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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

 
Freedom
The Freedom section is now a book.
Click here for info

Click for information about <i>Free Will: The Scandal in Philosophy</i>

Watch a 10-minute animated tutorial on the Two-Stage Solution to
the Free Will Problem

This Freedom section of Information Philosopher is an extensive history and a critical study of the "problem of free will."

From the original philosophical debates among the ancient Greeks down to the current day, the arguments of hundreds of philosophers and scientists have been researched and are reported on web pages here, resources for use by students and scholars everywhere.

Dozens of critical concepts in the free will debates, frequently jargon-laden, are presented on individual web pages (linked to from the left-hand column of this Freedom section).

You will also find briefer definitions of some jargon in our extensive glossary of terms.

Underlined blue hyperlinked words on every page let you jump to detailed explanations.

A Taxonomy of Views on Free Will

A taxonomy of free will positions
We arrange the arguments and positions in a taxonomy of some two dozen currently popular views for and against libertarian free will.

Although the Information Philosopher attempts to present the most objective possible account of these philosophical arguments, we have identified two things that readers may want to study first and have in mind as they navigate the web site.

The first is a very strong logical argument against libertarian free will that appears again and again in philosophical writings since ancient times. We call it the standard argument against free will. If you master it first, you will be more likely to recognize it in its various forms.

The second thing is what looks to be, after twenty-four centuries of sophisticated and often heated discussion, the most plausible and practical solution to the free will problem. Some readers may want to keep this possible solution in mind when reading the various arguments. Most philosophers and scientists have preferred solutions to the problem that almost invariably bias their accounts. You almost certainly bring your own views to your reading and research.

Please read on to be aware of our views before you begin.

The Standard Argument Against Free Will
The standard argument is very simple.

Either determinism is true or indeterminism is true.

If determinism (actually pre-determinism) is true, we are not free.

If indeterminism is true, our actions are random and we are not responsible for them.

No free will either way.

The Two Requirements Needed To Defeat the Standard Argument
The first requirement is some indeterminism, to break the causal chain of determinism,
and to generate creative thoughts and alternative possibilities for action.

But this indeterminism must somehow not destroy our moral responsibility.

Thus the second requirement is that our deliberations and evaluations are "adequately" determined, so that we can be responsible for our choices, so that they are "up to us."

"Adequate" determinism means that the indeterministic alternative possibilities are not normally the direct cause of our actions.

Objective chance means that the alternative possibilities are not causally determined by immediately preceding events, so they are unpredictable by any agency, including us.

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

Randomness gives us the "free" in free will.
Freedom also requires an adequately determined will that chooses or selects from those alternative possibilities. There is normally nothing uncertain about this choice.
Adequate determinism gives us the "will" in free will.
Random thoughts can lead to adequately determined actions, for which we can take moral responsibility.

Thoughts come to us freely. Actions come from us willfully.

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, yet alarmingly ubiquitous in philosophy textbooks and classes.

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

Arthur Stanley Eddington, one of the first scientists to appreciate the implications of quantum mechanics, and who hoped quantum indeterminacy would throw light on the problem of free will, accepted the standard argument and declared "there is no halfway house" between randomness and determinism.

The Information Philosopher proposes a model of human freedom that is indeed 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 indeterminacy to provide an "Agenda" of unpredictable thoughts and actions, critical to both freedom and creativity. We call this the "Micro Mind," but it is 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."

Note that the indeterminacy in a stored idea need not be internal to the brain. It may come from an external event that the brain/mind notices.

And the indeterminacy need not be contemporaneous with current decisions. It may be an internally-generated idea thought of first long ago, only now coming to mind as an option.

Finally, it is extremely unlikely that the indeterminacy can be the result of a specific quantum event that is amplified (as Arthur Holly Compton thought) to provide "randomness on demand" - to help with Robert Kane's "torn decision," for example.

The "Macro Mind" examines the partially undetermined 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 very likely 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.

soft causality, but no strict determinism
Our model eliminates the perfect certainty associated with many strict determinisms. Nevertheless, we retain the very important concept of causality - despite the fact that some events are unpredictable from 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 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, A. A. Long and David Sedley, Julia Annas, John Martin Fischer, Alfred Mele, Stephen Kosslyn, Alfred Mele, Bob Doyle, 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 could not see) any location of indeterminism in the brain that does not compromise agent control.

We also resolve 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 believed that the human body was a deterministic machine, governed by lawful reflexes of stimuli and responses. But he also believed that his mind could originate undetermined free actions (indeterminata, he called them). Reconciling indeterminism and determinism is at the heart of the mind-body problem.

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 this 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.

For Teachers
For Scholars

The Problem The History The Cogito The Physics The Biology
Part Three - Value Part Five - Problems
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