There have been several philosophers throughout our time who have advocated different positions on the problem of free will. There are three main positions and they are the following: hard determinism, soft determinism, and libertarianism. Hard determinist believe that absolutely everything has been prearranged, that our decisions our not our own. Soft determinists believe that determinism is true and that determinism is compatible with free will and responsibility. And finally, libertarianisms believe that all of our decisions are based truly upon our own thinking, not just by random chance, but instead on the result of rational agency. There are many arguments for the problem of free will, and it appears that no successful conclusion has been made to fully close this problem.
The philosopher Paul Holbach was born in the 1700s, and during that time science was limited. Holbach does, however, elaborate on concepts that somewhat pertain to the scientific method. According to Holbach, free will is an delusion fictitious by the human's perception of the will. The will, Holbach proclaims, is caused by certain motives that are accumulated through our relations with the environment. Stimuli, or motives, created from our environment produces impressions in the brain that may be "good or bad, agreeable or painful", or one that just resides in the memory. These motives create impulses in the brain that can result into action. All decisions that we make, in essence, is not truly a decision at all, but is actually an output that is constructed from these motives; hence, there is no such thing as making a pure choice from one's own original thoughts. In other words, our actions are not from our own personal decisions, but rather, our actions are produced from past experience and hereditary factors. Hard determinism comes from the thought that people are not free and do not have freewill due to unseen forces within the human mind and areas of the unconscious not aware to us.