Hierarchical Brain

Free will

Free will is an emotive and polarising subject. On one side of the argument, many people say it must exist in order to justify the aspects of individual responsibility that are assumed by our moral, justice and legal systems, and to make life worth living; on the other side, a growing number of scientists say that it cannot exist in a deterministic world. I propose that both of these apparently opposing views can be correct at the same time, but at different levels of description. However, both come with provisos: the free will I have is not what I inherently think I have, and the behaviour of my brain is not totally predictable, even though it is theoretically deterministic.

This explanation of free will as a high-level emergent feature depends on the existence of my self symbol schema, on my conclusion that I am my self symbol schema, and on the process of attention, and therefore sits at the highest level in my hierarchical structure of levels of description.

Overview and definitions

• Free will has been discussed by scientists and philosophers for many years, but both persuasive arguments by philosophers and recent advances in neuroscience have cast serious doubts on the normal definition of the term¹.
  • Some standard definitions are as follows:
    1. Wikipedia says free will is “the notional capacity or ability to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded”.
    2. The Cambridge English Dictionary says free will is “the ability to decide what to do independently of any outside influence”.
    3. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says free will is the “power to control one’s choices and actions” and that “when an agent exercises free will over her choices and actions, her choices and actions are up to her. ...up to her in the sense that she is able to choose otherwise, or at minimum that she is able not to choose or act as she does, and up to her in the sense that she is the source of her action.”
  • These definitions can be broken down into three statements about my free will.
    1. I can make a conscious choice between two or more options at any given time.
    2. The choice I can make is free of pre-conditions or external influences.
    3. Given identical circumstances, I could have made a different choice.
  • These three statement match well with what I innately tend to believe that my free will is, but I know that this does not necessarily mean that they are correct.
    • In terms of my proposals on this website, what I innately believe is stored in my symbol schema that represents free will.
    • All symbol schemas are compressed versions of reality and are incomplete and not fully accurate.
    • In particular, symbol schemas that represent internal brain processes are incomplete because they can only describe the conscious part of the process (more on this below).
  • When these three statements are examined more closely, there are serious problems with all of them. These problems have been discussed in great depth by many thinkers over many years, and going into the philosophical arguments in great detail would not serve any useful purpose², but this is a very brief summary of the major objections:
    1. If my consciousness is the cause of my choice, then something has to be the cause of that, and so on; a choice cannot be without cause. The lowest level of cause must be predetermined, so it cannot be a free choice.
    2. If a choice is truly free of pre-conditions or external influences then it is simply a random selection; a choice can only be made by considering the conditions or implications.
    3. Circumstances are never identical, so supposing that a different choice could have been made is purely hypothetical; in addition, there is some indeterminacy in the world and within my brain, so even if circumstances were the same, different conditions could apply to a choice.
  • For these reasons a lot of writers have felt that the only way forward is to redefine what we mean by free will to try to get around these problems. The result is always likely to be something that is rather different from what I inherently believe free will to be, but that is inevitable.
• The opinions of scientists and philosophers on the subject of free will have become particularly polarised in recent years with an increasing number (although still a minority) arguing that it cannot exist, and others saying that this is a dangerous idea to express.
  • Many people feel that there has to be at least some ability for humans to make a choice, whether or not it is actually called free will, for several reasons:
    1. If I cannot choose what I do, then doing science research or proposing theories would be pointless⁹.
    2. If people felt there was no free will, justice and legal systems could break down^{11, 12}.
    3. No free will means no personal responsibilities and no morality, which could harm mental health, personal relationships and the general feeling of there being a meaning in life¹³.
• My proposal is that I do have something that can be called free will at the high level of symbols schemas even if it cannot exist at the lower levels.
  • The high-level view of free will needs to be considered in the context of my other proposals on this website.
    1. I am my self symbol schema, which means that my consciousness resides within my self symbol schema.
    2. Any choices that I consciously make are initiated by me via the process of attention.
    3. My symbol schemas that represent free will and attention are both incomplete and to some extent inaccurate, because they are created by the process I call cognoception.
    4. I only have an influence over my attention, not full control, therefore I also do not have full control over the choices I make. However this really applies only to rapid decisions made within a few seconds; for decisions that I deliberate over, I can have full control over the choices I make.
    5. This deliberation also always depends on other aspects of my self that are stored in symbol schemas outside my self symbol schema that can be described as my motivations, beliefs, desires, preferences and previous experiences.
    6. My choices are often also influenced by my deeper attributes of my self such as my upbringing, my culture, other people’s advice or opinions, as well as traits or desires built into my DNA by evolution.
    So my free will is not what I inherently think it is, but I do have the ability to make a conscious choice of what I say, think or do, and from my point of view, from the perspective of being within my self symbol schema, it is a free choice, dependent only on properties of my self.
  • At the lower level of neurons and synapses, despite the claims of some physicists, the behaviour of the brain is not fully deterministic, because of random thermal fluctuations, and even possibly random quantum events, and the chaotic architecture of the structure of the brain.
  • At the lowest level of atomic interactions, the brain, like all other physical processes in the universe, is completely deterministic, and, at least in theory, completely predictable. This does not, however, undermine the statements above about the higher levels.
• There are some similarities between free will and consciousness, but also some differences.
  • For both free will and consciousness, I am convinced I have it, and I also feel I must have it because life and existence would be not be the same without it.
  • Both my free will and my consciousness are purely personal feelings that cannot be known to anyone else, although other people can see the results of them. In both cases I can describe my own feelings about them to others.
  • It is relatively easy to set up an experiment that asks a subject to make a choice to demonstrate free will and to see what they do and perhaps monitor how they do it to a limited extent. This is much more difficult with consciousness. However, judging the meaning of the results of these experiments is notoriously difficult.
  • There has been a huge number of articles written about both free will and consciousness over many years, but free will is perhaps the more polarising subject of the two, people either say it exists, or it doesn’t.
  • The exact definitions of both consciousness and free will are also subjects that generate much debate, and in both cases writers (particularly philosophers) are very good at defining the terms in subtly different ways to suit their own arguments.
  • There are some differences in the effect on my personal existence of the two: if I did not have consciousness then having free will would be impossible. However, if I had consciousness and no free will, I would be like a robot, unable to make my own choices and therefore not responsible for my own actions.
• In the phrase “free will”, the word “will” means choice¹⁵, but it also has a connotation of something slightly deeper, a consistent thread running through my decisions.
  • The deeper feeling of ownership is what psychologists call agency, it is my sense that I am the instigator of my decisions, actions and thoughts.
    • My proposal is that my sense of agency comes about because my symbol schema that represents free will is within my self symbol schema.
  • My feeling of will or choice is what psychologists call volition, more commonly called willpower or self-control.
    • It seems to me that my willpower or self-control is simply my ability to focus my attention, which can feel like a limited resource because it gets more difficult as I get tired (see differences in attention).

Non-deterministic chaos

• An increasing number of scientists and philosophers say that there can be no such thing as free will because everything that happens in the world (including in the brain) is determined by previous events, and is therefore (in theory) predictable. This is undeniably true, but only at the lowest level of processing.
  • Here are three examples:
    • The German philosopher Thomas Metzinger has stated that determinism is obviously true in the brain, so a particular brain state is always caused by a previous brain state plus influences from the environment¹⁷.
    • Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder has published a YouTube video entitled I don’t believe in free will. This is why. which states that the future is determined by the past except for random quantum jumps that no-one can control¹⁸.
    • Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky published a book in 2023 entitled Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, and has concluded that we don’t have free will. He acknowledges that most neuroscientists, philosophers and the vast majority of the general population all believe humans have at least some degree of free will, because it is essential to how we see ourselves, fuelling the satisfaction of achievement or the shame of failing to do the right thing. But he says determinism in the brain means that there is no logical room for free will¹⁹.
  • However, I propose that the operation of the brain is non-deterministic and chaotic: there are low-level random influences that can cause changes to the operations of synapses or the firing of neurons which can be amplified by the chaotic architecture of the brain and therefore potentially cause changes to the behaviour of the owner of the brain⁷.
    • Deterministic chaos with random seeding creates non-deterministic chaos.
    • The implication is that, if a scientist is examining a specific area of a brain in isolation, whether it is a single synapse, a single neuron, a group of any numbers of these, or even a whole brain, despite having a complete description of all the inputs, they will not be able to determine for sure what the output or behaviour will be.
    • If the brain is non-deterministic, then its behaviour and actions are unpredictable, even in principle.
    • The reasons for this property of the brain are explained in the next few paragraphs.
  • There are three possible causes of random molecular-level changes in the brain:
    1. Random thermal fluctuations of ions or other molecules within a neuron are happening all the time.
       • This is the main source of what is often simply called noise and can be divided into synaptic noise and slightly higher-level neuronal noise.
       • These random variations could potentially cause a neuron to be more (or less) likely to raise an action potential, the result of which could be amplified by being passed onto many other neurons⁵.
    2. Quantum-level fluctuations of atoms and electrons could cause random outcomes, although many people think that these are too small and short-lived to affect molecules in the wet and relatively warm environment inside the brain⁶.
    3. High-energy particles such as cosmic rays and from other ionising radiation, if they penetrated the skull, could cause a change to a synapse.
       • This has been acknowledged as a possible source of random changes to DNA in living cells in other parts of the body⁸.
       • It has been investigated because of the particular risk to astronauts, and it has also been acknowledged as a problem for people who receive cranial radiotherapy²⁰, but is probably a low risk for other earth-bound people.
  • It is debateable whether any of these three factors on their own could actually cause a change to the behaviour of a human, but any of them, and particularly the first one, could act as the seed to cause much more widespread changes in the brain due to the inherent architecture of the brain, which is often called deterministic chaos³, or self-organised criticality.
    • Given the degenerate and resilient nature of the brain, it would seem likely that any small fluctuations like those caused by the three factors described above, on their own, would usually be cancelled out and have very little effect, although this would be very difficult to either prove or disprove.
    • Chaos has been known to be a feature of the architecture of the brain for some years, and is thought to be a fundamental part of the way the brain operates.
      • See model of my world § chaos for more details on how this architecture comes about and how it is useful to brain functions.
      • The word “chaos” is being used here in its mathematical definition in chaos theory rather than the common meaning of “disarray” or “bedlam”.
    • Some people do think that quantum-level changes could act as the seed for chaotic behaviour⁴, but random thermal fluctuations could certainly be the seed for chaotic behaviour.
• If the operation of my brain is non-deterministic, then my actions and my behaviour are not completely determined and not totally predictable, but I cannot inherently be aware of this.
  • Some people have suggested that this is sufficient to create my feeling of free will²⁴, but I do not think this is satisfactory.
    • There is no reasonable scientific explanation for how the brain could affect the outcomes of random fluctuations.
    • If there were some way that the brain could do this, they would no longer be random fluctuations, they would be influenced by my brain.
    • Having free will is surely more than simply having a random choice made without any conscious input.
  • It means that in identical circumstances, I might choose different options on different occasions, although, as pointed out above, the possibility of identical circumstances is really only a hypothetical proposal.
  • It also means that different people might act in different ways in identical circumstances.
  • The proposal that free will is still possible whether or not the brain is deterministic is called compatibilism.
    • This seems to be a popular position amongst philosophers: a 2020 survey found that 59% of philosophers accept compatibilism, according to the Wikipedia entry.
    • It defines free will to be acting independently of external influences, but dependent on other internal factors such as motivation, belief, preferences, desires or goals.
    • My explanation does fall under the heading of compatibilism, but I think I provide a lot more background on how it functions, particularly in the differences in the levels of description and what they mean.
• A non-deterministic brain does not, in itself, provide anything like free will, but it does assist the arguments in two respects:
  1. It makes it far easier to understand how small relatively small influences from my consciousness, what I call my self symbol schema, may be able to make a significant change to the process of attention, so shifting my conscious attention from one thing to another and therefore bring about a change to my actions and/or thinking.
  2. It calls into question the conclusions of some people, such as in the three examples above, who say that free will does not exist solely because the brain is fully deterministic.

My explanation

• I propose that free will is an emergent feature that can only be described at the highest level in my hierarchical structure of levels of description within the brain.
  • Many other writers have said that free will is emergent, but I have not read any other explanation that provides details of the level at which the emergence happens and how it happens. My proposals provide these details on this website.
  • At the lowest levels of description of the human brain, at the level of particle physics, there is no doubt that that there is determinism; each state of particles is caused by the previous state of particles, and is therefore theoretically predictable, even if the predictions may be in the form of probabilities, because of the nature of quantum mechanics.
  • At the level of neurons and synapses, there does seem to be scope for random, non-deterministic behaviour, as outlined above, but this does not, on its own, provide for anything resembling free will.
  • However, at the highest level, at the level of symbol schemas, and particularly from the perspective of my consciousness being within my self symbol schema, I do have free will in the sense that I can make a deliberate and conscious choice that is only influenced by aspects of my self.
• One of the main reasons I was prompted to come to this conclusion is because the symbol schema in my brain that represents free will must be largely correct in saying that I have agency and am able to choose what I think, say or do.
  • I know it says this because it is my inherent belief that I have free will, and this seems to be the same for (almost) all human adults. If this were not the case, we would not have the current moral or legal systems that depend on individual responsibility.
  • All symbol schemas in my brain are not necessarily correct or complete, because they are compressed, abstracted and idealised versions of reality. The details are filtered out by afferent processing so that only common features are represented.
  • My models of free will and the process of attention, which are symbol schemas within my self symbol schema, specify that I have full and direct conscious control over what I pay attention to and therefore over the choices I make.
    • However, these models have been created by the process I call cognoception which means that are not fully complete and are inaccurate in some respects. They have no information about the unconscious aspects of the processing, but do reflect something of the truth relating to conscious processing (see cognoception § summary).
    • My influence on attention is top-down (or efferent, and can be called downward causation, or prediction), but attention involves influences from other directions as well as top-down¹⁴; it is a multi-level competitive process, so there is no guarantee that my influence will win the competition.
  • However, the fact that my symbol schema for free will is very clear that I have a choice, and that I am responsible for my choices, means that this part of the model must be true, at least in part.
  • So I conclude that free will is an emergent concept that exists only at the level of my self symbol schema, and cannot be described at lower levels²¹.
  • Being an emergent concept, it is able to exert downward control on lower levels¹⁰.
• My choices also always depend on other aspects of my self that are stored in symbol schemas outside my self symbol schema that can be described as my beliefs, desires, preferences, goals and previous experiences (see cognoception § overview).
  • This final part of the process is hierarchically iterative: a suggested decision comes from my unconscious process of attention, I can assess this in the light of my experience or desires and make a prediction downwards, it is then processed unconsciously, and it can then come back up to my consciousness, and the process can loop round many times.
  • A decision is finally made when my attention causes an action, which can be doing, saying or thinking something.
• So my free will is not what I inherently think it is, but I do have the ability to make a conscious choice of what I say, think or do, and from my point of view, from within my self symbol schema, it is a free choice, dependent only on properties of my self.
• There are two other writers in particular who have described free will in ways that are similar to my proposals.
  1. Douglas Hofstadter, in his 1979 book Godel, Escher, Bach, gives some different levels of non-living systems that could be said to make choices, on the basis that making choices is effectively the same as exercising free will²³. Two of the most interesting examples are as follows:
     • A marble rolling down a bumpy hill has a trajectory that is not predictable, and will be different every time, but is nevertheless governed by the laws of physics.
       • This is due to the chaotic nature of the trajectory, where the tiniest change in the initial conditions can result in a completely different outcome.
       • This is non-deterministic chaos, but no choices are being made, despite the different outcomes.
     • A robot with a humanoid brain that has a symbol-modelling scheme, including a self-model, is navigating a maze with many T-junctions where each junction needs a left-or-right decision. Initially, its choices are made at random, but later its symbol-modelling system and its self-symbol are allowed to have an influence on the choice.
       • At first, the robot’s choices of whether to turn left or right are based solely on the results given by a calculator that is churning out the decimal expansion of the square root of two.
       • So, in effect, the choices are made totally at random, but the robot’s self-model does not know where the choices are coming from or how they are made.
       • When the robot’s symbols, including its self-symbol, are allowed to affect its choices, it may itself then feel that it has an influence over the decision, although it still does not know where the lower-level decisions are coming from.
       • Hofstadter says that this lack of knowledge in itself can lead to our feeling of free will²³, but I am not sure that this is enough.
       • Unfortunately, Hofstadter does not make clear what influence the other symbols of the robot can have, or where that influence comes from, but I think it is a useful description which is not very far from the position of a human brain.
  2. A recent book by neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell²⁵ details how living creatures evolved to have agency, which is the ability to act on their environment depending on inputs from the environment. These evolved into goals or purposes which can then influence future choices.
     • He says that there is indeterminism at the lower levels, because of molecular-level randomness, quantum fluctuations and chaotic mechanisms.
     • He defines the term “Cognitive Realism” meaning that we have beliefs, desires, goals, and that neurons represent these, have meaning, and can have causal power.
     • He says that top-down influence can choose between underdetermined options, and gives details on how the brain inhibits actions when planning or assessing possible future options.
     • He says we can also recursively think about and update our options, preferences and goals and make decisions based on these things²⁶.
     • He claims that this description provides free will, but, without definitions of levels of description, I feel that his explanation is not complete.
• My proposal for free will within the human brain is like the example of Hofstadter’s robot above, but with a number of additions, some with similarities to Mitchell’s ideas.
  • The low-level, non-conscious processing is driven by attention and is largely not random¹⁴. It consists of incoming afferent data (or prediction errors) and lateral influences (mostly inhibitory), and is the same as my normal process of thought, in which symbol schemas can activate and deactivate each other depending on the strengths of connections between them.
  • The high-level, efferent influences on attention, which can also be regarded as being predictions, come from my self symbol schema.
    • These are based on already-existing information held in other symbol schemas that represent properties of my self, and so are connected to my self symbol schema.
    • These include my beliefs, desires, goals, preferences, previous experiences, upbringing and my own nature²⁷.
  • The making of a decision or a choice is nearly always a hierarchically iterative process: efferent influences from my self symbol schema can change lower-level activations (see downward causation below), which then affect what arrives back at my self symbol schema, and this affects further information sent back down, and so on.
  • Like the robot in Hofstadter’s example above, we do not know how the lower-level decisions are made, or anything about the multi-level biased competition process of attention, but the reasons for this can now be explained.
    • I am my self symbol schema, so I can only know things that happen in my self symbol schema, or other schemas that are briefly attached to it via attention.
    • My model of attention, and my model of free will, which includes agency and volition, can only be built from what is seen within my self symbol schema.
  • Although everything in my brain runs according to the laws of physics, the structure of the model of my world is in a state of non-deterministic chaos, so there is always a random element.
  • The influences from within my self symbol schema are based on information and mental states that were stored previously, some from a long time previous, perhaps even from when was a child, when a large part of my personality and basic beliefs were set. There are also some obvious influences built into my DNA that have been created by evolution.
  • These are all potentially predictable, but from my point of view, from inside the self symbol schema, I have free will because I can influence decisions that are made by the non-conscious lower levels, I can then assess them as part of a hierarchical loop process, so that I feel I have full control over my actions and that it is entirely my own choice and free from outside influence¹⁶.
  • In fact I do not have full control, I only have an influence, but I can influence the amount of influence I have, so that, for decisions that take some time (more than a few seconds), I can justifiably say that I have full control.
  
• Here is a simplified example (see diagram, and diagram information) - the ovals indicate symbol schemas, and the links indicated are only activated at the time they are described:
  • I (unconsciously) feel thirsty and automatically (unconsciously) reach to get my coffee mug, but what I am doing reaches my consciousness via attention (A).
  • Then my preferences come to my attention (B), which makes me I think maybe I don’t want coffee today because I have it every day, it would be better to have water. This is processed efferently back to the unconscious attention processing (C).
  • Before I have even thought about reaching for a glass, the thought of water makes me (unconsciously) think about tea (D).
  • The thought comes into my consciousness that a cup of tea would be nice (E).
  • This type of circular transaction may be repeated with different options and considerations, and may include my updating my desires or preferences (F).
  • Finally, I make a conscious choice that I will have coffee after all, and I take action to make it (G).
• From my point of view, inside my self symbol schema, this was my choice, I was not influenced by anyone or anything else, and I could have done otherwise.
  • Of course my decision was affected (and possibly governed) by my previous experience, my preferences, and my mood, but this is inevitable.
  • Any of the processing, conscious and unconscious, could have been non-determinate, so my decision probably could not have been predicted, even by a hypothetical scientist with all possible information about previous states.
  • Primarily though, it feels like free will to me, because my model of free will says it was fully my choice, and I was not aware of the unconscious processing going on.

Downward causation

• If the brain is considered from the bottom-up in a deterministic fashion, then no free will can be possible because all our actions are predetermined by the present situation and our past experiences. However, if the brain is more properly considered as a multi-level, dynamic complex system, then higher levels structures can have downward causality, which is the ability to change the lower levels.
• Downward, or top-down, causality happens in a hierarchical system with emergent features^{22, 28}.
  • I provide examples of clouds and computer software on the page about levels of description.
  • A cloud is an everyday example, but it is not sentient; it cannot think to itself “Did I choose to cause that rainfall?” and in fact it has no choice.
  • But if it could think, I suggest that it would not be inherently aware that it was made up of water droplets held in suspension, it would only know that it was a cloud and that had agency, it could cause changes to other things.
  • We have no precedent, example, analogy or metaphor that allows us to even start thinking about what it would be like for a thinking, feeling high-level schema to have the ability to initiate downward causation.
  • But I do have the knowledge, because I am such a thing.
• I have free will because, at the level of description where “I” reside, I am able to cause things to happen, and I am able to make choices. If I claim to exist as a thinking, conscious entity, then I must bear the responsibility of having free will.

Conclusions

• The following is a similar argument to those in the conclusion sections of feeling § conclusions and I am my self symbol schema § conclusions, that show why only a self-modelling self symbol schema can have feelings and consciousness, respectively.
  1. Free will requires self-awareness - I would not be able to think or believe or know that I had free will unless I could reflect upon it.
  2. Self-awareness is a thing being aware of itself.
  3. Awareness of a thing requires a schema, or model, of the thing being perceived.
  4. The self is represented by a schema, what I call the self symbol schema, which models itself, and I am that self symbol schema.
  5. Therefore free will is only possible from within the perspective of a self symbol schema.
  6. And therefore, from my perspective, I can and do have free will.
  This argument does not prove that free will exists in the form I have described it, but it does show that free will cannot exist except within a model of the self, and since my model of free will says I do have it, I believe this proves that it does exist.

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References For information on references, see structure of this website - references

1. ^ Can neuroscience enlighten the philosophical debate about free will - Delnatte, Roze, Pouget, Gallea and Welniarz 2023
   doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2023.108632 downloadable here or see GoogleScholar.
   Section headed “2.1. Philosophical questions” contains a very good summary of the philosophical positions and problems relating to free will.
   Beginning of abstract: “Free will has been at the heart of philosophical and scientific discussions for many years. However, recent advances in neuroscience have been perceived as a threat to the commonsense notion of free will as they challenge two core requirements for actions to be free. The first is the notion of determinism and free will, i.e., decisions and actions must not be entirely determined by antecedent causes. The second is the notion of mental causation, i.e., our mental state must have causal effects in the physical world, in other words, actions are caused by conscious intention.”
2. ^ Free Will, Physics, Biology, and the Brain - Koch 2009
   Chapter 2 in Downward Causation and the Neurobiology of Free Will ed. Murphy, Ellis and O’Connor pub. Springer 2009
   doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-03205-9_2 downloadable here or see GoogleScholar.
   Page 32, last paragraph: “The question of free will - what it means and whether it exists - is as old as philosophy itself, with an enormous literature... Arcane and eristic arguments have been advanced for or against whatever position one might conceivably hold. Let us not be too distracted by these millennia of learned and disputatious philosophical debate, and focus on what physics, neuroscience, and psychology have to contribute to this aspect of the mind-body problem. Science has discovered matters that open up new ways of thinking about the ancient conundrum of free will.”
3. ^ Ibid. Free Will, Physics, Biology, and the Brain
   Page 36, third paragraph: “...it took the digital computer in the second half of the twentieth century to reveal deterministic chaos for what it is - a full-blown setback for the notion that the future can be accurately forecast. It was the MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz who discovered this in the context of solving three simple mathematical equations characterizing the motion of the atmosphere. The weather predicted by the computer program varied widely when he entered starting values that differed by less than a tenth of one percent: this is the hallmark of chaos - infinitesimal small changes, tiny perturbations in where the equations start off lead to radically different outcomes. Lorenz coined the term Butterfly Effect to denote such extreme sensitivity to initial conditions: the beating of a butterfly’s wings creates barely perceptible ripples in the atmosphere that ultimately alter the path of a tornado elsewhere.
   Chaos is the reason why precise long-term weather prediction will never be in the cards. Meteorologists must record the local temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, solar radiation, wind speed, and so on quite accurately to assess future weather patterns. For the sake of this argument, let us assume that they must be measured to within a few percent of their true values in order to forecast coastal fog in the morning a couple of days hence. To forecast fog a week from now, these variables need to be estimated to within a fraction of a percent of their true value; if one wanted to know about fog in ten days time it would require a degree of accuracy unattainable in the real world due to all the uncertainties and fluctuations in the atmosphere.”
4. ^ Ibid. Free Will, Physics, Biology, and the Brain
   Page 38, end of first paragraph: “microscopic things such as elementary particles or small atoms and molecules violate common sense: the more precisely you determine where they are, the more uncertain, the more fuzzy, is their speed, and vice versa.”
   Page 40, second paragraph: “What cannot be ruled out is that tiny quantum fluctuations deep in the brain are amplified by deterministic chaos and will ultimately lead to behavioral choices. ... The release of a single synaptic vesicle may be dependent on some pre-synaptic quantum event. This might generate an action potential in the post-synaptic neuron that, in turn, triggers a cascade of active neurons that ultimately give rise to movement. Biological organisms - from bacteria to bugs to boys - may well act truly randomly, like the proverbial toss of the coin. In that case, the laws of cause and effect do not fully determine behavior. Physics would not, even in principle, predict whether I will choose the glass of coke or the cup of coffee. True choice would become possible.”
5. ^ Ibid. Free Will, Physics, Biology, and the Brain
   Page 42, last paragraph: “A salient feature of nervous systems and their components are their noisy, random character. Individual voltage- and ligand-gated ionic channels - single proteins that are inserted into the neuronal membrane - enable neurons to communicate with each other via chemical synapses and generate and propagate all-or-nothing binary pulses, the action potentials that are the lingua franca [common language] of almost all nervous systems. The ionic currents flowing through such channels are microscopic, discrete, and stochastic [random].”
   Page 43, end of first paragraph: “...it is generally believed that the stochastic character of ionic channels can be entirely explained by thermal fluctuations and does not rely on quantum indeterminacy.”
   Page 43, last two paragraphs, to page 44: “Randomness is also apparent at the level of action potentials. Say that a microelectrode, essentially a conductive wire, is placed close to a nerve cell in the brain of a monkey looking at a display of a randomly moving cloud of dots. Each time the display is turned on, the cell becomes excited and fires a set of all-or-none electrical pulses, 'spikes' in neuro-lingo. These can be picked up by the microelectrode. Spikes are the principle means of rapid communication among nerve cells throughout the animal kingdom. If you look carefully, the precise pattern of spikes varies unpredictably from one trial to the next, while the average number of spikes remains reasonably constant. Some of this variability is due to trembling eyes, the exact timing of the heart beat, breathing, and so on. The remaining unpredictability is thought to be accounted for by the incessant movement of the molecules, primarily water, making up the wet and warm brain - thermal motion that I mentioned above. This ceaseless motion cannot be predicted but is still subject to the laws of cause and effect.”
6. ^ Ibid. Free Will, Physics, Biology, and the Brain
   Page 44, end of first paragraph (continuation from previous quotation): “Biophysicists by and large believe that quantum mechanics has no essential role to play here [in the brain]. While nervous systems - like anything else - obey quantum mechanics, the collective effects of all these molecules frenetically moving about is to smear out any quantum indeterminacy. At the cellular level, neurons look to be firmly governed by classical physics.”
   
7. ^ Ibid. Free Will, Physics, Biology, and the Brain
   Page 45, second paragraph: “Nervous systems are indeterministic. Whether or not this indeterminism is grounded in quantum mechanics remains an open question. Your actions are not, and never will be, predictable. Even though the universe and everything within it obeys natural laws, the state of the future world is contingent in a way that, in general, cannot be computed from its current state.”
8. ^ Human Freedom and 'Emergence' - Newsome 2009
   Chapter 3 in Downward Causation and the Neurobiology of Free Will ed. Murphy, Ellis and O'Connor pub. Springer 2009
   doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-03205-9_3 downloadable here or see GoogleScholar.
   Page 54, third paragraph: “Absorption of high energy photons by DNA in my skins cells can result in genetic damage and fatal cancer, irreversibly changing the course of my life and the lives of my family, friends, and colleagues. Yet the triggering events - photon absorptions - are fundamentally random and unpredictable, even in principle. To my mind, therefore, the model of a fully deterministic world can be set aside.”
   
9. ^ Ibid. Human Freedom and 'Emergence'
   Bottom of page 54 to page 55: “...the sense of human freedom, or autonomy, is just as important for scientific understanding as for everyday understanding of the world. Thoroughgoing determinism becomes entangled in profound logical difficulties in science no less than in everyday life. J.B.S. Haldane put the matter succinctly: 'If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of the atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true ...and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms'. Haldane’s point is that the entire enterprise of science depends upon the assumption that scientists have freedom to evaluate evidence rationally and make reasoned judgments about the truthfulness of particular hypotheses and results. If, however, the scientist’s rational judgments, and her/his beliefs about the validity of the scientific method, simply reflect an inevitable outcome of the atomic, molecular, and cellular interactions within a particular physical system, how can we take seriously the notion that her/his conclusions about the world bear any relation to objective truth? ... The attempt to adopt a thoroughgoing determinism is like sawing off the branch that one is sitting on; the result is intellectual freefall.”
   
10. ^ Ibid. Human Freedom and 'Emergence'
    Page 55, third paragraph: “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? Although I have no certain answer to this question, I suspect that answers will ultimately lie in a deeper understanding of emergent phenomena in complex systems. ...By 'emergence', I mean that complex assemblies of simpler components can generate behaviors that are not predictable from knowledge of the components alone and are governed by logic and rules that are independent of (although constrained by) those that govern the components. Furthermore, the intrinsic logic that emerges at higher levels of the system exerts 'downward control' over the low-level components.”
    
11. ^ Free Will, Determinism, and the Criminal Justice System - The Law Office of John Guidry
    Middle of first paragraph: “Free will creates the moral structure that provides the foundation for our criminal justice system. Without it, most punishments in place today must be eliminated completely.”
12. ^ On Microscopic Irreversibility and Non-deterministic Chaos: Resolving the Conflict between Determinism and Free Will - Hong 2012
    doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-28111-2_21 see GoogleScholar.
    Page 228, second paragraph: “If human actions are predetermined, what is the point of education and enlightening? ... From a legal point of view, if our actions were pre-determined by events long past, the criminals should not be held responsible for the committed crime. It was equally unsettling from an ethical and/or religious point of view: If there were no free will, what is the point of repentance and resurrection? Absent free will, what is the point of discussing whether free will is compatible with determinism or not, much less its existence?”
13. ^ Free Will Skepticism in Law and Society: an Overview - Caruso, Shaw and Pereboom 2019
    downloadable here or see GoogleScholar.
    Chapter 1, bottom of first page to top of page 2: “What all varieties of free will skepticism share, however, is the belief that the evidential standard for our having basic desert moral responsibility is not met, and as a result there is a strong presumption against the legitimacy of the practices associated with it - such as the reactive attitudes of resentment, indignation, backward-looking blame, and retributive punishment. Critics of free will skepticism argue that adopting such a view stands to have harmful consequences for our interpersonal relationships, society, morality, meaning, and the law. They contend, for instance, that relinquishing belief in free will and basic desert moral responsibility would undermine morality, leave us unable to adequately deal with criminal behavior, increase antisocial conduct, and destroy meaning in life.”
14. ^ ^ Free Will and Top-Down Control in the Brain - Frith 2009
    Chapter 12 in Downward Causation and the Neurobiology of Free Will ed. Murphy, Ellis and O’Connor pub. Springer 2009
    doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-03205-9_12 downloadable here or see GoogleScholar.
    Page 200, under the heading “1 Top-Down and Bottom-Up Processes in Attention”, third paragraph: “Behavioral and physiological studies show that the brain contains a relatively simple mechanism by which mutual interactions between the many competing stimuli ensure that only one or a few stimuli win the competition for the control of behavior and awareness. The idea is that each sensory channel inhibits all the others. This means that, as information passes up through the central nervous system (CNS), the stronger channels get stronger while the weaker channels get weaker, until only the strongest survives. It is this strongest survivor that determines our next action, for example, by moving our eyes towards the source of the stimulus. It is also this strongest survivor that enters conscious awareness.”
15. ^ I am a strange loop - Douglas Hofstadter 2007 Basic Books or see GoogleScholar.
    Page 339, second paragraph under the heading “Yes, people want things”: “When people decide to do something, they often say, 'I did it of my own free will.' I think what they mean by this is usually, in essence, 'I did it because I wanted to, not because someone else forced me to do it.' Although I am uncomfortable with the phrase 'I did it of my own free will', the paraphrase I’ve suggested sounds completely unobjectionable to me. We do indeed have wants, and our wants do indeed cause us to do things... ”
16. ^ Ibid. I am a strange loop
    Page 340, under the heading “There’s No Such Thing as a Free Will”: “What, then, is all the fuss about 'free will' about? Why do so many people insist on the grandiose adjective, often even finding in it humanity’s crowning glory? What does it gain us, or rather, what would it gain us, if the word 'free' were accurate? I honestly do not know. I don’t see any room in this complex world for my will to be 'free'.”
    Page 341: “In sum, our decisions are made by an analogue to a voting process in a democracy. Our various desires chime in, taking into account the many external factors that act as constraints, or more metaphorically, that play the role of hedges in the vast maze of life in which we are trapped. Much of life is incredibly random, and we have no control over it. We can will away all we want, but much of the time our will is frustrated. Our will, quite the opposite of being free, is steady and stable, like an inner gyroscope, and it is the stability and constancy of our non-free will that makes me me and you you, and that also keeps me me and you you.”
17. ^ German philosopher Thomas Metzinger, in an online post in 2006 says: “For middle-sized objects at 37 [degrees C] like the human brain and the human body, determinism is obviously true. The next state of the physical universe is always determined by the previous state. And given a certain brain-state plus an environment you could never have acted otherwise - a surprisingly large majority of experts in the free-will debate today accept this obvious fact. Although your future is open, this probably also means that for every single future thought you will have and for every single decision you will make, it is true that it was determined by your previous brain state.”
18. ^ Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder is a well-known YouTuber who released a video entitled I don’t believe in free will. This is why. in June 2023. A transcript of the first few seconds is: “The future is determined by the past except for random quantum jumps which no-one can control; causes have causes have causes, and they go back all the way to the big bang.”
19. ^ Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky wrote a book in 2023 entitled Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, and has been interviewed in the New York Times and quoted in Phys Science News, which says, under the title “Scientist, after decades of study, concludes: We don’t have free will”: “Most neuroscientists believe humans have at least some degree of free will. So do most philosophers and the vast majority of the general population. Free will is essential to how we see ourselves, fueling the satisfaction of achievement or the shame of failing to do the right thing. ... The book breaks down the neurochemical influences that contribute to human behaviors, analyzing the milliseconds to centuries preceding, say, the pulling of a trigger or the suggestive touch on an arm. ... If it’s impossible for any single neuron or any single brain to act without influence from factors beyond its control, Sapolsky argues, there can be no logical room for free will. Many people with even a passing familiarity with human biology can comfortably agree with this - up to a point. We know we make worse decisions when hungry, stressed or scared. We know our physical makeup is influenced by the genes inherited from distant ancestors and by our mothers’ health during her pregnancy. Abundant evidence indicates that people who grew up in homes marked by chaos and deprivation will perceive the world differently and make different choices than people raised in safe, stable, resource-rich environments. A lot of important things are beyond our control. But, like - everything? We have no meaningful command over our choice of careers, romantic partners or weekend plans? If you reach out right now and pick up a pen, was even that insignificant action somehow preordained? Yes, Sapolsky says, both in the book and to the countless students who have asked the same question during his office hours.”
20. ^ What happens to your brain on the way to Mars - Parihar, Allen, Tran, Macaraeg, Chu, Kwok, Chmielewski, Craver, Baulch, Acharya, Cucinotta and Limoli 2015
    doi: 10.1126/sciadv.1400256 downloadable here or see GoogleScholar.
    End of abstract: “Our data indicate an unexpected and unique susceptibility of the central nervous system to space radiation exposure, and argue that the underlying radiation sensitivity of delicate neuronal structure may well predispose astronauts to unintended mission-critical performance decrements and/or longer-term neurocognitive sequelae.”
    Second sentence of second column of abstract: “Clinicians have known for decades that patients subjected to cranial radiotherapy for the control of brain malignancies develop severe and progressive cognitive deficits that never resolve.”
21. ^ Top-Down Causation and the Human Brain - Ellis 2009
    Chapter 4 in Downward Causation and the Neurobiology of Free Will ed. Murphy, Ellis and O’Connor pub. Springer 2009
    doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-03205-9_4 downloadable here or see GoogleScholar.
    Page 65 under the heading “Hierarchy”: “A hierarchical structure will be described by a corresponding hierarchy of variables appropriate to describing the different levels of the hierarchy. A high-level variable is a quantity that characterizes the state of the system in terms of a description using high-level concepts and language - it cannot be stated in terms of low-level variables. The higher levels of structure and causation cannot be reduced to lower-level terms, as the relevant concepts lie outside those that can be described in terms of lower-level concepts.”
22. ^ Ibid. Top-Down Causation and the Human Brain
    Page 66, under the heading “4 Top-Down Causation”: “Top-down causation is the ability of higher levels of reality to have a causal power over lower levels. When dynamic effects take place, the outcome would be different if the higher level context were different. Altering the high-level context alters lower-level actions; this is what identifies the effect as top-down causation. ... Top-down causation is ubiquitous in physics, chemistry, and biology, because the outcome of lower-level interactions is always determined by context.”
23. ^ ^ Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter Penguin Books UK 1979 or see GoogleScholar.
    Chapter 20, “Strange loops, or tangled hierarchies”, pages 710-713 under the heading “The Self-Symbol and Free Will”, second paragraph: “One way to gain some perspective on the free-will question is to replace it by what I believe is an equivalent question, but one which involves less loaded terms. Instead of asking, 'Does system X have free will?' we ask, 'Does system X make choices?' By carefully groping for what we really mean when we choose to describe a system - mechanical or biological - as being capable of making 'choices', I think we can shed much light on free will. It will be helpful to go over a few different systems which, under various circumstances, we might feel tempted to describe as 'making choices'. From these examples we can gain some perspective on what we really mean by the phrase.”
    And page 713 under the heading “A Godel vortex where all levels cross”, end of first paragraph: “From this balance between self-knowledge and self-ignorance come the feeling of free will.”
24. ^ On Minds and Machines - Daniel Gibson 2020
    Fitzwilliam College Cambridge Arrol Adam competition winner 2020 downloadable here or see GoogleScholar.
    This prize-winning essay is a review of Hofstadter’s ideas on consciousness and free will that are briefly covered in the previous reference. From the last two paragraphs: “Even if our brains are fundamentally physical in nature, they are certainly complex systems, and many aspects of our behaviour are unpredictable. If it is fundamentally impossible to predict our future, short of allowing the universe to run its course, I would say this unpredictability is tantamount to having freedom of choice. That is by no means a rigorous argument, but it is how I think of my own free will, and I find it satisfactory to say 'Even if I’m entirely deterministic in nature, and can follow just one future path, my brain is so complex that there is absolutely no way of predicting every aspect of that future path. Therefore, I may as well have freedom of choice.' I don’t think that the physicalist viewpoint necessitates the depressing conclusion that, since everything can be reduced to computation, life loses all its meaning. My own beliefs regarding the mind have changed, but that has had no effect on my own inner feeling of free will or consciousness. Whether or not our minds our physical in nature, whether or not free will is an illusion - answering these questions will not change the fact that we do feel conscious, experience emotions and perceive our own thoughts. Above all, and without a doubt, it feels like we have freedom of choice. In a very real sense, how we feel is all that matters.”
25. ^ Free agents: how evolution gave us free will - Mitchell 2023, Princeton University Press.
    Also see Free agents (Google books)
    I have only recently bought this book. Relevant direct quotes will follow soon.
    There are many useful reviews available - for example, see here and here.
    This Holodoxa review says: “We act for reasons, and these reasons emerge from the collection of our experiences, the goals we’ve set (via metacognition and planning), our innate proclivities, and the set of choices available to us in any situation.”
26. ^ Ibid. Free agents: how evolution gave us free will
    A Royal Society of Biology review of the book by Mitchell says: “One final step sets humans apart. We can reason about our reasons. The extra levels of our cognitive hierarchies let us make models of our own minds. We can recursively think about our beliefs and desires and intentions, and consciously operate on them as objects of cognition, not just elements of it. We can consider and decide, and reconsider, and change our minds - we can consciously deliberate and choose our actions. It’s not absolutely free from any prior causes, as some people seem to demand of 'free will'. On the contrary, our actions are informed by our past and directed towards our future. That is precisely what allows us to persist as selves through time. We have degrees of freedom and we exert our will to choose among them.”
27. ^ Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference, and Consciousness - Philip Johnson-Laird Cambridge University Press 1983
    Page 473, middle of second paragraph: “An intention is a conscious decision to act so as to try to achieve a particular goal. An organism can have an intention only if it has an operating system that can elicit a model of a future state of affairs, and decide that it itself should act so as to try to bring about that state of affairs. A crucial part of having an intention is precisely an awareness that the system itself is able to make such decisions. The system has to be able to represent the fact that it can itself generate models of future states of affairs and decide to try to bring them about. Granted a goal-directed planning ability and the recursive machinery to embed models within models, the operating system only needs access to a model of itself in order to have intentions. The model that individuals have of themselves includes memories of how they have felt or behaved in the past; memories of how they interacted with others; and a knowledge of their tastes, preferences, and proclivities. They also know much about the high-level realities of their own minds: their ability to perceive, remember and act; their mastery of this or that intellectual skill; their imaginative and ratiocinative [reasoning] abilities. Of course, they have access only to an incomplete (and perhaps partially erroneous) model of their own mental abilities. Their model has no information about the inner workings of the multiple parallel processors or about the processes that underlie its own representation.”
    
28. ^ Understanding complexity in the human brain - Bassett and Gazzaniga 2011
    doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2011.03.006 downloadable here or see GoogleScholar.
    Page 205 under the heading “Bidirectional causation and complementarity”: “Emergence is characterized by a higher-level phenomenon stemming from a lower system level; that is, emergence is upward. However, an important property of the brain, as opposed to some other complex systems, is that emergent phenomena can feedback to lower levels, causing lower level changes through what is called downward causation. The combination of upward emergence and downward causation suggests a simple bidirectionality or more nuanced mutual complementarity that adds to the complexity of the system, and underscores the fact that the emergence of mental properties cannot be understood using fundamental reductionism.”

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