Austin,
Thanks, you have raised lots of interesting points. I've been short on time, but before midnight (in 5 minutes? oops) let me mention a couple of items quickly:
-- Alas, I cannot provide any specific references for the dark function (or negative image) interpretation of quantum mechanics because... well... this essay is where I invented it.
I'm not familiar with any papers or prior work that proposes quite this idea... or even remotely this idea? It's, um, a bit radical, I guess, though it surely does not feel that way to me, since it fits a lot of stuff together nicely once you go the dark route. No more infinite sums of infinitesimals, just large but always finite set of superselection rules.
The closest thing to a resource available is decoherence theory, especially (and oddly) some of the earlier work there, when folks seem to be a bit more open to saying radical things about the wave function being "defined" by its environment. But taking it to the extreme I did -- the literal inverse of MWI, total darkness where once lived an infinity of other states and universes -- well, it at least seems to be a new interpretation. That said, there's always something related buried in the deep literature. I've just not found anything yet.
I have brought up essentially the same idea over the past year on Backreaction, using different terminology such as a bit-first view. However, I've quickly become fond of "dark functions" because this phrase describes vividly exactly what the intent is: The absence of state within a region of space, constrained not by anything within it (there is nothing!), but by the full set of superselection rules in both spacetime and the immediate environment.
So, bottom line: For good or bad, the first and so far only reference on dark function is in this essay.
-- For the dual universe part, it's interesting that you mention yin-yang, because I so don't think of it that way that I didn't recognize what you meant the first time I read your sentence. The reason is, ironically, exactly the issue you mentioned: the absolutely critical importance of observer location.
No matter which universe you are in, the other universe will be the negative one to you, and exactly so, not "sort of" as with antimatter. So it's not black vs white, but purely where you are located.
This is something I didn't get into (um, I don't think? :) in the essay, but if both space and time are emergent forms of entanglement -- by which I mean a simpler, more direct, and coarser version than the complicated and insanely over-detailed Planck-scale holographic version of space as entanglement -- then this entanglement quite literally acts a net that drags you with it as you move along with the time of your universe. It drags you because you are a classical, information-defined entity -- that's what information is at a deeper level, part of this network. That's also why dark functions work so well for issues of context: With dark functions,all of physics is context, in particular all of classical physics.
This spacetime dragging effect also provides another delightfully simple way to interpret quantum physics: It's physics for which time has not yet been defined, for which due to constraints or due to designed safeguards against it, the network of classical physics has not yet "snared" the event and forced it to become classical, informational, a part of history. Wave collapse becomes snagging those who've been dragging, so to speak. It's not easy to hide, either.
Another bit that is fun with this view is that the original process of pair generation never ends. That is, other universe pairs are in effect trying to start all the time within ours, but cannot get very far before they too are captured by the entropic net of entangled information (the Boltzmann fabric as I like to call it) that is the evolving spacetime of our universe.
Ongoing pair production even of space and time also provides another way of explaining why things get ratty and weird at the quantum level. Since even (actually, especially) the direction of time is determined by the entangled, number-conserving consensus of the Boltzmann fabric, then at small enough scales even that direction starts getting ratty around the edges, at least until time is forced back into order by an encounter with causal history in the form of the Boltzmann fabric, the information that is classicality.
(Such virtual pair breakout attempts are not necessarily completely random, since they too are constrained. For example, want to know why protons and neutrons are small, and the color force is spatially constrained? Psst, a little secret: It involves multiple axes of time competing with each other to try (and fail) to get to be "real" times. One result is the 3-space of strong and electric charge displacements that we call the color force. But only one causal time can emerge into the broader universe from such any such competition, just as only the electric force can emerge from baryons into unlimited xyz space. The txyz fabric is a very unforgiving taskmaster, forcing the little temporal rebellions constantly taking place within nucleons to be both crystallized into a precise 3-space of color charge displacements, and severely limited in xyz size so that quantum uncertainty can wash out any attempts to create truly alternative causal timelines.)
Argh, did I say quick?? It's almost 1am. Later!! Sometime this week...
Cheers,
Terry