Stephen Hawking's Grand Design

I stumbled across a 4 part TV series hosted by Steven Hawking last weekend and recorded it. I watched the first one a couple days ago, and it was wonderful! Really interesting and thought provoking. The first episode was titled "The Meaning of Life". I have been wondering about that on and off over the past....fifteen years, and so I was really interested in what Hawking had to say about it. And I will get to that in a later post, but I wanted to write about something else.
One of the things I found especially interesting was his discussion of free will. It is a contentious point for a lot of people when discussing evolution, specifically when arguing against it. The argument goes, if evolution/natural selection really happen, then how do you explain free will which often appears to contradict what natural selection would "choose"? First of all, natural selection doesn't choose anything. It is simply the result of a process that occurs within systems where not every organism survives equally. And therefor free will cannot contradict it. But then what is it?
Hawking likens the billions and trillions of possible neural connections in the brain to another complex system: weather. He says
"Our brains create and sustain our conscious minds through an extraordinary network of interactive neurons."
He goes on to say
"The mind is like weather inside our heads. Free will is simply what we call the process that happens (just like natural selection just happens)  when this vastly complex system faces a choice." (Parentheses inside quote are mine)
Now maybe at first blush you find this definition...less than romantic, and unflattering, but the more I think about it, the more incredible of an idea it becomes to me. To think of our minds like weather, with the same sort of complexity, and unpredictability, and ability to surprise the hell out of us on a daily basis is a truly awesome thought to me. To think of free will as a process resulting directly from the complexity of my mind is....mind blowing, because it means that not only does it exist, but it always will. To know that nature endowed me (but not on purpose!) with the capacity to forever be able to bewilder myself, and be astonished by others no matter what I think I know, is exciting and wonderful, and fills me with a curiosity about the future that I can barely express!
If Hawking is right,and free will is just a side effect of the complex system housed in our skulls, how incredibly lucky for us hu? It didn't have to happen, but it did. WOW! So awesome! This will definitely be added to my list of things I love about my life!