Free Will Part 4 — The Cognitive Architecture of Free Will

An examination of metacognition and heuristics demonstrates both the existence and precarious nature of free will.

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We will explore how memory, imagination, and heuristics work together to achieve an aspirational evolutionary goal of producing free will in intelligent life, but also show that aspiration is still in its infancy.

To understand the physical and cognitive argument for free will, we must first dismantle the ultimate determinist thought experiment: Laplace’s Demon. Proposed in 1814, the concept posits that if a super-intellect knew the precise location and momentum of every atom in the universe, it could calculate the entirety of the past and future. Everything, in this view, is simply a consequence of what came before.

However, modern mathematics and computer science offer a devastating counterargument through Computational Irreducibility, a concept heavily developed by physicist Stephen Wolfram…

NOTE: This is a companion article to the YouTube video which can be watch here: https://youtu.be/84mrioohkzc | The purpose of this article is to provide a deeper and more scholarly dive into the topics discussed. The full article can only be read on Medium.com, the link to the full article is provided below: