Experiment to Prove/Disprove Free Will.

We all know that humans are conscious. And we also know that, with a fair bit of certainty, that the brain has no other particles apart from the particles from the Standard Model. This means that either the particles from the Standard Model have to be conscious and our consciousness is just a consciousness of a particular electron or a quark (or some other particle), or it is an emergent phenomenon which is a result of a particular arrangement of those particles. There is no third option here. I personally believe that the first case is true with a very high probability, because any emergent phenomenon is a human creation and is not based on reality. For example, we have a wet towel, but not a wet molecule. Here wetness is an emergent phenomenon, but that is only an abstract property. If there are no humans there, then there is no wetness, just a bunch of water molecules. So saying something as an emergent phenomenon makes no real sense. So, the particles of the standard model are most certainly conscious.

But what about space? To answer this question we have to look into Quantum Field Theory. As per that, the entire universe is made up of fields; one for each fundamental particle. Any particle is just an excitation in this field. There are no physical independent point particles anymore, we have only excitations in these fields and energy can be transferred from one field to another. This explains the process of decay, annihilation and pair production, hawking radiation etc. Now that we know that fields are omnipresent, and we know that our brains are in that field and our cranium has no magical powers to block those fields, the only logical conclusion is that all the universe has to be conscious. At least it has to have the capacity to transfer consciousness because the conscious particles are moving through this space as excitations.

Now, what about free will? Is consciousness just a passive observer or possess free will? Here I propose an experiment. We know that there is brain activity during the thought processes. If there is free will, then this consciousness should be able to create new thoughts that are not part of the existing universe. This means that there must be some change in the velocity of the particles in our brain. Which means a change in energy, which means change in mass. We all know that most of the mass we have is because of the energy stored in the nucleons and not because of the Higgs mechanism (refer to PBS videos on this). This means, if we keep a deep thinker in an isolated chamber, then there should be a minute change in the mass of that person. If the person is in deep sleep then there should be no change or lesser change in the mass. Of course, this violates the principle of conservation of mass-energy, but existence of free will have to do this.

Before worrying about conservation of mass-energy, we need to know that these are only empirical laws, not derived using any mathematical rules. We have big bang where lots of matter got created from nothing. Probably, the mass came from a parallel universe, so we can still not lose sleep over it. The bottom line is that if we have sensitive enough instruments to measure such minute changes in mass, we can prove the existence of free will.