He has written more widely (with excursions into quantum mechanics, neuroscience, and consciousness), more deeply, and certainly more extensively than most of his colleagues on what is widely acknowledged the most difficult and long-lasting problem in philosophy, the problem of free will.

Unlike his illustrious predecessors, led by Thomas Hobbes and David Hume, and almost all of his contemporaries, he has not succumbed to the easy path of Compatibilism - by simply declaring that the free will we have (and should want, say some) is completely consistent with determinism, namely a "voluntarism" in which our will is completely caused by prior events.

Nor does he go down the path of Incompatibilism, looking for non-physical substances, dualist forms of agency, or simply identifying freedom with Epicurean chance, as have many scientists with ideas of brain mechanisms amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminism to help with the uncaused "origination" of actions and decisions.

Honderich does not claim to have found a solution to the problem of free will or determinism, but he does claim to have confronted the problem of the consequences of determinism. He is dismayed because the truth of determinism requires that we give up "origination" with its promise of an open future, restricting - though not eliminating - our "life hopes."

Unlike many of his hard determinist colleagues, who appear to welcome determinism and enjoy describing belief in free will as an illusion, Honderich is unique in his passionate sense of real loss. We might have been the author of our own actions, we could have done otherwise, and thus be held accountable and morally responsible in a way more acceptable to common sense. He describes the life hope that is lost - a future we can make for ourselves.

We have a kind of life-hope which is incompatible with a belief in determinism. An open future, a future we can make for ourselves, is one of which determinism isn't true.

Suppose you become convinced of the truth of our theory of determinism. Becoming really convinced will not be easy, for several reasons. But try now to imagine a day when you do come to believe determinism fully. What would the upshot be? It would almost certainly be dismay. Your response to determinism in connection with the hope would be dismay. If you really were persuaded of determinism, the hope would collapse.

This is so because such a hope has a necessary part or condition on which the rest of it depends. This is is the image of origination. There can be no such hope if all the future is just effects of effects. It is for this reason, I think, that many people have found determinism to be a black thing. John Stuart Mill felt it as an incubus, and, to speak for myself, it has certainly got me down in the past.
(How Free Are You?, p.94)

Though he is its foremost champion, Honderich characterizes determinism as a black thing and an incubus which gives him dismay.

Honderich faults the Compatibilists and Incompatibilists on three counts. First, he says that moral responsibility is not all that is at stake, there are personal feelings, reactive attitudes, problems of knowledge, and rationalizing punishment with ideas of limited responsibility. Second, these problems can not be resolved by logical "proofs" nor by linguistic analyses of propositions designed to show "free" and "determined" are logically compatible. And third, he faults their simplistic idea that one or the other of them must be right.

We need all the determinism we can get in a proper theory of free will. As Ted says, we need a strong determinism.

However, the determinism that we have in the natural world is only an adequate physical determinism, not the metaphysical strict causal determinism of the dogmatic philosophers.

Ted calls the determinism we have "near-determinism" or "determinism-where-it-matters" and sometimes "macro-determinism."

Our goal in this dialogue is to show that near or adequate determinism is all we need to firmly establish "origination," which brings along with it creativity, the introduction of new information (knowledge, for example) into the world, and an explanation for the individuality of the person, including our memory, our store of actionable information that is the key to our character and our personality and that is a core component of consciousness.

In a Newtonian or Laplacean deterministic world, all the information in the world is contained in the knowledge of the world at any instant. This is a scientific variation on the theologian's totem simul, in which all times are as one in the eyes of God.

Our world, however, is a world of increasing information. When we create new information, it leads to Ted's "future we can make for ourselves."

We need to limit Ted's hard determinism, as Kant also argued, to make room for freedom.

But we must also recognize limits to chance and indeterminism, to make room for his near determinism in our will.

Bob: Our explanations can be wholly natural and still dis-solve the mystery of the complex concept "free will," unpacking it into a random "free" and a determined "will." Our mind is a natural process that contains an adequately determined will and a random generator of alternative possibilities.

Ted: Such mysterious explanations include within themselves a certain proposition, on reflection a striking one. It is that every fact about a person, including every fact about brain and Central Nervous System, and character and personality, and thought and feeling, might have been exactly as it was before and at the moment when the person understood something, or hoped, or decided, or acted, and nevertheless the understanding, hoping, deciding or acting might never have occurred. That was a possibility in reality, not merely something that can be thought without contradiction.

Bob: We shall see how having alternative possibilities allows someone to have done otherwise in essentially the same circumstances.

Ted: To put the same question in a last and the most familiar philosophical way, what follows from a determinist theory of our existence?

Bob: Determinism will be seen to provide control over the natural chaos and chance in the universe. "Free will" is a combination of randomness and determinism, of chance and choice.

Ted: I have in mind, as philosophers generally have, a theory which is deterministic in a strong way. Many theories of our existence, including Freud's, whatever else is to be said of them, can be, and often are, taken in the strong deterministic way. The same question of consequences arises, as it turns out, about certain widely accepted outlooks or theories which are less deterministic, or indeed partly indeterministic and wholly consistent with a common interpretation of Quantum Theory. It arises, for example, about what is sometimes called naturalism, or the scientific vision of ourselves, which may combine micro-indeterminism with macro-determinism. (Dennett, 1984 Searle, 1984, Lect. 6) Philosophers have given more attention to this question of consequences than to two prior ones, those of the conceptual adequacy and of the truth of determinism. Expressed differently, and as generally, it is the question of what we are to make of our lives if or since determinism is true.

It has given rise to two traditions, each seeming to be as strong now as it has been in past centuries. The answer given in one tradition is that if determinism is true, we are not free. Determinism and freedom are incompatible, irreconcilable. Almost always, in this tradition, out of the conviction that we are free, or out of the deep desire to be so, it is also concluded that determinism is not true. The answer to the question of the consequences of determinism given in the second tradition is that the truth of determinism does not or would not touch our freedom. We are free despite its truth, as many say, or as some say, because of it. Determinism and freedom are compatible, reconcilable.

Bob: The first Incompatibilist tradition embodies what I call the Determinism Objection to Free Will. The second Compatibilist tradition raises the Randomness Objection against libertarian incompatibilists. These two objections, along with the Responsibility Objection, form the Standard Argument Against Free Will.

Ted: My great hope for this book, and my greatest claim for it, is that it resolves the problem of the consequences of determinism. At least it gives the fundamentals or outline of the resolution. It resolves the problem not by succeeding where there must be no hope of succeeding, where whole declamatory lecture-halls of philosophers, as audacious or arrogant as I, and certainly more able, have failed. That is, it does not succeed by establishing that one or the other of the two traditions is correct. It is part of the resolution of the problem that both are mistaken. Their fundamental propositions are false.

Bob: I agree that the Compatibilist and Incompatibilist arguments are flawed. But my hope is to eliminate the mistakes and save the good parts of these two traditions.

We can show that Compatibilists and Determinists were right about the Will, but wrong about Freedom. Incompatibilist Libertarians were right about Freedom, but wrong about the Will.

Ted: The problem, as remarked, is the one most considered by philosophers, at least since Thomas Hobbes's Liberty and Necessity of 1646. It has almost always been considered a certain way. The question has been asked whether, if determinism is true, we are free in such a way that we are morally responsible for our actions. One tradition answers no, the other yes. To that question has occasionally been attached another closely related moral issue, that of the justification of punishment.

Bob: Combining the randomness of free origination with the determinism of will can only strengthen our sense of moral responsibility. But our freedom is still restricted by many external and internal constraints that clearly limit the rationale for punishment rather than therapy.

Ted: To proceed in this way is not to come into close touch with the true subject of the consequences of determinism. It is to leave out a lot of that subject, most of it. P. F. Strawson's 'Freedom and Resentment' (1962) rightly directed philosophers away from moral responsibility (although with the official aim of returning to it) to another part of the general question. It has to do not with feelings of moral approval and disapproval with respect to someone's decision or action, which is in fact the subject-matter of the question of moral responsibility, but with what may be called personal feelings, of which resentment and gratitude are two. However, there are more parts to the question of consequences, and they require attention as much. Indeed, in my view, one of these can be said to demand attention more than either the given moral disapproval and approval or personal feelings. It is the question of how determinism stands to what can be called our life-hopes. It is with respect to this above all that a theory of determinism appears to be most challenging. It can be, as it has been to many, including myself, a black thing.

The first chapter of the book begins a consideration of life-hopes, personal feelings, and moral disapproval and approval, and also additional consequences of determinism. One, which has hitherto been misplaced and isolated in philosophical discussions, and thus been misconceived, has to do with knowledge. The fifth and sixth matters considered in an initial way in the chapter have to do with morality, but not moral responsibility. They are the matter of right action and principles, and the matter of the general moral standing of persons.

It is my contention that a broad fact having to do with our common attitudes and responses in the matter of determinism and life-hopes, determinism and personal feelings, and so on, is fully sufficient to provide a refutation of the propositions fundamental to the two traditions of Incompatibilism and Compatibilism. Those propositions are elicited by means of a brief historical survey carried forward in the second chapter. it is indeed the conclusion of the second chapter that both traditions consist in provable error.

The third chapter completes the inquiry into determinism and life-hopes, personal feelings, knowledge, moral responsibility, actions and principles, and the general moral standing of agents. It gives my resolution of the problem of the consequences of determinism. It is also a resolution, as already indicated, of the problem of consequences raised as much by widely held near-determinist theories of the mind which assert or contemplate indeterminism at the micro-level, by way of Quantum Theory, but none the less accept or tend to accept macrodeterminism, a determinism which certainly includes what are commonly called neural events. This principal conclusion of the book may not be right, as I am confident it is, but very certainly it is not more of the same. It is not one more attempt to have one of those two so overridden and wearied nags, Incompatibilist or Compatibilist, plod at last into the winner's enclosure. They are both put out to pasture.

Bob: Ted is quite right that we must keep Quantum Theory at the micro-level, and must assert his "macrodeterminism" at the level of neural events involved in willed decisions.

But the creation, storage, and communication of actionable information (knowledge) goes on at the micro-level, and like any communication system is subject to quantum (and thermal) noise.

Ted: It would be satisfactory to conclude this introduction by saying that my aim in what follows has been no more than to advance truth, or, even, to advance truth and do myself some good by doing so. Whatever can be said along those lines, something needs to be added. Philosophy in general does seem one of the intellectual endeavours which most gives rise to kinds of assertiveness, combativeness, and dismissiveness. The latter traits, as it seems, are pervasive, not a lot less noticeable when they are officially disavowed. (Nozick, 1981) Philosophers cannot but seem to be advocates — learned or not so learned counsel. I do not mean that they do not believe in their briefs, but rather that they certainly press them. The truth may be owed to the subject-matters of philosophy, which are such that the facts in them do not in the end speak for themselves, or speak still more uncertainly than elsewhere. Whatever the explanation of this truth about philosophers and philosophy, I cannot claim to have risen far enough above it.

Bob: My goal is to engage all the best "advocates" in this debate, Ted for Determinism, Robert Kane for Libertarianism, Daniel Dennett for Compatibilism, and Peter van Inwagen for Incompatibilism.

My hope at best is for what Charles Sanders Peirce called an intersubjective agreement among a community of inquirers committed to open discussions and skeptical about all established truths.

There is reason for as much or more suspicion about this theory. Is it respectable? Does it give us what deserves the name of being a philosophy of mind and action? Is it made respectable by what it usually includes, an interpretation of the troubled part of physics that is Quantum Theory?

1. Chance exists in the universe. Quantum mechanics is correct. Indeterminism is true, etc.

2. Chance is important for free will. It breaks the causal chain of determinism.

3. Chance cannot directly cause our actions. We cannot be responsible for random actions.

4. Chance can only generate random (unpredictable) alternative possibilities for action or thought. The choice or selection of one action must be adequately determined, so that we can take responsibility. And once we choose, the connection between mind/brain and motor control must be adequately determined to see that "our will be done."

5. Chance, in the form of noise, both quantum and thermal, must be ever present. The naive model of a single random microscopic event, amplified to affect the macroscopic brain, never made sense. Under what ad hoc circumstances, at what time, at what place in the brain, could it occur to affect a decision? And if chance did affect the decision, we would not be in control, we could not take responsibility.

6. Chance must be overcome or suppressed by the adequately determined will when it decides to act, de-liberating the prior free options that "one could have done." Our choices are the determined actions of our will.

Interactionism as sketched is a bad determinism, which must not delay us. What really needs attention is the kind of explanation of mental events that is radically different from all of what we have been considering so far. This different kind is in terms of Free Will and is indeterministic, not a matter of causation as we know it. It has often been assumed and talked about, and it has also been set out in full complexity by industrious philosophers. In fact, they say more than anyone is likely to have the fortitude to be able to consider.

Bob: We hope that the Information Philosopher website will have that fortitude to consider all those industrious philosophers, giving a summary account of their positions, and then fitting them into a taxonomy of free will positions.

We then hope to reach out personally to those still alive and seek their intersubjective agreement to a mind model that combines indeterminism and adequate determinism in the complex concept "free will."

Ted: The main guiding aim of a Free Will theory is getting to a conclusion from which it will then follow that we can be taken as absolutely responsible for our choices and our ensuing actions. It is to get to something such that it will follow that we can be taken as responsible in a certain way. That is all-important. As noticed in passing at the start, there is more than one thing that can be called being held responsible for things or being credited with responsibility for things.

The aim of a Free Will theory is likely to be to make us such that we can be held responsible or credited with responsibility where our doing these latter things involves certain feelings. But above all, our being responsible in this way involves our being able now to choose differently from how we do, given the present and ourselves exactly as they are and the past exactly as it was. Our choices, on this story, cannot be effects but come about somehow very differently.

Bob: Moral responsibility and ability to do otherwise are central requirements for a free will model.

This involves our being able to choose otherwise in exactly the same circumstances.

Ted: Almost all historical and also most recent theories have to do with not only neural events and mental events but also something else, a self or originator. What they come to is that in each of us there exists an ongoing entity that is said to originate choices and decisions and hence actions, which things are not necessitated by neural events or anything else.

Bob: An originator, one who brings new information into the world, is one that contributes to that "open future" by decisions and actions that can be totally unpredictable and thus "free."

Ted: Free Will sounds like something out of the past, as it is, but it can be brought up to date.

This is the stage when we bring in an interpretation of physics, or rather an interpretation of the part of it that is Quantum Theory. It is in fact an interpretation of some mathematics, a way of saying what the mathematics could come to in terms of the actual world. We will be returning to the subject. What is important now is that the interpretation supposes that there are things that happen that are not effects but which are made probable by what happens before them.

Bob: The things that happen as a consequence of quantum indeterminism are best thought of as events (or effects, if you like) that were not completely predictable from prior events - were not completely determined by prior events. Their occurrence is a matter of probability.

Chance is one of the requirements for a free will model. But probability is no help if involved directly in human decisions.

Ted: We now come on a first large problem. That the theory takes neural events to be made probable by antecedents is not just a case of its supporters granting something of what seems true. It is not just a necessary bow on their part in the direction of neuroscience. That is, it is not just a concession in the direction of real causal connection.

If there is not a very high probability that items will be followed by the right other neural events, then actions we fully and absolutely intend will on too many occasions mysteriously not happen.

Bob: We must have a will adequately determined to carry out our intentions. Quantum events are best seen as simple generating alternative possibilities for thoughts and actions.

Quantum events must not be the probable cause of our actions or influence the probabilities of our different decisions, except insofar as the determined will considers those alternative possibilities in making its determination.

Ted: Can this large problem of seeming inconsistency really be dealt with? Maybe it can. Maybe we can tolerate the ad hoc idea that the earlier neural events are not so probable, in order to leave room for Free Will, but the later neural events are more probable, so that our behaviour doesn't involve many mysterious failures and surprises. Even so, we have not got very far in filling out the theory.

Bob: Daniel Dennett and Alfred Mele, while not endorsing indeterminism, have argued that probability should be kept in the early stages of neural processes.

Robert Kane and Laura Ekstrom are ambivalent about the location and timing of quantum indeterminism. They call for probability in later neural events. They are concerned that if indeterminism is not allowed in the final decision, the will is determined to make the same decision in the same circumstances.

Apart from the fact that we can never be in exactly the same circumstaces (because of our individuality, our memory, and the sheer randomness of action possibilities, some coming from the external world and some coming from our creative mind, what precisely is wrong with our will making the same decision - consistent with our character and values - in the same hypothetical circumstances?

Kane, Peter van Inwagen, and Laura Ekstrom struggle with models for where and when a quantum event can enter into the making of a decision. How can randomness be called in at exactly the right moment, they ask?

We solve the problem of timing and locating quantum indeterminism by identifying it with ever-present noise in the neural circuitry of the brain, which introduces storage errors and recall errors. Randomness is always present. The decisive will simply turns off the randomness.

The power and control of the determined will comes from its ability to suppress neural circuitry noise when a decision is needed.

To fill out the theory, Ted's strong, if only adequate, determinism is needed for the human will.

Ted: Soon after Quantum Mechanics was interpreted as the idea that there are truly unnecessitated events in the world, events not nomically connected with what precedes them, it was supposed that Free Will was thereby automatically saved. It was saved just by these random or chance events. That is, it was supposed that these events by themselves give us Free Will. But of course they don't.

Bob: This Randomness Objection and the Determinism Objection are the backbone of the Standard agrument Agains Free Will.

Our history of free will, especially the quantum mechanics debates, documents all the proposed mechanisms for injecting quantum randomness into the brain. None are at all plausible.

The latest quantum suggestions, from scientists like Roger Penrose, Henry Stapp, and the self-taught Australian jurist David Hodgson, invoke mysterious properties of quantum mechanics like non-local effects and quantum gravity.

They hope to explain a mystery with another mystery.

Ted: The theory of Free Will we are trying to put together tries to deal with this.

A couple of things are clear. If you want to explain a decision somehow, but not make it into a necessary event, it will be a good idea not to explain it by citing something that happens before it, a prior event that somehow gives rise to it. That will immediately raise the question of the prior event's being caused, and worse, being caused to cause the decision. An ongoing entity, a self or originator, seems better than an event.

Bob: Can we be satisfied with several "uncaused" prior events that are generated in the subconscious? Each is some possibility for action or thought. Each has a random (noise) component that makes it unpredictable - and thus original. But none of them is a direct cause for the decision.

The direct cause of the decision lies in the determination of the will to choose one among these chance alternative possibilities.

Ted: If the aim is to hold us responsible now in a way for a past choice or decision conceived as causally unconnected with our brains and characters and everything else, it is at least useful to have something definite on hand now to aim at, something that seems to be of the right sort. We need the right kind of object for our feelings. The same point applies to our having a certain moral credit.

Bob: No, the aim is to hold us responsible for any present decision that was determined by our brains and characters by a choice among chance alternative possibilities.

To be sure, our character - expressed in habitual decisions - may have been formed by Robert Kane's past "self-forming actions." But even those were not random at that past time, as he imagines. They too were determined acts of will, from free alternative possibilities..

Ted: We have a second problem, still larger than the one about inconsistency in probabilities. It is a problem of clarity. All we can get hold of with respect to a self or originator is that it is in a kind of relation to decisions — we are told that it originates them. It is safe to say that no one has ever begun to answer the question of the nature of a self or originator. In fact no advocate has really faced up to the problem. All have slid by it. It seems to me likely that all future announcements of a self will be like the traditional and the recent ones (Reid; O'Connor 1995a; Clarke; Rowe).

Bob: Can you agree that a satisfactory relation between an originator and a decision is simply the brain selecting, deterministically and in character, among alternative possibilities?

Note that, just as in natural selection, the overwhelming fraction of alternate possibilities are never chosen - they aren't "fit."

Ted: So there are two large problems, one about inconsistency in matters of probability, and one about clarity in talk of the nature of the self. There is a third problem, related to the second, and such as to make the second worse. It is another problem of clarity. It is all very well, when asked about the relation between an originator and a decision, to say that it originates the decision. What does that mean?

It is downright embarrassing to hear that the originator looks over the brain and selects neurons for activating in order to get what it wants, or rather the mental events it wants. This turns up in a large book on Free Will by a philosopher and a neurophysiologist (Eccles and Popper). It does of course involve the homunculus trouble, but that is not all. There is another much larger difficulty.

Bob: I completely agree that the models of self so far proposed all fall into this homunculus trap, one that John Locke identified as the infinite regress of what wills the will.

Although the Eccles and Popper discussions were mostly mind-body dualist ("interactionist") and not particularly coherent, Popper's 1971 Compton lectures present a fine model of the will choosing from among alternative possibilities generated by quantum uncertainty.

Ted: It is no good using ordinary mental verbs such as 'look over', select', and 'want' in order to try to describe what the relation is between an originator and a mental event. At any rate it is no good leaving the matter there. We want to know what these verbs come to in these uses, what is involved in the activities they describe. We need a general understanding of these activities. A general understanding of such activities is in fact exactly the concern of determinist and indeterminist philosophies of mind. Determinist philosophies understand such activities as a matter of standard effects. What is the opposed understanding — something in addition to the denial that the activities are such effects?

Bob: The indeterminism in our model is limited to the chance alternative possibilities. Indeterminism has no place in the willed decision. An adequate determinist model of the will is all we need as an originator, since it chooses from unpredictable possibilities for its decisions.

Ted: One more remark here. Some of the philosophers who try to save Free Will by way of a self make use of a certain old idea taken from religion and theology. They even make use of the idea to try to define or explain the nature of a self. It is the idea of God as self-causing or cause-of-himself. What the philosophers of Free Will say about the self is that it, and certainly not an event in or of it, causes itself to make a decision — or something like that. It is hard for me to believe that time needs to be spent on trying to make sense of such stuff, wherever it turns up. Surely it does not make as much sense, even, as talk of causes as things that make other events probable, talk of causes as only required conditions, and so on.

Bob: There is a strong sense that we have the power of what the theologians called causa sui, a power they reserved to God. And even stronger, there is a religious sense that God has made man creative in his image. In our model, those creative unpredictable ideas are the consequence of uncaused quantum events behind the alternative possibilities, where uncaused simply means unpredictable from prior events.

Ted: Have at least some of us not implicitly been thinking of the originator as something like a causal circumstance? Certainly this is natural. It avoids some difficulties, since it is satisfactorily impossible to think that a whole causal circumstance persists through time but has its effect only at one moment rather than another. It is also satisfactorily impossible to think that a causal circumstance can give rise to a multitude of different things, and at one moment to opposite things. But despite advantages, we simply cannot take the originator as a causal circumstance. It doesn't guarantee anything. Is there another possibility? What if we think of an originator as just a cause, just a part of a causal circumstance?

We now have an idea of Free Will, very different indeed from the model we have been considering. The originator becomes one constant or ongoing element of various causal circumstances for decisions. The other items in each particular circumstance might be different mental events, including desires, inclinations, and so on. We certainly face a difficulty. If such a causal circumstance really is a causal circumstance, then one particular decision and no other has to be the upshot. If it is to serve the ends of a Free Will theory, we are going to have to make the new story very different, and very mysterious.

Bob: You are definitely on to something here, but it need not be mysterious at all. First, you are right that one particular decision has to be the upshot (given identical alternative possibilities, which of course is highly improbable). And you must remember that the determined will is not itself "free." It is the mind or the self that is free.

John Locke pointed out this confused language long before Hume reinvented Compatibilism. Locke thought it was abuse of language 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."

Ted: It will have to be that when everything else is in place for a decision, it is up to the originator whether or not to pull its weight. Certainly an originator has traditionally been thought to be able to defeat desires, go against the person's whole nature, rise over the past, choose the path of duty, and so on. But then we seem to be back with the originator as decisive by itself, again something like a causal circumstance — which in fact it can't be. We get pretty much the same bafflements as before. How could what is unchanging give rise to something or its opposite? What is this obscure activity?

Bob: In our information philosophy, the decisive and determining will is definitely not unchanging. Every new decision, and every new perception or thought between decisions, adds information to our minds, constantly changing the spectrum of alternative possibilities that we may generate. Our character itself may change somewhat with every decision.

Ted: We do not get out of these various difficulties about the relation between an originator and decisions by turning to seemingly different conceptions of an originator, perhaps as a faculty of the mind called the Will, or an active power, or the Self-Conscious Mind. If is not clear what these entities are, but it does seem that the different ways of talking simply inherit the various difficulties. The Will, for example, is sometimes said to be a rational disposition (Kenny 1975). Such a thing has the power to produce something all by itself, but it may not. But then what are we to understand about its working when it does work? Why does it work at one time rather than another? How can it give rise to a different and opposite decision from the one it does give rise to? All this seems to be the same mystery again.

Bob: Because our "Micro Mind" generates unpredictible new actionable information, and because our "Macro Mind" (including character and values) may change to some degree with every new decision, we are capable of surprise, even to ourselves. This includes acting differently in the same circumstances.

Ted: One summary of the mystery is that we are given no explanation of why or how decisions and the like are supposed to come about, and thus given no content to talk of their being in our control, or their being such that we are responsible for them. The sad fact is that these theories seem to fall back into being what we noticed earlier, and what they must of course try to add to, the idea owed to Quantum Theory that decisions and choices are a matter of mere chance events. This falling-back does indeed wreck responsibility and dignity and special rights and so on.

Bob: Here the quotes from Ted's books cannot respond to the new ideas and he falls back on the Randomness Objection to Quantum Theory. This objection is that chance directly causing our actions (which in our model it does not) destroys moral responsibility.

The determined will is in control of the chaotic unconscious (at least most of the time).

All living organisms live in a chaotic environment, yet they keep control using adequately determined processes. Our DNA is extraordinarily "determined" to maintain the basic information content in its genetic code over billions of years, yet "free" to try new combinations of information that produced Ted from Rae Laura and John William.

Let's hear Ted's final remarks on the difficulty devising an intelligible model for an originator of our actions. Then we will examine his "second thoughts" that suggest we nevertheless need to bring back some sort of originator.

Ted: In my opinion the least embarrassing response to the request for an explanation of the relation between an originator and decisions is that an explanation cannot be given. We have to regard this relation as primitive or unanalysable. The situation is to be taken as like one with a language or a logical system. Not every term can be broken down into others — there has to be at least one term that is taken as clear without being explained in terms of others. We start with that and explain other things in terms of it.

Bob: Don't we wish that the terms "free" and "will" could be defined with Honderich clarity, so we could then explain the complex notion of free will in terms of them?

Ted: What this response comes to is that there exists a relation between an originator and a decision such that the person in question can in a way be held responsible for the decision. More can be said about what it is to hold a person responsible, but nothing can be said about the relation itself. We just somehow understand it. This may seem suspicious, or a cop-out, and of course it does not help with the two earlier problems, about inconsistency in connection with probability and the very nature of an originator. But it is a possible position. Something like it it is held by a very acute philosopher who has been to the fore among Incompatibilists. Freedom is incompatible with determinism, he said, but this freedom remains a mystery (van Inwagen 2002).

Bob: van Inwagen merely repeats the Determinism Objection to free will and renames it the Consequence Argument. There is nothing new there.

He does not see that Free Will requires (at least near-) Determination and is Inconceivable Without It (as R. E. Hobart, and later Phillipa Foot, maintained).

Ted: After all this, it may come as no surprise, despite the temptations of the idea of an originator, that there are philosophers of Free Will who have given up entirely on the idea. They argue for origination without an originator or self. They have no truck with a non event or unchanging substance somehow giving rise to choices and decisions. They have nothing to say about self-causation.

That is not all that can be said at this point, particularly about the matter of probability and effects. Probability is a difficult and disputed subject, as was remarked earlier, even if it is clear that an event's having been made probable by something is not the same as the thing's having been a causal circumstance for it. But this is consistent with another clear and good idea — the possibility that our talk of the probability of an event's happening actually presupposes and depends on there really being a standard causal explanation of the event. This bad news for Free Will philosophy is roughly as follows.

What is it for an earlier event A to have made it 95 per cent probable that a later event B would occur? A good idea about this has to do with the fact, of which you have already heard, that typically we don't know exactly and fully what is in a causal circumstance for B. And that typically we have a pretty good idea. We know in what situation a causal circumstance tends to occur.

Suppose it has been our experience that in 95 per cent of the situations in which event A occurred, it was followed by B. We say B is 95 per cent probable with respect to A, and what this means is just that in 95 per cent of the situations in which A occurs, there is precisely a causal circumstance for B. That leaves B as just probable with respect to A, and not the effect of A as a causal circumstance. But the fact of probability simply presupposes that B is the standard effect of something. As I say, bad news if you want to put probability together with indeterminism.

Bob: I completely agree here. The probabilities involved with our use of indeterminism are limited to the free generation of alternative possibilities for de-liberation by the adequately determined will.

Chance is never the direct cause of our actions or decisions.

Ted: Last but not least, it is likely that a Free Will theory really cannot get rid of the embarrassment of an originator. It has to have something that is going to be responsible. A past decision itself, whether it was probable or self-causing or teleological or anything else, isn't what we hold responsible for actions or give a kind of moral credit to for actions. If a philosopher says it is not a person in an ordinary sense who is responsible, something of certain traits, desires and so an, he will indeed need to offer us something more than a choice or decision in certain relations. We don't put past decisions in jail either.

Have I been too hard on the philosophy of Free Will, too judgemental? Well, have a look for yourself at efforts to set out clear, consistent and complete accounts (Kane 2002a; O'Connor 1995b). As for our project of setting out a determinist philosophy, we need to finish it by looking at the relation of conscious events to subsequent actions. We will then come to a final judgement about the clarity, consistency, and completeness of the two philosophies, and then really look at the question which has already been pushing in, their truth.

Bob: Ted's position on hard determinism has spawned a cottage industry of philosophers with variations on his basic idea, called "hard incompatibilism" or "illusionism." We have surveyed the growing number of distinct positions in our history of the free will problem and have created a taxonomy.

Ted's argument for near-determinism is stronger than any of his followers, and if he became convinced that the explanation for origination is simply the alternative possibilities generated by a limited indeterminism, I am sure his arguments would convince all his colleagues who have looked to him for inspiration.

Ted returns to the loss of an originating self...

Ted: What can come up is something that can seem to be on the way to a conviction. It is the question of whether a certain sense of one's life can have to do only with origination or Free Will, and nothing else, and thus in consistency with determinism we have to try to escape from it. Can this sense of one's life rest on some other ground instead? The sense in question has to do with more than one's moral responsibility, but that is part of it, and a place to start with these reflections.

If you settle down to think of your past life, to give it reflective attention, it can seem that you cannot avoid feeling responsible in a certain way for what you have done. This is likely to be more a matter of holding yourself responsible than crediting yourself with responsibility. To engage in autobiographical thinking of a serious sort, let alone the actual writing of an autobiography (Honderich 2001a), is surely to come to feel that your life has had in it patterns, actions, feelings and so on such that you would feel a lot better if they were missing. To get the sequence of your life into focus is surely to disapprove morally of yourself in something like the way that goes with accepting Free Will. It is to find retributive impulses in yourself against yourself. To get hold of the episodes of your past is surely to fall into or to be inclined to just that guilt contemplated earlier as something from which determinism should free us.

This particular kind of moral disapproval owed to autobiographical reflection, the special guilt, must at least at first seem to carry with it and depend on the image or idea of the initiation of actions inconsistent with determinism. It seems to carry with it what there is a lot of reason to despair of, an image of origination.

That is not the end of the story about autobiographical reflection, but only half of it. Our dealings with our pasts are not all judgemental, not all concerned with moral disapproval or approval. Often, if you get started on reflection about your past life, what you want is just to understand. How did it come about? How were those person-stages connected? How did I get where I got and become what I am? The aim is explanation, not judgement.

Bob: In our information philosophy, person-stages are connected by the information stored in minds that contain the record of past experiences, both knowledge and feelings.

Ted: In particular, is it conceivable that we can by some idea or other persist in certain attitudes, which do indeed seem tied up with the obscure and factitious machinery of origination — persist in these attitudes without recourse to the machinery of origination and in all ways consistently with determinism?

Something else needs attention before we look at this main question. Something else, in fact, changes the question significantly..., let me quickly say only that there has been some individuality about my life. There has been a uniqueness that can seem to be in conflict with my life's having been a sequence of causal circumstances. This individuality is certainly not a matter of my being significantly different from others in terms of character or personality. Each of at least many of us, paradoxically, is individual in this way. It is not too much to say that each of us stands apart from others and from everything else.

Bob: Our information philosophy is a powerful basis for theories of individuality and subjectivity. Life and intelligence cannot be reduced to chemistry and physics, despite its compatibility with those natural laws.

Life is quintessentially information, unique information that is the ancient principum individuum and the difference that makes the difference in all of us.

Ted: So — I can have a sense of my life that consists in a certain feeling of moral responsibility and also an idea, separate from morality, of an individuality or uniqueness. Does it have other sides? These two will be enough for our reflections. This sense of my life, to continue, suggests a source that it cannot really have, a source in the murky machinery of origination, once characterized as panicky metaphysics (P. F. Strawson). Can it be that there is another ground, very different, for this sense? It would be agreeable to have a confident and developed idea of such a ground to report to you, but I do not have that.

Bob: Strawson's complaints about "panicky metaphysics" were misplaced.

The strict causal determinism of the dogmatic philosophers and theologians is far more metaphysical than our arguments based on indeterministic chance and adequate physical determinism in the natural world.

We must recognize sensible limits to freedom (indeterminism) to make room for will (adequate determinism), and vice versa.

Ted: The departure that may be needed in connection with determinism and freedom, and in particular in connection with determinism and a sense of a life as individual, is in fact a kind of change of subject.

It is that it seems possible that the new thinking that is needed with determinism and our senses of our lives will actually have to do with the nature of consciousness. It may have to do, yet more fundamentally, with consciousness and the nature of reality. It may be that the true resolution of the problem of determinism and our senses of our lives is to be found not in moral philosophy, and not in the philosophy of mind narrowly understood, but in metaphysics and epistemology, these being understood as philosophical concerns with the nature of reality and our part of it and our role in it. It may be, even, that the particular new thinking on consciousness will do something to resolve the problem of a basis of our senses of our lives.

Not to be faint-hearted, let me leave you, particularly the one or two open-minded postgraduate students of the age, with one other thought. It is another indication of the extent to which we may need to abandon the philosophy of determinism and freedom as we have and have has it and start up again in this new millennium. It may also actually be of use with the problem of determinism and freedom, and in particular another basis for our senses of our lives.

Bob: As one of those open-minded postgraduates, I am always interested in new thoughts.

Ted: What this comes to is that the culmination of a life, say, is a matter of plain determinism, but there seems also to be the possibility of some kind of explanation of it that is different in kind. Some kind of departure from determinism, or unexpected addition to it. At any rate there is a problem or paradox here. The putative explanation would be consistent with determinism, indeed within it, but different in kind from ordinary causal explanation — ordinary explanation of an event by a causal circumstance. I have wondered, unsuccessfully so far, if the thing is worth reflection in connection with determinism and the attitudes in which we can find ourselves persisting — determinism and a sense of one's life.

Bob: The one departure from deteminism simpliciter is first to see the chaos and chance in the natural world. Then observe the fact that our lives, and indeed all life, and all cosmic structure, is capable of overcoming, of controlling (within obvious limits) this chaos and chance.

Our sense of life must include the wonder of our extraordinary ability to create and maintain information structures in the presence of disorder (entropy).

There is a battle going on. It is a struggle between destructive chaotic processes that drive a microscopic underworld of random events versus constructive cosmic processes that create information structures with extraordinary emergent properties.

The created information structures range from galaxies, stars, and planets, to molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles. They are the structures of terrestrial life from viruses and bacteria to sensible and intelligent beings. And they are the constructed ideal world of thought, of intellect, of spirit, including the laws of nature, in which we humans play a role as co-creator.

Ted: It may be that we shall get nowhere. It may be, despite what has been said, that there is no need to try. Your sense of your life as individual, if you too have one, may be a kind of illusion. You may be no more than a victim of that process of acculturation mentioned earlier, that one that has much to do with Western religions and begins with our mothers. You may have had both an ungrounded feeling of moral responsibility imposed on you and also a mistakenly enlarged sense of your existence and your importance. It could be that there is no truth that gives us what I have been calling our senses of our lives. We are just giving in to mother.

Bob: Ted seems to be regressing back to his Freud studies.

We need to remind him of his original goal - "The impulse to my stirring was just to see something or other clearly, get something or other really right."

Can we get him to see clearly that if he combined his determinism with a limited indeterminism he would have something that his "plain seeing and plain speaking of fundamental things" can use to create an Epicurean "swerve" in the course of the philosophy of freedom, determinism, and moral responsibility?

Can he see his still open future, a future he can make for himself?

If he leads, will not the rest of recent philosophy follow?

That surely should fit into his life hopes.