From what I’ve read, according to the Many Worlds theory, every time I make a choice, a new universe springs into being in which I make a different choice. But what constitutes a choice? Does it have to be a conscious, binary choice? For example, there are a large number (infinite?) of things I’m NOT doing right now, including running around my workplace naked except for clown makeup. Does that mean that there’s a universe in which I am doing that? And am I just getting lucky to keep ending up in the universe in which I’m behaving well? Or does the theory only apply when I have to actually consider what to do next? (Until now I’ve never considered running around naked at work with clown paint on).
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As the other user said, Many Worlds isn’t explicitly focused on _your_ choices, but on the “choices” made by particles. Contrary to classical understanding, a particle doesn’t have to behave like a billiard ball bouncing around according to clear geometric rules; its location and velocity can be a bit fuzzy, which creates a certain amount of randomness in the universe. At the level of everyday life, this randomness mostly washes out, but it is noticeable at the particle level. Many Worlds says that this fuzziness represents separate universes splitting off for every single particle every time there’s more than one thing the particle could be doing, which is all the time. That’s a lot of universes.
Most of the randomness at the particle level washes out at the everyday level – for every particle that zigs instead of zags, there’s probably another that zags instead of zigs, and so on. Consequently, most universes would probably look more or less similar. But not all of them would.
Inhibitory neurons in your brain tell you that it would be a bad idea to be a naked clown. They prevent you from doing that by releasing neurotransmitters into synapses, and these neurotransmitters move through a combination of Brownian motion and chemical attraction toward receptors at the far end of the synapse to pass those signals along. That’s all a choice is, by the way – different neural circuits firing, weighing the strength of some signals against others.
It is extraordinarily unlikely – extraordinarily, I say – that every single one of those neurotransmitters in your inhibitory pathway would be nudged away from its cognate receptor by errant water molecules through otherwise-random Brownian motion. It is so unlikely that we can disregard it for any other conversation. But mathematically speaking, it is _not_ impossible. Ergo Many Worlds would have, among the infinite possible worlds in the multiverse, some where you are a naked clown.
It’s not just luck that in most universes, you still have a job. The clown scenario requires extremely improbable aggregate particle behavior. Other choices you might make may face less inhibition or may have greater relative salience, so multiple competing possible results are more likely.
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