Not even wrong: Why does nobody like pilot-wave theory? [pdf]
My understanding of QM is only surface-level, so there may be subtleties I&#x27;m missing, but this presentation&#x27;s arguments against the many-worlds interpretation seem pretty weak.<p>Page 28 grudgingly alludes to the idea that MWI could be simpler than other theories (&quot;Objection based on surprisingly common misconception that standard QM defined solely by Schrödinger&#x27;s equation ... It is only within a many-worlds framework that this view could begin to make sense&quot;), but later introduces MWI as a contender beginning with a nonsense news headline and then characterizes it as intuitively bizarre for proposing a large multiverse, as if the size for its proposed multiverse was an obvious point against it. It seems to me there&#x27;s an implied misuse of Occam&#x27;s razor: &quot;Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity&quot; is most properly applied to the number of rules in a theory, not the amount of matter a theory predicts. (If you apply it based on the amount of matter a theory predicts, then Occam&#x27;s razor surely should rule out theories that dim clusters of light in the sky correspond to trillions of galaxies like our own, and should prefer theories that predict that they&#x27;re illusions, reflections, or something otherwise insignificant that fits the observations.)<p>Page 39 and 40 both quote paragraphs from books that seem more convincing to me than the presentation&#x27;s seemingly hand-waving refutations. Page 40&#x27;s refutation appears to do nothing but insist upon PWT&#x27;s &quot;epiphenomenal &#x27;pointer&#x27;&quot;, naming our branch as real and explaining away the many deep interactions of other branches as only being &quot;mathematical significant&quot; rather than having &quot;ontological significance&quot;. ... Maybe this is a bad time to mention my preference for the Mathematical universe hypothesis (&quot;which posits that all computable mathematical structures (in Gödel&#x27;s sense) exist&quot;), which seems to make the idea of something having mathematical significance but not ontological significance meaningless.