My impression (also not a physicist) is that there’s no obvious connection between a wave function collapsing somewhere in the universe and your neurons churning through a decision about which door you’d rather walk through. Under Many Worlds, every quantum-possible universe exists, but that doesn’t mean that your experience of decision-making is equal-and-opposite distributed across those worlds. If you like the look of the right door better than the left door, then probably most of your selves will go through that door.
(If you’re interested in a fictional exploration of these issues, Ted Chiang’s Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom is excellent.)
fwiw, my concern isn’t premised on “all futures / choices being equally likely.”
I think the concern is closer to something like “some set of futures are going to happen (there’s some distribution of Everett branches that exists and can’t be altered from the inside), so there’s not really room to change the course of things from a zoomed-out, point-of-view-of-the-universe perspective.”
My impression (also not a physicist) is that there’s no obvious connection between a wave function collapsing somewhere in the universe and your neurons churning through a decision about which door you’d rather walk through. Under Many Worlds, every quantum-possible universe exists, but that doesn’t mean that your experience of decision-making is equal-and-opposite distributed across those worlds. If you like the look of the right door better than the left door, then probably most of your selves will go through that door.
(If you’re interested in a fictional exploration of these issues, Ted Chiang’s Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom is excellent.)
fwiw, my concern isn’t premised on “all futures / choices being equally likely.”
I think the concern is closer to something like “some set of futures are going to happen (there’s some distribution of Everett branches that exists and can’t be altered from the inside), so there’s not really room to change the course of things from a zoomed-out, point-of-view-of-the-universe perspective.”
I’ll give the Chiang story a look, thanks!