For those encountering this paper for the first time I thought it would could helpful to point out some stuff:<p>"The Strong Free Will Theorem" is a successor paper to an earlier paper called "The Free Will Theorem" (easily found via a search engine or Wikipedia). Both papers are fairly accessible to the typical hacker. Both are somewhat profound. It might be easier to start with the earlier paper.<p>Traditionally, people debate "interpretations" of QM especially and relativity to an extent. E.g., the "many world" interpretation of QM. These papers take a novel and interesting approach to analyzing such questions. They are quite refreshing, in terms of avoiding needless metaphysical claptrap.<p>Finally, I don't recall if the papers themselves mention this but at least in speaking appearances Conway has said that he doesn't mean for people to read too much (or too little) into the word "Will", here. Fundamentally, the theorems are about how the history of the universe up to some point (taking into account a relativistic view of history) does or does not relate to the future action of the universe. They formulate things in particularly poignant anthropomorphic terms but the result is more general. If you would rather not locate "will" in these results, Conway is happy to concede that the theorems could as well be dubbed the "free whimsy" theorems... implying meaningless rather than meaningful randomness in certain human choices.
What if there's nothing deterministic in this universe? The notion of determinism deduced from God, Nature, or whatever is the key behind the concept of free will. Otherwise, how can we identify free will, which is essentially a fancy term for "non-determinism"? The concept of free will cannot stand by itself without the notion of determinism. In other words, if everything is truly random, then there's no room for both determinism and free will. However, I don't think the structured randomness described by quantum mechanics counts for the randomness that truly goes beyond both determinism and free will. It may be incomprehensible for any of internal observers of this universe.
Lack of determinism is not the same as free will. Being constrained to the past to include the future (i.e. some probability distribution over possible choice states) is still a mechanism embedding stochastic processes, and can be modelled algorithmically.<p>To really get to free will we also need teleological causation:<p>danielnolanphil.googlepages.com/TeleologyHawthorneNolan.pdf<p>Also, here are empirical results from my research showing we are capable of teleological causation and thus have free will:<p><a href="http://www.box.net/shared/u13u3agxqg" rel="nofollow">http://www.box.net/shared/u13u3agxqg</a>
Very interesting.<p>If I'm reading this correctly, he says that the idea that human will is deterministic is obsolete. The idea came because it was thought the universe is deterministic, but modern quantum mechanics shows the universe is not deterministic, and neither is human will.