Interestingly, the quantum theory of information adds a novel twist to this millennia-old question of determinism versus randomness. This question is not just important for our understanding of reality, it is also important to us on a very personal level. The answer to this impacts on whether there is any room for genuinely free action in an ordered and structured Universe like ours. lf the laws of reality govern everything, then even our actions would be subjugated and determined by them. This of course leaves us no room for the human element we call 'free will'- a property that we strongly feel distinguishes us from non living matter (and other animals). It is also seen as the basis of our consciousness.
Most of us in the West feel that determinism cannot completely govern reality because we are certain that we have free will, though what exactly this amounts to is far from uncontroversial. For the sake of discussion, let us define free will as the capacity for persons to control their actions in a manner not imposed by previous events, i.e. as containing some element of randomness as well as some element of determinism. So, if we accept the notion that we do indeed have free will, then we are already, in some sense, entertaining the idea that there maybe a random element to reality (obviously not all elements of reality can be random, because this too would exclude any role for free will).
This still raises an intriguing question, simply because either of the two possible answers -'yes we do have free will', or 'no we don't' - seem to lead to a contradiction. For example, suppose you answer with 'yes, we have free will'. How would you demonstrate the validity of this statement? You would need to act in a way that would not be predetermined by anything. But how can this ever be, when whatever you do, can, in fact, be predetermined by something? To further qualify this argument, say you decide to act out of character, e.g. having an introverted personality you decide to start a conversation with a complete stranger on the street. But, the very fact that you decided to act contrary to your usual predisposition, seems itself to be fully predetermined. It is simply so by the fact that you determined that you would act out of character to prove free will. In this case perhaps in trying to prove free will, you are more likely to demonstrate that actually you have none. Your emotions could have been controlled by some outside factors which lead you to the conclusion that you must act out of character. If they were, all you are really trying to do is deterministically fight determinism, which is by definition a deterministic process!
The considerable difficulty in demonstrating free will conclusively lead us to postulate that perhaps we cannot have it. But this answer feels completely contrary to the whole of human psychology. Can nothing good that I do be attributed to me? Is it all predetermined by my genes or my history or my parents or social order or the rest of the universe? Even worse, we tend to reward people for doing good deeds and punish them for bad ones. This would seem to be completely misconceived if humans did indeed not have any free will. How can you punish someone for doing something when they are not free to do otherwise? Is our whole moral and judicial system based on the illusion of free will? This just feels wrong, although there is no logical reason why free will is necessary.
That we seem to have no way of proving that there is freewill was poetically stated by the famous biologist Thomas Henry Huxley: 'What proof is there that brutes are other than a superior race of marionettes, which eat without pleasure, cry without pain, desire nothing, know nothing, and only simulate intelligence?'
Free will lies somewhere between randomness and determinism which seem to be at the opposite extremes in reality. It's clear that neither pure randomness or pure determinism would leave any room for free will. If the world is completely random, then by definition we have no control over what will happen, and if the world is completely deterministic we also similarly have no control over what will happen as it would all be pre-scripted. So you are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
But are randomness and determinism actually opposite extremes when it comes to defining reality? Are they mutually exclusive, meaning that they cannot both exist within the same framework? Our latest model of physics, quantum theory suggests that there is a way of combining the two. Every quantum event is fundamentally random, yet we find that large objects behave deterministically. How can this be?
The answer is that sometimes when we combine many random things, a more predictable outcome can emerge. This may seem paradoxical at first (shouldn't lots of random things give you something even more random?) but this is not necessarily the case.
.
