Hi Bill.
My name is Thomas and I'm from Los Angeles.
I would really like to hear your opinion on whether or not we have free will in the conventional
meaning.
Is there really an independent ego right here that is control of my every thought and action?
I think Einstein is a determinist so he does not believe in free will, but then there's
the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, although to my understanding the uncertainty is in
our scientific instruments and the inaccuracies of the measurements.
Thank you.
Well, you covered a lot of ground in there but nobody knows about the nature of consciousness.
I think we have free will up to a point, but we are driven by deep, deep things like wanting
to get food, making more people, that is to say mating.
And then I cannot help but notice how much people from the same family tend to do the
same things.
Same families tend to do the same things just anecdotally.
But clearly I know I have made decisions based on things that happened around me that I wouldn't
have made without being informed by history or what I'd noticed.
I know I have.
Now if that turns out not to be true I would be very surprised.
Now as far as the uncertainty principle goes, uncertainty principle is roughly there's a
quantum, there's an amount of energy below which you can't measure.
The old saying is you can know where the electron is or you can know how fast it's going but
you can't know both, not exactly because anything you would use to measure it would inherently
move the electron or change its speed.
That's the classic uncertainty principle at work.
With that said, I am satisfied now, as an engineer and scientist, that our brains are
chemical reactions and chemical reactions, at some level, depend on quantum mechanics,
on the interaction of subatomic particles based on this extraordinary thing called quantum
electrodynamics, you alluded to it.
And so at some level there's randomness in what we think because we're made of chemicals
that have randomness.
But largely human behavior is generally predictable.
There's whole schools full of psychologists and psychiatrists who study humans and they
come across patterns, and those patterns have got to be part of our brains and our free
will has got to be part of that.
I mean I don't mean to skirt your question, but the nature of consciousness – you are
living at a time when the nature of consciousness is not understood but it may be very soon
because we'll build computer models or computers that are as sophisticated or as complicated
or as messed up as human brains and they will behave the same way as human brains, as long
as they're plugged, the computers.
Carry on.