When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.Does free will violate the laws of physics?. | Credit: Yuichiro Chino/Getty ImagesYou are currently making a conscious, willful decision to read this article. But physics says every action has a cause. So did you really make this decision as freely as you thought?One of the bedrock philosophical concepts under all of physics is something called causal determinism. It says that every effect has a cause, and that if you know the current state of a system, you can use the power of physics to predict how it behaves. If effects happened without causes, then there wouldn’t be much need for physics. And if we couldn’t predict how systems would behave, then we wouldn’t be very good at our jobs.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementWith this philosophy, physics has made enormous progress in advancing our understanding of the universe, from subatomic quantum systems to the Big Bang. And a part of that universe contains these weird things called brains that have the curious property of consciousness and the ability to freely make decisions.So, at first glance, it seems like our understanding of physics forbids free will. We don’t really have a choice, because if we had perfect knowledge of all the molecules and electrical activity in our brains, then we must be able to determine our choices in advance.But there are three aspects of physics that add some wrinkles to …
