When deterministic Newtonian physics gave way to Quantum, it all but seemed that the Universe was after all, not deterministic, rather there was in it an inherent randomness and probabilistic nature. What are the implications of this on Free Will? The discussion rages on, and it is one of the “hard questions” of science.

In this video, the host states that there are many physicist, and philosophers of science that are taking the view of “strong emergence”, that is, the view that the logical thinking of rational beings, is not determined purely in something we could have predicted from the structure of, let us say, the early Universe, or from the information contained in the CMB radiation at that stage.

Rational minds develop logical thinking and that logical thinking leads to for example the writing of books, like Einstein’s Relativity, and Darwin’s Origin of Species. There was nothing in that early CMB state that required a particular individual to write down a particular book. But even further, logical thinking once developed, can actually now begin to determine how the physics evolves. An analogy is given of a computer, where the working components are physical objects, but how the computer works and its output is determined by an algorithm, the language that is input by a rational mind (I may have not represented that correctly, because I could not accurately explain how a computer works, please watch them explain it on the video). Or take a program like Google’s software, and how the working is according to complex algorithms rationally devised.