"Truly-Free" Will

Challenge: find a way to reconcile the following 5 points - not to believe them, just to make them logically consistent with each other:

1. The physical universe operates according to the laws of physics  as we know it, and this includes the human brain and all its thoughts and decisions. In other words, every 'brain state' follows from the brain state prior to it, plus sensory input etc, all according to physical law.

2. There is a being (for example the Entity which in religion is called 'God') which designed the laws of nature and the big bang and created it. This Being knows everything that occurs in the universe, including all physical processes, including all thoughts and decisions in every human brain.

3. The Being believes in the notion of 'good & evil', & punishment for evil actions; specifically, that humans are 'responsible' for actions they choose to take which they could have chosen not to take, and humans who choose to do 'evil' when they could have chosen to do the good can be considered to 'deserve punishment' from that Being.

4. This Entity or Being is smart, subtle, sophisticated, and not evil, and does not 'punish' a rock for falling from a mountain onto someone's head since it was the gravity which the Being themselves created which caused this to happen; this being does not punish vegetation or even animals since they do not 'plan' or 'choose' and certainly do not understand good and evil; this being does not punish human decisions taken by instinct etc. Also, this Entity of course does not punish any Human actions following from a brain-decision whose origin can be traced to physical causes - that is, there is no punishment for human actions which arise as a result of careful thought and deliberate action if they follow from the operation of natural law (including of course those which govern brain processes) which was after all created by the Entity. 

5. There is at least one human in all of history (eg Hitler, Stalin etc) who was punished for their actions.

I don't believe these can be reconciled.

Note that I deliberately circumvented the use of the term "free will" in the above, and instead will use these 5 points to make it clear what I and many others mean by this term.

It seems clear that the type of "true free will" required to make points 2,3,4 & 5 consistent would be one which does not follow point #1, ie 'true free will' would need to be beyond the type of causation known to physics. 

It is this type of "true free will" which is referred to (explicitly or implicitly) in the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden.

 (As is evident via its juxtaposition to the creation story, which presents a Being/Entity of the type we mentioned above [as understood by normative Jewish Tradition).

It is this type of free will we will be referring to in all articles on this site. A type of free will which is denied to exist by many writers, and is incompatible with a materialist conception of reality, and with cause & effect. 

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Note that just as I think that the writers referring to a free will which is consistent with materialism and cause-effect are missing the point of what I andothers like me mean by "free will", so too writers referring to 'consciousness' or 'awareness' which is consistent with materialism are missing the point - and maybe even missing a consciousness :)  [In my essay on this topic I refer to them as "Mindless Materialists"]

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FREE WILL, QUANTUM PHYSICS, AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE WAVE FUNCTION 

A free-willed decision, in order to be truly free in the sense we mean here, has to be unconstrained by the laws of nature and not determined by any physical phenomena - neither the result of deterministic nor random processes. Free will is then unique in operating via interactions which transcend both the determinism of classical physics and the randomness of quantum physics.   

Given that free will transcends quantum randomness (as it transcends nature in general) we postulate that if there is any process which can "collapse the quantum wave function"** it would be a mind engaged in a free willed-choice.

Since a consciousness can causally affect the universe only if it has a free will, and a free will is by definition unthinkable without a consciousness, we will assume in the course of further discussion that free will subsumes within itself the concept of consciousness.

Indeed, some eminent physicists have proposed that it is only measurement performed by a conscious being which can transform the quasi-real state into a fully physical real state, and that stipulation applies just as well to the universe as a whole. However I feel that it is free will which underlies this property of consciousness.

We can try to apply this perspective to the existence of the universe itself. According to quantum metaphysics (Wheeler et al), the universe as a whole can emerge into reality only as a result of observation via consciousness. 

My speculation is that consciousness possibly must function in a nonquantum (or quantum-transcendent') fashion in order to “collapse the wave function.” Since as I define it the only such nonquantum factor in the universe is free will (it transcends both determinism and randomness), I postulate that it is the presence of a free-willed (conscious) being which enables the universe to emerge into reality.

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 See other articles on this topic included under the rubric of my book "The Retroactive Instant Universe"