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TobyBartels comments on Possibility and Could-ness - Less Wrong
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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.