Keep in mind that philosophy is done by thinking and talking about problems, whereas a scientist forms a hypothesis and tests its predictions with experiments. Almost everything written about free will to date has been verbal debate, usually about the precise meaning of philosophical concepts, like causality, necessity, and the other dogmas of determinism.

Before there was anything called philosophy, religious accounts of man's fate explored the degree of human freedom permitted by superhuman gods. Creation myths usually end in adventures of the first humans clearly making choices, but a strong fatalism is often present in those tales that foretell the future, based on the idea that the gods have foreknowledge of future events. Anxious not to annoy the gods, the myth-makers usually held the implausible view that the gods' foreknowledge was compatible with human freedom. This was an early form of today's compatibilism, which holds that determinism and necessity are compatible with free will.

The first thinkers to look for causes in natural phenomena (rather than gods controlling events) were the Greek physiologoi or cosmologists. The reasons (logoi) behind the physical (physis) world became the ideal "laws" governing material phenomena. The physiologoi argued that laws produce a cosmos (order) out of chaos. These first cosmologists imagined their universal laws were all-powerful and felt that they must be the natural causes behind all things, including the mind of man (nous).

Pre-philosophical arguments about gods controlling the human will were transformed into arguments about pre-existing causes controlling it, a causal chain of events leading back to a First Cause (later taken by many religious thinkers to be God). Some physiologoi held that although everything physical was caused, this might nevertheless be compatible with mental freedom. This is mind/body dualism, perhaps the most important of all the great dualisms. The ideal mind (or soul) presumably is a substance different from matter and would have laws different from the material body.

The materialist philosophers, Democritus and Leucippus, claimed that all things, including humans, were made of atoms in a void, with their individual motions strictly controlled by causal laws. Leucippus stated the first dogma of determinism, an absolute necessity.

"Nothing occurs at random, but everything for a reason and by necessity." ¹

The consequence is a world with but one possible future, completely determined by its past. Some even argued for a great cycle of events (an idea borrowed from Middle Eastern sources) repeating themselves over thousands of years.

The Pythagoreans, Socrates, and Plato attempted to reconcile an element of human freedom with material determinism and causal law. But the first major philosopher to argue convincingly for some indeterminism was probably Aristotle. He described a causal chain back to a prime mover or first cause, and he elaborated the four possible causes (material, efficient, formal, and final).

Nevertheless, in his Physics and Metaphysics Aristotle also said there were "accidents" caused by "chance (τυχη)." ² In his Physics, he clearly reckoned chance among the causes. Aristotle might have added chance as a fifth cause - an uncaused or self-caused cause - that happens when two causal chains come together by accident (συμβεβεκος). He noted that the early physicists found no place for chance among the causes.

Aristotle knew that many decisions were quite predictable based on habit and character, but they were no less free if one's character itself and predictable habits were developed freely in the past and were changeable in the future. This was the view of Eastern philosophies and religions. Our Karma (etymologically one's character) has been determined by past actions (even from past lives), and strongly influences our current actions, but we are free to improve our Karma by good actions.

One generation after Aristotle, Epicurus argued that as atoms moved through the void, there were occasions when they would "swerve" from their otherwise determined paths, thus initiating new causal chains. Parenthetically, we now know that atoms do not occasionally swerve, they move unpredictably whenever they are in close contact with other atoms. Everything in the material universe is made of atoms in unstoppable perpetual motion. Deterministic paths are only the case for very large objects, where the statistical laws of atomic physics average to become nearly certain dynamical laws for billiard balls and planets.

So Epicurus' intuition of a fundamental randomness was correct. We know Epicurus' work largely from the Roman Lucretius and his friend Cicero, who summarized the situation in about the year 50 BCE. Cicero unequivocally denies fate, strict causal determinism, and God's foreknowledge.

"If there is free will, all things do not happen according to fate; if all things do not happen according to fate, there is not a certain order of causes; and if there is not a certain order of causes, neither is there a certain order of things foreknown by God." ³

It was the Stoic school of philosophy that solidified the idea of natural laws controlling all things, including the mind. ⁴ Their influence persists to this day, in philosophy and religion. Most of the extensive Stoic writings are lost, probably because their doctrine of fate, which identified God with Nature, was considered anathema to the Christian church. The church agreed that the laws of God were the laws of Nature, but that these were two different entities. In either case strict determinism follows by universal Reason (logos) from an omnipotent God. Stoic virtue called for men to resist futile passions like anger and envy. The fine Stoic morality that all men (including slaves and women) were equal children of God coincided with (or was adopted by) the church. Stoic logic and physics freed those fields from ancient superstitions, but strengthened the dogmas of determinism that dominate modern science and philosophy, especially when they explicitly denied Aristotle's chance as a cause. ⁵

The major founder of Stoicism, Chrysippus, took the edge off strict determinism. He wanted to preserve the important idea of moral responsibility. Whereas the past was unchangeable, some things that are possible do not occur necessarily from past external factors alone, but might depend on ourselves. He continued to deny chance. Chrysippus would be seen today as a compatibilist. ⁶

Alexander of Aphrodisias, the most famous commentator on Aristotle, writing 500 years after Aristotle's death, at a time when Aristotle and Plato were rather forgotten minor philosophers in the age of Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics, defended a view of moral responsibility we would call libertarianism today. Greek philosophy had no precise term for "free will" as did Latin (liberum arbitrium or libera voluntas). The discussion was in terms of responsibility, what "depends on us" (in Greek ἐφ ἡμῖν). Alexander believed that Aristotle was not a strict determinist like the Stoics, and Alexander himself argued that some events do not have predetermined causes. In particular, man is responsible for self-caused decisions, and can choose to do or not to do something. Alexander denied the foreknowledge of events that was part of the Stoic identification of God and Nature.⁷

Most of the ancient thinkers recognized the obvious difficulty with chance (or an uncaused cause) as the source of human freedom. They described chance as a "cause obscure to human reason" (ἀιτιάν ἄδελον ἀνθρωπίνω λογισμῶ).

Actions caused by chance are simply random and we cannot feel responsibility for them. But we do feel responsible. Despite more than twenty-three centuries of philosophizing, most modern thinkers have not moved significantly beyond this core problem of randomness and free will for libertarians - the confused idea that free actions are caused directly by a random event. For them, free will remains unintelligible.

A couple of centuries after Alexander, a subtle argument for free will was favored by early Christian theologians. They wanted human free will in order to absolve an omnipotent God of responsibility for evil actions. This is called the problem of evil. Those who held God to be omniscient, Augustine for example, maintained that God's foreknowledge was compatible with human freedom, an illogical position still held today by most theologians. His more sensible contemporary, the British monk Pelagius (Morgan) held, with Cicero, that human freedom prohibited divine foreknowledge. The success of Augustine's ideas led the church to judge Pelagius a heretic. ⁸

The Scholastics were medieval theologians who tried to use Reason to establish the Truth of Religion. Because they used Reason, instead of accepting traditional views based on faith and scripture alone, they were called moderns. Thomas Aquinas maintained that man was free but also held there was a divine necessity in God's omniscience, that God himself was ruled by laws of Reason. Dun Scotus took the opposite view, that God's own freedom demanded that God's actions not be necessitated, even by Reason. Both argued that human freedom was compatible with divine foreknowledge, using sophisticated arguments originally proposed by Augustine, that God's knowing was outside of time, arguments used again later in the Renaissance and by Immanuel Kant in the Enlightenment. ⁹

Great Jewish thinkers like Maimonides in his Guide for the Perplexed and Chapters on Ethics argued for human freedom, especially against the idea of omniscience in the Christian God, though in more popular commentaries he embraced a natural law and divine foreknowledge that controlled much human action. ¹⁰ Islamic thinkers hotly debated God's will, with the Sunni generally determinist and the Shia inclined toward freedom. ¹¹ Asian religions like Buddhism, which do not have the paradox of an omniscient God, embrace human freedom in Karma, which includes a person's character and values that tend to shape one's behavior, but can always be changed by acts of will. ¹²

Renaissance thinkers like Pico della Mirandola and Giordano Bruno questioned the teachings of the church and asserted a perfectibility of man that required the freedom to improve as well as to fail. ¹³ Lorenzo Valla and Pietro Pomponazzi followed the Scholastics and argued that God's foreknowledge of human actions was outside of time. ¹⁴ The Dutch humanist Erasmus and protestant reformer Martin Luther exchanged diatribes on free will. Luther's was frankly called "The Bondage of the Will." He saw nothing new in Erasmus' work, nor do we. ¹⁵

Modern philosophy began with René Descartes and the other continental rationalists, Gottfried Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza. They were called modern because they tried to use Reason to establish the certainty of Truth (including Religion). Descartes found the realm of human freedom in the Mind, which he thought was a separate substance from the material Body. He advocated a mind/body dualism in which matter or body is determined and spirit or mind is free and by its nature unconstrainable. ¹⁶ Spinoza objected to Descartes's freedom. It involves an uncaused cause, which Spinoza felt was impossible. Spinoza's freedom was compatible with necessity. ¹⁷

Thomas Hobbes and John Bramhall were contemporaries of Descartes living in Europe as expatriates during the English Civil War. They debated Liberty and Necessity circa 1650. Hobbes held that liberty was simply the absence of external impediments to action, because the voluntary actions of a "free will" all have prior necessary causes and are thus determined. He equated necessity to the decree of God. ¹⁸ Bramhall saw liberty as a freedom from inevitability and predetermination, but saw it consistent with the prescience of God. ¹⁹ Both were compatibilists, Hobbes' freedom was compatible with causal determinism and Bramhall's with religious determinism.

The British empiricist philosophers - George Berkeley ²⁰, John Locke ²¹, and David Hume - essentially all found chance or indeterminism unacceptable. Determinism was obviously required for us to be responsible for our actions. Hume, a modern Skeptic, doubted the existence of certain knowledge and questioned causality, but he thought (correctly, if inconsistently) that our actions proceeded from causes in our character. Free will at best was compatible with determinism in the sense that our will caused our actions, even though the willed action was the consequence of prior causes. An uncaused cause (the "causa sui" or self-cause), or a free action generated randomly with no regard for earlier conditions ("sui generis" or self-generated), was considered unintelligible. Hume said "'tis impossible to admit of any medium betwixt chance and an absolute necessity." ²²

John Locke liked the idea of Freedom and Liberty. He thought it was inappropriate to describe the Will itself as Free. The Will is a Determination. It is the Man who is Free. "I think the question is not proper, whether the will be free, but whether a man be free." " This way of talking, nevertheless, has prevailed, and, as I guess, produced great confusion."

The empiricists saw new evidence for strict causality and determinism in natural science. Isaac Newton's mathematical theory of motion (classical mechanics) could predict the motions of all things based on knowledge of their starting points, their velocities, and the forces between them. ²³ Surely the forces that controlled the heavenly bodies controlled everything else, including our minds. Thus the rationale for determinism was shifting from theological or religious determinism back to the physical/causal determinism of the Greek cosmologists and atomists. Leibniz imagined a scientist who could see the events of all times, just as all times are thought to be present to the mind of God.

"Everything proceeds mathematically...if someone could have a sufficient insight into the inner parts of things, and in addition had remembrance and intelligence enough to consider all the circumstances and take them into account, he would be a prophet and see the future in the present as in a mirror." ²⁴

Pierre-Simon Laplace particularized this Leibniz vision as an intelligent being who knows the positions and velocities of all the atoms in the universe and uses Newton's equations of motion to predict the future. Laplace's Demon has become a cliché for physical determinism.

One might naively think that the development of modern probability theory and statistics would have encouraged acceptance of chance in human affairs, but surprisingly, the major theorists of probability were determinists. The mathematical distribution of possible outcomes in games of chance was formally derived independently by a number of great mathematicians in the eighteenth century, Abraham De Moivre (1667-1754), Daniel Bernoulli (1700-1782), Laplace (1749-1827), and Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855). Laplace disliked the disreputable origins of this theory and renamed it the "calculus of probabilities."

Immanuel Kant's reaction to Newtonian determinism, and to David Hume's criticism of obtaining certain knowledge based only on our sense perceptions, was to admit determinism as correct in the physical or phenomenal world, but he set limits on this determinism . Kant subsumed causality and determinism under his idea of Pure Reason. Indeed he made determinism a precondition for rational thought. But he set limits on the Practical Reason to make room for God, freedom, and immortality.

In his Practical Reason, Kant imagined two worlds (another mind/body dualism), the world of phenomena and a "noumenal" world of mind (nous) - a subtle variation on the realms of Plato's Ideas, the Scholastic and Renaissance idea of a God outside of time, and Descartes' Mind - in which Kant based rational belief in freedom, God, and immortality, as well as values. ²⁵

At the same time that Kant was inventing his most fanciful other-worldly explanation of free will, his contemporary Samuel Johnson uttered his brief analysis of the problem.

"We know our will is free, and there's an end on't."

Since Kant's time very few philosophers have offered genuinely new ideas for reconciling our sense of human freedom with physical determinism, which for most thinkers also implies causality, certainty, necessity, and predictability of the one possible future consistent with determinism.

This is despite three great advances in science that critically depend on the existence of real chance in the universe and two developments in logic and mathematics that question the status of philosophical certainty.

We briefly review philosophers since Kant who expressed important views on freedom, and then examine some failed suggestions to include real chance and quantum indeterminacy in the process of free will. We can broadly classify these thinkers as determinists, compatibilists, or libertarians,

Determinists - Few modern philosophers admit to being "hard" determinists (as William James called them ³¹), who maintain that there is just one possible future, but all determinists believe in "strict" causality. Some argue that without causality knowledge would be impossible, since we could not be sure of our reasoning process and deduced truths. Note that there are as many kinds of determinists as there are determinisms.

Compatibilists claim that free will is compatible with determinism, since if determinism did not hold, they think that their will could not determine their actions. William James called them "soft" determinists. Though our will is itself caused, these causes include our own character, and this is enough freedom for them, even if our character was itself determined by prior causes. ³²

Libertarians argue that free will is incompatible with determinism and thus are called incompatibilists. Many libertarians still hold a dualist view, with Mind able to circumvent causal laws that constrain the Body. Critics call the libertarian view incoherent and unintelligible if it denies determinism and causality, which they take to be a basic requirement for modern science - indeed the basis for logic and reason. And many libertarians admit their unhappiness with chance as the source of freedom. ³³

Note that hard determinists are also (with libertarians) called incompatibilists, since they deny free will. We see they also deny chance, arguing, as Aristotle thought his predecessors had argued, that everything must be caused. Some of them admit their discomfort with the implications of quantum mechanical indeterminism, and express hope that quantum mechanics will be found to include hidden variables that restore determinism. ³⁴

Broadly speaking, philosophers after Kant can be divided into four main groups,

• those who continued to accept compatibilism (or even determinism),
• those who simply asserted human freedom (some even admitting chance as a factor),
• those philosophers and scientists who reacted, most of them negatively, to the specific new form of chance and "indeterminism" introduced by quantum mechanics in the 1920's,
• and those active in recent renewed debates about free will, with lots of philosophical analysis and logic chopping but virtually nothing new to add.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's greatest contribution to philosophy was to stress the importance of time and process over mechanism, with its implicit predictability. Just as Aristotle was more this-worldly than his mentor Plato, so Hegel brings Kantian ideas down from the timeless noumenal realm into an evolving world. He spoke of an absolute freedom of the individual "in itself," a concept following Kant, the "an sich." But in his dialectical idealism, the individual subject (or being) goes on to see itself in the light of others as objects (the non-being). He calls this the "for itself," Kant's "für sich." The final stage of his "aufhebung" unites these to become the "in and for itself," At this point, Hegel's freedom is a will that is the will of a community (Being). He says, "Freedom and will are for us the unity of subjective and objective." "Freedom also lies neither in indeterminateness nor in determinateness, but in both.” ³⁵ (Philosophy of Right, Introduction, Sects. 5 and 8)

Hegel's idealist colleagues Fichte and Schelling were very enthusiastic about freedom for the individual, the "I," which was Kant's "transcendental subject." They wanted the I to be "unconditioned," an undetermined thing in itself (unbedingtes Ding an sich). For Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, this freedom was freedom from both Nature and God. ³⁵

"The defenders of Freedom usually only think of showing the independence of man from nature, which is indeed easy. But they leave alone man's inner independence from God, his Freedom even with respect to God, because this is the most difficult problem.

"Thus since man occupies a middle place between the non-being of nature and the absolute Being, God, he is free from both. He is free from God through having an independent root in nature; free from nature through the fact that the divine is awakened in him, that which in the midst of nature is above nature."

Arthur Schopenhauer's essay "On the Freedom of the Will" won the prize of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences in 1839. His description of his predecessors' work (pp. 65-90) is extensive. He defined absolute freedom - the liberum arbitrium indifferentiae - as not being determined by prior grounds. "Under given external conditions, two diametrically opposed actions are possible." Schopenhauer found this completely unacceptable. "If we do not accept the strict necessity of all that happens by means of a causal chain which connects all events without exception, but allow this chain to be broken in countless places by an absolute freedom, then all foreseeing of the future... becomes...absolutely impossible, and so inconceivable." ³⁶

In the 1820's the great French mathematician Joseph Fourier noticed that statistics on the number of births, deaths, marriages, suicides, and various crimes in the city of Paris had remarkably stable averages from year to year. The mean values in a "normal distribution" (one that follows the bell curve or "law of errors") of statistics took on the prestige of a social law. The Belgian astronomer and statistician Adolphe Quételet did more than anyone to claim these statistical regularities were evidence of determinism.

Individuals might think marriage was their decision, but since the number of total marriages was relatively stable from year to year, Quételet claimed the individuals were determined to marry. Quételet used Auguste Comte's term "social physics, to describe his discovery of "laws of human nature," prompting Comte to rename his theory sociology.

Quételet's argument for determinism in human events is quite illogical. It appears to go something like this:

• Perfectly random, unpredictable individual events (like the throw of dice in games of chance) show statistical regularities that become more and more certain with more trials (the law of large numbers).
• Human events show statistical regularities.
• Human events are determined.

Quételet might more reasonably have concluded that individual human events are unpredictable and random. Were they determined, they might be expected to show a non-random pattern, perhaps a signature of the Determiner.

In England, Henry Thomas Buckle developed the ideas of Quetelet and argued that statistical regularities proved that human free will was nonexistent.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) did great work on probability in his System of Logic, but like the continental mathematicians was a confirmed determinist.

Mill's godson Bertrand Russell also had no doubt that causality and determinism were needed to do science. "Where determinism fails, science fails," he said. Russell could not find in himself "any specific occurrence that I could call 'will'." ³⁷

A few thinkers questioned the idea that individual random events were actually determined simply because their statistical averages appeared to be determined. Bernard Bolzano (1781-1848) and Franz Exner (1802-1880) were both professors at Prague in the 1830's and 40's. They had a famous correspondence in which they discussed the possibility of free will. Bolzano, a Catholic priest, was stripped of his teaching post because his ideas were anathema to the Catholic Austrian government that paid his salary. One outcome of the revolution of 1848 was a reform of Austrian education aimed at diminishing the power of the Catholic religion, especially in education. Exner was the principal architect of this curriculum reform, and a central secular tenet was to teach the concept of probability, to encourage students to take responsibility for their own lives.

In France, two thinkers, Charles Renouvier (1815-1903) and Alfred Fouillée (1838-1912), argued for human freedom and based it on the existence of absolute chance. In his Essais de critique générale, Renouvier generally followed Kant, but he moved human freedom from Kant's imaginary noumenal realm into the phenomenal world, which for Renouvier included contingent events. In La Liberté et le déterminisme, Fouillée denied necessity and determinism.

Every philosopher after Charles Darwin's Origin of Species was affected by the explanation of evolution as random variation followed by natural selection. A few embraced it, and found that it gave support to their ideas of human freedom, based on the liberating notion of chance. But few offered a convincing idea of how exactly chance as a cause could be made consistent with moral responsibility.

Charles Sanders Peirce was deeply impressed by chance as a way to bring diversity and "progress" (in the form of increasingly complex organisms) to the world. Obviously modeling his thinking on the work of Charles Darwin, Peirce was unequivocal that chance was a real property of the world. He named it tyche, and made tychism the basis for the evolutionary growth of variety, of irregular departures from an otherwise mechanical universe, including life and Peirce's own original thoughts. But Peirce did not like Darwin's fortuitous variation and natural selection. He falsely associated it with the Social Darwinist thinking of his time and called it a "greed philosophy." Peirce also rejected the deterministic evolution scheme of Herbert Spencer, and proposed his own grand scheme for the evolution of everything including the laws of Nature! He called this synechism, a coined term for continuity, in clear contrast to the random events of his tychism.

[Necessity claims] "that the state of things existing at any time, together with certain immutable laws, completely determine the state of things at every other time (for a limitation to future time is indefensible). Thus, given the state of the universe in the original nebula, and given the laws of mechanics, a sufficiently powerful mind could deduce from these data the precise form of every curlicue of every letter I am now writing." ^37a

William James,in The Will to Believe, simply asserted that his will was free. As his first act of freedom, he said, he chose to believe his will was free. He was encouraged to do this by reading Charles Renouvier.

James coined the terms "hard determinism" and "soft determinism" in his lecture on "The Dilemma of Determinism." He described chance as neither of these, but "indeterminism." He said,

"The stronghold of the determinist argument is the antipathy to the idea of chance...This notion of alternative possibility, this admission that any one of several things may come to pass is, after all, only a roundabout name for chance." ³⁸

James was the first thinker to enunciate clearly a two-stage decision process, with chance in a present time of random alternatives, leading to a choice which grants consent to one possibility and transforms an equivocal future into an inalterable and simple past. There are undetermined alternatives followed by determined choices.

"What is meant by saying that my choice of which way to walk home after the lecture is ambiguous and matter of chance?...It means that both Divinity Avenue and Oxford Street are called but only one, and that one either one, shall be chosen." ³⁹ (James, The Will to Believe, 1897, p.155)

James very likely had the model of Darwinian evolution in mind. Unlike his colleague Charles Peirce, from whom he learned much about chance, James accepted Darwin's explanation of human evolution.

Henri Bergson, in his "Time and Free Will," argued that time in the mind (he called it dureé or duration) was different from physical time. In particular, because minds were evolving living things with memories of all their past experience, they could not be treated as collections of mechanical atoms with no such memories, so minds were not subject to deterministic laws.

Friedrich Nietzsche knew Darwin and perhaps knew of the debates in the German universities about probability and irreversibility. He may have been impressed by mechanistic explanations for everything including human affairs. His "eternal return" is consistent with microscopic particles (atoms) following deterministic paths that eventually repeat themselves. His aphoristic and polemical writing style makes his real position on free will hard to fathom. Nietzsche both denied the will and even more strongly claimed that as overmen we must choose to make ourselves. This choice has even greater weight because it would be repeated again and again in his vision of an eternal return.

Henri Poincaré describes a two-stage process in mathematical discoveries, in his lectures to the Paris Société de Psychologie around 1907. The first stage is random combinations, which he likens to Epicurus' "hooked atoms" ploughing through space in all directions, like a "swarm of gnats." He apologizes for the crude comparison, but says

"the right combination is to be found by strict calculations [which] demand discipline, will, and consequently consciousness. In the subliminal ego, on the contrary, there reigns what I would call liberty, if one could give this name to the mere absence of discipline and to disorder born of chance." ⁴⁰

In 1937, at the Paris Centre de Synthése, a week of lectures was delivered on inventions of various kinds, including experimental science, mathematics, and poetry. The mathematician Jacques Hadamard described the conference in his book The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field (1949) Hadamard's emphasis was on the discovery or invention of mathematical theories and his main subject was Henri Poincaré.

Hadamard assures us that Poincaré's observations do not impute discovery directly to pure chance. He says "Indeed, it is obvious that invention or discovery, be it in mathematics or anywhere else, takes place by combining ideas." "It cannot be avoided that this first operation takes place, to a certain extent, at random, so that the role of chance is hardly doubtful in this first step of the mental process. But we see that the intervention of chance occurs inside the unconscious." The first step is only the beginning of creation, for the following step, says Hadamard, "Invention is discernment, choice...it is clear that no significant discovery or invention can take place without the will of finding." ⁴¹

Poincaré is apparently the second thinker, after William James, to see random combinations of ideas in the unconscious mind, followed by willful decisions or choices made consciously.

Ayn Rand, the greatest woman philosopher, and a political libertarian, argued that thinking itself involved an act of choice. In her philosophical novel, she said "thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct," and she reduced "to be or not to be" to "to think or not to think." ^41a

In 1925 Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, and Pascal Jordan, formulated their matrix mechanics version of quantum mechanics as a superior formulation of Neils Bohr's old quantum theory. The matrix mechanics confirmed discrete states and "quantum jumps" of electrons between the energy levels, with emission or absorption of photons.

In 1926, Erwin Schrödinger developed wave mechanics as an alternative formulation of quantum mechanics. Schrödinger disliked the abrupt jumps. His wave mechanics was a continuous theory.

Within months of the new wave mechanics, Max Born showed that while Schrödinger's wave function evolved over time deterministically, it only predicted the positions and velocities of atomic particles statistically.

Heisenberg used Schrödinger's wave functions to calculate the "transition probabilities" for electrons to jump from one energy level to another. Schrödinger's wave mechanics was easier to visualize and much easier to calculate than Heisenberg's own matrix mechanics.

In early 1927, Heisenberg announced his uncertainty principle limiting our knowledge of the simultaneous position and velocity of atomic particles, and declared that the new quantum theory disproved causality. "We cannot - and here is where the causal law breaks down - explain why a particular atom will decay at one moment and not the next, or what causes it to emit an electron in this direction rather than that." ⁴²

Later in 1927, Bohr announced his complementarity principle and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics that argued for a dualist combination of wave and particle aspects for atoms and electrons.

Schrodinger argued vociferously against the random quantum jumps of Bohr and Heisenberg and for a return to his easily visualized deterministic and continuous physics.

Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Schrödinger, and other leading physicists were appalled at Born's assertion that quantum mechanics was probabilistic and Heisenberg's claim that strict causality was no longer tenable. Einstein's famous remark was "The Lord God does not play dice." Planck said, "the assumption of absolute chance in inorganic nature is incompatible with the working principle of physical science." "This means that the postulate of complete determinism is accepted as a necessary condition for the progress of psychological research." ⁴³

Just a few years earlier, in 1919, Schrödinger and his mentor Franz Serafin Exner (son of the 19th-century educator) had been strong disciples of Ludwig Boltzmann. They were convinced that Boltzmann's kinetic theory of gases required a microscopic world of random and chaotic atomic motions. Why did Schrödinger switch from an indeterminist to a determinist philosophy, then adhere to it the rest of his life? Perhaps because his work now put him in the company of Einstein and Planck? Planck stepped down from his chair of theoretical physics at the University of Berlin and gave it to Schrödinger, who won the Nobel prize in 1933. It took nearly thirty more years and another world war before the Nobel committee gave Max Born the prize for his probabilistic interpretation of the wave function.

In his Gifford Lectures of 1927, Arthur Stanley Eddington had described himself as unable "to form a satisfactory conception of any kind of law or causal sequence which shall be other than deterministic." ⁴⁴ Eddington had already established himself as the leading interpreter of the new relativity and quantum physics. His astronomical measurements of light bending as it passes the sun had confirmed Einstein's general relativity theory.

A year later, in response to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, Eddington revised his lectures for publication as The Nature of the Physical World. There he announced "It is a consequence of the advent of the quantum theory that physics is no longer pledged to a scheme of deterministic law," ⁴⁵ and enthusiastically identified indeterminism with freedom of the will.

But Eddington left himself open to the charge since Epicurus' time, that chance could not be identified with freedom. He was apparently unaware of the work of William James or Henri Poincaré to make deliberation a two-stage process - first random possibilities, then a choice. A decade later, in his 1939 book The Philosophy of Physical Science, just a few years before his death, he reluctantly concluded there is no "halfway house" ⁴⁶ between randomness and determinism - an echo of Hume's "no medium betwixt chance and an absolute necessity."

Niels Bohr mentioned the free will and causality discussions in 1929, but he spoke vaguely, with his vision of complementarity, and likened them to subjective and objective views:

"Just as the freedom of the will is an experiential category of our psychic life, causality may be considered as a mode of perception by which we reduce our sense impressions to order...the feeling of volition and the demand for causality are equally indispensable elements in the relation between subject and object which forms the core of the problem of knowledge." ^46a

The German philosopher Ernst Cassirer was close to many of the physicists in this debate and had a profound influence on some of them. Cassirer also influenced the predominantly deterministic views of other philosophers, themselves untrained in physics, who tried to understand the implications of quantum indeterminism for their philosophies. In his 1936 book Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics, Cassirer made the case an ethical one, saying

"all truly ethical action must spring from the unity and persistence of a definite ethical character. This in itself shows us that it would be fatal for ethics to tie itself to and, as it were, fling itself into the arms of a limitless indeterminism." ⁴⁷

Max Born had been first to see that chance and probability were essential to quantum mechanics, as they had been to the statistical laws of physics since Boltzmann. Unfortunately Born was strongly influenced by Cassirer, the non-scientist philosopher who said "we cannot do away with the guiding concept of determinism." Born concluded somewhat dialectically that free will was just a subjective phenomenon,

"I think that the philosophical treatment of the problem of free will suffers often from an insufficient distinction between the subjective and objective aspect." ⁴⁸ (Cause and Chance, p. 127).

Born approvingly quotes Cassirer, from the last chapter of Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics,

"whether causality in nature is regarded in the form of rigorous 'dynamical' laws or of merely statistical laws...In neither way does there remain open that sphere of 'freedom' which is claimed by ethics." ⁴⁹ (source, Cassirer, p. 209)

Some biologists quickly objected to the idea of physical uncertainty in the human mind because large amounts of matter insure adequate regularity of the statistical laws. ⁵⁰ (C.G.Darwin, Science, 1931).

But physicist Arthur Holly Compton defended the Eddington suggestion, with the idea of an amplifier that would allow microscopic random events to produce macroscopic random events. ⁵¹ Four years earlier, the biologist Ralph Lillie had argued that natural selection was such an amplifier of microscopic randomness. (in Science, 1927, Arthur Holly Compton, Science, 1931).

This 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 in The Freedom of Man (1935), 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 (in The Human Meaning of Science, 1940), we should expect men's actions to follow certain (sic) rules of chance. ⁵²

In the Atlantic Monthly of 1957, Compton saw the two-stage process of chance preceding choice.

"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." ^52a

John Eccles, the great neurophysiologist, took Eddington's suggestions seriously and looked for places in the brain where quantum uncertainty might be important. He decided on the synapses, where the axon of one neuron communicates with the dendrite of another neuron across a narrow gap (less than 1000 Angstroms). In his 1953 book The Neurophysiological Basis of Mind, Eccles calculated the positional uncertainty of the tiny synaptic knob. He found it to be 20 Angstroms in 1 second, a relatively tiny but perhaps significant fraction of the synaptic gap or cleft.

One other scientist and sometime philosopher, Henry Margenau, saw quantum uncertainty as necessary for free will, but that there were "more steps" needed to explain freedom. In his Wimmer Lecture of 1968, he said

"Freedom cannot appear in the domains of physiology and psychology if it is not already lodged in physics...embracing the belief that freedom is made possible by indeterminacies in nature will not solve the problem of freedom...it permits only one first step towards its solution." ^52a.

Ιnstead of Ernst Cassirer's view "that it would be fatal for ethics to tie itself to and, as it were, fling itself into the arms of a limitless indeterminism," Margenau embraced indeterminism as the first step toward a solution of the problem of human freedom.

Margenau lamented that his position "forces us to part company with many distinguished moral philosophers who see the autonomy of ethics threatened when a relation of any sort is assumed to exist between that august discipline and science." Margenau clearly means his longtime mentor.

"Ethics, says Cassirer, should not be forced to build its nests in the gaps of physical causation, but he fails to tell where else it should build them, if at all."

Then in his book Einstein's Space and Van Gogh's Sky of 1982, Margenau condensed his model into a single paragraph, with two components - Compton's chance and choice.

Our thesis is that quantum mechanics leaves our body, our brain, at any moment in a state with numerous (because of its complexity we might say innumerable) possible futures, each with a predetermined probability. Freedom involves two components: chance (existence of a genuine set of alternatives) and choice. Quantum mechanics provides the chance, and we shall argue that only the mind can make the choice by selecting (not energetically enforcing) among the possible future courses.

We note sadly that Margenau does not cite the earlier work of Compton (or the philosopher Karl Popper's adaptation of Compton - see below). Perhaps because free will was not a topic for mainstream scientific journals, he felt no need for rigorous references and scrupulous priority of ideas. But then his own work does not get referred to by later thinkers.

Most other Nobel-prize-winning scientists and their philosophical interpreters could not reconcile quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle with human freedom, concluding only that strict determinism was certainly not the case for the physical or phenomenal world.

We should mention a few bizarre suggestions by scientists of how some of the more mysterious properties of "quantum reality" might help explain consciousness and free will.

Roger Penrose claims, in his 1989 book The Emperor's New Mind that non-locality and quantum gravity are involved in the mind. Like Eccles, he speculates that single-quantum sensitive neurons are playing an important role deep inside the brain. But he needs large numbers of neurons to cooperate:

"Such co-operation, I am maintaining, must be achieved quantum-mechanically; and the way that this is done is by many different combined arrangements of atoms being 'tried' simultaneously in linear superposition perhaps a little like the quantum computer...The selection of an appropriate (though probably not the best) solution to the minimizing problem must be achieved as the one-graviton criterion (or appropriate alternative) is reached - which would presumably only occur when the physical conditions are right" (p. 437)

David Hodgson extended Penrose's ideas in his 1991 book Mind Matters. He claims that

"My discussion of quantum mechanics has confirmed [the mind's] indeterministic character; and has also suggested that quantum mechanics shows that matter is ultimately 'non-material' and non-local, and that perhaps mind and matter are interdependent." (p.381)

Penrose went further in 1994 in his book Shadows of the Mind, calculating that tens of thousands of neurons could exist in a coherent correlated superposition of states for one-fortieth of a second (the fundamental alpha-rhythm rate). He cites the idea of a dualistic "mind-stuff" influencing the "quantum choices" with its "free will."

"With the possibility that quantum effects might indeed trigger much larger activities within the brain, some people have expressed the hope that, in such circumstances, quantum indeterminacy might be what provides an opening for the mind to influence the physical brain. Here, a dualistic viewpoint would be likely to be adopted, either explicitly or implicitly. Perhaps the 'free will' of an 'external mind' might be able to influence the quantum choices that actually result from such non-deterministic processes. On this view, it is presumably through the action of quantum theory's R-process that the dualist's 'mind-stuff' would have its influence on the behaviour of the brain." (p.349)

This resembles Eddington's rough ideas and later remarks by Eccles that since wave functions are neither matter nor energy they are the ideal vehicle for the interaction between non-physical mind and physical matter.

Penrose provides considerable evidence for correlated states in the microtubules within the cell's cytoskeleton, then descibes chemical evidence for connecting the microtubules and consciousness in anaesthesia. (p.357-370)

Henry Stapp is another physicist employing quantum strangeness. In his 2003 Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics, Stapp argues that mental intentions and strong "mental efforts" can influence quantum wave functions and produce correlated behaviors over large regions of the brain. Resembling Penrose's arguments (without any reference), Stapp says:

"It should be mentioned here that the actions P are nonlocal: they must act over extended regions, which can, and are expected to, cover large regions of the brain. Each conscious act is associated with a Process I action [collapse of the wave function] that coordinates and integrates activities in diverse parts of the brain. A conscious thought, as represented by the von Neumann Process I, effectively grasps as a whole an entire quasi-stable macroscopic brain activity." (p.252)

In the 1950's, Mortimer Adler compiled a massive two-volume history of The Idea of Freedom. It covers at great length ideas of political freedom and freedom from external constraints, as well as the central freedom of the individual will to choose from among possibilities that are not necessary or predictable. In an attempt to clarify the situation, Adler invents new terms that he hopes are "dialectically neutral" like the natural freedom of self-determination, self-realization, and the acquired freedom of self-perfection, all of which make some of his discussions very difficult to follow. For example, Adler's natural freedom includes Hegel's freedom of a stone falling according to Newton's law of gravity. And Adler includes many theologically minded philosophers who argue that man is only free when following a divine moral law. Sinners, they say, do not have free will, which is odd because sinners are presumably responsible for evil in the world despite an omniscient and omnipotent God.

In his over 1400 pages, Adler devotes only six pages to brief comments on quantum mechanical indeterminism ⁵³ (v.1, p.461-466). Adler depends heavily on the thoughts of Max Planck and Erwin Schrödinger, who along with major thinkers like Einstein, Louis de Broglie, and David Bohm, rejected indeterminism.

The philosopher Karl Popper had a famous collaboration over some decades with the neuroscientist John Eccles. The two were mind/body or mind/brain dualists who hoped to discover the mind to be more than a mere "epiphenomenon" of the material brain. They briefly considered quantum effects, initially to dismiss them, and then to reconsider them.

In their dialogue X, Eccles said, "It is not possible I think to utilize quantum indeterminacy." Popper replied, "I do of course agree that quantum theoretical indeterminacy in a sense cannot help, because this leads merely to probabilistic laws, and we do not wish to say that such things as free decisions are just probabilistic affairs. The trouble with quantum mechanical indeterminacy is twofold. First, it is probabilistic, and this doesn't help much with the free-will problem, which is not just a chance affair. Second, it gives us only indeterminism." ⁵⁴

To this point, Popper reflects the overall negative reaction of the scientific and philosophical communities to indeterminism. But in his 1965 Arthur Holly Compton memorial lecture Of Clouds and Clocks, Popper celebrated Compton's contributons to the question of human freedom, including the insufficient idea of the quantum uncertainty amplifier. But then he goes on to describe a two-stage decision process modeled on Darwinian natural selection. Can we doubt these were directly inspired by Compton's later remarks and Compton's 1931 references to Ralph Lillie and evolution?

"New ideas have a striking similarity to genetic mutations," Popper says, "Mutations are, it seems, brought about by quantum theoretical indeterminacy (including radiation effects). On them there subsequently operates natural selection which eliminates inappropriate mutations. Now we could conceive of a similar process with respect to new ideas and to free-will decisions. That is to say, a range of possibilities is brought about by a probabilistic and quantum mechanically characterized set of proposals, as it were - of possibilities brought forward by the brain. On these there operates a kind of selective procedure which eliminates those proposals and those probabilities which are not acceptable to the mind." ⁵⁵(The Self and its Brain, 1977, pp.539-540)

Popper is thus the third thinker (or fourth, if we liberally interpret Compton) to describe a two-stage mental process, after James and Poincaré. He also solves the problem of indeterminism directly causing our decisions. Note Popper's not so subtle shift of the realm of chance to the material body (his "World 1") and the realm of determination to the mind (his "World 2"). The traditional dualism from the ancients to Kant made the material body the realm of phenomenal determinism and the mind or spirit the noumenal realm of freedom, God, and immortality.

The physicist Richard Feymam also proposed a Compton-style Geiger-counter event followed by a bomb explosion. This caught the attention of Wittgenstein scholar Elizabeth Anscombe in her 1971 inaugural lecture at Cambridge University, where she said

It has taken the inventions of indeterministic physics to shake the rather common dogmatic conviction that determinism is a presupposition or perhaps a conclusion, of scientific knowledge. Feynman's example of the bomb and Geiger counter smashes this conception; but as far as I can judge it takes time for the lesson to be learned. I find deterministic assumptions more common now among people at large, and among philosophers, than when I was an undergraduate.

Daniel Dennett is a strong critic of any randomness or indeterminism in free will. Yet in his book "Brainstorms" in 1978, he proposed an influential "model of decision making" with a two-stage account of free will. In his chapter "On Giving Libertarians What They Say They Want" (p.286), Dennett clearly separates random possibilities from determined choices. ⁵⁷ But does Dennett, following James, Poincaré, and Popper, see that this solves the problem of indeterminism in free will that has plagued philosophy since Epicurus' "swerve" of the atoms? He says, a bit sarcastically, that his model "puts indeterminism in the right place for the libertarian, if there is a right place at all [my emphasis]."

After giving six excellent reasons why his suggestion is what libertarians are looking for, Dennett then mistakenly suggests that the randomness generator might as well have been a computer-generated pseudo-random number generator. He says "Isn't it the case that the new improved proposed model for human deliberation can do as well with a random-but-deterministic generation process as with a causally undetermined process?"

This completely misses the libertarian's point! But then Dennett's argument for libertarianism may just be a compatibilist's straw man. He does not pursue it in his later works, such as Elbow Room, The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (Dennett, 1984).

Dennett's model was inspired by many sources. One was David Wiggins' Towards a resonable libertarianism, which cited Bertrand Russell and Arthur Stanley Eddington as suggesting quantum indeterminism. . Another was Herbert Simon's 1969 two-stage "generate and test" model for creating computer artifacts ⁵⁹ (Simon, 1969, p.), itself a computer version of Darwin's random variation and natural selection model for biological evolution. Another source was Hadamard's book. Dennett (p.293) quotes the poet Paul Valéry (from Hadamard, p.30), who imagines two agents (in one mind?)

"It takes two to invent anything. The one makes up combinations; the other one chooses." ⁶⁰

But as we have seen, this was Poincaré's idea which Valéry picked up at the 1937 conference. Nevertheless, Dennett's article is so influential in the philosophical community that two-stage models for free will are sometimes called "Valerian." We discuss Dennett's seminal article, with significant excerpts, in Giving Determinists What They Say They Want.

Peter van Inwagen, in his "An Essay on Free Will," caused a stir in 1983 by arguing that compatibilism is demonstrably false, from what has come to be called the consequence argument. In short, if compatibilism traces causes of our actions back to events before we existed, then our actions are simply the consequences of those earlier events and are "not up to us." Speaking as a logical philosopher, he concludes that "the free-will thesis and determinism are incompatible. That is, incompatibilism is true." "To deny the free-will thesis is to deny the existence of moral responsibility, which is absurd...Therefore, we should reject determinism." ⁶¹ This of course has been obvious to libertarians since Epicurus.

Robert Kane, in his 1985 book Free Will and Values, aware of earlier proposals by Eccles, Popper, and Dennett, but working independently, proposed an ambitious amplifier model for a quantum randomizer in the brain - a spinning wheel of fortune with probability bubbles corresponding to alternative possibilities, in the massive switch amplifier tradition of Compton and Gomes. Kane says (p.147):

"neurological processes must exist corresponding to the randomizing activity of the spinning wheel and the partitioning of the wheel into equiprobable segments (red, blue, etc.) corresponding to the relevant R-alternatives."

What was unusual about Kane's model was that it combined free will and values. Kane claimed the choice was moral and made in accord with Kant's concept of duty.

"the succession of random selections among equiprobable alternatives is meant to be a continuing reminder (a mental or neurological representation) of the fact that the reason sets of other persons are to be treated equally."

With Robert Kane we come to the end of the failed suggestions for a two-stage process of quantum randomness followed by a determined choice. Kane explains that the main reason for failure is "locating the master switch and the mechanism of amplification...We do not know if something similar goes on in the brains of cortically developed creatures like ourselves, but I suspect it must if libertarian theories are to succeed." (p.168)

In addition, Kane claims that the major criticism of indeterminist libertarian models is explaining the power to choose or do otherwise in "exactly the same conditions," something he calls "dual rational self-control." Given that A was the rational choice, how can one defend doing B under exactly the same circumstances? (Kane, 1985, p.59) Kane is concerned that such a "dual power" is arbitrary, capricious, and irrational.

Apart from the fact that information-rich systems with a history are never in the exact same conditions, and ignoring the fact that random alternative possibilities are unlikely to repeat, an adequately determined will would very likely make the same choice, for the same reasons, from the same set of alternate possibilities. But it might on the other hand exercise its irrational prerogative! We humans are unpredictable, which makes us occasionally capricious and arbitrary. Why the problem?

Richard Double, in his 1991 book The Non-Reality of Free Will, agrees with Kane that libertarian free will must have the "dual ability" to choose otherwise with rational control. But he says:

"My conclusion is that the deep reason why no libertarian view can satisfy all three conditions [ability-to-choose-otherwise, control, and rationality] is that the conditions are logically incompatible. Hence, libertarianism, despite its intuitive appeal, turns out to be incoherent. (p.190)

There is a rich history of linguistic and logical quibbles among compatibilists over the ability to do otherwise. One could have done otherwise, if one had chosen to do so, i.e., if things had been different. But since things are never different (in retrospect) one could not have so chosen, according to compatibilists (and determinists).

Albert Mele, in his book Autonomous Agents, argued in 1995, mostly following Dennett, that libertarians should admit that the final stages of deliberation are determined and only admit indeterminism in the early stages of the decision process. While he himself has made no commitment to such indeterminism, and wonders how it could be physically possible, he offers the idea to others as a "modest libertarianism." ⁶² (p.211-220)

Randolph Clarke assessed the Dennett and Mele suggestions in his 2003 Libertarian Accounts of Free Will and found them inadequate. His work, he says, was carried out by thinking alone and required no specialized knowledge of natural science. At best, he concludes, indeterminism in processes leading to our actions is superfluous, adding nothing of value and possibly detracting from what we want.

But even the major spokesman for "hard" determinism," Ted Honderich, considers the suggestion of "near-determinism." He says, "Maybe it should have been called determinism-where-it-matters. It allows that there is or may be some indeterminism but only at what is called the micro-level of our existence, the level of the small particles of our bodies." ⁶³ (Honderich, 2002, p.5)

Today Robert Kane is the acknowledged dean of the community of philosophers writing actively on the free will problem. Before Kane, in the late twentieth century, Anglo-American philosophers had largely dismissed free will as a "pseudo-problem." Although like the others, Kane does not find any libertarian position, including his own, "intelligible," he developed the view that even if most of our actions are determined entirely by our character, these "self-formed actions" can be free if we at times in the past freely created our own character (and if we remain free to change it). This was Aristotle's view and agrees with Buddhist ideas of Karma.

In addition to his work to find some pathway through the "free will labyrinth" to an intelligible account of freedom, Kane has assembled in one place perhaps the best survey of modern positions on free will, from theology and fatalism to mostly dualist libertarian perspectives. His massive 2002 sourcebook, The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, has contributions from over two dozen contemporary philosophers with strong ideas about free will. Sadly most continue to be wordy jargon-laden debates and attempts to logically refute one position or another.

That there is nothing new, that it is mostly determinist, and that it is dismissive of freedom as unintelligible, makes the Oxford Handbook an accurate reflection of the current state of the free will problem. Kane cites Anscombe and insightfully remarks "One may legitimately wonder why worries about determinism persist at all in the twenty-first century, when the physical sciences - once the stronghold of determinist thinking - seem to have turned away from determinism." ⁶⁴

Besides Kane, a few more recent libertarian philosophers defend "incompatibilism," but cannot agree on an "intelligible" account of how, when, and perhaps most importantly, where indeterminism enters the picture - without making our actions purely random.

They include Randolph Clarke, Laura Waddell Ekstrom, Carl Ginet, and Timothy O'Connor. David Widerker has extended Kane's strong 1985 criticism on Frankfurt-stle examples, as a defense of incompatibilism.

Unfortunately, their works are full of a dense jargon defining (sometimes obscuring) subtle differences in their views - agent causation, event causation, non-occurrent causation, reasons as causes, intentions, undefeated authorization of preferences as causes, noncausal accounts, dual control, origination, and narrow and broad incompatibilism.

A few compatibilist/determinist philosophers have, following Peter Strawson, turned the conversation away from the "unintelligible" free will problem to the problem of moral responsibility. They include John Martin Fischer, Derk Pereboom, and Saul Smilansky.

Fischer's main interest is semicompatibilism, that free will may be incompatible with determinism, but his main interest moral responsibility, is not incompatible. Fischer has recently edited a 4-volume, 46-contributor, 1300+ pages compendium of articles on moral responsibility - entitled Free Will, a reference work in the Critical Concepts in Philosophy series (Routledge 2005).

Some of these thinkers follow the psychologist Daniel Wegner and argue that free will is an illusion.

Another popular effort in recent years has been to invoke mysterious properties of quantum mechanics (beyond simple indeterminism) to explain free will and consciousness. Notable contributors include Roger Penrose, who combines non-local quantum effects with quantum gravity in his Emperor's New Mind. Henry Stapp also invokes non-local quantum mechanics, as does Australian jurist turned philosopher David Hodgson.

John Searle recently wrote in his 2007 Freedom and Neurobiology, "The persistence of the free will problem in philosophy seems to me something of a scandal. After all these centuries of writing about free will, it does not seem to me that we have made very much progress." ⁶⁵ (p.37) In a breakthrough of sorts, Searle admits that he could never see, until now, the point of introducing quantum mechanics into discussions of consciousness and free will. Now he says we know two things, "First we know that our experiences of free action contain both indeterminism and rationality...Second we know that quantum indeterminacy is the only form of indeterminism that is indisputably established as a fact of nature...it follows that quantum mechanics must enter into the explanation of consciousness." (p.74-75)

Indeed it does. Despite a century of failed attempts, can we convince Searle and other philosophers that indeterminism followed by an adequate if not strict determinism is the right two-stage model for free will? It will depend in part on our successful location for indeterminism in the brain and the great simplicity of the amplification process, compared to previous models. See our Cogito model.

Why have most philosophers been unable for millenia to see that the common sense view of human freedom is correct? It is partly because their logic and language preoccupation likes to say that either determinism or indeterminism is true, and the other must be false.

Our physical world includes both, though the determinism we have is only an adequate description for large objects. So any intelligible explanation for free will must include both indeterminism and adequate determinism, in a temporal sequence.