The Question of Free Will

Throughout the ages, people have debated the question of whether we have much of a choice in the actions we take. While we seem to have the appearance of Free Will, sometimes we also seem to be bound to our individual fates.

I’m excited to see James Clerk Maxwell join in the conversation. The Life of James Clerk Maxwell includes an essay he shared with several of his friends in February, 1893. It’s called “Does the progress of Physical Science tend to give any advantage to the opinion of Necessity (or Determinism) over that of the Contingency of Events and the Freedom of the Will?”

He talks about how metaphysics and philosophy are influenced by advancements in the physical sciences. Then, he provides the following examples, which are as relevant today as during his time.

1. Because energy is neither created nor destroyed, “… the soul of an animal is not, like the mainspring of a watch, the motive power of the body, but that it’s function is rather that of a steersman of a vessel,—not to produce, but to regulate and direct the animal powers.”
2. “… the most important effect of molecular science on our way of thinking will be that it forces on our attention the distinction between two kinds of knowledge, which we may call for convenience the Dynamical and Statistical.” This reminds of Einstein’s claim that “God does not play dice with the universe.” And Maxwell considers this before anyone began to understand quantum mechanics!
3. Increasing entropy can be thought of as a tendency toward disorder. Maxwell recognizes this as an “arrow of time”. He says, “There may be other cases in which the past, but not the future, may be deducible from the present. Perhaps the process by which we remember past events, by submitting our memory to analysis, may be a case of this kind.”
4. He also considers the ideas that have led us to “chaos theory”. He says, “… when an infinitely small variation in the present state may bring about a finite difference in the state of the system in a finite time, the condition of the system is said to be unstable.” We cannot predict the future state of such systems.

So, what is his conclusion? He says, “… the promotion of natural knowledge may tend to remove that prejudice in favour of determinism which seems to arise from assuming that the physical science of the future is a mere magnified image of that of the past.” He’s saying that our understanding of nature changes with time.

During Newton’s time, people imagined the universe works like a clock.

“We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes.”

— Pierre-Simon Laplace

Maxwell is saying that this view is no longer consistent with how physics has evolved. Our improved understanding of nature does not preclude one from taking the idea of Free Will seriously.

I love how Maxwell doesn’t overstate his case. He’s comfortable with ambiguity. After a lifetime of significant work in physics, he knows there is more to our world and more to life than we can easily explain.