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Psychonominaut t1_jc5tt13 wrote

Would disagree with your last point only because we don't know how the brain works. What if our brains can implicitly understand and mediate quantum states? If that's the case, every iteration of "you" might be vastly different because every iteration has completely different quantum states of mind to deal with from birth to death. Our lives and our thoughts compound from birth, I find it hard to believe that in all the probable universes, the same me is doing the same thing. But then again, based on many worlds, there would be an infinite number that supposedly do the exact same things. There'd also be an infinite number where because of the countless changes in others and histories, you are not you, or you are the you that does everything but the things you do.

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hughperman t1_jc5ytmo wrote

>What if our brains can implicitly understand and mediate quantum states?

Sorry but this is sci-fi brain thinking. We understand the brain plenty well enough to answer this specific idea. The brain is a physical object, based in reality like every other object. We understand its molecular, cellular function very well. It is composed of particles like every other object, which have quantum superpositions like every other particle in the universe. The complex emergent behavior of the brain is difficult to understand, yes, but that is not a license to apply quantum physics concepts at macroscopic levels.

If you want to allow some spooky quantum navigation by a "soul" of some sort, we need to acknowledge that we are not talking about any physics or scientific knowledge.

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Psychonominaut t1_jc6cfg4 wrote

Physics will be and is increasingly being applied to biology and the brain, so it's not necessarily sci-fi thinking even though I think the idea of multiverse is sci-fi thinking since we can't prove it anyway. We know a lot about the brain for the past 300 or so years of research that has gone into it but who knows if that's a lot or nothing depending on the future of these disciplines - we've not scratched the surface of a lot of things, things that require huge interdisciplinary approaches and in some cases revolutionary thinking and engineering. The idea of quantum states being mediated by brains is a working hypothesis by some* physicists in an attempt to try and explain emergence. And I've used this example before but appropriating the idea of bit flips to brains/biology and even interactions across the universe, sure there'd be repetition, but repetition of exact same elements, evolutions, and histories? Can only see that as unlikely unless there truly is infinity "out there"; the chances of the same/similar things happening become close to zero but not zero (ever with infinity). And in the end, imo this whole thread is pretty speculative.

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