free will

freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention [1]

To simply question whether free will exists is worthless without more thoroughly defining what it is.
I don't expect to provide a valuable definition.

I will discard "divine intervention" from my considerations, because it has little apparent connection to the real world.

A challenge is determining a reasonable definition of "free will" that does seem to exist and occur in our world. Discarding "divine intervention", we can view free will as the "freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes" [1] . It raises the question: What choices could possibly not be determined by prior causes? What choices have ever been made that weren't influenced, and ultimately determined, by prior events?

If there is true randomness, i.e. events lacking causality in our world, could these events culminate to provide true free will? Could the apparent non-deterministic randomness we see at the bases of our natural laws lead us to make some choices truly at random? Possibly, but here we reach another question: is there a difference between "free will" and "random will"?

If we do not consider "random will" to encompass the idea of "free will", what possibly could? Could the decisions we make be determined by some causality-free laws beyond our understanding?

–Probably not.

References