Free will re-redux

There are domains of computational irreducibility... and that is where we are. Or you could say we are inside Laplace's demon's computer (which is the universe) that is calculating the future. The future can't be predicted except to run the simulation and see what happens. You can locally simplify into domains of computational reducibility (physics and engineering) which allow you to make probabilistic predictions. If you haven't already, please listen to this Lex Fridman podcast with Stephen Wolfram... one of the best yet!

We can't predict individual particle behavior in that fluid simulation I showed without running the simulation just like we can't predict individual particle behavior of quantum particles without "running the simulation" which is life.

In my "Patternism" model all randomness is fundamentally a result of subjective choice which by definition is the "first cause" the act of determining and if such choice were predictable it would be defined as part of the fundamental Object. We all contain "first cause" because the divine mind hasn't made up its mind yet and it doesn't know how to make up its mind until it sees what happens... nested feedback loops and we are each tracing out one such feedback loop out of all the possible loops that can exist.

Might be of interest, a bridge between computers and indeterminism ->

The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine

In honor of Alan Turing’s hundredth birthday, I unwisely set out some thoughts about one ofTuring’s obsessions throughout his life, the question of physics and free will. I focus relatively narrowly on a notion that I call “Knightian freedom”: a certain kind of in-principle physical un-predictability that goes beyond probabilistic unpredictability. Other, more metaphysical aspects of free will I regard as possibly outside the scope of science.I examine a viewpoint, suggested independently by Carl Hoefer, Cristi Stoica, and even Turing himself, that tries to find scope for “freedom” in the universe’s boundary conditions rather than in the dynamical laws. Taking this viewpoint seriously leads to many interesting conceptual problems. I investigate how far one can go toward solving those problems, and along the way, encounter (among other things) the No-Cloning Theorem, the measurement problem, decoherence, chaos, the arrow of time, the holographic principle, Newcomb’s paradox,Boltzmann brains, algorithmic information theory, and the Common Prior Assumption. I also compare the viewpoint explored here to the more radical speculations of Roger Penrose.The result of all this is an unusual perspective on time, quantum mechanics, and causation,of which I myself remain skeptical, but which has several appealing features. Among other things, it suggests interesting empirical questions in neuroscience, physics, and cosmology; and takes a millennia-old philosophical debate into some underexplored territory.

Aaronson notes it is part of a solution rather than an actual solution, but has some interesting conjectures related to some of the things you've talked about.