Free Will and Consciousness in the Multiverse: Physics, Philosophy, and Quantum Decision Making

Introduction: Developing a Multiverse View of Decision Making and Consciousness.- PART I: Setting the Stage for the Clustered-Minds Multiverse.- Why the Multiverse is the Most Parsimonious Way of Interpreting Quantum Mechanics.- Interdisciplinary Evidence for the Multiverse Including a Detailed Analysis of What Time Is.- How Different Versions of the Multiverse Interpretation Have Different Consequences for Free Will and Ontology: Developing the Concept of a Clustered-Minds Multiverse.- Part II: Answers Suggested by the Clustered-Minds Multiverse for Selected Questions in Philosophy.- Dualistic Idealism: No Supervenience of Consciousness on the Physical.- A Special Form of Free Will: Parallel Watching of Different ’Movies’ but with Different Levels of Awareness.- Are we responsible for Our Decisions?.- PART III: Quantum Decision Making in the Multiverse as Vectorial Choice: Towards a Transformation of the Decisions Sciences.- General Framework, Objective Function and Probability.- Different Concepts of Utility.- Games and Markets.- PART IV: Consequences For Selected Psychological Phenomena and Experimental Research in the Social Sciences.- Repetition Compulsion and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies.- A Generalized Rosenthal Effect in Experimental Research in the Social Sciences.- Selected Consequences of the Clustered-Minds Multiverse for Weltanschauung and Scientific Research.

Christian D. Schade holds the chair of Entrepreneurial and Behavioral Decision Making at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Furthermore, he is a Research Fellow at Wharton’s Risk Management and Decision Processes Center (University of Pennsylvania). His research contributes to a better understanding of decision making in general and of entrepreneurial as well as innovative decision making. He is currently working on novel foundations and perspectives for the decision sciences. His research is mainly based on laboratory experiments, economic psychology and mathematical psychology, as well as quantum mechanics.