How to Believe in Free Will

Putting aside the question, for the moment, of whether you believe that your destiny, as a human being, is fully in your control, you almost certainly believe that a computer’s, at least, is not. A computer does not control its destiny. It’s answerable to a program. It does only what it’s told to do, and nothing more.

Well, I’m not so sure. And neither, in point of fact, was Alan Turing, who invented the damn things. This wasn’t some sort of woo-woo, proto-singularitarian flight of fancy on his part. It was right there, rather prosaically, in the math: At a certain point, even if you knew the algorithms inside and out, you had to conclude that a certain measure of unpredictability remained.

As with computers, so with life? According to certain contemporary physicists, anyway, yes: No matter how much you know about a given situation, and even if you know everything about it, there are still times you won’t know, can’t know, exactly what’s gonna happen. This is incredible!

So incredible, in fact, I’ve decided it’s Physics Week here at The Big Story newsletter, and that you must read both Charlie Wood’s piece on unpredictability and Lyndie Chiou’s on black holes. Both were originally published by Quanta, from whom WIRED syndicates mind-benders on occasion, and both, in their way, support my general belief that—and you can turn back to this question now—human beings control their own destinies.

Am I trying to say, in other words, that we have free will? Physicists and philosophers, even the ones responsible for these very findings, wouldn’t like that, but why not? If even the most predictable of outcomes—a computer program—is not, in the end, perfectly predictable, something as torturously multifarious as a human life can’t possibly be either. So not believing that life is yours to live? That, I think, is no way to live at all.

P.S. The Big Story newsletter is expanding! Or at least absorbing one of its sister newsletters, WIRED Classics, wherein one of our brilliant research editors, Sam Spengler, mines the archives for a still-relevant Big Story of old. So keep scrolling, people. Or don’t. Your will is your own—free.

As with computers, so with bowling balls. In 2021, longtime WIRED contributor Brendan I. Koerner took a journey through the expansive and unknowable universe inside the core of the bowling ball—the enigmatic main character of a sport that is, according to players, “a physics puzzle so elaborate that it can never be mastered.”

In “One Man’s Amazing Journey to the Center of the Bowling Ball,” Koerner explains the construction of these peculiar spheres in more detail than you might imagine possible. (“Radius of gyration” and “positive axis point” are just some of the terms you’ll encounter). He also offers an affectionate portrayal of one of the sport’s most determined innovators, Mo Pinel. Koerner’s surprisingly moving feature reflects on the everyman’s relationship to physics and how Pinel, with his “bone-deep sense of bowling’s elemental splendor,” initiated an obsession with scientific precision among the sport’s elite. 

Koerner acknowledges that at the end of the day, the most consequential component of bowling is not the balls’ oddly shaped cores but rather the human element. How a ball moves during its path down the lane is primarily determined by the player who threw it. In this regard, physics is more a tool to be harnessed than an oppressor. This week I’d love to hear other examples of humanity’s physics-defying feats. Recount your stories via email or comment below the story. 

On Wednesday, WIRED attempted to answer the question, is there nothing that AI won’t believe? We looked at Google’s unflinchingly gullible AI Overviews: Users have discovered that the feature will deliver, with unearned confidence, a completely fabricated definition for any completely made-up idiom entered into its search bar. WIRED readers took to the comments, offering an array of delightful, previously unknown expressions. Google informed one reader that “It's running hippos,” means a “big chaotic event in a swamp.” And “so a cat , so a dog” apparently suggests that “cats and dogs have distinct temperaments and behaviors, and that one might be a better fit for a particular person or lifestyle than the other.” 

Tell us about your favorite WIRED stories and magazine-related memories. Write to samantha_spengler@wired.com, and include “CLASSICS” in the subject line.