Robert Kane provides a critical overview of debates about free will of the past half century, relating this recent inquiry to the broader history of the free will issue and to vital currents of twentieth century thought. Kane also defends a traditional libertarian or incompatibilist view of free will, employing arguments that are both new to philosophy and that respond to contemporary developments in physics and biology, neuro science, and the cognitive and behavioral sciences.

It has long been one of the most fundamental problems of philosophy, and it is now, John Searle writes, "the most important problem in the biological sciences": What is consciousness? Is my inner awareness of myself something separate from my body? In what began as a series of essays in The New York Review of Books, John Searle evaluates the positions on consciousness of such well-known scientists and philosophers as Francis Crick, Gerald Edelman, Roger Penrose, Daniel Dennett, David Chalmers, and (...) Israel Rosenfield. He challenges claims that the mind works like a computer, and that brain functions can be reproduced by computer programs. With a sharp eye for confusion and contradiction, he points out which avenues of current research are most likely to come up with a biological examination of how conscious states are caused by the brain. Only when we understand how the brain works will we solve the mystery of consciousness, and only then will we begin to understand issues ranging from artificial intelligence to our very nature as human beings. (shrink)

(1997). Cartesian cut, Heisenberg cut, and the concept of complexity. World Futures: Vol. 49, The Quest for a Unified Theory of Information, pp. 333-355.

Determinism is a perennial topic of philosophical discussion. Very little acquaintance with the philosophical literature is needed to reveal the Tower of ...

Presents German physicist Werner Heisenberg's 1958 text in which he discusses the philosophical implications and social consequences of quantum mechanics and other physical theories.

The book is an extended study of the problem of consciousness. After setting up the problem, I argue that reductive explanation of consciousness is impossible , and that if one takes consciousness seriously, one has to go beyond a strict materialist framework. In the second half of the book, I move toward a positive theory of consciousness with fundamental laws linking the physical and the experiential in a systematic way. Finally, I use the ideas and arguments developed earlier to defend (...) a form of strong artificial intelligence and to analyze some problems in the foundations of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

The philosophy of quantum mechanics has often been conceived by physicists as a collection of dogmas concerning what can be measured, observed and known. To this branch of dialectics the present paper does not attempt to contribute, chiefly because it is written from the conviction that no part of science, nor any philosophy, can safely predict what may be feasible or knowable. Rather, this brief essay endeavors to expose the epistemology of quantum physics in a way which allows it to (...) be recognized as an extension of the ordinary processes of cognition, as the continuation of a line which starts in sensory perception, leads straight through the methods of classical physics into quantum mechanics and shows no signs of terminating even there. (shrink)

This paper examines commonly offered arguments to show that human behavior is not deterministic because it is not predictable. These arguments turn out to rest on the assumption that deterministic systems must be governed by deterministic laws, and that these give rise to predictability "in principle" of determined events. A positive account of determinism is advanced and it is shown that neither of these assumptions is true. The relation between determinism, laws, and prediction in practice is discussed as a question (...) in scientific epistemology. (shrink)

This book develops a new theory of determinism that offers fresh insights into questions of how intentions and other mental events relate to neural events, how both come about, and how both result in actions. Honderich tests his theory against neuroscience, quantum theory, and possible philosophical refutations, and discusses the consequences of determinism and near-determinism for life-hopes, knowledge, and personal feelings.

The context of an operational description is given by the distinction between what we consider as relevant and what as irrelevant for a particular experiment or observation. A rigorous description of a context in terms of a mathematically formulated context-independent fundamental theory is possible by the restriction of the domain of the basic theory and the introduction of a new coarser topology. Such a new topology is never given by first principles, but depends in a crucial way on the abstractions (...) made by the cognitive apparatus or the pattern recognition devices used by the experimentalist. A consistent mathematical formulation of a higher-level theory requires the closure of the restriction of the basic theory in the new contextual topology. The validity domain of the so constructed higher-level theory intersects nontrivially with the validity domain of the basic theory: neither domain is contained in the other. Therefore, higher-level theories cannot be totally ordered and theory reduction is not transitive. The emergence of qualitatively new properties is a necessary consequence of such a formulation of theory reduction (which does not correspond to the traditional one). Emergent properties are not manifest on the level of the basic theory, but they can be derived rigorously by imposing new, contextually selected topologies upon context-independent first principles. Most intertheoretical relations are mathematically describable as singular asymptotic expansions which do not converge in the topology of the primary theory, or by choosing one of the infinitely many possible, physically inequivalent representations of the primary theory (Gelfand–Naimark–Segal-construction of algebraic quantum mechanics). As examples we discuss the emergence of shadows, inductors, capacitors and resistors from Maxwell’s electrodynamics, the emergence of order parameters in statistical mechanics, the emergence of mass as a classical observable in Galilei-relativistic theories, the emergence of the shape of molecules in quantum mechanics, the emergence of temperature and other classical observables in algebraic quantum mechanics. (shrink)

The physical process of observation is considered from a specific information theoretical viewpoint. Using the modified concept of an information based on infinite alternatives, a formalism is derived describing the elementary transfer of one bit of information. This bit of information is produced on a virtual (nonreal) sub-quantum level of physical description. The interpretation of the formalism yields the following, complementary points: (i) the effect of spatiotemporal delocalization on the sub-quantum level, and (ii) a possible access to the concept of (...) chaos as an intrinsic property of quantum systems. As a brief example, elementary information transfer is illustrated in a cosmological context. Finally, a formal approach to information production on the sub-quantum level is sketched on the basis of complex time. (shrink)

A fundamental link between system theory and statistical mechanics has been found to be established by the Kolmogorov entropy K. By this quantity the temporal evolution of dynamical systems can be classified into regular, chaotic, and stochastic processes. Since K represents a measure for the internal information creation rate of dynamical systems, it provides an approach to irreversibility. The formal relationship to statistical mechanics is derived by means of an operator formalism originally introduced by Prigogine. For a Liouville operator L (...) and an information operator $\tilde M$ acting on a distribution in phase space, it is shown that i[L, $\tilde M$ ]≡KI (I=identity operator). As a first consequence of this equivalence, a relation is obtained between the chaotic correlation time of a system and Prigogine's concept of a “finite duration of presence.” Finally, the existence of chaos in quantum systems is discussed with respect to the existence of a quantum mechanical time operator. (shrink)

The endo/exo-dichotomy in the domain of the material world is analyzed from the standpoint of old-fashioned Cartesian dualism. The holistic structure of the quantum world enforces a Platonic view for the universally valid laws governing matter. In contrast to the structural simplicity of non-operational quantum endophysics, the empirical reality and experiments belong to quantum exophysics. In algebraic quantum mechanics, the transition from quantum endophysics to quantum exophysics is mathematically welldefined. The exophysical richness and variety of the concrete and particular emerges (...) by imposing a new, contextually selected topology into fundamental endophysics. In the Cartesian world view, the inverse problem, however, is ill-posed. Though the endophysical realm can be grasped by human reason, endophysics cannot be set up from sense data and experiments without recourse to primordial images. (shrink)

The traditional formalism of quantum mechanics is mainly used to describe ensembles of identical systems (with a density-operator formalism) or single isolated systems, but is not capable of describing single open quantum objects with many degrees of freedom showing pure-state stochastic dynamical behaviour. In particular, stochastic 'line-migration' as in single-molecule spectroscopy of defect molecules in a molecular matrix is not adequately described. Starting with the Bohr scenario of stochastic quantum jumps (between strict energy eigenstates), we try to incorporate more general (...) pure-state stochastic dynamical behaviour into the quantum mechanical formalism.Probability distributions of (approximately) pure states, arising through the stochastic pure-state dynamics for long times, give rise to appropriate decompositions of thermal density operators. These decompositions of density operators into pure states mediate between quantum mechanics for ensembles of molecules and quantum theory for single molecules (or single dressed quantum objects). We suggest that such decompositions should be consistent with infinite limits (e.g. the Born-Oppenheimer limit for infinite nuclear masses) in the sense that quantum fluctuations (around classical behaviour in the infinite limit) die out asymptotically. (shrink)

After a brief review of ontic and epistemic descriptions, and of subjective, logical and statistical interpretations of probability, we summarize the traditional axiomatization of calculus of probability in terms of Boolean algebras and its set-theoretical realization in terms of Kolmogorov probability spaces. Since the axioms of mathematical probability theory say nothing about the conceptual meaning of “randomness” one considers probability as property of the generating conditions of a process so that one can relate randomness with predictability (or retrodictability). In the (...) measure-theoretical codification of stochastic processes genuine chance processes can be defined rigorously as so-called regular processes which do not allow a long-term prediction. We stress that stochastic processes are equivalence classes of individual point functions so that they do not refer to individual processes but only to an ensemble of statistically equivalent individual processes. Less popular but conceptually more important than statistical descriptions are individual descriptions which refer to individual chaotic processes. First, we review the individual description based on the generalized harmonic analysis by Norbert Wiener. It allows the definition of individual purely chaotic processes which can be interpreted as trajectories of regular statistical stochastic processes. Another individual description refers to algorithmic procedures which connect the intrinsic randomness of a finite sequence with the complexity of the shortest program necessary to produce the sequence. Finally, we ask why there can be laws of chance. We argue that random events fulfill the laws of chance if and only if they can be reduced to (possibly hidden) deterministic events. This mathematical result may elucidate the fact that not all nonpredictable events can be grasped by the methods of mathematical probability theory. (shrink)

I give a philosophical assessment of developments in modern physics such as chaos, quantum mechanics and nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. My thesis combines knowledge and expertise from both physics and philosophy in an attempt to assess the consequences of these modern developments for determinism, indeterminism and free will. I have developed some now and important insights particularly with respect to the limited applicability of determinism to physics and with regard to systematic defects in free will theories.