Choosing a faith

A puff of wind cannot cause a wavefunction to collapse. That's a fairly immediate result of the quantum mechanical formalism. Only an observation causes the wavefunction to collapse. As for what exactly qualifies something to be an observer to do so: at a minimum it's something that can experience/register information and has some capacity of memory and choice. Beyond that a clearer answer isn't available.However you can have a nuke go off and the wavefunction won't collapse in the equations. This is simply due to what the quantum state is, it's a generalisation of a probability distribution. So if somebody rolls a dice in a closed room, the chance of each result is:
[1/6,1/6,1/6,1/6,1/6,1/6]
when you learn the result was even, then the distribution "collapses" to:
[0, 1/3, 0, 1/3, 0, 1/3]
because now you know the result was even. This collapse cannot be caused by any interaction with the wind or whatever. A gust of wind passing through the room doesn't really change your probabilities for what the dice role was (it might alter them if you have reason to believe the wind affected the die roll in some way).It's the same in quantum theory. The only difference is that Quantum Theory is probability theory modified to take into account that some variables don't have well-defined values until observation. In regular probability theory you would assume the dice has some result/outcome independent of observation. Quantum Theory drops this assumption.

Decoherence is a little more subtle than that.First the important point is to grasp that the quantum state (called a "wavefunction" in certain special cases) is simply a type of probability distribution. It's not a concrete actual thing like a stone, tree or dog. It's like any probability, a subjective estimate of how confident one is that certain future observations will have certain values.In quantum mechanics not all such observations can be considered to reveal a pre-existing truth. This changes how the calculus of probabilities works.However for certain properties of large scale objects, such as "where is the Eiffel Tower?", the probabilities obey the same rules as classical probability and so can be seen to reflect ignorance of some pre-existing truth.Decoherence is the name for this process where quantum probabilities become classical probabilities. It's an objectification limit. It is as Thomas Banks (professor at Rutgers and Santa Cruz) says in his 2019 textbook "Quantum Mechanics: An Introduction": Decoherence describes this emergence.

To be clear the wavefunction is not some actual object like a wave or tree etc that is somehow physically affected.The wavefunction is a mathematical construct that represents the knowledge of a living being and its collapse represents the acquisition of knowledge by such a being.Various terms are used in the literature for such a living being. Observer, Agent, IGUS and many more. Quantum Theory does not make statements about the universe in the absence of observers. To quote Wolfgang Pauli in Handbuch der Physik 5(1): Square brackets indicate my insertion for clarity.

The second part of the sentence indicates you aren't fully understanding the implications of the first part.If somebody rolls a dice in a room, then I have a list of probabilities given above as:
1/6[1] + 1/6[2] + 1/6[3] + 1/6[4] + 1/6[5] + 1/6[6]
that is a 1/6 chance for each number.If I walk into the room and see the result is "2" then my probabilities are:
1[2]
i.e. it is certainly 2.However to somebody outside the room the probabilities are:
1/6[1, Goku saw 1] + 1/6[2, Goku saw 2] + 1/6[3, Goku saw 3] + 1/6[4,Goku saw 4] + 1/6[5, Goku saw 5] + 1/6[6, Goku saw 6].So whether the probabilities collapse or "evolve and include the observer" depends on whose probabilities we are discussing. Just as in classical probability. What textbook are you getting this from? Have you seen actual decoherence calculations? Decoherence and collapse are two completely different things. They don't result in quantum states of the same form.
You need far more than entanglement to get decoherence, most entangled systems don't show any decoherence at all. I was answering a question about collapse, not decoherence. You're mixing up two separate aspects of the formalism here. Okay what is this "problem" and what is the actual incompleteness. Can you point to some aspect of the mathematics that actually displays this incompleteness. All the features I am discussing are present in classical statistics as well for the most part.

I don't fully agree with the picture painted in this post. Let me just say a few things. We had the same level of wealth as most countries in Europe until the invasions by Britain in the 17th century. We weren't always a poor country, but made poor by British colonialism.Most of the churches and religious buildings you mention are either:(a) Built by and for wealthy British colonists
(b) Built under patronage by Gaelic lords before British invasionsand not really by the people living in poverty in the 18th and 19th century.I'm no fan of the Catholic Church here, but to me what you saw in Cork tells a story about Imperialism rather than religion.

To be clear I didn't think you were, in fact I don't really see how it could be understood as "picking on Ireland". I'm just saying the actual events surrounding what you saw are not what you might think. Most of the people who funded those churches were wealthy and those in poverty around them in fact had little access to religion at the time.

I don't know how it could be seen to since the states following decoherence and collapse/projection are not the same.

I really don't know how somebody could disagree with that genuinely. It's pretty easy to see in a decoherence calculation that they are not the same. I mean they are literally not the same density matrix.

Why do you think that?In Gaelic Ireland parochial tithes were typically paid by the Nemed (roughly speaking "Nobility", although it doesn't correspond to Feudal Nobility) by supplying their sons to the church and granting lands. I wasn't forgetting it, I just don't know how it relates to what I said. Can you explain?

Bohr often discussed this in terms of Complementarity and has a few essays on the topic, as do other modern physicists and chemists like Hans Primas. It's a general feature of quantum mechanics that statements about one aspect of a system can't be reduced to statements about certain "fundamental aspects". This is called Complementarity.So in quantum electrodynamics statements about the colour of light don't reduce to just being statements about the frequency of light. They're both two aspects of light, neither is more fundamental and indeed trying to combine them into one picture leads to contradictions if pushed too hard.Similarly I don't expect statements about psychology and personality to just reduce to statements about neurons and chemical channels.In simpler terms I wouldn't be a materialist or reductionist because I don't think QM supports it. I remember nwr saying similar things, but coming at it from a general philosophical angle rather than a QM angle.

The only time Irish people were drained of their money by tithes was when British law forced them to pay it to support the Anglican church in Ireland (i.e. not their own religion) and was viewed as another aspect of colonialism.I would have seen that as supporting what I was saying, that this was more to do with British Imperialism. What aspect am I forgetting?

But I wasn't forgetting it. I am aware that these buildings are religious and hence in an obvious sense "the church came to possess money once owned by the poor". How could I forget that. In my original post I was saying that I think you are missing the actual context of what was going in Ireland at the time.
The average Irish person had to give money and people to support the British army, money to support British landlords' vanity projects, all crops except the least nourishing ones to support the British market and yes money to support the religion of the British colonists. My point was that seeing this as being about "Religion feeding on people" is not the most accurate view, it was rather Britain just feeding on Ireland.I'm not "forgetting" about the tithes, I own original documents and papers complaining about them in Gaelic. I'm disagreeing with the slant being put on this because it's not really about religion except in the superficial sense that these particular British buildings are religious. It was about British colonialism. The average poor person did not give money to support the Catholic Church, the large Huguenot churches or Yola churches in Wexford. The Anglican church as some entity in itself did not extort us, Britain did. Also most of the funding for these buildings did not come from those tithes.If during the Japanese invasion of China in the 30s-40s one of the things the Chinese had to build for the Japanese was a few Jinja, it would be an odd focus to look at these Jinja and say "look at what Shintoism did".

Yeah British colonialism is just some silly rabbit hole. Dumb old me.
These buildings weren't actually payed for by the poor paying tithes, but still "some" tithes existed and that's much more important since religion is the bad guy here, not imperialism. Tithes is a concept is from the Bible, forget that French, Yola etc groups never made us pay these things and that they were simply one among several British taxes. Oh wait sure taxes were Egyptian in origin, not British and the word Tax is French as well.

The church was a fraction of what we had to pay in both food and money to the British government. This is like saying enforced labour in India in Assam and Uttar Pradesh and others was really about the tea industry because they literally picked tea or would the crown have enforced slave labour without the tea industries constant demands.
I mean yes it is literally true and probably had the tea industry not kept it up they wouldn't have, but it was just an aspect of the British colonial system in India. There was enforced labour all over the place. Similarly in Ireland, the Anglican Church was a drop in the ocean of what was drained away. It makes little sense to look at the exploitation and focus on the Anglican Church in particular, motivated by buildings they largely funded themselves. Especially since for example the Anglican church helped in the Gaelic revival by funding early Gaelic magazines, as did the Presbyterian church. Out of all the British institutions they probably did the least damage.

The church were part of it, but honestly in terms of life and money a very small part and one of the few British institutions that contributed positively at points.Originally I was discussing the buildings in Cork not being built by the Irish poor. This then changed to tithes and that tithes are a Biblical concept not British, so this is still more religious somehow. I honestly find this as laughable as downplaying the tea plantations in India as British slave labour because tea farms were originally a Chinese concept.