Summary
Whether free will is a reality is an increasingly urgent problem, both from a scientific and a social point of view. An ability to make judgments and take actions that are “free” in some meaningful sense would seem a prerequisite for the process of scientific reasoning and for our ability to behave morally. How are we to reconcile the “autonomy” of a reasoning intellect with our scientific conviction that all behavior is mediated by mechanistic interactions between cells of the central nervous system? It seems that answers will ultimately lie in a deeper understanding of emergent phenomena in complex systems. This will help enrich our impoverished standard notions of causation in physical systems.
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Newsome, W.T. (2009). Human Freedom “Emergence”. In: Murphy, N., Ellis, G.F.R., O’Connor, T. (eds) Downward Causation and the Neurobiology of Free Will. Understanding Complex Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03205-9_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03205-9_3
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