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ANNOTATION:
Indeterminism and Free Will
The main thesis of the article "Determinism vs. Freedom" by V.Turchin appears to be that the indeterminism of sub-atomic particles proposed by modern quantum theory somehow removes the problems facing the possibility of human free will. However, I would like to suggest a few reasons for thinking that this is not the case.
1) The truth of the thesis of Free Will does not follow deductively from the falsity of determinism as it is possible for both of these theses to be false. To see this, consider the possibility that there may be no such thing as causal necessity and the sequence of events in the world is purely the result of chance. If this were the case, then determinism would clearly be false, yet we would not possess free will either, as our actions would not be determined by our thoughts.
2) Even if indeterminism is true of our thoughts and actions, we would not possess free will in any meaningful sense. A crucial element of our notion of free will is that we have some control over our thoughts and actions, but if they are completely uncaused then it would seem that they are completely random and are just as much out of our control as they would be had they been causally determined by previous events.
3) Finally, quantum theory claims that the behaviour of certain subatomic particles is fundamentally unpredictable, but it does not propose that the behaviour of the objects (and people) constituted of those particles will not be deterministic. The entities that are acknowledged to behave indeterminately are of a fundamentally different nature to the entities that are to possess free will.
For further discussion on this issue, see "Contemporary Metaphysics" by Michael Jubien (1997), or "Determinism & Free Will" by Cynthia Macdonald (1995).
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