In his laconically named 1637 treatise, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences , René Descartes argued that while a mechanical body could imitate human behaviour if it so wished, true thought (therefore true being) was exclusive to the res cogitans – the thinking substance – which machines could never possess. One wonders if this was taken as a challenge, and (separately) if it was meant to be one. In the centuries to follow, mechanistic fantasies could only further proliferate the living world. Jacques de Vaucanson's grain-kernel-digesting-and-excreting duck from 1764, for instance – deft as it was in its intended simulation – marked the beginning of the hunt for the line between imitation and genuine cognition. An American artist's (incorrect) explanation for how the duck managed to eat and excrete grain. On inspection some half century down the line, a French illusionist concluded the it did not, as...
“The ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything” was never really defined as a question, which is why Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy delights in answering it with “42.” A fittingly nonsensical answer for a fittingly nonsensical question. This is an error that some may deem deliberately obtuse – therefore an error that I will try my best to avoid. To answer a question, it would seem, one's first step must be to ask it. And here is what I ask: Can physics tell us if we have free will? A straightforward question that cannot be answered with nonsense justifiably. But the devil is in the details, and it is the moral onus of the curious to get to them first. Our most capital specimen of a question raises two others of its kind. Who is ‘we’? What is ‘free will’? The former is a subjective to the speaker's context, i.e., something under our control. I take this opportunity to restrict it to the human race. Animals, plants, amoebas and the cup of...