People will think of all kinds of things in order to anesthetise their conscience; basically, convince themselves that it doesn’t matter what they do, so they are fine. I think I’ve heard it all, talking to all kinds of amoral and godless people over the decades, but probably the most brain-dead thing I’ve heard is using the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory to justify amorality.

Many-worlds interpretation is very popular in Hollywood, but it’s otherwise sheer nonsense. Basically, it solves the Schroedinger’s cat paradox in a non-probabilistic manner, by stating that in every quantum function collapse junction the universe forks into versions where every possible outcome is the reality. Essentially, you get a universe where the cat is alive, and the universe where the cat is dead.

Ignoring the fact that the quantum function doesn’t extend past the microscopic realm and translates very poorly into the macroscopic world of Einsteinian gravity, the amoral pieces of human garbage who want to be perceived as cool, scientific and educated, extend this principle into the sphere of moral choice, so at every moral junction the universe forks into various versions, each containing a version of you that made one possible choice. So, as you made every possible choice by the obligatory nature of the many-worlds split, a question of morality doesn’t even present itself. In every choice where you could do this or that, you did both, so there’s no actual choice involved.

So, let me deal with this very quickly. First of all, collapse of probabilities into certainty doesn’t actually have anything to do with reality; it only deals with our ignorance, that collapses into certainty at the point of revelation. Schroedinger’s cat is never 50% alive; it’s always either completely dead or completely alive, and it’s just our ignorance of its condition that collapses into certainty; basically, all probabilities collapse into either 1 or 0, at the point of revelation. Opening the box with the cat doesn’t fork universes, it reveals the actual reality so that we can stop playing with probabilities, which are merely quantification of our ignorance.

Second, quantum anything doesn’t really work on a macroscopic scale, or there would be a quantum theory of gravity, or a great unified theory of everything, that would combine the two. From what I can tell, quantum indeterminism looks very much like what happens when you try to play at the limits of resolution, according to the Nyquist-Shannon theorem of sampling. You get aliasing, or indeterminate result. No, when you try to photograph high-frequency detail of fabric with a photographic sensor, the aliasing you’re getting isn’t a sign that universes are forking. It’s just that your sensor is being “outresolved”, which is usually solved by introducing a low-pass filter in front of it, which will slightly blur the detail right at the Nyquist-Shannon limit. This stuff is a common bane of digital photography, and some manufacturers are making versions of their cameras with or without the low-pass filter, so depending on what you photograph you may choose between the sensor that will not create moire patterns on textile, or the sensor that will resolve more high-frequency detail in nature, and you don’t care that the detail at the Nyquist-Shannon limit will be “false”, because in most cases errors will statistically disperse and not be obvious.

Third, let’s assume, against all reason and evidence, that the universe actually does fork at every decision point. So, there’s a universe where you died at every point where you had a close call. There’s a universe where you bought bitcoin when its price was in cents. There’s a universe where that girl you had sex with got pregnant. There’s a universe where you died from covid. There’s a universe where you did all the right things at the right points, made all the right choices, aligned yourself with God to such perfection that you attained apotheosis.

So, my question is, why are you not that person? If the best version of you is in some other universe where it forked out due to you making different choices, how is this interpretation of your situation different from just saying that you fucked up, or that the best version of you dripped down your mom’s leg?

Rather than the many-worlds nonsense, I would say that you are constantly pruning the tree of your options and choices. With every fork in the road, you lose the version of you that would have happened had you taken the other road. Since you can’t go back in time, that possible version of yourself is lost; it collapsed into non-reality at the time of choice. If you didn’t buy Bitcoin at $1, that’s not coming back, and you can’t swap places with some alternative you in a parallel universe where you did.

Which brings us to my next point: if you can’t swap places with the version of you that didn’t fuck up, pretending that there’s a version of you that did everything well, which neutralises the version of you that fucked up everything, has no practical utility. You are not a sum of all your parallel selves that made all possible choices; you are a result of pruning the tree of choices into a specific outcome that is you. This is what it actually is, and pretending otherwise is as useful as pretending that you did actually get into bitcoin early, or that you bought gold at 1000 EUR per oz. If you didn’t, you didn’t. Possibility collapsed into reality at the moment of choice, and now you are the sum total of your choices. If you pruned your tree of choices wrong, and ended up with a bonsai shrub of utter doom, it is what it is.

In other words, no theory will get you out of the quagmire of wrong choices, and you are free to prove me wrong by swapping places with the version of you that did everything right. Otherwise, you might as well have put in the effort to become the best possible version of yourself, rather than try to theorise a way out of your loserdom.