Thanks to Rebecca Gorman for co-developing this idea

On the 26th of September 1983, Stanislav Petrov observed the early warning satellites reporting the launch of five nuclear missiles towards the Soviet Union. He decided to disobey orders and not pass on the message to higher command, which could easily have resulted in a nuclear war (since the soviet nuclear position was "launch on warning").

Now, did Petrov have free will when he decided to save the world?

Maintaining free will when knowledge increases

I don't intend to go into the subtle philosophical debate on the nature of free will. See this post for a good reductionist account. Instead, consider the following scenarios:

The standard Petrov incident.
The standard Petrov incident, except that it is still ongoing and Petrov hasn't reached a decision yet.
The standard Petrov incident, after it was over, except that we don't yet know what his final decision was.
The standard Petrov incident, except that we know that, if Petrov had had eggs that morning (instead of porridge^[1]), he would have made a different decision.
The same as scenario 4., except that some entity deliberately gave Petrov porridge that morning, aiming to determine his decision.
The standard Petrov incident, except that a guy with a gun held Petrov hostage and forced him not to pass on the report.

There is an interesting contrast between scenarios 1, 2, and 3. Clearly, 1 and 3 only differ in our knowledge of the incident. It does not seem that Petrov's free will should depend on the degree of knowledge of some other person.

Scenarios 1 and 2 only differ in time: in one case the decision is made, in the second it is yet to be made. If we say that Petrov has free will, whatever that is, in scenario 2, then it seems that in scenario 1, we have to say that he "had" free will. So whatever our feeling on free will, it seems that knowing the outcome doesn't change whether there was free will or not.

That intuition is challenged by scenario 4. It's one thing to know that Petrov's decision was deterministic (or deterministic-stochastic if there's a true random element to it). It's another to know the specific causes of the decision.

And it's yet another thing if the specific causes have been influence to manipulate the outcome, as in scenario 5. Again, all we have done here is add knowledge - we know the causes of Petrov's decision, and we know that...

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