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Free will is the ability of agents to make choices free from certain kinds of constraints. Historically, the constraint of dominant concern in philosophy has been that of determinism. However, many others define free will without reference to determinism, and posit that freedom from other constraints is more relevant, such as physical constraints (e.g. chains or imprisonment), social constraints (e.g. threat of punishment or censure), or mental constraints (e.g. compulsions or phobias, neurological disorders, or genetic predispositions).

Those who define free will as freedom from determinism are called incompatibilists, as they hold determinism to be incompatible with free will. The two main incompatibilist positions are metaphysical libertarianism, the claim that determinism is false and thus free will is at least possible; and hard determinism, the claim that determinism is true and thus free will is not possible. Hard incompatibilism furthermore posits that indeterminism is likewise incompatible with free will, and thus either way free will is not possible.

Those who define free will otherwise, without reference to determinism, are called compatibilists, because they hold determinism to be compatible with free will. Some compatibilists hold even that determinism is necessary for free will, arguing that choice involves preference for one course of action over another, a process that requires some sense of how choices will turn out. Compatibilists thus consider the debate between libertarians and hard determinists over free will vs determinism a false dilemma. Different compatibilists offer different definitions of free will taking different types of constraints to be relevant to the issue.

The principle of free will has religious, legal, ethical, and scientific implications. For example, in the religious realm, free will implies that individual will and choices can coexist with an omnipotent divinity. In the law, it affects considerations of punishment and rehabilitation. In ethics, it may hold implications for whether individuals can be held morally accountable for their actions. In science, neuroscientific findings regarding free will may suggest different ways of predicting human behavior.

In Western philosophy
Humans have a strong sense of freedom, which leads us to believe that we have free will. An intuitive feeling of free will can, however, be mistaken. Classical compatibilists have argued that free will holds as long as we are not externally constrained or coerced. Modern compatibilists however make a distinction between freedom of will and freedom of action, that is, separating freedom of choice from the freedom to enact it. A different view is that of incompatibilists, namely, that if the world is deterministic then, our feeling that we are free to choose an action is simply an illusion. This dilemma is what in philosophy is known as the problem of free will (or sometimes referred to as the dilemma of determinism ), and it is a moral dilemma because it is difficult to decide how to assign responsibility for our actions.

Fundamental debate continues over whether the physical universe is deterministic. Physical models offered at present are both deterministic and indeterministic, and are subject to interpretations of quantum mechanics - which themselves are being constrained by ongoing experimentation. Yet even with physical indeterminism, arguments have been made against the feasibility of incompatibilist free will in that it is difficult to assign Origination (responsibility for "free" indeterministic choices).

Given that humans all experience a sense of free will, and the difficulties with incompatibilism, modern compatibilists attempt to find ways of accommodating it. For example, attempts have even been made by modern compatibilists in psychology to reconcile traditionally accepted attributes of free will with physical determinism, including an inner struggle for virtue.

Despite our attempts to understand nature, a complete understanding of reality remains open to philosophical speculation. For example, the laws of physics (deterministic or not) have yet to resolve the hard problem of consciousness: "Solving the hard problem of consciousness involves determining how physiological processes such as ions flowing across the nerve membrane cause us to have experiences." According to some, "Intricately related to the hard problem of consciousness, the hard problem of free will represents the core problem of conscious free will: Does conscious volition impact the material world?" Although incompatibilist metaphysical libertarianism generally represents the bulk of non-materialist constructions, including the popular claim of being able to consciously veto an action or competing desire, compatibilist theories have been developed based on a form of identity dualism in which "the experience of conscious free will is the first-person perspective of the neural correlates of choosing". It is however apparent that, even disregarding the hard problem of consciousness, "consciousness plays a far smaller role in human life than Western culture has tended to believe."

Below are the classic arguments bearing upon the dilemma and its underpinnings.

Incompatibilism
Incompatibilism is the position that free will and determinism are logically incompatible, and that the major question regarding whether or not people have free will is thus whether or not their actions are determined. "Hard determinists", such as Martin Luther and d'Holbach, are those incompatibilists who accept determinism and reject free will. "Metaphysical libertarians", such as Thomas Reid, Peter van Inwagen, and Robert Kane, are those incompatibilists who accept free will and deny determinism, holding the view that some form of indeterminism is true. Another view is that of hard incompatibilists, which state that free will is incompatible with both determinism and indeterminism.

Traditional arguments for incompatibilism are based on an "intuition pump": if a person is like other mechanical things that are determined in their behavior such as a wind-up toy, a billiard ball, a puppet, or a robot, then people must not have free will. This argument has been rejected by compatibilists such as Daniel Dennett on the grounds that, even if humans have something in common with these things, it remains possible and plausible that we are different from such objects in important ways.

Another argument for incompatibilism is that of the "causal chain." Incompatibilism is key to the idealist theory of free will. Most 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. This argument has also been challenged by various compatibilist philosophers.

A third argument for incompatibilism was formulated by Carl Ginet in the 1960s and has received much attention in the modern literature. The simplified argument runs along these lines: if determinism is true, then we have no control over the events of the past that determined our present state and no control over the laws of nature. Since we can have no control over these matters, we also can have no control over the consequences of them. Since our present choices and acts, under determinism, are the necessary consequences of the past and the laws of nature, then we have no control over them and, hence, no free will. This is called the consequence argument. Peter van Inwagen remarks that C.D. Broad had a version of the consequence argument as early as the 1930s.

The difficulty of this argument for some compatibilists lies in the fact that it entails the impossibility that one could have chosen other than one has. For example, if Jane is a compatibilist and she has just sat down on the sofa, then she is committed to the claim that she could have remained standing, if she had so desired. But it follows from the consequence argument that, if Jane had remained standing, she would have either generated a contradiction, violated the laws of nature or changed the past. Hence, compatibilists are committed to the existence of "incredible abilities", according to Ginet and van Inwagen. One response to this argument is that it equivocates on the notions of abilities and necessities, or that the free will evoked to make any given choice is really an illusion and the choice had been made all along, oblivious to its "decider". David Lewis suggests that compatibilists are only committed to the ability to do something otherwise if different circumstances had actually obtained in the past.

Using T, F for "true" and "false" and ? for undecided, there are exactly nine positions regarding determinism/free will that consist of any two of these three possibilities: Incompatibilism may occupy any of the nine positions except (5), (8) or (3), which last corresponds to soft determinism. Position (1) is hard determinism,and position (2) is libertarianism. The position (1) of hard determinism adds to the table the contention that D implies FW is untrue, and the position (2) of libertarianism adds the contention that FW implies D is untrue. Position (9) may be called hard incompatibilism if one interprets ? as meaning both concepts are of dubious value. Compatibilism itself may occupy any of the nine positions, that is, there is no logical contradiction between determinism and free will, and either or both may be true or false in principle. However, the most common meaning attached to compatibilism is that some form of determinism is true and yet we have some form of free will, position (3). Below these positions are examined in more detail. Alex Rosenberg makes an extrapolation of physical determinism as inferred on the macroscopic scale by the behaviour of a set of dominoes to neural activity in the brain where; "If the brain is nothing but a complex physical object whose states are as much governed by physical laws as any other physical object, then what goes on in our heads is as fixed and determined by prior events as what goes on when one domino topples another in a long row of them." Physical determinism is currently disputed by prominent interpretations of quantum mechanics, and while not necessarily representative of intrinsic indeterminism in nature, fundamental limits of precision in measurement are inherent in the uncertainty principle - whose effects are inversely proportional to mass. The relevance of such prospective indeterminate activity to free will is however contested, even when chaos theory is introduced to magnify the effects of such microscopic events.

Hard determinism
Determinism is a broad term with a variety of meanings. Corresponding to each of these different meanings, there arises a different problem of free will. Hard determinism is the claim that either nomological determinism or theological determinism is true (see causal determinism below), and that it is incompatible with free will, so free will does not exist. Forms of determinism include:
 * Causal determinism, which states that 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.
 * 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.
 * Theological determinism is the idea that God determines all that humans do, either by knowing their actions in advance, via some form of omniscience or by decreeing their actions in advance. 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.
 * Biological determinism is the idea that all behaviors, beliefs, and desires are fixed by our genetic endowment and our biochemical makeup, the latter of which is affected by both genes and environment.
 * Other forms of determinism include: cultural determinism and psychological determinism. Combinations and syntheses of determinist theses, e.g. bio-environmental determinism, are even more common.

Metaphysical Libertarianism


Metaphysical libertarianism is one philosophical view point under that of incompatibilism. Libertarianism holds onto a concept of free will that requires that the agent be able to take more than one possible course of action under a given set of circumstances.

Accounts of libertarianism subdivide into non-physical theories and physical or naturalistic theories. Non-physical theories hold that the events in the brain that lead to the performance of actions do not have an entirely physical explanation, which requires that the world is not closed under physics. Such interactionist dualists believe that some non-physical mind, will, or soul overrides physical causality.

Physical determinism implies there is only one possible future and is therefore not compatible with libertarian free will. As consequent of incompatibilism, metaphysical libertarian explanations that do not involve dispensing with physicalism require physical indeterminism, such as probabilistic subatomic particle behavior – theory unknown to many of the early writers on free will. Some libertarian explanations involve invoking panpsychism, the theory that a quality of mind is associated with all particles, and pervades the entire universe, in both animate and inanimate entities. Other approaches do not require that free will be a fundamental constituent of the universe. Ordinary randomness is appealed to as supplying the "elbow room" that libertarians believe necessary.

Models of volition have been constructed in which it is seen as a particular kind of complex, high-level process with an element of physical indeterminism. An example of this approach is that of Robert Kane, where he hypothesizes that, "in each case, the indeterminism is functioning as a hindrance or obstacle to her realizing one of her purposes—a hindrance or obstacle in the form of resistance within her will which must be overcome by effort". Although at the time quantum mechanics (and physical indeterminism) was only in the initial stages of acceptance, in his book Miracles: A preliminary study C. S. Lewis stated the logical possibility that if the physical world were proved indeterministic this would provide an entry point to describe an action of a non-physical entity on physical reality. Indeterministic physical models (particularly those involving quantum indeterminacy) introduce random occurrences at an atomic or subatomic level. These events might affect brain activity, and could seemingly allow incompatibilist free will if the apparent indeterminacy of some mental processes (for instance, subjective perceptions of control in conscious  volition) map to the underlying indeterminacy of the physical construct.

This relationship however requires a causative role over probabilities that is questionable, and it is far from established that brain activity responsible for human action can be affected by such events. Secondarily, these incompatibilist models are dependent upon the relationship between action and conscious volition, as studied in the neuroscience of free will. It is evident that observation may disturb the outcome of the observation itself, rendering limited our ability to identify causality. Niels Bohr, one of the main architects of quantum theory, suggested however that no connection could be made between indeterminism of nature and freedom of will.

Hard incompatibilism
Hard incompatibilism is defended by Derk Pereboom, who identifies a variety of positions where free will is seen irrelevant to indeterminism/determinism, among them the following:
 * Determinism (D) is true, D does not imply we lack free will (F), but in fact we do lack F.
 * D is true, D does not imply we lack F, but in fact we don't know if we have F.
 * D is true, and we do have F.
 * D is true, we have F, and F implies D.
 * D is unproven, but we have F.
 * D isn't true, we do have F, and would have F even if D were true.
 * D isn't true, we don't have F, but F is compatible with D.
 * Derk Pereboom, Living without Free Will, p. xvi.

Pereboom calls positions 3 and 4 soft determinism, position 1 a form of hard determinism, position 6 a form of classical libertarianism, and any position that includes having F as compatibilism. He largely ignores position 2.

John Locke denied that the phrase "free will" made any sense (compare with theological noncognitivism, a similar stance on the existence of God). He also took the view that the truth of determinism was irrelevant. He believed that the defining feature of voluntary behavior was that individuals have the ability to postpone a decision long enough to reflect or deliberate upon the consequences of a choice: "...the will in truth, signifies nothing but a power, or ability, to prefer or choose".

The contemporary philosopher Galen Strawson agrees with Locke that the truth or falsity of determinism is irrelevant to the problem. He argues that the notion of free will leads to an infinite regress and is therefore senseless. According to Strawson, if one is responsible for what one does in a given situation, then one must be responsible for the way one is in certain mental respects. But it is impossible for one to be responsible for the way one is in any respect. This is because to be responsible in some situation S, one must have been responsible for the way one was at S−1. To be responsible for the way one was at S−1", one must have been responsible for the way one was at "S−2, and so on. At some point in the chain, there must have been an act of origination of a new causal chain. But this is impossible. Man cannot create himself or his mental states ex nihilo. This argument entails that free will itself is absurd, but not that it is incompatible with determinism. Strawson calls his own view "pessimism" but it can be classified as hard incompatibilism.

Causal Determinism
Causal (or Nomological) determinism propose that there is an unbroken chain of prior occurrences stretching back to the origin of the universe. It is the concept that physical events are bound by causality in such a way that any state (of an object or event) is completely determined by prior states. Causal determinists believe that there is nothing uncaused or self-caused. Quantum mechanics poses a serious challenge to this view.

Destiny and Fate
Destiny or fate is a predetermined course of events. It may be conceived as a predetermined future, whether in general or of an individual. It is a concept based on the belief that there is a fixed natural order to the cosmos.

Although often used interchangeably, the words "fate" and "destiny" have distinct connotations.

Fate generally implies there is a set course which cannot be deviated from, and for which one has no control over. Fate is related to determinism, but makes no specific claim of physical determinism. Even with physical indeterminism an event could still be fated externally (see for instance theological determinism). Destiny likewise is related to determinism, but makes no specific claim of physical determinism. Even with physical indeterminism an event could still be destined to occur.

Destiny implies there is a set course which cannot be deviated from, but does not of itself make any claim with respect to the setting of that course (ie, it does not necessarily conflict with incompatibilist free will). Free will if existent could be the mechanism by which that destined outcome is chosen (determined to represent destiny).

Logical Determinism
Discussion regarding destiny does not necessitate the existence of a higher power. Logical determinism or Determinateness is the notion that all propositions, whether about the past, present, or future, are either true or false. This creates a unique problem for free will given that propositions about the future already have a truth value in the present (i.e. it is already determined as either true or false), and is referred to as the problem of future contingents.

Omniscience
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 high level predeterminism; and as such even if an individual could have influence over their lower level physical system (metaphysical libertarianism) 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
Predeterminism is a thesis which states that one's destiny was established externally (for example, exclusively by a creator deity). Predeterminism is the idea that every event is caused, not simply by the immediately prior events, but by a causal chain of events that goes back well before recent events, and that human actions cannot interfere with the outcomes of this pre-established chain. Yet as distinct from causal determinism above, this chain of events is not necessarily product of the physical system itself being deterministic. The term predeterminism suggests not just a determining of all events, but the prior and deliberately conscious determining of all events (therefore done, presumably, by a conscious being). While determinism usually refers to a naturalistically explainable causality of events, predeterminism seems by definition to suggest a person or a "someone" who is controlling or planning the causality of events before they occur and who then perhaps resides beyond the natural, causal universe. Predestination asserts that a supremely powerful being has indeed fixed all events and outcomes in the universe in advance, and is a famous doctrine of the Calvinists in Christian theology. Predestination is a form of hard theological determinism.

Predeterminism has therefore been compared to fatalism. Fatalism is the idea that everything is fated to happen, so that humans have no control over their future.

Theological Determinism
Theological determinism is a form of determinism which states that all events that happen are pre-ordained, or predestined to happen, by a monotheistic God. Two forms of theological determinism exist. The first one, theological compatibilism, accepts that humans have free will to choose their actions, holding that God, whilst knowing their actions before they happen, does not affect the outcome. God's providence is "compatible" with voluntary choice. The other form, known as "Hard Theological Determinism", holds that free will does not exist, and God has absolute control over a person's actions.

In the definition of compatibilism and incompatibilism, including hard determinism and metaphysical libertarianism, the literature often fails to distinguish between physical determinism and higher level forms of determinism (predeterminism, theological determinism, etc). As such, hard determinism with respect to theological determinism (or "Hard Theological Determinism" above) might be classified as hard incompatibilism with respect to physical determinism (if no claim was made regarding the internal causality or determinism of the universe). By the same principle, metaphysical libertarianism with respect to physical determinism might be classified as compatibilism with respect to theological determinism (if it was assumed such free will events were pre-ordained and therefore were destined to occur, but of which whose outcomes were not "predestined" or determined by God), or even hard theological determinism (if it was assumed instead that such outcomes were predestined by God).

The mind-body problem


The idea of free will is one aspect of the mind-body problem, that is, consideration of the relation between mind (for example, consciousness, memory, and judgment) and body (for example, the human brain and nervous system). Philosophical models of mind are divided into physical and non-physical expositions.

Cartesian dualism holds that the mind is a nonphysical substance, the seat of consciousness and intelligence, and raises the question of how mind and body interact. It is suggested that although the two worlds do interact, each retains some measure of autonomy. Under cartesian dualism external mind is responsible for bodily action, although unconscious brain activity is often caused by external events (for example, the instantaneous reaction to being burned). Cartesian dualism implies that the physical world is not deterministic - and in which external mind controls (at least some) physical events, providing an interpretation of incompatibilist free will. Stemming from Cartesian dualism, a formulation sometimes called  interactionalist dualism suggests a two-way interaction, that some physical events cause some mental acts and some mental acts cause some physical events. One modern vision of the possible separation of mind and body is the "three-world" formulation of Popper. Cartesian dualism and Popper's three worlds are two forms of what is called epistemological pluralism, that is the notion that different epistemological methodologies are necessary to attain a full description of the world. Other forms of epistemological pluralist dualism include psychophysical parallelism and epiphenomenalism. Epistemological pluralism is one view in which the mind-body problem is not reducible to the concepts of the natural sciences.

A contrasting approach is called physicalism. Physicalism is a philosophical theory holding that everything which exists is no more extensive than its physical properties; that is, that there are no non-physical substances (for example physically independent minds). Physicalism can be reductive or non-reductive. Reductive physicalism is grounded in the idea that everything in the world can actually be reduced analytically to its fundamental physical, or material, basis. Alternatively, non-reductive physicalism asserts that mental properties form a separate ontological class to physical properties: that mental states (such as qualia) are not ontologically reducible to physical states. Although one might suppose that mental states and neurological states are different in kind, that does not rule out the possibility that mental states correspond to neurological states. Under non-reductive physicalism mental states are not causally inert (they influence physical states and vice versa), unlike epiphenomenalism. In one such construction, anomalous monism, mental events supervene on physical events, describing the emergence of mental properties as correspondent to physical properties - implying such causal reducibility. Non-reductive physicalism is therefore often categorised as property dualism rather than monism, yet other types of property dualism do not adhere to the causal reducibility of mental states (see again epiphenomenalism).

Incompatibilism requires a distinction between the mental and the physical, being a commentary on the incompatibility of (determined) physical reality and one's presumably distinct experience of will. Secondarily, metaphysical libertarian free will must assert influence on physical reality and therefore requires mind as distinct from body. Both substance and property dualism offer such a distinction, and those particular models thereof which are not causally inert with respect to the physical world provide a basis for illustrating incompatibilist free will (i.e interactionalist dualism and non-reductive physicalism).

Compatibilism


Compatibilists maintain that determinism is compatible with free will. It may, however, be more accurate to say that compatibilists define "free will" in a way that allows it to co-exist with determinism (in the same way that incompatibilists define "free will" such that it cannot). Compatibilists believe freedom can be present or absent in a situation for reasons that have nothing to do with metaphysics. For instance, courts of law make judgments about whether individuals are acting under their own free will under certain circumstances without bringing in metaphysics. Similarly, political liberty is a non-metaphysical concept. Likewise, compatibilists define free will as freedom to act according to one's determined motives without hindrance from other individuals. So for example Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, and the Stoic Chrysippus. In contrast, the incompatibilist positions are concerned with a sort of "metaphysically free will," which compatibilists claim has never been coherently defined. Compatibilists argue that determinism does not matter; what matters is that individuals' wills are the result of their own desires and are not overridden by some external force. To be a compatibilist, one need not endorse any particular conception of free will, but only deny that determinism is at odds with free will.

Although there are various impediments to exercising one's choices, free will does not imply freedom of action. Freedom of choice (freedom to select one's will) is logically separate from freedom to implement that choice (freedom to enact one's will), although not all writers observe this distinction. Nonetheless, some philosophers have defined free will as the absence of various impediments. Some "modern compatibilists", such as Harry Frankfurt and Daniel Dennett, argue free will is simply freely choosing to do what constraints allow one to do. In other words, a coerced agent's choices are still free because such coercion coincides with the agent's personal intentions and desires.

Free will as lack of physical restraint
Most "classical compatibilists", such as Thomas Hobbes, claim that a person is acting on the person's own will only when it is the desire of that person to do the act, and also possible for the person to be able to do otherwise, if the person had decided to. Hobbes sometimes attributes such compatibilist freedom to each individual and not to some abstract notion of will, asserting, for example, that "no liberty can be inferred to the will, desire, or inclination, but the liberty of the man; which consisteth in this, that he finds no stop, in doing what he has the will, desire, or inclination to doe [sic]." In articulating this crucial proviso, David Hume writes, "this hypothetical liberty is universally allowed to belong to every one who is not a prisoner and in chains". Similarly, Voltaire, in his Philosophical Dictionary (or Dictionnaire philosophique), claimed that "Liberty then is only and can be only the power to do what one will." He asked, "would you have everything at the pleasure of a million blind caprices?" For him, free will or liberty is "only the power of acting, what is this power? It is the effect of the constitution and present state of our organs."

Free will as a psychological state
Thirteenth century philosopher Thomas Aquinas viewed humans as pre-programmed (by virtue of being human) to seek certain goals, but able to choose between routes to achieve these goals. In facing these choices, humans are governed by intellect, will, and passions. The will is "the primary mover of all the powers of the soul...and it it is also the efficient cause of motion in the body." Choice falls into five stages: (i) intellectual consideration of whether an objective is desirable, (ii) intellectual consideration of means of attaining the objective, (iii) will arrives at an intent to pursue the objective, (iv) will and intellect jointly decide upon choice of means (v) will elects execution. Free will enters as follows: Free-will is an "appetitive power", that is, not a cognitive power of intellect (the term "appetite" from Aquinas's definition "includes all forms of internal inclination.") He states that judgment "concludes and terminates counsel. Now counsel is terminated, first, by the judgment of reason; secondly, by the acceptation of the appetite [that is, the free-will]."

Aquinas's compatabilist view is defended thus: "Free-will is the cause of its own movement, because by his free-will man moves himself to act. But it does not of necessity belong to liberty that what is free should be the first cause of itself, as neither for one thing to be cause of another need it be the first cause. God, therefore, is the first cause, Who moves causes both natural and voluntary. And just as by moving natural causes He does not prevent their acts being natural, so by moving voluntary causes He does not deprive their actions of being voluntary: but rather is He the cause of this very thing in them; for He operates in each thing according to its own nature."

Some explanations of free will focus on the internal causality of the mind with respect to higher-order brain processing – the interaction between conscious and unconscious brain activity.

The notion of levels of decision is presented in a different manner by Frankfurt. Frankfurt argues for a version of compatibilism called the "hierarchical mesh". The idea is that an individual can have conflicting desires at a first-order level and also have a desire about the various first-order desires (a second-order desire) to the effect that one of the desires prevails over the others. A person's will is identified with their effective first-order desire, i.e., the one they act on, and this will is free if it was the desire the person wanted to act upon, i.e., the person's second-order desire was effective. So, for example, there are "wanton addicts", "unwilling addicts" and "willing addicts." All three groups may have the conflicting first-order desires to want to take the drug they are addicted to and to not want to take it.

The first group, wanton addicts, have no second-order desire not to take the drug. The second group, "unwilling addicts", have a second-order desire not to take the drug, while the third group, "willing addicts", have a second-order desire to take it. According to Frankfurt, the members of the first group devoid of will and therefore no longer persons. The members of the second group freely desire not to take the drug, but their will is overcome by the addiction. Finally, the members of the third group willingly take the drug they are addicted to. Frankfurt's theory can ramify to any number of levels. Critics of the theory point out that there is no certainty that conflicts will not arise even at the higher-order levels of desire and preference. Others argue that Frankfurt offers no adequate explanation of how the various levels in the hierarchy mesh together.

Free will as unpredictability
In Elbow Room, Dennett presents an argument for a compatibilist theory of free will, which he further elaborated in the book Freedom Evolves. The basic reasoning is that, if one excludes God, an infinitely powerful demon, and other such possibilities, then because of chaos and epistemic limits on the precision of our knowledge of the current state of the world, the future is ill-defined for all finite beings. The only well-defined things are "expectations". The ability to do "otherwise" only makes sense when dealing with these expectations, and not with some unknown and unknowable future.

According to Dennett, because individuals have the ability to act differently from what anyone expects, free will can exist. Incompatibilists claim the problem with this idea is that we may be mere "automata responding in predictable ways to stimuli in our environment". Therefore, all of our actions are controlled by forces outside ourselves, or by random chance. More sophisticated analyses of compatibilist free will have been offered, as have other critiques.

In the philosophy of decision theory, a fundamental question is: From the standpoint of statistical outcomes, to what extent do the choices of a conscious being have the ability to influence the future? Newcomb's paradox and other philosophical problems pose questions about free will and predictable outcomes of choices.

The sensitivity of the physical mind


Given that compatibilist models of free will are not concerned with external (non-physical) influence on the brain, they are often subject to deterministic relationships as discoverable in the physical world (including the brain). Cognitive naturalism is a physicalist approach to studing human consciousness in which mind is simply part of nature, perhaps merely a feature of many very complex self-programming feedback systems (for example, neural networks and cognitive robots), and so must be studied by the methods of empirical science, for example, behavioral science and the cognitive sciences like neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Cognitive naturalism stresses the role of neurological sciences. Overall brain health, substance dependence, depression, and various personality disorders clearly influence mental activity, and their impact upon volition also is important. For example, an addict may experience a conscious desire to escape addiction, but be unable to do so. The "will" is disconnected from the freedom to act. This situation is related to an abnormal production and distribution of dopamine in the brain.

The neuroscience of free will places restrictions on both compatibilist and incompatibilist free will conceptions.

Other views
Some philosophers' views are difficult to categorize as either compatibilist or incompatibilist, hard determinist or libertarian. For example, Ted Honderich holds the view that "determinism is true, compatibilism and incompatibilism are both false" and the real problem lies elsewhere. Honderich maintains that determinism is true because quantum phenomena are not events or things that can be located in space and time, but are abstract entities. Further, even if they were micro-level events, they do not seem to have any relevance to how the world is at the macroscopic level. He maintains that incompatibilism is false because, even if indeterminism is true, incompatibilists have not provided, and cannot provide, an adequate account of origination. He rejects compatibilism because it, like incompatibilism, assumes a single, fundamental notion of freedom. There are really two notions of freedom: voluntary action and origination. Both notions are required to explain freedom of will and responsibility. Both determinism and indeterminism are threats to such freedom. To abandon these notions of freedom would be to abandon moral responsibility. On the one side, we have our intuitions; on the other, the scientific facts. The "new" problem is how to resolve this conflict.

Two-stage models
In 1884 William James described a two-stage model of free will: in the first stage the mind develops random alternative possibilities for action, and in the second an adequately determined will selects one option. A number of other thinkers have since refined this idea, including Henri Poincaré, Arthur Holly Compton, Karl Popper, Henry Margenau, Robert Kane, Alfred Mele, and Martin Heisenberg.

Each of these models tries to reconcile libertarian free will with the existence of irreducible chance (today in the form of quantum indeterminacy), which threatens to make an agent's decision random, thus denying the control needed for responsibility.

If a single event is caused by chance, then logically indeterminism would be "true." For centuries, philosophers have said this would undermine the very possibility of certain knowledge. Some go to the extreme of saying that real chance would make the whole state of the world totally independent of any earlier states. Some Stoics are reported to have said that a single uncaused cause could destroy the universe (cosmos), James said most philosophers have an "antipathy to chance." His contemporary John Fiske described the absurd decisions that would be made if chance were real, and if volitions arise without cause. In modern times, J. J. C. Smart has described the problem of admitting indeterminism, as assigning the cause of action to quantum mechanical randomness and therefore impairing rather than granting our freedom.

Terence McKenna would disagree with J.J.C. Smart. Terence McKenna thought biological systems were a chemical strategy of amplifying of quantum mechanical indeterminacy to such a degree that freedom, true freedom, shimmers into existence at the macrophysical level.

The challenge for two-stage models is to admit some indeterminism but not permit it to produce random actions, as determinists fear. And of course a model must limit determinism but not eliminate it as some libertarians think necessary. Two-stage models limit the contribution of random chance to the generation of alternative possibilities for action. But note that, in recent years, compatibilist analytic philosophers following Harry Frankfurt have denied the existence of alternative possibilities. They develop "Frankfurt-type examples" (thought experiments) in which they argue an agent is free even though no alternative possibilities exist, or the agent is prevented at the last moment by neuroscientific demons from "doing otherwise."

Free will as an illusion

 * “Experience teaches us no less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.” B de Spinoza Ethics

David Hume discussed the possibility that the entire debate about free will is nothing more than a merely "verbal" issue. He suggested that it might be accounted for by "a false sensation or seeming experience" (a velleity), which is associated with many of our actions when we perform them. On reflection, we realize that they were necessary and determined all along.

Arthur Schopenhauer put the puzzle of free will and moral responsibility in these terms: "Everyone believes himself, a priori, perfectly free—even in his individual actions, and thinks that at every moment he can commence another manner of life. ... But a posteriori, through experience, he finds to his astonishment that he is not free, but subjected to necessity, that in spite of all his resolutions and reflections he does not change his conduct, and that from the beginning of his life to the end of it, he must carry out the very character which he himself condemns..." In his essay On the Freedom of the Will, Schopenhauer stated, "You can do what you will, but in any given moment of your life you can will only one definite thing and absolutely nothing other than that one thing." According to Schopenhauer, phenomena do not have free will. However, will [urging, craving, striving, wanting, and desiring] as noumenon is free.

Free will as "moral imagination"
Rudolf Steiner, who collaborated in a complete edition of Arthur Schopenhauer's work, wrote The Philosophy of Freedom, which focuses on the problem of free will. Steiner (1861–1925) initially divides this into the two aspects of freedom: freedom of thought and freedom of action. The controllable and uncontrollable aspects of decision making thereby are made logically separable, as pointed out in the introduction. This separation of will from action has a very long history, going back at least as far as Stoicism and the teachings of Chrysippus (279 – 206 BC), who separated external antecedent causes from the internal disposition receiving this cause.

Steiner then argues that inner freedom is achieved when we bridge the gap between our sensory impressions, which reflect the outer appearance of the world, and our thoughts, which give us access to the inner nature of the world. Acknowledging the many influences on our choice, he points to the impact of our becoming aware of just these determinants. Outer freedom is attained by permeating our deeds with moral imagination. Steiner aims to show that these two aspects of inner and outer freedom are integral to one another, and that true freedom is only achieved when they are united.

Free will as a pragmatically useful concept
William James' views were ambivalent. While he believed in free will on "ethical grounds," he did not believe that there was evidence for it on scientific grounds, nor did his own introspections support it. Moreover, he did not accept incompatibilism as formulated below; he did not believe that the indeterminism of human actions was a prerequisite of moral responsibility. In his work Pragmatism, he wrote that "instinct and utility between them can safely be trusted to carry on the social business of punishment and praise" regardless of metaphysical theories. He did believe that indeterminism is important as a "doctrine of relief"—it allows for the view that, although the world may be in many respects a bad place, it may, through individuals' actions, become a better one. Determinism, he argued, undermines meliorism—the idea that progress is a real concept leading to improvement in the world.

Free will and variations of causality
Freeman introduces what he calls "circular causality" to "allow for the contribution of self-organizing dynamics", the "formation of macroscopic population dynamics that shapes the patterns of activity of the contributing individuals", applicable to "interactions between neurons and neural masses...and between the behaving animal and its environment".

In this view, mind and neurological functions are tightly coupled in a situation where feedback between collective actions (mind) and individual subsystems (for example, neurons and their synapses) jointly decide upon the behavior of both. The adjective "circular" in "circular causality" is intended to separate this interactive causation from simple stimulus-response and to express an extension of traditional feedback theory to cases where no obvious feedback loops can be identified. An analogy is drawn between mind and some emergent behavior seen in inanimate nature, such as Rayleigh–Bénard convection.

Futhermore, observations suggest the possibility that "free will" and neurology inhabit different realms, and it is confusion to try to explain "free will" using a neurological approach.

Physics
Early scientific thought often portrayed the universe as deterministic – for example in the thought of Democritus or the Cārvākans – and some thinkers claimed that the simple process of gathering sufficient information would allow them to predict future events with perfect accuracy. Modern science, on the other hand, is a mixture of deterministic and stochastic theories. Quantum mechanics predicts events only in terms of probabilities, casting doubt on whether the universe is deterministic at all. Current physical theories cannot resolve the question of whether determinism is true of the world, being very far from a potential Theory of Everything, and open to many different interpretations.

Assuming that an indeterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, one may still object that such indeterminism is for all practical purposes confined to microscopic phenomena. This is not always the case: many macroscopic phenomena are based on quantum effects. For instance, some hardware random number generators work by amplifying quantum effects into practically usable signals. A more significant question is whether the indeterminism of quantum mechanics allows for the traditional idea of free will (based on a perception of free will). If a person's action is however only result of complete quantum randomness, and mental processes as experienced have no influence on the probabilistic outcomes (e.g. volition), this in itself would mean that such traditional free will does not exist (because the action was not controllable by the physical being who claims to possess the free will).

Under the assumption of physicalism it has been argued that the laws of quantum mechanics provide a complete probabilistic account of the motion of particles, regardless of whether or not free will exists. Physicist Stephen Hawking describes such ideas in his 2010 book The Grand Design. According to Hawking, these findings from quantum mechanics suggest that humans are sorts of complicated biological machines; although our behavior is impossible to predict perfectly in practice, "free will is just an illusion." In other words, Hawking thinks that only compatibilistic (deterministic) free will is possible based on the data.

Erwin Schrödinger, a nobel laureate in physics and one of the founders of quantum mechanics, came to a different conclusion than Hawking. Near the end of his 1944 essay titled What Is Life? he says that there is "incontrovertible direct experience" that humans have free will. He also states that the human body is wholly or at least partially determined, leading him to conclude that "...'I' -am the person, if any, who controls the 'motion of the atoms' according to the Laws of Nature." He explains this position on free will by appealing to a notion of self that is emergent from the entire collection of atoms in his body, and other convictions about conscious experience. However, he also qualifies the conclusion as "necessarily subjective" in its "philosophical implications." Contrasting the views of Hawking and Schrödinger, it is clear that even among eminent physicists there is not unanimity regarding free will.

Genetics
Like physicists, biologists have frequently addressed questions related to free will. One of the most heated debates in biology is that of "nature versus nurture", concerning the relative importance of genetics and biology as compared to culture and environment in human behavior. The view of many researchers is that many human behaviors can be explained in terms of humans' brains, genes, and evolutionary histories. This point of view raises the fear that such attribution makes it impossible to hold others responsible for their actions. Steven Pinker's view is that fear of determinism in the context of "genetics" and "evolution" is a mistake, that it is "a confusion of explanation with exculpation". Responsibility doesn't require that behavior be uncaused, as long as behavior responds to praise and blame. Moreover, it is not certain that environmental determination is any less threatening to free will than genetic determination.

Neuroscience
It has become possible to study the living brain, and researchers can now watch the brain's decision-making process at work. A seminal experiment in this field was conducted by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s, in which he asked each subject to choose a random moment to flick her wrist while he measured the associated activity in her brain; in particular, the build-up of electrical signal called the readiness potential (after German Bereitschaftspotential). Although it was well known that the readiness potential caused and preceded the physical action, Libet asked whether it could be recorded before the conscious intention to move. To determine when subjects felt the intention to move, he asked them to watch the second hand of a clock. After making a movement, the volunteer reported the time on the clock when they first felt the conscious intention to move; this became known as Libet's W time.

Libet found that the unconscious brain activity of the readiness potential leading up to subjects' movements began approximately half a second before the subject was aware of a conscious intention to move.

These studies of the timing between actions and the conscious decision bear upon the role of the brain in understanding free will. A subject's declaration of intention to move a finger appears after the brain has begun to implement the action, suggesting to some that unconsciously the brain has made the decision before the conscious mental act to do so. Some believe the implication is that free will was not involved in the decision and is an illusion. The first of these experiments reported the brain registered activity related to the move about 0.2 s before movement onset. However, these authors also found that awareness of action was anticipatory to activity in the muscle underlying the movement; the entire process resulting in action involves more steps than just the onset of brain activity. The bearing of these results upon notions of free will appears complex.

Some argue that placing the question of free will in the context of motor control is too narrow. The objection is that the time scales involved in motor control are very short, and motor control involves a great deal of unconscious action, with much physical movement entirely unconscious. On that basis "...free will cannot be squeezed into time frames of 150–350 ms; free will is a longer term phenomenon" and free will is a higher level activity that "cannot be captured in a description of neural activity or of muscle activation..." The bearing of timing experiments upon free will is still under discussion.

More studies have since been conducted, including some that try to:
 * support Libet's original findings
 * suggest that the cancelling or "veto" of an action may first arise subconsciously as well
 * explain the underlying brain structures involved
 * suggest models that explain the relationship between conscious intention and action

Neurology and psychiatry
In several brain-related conditions, individuals cannot entirely control their own actions. Though the existence of such conditions does not directly refute the existence of free will, the study of such conditions, like the neuroscientific studies above, is valuable in developing models of how the brain may construct our experience of free will.

For example, people with Tourette syndrome and related tic disorders make involuntary movements and utterances, called tics, despite the fact that they would prefer not to do so when it is socially inappropriate. Tics are described as semi-voluntary or "unvoluntary", because they are not strictly involuntary: they may be experienced as a voluntary response to an unwanted, premonitory urge. Tics are experienced as irresistible and must eventually be expressed. People with Tourette syndrome are sometimes able to suppress their tics for limited periods, but doing so often results in an explosion of tics afterward. The control exerted (from seconds to hours at a time) may merely postpone and exacerbate the ultimate expression of the tic.

In alien hand syndrome, the afflicted individual's limb will produce meaningful behaviors without the intention of the subject. The affected limb effectively demonstrates 'a will of its own.' The sense of agency does not emerge in conjunction with the overt appearance of the purposeful act even though the sense of ownership in relationship to the body part is maintained. This phenomenon corresponds with an impairment in the premotor mechanism manifested temporally by the appearance of the readiness potential (see section on the Neuroscience of Free Will above) recordable on the scalp several hundred milliseconds before the overt appearance of a spontaneous willed movement. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging with specialized multivariate analyses to study the temporal dimension in the activation of the cortical network associated with voluntary movement in human subjects, an anterior-to-posterior sequential activation process beginning in the supplementary motor area on the medial surface of the frontal lobe and progressing to the primary motor cortex and then to parietal cortex has been observed. The sense of agency thus appears to normally emerge in conjunction with this orderly sequential network activation incorporating premotor association cortices together with primary motor cortex. In particular, the supplementary motor complex on the medial surface of the frontal lobe appears to activate prior to primary motor cortex presumably in associated with a preparatory pre-movement process. In a recent study using functional magnetic resonance imaging, alien movements were characterized by a relatively isolated activation of the primary motor cortex contralateral to the alien hand, while voluntary movements of the same body part included the concomitant activation of motor association cortex associated with the premotor process. The clinical definition requires "feeling that one limb is foreign or has a will of its own, together with observable involuntary motor activity" (emphasis in original). This syndrome is often a result of damage to the corpus callosum, either when it is severed to treat intractable epilepsy or due to a stroke. The standard neurological explanation is that the felt will reported by the speaking left hemisphere does not correspond with the actions performed by the non-speaking right hemisphere, thus suggesting that the two hemispheres may have independent senses of will.

Similarly, one of the most important ("first rank") diagnostic symptoms of schizophrenia is the delusion of being controlled by an external force. People with schizophrenia will sometimes report that, although they are acting in the world, they did not initiate, or will, the particular actions they performed. This is sometimes likened to being a robot controlled by someone else. Although the neural mechanisms of schizophrenia are not yet clear, one influential hypothesis is that there is a breakdown in brain systems that compare motor commands with the feedback received from the body (known as proprioception), leading to attendant hallucinations and delusions of control.

Determinism and emergent behavior
The notion of emergence refers to cooperative system-wide responses, best understood on a global basis rather than one of individual components. This idea has wide application, including that to societal structures and to the brain itself. There are several schools of thought regarding emergence, and these have implications for free will. The school of strong emergence takes the view that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and suggest a downward causation is possible, that is, phenomena at a larger-scale level of organization can exert causal influence on a smaller-scale level. From this stance, the mind is an emergent property of the brain that can control the brain itself, and free will is one such phenomenon. Opposite views are nominal emergence and weak emergence. Both deny the possibility of downward causation and see emergence as an expression of events that fundamentally are microscopically generated. The difference between nominal and weak emergence is only in the complexity of the connection to the underlying microscopic behavior.

In some generative philosophies of cognitive sciences and evolutionary psychology, free will is assumed not to exist. However, an illusion of free will is created, within this theoretical context, due to the generation of infinite or computationally complex behavior from the interaction of a finite set of rules and parameters. Thus, the unpredictability of the emerging behavior from deterministic processes leads to a perception of free will, even though free will as an ontological entity is assumed not to exist. In this picture, even if the behavior could be computed ahead of time, no way of doing so is simpler than just observing the outcome of the brain's own computations.

As an illustration, some strategy board games have rigorous rules in which no information (such as cards' face values) is hidden from either player and no random events (such as dice rolling) occur in the game. Nevertheless, strategy games like chess and especially Go, with its simple deterministic rules, can have an extremely large number of unpredictable moves. By analogy, "emergentists" suggest that the experience of free will emerges from the interaction of finite rules and deterministic parameters that generate infinite and unpredictable behavior. Yet, if all these events were accounted for, and there were a known way to evaluate these events, the seemingly unpredictable behavior would become predictable. This is already true of chess, which is completely predictable (i.e. solved by computation). Cellular automata and the generative sciences can model emergent processes of social behavior on this philosophy.

In their book The Grand Design Hawking and Mlodinow suggest a thought experiment in which one encounters an alien that may be a robot. Today robots can be made that adapt their responses to their environment through self-programming, so-called intelligent robots. Much of the description of these machines seems parallel to human behavior, although technology has still not reached sufficient complexity to make a strong case for the similarities. Is such a machine deterministic? We cannot predict the machine's exact behavior without a complete knowledge of its personal history with its environment, the reliability of its components, and its present state of programming, uncertainties in which limit us to probabilistic statements.

Groups of cooperating robots also are envisioned: One can conjecture that some such groups could evolve following a Darwinian scheme, not only an interest of engineers, but a recurrent topic of science fiction.

Experimental psychology
Experimental psychology's contributions to the free will debate have come primarily through social psychologist Daniel Wegner's work on conscious will. In his book, The Illusion of Conscious Will Wegner summarizes what he believes is empirical evidence supporting the view that human perception of conscious control is an illusion. Wegner summarizes some empirical evidence that may suggest that the perception of conscious control is open to modification (or even manipulation). Wegner observes that one event is inferred to have caused a second event when two requirements are met: For example, if a person hears an explosion and sees a tree fall down that person is likely to infer that the explosion caused the tree to fall over. However, if the explosion occurs after the tree falls down (i.e., the first requirement is not met), or rather than an explosion, the person hears the ring of a telephone (i.e., the second requirement is not met), then that person is not likely to infer that either noise caused the tree to fall down.
 * 1) The first event immediately precedes the second event, and
 * 2) The first event is consistent with having caused the second event.

Wegner has applied this principle to the inferences people make about their own conscious will. People typically experience a thought that is consistent with a behavior, and then they observe themselves performing this behavior. As a result, people infer that their thoughts must have caused the observed behavior. However, Wegner has been able to manipulate people's thoughts and behaviors so as to conform to or violate the two requirements for causal inference. Through such work, Wegner has been able to show that people often experience conscious will over behaviors that they have not, in fact, caused—and conversely, that people can be led to experience a lack of will over behaviors they did cause. For instance, priming subjects with information about an effect increases the probability that a person falsely believes is the cause. The implication for such work is that the perception of conscious will (which he says might be more accurately labelled as 'the emotion of authorship') is not tethered to the execution of actual behaviors, but is inferred from various cues through an intricate mental process, authorship processing. Although many interpret this work as a blow against the argument for free will, both psychologists  and philosophers  have criticized Wegner's theories.

Emily Pronin has argued that the subjective experience of free will is supported by the introspection illusion. This is the tendency for people to trust the reliability of their own introspections while distrusting the introspections of other people. The theory implies that people will more readily attribute free will to themselves rather than others. This prediction has been confirmed by three of Pronin and Kugler's experiments. When college students were asked about personal decisions in their own and their roommate's lives, they regarded their own choices as less predictable. Staff at a restaurant described their co-workers' lives as more determined (having fewer future possibilities) than their own lives. When weighing up the influence of different factors on behavior, students gave desires and intentions the strongest weight for their own behavior, but rated personality traits as most predictive of other people.

Psychologists have shown that reducing a person's belief in free will makes them less helpful and more aggressive. This may occur because the subject loses a sense of Self-efficacy.

Caveats have however been identified in studying a subject's awareness of mental events, in that the process of introspection itself may alter the experience

Believing in free will
In recent years, free will belief in individuals has been analysed with respect to traits in social behaviour. In general the concept of free will researched to date in this context has been that of the incompatabilist, or more specifically, the libertarian, i.e. freedom from determinism.

What people believe
Whether people naturally adhere to an incompatibilist model of free will has been questioned in the research. Eddy Nahmias has found that incompatibilism is not intuitive – it was not adhered to, in that determinism does not negate belief in moral responsibility (based on an empirical study of people's responses to moral dilemmas under a deterministic model of reality). Edward Cokely has found that incompatibilism is intuitive – it was naturally adhered to, in that determinism does indeed negate belief in moral responsibility in general. Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols have proposed that incompatibilism may or may not be intuitive, and that it is dependent to some large degree upon the circumstances; whether or not the crime incites an emotional response – for example if it involves harming another human being. They found that belief in free will is a cultural universal, and that the majority of participants said that (a) our universe is indeterministic and (b) moral responsibility is not compatible with determinism.

Studies indicate that peoples' belief in free will is inconsistent. Emily Pronin and Matthew Kugler found that people believe they have more free will than others.

Studies also reveal a correlation between someone's likelihood of accepting a deterministic model of mind, and their personality type. For example, Adam Feltz and Edward Cokely found that people of an extrovert personality type are more likely to dissociate belief in determinism from belief in moral responsibility.

Roy Baumeister and colleagues reviewed literature on the psychological effects of a belief (or disbelief) in free will. The first part of their analysis (which is all that we are concerned with here) was not meant to discover which types of free will actually exist. The researchers instead sought to identify what other people believe, how many people believed it, and the effects of those beliefs. Baumeister found that most people tend to believe in a sort of "naive compatibilistic free will".

The researchers also found that people consider acts more "free" when they involve a person opposing external forces, planning, or making random actions. Notably, the last behaviour, "random" actions, may not be possible; when participants attempt to perform tasks in a random manner (such as generating random numbers), their behaviour betrays many patterns.

Effects of the belief itself
Baumeister and colleagues found that provoking disbelief in free will seems to cause various negative effects. The authors concluded, in their paper, that it is belief in determinism that causes those negative effects. This may not be a very justified conclusion, however. First of all, free will can at least refer to either libertarian (indeterministic) free will or compatibilistic (deterministic) free will. Having participants read articles that simply "disprove free will" is unlikely to increase their understanding of determinism, or the compatibilistic free will that it still permits.

In other words, "provoking disbelief in free will" probably causes a belief in fatalism. As discussed earlier in this article, compatibilistic free will is illustrated by statements like "my choices have causes, and an effect – so I affect my future", whereas fatalism is more like "my choices have causes, but no effect – I am powerless". Fatalism, then, may be what threatens people's sense of self-efficacy. Lay people should not confuse fatalism with determinism, and yet even professional philosophers occasionally confuse the two. It is thus likely that the negative consequences below can be accounted for by participants developing a belief in fatalism when experiments attack belief in "free will". To test the effects of belief in determinism, future studies would need to provide articles that do not simply "attack free will", but instead focus on explaining determinism and compatibilism. Some studies have been conducted indicating that people react strongly to the way in which mental determinism is described, when reconciling it with moral responsibility. Eddy Nahmias has noted that when peoples actions are framed with respect to their beliefs and desires (rather than their neurological underpinnings) they are more likely to dissociate determinism from moral responsibility.

Various social behavioural traits have been correlated with the belief in deterministic models of mind, some of which involved the experimental subjection of individuals to libertarian and deterministic perspectives.

After researchers provoked volunteers to disbelieve in free will, participants lied, cheated, and stole more. Kathleen Vohs has found that those whose belief in free will had been eroded were more likely to cheat. In a study conducted by Roy Baumeister, after participants read an article disproving free will, they were more likely to lie about their performance on a test where they would be rewarded with cash. Provoking a rejection of free will has also been associated with increased aggression and less helpful behaviour as well as mindless conformity. Disbelief in free will can even cause people to feel less guilt about transgressions against others.

Baumeister and colleagues also note that volunteers disbelieving in free will are less capable of counterfactual thinking. This is worrying because counterfactual thinking ("If I had done something different...") is an important part of learning from one's choices, including those that harmed others. Again, this cannot be taken to mean that belief in determinism is to blame; these are the results we would expect from increasing people's belief in fatalism.

Along similar lines, Tyler Stillman has found that belief in free will predicts better job performance.

In Hindu philosophy
The six orthodox (astika) schools of thought in Hindu philosophy do not agree with each other entirely on the question of free will. For the Samkhya, for instance, matter is without any freedom, and soul lacks any ability to control the unfolding of matter. The only real freedom (kaivalya) consists in realizing the ultimate separateness of matter and self. For the Yoga school, only Ishvara is truly free, and its freedom is also distinct from all feelings, thoughts, actions, or wills, and is thus not at all a freedom of will. The metaphysics of the Nyaya and Vaisheshika schools strongly suggest a belief in determinism, but do not seem to make explicit claims about determinism or free will.

A quotation from Swami Vivekananda, a Vedantist, offers a good example of the worry about free will in the Hindu tradition. "Therefore we see at once that there cannot be any such thing as free-will; the very words are a contradiction, because will is what we know, and everything that we know is within our universe, and everything within our universe is moulded by conditions of time, space and causality. ... To acquire freedom we have to get beyond the limitations of this universe; it cannot be found here."

However, the preceding quote has often been misinterpreted as Vivekananda implying that everything is predetermined. What Vivekananda actually meant by lack of free will was that the will was not "free" because it was heavily influenced by the law of cause and effect—"The will is not free, it is a phenomenon bound by cause and effect, but there is something behind the will which is free." Vivekananda never said things were absolutely determined and placed emphasis on the power of conscious choice to alter one's past karma: "It is the coward and the fool who says this is his fate. But it is the strong man who stands up and says I will make my own fate."

In Buddhist philosophy
Buddhism accepts both freedom and determinism (or something similar to it), but rejects the idea of an agent, and thus the idea that freedom is a free will belonging to an agent. According to the Buddha, "There is free action, there is retribution, but I see no agent that passes out from one set of momentary elements into another one, except the [connection] of those elements." Buddhists believe in neither absolute free will, nor determinism. It preaches a middle doctrine, named pratitya-samutpada in Sanskrit, which is often translated as "inter-dependent arising". This theory is also called "Conditioned Genesis" or "Dependent Origination". It teaches that every volition is a conditioned action as a result of ignorance. In part, it states that free will is inherently conditioned and not "free" to begin with. It is also part of the theory of karma in Buddhism. The concept of karma in Buddhism is different from the notion of karma in Hinduism. In Buddhism, the idea of karma is much less deterministic. The Buddhist notion of karma is primarily focused on the cause and effect of moral actions in this life, while in Hinduism the concept of karma is more often connected with determining one's destiny in future lives.

In Buddhism it is taught that the idea of absolute freedom of choice (i.e. that any human being could be completely free to make any choice) is unwise, because it denies the reality of one's physical needs and circumstances. Equally incorrect is the idea that humans have no choice in life or that their lives are pre-determined. To deny freedom would be to deny the efforts of Buddhists to make moral progress (through our capacity to freely choose compassionate action). Pubbekatahetuvada, the belief that all happiness and suffering arise from previous actions, is considered a wrong view according to Buddhist doctrines. Because Buddhists also reject agenthood, the traditional compatibilist strategies are closed to them as well. Instead, the Buddhist philosophical strategy is to examine the metaphysics of causality. Ancient India had many heated arguments about the nature of causality with Jains, Nyayists, Samkhyists, Cārvākans, and Buddhists all taking slightly different lines. In many ways, the Buddhist position is closer to a theory of "conditionality" than a theory of "causality", especially as it is expounded by Nagarjuna in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā.

In other theology
The theological doctrine of divine foreknowledge is often alleged to be in conflict with free will, particularly in Reformed circles—for if God knows exactly what will happen, right down to every choice, that calls into questions the status of choices as free. If God has timelessly true knowledge about one's choices, this seems to constrain individual freedom. This problem is related to the Aristotelian problem of the sea battle: tomorrow there will or will not be a sea battle. If there will be one, then it seems that it was true yesterday that there would be one. Then it would be necessary that the sea battle will occur. If there won't be one, then by similar reasoning, it is necessary that it won't occur. This means that the future, whatever it is, is completely fixed by past truths—true propositions about the future.

However, some philosophers follow William of Ockham in holding that necessity and possibility are defined with respect to a given point in time and a given matrix of empirical circumstances, and so something that is merely possible from the perspective of one observer may be necessary from the perspective of an omniscient. Some philosophers follow Philo of Alexandria, a philosopher known for his homocentrism, in holding that free will is a feature of a human's soul, and thus that non-human animals lack free will.

Some views in Jewish philosophy stress that free will is a product of the intrinsic human soul, using the word neshama (from the Hebrew root n.sh.m. or .נ.ש.מ meaning "breath"), but the ability to make a free choice is through Yechida (from Hebrew word "yachid", יחיד, singular), the part of the soul that is united with God, the only being that is not hindered by or dependent on cause and effect (thus, freedom of will does not belong to the realm of the physical reality, and inability of natural philosophy to account for it is expected). While there are other views of free will in Judaism, most share the same basic Kabbalah principles.

In Islam the theological issue is not usually how to reconcile free will with God's foreknowledge, but with God's jabr, or divine commanding power. al-Ash'ari developed an "acquisition" or "dual-agency" form of compatibilism, in which human free will and divine jabr were both asserted, and which became a cornerstone of the dominant Ash'ari position. In Shia Islam, Ash'aris understanding of a higher balance toward predestination is challenged by most theologians. Free will, according to Islamic doctrine is the main factor for man's accountability in his/her actions throughout life. Actions taken by people exercising free will are counted on the Day of Judgement because they are their own, however the free will happens with the permission of God.

The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard claimed that divine omnipotence cannot be separated from divine goodness. As a truly omnipotent and good being, God could create beings with true freedom over God. Furthermore, God would voluntarily do so because "the greatest good ... which can be done for a being, greater than anything else that one can do for it, is to be truly free." Alvin Plantinga's "free will defense" is a contemporary expansion of this theme, adding how God, free will, and evil are consistent.