Comic Strips

To address the second half of your comment, how do I explain “something apparently happening” when nothing ever happens? Many worlds might claim no definitive events occur, but it does claim that states become mutually dependent and interact, that’s all we need to perceive something occurring. What we perceive as events do not need to line up with “real” events outside our environment.

If you can emulate the universe on a computer, then you can also (with enough processing power) instead randomly generate universe states, either way you’ll eventually generate redbob, either way redbob exists, even if he’s just a pattern of numbers he doesn’t get to know that. Do events exist if the universe is just randomly generated numbers? Of course not, but redbob still thinks they do.

Given all that, events do not need to be “real”, they just need to look real from our perspective.

Edit: to be clear, not supporting nutty concepts like we’re in a simulation or a random number generator, just using them as thought experiments to prove that eventless systems can emulate the appearance of events and states internally

Bob is a scientist, they have hooked a computer to the R vs T experiment and when R occurs the screen flashes red.

When the screen flashes red, red photons collide with Bob's skin and eyes, signals enter their brain and they observe a red screen, and they remember it.

After all that, the collection of atoms describing Bob, their state, contains lots of dependency on that red screen, they are redbob, their state could only exist in a universe where that screen was red.

So, given the state of redbob, I think it’s reasonable to say that perceived R.

Neither R nor T has actually happened, but the state of redbob I described cannot ever have observed T, they can only have observed R. So they only exist in a limited subset of the full universal quantum state, they coexist with a red screen and with R because they must.

There’s of course a second state of matter that is the scientist observing T. Bluebob.

An outside observer of the universe might insist neither R nor T has occurred, that both Bobs are equally real, that the quantum soup contains it all.

But if you are redbob, you have still observed R.

We are all redbob all the time.

But why do we sometimes observe quantum superpositions, why do we not see a fully classical universe?

If we imagine putting Bob in a quantum tight box, then instead of asking him what he saw we ask only questions that don’t require us to know which bob he is (and the only link is carefully designed to not change even slightly in response to the massive differences between redbob and bluebob), then we get to be the outside observer, our quantum state is indifferent between the bobs so our perspective encompasses them both. We can prove this is distinct from simply not knowing which Bob is in a classical box, because unlike the classical box, we really are able to manipulate a soup of all the states we’re not dependent on.