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Nubulous comments on Decision theory: Why Pearl helps reduce “could” and “would”, but still leaves us with at least three alternatives - Less Wrong
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Comments (70)
I think you may be confusing the microstate and macrostate here - the microstate may branch every-which-way, but the macrostate, i.e. the computer and its electronic state (or whatever it is the deciding system is), is very highly conserved across branching, and can be considered classically deterministic (the non-conserving paths appear as "thermodynamic" misbehaviour on the macro scale, and are hopefully rare). Since it is this macrostate which represents the decision process, impossible things don't become possible just because branching is occurring.
For the other perspective see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
Small fluctuations are often rapidly magnified into macroscopic fluctuations.
Computers sometimes contain elements designed to accelerate this process - in the form of entropy generators - which are used to seed random number generators - e.g. see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_random_number_generator#Physical_phenomena_with_quantum-random_properties
I don't think anyone is talking about impossible things becoming possible. The topic is whether considered paths in a decision can be legitimately considered to be possibilities - or whether they are actually impossible.