Emergent Will
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The philosophical problem of free will has endured through centuries of enquiry. There is reason to believe that new factors must be integrated into the analysis in order to make progress. In the current physicalist approach, emergence and the physical limits of information representation are found to play crucial roles in the ontological dependence of volitional processes on their neural basis. The commonly invoked characterization of free will as 'being able to act differently' is shown to be problematic and is reframed as a more precise explicatum conducive to formal analysis. Subsequently, it is found that the mind operates as an ontologically open system — a causal high-level entity whose dynamics resist reduction to the states of its associated low-level neural systems, even under conditions of physical closure. An affirmative stance on free will for conscious agents is outlined.
Source: Journal of Consciousness Studies
Author: Jan Scheffel
Institution: KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Language: English
Topic: Free Will and Agency
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4409112143