> I found the concept of free will at odds with my opinion that the brain and physics are very deterministic. IMO, this is the prime example of theory vs pract

> I found the concept of free will at odds with my opinion that the brain and physics are very deterministic. IMO, this is the prime example of theory vs practice. In my opinion, our universe is deterministic at a theoretical level, but will never be practically deterministic. * Everything is likely made of a fundamental building block that can be predicted and modeled. In isolation, there is a small enough system that can be represented deterministically. * The universe is far, far too complex to apply determinism in any meaningful way. * Any device able to model the determinism of the universe at a fundamental would itself be non-deterministic. That devices would either (1) need to model itself - which would be infinitely recursive since the model of itself would also need to model itself (2) isolated from the universe - which is currently impossible and also implies that our universe is a simulation within another system (3) operate on abstractions/simplifications - which leaves room for error. * Finally, determinism is only practically useful if it can be used to (1) repeatedly generate the same results for the same inputs (2) or, predict the results based on knowing the inputs. * 1. This will never be possible because we operate within the system being modeled. That system progresses forward and the same inputs can never be utilized more than once (some variable somewhere would be different). * 2. We are so incredibly far from modeling determinism that it's still impossible to predict results for known inputs. There will always be unknown in a model that leads to error.