I can choose to type any word I like
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Determinism
have free will.
] Look...
I can choose to type any word I like.
Giotto...
Many philosophers tell me I am deluded. I was always going to type
that word and I have no free will. Everything in my life is predetermined.
I’m rather like a character in an enormous video game. The character
might think it was free to act, and its actions would appear random.
Yet from the moment the player clicked the button to start the game,
every action the character takes is determined by a preprogrammed set
of rules. This is the free will debate. How can we tell we are free? Would
there be any observable effect?
One of the big problems is that philosophers codified much of our
modern theory of free will in the 19" century, at a time when all the
known physical laws were deterministic and reversible. They could not
see a way for free will to emerge from such physical laws. There was even
a group called the Compatibilists lead by David Hume that thought free
will could coexist with determinism. Provided you felt free it did not
matter that your actions were inevitable.
We all want free will to mean actual freedom to make conscious
choices. We would like to affect the world in which we live; not the other
way around. I dislike making definitions — I find they take away from the
core argument and only result in linguistic jousting, but it seems that two
centuries of philosophers have avoided a proper discussion of free will by
loosely defining the term. Here is my definition:
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015731
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