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Determinism

I 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 19th 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:

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