> I find this very implausible. So does Douglas Hofstadter Dennett does a good refutation of Penrose. There's some in Darwin's Dangerous Idea (I think; might b

> I find this very implausible. So does Douglas Hofstadter Dennett does a good refutation of Penrose. There's some in Darwin's Dangerous Idea (I think; might be confusing it with Consciousness Explained), but he finishes the job in Freedom Evolves Long story short, his assertion is that the contradiction between determinism in physics and free will in humans is a category mix-up, not a true contradiction. There are so many layers between the two levels, so many interactions, that when you get to the top level at which we consider an coherent blob of "matter" called an "organism" -- with a "brain" even -- there really are things called "thinking" and "free will". But way down at the level of molecules, those concepts aren't even nonsensical; they're just meaningless. To talk about free will, you have to have a very high vantage point. And that's why it gets confusing when you go back down to the building blocks. This is similar to the systems argument against Searle's Chinese Room: the phenomenon we find so interesting disappears when the system is broken down, exactly because it's an emergent product of the system. There are analogies I could make, but I'd probably miss something, so I'll leave it to Dennett (he actually uses the Game of Life to make his point). I highly recommend reading Freedom Evolves if you're into these ideas. Very thought-provoking, especially for its compact length.