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ScottAaronson comments on Quotes and Notes on Scott Aaronson’s "The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine" - Less Wrong Discussion
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Just as a quick point of information, these arguments are all addressed in Sections 2.2 and 3.1. In particular, while I share the common intuition that "random" is just as incompatible with "free" as "predictable" is, the crucial observation is that "unpredictable" does not in any way imply "random" (in the sense of governed by some knowable probability distribution). But there's a broader point. Suppose we accepted, for argument's sake, that unpredictability is not "fundamental to freedom" (whatever we take "freedom" to mean). Wouldn't the question of whether human choices are predictable or not remain interesting enough in its own right?
I think that the "absolute prediction" question is answered. I mean, I'm acquiring bits of information you can't physically know all the time just by entangling with air molecules that haven't reached you yet. But there's a separate question of "how important is that?" which is a combination of at least two different questions: first "how big an impact does flipping a qubit have on human cognitive actions?" and second "how much do I care that someone can't predict me exactly, if they can predict my macroscopic actions out to a time horizon of minutes / days / years?"
I think you're more concerned about absolute prediction relative to "pretty good" prediction than I am, which is a shame because that's the totally subjective part of the question :)
As a point of information, I too am only interested in predicting macroscopic actions (indeed, only probabilistically), not in what you call "absolute prediction." The worry, of course, is that chaotic amplification of small effects would preclude even "pretty good" prediction.
By "random" I certainly don't mean to imply that the probability distribution must be knowable. I don't see how an unknowable probability distirbution makes things any more up to me, any more under my control.