2010-11-08

Free will and determinism as part of a continuum

Sometimes I am filled with a forbidding mortality.
I'm thinking of my life from the point of view of a Buddhist or Hindu soul at the beginning and the end of a life. Perhaps it's the same as the view of one day in our lives.

If everything is determined then a life is like a book, a play, a movie, predetermined, lived over and over, the same.

It seems as if we have free will and if we have, the view is different at the beginning and the end. At the beginning, a life full of potential to be anything, at the end, completed, fixed, determined. We live life as an observer in a quantum drama, fixing our lives, collapsing potential, choosing choices, moving through it, fixing it to a single fixed trail. I have to ask though, if the life, the day, the week is fixed at the end, how is it not fixed at the beginning?

Yet even our memories are notoriously fickle - two people can remember a particular happening as quite different and as the event becomes distant it blurs.

What if our lives are part of the multiverse, all possible choices made, chosen, fixed, unfixed, all those lives, connected by us, we, I, am the glue that binds all my lives into one, at the beginning and the end of my life, all these lives, all these possibilities, choices.

What if there is a continuum between these choices? A multiverse with some kind of resonance, some kind of probability, preference. A path through the multiverse that is more travelled than the others. Still those other less travelled paths exist on the edge of our lives. Even if that preference is just lives that resonate with this one. Distance from here. A blurring. How much the probability blurs? If the life is more in focus it is like a simple determined life, if more blurred like a resonant path through the multiverse.

I sometimes think we live life as though walking backwards, able to see/remember the past, only able to see briefly into the future, the way we are going, sometimes guessing sometimes missing and bumping into things we didn't see.