Do You Have a Free Will?

Are you free? Free to choose what you do  and make decisions? Or are you an NPC, unable to decide anything for yourself?

You  feel that you have control over your life, or at least what you’ll have for breakfast.  But this may be an illusion. Physics actually may force you to go through life as  if on rails, with no free will at all.

You experience free will all the time. Like when you decided to watch this video  instead of doing something useful. Free will is your ability to decide by yourself  what you do.

It means that the future is an open arena that you can shape with your actions. It’s  at the core of human relationships – it means you are responsible for your actions, which  is the basis of our moral and legal systems. There are too many dimensions for one short  video – moral, psychological, biological, so we’ll focus on the most essential  part: Is free will even possible?

Two main philosophical camps are fighting  about this. No matter how we represent them, they'll be upset about it – so we’ll use  our own words. The first camp claims that the very idea of free will is fundamentally  incompatible with the laws of the universe: You Are an NPC Whatever “you” exactly are, it's  somehow made up of your physical brain and body.

And these are made of cells, which are made of proteins, which are made of  atoms and particles like protons or electrons. So fundamentally, you are a specific, quite  lovely, dynamic pattern of particles. Particles have no will, no motivation, no freedom,  they blindly follow the laws of physics.

And we don’t know why, but most laws  of physics are deterministic – which means that things happen the way they do  because of the things that came before. If you play pool and hit a ball at a specific  speed and angle, the laws of physics tell you exactly how all the balls on the table will  behave – their speeds, recoil directions, everything. These laws completely decide the  behavior of all balls on the table.

At the microscopic level things work very much  like that, only without players. Actions and reactions affect all the particles in the  universe, creating a chain of causal effects that extends throughout time, from the past to the  future. Things happen, making other things happen.

Now imagine that if, right after the  Big Bang, a supersmart supercomputer looked at every single particle in the  universe and noted all their properties. Just by applying the deterministic laws  of physics, it should be able to predict what all the particles in existence  would be doing until the end of time. But if you are made of particles and  it’s technically possible to calculate what particles will do forever, then  you never decided anything.

Your past, present and future were already  predetermined and decided at the Big Bang. That would mean there is a kind of  fate and you are not free to decide anything. You may feel like you make decisions,  but you're actually on autopilot.

The motions of the particles that make  up your brain cells that made you watch this video were decided 14 billion  years ago. You are just in the room when it happens. You're only witnessing how the  universe inside you unfolds in real time.

But this can’t be true because of quantum  mechanics, right? Quantum processes are intrinsically random, not deterministic, and  can’t be predicted with total certainty. On the quantum pool table, balls can go  randomly left or up or banana.

Their behavior isn’t set by what came before  but randomly decided in real time. But for the no-free-will camp, this doesn’t  affect their argument . They think that since quantum processes are random, they don’t allow  you to make any decisions.

Because if there is randomness for the things that fundamentally  make up your brain and body, these random processes make the decisions for you. How? Say an electron can randomly go right or  left.

If it goes left, it triggers electric currents between your neurons that create a  neuronal process, which triggers a long chain of actions that make you watch a youtube video.  Or it goes right and makes you clean your room. Just because the chain is extremely complex  doesn’t mean you have any control over it.

So maybe your fate was not decided at the Big  Bang but it is decided at this very moment. The important part is that it's not decided by you.  You get no say in this, you have no free will.

Wow. This is kind of a bummer because the  argument fundamentally seems to make sense. Except nooooooo, screams the free will side, this  is a really bad way to think about the universe.

You Are The Main Character We know that we can reduce everything that  exists to its basic particles and the laws that guide them. While this makes physics feel like the  only scientific discipline that actually matters, there is a problem: You can’t explain everything  in our universe only in terms of particles. One key fact about reality that we can’t  explain by looking just at electrons and quantum stuff is emergence.

Emergence is  when many small things together create new fundamental traits that didn’t exist before. A drop of water is just a  sextillion H2O molecules. If you get water on your pants, they get  wet.

But what is… wetness? H2O molecules are not wet. But your pants are definitely  wet now.

Many small things together just created something new that doesn't exist  at the level of the individual molecules. Emergence occurs at all levels of reality,  and reality seems to be organized in layers: atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, organs, you,  society. Put many things in one layer together and they’ll create the next layer up.

Every  time they do, entirely new properties emerge. One Atom can’t handle information, but many  of them together can form a DNA molecule. Molecules are not alive, but many of them can form  a cell, and cells are alive.

With each jump up the complexity ladder the rules of what's possible  change. Completely new things emerge that are much more than the sum of their parts. And here the  reductionist view of the universe breaks down.

The layers of reality need each other to make  sense. You can explain living things with cells, cells with molecules and molecules  with atoms. But because of emergence, you can’t start with quantum particles and  reconstruct the universe.

You can’t explain galaxies with quantum mechanics,  or human psychology with quarks. This is not the whole story. Reality is not  just structured in layers but for some reason the layers are also largely independent of  each other.

Things existing within the same layer can influence each other and maybe  a layer up or down. But often they don’t seem to influence things much higher up or  down. To figure out how your organs work, you don’t need quarks.

To understand politics,  you don’t need to know about cells! If you want to explain things happening on one layer, you  can only do that by staying close to that layer. “Noooooooo” screams the no-free-will camp in frustration.

“You can’t just  use magic to explain free will! ” But the emergence argument doesn’t invoke  magic. It just says that thinking about free will in terms of determinism and fundamental  laws is a dead end.

A kind of category error, like trying to explain galaxies by  looking at your digestive tract. It is part of a reductionist school  of thinking about the universe that very successfully shaped science for a long  time – but that's challenged by emergence. So maybe, trying to understand free will  by looking at fundamental particles, deterministic laws and quantum  mechanics misses the point.

The question we should be asking is – which  layer of reality is relevant to free will? Well, just like no individual molecule creates  wetness, not a single cell in your brain wants to watch Youtube. But one layer up, your  brain made of 80 billion interconnected neurons does.

On this layer all the things  relevant to you emerge: your consciousness, character, feelings, your fears and dreams. This  is where you emerge. We don’t know why and how, but we know that you're here, right now. 

How all the things going on in your brain play off each other to make you who you are  is a whole different can of worms – but on this layer of reality, you are part of the  decision process. Because, at this level, “you” are just one more physical cause of  whatever happens in your brain. You are shaped by your decisions and your decisions are shaped by  you.

You have a say about this layer of reality. You are not just witnessing how the  universe inside you unfolds – you’re actually taking part in it! And  you are free to do so however you see fit.

At least this is how  some on the free will side see it. Conclusion and Opinion So who is right? Is there free will?

We  don’t know. If you ask us personally, we think the argument for free will  is more appealing because it brings the complexity of the universe to the table.  Maybe existence is just the sum of its parts, but at least for now it seems  the universe is not that simple.

But even if we don’t have free will, it’s  not clear what that changes for practical purposes. You and us, we humans, on a purely  subjective basis, feel like we have free will and that your decisions are yours to make. As  long as we are not sure either way, and if it feels like you are making decisions, what does  it matter if a non-existent supercomputer could have calculated the future at the big bang? 

Or if quantum stuff all the way down randomly nudges your cells one way or the other. Free  will that feels free is good enough for us. In any case, now you can decide what to do  next.

Maybe get some stuff done? Or watch more of our videos? It’s your decision!

Probably. At least you can pick which video to watch next -  in theory. What you have really almost no control  over is how the state of the world is presented to you in the news.

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