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Sophiaolender's picture

Free will

After talking about free will last week in class, I started thinking a lot about the idea and whether or not it exists. People can argue that all of our decisions are based on our pasts, and so while we trick ourselves into thinking we are acting off of our free will, we are in fact just doing the things that your history and our personalities would tell us to. This then led me to thinking about our lives as predetermined - maybe all of our actions interwoven become the blanket of the future. Then I recognized an idea that might interrupt this predetermination -- the example I related was college acceptances and rejections. There is no way for anyone to know whether or not they will get into a certain college, and sometimes our free will is interrupted because of colleges that you just are not accepted to. So, in more general terms, free will gets interrupted by outside forces that are uncontrollable. Is there a way to control the college process? I don't know but I don't think there is any specific resume that will get you an automatic acceptance at every single college. Maybe free will is only practiced through the actions of others. Perhaps we can only affect the free will of others, and never ourselves.

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