Free will
Atomic claims
Free will is a philosophical term for a significant kind of control agents are held to have over their actions.
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The concept of free will is commonly tied to moral responsibility.
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The central debate concerning free will is whether it is compatible with causal determinism.
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The question of free will remains unresolved in philosophy.
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The bearing of neuroscience on free will is disputed.
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The concept of free will is usually analysed in terms of the ability to do otherwise.
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Compatibilism holds that free will is compatible with determinism.
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Libertarian incompatibilists hold that free will exists.
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Libertarian incompatibilists hold that determinism is false.
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Hard determinists (or hard incompatibilists) hold that free will does not exist.
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Augustine treated free choice of the will in relation to evil and divine foreknowledge in De libero arbitrio (c. 387–395).
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Erasmus (De libero arbitrio, 1524) disputed free will's role in salvation.
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Hobbes defined a free man as one not hindered from doing what he has the will to do.
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Hume defined liberty as "a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will."
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P. F. Strawson argued that practices of holding responsible rest on "reactive attitudes" such as resentment.
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P. F. Strawson argued that practices of holding responsible do not rest on a metaphysical thesis about determinism.
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Harry Frankfurt presented cases intended to show that moral responsibility does not require the ability to do otherwise.
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Peter van Inwagen formulated the Consequence Argument.
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The Consequence Argument states that if determinism is true, our acts are consequences of laws of nature and the remote past.
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Galen Strawson argued that ultimate moral responsibility is impossible whether or not determinism is true.
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Galen Strawson argued that ultimate moral responsibility would require being the cause of oneself.
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Robert Kane developed an event-causal libertarian account.
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Robert Kane's account locates indeterminism in "self-forming actions".
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Derk Pereboom defended hard incompatibilism.
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Derk Pereboom included a "four-case" manipulation argument in his defense of hard incompatibilism.
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Libet and colleagues reported that the readiness potential began roughly 550 ms before a spontaneous movement.
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Libet and colleagues reported that awareness of the intention to move occurred about 200 ms before the movement.
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Soon and colleagues reported that fMRI activity predicted a left/right choice up to about 10 seconds before reported awareness.
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Soon and colleagues reported that the prediction accuracy was roughly 60%.
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Schurger and colleagues proposed that the readiness potential may reflect accumulating stochastic neural fluctuations.
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In the 2020 PhilPapers survey, about 59% of responding philosophers accepted or leaned toward compatibilism.
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Vohs and Schooler reported that reading anti-free-will passages increased cheating.
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Whether free will can coexist with determinism remains disputed.
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The Consequence Argument and Frankfurt-style cases are still debated.
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Critics argue that undetermined choices would be matters of luck.
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Libertarians dispute the claim that undetermined choices would be matters of luck and not agent-controlled.
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Some authors take Libet-type findings as evidence against conscious control.
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Others argue the Libet-type experiments involve arbitrary choices.
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Others argue the Libet-type experiments do not show that decisions precede awareness.
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Whether the fundamental laws of physics are deterministic depends on the interpretation of quantum mechanics.
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Whether quantum indeterminacy is relevant to agency is contested.
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The compatibility of free will with divine foreknowledge is disputed within and across religious traditions.
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There is no agreed definition of free will.
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Some hold that disputants in the free will debate are using different concepts.
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Free will is the capacity of agents to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded.
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The concept of free will intersects with philosophy.
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The concept of free will primarily centers on whether human actions are determined by prior causes or if individuals possess independent agency.
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The existence of free will remains a subject of extensive interdisciplinary debate.
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In contemporary philosophy, the free will debate is structurally organized around the compatibility of free will and causal determinism.
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Causal determinism is the thesis that every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature.
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Incompatibilism is the philosophical position that free will and determinism are logically mutually exclusive.
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Compatibilism is the position that free will and determinism can co-exist.
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Compatibilism often defines free will as the ability to act according to one's motives without external coercion.
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Hard determinism is a form of incompatibilism which asserts that determinism is true and therefore free will does not exist.
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Libertarianism, in the context of metaphysics, is an incompatibilist position asserting that free will exists and determinism is false.
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In 1983, neuroscientist Benjamin Libet published an experiment measuring brain activity.
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Benjamin Libet's 1983 experiment revealed that a "readiness potential" (Bereitschaftspotential) in the motor cortex precedes a subject's conscious awareness of the decision to move.
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A 2008 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study found that the outcomes of a decision can be encoded in brain activity before the decision enters conscious awareness.
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The legal systems of most modern jurisdictions rely on the presumption of free will.
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Most modern legal systems require mens rea (a guilty mind) to establish criminal culpability.
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The advent of quantum mechanics in the 1920s introduced physical indeterminism at the subatomic level.
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The physical indeterminism of quantum mechanics challenges the classical Newtonian model of a strictly deterministic universe.
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Whether experiments by Libet and his successors disprove free will is heavily contested.
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Critics argue that Libet-style experiments only measure trivial, unreasoned actions like flexing a wrist.
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Critics argue that the "readiness potential" may represent background neural noise or generalized anticipation rather than a predetermined decision.
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Some researchers propose a "free won't" mechanism.
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The "free won't" mechanism argues that consciousness retains the veto power over unconscious urges.
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The application of quantum indeterminism to human free will is disputed.
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Some physicists and philosophers argue that quantum mechanics allows for a non-deterministic universe compatible with free will.
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Critics counter that subatomic randomness does not equate to conscious agency or control.
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Critics argue that macroscopic brain functions operate deterministically despite quantum fluctuations at the micro-level.
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Philosophers actively debate whether moral responsibility inherently requires free will.
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Incompatibilists generally argue that praise and blame are unjustified if actions are determined.
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Compatibilists argue that moral responsibility remains coherent in a deterministic framework.
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Compatibilists argue that moral responsibility remains coherent provided the agent had the capacity for rational deliberation and was not coerced.
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External references: Wikidata Q9476