Determinism, Free Will and Paradox

[Mudhammam]

This thread is interesting but I think a bit confused. I liked your idea of free will, benny, as it reminded me to some degree of Schopenhauer's philosophy, but in the end I don't quite find justification or meaning in your smuggling in of "free" with "will." I disagree with Alex that the universe isn't determined --- in fact physicists like Brian Greene seem to disagree as well, and I take him to be a pretty reliable popularizer of the field; but I'm not a scientist so instead I'll go the route of philosophy and say that determinism is the only tenable position so long as we speak of change, and things in the Universe certainly change as a result of preceding conditions, even in QM as far as I understand it (not a lot).

Benny, you also basically state, if I understand you right, that "things couldn't have been any other way since the initial determinants were set in place," say, at "the beginning of time." That sounds profound, and no doubt it is, but all you seem to really mean is that there is one future, just like there is one present, and currently you are in it... Just like you can only be doing some one thing, as it happened yesterday or whenever you decided to type out that post. And whatever you're doing now is traceable to instances in between those two points in time in such a way that we can intelligently rule out any "free," or rather spontaneous---as in uncaused---breaks in that chain of infinitely complex changes.