'Hey Bill Nye, Do Humans Have Free Will?' #TuesdaysWithBill

Hi Bill. My name is Thomas and I'm from Los Angeles.

I would really like to hear your opinion on whether or not we have free will in the conventional meaning. Is there really an independent ego right here that is in control of my every thought and action? I think Einstein is a determinist, so he does not believe in free will, but then there's the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Although, to my understanding, the uncertainty is in our scientific instruments and the inaccuracies of the measurements. Thank you.

Well, you covered a lot of ground in there, but nobody knows about the nature of consciousness. I think we have free will up to a point, but we are driven by deep, deep things like wanting to get food, making more people, that is to say, mating. And then I cannot help but notice how much people from the same family tend to do the same things. Same families tend to do the same things just anecdotally.

But clearly I know I have made decisions based on things that happened around me that I wouldn't have made without being informed by history or what I'd noticed. I know I have. Now, if that turns out not to be true, I would be very surprised.

Now, as far as the uncertainty principle goes, the uncertainty principle is roughly there's a quantum, there's an amount of energy below which you can't measure. The old saying is you can know where the electron is or you can know how fast it's going, but you can't know both, not exactly, because anything you would use to measure it would inherently move the electron or change its speed. That's the classic uncertainty principle at work.

With that said, I am satisfied now, as an engineer and scientist, that our brains are chemical reactions. Chemical reactions, at some level, depend on quantum mechanics, on the interaction of subatomic particles based on this extraordinary thing called quantum electrodynamics, you alluded to it. And so, at some level, there's randomness in what we think because we're made of chemicals that have randomness.

But largely, human behavior is generally predictable. There's whole schools full of psychologists and psychiatrists who study humans and they come across patterns, and those patterns have got to be part of our brains, and our free will has got to be part of that. I mean I don't mean to skirt your question, but the nature of consciousness – you are living at a time when the nature of consciousness is not understood, but it may be very soon because we'll build computer models or computers that are as sophisticated or as complicated or as messed up as human brains, and they will behave the same way as human brains, as long as they're plugged, the computers. Carry on.