  In a recent series of papers and lectures, John Conway and Simon Kochen
presented The Free Will Theorem. "It asserts, roughly, that if indeed we humans
have free will, then elementary particles already have their own small share of
this valuable commodity." Perhaps the primary motivation of their papers was to
place stringent constraints on quantum mechanical hidden variable theories,
which they indeed do. Nevertheless, the notion of free will is crucial to the
proof and they even speculate that the free will afforded to elementary
particles is the ultimate explanation of our own free will. I don't challenge
the mathematics/logic of their proof but rather their premises. Free will and
determinism are, for me, not nearly adequately clarified for them to form the
bases of a theoretical proof. In addition, they take for granted supplemental
concepts in quantum mechanics that are in need of further explanation. It's
also not clear to me what utility is afforded by the free will theorem, i.e.,
what, if anything, follows from it. Despite the cheeky subtitle of my essay, I
do think that the explicit introduction of free will into discussions of hidden
variables and other interpretations of quantum mechanics might help expose
foibles in many of those deliberations. For this reason, I consider the
Conway-Kochen free will theorem to be a positive contribution to the philosophy
of quantum mechanics.

Quantum Physics;History and Philosophy of Physics