I wanted to give you a personal view on free will / determinism and see what you thought of it.

Let me state, that over the past few years, science, not religion, has gotten me through some very tough times. During these times, I've studied and been intrigued my quantum mechanics.

Along the way, came the many worlds interpretation. Interesting. Now how this pertains to the free will debate.

In describing the MWI interpretation, often a tree with many, many branches is used to describe the theory. Lets for an instant, believe this to be an accurate description of our "world". That is, a piece of paper with a simple 2-d tree, with tons of branches branching off of each other.

Okay, imagine one view, where we are looking at the paper from above, objectively as an observer(no religious implication). We see all the paths and possibilities, and there is where the determinism comes from. We know what paths could be chosen, regardless of time, because all of those paths are going to be chosen in one world or another.

Now, let's go down to the piece of paper, and pretend that we are living that tree as our own life (yes, hard to explain over a thread for me lol) subjectively. There are possibly an infinite number of choices to be made and paths to follow, yet we don't know all of them, and no matter what, we can't. We could spend all damn day deciding what angle to step out of our front door at, and yet, no other person at our level could predict it either.

So there comes the free will, or at least an illusion of it. But regardless, if there's an infinite number choices, does it even matter?

From the subjective view, in our mind, we have free will, I mean, that term is just a label representing an idea anyway right?

But from "above" that paper or beyond that paper, an objective observer (could be anything, doesn't matter, no religious implication in my theory), if we are able to see all the possibilities with no specific frame of reference regarding time, and we see the beginning, present, and future possibilities of that person, then the world is determinate from that view.

What do you think?

This is a standard determinist response to the problem of quantum randomness.

As for the term "free will," some people use it to refer to an idea. They're called compatibilists. And your example works for them. Others use it to refer to a doctrine. I doubt this fits their orthodoxy, so they would probably classify it as "not free will."

Maybe you should go add this to the monster thread we already have...

Perhaps you can consider some of the arguments there and how they'd respond to your position.

How would the Libertarian respond? The Compatibilist? The Hard Determinist?

Will do. Thank you. Ivan

QM is used in free will debates in the same way its used in religion debates. I would guess that no more than two people on 2+2 really know QM (and this is disregarding Feynman's quote), yet many seem more than willing to use it as a basis for one argument or another.