Quantum physics may imply the existence of free will
Free will is one of those things where people tend to be very attached to its being true or false and yet most people implicitly treat it as true. Consider that we hold people accountable for their actions as if they decided to carry out those actions of their own free will. We reward people for their successes and discoveries likewise. If Albert Einstein didn’t really make his discoveries but it was, instead, inevitable that his brain would do so, does he really deserve his Nobel Prize?
Some argue that we should accept that free will is a myth and change our society accordingly.
Our justice system (especially in the United States) is heavily invested in the free will hypothesis. We punish people for crimes. We do no treat them like broken machines that need to be fixed. Other nations like Norway, however, take exactly this approach.
Many physicists believe that free will in incompatible with modern physics.
The argument goes like this:
(1) Classical (non-quantum) mechanics is deterministic. Given any initial conditions to a classical system, and the entire future and past state of the system can be determined. There is no free will in determinism.
(2) Quantum mechanics allows for randomness in the outcomes of experiments, but…
