Free will

All of us subjectively experience being torn between doing one thing or another –what we would like to do, what we think we should do, or what we think others would appreciate our doing, and so on. We also assume that the decision is up to us, that we are free to do one thing or another, and others heap blame or praise on us assuming the same thing. This is what is meant when someone claims to believe in free will. At the same time, we realise that the world works in ways we can understand because there are law-like processes that we can decipher, and that allow us to explain what happens around us. The principle operating here is that events are caused, not random, a principle that is known as determinism. If the world is deterministic, that is it responds to patterns of cause and effect, then human actions are either and exception to this rule, or our feeling that we are free to decide what we like is simple an illusion. We have trouble thinking all our actions a determined, and that our sense of freedom is totally illusory, but we also have problems thinking that our actions are totally outside the realm of causality. The latter position would make our actions random, and this is not a palatable idea for most of us... This is what in philosophy is known as the problem of free will. Solutions to the problem range from denying it exists, so choosing between determinism and free will, various attempts at redefining it so that we change what we mean by being able to have done other than what we did.