So we do have free will after all

Freedom to choose our routes into the future.

Are our choices and actions free or causally determined? And if the latter, doesn’t that have serious implications for our personal, social and moral lives?

Determinism in this context is the idea that the effects of everything we think and do are necessitated by preceding causes. But doesn’t this destroy moral responsibility, along with all human hopes and aspirations?

If we have no actual choice in what we do, doesn’t that excuse all anti-social behaviour and undermine completely relations between people? Aren’t, therefore, freedom and determinism incompatible?

Such issues of freedom have long been a vexed issue in philosophical circles, including the question of freedom itself: do we need to be free only in the sense of being free from coercion or compulsion — so that all we really need is voluntariness — or must actions be fully free in order to be morally responsible?

The philosophical notion of ‘metaphysical freedom’ does not accept that life is governed by causal laws, and argues that we do have the power to choose our routes into the future. Under metaphysical idealism, all reality is subjective so free will exists as intentional choice arising from mental processes internal to us; all choices are exclusively subjective.

Because a classical physical system is deterministic, free will cannot exist within it. But the indeterminism of a quantum system, it’s been claimed, allows the existence of free will through the ability of that system to decide which state to exhibit next. Quantum entanglement is seen as incompatible with the idea that the state that will be exhibited exists prior to its measurement.

Thus quantum science can be regarded as rejecting causal determinism although, that said, the nature of indeterminism in quantum mechanics is perceived as randomness, simply pure chance, and randomness cannot be related to what we regard intuitively as free will within which we make choices based on experience and predilections.

But now, physicist and entrepreneur Samir Varma, who engages cogently with these profound issues, asks: how can we possibly have free will if the precise mathematical laws of physics, which underpin life and existence, determine the actions of all atoms in the universe, including those…