Determinism, Free Will and Paradox

[The Grand Nudger]

We've talked much about determinism in the context of free will. If all the universe is a product of mechanical certainty, then there is no free will, at least as we'd normally think about it.

No mind-as-unmoved mover, but I never thought about free will like that anyway. That's all that hard determinism takes off the table. Is that really such a problem? In and of itself, I mean, not a problem because it removes, in your mind...some other favored concept. An actual problem?
(you know my biggest gripe is that these threads always end up boiling down to "but if theres no free will then what about this other thing!" :Shrugs: What about it? Is it patently impossible to argue free will on it's own merits?)

But it seems to me we've taken a good philosophical idea and trivialized it as a kind of parlor trick to pull out of a hat for online discussions, ignoring that under the hat sits a universe-sized dragon to think about.

Are you claiming that there's a dragon in your garage, Mr Sagan? Show me.

If we accept that everything that exists is connected, at least by Gravity, and perhaps by being entangled in a Big Bang event as well, then what does this mean? It means that all events, past, present and future, inevitably lead to my existence, and yours, and etc., like a multidemensional tapestry woven of a single thread.

I don't think we can make quite that big a leap just by removing/modifying "free will". Neither the present nor the future lead (in either tense) to you, inevitably or otherwise, unless we reject the notion and experience of asymmetry regarding time. Lets challenge one thing at a time, eh?

If you were to pull at that thread at any point in that tapestry, the entire picture would be transformed, perhaps subtly, or perhaps not so subtly. But perhaps we can't do that, can we, because we ourselves would then flicker out of existence.

If I removed your mother then I'd expect you to flicker, if I removed you then I would expect you to flicker (and in both cases I would expect to find no "future you"). If I removed your future self I wouldn't expect your present or past self to flicker, no. I wouldn't expect that, because we end people all the time and it doesn't seem to have that effect. So, no...I don't think that removing -just any- strand changes the -whole- picture. Some "threads in the tapestry", sure, but not all.

So free will, it seems, must be false. Right?

On the basis of the above....I'd say no, not at all. I think you've gone off on a tangent about time and whether or not it expresses itself asymmetrically. If it expresses itself symmetrically, then perhaps I could remove you in the future and this would somehow alter the past - but things don't seem to work that way, in our experience -regardless of whether or not we have "free will". Or maybe I'm misreading?