Clearly, people are subject to the laws of physics. But nothing in physics chooses. Physics needs no strategies or game theory. Its main business is mechanical causation. Physics has no future. Like the best Buddhists, it feels only the forces of the present. Human psychology is different from physics precisely because it evolved to weigh and choose between forces from different possible futures. Physics developed in situations like this: Everything of type X always does Y under conditions Z, where X, Y and Z are mathematically related. And simple scenarios such as: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Some people behaviors are like that. But many are not. Consider Darwin’s observation that “many a Hindoo…has been stirred to the bottom of his soul by having partaken of unclean food.” The same food eaten unknowingly, or by an unbeliever (even an identical twin), wouldn’t cause the same reaction. The story of the food, not the food itself, causes the “soul shaking.” In psychology, the same stimulus often doesn’t cause the same reaction. Unmathematical narrative-like patterns of contingency influence our reactions and decisions. Their flexible, if-then, weakly causal, multifactor kind of logic is different from that typical of the number-struck sciences. Babies use “contingency patterns” to distinguish objects that behave with physics-like regularities from objects with agency. Free will, real or not, changes practical predictability. Too many scientists aren’t as practical as babies. - http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/2013/06/28/the-limits-of-psychophysics-and-physics/