Problems of Free Will and Determinism

Abstract

The debate between free will and determinism has been a controversial issue of philosophy. Despite the fact that many people believe in human free will, there is no definite way to prove its existence. Along with the development of physics and neurobiology, the debate between these two theories has taken other aspects, which are different from traditional approaches. On one side, on the basis of Newtonian physics, some philosophers maintain that physical determinism dominates mental events in the brain; at the other side, other philosophers insist that free will can be possible because of quantum indeterminism. However, quantum indeterminism also presents a problem to free will: the matter of random chance. Because of problems in free-will theory, philosophers such as compatabilists, who believe that free will and determinism are compatible, have insisted on changing the definition of free will. In this article, however, I have kept the definition of free will in which people generally believe, and examined doubts and problems that physical determinism and quantum indeterminism present to the free will. In this article, I suggest an expanded model to overcome the problems of free will, which is different from dualism. Traditionally, dualism gives rise to the mind-body problem. Since it categorically separates the two domains, how can consciousness in the mental domain affect matter in the physical domain? In the expanded domain model, however, the physical domain is not excluded from the mental domain. Rather, the mental domain includes it. The premises of physical determinism and quantum indeterminism are materialism, the causal closure of physics, and reductionism. With the expanded domain model, I have attempted to justify two features of free will . autonomy and availability of possible alternatives. Nonetheless, though this model can provide a way to solve the problems of free will, it presently has its own difficulty: the postulated free will aspect of our mental domain lies beyond the physical domain and is accessible only by the self, which makes the mental domain difficult for objective study. Still, however, I believe that it will not remain a subjective area forever. As the fundamental substance of science has changed from the four elements of Empedocles to elementary particles in Quantum Mechanics, there will hopefully someday be a way to research the subjective area of our mental domain.