Free will - Part I

I was once in a taxi on my way to Gatwick airport when the traffic on the motorway came to a standstill. The driver turned on the radio to discover what was going on. It transpired that some bloke had decided to kill himself by jumping off a bridge over the road and, to this end, had climbed over the railings lining the bridge. But then he'd had second thoughts and when we tuned in he was dangling there, 10m above the southbound carriageway of the M23, undecided, while negotiators tried to talk him out of it. After about ten minutes listening to the idiot savant fronting Radio One at the time my taxi driver, evidently not a compassionate man, smacked the radio with the palm of his hand and shouted "Jump, you bugger, jump!" I can't remember whether the bugger jumped or not but I caught my flight.

Here's another (approximately) true story. A former colleague of mine bumped into an old friend in the lobby of J.P. Morgan's then headquarters on Wall St, in New York.

"Can't chat," said the friend, "I'm on my way to JFK."

"Why don't we have dinner tonight and you can fly home in the morning instead?" suggested my colleague.

The friend dithered for a while but Janine was persistent and eventually it was agreed that they'd have a girl's night out and reminisce.

The flight that the friend was due to catch, Swissair flight SR 111, departed without her and not long afterwards crashed into the sea near Halifax, killing everyone aboard. According to my colleague, the friend had neglected to call her husband to inform him of her change of plan (no one had Blackberries in those days) and he and her children therefore spent several hours believing she was dead, while she slept off a champagne-induced coma.

Or what about this one? I'm in a restaurant in Primrose Hill with a group of colleagues and my wife. Among the colleagues is a woman whom I'd very much like to sleep with. The party is going well; everyone appears to be having a good time, so I suggest that we all go back to our place and continue the evening there. Raucously, everyone agrees. I order three taxis and engineer it such that the object of my desire and I are eventually the only ones left, waiting for the third taxi. We are both quite tipsy. Beneath the table our knees touch.

What these three (approximately) true stories have in common is that relatively small decisions made in the brains of single individuals in one narrow context had major ramifications for dozens or even thousands of related and unrelated individuals in a much broader context.

A few extra molecules of acetyl choline dribbled into the relevant synapse, or a few withheld, and a body might have smashed through the window of a car bound for Brighton, my colleague's friend would have met with a premature and terrifying death and perhaps I would still be married to my ex-wife.

The question that interests me is this: who made these decisions? Expressed differently, how did the brains in which the decisions crystallised arrive at those decisions? If you think that the answer is either obvious or uninteresting, I put it to you that you ought to reconsider.

To be continued...