> But we can't calculate our way to a rose [..] How complex phenomena emerge from the fundamental laws of the universe is a blank spot on the map of human under

> But we can't calculate our way to a rose [..] How complex phenomena emerge from the fundamental laws of the universe is a blank spot on the map of human understanding. You're looking there and saying "I don't see a road to free will through here." You think this says something about free will, but all it really does is say something about the map. I think this is a very good argument and I think I will use it myself in the future. But I can see that our current understanding of physics can have a road to a rose, even if I can't see the road. I can't see how our current understanding of physics can have a road to decision making that is different from an artificial neural network or an ensemble of boosted trees. So where I am stuck on the free will question is: Either my computer has free will, or humans don't. And we generally consider computers to not have free will, because they follow their programming. So what is it that humans do, that is fundamentally different from following our programming? > As long as our ability to freely make decisions doesn't violate our understanding of physics, you can't say that our understanding of physics excludes our ability to freely make decisions. My argument is that we are not making decisions freely, but we are a complex system, running entirely on reactions following the laws of physics in fundamentally the same way that water doesn't make a decision about where to flow, it just flows.