> Before you can talk about "the actions of the experimenter or the apparatus" you have to tell me what an experimenter or an apparatus is.
This is a very common error of armchair worldview building. Experiment-based sciences such as physics do not work exclusively that way; we can make progress without being so ambitious as to describe and exhaust the whole world in a single scheme. There are things in the real world that have no useful definition or model in physics, such as matter, or experimenter, or apparatus, or measurement. And this is fine, because we know them by experience, and the subject of the investigation is usually something else and rather more specific.
> But theory tells us, and experiment confirms, that classical objects do not actually exist.
Which theory, which experiment? The studies in quantum foundations showed that explaining expensive experiments with light and particles in the classical terms is hard, and some naive intuitive models, surprisingly, are not consistent with quantum theory. This is very far from "classical objects do not exist". They can easily exist, just with properties that are contextual and interactions that are non-local. And those are categories we are aware of; the possibilities are endless.
If you're thinking about the Everettian viewpoint where indeed no classical objects exist, this is just one possible theoretical scheme of thinking, not an experiment-based physical theory. There is Bohmian mechanics, where particles do exist. There are other theories where particles do exist.
> If you have a better theory, you should publish it.
A better theory in place of "classical objects don't exist" is "don't try to explain the whole world with a single scheme". There is the statistical interpretation due to Einstein, Ballentine and the Bohmian viewpoint which get us useful models and predictions in the realm of atomic physics. There is the classical theory, which gets us understanding of civil engineering, Earth-scale events and celestial mechanics. There is the general theory of relativity, which gets us accurate description of gravity. None of these overlap very well. Neither is explained by Everettian viewpoint.
> Experiment-based sciences such as physics do not work exclusively that way; we can make progress without being so ambitious as to describe and exhaust the whole world in a single scheme.
Nope The object of the game in the physical sciences is reductionism. Reducing the number of explanations required to account for observations is the definition of progress.
> "don't try to explain the whole world with a single scheme"
That's not a theory. That's throwing in the towel.
This is a very common error of armchair worldview building. Experiment-based sciences such as physics do not work exclusively that way; we can make progress without being so ambitious as to describe and exhaust the whole world in a single scheme. There are things in the real world that have no useful definition or model in physics, such as matter, or experimenter, or apparatus, or measurement. And this is fine, because we know them by experience, and the subject of the investigation is usually something else and rather more specific.
> But theory tells us, and experiment confirms, that classical objects do not actually exist.
Which theory, which experiment? The studies in quantum foundations showed that explaining expensive experiments with light and particles in the classical terms is hard, and some naive intuitive models, surprisingly, are not consistent with quantum theory. This is very far from "classical objects do not exist". They can easily exist, just with properties that are contextual and interactions that are non-local. And those are categories we are aware of; the possibilities are endless.
If you're thinking about the Everettian viewpoint where indeed no classical objects exist, this is just one possible theoretical scheme of thinking, not an experiment-based physical theory. There is Bohmian mechanics, where particles do exist. There are other theories where particles do exist.
> If you have a better theory, you should publish it.
A better theory in place of "classical objects don't exist" is "don't try to explain the whole world with a single scheme". There is the statistical interpretation due to Einstein, Ballentine and the Bohmian viewpoint which get us useful models and predictions in the realm of atomic physics. There is the classical theory, which gets us understanding of civil engineering, Earth-scale events and celestial mechanics. There is the general theory of relativity, which gets us accurate description of gravity. None of these overlap very well. Neither is explained by Everettian viewpoint.