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.
