler than collapse. Again, this is not to say that MWI isn’t overwhelmingly likely, but if we were to discover some evidence that its predictions stopped working in the high entanglement limit, some form of collapse is a reasonably likely departure from the simplest model. If we were to discover some evidence for say the intelligent design of life on Earth, a Christian god is still a spectacularly unlikely departure from the simplest model.
I don’t feel that the weight of the evidence is much different. For both atheism and MWI, I basically have Occam’s Razor plus some stretching on part of the opposing theories. “The way the world is underneath our observations” is really hard to get any hard evidence on.
Occam’s Razor doesn’t just tell you which option is more likely—it tells you how much more likely it is. The hypothesis that God exists is way, way more complicated than the alternative (I would guess billions or trillions of bits more complicated). The hypothesis that collapse occurs is more complicated than the alternative, but the difference isn’t in the same ballpark. Maybe you doubt that it is possible to concisely describe collapse, in which case we just have a factual disagreement.