my pet theory: consciousness, free will, the soul, the spice, whatever you want to call it is a sum of the evolutionary process which produces a living being pl

my pet theory: consciousness, free will, the soul, the spice, whatever you want to call it is a sum of the evolutionary process which produces a living being plus the noise that its substrate and environment excite it with. i believe that the true fuel that drives complex behaviors in neurological systems is noise, and what appears to be free will is simply noise that we can never completely measure, understand or replay. i suspect neurological systems are deterministic only in context of a completely deterministic environment/universe which for our purposes simply doesn't exist. so maybe the field of artificial intelligence, with its completely deterministic and replayable ttl worlds may produce some interesting results around the notion of free will, but i suspect that unless we can replay and then mutate the physical world deterministically, we'll never know if the study of neurological systems can. if you excite a machine with noise, and it creates a memory while producing a complex behavior, is it any less alive than a living biological system that is excited by the noise in its environment? my $.02, definitely keep the change!