About
About the Book
Most philosophers today believe that the future is determined. Those beliefs are based largely on conclusions drawn from physics, and the idea that prior causes rigidly dictate future events. We Change Our Minds takes a fresh look at those arguments and reaches a very different conclusion: the future is not determined, and we are able to choose our paths through it. Free will is real — not a comforting illusion, not a paradox to be dissolved, but a genuine capacity compatible with a naturalistic view of the world. The full account runs in five parts.
1. Emergence opens the door to mental causation. The laws of physics alone do not determine specific outcomes. Initial conditions do. And certain configurations of initial conditions carry emergent properties that are ontologically new, causally operative, and simply absent from the disorganized components. This holds at every level of the physical world, from chemistry to biology to evolution to consciousness. The high-level configuration genuinely determines what happens.
2. Consciousness evolved with a functional role to play. Subjective experience arose because it solved a scaling problem that algorithmic processing could not handle. Value is constitutive of that process from its origin. Each emergent step that followed added capability, all of it operating through qualitative felt value rather than algorithmic computation.
3. The future is not already fixed. The Rietdijk–Putnam argument holds that relativity commits us to a block of frozen spacetime. It fails, because the alternate planes of simultaneity it depends on, although valid as bookkeeping for each frame, cannot each be separately real. The physics permits at most one real present, never the many their argument requires. The future on this account remains genuinely open.
4. The agent controls the causal chain. Deliberation does not escape prior causes — it works with them. The reasons, beliefs, and goals that prior causes established are exactly the elements the agent examines, questions, and modifies. The agent is able to essentially rewire their own brain and assemble the causal chain that drives future action. The cause of our action is that we chose it.
5. Conscious control is not itself deterministic. Laplace's Demon fails for consciousness, because the physical facts alone are insufficient to calculate what consciousness does. Consciousness works on the emergent properties of subjective qualia, which do not appear in any complete catalogue of the physical facts. The indeterminant nature of top-down subjective selection is magnified by recursion — imagined alternative futures and self-modification — and compounded in every moment of conscious control.
The agent freely directs the conscious actions that determine outcomes.
The book's closing chapter examines the practical limitations of our free will and the implications for moral responsibility and value.
About the Author
David Alan Coke was born in 1963 and grew up a few miles outside Sparta, Michigan. He earned his master's degree in engineering from the University of Michigan in 1986 and spent the next 38 years managing projects in the automotive industry, including two years living in Germany, with other projects carrying him to Italy, Mexico, China, Hungary, Brazil, England, and Sweden. In 2007 he began building electric guitars on the side, based on his patented semi-hollow "backbone" design.
Now retired, he is the author of We Change Our Minds, a book providing a naturalistic account of libertarian free will.
David has two grown children, Adriana and Alexander. In December 2025 he married Lyndsey Lanser. They live together with their furbaby Dalia in Wolverine Lake, Michigan.
