Do I, Lucifer, have free will ?

No, the ways in which we react to unexpected stimuli are predetermined by factors that are beyond our control, which shape our personalities, preferences, biases, how easily suggestible we are, etc. So for example, if you 'randomly' happened to see an advert for pizza and you happened to like pizza, then you are more likely to buy it. On the other hand, if it is a 'random' advert for McDonald's and you hate McDonald's, then you probably won't be influenced to purchase your next meal there.

Moreover, even if we could make 'random' choices, random will =/= free will.

This has turned into full on debate on free will. Good stuff.

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.

Perhaps there is no free will.

What is the difference between free-will and randomness and or non-determinism?

One way to insure the possibility of free-will was to have more than one choice. But that doesn't separate free-will from non-determinism or from randomness.

Free will strictly undefined some property or essence which grants unrestrained action

randomness strictly undefined the state or condition of having an unpredictable outcome such that any outcome is equally probable

indeterminism / non-determinism

1. (a) the doctrine that human actions, though influenced
somewhat by preexisting psychological and other conditions,
are not entirely governed by them but retain a certain
freedom and spontaneity.

(b) the theory that the will is to some extent independent
of the strength of motives, or may itself modify their
strength in choice

Peter van Inwagen in his "Metaphysics" (2009) explains point of view that both determinism and indeterminism (which he understands as randomness) are incompatible with free will.

He concludes that as such, free will cannot exist or merely an illusion.

Perhaps the explanation of the fact that both compatibilism and incompatibilism seem to lead to mysteries is simply that the concept of free will is self-contradictory. Perhaps free will is, as the incompatibilists say, incompatible with determinism. But perhaps it is also incompatible with indeterminism, owing to the impossibility of its being up to an agent what the outcome of an indeterministic process will be. If free will is incompatible with both determinism and indeterminism, then, since either determinism or indeterminism has to be true, free will is impossible. And, of course, what is impossible does not exist.

A research by Thomas Breuser concluded that neither deterministic, nor indeterministic universally-valid theories are possible. That means that no theory can predict (even probabilistically) the future of a system which contains the observer himself due to self-reference problem.


Determinism (cause and effect) is like math; we just have to agree that all things (abstract things are not things in their own right since thoughts do not exist outside of our scull) can be explained through cause and effect until we find too many things not happening according to cause and effect, just like we just have to agree that 1 + 1 = 2 until too many people start adding up 1 pile of sand with another pile of sand and get confused over why they don't have two piles. Unless we agreed on how knowledge can exist (cause and effect and math being 2 of the most vital) are agreed upon we will get nowhere and have to believe that knowledge is impossible.

When it comes to 'free-will' as oppose to 'will' I don't see how anyone has ever defined 'free-will' in a useful way as something different from 'will', and then shown an example of when this happened. To make it different you would have to make the necessary conditions of 'free-will' something similar to 'you can take an action unhindered and uninfluenced by current and past events' and try to present examples of when this happened. Because no one is arguing that we don't make choices; whether they are free or not they are still choices; choices which are either caused or not caused by something else.

Free-will is the antonym of determinism. non-determinism is not the right way to define it

When it comes to 'non-determinism' I have a hard time even comprehending what it means. Because I can't imagine how a non-deterministic universe would work. How would it function if it did not function according to cause and effect

Today (and maybe for ever) we can't tell with certainty if our universe is deterministic or not. Even if we define the universe as a non-cyclical infinite space-time continuum it still could be either random or intrinsically predictable. And the foreseeable future indeed make it seem like it is practically irrelevant to have a precise definition for those concepts.

There is still debate regarding the existence of randomness. It has been noted that behaviors at a quantum level appear to be random. But one could argue that we are mistaking inadequate data for random behavior.

Even if quanta are not random, the behind the scenes variables are unknowable, especially if it is the result of infinite universes all interacting with the same, shared gravity. If that isn't sufficiently random, then random holds no meaning anymore

Let us assume that randomness does not exist. For example, even the flip of a coin is not considered random. The coin's flip can be calculated if certain variables are given (the force used for the flip, air resistance, distance from the ground, etc).

But this would imply that no action is completely independent of another action. Meaning an action that occurred millions of years ago can be the cause of a seemingly unrelated outcome today.

Since all actions are a result of previous actions, this would mean all actions are the result of the very first action (whatever that action was).

By this logic, is every single action that has occurred after the very first action up to now predetermined? Wouldn't this imply that all events to take place in the future are also predetermined and can be calculated?

This suggests that every single action we perform can be traced back to the very first action. So does the non-existence of randomness also imply the non-existence of free will?


From a more classical viewpoint, if one is intellectually honest, the only way out of Zeno's paradox is nondeterminism. What happens when things are in perfect balance depends on some higher moment, (or influences from farther away or farther back in time) and if those are balanced, it depends on a higher one still.

Aquinas' answer to Zeno's paradox (in the First Way) is God, Newton's was uniform infinite differentiability of functions that are reciprocally or iteratively defined (which many mathematicians consider unlikely). In my book, both are cheating. Ours, now, is generally nondeterminism. Motion is possible because the lack of motion is impossible, and that mandatory motion, is at its root, utterly random.

Even if physics were determined entirely by mathematics, from this perspective the math itself is not really strong enough to support a deterministic worldview in complex situations. We can make approximations, but they become bizarre and break, fairly easily, and then we just assume there are better approximations because it is in our experience that this is what works. But the math does not say there are really better ones to make. It just says you can insist further as much as you want. Really a lot of things remain undefined. At small enough scale, Heisenberg suggests, it may even be required that they remain undetermined

A misunderstanding of chaos theory - the whole point of which is that deterministic systems may be effectively unpredictable. Systems with strange attractors are deterministic, but exhibit sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Arbitrarily small discrepancies in the initial conditions become arbitrarily(ish) large discrepancies in long-term behaviour. Given perfect knowledge, chaotic systems are still predictable

Chaos theory works on infinitely differentiable functions - the famous “butterfly” Lorentz attractor appears in a system of three quadratic differential equations; they're certainly infinitely differentiable (although boring after the 3rd differentiation