Imagine we really do live in a branching universe, and our free-will decisions help determine that branching. The future would contain many different versions of your life-to-be. All would physically exist somewhere.
The particular life you experience would be only the tiniest fraction of yourself (of all the future-webbing from branching upon branching). In a weird way, even after your entire life, you would be a stranger to yourself. The person with your DNA and body would have led potentially a vast variety of lives. In some, you might be a murderer. And that's where it begins to get especially weird. You wouldn't know. Maybe in this life you have a PhD and three houses, but in most of your other lives you're degreeless and homeless. You'd have no idea. The point is that even after living your entire life, you wouldn't know most of the potentials. You wouldn't know whether most versions of you are funny, for example.
But that's only the PG stuff. It gets worse.
Other people are also branching. Or... are they? See, the thing is, you're seeing only a tiny slice of other people's potentials, as well. And... you're seeing the slices that happen to coincide with your own. Are you noticing something possibly uncomfortable?
If your choices pick which of your life branches you travel down, it seems your choices also must pick, at least in part, which life branches others travel down. Yet you and they travel down all the paths.
It's kind of like looking in a mirror. What you see reflected in it depends on your viewing angle. As you choose things in life, you're picking the branch of the multiverse you travel, but that also constrains which branches belonging to other people still intersect with yours. By choosing, you're moving the mirror, or your viewing angle.
The freakish thought is that maybe it's all the same process and when you choose, you are in a sense choosing for everyone. And so you don't know any people. You just know these sort of shadows of people that happen to intersect with the branches you walk down. They're all reflections of you, and you of them.
It's a very lonely view of the universe and I really don't like it. But my mind comes up with such things apparently because it likes to freak me out.
