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Noema ·For the curious

The Nature of Free Will in the Age of AI

by Albert Yuan

Published 2026-08-13 15:10:23+00:00

If every action has a biological cause, who is choosing the morning coffee?

0:00 / 17:42 · Narrator Charon

Context

Albert Yuan opens this 13 August 2026 essay with a simple morning routine: walking into a kitchen and choosing coffee over juice. That decision feels entirely independent. Yet popular science books have spent the last decade arguing that free will is just a biological trick, tracing every human action back to a chain of prior causes. Yuan suggests the public debate has let a misunderstanding of physics erase human responsibility. He pauses to ask what it actually means to make a choice, and why giving up that idea carries a surprisingly heavy cost.

Show notes

A defense of human agency against the claim that neuroscience has proved free will is an illusion. The argument defines choice not as a break in the laws of physics, but as a biological organism's ability to reflect on its own desires. This framework is then applied to famous brain experiments, the history of determinism, and the new problem of intentions in artificial intelligence.

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