xii Are the Androids Dreaming Yet? decision was already made. As Daniel Dennett says, “You have no free will. Get over it!” They say I am effectively an avatar in some giant cosmic computer game, going about my business in an entirely predefined way. I do not agree! If they are right all the coincidences and chance actions of my life were fixed at the time of the Big Bang. I feel this must be wrong, but finding a chink in the determinist armor is hard work; the laws of physics as we know them today are almost exclusively deterministic. This book lays out the options — the chinks — that would allow free will to enter our Universe. To understand human thinking we would really like to look inside a working human brain. We can’t do this yet. All we can do is observe minds at work when they communicate with one another. If our minds think non-computationally — as I believe — we should be able to see them struggle when they have to translate thoughts into symbolic form. The more symbolic, the harder it will be. This is indeed what we observe: face- to-face communication is easy, while formal written modes are much harder. We will explore the difference between human and computer communication as our first step in locating the weakness in the armor of determinism. What do I Believe? As a scientist, I ought not to have beliefs. I should have theories and working assumptions. But, as a human being, I must admit believing certain things are true. Science does not forbid beliefs. It just requires you to be prepared to have one overturned if a better one comes along. Richard Feynman summed this up in a lecture he delivered at Cal Tech: “If you want to discover a theorem,” he said, “first, you guess, then you work out some effect predicted by the theorem. Finally, you see if the effect happens in the real world. If it does, you have a good theory. If the effect happens a little differently, you will need to look for a better theory.’ Here are some of my overturn-able beliefs.