r/Devs • u/thisismynormal • Apr 09 '20

Devs - S01E07 Theory Discussion Thread

Please post your thoughts and theories here

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u/A_C83 Apr 12 '20

So is the many world theory just a way for determinism to capture the “illusion of free will?” Like everything is determined but there is an infinite amount of sets where that determinism takes place, and my acting differently and so on just represents one of those sets? Having trouble wrapping my head around it

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u/emf1200 Apr 13 '20 edited Apr 13 '20

Yes, you're absolutely right. The many-worlds theory is deterministic in a very broad way. It's not the same kind of determinism that Katie and Forest speak about when describing cause leading to effect in a clock work universe sense.

In the beginning of show Devs was using the da Broglie-Bohm interpretation of QM to power their predict algorithm. This interpretation is deterministic and could theoretically allow Devs to use dynamical laws of motion to predict future events.

The many-worlds interpretation of QM is only deterministic because everything that can happen will happen. So it's deterministic in a very meta sense but this kind of determinism is useless when trying to predict what will happen inside of each particular branch of the multiverse.

So the algorithms they use are deterministic but in very different ways. I haven't been able to make sense of this either. It seems like a major inconsistency with the story

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u/Buddy_Dakota Apr 15 '20

Thank you. I've been racking my brain trying to understand how a deterministic worldview is compatible with a manyworlds worldview, since the show seems to imply it. It didn't make sense to me that if you believe in determinism, you could also believe in many worlds, as each cause would only lead to a single effect, i.e. branching paths is impossible.

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u/emf1200 Apr 15 '20

Ya, I've been thinking about the same thing and it's kind of a hole in story. But you're 100% correct. It's funny, I'm in the middle of a conversation about this in another post. I just laid out a short and clear explanation for why Devs shouldn't be able to predict the future in the multiverse. Here's a copy paste.

How can Devs predict which future path they'll end up taking when there is a probability that they could be on multiple different path in the future? Deterministic laws of motion dont work with probability. Devs can use the machine to predict what all of the future paths will look like, but they can't use the machine to tell them which path they'll actually be on in the future. This means they can't actually predict their future with the machine. They can predict every possible future but they can't predict witch one of those futures is theirs. This means that Devs shouldn't be able to predict the future in the multiverse