“MWI having a fixed phase space that doesn’t actually increase in size over time.”
(1) That assumes we are already simulating the entire universe from the Big Bang forward, which is already preposterously infeasible (not to mention that we don’t know the starting state).
(2) It doesn’t model the central events in QM, namely the nondeterministic events which in MWI are interpreted as which “world” we “find ourselves” in.
Of course in real QM work simulations are what they are, independently of interpretations, they evolve the wavefunction, or a computationally more efficient but less accurate version of same, to the desired elaboration (which is radically different for different applications). For output they often either graph the whole wavefunction (relying on the viewer of the graph to understand that such a graph corresponds to the results of a very large number of repeated experiments, not to a particular observable outcome) or do a Monte Carlo or Markov simulation of the nondeterministic events which are central to QM. But I’ve never seen a Monte Carlo or Markov simulation of QM that simulates the events that supposedly occur in “other worlds” that we can never observe—it would indeed be exponentially (at least) more wasteful in time and memory, yet utterly pointless, for the same reasons that the interpretation itself is wasteful and pointless. You’d think that a good interpretation, even if it can’t produce any novel experimental predictions, could at least provide ideas for more efficient modeling of the theory, but MWI suggests quite the opposite, gratuitously inefficient ways to simulate a theory that is already extraordinarily expensive to simulate.
Objective collapse, OTOH, continually prunes the possibilities of the phase space and thus suggests exponential improvements in simulation time and memory usage. Indeed, some versions of objective collapse are bone fide new theories of QM, making experimental predictions that distinguish it from the model of perpetual elaboration of a wavefunction. Penrose for example bases his theory on a quantum gravity theory and several experiments have been proposed to test his theory.
“MWI having a fixed phase space that doesn’t actually increase in size over time.”
(1) That assumes we are already simulating the entire universe from the Big Bang forward, which is already preposterously infeasible (not to mention that we don’t know the starting state).
(2) It doesn’t model the central events in QM, namely the nondeterministic events which in MWI are interpreted as which “world” we “find ourselves” in.
Of course in real QM work simulations are what they are, independently of interpretations, they evolve the wavefunction, or a computationally more efficient but less accurate version of same, to the desired elaboration (which is radically different for different applications). For output they often either graph the whole wavefunction (relying on the viewer of the graph to understand that such a graph corresponds to the results of a very large number of repeated experiments, not to a particular observable outcome) or do a Monte Carlo or Markov simulation of the nondeterministic events which are central to QM. But I’ve never seen a Monte Carlo or Markov simulation of QM that simulates the events that supposedly occur in “other worlds” that we can never observe—it would indeed be exponentially (at least) more wasteful in time and memory, yet utterly pointless, for the same reasons that the interpretation itself is wasteful and pointless. You’d think that a good interpretation, even if it can’t produce any novel experimental predictions, could at least provide ideas for more efficient modeling of the theory, but MWI suggests quite the opposite, gratuitously inefficient ways to simulate a theory that is already extraordinarily expensive to simulate.
Objective collapse, OTOH, continually prunes the possibilities of the phase space and thus suggests exponential improvements in simulation time and memory usage. Indeed, some versions of objective collapse are bone fide new theories of QM, making experimental predictions that distinguish it from the model of perpetual elaboration of a wavefunction. Penrose for example bases his theory on a quantum gravity theory and several experiments have been proposed to test his theory.