Free Will Is Real

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If you arrived here directly from a Google Search, this website accepts free will as real and then integrates free will into physics. You may wish to read this brief overview for additional details.

The Free Will Problem

Most people will never ask themselves if free will is real. To them the question would be absurd – of course they can make choices. For the typical lay person, their ability to make choices is so self-evident as to be unworthy of serious consideration. To the contrary, however, most physicists believe that free will is not possible. For many scientists, free will is only an illusion.

But if our ability to make choices is so self-evident, then why are physicists so reluctant to accept free will as real?

It turns out that physicists have very good reasons for not accepting free will as real. If we could freely choose to make our material body do one thing, or to do something else entirely, then our conscious choices would be the cause of these material events and not the physical laws. We would now have conscious minds causing some material events while the physical laws would be causing other material events. This division of governance over matter would create intractable problems in physics.

So free will is unquestionably real to lay people, but scientifically impossible to physicists. It is simultaneously that which must be and that which cannot be.

If free will is real, then we are free to choose our own path in life, but this same freedom to choose would incapacitate physics and end any hope of ever understanding the universe.

On the other hand, if free will is not real, then the atoms in our brain are directing our every move while we falsely imagine ourselves to be in the driver’s seat. If free will is an illusion, then all of life is smoke and mirrors, but at least we can run scientific experiments to our heart’s content and learn every detail about this same universe that deceives us.

Or perhaps we’re missing something.

The Definition of Free Will

Because free will is defined differently in different works, we will begin by defining the term. We are not interested in the tortured definitions found in philosophy books. We want a simple definition that matches how free will is understood and used by the general population in everyday conversations.

Specifically, our definition of free will must give every individual ownership over their thoughts and actions. And we can only have ownership over our thoughts and actions if we are free to choose other thoughts and actions. This freedom to choose our thoughts and actions means that we can rightly be held responsible for the things we do. More formally, free will is defined herein as follows.

Free Will:

The ability of a conscious mind to freely choose its own thoughts and the actions of its body from among various alternatives.

Free Will and the Physical Laws

If we were told that we would now choose all our actions by rolling dice, we would not be grateful that at least we still have free will. We do not make important decisions by rolling dice. This example makes clear that we do not equate statistical probabilities with choices deliberately made.

Similarly, if our choices were being directed by quantum level probabilities, our choices would be no less statistical than if we were rolling dice. Because there can be no ownership over actions that are statistically determined, we must reject the possibility that free will choices could be directed by quantum level probabilities.

And the same could be said if the physical laws at any level were directing our choices. We would have no ownership over our actions if our actions were being directed by the physical laws. So if free will is real as defined above, then the ultimate cause of our actions cannot be quantum level probabilities or the physical laws in general.

If free will exists, then events caused by free will decisions would lie beyond the reach of experimental, statistical, or computational understanding. Free will would mean a universe where the physical laws are no longer sufficient for fully understand­ing material events.

Moreover, if free will is real, then the conscious mind and the physical laws would not have equal authority. The mind would have the higher power, for it is the mind that is choosing the final outcome. Free will would mean that the physical laws take a backseat to unpredictable minds.

Importantly, for free will to exist, there must first exist a conscious mind. Choices cannot exist if there is no conscious mind considering alternative outcomes.

The Significance of Free Will

Our bodies are made up of matter. If our thoughts can direct the motion of this matter according to choices freely made, then all matter in the universe is not fully governed by the physical laws.

But if all matter is not fully governed by the physical laws, then the current scientific paradigm of the universe is flawed at the level of its most basic assumptions. This possibility of error at the very foundation of science makes the free will problem the single most important problem in science.

Aligning Our Beliefs With Our Lives

Should we accept free will as real or reject free will as nothing more than an illusion. We will look to the events that took place around 450 B.C. for guidance on how to find the answer to this question.

In 450 B.C., the world faced a problem similar to the free will problem. Although the world’s general population widely accepted that motion was real, there was an educated and influential philosopher named Zeno who was presenting convincing arguments that all motion had to be an illusion. We will quickly present one of Zeno’s many paradoxes for context.

Before an arrow can hit a target, the arrow must first reach a point that is half the distance to the target. But when the arrow reaches this point, there is now another point that is half the distance to the target. The arrow will now have to get to this second half-way point before it can reach the target. But no matter how many half-way points the arrow gets to, there will always be more. If there is always another half-way point between the arrow and the target, then the arrow can never arrive at the target itself. Therefore, the motion we think we are seeing cannot be real, it must be an illusion.

The motion problem of 450 B.C. parallels our current problem with free will. The world’s general population accepts that we can freely make choices, but some educated and influential individuals are making strong arguments that free will must be an illusion. We will use the similarities between the free will problem and the motion problem to gain insight on how we should move forward with the free will problem.

Fortunately for motion users everywhere, mathematicians eventually identified the flaw in Zeno’s paradoxes. However, the certainty that there had to be an error could have been known all along. Zeno was traveling to give his talks, and again he was using motion to deliver those talks. That is, Zeno could not deny the existence of motion without using the very motion that he was denying.

This brings us to the lesson that will guide us: There must be an error in a belief if it is not possible to live life consistent with that belief. In the next section, we will examine whether it is possible to live a life consistent with the belief that free will is not real.

Our Lives Assume Free Will

As we will soon see, scientists have many good reasons for believing that free will cannot be real. However, before considering their reasons, we will first apply the lesson learned from the debate on motion. Is it possible to live a life consistent with the belief that free will is not real?

If we were to deny free will, would we be like Zeno, denying free will with our words while confirming free will with our lives? In this section, we will examine the case favoring free will as revealed by the way we live our lives.

Indeed, once we open our minds to the possibility that free will may be real, we quickly realize that we demonstrate our full acceptance of free will in virtually everything we do. Consider the language we use throughout the day, every day. So many of the words we use, like

should, could, demand, decide, must, shame, good, bad, punish, reward, evil, hero, thank you, responsible, harsh, will power, guilt, brave, coward, sorry, cruel, honest, persuade, lazy, regret,

and countless others, presuppose choices freely made. A person could not be guilty if their actions could not have been otherwise. Guilt implies choice. Thus, we demon­strate our acceptance of free will as real by using everyday words like “guilt” and “guilty.”

The words “I’m sorry” would make no sense if choices were not real. Yet, some­times we need to hear these words, and sometimes we need to say them. Both imply an acceptance of free will. Denying free will is futile because our denials would never be aligned with many of the words needed to keep our personal relationships healthy.

Often, bad choices lead to the funniest stories. But these stories are funny pre­cisely because we understand that it was an unnecessary, witless decision that began a humorous series of unfortunate events. Freely made choices gone awry are front and center in humor, and laughter makes clear our understanding that choices led to events that could have been otherwise.

And what about our emotions? When a girl learns her boyfriend cheated on her, we expect her to become angry with him. But by expecting her to become angry, we reveal our understanding that the boyfriend cheated when he could have not cheated. If free will were an illusion, then what he did he could not have done differently and her anger would be unjustified. But girls and guys in these situations do get angry. Their angry response, and our full acceptance of their response as rational, makes clear everyone’s understanding that we are freely choosing our actions.

If we believed that free will did not exist, we would never ask a spouse or child why they did something. For a person who denies free will, asking such a question would be irrational. We cannot believe that the physical laws govern all motion, in­cluding the actions of humans, and then seek out the motives that led to an action that could not have been otherwise.

To believe that free will is an illusion is to accept that a person did not choose to do what they did. So if free will is an illusion, then motives too must be an illusion. But this is not how we live our lives – we want to know why.

If we truly believed that free will were not real, we would never regret anything we have done because the inability to make choices would make regret irrational. But in real life, we do have regrets, and these regrets reveal our understanding that we bear full responsibility for our bad choices.

Whenever we take an action to make something better, we expose our belief that we can change outcomes from what they otherwise would have been. We would not consider heroes to be heroes if we did not believe that they had freely chosen their courageous actions. Our acceptance of free will permeates our lives down to the most common details.

English is not unique – languages around the world reveal our widespread ac­ceptance of choices as real. A full, universal rejection of free will could not be realized unless dehumanizing changes were first made to every human language. And yet, we could not even succeed at this task in our own personal communications.

We find evidence supporting free will embedded in our language, our humor, in our demands for justice, in our emotions, and in our judgments of others and of ourselves. We could argue that free will is an illusion just as Zeno argued that motion was an illusion, but the way we live our lives would undercut even the best of our arguments.

For all the above reasons, we hereby accept that free will is real and free of any predetermined causes or statistical probabilities. The lesson learned from the debate on motion teaches us that we must start out by aligning our beliefs with the lives we lead. This acceptance of free will means that we will have to find solutions to seem­ingly intractable physics problems, so that will be our focus in the early chapters.

Discredited Free Will Experiments

Readers not interested in reading about the discredited free will experiments may freely move on to Chapter 2.

Some readers may be familiar with the EEG and fMRI experiments that were once promoted as solid evidence that free will could not be real. These experiments appeared to demonstrate that the physical brain was initiating muscle movements even before the conscious mind had made the decision to move.

Partly due to these experiments, it became widely accepted within some scientific circles that the physical brain initiates all our actions and not the decisions of the conscious mind. As recently as 2016, The Atlantic magazine published an article titled, “There’s No Such Thing as Free Will,” which referred to these experiments as supporting evidence.

However, these free will experiments did not withstand the test of time. They have now been discredited by the scientific community due to both process flaws and more recent experiments that have invalidated the original interpretations of the data. The problems found have now become numerous, so we will limit ourselves to only a general discussion of notable shortcomings in these free will experiments.

The free will experiments were reporting that the brain activities leading to movement were taking place before the conscious mind had even made the decision to move, and that the time difference between the two ranged from half a second up to eleven seconds. However, these times were not consistent with the known times needed by the brain to initiate muscle motion.

Many and widely known studies on reaction times consistently showed that subjects react to an external stimulus in less than two tenths of a second. This means that once the process to move a muscle has begun within the brain, muscle motion will follow within two tenths of a second. So when these free will experiments were reporting brain processing times of up to eleven seconds, it became clear that the brain signals they were detecting were never causally related to the eventual muscle motion that followed.

However, these lengthy time delays would be entirely consistent with a conscious mind trying to synchronize anticipated muscle motions with the display of a timing device, which is exactly what the subjects in the experiments were doing. It was found in later experiments that even when the conscious mind is only anticipating an action, brain activity matching that of the free will experiments is already present.

Furthermore, it was found that the brain activity interpreted as the initiation of movement was also present when the subjects chose a newly introduced option of “no movement.” Because this brain activity could no longer be linked to muscle movement, it could not be held up as the cause that was initiating muscle movement before the conscious mind had made the decision to move.