The movie “Sliding Doors,” released in 1998, was inspired by the concept of parallel universes and the “what if” scenario. The film explores two parallel storylines that diverge based on a split-second event in the protagonist’s life. The idea of exploring the consequences of different choices and the impact of chance events on one’s life served as the inspiration for the film.
Quantum physics introduces the concept of indeterminacy at the quantum level, suggesting that certain events are inherently probabilistic rather than deterministic. Some proponents argue that this indeterminacy could allow for a degree of randomness that might contribute to free will. However, this idea is speculative, and there’s no consensus on how quantum phenomena directly influence human decision-making or free will. It’s a topic that bridges philosophy and science, and opinions vary among experts.
Plausibly, human decisions are random in the relevant sense.
your life is not a straight line stretching from past to future. It is more like a tree, branching again and again into many lives–many people in other parallel worlds, each with an equal claim to descend from your past self. And whenever a quantum-mechanically random event occurs, a new person in a new world will see each and every possible outcome.
So typically, when you face a choice, your descendants in different branches will make and act out different decisions. The implications for free will are frightening, and potentially dehumanizing.
Perhaps we are responsible, not for the individual actions our future selves take within individual branches, but for the overall pattern of our successors’ future actions and their quantum weights (which we ordinarily think of as probabilities but may or may not really deserve that name). The deep self does influence this overall pattern: a good-natured personality will increase the weight of future branches where the agent acts rightly. This is not the ordinary sort of freedom we take ourselves to have, which surely requires having control over our individual actions. But it may be a form of freedom that is worth wanting, if many-worlds provides the correct picture of our universe and its structure. And if that is the sort of universe we live in, this may be the best sort of freedom we can hope to possess.
