Although they do not "split off" in the same envisioned early on by DeWitt, there is definitely some unanswered questions here. Alastair Wilson and Simon Saunders has raised this issue. Are all the worlds in the wavefunction from the beginning of time or do they somehow spring out from one world? This is called overlap vs non-overlap (first discussed by David Lewis).
Since you are the expert, by all means answer this for us.
Are all the worlds in the wavefunction from the beginning of time or do they somehow spring out from one world? This is called overlap vs non-overlap (first discussed by David Lewis).
So, by "world" in this post I'll mean "basis sate for the universe." The basis is arbitrary, so what "world" means will still depend on how I'm choosing what "worlds" are - there's the energy basis, for instance, where nothing ever changes if you look at just one of those "worlds." But you can have animals or computers in ...
http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1103
Eliezer's gung-ho attitude about the realism of the Many Worlds Interpretation always rubbed me the wrong way, especially in the podcast between both him and Scott (around 8:43 in http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/2220). I've seen a similar sentiment expressed before about the MWI sequences. And I say that still believing it to be the most seemingly correct of the available interpretations.
I feel Scott's post does an excellent job grounding it as a possibly correct, and in-principle falsifiable interpretation.