Yes, there may be random elements—quantum flickers that introduce unpredictability into one’s behavior—but slaving your decisions to a dice roll doesn’t make you free.

Max Tegmark, The Mathematical Universe, arXiv e-print, April 5, 2007, http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0646.

Brian Whitworth, The Physical World as a Virtual Reality, arXiv e-print, January 2, 2008, http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.0337.

Nick Bostrom, “Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?,” The Philosophical Quarterly 53, no. 211 (2003): 243–255, doi:10.1111/1467-9213.00309. 87. Nick Bostrom, “The Simulation Argument,” n.d., http://www.simulation-argument.com/.

Kaj Sotala and Harri Valpola, “Coalescing Minds: Brain Uploading-Related Group Mind Scenarios,” International Journal of Machine Consciousness 04, no. 1 (June 2012): 293–312, doi:10.1142/S1793843012400173.

V. S. Ramachandran and Stuart Hameroff, “Beyond Belief: Science, Reason, Religion & Survival. Salk Institute for Biological Studies, Nov 5–7, 2006 (Session 4),” The Science Network, 2006, http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/beyond-belief-science-religion-reason-and-survival/session-4-1.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain (New York: Quill, 1999).

Near the end of this novel there’s a teaching moment on the subject of natural selection. Most people seem to think that organisms develop adaptive traits in response to environmental change. This is bullshit. The environment changes and those who already happen to have newly adaptive traits don’t get wiped out.

Lee Smolin (of Waterloo’s Perimeter Institute) goes against the grain: he rejects digital physics outright and serves up a single universe in which time is not an illusion, reality is not deterministic, and universes themselves grow, reproduce, and evolve via natural selection writ very large (think of black holes as offspring; think of entropy as