The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.

Albert Einstein

The word "probably" defines gambling.

I recall some years ago I was playing in a card game the verion was called 3 card guts.

No wild card, no flushes , no straights.
Just 3 cold cards high card, pairs and trips to win.

To stay in a hand you had to match the pot, the dealer could not drag the pot.

The pot was equal to evey cent I had on me PLUS my paycheck.

BUT I HAD THREE JACKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now the odds on that had are not quite the same as your example of

"flip a coin a million times I'd be damn sure I wasn't going to get all heads."

But they are REAL high.

Sandy had 3 Queens ;-((((

That was my regular Wednesday night poker game with some buddys for years, so no cheating was not a factor.

Rule No 1 You can ALWAYS lose
Rule No 2 NEVER bet what you cannot afford to lose.

I agree with you, no matter how sure he thing is my life or soul are things I cannot afford to lose.

Lucky for me though I had filled up my gas tank on the way to the game.

I lived on fried cornmeal and bacon grease for a week until my next paycheck

Now I LIKE fried cornmeal in bacon grease but as steady diet it loses something after a few days ;-)

At first I thought we were going to get a lil' anecdote on probability and the trouble students have getting it.
But a reference to a supernatural being had to be coming...

Umm ... perhaps you aren't familiar with the context of Einstein's comment? Einstein simply could NOT accept quantum mechanics, precisely because of its probabilistic nature. Gone are the little electrons orbiting a nucleus. In their place is the probability that an electromagnetic charge will exist at a given energy level. No certainties at all, no "things" -- and yet the universe goes on and my computer works fine on alternating current.

Susskind's reference to Einstein's deep discomfort with quantum probability shows that his imaginary student's difficulty is one that many share. The final sentence is, of course, the kicker ...

Low probabilities can be counter intuitive when the number of trials is high.

At my first engineering job I was assigned to debug a chip which was malfunctioning in the lab. I diagnosed the problem as being due to two signals colliding at the same ciruit element (details elided for the non-technical). The odds against this happening were provably many tens of millions to one in any given cycle, and yet I was sure this was the problem. Why?

Because the chip was running at 10 MHZ (ten million cycles per second), so this event with a probability of a mid level lottery payoff was causing the chip to fail every few seconds.

The source of the problem had escaped a few folks who had perhaps unconciously dismissed the improbably collision of signals as impossible - "it'll never happen".

Never is a long time. Tempus Fugit.

Yeah, I like the idea that God doesn't play dice because He doesn't dare . . . or because He Knows Better! Heh.

Yeah, I like the idea that God doesn't play dice because He doesn't dare . . . or because He Knows Better! Heh.

Why would God create a completely deterministic universe? Assumably, being god and all, he would know how everything was going to come out before he started. I find the whole thought of a purely deterministic universe depressing. What would be the point?

I think it's natural to find probability confusing because we encounter so many things that are only sort of probabilistic. You can put human height on a probability curve, but we only get so tall (or so short) no matter how many billions of human beings are in question.

When the slow student says, "Ah, now I get if. Every time I flip 1,000 times I will always get something between 970 and 1,030 heads. Every single time! Wow, now that's a fact I can count on." he's wrong of course. But with lots of things other than coin flips a statement similar to that would have been right.

Great stuff. It is important to remind scientists and those who listen to them that science is no different from any other human pursuit - there are no certainties, only well informed guesses (see Popper).

This is the central issue in the Gambler's Fallacy, too - the one that says "I've been losing for a long time, so now I must be about to win because over time, the odds even out."

Uh, no. Take coin flips, for example.

If you've guessed wrong on a coin toss the last 10 times, your odds of guessing right next time are still 50% (unless the coin has been tampered with). The odds are still the odds, and while what has happened in the past is independent of future odds, it can't be undone either.

As Lewy14 notes, those 1-in-millions events DO happen on occasion.

All your 10 bad coin flip guesses mean is that you're a little bit closer to experiencing one of them - getting just 20 wrong (or correct) in a row is 1,048,576 to 1 odds, and this first 10 is 1,024 to 1. So now your odds of getting 20 in a row right/wrong are 1,000 to one rather than 1,000,000 to one... the same odds as 10 in a row now, because those 10 right/wrong guesses have already happened and only the next 10 have probabilities any more.

This point seems really pedantic, but people throw away billions of dollars because they don't understand it.

FYI, the odds of getting even 100 heads in a row is a pretty astonishing number: 1 in 1,267,650,600,228,230,000,000,000,000,000

I wouldn't bet my soul on anything, and the point about never betting what you can't lose is a good one... but when the prof says the laws of large numbers protect him, he's talking about probability dynamics and numbers like these.

Joe, as we say in the trade, probability has no memory.

Robin, Einstein believed that quantum theory was incomplete right up to his death to his death in 1955. Yet his argument of locality has been disproved by the split-screen experiment and the ghost image experiment in quantum mechanics-- does this mean that god does, indeed, play dice?

oops, sorry, double-slit experiment.

It means, at the very least, that there are dimensionalities Einstein did not take into account. At least, that is one interpretation of quantum theory - i.e. the split of alternate timelines for each event that can happen. In this model quantum probabilities don't imply that God gambles because neither He nor the electron is limited to a single frame of reference in time. We see it as gambling only because we are confined to a single time/reality line.

I've read other physicists who believe that the model of alternative paths splitting off from each decision isn't sustainable, given that at every instant every electron may be said to be deciding energy levels/locations. However, we lack good ways to visualize on this scale. My own visualization (which is by no means accurate, I'm sure) is that instead of a nice neat electron orbiting a clearly defined nucleus we have a fuzzy band consisting of a probability function, which surrounds a fuzzy band of interacting probability functions at the center ..... at least that's how I manage to combine wave and particle in my mind at the qualitative level. But maybe we have a reader whose level of physics study surpasses mine & who can refine that??

"The probabilistic undeterminism that's fundamental to quantum physics gives us the wiggle room that we need to have free will."

No, it does not. If our brains are "random", then "we" are still not in control of what we do. Too bad, so sad, no wiggling out what way.

Probability is what we use when we have incomplete information. It's a sort of shorthand notation that's extremely useful for cases where we don't have the computing power or observational capability to map out every discrete transaction of an extremely complex system (even something like a container of gas is complex in these terms). It's an extremely robust and useful set of heuristics, but should not be confused with physical laws. Probability would not work without determinism; there really is no such thing as "randomness", just apparent randomness due to incomplete information about the phenomenon we're observing.

All that said, we don't need to resort to vague misinterperetations of quantum mechanics in order to preserve "free will" (whatever that means). We just need to strip away the fuzzy metaphysical ideas we have about the human ability to think and make choices. Consider a thermostat: it contains an ideal temperature and is constantly getting input from its surroundings and comparing them to that internal ideal, then outputting a signal to adjust the temperature of the system. This is a banal model of a very simple feedback loop, with a system (the thermostat) constantly sending information into its surroundings and then getting that information fed back into it, and around and around ad infinitum.

Now pan out and make that simple mechanism vastly more complex, allowing the system to refer to itself as well as its environment; give it several sources of data input from its surrounding environment (visual, audio, etc); give it vast amounts of storage space and a massively parralel processor, divided up into modules that excel at specific tasks -- ones for processing different sense-data, carrying out regular actions, calculating the possible consequences of more complex courses of action (like Deep Blue or Gary Kasparov), ones for sending off internal signals based on state-changes (think hunger or emotion) etc -- and huge amounts of memory space to store significant data in, and you've basically got the human mind.

This is a wholly deterministic picture, yet it does not change anything else we already know. Humans can still think and choose courses of action like they always have; it just gets rid of a lot of fuzzy mystical ideas. People use the word "determinism" as something to be feared, but it really isn't.

Matt,
Maybe you misunderstand what I mean by deterministic. Perhaps if we called it Newtonian instead? Or maybe mechanistic? You might get what I mean.

In such a universe the current state of everything would follow directly from the initial conditions in a rules based (laws of physics) fashion, without variance. If such a universe could be rewound and started over with exactly the same initial conditions, then the results would always be the exactly the same. Always. Can this be our working defintion of a deterministic universe?

In such a universe there would truly be no free will. Everything that's going to happen will happen, based on the rules and the initial conditions. There's no agent contained within this universe that could alter fate by even the smallest smidgen.

If there truly is a God that knows apriori the ultimate outcome then that says the universe must be deterministic, since every decision (if you could call it that) anyone could ever make would be known ahead of time. Can you say Calvin and predetermination?

This kind of universe would make our perception of free will a cruel joke. At the verge of kicking off such a universe, I'm not sure why any ominpotent being worth his salt wouldn't just say: "Ah that's how it's going to turn out. Never mind, that would be a waste of time." And then just go about some other more important godly business.

Any way, the very idea that quantum physics has this indeterminate quality about it says, to me at least, that this universe has room for free will. That's because there's no way to predict in toto the future state of the universe! You can rewind it and start it over again, but, BUT, this time you'd could get a different result. There's at least the possiblity that a single mind within that universe can act to change the outcome. That's the wiggle room.

The indeterminism that Einstein rejected, I embrace. It's the indeterminism that makes everything worth while. Of course, Descartes's evil demons could be planting these illusions in our minds, so everything comes down to faith at some level, even "Cogito ergo sum".

Lurker,

You start with a fair enough description of a deterministic universe, then say this: "In such a universe there would truly be no free will." To which I would respond: yes, and in a world where earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are caused by seismic activity, there can be no room for angry gods; in a world where my dad bought me my Christmas presents, there can be no room for Santa Claus.

What's "free will"? If what you're talking about is some sort of "ghost in the machine" or "unmoved mover", then you're dead right -- no such thing. Never has been. It's a myth that humans came up with to explain a phenomenon we didn't fully understand -- our own consciousness in this case -- just like we used to do with the weather and everything else. But that doesn't mean we don't make choices any more than lightning doesn't strike tall things; the phenomenon is still there and we can still appreciate it for what it is, it's just demystified now. There's nothing threatening about this if you don't fall into the trap of being disappointed that there is no Santa Claus; you still get your present and now have a better appreciateion of where it comes from.

And at the risk of repeating myself, let me repeat myself: the "indeterminacy" of QM (which is really just a measuring problem, not a metaphysical principle) would not "[leave] room for free will" (at least not in the unmoved-mover sense you seem to mean) because if things are not determined then they're just totally uncontrollable and unpredictable and irrational. The phenomenon we call "free will" requires determinism, because otherwise we'd have no way of making any sense of the world and making rational decisions based on the input we get.

I partially understand now. You don't believe in free will. Can you help me understand you position better? Please read through the following questions and maybe you can figure out what I still don't get about what you're saying.

Is it your belief that a human mind is basically a processing unit which applies the various inputs (senses) to its current state contained in memory to arrive at its next state? This would seem to be the "complex thermostat" that you mentioned.

Would such a mind always give the same result given the same current state and the same inputs?

Do you think that the universe containing this mind is deterministic, i.e. it could be rewound and restarted with exactly the same result?

Including the states of all the minds in it?

Or is there some room for randomness (indeterminism?) in your concept of the universe, i.e. rewinding and restarting could yield different results?

Do you accept the randomness without accepting the concept of free will?

Or do you reject the randomness altogether?

Lurker,

I know what I'm trying to get across is a little counterintuitive, much the same way as the heliocentric solar system and the theory of evolution are counterintuitive (and no I'm not being condescending here, they really are), so I'll try to clarify a bit.

One big stumbling block I ususally find causing problems is the unspoken assumption that mind and matter are two seperate things. They're not. We're used to thinking of physics in the abstract, so it's easy to lose sight of the fact that we are a continuous part of the physical world, and as such follow the same rules as everything else. Picture a three-dimensional block of space with atoms whizzing in and out of it; those atoms can take the form of a cloud of gas, complex molecules like RNA, single-cell organisms, an invertibrate, a primative mammal, or a human being (in increasing order of complexity). Much like the thermostat, our surrounding environment has an effect on us and we also have an effect on it -- a constant feedback loop. Humans are gloriously complicated things, but the basic principles at work are the same.

Your impression of how I view the mind is pretty much correct, and there's a growing body of evidence in cognitive neuroscience to back me up. So I would answer "yes" to all of your questions, up until this one: "Or is there some room for randomness (indeterminism?) in your concept of the universe, i.e. rewinding and restarting could yield different results?" This brings us close to murky territory involving complicated stuff in complexity theory that I'll confess to not totally understanding, but my tenative answer is "no." But it doesn't really matter if the universe turns out slightly differently every time you wind it up and let it go; it will still be doing so according to causal laws. If it didn't, everything we take for granted would be impossible.

This part requires a bit of explication: "Do you accept the randomness without accepting the concept of free will? Or do you reject the randomness altogether?" I went over this once already but I'll try to make it more clear: there is randomness all over the place, but we need to be clear about what we mean when we talk about "randomness." A raindrop trailing down a windowpane exhibits Gaussian randomness, but that doesn't mean it's not following causal laws; this is not normally what we think of when we talk about "randomness", but that's what it is. An example of "randomness" in the more colloquial sense would be an event like a 9/11; this is an example of Poisson randomness, the proverbial bolt from the blue, but once again that doesn't mean the plane and the buildings aren't following deterministic physical laws. Gaussian randomness and Poisson randomness are mathematically different, but the events are not physically different in a qualitative sense.

What I'm getting at with these examples is this: probability theory is a body of mathematical rules we use to describe events and processes when we are not physically capable of describing them fully deterministic ways. This may be due to an inability to actually measure what we're trying to describe (a la Heisenberg), or it may simply be because the time it would take to compute and total up all of the individual deterministic interactions at work is simply not feasible. Randomness is not a physical reality, it's a mathematical construction referring to events where we have incomplete information. That is all. Underneath all of that, we still have cause and effect.

Matt,
I don't know if you're still around or not....

Maybe some of my references to God have thrown you of the trail. I agree that the human mind is part and parcel of the universe. I assume nothing about a "ghost in the machine" or any of that.

Just speaking for myself, I have a perception of freewill, meaning my typing this reply was not preordained at the beginning of the universe. I have chosen to engage in this conversation. If the universe really is completely deterministic, then this comment really was preordained at the beginning and my perception of free will is an illusion. How are we to tell the difference?

You may have a different opinion or perhaps the illusion of a different opinion. Who knows? As for me, I'm going to assume that I truly do have the ability to change my fate by an act of will.

Im almost afraid to point out the double slit experiment has problems. as anyone that understands the universe well enough to build working transmitters from scratch without plans or drawings should be able to tell you.

A hypothetical transmitter, with a freq range that would cover 10 mhz all the way to the color violet, is tuned to 30 mhz and keyed, are those 30 foot "photons" (wave length at that freq) comming from my antenna ?

A hypothetical lazer, built to scale that the molcules of ionisable gas is subsituted to 1000 watt pulse 30 mhz transmitters, that trigger to re-enforce the passing 30 foot long wave. the end mirrors are 10 miles across and 200 miles apart, one mirror has an electrical half wave HF-Lazer exit hole (about 30 feet around the inside edge)

this HF Lazer would probably blast holes thru planets, no problem

Hint, how would this energy behave directed at your two-slot experiment ?

I hope ive stimulated some nurons.

Raymond, ok, ok, i was using the double-slit experiment to counter Einstein's argument of locality , but you are correct. :)
However, the problem with lasers is that one still has to consider that an entangled pair of photons constitutes a single entity even while they are separate from each other. So entangled photons yield a different result for the Young experiment. :)

In the end, I'll simply cite my favorite, Godel's Incompleteness Theorem in defense of free will--
All consistent axiomatic formulations of number theory include undecipherable propositions.
Or, we cannot ever know it all. :)

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. TS Eliot

Lurker,

Your line of thought can be summed up as "if our actions are deterministic, we do not control them." But flip that around. By that same logic, if our actions are "random" (i.e. non-deterministic), "we" don't control them either. You cannot wiggle out that way. If our mental processes were non-deterministic then they would not follow any kind of discernable logic, pattern, or causation. This is demonstrated to be false by every rational thought or action we exhibit, and how we change our minds based on new inputs. Cause and effect.

"You are right, except I'd take this a step further. Given this limitation of our instrumentation, we can't distinguish whether we are in a universe that has some randomness and is therefore indeterministic in some facet or a universe that is completely deterministic."

I guess I didn't make this part explicit enough, so here goes: mathematical randomness cannot logically exist without underlying deterministic mechanisms to define the paramaters of the distribution. If individual molecules in a chemical reaction were not following consistent causal rules, it would be totally impossible to calculate the entropy change in the reaction. And yet we can do so, with great accuracy, despite the apparent randomness of molecular movement. "Indeterminism" is a meaningless and logically incoherent concept; it's a null value.

"True, randomness is a mathematical concept, but this doesn't preclude that the universe has randomness as a component. We just don't have the ability to tell the difference with the tools at our disposal."

Quick: when you close your eyes, does the universe go away? Would the universe stop existing if you were blind, deaf and had a malfunctioning nervous system? Of course not. Just because it's currently an engineering impossibility to measure certain things or express certain events in a complete step-by-step fashion doesn't mean that's not how things actually work. This is basically a God of the Gaps argument: because we can't measure it, we can fill that gap with mysterious, vague, unquantifiable metaphysical pronouncements. Sorry, not convincing.

"Certainly on a macro level the universe appears to be deterministic, but on the quantum level things are not deterministic. Who can say whether this quantum phenomena can manifest at a macro level somehow. Perhaps even within the human mind?"

See above. You keep confusing apparent randomness with physical reality. They are not the same thing. There are plenty of interperetations of QM that are consistent with determinism, such as the Transactional Interperetation (one I find more persuasive than the standard Copenhagen Interperetation).

"Just speaking for myself, I have a perception of freewill, meaning my typing this reply was not preordained at the beginning of the universe. I have chosen to engage in this conversation. If the universe really is completely deterministic, then this comment really was preordained at the beginning and my perception of free will is an illusion. How are we to tell the difference?"

I have a perception that the sun revolves around the earth. If it were otherwise, how could we tell the difference? Of course we can tell, and we have, but the phenomena remain the same as they ever were. Free will, as in the ability to think and make choices, are not an "illusion." It's your perception of what those things mean that's illusory. Do you understand the difference?

"As for me, I'm going to assume that I truly do have the ability to change my fate by an act of will."

What is will? Point to it. Suggest a potential way to quantify it. Until you can do that, it remains a null concept. That is not to say that we cannot change ourselves and our environment through our own actions; we merely need to jettison the vague religious baggage that clouds our perception of what we're actually doing.

Oh, Matt, lighten up-- how do you quantify electromagnetic/biochemichal patterns? Thought is beyond determinism, and like Zeilinger says, information and reality are really the same thing.

True randomness exists in the universe-- look at selecting numbers from a bingo cage.

Matt,
We've arrived at the two ships passing in the night phase of this discussion. It's been fun and interesting so far, so I'm still game if you are...

In my last statement, I didn't refer to any metaphysics, or God, or any other extra-universe phenomena. These concepts are not necessary to understand what I'm trying to say.

Let me try to simplify it once more...

1. In a completely deterministic universe there could be no free will, i.e. everything is preordained based on the laws of physics and the initial conditions. Events would follow one from the other without variation by strict cause and effect.

2. Since on the quantum level strict cause and effect breaks down, then, for this level at least, our universe is not deterministic.

3. Since our universe is not deterministic, there's no way to predict the state of the universe in toto (must include ALL quantum states in the universe) at some future time, even if you had a computing device up to the task.

4. Given #2 and #3, the existance of free will cannot be excluded.

That's all I was trying to say.

Now, you may say that #2 can be falsified by the Transactional Interpretation of QM that you linked. And if this is indeed true and #2 is false, then...

5. Any perception of self awareness or free will within a deterministic universe is only an artifact of the simple operation of cause and effect. There truly is no self or will. Now, that's depressing.

Enough of what I think. What do you think?
I'm interested in your thoughts of the concept of "self" in a deterministic, cause and effect universe. Here are some question to start you off. I'm not so much interested in your answers as you thoughts.

What do you mean by our own actions?

If our minds, imbedded in this deterministic universe, operate on a purely cause and effect basis, then how have we decided to act at all?

How is it that our minds are not just part of the invariant chain of cause and effect started at the beginning of time?

And if they are a part of this chain, it is true that there's no 'who' there to decide anything... what happens is what was always going to happen. There's nothing to decide.

Ok ill complicate my picture, sticking with my two hypotheticals.

The focus here is specifically, the nature of the energy, what would it look like if you could see it? would that exolain the two-slit observations ?

I assert it will.

First, for simplicity, the antenna/radiator(s) in both models are center fed,half wave dipoles.

At resonance the center resembles a pure resistance to the ac input current, we assume conductors are large compared to the current, so that power consumed and "lost" into the dipole is radiation "loss",, it is the power radiated, heat loss in the conductors is near zero.

the current and voltage plot across it will look rather strange, and will look so because of of the propagaton delay across its length, viewed broadsides it will look like a twist in time itself.

When the current and voltage is at its maximum at the center point, at that instant in time, the voltage gradient tapers to zero to the ends.

When the current/voltage at the center is passing the zero crossing point, the voltage at the tips is at its maximum.

This effect is seen because the antenna tips, are one fourth of the cycle time, delayed in time, from the center. there is a twist in time, seen across the entenna.

Its the HF laser hypothetical, that is the more traditional (unexpected by most) its output energy, operating as decribed, would be of an identical nature of a real gas dye laser. and in a two slit experiment, would have the same result.

The first model however, has some suprises for many a not quite ready for prime time quantum theorist (as well as quite a few that have become "lost" and detached from reality the way pure theorist always do. and one reason why leftism is still supported most strongly in Universities, like some group hug undiscovered sokal hoax)

The wrench is the ability it has to range all the way to the color violet, because at that freq, the nature of the light is unlike the nature of any energy found in nature.

All light energy found in nature is composed of one shot pulses, never in sync, the emisson is white noise distribution across the time axis, even if monochomatic in freq, and coherrent, its still a white noise energy distribution of one shot pulses over the time axis.

My transmitter is not like that at all, its unlike any light ever seen, its emission is not a flood of random one shots but it is a stream of pure waves, connected back to back in smooth unbroken expanding concentric ripples of alternating force lines electric and magnetic, the properties of this light would confuse the quantum theorist.

Now, what if I used this source to excite a regular gas die laser ?!?

Heres a hint, it would cause the biggest stink and contraversy the field has had in years.

Raymond,
I'm jumping in here since it looks like you were wanting a reply. I don't have enough experience in the operation of antenna's to either accept or refute you statements. Sorry that I'm not a better partner to converse with in this case.

Raymond,

You do realize that by proposing an experiment and predicting its results without actually performing it, you're doing exactly what a theorist does?

Do the experiment in a reproducible manner, or get someone else to do it, and then maybe you'll have a leg to stand on. Until then, your rantings about quantum theory being fatally flawed (yes, thanks to Google I've seen that you've commented on this topic before) are not very credible. "Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence", and all that.

Also, your description here is rather incoherent.

Raymond, I really need you to take a step back. I may want to suggest that you start your own blog and point us to your posts; I think that you're starting to drag the comments here out of the path of wide discussion that we intend them to be.

I'll email you and we can discuss it...

A.L.

Colin, its a thought experiment, based on known criteria, i laid out directly the nature of things i know about, and thus the posit is not baseless.

Instead of even noticing that the results might indeed be interesting your rebuttal is devoid of content.

I would ask, just what, in particular, do you refute ?

And on what basis in fact, do you object ?

And i didnt even state what the reults would be, but tempted the reader to ponder, just what, the result might be.

You accuse me of predicting the result, i did not, knowing physics well enough does suggest a result, but i deliberatly did not state it.

So the conclusion that you object to, that i did not state, is your own, so i should ask why you are objecting to yourself, and then projecting that objection, onto me.

Jinn -- I would agree with Zeilinger. All information is just a series of theoretically commensurable energy transfers, including the information in our heads. And this is me lightened up! Determinism -- "what, me worry?"

Lurker -- One more reply before this one drops off the main page, then if you like, we can continue this by e-mail (clickey namey).

You say at the outset that you're not making any metaphysical references, but I do not think that word means what you think it means. Any existential statement that can't be empirically verified or any universal theory that can't be falsified qualifies as metaphysical. A conception of "free will" that defies empirical analysis falls under that heading.

My problem here is that your premise #1 is flawed from the get-go. I've said it before, I'll say it again: the set of phenomena call "free will", i.e. the ability to think and make choices, requires determinism. If our thoughts and our environment didn't follow any kind of causal logic, volition and consciousness as we know it would be impossible. When you say that "[i]n a completely deterministic universe there could be no free will", the validity of that statement depends on what you're talking about: if it's some sort of vague and spooky "self" that doesn't follow causal laws, then you're dead right; but if you're talking about the phenomena we see every day, like my ability to weigh the pros and cons of potential courses of action and act accordingly, then you're dead wrong.

Moving to premise #2, you're misinterpereting what QM actually tells us: determinism does not break down at the quantum level. If quantum phenomena did not follow causal laws, the computer you're using right now would not work, and lasers would be impossible. Your CPU depends on many trillions of electrons per second doing exactly what they're supposed to; if even a very small number of those electrons deviated randomly every cycle, the errors would multiply outward through a butterfly effect and make the whole thing unusable. Lasers depend on making millions of photons align perfectly, every crest and trough of numerous light waves in perfect coherence; if they did not follow causal laws, there could be no such effect. (Amusingly enough, Bohr and von Neumann originally thought that lasers were impossible because that would make it theoretically possible. Great men make great mistakes.)

If #2 is invalid then so is #3, but I want to address this anyway: "there's no way to predict the state of the universe in toto ... at some future time, even if you had a computing device up to the task." Once again, computational irreducibility does not imply "inderterminism". On the contrary, the fact that some events are computationally irreducible is a consequence of deterministic physical limitations.

I don't think point #4 even necissarily follows from the premises, but assuming it does then it falls apart once those are knocked down. Once again I ask you, what do you mean by "free will"? From here it sure looks about the same as God -- a null value containing no information. If you really want to believe in such things then I'm not going to be able to reason you out of it, but don't try bringing those toys into science's sandbox.

In point #5, what you take to be the logical conclusion of what I'm saying: no will, no self. And in a sense, that's true: Hume was right, there is no essence of mind that exists independently of matter and energy; our consciousness is a bundle of different programs all running at once that results in an emergent phenomenon we call self-awareness. But this need not be depressing. There's no Santa, the earth moves around the sun, we are related to chimpanzees; all of these revelations were thought depressing at the time people learned of them, but we seem to have moved along okay. The phenomena of life are still all there and as interesting as they ever were.

I know this is not easy to wrap one's mind around; when it first hit me I went into a black depression for several days and barely even left my bedroom. But having stepped back and thought about it, the only reason I felt depressed was because my whole life I'd been surrounded by old myths that taught me to expect things to be otherwise. Once I realized that fretting about this made about as much sense as fretting about the sun burning out in millions of years, I learned to stop worrying and love determinism. It's what makes life, the universe, and everything possible.

"the set of phenomena call "free will", i.e. the ability to think and make choices, requires determinism"

Sure does Matt, without it, you car would not start in the morning, the element of "chance" is those certain days where neglect or the unnoticed problem makes you late for work that day.

I thought I might ignite an email debate with my two posts, the level of discussion here made me think my models would be understood.

Where I was going to use them to shoot an arrow at the heart of the worshipers of the improbability drive of HGttGalaxy fame.

Some postmodern quacks project it so far that they decide that fact and objective truth no longer exists, where all such is demoted to perception and opinion.

Anyhow, it can get rather entertaining when you point out one of the core illustrations of quantum uncertainty might be more of a result of the experoment than a true observation of the nature of the observed.