This paper re-examines the problem of free will in light of both deterministic and indeterministic assumptions about the structure of the world. On the philosophical side, it analyzes van Inwagen’s arguments that free will is incompatible with determinism—because our actions would then be fixed by a remote past and the laws of nature—and with indeterminism, on the grounds that indeterministic outcomes reduce to mere chance. On the neuroscientific side, it revisits Libet-style experiments, often interpreted as showing that unconscious brain activity initiates voluntary actions before conscious intention, and critically reviews recent reinterpretations of the readiness potential and the limitations of such paradigms for assessing free will. The paper then diagnoses a shared structure in these challenges: they presuppose a strict dichotomy between Laplacean determinism and a thin, law-governed conception of chance that leaves no conceptual space for non-chance indeterminism or for agent-level causal contributions. A simple quantum thought experiment is used to show how microscopic indeterminism can have direct macroscopic effects, undermining the assumption that the macroworld is effectively deterministic. Finally, the implications of computational and dynamical models of cognition are considered, arguing that their built-in constraints should be read as limits of the models rather than as metaphysical results. The conclusion advocates a naturalistic agnosticism: current physics, neuroscience, and cognitive science neither establish nor refute free will, but underdetermine its status while still placing substantive constraints on any viable theory of it.
Jovan M. Tadić (Tue,) studied this question.