Related papers: Reframing the Free Will Debate: The Universe is No…
Both deterministic and indeterministic physical laws are incompatible with control by genuine (non-illusory) free will. We propose that an indeterministic dynamics can be $weakly$ compatible with free will (FW), whereby the latter acts by…
Physicists are increasingly beginning to take seriously the possibility of laws outside the traditional time-evolution paradigm; yet our understanding of determinism is still predicated on a forwards time-evolution picture, making it…
The basic question in the long-standing debate about free will (FW) is not whether FW can be demonstrated to exist nor even whether it exists, but instead how to define it scientifically. If FW is not dismissed as an illusion nor identified…
The abstract concept of indeterministic free will is distinguished from the phenomenon of free will. Evidence for the abstract concept is examined and critically compared with various designs of automata. It is concluded that there is no…
Most physics theories are deterministic, with the notable exception of quantum mechanics which, however, comes plagued by the so-called measurement problem. This state of affairs might well be due to the inability of standard mathematics to…
In this letter, we point to three widely accepted challenges that the quantum theory, quantum information, and quantum foundations communities are currently facing: indeterminism, the semantics of conditional probabilities, and the spooky…
The title refers to the Free Will Theorem by Conway and Kochen whose flashy formulation is: if experimenters possess free will, then so do particles. In more modest terms, the theorem says that individual pairs of spacelike separated…
It is argued that the concept of free will, like the concept of truth in formal languages, requires a separation between an object level and a meta-level for being consistently defined. The Jamesian two-stage model, which deconstructs free…
Metaphysics is traditionally conceived as aiming at the truth -- indeed, the most fundamental truths about the most general features of reality. Philosophical naturalists, urging that philosophical claims be grounded on science, have often…
We investigate the fate of determinism in general relativity (GR), comparing the philosopher's account with the physicist's well-posed initial value formulations. The fate of determinism is interwoven with the question of what it is for a…
According to the widely accepted opinion, classical (statistical) physics does not support objective indeterminism, since the statistical laws of classical physics allow a deterministic hidden background, while --- as Arthur Fine writes…
One main goal of argumentation theory is to evaluate arguments and to determine whether they should be accepted or rejected. When there is no clear answer, a third option, being undecided, has to be taken into account. Indecision is often…
The paper starts with the proposal that the cause of the apparent insolubility of the free-will problem are several popular but strongly metaphysical notions and hypotheses. To reduce the metaphysics, some ideas are borrowed from physics. A…
In quantum gravity there is no notion of absolute time. Like all other quantities in the theory, the notion of time has to be introduced "relationally", by studying the behavior of some physical quantities in terms of others chosen as a…
Free will is fundamental to morality, intuition of self, and normal functioning of the society. However, science does not provide a clear logical foundation for this idea. This paper considers the fundamental scientific argument against…
The so-called "free will axiom" is an essential ingredient in many discussions concerning hidden variables in quantum mechanics. In this paper we argue that "free will" can be defined in different ways. The definition usually employed is…
A tradition handed down among physicists maintains that classical physics is a perfectly deterministic theory capable of predicting the future with absolute certainty, independently of any interpretations. It also tells that it was quantum…
We propose an interpretation of physics named potentiality realism. This view, which can be applied to classical as well as to quantum physics, regards potentialities (i.e. intrinsic, objective propensities for individual events to obtain)…
Historically, appearance of the quantum theory led to a prevailing view that Nature is indeterministic. The arguments for the indeterminism and proposals for indeterministic and deterministic approaches are reviewed. These include collapse…
We present the foundations of a new emerging interpretation of quantum theory bearing wide-range implications. Physical basis of the interpretation is non-questionable yet relatively new--it relies on the different structures…