[umvi]

So when a person commits a crime, they can just say: "the initial state of my molecular machine made me do it!" ...?

To me that is exactly the same as saying "the devil made me do it!"

i.e. both things are euphemisms for "I'm not accountable for my actions"; "I'm not at fault"; "It was beyond my control", etc.

And if you truly believe there is no such thing as free will and that everything is predetermined, then you'd have to agree. Hitler can't be held accountable for his choices; his actions were all predetermined and his fate was sealed at the big bang; he just got an unlucky "initial state".

[chr1]

Since you are exactly the molecular machine, nothing more and nothing less, saying "the initial state of my molecular machine made me do it" is same as saying "the initial state of my self made me do it". So it does not mean that you should not be accountable, on the contrary it means that the action was caused by your essence, what makes you you, and not some outside entity or random chance.

As for the free will, it means that the behavior of a molecular machine depends on machine itself, not on far away stars or a random number generator. One can't say that he got unlucky initial state, because he _is_ that unlucky state. Any change of the state would create someone entirely different. Moreover Stephen Wolfram's computational irreducibility principle implies that despite all the information being contained in initial state, only way to extract predictions from that state is to run the molecular machine and observe its behavior.