REDEFINE the concept of free will? Only a Nobel laureate would have the nerve. Last year, the Dutch physicist Gerard ‘t Hooft announced that the weird effects that spring from quantum mechanics arise from a deeper deterministic reality based on classical physics. People objected that his theory appeared to rob us of free will, and now ‘t Hooft has responded by moving the goalposts. No, we don’t have free will as it is commonly understood, he says – but that’s because the way it is commonly understood is wrong.
‘t Hooft, of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, shared a…
