Ian Durham - Toward a formal model of free will

Ian Durham
Saint Anselm College

Most discussions around the nature of free will center on whether or not it exists or can exist. Lost in this argument is the fact that we at least perceive that free will exists, whether or not it actually does. This is an important distinction. If we take an operational view of perceived free will, we can construct meaningful measures for analyzing ensembles of possible choices. I present such a formal model here that is based on statistical emergence and that gives concrete, formal measures of free choices and free will.

Filmed at the Models of Consciousness conference, University of Oxford, September 2019.