Free Will: The Elusive Ideal

The Scope of Man's Free Will

The ideal antiplatelet drug for stroke prevention--still elusive.

See related article, pages 1358–1363. Since the publication of the Antiplatelet Trialists Collaboration meta-analyses well over a decade ago1 showing a relative risk reduction of 25% from aspirin for all secondary vascular ischemic events in patients presenting with a variety of vascular disorders, there have been numerous attempts to improve on these modest benefits. Reducing the dose of aspir...

The Free Will Theorem

On the basis of three physical axioms, we prove that if the choice of a particular type of spin 1 experiment is not a function of the information accessible to the experimenters, then its outcome is equally not a function of the information accessible to the particles. We show that this result is robust, and deduce that neither hidden variable theories nor mechanisms of the GRW type for wave fu...

Free will

Much of the best biological work in decision-making has been carried out in bacteria and insects because the genetics of these organisms is better understood and they provide the most physically accessible nervous systems. With the advent of modern imaging and neurophysiological techniques, however, decision-making by human and non-human primates has become a bustling area in the early stages o...

Free Will

A criterion for the existence of human free will is specified: a human action is asserted to be a manifestations of human free-will if this action is a specific physical action that is experienced as being consciously chosen and willed to occur by a human agent, and is not determined within physical theory either in terms of the physically described aspects of nature or by any non-human agency....