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Comment by njarboe | Hacker News Reader

The functioning of chemistry in individual cells definitely are influenced by quantum effects. Over a short period of time the functioning of the neurons in the human brain will be influenced by QM enough that the billiard ball, clock work, deterministic view of the future unfolding is not correct.

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> The functioning of chemistry in individual cells definitely are influenced by quantum effects.

So? Transistors used in modern computers directly depend on quantum effects (semiconductor physics was an outgrowth of QM) as well, yet we do not need to take into account QM when writing software or designing microprocessors.

Where will my body be in five years? Quantum effects will definitely be manifest enough that the answer to that is not deterministic. Maybe because I am not a professional philosopher I'm missing the special meaning of the work deterministic as used here. I think the point of the OP was that computers are a specially designed system that is very complicated, but at the bottom created by humans who have spent a lot of time and effort to make it deterministic unlike the the "real" world.

It isn't enough that the processes are affected. The processes must be affected in such a way that the idea of determinism at other scales is compromised.

  In any event, positing some sort of "QM consciousness" does nothing to save the concept of free will. Where is the "free will" in a fundamentally random phenomenon? Whether one accepts determinism or not, the notion of free will is incoherent.

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