opinion on whether or not we have free will in the conventional meaning. Is there really

an independent ego right here that is control of my every thought and action? I think Einstein

is a determinist so he does not believe in free will, but then there's the Heisenberg

Uncertainty Principle, although to my understanding the uncertainty is in our scientific instruments

and the inaccuracies of the measurements. Thank you.

Well, you covered a lot of ground in there but nobody knows about the nature of consciousness.

I think we have free will up to a point, but we are driven by deep, deep things like wanting

to get food, making more people, that is to say mating. And then I cannot help but notice

how much people from the same family tend to do the same things. Same families tend

to do the same things just anecdotally. But clearly I know I have made decisions based

on things that happened around me that I wouldn't have made without being informed by history

or what I'd noticed. I know I have. Now if that turns out not to be true I would be very

surprised. Now as far as the uncertainty principle goes,

uncertainty principle is roughly there's a quantum, there's an amount of energy below

which you can't measure. The old saying is you can know where the electron is or you

can know how fast it's going but you can't know both, not exactly because anything you

would use to measure it would inherently move the electron or change its speed. That's the

classic uncertainty principle at work. With that said, I am satisfied now, as an engineer

and scientist, that our brains are chemical reactions and chemical reactions, at some

level, depend on quantum mechanics, on the interaction of subatomic particles based on

this extraordinary thing called quantum electrodynamics, you alluded to it.

And so at some level there's randomness in what we think because we're made of chemicals

that have randomness. But largely human behavior is generally predictable. There's whole schools

full of psychologists and psychiatrists who study humans and they come across patterns,

and those patterns have got to be part of our brains and our free will has got to be

part of that. I mean I don't mean to skirt your question, but the nature of consciousness

– you are living at a time when the nature of consciousness is not understood but it

may be very soon because we'll build computer models or computers that are as sophisticated

or as complicated or as messed up as human brains and they will behave the same way as

human brains, as long as they're plugged, the computers. Carry on.