[ExI] Everett worlds

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Mon, 17 Aug 2020 at 18:52, Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 17, 2020 at 10:35 AM Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat
> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, 17 Aug 2020 at 00:04, Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> >>
> >> Thanks John. Yours is the standard Everettian answer. Others dislike
> Everett’s fully deterministic QM because it leaves no room for free will.
> Some kind of post-decoherence selection could allow for free will in a
> quasi-Everettian framework.
> >
> >
> > There are various definitions of “free will” but if you use the
> incompatibilist one, requiring that our actions be undetermined, Many
> Worlds still allows for that because there is true randomness from the
> first person perspective due to the impossibility of self-locating. Having
> said that, we would not be able to function, or even survive outside of a
> nursing home, if to a significant extent our actions were undetermined.
> >
>
> Good point. I have never understood compatibilist free will. It seems
> to me that if I am an automaton with a delusion of being a free agent,
> I am still an automaton.
>

Compatibilists say that you act freely if your actions are determined by
your preferences, and you do not act freely if your actions are determined
by someone coercing you or by a mental illness. This is the definition of
what it means to act freely used by most people; for example, it is the
definition used in courts, and it is put to the test many times a day
around the world.

Incompatibilists add to the above that you cannot act freely if your
actions are determined. What they can't explain is how it would be possible
to function if your actions were not determined. It might not matter much
if you were choosing a flavour of ice cream, but it would quickly kill you
if you were trying to cross the road, for example.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou

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