Free Will

A recent article in Wired discussed a study that may show how brain activity can predict your decisions before you make them. The study only involved very simple decision making, whether to push a button with your left or right hand, but they were able to predict what people would choose to do seven seconds before they did it. They didn't have complete accuracy, and say it may not apply to more complex decisions, but it does bring up an interesting subject.

Could our actions be predetermined by the laws of physics? If every thought and action could be linked to a chemical process in the brain, and those reactions were predictable, then animals would be organic machines, simply carrying out the programming encoded within their DNA. That may not be the case, but assuming that it is, does that leave any room for free will? I think that it could, and I'll come back to that.

For now, please watch this cartoon.


Double Slit Experiment

Ok, everyone familiar with quantum physics now? Good. Now this dealt with electrons specifically, but actually everything travels as a set of wave functions at the subatomic level. There are different interpretations of this, but I'll just stick to one as it doesn't really affect my main topic. So, in answer to the old question "If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?", we would have to say yes, it does. And no, it doesn't. And at the same time, it didn't fall, and it exploded, and it traveled to mars. The wave function of the tree (or the wave function of every subatomic particle in the tree) and the air that would make the noise encompasses every possible path that they could take. And each of those possibilities has a chance of being true. Once observed, the wave function collapses into a single possibility. You could say that quantum physics restates my "perception is reality" belief as "reality is perception".

Quantum physics plays havoc with predestination. This raises some interesting possibilities to inject free will back into biology, even if our actions are based entirely on brain activity. Since we're also made of subatomic particles, the substance of our brains and the decisions that we make could also be said to exist in a wave function. When you pass a coworker in the hallway and they say "Hello", you say "Hello" back, do nothing, slap them the in the face, fall over and make a sound, chew your leg off, drop your pants, and every other possibility. However, we don't experience this because we are constantly observing ourselves and those around us, so the wave functions collapse immediately.

Since information is limited to the speed of light, we get to observe ourselves before others do, and collapse our own wave functions. Quantum mechanics is already the Pope of Weird Town, it doesn't really make it that much stranger to think that the observer may in some way be able to choose among those wave functions to affect their collapse. Bam, free will again.

That does leave one interesting question I will leave you with though. We aren't actually observing the chemical reactions in our brains, we're simply observing our own actions. In the experiment, the observers could monitor MRI activity and observe the brain making it's decision seven seconds before the subject acted. In such a situation, if the scientific observers are collapsing the wave function, before the person has become aware of his own thoughts, how does that affect free will?

Recycling Toxins

I recently came across an article which stated that only a few years we may see plastics made from the air pollution byproducts of other manufacturing processes. Being a fan of efficient systems, I think this is a great idea. Here is a graphic to demonstrate the elegance of such a system.



For those who prefer that joke in video form, it's been done. Between material reuse and electricity generating clothing, the future looks like a bright utopia.