Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal The Physicist Who Proved Free Will Using Thermodynamics
Why Physics Proves You Can Never Predict Your Own Future and That's Freedom
Free will emerges from a fundamental physical limitation: no system, including perfect predictors or even a Laplacian demon, can in principle predict its own next action accurately.
This is due to self-referential paradoxes and the structure of relativity – specifically, the information available in an event's past light cone never suffices to determine its future with certainty. Predictive systems that try to forecast their own outputs run into logical impossibilities that prevent accurate predictions.
This inherent unpredictability opens the door for real agency, allowing organisms like humans, with rich internal information processing and memory, to constitute themselves over time by their choices. Jenann Ismael explains that free will thus is rooted in physics, not an illusion, as it depends on the physical impossibility of complete self-prediction, coupled with thermodynamic asymmetries enabling organisms to act from internally curated information.
Limits of Self-Prediction
- No perfect deterministic system can predict its own next action without failure due to logical impossibility.
- This inherent limitation creates fundamental unpredictability within physical deterministic models.
Relativity Limits Determinism
- In relativity, past light cones never contain enough information to predict future events with certainty.
- This makes determinism impossible in a universe that respects causal structures of relativity.
