Is "free-will" controlled by the laws of physics>>?

Question

do you have free-will or is your brain a product of the universal laws> I believe that our abililty to make choices gives us a clue of a spiritual realm>wut do you think>

Answer 1

Very good question. A little less than century ago science came face to face with the free will issue, in quantum physics. (Quantum physics was developed consistently in 1920-1930, and continue to be central part of modern fundamental physics.) Formerly, in Newton mechanics, it was considered that if you know everything about initial conditions of experiment, you are able to predict exactly what will happen. Now, thanks to quantum physics, it is well known and well tested that one cannot predict future even if knows everything possible at the moment. Even tiny electron has its 'free will'. In modern physics you calculate not trajectories but probabilities. One can only predict probabilities of different outcomes. And as we, humans, are basically big pieces of matter, we too have free will, greatly amplified by our complexity. Nobody can know of find out what will happen. Nothing is 'written on a stone'. There is no fate. That is the present picture of the world as far as I know.

Answer 2

Personally I believe we are born with free-will. Nothing deters the ability of choice to do or not. We are only in control of what our minds have learned. If our brains were the product of univesal laws, would we not already be developed from the start. or have the ability to develope without any effort. The mind is a mental muscle it can only take a certain pace to develope, too little we become lazy, too much and we over load and go insane.
The biggest down-fall of human is they strive on theories and either focus on one thing or another but never keeping the possibilites open to all directions. We learn to accept one thing and everything else becomes untrue. If our minds we indeed strong enough we could see how foolish and blind-sided most of us become by ruling out possibilities because of believe.

Answer 3

You're assuming there are a whole slew of these laws, when in fact there aren't half a dozen of them. Most of what we think are Laws, are in fact theories or principles. Why they should affect your will, free or not, is unclear to me.
Are you trying to say you figure you're a victim of quantum physics? Or to imply that because you have free will, something Else governs your life and choices?
I believe that we are all, to some degree, prisoners of physics, but then, there's always Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle to calculate into the mix.
Pretty sure God could answer your questions, though.

Answer 4

The entire Universe is governed by "laws." What happens at any occurrence at any level of existence is governed. However "free will" must mean that the choice to do what one wants, as one wants, when one wants doesn't set it outside of the Universe, so it must be governed by whatever "laws" order same. As to your clue to spirituality: all roads lead to Rome.

Answer 5

There is no theory of consciousness in physics. Some have speculated that free will might be related to the uncertainty principle. At the very least, quantum physics shows us that the universe is not completely deterministic.

Answer 6

assuming the laws of physics are part of the universal laws... but what if youre free will came about from a differentiation of many millions of neurons which developed over millions upon millions of years. Evolution led to brain development, which led to the idea of free-will.
how about this as a follow up question; are our brains powerful enough/developed enough to change universal laws?

Answer 7

Excellent question which is pretty much the same as "s your belief purely in scientfic or spiritual?"
Well..believing that I can do something useless/crazy/idiotic by my own free will at any time and knwing that's it's a useless/crazy/idiotic act...
Then I would say NO FREE WILL ISN'T CONTROLLED BY ANY LAWS

Answer 8

Yes. Assuming the laws of physics are a set of universal laws that are always the same regardless of frame of reference, etc. Then everything would be mechanical. If everything is mechanical, then if you have the initial conditions and understand all the laws, then all actions ARE predictable (even if they're too complex for us to predict with our current scale of technology; inability to perform sufficient calculations to do it doesn't mean it's not in fact happening in this manner in reality).

So, even our perception of our own independence would be predictable in this scenario. The only way that things would NOT be mechanical, is if unpredictable (random) actions can occur. But if all actions are "caused" and are mechanical, then truely "random" actions are NOT possible. We may simply not see the causes, or properly understand them, thus they APPEAR to be random, even though they are not.

Confusing, I know. But, such is life.

So, yeah, if the universe is mechanical and theoretically all processes are "understand-able" then so long as we can know all the relevant starting information that can interact with our frame of reference, we can predict all actions within that frame of reference.

Of course, in terms of predictive capability, for even the smallest predictions we'd have to know a HUGE amount of starting information.

Say, we have a sphere 3 cm in diameter, and wanted to predict all actions within that sphere, we'd need to know not only the starting states of everythign within that sphere, but everythign that could interact with that sphere. Say we wanted to predict its actions for a period of 1 second, how much information would we need? Well, what's the fastest anything could possibly move to interact with the stuff in the 3 cm of space? The speed of light. So, we'd need to know the starting information for EVERYTHING within 1 light second of the outermost edge of that 3 cm sphere. Light travels extraordinarly fast. And since we're working in 3 dimensions it would be basically a cubic function, IE, 1 light second in all three directions. That's a fairly large space! just to make a tiny prediction. Efficiency would become better the larger a space you're trying to predict (assuming you have the capacity/capability to analyze that much data at one time) since the ratio of contents to the external buffer zone would continue to decrease. So, if you wanted to predict 1 light year's work of interactiosn for oe light second, the zone around the 1 light year area would only be one light second long. That's a fairly minimal extra amount to have to collect info about.

But of course all that only relates to our predictive capability, and not to how the stuff itself works. I'm just saying that physically it may be predictable and act according to specific laws, but our ability to process that volume of information may not exist in order to make effective predictions. So, we may not be able to effectively USE the predictability of the universe in any meaningful way. *Shrug* oh well.

Answer 9

No, however it is controlled by the US government. ;-)