Jacques Monod’s 1971 book Chance and Necessity was a landmark in the popular science literature for its unequivocal statement that the origin of life is purely a product of Chance.

…chance alone is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biology is no longer one among other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. And nothing warrants the supposition — or the hope — that on this score our position is likely ever to be revised.
(Chance and Necessity, p. 112)

Monod correctly denies any teleological forces are needed to create life from inanimate matter, but he finds that teleonomic purposeful behavior is one of the fundamental characteristics of life, along with what he calls autonomous morphogenesis (life is “self-constructing”) and reproductive invariance (life is “self-replicating”).

Information philosophy agrees that with the emergence of life, information structures with purposes entered the universe.

But there must have been information-creating, ergodic processes at work before terrestrial life appeared. They created the informational substrate for life, in particular, the sun and the planetary environment hospitable to the origin of life on earth.

Monod says that some biologists have been unhappy with his idea of teleonomy, that living beings are endowed with a purpose or a project, but he says this is essential to the definition of living beings. His next criterion is autonomous morphogenesis. He says,

…a living being’s structure results from a … process … that owes almost nothing to the action of outside forces, but everything, from its overall shape down to its tiniest detail, to “morphogenetic” interactions within the object itself.

We now know this is only “adequate determinism“

It is thus a structure giving proof of an autonomous determinism: precise, rigorous, implying a virtually total “freedom” with respect to outside agents or conditions — which are capable, to be sure, of impeding this development, but not of governing or guiding it, not of prescribing its organizational scheme to the living object. Through the autonomous and spontaneous character of the morphogenetic processes that build the macroscopic structure of living beings, the latter are absolutely distinct from artifacts, as they are, furthermore, from the majority of natural objects whose macroscopic morphology largely results from the influence of external agents.

Crystals are one of the few purely physical “ergodic” processes, reducing the entropy locally

To this there is a single exception: that, once again, of crystals, whose characteristic geometry reflects microscopic interactions occurring within the object itself. Hence, utilizing this criterion alone, crystals would have to be classified together with living beings, while artifacts and natural objects, alike fashioned by outside agents, would comprise another class.
(Chance and Necessity, p.10)

The quantum cooperative atomic phenomena that form crystals are of course the same as form the macromolecules of life, DNA, RNA, etc.

Monod thinks there is an “internal, autonomous determinism” that “guarantees the formation of the extremely complex structures of living beings.” The “guarantee” can not be perfect as a result of statistical physics. Monod is fully aware of quantum indeterminacy. After discussing chance in terms of probability and games of chance, he says,

on the microscopic level there exists a further source of still more radical uncertainty, embedded in the quantum structure of matter. A mutation is in itself a microscopic event, a quantum event, to which the principle of uncertainty consequently applies. An event which is hence and by its very nature essentially unpredictable.

Monod identifies the key evolutionary process as the transmission of information from one living information structure to the next. Note that this is accomplished in the constant presence of thermal and quantal noise

.

Such structures represent a considerable quantity of information whose source has still to be identified: for all expressed — and hence received — information presupposes a source. He says “the source of the information expressed in the structure of a living being is always another, structurally identical object.”

[Living beings have the] ability to produce and to transmit ne varietur the information corresponding to their own structure. A very rich body of information, since it describes an organizational scheme which, along with being exceedingly complex, is preserved intact from one generation to the next. The term we shall use to designate this property is invariant reproduction, or simply invariance.With their invariant reproduction we find living beings and crystalline structures once again sharing a property that renders them unlike all other known objects in the universe. Certain chemicals in supersaturated solution do not crystallize unless the solution has been inoculated with crystal seeds. We know as well that in cases of a chemical capable of crystallizing into two different systems, the structure of the crystals appearing in the solution will be determined by that of the seed employed.
(Chance and Necessity, p.12)

Monod claims that the main distinction between crystals and living things is the quantity of information transmitted between the generations. He thus neglects the creativity inherent in the acquisition and transmission of knowledge by living things.

Crystalline structures, however, represent a quantity of information by several orders of magnitude inferior to that transmitted from one generation to another in the simplest living beings we are acquainted with. By this criterion — purely quantitative, be it noted — living beings may be distinguished from all other objects, crystals included.

In his major contribution toward an informational approach to biology, Monod goes on to make a quantitative estimate of what he calls the “teleonomic level” of a species, arranging them in a hierarchy based purely on information content. This is an important beginning for information-based biological science.

…since a structure’s degree of order can be defined in units of information, we shall say that the “invariance content” of a given species is equal to the amount of information which, transmitted from one generation to the next, assures the preservation of the specific structural standard. As we shall see later on, with the help of a few assumptions it will be possible to arrive at an estimate of this amount.That in turn will enable us to bring into better focus the notion most immediately and plainly inspired by the examination of the structures and performances of living beings, that of teleonomy. Analysis nevertheless reveals it to be a profoundly ambiguous concept, since it implies the subjective idea of “project.” [Consider] the example of the camera: if we agree that this object’s existence and structure realize the “project” of capturing images, we must also agree, obviously enough, that a similar project is accomplished with the emergence of the eye of a vertebrate.

But it is only as a part of a more comprehensive project that each individual project, whatever it may be, has any meaning. All the functional adaptations in living beings, like all the artifacts they produce, fulfill particular projects which may be seen as so many aspects or fragments of a unique primary project, which is the preservation and multiplication of the species.

To be more precise, we shall arbitrarily choose to define the essential teleonomic project as consisting in the transmission from generation to generation of the invariance content characteristic of the species. All the structures, all the performances, all the activities contributing to the success of the essential project will hence be called “teleonomic.”

This allows us to put forward at least the principle of a definition of a species’ “teleonomic level.’ All teleonomic structures and performances can be regarded as corresponding to a certain quantity of information which must be transmitted for these structures to be realized and -these performances accomplished. Let us call this quantity “teleonomic information.” A given species’ “teleonomic level” may then be said to correspond to the quantity of information which, on the average and per individual, must be transferred to assure the generation-to-generation transmission of the specific content of reproductive invariance.
(Chance and Necessity, pp.13-14)

For François Jacob, who shared the Nobel Prize with Jacques Monod, teleonomy was a basic characteristic of every cell. Jacob said that the basic purpose and desire of every cell is to become two cells

.

But Monod sees that his teleonomy appears to be in conflict with a basic tenet, the very cornerstone, of modern science.

The cornerstone of the scientific method is the postulate that nature is objective. In other words, the systematic denial that “true” knowledge can be got at by interpreting phenomena in terms of final causes - that is to say, of “purpose.” An exact date may be given for the discovery of this canon. The formulation by Galileo and Descartes of the principle of inertia laid the groundwork not only for mechanics but for the epistemology of modern science, by abolishing Aristotelian physics and cosmology. To be sure, neither reason, nor logic, nor observation, nor even the idea of their systematic confrontation had been ignored by Descartes’ predecessors. But science as we understand it today could not have been developed upon those foundations alone. It required the unbending stricture implicit in the postulate of objectivity — ironclad, pure, forever undemonstrable. For it is obviously impossible to imagine an experiment which could prove the nonexistence anywhere in nature of a purpose, of a pursued end.But the postulate of objectivity is consubstantial with science; it has guided the whole of its prodigious development for three centuries. There is no way to be rid of it, even tentatively or in a limited area, without departing from the domain of science itself.

Objectivity nevertheless obliges us to recognize the teleonomic character of living organisms, to admit that in their structure and performance they act projectively — realize and pursue a purpose. Here therefore, at least in appearance, lies a profound epistemological contradiction. In fact the central problem of biology lies with this very contradiction, which, if it is only apparent, must be resolved; or else proven to be utterly insoluble, if that should turn out indeed to be the case.
(Chance and Necessity, pp.21-2)

Monod’s resolution of his “profound epistemological contradiction” is to make teleonomy secondary to - and a consequence of - reproductive invariance.

Since the teleonomic properties of living beings appear o challenge one of the basic postulates of the modern theory of knowledge, any philosophical, religious, or scientific view of the world must, ipso facto, offer an implicit if not an explicit solution to this problem.{T]he single hypothesis that modern science here deems acceptable: namely, that invariance necessarily precedes teleonomy. Or, to be more explicit;` the Darwinian idea that the initial appearance, evolution, and steady refinement of ever more intensely teleonomic structures are due to perturbations occurring in a structure which already possesses the property of invariance — hence is capable of (preserving the effects of chance and thereby submitting them to the play of natural selection.

Ranking teleonomy as a secondary property deriving from invariance — alone seen as primary — the selective theory is the only one so far proposed that is consistent with the postulate of objectivity. It is at the same time the only one not merely compatible with modern physics but based squarely upon it, without restrictions or additions. In short, the selective theory of evolution assures the epistemological coherence of biology and gives it its place among the sciences of “objective nature.”
(Chance and Necessity, pp.23-4)

Monod summarizes the history of philosophy more or less as we do (and as Karl Popper does), along the lines of the great division, or dualism, between idealists and materialists.

We see the distinction as between those who think information is an invariant and those who see it as constantly increasing. Monod’s focus on reproductive invariance may prevent him seeing the importance of novelty and creation of new information. Ever since its birth in the Ionian Islands almost three thousand years ago, Western philosophy has been divided between two seemingly opposed attitudes. According to one of them the authentic and ultimate truth of the world can reside only in perfectly immutable forms, by essence unvarying. According to the other, the only real truth resides in flux and evolution. From Plato to Whitehead and from Heraclitus to Hegel and Marx, it is clear that these metaphysical epistemologies were always closely bound up with their authors’ ethical and political biases. These ideological edifices, represented as self-evident to reason, were actually a posteriori constructions designed to justify preconceived ethico-political theories.
(Chance and Necessity, p.99)

Like many scientists, Monod regards the open search for knowledge and truth as of intrinsic value. Can he go on to make knowledge itself a value in the objective world of “value-free” science? Monod seeks an “ethic of knowledge.”

Must one adopt the position once and for all that objective truth and the theory of values constitute eternally separate, mutually impenetrable domains? This is the attitude taken by a great number of modern thinkers, whether writers, or philosophers, or indeed scientists. For the vast majority of men, whose anxiety it can only perpetuate and worsen, this attitude I believe will not do; I also believe it is absolutely mistaken, and for two essential reasons.First, and obviously, because values and knowledge are always and necessarily associated in action just as in discourse.

Second, and above all, because the very definition of “true” knowledge reposes in the final analysis upon an ethical postulate.

Each of these two points demands some brief clarification.

Ethics and knowledge are inevitably linked in and through action. Action brings knowledge and values simultaneously into play, or into question. All action signifies an ethic, serves or disserves certain values; or constitutes a choice of values, or pretends to. On the other hand, knowledge is necessarily implied in all action, while reciprocally, action is one of the two necessary sources of knowledge.

The moment one makes objectivity the conditio sine qua non of true knowledge, a radical distinction, indispensable to the very search for truth, is established between the domains of ethics and of knowledge. Knowledge in itself is exclusive of all value judgment (all save that of “epistemological value”) whereas ethics, in essence nonobjective, is forever barred from the sphere of knowledge.

The postulate of objectivity…prohibits any confusion of value judgments with judgments arrived at through knowledge. Yet the fact remains that these two categories inevitably unite in the form of action, discourse included. In order to abide by our principle we shall therefore take the position that no discourse or action is to be considered meaningful, authentic unless — or only insofar as — it makes explicit and preserves the distinction between the two categories it combines. Thus defined, the concept of authenticity becomes the common ground where ethics and knowledge meet again; where values and truth, associated but not interchangeable, reveal their full significance to the attentive man alive to their resonance.

In an objective system…any mingling of knowledge with values is unlawful, forbidden. But — and here is the crucial point, the logical link which at their core weds knowledge and values together — this prohibition, this “first commandment” which ensures the foundation of objective knowledge, is not itself objective. It cannot be objective: it is an ethical guideline, a rule for conduct. True knowledge is ignorant of values, but it cannot be grounded elsewhere than upon a value judgment, or rather upon an axiomatic value. It is obvious that the positing of the principle of objectivity as the condition of true knowledge constitutes an ethical choice and not a judgment arrived at from knowledge, since, according to the postulate’s own terms, there cannot have been any “true” knowledge prior to this arbitral choice. In order to establish the norm for knowledge the objectivity principle defines a value: that value is objective knowledge itself. Thus, assenting to the principle of objectivity one announces one’s adherence to the basic statement of an ethical system, one asserts the ethic of knowledge.

By the very loftiness of its ambition the ethic of knowledge might perhaps satisfy this urge in man to project toward something higher. It sets forth a transcendent value, true knowledge, and invites him not to use it self-servingly but henceforth to enter into its service from deliberate and conscious choice. At the same time it is also a humanism, for in man it respects the creator and repository of that transcendence.

The ethic of knowledge is also in a sense “knowledge of ethics,” a clear-sighted appreciation of the urges and passions, the requirements and limitations of the biological being. It is able to confront the animal in man, to view him not as absurd but strange, precious in his very strangeness: the creature who, belonging simultaneously to the animal kingdom and the kingdom of ideas, is simultaneously torn and enriched by this agonizing duality, alike expressed in art and poetry and in human love.

Conversely, the animist systems have to one degree or another preferred to ignore, to denigrate or bully biological man, and to instill in him an abhorrence or terror of certain traits inherent in his animal nature. The ethic of knowledge, on the other hand, encourages him to honor and assume this heritage, knowing the while how to dominate it when necessary. As for the highest human qualities, courage, altruism, generosity, creative ambition, the ethic of knowledge both recognizes their sociobiological origin and affirms their transcendent value in the service of the ideal it defines.
(Chance and Necessity, pp.173-9)

Monod took the title of his work from a statement by Democritus that he imagined or misremembered (an example of the Cogito Model for human creativity). He opens his book with this quotation,

Everything existing in the Universe is the fruit of chance and necessity. Democritus

Unfortunately, Democritus made no such statement. As the founder of determinism, he and his mentor Leucippus were adamantly opposed to chance or randomness. Leucippus insisted on an absolute necessity which leaves no room in the cosmos for chance.

“Nothing occurs at random (maten), but everything for a reason (logos) and by necessity.”οὐδὲν χρῆμα μάτηῳ γίνεται, ἀλλὰ πάντα ἐκ λόγου τε καὶ ὑπ’ ἀνάγκης

This week’s Nature magazine (14 May 2009) has an essay on free will by Martin Heisenberg (son of Werner), chair of the University of Wurzburg’s genetics and neurobiology section of their BioCenter.

Since the indeterminacy principle was his father’s work, the comment that the physical universe is no longer determined and that nature is inherently unpredictable comes as no surprise.

What is unusual is that Heisenberg finds evidence of free behavior in animals, including some very simple ones such as Drosophila, on which he is a world expert.

He says:

“the activation of behavioural modules is based on the interplay between chance and lawfulness in the brain. Insufficiently equipped, insufficiently informed and short of time, animals have to find a module that is adaptive. Their brains, in a kind of random walk, continuously preactivate, discard and reconfigure their options, and evaluate their possible short-term and long-term consequences.

“The physiology of how this happens has been little investigated. But there is plenty of evidence that an animal’s behaviour cannot be reduced to responses. For example, my lab has demonstrated that fruit flies, in situations they have never encountered, can modify their expectations about the consequences of their actions. They can solve problems that no individual fly in the evolutionary history of the species has solved before. Our experiments show that they actively initiate behaviour.”

When you combine some randomness with some “lawful” (read evolved and adequately determined) behaviors you get something like free will.

This is more or less exactly my work of the last few decades. Free will is a two-stage process.

First there is a random generation of alternative possibilities, some of which may be truly creative in the sense that they are new information in the universe.

Then an adequately determined will selects, from among these possibilities, the one best suited to one’s character and values, along with one’s current desires.

First free, then will.

It is not that the will is free in the sense of random. The will is determining and adequately determined.

Several other philosophers and scientists have had something close to this idea since William James in 1884, including Henri Poincaré, Arthur Holly Compton, A.O. Gomes, Karl Popper, Henry Margenau, Daniel Dennett, Robert Kane, and Alfred Mele.

For more details, you might want to look at a few of the web pages on informationphilosopher.com.

There you will find web pages on the above thinkers and over one hundred others who have considered the problem of free will, including several gardeners.

I am working on a history of the free will problem here (a very long page).
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/history/

Here is my version of the two-stage model (a much shorter page).
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/cogito/

Compare the standard argument against free will, which separately attacks randomness and strict determinism. Taken together, randomness and adequate determinism suggest that many compatibilists might consider a merely adequate compatibilism?
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/standard_argument.html

Abraham de Moivre’s classic book The Doctrine of Chances (in three editions between 1718 and 1756) was basically a handbook for gamblers. It enabled them to know how to bet in various games of chance.

It begins…

The Probability of an Event is greater or less, according to the number of Chances by which it may happen, compared with the whole number of Choices by which it may happen or fail.

This brief statement contains the assumption that all states are equally probable, assuming that we have no information that indicates otherwise.

While this describes our information epistemically, making it a matter of human knowledge, we can say ontologically that the world contains no information that would make any state more probable than the others. Such information simply does not exist. This is sometimes called the principle of insufficient reason or the principle of indifference.

If that information did exist, it could and would be revealed in large numbers of experimental trials, which provide the statistics on the different “states.”

Probabilities are theories. Statistics are experiments.

In the philosophical controversies between a priori or epistemic interpretations of probability and a posteriori or ontological interpretations, the latter are often said to be “frequency” interpretations of probability. We prefer to use the term statistics for these frequencies.

de Moivre’s work underlies James Clerk Maxwell’s velocity distributions for the molecules in a gas, and Ludwig Boltzmann’s explanation for the increase of entropy in statistical mechanics (the second law of thermodynamics).

All other things being equal, any physical system evolves toward the macrostate with the greatest number of microstates consistent with the information contained in the macrostate. This information is intrinsic to the system. It may be observable, but it in no way depends on being observed or “known” to any observer.

In his book, de Moivre worked out the mathematics for the binomial expansion of (p - q)ⁿ by analyzing the tosses of a coin. If p is the probability of a “heads” and q = 1 - p the probability of “tails,” then the probability of k heads is

de Moivre also was the first to approximate the factorial for large n as

James Stirling determined the constant in de Moivre’s approximation ( = √(2π), which is now commonly called Stirling’s formula.

Using this approximation, which is valid for large numbers, de Moivre went on to approximate the discrete binomial expansion with a continuous curve.

Pierre-Simon Laplace also derived this result, which is sometimes called the de Moivre-Laplace Theorem. Laplace very likely knew of de Moivre’s work, but gave him no credit, perhaps because of de Moivre’s association with gambling, perhaps because de Moivre was a Huguenot protestant who had emigrated to England, or perhaps because Laplace’s great works summarized much of the previous century’s mathematics and science without giving credit to his predecessors.

Nearly 100 years later, Legendre and Gauss independently developed this curve as the distribution of measurement errors. It came to be poorly named the “law” of errors, misleading many philosophers to argue that random events were therefore lawful and determined by this underlying lawfulness.

In order to derive de Moivre’s curve as the distributions for errors, Legendre and Gauss made three assumptions - that errors are distributed symmetrically around a maximum value, that the value goes to zero for large positive and negative values of x, and that the mean value of errors is the average value, namely zero.

In Laplace’s hands, this tendency for the curve to peak around a maximum at the mean value in the limit of large numbers came to be called the central limit theorem.

Today the principle of indifference (equiprobability assumption), the law of large numbers, and the central limit theorem are three of the fundamental postulates of probability.

Returning to de Moivre’s original work, which was the chance occurrence of random events, it is very important to note that individual events are still very random, despite their asymptotic approach to the normal distribution in the limit of large numbers of events. The material world itself is discrete and random, despite the idealization of the analytical continuous probability curve discovered by de Moivre.

David Layzer is a Harvard astrophysicist who in the early 1970’s made it clear that in an expanding universe the entropy or disorder would increase, as required by the second law of thermodynamics, but that because the number of phase-space cells was also increasing, the maximum possible entropy of the universe might increase faster than the actual entropy increase.

The difference between the maximum possible disorder and the actual disorder allows for the growth of order in the universe, the subtitle of Layzer’s 1990 book Cosmogenesis.

Layzer pointed out that if the equilibration rate of the matter (the speed with which it redistributes itself randomly among all the possible states) was slower than the rate of expansion, then the “negative entropy” (defined as the difference between the maximum possible entropy and the actual entropy) would increase. Claude Shannon had identified this negative entropy with “information.”

Since James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann, most physicists and astronomers believed that the universe began with a high degree of organization or order (or information) and that it had been running down ever since to an ultimate “heat death.” Layzer showed that this standard view was wrong for our expanding universe.

Layzer was perhaps the first to claim that the initial state of the universe lacked significant order or information.

We need not assume, as Clausius and Boltzmann did in the nineteenth century and as many modern astronomers and physicists still do, that the Universe started out with a huge store of order that it has been gradually dissipating ever since. If {this] hypothesis is correct, the initial state of the Universe was wholly lacking in order.
(Cosmogenesis, p.170)

In the opening chapter of Cosmogenesis, Layzer tackled the problems of free will, determinism, and moral responsibility:

Freedom and Necessity

What is the relation between being and becoming? Is the future as fixed and immutable as the past? What is chance? These questions bear on one of the perennial problems of Western philosophy, the problem of freedom and necessity.

Each of us belongs to two distinct worlds. As objects in the world that natural science describes we are governed by universal laws. To Laplace’s Intelligence we are systems of molecules whose movements are no less predicable and no more the results of free choice than the movements of the planets around the Sun. but as the subjects of our own experience we see the world differently; not as bundles of events frozen into the block universe of Laplace and Einstein like flies in amber, but as the authors of our own actions, the molders of our own lives. However strongly we may believe in the universality of physical laws, we cannot suppress the intuitive conviction that the future is to some degree open and that we help to shape it by our own free choices.

This conviction lies at the basis of every ethical system. Without freedom there can be no responsibility. If we are not really free agents — if our felt freedom is illusory — how can we be guided in our behavior by ethical precepts? And why should society punish some acts and reward others? The Laplacian worldview tends to undermine the basis for ethical behavior.

Judeo-Christian theology faces a similar problem. Although Laplace’s Intelligence is not the Judeo-Christian God — Laplace’s Intelligence observes and calculates; the Judeo-Christian God wills and acts (”Necessitie and chance approach not mee, and what I will is Fate,” says the Almighty in Milton’s Paradise Lost)— they contemplate similar universes. Nothing is uncertain for an all-knowing God, and the future, like the past, is present to His eyes. But if we cannot choose where we walk, why should those who take the narrow way of righteousness be rewarded in the next life while those who take the primrose path are consigned to the flames of hell?

Theologians have not, of course, neglected this question. Augustine, for example, argued that God’s foreknowledge (or more accurately, God’s knowledge of what we call the future) doesn’t cause events to happen and is therefore consistent with human free will. Other theologians have embraced the doctrine of predestination and argued that free will is indeed an illusion. Still others have taken the position that divine omniscience and human free will are compatible in a way that surpasses human understanding.

Reconciling the scientific and ethical pictures of the world was a concern of the first scientists. Our scientific picture of the world was foreshadowed by Greek atomism, a theory invented by the natural philosophers Leucippus and Democritus in the fifth century B.C. According to this theory, the world is made up of unchanging, indestructible particles moving about in empty space and interacting with one another in a completely deterministic way. Like modern biologists, Democritus believed that we, too, are assemblies of atoms. Yet Democritus also elaborated a system of ethics based on moral responsibility. He taught that we should do what is right not from fear, whether of punishment or of public disapproval or of the wrath of gods, but in response to our own sense of right and wrong. Unfortunately, the surviving fragments of Democritus’s writings don’t tell us how or whether he was able to reconcile his deterministic picture of nature with his doctrine of moral responsibility.

A century later, another Greek philosopher with similar ideas about physical reality and moral responsibility faced the same dilemma. Epicurus (341-270 B.C.) sought to reconcile human freedom with the atomic theory by postulating a random element in atomic interactions. Atoms, he said, occasionally “swerve” unpredictably from their paths. In modern times, Arthur Stanley Eddington and other scientists have put forward more sophisticated versions of the same idea. According to quantum physics, it is impossible to predict the exact moment when certain atornic events, such as the decay of a radioactive nucleus, will take place. Eddington believed that this kind of microscopic indeterminism might provide a scientific basis for human freedom:

It is a consequence of the advent of quantum theory that physics is no longer pledged to a scheme of deterministic laws. . . . The future is a combination of the causal influences of the past together with unpredictable elements. . [S]cience thereby withdraws its moral opposition to free will.

But neither Epicurus nor Eddington explained what the “freedom” enjoyed by a swerving atom or a radioactive atomic nucleus has to do with the freedom of a human being to choose between two courses of action. Nor has anyone else.
(Cosmogenesis, p.6-7)

Of course many have tried, as we show in our  History of the Free Will Problem.  And we propose our own solution.

In the concluding chapter of Cosmogenesis, Layzer argues for unpredictable creativity in biological evolution and human activity.

Creative human activity is unpredictable in the same way and for the same reasons that biological evolution is unpredictable. Unpredictability, however, is only one aspect of human freedom. We are free because we are, to a considerable extent, the authors of our own lives, and because every human life is something new under the Sun. That is what Democritus and Socrates believed; and if the picture I have sketched in this book is correct in its main outlines, it is also one of the lessons of modern science. Our awareness of the openness of the future and of our own ability to help shape it reflects a deep property of objective reality.

The scientific worldview sketched in the preceding pages offers an alternative to reductionism in both its physical and its biological forms. It shows us that the Universe is more than a collection of elementary particles governed by immutable mathematical laws. Order and the processes that bring order into being lie at the heart of reality. Biological evolution, cultural evolution, and individual human lives not only are the most prolific sources of order in the known Universe, but also are creative. Because of them, the future is genuinely open.

Illusionism is the position that free will does not exist and is merely an illusion.

Many ancient and modern thinkers have made this claim, including Hobbes and Einstein.

Some moderns claim it will do society good to recognize this illusion. Many simply want to eliminate all retributive punishment of criminals. Others, following Peter Strawson, want to hold onto the ideas of blame and praise.

A few compatibilist/determinist philosophers have, following Strawson, turned the conversation away from the “unintelligible” free will problem to the problem of moral responsibility. They include John Martin Fischer, Derk Pereboom, and Saul Smilansky.

They basically abandon free will as incompatible with determinism and hold onto moral responsibility as compatible, but their positions are all subtly nuanced.

Pereboom, Smilansky, Galen Strawson, and the psychologist Daniel Wegner explicitly say that free will is merely an illusion.

Smilansky, for example, says in his 2000 book Free Will and Illusion:

Illusionism is the position that illusion often has a large and positive role to play in the issue of free will. In arguing for the importance of illusion, I claim that we can see why it is useful, that it is a reality, and why by and large it ought to continue to be so. Illusory beliefs are in place concerning free will and moral responsibility, and the role they play is largely positive. Humanity is fortunately deceived on the free will issue, and this seems to be a condition of civilized morality and personal value.

Daniel Wegner describes it very simply, “It usually seems that we consciously will our voluntary actions, but this is an illusion.”

In his 2002 book, The Illusion of Conscious Will, he says

So, here you are reading a book on conscious will. How could this have happened? One way to explain it would be to examine the causes of your behavior. A team of scientific psychologists could study your reported thoughts, emotions, and motives, your genetics and your history of learning, experience, and development, your social situation and culture, your memories and reaction times, your physiology and neuroanatomy, and lots of other things as well. If they somehow had access to all the information they could ever want, the assumption of psychology is that they could uncover the mechanisms that give rise to all your behavior and so could certainly explain why you picked up this book at this moment. However, another way to explain the fact of your reading this book is just to say that you decided to pick up the book and begin reading. You consciously willed what you are doing.

These two explanations are both appealing but in different ways. The scientific explanation accounts for behavior as a mechanism and appeals to that part of us that knows how useful science is for understanding the world. It would be wonderful if we could understand people in just the same way. The conscious will explanation, on the other hand, has a much deeper grip on our intuition. We each have a profound sense that we consciously will much of what we do, and we experience ourselves willing our actions many times a day. As William James put it, “The whole sting and excitement of our voluntary life … depends on our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago” (Principles of Psychology, 1890, 453). Quite apart from any resentment we might feel on being cast into the role of mechanisms or robots, we appreciate the notion of conscious will because we experience it so very acutely. We do things, and when we do them, we experience the action in such a way that it seems to flow seamlessly from our consciousness. We feel that we cause ourselves to behave.

The idea of conscious will and the idea of psychological mechanisms have an oil and water relationship, having never been properly reconciled. One way to put them together — the way this book explores — is to say that the mechanistic approach is the explanation preferred for scientific purposes but that the person’s experience of conscious will is utterly convincing and important to the person and so must be understood scientifically as well. The mechanisms underlying the experience of will are themselves a fundamental topic of scientific study. We should be able to examine and understand what creates the experience of will and what makes it go away. This means, though, that conscious will is an illusion.

It is an illusion in the sense that the experience of consciously willing an action is not a direct indication that the conscious thought has caused the action.