WAKING LIFE -- ILLUSTRATED SCREENPLAY & SCREENCAP GALLERY

So now it starts to look like the Big Bang set up the initial conditions, and the whole rest of human history, and even before, is really just sort of the playing out of subatomic particles according to these basic fundamental physical laws. We think we're special. We think we have some kind of special dignity, but that now comes under threat.  I mean, that's really challenged by this picture.

So you might be saying, "Well, wait a minute. What about quantum mechanics? I know enough contemporary physical theory to know it's not really like that. It's really a probabilistic theory. There's room. It's loose. It's not deterministic." And that's gonna enable us to understand free will.

But if you look at the details, it's not really gonna help because what happens is you have some very small quantum particles, and their behavior is apparently a bit random.  They sort of swerve.  Their behavior is absurd in the sense that it's unpredictable and we can't understand it based on anything that came before. It just does something out of the blue, according to a probabilistic framework. But is that gonna help with freedom? I mean, should our freedom just be a matter of probabilities, just some random swerving in a chaotic system? That just seems like it's worse. 

I'd rather be a gear in a big deterministic, physical machine than just some random swerving.

So we can't just ignore the problem. We have to find room in our contemporary world view for persons, with all that it entails. Not just bodies, but persons.

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