whole existence is surrounded by non-deterministic physics. Therefore

Free Will 353 whole existence is surrounded by non-deterministic physics. Therefore, your actions are not predetermined by anything in your local corner of the Universe — the past light cone if you want to be strict about the physics. The determined determinists are a determined bunch. Just because the information that determines your actions cannot be encoded by the particles you are made from, does not mean youare free. The information could be stored in parts of the Universe we cannot see, or held outside the Universe in some sort of cosmic hard drive. Every creative event in the Universe would be specified in this store. But this begs the third question: How was this store of information generated in the first place? If a Universe contains creative things — as our Universe does — there is no way to computably generate the necessary determinist store of information. The Universe has free will because there is no deterministic process that could generate it. If our Universe were a Turing machine, everything within it would be too. Think about the deterministic clockwork argument I gave earlier. If you try to construct a better — say a more random -— machine inside a Turing machine, an observer could simply ignore the better machine hidden within it, and watch the outer machine work. The outer machine will predict the operation of the inner machine perfectly, even if the inner machine is fiendishly complicated. We have to consider the machine on which our human software runs. Our bodies, our minds, all that we are, is software running on the Universe's hardware of quarks and photons. If the hardware is deterministic, then so is our software. And if the hardware is deterministic, there can be no creativity within the Universe. So the free will camp has an argument easily as frustrating as the one deployed by the determinists. Every time a determinist asks, “How do you know you were not always going to do that?” the free will believer can reply, “You asked me a question. If this dialogue is to have any significance, then we must exist in a rational Universe and, therefore, the laws of information give us creativity and free will. If you believe we are fully determined, there is no point in my answering your question.” I reason. Therefore, I have free will. The Universe is not a machine. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016043