There are a few ways to look at the question, but by my reasoning, none of them result in the answer “literally infinite.”
From a deterministic point of view, the answer is zero degrees of freedom, because whatever choice the human “makes” is the only possible choice he/she could be making.
From the perspective of treating decision-making as a black box which issues commands to the body, the amount of commands that the body can physically comply with is limited. Humans only have a certain, finite quantity of nerve cells to issue these commands with and through. Therefore, the set of commands that can be sent through these nerves at any given time must also be finite.
True, without a source of randomness there are technically finite states that a human brain can decide on. So I suppose it’s not literally infinite, but it still gets us to 2^(number of neurons in a brain), which is many more states than a human brain could experience in the lifetime of the universe. Of course, many of those states are fundamentally broken and would just look like a seizure, so perhaps all of those should be reduced together.
There are a few ways to look at the question, but by my reasoning, none of them result in the answer “literally infinite.”
From a deterministic point of view, the answer is zero degrees of freedom, because whatever choice the human “makes” is the only possible choice he/she could be making.
From the perspective of treating decision-making as a black box which issues commands to the body, the amount of commands that the body can physically comply with is limited. Humans only have a certain, finite quantity of nerve cells to issue these commands with and through. Therefore, the set of commands that can be sent through these nerves at any given time must also be finite.
True, without a source of randomness there are technically finite states that a human brain can decide on. So I suppose it’s not literally infinite, but it still gets us to 2^(number of neurons in a brain), which is many more states than a human brain could experience in the lifetime of the universe. Of course, many of those states are fundamentally broken and would just look like a seizure, so perhaps all of those should be reduced together.