&gt;But the argument isn&#x27;t as simple as &quot;physicalism entails the absence of free will&quot;.<p>Right, I said that&#x27;s probably all he <i>should</i> say.<p>&gt;His point is that even if our actions are (probabilistically) determined by a set of underlying physical laws, it may still be that the character of those laws is such that it is fundamentally impossible to predict future actions, in which case we would still have meaningful free will.<p>It&#x27;s hard to see how it makes any difference to my level of freedom whether someone else can successfully predict what I&#x27;m going to do. You can predict pretty reliably that I&#x27;m going to have breakfast in the morning, but it&#x27;s still a free decision on my part.<p>&gt;but the characterization of free will in terms of the concrete question &quot;is it possible to build a prediction machine?&quot; seems like a useful and novel contribution that doesn&#x27;t just reduce to the old question of &quot;is physicalism true&quot;.<p>It seems to me that the question of whether or not we have free well is largely orthogonal to the question of whether or not our actions are predictable. I suspect that all four combinations of predictable&#x2F;unpredictable and free&#x2F;unfree are logical possibilities. So I think Aaronson is conflating a lot of things that ought not to be conflated, and which have been endlessly and subtly picked apart in a philosophical literature that he appears not to have bothered reading. (I haven&#x27;t read that much of it either, but it already contains pretty much every idea about free will that is likely to occur to anyone in our present state of knowledge.)