Eric Holloway: Can free will be a scientific idea?

Yes, if we look at it from the perspective of information theory:

So, if all of our universe could, in principle, be run on a smartphone, then every part of the universe could certainly be run on a smartphone, including the human mind. This is why many highly educated and intelligent people think that the mind itself must reduce to a computer algorithm, at least in theory. In their view, there is just no other possibility.

However, their assumption is provably false. There are other possibilities. Chance and necessity are a very narrow restriction on the range of possibilities. They are a very successful restriction because we’ve been able to explain and control much of our world by reducing it to models of chance and necessity. But the point remains that chance and necessity is not the only way things can be.

Why not? To understand what the phrase “chance and necessity” means, we need a brief detour through probability theory. In everyday life, we casually throw around the terms “confidence,” “chance,” and “likely.” We sometimes attach numbers too. We say that an event has a 90% chance of occurring. But, what do we mean by a “90% chance”?

There are several ways of interpreting our notion of a 90% chance and they do not all mean the same thing.

Eric Holloway, “Can free will really be a scientific idea” at Mind Matters News

Further reading on free will:

Why do atheists still claim that free will can’t exist? Sam Harris reduces everything to physics but then ignores quantum non-determinism (Eric Holloway)

Was famous old evidence against free will just debunked? The pattern that was thought to prove free will an illusion may have been noise

and

Younger thinkers now argue that free will is real. The laws of physics do not rule it out, they say.

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