Board Thread:The Last Sovereign Discussion/@comment-27713488-20180327004110/@comment-31808207-20180409074947

Sadly, I'm not sure it's a problem that can be empirically solved, not only because we can't test the hypothesis (as you've pointed out, we can't tell from the emic standpoint if we're Simon in TLS or Ben-Hur in the eponymous film), but also because my answer to "Why" would be from a standpoint of Cartesian Dualism, where the mind is something that transcends the body (though remains linked to it). From that perspective, the source of nondeterminism is a force acting from outside the otherwise deterministic physical world to create agency. On the surface, that sounds unscientific, but I mean... String theory is considered mainstream science despite being unfalsifiable at current levels of measurement, and in astrophysics there's the idea that something beyond the observable universe could affect the things within it (e.g. dark flow). It would be nice in some ways if it was falsifiable, but it makes things interesting that it isn't, since even if the world is deterministic, the belief that it's nondeterministic can affect your actions and thus affect the outcomes they lead to.

I'd argue that dualism is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for nondeterminism, and that trying to pull a quantum physical explanation out of nothing instead of embracing a necessary assumption was the failing of the story you referenced before. Of course, considering the various indications of Sierra's beliefs, that does make it reasonable to be concerned about similar problems--but I wouldn't be too worried. Like I said, the evidence we have so far (imo) points to a very different sort of destiny or determination than we're discussing. [Sleep well, also, haha].