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Manfred comments on Possibility and Could-ness - Less Wrong
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At the risk of drawing wrong conclusions from physics I don't understand, I propose this model of free will within a lawful universe:
As I stand there thinking whether or not I should eat a banana, I can be confident that there's a world where a zombie-me is already eating a banana, and another world where a zombie-me has walked away from a banana.
As I stand near the edge of the cliff, there's a world where a zombie-me has jumped off the cliff to test quantum immortality, and Inspector Darwin has penciled in a slightly lower frequency of my alleles. But there is no world in which I’d jumped, sprouted wings, and survived.
There are in fact an infinite number of worlds in which you jump, sprout wings, and survive. To change the words and make the physics entirely well-accepted: if you jump off a cliff, there is a nonzero probability you sprout wings.
I don't understand how this gives or doesn't give you free will, though - your actions are just (note: me using that word means I'm playing devil's advocate :D) random. Even though they're weighted towards certain outcomes, that doesn't mean a loaded die has free will when it "chooses" 6.
Well, for most intents and purposes and possibly literally. Do 'we' actually know if there is any precision limit down there in the quantum? Like a 'plank quantum goo stuff' or whatever the proper name would be.
Oh man, if probability is quantized that would be unusual.
Actually I guess it would be a natural consequence of quantizing information (I think), which has some decent theoretical reasons. But I don't know of any good evidence either way, and continuous spacetime has its good points too.
No idea here either. Although the question is interesting to me. If nothing else it impacts the reply one can give to the quantum suicidal. :)
My free will is in choosing which world my consciousness would observe. If I have that choice, I have free will.
There’re instances when I don’t have free will. Sprouting wings is physically improbable. If I estimate the chance of it happening at epsilon, within the constraints of physics, and even then as a result of random chance, this option wouldn’t really figure in my tree diagram of choices. Likewise, if quantum immortality is correct, then observing myself dying is physically impossible. (But what if the only way not to die would be to sprout wings?)
Random actions are also an example of lack of free will. Suppose we’re playing Russian roulette, except we’re shooting our feet and not our heads. Quantum immortality would not kick in to save your foot. So once you pull the trigger, you have no choice over whether your foot gets shot or not. No free will there.
I suppose if a die had consciousness, it would be going through a similar decision process. Instead of a die, imagine a person embedded in a die-like cube with numbered sides. If this human die could affect the outcome of the roll, that’s free will. If not, that’s a random action.
Either way, I’m done arguing about this, because we’re not addressing the main problem with my proposal: all of the above should only work if a decision is a quantum event. I haven’t read anywhere that another world can split off as a result of a non-quantum event. Correct me if I’m wrong.
There is no such thing as a non-quantum event. As far as we can tell, quantum physics is reality.
Obligatory link to old material: Egan's Law
I apologize. That's not how I meant it. All events are quantum, and they add up to reality. What I meant was, is free will lost in the addition?
This intuition is difficult like hell to describe, but the authors of Quantum Russian Roulette and this post on Quantum Immortality seemed to have it, as well as half the people I’d ever heard mentioning Schrödinger's cat. It’s the reason why the life of a person/cat in question is tied to a single quantum event, as opposed to a roll of a classical die that’s determined by a whole lot of quantum events.
Our decisions are tied to the actions of bijillions of quarks.
By analogy, consider tossing fair quantum coins. What’s the probability that between 45% and 55% of the coins would land heads? Obviously that depends on the number of coins. If you toss only 1 coin, that probability is p=0. If you toss 2 coins, p=0.5. As coins --> inf, p --> 1.
The “degrees of probabilistic freedom” are reduced as you increase the number of random actions. The outcome becomes more and more determined.
In the case of Schrödinger's Cat, Schrödinger was criticising the København interpretation, in which there is a distinction drawn between classical and quantum worlds. In this and other thought experiments, if somebody who makes such a distinction might be listening in, then you have to make sure that they will accept that the relevant event is quantum. (Sometimes you also want to have precise probabilities to work with, too, so it helps to specify exactly what quantum event is the deciding factor.)
This is the reverse of supposing that something is not a quantum event and hoping that those who don't make this distinction will accept it.
Yes, but we're back to the objection that there are still a small portion of worlds that come out differently.
You seem to be using a model in which there are two kinds of coin flips. There are quantum coin flips, which cause the world to split. And then there are classical coin flips - deterministic and non world-splitting, though due to our own lack of knowledge of initial conditions, there is a subjective probability of 0.5 for each outcome.
I use a model something like this. But I assume that whenever a classical coin is flipped, there was an earlier quantum, world-splitting event which resulted in two worlds, one in which heads is the winning call, and one in which tails is destined to be the result.
Are there thermodynamic coin flips too? A coin flip where the outcome depends on whether a single particle of an ideal gas determines the coin flip, depending on whether it is in the left hand side or right hand side of a box? :-)
The bigger something is, the more predetermined it gets.
Then your classical coin is a quantum coin that simply made its decision before you observed it. The outcome of a toss of a real classical coin would be the result of so many quantum events that you might as well consider the toss predetermined (my post above elaborates).
The exact same goes for a thermodynamic coin flip, except a lot fewer quantum events determine the outcome of this one.
In both these cases, each quantum event would split worlds up. But given how many of them happen, each non-quantum coin toss creates 2^(that many) new worlds (here I'm naively assuming binary splits only). In how many of those worlds has the coin landed heads, and in how many has it laded tails? If 99.998% of your zombies in other worlds, as well as you in this one, had observed the coin landing heads, then the outcome was really close to predetermined.