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Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
Rogers Albritton
Alexander of Aphrodisias
Samuel Alexander
William Alston
Anaximander
G.E.M.Anscombe
Anselm
Louise Antony
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
David Armstrong
Harald Atmanspacher
Robert Audi
Augustine
J.L.Austin
A.J.Ayer
Alexander Bain
Mark Balaguer
Jeffrey Barrett
William Barrett
William Belsham
Henri Bergson
George Berkeley
Isaiah Berlin
Richard J. Bernstein
Bernard Berofsky
Robert Bishop
Max Black
Susanne Bobzien
Emil du Bois-Reymond
Hilary Bok
Laurence BonJour
George Boole
Émile Boutroux
Daniel Boyd
F.H.Bradley
C.D.Broad
Michael Burke
Lawrence Cahoone
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Rudolf Carnap
Carneades
Nancy Cartwright
Gregg Caruso
Ernst Cassirer
David Chalmers
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Randolph Clarke
Samuel Clarke
Anthony Collins
Antonella Corradini
Diodorus Cronus
Jonathan Dancy
Donald Davidson
Mario De Caro
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Daniel Dennett
Jacques Derrida
René Descartes
Richard Double
Fred Dretske
John Dupré
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
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Austin Farrer
Herbert Feigl
Arthur Fine
John Martin Fischer
Frederic Fitch
Owen Flanagan
Luciano Floridi
Philippa Foot
Alfred Fouilleé
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Bas van Fraassen
Michael Frede
Gottlob Frege
Peter Geach
Edmund Gettier
Carl Ginet
Alvin Goldman
Gorgias
Nicholas St. John Green
H.Paul Grice
Ian Hacking
Ishtiyaque Haji
Stuart Hampshire
W.F.R.Hardie
Sam Harris
William Hasker
R.M.Hare
Georg W.F. Hegel
Martin Heidegger
Heraclitus
R.E.Hobart
Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Shadsworth Hodgson
Baron d'Holbach
Ted Honderich
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Frank Jackson
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Jaegwon Kim
William King
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Christine Korsgaard
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Thomas Kuhn
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Keith Lehrer
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Joseph Levine
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David Lewis
Peter Lipton
C. Lloyd Morgan
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Michael Lockwood
Arthur O. Lovejoy
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John R. Lucas
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Tim Maudlin
James Martineau
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Thomas Nagel
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John Norton
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Charles Sanders Peirce
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
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Michael Smith
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Isabelle Stengers
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Roy Weatherford
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David Widerker
David Wiggins
Bernard Williams
Timothy Williamson
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Susan Wolf

Scientists

David Albert
Michael Arbib
Walter Baade
Bernard Baars
Jeffrey Bada
Leslie Ballentine
Marcello Barbieri
Gregory Bateson
Horace Barlow
John S. Bell
Mara Beller
Charles Bennett
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Susan Blackmore
Margaret Boden
David Bohm
Niels Bohr
Ludwig Boltzmann
Emile Borel
Max Born
Satyendra Nath Bose
Walther Bothe
Jean Bricmont
Hans Briegel
Leon Brillouin
Stephen Brush
Henry Thomas Buckle
S. H. Burbury
Melvin Calvin
Donald Campbell
Sadi Carnot
Anthony Cashmore
Eric Chaisson
Gregory Chaitin
Jean-Pierre Changeux
Rudolf Clausius
Arthur Holly Compton
John Conway
Jerry Coyne
John Cramer
Francis Crick
E. P. Culverwell
Antonio Damasio
Olivier Darrigol
Charles Darwin
Richard Dawkins
Terrence Deacon
Lüder Deecke
Richard Dedekind
Louis de Broglie
Stanislas Dehaene
Max Delbrück
Abraham de Moivre
Bernard d'Espagnat
Paul Dirac
Hans Driesch
John Eccles
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Gerald Edelman
Paul Ehrenfest
Manfred Eigen
Albert Einstein
George F. R. Ellis
Hugh Everett, III
Franz Exner
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R. A. Fisher
David Foster
Joseph Fourier
Philipp Frank
Steven Frautschi
Edward Fredkin
Benjamin Gal-Or
Howard Gardner
Lila Gatlin
Michael Gazzaniga
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
GianCarlo Ghirardi
J. Willard Gibbs
James J. Gibson
Nicolas Gisin
Paul Glimcher
Thomas Gold
A. O. Gomes
Brian Goodwin
Joshua Greene
Dirk ter Haar
Jacques Hadamard
Mark Hadley
Patrick Haggard
J. B. S. Haldane
Stuart Hameroff
Augustin Hamon
Sam Harris
Ralph Hartley
Hyman Hartman
Jeff Hawkins
John-Dylan Haynes
Donald Hebb
Martin Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
John Herschel
Basil Hiley
Art Hobson
Jesper Hoffmeyer
Don Howard
John H. Jackson
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Roman Jakobson
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Pascual Jordan
Eric Kandel
Ruth E. Kastner
Stuart Kauffman
Martin J. Klein
William R. Klemm
Christof Koch
Simon Kochen
Hans Kornhuber
Stephen Kosslyn
Daniel Koshland
Ladislav Kovàč
Leopold Kronecker
Rolf Landauer
Alfred Landé
Pierre-Simon Laplace
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David Layzer
Joseph LeDoux
Gerald Lettvin
Gilbert Lewis
Benjamin Libet
David Lindley
Seth Lloyd
Hendrik Lorentz
Werner Loewenstein
Josef Loschmidt
Ernst Mach
Donald MacKay
Henry Margenau
Owen Maroney
David Marr
Humberto Maturana
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Ernst Mayr
John McCarthy
Warren McCulloch
N. David Mermin
George Miller
Stanley Miller
Ulrich Mohrhoff
Jacques Monod
Vernon Mountcastle
Emmy Noether
Donald Norman
Alexander Oparin
Abraham Pais
Howard Pattee
Wolfgang Pauli
Massimo Pauri
Wilder Penfield
Roger Penrose
Steven Pinker
Colin Pittendrigh
Walter Pitts
Max Planck
Susan Pockett
Henri Poincaré
Daniel Pollen
Ilya Prigogine
Hans Primas
Zenon Pylyshyn
Henry Quastler
Adolphe Quételet
Pasco Rakic
Nicolas Rashevsky
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Frederick Reif
Jürgen Renn
Giacomo Rizzolati
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Juan Roederer
Jerome Rothstein
David Ruelle
David Rumelhart
Tilman Sauer
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Jürgen Schmidhuber
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Aaron Schurger
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Thomas Sebeok
Franco Selleri
Claude Shannon
Charles Sherrington
David Shiang
Abner Shimony
Herbert Simon
Dean Keith Simonton
Edmund Sinnott
B. F. Skinner
Lee Smolin
Ray Solomonoff
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John Stachel
Henry Stapp
Tom Stonier
Antoine Suarez
Leo Szilard
Max Tegmark
Teilhard de Chardin
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Richard Tolman
Giulio Tononi
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Francisco Varela
Vlatko Vedral
Mikhail Volkenstein
Heinz von Foerster
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John von Neumann
Jakob von Uexküll
C. S. Unnikrishnan
C. H. Waddington
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Daniel Wegner
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Paul A. Weiss
Herman Weyl
John Wheeler
Wilhelm Wien
Norbert Wiener
Eugene Wigner
E. O. Wilson
Günther Witzany
Stephen Wolfram
H. Dieter Zeh
Semir Zeki
Ernst Zermelo
Wojciech Zurek
Konrad Zuse
Fritz Zwicky

Presentations

Biosemiotics
Free Will
Mental Causation
James Symposium
 
Mark Hadley

Mark Hadley is a physicist on the academic staff at the University of Warwick.

His 2018 research essay in the Journal of Consciousness Exploration an Research is titled "A Deterministic Model of the Free Will Phenomenon." It challenges the evidence for indeterminism and develops a deterministic model of decision making.

Hadley writes:

The relation between free will and physics is contentious and puzzling at all levels. Philosophers have debated how free will can be explained with current scientific theories. There is debate about the meaning of the term free will, even leading to questions about whether or not we have anything called free will. A key focus of the philosophical debate is compatibility of free will with deterministic physical theories. Philosophers who argue against determinism, suggest a fundamental role for quantum theory in models of our decision making. It is the supposed link to quantum theory first attracted my interest. The literature extends from philosophy journals to science publications (Conway and Kochen 2006, Libet 1985, Nichols 2011).

This work takes a unique approach to the problem, looking for evidence, building models and making predictions. It is critically important to recognise two different uses of the term free will. An abstract concept, and a known property of human decision making, they are distinct and require different approaches, but they are often confused. Searle (2007) points to the lack of progress on the free will problem over centuries and suggests that the way forward will be to recognise a false supposition. We identify that false supposition that: the phenomenon of free will provides evidence and relevance for the abstract concept of indeterministic free will. It does not.

There is an abstract concept of indeterministic free will. It is the concept of a decision making process not governed by classical deterministic laws of physics. Because this is an abstract concept, it makes sense to ask ‘Do we have free will?’ If we understand the concept then we can design tests to answer the all-important question ‘Do we have free will?’ The answer might be expected to depend on exactly how we define the conceptual form of free will. For the abstract concept called free will we ask what its properties would be and how we could test for its existence or measure it.

This paper also recognises a phenomenon of free will that we possess as a characteristic of human decision making - a belief and common experience that we could do otherwise. It is widely accepted, almost universal, and crosses cultural divides (Sarkissian et al 2010). It underpins theological, legal and moral systems (Nahmias et al 2007), (Nichols and Knobe 2007). The overwhelming majority of philosophers and commentators ascribe the property to humans, generally not to animals, and most definitely not to computers. We will try to characterise and model the phenomenon and then test the model against the facts. Note that the phenomenon of free will (the phenomenon) exists, it is up to us to accurately model the phenomenon. We will do exactly that.

This is not a review paper. Philosophical and other references are given to respected sources to illustrate the debate, rather than as a comprehensive review. This paper is exclusively about the decision making process. Some debate is about the ability or otherwise to enact a decision, where an agent freely makes a decision but is impaired from acting on it by one form or other of constraint (Frankfurt 1969). What happens after a decision is reached seems relatively free from paradoxes and does not challenge the interface between the mind and the laws of physics.

In the literature the same term, free will, is used for the abstract concept of indeterministic decision making and also for the phenomenon that we can do otherwise, which is a cause of substantial confusion and is at the heart of most assertions that quantum theory is required to explain free will. Some authors recognise the assumption they are making (Searle 2007), others seem to make it unwittingly. Arguments along the lines of: free will [the concept] is incompatible with deterministic laws; we have free will [the phenomenon] therefore it must be due to non-deterministic theories, of which quantum theory is our prime example. Confusing the two also takes away any motivation to look for evidence of the concept, because the phenomenon is taken as that evidence. The confusion also undermines the search for models because decision making that is indeterministic is equated to free will (the concept) without explaining why that gives rise to perceived freedom to do otherwise, which is the phenomenon of free will.

Hadley participated in a debate on free will at an organization called VVoIP_Physics_Debates. They are a non-profit, non-governmental organization formed to organize VVoIP (Voice and Video over IP) video-panel debates (seminars, colloquiums, workshops, and schools) supported by free of charge internet and paper publications of proceedings to facilitate progress in physics and related subjects.

Hadley's contribution to the debate was "The False Presupposition and a Testable Model of the Free Will Phenomenon"   YouTube Video   Power Point Slides

His most recent idea is what Hadley calls his "challenge model."

The challenge model of free will aims to model the phenomenon of free will – the perception “that we could do otherwise”. Unlike two stage models it has nothing to do with determinism or indeterminism. The author, Mark Hadley, claims that there is no role for either determinism or indeterminism in explaining human free will. Not only is there no evidence for either, but any pattern of decision making could be replicated using either deterministic or indeterministic mechanisms.

The challenge model, is constructed from a standard goal seeking agent as commonly used in a variety of disciplines. A goal of “independence” is added. Independence is satisfied when the agent responds to a challenge. A challenge like “could you do otherwise” results in a probabilistic change in behaviour (the actual response depends upon all the other goals and states of the agent).

Furthermore, the agent can generate its own challenges “I wonder if I could do ….?” And therefore builds up a history of being able to do otherwise. That gives the perception to the agent, and to third parties, that they could do otherwise.

The clearest test of the challenge model is the way a very predictable action can be reversed in response to a challenge. Such as “could you write with your left hand?” “Could you put your hand near that flame?”

The VVoIP Debate on Free Will included Nicolas Gisin's idea that free will is a necessary precondition for science itself..

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