Do you believe in free will?

[genkaus]

Yes, and if the emergent entity is not independent of its constituent entities, and those constituent entities are fully determined, then the emergent entity is also full determined. The emergent entity doesn't "break free" of lower level properties just because it is an emergent entity.

Umm... ok.

Where do you expect that any entity that is fully determined by entities that themselves are fully determined is going to get anything non-deterministic?

Nowhere.

You don't get to just "invent new properties" because you used the word emergent.

I don't.

Think again of my example. The hurricane follows the same path as the real thing, not because the underlying properties and the emergent property happen to coincidentally converge on the same result, the result is the same because the emergent property is fully determined by the underlying properties. In what sense is our model hurricane and its path not fully determined even though those are both emergent properties?

None. What about it?

I get the feeling that like others are using "quantum mechanics" in place of "magic", you are using "emergent properties" as a substitute for "magic".

I'm not.

You can't get indeterminism or freedom out of a system in which the behavior of the constituent entities are fully deterministic, no matter how many "emergent properties" or "emergent entities" there are.

Your point?

(And I'll point out a couple things just so neither you or I get confused. 1) equating chaos and unpredictability with indeterminism; chaos, or chaotic systems are fully deterministic, the unpredictability comes from a lack of knowledge about the system (in principle, see Heisenberg; we may not have adequate mathematics either). That is not indeterminism, that is a practical knowledge problem.

You are confused.

2) You might half be thinking of emergent self-organization, which is not really related, but that again does not get you indeterminism.

Never said it does.

3) Not sure this was you, but someone was asking whether determinism equals predestination; no, because the laws of our universe include laws that are essentially stochastic ("in that a system's subsequent state is determined both by the process's predictable actions and by a random element" Wikipedia: Stochastic). Quantum mechanics is probabilistic, so the future state isn't fully determined by the present state, only the probabilities of any particular future state (I think I'm implicitly appealing to the Copenhagen interpretation, which, may be slightly illicit, as interpretations of QFT and QFT itself are two separate things).)

Not me.

As it stands, it seems you have either not read or not understood my argument for free-will. Address that, and then we'll talk.