Do We Really Have No Free Will?
There’s a large discrepancy between what science and religion have to tell us about being able to make your own choices. In our daily lives it doesn’t matter much, because whether by choice or not you still have to buy some bread and go to work. However, there are times when an answer to this question becomes evermore important. When being convicted for criminal charges the question of whether you did something on purpose or by accident becomes life-changing knowledge. If I plan a trip to somewhere, I want to be in control of where I’m going, not being taken off to somewhere completely arbitrary.
Free will is a word with many different meanings. Intuitively, many people think of it as being able to make decisions based on what you believe in. Unfortunately, that’s a very fragile definition of the word. What if, through clever advertising, you’re made to believe something that you didn’t believe in beforehand? Does that still count as free will? What if you were born in a different place, at a different time? Surely you would have different convictions. To simplify things in what is yet to come, I’m going to define free will in a very scientific way: the capacity to re-shape your environment, instead of your environment shaping you.
The Q-Word
A lot of New Age people and spiritualists are convinced that free will can magically be explained by saying the Q-word: quantum. The reasoning that is almost always applied takes advantage of the misunderstandings that have to do with the so-called observer effect. It’s an effect that plays a key role in quantum theory, and remains largely unresolved till this day. When there’s doubt, there’s room for false theories to develop.
In certain experiments involving small packets of light, the observer has a direct influence on the results that are generated by the experiment. But who, or what, is that observer? Does such an experiment produce the same result if the scientists leave the room? If there’s a device doing the measurement, then what particle of the device is responsible for the observed results?
For decades, physicists have remained in doubt, giving spiritualists freedom to claim that consciousness alone is able to influence reality. However, in recent years the question has been partially resolved, by taking into account a process known as quantum decoherence. Superpositions (i.e. “the cat is dead and alive at the same time”) naturally decay into one state or another (“the cat is dead”). The key discovery was that large quantum systems (like yourself) contain many different wave-functions that interact with one another. Think of it as a large music orchestra. If all the musicians play the exact same note, you will be able to recognise one note, a “superposition”. The cat is alive and dead. If everyone just minds their own business and plays randomly then it will sound like a cacophony, and there will be no superpositions. Just like that orchestra, most of the particles you are made of mind their own business, which is why we humans never are in a superposition.
Decoherence does not solve all the issues, but shows how people’s imagination can quickly go awry. Physicists are still debating whether entropy has anything to do with the observer’s effect, in which case all of the problems would be solved. Ideas that the mind can affect the material world clearly belong to the realms of science-fiction.
A Surprising Turn
The British mathematician Roger Penrose, who was a respected colleague of Stephen Hawking, believes we do have free will. Together with Stuart Hameroff, an American anesthesist, he proposed a theory called orchestrated objective reduction. In it, the two predict that certain cell parts in the brain (the microtubules to be precise) are using quantum-effects to generate consciousness. It’s a bold move, and you could make it even bolder by flipping the two ingredients: consciousness generates quantum-effects that influence the material world.
Didn’t we just say that such claims were spiritual nonsense?
Scientists responded much the same way to the first formulation, saying, among other things, that the brain is “too warm, wet and noisy” to sustain any noticeable quantum effect. My biggest surprise came when I learned that certain quantum states do exist in the microtubules. In 2013, a team of mostly Japanese researchers was able to pinpoint a “memory switching device” inside a microtubule of a neuron that uses quantum properties to sustain about 500 different states. In and by itself this proves nothing, but it does tell us that previous beliefs about the brain being too hostile for quantum processes to take place are unfounded. Who knows what other strange properties of nature our brains might use, or that are being used? Much remains to be discovered, but I’m staggered by the audacity of Penrose and Hameroff to bring forth such a theory.
Back To Free Will
What does all of this tell us about free will? Nothing, it is just one theory that hasn’t even been proven yet. But it does make you realise that, even though we tend to think of ourselves as electro-chemical reactions going on in a brain that have no control over, there is always the possibility that this is not the case. The mind remains a mystery, and even though neuroscientists are able to predict using a brain scan what decisions we are going to make even before we make them, that does not mean that there’s no room for doubt. Perhaps one day we will learn that every decision we make is tightly coupled to the neurons in our brain, perhaps not. Either way, it is best to keep believing in your own responsibility for the decisions you make, or the world would be a very grim place to live in.
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