Free will and Intentional State of Mind - Chaos Theory Implies Unpredictability Not Indeterminism

It is tempting, to think that the explanation of the conscious experience of free will must be a manifestation of quantum indeterminism at the level of conscious rational decision making. We thought free will was a mystery, but consciousness and quantum mechanics were two separate and distinct mysteries. Now we have the result that in order to solve the first we have to solve the second and invoke one of the most mysterious aspects of the third to solve the first two.

I think most neurobiologists would feel that this is probably how the brain actually works, that we have the experience of free will but it is illusory; because the neuronal processes are causally sufficient to determine subsequent states of the brain, assuming there are no outside stimulus inputs or effects from the rest of the body. It means that our experience of freedom plays no causal or explanatory role in our behavior. It is a complete illusion, because our behavior is entirely fixed by the neurobiology that determines the muscle contractions. On this view evolution played a massive trick on us. Evolution gave us the illusion of freedom, but it is nothing more than that - an illusion.

Together with the experience of acting, and in addition how the brain produced conscious thought processes,in which the constraints of rationality are already built in as constitutive elements, you would, so to speak, get the self for free.

The elements necessary for an organism to have a self are first, it must have a unified field of consciousness; second,it must have the capacity for deliberating on reasons, and this involves not only cognitive capacities of perception and memory but the capacity for coordinating intentional states so as to arrive at rational decisions; the constraints of rationality are already built into intentional phenomena such as beliefs and desires and into thought processes.


Chaos theory, as I understand it, implies unpredictability but not indeterminism.

"Free Will as a Problem in Neurobiology"
John Searle
Mills Professor of the philosophy of mind and language