Free will is sometimes understood to mean origination, the power to break the causal chain

of events, so that one's choice is uncaused by any previous event, external or internal.

Free will is the ability to choose between different possible courses of action. It is closely linked
to the concepts of responsibility, praise, guilt, sin, and other judgments which apply only to
actions that are freely chosen.

incompatibilists reject the idea that freedom of action consists simply in "voluntary" behavior.
They insist, rather, that free will means that man must be the "ultimate" or "originating"
cause of his actions. He must be causa sui, in the traditional phrase. Being responsible for
one's choices is the first cause of those choices, where first cause means that there is no
antecedent cause of that cause. The argument, then, is that if man has free will, then man is
the ultimate cause of his actions. If determinism is true, then all of man's choices are caused by
events and facts outside his control. So, if everything man does is caused by events and facts
outside his control, then he cannot be the ultimate cause of his actions. Therefore, he cannot
have free will

Determinism is the philosophical position that for every event, including human action, there
exist conditions that could cause no other event.

Determinism is a broad term with a variety of meanings.[56] Corresponding to each of these

different meanings, there arises a different problem for free will.[57] Hard determinism is the
claim that determinism is true, and that it is incompatible with free will, so free will does not
exist. Although hard determinism generally refers to nomological determinism (see causal
determinism below), it can include all forms of determinism that necessitate the future in its
entirety.[58] Relevant forms of determinism include:

 Causal determinism— the idea that everything is caused by prior conditions, making it
impossible for anything else to happen.[59] In its most common form, nomological (or scientific)
determinism, future events are necessitated by past and present events combined with the laws
of nature. Such determinism is sometimes illustrated by the thought experiment of Laplace's
demon. Imagine an entity that knows all facts about the past and the present, and knows all
natural laws that govern the universe. If the laws of nature were determinate, then such an
entity would be able to use this knowledge to foresee the future, down to the smallest
detail.[60][61]
 Logical determinism—the notion that all propositions, whether about the past, present or
future, are either true or false. The problem of free will, in this context, is the problem of how
choices can be free, given that what one does in the future is already determined as true or false
in the present.[57]
  Theological determinism—the idea that the future is already determined, either by a creator
deity decreeing or knowing its outcome in advance.[51][62] The problem of free will, in this
context, is the problem of how our actions can be free if there is a being who has determined
them for us in advance, or if they are already set in time.
 Omniscience is the capacity to know everything that there is to know (included in which
are all future events), and is a property often attributed to a creator deity. Omniscience
implies the existence of destiny. Some authors have claimed that free will cannot coexist
with omniscience. One argument asserts that an omniscient creator not only implies
destiny but a form of high level predeterminism such as hard theological determinism or
predestination - that they have independently fixed all events and outcomes in the
universe in advance. In such a case, even if an individual could have influence over their
lower level physical system, their choices in regard to this cannot be their own
(libertarian free will). Omniscience features as an incompatible-properties argument for
the existence of God, known as the argument from free will, and is closely related to
other such arguments, for example the incompatibility of omnipotence with a good
creator deity (i.e if a deity knew what they were going to choose, then they are
responsible for letting them choose it).

Predeterminism is the idea that all events are determined in advance.[95][96] Predeterminism is the
philosophy that all events of history, past, present and future, have been decided or are known (by God,
fate, or some other force), including human actions. Predeterminism is frequently taken to mean that
human actions cannot interfere with (or have no bearing on) the outcomes of a pre-determined course
of events, and that one's destiny was established externally (for example, exclusively by a creator deity).

Predestination asserts that a supremely powerful being has indeed fixed all events and outcomes in the
universe in advance,

Theological determinism is a form of determinism stating that all events that happen are pre-ordained,
or predestined to happen, by a monotheistic deity, or that they are destined to occur given its
omniscience.

They argued that human

Do we have free will – a physicist’s

perspective?
Posted on January 18, 2013 by Jim Al-Khalili

This blog was prompted by an online article I was alerted to by Roger Highfield on Twitter,
which discussed how neuroscientists were conducting experiments suggesting that free will is
indeed just an illusion. It was rather dismissive of the years (no, make that centuries) of
philosophical debate that has seemingly not brought us any closer to an answer. Now, as a
physicist I am usually at the front of the hard-nosed scientist queue when it comes to philosophy
bashing. But on this issue, I am not so sure.

Are we really part of a clockwork universe?

What follows is a bit of a cheat, because this is an edited version of part of a chapter from my
book Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Science, in which I discuss something called
Laplace’s demon. Anyway, it is a theoretical physicist’s ramblings that may be seen by
neuroscientists and psychologists as fluffy philosophy, and philosophers will just think it naïve.
But there you go.

Let me begin by carefully distinguishing between three concepts: determinism, randomness

and predictability. Firstly, by ‘determinism’ I mean what philosophers refer to as causal
determinism: the idea that events in the past cause events in the future. And it follows, taking the
idea to its logical conclusion, that therefore everything happens for a reason that can be traced all
the way back to the birth of the Universe itself.

In the seventeenth century Isaac Newton came up with his laws of mechanics using the newly
understood mathematics of calculus, which he was instrumental in developing. His equations
allowed scientists to predict how objects move and interact with each other, from the firing of
canon balls to the motion of the planets. Using mathematical formulas in which values for
physical attributes of an object, such as its mass, shape and position, its speed and the forces
acting on it, could be plugged into simple equations that could provide information on the state
of the object at any future time.

(i) Determinism is true so all our actions are predictable and we have no free will, just the
illusion that we are making free choices;

(ii) Determinism is true but we can still have free will;

(iii) Determinism is false; there is built-in randomness to the Universe allowing us the room to
have free will;

(iv) Determinism is false, but we still don’t have free will since events happen randomly that we
have no more control over than we would if they were predetermined.

Scientists, philosophers and theologians have debated whether or not we have free will for
thousands of years. I’m going to focus here on certain aspects of the nature of free will and its
connection with physics. I certainly won’t be straying into the realm of what is called the mind-
body problem, the nature of consciousness or the human soul.

So do we have free will or don’t we? The answer, despite what I have said about determinism, is
yes I believe we still do. And it is rescued not by quantum mechanics, as some physicists argue,
but by chaos theory. For it doesn’t matter that we live in a deterministic universe in which the
future is, in principle, fixed. That future is only knowable if we were able to view the whole of
space and time from the outside. But for us, and our consciousnesses, imbedded within space-
time, that future is never knowable to us. It is that very unpredictability that gives us an open
future. The choices we make are, to us, real choices, and because of the butterfly effect, tiny
changes brought about by our different decisions can lead to very different outcomes, and hence
different futures.

Paul Russell's Version

...the well-known dilemma of determinism. One horn of this dilemma is the argument that if an
action was caused or necessitated, then it could not have been done freely, and hence the agent is
not responsible for it. The other horn is the argument that if the action was not caused, then it is
inexplicable and random, and thus it cannot be attributed to the agent, and hence, again, the agent
cannot be responsible for it. In other words, if our actions are caused, then we cannot he
responsible for them; if they are not caused, we cannot be responsible for them. Whether we
affirm or deny necessity and determinism, it is impossible to make any coherent sense of moral
freedom and responsibility.
(Freedom and Moral Sentiment, 1995, p.14)