On Wed, 8 Dec 1999, Russell Standish wrote:
> > In a MW or all-universe model, all your decisions can do is to change
> > the percentage of people-like-you who do certain things, or equivalently
> > the percentage of universes in which people-like-you have taken various
> > actions.
>
> I disagree with this statement strongly. The evolution of the MW model
> is completely deterministic, and the ratios of measures of different
> worlds is completely determined at the start.
I discussed this one, decision theory in the MWI, with Wei Dai
pretty thoroughly a while ago; look it up.
Basically, your decisions *do* still determine the outcome, just
like in a single-universe deterministic model. Which is the same as
saying that the laws of physics + initial conditions determine the
outcome; just another way of talking about the same thing, as you are not
something outside of physics.
> What your free will does is affect the likelihood of what branch your
> 1st person experience will take. Free will is a 1st person phenomenon,
> not a 3rd person phenomenon.
There is no free will; in fact, as I say above, realizing that
solves the problem. As for "1st person" you will not be surprised that I
see no basis for such distinctions.
- - - - - - -
Jacques Mallah (jqm1584.domain.name.hidden)
Graduate Student / Many Worlder / Devil's Advocate
"I know what no one else knows" - 'Runaway Train', Soul Asylum
My URL:
http://pages.nyu.edu/~jqm1584/
Received on Sun Dec 12 1999 - 16:43:26 PST