Letter: Is complexity a clue to our place in the universe?

From Malcolm Shute, La Tour d'Aigues, France

Richard Webb says that free will is “often seen as the opposite of determinism” (15 February, p 34). Surely, though, it is randomness that is the true opposite of determinism.

It seems to me that free will is balanced on the knife-edge boundary between these states, in a way that is analogous to liquid existing on the line between gaseous and crystalline states.

Many articles in New Scientist have commented on the special nature of this boundary between stasis and randomness, and the interesting and counter-intuitive chaotic behaviour that it leads to.

I see quantum mechanics, too, as positioned on the boundary of self-organised criticality between classical physical behaviour and weird interconnectedness (26 February 2011, p 36). Could there be a glimmer of a theory of everything here?