Free Will Pessimism

The immediate aim of this paper is to articulate the essential features of an alternative compatibilist position, one that is responsive to sources of resistance to the compatibilist program based on considerations of fate and luck. The approach taken relies on distinguishing carefully between issues of skepticism and pessimism as they arise in this context. A compatibilism that is properly responsive to concerns about fate and luck is committed to what I describe as free will pessimism, which is to be distinguished from free will skepticism. Free will skepticism is the view that our vulnerability to conditions of fate and luck serve to discredit our view of ourselves as free and responsible agents. Free will pessimism rejects free will scepticism, since the basis of its pessimism rests with the assumption that we are free and responsible agents who are, nevertheless, subject to fate and luck in this aspect of our lives. According to free will pessimism, all the major parties and positions in the free will debate, including that of skepticism, are modes of evasion and distortion regarding our human predicament in respect of agency and moral life

Protean Free Will

This paper argues that free will is a purely theological issue, and offers an error theory for the free will debates in analytic philosophy in terms of evolutionary naturalism. I introduce 'protean free will' (PFW) as the ability to play mixed strategies effectively in noncooperative interactions. Thence, I argue that traditional worries about divine foreknowledge, Frankfurt controllers, moral responsibility, and determinism are side effects of selective pressures for unpredictability in our evolutionary past. Finally, I interpret the Libet experiments as showing an adaptive response to such pressures. I conclude that PFW does most things most philosophers want free will to do, conditional on the nonexistence of God

The Free Will Theorem

On the basis of three physical axioms, we prove that if the choice of a particular type of spin 1 experiment is not a function of the information accessible to the experimenters, then its outcome is equally not a function of the information accessible to the particles. We show that this result is robust, and deduce that neither hidden variable theories nor mechanisms of the GRW type for wave function collapse can be made relativistic. We also establish the consistency of our axioms and discuss the philosophical implications.Comment: 31 pages, 6figure

On Incompatibilist Free Will

We consider the possibility of defining some kind of activity which meets the intuitive requirements of incompatibilist free will. Our analysis of this will be done in a fashion which in some ways parallels the work of Pink on this matter. We will then consider the evidence of such free will, both from an introspective perspective and from a scientific perspective. In the latter we consider neurological and psychological evidence

The Reality of Free Will

The uniqueness of each viewpoint, each point of effect, can be "overcome" only by changing the viewpoint to other viewpoints and returning. Such an alternation, which can also appear as constant change, makes up the unity of the world. The wholeness of an alternation, however, is a consciousness structure because of the special relationship between the circumscribing periphery and the infinitesimal center. This process structure unites determinacy and indeterminacy at every point also totally. We are dealing, therefore, with forms of consciousness everywhere, with more or less freedom of choice and an increasingly unknown depth. We live in a world of choosing consciousness or better: awareness. In this respect, our environment expresses a deep truth about ourselves

Evolving Persons and Free Will

Human beings are masters of deception if they want to appear superior to others and to suggest that they have everything under control (see, e.g., Fingarette 2000, Mele 2000). Such self-delusions might be advantageous, because those are the most successful liars who believe their own lies. Although it seems paradoxical at first (for he who does not tell the untruth intentionally is, strictly speaking, not a liar at all), it rests upon a much more radical self-deception which is quite useful – a systematic and continuous illusion regarding ourselves. Higher-order forms of self-consciousness, namely I-consciousness, are based on a feature which is called a self-model. This is an episodically active representational entity (e.g. a complex activation pattern in a human brain), the contents of which are properties of the system itself. It is embedded and constantly updated in a global model of the world, based on perceptions, memories, innate information etc. (Metzinger 1993). But because self-models cannot represent their own representations as their own representations as their own representations and so on ad infinitum, they are semantically transparent, i.e. on the level of their content they do not contain the information that they are models. Thus, such systems are not able to recognize their self-model as a self-model (Van Gulick 1988). The result is an ego-illusion, which is stable, coherent, and cannot be transcended on the level of conscious experience itself