Transcript

Today, I want to talk about an issue that must have occurred to everyone who spent some time thinking about physics, which is that the idea of free will is both incompatible with the laws of nature and entirely meaningless. I know that a lot of people just do not want to believe this, but I think you are here to hear what the science says. So I will tell you what the science says in this video. I first explain why free will does not exist, indeed makes no sense, and then tell you why there are better things to worry about. I want to say ahead that there is much discussion about free will in neurology where the question is whether we subconsciously make decisions before we become consciously aware of having made one. I am not a neurologist, so this is not what I am concerned with here.

I will be talking about free will as the idea that in this present moment there are several futures which are possible, and your free will plays a role for selecting which one of those possible futures becomes reality. This, I think, is how most of us intuitively think of free will, because it agrees with our experience of how the world seems to work. It is not how some philosophers have defined free will, and I will get to this later. But first, let me tell you what's wrong with this intuitive idea that we can somehow select among possible futures. Last week, I explained what differential equations are, and that all laws of nature which we currently know work with those differential equations.