Free will
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Free will is the theory that every person can decide what to do freely.
The opposite of free will is determinism. Determinism means that, if someone knew everything about someone else, they could work out exactly what that person would do.
Most people think we have free will. But in fact there is a very hard question. If there is free will, then even if somebody else knew everything about us, they would not be able to work out exactly what we would do. The question is, if that is true how do we work out what we will do?
If we work out what to do based on things we know or think, then the other person would know that too, because they know everything about us. Then they could work it out in the same way and know what we would do, and there would be no free will. Another idea is that some of the things we use when working out what to do are random. But if what we do is based on something random, does that mean we are "free" or not?
There are also questions about what it would mean if there were no free will. If there were no free will and somebody steals something from you, do we have to let them do so, because they could not have chosen to do anything else?
Some people think that if there were no free will, we would not have to think about anything. But those people are making a mistake. Determinism does not mean that we already know what to do so we do not have to think about it. It means that we do think about it but that our thoughts always end up the same.
One person, called Hume, started a group called the Compatibilists. Compatibilists are people who think that, even if somebody could work out everything we would do, there could still be free will as long as we are able to do things we want. People who are not compatibilists say that this would not be free, because if someone else knew what we wanted, they would know that we would do it; also we are not free to choose what we want or like, so doing things because we want to do them does not mean we have freely chosen them.
