"Yeah now the title's decided, sounds perfect! Oh God! Here cometh the actual matter. How do I start..Hey, what's the time now?...Oh yeah its 7:30..Gotta finish off this stuff..go home, change, freshen up..yeah yeah..I know ..Com'on now don't deviate, now concentrate. Yeah..how do I start?"
We are unique, aren't we? By we, I don't just mean humans but I refer to every living organism in this Universe sharing one of the most complex and intriguing characteristic property called 'Freewill'. Freewill does go deep.
Let us start with a carrom board. We know the dimensions of the board, say, on the co-ordinate axes.There's a striker of known dimension and mass too, say, placed at some co-ordinate within the board. The board is held perfectly horizontal (On Earth). Now, a force of known magnitude acts at a known point on the striker parallel to the plane of the board sending the striker over the board surface. Assume frictionless surface and no air resistance, perfectly elastic collision with the walls of the board and no loss of momentum consequently. Now, having known the initial position and velocity of the striker, having known the laws that govern its motion, having known that the Newton's Laws of motion are true it is possible to predict its position and velocity at any point in the future.
This is predictability at its best. A phenomenon follows a definite law, and the knowledge of the initial data set helps us estimate the final data set. Here, the striker was just an agent of certainty, a medium facilitating the Law of Motion to physically manifest itself providing the knowledge of its future state. The striker was bound to follow the law and it would have by no means disobeyed, for, the luxury of choice is enjoyed by a lucky few!
This is where life standsout. This is how freewill can change the entire course of a seemingly natural physical phenomenon and also making it completely impossible to predict its course. Choice is the culprit. Choice can change the outcome of any phenomenon. And the only entity that can choose the course of the event, which has the freedom to act on its own, bound to the laws of Universe yet possessing the ability not to follow them, is intelligent life. The term intelligent is necessary because of the fact that freewill is not a luxury shared by all life forms. We humans are at the apex of intelligence in the big pyramid of living beings (atleast on this planet). As we come down to simpler organisms, this particular characteristic property decreases in its magnitude and thus reducing the freedom of choice as well. For example consider a plant. It is a living thing and it does act on its own i.e. it grows, consumes, produces etc. But does it have a choice to 'not grow'?My point is straight here. If two seeds are planted in two different pots with same amount of earth, same quality of earth and going to the extent of saying that the amount of energy available to the two seeds is the same, then the amount of growth of both the seeds into plants would be exactly equal. They don't have a choice to say"I've had enough or I don't feel like eating". They ought to 'eat' whatever comes to them. They ought to survive until energy is available (keeping the age factor aside for a while). But complex organisms unlike the others have a choice at every moment of their survival. A decision is made for every minute action they perform. This moment of decision-making is the cross-road of the event continuum. This is the junction where all laws, all predictability hangs at the mercy of that one decision that will decide the future of this Universe and the irony lies in the fact that the decision follows laws inexplicably dissociated with whatever laws we've discovered, making the future just a Probability.
What makes intelligent life really intelligent is the presence of the Conscious. The conscious is aware of the Universe and of its own existence. The conscious is what differentiates us from the other organisms. We are at the apex of the pyramid of the self-conscious living beings. What I intend to say when I use the phrase "Pyramid of Conscious' is that, as we descend this pyramid, we become continuously aware of the fact that the power of 'Free Will' is directly proportional to the Conscious level. More is the awareness of self-existence, more is the choice to act.
Some times it may well seem that the power of free-will, the result of a self-conscious being, can be so brutal, that no matter what the Equation of Everything may predict, it would break-down hopelessly before the unpredictability of the living. It is like a point of in-adherence, where the Equation of Everything adds an exception ultimately contradicting the very nature of the Equation.
I have a remote, yet strong feeling that, the uncertainty principle, the quantum theory and life are related at some level with respect to the nature of chaos inherent in all of them. Uncertainty principle says, "What you see, you change". It says we will never be able to measure a particle's speed or locate its position, no matter what, because, the very act of 'seeing' changes both the parameters of the status of the particle in both time and space. Quantum theory on the other hand, attaches a probability to every phenomenon in this Universe. It says, the events which we perceive are not the ONLY events to occur as we perceive them. Every event has an infinite number of consequent events bound to it. All the infinite number of events have a definite probability of occurrence. So, if an event 1 leads to another event 2, then event 2 has had the highest probability of occurring. Nevertheless, the rest infinite minus 1 events wouldn't get destroyed, instead, they occur in parallel Universes. Leaving aside the topic of parallel Universes for a while, we shall dwell upon the probabilistic nature of every phenomenon and the role uncertainty plays here. This is in exact coherence with the probabilistic nature of intelligent life; life with Free-will, where unpredictability governs every step it takes towards its future.
