Determinism

Determinism is the philosophical proposition that every event, including human cognition, decision and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. It holds that no random, spontaneous, mysterious, or miraculous events occur. The principal consequence of the deterministic claim is that it poses a challenge to the existence of free will.

Determinism and generative processes
In emergentist or generative philosophy of cognitive sciences and evolutionary psychology, free will does not exist. However an illusion of free will is experienced due to the generation of infinite behavior from the interaction of finite-deterministic set of rules and parameters. Thus the unpredictability of the emerging behavior from deterministic processes leads to a perception of free will, even though free will as an ontological entity does not exist.

As an illustration, the strategy board-games chess and Go have rigorous rules in which no information (such as cards' face-values) is hidden from either player and no random events (such as dice-rolling) happen within the game. Yet, chess and especially Go with its extremely simple deterministic rules, can still have an extremely large number of unpredictable moves. By analogy, emergentists or generativists suggest that the experience of free will emerges from the interaction of finite rules and deterministic parameters that generate infinite and unpredictable behavior. Yet, if all these events were accounted for, and there were a known way to evaluate these events, the seemingly unpredictable behavior would become predictable.

Dynamical-evolutionary psychology, cellular automata and the generative sciences, model emergent processes of social behavior on this philosophy, showing the experience of free will as essentially a gift of ignorance or as a product of incomplete information