this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
1160 points (97.6% liked)
internet funeral
6925 readers
1 users here now
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤart of the internet
What is this place?
• !hmmm@lemmy.world with text and titles
• post obscure and surreal art with text
• nothing memetic, nothing boring
• unique textural art images
• Post only images or gifs (except for meta posts)
Guidlines
• no video posts are allowed
• No memes. Not even surreal ones. Post your memes on !surrealmemes@sh.itjust.works instead
• If your submission can be posted to !hmmm@lemmy.world (I.e. no text images), It should be posted there instead
This is a curated magazine. Post anything and everything. It will either stay up or be lost into the void.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yeah, that's my understanding of it, too. If you go back in time to any point in your life, you'll be exactly the same, with all the same experiences and the exact same thoughts running through your head. Every single atom in the entire universe will be exactly the same as it was at that exact moment, so of course you'll make the exact same decision.
The universe as a whole is just a huge, insanely complicated chemical reaction. Ultimately, we're free to make whatever choice we want, but that choice was what we were always going to choose.
It's like how flipping a coin or rolling a die isn't really random - if it were possible to gain an insanely in-depth understanding of all of the forces acting on the object, and you had the power to manipulate your throw to give it the exact force needed, you could have it land exactly how you want it to every time. Instead, we call the act random because it's too complicated for us to manipulate it effectively.
To be clear, I'm not a scientist, so I was trying to avoid getting into quantum physics, however if I'm not mistaken, there are some processes on the quantum level that seem to be irreversible or wholly unpredictable. As such, going back in time wouldn't guarantee the same outcome on a quantum level. However, afaik the effect that it would have on humans is purely speculative.
Additionally, it could be that our understanding of quantum phenomenon is similar to our understanding of the universe back when astrology was all the rage and people believed the stars and planets were unpredictable. It could be that we're working from the wrong frame of reference and as a result, it only appears as though things in the quantum realm are hard to predict if not straight-up unpredictable.