Free will as "modus operandi" of consciousness

Abstract

The problem of free will in philosophy of mind arises when we ask ourselves how the man, as a bearer of possibility to act freely, relates to the physical determinism or indeterminism in nature. The author deals with the analysis of the phenomenon of freedom among dominant metaphysical frameworks of determinism and indeterminism. Contemporary physicalistic approaches have their counterparts in modern materialistic metaphysics, so we will briefly pay attention to the genesis of their emergence. After presenting an objective approach to free will, in the last chapter we turn our perspective towards subjectivity. It turns out that freedom depends on (self) consciousness, i.e. that freedom is its inalienable feature. The author will defend the thesis that the understanding of freedom requires the affirmation of the ontology of the subject. Subjectivity or self-consciousness are necessary conditions for the existence of freedom that cannot be reduced ontologically to simpler physical processes. Freedom is defined as the modus operandi of self-conscious systems, the essence of which is deduced from the possibility of existence in a three-dimensional structure of time.