Daniel Dennett was a compatibilist. He attempted to carve some elbow room for freedom of decision-making by inserting some indeterminism in his ‘practical free will’ model. The purpose of inserting indeterminism in decision-making processes was to break the causal chain of hard determinism and to provide a source for novelty not already implicit in past events. This would explain creativity and also allow for indeterminism required for free will. However, he falls short of allowing indeterminism to break the causal chain and accepting that free will could reconnect it with novel links. The ‘practical free will’, he says, ‘installs indeterminism in the right place for the libertarian, if there is a right place at all’. This cautious acceptance of indeterminism in causal chains did not succeed, because it was randomness that he was inserting, not indeterminism of well-defined alternatives. I will demonstrate a form of indeterminism based on the instability and criticality of some physical states, which offers well-defined alternatives in the physical world at the classical (not quantum) level. This form of indeterminism fits perfectly into causal chains and opens the door to reconciling libertarian free will with the physicalism of the world more elegantly than Dennett's model.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-262
