The Free Will Debate

Consciousness, Justice and Technology

This discussion addresses a range of topics in the free will debate, from the determinism of Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky, to the compatibilism of Daniel Dennett, to the free will libertarianism of Kevin Mitchell and David Lawrence.

The Free Will Position

Agency, or free will, is a feature of consciousness; it is the capacity for self-caused action; it is both the unmoved mover generating a new path, and the chooser, collapsing the wave function into one potentiality, solidifying one path out of the field of potentials

The development of consciousness is the development towards freedom. The goal of being human is to realize the full potential of this faculty.

As agency is intimately interwoven in the fabric of reality, the universe that free will describes is not static but dynamic, and reality, at least in part, is choice-dependent.

All creative human endeavor is predicated on agency as an irreducible assumption, without which it would be self-defeating. Science and philosophy (as they have been understood and practiced) would make no sense in a fully deterministic universe.