Title: Introduction to Philosophy/What is a Person - Wikibooks, open books for an open world
Headings: Introduction to Philosophy/What is a Person
Introduction to Philosophy/What is a Person
Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person
Free-will and Ethics
Further reading

Content: Libertarians accept indeterminism and incompatibilism, believing that human decisions are random, that this randomness does not rule out free will, and in fact that randomness actually allow free will. Determinists hold that, if a particular system is deterministic, its immediately next state will be exactly determined by its present state. This means that, in a deterministic system given any particular set of circumstances, the immediately succeeding set of following outcomes or events are determined, guaranteed by the laws of nature. Everything in nature is made up of atoms that behave according to the laws of nature, and we are no different. Determinism is the view that everything happens necessarily due to the circumstances that precede it; Hard determinism is the dual view that this is true and that people are unable to truly make their own decisions. Incompatibilism is the view that, if the laws of nature determine what people will do under certain circumstances (circumstances which were themselves determined by the circumstances that immediately preceded them), people cannot have free will. Everything we know about science and the physical world points to determinism being true under virtually all observable circumstances. However, certain interpretations of quantum mechanics hold that some events are fundamentally random, which means it is possible that some brain events are random. This in turn means that it is at least theoretically possible that some human decisions could be random, as in the case of a person who decides to order chocolate ice cream but instead, for no reason, orders Neapolitan.