There are scenarios in which the most rational choice would be to become as random as possible to avoid predictability. For example, when you play rock, paper, scissors, in the first approximation at least, the best you can do is to become completely random selecting among three options. This offers the opponent no chance to predict. Game theory tells us that total randomness here gives the opponent no chance to find an advantage except by luck. Yet if there is a chance to predict the opponent in turn, then pure randomness is no longer the best option. The best option is to constrain that randomness—that so-called total freedom—to complement what can be predicted about the opponent's choice.
I think we have a sort of freedom of will because first our minds are highly complex and their activity bubbles up from chaotic factors, but also second because it behooves us to be unpredictable to any opponents. That is, we do not just choose chaotically, and we are not just inherently unpredictable as weather, we choose chaotically-randomly among sensible options. The seemingly infinite spectrum of possible thought and action is whittled down by sensation and emotion - by feeling. To say we can choose without feeling (if this picture I'm painting is true enough) would be absurd, as it is by feeling - by consciousness, by the reflective innerly sculpting of informing ourselves - that we make any decision at all.
We have trouble choosing "randomly" unless there is a criterion. At simplest, that criterion would be "choose randomly!" and we would not know what to do, we would have to depend on our current feeling to constrain and suggest. So "choose randomly!" for us can only mean "do what you feel!"
If we can only, at our freest, do what we feel, we are not entirely free and never will be while we feel. By this way of seeing, death may be the ultimate freedom. What happens to our window at that moment we do not know for certain. It is relatively unconstrained by known fact. It may well be that we blink out forever, but it may also be that something even more mysterious happens. In a real "forever," patterns are likely to recur. Even a pattern as complicated as a life might recur. So we cannot be entirely certain that a sufficiently close pattern will never recur and we will never take consciousness again. Can we?
Death is a big rolling of hidden dice. We do not understand the factors, yet, that make us conscious, so we cannot say for certain whether they might ever recur. We can say essentially for certain - to everyone's satisfaction - that consciousness itself will recur. We see it everywhere, even in animals. But we do not know whether our own window, which we find so special and meaningful, will ever have another chance - whether with similar biological details or any other set of circumstances. Most of us would like to continue feeling something after death - would like another life - provided it is not too bad a life - even if nearly everything about us were to change other than the living and the tolerability.
Feeling is evolved strategy. (Evolved and finite, it is likely flawed.) Choosing is, perhaps, evolved randomness within that strategy. (This may begin to compensate for the flawing.)
It may still be that we tap into quantum randomness for a source of pure unpredictability and universe-branching potential. (Shouldn't that be a term? Branching potential? It's a hypothesis, at least. We have to give it that much.) Relativistic effects - unbeknownst to the developers - are necessary for the operation of car batteries. Quantum effects - unbeknownst to the developers - are necessary for the operation of fireworks. Biologists have already demonstrated that birds' sense of direction by magnetic detection depends on quantum effects. This is a proof of concept that evolution has been able, like the developers of fireworks and car batteries, to drill down and harness "rare" physics for specific uses. Evolution can channel quantum effects and no doubt relativistic effects - that is its genius, that it can use anything that can be found, and without intention.
And so why are we so certain - just because we do not see how it would work - that consciousness has no quantum or relativistic properties? Maybe it has both.
Consciousness is a pure moment. It is the essence of immediacy. If we believe relativity, then separated events in space cannot be exactly immediate - cannot be entirely and definitely simultaneous. Maybe consciousness is a complicated tangle of immediacy, and you and I do not share consciousness because our minds are already too far separated in space - and therefore time.
I think it's true. I may be an ignoramus, may be operating on hunches, but I think it's true.
It's entirely possible - maybe even overwhelmingly likely, for all I know - that consciousness has nothing to do with the special features of relativity or quantum mechanics. But it also seems possible - however minutely - that consciousness has in common with black holes a merging of both kinds of effect.
Physicists may be ashamed to suggest such notions without ways to test them. I am not a physicist and I try not to be ashamed. The child in me wants to know and doesn't see why not.
