Farmer said, “On a philosophical level, it struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic, but you can’t say what it’s going to do next. At the same time, I’d always felt that the important problems out there in the world had to do with the creation of organization, in life or intelligence. But how did you study that? What biologists were doing seemed so applied and specific; chemists certainly weren’t doing it; mathematicians weren’t doing it at all, and it was something that physicists just
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