Alive and Dead...part 5

After what seems like ages, I am finally back again with another in this series of posts. I was meaning to write a LOT sooner but with such a crazy schedule, I have not really had the time nor found a topic that interested me enough to blog about. With the semester almost over and the summer "vacation" ( i use quotes cos lets be honest, we grad students dont have vacations, infact as Govi would put it--"we sleep only on national holidays"), i think+hope to have a lot more time to check out interesting ideas and write what i think of them.
I was hoping to turn these "dead and alive" posts to more of a discussion as I branch out into the realm of philosophy and possibly even mysticism and find out what you guys think about things which seem quite obvious but are far from it.
For this post, I decided to talk about the most common and obvious of phenomenon, so trivial that we probably do it every living second of our lives but do not think twice about it. Infact you did it when you chose to read this post. I am talking about Freewill ofcourse. The concept of CHOICE is so simple, yet so powerful. Entwined in this concept is that of destiny and all the baggage it brings. You ask me, what is there to think about this? Its quite obvious isnt it? I can decide to continue reading this post or not and its completely according to me...ME and me alone. But is it? Are you sure, that your choice isnt already influenced or decided upon before you make it? In short, did you really have a choice in the first place??Seems ridiculous to even ask such a question, doesnt it? But think about it. What if the freedom of choosing was merely an illusion?
Confused? Before I explain with one of my favourite examples, I need to put forward the idea that freewill and choice indicates randomness. When you have the ability to go either left or right and the decision is completely upto you and not determined by anything else, your choice is infact random and noone can truly predict with absolute certainity, what you will do. Sounds reasonable?? Now back to the example (ohh boy!! you are gonna love this one!! :) )
Consider a pool table with some red balls placed randomly on it. Now take a blue ball, place it on the table and strike it with the stick. Watch as it hits the red balls and moves around. The movement of the blue ball and the red balls can be completely determined by you using Newton's laws of motions, a bit tedious to do but can be done. The movement of the ball is completely deterministic and its possible to predict it properly for any future time. Now suppose you brought a friend into the room and made him wear glasses which filtered out the red balls and all he saw was the single blue ball, now moving on the pool table in what would appear to him complete random motion. Now according to him, the movement of the blue ball cannot be predicted and in fact it has a free will or the ability to choose what it wants to do, its like it has a "mind of its own" (hmmm I wonder, what else thinks it has mind of its own?? hehe). But you, having knowledge of the whole system of the blue and red balls know that is not true. Can you guys see the whole concept of illusion that I was talking about?
So lets just extend this to the entire universe. A giant leap but nonetheless allowed. If the entire universe is one large quantum mechanical system, then it should infact evolve or change in time deterministically according to something called the Schroedinger equation, i.e. if we knew the necessary components of the equation for the system of the universe, then we should in theory determine what exactly will happen to anyone and everyone in every single point of time, in short chalk out everyone's destiny clearly, one which they cannot avoid ( here you might ask, if I knew my destiny, my future, would I not be able to do something to change it? perhaps you can but then again, you having the power, the ability, the choice to change things might just be another illusion. Mind boggling isnt it??) But then again, it is almost near impossible to determine the parameters needed to solve the required equation for the universe and even if we did, the jury is still out on whether the universe evolves according to this equation or not in the first? (Two of my profs here openly fight on this topic every single time they meet :D ) Many do not think and/or like the idea that the universe behaves deterministically, because then it means you do not really think and make choices but only appear to do so.
Another interesting aspect is that, though I am not sure about this yet, the Schrondinger equation does not differentiate between positive and negative time, which means that if we assume the Big Bang(not the sitcom :D ) as time=0, then it means a "universe" identical to ours at every point in time should have existed before the big bang occurred. A universe before the big bang?? We do not even understand the universe almost immediately after the big bang!! forget about trying to understand one before that!!
So I have said all that I wanted to say or that I am supposed to say. So what do you people think or supposed to?? :D

Gnut
...signing off because I am supposed to??

PS: I am really looking forward to the World Science festival in NYC from June 2nd-6th. They are a few talks on the universe, human brain, what exactly it means to think and understand,etc which I am dying to attend :)