About
About the Book
Do we choose our futures, or only watch them arrive?
Much of modern science and philosophy says that physics fixes the future, and free will must either be redefined until it fits, or denied altogether. In We Change Our Minds, author David A. Coke argues that neither concession is necessary.
The laws of physics alone determine nothing. What happens depends on how matter is arranged, and new forms bring emergent properties into the world. Coke traces how the mind evolved and how consciousness emerged with a functional role to play, with value embedded at its origin. Conscious deliberation is a weighing of what matters, not a calculation, and it settles which imagined future becomes real.
Drawing on over a hundred sources and answering major philosophical objections, this book defends free will in its strongest sense: not as a comforting illusion nor as a paradox to be dissolved, but as a genuine capacity that fits with a naturalistic view of the world. The future is open, and we choose our paths through it.
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.
