thanks a lot for the info:)

Good article. I agree with your points about determinism. It is far more useful to regard the natural world, in practice, as probabilistic. Whether or not the universe actually *is* probabilistic or deterministic is for physicists to decide and is not immediately relevant to us.

However, I have to agree with Dr. Bargh that the question of determinism is not necessarily relevant to the question of free will. I say not "necessarily" because while it is clear that strict determinism precludes free will, it doesn't follow that a probabilistic world automatically grants free will.

The commenter above makes a crucial point, that free will isn't an automatic consequence of a probabilistic universe. It's not clear, even, what could allow for free will as ordinarily conceived.

Related to this, there is the question of whether quantum-level uncertainty (or the lack thereof) is even of any relevance to macro-level experience.

There also seems to be something of a confusion in the article of perception and reality. The author is at pains to distinguish the two early on, but towards the end appears to conflate them - at least to the point of relegating the acceptance of determinism to a practically irrelevant 'abstract' article of faith.

Surely, though, an awareness and understanding of determinism is absolutely critical to any kind of work in psychology? I am not a psychologist myself, but I would think that distinguishing the practical limitations to our knowledge that lead to belief in and behaviour as if we have free will from the deterministic reality, would - far from being just a theoretical curiosity - have profound implications for how psychologists treat patients and try to guide social policy.

These two comments both make the very correct and astute observation that quantum indeterminacy does not guarantee free will and in fact may not contribute any useful basis for understanding it.

The questions of free will and determinism may not be entirely orthogonal, but their linkage is more tenuous than may seem at first. Compatibilitists (including most philosophers) believe determinism and free will can go together. Moreover, as these comments indicate, physical indeterminacy leaves us far short of free will. One might begin to think about the problem in terms of agency being an evolved response to the reality of multiple possibilities. (In a deterministic universe, there are not multiple possibilities.)

I'm not certain that the majority of philosophers are Compatibilsts, but, even if so, it's important to distinguish just what Compatibilists mean by the term 'free will'.

They use a largely eviscerated notion of what the lay person typical means by the term, since we have free will, on the Compatibilist view, even though we are never able to do anything other than what we in fact do. Whatever we do 'choose', we had to 'choose'; we couldn't have done otherwise - on pain of violating determinism and being at odds with basic physics.

With regards to multiple possibilities - it is arguable whether there is genuine, or merely epistemic, indeterminacy at the quantum level, but very importantly, even if there is real indeterminacy for particles at the quantum-level, this doesn't offer any evidence for macro-level indeterminacy - such as multiple possible choices for human beings - at all, and nor could it. Determinacy (or otherwise) at the quantum-level can have no bearing on the determinacy of macro-level phenomena, even in principle; not least of all, such phenomena would be measurable, and therefore necessarily determinate.

Given that psychology is a macro-level discipline, just as is neuro-science and everything but quantum physics, the question of quantum-level indeterminacy cannot be relevant to human decision-making.

As said above, a belief that the world may not be deterministic but probabilistic does not add anything to the free will case. The problem for free will-ers is to work out what mechanism gives us 'choice'.

If you are a materialist (ie believe all that exists is matter and fundamental forces) then you will have a hard time finding it. If you believe in a soul or something similar then that's fine, but the belief if free will is then ultimately spiritual, not scientific.

The world we live in is determinist. We can predict where a billiard ball will role, the motion of the planets, we know many of the laws of the fundamental forces that govern these objects. Objects are made of atoms and they obey certain rules.

Free will requires our atoms (in our brain I presume) to be able to 'choose' where our other atoms go. If I could have taken the left path or the right path, then some part of me, (which is made of atoms) decided to do something, and as a result I (a pile of atoms) took the left or right path. For our atoms or our self to be able to make this choice, they cannot be governed by the fundamental forces of the universe which govern rocks and leaves, planets and solar systems. These things cannot make choices. This god-like power we must possess under a free will account has yet to be explained. I, like many others, find it unintelligible.

Compatibilists use the term free will to mean something completely different - they generally mean 'without external force'. A person who has a gun to his head and is told to eat a sandwich has no free will - if the gunman wasn't there to influence what happened, the person would have free will. This has nothing to do with the concept of free will we are discussing, and they should probably be using different words.

You discussion of everyday concepts which determinist's cannot believe is pretty silly. People use probability when we don't have enough information to determine an outcome in the future (eg an election result). Most free will-ers believe a coin toss is deterministic and yet we all still refer to this event as occurring by chance. Similarly the word 'perhaps' has nothing to do with free will or determinism, but is used when we don't know the outcome and are expressing relative probabilities. It is not an idle exercise in futility to think, "If I had not said those things, we could have avoided the argument", because reflecting on past experiences may causally determine future ones.

To the post above - finally I found someone on the net who said exactly what I have been thinking. The ironic thing is, I believe from the time of the big bang that it was inevitable that I would stumble upon this website on July 2 of 2009. Why would it have happened any other way?

Statistics defines a random event as an undefined function with some constraints. For a coin, the function has only two outcomes: heads and tails, and since the function itself is undefined in your point of view, it is distributed as 50/50.

The function becomes defined through physics and other interactions eventually. So stats and determinism can easily coexist. A statistical function is merely a placeholder for something determinant. It seems like ignorance, but this it not quite the case. It is merely unknown or unattainable information at your point of view. (Unattainable because although you know the constraints, you know nothing else about the actual occurrence).

This is why many believe that quantum mechanics, defined completely by probability, is incomplete and merely setting the constraints on an otherwise completely defined laws of nature.