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Free Will

What Is Free Will?

Grant Bartley wants to know what the problem with freedom is all about.

To answer the philosophical riddle of whether people have free will, we first need to understand what free will is, or at least, what it would be. My goal here is to work out what free will must be if it does exist, and along the way, try to demonstrate that it must exist.

Some Choice Jargon

An attempt to define ‘free will’ might reasonably start by defining ‘freedom’. I will use the definition that freedom is the capacity to explore possibilities. This isn’t the only good definition of freedom, but it works well with the rest of what I’m going to say.

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