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Arthur Stanley Eddington
(1882-1944)
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 Albert Einstein's general relativity theory. And his popular interpretations of these difficult physical theories made Eddington widely known to the general public.

A year later, in response to Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, Eddington revised his lectures for publication as The Nature of the Physical World. There he dramatically 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. He went even farther and enthusiastically identified indeterminism with freedom of the will.
But Eddington left himself open to the charge, well known since Epicurus' original suggestion for an uncaused swerve of the atoms, that chance could not be simply identified with freedom. He seems to have been unaware that determinism and indeterminism were two horns of the dilemma in the historic standard argument against free will.

Eddington was apparently unaware of the work of William James or Henri Poincaré to make deliberation a two-stage process - first random possibilities, then a de-liberate decision, first chance, then choice.

Philosophers were quick to attack Eddington, led by L.Susan Stebbing, who argued in her Philosophy and the Physicists that a "free electron" had nothing to do with human freedom.

A decade after embracing indeterminism and just a few years before his death, Eddington in his 1939 book The Philosophy of Physical Science reluctantly concluded there is no "halfway house" 46 between randomness and determinism - an echo of David Hume's "no medium betwixt chance and an absolute necessity."

"The indeterminacy recognised in modern quantum theory is only a partial step towards freeing our actions from deterministic control." (The Nature of the Physical World, 1928, 313)

"The revolution of theory which has expelled determinism from present-day physics has therefore the important consequence that it is no longer necessary to suppose that human actions are competely predetermined. Although the door of human freedom is opened, it is not flung wide open; only a chink of daylight appears." (New Pathways in Science, 1935, p.87)

"I would even say that in the present indeterministic theory of the physical universe we have reached something which a reasonable man might almost believe." (New Pathways in Science, 1935, p.91)

"There is in a human being some portion of the brain, perhaps a mere speck of brain-matter, perhaps an extensive region, in which the physical effects of his volitions begin,." (The Philosophy of Physical Science, 1938, p.182)

"There is no half-way house between random and correlated behavior. Either the behavior is wholly a matter of chance, in which case the precise behavior within the Heisenberg limits of uncertainty depends on chance and not volition. Or it is not wholly a matter of chance, in which case the Heisenberg limits...are irrelevant." (The Philosophy of Physical Science, 1938, p.182)

The Cogito model of human freedom is in many ways the "halfway house" that Eddington could not see, combining determinism and indeterminism.
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