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Kaarssteun OP t1_iwxfimg wrote

Reply to comment by Mortal-Region in Are you a determinist? Why/why not? How does that impact your view of the singularity? by Kaarssteun

I'd say that falls under dualism, no? A determinist would heavily disagree - how can you get to two end states with an identical starting condition? To me, theories like those sound more like a gimmick than anything else. Would love to be disproven though

Edit - thinking about it a little more, I'm more sure that that would fall under dualism. A splitting timeline would need a definition of an option, a decision. If i choose ball A over B, that's obviously a decision, but If i let go of a rock, it falling to the ground is not a decision. It will always fall. Where is the line? Is a synthetic neural network with just three neurons making a decision when it goes through a computation cycle? How about organic neural networks with just three neurons? Point I'm getting at, calling a decision a decision is more of a question of being human as opposed to true circumstances.

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Mortal-Region t1_iwxjcb8 wrote

Under many-worlds, each world is deterministic. But if there's a version of you who made decision A, and a version who made decision B, and you find yourself on the A branch, then you're the one who made decision A. Free will is preserved, in a sense, because not only could you have made a different decision, there's a version of you who did.

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treesprite82 t1_iwxw10q wrote

> A splitting timeline would need a definition of an option, a decision.

This is a reasonable conclusion to reach from the informal description you were given, but (I'd argue) not a valid objection to MWI itself.

Mainstream theories of quantum mechanics share the idea of entanglement and superposition. Think of Schrödinger's cat experiment where a radioactive atom gets in a superposition of "decayed" plus "not decayed", then interacts with the detector so there's a system in the superposition of "decayed & detected" plus "not decayed & not detected", and eventually a superposition of "decayed & detected & cat dead" plus "not decayed & not detected & cat alive".

Copenhagen interpretation says this stops when it interacts with a "classical" observer, which is left undefined, and collapses into one of the possibilities at random. Wigner interpretation says similar, but defines observer as being a consciousness somewhere between a mouse and a dog.

Many-worlds interpretation says there are no "observers" and the whole universe is a quantum system. Consequence of this is that entanglement "bubbles up" until the entire universe is in a superposition. There's no definition of "choices" or even "worlds" being relied on.

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turnip_burrito t1_iwydff4 wrote

No, it's not dualism. In many worlds quantum mechanics, every particle motion has alternate superposition branches. It happens constantly, every moment, not limited to when a human makes a decision.

It is very deterministic and only requires physics.

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