There's a simpler model available for discourse here? Well, fascinating. Please explain.
Simpler than what?
Newton's laws are simpler than Newton's laws plus elan vital, and once you understand enough, you realize they make much the same predictions. Ergo, you just explained away elan vital. General Relativity is simpler than Newtonian gravity plus time dilation. Once you get General Relativity, you've explained away time dilation.
This, by the way, is a very dangerous mentality. Occam's Razor is only a heuristic. New evidence may favor greater complexity over less. General Relativity is more complicated than Newtonian gravitation, for example.
No. Evidence shows that the simpler models that don't explain this are outright false. The simplest one remaining is the most likely. Newtonian gravitation is simpler than General Relativity, but it does not match what we see. Postulating Newtonian gravitation with time dilation added in makes it more complex. Adding in the non-euclidean geometry stuff makes it still more complex. At this point, General Relativity is the simplest explanation we can think of.
It would seem not. I never saw any connection between entanglement with rocks and alternative universes. Please explain.
"Entanglement" means that each combination of states exists separately. If every atom of a rock is entangled, there is a separate amplitude for every configuration of the atoms. If every particle in the universe is entangled, this means that there is an amplitude for each combination of particles. For example, there's the configuration corresponding to the "universe" we see. There's also one that looks exactly like how it would have ended up if Germany won WWII. Technically, a lot more than one. Infinitely many, in fact.
Simpler than what?
... sir, you have a very... 'slippery' manner of discourse. It makes it difficult to figure out exactly what it is you're trying to say and when.
You suggested that there was a simpler model than either CI or MWI. So what is it?
Newton's laws are simpler than Newton's laws plus elan vital
Yes but that's not the topic at this point. In other subthreads I'm sure elan vital may be relevant, but not this subthread.
Once you get General Relativity, you've explained away time dilation.
What in the hell? Excuse me, but... I'm not aware of ...
I am looking for examples of mysterious answers that were eventually explained *away* by science. I can think of two: One is the belief that the behaviour of living things was explained by the mysterious force of elan vital, and not by mere chemistry; which was destroyed by the synthetisation of urea. The other is the special (and mysterious) role of the conscious observer in quantum mechanics, which was explained away by demonstrating that rocks can get entangled with electrons just as much as brains can. Can anyone furnish me with other examples?
I observe in passing that phlogiston is *not* such a mysterious answer. Eliezer is down on it, but I think unjustly so; for people did in fact perform experiments on phlogiston, including the final experiment to find the weight of the phlogiston that had passed out of the burning material and into the byproducts. It turned out that the phlogiston had negative mass... in other words, that the direction of the transfer had been misidentified. But if you think of phlogiston as `negative oxygen', it makes the same predictions as modern chemical theory. This is no worse a mistake than mistaking the direction of the current, a mistake which is *still* enshrined in our sign conventions; it is not a mysterious answer of the form "X->Y" with no details of X given and any value allowed for Y.
However, I digress. Mysterious answers blown away by experiments, anyone?