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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
Daniel Boyd
F.H.Bradley
C.D.Broad
Michael Burke
Lawrence Cahoone
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Rudolf Carnap
Carneades
Nancy Cartwright
Gregg Caruso
Ernst Cassirer
David Chalmers
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Tom Clark
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
Austin Farrer
Herbert Feigl
Arthur Fine
John Martin Fischer
Frederic Fitch
Owen Flanagan
Luciano Floridi
Philippa Foot
Alfred Fouilleé
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Bas van Fraassen
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
Frank Jackson
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
Joseph Levine
George Henry Lewes
C.I.Lewis
David Lewis
Peter Lipton
C. Lloyd Morgan
John Locke
Michael Lockwood
Arthur O. Lovejoy
E. Jonathan Lowe
John R. Lucas
Lucretius
Alasdair MacIntyre
Ruth Barcan Marcus
Tim Maudlin
James Martineau
Nicholas Maxwell
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
U.T.Place
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
John Duns Scotus
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Wilfrid Sellars
David Shiang
Alan Sidelle
Ted Sider
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Peter Slezak
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
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

David Albert
Michael Arbib
Walter Baade
Bernard Baars
Jeffrey Bada
Leslie Ballentine
Marcello Barbieri
Gregory Bateson
Horace Barlow
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
Jean Bricmont
Hans Briegel
Leon Brillouin
Stephen Brush
Henry Thomas Buckle
S. H. Burbury
Melvin Calvin
Donald Campbell
Sadi Carnot
Anthony Cashmore
Eric Chaisson
Gregory Chaitin
Jean-Pierre Changeux
Rudolf Clausius
Arthur Holly Compton
John Conway
Jerry Coyne
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
Bernard d'Espagnat
Paul Dirac
Hans Driesch
John Eccles
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Gerald Edelman
Paul Ehrenfest
Manfred Eigen
Albert Einstein
George F. R. Ellis
Hugh Everett, III
Franz Exner
Richard Feynman
R. A. Fisher
David Foster
Joseph Fourier
Philipp Frank
Steven Frautschi
Edward Fredkin
Benjamin Gal-Or
Howard Gardner
Lila Gatlin
Michael Gazzaniga
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
GianCarlo Ghirardi
J. Willard Gibbs
James J. Gibson
Nicolas Gisin
Paul Glimcher
Thomas Gold
A. O. Gomes
Brian Goodwin
Joshua Greene
Dirk ter Haar
Jacques Hadamard
Mark Hadley
Patrick Haggard
J. B. S. Haldane
Stuart Hameroff
Augustin Hamon
Sam Harris
Ralph Hartley
Hyman Hartman
Jeff Hawkins
John-Dylan Haynes
Donald Hebb
Martin Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
John Herschel
Basil Hiley
Art Hobson
Jesper Hoffmeyer
Don Howard
John H. Jackson
William Stanley Jevons
Roman Jakobson
E. T. Jaynes
Pascual Jordan
Eric Kandel
Ruth E. Kastner
Stuart Kauffman
Martin J. Klein
William R. Klemm
Christof Koch
Simon Kochen
Hans Kornhuber
Stephen Kosslyn
Daniel Koshland
Ladislav Kovàč
Leopold Kronecker
Rolf Landauer
Alfred Landé
Pierre-Simon Laplace
Karl Lashley
David Layzer
Joseph LeDoux
Gerald Lettvin
Gilbert Lewis
Benjamin Libet
David Lindley
Seth Lloyd
Werner Loewenstein
Hendrik Lorentz
Josef Loschmidt
Alfred Lotka
Ernst Mach
Donald MacKay
Henry Margenau
Owen Maroney
David Marr
Humberto Maturana
James Clerk Maxwell
Ernst Mayr
John McCarthy
Warren McCulloch
N. David Mermin
George Miller
Stanley Miller
Ulrich Mohrhoff
Jacques Monod
Vernon Mountcastle
Emmy Noether
Donald Norman
Alexander Oparin
Abraham Pais
Howard Pattee
Wolfgang Pauli
Massimo Pauri
Wilder Penfield
Roger Penrose
Steven Pinker
Colin Pittendrigh
Walter Pitts
Max Planck
Susan Pockett
Henri Poincaré
Daniel Pollen
Ilya Prigogine
Hans Primas
Zenon Pylyshyn
Henry Quastler
Adolphe Quételet
Pasco Rakic
Nicolas Rashevsky
Lord Rayleigh
Frederick Reif
Jürgen Renn
Giacomo Rizzolati
A.A. Roback
Emil Roduner
Juan Roederer
Jerome Rothstein
David Ruelle
David Rumelhart
Robert Sapolsky
Tilman Sauer
Ferdinand de Saussure
Jürgen Schmidhuber
Erwin Schrödinger
Aaron Schurger
Sebastian Seung
Thomas Sebeok
Franco Selleri
Claude Shannon
Charles Sherrington
Abner Shimony
Herbert Simon
Dean Keith Simonton
Edmund Sinnott
B. F. Skinner
Lee Smolin
Ray Solomonoff
Roger Sperry
John Stachel
Henry Stapp
Tom Stonier
Antoine Suarez
Leo Szilard
Max Tegmark
Teilhard de Chardin
Libb Thims
William Thomson (Kelvin)
Richard Tolman
Giulio Tononi
Peter Tse
Alan Turing
C. S. Unnikrishnan
Francisco Varela
Vlatko Vedral
Vladimir Vernadsky
Mikhail Volkenstein
Heinz von Foerster
Richard von Mises
John von Neumann
Jakob von Uexküll
C. H. Waddington
John B. Watson
Daniel Wegner
Steven Weinberg
Paul A. Weiss
Herman Weyl
John Wheeler
Jeffrey Wicken
Wilhelm Wien
Norbert Wiener
Eugene Wigner
E. O. Wilson
Günther Witzany
Stephen Wolfram
H. Dieter Zeh
Semir Zeki
Ernst Zermelo
Wojciech Zurek
Konrad Zuse
Fritz Zwicky

Presentations

Biosemiotics
Free Will
Mental Causation
James Symposium
 
Seth Lloyd
Seth Lloyd is a theoretical physicist and computer scientist at MIT with a strong background in mechanical engineering. He calls himself a "quantum mechanic" and is one of the designers of quantum computing systems.

Lloyd's most provocative idea is that the universe is a giant computer. Everything in it, including all living systems, are running one enormous program. This seems to be an extreme form of determinism, with the program an example of the super-intelligence of a Laplace Demon, who can see the complete past and future. But Lloyd is no determinist, he sees that quantum mechanics introduces probabilities and uncertainty.

Lloyd worked with Rolf Landauer at IBM, who extended the ideas of John von Neumann and Leo Szilard, who, along with many other physicists, had connected a physical measurement with thermodynamical irreversibility, that is to say a dissipation of energy and increase in entropy.

The increase in entropy (or decrease in available negentropy, as Leon Brillouin put it), must equal or exceed the increase in information acquired in the measurement, in order to satisfy the second law of thermodynamics. There is an intimate connection of physical things and information, captured in John Wheeler's famous dictum, "It from bit."

Seth Lloyd is quite correct that information ("bits") is physical ("its"). However, unlike things, which are concrete and material. Information is abstract and immaterial. To be sure, bits in a computer are embodied in the logical switches that represent 1's and 0's.

Free Will
In his proposed "Turing Test" for free will, Lloyd says because "quantum mechanics implies that events are intrinsically unpredictable, the ‘pure stochasticity’ of quantum mechanics adds only randomness to decision making processes, not freedom." This is the second part of the standard argument against free will.

By contrast, he says that the theory of computation provides an "intrinsic computational unpredictability" that gives "rise to our impression that we possess free will."

Unpredictability is not freedom, just the inability for anyone, including ourselves, to predict what we are going to do.

Lloyd writes,

The primary scientific issue in the debate over free will is traditionally taken to be the question of whether the world is deterministic or probabilistic in nature . (Whether or not this is indeed the proper question to ask will be discussed in detail below.) In a deterministic world, events in the past fully determine the outcomes of all events in the present and future. Conversely, if the world is probabilistic, then at least some outcomes of current events are neither determined nor caused by events in the past. Determinism is evidently a problem for free will: more than two thousand years ago, Epicurus felt obliged to emend the determinism of Democritus’s atomic picture by adding an occasional probabilistic ‘swerve’ to the motion of atoms, in part to preserve freedom of will. From the seventeenth until the twentieth century, by contrast, most scientists believed that the world was deterministic, for the simple reason that all known physical laws, from Newton’s laws to Maxwell’s equations, were expressed in terms of deterministic differential equations. In such theories, apparently probabilistic behavior arises from lack of knowledge combined with sensitive dependence on initial conditions (‘chaos’) [2]. In a deterministic physical world, an hypothetical being (Laplace’s ‘demon’) that possesses exact knowledge of the past could in principle use the laws of physics to predict the entire future.

From Newton up to the twentieth century, the philosophical debate over free will by and large assumed that the world is deterministic. In such a deterministic world, there are two antagonistic philosophical positions [3]. Incompatibilism claims that free will is incompatible with a deterministic world: since all events, including our decisions, were determined long ago, there is no space for freedom in our choices. Compatibilism, by contrast, asserts that free will is compatible with a derministic world. In contrast to classical mechanics, the theory of quantum mechanics that emerged as the fundamental physical framework at the beginning of the twentieth cnetury predicts that the world is intrinsically probabilistic. Despite Einstein’s opinion that ‘God does not play dice,’ experiment and theory have repeatedly confirmed the probabilistic nature of events in quantum mechanics. For example, the Kochen-Specher theorem [18] shows that certain types of deterministic hidden-variable theories are incompatible with the predictions of quantum mechanics, a result extended by the Conway-Kochen ‘free will theorem’ [19]. (Despite the presence of the phrase ‘free will’ in its title, and the authors’ whimsical assertion that ‘if indeed we humans have free will, then elementary particles already have their own small share of this valuable commodity,’ this theorem is less a statement about free will in the sense discussed in the current paper, and more a statement about the incompatibility of deterministic models of quantum mechanics with special relativity.) At first, it might seem that the probabilistic nature of the underlying physics of the universe implies renders the compatibilism–incompatibilism debate moot. Indeed, when it became clear starting in the mid-nineteen twenties that quantum mechanics was necessarily probabilistic, scientists began to invoke the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics to supply the freedom in free will. In 1928 Arthur Eddington stated [4] that with the ‘advent of the quantum theory . . . physics is no longer pledged to a scheme of deterministic law.’ Consequently, ‘science thereby withdraws its moral opposition to free will.’ Eddington’s book inspired Turing to investigate the connection between quantum mechanics and free will [1]. The way in which quantum mechanics injects chance into the world was analyzed by A.H. Compton [5], whose work on photo-electric cells formed the basis for his notion of a ‘massive switch amplifier’ that could amplify tiny quantum fluctuations to at scale accessible to the brain. Such purely random information resulting from the amplification of quantum fluctuations, Eddington and Compton argued, could then supply the seeds for probabilistic decisions. The Conway-Kochen theorem is the latest in a long line of works that identifies free will with the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics.

But are decisions ‘free’ simply because they are probabilistic? Flipping a coin to make a decision is typically used as a last resort by deciders who are unable to make the decision themselves: the outcome of the coin toss determines the decision, not you. As the twentieth century wended on, it became clear that merely adding randomness did not obvously solve the problem posed by incompatibilism. After all, as the philosopher Karl Popper noted [6], one of they key features of a decision arrived at by the process of free will is that it is NOT random. Eddington and Compton backtracked. By the end of the twentieth century, Steven Pinker could declare confidently [7] that ‘a random event does not fit the concept of free will any more than a lawful one does.’ If determinism robs us of agency, then so does randomness.

For many contemporary scientific opponents of free will, it seems that the problem with free will is not so much the question of determinism vs. probability, but rather the existence of a mechanistic description of the system that is making the decision.

The idea of "naturalism" treats human beings as machines, as purely material things subject to the "laws of nature."

Naturalism is a materialism, indeed an eliminative materialism. This is the idea that there are no ideas and no minds. The immaterial mind is identical to the material brain.

Philosophers who have attempted to explain free will in terms of event causation (for example, Robert Kane, assume that everything is the result of a causal chain of events, some of which are determined, others are probabilistic, uncaused, or "self-caused."

There is nowhere in this picture for a mind that can generate alternative possibilities for action and then evaluate all those possibilities, holding them all in a mind before a deliberation process evaluates them all and selects one. This is the two-stage model of free will.

Lloyd is a member of a group of scientists and philosophers pursuing "digital philosophy," They include Gregory Chaitin, Edward Fredkin, Rudy Rucker, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Stephen Wolfram, and Konrad Zuse.

References
The Universe as a Quantum Computer
A Turing Test for Free Will
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