A magnificent first day of Spring is upon us. The mercury is in the mid-twenties, jasmine is beginning to flower, birds are swooping and dodging each other, yet I am contemplating the idea of free will. It came up again in my reading over breakfast and I followed articles and links doggedly. It is a difficult subject and fraught with abstruse equations of the mind.

Now, it seems obvious to us that we possess free will - "the capacity to choose between different possible courses of action, unimpeded." I like that Wikipedia definition quite a lot and the final word is a key to the question. Everyday we appear to make unimpeded choices about hundreds of different things - we might even say to ourselves , 'I can do this or this or this and I choose to do this' and thus seem to be making a very deliberate decision when faced with a range of options. But it is not as simple as that.

There are lots of factors that go into making us who are we are today. Our parents, our teachers, our upbringing, our enculturation, friendships, television and media, how we develop our minds. Then there is our genetic makeup and that whole area of subconscious drives that Freud first described. And the brain - how does that work? I could go on.

So free will is far more complicated, one might say, constrained, than is 'obvious' or 'natural' to us in the present. There are those on the deterministic end of the spectrum who claim that we do not have free will at all - that it is an illusion. I don't hold to that view, for I think that we are much more than a mere sum of the parts, no matter how well they might have been described or explained.

Think about that, next time to decide to have a short black over your regular latte.