Human Freedom “Emergence”

Abstract

Whether free will is a reality is an increasingly urgent problem, both from a scientific and a social point of view. An ability to make judgments and take actions that are “free” in some meaningful sense would seem a prerequisite for the process of scientific reasoning and for our ability to behave morally. 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? It seems that answers will ultimately lie in a deeper understanding of emergent phenomena in complex systems. This will help enrich our impoverished standard notions of causation in physical systems.