http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23641219

Front Psychol. 2013 Apr 30;4:131. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00131. Print 2013.

The predictive brain and the "free will" illusion.

De Ridder D, Verplaetse J, Vanneste S.

Source

Brai2n, TRI and Department of Neurosurgery, University Hospital Antwerp Edegem, Belgium

"The free will problem is a philosophical battle between compatibilists and incompatibilists. According to compatibilists like Hobbes, Hume, James, and Dennet, free will is not in danger if determinism is true. Free will is perfectly compatible with a deterministic working of our universe and brain. Incompatibilists disagree but differ about the conclusion to be drawn. Hard incompatibilists such as Spinoza and Laplace conclude that there is no free will because determinism is true, while soft incompatibilists like Reid, Eccles, and Penrose believe that our free will exists because determinism is false. In arguing for indeterminism incompatibilist libertarians often refer to fashionable theories such as quantum mechanics or thermodynamics which apply stochastic, non-linear models in order to describe physical processes. Nowadays these non-linear models are also applied to brain processes (Ezhov and Khrennikov, 2005), though philosophers still disagree whether this really shows that determinism is wrong and indeterminism or chance is sufficient to decide freely."