Free Will, Destiny and D-Will

While delivering a lecture in New York on Jan 10, 1896, Vivekananda said:

There cannot be any such thing as free will. The very words are a contradiction, because will is what we know, and everything that we know is within our universe. Everything within our universe is moulded by the conditions of space, time, and causation. Everything that we know, or can possibly know, must be subject to causation, and that which obeys the law of causation cannot be free.

The debate between Free Will and Destiny has been going on for ages and the question is still unresolved. Every now and then we read the news of someone having found a proof or a convincing argument in favor of one of these two dichotomies of nature. And then after some time, somebody else finds a flaw in the proof or a counter-example to the convincing argument, and the battle continues. Of all the arguments and counter-arguments that I have heard or read so far, the one by Vivekananda seems most convincing.



The debate between Free Will and Destiny is not merely restricted to philosophical considerations. The personality and overall outlook of a person depends a lot on which one of these two he thinks is the truth. If a person believes in Free Will, then he takes whole responsibility for all that happens in his life. If a person believes in Destiny, he accepts that he is a mere machine and has no role to play in whatever happens to him or to others. And if the consequences of an idea on individual lives can be so profound, it surely has much more important consequences for society as a whole. Societies that accept Free Will are very different from societies that accept Destiny. Societies where people take responsibility for their actions are usually found to be much more developed and prosperous compared to the ones that believe in Destiny.

In the 20th century, the question between Free Will and Destiny took a whole new turn with the advent of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics proposed that the microscopic world of electrons and protons is not deterministic and obeys the predictions of probabilistic prescriptions. And these predictions of quantum mechanics agreed very well with experimental observations. This gave rise to a whole new set of arguments in favor of Free Will and it seemed that the age-old debate was going to be settled soon. However, a lot of physicists were not very happy with a probabilistic prescription for reality and there was, and still is, an ongoing effort to come up with a deterministic theory that explains the predictions of quantum mechanics.

From the mathematical point of view, Free Will is a random process and Destiny is deterministic process. However, this simple definition of Free Will is very misleading and has led to a lot of confusion in the past. In the strict sense, according to Free Will, human actions are not just any arbitrary random process, but a random process consisting of a set of independent random variables. In other words, Free Will states that human actions/choices at a present time are totally independent of human actions/choices at any past time. And Destiny states that actions/choices at a present time are completely determined by human actions/choices at any past time. These two concepts are two sides of the river of reality. The truth lies in the middle.

As Vivekananda states and as all scientists believe, causation is a prime ingredient of nature. Thus, if we believe in causation, there cannot really be a Free Will, as per the arguments of the quote above. However, this does not mean a victory for Destiny. Reality is still a random process, but where the set of random variables are dependent. In other words, our actions/choices at the present moment are not totally "free" but they are also not completely determined by our past actions/choices. We can choose now, but our choices are dependent on our past choices in a non-deterministic way. Thus, the important point to note is that:

We do not have "Free-Will", but we still have "D-will".
D=Dependent

Though the above arguments sound convincing, there is one piece of the puzzle that is still missing. It is not hard to accept that there is no such thing as a completely free and independent act of will. However, to be able to say that there is still an act of will (dependent randomness), we have to have a convincing argument against the world being a deterministic process. And as of now, there is no convincing argument that shows the absence of determinism. However, in a very interesting paper published in 1979, it was shown that it is possible to obtain a probabilistic Markov process from deterministic dynamics without any loss of information. In other words, there is a representation where certain deterministic systems are indistinguishable from probabilistic prescriptions! Thus, there is a very thin line (at best) between determinism and purely random behavior.