Unlike the Newtonian paradigm, the quantum one has opened up the possibility that we humans have free will. We really can influence probabilities by skilfully executed action in the real world. The odds that the flap of a butterfly’s wing will cause a hurricane or a rockslide are extremely remote. The odds that I will not get hit by a rockslide if I hear a roaring and duck beneath an overhanging shelf of basalt are much better. I can react successfully to the unforeseen. 

The odds that a field in April, left alone, will be full of corn ripening by October are extremely remote. The odds are much higher that the same field will contain a corn crop if I seed it with corn in April and water and weed it for the next five months. Human knowledge and skill enable us to intervene in the flows of events around us. At present, we can’t stop the hurricane, but our computer models, when fed enough data, can tell us when we need to get out of the hurricane’s way if we want to have reasonable odds of going on with our lives.

                          

   

                                 Planaria (aver. size 1 - 2 cm. long) (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

The programming in life forms as humble as planaria enables them to swim to the side of the petri dish that is out of the direct light. They use their innate intelligence—their unique instincts—to improve their odds of survival by avoiding beams of direct light. How much more empowering is human programming? Thus, the quantum view is a view of ourselves that deeply resonates with our belief in the free will that directs our daily actions.

We are, within human limits, free. We can perform actions that alter the odds of some possible futures happening. We learn, think, and act to increase the odds of experiencing futures that will support our survival, health, and comfort, and decrease the odds of our experiencing futures that will lead us to pain, injury, and death. We think, learn, and act in ways that make it more likely that we will keep being able to to think, learn, and act. This is the nature of human freedom, and the lesser degrees of freedom in all life forms.

We gain a better understanding of how profoundly different this worldview is when we contrast it with the old Newtonian one. Philosophers who understood the old Newtonian worldview believed that natural laws like Newton’s laws of motion would eventually explain phenomena in the realms of Physics, then Chemistry, Biology, Psychology, and History. In this model, every event and every action performed by animals or humans is seen as being governed by rigorous natural laws that in each case must lead to only one outcome. Thus, only one history for the entire universe is possible. Human intuitions about the extent - even the existence - of our own freedom are illusions.

This view is called determinism: it says there is no such thing as free will because the future is already set, even if no human being will ever be able to know all of the natural laws and the positions and momenta of all of the particles. In principle, under the Newtonian view, there is no free will for humans or anything else in this universe because the future is already fixed. The quantum view, by contrast, opens up the possibility that living things can learn to spot patterns in the sense data they detect in the world around them, recognize the ones that tell of hazards and opportunities, and act to alter the probabilities of future events so that their chances of survival improve.

That picture resonates with our habitual and intuitive view of ourselves. We are, to a degree that varies from situation to situation, free. We can shape future events.