By Dr. Peter C. Lugten
Published in Free Inquiry, the Journal of Secular Humanist Ideas, 46(3), 13-20, Apr/May 2026.
“Suppose that a man pulls the trigger of a gun. Mechanistically, the muscles in his index finger contracted because they were stimulated by a neuron having an action potential (i.e., being in a particularly excited state). That neuron in turn had its action potential because it was stimulated by the neuron just upstream. Which had its own action potential because of the next neuron upstream. And so on.
Here’s the challenge to a free willer: find me a neuron that started this process in this man’s brain, the neuron that had an action potential for no reason, where no neuron spoke to it just before. Then show me that this neuron’s actions were not influenced by whether the man was tired, angry, stressed or in pain at the time. That nothing about this neuron’s function was altered by the sights, sounds, smells and so on, experienced by the man in the previous minutes, not by the levels of any hormones marinating in his brain in the previous hours to days (and so on…)
Show me the neuron being a causeless cause in this total sense …show me a neuron (or brain) whose generation of a behavior is independent of the sum of its biological past, and for the purposes of this book, you’ve demonstrated free will”
So wrote Robert Sapolsky in his 2023 critically acclaimed, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (1 pp. 14-15). If only there were a cash reward attached to his challenge! In this paper I’ll use the challenge to demonstrate how a new theory beats out determinism, compatibilism, and all the other -isms associated with free will.
I’m not alone in pointing out his first error: that the challenge to discover a neuron acting as a causeless cause, independently of its past, would be satisfied by finding a neuron that fired off quite randomly; yet a person whose behavior was governed quite randomly has no free will. Putting this aside, the point Sapolsky aims for is to deny us our free will, and even the notion that we are agents at all. Our moral behavior may change, but the decision to change was causally determined. “We can subtract responsibility out of our view of aspects of behavior. And this makes the world a better place” (1 p. 340). My task will be to prove our will is neither irrevocably determined by the past, nor a result of random indeterminacy, but is instead genuinely free, in the sense that for any decision, we could have chosen otherwise.
To understand my view let us first consider how neurons are activated. In fact, brain neurons do “fire” stochastically when not being acted on; but when stimulated by one or more other neurons, some possibly inhibitory, the summed stimulation may exceed a threshold, upon which the neuron may fire a packet of action potentials.
However, this can be subject to tricky goings on within the neuron’s synapses, elucidated by neuroscientist Peter Ulric Tse as his theory of Criterial Causation (2). By means of a property of NMDA synaptic receptors, not only may the neuron, after receipt of several signals, activate the next neuron in the chain, or its circuit, it may also alter the criteria, or the signaling it selects, that will activate it the next time it is stimulated. These are not arbitrary outcomes, yet neither are they entirely predictable, so they generate novelty despite being tied to preset criteria for firing. Criterial Causation, Tse wrote “offers a middle path between determinism and randomness” (2 p. 131).
This allows unconscious systems to provide new solutions to meet now modified criteria. First, new criteria are set for firing. Next, a variable input hits the neuron; then, post-synaptic neurons, depending on whether the new criterion was met, either fire or not. The first two steps allow randomness, supervened on by a determined step. In decision making, wrote Tse, an “executive system” creates the necessary criteria in the working memory. Unconscious systems then offer decent matches. If these are rejected, it results in a reset of the criteria, and a new offering of randomly different but adequately determined choices (2 p. 147). Tse showed how randomness can be supervened upon by a determined step to give adequately determined choices. In this article I will explain how conscious feedback unites the predictable with the unpredictable element within our behaviors into a freely willed system for which we can be held responsible.
My View: The Modular-with-Feedback Theory
The Modular-with-Feedback Theory of Free Will (3) is a new theory that emphasizes the role of conscious feedback in priming our subconscious to offer up choice options that are in keeping with our character. Different ideas, or potential problem solutions, are represented by modules of interacting neurons that generate oscillating patterns of activity. The modules are groups of neurons that trigger each other in a repeating pattern that can either fade away, or recruit neighboring neurons to expand. In the solving of any particular problem, the dominant oscillation overwhelms its competitors, to become conscious, or, much of the time, when we are thinking about something else, directly activates the relevant motor neurons, for instance, to steer the car as you drive home. The subconscious process can be compared to a tournament of soccer teams, each team representing a possible choice we could make, weighted such that some have much stronger players than others. When we make a conscious choice, these teams face off, and the winner can emerge into consciousness. Imagine being faced with a choice between chocolate and strawberry ice cream, and historically, team chocolate has been the stronger team, winning 70% of the time. However, today, team strawberry happens to win, and you realize that this particular strawberry ice cream is especially delicious. This sends a message to our subconscious, and the weightings are reassessed. It is as if team strawberry has acquired a new star center-forward, and tomorrow, is much more likely to win again.
Ever since our development as children, our choices tend to be rewarded or punished, and as a result of this experience, we consciously adjust the weighting applied to that choice in the future. We develop our character as a result of the weighting we apply to these choices, which determines not how we will behave now but the probability of how we will behave the next time we are faced with a similar choice. As a result, we can expect that tomorrow, we will freely choose to make an appropriate choice in any given situation, which for some people may be to pull the trigger of a gun, and for some people, not to. This is because of the weightings placed on those two options by our conscious past experience, and these weightings will usually subconsciously send up the appropriate decision for our conscious approval and enactment, even in the heat of a moment. However, it is never guaranteed that we will freely make the appropriate choice, and the pathologies of free will, such as anger, tiredness, testosterone marinade, drug impairment or a mental illness may disable our free will in much the same way as a broken arm impairs our ability to throw a ball. The subconscious weightings may then be shuffled or misassigned, or the proffered choice consciously overridden. It does not mean that we lack free will, only that in particular circumstances the normal exercise of our will has been impeded.
How do the conscious choices that modify weightings arise? For all significant, thought-out choices, these are chosen by our conscious thoughts and we think about the options at the level of consciousness. The options are mediated by our subconscious, flagged already with consciously pre-set weightings, but, as in any soccer game, the strongest option doesn’t always win. This introduces an element of chance. But the winning option (of the subconscious tournament) still has to satisfy our conscious character, which has been shaped by the history of previous choices, and their results, since childhood. In this analogy, the conscious character is equivalent to the manager of the team, responsible for its results, and able to alter the squad or its tactics, or bring on a substitute, according to past, even current, performance. Not each decision, but the result of each decision, imprints itself on our subconscious through reapportionment of weightings, and has an effect consciously on our character.
So, unlike Sapolsky, who says our choices are (pre)determined by our past history, I maintain that our choices are strongly influenced, but not fixed, by feedback, positive or negative, from the results of past decisions (and the history that necessitated making them). This includes, first, a random element (which interrupts any causal sequence), explaining why we sometimes blurt out stupid remarks, or discover surprising new abilities that we possess. It also includes conscious supervision, which is responsible for analysing the results, and the subsequent reset of weightings, which we freely, rationally, choose.
Don’t conscious choices have to be caused? Of course our free will is caused, otherwise it would just be random activity, but it is caused not by an unbroken chain of causal interactions, but by a causal interaction with a random element, which can lead to surprises, mistakes, character-building, and, most of all, learning. How our consciousness can physically cause the reset of our subconscious weightings is part of the Mind-Body problem, addressed in “The Self, Its Brain, and a Solution to the Mind-Body Problem”(4) and “How Entropy Explains the Emergence of Consciousness: The Entropic Theory”(5). That it is able to do so, however, is attested to by the experiments of Jeffrey Schwartz. The reference to Schwartz and Begley (6 p. 93-94) is important. In his work on treating Obsessive Compulsive Disorder patients, Schwartz showed that by training people to use their conscious thought processes alone, he could not only alleviate their OCD, but he could demonstrate physical, material changes to brain tissues visible on PET scans. Conscious thinking can change our neurons. This disproves the notion that our conscious thoughts are an “epiphenomenon” riding on top of, but unable to alter, underlying brain mechanics. Therefore, our thinking that we want to do something can actually be the cause of our doing it, which is necessary for free will.
Neurons in the brain belong to circuits, often several at any given time, and their normal function can generate thoughts (7). These thoughts may clash. However, subconscious circuits, or modules, normally compete with each other with probability weightings adjusted by past experience in order to give an adequately determined conscious decision that is yet compatible with randomness. Because of this, I call this an “inverse compatibilism”. It is not compatible with traditional determinism, in part, because the universe is not physically determined in an absolute sense.
To drive this home, let me cite Richard Feynman (8): “We do not know how to predict what would happen in a given circumstance, and we believe now that it is impossible – that the only thing that can be predicted is the probability of different events”, and Stephen Hawking (9): “Quantum mechanics therefore introduces an unavoidable element of unpredictability or randomness into science”. It’s worth considering Richard Muller’s quote: “We can’t predict when an atom will disintegrate, and the Laws of Physics, as they currently exist, say this failure is fundamental. If we can’t predict such a simple physical phenomenon, then how can we imagine that someday we will be able to show that human behavior is completely deterministic?” The Health Physics Society website “Are Our Bodies Radioactive?” (10) elaborates on how radioactive decays take place in our bodies at a rate of thousands per second, or 10% of the typical background radiation we receive from our environment. This represents a lot of indeterminism. Given the “butterfly effect” (11), it follows that an unfortunate combination of indeterminist radioactive decays must routinely cause cancers in people who would have made a difference, had they survived. Philosophers can no longer baldly state that the Universe is determined, and expect us to accept it. We have moved beyond the classical physics of Isaac Newton and David Hume.
Yes, particles always follow physical laws. There is quantum indeterminacy, but “weird” quantum behaviors mostly disappear at classical scales due to a process called “decoherence”. However, several important biological systems have co-opted these quantum effects, including photosynthesis in plants (12), navigation in birds (13), odor detection in mammals (14), disease fighting by ferritin molecules (15), and microtubule functions, possibly linked to the origins of life and consciousness (16). In other words, they take advantage of, and depend on, indeterminacy effects that can only occur at the quantum level, and utilize them before they can decohere, to generate physiological effects that we appreciate at the classical level. We also have chaotic systems which are still determined by their starting points, even though differences in starting point almost too small to measure may lead to much different outcomes. We have predictable probability distributions for the cumulative effects of random motions, even chaotic ones, which enable meteorologists to forecast weather patterns ten days from now, though not much further, despite their deterministic origin.
But we also have genuinely unpredictable events, such as the when and where of the radioactive decay of specific atoms, and whether that will lead to a neoplastic transformation, because the effect of a given mutagen event depends on the past history of the DNA on which it impinges. Tumorigenesis is the result of the cumulative effect of various epigenetic modifications (17). “Many such events, broadly divided into the stages of initiation, promotion and progression, which may occur over a long period of time in the context of chronic exposure to a carcinogen, can lead to the induction of a human cancer” (18). We know that if we start with 1,000 radon atoms, after 3.8 days, 500 will have decayed yielding mutagenic alpha particles. The more fateful question facing a recently sensitized oncogene in your lung cells is whether this particular radon atom you just inhaled will decay before you exhale it. This uncertainty can be amplified by chaotic dynamics, thus preventing the predictability of cause and effect over long time periods even in principle. If you could go back in time just an hour, and restart the planet Earth exactly as it was then, there would be radioactive decays in some places that happened differently, with different outcomes, and this would change the future.
Even this doesn’t generate free will. What it does is to show that a theory of free will must be compatible with indeterminism, not determinism. Those philosophers whose argument depends on a completely determined Universe must shoulder the burden of proving that it is so. The simplest proof that it is not determined can be found in a paper on emergent phenomena
(5). Hard determinism requires that a “Laplacian demon” would be able to predict every event in the future from the beginning of the Universe. An emergent phenomenon is one that, by definition, cannot be predicted by a complete understanding of the underlying (determined) level of organization. Although self-organizing structures and the evolution of complexity follow predetermined rules, as Sapolsky emphasized, the emergence of classical from quantum physics, the emergence of life from molecular biology, and that of consciousness from neurons have not been shown to have a predetermined origin, or even an explicable one, and it would seem that these events must have come as a surprise to Laplace’s demon. Since we are classical, living, conscious entities, we therefore cannot have been predetermined.
But let’s assume, as devil’s advocate, that the outcome of a soccer game is predetermined by the arrangement of all the atoms in the players’ brains, boots, and the bounciness of the ball before the game ever starts – like a complex game of billiard balls bouncing off each other at predetermined angles. The goalie couldn’t help but have flubbed that easy save, just as you had no alternative but to choose the strawberry ice cream. This has a relatively trivial effect on the Modular-with-Feedback theory even though the outcome of your decision-making is now determined by the weightings you gave the choice options beforehand. Nonetheless, these are based on your conscious character plus the reaction of the world in general to your previous choices. There is no known mechanism whereby your conscious thoughts are determined by any specific neuronal activity (or vice versa). Due to the mysterious nature of the emergence of consciousness, you are free at the conscious level to reassign the weightings after each decision, even as you try to score a winning goal.
Or, let’s assume that we could determine how each thought arose from a specific pattern of neuronal oscillations, and then automatically proceeded to generate a behavior, leaving our thought as an epiphenomenon. In a non-deterministic universe, our choices would still be affected by the random element of the subconscious tournament, and we would remain responsible for the weightings we pre-assigned the modular options.
Therefore, in order to falsify the Modular-with-Feedback theory, it would be necessary to prove both that the Universe is deterministic and that consciousness is an epiphenomenon.
In answer to Sapolsky’s challenge, to ask for a neuron at the start of a chain that is a causeless cause is a category error, like asking what color intelligence is. Being caused does not make an action, or our free will, determined. Our character has been caused by the results of experiences following past decisions. These include imposed punishments and rewards, but also an element of luck as to whether any given decision, like the striker’s decision to shoot for goal, will turn out well or ill. Free will is not determined like the knock-on of billiard balls. It is messier than that, more like a game of soccer. Randomness has been included in the Modular-with- Feedback Theory in such a way as to allow adequate determination and, through feedback, genuine free will.
Therefore, for the purposes of Sapolsky’s book, and more, I’ve demonstrated free will.
Discussion of Sapolsky
Having said all that, Sapolsky in particular seems more focused on our personally being determIned than on universal determinism. In his chapter “Is Your Free Will Random?” (1 pp. 214-239), Sapolsky seems to acknowledge, albeit it often dismissively, that random events may occur. The chapter follows one on quantum “weirdness”, which acknowledges that “the subatomic universe works on a level that is fundamentally indeterminist on both an ontic and epistemic level” (1 p. 213). From here, Sapolsky considers whether quantum effects in the brain may be amplified in such a way as to contribute to free will. He notes that: “In Tse’s view, the location of the magnesium [atom in a glutamate receptor] can change in the absence of antecedent causes, because of indeterminate quantal randomness. And these effects bubble up
further: ‘The brain has in fact evolved to amplify quantum domain randomness… up to the level of neural spike timing randomness’…and the consequences ripple further into circuits of neurons and beyond” (1 p. 218). Here and throughout the chapter, Sapolsky’s point is that these random occurrences, even though they may ”bubble up” toward consciousness, lack any mechanism to influence a brain to decide something one way or the other. Nor does he concede they are necessarily random, citing various potential modifiers. Determined indeterminacy, he suggests, is deterministic neurobiology making unpredictable neuronal events more or less likely to occur; this does not imply that quantum randomness is an uncaused cause. (1 p. 225)
Sapolsky considered the experiments of Benjamin Libet and others subsequently, who found that with properly placed brain monitoring, one can predict the outcome of a simple choice a third of a second or more before the subject is aware of making the decision. But many neuroscientists agree that the artificiality of the set up removes it from real world practical considerations of how we make important, considered decisions, and Sapolsky concedes as much (1 pp.19-36).
Rather than focusing on the hard determinism of Laplace’s demon, Sapolsky focuses on what Alan Johnson (19 pp. 37-41) called “ad hoc” determinism. This can be characterized by the “I was raised by abusive parents in a crime-ridden neighborhood; therefore my tragic circumstances made me do it” defense. It has long been known that heritable components influence important character traits including intelligence, novelty seeking, fearfulness, aggression and violence. It is estimated that our genetics contribute to approximately 50% of the influence on our behavior (20). We are also influenced by our epigenetic familial history (21).
Sapolsky examines at length the role of our genes, neurotransmitters, hormones, regional brain organization, environmental factors, climate, stress, gut bacteria, stage of brain maturation,
up-bringing, cultural heritage over many generations, and sheer luck to claim a seamless firewall against free will in which no neuron exists that has not been influenced by what has come before. All very interesting and thoroughly researched. According to the Modular-with- Feedback theory, these factors strongly, even pathologically, influence the weightings we apply to different subconscious choice options. With the exception of brain pathology, this does not invalidate the competition between choice options, and the subsequent conscious feedback, that gives us free will. There is no Law of Determinism that always prevents one from overcoming adversity to pursue one’s chosen dream, nor is there one that prevents scions of the privileged from squandering everything through bad choices.
Eleven years before Robert Sapolsky dropped his 511 page blockbuster, philosopher Sam Harris published his Free Will, which made similar arguments in a slender 83 pages (22). Presaging Sapolsky, Harris wrote: “if determinism is true, the future is set – and this includes all our future states of mind and our subsequent behavior”, though he does acknowledge that evolution, being driven by random mutations arising from cosmic rays subject to quantum effects, “seems unpredictable in principle” (22 pp. 29-30). But free will is an illusion (22 p.5). Intentions don’t originate in one’s consciousness, according to Harris, they appear there (22 p.8). The Modular-with-Feedback Theory places intentions and decisions leading to them in our consciousness but only after they are subconsciously selected for projection there, a process that takes into account feedback from previous similar situations, and which is guided by (despite a random element) a perceived need to maintain one’s character. While Harris argues that we can’t separate our will from our reward process, we can indeed consciously decide to tag our reward process with weights that reward changes in our future behavior. Harris ridiculed the idea that we could be free to choose that which we didn’t happen to think of, i.e., a glass of juice when he had chosen water over beer (22 p.19). But we are indeed free to reject both beer and water, and request our subconscious to keep sending up new ideas, until it hits upon the idea of juice. These thoughts may be deterministically caused by our physiological sensation of thirst, and our conscious desire to quench that thirst, but our choice between beverage options is willed freely due to the role chance plays in our subconscious selection process, coupled with the weightings that we have historically freely chosen to assign to those options, and our ability to consciously reject options and demand new ones.
“You can do what you decide to do – but you cannot decide what you will decide to do” (22 p.38). Harris notes you can purge the house of sweets if you wish not to eat them, but you can’t know why you didn’t do it yesterday. You may have sufficient will power to change your life, he added, but that is luck, and you can’t make your own luck. But we often make our own luck, through our choices in how to behave. Our free will can build the motivation to throw out the sweets, by training the subconscious not to want them, especially through tagging the “eat sweets” option with emotions such as nausea or disgust. Will power seems to vary between individuals, and is subject to pathologies of free choice such as hunger, tiredness, anger, drugs, circadian rhythms, etc. Our motivation to hold to a resolution is driven by the flow of dopamine, serotonin and noradrenaline in our brain’s reward system, but we can influence through feedback whether we are motivated more by food or by body image.
The Compatibilism of Daniel Dennett, and his argument with Sam Harris
Daniel Dennett is a compatibilist philosopher, believing that, despite a determined Universe, we possess a variety of free will. He reviewed Free Will by Sam Harris, and argued that it attacked only the flawed “popular” idea of free will (23). Dennett was known for insisting that consciousness is an illusion (actually physically being the winner of competing circuits, especially when commandeering the language center and forming memories) (24 p. 254), but he turned on Harris, ironically, for insisting that free will is an illusion. “We don’t think free will is
an illusion at all, but rather, a robust feature of our psychology and a reliable part of the foundations of morality, law and society” (23 p. 1). He proposed a “more sophisticated model” consistent with neuroscience and introspection, allowing a version of responsibility able to justify blame and reward. (He had earlier written, in Freedom Evolves: “But I cannot deny that the tradition also assigns properties to free will that my varieties lack. So much the worse for the traditions, say I”) (24 pp. 224-5).
He then noted how his choice at time t can “bias the settings in his brain” that can subconsciously influence his choice at t1, and he developed this into an introspective means to improve our self-control, yielding moral responsibility (23 p. 11). But, failing to see the role of chance in selecting between differently biased options, he was left with “..so long as one can get what one wants so wholeheartedly, what could be better?” In Freedom Evolves, Dennett proposed that “though our futures are fixed, our natures are designed through evolution to be able to change in response to our interactions with the world. To the ‘God’s eye view’, nothing changes in the Universe, but from the agent’s perspective, things change all the time, and agents change to meet the changes” (24 p. 93). “Our thinking tasks get outsourced to
semi-independent neural subcontractors in competition with each other, but the thinking still has to get done, and wherever thinking gets done, people do things for reasons that are their reasons” (24 p. 187). Our intentions may be caused, as Harris claimed, by events in our brains that we don’t intend, but this, said Dennett, “is the very epitome of freedom: you have the ability to intend exactly what you think to be the best course of action” (23 p.15). Determinism (events are caused by past history) is different from fatalism (the future is inevitable) and Dennett wanted to create a gap and squeeze free will out from between the two. Although we could not have chosen to do differently than we did, the option was there, and we could have had “elbow room” to choose between alternate worlds, said Dennett, to hopefully select the best outcome (24 p. 88). “Evitability”, rather than a determined “inevitability”, is how our ability emerges from complexity, evolved in the brain, to anticipate likely consequences and avoid bad ones (24 p.56).
But as many have noted, none of this is free will; it’s determined will, unable to do otherwise, no matter what Dennett called it.
This argument continued with Harris (25) accusing Dennett’s argument of having performed “conceptual surgery” in order to make free will presentable. Harris emphasized the distinction between the first-person experience of mind (seemingly free) and the third-person theory of mind (subconsciously determined), but this is contradicted by the work of Schwartz (6), which showed that conscious thoughts can directly alter the underlying structure of the brain, and this can be seen on PET scans. These particular conscious thoughts had to be learned through attending a four-step program to treat Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, which means they could not have been determined by the history of the participant. Although the participants were arguably determined by their participation in the program, the process was one of acquiring the program’s concepts consciously, and then consciously deciding to impose those thoughts onto the underlying brain structure. Were the participants not freely willing to do this, their predetermined participation in the program would have ended in failure. The first-person experience is not distinct from but may, in fact, direct the third-person subconscious mind.
Determinism, Compatibilism, Free Will and Punishment
Sapolsky and Harris agree that criminals aren’t responsible for their crimes, that we shouldn’t blame them or hate them for what they’ve done, any more than that we should rail against the immorality of a tornado or an earthquake. The “ad hoc” determinism of the “My impoverished and abusive upbringing made me do it“ defense is real, but not, as they would have it, inescapable. Many kids overcome such backgrounds and win college scholarships: it is a matter of determination, not determinism!
Sapolsky favors the Norwegian model of criminal justice, citing Anders Breivik (1 p. 379), who, in 2011, killed 77 mostly teenagers in an act of Neo-Nazi terrorism, and is serving 21 years in a relatively comfortable jail. Sapolsky asks, once Breivik is determined no longer to be dangerous, why jail him at all? Such would be the unpalatable consequences of
determinism, but compatibilism is no better. Compatibilists cannot arrive at “alternate-possibilities” free will (free to have done otherwise), but claim an “actual-sequence” freedom to act freely without coercion. The compatibilist would thus argue that Breivik, having not been coerced to terrorize Oslo that day, acted out of free will, even though he had no alternative possibility. Surely, if he could not have acted differently, he could not, logically, be blamed.
It is only through the Modular-with-Feedback Theory that we can assign real responsibility, blame, and justifiable punishments to criminals such as Breivik, who, whether or not he was sane that day, freely chose to immerse himself in his hateful world view. Only an insane person could feel no overwhelming guilt, no obligation to endure penance after committing such a crime. If such a criminal is later cured of insanity, their choice resulting from this feedback to their modular mechanism should be to serve out their sentence willingly. Otherwise, we should question the sincerity of their “cure”.
Libertarianism
The much feared alternative to determinism would be a chaotic buffet of random choices, where we would act out each whim, lacking self-control. Libertarian philosophers flirt with a bit of this randomness, trying to entrain it in some way with contrivances that limit our choice-making to that for which we can be held responsible. Libertarianism is also called “incompatibilism”, vis a vis determinism. Libertarians insist that we control our decisions through some element able to stand outside the chain of causation; it is just that they cannot give a realistic account of how this can occur.
Robert Kane’s libertarianism holds almost to determinism, except that he allowed individuals to experience rare Self-Forming Actions, when an extremely important decision is needed, in which they break free of determinism by some unexplained mechanism. Kane suggested that such stressful uncertainty can move appropriate brain regions away from thermal equilibrium, stirring up chaos, sensitizing it to micro-indeterminacies at the level of neurons (27 p. 130). Of course, and Sapolsky (1 p. 235) agrees, this still doesn’t provide a credible mechanism for freely making a controlled decision one way, not the other. Kane skirted the Modular-with-Feedback theory, considering the choice of a businesswoman on her way to an important meeting, who witnessed an assault in an alley, as to whether or not to intervene (27 p.126). He discussed the struggle between two “recurrent and connected neural networks”, which interfere with and feed back on each other, until one wins the tug of war to provide the decision. He never seized the point that feedback comes after the result of the decision has been assessed, changing the weighting the two neural networks will carry when they re-engage in the future.
Robert O. (Bob) Doyle (28), advocated a two-stage model of free will. The subconscious, he wrote, can generate options in a quantum indeterminate fashion; a conscious, determined, decision is then made between these options. As Doyle noted, other philosophers, beginning with William James in 1884, with his lecture “The Dilemma of Determinism” (29), have described similar two-stage models. They try to justify a libertarian free will layered on top of random indeterminism. By adding a layer of determinism to a probabilistic one, they make the claim that they have created an adequately determined theory. They are all flawed in that without a feedback mechanism, they fail to allow change to the character of one’s deterministic layer. What libertarianism has been missing is mechanism. It has been missing the Modular-with-Feedback theory.
Conclusion
According to the Modular-with-Feedback theory, we are, when not pathologically compromised, adequately but incompletely determined. Free will, arising from subconscious competing modular mechanisms subject to conscious feedback, makes us free because the mechanism allows us to choose between randomly selected elements, but responsible because the mechanism governing our choice, being consciously weighted by our prior choices, allows us justifiably to feel that the choice was ours. The extent of the role of chance is hidden by the mechanism, but it is sufficient to preclude determinism, and compatibilism. This is why, due to its compatibility with indeterminism, I call it an inverse compatibilism. Through this mechanism, we are neither determined nor random, but in between them, free.
References:
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2. Tse, Peter Ulric. (2013) The Neural Basis of Free Will. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
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