Publisher's Synopsis
The philosophical arguments in this text centre around the defence of four main theses. The first is that many deterministic systems are unpredictable in their behaviour. The second is that randomness and determinism are consistent: randomness in the strongest possible sense can occur in a fully deterministic world. The third is that for a variety of physical phenomena there is no principled way of deciding whether the appropriate theory should be deterministic or indeterministic. The metaphysics of either determinism or indeterminism is transcendental. The fourth is that the biological computations required for perceptual feedback and proprioceptive correction of movement cannot be reduced to physcially deterministic properties. The general conclusion is that either compatibility or incompatibility with physical determinism is irrelevant in the analysis of free will.
