Letter: Free to question the very idea of free will

From Nigel Tuersley, Wardour, Wiltshire, UK

You looked at superdeterminism, a take on quantum theory that does away with randomness (15 May, p 36). Objections were raised to it on the grounds that it would deny humans free will.

As far as we are aware, nothing in the universe is independent of the cosmos, and what we refer to as free will is, in fact, no more or less than the sum of our prior genetic and environmental influences.

More fundamentally, by what convoluted logic can it be argued that an element of randomness at the quantum level renders the case for independent thought more compelling? A so-called free will rooted in random processes is no more independent than if it is determined by non-random factors.