In a recent conversation with a friend, he made a startling declaration–there is no free will in the world!  His contention was that everything is pre-ordained and that we are only acting out our part off a script that has already been fully written out.

So what is free will.  Free will would mean that we can choose to act in one or another way.  To have a fatalistic view of the world which says that there is no free will at all means that there is no possibility of exerting effort in one or another way to change the outcome.

Let us look at an example.  Let us you have a slice of pizza in front of you and you need to decide whether to eat that slice or not (of course we can create a more serious question like you have a Rs 1000 note on the ground and you are trying to decide whether to pick it up or not).  Now on the face of it, we make that choice all the time.  Sometimes we eat the pizza slice and at other times we resist and refuse it.  However, if you take it one more level, the choice to eat the pizza went through some process of thinking or intution which decided to eat or not to eat.  Maybe you had indulged heavily the previous night and were feeling too full.  Maybe you have been exercising for a week straight and felt you could indulge a bit.  In either case before your hand reached out for the pizza slice, there was a signal in the brain which asked the muscles in your hand to contract and relax in a way that you reached out for the slice or not.

Now that process of looking at some information stored in your mind, processing it according to some prior rules, all can be done deterministically.  So the question is that presented with exactly the same stimuli can we chose to act in two different ways.  At the end of the day the question will come down to whether “we” can control a simple firing of neuron in our brain.  Who makes us think to begin with?  It is like a binary switch.  And any switching needs energy.

Another example is to view the world like a closed system.  To simplify, let us assume it to be made of billiard balls floating around in a gravity free space.  Now, one can observe the billiards balls and can deterministically determine there position at any time period in the future.  Only way for the balls to be in a different place then predicted by Newtonian mechanics is for external agent/energy to be brought in which changes the direction, velocity or mass of the ball.

So, if we believe that there is free will we need to believe that there is a source of energy outside our current view of universe which allows us to change the deterministic outcome of a physical system.

Or does it?  Maybe we are simultaneously in both states, and the consciousness effortlessly (without involving energy) decides to pick one path.  So either we have to believe an infinite external source of energy or simultaneous existence of multiple “realities.”