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AlexMennen comments on Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 3 - Less Wrong
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People making decisions are not quantum events. When a photon could either end up in a detector or not, there are branches where it does and branches where it doesn't. But when you decide whether or not to do something good, this decision is being carried out by neurons, which are big enough that quantum events do not influence them much. This means that if you decide to do something good, you probably also decided to do the same good thing in the overwhelming majority of Everette branches that diverge from when you started considering the decision.
This may be true, but I don't think anyone knows for sure, and it seems likely to me that the brain has the property of sensitivity to initial conditions, meaning that it's likely to do different stuff in different Everett branches.
Yvain recently asked about this on his blog -- he tends to agree with you:
More on-topic for the grandparent: Greg Egan's novella Oracle talks about the ethical issue of bad stuff happening in other Everett branches.
The fact that I can reliably multiply numbers shows that at least some of my decisions are deterministic.
To the extent that I make ethical decisions based on some partially deterministic reasoning process, my ethical decisions are not chaotic.
If, due to chaos, I have a probability p of slapping my friends instead of hugging them, then Laplace's law of succession tells me that p is less than 1%.
There must be chaotic amplification of quantum events going on. Any macroscopic system at finite temperature will be full of quantum events, like a molecule in an excited state returning to its ground state. The quantum randomness is a constant source of "noise" which normally averages out, but sometimes there will be fluctuations away from a mean, and sometimes they will be amplified into mesoscopic and macroscopic difference. This must be true, but it would be best to have a mathematical demonstration, e.g. that the impact of quantum fluctuations on the transfer of heat through an atmosphere will amplify into macroscopically different weather patterns on a certain timescale.
I have taken lots of decisions based on random bits from Fourmilab or random.org (especially before finding LessWrong -- nowadays I only do that when deciding which password to use and stuff like that).