The Importance of Freedom in Life

Freeman Dyson called himself an incurable Tolstoyan, in reference to Leo Tolstoy's experiment with a bottom-up approach to education. He was not merely stating a preference for a certain vision of education, but telling us something about the very nature of things and ourselves. We cannot know in advance what an electron will do, because what it will do is simply speaking, not predetermined but free. This freedom, at even the atomic level, is no mere wishful thinking or speculative hypothesis for Dyson. As he says in our interview today, it's a fact. It's a fact with which our free will deniers and mechanistic modelers and top-down