If you ask most people today if they believe they have free will they will answer “Yes.” To most people it would seem obvious that we have free will, they feel it all the time. But is this true and is it even possible at all? I want to argue that it is indeed not possible and not true. I can’t prove anything, and I won’t aim to prove anything but I will show evidence of my claim through various thought experiments utilizing what we currently know about the natural world. By showing indications of our world being deterministic I believe that we can conclude that human beings have no free will at all, only the illusion of it. By free will I mean “the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one’s own discretion.” (Oxford Dictionary) In other words free will in human beings is the ability to reject instinctive desires and chose to do otherwise. That will be the definition of free will throughout the article.

The first step will be to determine whether we are living in a deterministic universe or not. Let’s construct a thought experiment where we imagine a universe similar to our own but only with two solid round objects. These objects are moving towards each other on a collision course and using Newtons Laws of motion we can predict exactly how the scenario will unfold as the two objects collide. If we rewind the clock of the universe and start it again, exactly the same event will happen. This is because science can predict what happens when two objects collide. Let’s scale this to 100 objects. This is now an overwhelming amount of collisions and it will be very difficult for a person to calculate all of the factors, but not impossible. Given enough time where a physicist or mathematician has all the information about everything in the universe he or she would be able to predict exactly what is going to happen. Modern computers can do this within minutes. In this universe we can agree that nothing has free will. It is full of blank objects, that can’t act on their own. This applies to any amount of objects. Given enough time it can be predicted how the objects will interact (quantum physics and dark energy/matter is an exception but I will cover that later on), even if we constructed our own universe without life on any planet we could predict the complete fate of the universe. We know how matter interacts with other matter on a chemical and atomic level, we know how gravity works and we know how motion works. All the forces that would influence the universe from the big bang would be deterministic and predictable. So in a universe without life evolving there would be no free will and it would be a deterministic universe.

This is, of course, not our own universe, so let us add a very simple life form. We will add a very simple beetle to one of the planets. There is only one insect and its only purpose is to seek out sun for energy, much like a plant does. This beetle is no different from the ground it is standing on, it is just more complex in its atomic structure. In science it is very useful to take big and complex things and break them down into smaller parts. It then becomes easier to explain the sum of its parts. We can do the same thing with the beetle. The beetle consist of atoms, which interact with each other and with the surrounding environment, just like two nonliving objects do, but again much more complex.

Given that we know every property of every particle in the entire universe it doesn’t matter if it contains a beetle we consider to be alive, we can still predict how they will interact together using the universal laws. In this world there is therefore no free will and the world is deterministic. The beetle has no control over its desires, it is too simple to resist the chemical reactions in it’s nerve system, and just follows the instincts encoded in its DNA. We’re slowly getting to the universe we know, so let’s add evolution by natural selection to the equation. We have yet to understand how life began so we will start with the simplest forms of life moving on to reptiles and eventually mammals. If we look at the early ancestor to a wolf we would still not consider this creature to have free will. It is following its desires by instinct just like the beetle did, however it is much more complex than the beetle with millions of atoms interacting all the time.

Moving on to the Australopithecus. One of our early ancestors these creatures are still more ape-like than human. We would probably still not consider them to have any free will just like the wolf and the beetle and even if we were to, we could just step back some millions of years and ask again until we find something we can be sure of to not have free will. Here we find the first problem. When did free will enter into evolution? Is it possible to have less free will than another species, or did it suddenly appear at some point in human evolution? This is one concern I have with free will, but it is not the main one I wish to discuss.

We can use the exact same analogy that we used with the beetle and the ancient wolf. If we know every property of every particle in the universe we can predict how these particles will interact with each other. You will notice that breaking everything up into the smallest particles it makes it irrelevant whether or not we consider something to be alive. In this perspective there are only simple objects and complex objects, which all follow the same rules and are made up of the same material. And the same goes for human beings. Everything in a human being follows the laws of nature. Atoms don’t suddenly behave differently because they are inside a human body and chemical reactions are no different inside the human body. Every aspect of the human mind can be explained, potentially, but we don’t yet have the information and the processing power to understand it. There is no evidence of any “magic stuff” inside the human mind or any evidence of a soul. I don’t see a logical argument going from our ancestors, who we would agree had no free will and thus no soul, to us. Did we gradually evolve a soul? Did it hop into the process of evolution somehow? How does the soul defy the laws of nature. It’s not a rational idea to me. The human mind is nothing more than an extremely powerful and extremely complex set of neurons in an awesome network that baffles us. I am confident that we one day will be able to explain consciousness and find, that there is nothing special about it in terms of the laws it follows. The key law is the law of cause and effect. Everything in the universe that happens has a cause and then an effect. If the beetle senses sunlight in front of it, that causes the beetle to move forward, if we are thirsty this will cause us to drink something.

All of these causes can be tracked down the line to the beginning of the universe. If you make a choice between two things, let’s say coffee and tea, as Sam Harris used in his analogy (Free Will), these desires have a cause, and that cause also has a cause, and if you go back far enough you will see that you always end up with a cause, which you had no control of. This means, that all of your actions are being caused by something over which you had no control or knowledge of whatsoever. How can you then be free, when what you chose has already been determined by something of which you had no control over? And just like the beetle, the wolf and our ancient ancestor it seems very likely that we live in a deterministic universe without any free will.

Now we get to the part about the things in the universe we still don’t know much about: Quantum physics and dark matter/energy. Some have proposed that since we don’t yet understand these things they could be what give us free will. But let’s examine this case closer: If our free will does indeed come from quantum events then how are they free? This just has the exact same effect which I described: That everything human beings do is subject to cause and effect. This cause is just at the quantum level, which we again have no control over. The same goes for dark matter and energy; these are just causes we know less about. They are uncontrollable causes nevertheless.

From this we can conclude the following: Every aspect of the human body and mind follow the natural laws like all other particles and are not special. The same aspects are subject to cause and effect just like everything else in the universe. Quantum physics and dark energy/matter do not make it any more likely for us to have free will. When I first came to the conclusion after reading Free Will and The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris as well as How Consciousness Works by Daniel Dennett it was difficult to shake off. I initially felt as if everything was meaningless since we are essentially just sentient robots without free will. But the illusion of free will is incredibly strong and I live willingly in it every day. I think it is important to research this issue more, because it has a huge impact on how we treat people in our world.

The entire justice system is built around people having a free choice, so it might seem illogical to have such a system if people can’t help but do what they are determined to. I came to the conclusion that the fundamental principles of the justice system do not need to change whether we have free will or not. Just because people can’t escape their inevitable actions doesn’t mean that the justice system doesn’t serve a role in preventing it. A person who is contemplating murder is a lot more likely to go through with his plan if there is not punishment. Just like a shoplifter would be more likely to steal if there was no punishment. The justice system is not just there to punish people for their actions; it is also there to serve as a guide for what we wish for the world to be. Its intimidation alone has a great impact whether or not we act on our illusion of free will.

We don’t need to change our institutions or much of the way we behave, and we can still live in the illusion of free will as it gives great comfort, but we should be aware of the fact that it is an illusion and remember it when we judge people by what they do. They can’t help it.

I would recommend any reader all of the mentioned books. They are amazing tools for helping us understand the world and our own minds. I would also recommend the article “Free Will, Determinism, and the new Fatalism” by Aamir Moghal, who originally inspired me to write my own article.