Quantum Approaches to Consciousness (2015)
Philosophers latched onto the idea of QM in consciousness bc they thought the randomness aspect left room for free will. Of course it doesn&#x27;t, any more than hooking up an axe over your head that will only drop if a certain atom decays means that you can now choose the time of your death. The point being we don&#x27;t control the randomness, it evolves according to the laws of QM and therefore there is no role at all for &quot;choice&quot; to play. Also observe that a rock has the same level of access to the underlying randomness of QM and we don&#x27;t say it has free will. Even if the human brain propagates the randomness upwards to larger systems, there is still no choice in how that is done. Theoretically, it is possible for a rock to exhibit crazy quantum behavior every once in awhile as well.<p>Of course, free will is an inconsistent notion predicated on the idea that there is a &quot;you&quot; separate from &quot;your chemicals&quot; that would do something different if only that dang physics would let it. But separate yourself from your chemicals and you don&#x27;t get free will, you get literally nothing. People don&#x27;t realize the implicit dualism in all of this free will stuff