John Calvin, determinist Christian leader                                                                                                                           (credit:  via Wikimedia) 

                                                           

So, on this crucial issue of human freedom, let’s digress for a minute.

Quantum Theory says determinism is false. Free will is real for all living things, especially humans. Living things flow back against the current of entropy and the winds of uncertainty. For example, chlorophyl can absorb a single photon. This means that it can alter probabilities at the quantum level. All life more complex than plants takes advantage of the odds driving events from that point up the complexity levels to us. Living things are smart gamblers, from amoeba on up to fish, birds, and humans as individuals and even whole tribes. Our actions have been designed by evolution over eons of time to maximize the odds embedded in the events of the real, physical world. Humans are the smartest of the gamblers that live in the real world. And smart gamblers survive.

The evidence that shows the free will claim to be true is in the fact that there is life at all. The universe, working in its normal way, works to destroy complex bundles of matter like us. But life fights off that destruction or slips past it and goes on to make more of itself. (For us, the “more” is our kids.) Even algae are – to a degree – free. An algae uses chlorophyl to trap photons of light as chemical energy, then uses the chemical energy to perform tasks like make cell walls and organelles and so to become an entity with identity: a creature: a thing that is identifiably not part of the undifferentiated primordial soup around it. A living being that can alter odds.  

Events occur in sequences that can’t be exactly predicted even if we understood all the laws of science and knew the positions of all the particles in the cosmos. But the ways in which events unfold do contain trends. Living things recognize and use the trends to respond effectively to events in reality. Over generations, species adapt and as the more up-to-date among them reproduce, the less fit die off. Thus, living things constantly update their reproductive codes, i.e. their survival odds. Once the first chlorophyl molecule absorbed a photon of light and saved its energy in ATP chemical storage, the rest of evolution was just a matter of many collisions over eons of time. In a universe as big as ours, with googols of collisions happening, life was bound to arise somewhere. Earth got lucky.

Quantum theory supports the view that the outcome of the events leading up to this moment is a matter of probabilities, not certainties. The future is not set. However, this fact of the physical world also means we can influence how events occur. Discover and perform acts that tilt the odds of future events in our favor.

In this universe, we humans can learn which events contain higher survival odds for us and also learn how to intervene in event sequences to enhance the odds of upcoming ones that will benefit us and lower the odds of ones that might harm us. Often, we can even make events we want into near certainties. The garden will almost certainly yield food if we plant in rich soil, weed every week, and hill the potatoes, or even move the operation inside a controlled-atmosphere greenhouse. Agriculture advances. Similarly, so do our other technologies.

Then, in a powerful way, we humans pass our knowledge on to our kids. Knowledge accumulates over generations in cultures just as it does in genes: by trial and error. It’s there, in tribes passing culture across time, that our human survival edge lies.  

Note as an aside that determinists may say there’s no free will, but they live by free will guidelines that have been passed down to us by our forebears. Those guidelines have evolved to improve our odds of surviving possible harsh future scenarios. We plant and irrigate crops so we’ll have food next year. Not famine. We avoid known paths of avalanches because we’ve learned from harsh experience where the avalanches in our area hit most often. We do these acts and many others like them to improve our odds of surviving in this harsh reality.

So do determinists. In short, they don’t live by determinism. They live as if they have free will. What they say about freedom isn’t consistent with what they do.

Consider an example. Determinists in most parts of the world today live where there are cars and cell phones. If Deter is driving in traffic on a four lane road, and the driver beside him, Stupe, is not attending to his driving very well, but is instead looking at his cell phone, and if even worse, Stupe’s car begins to drift into Deter’s lane, forcing Deter to steer further toward the center line and thus toward oncoming traffic, Deter is going to get angry with Stupe -- not Stupe’s car or cell phone, even if in casual conversation, Deter claims he’s a determinist.

Believing in free will is what enables us to assign responsibility to one another, and to function in daily community life. Deter may say he’s a determinist, but in the real world where he lives, he isn’t one. On the other hand, he may come to regret some of the horn-beeping, fist-shaking, and swearing that he directed at Stupe. Stupe has just been hired as Deter’s new department head.

Finally, seeing how scientists do science is the decisive argument. They design experiments that isolate events so that the trends underlying those events can be exposed, understood, and even quantified. They make events go in ways that almost never occur in nature, and they make these events occur when and where they choose. An experiment is a contrived event, as is an H-bomb. If the control that scientists doing science exert over reality doesn’t evidence freedom, what could?

 

                            Scientist at work in a lab, imposes his will on events in reality

                             (credit: Mark Shwartz, Stanford ENERGY, via Wikimedia)