THE BORN RULE AND FREE WILL: WHY LIBERTARIAN AGENT-CAUSAL FREE WILL IS NOT “ANTISCIENTIFIC”

Abstract

In the libertarian “agent causation” view of free will, free choices are attributable only to the choosing agent, as opposed to a specific cause or causes outside the agent. An often-repeated claim in the philosophical literature on free will is that agent causation necessarily implies lawlessness, and is therefore “antiscientific.” That claim is critiqued and it is argued, on the contrary, that the volitional powers of a free agent need not be viewed as anomic, specifically with regard to the quantum statistical law (the Born Rule). Assumptions about the role and nature of causation, taken as bearing on volitional agency, are examined and found inadequate to the task. Finally, it is suggested that quantum theory may constitute precisely the sort of theory required for a nomic grounding of libertarian free will. Born Rule; free will; anomic action 1. The Born Rule and Free Choices The agent causation (AC) theory of free will holds that truly free human choices are attributable not to specific events or causes external to a choosing agent, nor to desires or other internal psychological influences, but only to the volitional power of the choosing agent. In effect, that is what “volition” means according to AC. But the latter is currently a minority view. The more “mainstream,” conservative approach to the problem of free will is to assert that “free will” simply means acting in accordance with our desires in a way that is free of external constraints. This view is called compatibilism, because it was developed specifically to be compatible with deterministic laws. In effect, it defines the term “free will’ in such a way that we can say we are making free choices as to how to behave even when all of our behaviors are fully determined by past causes and inexorable deterministic laws (or even fated in the sense of being elements of a “block world” in which the future exists in the same way as the past and present). In contrast, AC is a form of incompatibilism, which denies that free will is compatible with determinism. It holds that in order for us to have free will, the world must be fundamentally indeterministic. AC is the libertarian form of incompatibilism; it asserts that the world is in fact indeterministic, and that we do have free will. Our own volitional power is taken as the primary cause of our choices. The complementary form of incompatibilism is to assert that the world is deterministic and therefore to deny that we have free will. It is often asserted that the agent causation view requires lawlessness, and is necessarily ”antiscientific.” For example, the entry on incompatibilism in the Stanford Encyclopedia