Free Will
&gt;<i>If free will depends on an inability to predict future behavior, then it would follow from that free will somehow depends on our being unique: on it being impossible to copy us.</i><p>That&#x27;s similar to the conclusion I came to, too.<p>That free will is basically the series of singular inevitable outputs of a computation (the &quot;me-the-person-in-the-universe&quot; computation) that are not compressible&#x2F;reducible (they have to be run to come to the output).<p>And it&#x27;s free not because it &quot;freely&quot; selects among several choices, but rather because it&#x27;s uniquely personal -- as a person, one can ever only do&#x2F;will the thing they end up doing&#x2F;willing (tautologically: one&#x27;s history is he&#x2F;her -- our will defines us), but what that is can only be found out after the tact.<p>&gt;<i>There were some famous experiments in the 1980&#x27;s, where someone would attach electrodes to someone&#x27;s brain and would tell them that they could either press button 1 or 2. Something like 200ms before the person was conscious of making the decision of which button to press, certainly before they physically moved their finger, you could see the neurons spiking for that particular finger. So you can actually predict which button the person is going to press a fraction of a second before they&#x27;re aware of having made a choice. This is the kind of thing that forces us to admit that some of our choices are less free than they feel to us---or at least, that whatever is determining these choices acts earlier in time than it seems to subjective awareness.</i><p>Similar to my comment above, I find the ideas drawn from those experiments (that there&#x27;s no free will) wrong.<p>The fact that a choice&#x2F;action can be known (from neural activity etc) before the choice becomes conscious to the subject, doesn&#x27;t necessarily mean that the subject doesn&#x27;t have free will. It can just mean that the subject has a whole beneath-the-surface thing beyond the conscious layer. It&#x27;s not like the person&#x27;s neurons belong to somebody else -- or that we only &quot;live&quot; by thinking.