Free Will As an Open Scientific Problem

In this largely antimetaphysical treatment of free will and determinism, MarkBalaguer argues that the philosophical problem of free will boils down to an open scientificquestion about the causal histories of certain kinds of neural events. In the course of hisargument, Balaguer provides a naturalistic defense of the libertarian view of free will. Themetaphysical component of the problem of free will, Balaguer argues, essentially boils down to thequestion of whether humans possess libertarian free will. Furthermore, he argues that, contrary tothe traditional wisdom, the libertarian question reduces to a question about indeterminacy--inparticular, to a straightforward empirical question about whether certain neural events in our headsare causally undetermined in a certain specific way; in other words, Balaguer argues that the rightkind of indeterminacy would bring with it all of the other requirements for libertarian free will.Finally, he argues that because there is no good evidence as to whether or not the relevant neuralevents are undetermined in the way that's required, the question of whether human beings possesslibertarian free will is a wide-open empirical question.

Mark Balaguer is Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles. He is the author of Platonism and Anti-Platonism in Mathematics.