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The free will problem is best seen as part of a more general problem concerning the place of agency in the natural world. This general problem originates in a metaphysics of nature that is often associated with contemporary natural sciences, and for which causal explanation takes exclusively events as its relata. On the other hand, there is a quite natural view of agency on which the agent directly brings about a state of affairs. But an agent is not an event, so it's not clear how both views could be true. The most common way to deal with this problem is to give a reductive analysis of action as a certain kind of event-causation which also rationalises behaviour (e.g., that an agent's having an intention to Φ causes her to Φ).
I will show that there is there is scope for a theory of agency that is both non-reductive and in accord with natural sciences (if not with the aforementioned metaphysics). This theory will need to be one that posits a continuity between intentional action and simpler sorts of self-organisation in nature. In this connection, Friston (2013) offers a theory of biological self-organisation according to which biological systems resist environmental dispersion by comprising an implicit model of the causes of impingements on boundary states, and making changes in their efferent states in order to avoid impingements that are surprising given this model. I show how this provides a novel path to a non-reductive theory of agency in philosophy.
