Free will as an open scientific problem
Cambridge, 2010
Abstract
The metaphysical problem of free will reduces to a specific, empirical question regarding the causal histories of neural events, particularly during “torn decisions” where an agent’s reasons for multiple options are balanced. Philosophical debates concerning compatibilism and conceptual analysis are largely irrelevant to determining whether human beings actually possess free will, as these inquiries address semantic usage rather than the underlying physical reality of human decision-making. If certain decisions are undetermined at the moment of choice—a condition termed TDW-indeterminism—then agents possess a freedom-enhancing variety of authorship and control consistent with libertarianism. This specific form of indeterminism requires that the outcome of a decision is not causally necessitated by prior events, yet the process remains appropriately non-random because it constitutes an intentional act of the agent. Current evidence from quantum mechanics and neuroscience is insufficient to confirm or refute the existence of such indeterminacies in the human brain. Neither a priori reasoning nor existing empirical data justifies a commitment to either determinism or indeterminism at the neural level. Consequently, the existence of libertarian free will is a wide-open scientific problem, and the metaphysical status of agency remains contingent upon future empirical discoveries in neural dynamics and the physical laws governing brain activity. – AI-generated abstract.
Quotes from this work
Whenever you’re trying to discover something about the nature of the world, you can always proceed straight to the point at hand, without having to determine the meaning of some folk expression, by simply introducing some theoretical terms and defining them by stipulation. Thus, for example, if you just want to know what the solar system is like, you can forget about folk terms like ‘planet’ and introduce some new terms with clearly defined meanings. And if you just want to know what human decision-making processes are like, you can simply use terms of art like ‘Humean freedom’ and ‘L-freedom’ and so on and proceed straight to the point at hand, trying to determine which of the various kinds of freedom (or “freedom”) human beings actually possess without first determining the ordinary-language meaning of the folk term ‘free will’. And if you’re in a situation where you already know all the relevant metaphysical facts but don’t know what some folk term means, then you can describe the metaphysical facts using technical terms with stipulated definitions, and so your lack of knowledge of the meaning of the folk term shouldn’t be treated as a genuine ignorance of (nonsemantic) metaphysical facts.