Are you free? Free to choose what you do and make decisions? Or are you incapable of deciding anything for yourself? You feel like you’re in control of your life, or at least what you’re having for breakfast. But that may be an illusion. Physics can actually force you to go through life as if on rails, with no free will at all.
You experience free will all the time. For example, when you decided to read this article instead of doing something else. Free will is your ability to decide for yourself what you will do. It means that the future is an open arena that you can shape with your actions. It is the core of human relationships; it means that you are responsible for your actions, which is the basis of our moral and legal systems. But is free will actually possible?
Two main philosophical sides fight over this. One side claims that the concept of free will is fundamentally incompatible with the principles of the universe:
“You have no free will”
Whatever “you” are somehow consists of a physical brain and body. And those are made of cells, which are made of proteins, which are made of molecules, which are made of atoms, and so on.
So basically, you are a specific, dynamic arrangement of particles. Particles have no will, no motivation, no freedom; they blindly follow the principles of physics. And we don’t know why, but most principles of physics are deterministic. This means that things happen this way because of the things that happened before.
If you’re playing pool and hit a ball at a specific speed and angle, the principles of physics will determine exactly how all the balls on the table will behave later: their speeds, bounce directions, everything. These principles completely decide the behaviour of all the balls on the table. At the microscopic level, things work very much like this, but without players. Actions and reactions affect all particles in the universe, creating a chain of causal effects that stretches through time, from the past to the future. Things happen by making other things happen.
Now imagine if, right after the Big Bang, a super-intelligent supercomputer looked at every single particle in the universe and wrote down all their properties. Only using the deterministic principles of physics, could theoretically predict what all existing particles will do until the end of time.
But if you are made of particles, and it is technically possible to calculate what particles will do forever, you have never decided anything. Your past, present and future were already predetermined at the Big Bang. That would mean that there is some kind of fate and you don’t get to decide anything.
You may feel like you’re making decisions, but you’re actually acting on autopilot. The movements of the particles that make up your brain cells, which made you read this article, were decided 14 billion years ago. You are only there when it happens. You just watch how the “universe” inside you unfolds in real time.
But that can’t be true because of quantum physics, can it? Quantum processes are intrinsically random, not deterministic, and cannot be predicted with certainty. On the quantum pool table, balls can go randomly left or up or anywhere. Their behaviour is not fixed by what happened before, but is randomly “decided” in real time.
But for the believers in “no free will”, this does not affect their argument. They think that because quantum processes are random, they don’t allow you to make any decisions. Because, if there is randomness to the things that essentially make up your brain and body, those random processes make the decisions for you. How?
Let’s say an electron can randomly go right or left. If it goes to the left, it triggers electrical currents between your neurons that create a neuronal process that triggers a long chain of actions that lead you to read this article. 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 wasn’t decided at the Big Bang, but it is decided in this moment. The important thing is that it is not decided by you. You have no influence on this; you have no free will.
Oh! That’s unfortunate because the argument basically seems to make sense. But “No!” cries the free-will side, “That’s a really bad way to think about the universe.”
“You do have free will”
We know that we can reduce everything that exists to its basic particles and the principles that govern them. Although this makes physics seem like the only scientific discipline that actually matters, there is a problem: You cannot explain everything in the universe only in terms of particles.
One main fact about reality that we can’t explain just by looking at electrons and quantum stuff is something I call emergence. Emergence is when many small things together create new fundamental characteristics that did not exist before.
A drop of water is only H2O molecules (approx. 1.67 × 1021 of them). If you get water on your clothing, it gets wet. But what actually is moisture? H2O molecules are not wet. But your clothes are definitely wet now. Many small things together have created something new that does not exist at the level of the individual molecules.
Emergence occurs at all levels of reality, and reality appears to be organised in layers: atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, organs, you, society. Put many things together in one layer and they will create the next layer. Each time they do this, completely new features emerge.
One atom cannot 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 leap up the ladder of complexity, the principles of what is possible change. Entirely new things emerge that are much more than the sum of their parts. And this is where the reductionist view of the universe breaks down.
The layers of reality need each other to make sense. You can explain living things in terms of cells, cells in terms of molecules and molecules in terms of atoms. But due to emergence, one cannot start with quantum particles and reconstruct the universe. You cannot explain galaxies or human psychology with quantum physics.
That’s not the whole point. Reality is not only 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 possibly one layer above or below. But often they do not affect things much higher or lower. To find out how organs work, you don’t need quarks. To understand politics, you don’t need to know about cells. If you want to explain things that happen in one layer, you can only do that by staying close to that layer.
“No!” cries the non-free-will side, “You can’t just use magic to explain free will!”
But the emergent argument does not invoke magic. It just says that thinking about free will in terms of determinism and fundamental principles is a dead end, a sort of category error. It is part of a reductionist school of thinking about the universe that has very successfully dominated science for a long time, but that is being challenged by emergence.
So perhaps trying to understand free will by looking at fundamental particles, deterministic principles and quantum physics misses the point. What we should be asking is, “Which layer of reality is relevant to free will?”
Well, just as no individual molecule creates moisture, no cell in your brain wants to read an article. But one layer higher, your brain, made of 80 billion interconnected neurons, does that. On that layer appear all the things related to you: your consciousness, personality, feelings, your fears and dreams. This is where you emerge. You don’t know why or how, but you know that you are indeed here, right now. How all the things going on in your brain interplay to make you that way is a completely different matter. But on that layer of reality, you are part of the decision-making process. You are shaped by your decisions and your decisions are shaped by you. You have a right to decide on that layer of reality.
You don‘t just watch how the “universe” develops inside you – you actually participate in it. And you are free to do whatever you see fit. At least that’s how some on the free will side think about it.
Conclusion and opinion
So who is right? Is there free will? I’m not sure. But think about it: If you believed that free will does not exist, that it is only an illusion, where would that belief come from? Would it just be the result of countless actions and reactions of particles and random quantum stuff? If so, what connection would there be between those and “the truth”? You can’t prove that proofs doesn’t exist, or don’t matter at all. It would be like removing the ground on which you stand.
However, even if we don’t have free will, it’s not clear what that changes for practical purposes. You and we, we humans, on a purely subjective basis, feel that we do have free will and that our decisions are our doing. Although we’re not sure either way, if you feel like you’re making decisions, what does it matter if a super-intelligent supercomputer could have calculated the future at the time of the Big Bang? Or if quantum stuff randomly pushes your cells one way or the other? Free will that seems free is good enough for us.
Anyway, now you can decide what to do now. Maybe do some work? Or read another article? It’s your decision. Probably.
The Esperanto version of this article originally appeared in Esperanto sub la Suda Kruco (no. 155, September 2024), the journal of the Australian Esperanto Association. It is based on a video by Kurzgesagt, Do You Have a Free Will? (youtu.be/UebSfjmQNvs)
Photo by Vladislav Babienko on Unsplash (detail)