What matters to me is that unlike my desk and unlike my chair and unlike my mug, my collection of particles is able to execute an enormously diverse set of behaviors. Indeed, my particles just composed this very sentence and I’m pleased they did. Sure, that reaction, too, is nothing but my particle army carrying out their quantum mechanical marching orders, but that doesn’t diminish the reality of the feeling. I am free not because I can supersede physical law, but because my prodigious internal organization has emancipated my behavioral responses.
