Thank you for your thoughtful and thought-provoking response. In my essay, I focused on physics and took a very simplistic concept of free will. I equated free will to being free from determinism—my choice is not determined; therefore, I have free will. As you suggested, this implies contra-causal free will.
I would also maintain that when a perfectly balanced pencil falls (say in a perfect vacuum), its direction of fall is fundamentally random and free from determinism. In your words, the pencil is “able to counter or “rise above” physical causality (and quantum level randomness).” It would be inappropriate, however, to say the pencil has free will or decides which way to fall. A pencil has no consciousness.
I agree 100% that physics and chemistry apply to neurons. But I disagree with any interpretation of physics that implies there is no contra-causal free will.
The Dissipative Conceptual Model (https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202007.0469/v3) is an alternative interpretation of physical reality. It is fully consistent with empirical physical data, without “aesthetically distasteful” and untestable implications, such as the Many Worlds Hypothesis, Superdeterminism, or the possibility (in the limit of perfect isolation) of a superposed live-dead cat. It also does not preclude contra-causal free will.
The DCM establishes dissipative processes as fundamentally real. It proposes a new principle, the Kelvin Selection Principle, which governs the self-organization of structures within dissipative systems. The KSP selects from among multiple possible processes, all consistent with a system’s physical constraints, based on their relative usefulness.
The article develops the DCM for physical systems, and it applies the KSP to simple dissipative systems. The brain is ultimately a physical-chemical dissipative system. Extending application of the KSP from simple systems to the brain would clearly be a daunting and speculative task. However, if thoughts and decisions are organized patterns of neuron firings, then multiple thoughts or decisions can exist as physically consistent possibilities. The KSP might assign usefulness to, and provide a reason for a decision’s selection, but the decision is not strictly determined, and its selection from other possible decisions would describe contra-causal free will.
