Van Inwagen Free Will Analysis

Van Inwagen presents three philosophical approaches to the question of will. The first suggests that free will is incompatible with determinism, since the path taken by an agent faced with equally possible futures that have equal connections to the present is, by virtue of their equal possibility, indeterminate. The mystery lies in the fact that, when applied to neural activity, the agent whose behavior will be determined by the path taken by a neural pulse that can take a number of equally probable paths, has no executive power over which of the paths, and thus behaviors, will result.

Conversely, one can hold a deterministic view that is incompatible with free will. This approach holds that only one of the alternative futures that may exist

in a given moment is a physically possible continuation of the present. The paths appear to be continuous from the view of the agent, but may in fact be disjointed when seen from afar — such that it’s impossible to really know whether one is ever really faced with more than one possibility.

Compatibilists believe that both of these views may be true. Such would be the case if some futures that can’t be joined to the present without a violation of the laws of nature, are, nevertheless, open. Van Inwagen presents the problem of compatibilism as determining which futures that don’t have physically possible connections with the present are open.