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. Algorithms are constantly working behind the scenes to decide which information to show you, and alarmist headlines get amplified over straightforward reporting.

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We think they do an important job – If you’re not completely free in your decision to stop scrolling, at least take control over what occupies your mind. To help you make the most of your life we've created a Curiosity Guide that will take you on epic adventures to change your perspective on the world.