Free Will Vs. Determinism

Free will and determinism control several aspects of everyday human life. Free will is the decision to make your own choices freely while constantly reflecting on it. In order to truly reflect on your choices, it is essential to have heard from many different values, attitudes and beliefs to properly create your own free choice. Free will also does not abide to any outside influence in creating your choices. However, other people’s values, attitudes and beliefs can be the basis for your own by using concepts such as interpolation and or extrapolation. Determinism is the adopting of someone else’s beliefs without questioning or reflecting on their values, attitudes and beliefs. Taking this form of action results in not thinking for yourself
From the parents you have, to the places you are raised in, these factors are all part of your environment you grow accustomed to that shape your beliefs. Someone growing up in a rural village in Africa will have an entirely different set of attitudes, values and beliefs than someone growing up in the middle of New York City. The environment you are born in cannot be chosen by you and as a result, it is also a determined factor. Depending on your environment a rock traveling through a very slow stream will become jagged. While a rock traveling through a very quick stream will become smooth. Having a twin and growing up in a very similar environment will still result in them being two different people with different personalities. This is due to the very minor changes in the environment they encounter because no environment is exactly the same for two different people on this Earth. When you are able to reflect upon other many other people’s decisions around you to formulate your own, then you can determine if that environment is where you want to stay, or move. This would then make environmental factors become a free willed trait over time. Therefore, environmental factors can become part of your free will over time when you are able to control your own life and constantly reflect upon decisions made around
Both free will and determinism have limits on your choices, making limits unavoidable in either form of action. These limits are not considered choices due to being out of the realm of possibility to occur. There are both physical limits and environmental limits that play a role in some choices that can be made. Not being able to hold your breath underwater for fifty minutes is an example of a physical limit that all humans face. Another physical limit is old age. Being old has limits on your choices such as not being able to be a soccer player due to being out of the age of legibility. An environmental limit can be the fact that you cannot be the president of the United States if you are not born in the United States or you do not have parents who are American citizens. Another environmental limit is trying to go to the beach for the afternoon when you live in Idaho. Since Idaho is nowhere near the beach, going there is an environmental limit due to it being too far away to be a choice. Even though there may be limits on the choices you can make, you still do have some choices