On free will

Science is about the physical reality. Scientists themselves can also think about things outside of physical reality but that is not science. So why is there a trickle of papers dealing with freewill? I ask this because I cannot find anything for freewill to be free-from other then the processes of matter and energy in the nervous system. In other words, freewill is freedom from physical reality. Science concerns itself with what can be actually investigated and it cannot investigate anything that is not physical. Whether freewill exists or not and what it might be like are not scientific questions.


Some (see Brembs paper) would like to make it a scientific question by unilaterally re-defining the word/phrase ‘freewill’. Changing the meanings of words is something that science does fairly often. But in this case it is DANGEROUS. The general media and the anti-neurobiology commentators are not going to warn the public that science has changed the meaning of freewill. They will just point out that science has accepted the spiritual. It would be as dangerous as changing the meaning of ‘intelligent design’ to mean a natural process of optimization. What science has to get across is that the freewill-vs-determinism argument is dead because BOTH ideas are flawed.

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