You can find some information on this topic here. I originally came upon this in this month's issue of Seed.
The idea, basically, is that electrons seem to have free will. The original paper (available here as a PDF), by John Conway and Simon Kochen of Princeton, is really too technical for my level of expertise. However, the main gist of it is really interesting. The authors state "that the response of particles to a certain type of experiment is not determined by the entire previous history of that part of the universe accessible to them."
This is a strange thought, but it makes sense in a way. I remember a philosophical question posed during my time as an undergrad that asked how we could possibly have real free will. A similar question was posed in the film "Waking Life." The question goes something like this: since the universe is governed by fundamental laws down to the atomic level - with molecules typically behaving according to those laws - how is that we, who are made up of those molecules, have free will? Could the answer lie within the subatomic world of quantum physics, where our idea of physics seems to break down and begin acting completely random? If so, does that mean that we don't actually have free will, but are acting out the randomness of the universe?
This leads to an even stranger question which is this: are we just cogs in a machine, acting out the fundamental physical laws in the universe, or are we just the result of complete randomness, acting out the randomness of the subatomic world, and just imagining we have control over ourselves?
According to the author of the paper, however, the actions of subatomic particles may not be so random. "No theory can predict exactly what these particles will do in the future for the very good reason that they may not yet have decided what this will be!"
So, maybe our free will is the result of the free will of the electrons and the subatomic particles themselves. This still poses questions as to whether we actually have our own free will as individuals or whether we are acting out the (proposed) free will of these particles, but it does make the whole thing much more interesting.
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| By George on 02/19/2007 @ 12:14 AM | Share And Enjoy:
