I have described freedom as an “impossible reality”. Its origin is not to be found in the material world and the habits of nature portrayed in the laws and causes of natural science. There are two possible conclusions to be drawn from this: either that our belief in freedom is an illusion; or that natural science, and the simplified metaphysics we take from it, are incomplete accounts of the world and, importantly, of human life. This volume has been devoted to arguing for the second conclusion, not the least because I do not think we should deny the reality of something just because we cannot understand how it is possible when we look at the world through the lens of objective, quantitative science.

That the scientific gaze cannot accommodate free will is to be expected. Science seeks fundamental, underlying, unchanging patterns beneath all change and must therefore look straight past or through the realm where freedom is exercised. It cannot accommodate the perspective on nature that a subject has, even less account for the transformation of what-is into a situation which requires action, or into initial conditions that are the platform for such action. There is equally little place for the sense that the present moment, far from being an involuntary inheritance we are stuck with, is a starting point, a point of departure to a chosen future, not predetermined by the habits of nature.

As many philosophers have pointed out, natural science has progressed by removing from its interpretation of the world precisely the subjective consciousness and its intentionality that makes agency possible. The consciousness of human subjects is also that which makes science, its search for laws and causes, possible. If we were not able individually and collectively to approach the habits of nature from without, those habits could not have been discovered and exploited to create the technology by which we are able to predict and manipulate the natural world with ever-increasing power. If the world were the physical world, and the physical world that which is revealed through physics, there would be no physics to reveal it. Physics cannot explain physics.