The other cat is being observed by the other you. When you open the box and look, you entangle your state with the cat's, and the wavefunction describing both of you becomes one that could be decomposed as a superposition of two "worlds", one with a live cat and a you who's observed a live cat, the other with a dead cat and a you who's observed a dead cat.
As far as I can see people's objection to this tends to be that they don't feel like they're in a superposition. To which my response is: what would you expect it to feel like? Bearing in mind that the wavefunction is describing all the states of your neurons etc..
But the other me isn't observed. There's no empirical evidence for that other world. It's an interpretation of the mathematical formalism that there would be other mes making different observations. But there's nothing observational saying I have to choose the MWI interpretation as the correct one.
There's no empirical evidence that the world continues to exist when you close your eyes, it's just the most natural interpretation of our best available mathematical formalism.
Other than the fact your other senses are working, the ground continues to hold you up, gravity is still at play, you're still breathing, etc. That's a ridiculous standard for empirical. MWI isn't the only interpretation, and there isn't a current experiment which can determine which if any of the interpretations are correct. This is the same problem String Theory has had. You can't just base reality on the math.
> Other than the fact your other senses are working, the ground continues to hold you up, gravity is still at play, you're still breathing, etc.
Sure; I was being poetic. We could talk about when you sleep, or distant regions of the universe that you simply can't measure within a human lifetime.
> MWI isn't the only interpretation, and there isn't a current experiment which can determine which if any of the interpretations are correct. This is the same problem String Theory has had. You can't just base reality on the math.
When other "interpretations" require extra assumptions, you can, and should. Otherwise you can never rule out theories that add extra epicycles that have no observable consequences.
You are "in" the wave function still associated with the live cat, but not with the dead cat wave function. Obviously neither you or a cat is a single wave function, but that's basically the explanation.
I understand that's the interpretation, but I don't observe the dead cat, so I don't feel compelled to accept MWI. I'm not saying it's wrong (who knows), only that it's not scientific (lacking empirical evidence for the dead cat) and one of the other interpretations could be correct (again who knows if any of them are representative of the true state of affairs).
The two cats are what the Schroedinger equation implies. The fact that you don't observe the dead cat is perfectly consistent with the Schroedinger equation. To deny the dead cat means that the Schroedinger equation doesn't describe physical reality, and that it has to be modified or added to in some way. There are ways to do so, but it makes the underlying model more complicated and more awkward. Occam's razor would suggest that the Schroedinger equation is the simplest and most parsimonious explanation for what we observe, despite it also predicting the unobservable (for us) other branches of the wave function.
I understand, but Schrodinger himself came up with the cat thought experiment to demonstrate that he felt something was obviously wrong. A version of the Copenhagen interpretation would just say the wave equation is a useful tool for predicting experimental outcomes. We can't say what's really happening when we're not observing. So you don't need to add anything, you just give up on saying what's real. Which seems defeatist or anti-realist, but then one can always hold out hope for better experiments to one day show us what is really going on.
As for parsimonious interpretations, what does superdeterminism add?
