I wouldn’t equate free will with physicalism. It’s possible that physicalism might entail the absence of free will (I don’t claim to know the answer to this question), but it’s pretty clear that the entailment doesn’t go in the other direction.<p>I’m a bit frustrated here, because physicists often seem to retreat to this position that it’s all just a question of terminology once people start pushing back against their philosophical claims. If Aaronson actually is using terms in such a weird way as you suggest, then I just have no idea what he is on about. We already have a perfectly fine word that means unpredictable; there’s no need to repurpose “free”.<p>I admit that I have no way of knowing what he has or hasn’t read, and my comment on that was snarky. But he doesn’t refer to any philosophical work in the interview, and I couldn’t find much published work by him that really engages with the current literature.