Science Quote by Murray Gell-Mann

Gell-Mann is doing two things at once here: draining a popular fantasy of its glamour, and defending the dignity of physics as something other than a vending machine for metaphysical consolation. The sentence has the restrained impatience of a scientist who has watched “quantum” get repurposed into a cultural permission slip: if atoms are probabilistic, then maybe your choices are too, and maybe that rescues free will from the grim machinery of determinism. He refuses the rescue.

The key move is his phrase “subjective impression.” He grants the phenomenology - we do feel a kind of openness as we decide - but he treats it as data about minds, not about wavefunctions. By calling it “a kind of indeterminacy behavior,” he hints that what we label “free will” might be an emergent pattern: a system complex enough that its own internal predictions are limited, so it experiences its next move as undetermined. That’s a cognitive story, not a quantum one.

Context matters: coming from a Nobel-winning architect of quarks, this is also boundary-setting. Quantum mechanics already has enough interpretive fog; stapling it to agency is, in his view, category error plus wishful thinking. Randomness isn’t freedom anyway. If your decisions were genuinely quantum-random, you wouldn’t be more responsible; you’d be less intelligible.

The subtext is almost managerial: stop laundering human meaning through hard science. If you want to explain free will, look to neuroscience, psychology, computation, and social context - not to the spooky romance of indeterminacy at the bottom of reality.