Freedom requires some events that are not causally determined by immediately preceding events, events that are unpredictable by any agency, events involving quantum indeterminacy.

These random events generate alternative possibilities for action.

They are the source of the creativity that adds new information to the universe.

Randomness is the "free" in free will.

Adequate determinism is the "will" in free will.

Random thoughts can lead to adequately determined actions, for which we can take moral responsibility. Thoughts come to us. Actions come from us.

We must admit indeterminism
but not permit it to produce random actions
as Determinists mistakenly fear.

We must also limit determinism
but not eliminate it
as Libertarians mistakenly think necessary.

Evaluation and careful deliberation of all the available possibilities, both ingrained habits and creative new ideas, must help us to "determine" and thus "cause" our actions.

But some event acausality is a prerequisite for any kind of agent causality that is not pre-determined.

When philosophers in the 1920's looked at the newly discovered quantum uncertainty principle as a means of breaking the iron grip of determinism (actually many determinisms), they found it most unsatisfactory.

If my action is the direct consequence of a random event, I cannot feel responsibility. That would be mere indeterminism, as unsatisfactory as determinism. Determinism and indeterminism are the two horns of the dilemma in the standard argument against free will, a logical and philosophical argument that is seriously flawed.

For some philosophers, any indeterminism at all threatens reason itself. Reason seems to require strict causality and perfect certainty for truth.

Arthur Stanley Eddington, a scientist who understood the quantum mechanics, and who hoped it would throw light on the problem of free will, accepted the standard argument and declared "there is no halfway house" between randomness and determinism.

We propose a model of human freedom that is a halfway house between chance and necessity, one that involves both, first indeterminism to generate free alternative possibilities, then adequate determinism to choose, to will one of those possibilities.

Without this freedom there can be no explanation for human creativity, which brings unpredictable new information into the universe, "something new under the sun."

Our mind model invokes quantum uncertainty to provide an "Agenda" of unpredictable thoughts and actions, critical to both freedom and creativity. We call this the "Micro Mind," but it not in a particular location in the brain. The Micro Mind describes the brain's information processing systems, the storage and retrieval of actionable information, communicated by structures small enough to be affected by quantum uncertainty, by quantum and thermal "noise."

The "Macro Mind" examines the agenda and chooses what to do or say based on its character (the result of past actions and feelings about them), its values, and its current feelings and desires. The Macro Mind has evolved to suppress the microscopic low-level noise. It averages over vast numbers of atoms and molecules in a large enough physical structure to be highly predictable - adequately determined - its choices are in practice unaffected by quantum indeterminacy.

Our Cogito mind model uses random noise when it needs it for imagination and creativity, but suppresses noise whenever it needs to for consistent behavior and responsibility.

Each event, as an effect, still has its causes. But some causes are now what ancient philosophers called a causa sui, a cause that includes itself among its causes. This modified or "soft" causality contains the mixture of unpredictability and predictability, of indeterminism and adequate determinism, of acausality and causality, that we need for freedom and creativity on the one hand and responsibility for our actions on the other.

In our history of the free will problem, we have found several great thinkers who have anticipated this two-stage solution to the classical problem, among them William James, Henri Poincaré, Arthur Holly Compton, Karl Popper, Daniel Dennett, Henry Margenau, Robert Kane, Alfred Mele, and Martin Heisenberg.

Mele describes the importance of the temporal sequence quite clearly, though he remains agnostic on the truth of determinism and does not see (as others did not see) a location of indeterminism in the brain that does not compromise agent control.

We also review the conundrum of how we could have done otherwise in identical situations.

We celebrate the first modern philosopher, René Descartes, in naming our mind model, as other psychologists also have, the Cogito. Descartes thought (as did great theologians before him) that he could reason logically to truths about himself, the world, and God. His hubris about the power of Reason undermined reason and philosophy itself, leading to a great fall after David Hume's criticism and Immanuel Kant's desperate attempt to limit Reason to make room for freedom, values, God, and immortality. Only today can we glimpse a path to recovery from the crisis of reason.

The ancient philosophers understood the need for a random element very well. From Aristotle's "accidents" or chance causes to Epicurus' "swerve" (the clinamen), they added the exceptional event that was causa sui, the start of a new causal chain. The Latin word for thinking embodies our mind model in its etymology. Cogito derives from co-agitare, to "shake together." The key concept is that the resulting connections of ideas, and actions based on them, are as unpredictable as when we shake and then roll the dice.

But even in ancient times, chance, and any willed actions involving chance, were attacked as "obscure and unintelligible," terms still in use in the debates today. The Greeks called chance ἄδηλος (unclear, inscrutable, obscure), and ἄλογος (irrational, inexpressible). Aristotle said chance (τύχη) was "obscure to human reason (ἄδηλος ἀνθρωπίνῳ λογισμῷ - Metaphysics, Book XI, 1065a33)

Our Micro Mind is the undetermined source of alternative possibilities, of human creativity, of genuine novelty, something new under the sun, and when this unconscious runs out of control, we'll see it is the way to madness.

Our Macro Mind is the adequately determined will that de-liberates, and chooses among the alternative possibilities based on an individual’s character, values, past actions, and present circumstances. Every action of the Macro Mind creates new information in the mind.

Free will is a combination of microscopic randomness and macroscopic adequate determinism, in a temporal sequence - first chance, then choice.

Determinists and compatibilists have been right about the will, but wrong about freedom.

Libertarians have been right about freedom, but wrong about the will, which must be adequately determined for us to accept moral responsibility.

Randomness without determinism is blind chance.
Determinism without randomness is empty fate.