Giorgia Carli, a 4th year student in the Department of Philosophy, delivered a presentation at the 2nd Undergraduate Philosophy Conference, held at the University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK, on 4 March 2026 - a significant achievement at this stage of her undergraduate studies.
Her paper, Following the Trace of Memories: An Entropic Defence of Free Will, took on one of the central problems in the philosophy of action. In Giorgia’s own words:
“My presentation argued against van Inwagen’s ‘Consequence Argument’, which states that, in a deterministic world where the past and the natural laws determine the future, we lack free will. In particular, I rejected one of its premisses, called ‘The Principle’, by advancing an ‘Entropic Account of Cognitive Memories’, blending together concepts from both philosophy and physics.
On my account, cognitive memories are thermodynamic states (i.e. states originating from processes of entropy increase) that indicate a past interaction between ourselves and the environment. Due to their thermodynamic nature, cognitive memories carry information about our past, but not our future. They thus justify the ‘epistemic’ freedom that we have over our future interactions, which holds true even in the case of determinism. I therefore concluded that, in a deterministic world, we have free will because we are epistemically free in our decisions over our future.”
We congratulate Giorgia on this excellent work and wish her well as she continues her studies.
