h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

As far as I understood this, I agree. There might be, like "a God's Great Book Of Everything that's ever going to happen", but we still have at least the illusion of free will. Once we've made a choice, there is no way to determine whether or not, we could've also made the other choice. So this might be a bit pointless to even discuss it, but it's interesting.

You could say that the governing laws of physics should mean that every chemical reaction in a person's brain would be predictable, and therefore that their every thought and action would be predictable as well.
James

Well if someone has enough free time, he could do some calculations...

But apparently you should first get some basic info on the brain in question, and I'm not sure if it's possible without a drill. Plus to really be able to predict the future you would need to check out quite a high number of brains plus of course some other things in nature.

So by researching these things it is in theory possible to predict the future. But very complicated.

Not complicated for the laws of physics, though. The problem we have is that consciousness is a counter-intuitive epiphenomenon of brain chemistry. You would think a molecule of neurotransmitter was self-aware, would you; so how come you are?

Updated:
Not complicated for the laws of physics, though. The problem we have is that consciousness is a counter-intuitive epiphenomenon of brain chemistry. You wouldn't think a molecule of neurotransmitter was self-aware, would you; so how come you are?

Maybe every molecule is kind of self-aware, we just have ours connected so that we can show it. Or maybe not.

Actually that's a phenomenon often called "soul", I think.