Comment on Possibility and Could-ness

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 20:06:31 GMT

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.

Discuss