Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

having bodies — but again, not rocks and tables. As agents with physical bodies we are ‘settlers of matters’ — we can make a decision of some sort and that decision will change the course of things in the world. The ‘decision’ may be a thought, but likely as not this will lead to one or more physical actions at a later time, which will be the ‘settling’. So we are embodied agents who change the course of the future by settling matters in the real world.

There is nothing in the lowest levels of particle physics that forces our behaviour — we are free to act and our actions do not break any physical laws. For agents to be the ‘settler of matters’, it is not essential for determinism to be false, but neither does it rule out the falsity of determinism.

The only conclusion that can be reached is a compatibalist notion — somehow determinism is not contradicted by agency. It is not the type of compatibalism described earlier, please note, but one where we reach the rather startling conclusion that free will need not contradict determinism in a much more decisive manner than simply compatibalism being freedom from restraint. The conclusion is that we are not faced with the ancient dilemma of the fee will argument with which we started. There is something about conscious, sentient, agents that allows us to act freely yet without breaking any physical laws and without even the need to abandon a belief in determinism.

The future must be open if settling by agency is the heart of free will. If, on the other hand, determinism in its original form is true, then

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