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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on If Many-Worlds Had Come First - Less Wrong
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As far as I can tell, the only possible coherent state of affairs corresponding to RQM - the only reality in which you can embed these systems relating to each other - is MWI. To this is added some bad amateur incoherent epistemology trying to dance around the issue without addressing it.
You can quote me on the following:
Or here's another way of looking at it:
MWI = Minkowskian spacetime. Clear objective state of affairs, observer-invariant intervals separating events.
Single-world QM = Pre-Minkowski mysterious "Lorentz contractions" as a result of moving through the ether. The ether seems mysteriously unobservable and it's really odd that the Lorentz contractions just happen to be exactly right to make motion undetectable, when in principle the ether could be doing anything (just like it's mysterious that the worldeater eats off parts of the wavefunction according to the Born probabilities rather than something else, and only leaves one world behind). Also, since you don't know about the Lorentz transformation for time at this point in the history of physics, your equations will yield the wrong answers for extreme circumstances (just as a large enough quantum computer could contain observers who still wouldn't collapse).
"Shut up and calculate" = Use Minkowskian spacetime but refuse to admit that your equations might refer to something.
RQM = Relational Special Relativity = You repeatedly talk about how "motion" can only be defined relative to an observer, and it's impossible for the universe as a whole to move because it would have to be moving relative to something; you use this to insist that every observer has their private reality in which objects really are moving at a certain rate relative to them, and time really is progressing at a certain rate, and there's no conflict with other observers and their observed rates of motion because reality is not objective. If anyone shows you Minkowskian spacetime and asks why they should adopt your weird epistemology when there's all these perfectly natural invariants to use, or asks you what it would even mean for everyone to have a private reality, yell at them that the universe as a whole clearly can't have an objective state of motion because there's nothing else it could be moving relative to. Basically, Special Relativity only you'd rather give up the attempt to describe a coherent state of affairs than give up on talking separately about space and time the way you're accustomed to.
(If that didn't make sense check SEP or Wikipedia on RQM.)
Reversing the direction of the analogy, what are the "invariants" of MWI? A natural, emergent multiversal basis? nah. A natural, emergent Born's law? Nah...
That's actually a perfectly reasonable argument.
rQM is coherent, observers can't make contradictory observations. It just isn't objective. It also isn't anything-goes philosophical subjectivism. It is an interpretation that agrees with all the results of the formalism, like any interpretation properly so called, so it does not break anything or make anything unscientific.