Correction on Determinism & QM

Not all that long ago, I wrote about the implications quantum mechanics (quantum theory) might have on determinism and free will.

In any case, in a one-sentence summation, what this all means is that on an atomic level, things are non-deterministic - if one could somehow retrieve a state of the universe and all it's particles at one instant in time, one could not use this knowledge to infer what state they would be in at the next moment. One could only make predictions of likelihood.

This isn't entirely true, and I feel compelled to fix it, lest my readers go forth into the world without an understanding of the latest developments in quantum theory. It is true that one can't know, given the state of the universe or any system at a given time, what state it will be in at the next time. There are however, a fixed set of probabilities that can be determined, and a smaller subset of "highly likely" probabilities. If quantum theory can be so related to the decision making process, then the implication is that there are a fixed number of paths that are possible, and a small subset of paths that are likely.

This kind of one-to-one correlation with quantum theory makes me uncomfortable, because it seems to be an artificial attempt to tie two likely unrelated systems together. It may be the case that there is a relation between the decision making process and quantum theory, but if it exists it's probably not so tightly bound as what I'm saying here.

All of this said, it's worth noting that I've honestly moved on from the topic of determinism and free will. In 2006 a friend and I discussed the topic with some detail both on our respective blogs and personally, and after the time spent reviewing the different arguments and weighing each perspective, I came to a conclusion similar to John Locke's 17th century position: the whole idea is irrelevant. Locke had different reasons for coming to this conclusion, I think that whether or not we have an extremely good illusion of free will or actual free will it all comes out to the same thing - we should make our decisions based on what we think is right.