I love a good oxymoron, and free will is one of my favorites. There’s often wisdom to be harvested from oxymorons. Freedom is unconstrained dithering, doing whatever. Will is self-discipline, ...

Yeah frankly the case for "free will" is much much worse without determinism. If the thermal noise at synapses is strong enough to make you choose either A or B essentially on random if we re-run the ...

Each of us belongs to a world of cause and effect, governed by natural laws. Author and neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argues that our actions, like everything else, are fully determined by conditions ...

The takeaway of Robert Sapolsky’s Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will is basically the same as that espoused by those Snickers commercials: You’re not you when you’re hungry. Except ...

Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will, by Kevin J. Mitchell, Princeton University Press, 352 pages, $29.95 What is free will? Can a being whose brain is made up of physical stuff actually make ...

Daniel Stoljar receives funding from the Australian Research Council. Social media algorithms, artificial intelligence, and our own genetics are among the factors influencing us beyond our awareness.

IN recent years experimental work in physics has led to theoretical conceptions which suggest that the movements of atoms and electrons are just as indeterminate as human action. Yet it is doubtful if ...

I love a good oxymoron, and free will is one of my favorites. There’s often wisdom to be harvested from oxymorons. Freedom is unconstrained dithering, doing whatever. Will is self-discipline, ...