Are we free or determined - Essay Example

Though many philosophical points and theories are presented on this topic and this tradition exist throughout the world. It is observed that the determinism and free will are mutually exclusive to each other. The term determinism got wide meanings and there are two types of determinism, one is hard determinism or incompatibilists and the other one is soft determinism or compatibilists. Hard determinism is a belief, which says that the free will is an illusion but hard determinism says that both ideas can be coherently reconciled.

The free will is believed to be metaphysical truth of independent agency or it is defined as the feeling of agency that human experience when they act. The concept of free will plays a central role in our thinking and our views about the world. On the other hand, determinists believe that the level to which human beings have influence over their future is itself dependent on present and past. And it is also described as a term that tells all events in the world are the result of some previous event, or events.

And this shows that freedom of human beings is just an illusion. I believe that human are determined and not free will. It is sometimes believed that determinism demands that humans or individuals have no influence on the future events, but this concept is not correct. Determinism is that our past influences our future, and this is a true concept, even if we look it in our own lives. Many philosophers have given their views on this topic, including Omar Khayyam, Thomas Hobbes, Gottfried Leibniz, David Hume and Daniel Dennett etc.

If we look at the emergentist or the generative philosophy, we will see that the free will does not exist in it,2 but we can see its illusions because of the generation of infinite behavior from the interaction of finite-deterministic set of rules and constraints. And the unpredictable behavior of deterministic process leads us to the insight of free will. Though, we know that the free will is an ontological entity and it does not exist in real.3 According to some people, determinism is usually negated with morals and ethics.

On the other hand, people say that determinism is simply the sum of the pragmatic scientific results, which had made it devoid of subjectivism. As we known that there are no hard-set rules and regulations for morals and ethics and they are different in different cultures, and this makes them different from the physical rules, which are pre-defined and hardly change under any circumstances. But still their existence means that they were a certain result or product themselves. This is due to a comprehensive time period of social development, which is witnessed today, and also a convergence of events, which are created to generate the very idea of morals and ethics in the minds of people.

An example of determinism is genetic determinism, where we can now found a scientific connection between one's genes and one's actual and/or potential physical traits (hair and eye color, disease susceptibility, etc.). And this knowledge is used throughout the world for further research. The theory of determinism