some guy at a hat party walked up to me and tried to convince me that life has all sort of possibilities due to quantum mechanics.
why? why do weird people resort to quantum mechanics to explain free will? you don't need it. a toaster has free will, based solely on classical principles: it notices time and temperature and makes a choice to pop the toast. humans are a little more complicated, but it's the same idea.
what about quantum mechanics anyway
my understanding is this:
with a two hole experiment... you say that the electron leaves the emitter, nature uses some kind of a wave function so figure out the probability distribution of it landing at any place on the on the photographic paper, and it appears on the photographic paper (according to the probability distribution nature calculated).
the thing is that the wave, like a wave in the ocean or whatever..like a wave in the ocean, explores both slits, both possibilities.
if you have a cascade of events, like an electron going through a double slit, the activating one detector or another, then making another emitter go off (according to where the electron landed) and shooting through another slit, etc., then nature still has to explore all possibilities totally with the wave approach. again you end up with a probability of it ending up in some place on the final photographic paper detector, and that will match experiment.
it's nice to break the experiment into human observer and non-human experiment - but what if the human get's pulled in to the experiment...
extending a bit further, you can go ahead and say a whole human being is part of the cascade of events - since we are a bunch of atoms, each atom a detectors and an emitter of some sort (along with a bunch of other stuff atoms do). and now you just have an experiment, no more pesky division between the observer and the experiment. but now you end up with a system that just always has this wavy description of everything - it's not totally clear where the end of the experiment is. i suppose the human could write down the result on a sheet of paper and that could be considered the final result (another human could then take a look at it). yes, let's do that. lets call that person who writes stuff down the writer.
when nature does the wavy calculation, your writer doesn't have a particular state - all of his possible states will get explored. during the calculations, nature would keep track off all of his possibilities to get the final outcome right.
it begs the question: if nature apparently keeps track of all possibilities of the writer during its calculations, does that mean the writer is actually existing in all of those states? somehow i just doubt it. but it's bothersome - i have little evidence for my doubt.
is that cat really dead+rotten and alive+healthy at the same time - again i doubt it - but again - i have little evidence for my doubt.
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