Donald MacKay, who was a friend of Alan Turing (they were both members of the Ratio Club), thinks that it is not only misguided (a very basic mistake), but also immoral, to regard physical indeterminacy as essential for free will.
“… I will not here discuss the attempts which have been made to invoke Heisenberg’s Principle of Indeterminacy as a way of escape [from worries about free will]. I have argued elsewhere* that although physical indeterminacy might indeed give cerebral activity the spontaneity and originality which is associated with one aspect of ‘free-will’, we would be misguided and immoral to regard such indeterminacy as essential to the ‘freedom’ about which we have this ‘firm subjective conviction’.” (*MacKay, D. M. ‘Brain and Will’, The Listener (9 and 16 May 1957).[1]
Putting that aside, some will be cheered up by his point about the logical indeterminacy of free choice. ‘On the Logical Indeterminacy of a Free Choice’ is a useful piece that has been largely forgotten.
Students of AI who want to keep things in historical proportion might also like to look at his 1951 paper "Mindlike behaviour in artefacts".[2]
[1] MacKay, D. M. (1960) ‘On the Logical Indeterminacy of a Free Choice’ Mind 69: 31-40.
[2] MacKay, D. M. (1951) ‘Mindlike behaviour in artefacts’ British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2: 112–121.
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