An illustrated guide

Could you have done otherwise?

Every choice you make seems to be up to you. Yet everything you are was shaped by causes you never chose: genes, upbringing, chance and the laws of physics. Daniel Dennett argued that this is no threat to the freedom that matters. Free will is real, it evolved, and it needs no miracles.

This site starts from Dennett, who spent fifty years arguing that the free will worth wanting is compatible with a fully scientific picture of the world. His books Elbow Room (1984) and Freedom Evolves (2003) are the backbone of the Dennett page, which sets out his case in twelve steps and six interactive figures, from a digger wasp caught in a loop to a glider in Conway's Game of Life.

From there, each major view gets its own page: what it claims, the argument that drives it, and where it meets and parts from Dennett. His allies come first, then a history that runs from Aristotle and the Stoics through Hobbes, Hume and Kant to William James. The scientists follow, from Benjamin Libet's half-second to Robert Sapolsky's Determined, and finally the philosophers who think Dennett was wrong, whether because free will needs an open future or because nobody has free will at all.