47 Facts About Free will

Free will is the capacity of agents to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded.

Free will is closely linked to the concepts of moral responsibility, praise, culpability, sin, and other judgements which apply only to actions that are freely chosen.

Whether free will exists, what it is and the implications of whether it exists or not are some of the longest running debates of philosophy and religion.

Some conceive free will to be the capacity to make choices undetermined by past events.

Problem of free will has been identified in ancient Greek philosophical literature.

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The notion of compatibilist free will has been attributed to both Aristotle and Epictetus (1st century CE); "it was the fact that nothing hindered us from doing or choosing something that made us have control over them".

Classical compatibilists have addressed the dilemma of free will by arguing that free will holds as long as humans are not externally constrained or coerced.

Free will here is predominantly treated with respect to physical determinism in the strict sense of nomological determinism, although other forms of determinism are relevant to free will.

One response to this argument is that it equivocates on the notions of abilities and necessities, or that the free will evoked to make any given choice is really an illusion and the choice had been made all along, oblivious to its "decider".

The relevance of such prospective indeterminate activity to free will is, however, contested, even when chaos theory is introduced to magnify the effects of such microscopic events.

Libertarianism holds onto a concept of free will that requires that the agent be able to take more than one possible course of action under a given set of circumstances.

Non-causal accounts of incompatibilist free will do not require a free action to be caused by either an agent or a physical event.

Efforts of Free will theory is related to the role of Free will power in decision making.

Hard incompatibilism is the idea that free will cannot exist, whether the world is deterministic or not.

Free will took the view that the truth of determinism was irrelevant.

Free will believed that the defining feature of voluntary behavior was that individuals have the ability to postpone a decision long enough to reflect or deliberate upon the consequences of a choice: "…the will in truth, signifies nothing but a power, or ability, to prefer or choose".

Free will argues that the notion of free will leads to an infinite regress and is therefore senseless.

Idea of free will is one aspect of the mind-body problem, that is, consideration of the relation between mind and body (for example, the human brain and nervous system).

Secondarily, metaphysical libertarian free will must assert influence on physical reality, and where mind is responsible for such influence, it must be distinct from body to accomplish this.

Some "modern compatibilists", such as Harry Frankfurt and Daniel Dennett, argue free will is simply freely choosing to do what constraints allow one to do.

Compatibilist free will has been attributed to our natural sense of agency, where one must believe they are an agent in order to function and develop a theory of mind.

Critics of the theory point out that there is no certainty that conflicts Free will not arise even at the higher-order levels of desire and preference.

Compatibilist models of free will often consider deterministic relationships as discoverable in the physical world.

The suicidal agents were not conscious that their free will have been manipulated by external, even if ungrounded, reasons.

Free will maintains that incompatibilism is false because, even if indeterminism is true, incompatibilists have not provided, and cannot provide, an adequate account of origination.

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Free will rejects compatibilism because it, like incompatibilism, assumes a single, fundamental notion of freedom.

Free will suggested that it might be accounted for by "a false sensation or seeming experience", which is associated with many of our actions when we perform them.

However, the Free will [urging, craving, striving, wanting, and desiring], as the noumenon underlying the phenomenal world, is in itself groundless: that is, not subject to time, space, and causality.

Ultimately he believed that the problem of free will was a metaphysical issue and, therefore, could not be settled by science.

Free will's view has been associated with both compatibilism and libertarianism.

The Free will is "the primary mover of all the powers of the soul… and it is the efficient cause of motion in the body.

Free will enters as follows: Free will is an "appetitive power", that is, not a cognitive power of intellect.

In part, it states that free will is inherently conditioned and not "free" to begin with.

Therefore we see at once that there cannot be any such thing as free-will; the very words are a contradiction, because will is what we know, and everything that we know is within our universe, and everything within our universe is moulded by conditions of time, space and causality.

Second, although free will can be defined in various ways, all of them involve aspects of the way people make decisions and initiate actions, which have been studied extensively by neuroscientists.

Some of the experimental observations are widely viewed as implying that free will does not exist or is an illusion.

Some believe the implication is that free will was not involved in the decision and is an illusion.

Experimental psychology's contributions to the free will debate have come primarily through social psychologist Daniel Wegner's work on conscious will.

The implication for such work is that the perception of conscious Free will is not tethered to the execution of actual behaviors, but is inferred from various cues through an intricate mental process, authorship processing.

Free will extends these experiments to indeterministic processes and real-time brain observations while willing, assuming that an agent has every technological means to probe and rewire his brain.

In general, the concept of free will researched to date in this context has been that of the incompatibilist, or more specifically, the libertarian, that is freedom from determinism.

Roy Baumeister and colleagues reviewed literature on the psychological effects of a belief in free will and found that most people tend to believe in a sort of "naive compatibilistic free will".

Provoking a rejection of free will has been associated with increased aggression and less helpful behaviour.

However, although these initial studies suggested that believing in free will is associated with more morally praiseworthy behavior, more recent studies with substantially larger sample sizes have reported contradictory findings (typically, no association between belief in free will and moral behavior), casting doubt over the original findings.

The most succinct statement is by Maimonides, in a two part treatment, where human free will is specified as part of the universe's Godly design:.

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Actions taken by people exercising free will are counted on the Day of Judgement because they are their own; however, the free will happens with the permission of God.

Some philosophers follow Philo of Alexandria, a philosopher known for his homocentrism, in holding that free will is a feature of a human's soul, and thus that non-human animals lack free will.