a theory...

Dont be at yourself

Firstly, I'm not a scientist - and have little knowledge in this.

In the 4 demension thread, someone mentioned about alternate realites - where every decision created a new reality got me thinking...

Can we actually make choices?

Lets presume there are two of me (I know, a wonderful thought), faced with the same choice in the same circumstances. Shouldn't we both react the same? ie. If I was faced with a choice - could I actually choose? Or would it be predestined (by my personality etc) that I choose one answer?

Kairo

We'll, if it was the exact same circumstances, and you were faced with the exact same choice...you would react the exact same.

But the whole point of alternate realitys is not necessarily the choices you make...but the changes the enviroment takes. And those changes,no matter how small, will effect you choice in some way or another. e.g. You could be just about to make a very important choice, when all of a sudden you inhale a piece of dust that wasn't present in another reality, which causes you to sneeze, which momentarily sets your mind of its original track and you end up making a totally different choice.

And also, not forgetting the actual changes that could take place at birth. Any slight chemical change in the brain might effect the way you think later in life.

I also believe that there is a certain randomness in choices, and not everything is decided simply scientificly. What if you made the choice to decide something randomly :P Then the outcome would be different either way.

I'd imagine something like that would be best observed if you were to clone and exact duplicate of yourself, and give them the exact same choice. They wont allways pick the same. e.g. The person may like Pie....but if given the choice to eat Pie or Cake....one of the clones might decide it would be nice to have pie for a change while the other may not.

I know I have no scientifif evidence or anything like that to back it up...just a theory.

BoneCollector

you always have freedom of choice, yes you could choose one or the other and as soon as you did you change history.
all choices effect history. if i was a time traveler and 3 days before you where presented with the choice i traveled in to the future and saw that you choose the wrong one..
this does not mean it was predestined it simply means that this is the free choice you made.
if how ever i came back to the present i could tell you what was going to happen and you will think this will chang the future.
however... the act of me telling you will also be a factor in the decision you make and will still be the wrong choice based on the information you have to hand at the time.
but right and wrong are relative to any given situation.
any decission will seem to be the correct one at the time it is made. History judges if it was a good choice or not.

Dont be at yourself

Originally posted by Kyro

But the whole point of alternate realitys is not necessarily the choices you make...but the changes the enviroment takes.

But what changes the enviornment? At the start, the two universes would be created identical surely?

all of a sudden you inhale a piece of dust that wasn't present in another reality

But what would put that dust there? What would make that particle of dust behave differently in one reality than another?

And also, not forgetting the actual changes that could take place at birth. Any slight chemical change in the brain might effect the way you think later in life.

Again, why would there be any chemical changes? If everything was idenitcal, there wouldn't be

I also believe that there is a certain randomness in choices, and not everything is decided simply scientificly. What if you made the choice to decide something randomly :P Then the outcome would be different either way.

The only accurate way I could think of testing this would be to clone a person twice - both with no knowedge of the cloning, put them in an identical room and observe their behaviour.

bonkey

Originally posted by NekkidBibleMan
Firstly, I'm not a scientist - and have little knowledge in this.

In the 4 demension thread, someone mentioned about alternate realites - where every decision created a new reality got me thinking...

Can we actually make choices?

OK, alternate realities can be viewed in two ways.

Theres three main possibilities :

1) Our universe is not the only one, and there are others, created seperately to ours. These may or may not be siumilar to ours. We are in no way connected, and have no way of locating, detecting, or interacting with this reality, and thus can discount its existence as a non-issue

2) The concept of alternative realities "created" by time travel. This is speculative fiction. The argument is that *if* time travel were possible and attempted, then temporal paradoxes would be more or less unavoidable. Since science has no solution to temporal paradoxes, we define the notion of alternate timelines, or alternate realities. This argument is all very interesting, but is based on the premise that time-travel *is* possible - which our current model of reality seems to prevent. So, if time travel is not possible, this argument can be discounted as a non-issue. If time-travel is possible, then this becomes an issue only when time-travel is invented.

3) In QM, there is a principle which is increasingly becoming accepted called "sum of histories". Basically put, a particle travelling from A to B travels all possible paths from A to B. However, probability still exists at the Quantum level, and reality tends to be determined by the most probable path! Or something like that. It basically says that reality is a probability "smear", but that we observe one concrete instance of that. Now, you can theorise that if all the other probabilities exist, then there is no single reality, as not all probabilities must meet at a single point. So yes, there could be an infinite number of realties coming from quantum uncertainty and "sum of all histories", but it is not something which we can observe, nor influence.

So - do you have choice? It depends on what you define as "you", and how you look at this reality "smear". If you have some religious concept of a "soul", this is difficult to reconclie with there being an infinite number of you spread over an infinite number of realities.

In any case, you can never meet another you, because each time you cannot "cross" probabilities - as you exist in all of them.

Now, if you discard that notion, you can end up with the possibility that the entire universe is deterministic. It is governed by mathematical laws, and if anyone could understand them, they could predict what is happening next. From this perspective, you have no "real" choice. However, this level of calculation could never be performed *within* our universe as you would have a situation where something inside the universe had enough capacity to calculate everything about the universe, including itself - a paradox.

Therfore, even if the universe is deterministic, you cannot know that, nor can anyone else. Hence, the determinism is a bit useless - you may not have free choice, but nothing can determine it for a fact!

jc