Determinism, Free Will and Paradox

[Alex K]

-and that's the (or one of the) hook for why things seem so different in a QM experiment than they do in our lives as we experience them, or the universe as we experience -it-. If you isolate something, and find that a great deal is possible - that's not entirely surprising. Once you have forces pushing in from every direction, and a mountain of the same behind you....many of those possibilities that a QM particle might be able to realize in isolation become a non-issue as a part in the whole mess of interaction at a massively grander scale.

To put it another way, the more modifiers you add, the smaller the range of probability becomes. Perhaps x can be whatever it wants, it's truly random. However, when x interacts with y, lets say (just for ease of use) that half of those possibilities are removed. Add a z, take away another half. So forth and so on for everything that's interacting with any other thing....and up here...there's a whole hell of alot of "things".

So, the indeterminacy met on QM is for the most part negligible, and in specific instances where it is relevant, these are far removed from any environment likely to include a multitude of modifiers... which I would presume is the case with most objects larger than the atom?

I'm not sure I follow - are you saying that the indeterminacy of outcomes of such isolated small systems average out/become irrelevant when one zooms out? Because looking at any chaotic system, and be it a double pendulum, or the weather, we know that arbitrarily small perturbations will be amplified. Of course, they will be drowned it other influences which one could however at least in principle know and predict. Do we know that the electrical noise which is produced in any circuit such as the brain, will not influence neurons to fire at probabilistic times, thus blowing up the random element which is introduced by the quantum noise to macroscopic proportions? And let me stress that I'm not talking about consciousness from entanglement or such hokuspokus, but simply noise.