Freedom of human action requires the randomness of absolute unpredictability, yet the conscious knowledge that we are determined to be responsible for our choices.

Freedom requires some events that are not caused by immediately preceding events, events that are unpredictable by any agency, events involving quantum uncertainty. These random events create alternative possibilities for action.

Randomness is the "free" in free will.

Freedom also requires an adequately determined will that chooses or selects from those alternative possibilities. There is effectively nothing uncertain about this choice.

Adequate determinism is the "will" in free will.

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. For some philosophers, any indeterminism 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, 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 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." The Micro Mind has structures small enough to be affected by quantum uncertainty. A "Macro Mind" examines the agenda and chooses what to do or say based on its character (past actions and feelings) and its values. The Macro Mind is a large enough physical structure to be highly predictable - adequately determined - its choices are in practice unaffected by quantum uncertainty.

Our model eliminates the perfect certainty associated with many strict determinisms). We retain the very important concept of causality. But some events are unpredictable based on prior events. The world contains an irreducible quantum indeterminacy.

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 that many great thinkers have anticipated this two-component solution to the classical problem, among them William James, Henri Poincaré, Arthur Holly Compton, A.O. Gomes, Karl Popper, Henry Margenau, Daniel Dennett, Robert Kane, and Alfred Mele.

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.

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.

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.