I’ve been thinking a lot about consciousness and free will, and I want to share the path that led me from one idea to the other.

I call my view of consciousness QPI – Qualia Property Identity. The basic claim is simple but strong: the subjective feeling itself (the quale) is not something extra floating on top of physical processes. It is identical to certain intrinsic properties of the system. Redness is not “caused by” a physical property; in the relevant sense it is that property. The same goes for every other kind of experience.

Once you accept that, free will becomes much clearer.

The feeling of free will – that sense that “I could have done otherwise,” that this choice was truly mine – is also a quale. Under QPI, that means the free-will experience is identical to a real property of the system: the property of being able to have acted otherwise. If that property is present, the quale is present. You don’t need a magical soul or a special human essence. You just need the property.

This is why I wrote that long post about free will earlier. I was trying to show that an agent (a real, emergent physical system) can genuinely have alternative possible trajectories when quantum indeterminacy is in play. The quantum event doesn’t choose for the agent. The agent still chooses. The indeterminacy simply means the history was not fixed in advance, so the same agent could have ended up on a different path. That “could have done otherwise” is exactly the property I’m talking about.

I’m not the only one thinking in this direction. Robert Kane has spent decades defending a form of free will that uses indeterminacy inside the agent’s own efforts, so the choice remains the agent’s. Stuart Hameroff (with Penrose) argues that quantum processes in the brain can open non-computable possibilities while still leaving the agent as the one who acts. Helen Steward goes further and says many non-human animals already possess the kind of agency that involves real alternative possibilities. And there are people now applying similar ideas to artificial systems – arguing that if a system has genuine alternatives and control, then it has free will in the relevant sense, whether it’s made of neurons or silicon.
What QPI adds is the identity claim. Free will isn’t just a useful description or a higher-level pattern. The felt freedom is the property of being able to have done otherwise. Once that property exists in a system, the quale exists.

And that leads to the conclusion that still feels a bit radical even to me: free will is not reserved for humans. Any system that truly instantiates the property “could have acted otherwise” has free will in the same basic sense we do. Insects, complex AI, maybe other things we haven’t imagined yet. The difference is one of degree and complexity, not of kind.

I know this is dense. I’m still working out the details myself. But the core feels solid: start from the identity of qualia with properties, take the free-will feeling seriously as one of those qualia, and the rest follows.

Curious what you think.

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