Subatomic particles have free will

If humans have free will, then so do subatomic particles such as electrons, say American mathematicians.

"If experimenters have a certain freedom, then particles have exactly the same kind of freedom," wrote mathematicians John Conway and Simon Kochen, of Princeton University in New Jersey, in a recent paper published in Notices of the AMS. "Indeed, it is natural to suppose that this latter freedom is the ultimate explanation of our own," they said.

... "Conway and Kochen prove that the randomness does not depend on anything. They prove that the outcomes of these quantum random events are really completely independent of anything that has happened in the past," ... The U.S. mathematicians based their deductions on three unassailable theorems, which also happen to rhyme: 'spin' - measuring a quantum property called spin of an elementary particle; 'twin' - that a pair of particles are correlated; and 'min' - that an experimenter's choice of what to measure cannot be communicated faster than the speed of light.

If experimenters are free to choose between experiments - that is, the choice of experiments is not predetermined by past events - then the particle must also decide how to act on the spur of the moment.  ...

via Subatomic particles have free will | COSMOS magazine.

It sounds absurd, but if true ... I believe this would mean the Universe is conscious.   Does not a "will" require consciousness?

What is consciousness? Consciousness is what it is like to have a mental model of yourself.

What is a mental model? It is a representation in your brain of something outside (or inside) of yourself.

How does the brain represent something? Sensory inputs (including thoughts) are stored in long term memory. These memories are the brain's representations, it's models of everything, you, your computer, Mars, the Moon, Captain Kirk, maple syrup... everything you have ever known.

An aware system is one in which the model has sensors which connect it to and cause it to change with the thing that is being modeled.

A self-aware or conscious system is one which feeds back upon itself by having a smaller model of itself modeling the larger external world.  Consciousness is aware and self aware ... and aware it is self aware.

Consensus consciousness may be more than a social phenomena. It may be physical actor.  This idea that we can "manifest" (with a time delay) what we set our minds on, excites me. Still, my scientific training says this is only superstition, that thoughts, by themselves, do not change reality.

And yet... I can not explain the unpredictability of sub atomic particles.   I imagine, rationally, that there must be some as yet undiscovered type of Brownian motion going on... invisible bombardments...