[adeledeweylopez]

One of the major aims of physics is to try to describe reality with mathematical constructs.

If you start with what can be directly observed or experienced, then that's phenomenology.

Those are both valid and interesting ways of trying to understand reality, and I believe they are ultimately fully compatible with each other. But I think you are trying to hold physics to phenomenology standards in a way that doesn't make sense. No one thinks that Newton's theory of gravity "lost contact with empirical reality" because it doesn't have measurements or people as ontological components.

Anyway, that's all beside the point I was trying to make, which was just that the description of the MWI in the article was plain wrong.

[Ma8ee]

But Newtonian physics is compatible with our experience of reality. The Many Worlds Interpretation as described above isn’t.

[Extigy]

Not necessarily. When you live inside the wavefunction the outcomes of certain experiments very much look like a wavefunction collapse. MWI is a way to explain why that happens without having to have a special case where the universe has a completely different behaviour for just a moment in time.

You can formalise the mathematics of it using the concept of quantum decoherence.

[DiogenesKynikos]

How is MWI incompatible with our experience of reality?

[TheOtherHobbes]

We experience one reality, not many realities.

MWI handwaves that problem away without really explaining it. "It's random but subject to the Born Rule" is a description of what's already observed, not an explanation with predictive power for new and distinct observations.

There are much more complex criticisms that use words like "ontic" and "epistemic", but that's the fundamental problem that MWI claims to solve but doesn't.

[DiogenesKynikos]

> We experience one reality, not many realities.

How does MWI imply that we should simultaneously experience multiple realities? If two different states of you experience two different realities, each state of you is only aware of one reality.

MWI largely reduces to something like the Copenhagen interpretation for large systems. It's just that MWI explains the transition between the quantum and classical regime, doesn't require any ad hoc rules about observers, and doesn't need Schrödinger's equation to be violated.

[MacsHeadroom]

The claim wasn't that we should experience inaccessible worlds for MWI to be compatible with our experience of reality. That's obviously absurd.

The claim was that inaccessible worlds are inherently incompatible with our ability to empirically investigate or falsify them (via experience).

MWI has a metaphysical parsimony to it. But to believe it's physics is religious faith not physical science- and that's fine, but it's still not science.

I don't think collapse is real either. I think it's a phenomenological byproduct of consciousness requiring particilarity to model the world it perceives. You've already alluded to that being the case ('we can only experience our worldline').

If you knew the metaphysics behind that particularity well enough, you'd also know that it leaves no ground for and has no need of the existence of a physical material reality to begin with. As such, materialist physics has already made an epistemic leap which inevitably leads to mistaken intuitions about the most reasonable ways to interpret empirical phenomena.

[DiogenesKynikos]

> The claim was that inaccessible worlds are inherently incompatible with our ability to empirically investigate or falsify them

That's not what the claim was. The original claim was that MWI is "incompatible with our experience of reality." TheOtherHobbes then said that the incompatibility is that we experience only one reality, instead of many realities.

> MWI has a metaphysical parsimony to it. But to believe it's physics is religious faith not physical science- and that's fine, but it's still not science.

It's not religion to point out that QM explains the phenomenon of wavefunction collapse without any additional postulates (through decoherence). That's all that MWI says.

[jungturk]

> We experience one reality, not many realities.

Isn't that just a claim about the sensitivity of the detector?

I'm sure folks were dubious about the theory of the electromagnetic spectrum given their bias to visible light, but as experiments improved and detectors with them it doesn't seem so farcical.

[meroes]

It's not though. Instantaneous gravity, third law, etc, are not true in GR.