” an “embodied self”: the sum of the thoughts, beliefs, desires, dispositions and so on that live within him. The embodied self might not be conscious of every action, but it ultimately determines them – a sort of free will on autopilot.
physicist might question that separation of personhood from other material parts of the universe. Biological material is nothing more than agglomerations of atoms and molecules that follow the laws of physics – and surely we can’t claim to be in control of those. Vlatko Vedral, a physicist at the University of Oxford, thinks that to understand free will (or our lack of it) we need to better understand what makes the universe tick. “My guess is that we will be able to illuminate it more and more as we continue to reduce more complex natural sciences, such as biology and neuroscience, to physics,”
. Quantum physics, our most fundamental theory of how the building blocks of the universe behave, seems to say that a degree of randomness and uncertainty is built in to particle properties and movements – including those that make us up. Scale that up, and what happens in the universe can’t be entirely determined from beginning to end because you can never know what’s going to happen at the quantum scale.
that all this uncertainty is only because everything that can happen does happen, only in different universes. In this scenario, the universe really is predetermined. The only uncertainty lies in which pre-packaged universe you find your conscious self in: the one where you ordered fish and chips or the one where you didn’t.
argues that the universe is superdeterministic – that something outside it sets everything in stone, including the outcome of experiments we might do to test whether we have free will. To some people this amounts to a god. Vedral admits the possibility can’t be discounted. “Because we are finite, and part of the universe, we would still perceive it as non-deterministic.” There are some battles you just can’t win.
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