Determinism, the idea that the causal nature of the laws of reality mean that every event is pre-determined, is the most common criticism of the notion of free will. But what if determinism wasn't true? What if the current state of the universe could not have been predicted at a previous point of time, even with sufficient data and proccessing power? What if causation was not solely bottom up, and complex systems had genuine powers of causation? What if we had true powers of autonomy, unshackled by previous events or lower level structures of causality?In this course, Templeton Prize Winning cosmologist George F. R. Ellis takes us through quantum physics, cosmology, computing, biology, and psychology to explain how we harnessed the forces of randomness and developed the unique power to consciously cause events in the universe.
#determinism #quantumphysics #quantumcomputing
George Ellis is a cosmologist and mathematician. Co-author of The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time along with Stephen Hawking.
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