Humans have always thought of themselves as the authors of their choices. Each choice, each desire, each act of love or regret is deeply personal. It feels like there is an invisible ‘self’ inside us, consciously creating reality. But now modern neuroscience and physics are beginning to challenge this certainty. If the brain is making decisions before we are even consciously aware of them, then what does free will even mean? But if consciousness is simply the outcome of electrical signals and chemical reactions, why does existence even feel aware of itself? Perhaps the greatest mystery is not whether the universe exists, but why it is capable of questioning its own existence through us. Man has taken free will for granted for centuries, choice appeared to be inseparable from consciousness itself. Modern science, however, has increasingly questioned this assumption. In experiments, neuroscientists have discovered brain activity associated with decisions a few moments before people experienced making them. For many this opened up a disturbing possibility: maybe consciousness isn’t the initiator of decisions but rather just the awareness of them after the fact. Classical physics described the universe as a completely deterministic system, a cosmic mechanism functioning according to the laws of cause and effect. If all particles adhere to the laws of physics, then human thought itself may just be another consequence of previous events leading back to the beginning of the universe.

However, the deterministic........

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