On the question of free will and pre-determination,

[marylandblue]

50. Lot's of systems are not determined by their current state

Weather systems are one. They have a random element. They will always have a random element. You could build a computer as big as the universe and still not be able to compute all the random interactions in the atmosphere. So we make an assumption that the laws of physics control the system in an indeterminate way. The only difference between a weather system and a living system is that living systems, particularly brains, have goal-directed behavior. If you want to call that supernatural, fine with me, it doesn't change the fact that brains appear to this way. It is also a testable hypothesis. If we knew more about how the processes interact, we could see them interact the way I predict, but we still would have limits on our ability to predict the outcome. If on the other hand, we found that a certain set of initial conditions always leads to the same outcome, my hypothesis is proven false.