The End of Free Will?

Transcript of Michio Kaku's shorts:
- Begin -
"Newtonian Determinism says that the universe is a clock, a gigantic clock that’s wound up in the beginning of time and has been ticking ever since according to Newton’s laws of motion. So what you’re going to eat 10 years from now on January 1st has already been fixed. It’s already known using Newton’s laws of motion. Einstein believed in that. Einstein was a determinist.

Does that mean that a murderer, this horrible mass murderer isn’t really guilty of his works because he was already preordained billions of years ago? Einstein said well yeah, in some sense that’s true that even mass murderers were predetermined, but he said, they should still be placed in jail.

Heisenberg then comes along and proposes the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and says: ”Nonsense. There is uncertainty. You don’t know where the electron is. It could be here, here or many places simultaneously.” This of course Einstein hated because he said God doesn’t play dice with the universe. Well hey, get used to it. Einstein was wrong. God does play dice. Every time we look at an electron it moves. There is uncertainty with regards to the position of the electron.

So what does that mean for free will? It means in some sense we do have some kind of free will. No one can determine your future events given your past history. There is always the wildcard. There is always the possibility of uncertainty in whatever we do.

So when I look at myself in a mirror I say to myself what I'm looking at is not really me. It looks like me, but it’s not really me at all. It’s not me today now. It’s me a billionth of a second ago because it takes a billionth of a second for light to go from me to the mirror and back."
- End -
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Albert Einstein view of God, "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings".

In this one sentence alone, he had articulated his belief of his "God" and the fate of humanity. Of course, by "Spinoza's God", Einstein was referring to the 17th century philosopher's idea of "God and Nature were one" in his work 'Ethics'. Spinoza's work greatly influenced him. i had read and understood, hopefully, of Einstein's philosophy on life more than his physics theory.

So when i came upon respectable physicist Michio Kaku's assertion that Newtonian physics (which is deterministic) and Einstein's belief of the same of our universe, i had to relearn what i had came to understand about Einstein's philosophy.

Einstein was a determinist in a broad sense. In the classical idea of the 'cause and effect' of the universe. But he also believe in free will. Free will in the sense that humans have this freedom to his/her own "will", that is their actions and thoughts. But this freedom does not mean we are free from the causality (cause and effect) of our actions and thoughts (we are still being constraint by certain laws of the universe); it is that we are free from the restraint or compulsion of a higher supreme being.

"God does not play dice with the universe". i have always came to understand this as "God does not meddle in the affairs of humans". And not as taken literally to mean God determined the fate of humans. Einstein means there is an order that is followed in the universe (for want of a better description!), and although there may be chaos out of this order, but in the larger scale of the universe, order still prevails.

It is only in the larger scheme of things that his universe could be described as "deterministic". And deterministic in the sense as described previously-there is order amidst chaos. Humans are still left to their own devices living their lives. Every thoughts, each actions they make in this world would still have consequences. In the end, we are all responsible for our own actions. "God" does not punish or reward those actions. He even mentioned that our obsession with reward and punishment is what ails the human race.

The mass murderer part could be totally taken out of context, i think.

My faith in Einstein is restored. Human beings does have the power (though not an absolute power perhaps) to change things. And events does not follow a pre-determined path. There is order in chaos. In that case, Michio Kaku and Einstein does have similar, if not the same, ideas about free will*. To Einstein, free will could exist even in a deterministic universe. Free will is not the opposite of a predetermined or predestined future for us. The concept of free will has always been about choice. Determinism is not the opposite of free will. The concept of determinism is that in the larger scheme of the universe, we are still subjected to its natural law.

For Albert Einstein was not only a scientist. He was a philosopher too. And to him, scientific truths are sacred. "I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research . . . . A contemporary has said not unjustly that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people."

i asked myself, "is this important?" i believe writing this post answer that question. For if we don't have control over our thoughts and actions, then what is the purpose of life.

"When the answer is simple, God is speaking" ~ Albert Einstein.

* - From this excellent Time Magazine article, it does seemed that Einstein did not believe in free will: "A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills". But he also did mentioned, a quote from Arthur Schopenhauer, that "I am compelled to act as if free will existed because if I wish to live in a civilized society I must act responsibly." He had chosen to live responsibly.