To me, science is bound to explain human experiences by explaining qualities of the objects that form the world (I hope it’s not too far fetched, I just made it up). Some qualities can be observed, even if it takes an LHC, some can’t, at least we don’t have any idea yet how. If then the world splitting can’t be observed at all and all we know is our single resulting world then I guess science’s task is to explain this single world. At least, from inside the single world that may look like the main task of science. I may be wrong, that’s my thoughts right now.
In entangled systems, those systems only keep being entangled because they’re experimentally protected from outside influences. I always understood collapse as a result of special interactions of the wave with the surrounding, particularly interactions which expose particle-like features of the wave-particle. It has nothing to do with distance or size. And I think that can be shown really nice in the double-slit experiment. So right there, there’s no possibility in collapse theory that our brain or consciousness could be the referee of wave collapses. Before it gets to the brain, the wave function obviously has to interact. That’s also an argument against the Earth’s being a wave function. Wave and collapsed wave, in my understanding, explicitly behave differently, so we can’t say it was a wave all along, we just never knew it.
Finally, if you substitute collapse for world splitting, wouldn’t then world splitting produce the same effects and fulfill your last list quite as well as the collapse interpretation?
Nice series, really like it!
@ E.Y. O.K., no need to damn something or someone—I think I’m almost there. I still have a blockade at this point: The splitting world describes the world from a all-knowing top-down perspective from where everything looks linear, unitary etc. But from our encapsulated one-world perspective we see this as a series of nonlinear accidents: particles hit at one point, only one point, given by the probabilities governed by the wave function. Entanglement breaks when we measure it. So what I meant was, the splitting produces the illusion for us that the world is non-linear. Wouldn’t you say that from our perspective we would never be able to discriminate between both positions, if the non-linearity is true or if it’s just an illusion of an superordinate process? I cannot see how you could get experimental verification from within this one world. Or as long as we just want to describe our one world, how we could get better results than by calling the non-linearity ‘collapse’ and go on with our maths.
If I missed something along the line, I’m really willing to learn.