The Nature of Free Will, Part I

In the two hundred year era that began with Isaac Newton's scientific works and ended with the discovery of quantum physics, Newtonian physics (or "classical" physics) reigned supreme. And the foundation of Newtonian physics rests upon Newton's first law of motion: "Every body perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it." In other words, every physical event has a physical cause.

Most of us have heard Newton's laws many times, and we intuitively believe them. But the deep thinkers of the classical era realized that there was an interesting implication of the first law: If every event is generated as a result of an antecedent event, then the universe and everything in it follows a fixed track of causality. There is no happenstance or coincidence or free will; every event simply leads directly to the next event, for all time.

The perception of a deterministic universe was nicely stated by the French mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace:

An intellect which at a given instant knew all the forces acting in nature, and the position of all things of which the world consists -- supposing the said intellect were vast enough to subject these data to analysis -- would embrace in the same formula the motions of the greatest bodies in the universe and those of the slightest atoms; nothing would be uncertain for it, and the future, like the past, would be present to its eyes.
The concept of determinism was explored by Tolstoy in War and Peace, and by Mark Twain in The Mysterious Stranger and in his philosophical essay, "What is Man?"

In short, everyone who cared to think about it realized that we are all puppets on strings. God set the universe in motion, and then sat back and to watch it play itself out.

Then along came quantum mechanics. And things really started to get screwy.

The essential mystery of quantum mechanics is that, when you examine matter and energy on a sub-atomic scale, you find a breakdown of causality. The activity of a quantum particle defies analysis in other than probabilistic terms. Consider the example of an electron that moves from point A to point B following one of two possible paths. Although the electron must "choose" only one of the paths, the "footprint" shows conflicting evidence as to which path was taken. Physicists at this point throw up their hands and tell us that there is no meaningful statement to describe the travel of the electron, other than to say it ended up at point B. This is not to say that one path was taken but we can't know which. The truth is that both paths were taken and neither path was taken. Or perhaps it should simply be said that the path of the electron was not resolved in the physical universe.

The science establishment at first could not accept the lack of causality in the quantum world. Many believed that a cause-effect deterministic relationship would eventually discovered. When Albert Einstein said, "God does not play dice with the universe," he was expressing his disbelief in causeless events. It is now generally accepted that Einstein was wrong, and that quantum events do happen without specific cause or form.

Thus does the new science rescue us from the fate to which the old science had consigned us to. We are not puppets on a string, our destinies determined from the beginning of time. Quantum physics precludes determinism, and thus allows us the potential of true free will.

Or does it? Cause-and-effect continues to apply on the macrocosmic (non-quantum) level. Our practical analysis of the day-to-day world is based upon our assumptions of causality. Who cares if the underlying reality is unstable? Our personalities are formed by big events, not by sub-atomic interactions. So it's not clear how we are saved from our deterministic fate based upon a non-deterministic quantum world.

Nevertheless, it is interesting to contemplate how the quantum reality allows for the manipulation of physical events in our universe by Something Else. What is free will? An illusion we experience as we move along on our tracks? Or a quantum effect? This question is left as an exercise to the reader.