And what Sabine said in the quote is some kind of hand waving.
I think what a lot of people would think about the lack of free will is that it implies 'predestination'. Predestination is a religious belief that everything we do is predestined. This implies a complete lack of freedom. Whatever we do we do it because we are predestined to do it. That of course is probably hog wash.
I think what Sabine is saying is that all our thinking is based on electrochemical activity in our brains. The basis of this activity is of course quantum in nature and therefore deterministic, within the confines of quantum indeterminacy.
If you look at it, this happens at a very low level in the 'programming' of our brains, sort of like the 1 and 0's of computer operations. But the higher level programming is extremely complicated. With the number of synapses in our brain the programming for each of us is even more complicated than Windows. And of course we know just how weird Windows can get sometimes. So that each of us has slightly different programming and we think different thoughts and make different decisions. But at the base, those thoughts are controlled by a deterministic physical system. So we have a wide range of individual reactions, without having real free will. All we can do is what a long chain of deterministic conditions allows us to do.
And that of course depends on her being correct. I think I will go with a 'maybe'.
Bill Gill
