Does Quantum Mechanics Allow Free Will?

the scene a typical courtroom a jury of 12 looks on the defendant accused of a terrible crime sits slumped in his chair distraught his lawyer however is oddly confident ladies and gentlemen of the jury I will not stand here and try and defend my client by saying that he did not commit these crimes indeed he did the evidence is indisputable but you should find my client not guilty because ultimately he is not responsible for his actions you see my client grew up in a struggling family in a rough neighborhood he fell in with a bad

crowd he didn't get a proper education he was exposed to Crime at an early age and why was his family in this situation his great-grandparents came to that rough neighborhood as refugees from a devastating war that war was triggered by a series of droughts and the droughts were caused by an unusual change in ocean currents which in turn was caused by a slight change in the sun's brightness over those years of course we all know that the sun is powered by Fusion reactions and the rate of those Fusion reactions is determined by the Sun's mass

the sizes and types of stars that are born within the Milky Way galaxy is determined by its size and the number of merges it goes through and we can trace the origins of the Milky Way galaxy to a few hydrogen atoms existing within the first first 15 minutes of the Big Bang the laws of physics tell us how these hydrogen atoms began interacting with each other eventually sewing the seeds of the Milky Way and its neighbors leading to the formation of the sun leading to the drought leading to my client's unfortunate circumstances ladies and gentlemen

of the jury my client is not at fault because we can trace the origins of his circumstances and his actions all the way back to the beginning of the [Music] universe smiling the lawyer sits back down convinced that he has won the case but as he looks across the bench to his opposition he sees a broad smile on their face too what are they planning the prosecution stands to deliver their response ladies and gentlemen of the jury the defense relies on a philosophical position known as causal determinism a belief that everything has a cause and

we can trace those causes with the laws of physics but it is not quite that simple the laws of physics as we currently understand them do not always allow us to confidently predict an outcome Chaos Theory scatters predictions for most systems one can no more predict the weather a week from now let alone the life story of a human being as well as this the fuzzy probabilities of quantum mechanics mean that nothing is truly certain perfectly predicting the behavior of atoms within the Sun for example is simply impossible and even putting those Mysteries aside the

mysteries of Consciousness and how the brain works muddies the water even further your honor we cannot predict anything free will survives the defendant had a choice the prosecution sits and the judge is left open-mouthed and baffled it seems not only is the defendant on trial but the nature of Free Will itself who is [Music] right there are roughly the same amount of neurons in your brain as stars in the Milky Way about 86 billion the mind is complex and free will or not we all sometimes need help managing it better help is our sponsor today

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office therapy but with a therapist who is custom picked for you with more scheduling flexibility and at a more affordable price so get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com hot and I've also linked them Below in the description thanks to betterhelp for supporting educational content on YouTube imagine for a moment a superintelligent being far wiser and more capable than any human so vastly removed from our own abilities that we can scarcely comprehend it this being isn't just intelligent but also observant it can see and record the current position and velocity of every single atom

in the entire universe a water molecule floating in the androma the Galaxy a silicon atom buried thousands of miles under the ground a sodium ion pushing to and fro in your cerebral cortex nothing can escape this being's notice and attention it has perfect knowledge of the state of every single thing and this superintelligent being is also armed with another tool a complete knowledge of physics gravity electricity magnetism heat and more are all at its disposal this being has in a sense a perfect understanding of the way nature works the being can therefore put its knowledge

of these laws into practice knowing the state of every particle in the universe equips the being with the ability to tell the future by applying the laws of physics to the motion and behavior of every atom the being will know exactly with ultimate Precision where those atoms will go what they'll do next and how they'll Act and the being can repeat this again again advancing forward in time allowing it to predict with utter certainty the entirety of the future of the [Music] universe this being can see the chain of Coen effect stretching through the eons

it will see the future laid out before it from the microscopic to the cosmic it will see stars grow old and die it will see galaxies merge it will see new planets form and life life arise it will see the causes behind the emergence of intelligent creatures creatures who believe that they are acting of their own free will able to make choices as they please but the being will see that these creatures are fooling themselves every future act every choice every decision every effect can be clearly seen by the superintelligent being as clearly as we

can see the past known as class's demon after its originator Pierre Simone llas this thought experiment is the ultimate expression of a philosophical concept known as causal determinism in this view which had gathered momentum in the Years leading up to lass's publication in 1771 every effect to occur throughout the cosmos is preceded by a cause which in turn are preceded by their own causes all following the laws of nature in an unbroken chain going back to the beginning of the universe in other words every single future act and movement from all entities in the universe

is already determined already decided before it happens the past and present state of the universe dictates through the laws of nature what the future will be like it's just causes and effects going on forever there is no way to escape it no way to change it the future is already set in stone the plas wasn't the first scientist to put forward the notion of causal determinism especially in such blunt terms indeed lass's own thoughts were inspired by the work of earlier scientists most especially Isaac Newton though Newton himself wasn't a determinist he believed that Divine

Supernatural intervention played a part but it wasn't Newton's theological insights that led to Thea demon it was his physics Newton laid the groundwork for our modern conception of physics by bringing together two strands of thought the first strand was introduced by Galileo the idea that mathematics could be applied to explain and predict natural phenomena of course astronomers for Millennia throughout human history have used mathematical tools to predict the Motions of heavenly bodies but Galileo was the first to broaden these tools to explain phenomena everywhere not just in the heavens and the second strand that led

to Newton's Revolution was the concept of space itself in his work space took on a new meaning it wasn't just an abstract mathematical construct but a separate entity in the cosmos it was an empty stage on which the actors could act their parts Newton applied Galileo's mathematics to the concept of space to arrive eventually to his Laws of Motion which were a Triumph in understanding our natural world with Newton you could recall an object's position and momentum and predict where that object would go from now until eternity and this mechanical Clockwork view of motion and

interaction soed the seeds that would eventually become causal [Music] determinism the pl who was a master of mathematics and scientific genius in his own right spent much of his life extending and perfecting Newton's work and while he kept his faith closely held to his chest historians believe that he was at best agnostic to him causal determinism was obvious today causal determinism forms the philosophical Bedrock of all of physics and any science derived from physics physics assumes that the universe is deterministic and that every current state every effect has a cause Supernatural intervention and events that

occur without precedent are regarded as unphysical and therefore literally unreal in modern physics it's not that such extraordinary events shouldn't happen it's that they literally can't happen this causality of the universe empowers physicists to make predictions based on the current configuration of a system and it allows physicists to discover laws of nature because if the universe wasn't causal what would be the point of natural laws because anything could happen for no reason at all in essence physics is the scientific expression of the very philosophical concept of causal determinism and it works it works very very

well perhaps the earliest example of the power of causal determinism was in the prediction of total solar eclipses ancient societies had tried and failed to predict eclipses with any sort of reliability it wasn't until Newton's insights that we were able to make perfect calculations and in the early 1700s the astronomer Edmund hi predicted to the minute a total solar eclipse that passed over London and the style of maps he designed are still in use today indeed today you can open up any planetarium software and be presented with a map of the stars above your head

right now you can change the date to anything you wish a week from now a thousand years from now and be told with uncanny Precision what the new Sky will be you can list out total solar eclipses going forward as far into the future as you wish and it is all powered by determinism the planets of the solar system have a current state a current position and a current speed and their future motion is ruled by the force of gravity so you can take our mathematical description of gravity and apply it to the current state

of the solar system predicting the future movements of the [Music] planets but physicists haven't stop there they've developed intricate complex theories to explain the forces of nature they've learned how to combine these theories to describe complex phenomena from predicting how long our sun will shine to when the Milky Way will merge with Andromeda they have brought order to the universe realizing that the cosmos is isn't governed by capricious gods or supernatural creatures it is all just particles interacting with each other governed by a finite understandable set of natural laws that we can describe with mathematics

of course our knowledge of physics is not yet complete if you rely purely on Newton's formulation of gravity for example eventually your predictions of the future movement of the planets would be incorrect so you would have to switch to Einstein's updated formulation of gravity to make more accurate predictions and that's not an isolated example there are many holes and gaps in our modern formulation of physics from Dark Matter to superconductors we do not have a perfect knowledge of physics nor do we have perfect knowledge of the current state of every particle in the universe indeed

even with all of our knowledge of physics combined we cannot say with any certainty what fate will befall every single planet billions of years from now there are just too many particles to keep track of with too many individual interactions for us to make a perfectly accurate prediction and the solar system as complex as it is has nothing on an object like the human brain we could map every single atom inside every single neuron and still not be able to predict the behavior of those atoms a microsc into the future however while there is still

much to learn that does not put a dent in the fundamental idea behind determinism we do not have the capabilities of lassis superintelligent being we do not have perfect knowledge of the state of the universe and the physical laws governing Its Behavior but that is an expression of our own human limitations not a fundamental limit in determinism the cosmos still ticks along with one set of causes inescapably leading to another according to the laws of physics it is just that we can only keep track of a limited number of interactions and so if causal determinism

is true then Free Will is an illusion at least in principle this Bedrock of modern physics is a hammer blow to our control over the future this is because everything that ever happens is proceded by a set of causes that follow the laws of physics not just total solar eclipses if you ever find yourself running late for work you can follow the chain of causes back into the past to discover why you had to change your shirt because you spilled your coffee you spilled your coffee because you bumped the chair you bumped the chair because

you moved it last night to grab something from the top cupboard and on and on and on and it's not just the macroscopic causal determinism says that every choice we make is ultimately due to the movements of particles within our neurons which are again all governed by the laws of physics there are no surprises no decisions no effect Without a Cause just components of the universe obeying the laws that govern them and nothing more we may never develop the sophistication to predict with any degree of accuracy what a person may decide to do at any

given moment but that doesn't mean that their choices aren't already predetermined deep down we are just a set of atoms interacting with each other according to Natural laws following a chain of cause and effect stretching back billions of years to the Big Bang itself in a caus of the deterministic universe every choice we make in our entire lives was already decided for us eons ago before we or anybody else [Music] existed and so this sounds fairly conclusive A Clockwork universe in which we are just a cog but the plis superintelligent demon had a flaw it

didn't couldn't know everything because in 1771 theas himself did not know everything drip drip drip The Leaky tap has been keeping you up at night for a week you haven't been able to sleep you haven't been able to tune it out you haven't been able to ignore it it just keeps dripping the problem is that a dripping tap is a perfect example of what's known as a chaotic system chaotic systems come close to having regular patterns but they never quite repeat if the dripping tap was regular with each drip coming at the same interval your

brain would quickly filter it out and you could ignore it and return to sleep whereas if the drips were truly random your brain could also filter it out as just another source of noise but it's neither it's chaotic it's almost regular but not quite almost random but not quite it's something in between your brain is never able to predict when the next drip will arrive and so it keeps you awake and our modern understanding of chaotic systems traces back to 1961 [Music] all Edward Loren wanted to do was figure out why his computer program wasn't

working a researcher at MIT several years before Loren had become interested in the problem of predicting the weather weather like any other physical system was deterministic if you knew various properties like wind speed temperature and humidity you could apply the laws of physics to predict how the weather would change but this was no easy calculation even the simplest models required keeping track of 12 separate variables all tangled together through complex nonlinear equations which Loren could not solve by hand he had to use a computer and its efficient number crunching capabilities after running one forecasting simulation

the ren wanted to see the simulation play out again to save time he started the simulation from the middle using a print out of the Midway results as the input for a new run but to his surprise is he got a completely different answer it would take Loren's years to uncover the fundamental problem and wrap his head around what was going on and in the process he accidentally became the founder of modern Chaos Theory the issue was the way that the computer stored and printed the values of the variables in the simulation computers only have

a finite amount of memory and so they stop keeping track of precision after a certain number of digits past the decimal in the Ren's case his computer kept track of six digits of precision but to make the print out more readable the simulation only printed up to three digits the Rens knowing mathematics assumed that the extra three digits of precision wouldn't matter these were just tiny rounding errors less than one part in a thousand and so they shouldn't have affected the overall output of the simulation in the general understanding at the time small errors simply

stayed small but those seemingly insignificant differences between the numbers stored on the computer and the ones printed out led to drastic changes in the output of Loren's simulation making completely different forecasts of the weather what was going on was determinism dead did our mathematical understanding of physics laid down by Newton centuries ago fail with this seemingly simple task of weather prediction the answer was yes and no chaos theory is complicated before Loren's our understanding of mathematical physics relied on a few very basic assumptions one assumption was that if you wanted to predict the behavior of

a system you were studying you needed to know both its initial conditions and the laws of physics governing that system this is causal determinism to make better predictions you just needed two things more ACC Cate measurements of the initial conditions and better laws of physics but crucially it was thought that while your understanding of the future of a system would always get better the more you knew about it there would be a point of diminishing returns if you measured the initial conditions to a certain level of accuracy then you should get a corresponding level of

accuracy in your final prediction so if you make a small Improvement on your initial measurement then you should also see a small Improvement in your final prediction the small stuff just stayed small but apparently this was not the case for the weather the weather was extremely sensitive to initial conditions Loren discovered that the tiniest of changes to the initial conditions would completely blow up the entire system sending the weather on a totally different track it was chaotic in 1972 meteorologist Philip meriles organized a conference where Loren presented his findings meriles himself suggested the title of

the talk a phrase that still Echoes today decades later predictability does the flap of a butterfly wing in Brazil set off a tornado in [Music] Texas this question lies at the heart of what we now call Chaos Theory not every physical system is chaotic but many are to qualify as chaotic a system must have two very important properties number one the equations describing the system must be nonlinear meaning that the variables don't follow a straight line and number two the system must be sensitive to initial conditions where small changes in the beginning don't die out

but rather amplify themselves as the system evolves this combination leads to chaos meaning that tiny changes even ones that physicists would normally consider insignificant and irrelevant can lead to dramatically large effects this can make it all but impossible to proceed with accurate predictions of A System's Behavior while modern Chaos Theory found its Beginnings with Loren studying weather systems physicists had been encountering it for centuries without fully realizing it when Isaac Newton published his universal theory of gravity in the late 1600s he was able to apply his Newfound mechanical Theory to a slew of unsolved problems

in the solar system like the speed of the moon's orbit and the regular raising of the tides but his theory had limitations it worked perfectly when only two objects were involved but struggled to handle three known as the three body problem it was a thorn in the side of Newtonian Mechanics for centuries genius after genius the Plass included would throw themselves at the problem striving to find a simple succinct solution to describe the mutual gravity among three massive objects and predict their future behavior in 1887 to celebrate his 60th birthday Oscar II King of Sweden

even announced a public competition to find a solution to the three body problem nobody could find such a solution but the judges eventually awarded the prize to one HRI panare a French mathematician who ended up writing and revising multiple times an entire book exploring the subject in his explorations panare discovered that there were certain orbits that never repeated themselves but yet didn't collapse this was strange conventional thinking of determinism dictated that planetary orbits were either stable or unstable either a planet looped around in the exact same orbit year after year without variation or the gravitational

stresses pulling on the planet would send it crashing into the Sun or flying out of the solar system altogether but Pano found something new the orbits of the planets were stable in a sense meaning that they didn't go wandering off but they never quite repeated themselves making future prediction of their precise path the entire point of causal determinism impossible this was the beginning of Chaos Theory though panare didn't realize it and nearly a century later Edward Loren would find similar behavior in his studies of complex weather patterns he found that while the state of his

simulated weather system never exactly repeated itself once the system attained a certain combination of temperature wind speed Etc that precise combination would never appear again there were still larger patterns to the behavior of the weather system the temperature would regularly fluctuate between cooler and hotter the winds would blow in One Direction diminish then shift and so on but it was never exactly the same the weather system would find itself cycling but it was never exactly the same it seemed to theen that predicting the weather was just as impossible as predicting the gravitational motion of three

objects another example of a chaotic system is animal populations you might assume that once you understand Predator prey relationships and the life cycle of a species it would be easy to predict the future population but the equations governing population growth known as logistic Maps can be chaotic the population May cycle through semi-regular patterns but they'll never quite repeat and knowing the population one year does not guarantee that you'll know the population the next of course not all systems are chaotic a pendulum for example as long as it's not affected from the outside will not follow

this chaotic Trend but many are and chaotic systems are annoyingly sensitive to initial conditions the tiniest change at the start no matter how small can quickly amplify through sheer brute force of advanced computation meteorologists are able to provide reasonably accurate weather predictions going out a few days but beyond that the chaotic nature of the Earth's weather system prevents forecasting further and this chaos is built into the fundamental nature of the systems even the ples demon would struggle here because it would have to be truly Supernatural having infinitely precise information on the current state of the

universe anything less any finite amount of knowledge and Chaos would eventually Reign taking the system in unpredictable directions and ruining the dream of determinism but chaotic systems are still physical systems which means they are causally deterministic every single step in the evolution of a chaotic system is directly caused by the previous state of the system and the evolution of that system is still governed by physical laws Chaos Theory therefore does not destroy the fundamental principles of determinism but it does make it difficult if not out trit impossible to accurately predict with perfect Precision the future

evolution of the universe and yet still despite this chaos theory does not rescue free will we may never in practice be able to predict the choices and behaviors of human minds but that doesn't mean that our future decisions aren't already decided by physical laws it just means that we may never be able to apply determinism to humans we will always remain mysterious and seemingly unpredictable but deeper down as deterministic as we always have been chaos theory is a classical Theory of physics rooted in the same Clockwork mechanics as Newton's gravity with enough Precision you can

at least make a reasonable guess as to the next step that a system will take it takes time for chaos to unfold but there is another branch of physics that shakes these very foundations a branch bu of physics where future events cannot be predicted with any certainty at all where determinism the very Bedrock of modern physics completely falls apart it is quantum mechanics the physical theory that describes the subatomic foundations of our world and it might just hold the keys to unlocking free will Owen Schrodinger was sick of it he had watched in horror as

quantum mechanics a field he had played a key role in creating had evolved in a direction he found repulsive eventually he declared I don't like it and I'm sorry that I ever had anything to do with it and left the quantum World behind but before he departed quantum theory for good he left behind one last parting gift for the rest of the scientific community it was a thought experiment now famous and repeated every time quantum mechanics is mentioned involving a rather unlucky cat the thought experiment is simple you put a cat in a box you

construct a device that has a 50/50 chance of killing the cat you wait for the device's timer to go off you open the box and find the cat either dead or alive pretty straightforward except for what quantum mechanics says about the state of the cat prior to opening the box according to the most popular interpretation the cat exists in a state of both alive and dead simultaneously and it's impossible literally impossible no matter how ingenious or precise you are to determine the cat's fate until you open the box once you do out comes one of

the two possible States and the rest of physics proceeds normally but why a cat schoder had deliberately chosen a familiar cute experimental subject to point out what he thought was a glaring absurdity in quantum mechanics the complete lack of determinism only probabilities worked in Quantum calculations you could never be certain about what was going to happen but once you performed a measurement in this case open the box to check on the fate of the cat all the probabilities and indeterminism simply vanished to be replaced with the normal and deterministic laws of physics shrodinger it seemed

[Music] ridiculous experiments in quantum mechanics do appear to be totally random but that apparent Randomness mostly happens at Atomic or subatomic scales while out of the realm of normal human perception in 1921 physicist Oto Stern conceived of a straightforward experiment to bring the quantum world into direct View and a year later Walter GAC would construct it now today as the stern GAC experiment you start with a source of particles usually electrons you send those electrons through a region with an inhomogeneous magnetic field the field is slightly stronger in One Direction than the other electrons have

a very specific response to magnetic fields but this response can come in one of two directions up or down if you send beams of electrons through the device then half of the electrons will get deflected upwards and the other half downwards but here was the issue Stern and gerlak found it was simply impossible to predict what an individual electron would do you can calculate a probability over a large number of electrons half will go up half will go down but the most you can say about any one particular electron is that it has a 50/50

chance and that was just the beginning if you perform the EXP experiment along one axis after the process of measurement all the electrons will be happily spinning in the same direction but if you then attempt to measure their spin along a different axis Quantum Randomness rears its head again and you're forced into another world of probabilities the lesson here is that measurements of one Quantum property do not guarantee certainty for any other Quantum properties no matter what you're going to encounter uncertainties [Music] multiple experiments like the stern GAC setup demonstrated that the subatomic World played

by different rules rules where the determinism that had ruled physics for centuries did not apply a few years later in 1926 Schrodinger would attempt to sort out the messiness of the quantum World by introducing his now famous wave equation in this approach every particle in the universe had a wave associated with it these waves behaved like any other familiar wave would like water waves and electromagnetic waves they could add together or cancel each other out they could spread from a small point to cover a large area and so on Schrodinger hoped that his wave approach

would do away with all the indeterministic nonsense he believed that the results of quantum experiments only appeared to be random because we weren't including all the physical aspects of subatomic systems we were missing the waves associated with all matter and so that Li Ed our ability to understand some Atomic systems and predict their future Behavior indeed Schrodinger thought that these waves associated with matter particles were real entities as physical as anything else but other Quantum Pioneers like Vera Heisenberg and Max Bourne disagreed while they celebrated Schrodinger's work and the Monumental advance in understanding Quantum systems

that it was they took a different interpretation they viewed the waves as unreal and UNF physical contrary to Schrodinger's hope they interpreted the waves as mere expressions of the fundamental uncertainty that Schrodinger was trying to do away with in the first place in this view now known as The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics every particle in the universe still has a wave associated with it this wave propagates evolves and interacts with other waves the same way any other physical wave does but the wave doesn't manifest itself in direct observation in Instead The Wave represents a

mapping of the probabilities of the future fate of the particle where the wave is strong we are likely to find a particle in that location the next time we go looking for it whereas where the wave is weak we may still find the particle there but our chances are low shoing as wave equation allows us to make predictions in quantum mechanics but these are predictions of probabilities and likelihoods not hard facts [Music] and so bizarrely quantum mechanics is both deterministic and indeterministic at the same time the probability waves start from initial conditions and evolve according

to the known laws of physics namely the Schrodinger equation indeed if you know the initial conditions of a Quantum system You can predict precisely what the wave equation will do but crucially you don't know how the particle itself will behave that future is subject to the probabilities associated with the wave equation you can make guesses and assign chances but that's as good as you're ever going to get and yet once you make a measurement the wave function vanishes the particle appears and you can follow standard classical physics to track its progress and predict its future

behavior and so it seemed that in quantum mechanics there was a fundament Al limit to our knowledge of subatomic systems and the ultimate expression of this limit came in the form of Vera Heisenberg's uncertainty principle for some pairs of quantities you could never precisely measure both simultaneously the most common example is position and momentum you can know a little about both of these quantities for a given particle or a lot about one of them but you can't know a lot about both of them the more you learn about position the less you know about momentum

and vice Versa for Schrodinger this perversion of his wave mechanics was a step too far and he wasn't alone in fact he got the idea for The Cat In The Box experiment from his friend and colleague Albert Einstein who also held deep reservations about the direction quantum theory was going Einstein believed that the Copenhagen interpretation was following the wrong track instead of baking in uncertainty into the theory of quantum mechanics he thought we should instead view these threats to determinism as a sign that our theories were Incorrect and that we should seek a deeper more

fundamental theory that rescues a deterministic vision of the cosmos Schrodinger would eventually head to other Pursuits and Einstein would go to his grave without ever finding such a theory indeed nobody has found a deeper Theory sitting behind quantum mechanics quantum mechanics has survived every experiment thrown at it leading to a physical understanding of the microscopic world that powers everything from semic conductors to modern medicine but there have been attempts to recover determinism within the framework of quantum mechanics such as the idea of super determinism in this interpretation the results of quantum experiments only appear to

be random because we aren't looking at the whole picture ultimately every system is a Quantum system not just the subatomic particles in the experiment apparatus but the apparatus itself and the building it's housed in and the entire universe according to superdeterminism if we were to keep track of every single particle from the beginning of our universe onwards then the randomness of quantum experiments would disappear and we would be able to make perfect predictions even about subatomic systems other attempts like the many worlds interpretation replace the indeterminacy of quantum mechan mechanics with a branching parallel reality

every time a Quantum interaction happens in this interpretation everything is deterministic and perfectly predictable because there is a reality available for every possible outcome and so it remains an open question as to whether quantum mechanics is fundamentally deterministic or indeterministic if a deterministic interpretation prevails or if we one day discover a deeper hidden Theory then that will place the subatomic realm on the same deterministic footing as the rest of science with the same implications as to the nature of free will but even if subatomic systems truly are indeterministic it still doesn't guarantee free will we

can still predict the motion and behavior of subatomic particles we just have to replace hard certainties with fuzzy probabilities we can't say for certain what a given particle will do but we can provide solid guesses and indeed it's not even clear how Quantum indeterminism could lead to Free Will quantum mechanics dictates the behavior of subatomic particles while the brain is a much larger much more complex system chaos theory and quantum mechanics both shook the foundations of our classical understanding of physics the world we live in turned out to be much more complex rich and varied

than the Clockwork mechanics of Newton and the pl that us to believe but the core philosophical principle behind science that of causal determinism remains all events have causes and those causes are determined by the laws of physics yet even though causal determinism forms the Bedrock of modern physics there is no firm link between physics and the concept of Free Will perhaps despite all our advances in understanding the causal structure of the universe and the natural laws that govern it we and our brains may not be bound by Fate after [Music] all the experiment is simple

you take a participant who's received damage to some part of their visual cortex the part of the brain tasked with processing visual information the damage could be from a stroke a lesion or anything the cause doesn't matter as it just affects how the experiment is set up you then show the participant cards with images printed on them and ask them to identify the image against all expectations blind participants are able to guess the nature of the image with chances well above random in another experiment you toss a ball at the blind participant and they will

have The Uncanny ability ability to catch the ball far more often than they should by your accounts it seems blind people have some sort of visual perception despite their inability to see that said the participants never express any degree of certainty about their abilities nor can they explain how they can catch the ball or why they know the correct image the best they can describe the experience is as an intuitive gut reaction a feeling about what the image is or where the ball is going to fly but not the certainty of conscious knowledge there is

no definitive explanation for this phenomenon known as blindsight but it obviously has something to do with the Staggering complexity of the brain and the fact that it operates on multiple levels that we barely understand most of which are hidden from us while it's difficult to put estimates on the information processing capabilities of the brain because the brain is not a computer and does not churn through information like one a rough estimate is that less than 05% of the information arriving into the brain from our senses makes its way into our Consciousness in fact our Consciousness

represents only a small fraction of the full capabilities of our brains which are so complex it almost defies description let alone understanding at a cellular level a typical human brain will have around 86 billion individual neurons the neurons connect to each other to form a network with over a 100 trillion connections and besides the brain itself we also have a complete nervous system which constantly shuttles electrical signals to and from the brain plus there is the endocrine system which is another way that the brain and body interact with each other and that's just the base

cellular level neurons from different regions of the brain work together in multifaceted intricate ways to perform even simple tasks but simply the brain is one of the the most complex structures known to humanity this means that despite all the advances we've made in physics chemistry biology neuroscience and philosophy we still do not have a complete or some might argue even rudimentary understanding of how the brain works and how we arrive at our conscious experience of the world and of course our Consciousness is the key to Free Will as it's through our own self-awareness that we

develop the belief that we are in of our own decisions and that while we are influenced by the past the chain of events leading up to our decisions does not determine what those decisions are when it comes to deciding if we have free will or not we have to contend with two basic observations the first is that causal determinism has been found to be incredibly useful in explaining the workings of the natural world through the physical sciences even with chaos theory and quantum mechanics physicists still use a deterministic philosophy to approach their inquiries into nature

and that philosophy has yielded amazing insights but we must also acknowledge the astounding complexity of the brain and the Mysterious origins of our own Consciousness with its sense illusion or not of free will if we are to take causal determinism to its logical extreme then in principle we could track every single connection every single neuron every single proton molecule atom and every single subatomic particle in the brain and use our knowledge of fundamental physics to predict what those particles will do and from there predict how the brain will respond and evolve in time what our

conscious experience of that Evolution will be like and ultimately what decisions we are going to make regardless of whether we felt like we had free will or not if chaos theory is important in these calculations then we would not be able to make predictions about the brain's decisions very far into the future but we could still do it in the near term And if quantum mechanics is important in these calculations then we would have to replace precise predictions with fuzzier probabilities but we could still provide solid guesses and so in a deterministic universe Free Will

is only an illusion a byproduct of some deep neurology that gives rise to Consciousness and our brains are going to do what they were always going to do as they abound by the conditions of the universe in the past and the laws of physics [Music] but because the brain is so complex beyond our current understanding we simply cannot predict human behavior we can only hypothesize about the possibility of it without firm evidence that Free Will in the brain is an illusion we have to trust that our Clockwork mechanistic understanding of physics extends from basic subatomic

interactions all the way up to the level of consciousness and Free Will the nature of our own Consciousness is one of the largest Unsolved Mysteries in modern science ultimately we do not fully know how we are self-aware known as the hard problem of Consciousness the fundamental issue is that we do not know how to explain how it feels to be self-aware as philosopher Thomas Nagel phrased it we don't know how to describe what it feels like to be asked you have your own personal experience of being you a feeling of selfhood distinct from any other

feeling and any attempt to explain Consciousness from a deterministic perspective must grapple with that experience one popular Theory Of Consciousness is that basic perceptions like sight and taste re-represent themselves in the prefrontal cortex giving us a sensation of experiencing those Perceptions in another theory thoughts and emotions constantly battle for attention in our brains when one is in the spotlight so to speak we experience that thought or emotion whereas other perspectives on Consciousness view it as the complete opposite an integrated network of experiences emotions and thoughts that coales together and yet another approach sees Consciousness is

the method by which our higher order brain functions direct and Signal lower level processes but no matter the the theory in these ideas Consciousness is the result of deterministic processes we have our Consciousness which relies on the Neurology of the brain which in turn relies on basic chemistry and physics it is the complexity of the brain and the mysteries of Consciousness that gives us a range of possibilities as we try to reconcile Free Will with causal determinism so perhaps there is one more option to consider perhaps the universe is not deterministic this statement flies in

the face of modern scientific thinking but as successful as modern science is it does struggle to explain many components of the natural world it could be that not all aspects of the world are causally deterministic and our brains are one of these aspects science has forged ahead in explaining and understanding the causal deterministic parts of the Universe because ever since Galileo that's what the machine of science has been designed to do but there may be more to the universe than just that as an example of this statement consider the beginning of the universe itself in

causal determinism the current state of the universe flows from the past State according to the laws of physics but what about the initial state of the universe what about the laws of physics themselves even if some exotic currently unknown process triggered the Big Bang billions of years ago than what caused that previous process to exist in the first place what caused or triggered the laws of physics even an eternal universe is difficult to explain why is there something rather than nothing this is a long-standing problem showing that as powerful as causal determinism is it does

have its limits or perhaps the universe is deterministic but not always amable to the laws of physics perhaps some regions of the universe like the inside of our brains are so complex so intertwined that they will always stand Beyond Comprehension indeed the philosopher Douglas hofstader has hypothesized the existence of strange Loops which are mathematical structures that are deterministic but repeat back on themselves in complex unpredictable ways and yet another possibility is that chaos theory and Quantum mechanic iics somehow interact in the subtle neurochemical transmission system of the brain where they would combine to allow for

a myriad random uncertain possibilities given a set of inputs in this view free will is a real thing born from the unpredictable nature of fundamental physics perhaps we will never discover a set of physical laws that allows us to explain how the brain works in that case Free Will is still an illusion but one that we would never be able to decipher or untangle humans would always act in ways that are unpredictable and we would always have the sense that we are in control of our own decisions yet that is not quite the end there

is one more way of looking at it the debate between Free Will and determinism naturally presents itself as an either or option you must pick one or the other but there is another way called compatibilism conceived by the philosophers David Hume and Thomas Hobbs compatibilism relies on the fact that we have not yet discovered all the laws of nature and that new knowledge may find that deterministic physics still allows for free will specifically in this framework Free Will is defined as the ability to choose one option when presented with an alternative that just as easily

could have been Chosen and both options are allowed by the laws of physics imagine that you're out to dinner and you're trying to decide between two meals steak or the chicken you ultimately choose the steak and in a deterministic universe that choice was dictated by the laws of nature but consider an alternate reality where you chose Chicken in that universe that choice is also dictated by the laws of nature either way you haven't broken any law or invoked any Supernatural Powers over causality both options were allowed incompatibilism a deeper understanding of the laws of physics

would reveal how this works we do not yet understand such a theory but it doesn't mean it doesn't exist if we had that more advanced knowledge then we could rectify Free Will with determinism because our new knowledge of physics would clearly show that they are compatible so to the compatibilist the fact that there seems to be a rift between Free Will and determinism is really just showing us how limited we are in our understanding of nature physics and the brain and so there is no consensus as to the true nature of Free Will whether it's

a real facet of our experience or Just an Illusion brought about by a deterministic universe as for what you choose to believe that something only you can can decide or [Music] not you've been watching the entire history of the universe don't forget to like And subscribe and leave us a comment to tell us what you think thanks for watching and we'll see you next time [Music]