The advent of quantum mechanics in the 1920s brought two novel ideas. One is that a physical process can be stochastic: an outcome can be selected by a randomness constrained by a probabilistic law, as if ‘God plays dice’. The other is the idea that objects can exist without having definite properties, famously exemplified by Schrödinger’s Cat. These concepts are problematic and intimately related to each other.
In the first part of the workshop we shall discuss the ongoing history of an alternative to the concept of stochastic process introduced in the 1950s: there is no random selection of outcomes; all ‘possible’ outcomes of a quantum process may exist in different branches of a multiverse. In the second part we shall discuss how this idea of a cosmic dendritic structure connects with that of object-indefiniteness via the interpretation of the mind-body relation.