Day 3: the Free Will

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

France, Rousseau

Man thinks, God laughs.

Unknown

Most of us think we are free because we have choices to be or not to be, the key here is how does a choice being made. more specifically, what really happened in our brains when we were making a choice?

ARE WE FREE TO MAKE A CHOICE? (photo source)

For example, I "choose" to drink when I am thirsty, I "choose" to put on more clothes since it's getting cold, and I "choose" to be a good student at school because my mom taught me to be in this way when I was a kid.... It seems every decision you made is due to some reasons that you might not even aware, there are motivations for your every thought and action. It is sad to believe that we are just like kind of complicate machines that created by something which is far beyond us in a regular world.


Maybe free means randomness. All the human beings are matter-based and made of molecules, our memories are the connecting patterns of nerve cells, our senses are the reactions of our brains to the electrical signals, and our thinking is also a kind of nerve activities. What if we know everything about molecules and the connections amount them? So far, quantum physics tells us that could be described by probabilities theoretically, moreover in mathematics, even a simple determined differential equations system could lead to chaos, this imply us to think our world might be a huge system fulled of chaos and probabilities with some sort of order, so are our minds.

An example from John D. Norton. The ball on the top may start sliding down in any direction randomly. the same things happen all the time in the real world. (photo source)

A chaotic solution to the Lorenz Equations. It looks like a butterfly and it's unpredictable. (photo source)

Nature science are just math models which describe and predict objects, they are accurate but they are not the truth for they are modifying all the time. Maybe somehow it turns out to be determined in a deeper level. Free will is just illusion in our minds. We think we have free wills because there is no choice, just like I have to be here writing this post otherwise you won't be there reading these words. 

But don't worry, the world is still open to us even it has been written.