The question of the will being free or not is as unsettled as ever. We see the issue referred to throughout intellectual history, sides taken, sides forsworn; a riddle that will (seemingly) forever remain unsolved.

Karl Popper lends a helping hand to proponents of free choice when he reminds us of the fact that physics has made great strides even as insoluble issues at its heart abide. He’s not proposing that the will is free necessarily, but he does grant us intellectual space to consider options to a purely mechanistic/materialistic approach, reminding us that we’ve long accepted that light is both a wave and a particle. And for that matter, that the mystery of gravity is something we’ve all made peace with. We ask how gravity and electromagnetism act upon strong and weak forces knowing there’s no answer to the question. Einstein worked on a unitary theory from 1919 to 1955, failing to find one. The four identified forces of physics persist in their disunity, and yet the world as we’ve found it coheres. Notwithstanding this unelucidated interconnectedness, we interact with the physical world and continue to discover ever deeper secrets about it. So the fact that the way the mind works remains unresolved—is it strictly electro/chemical, or something else—something metaphysical—need not unsettle us. Popper offers us a reprieve during which we might sort things out.

On the other hand, in support of strict determinism, it should be said that it’s nearly impossible to conceive of a radically free will. What would a radically free will do, and in relation to whom? Would it want things that I want, and if so, would it be radically free? After all, it would have to want things that I wanted before it did, or be, at the least, interested in the things that interested me a millisecond before the purported wanting. If not, the will would become irrelevant, or worse, simply random.