[robertk]

What you do and think is exclusively dictated by the input of information going into your brain coming from perception encoded as electrons and ions flowing through the atoms consisting of your neurons. If someone had a printout of the small sub-manifold of spacetime that is you they could read out everything you ever thought and did and it would all make sense (meaning, follow from Schrodinger’s equation). You have no choice and you cannot defy physics. Even if you run into the street, it was so decreed, because you were deterministically ordained to be contemplating free will and attempt to violate it with a “random” action, which in conjunction with the random seed you have chosen (the current state of your neural ion flows) led you to deterministically run into the street. With, as always, a perfect causal pathway and explanation — no matter how free and random it seems. What you do next, always, is decided exclusively by what in the universe happened just before, and no other auxiliary or theological inputs.

[robertk]

The statement “free will does not exist” does not imply the world isn’t Minecraft. It is. Arbitrary actions allowed by physics are indeed allowed. The problem is unpacking that you can do what you want. It is the act and nature of wanting that is also fully constrained by physics. There is no “you” and no “want,” no notion of choice that isn’t simply isomorphic to doing the basic math of quantum mechanics and molecular biology… you are “merely” math executing in time and space, and you are and shall never be nothing more. https://secularsolstice.github.io/speeches/gen/Nothing_Is_Me...