There is an argument that free will doesn’t exist because there is an unbroken chain of causality we are riding on that dates back to the beginning of time. Meaning that every time you fart, scratch your nose, blink, or make lifechanging decisions there is a pre existing reason. These reasons might be anything from the sensory enviornment you were in the past minute, the hormone levels in your bloodstream at the time, hormones you were exposed to as a baby, or how you were parented growing up. No thought you have is really original and is more like a domino affect of neurons firing off in reaction to what you have experienced. What are your thoughts on this?
But that’s ignoring that there are multiple paths that can lead to state
z, isn’t it?I’ll try to design the simplest possible experiment: you have to radioactive atoms, each connected to a detector, and the detectors are connected to a counter. You leave the room and come back - the counter shows 2. How do you determine which atom decayed first?
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I see what you’re trying to get at. It’s not that we can definitely know the state, it’s that we could build the experiment in such a way that we can definitely know the state - and by not building it this way we’re essentially deliberately “throwing away” information about the final state.
Thanks for the explanation!