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Comment by webmaven | Hacker News Reader

> there's simply no place for free will unless you go down some weird/unfalsifiable rabbit holes like the MWI.

I don't follow. Quantum mechanics means that physics is stochastic, and only approximates classical determinism in aggregate. Meanwhile, brains seem to operate in a critical state that can be tipped to different phase transitions by small perturbations, so there is potential for a quantum event to influence the brain as a whole in a nondeterministic fashion.

This means that strict physicalism still leaves the door open to our behavior being stochastic rather than deterministic, doesn't it?

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Quantum events may be stochastic (there's still some hope for hidden variables though from what I understand -- either way, as far as the macroscopic world is concerned, it's basically random) but that doesn't mean that somewhere in that randomness a cosmic YOU is deciding anything. It just means it's random. Anything that follows after that is perfectly causal and determined and can be understood in the context of chaos theory.

So in this view consciousness is better explained as an illusion than as the seat of your will. Because you can't really have a will if every interaction that led to your existence can, in principle, be computed forward in time from the big bang. Physicalists see it as a complex emergent phenomenon akin to a run of Conway's Game of Life that started from a random seed.

It's true that the quantum mechanical influence amounts to randomness, but you're missing that this (weak) randomness is constantly being injected into biological processes and amplified, it isn't a "one and done" random seed. So it isn't true that the consequences of living systems can be modeled and computed deterministically, even in principle. And this is even less true of intelligent systems like brains.

Whether that stochasticity amounts to free will is a separate discussion, but it is fairly clear to me that many of our decisions are consequential and AREN'T predetermined. Which at least sounds like free will, or close enough to warrant being treated as such, anyway.

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