You suggested that there was a simpler model than either CI or MWI. So what is it?
I seem to have lost track of the conversation. I'm sorry.
MWI is a simpler model than CI. It does not have wave-form collapse. It has decoherence, which is functionally similar, but is an emergent phenomena of the actual laws of physics, rather than a law in of itself.
Looking at your second comment:
Well, the CI allowed for all forms of entanglement. It seems you were thinking it was supposed to explain away entanglement. It doesn't. It explains away waveform collapse and the process of becoming entangled (as distinct from the property of being entangled).
What in the hell? Excuse me, but... I'm not aware of any theories of 'time dilation' that predate General/Special Relativity.
They didn't have experiments supporting it yet. Given what we knew then, Newtonian physics may have been the simplest explanation. Now, it of itself, is not even an explanation, in that it doesn't match the experiment. If we added a law to force it, it would no longer be simpler than general relativity.
Entanglement between two pairs only lasts until some 'measuring' event occurs upon one of the pairs.
According to CI. There is no mathematical formalism as to what "measuring" is. They say it's when the system gets entangled with something "macroscopic". There has never been an experiment that showed wave-form collapse that couldn't be explained by decoherence, which arises from the same laws if you don't postulate wave-form collapse.
Quantum. Mechanics. Does. Not. Work. This. Way.
CI doesn't. MWI does. It's possible that there are variations known as MWI that don't include things like this, but the one Eliezer is a proponent of does. In fact, the specific variation he's a proponent of (timeless physics), postulates that the past and future are exactly the same kind of alternate universe.
I'd suggest reading the (quantum physics sequence)[http://lesswrong.com/lw/r5/the_quantum_physics_sequence/]. I'm not sure if Eliezer is as good at explaining it as he hopes he is, but I doubt he's worse than me.
CI doesn't. MWI does.
Handling this first: No, it doesn't. MWI does not and cannot postulate universal entanglement. Entanglement is a phenomenon of paired particles sharing quantum states. That is all it is. You're abusing the term very severely to mean something quite radically different from what it actually means.
MWI is a simpler model than CI. It does not have wave-form collapse. It has decoherence, which is functionally similar, but is an emergent phenomena of the actual laws of physics, rather than a law in of itself.
Handling this second.
I can...
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?