The familiar expression “hindsight is always 20/20” affirms that looking back on a behavior enables you to understand what previously you weren't cognizant of. And that regardless of whether you could ...

I love a good oxymoron, and free will is one of my favorites. There’s often wisdom to be harvested from oxymorons. Freedom is unconstrained dithering, doing whatever. Will is self-discipline, ...

Each of us belongs to a world of cause and effect, governed by natural laws. Author and neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argues that our actions, like everything else, are fully determined by conditions ...

A new book by a Stanford neurobiologist offers a jarring proposition: that humans do not have free will and thus cannot be considered morally responsible for our actions. In “Determined: A Science of ...

On the basis of three physical axioms, we prove that if the choice of a particular type of spin 1 experiment is not a function of the information accessible to the experimenters, then its outcome is ...

Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will, by Kevin J. Mitchell, Princeton University Press, 352 pages, $29.95 What is free will? Can a being whose brain is made up of physical stuff actually make ...

In his review of Sabine Hossenfelder’s “Existential Physics” (Bookshelf Aug. 11), Julian Baggini quotes the author’s argument that free will is impossible because “according to the currently ...