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Core Concepts

Actualism
Adequate Determinism
Agent-Causality
Alternative Possibilities
Causa Sui
Causal Closure
Causalism
Causality
Certainty
Chance
Chance Not Direct Cause
Chaos Theory
The Cogito Model
Compatibilism
Complexity
Comprehensive   Compatibilism
Conceptual Analysis
Contingency
Control
Could Do Otherwise
Creativity
Default Responsibility
De-liberation
Determination
Determination Fallacy
Determinism
Disambiguation
Double Effect
Either Way
Enlightenment
Emergent Determinism
Epistemic Freedom
Ethical Fallacy
Experimental Philosophy
Extreme Libertarianism
Event Has Many Causes
Frankfurt Cases
Free Choice
Freedom of Action
"Free Will"
Free Will Axiom
Free Will in Antiquity
Free Will Mechanisms
Free Will Requirements
Free Will Theorem
Future Contingency
Hard Incompatibilism
Idea of Freedom
Illusion of Determinism
Illusionism
Impossibilism
Incompatibilism
Indeterminacy
Indeterminism
Infinities
Laplace's Demon
Libertarianism
Liberty of Indifference
Libet Experiments
Luck
Master Argument
Modest Libertarianism
Moral Necessity
Moral Responsibility
Moral Sentiments
Mysteries
Naturalism
Necessity
Noise
Non-Causality
Nonlocality
Origination
Paradigm Case
Possibilism
Possibilities
Pre-determinism
Predictability
Probability
Pseudo-Problem
Random When?/Where?
Rational Fallacy
Reason
Refutations
Replay
Responsibility
Same Circumstances
Scandal
Science Advance Fallacy
Second Thoughts
Self-Determination
Semicompatibilism
Separability
Soft Causality
Special Relativity
Standard Argument
Supercompatibilism
Superdeterminism
Taxonomy
Temporal Sequence
Tertium Quid
Torn Decision
Two-Stage Models
Ultimate Responsibility
Uncertainty
Up To Us
Voluntarism
What If Dennett and Kane Did Otherwise?

Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
Rogers Albritton
Alexander of Aphrodisias
Samuel Alexander
William Alston
Anaximander
G.E.M.Anscombe
Anselm
Louise Antony
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
David Armstrong
Harald Atmanspacher
Robert Audi
Augustine
J.L.Austin
A.J.Ayer
Alexander Bain
Mark Balaguer
Jeffrey Barrett
William Barrett
William Belsham
Henri Bergson
George Berkeley
Isaiah Berlin
Richard J. Bernstein
Bernard Berofsky
Robert Bishop
Max Black
Susanne Bobzien
Emil du Bois-Reymond
Hilary Bok
Laurence BonJour
George Boole
Émile Boutroux
F.H.Bradley
C.D.Broad
Michael Burke
Lawrence Cahoone
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Rudolf Carnap
Carneades
Ernst Cassirer
David Chalmers
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Randolph Clarke
Samuel Clarke
Anthony Collins
Antonella Corradini
Diodorus Cronus
Jonathan Dancy
Donald Davidson
Mario De Caro
Democritus
Daniel Dennett
Jacques Derrida
René Descartes
Richard Double
Fred Dretske
John Dupré
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
Epictetus
Epicurus
Herbert Feigl
Arthur Fine
John Martin Fischer
Frederic Fitch
Owen Flanagan
Luciano Floridi
Philippa Foot
Alfred Fouilleé
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Michael Frede
Gottlob Frege
Peter Geach
Edmund Gettier
Carl Ginet
Alvin Goldman
Gorgias
Nicholas St. John Green
H.Paul Grice
Ian Hacking
Ishtiyaque Haji
Stuart Hampshire
W.F.R.Hardie
Sam Harris
William Hasker
R.M.Hare
Georg W.F. Hegel
Martin Heidegger
Heraclitus
R.E.Hobart
Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Shadsworth Hodgson
Baron d'Holbach
Ted Honderich
Pamela Huby
David Hume
Ferenc Huoranszki
William James
Lord Kames
Robert Kane
Immanuel Kant
Tomis Kapitan
Walter Kaufmann
Jaegwon Kim
William King
Hilary Kornblith
Christine Korsgaard
Saul Kripke
Thomas Kuhn
Andrea Lavazza
Christoph Lehner
Keith Lehrer
Gottfried Leibniz
Jules Lequyer
Leucippus
Michael Levin
George Henry Lewes
C.I.Lewis
David Lewis
Peter Lipton
C. Lloyd Morgan
John Locke
Michael Lockwood
E. Jonathan Lowe
John R. Lucas
Lucretius
Alasdair MacIntyre
Ruth Barcan Marcus
James Martineau
Storrs McCall
Hugh McCann
Colin McGinn
Michael McKenna
Brian McLaughlin
John McTaggart
Paul E. Meehl
Uwe Meixner
Alfred Mele
Trenton Merricks
John Stuart Mill
Dickinson Miller
G.E.Moore
Thomas Nagel
Otto Neurath
Friedrich Nietzsche
John Norton
P.H.Nowell-Smith
Robert Nozick
William of Ockham
Timothy O'Connor
Parmenides
David F. Pears
Charles Sanders Peirce
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
Plato
Karl Popper
Porphyry
Huw Price
H.A.Prichard
Protagoras
Hilary Putnam
Willard van Orman Quine
Frank Ramsey
Ayn Rand
Michael Rea
Thomas Reid
Charles Renouvier
Nicholas Rescher
C.W.Rietdijk
Richard Rorty
Josiah Royce
Bertrand Russell
Paul Russell
Gilbert Ryle
Jean-Paul Sartre
Kenneth Sayre
T.M.Scanlon
Moritz Schlick
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Wilfrid Sellars
Alan Sidelle
Ted Sider
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
J.J.C.Smart
Saul Smilansky
Michael Smith
Baruch Spinoza
L. Susan Stebbing
Isabelle Stengers
George F. Stout
Galen Strawson
Peter Strawson
Eleonore Stump
Francisco Suárez
Richard Taylor
Teilhard de Chardin
Kevin Timpe
Mark Twain
Peter Unger
Peter van Inwagen
Manuel Vargas
John Venn
Kadri Vihvelin
Voltaire
G.H. von Wright
David Foster Wallace
R. Jay Wallace
W.G.Ward
Ted Warfield
Roy Weatherford
C.F. von Weizsäcker
William Whewell
Alfred North Whitehead
David Widerker
David Wiggins
Bernard Williams
Timothy Williamson
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Susan Wolf

Scientists

Michael Arbib
Walter Baade
Bernard Baars
Jeffrey Bada
Leslie Ballentine
Gregory Bateson
John S. Bell
Mara Beller
Charles Bennett
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Susan Blackmore
Margaret Boden
David Bohm
Niels Bohr
Ludwig Boltzmann
Emile Borel
Max Born
Satyendra Nath Bose
Walther Bothe
Hans Briegel
Leon Brillouin
Stephen Brush
Henry Thomas Buckle
S. H. Burbury
Donald Campbell
Anthony Cashmore
Eric Chaisson
Gregory Chaitin
Jean-Pierre Changeux
Arthur Holly Compton
John Conway
John Cramer
Francis Crick
E. P. Culverwell
Antonio Damasio
Olivier Darrigol
Charles Darwin
Richard Dawkins
Terrence Deacon
Lüder Deecke
Richard Dedekind
Louis de Broglie
Stanislas Dehaene
Max Delbrück
Abraham de Moivre
Paul Dirac
Hans Driesch
John Eccles
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Gerald Edelman
Paul Ehrenfest
Albert Einstein
Hugh Everett, III
Franz Exner
Richard Feynman
R. A. Fisher
David Foster
Joseph Fourier
Philipp Frank
Steven Frautschi
Edward Fredkin
Lila Gatlin
Michael Gazzaniga
GianCarlo Ghirardi
J. Willard Gibbs
Nicolas Gisin
Paul Glimcher
Thomas Gold
A. O. Gomes
Brian Goodwin
Joshua Greene
Jacques Hadamard
Mark Hadley
Patrick Haggard
J. B. S. Haldane
Stuart Hameroff
Augustin Hamon
Sam Harris
Hyman Hartman
John-Dylan Haynes
Donald Hebb
Martin Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
John Herschel
Art Hobson
Jesper Hoffmeyer
E. T. Jaynes
William Stanley Jevons
Roman Jakobson
Pascual Jordan
Ruth E. Kastner
Stuart Kauffman
Martin J. Klein
William R. Klemm
Christof Koch
Simon Kochen
Hans Kornhuber
Stephen Kosslyn
Ladislav Kovàč
Leopold Kronecker
Rolf Landauer
Alfred Landé
Pierre-Simon Laplace
David Layzer
Joseph LeDoux
Benjamin Libet
Seth Lloyd
Hendrik Lorentz
Josef Loschmidt
Ernst Mach
Donald MacKay
Henry Margenau
James Clerk Maxwell
Ernst Mayr
John McCarthy
Warren McCulloch
George Miller
Stanley Miller
Ulrich Mohrhoff
Jacques Monod
Emmy Noether
Alexander Oparin
Abraham Pais
Howard Pattee
Wolfgang Pauli
Massimo Pauri
Roger Penrose
Steven Pinker
Colin Pittendrigh
Max Planck
Susan Pockett
Henri Poincaré
Daniel Pollen
Ilya Prigogine
Hans Primas
Adolphe Quételet
Jürgen Renn
Juan Roederer
Jerome Rothstein
David Ruelle
Tilman Sauer
Jürgen Schmidhuber
Erwin Schrödinger
Aaron Schurger
Claude Shannon
Charles Sherrington
David Shiang
Herbert Simon
Dean Keith Simonton
B. F. Skinner
Lee Smolin
Ray Solomonoff
Roger Sperry
John Stachel
Henry Stapp
Tom Stonier
Antoine Suarez
Leo Szilard
Max Tegmark
William Thomson (Kelvin)
Giulio Tononi
Peter Tse
Vlatko Vedral
Heinz von Foerster
John von Neumann
John B. Watson
Daniel Wegner
Steven Weinberg
Paul A. Weiss
John Wheeler
Wilhelm Wien
Norbert Wiener
Eugene Wigner
E. O. Wilson
Stephen Wolfram
H. Dieter Zeh
Ernst Zermelo
Wojciech Zurek
Konrad Zuse
Fritz Zwicky

Presentations

Biosemiotics
Free Will
Mental Causation
James Symposium

 
The Physics of Free Will
For information philosopy, the classical problem of reconciling free will with physical determinism is now seen to have been the wrong problem. The real problem is reconciling free will with indeterminism. The physical world is fundamentally undetermined, it began in chaos and remains chaotic and random at the atomic scale (as well as some macroscopic regions of the cosmos).
Even for large objects, the laws of physics are statistical laws. We have known this since Ludwig Boltzmann's work in 1877. Statistical physics was brilliantly confirmed at the level of atomic collisions by Max Born in 1926, and by Werner Heisenberg in 1927, with his quantum mechanical uncertainty principle. Unfortunately, antipathy to chance led many prominent physicists, then and now, to deny indeterminism and cling to a necessitarian deterministic physics.
Biologists knew even earlier, from Charles Darwin's work in 1859, that chance was the driver for evolution and so chance must be a real part of the universe. Indeed, it is known that quantum collisions of high-energy radiation with the macromolecules carrying genetic information create mutations that are a source of variation in the gene pool.
Charles Sanders Peirce, strongly influenced by Darwin, was the greatest philosopher to embrace chance, and he convinced his friend William James of it. James described the role of chance in free will in his essay, The Dilemma of Determinism.
Information philosophy has identified the cosmic creative processes (we call them "ergodic") that can overcome the chaotic tendency of indeterministic atomic collisions and create macroscopic, information-rich, structures. When these emergent structures are large enough, like the sun and planets, their motions become very well ordered and incredibly stable over time.
DNA has maintained its informational stability for nearly four billion years by adding error detection and correction processes.
Early Greeks like Anaximander saw the universe as a "cosmos" and imagined laws of nature that would explain the cosmos. Later the Stoic physicists identified these laws of nature with laws of God, proclaimed nature to be God, and said both were completely determined.
For the Greeks, the heavens became the paradigm of perfection and orderly repetitive motions without change. The sublunary world was the realm of change and decay. When, two thousand years later, Isaac Newton discovered apparently perfectly accurate dynamical laws of motion for the planets, he seemed to confirm a deterministic universe. But as Newton knew, and as Peirce and later Karl Popper were to argue, we never had observational evidence to support the presumed perfection. The physical laws had become a dogma of determinism.
Why is quantum uncertainty involved in the shaking together (co-agitare) of our agenda items, the real alternative possibilities for thought or action that allow us to say we "could have done otherwise?" There are three important reasons:
  • Before quantum uncertainty, many philosophers, mathematicians, and statistical scientists argued that chance was just a name for our ignorance of underlying deterministic processes. They denied the existence of real chance in the universe.

  • As soon as quantum mechanics was established in the 1920's, first scientists and then philosophers began claiming that quantum indeterminism could explain free will. We will look briefly at their proposed explanations. After a few years thought, the scientists generally qualified their enthusiasm or reported admissions of failure. Libertarian philosophers have been reluctant to give up on quantum indeterminism.

  • Quantum uncertainty remains the best explanation for breaks in the causal chain of strict determinism. But attempts to use the strange non-intuitive aspects of quantum mechanics - such as unpredictable quantum jumps between energy levels, "collapse" of the wave function in physical measurements, non-local behavior of particles that have become "entangled," spontaneous decay of "metastable" states, etc. - as models for the decision process have been hopeless failures. We must identify the critical aspect of quantum mechanical uncertainty that makes an "intelligible" contribution to human freedom while preserving moral responsibility.

Neuroscientists have doubted we could ever locate a randomness generator in the brain. It needs to be small enough to be susceptible to microscopic quantum phenomena, yet capable of affecting the large macromolecular structures like neurons. Let's look at some of the proposals for quantum randomness in the brain.


Probably the first scientist to connect quantum uncertainty to free will was Arthur Stanley Eddington, who until 1927 (in his Gifford Lectures) was a staunch supporter of physical determinism. He then said in 1928 with the "advent of the quantum theory that physics is no longer pledged to a scheme of deterministic law." "We may note that science thereby withdraws its moral opposition to free will."
Eddington's critics accused him of confusing "free" electrons with human freedom. And a decade later, he backed away from quantum randomness as an explanation. He reluctantly concluded there is no "halfway house" between randomness and determinism - an echo of Hume's "no medium betwixt chance and an absolute necessity."
In 1929 Neils Bohr described his views of "complementarity" in the Fundamental Principles underlying the Description of Nature. He applied complementarity to life and organic nature, to mind and body, to subject and object, and, most importantly, to free volition and causality. Although his ideas are vaguely stated, we can see the dialectical reconciling of chance and determinism that goes back to Hegel, James, and Poincaré and forward to Compton, Gomes, Popper, Margenau, and Eccles.
Arthur Holly Compton had shown in 1922 that photons (X-rays) could collide with electrons, showing both matter and radiation had wave-particle properties. In 1931 he proposed that photoelectric cells could work as amplifiers of random quantum events and provide room for human freedom.

Compton's naive model for free will came to be known as the massive switch amplifier. It was open to the ancient criticism that we can not take responsibility for random actions caused by chance. Compton defended the amplifier, but like Eddington, later denied he was trying to show that human freedom was a direct consequence of the uncertainty principle.

If physics were the sole source of our information, he said, we should expect men's actions to follow certain (sic) rules of chance. He said in 1957 that "When one exercises freedom, by his act of choice he is himself adding a factor not supplied by the [random] physical conditions and is thus himself determining what will occur."

Compton was probably a dualist who thought mind was a separate substance. Other scientists who relied on quantum uncertainty to provide alternate possibilities, to be selected among by a non-physical mind, were John Eccles and Henry Margenau.


Our Cogito model simply identifies the source of randomness as the inevitable noise, both thermal noise and quantum noise, that affects both proper storage of information and accurate retrieval of that information at later times. These read/write errors are an appropriately random source of unpredictable new ideas and alternative action possibilities.
We need not look for tiny random-noise generators and amplifiers in specific parts of the brain, any more than the homunculi sometimes evoked by philosophers to parody an internal free agent like a Maxwell's Demon of the mind.
If the Micro Mind is a random generator of frequently outlandish and absurd possibilities (think of the unconscious and the Freudian id), the complementary Macro Mind is a macroscopic structure so large that quantum effects are neglible. This is the critical apparatus that makes predictable - and adequately determined - decisions based on our character and values. Thus we can feel fully responsible for our choices, morally and legally.
Philosophers of Mind, whether hard determinist or compatibilist, should recognize this Macro Mind as everything we need to make a carefully reasoned choice that provides moral responsibility.
But now it is clear that our choices include self-generated random possibilities for thought and action that no external agent, natural or supernatural, and not even ourselves looking internally, can predict.
Our Cogito model gives the determinists what they say they want, an intelligible account of free will in which our decisions are adequately determined, yet completely free and sometimes unpredictable by any external agent and even by ourselves some of the time. We are unpredictably creative.
For Teachers
For Scholars
"As it has oftren been remarked, a few light quanta are sufficient to produce a visual impression." (Neils Bohr, Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature, p.117)

Chapter 4.3 - The Cogito Chapter 4.5 - The Biology of Free Will
Part Three - Value Part Five - Problems
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