Robert writes: “At the level of reductionist physics, the current thinking is that there is no free will and that we live in a totally deterministic universe subject to the initial conditions being the ultimate determinant as to what can or will occur in this (timeless) block universe. In other words, in this view, there is no randomness and, therefore, there is no luck; there is only complexity.”
Determinism and free will are a false choice. There are high quality pseudo-random number generators that won’t repeat in a lifetime, and true random number generators that amplify noise, like from resistors or that use quantum phenomena.<https://comscire.com/> Quantum mechanics plays a role in biological processes like photosynthesis and enzyme catalysis, but quantum cognition is pretty far out.<https://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.05929v2> Penrose tried to argue free will possible by arguing that the brain implements time travel! Some people will try anything to rescue this concept. Free will requires that the nondeterminism could be influenced by some supernatural independent force -- that there is a homunculus that can move the moments around of the many random distributions involved in integrating perceptual signals in the brain. Marcus
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