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Do We Have Free Will?

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Do We Have Free Will?

It is Friday night and your friends have just invited you to what is supposed to be the best party of the year, but it is your little brother’s birthday. Right before the party, you sit down to weigh your options and decided to stay home to celebrate your little brother’s birthday. Did you just make a free choice, or was your decision just the result of the natural laws in the universe coming together forcing you to stay home? In the words of Arthur Schopenhauer, ""Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills" . According to this, though you may believe that you have the complete freedom to choose where you wanted to go, your ultimate choice was caused by the events that occurred before this one. Although the choice of going to the party or staying home may seem to have given the illusion of free will, there was ultimately a physical law that could most likely explain why this decision was made. First off, there are three main viewpoints on the idea of free will: compatibilism, determinism, and indeterminism. Compatibilists state that it is possible for both free will and determinism to exist at the same time. Given an instance, a compatibilist will say that even though you are only really presented with one option in all situations, if this option is in accordance with the your true desires, then you have free will. Another idea some compatibilists believe is that there is always a natural law that can explain an outcome, but on minute levels, it is possible that the law is wrong. Because laws only explain what is most likely to occur, but nothing is ever completely determined on such a small level. An indeterminist would say that given a situation you would always have the option to choose because events are not pre-determined or affected by preceding events. Lastly, a determinist would completely counteract the

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