George Musser, a science writer reviewing a new book on the subject, thinks it will force free will skeptics to become more sophisticated in their arguments:
Recently, theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder insisted that the laws of physics do not really allow for free will. However, science writer George Musser, the author of Spooky Action at a Distance (2015), notes that the debate around free will and physics is changing—and not in the way that many would expect. Introducing a new book by Christian List of the London School of Economics, Why Free Will Is Real (2019), he notes that List is one of a newer generation of thinkers, including cosmologist Sean Carroll and philosopher Jenann Ismael, who do not see a contradiction between “a nuanced reading of physics” and free will: “Younger thinkers now argue that free will is real ” at Mind Matters News
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See also: Mind Matters News offers a number of articles on free will bu neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor on free will including
Can physics prove there is no free will? No, but it can make physicists incoherent when they write about free will. It’s hilarious. Sabine Hossenfelder misses the irony that she insists that people “change their minds” by accepting her assertion that they… can’t change their minds.
Does “alien hand syndrome” show that we don’t really have free will? One woman’s left hand seemed to have a mind of its own. Did it? Alien hand syndrome doesn’t mean that free will is not real. In fact, it clarifies exactly what free will is and what it isn’t.
And
Does brain stimulation research challenge free will? If we can be forced to want something, is the will still free?
Also: Do quasars provide evidence for free will? Possibly. They certainly rule out experimenter interference.
Isn’t biology becoming the new queen of science, with the other major fields (math, physics, chemistry) serving biology research? Could it be simply because in biology we’re closer than in another field to see complex functional specified information in action?
Emerging mechanisms of asymmetric stem cell division
Zsolt G. Venkei and Yukiko M. Yamashita
as to this quote from your article:
Well for the particles themselves it is certainly true that “at the fundamental physical level, there is no such thing as intentional goal-directed agency. ” But his claim that “Intentional agency is an emergent higher-level property” is refuted by the fact that in quantum mechanics “humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level.”
Thus it is impossible for free will to be a “emergent higher-level property” of the material brain when free will makes it presence known in “the laws of nature at the most fundamental level.”
As Anton Zielinger stated,,, “what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.”
Thus George Musser may try to claim that free will is merely an “emergent higher-level property” of the material brain but the fact of the matter is that free will is NOT ’emergent’ from anything material, no matter how complex a brain or computer may be, but free will preexist the material realm altogether. In other words, free will is a property of an immaterial mind, just as Theist’s have been holding for decades.
Moreover, unlike his evidence free conjecture that free will is ’emergent’, there actually is empirical evidence from quantum mechanics and neuroscience backing up the Theist’s contention that free will is a property of a immaterial mind.
As Michael Egnor stated, “an objective review of the neuroscientific evidence unequivocally supports the existence of free will.”
Moreover, although there have been several major loopholes in quantum mechanics over the past several decades that atheists have tried to appeal to in order to try to avoid the ‘spooky’ Theistic implications of quantum mechanics, over the past several years each of those major loopholes have each been closed one by one. The last major loophole that was left to be closed was the “setting independence” and/or the ‘free-will’ loophole:
And now Anton Zeilinger and company have recently, as of 2018, pushed the ‘free will loophole’ back to 7.8 billion years ago, thereby firmly establishing the ‘common sense’ fact that the free will choices of the experimenter in the quantum experiments are truly free and are not determined by any possible causal influences from the past for at least the last 7.8 billion years, and that experimenters themselves are therefore shown to be truly free to choose whatever measurement settings in the experiments that he or she may so desire to choose so as to ‘logically’ probe whatever aspect of reality that he or she may be interested in probing.
Moreover allowing free will and/or Agent causality into the laws of physics at their most fundamental level, (as the experimental evidence from Quantum physics itself now empirically demands), has some fairly profound implications for us personally.
For prime example, allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics, as the Christian founders of modern science originally envisioned,,,, (Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and Max Planck, to name a few of the Christian founders),,, and as quantum mechanics itself now empirically demands (with the closing of the free will loophole by Anton Zeilinger and company), rightly allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics provides us with a very plausible resolution for the much sought after ‘theory of everything’ in that Christ’s resurrection from the dead provides an empirically backed reconciliation, via the Shroud of Turin, between quantum mechanics and general relativity into the much sought after ‘Theory of Everything”. Here is a few post where I lay out and defend some of the evidence for that claim:
Verse:
Of supplemental note: