Here's an explanation of how quantum mechanics works and why it brings forward the fact that there is true randomness. If you don't care about it, just skip this chunk. Unfortunately, quantum mechanics defies some basic assumptions you may have about the world. Most importantly, it defies the the assumption that an object exists even when you're not looking at it and not detecting it. This makes it so things become very crazy when dealing with subatomic particles, such as electrons or photons, since they can't be detected unless they interact with something in a specific way. The reason quantum mechanics breaks that basic assumption can be seen if you understand wave-particle duality. Wave-particle duality just means that sometimes a particle acts like a particle, but other times it acts like a wave. More specifically, when we're not paying attention to a particle, it acts like a wave (so really it's not a particle at all), but when we try to detect it, it ends up suddenly popping up in a random position, and we detect it as if it is a particle. In physics we say that the particle "collapsed" into one position. This makes things very weird, since particles and waves don't act the same. Imagine you are sending a particle from point A to point B. There is wall at point B, and when a particle hits it, you know exactly where on the wall it hit. Simple. But here's the catch: After sending the particle from point A, it acts like a wave, since you haven't actually measured or detected it yet. When the wave arrives at point B and you try to detect it somewhere on the wall, it's as if the wave/particle chooses a random position to be in, and "collapses" into a particle at that position. The particle is more likely to appear where the wave is more intense.Let's say now that there is a wall between point A and point B with two slits in it. You know that you will get different results if the particle acts like a wave while traveling through the slits versus if it acts like a particle. Here's why: if the particle acts like a wave, then it will interfere with itself after going through the slits and create an "interference pattern" on the wall at point B. If the particle acts like a particle, then then it will simply have a 50/50 chance of going through one slit or the other, if it goes through at all. We can verify that the particle acts like a wave by shooting a bunch of particles from point A and seeing where they arrive at point B. This is a real experiment called the double slit experiment. In this experiment, if the particles act like particles, then we will simply see a clump of particles behind each slit. If the particles act like waves, however, we will see the clumps of particles representing the interference pattern of the waves (illustration at the bottom of the post). So the result? The particles form clumps representing the interference pattern. Particles indeed act like waves while we don't measure them. In addition, in order for quantum mechanics to work, the position a particle shows up in must be governed by true randomness, and it is more likely to show up where its wave was more intense, which explains why the particles in this experiment form clumps representing their waves' interference pattern. So there you go. That's why there has to be true randomness if quantum mechanics is correct. The random actions of small particles can then affect what happens on a bigger scale, making the future unpredictable, with many very different possible futures.
The fact that the future is not predetermined is only half way to answering the question of how much power we, conscious beings, have over the future. If the universe functions with randomness, then do beings with consciousness have the ability to actually make decisions? Or are we just part of the randomness of the universe? This is a hard topic that known science can not yet explain. Consciousness is an extremely hard topic to deal with. Just because we are conscious does not mean that our consciousness is directly responsible for our actions. The actions and decisions of conscious beings could simply be the laws of physics doing their work. It's almost disturbing to think that our thoughts and decisions could be nothing more than an illusion, and that all of it is just the laws of physics working. But there is still the possibility that we are thinking our own thoughts and making our own decisions. There just isn't a way to find out yet.
There is one more thing we haven't touched on, which is a theory about the universe that does say that the future is predetermined. The most promising theory that says this is Bohmian mechanics, although it is not nearly as popular as quantum mechanics (Read the part about quantum mechanics if you want to understand this part). Bohmian mechanics is an alternative to quantum mechanics that tries to explain wave-particle duality in a way that does not involve true randomness, and says that a particle always exists as a particle even when we're not paying attention to it. It says that for every particle, there is a "wavefunction" that applies a force on the particle, much like the wave of a particle in quantum mechanics. Particles in slightly different positions could potentially take very different paths because of differences in the force applied by the wavefunction. If we think back to the double slit experiment, slight differences in the particles' starting positions cause the wavefunction to push particles differently. Since the wavefunction is basically a wave, it interferes with itself after going through the slits, and will guide particles into clumps representing the interference pattern. So basically, Bohmian mechanics can accurately explain the universe in a way that doesn't require true randomness. But without randomness, everything has to be predetermined.
...or does it. Consider this one last thought. What if everything was predetermined, except for what conscious beings could contribute to the universe. This makes things really weird, but this may be fun to think about. This idea means that when the universe was young, and conscious organisms hadn't formed yet, everything was predetermined. This means that it was predetermined that conscious organisms came to exist, but after conscious organisms formed, instantly the universe stopped being completely predetermined since the conscious beings were able to make their own decisions and choose how they affected the world around them. This would make it so the universe would become more and more unpredictable as more conscious beings developed in the universe. I shouldn't get ahead of myself, since we don't even know if conscious life exists beyond Earth. Either way, this way of thinking makes the ability of conscious beings to choose how they affect their world seem absurd. But wouldn't it be just sad if everything ever was always predetermined? That is why I like quantum mechanics better then any "deterministic" theory. The idea of true randomness seems to allow for more possibilities of what consciousness could actually be, even though nobody knows really what consciousness is or how it works. Here's one more idea I propose about consciousness. There is true randomness in the universe, except for what happens in a conscious mind. In the sane way that a particle that acts like a wave collapses to a single particle in a random position when measured, a conscious mind can decide where certain particles inside their brain will collapse to, instead of it being random, allowing for conscious beings to think their own thoughts and have quite a lot of control over the future. This idea is also a bit far-fetched, but who wants to admit that we aren't actually thinking our own thoughts, and that the laws of physics are thinking them for us?
What do you think? How much power do we, as conscious beings, have over what happens in the future?
DOUBLE SLIT EXPERIMENT ILLUSTRATION:
This shows how the wave would travel through the two slits and interfere with itself. The white lines on the right indicate where the wave is the most intense, and therefore where the particles will most likely end up (in this case, photons, since light waves are labeled in the picture).
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