[Kaoru Chujo]

This discussion is reminding me of the discussions we had in the Noein thread. That excellent show was based on a (somewhat loose) version of the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory.

At the quantum level, we have indeterminacy. I don't see this extending to the macroscopic level, as most science fiction versions of it do, but at the macroscopic level, we also have indeterminacy, because of non-linear dynamics/chaos theory/butterfly effect. So the future is supposedly impossible to predict, since (as in the Hitchhiker's Guyide) you'd have to run a computer the size of a world to predict a world.

So at the moment I come down on the side of free will (remember that?). Except that the freedom is everywhere, not just in our wills. Or something.

But maybe quantum theory is evolving away from many worlds. Wikipedia covers this ground very well. The articles on consistent histories and decoherence suggest that, yes, any quantum event is indeterminate, but that when countless events have to be consistent with each other in the real world, countless possibilities are eliminated. I'm more comfortable with there being a lot of possibilities left to be indeterminate among, but some people are looking for there to be only one real possibility: the universe we live in.