A Full Circle

 One day, when I was about six or seven years old, my mother told me that God knew everything and everything that happened was God's will. 

I thought about it for a while and repeated it to myself: "God knows everything, and everything that happens is God's will." And suddenly I had this realisation that God knew I was going to think that thought, and what's more, it was His will that I did so. And then I realised that this second thought was His will too, and so was this third, and so on. I recall concluding that everything including anyone's thoughts and actions were God's will, and no one except God had any control on any of those, but given God was good, He was going to take care of me. Essentially, at the age of six or seven, I had rejected the notion of 'Libertarian Freewill' without realising it.

As years passed, like everyone else, I too read stories and learnt from teachers and parents that hard work pays off, good deeds are rewarded with good outcomes and so on. In other words, I started believing in Freewill, once again without realising it. And of course, I still believed in God.

At some point in my mid to late teen years I became exposed to the ideas of spirituality and mysticism such as oneness with the Universe and God, how individuals can find God within themselves if they work towards it etc. These ideas were far more intellectually appealing than an external God that controlled everything. So I became a seeker, convinced that if I apply myself, I was certain to find the Universal Truth. Basically, my ideas on Freewill had become diametrically opposite to what they were when I was six or seven although I did not realise it once again. By now I was believing in Freewill to such an extent that I thought it was my choice if I find the ultimate Truth or not.

Years passed, and sometime in my early twenties, influenced by the scientific and sceptical literature available online and some friends with an intellectual bent, I became an agnostic. I no longer believed in God or spirituality or mysticism. I continued to believe in Freewill, however now I knew the choices and their outcomes were modest, and limited to the scientifically possible realm.

It remained so until I happened to read about 'Laplace's Demon' a few years ago. It is this idea by Pierre-Simon Laplace (the same Laplace of the Laplace transforms which at least some of us should vaguely recall from our college/university days) that given Newtonian Mechanics allows us to determine where a body would go (and where it came from) simply by knowing its position and momentum, a sufficiently vast intellect should be able to do it for every single body in the universe - be it a planet or a particle. (Indeed, we now know that there is more that Newtonian Mechanics and Quantum Mechanics offers a lot more possibilities, but we can easily imagine a Schrodinger's demon that can do it for every particle in every branch of the quantum wave function of the universe.) Basically, if we had enough computing power to take a snapshot of the universe at any moment and analyse it, we can precisely determine both the past and the future of the universe.

Given our wills are nothing but thoughts, and thoughts are electro-chemical interactions in the brain, and electro-chemical interactions are ultimately interactions of physical particles which obey laws of physics, a Laplace's (or Schrodinger's) Demon would be able to predict everyone's thoughts and wills. Such a demon will never likely materialise, but one thing is certain: the physical laws state that conditions at the beginning of the universe determined everything that has happened since then, and everything that will happen in the future - including what anyone might think or will. In other words, based on physics, we can reject the notion of Libertarian Freewill.