Determinism, Free Will and Paradox

[Mudhammam]

Let me make very clear that I'm not talking about the will of God or anything here, nor heading in that direction. I'm only talking about the relationship between determinism, causality, and the local experience of human free will.

You've referred frequently to the human perspective as an affirmation of truth, but does this really make sense? It seems to me we can infer from experience only the relationship BETWEEN people and things or events, and not the nature of those things and events themselves. So clearly, the relationship between people and time is that we experience a dynamic environment, and the particular nature of that dynamism is (for example) the mechanical interaction of objects in space: inertia, gravity, etc. But just because I'm sitting at the back of a spaceship watching new things fly past me doesn't mean that the things I'm about to experience aren't already there.

Why is it that you feel the experience of free will is invalidated by the philosophical idea of determinism, but that other experiences, like the sensation of passage through time, necessarily cannot be? Is there really a necessary separation in these categories of experience, or is it something else? Is it perhaps that determinism waves away some of the apparent paradox implicit in free will (and, more broadly, sentience)? Has determinism, then, become a kind of scientific philosopher's stone, like the magical God which resolves paradox without itself needing to be considered one? Because I very much do still think the existence of a subjective perspective in an objective universe is paradoxical.

I'm suspicious of any answer which claims to be the right one, because it is at odds with my own experience-- that answers usually resolve to perspective rather than to truth. You can take yin and I can take yang, and we can chase each other's tails for a while, but in the end, there's always that little bit of irony there-- because all the learning you've done, and are doing, which leads you to take the position of determinism, has been done free-willfully by you. If someone calls you up for a beer, you don't after all tell them, "It is inevitable that I finish this book about causality," do you?

And that's the thing, for me. People claim to have learned something about reality, but then they consistently, and unapologetically, continue to act in a way which contradicts that knowledge. Why is this? I propose it's mainly because people sense that their intellectual conclusions don't very well represent their actual experience of life.

There's a lot of hand waving here. It was good until it started winding down. Given that I'm sure you're familiar with the literature, I'm curious as to why you'd think the subjective experience of acting would feel anything but free when the conditions are nowhere near transparent and could perhaps never be so. It seems like a fairly disposable argument, something akin to, "Well, it looks like the Sun rises from the ocean and travels over the earth and then sinks back into the water where it travels underground and returns to its starting point, hence separating night and day." In fact, it might be ironic that I'm arguing time isn't illusory merely because it's relative while you're arguing that free will isn't illusory because perhaps in some sense it's absolute. Anyway, I'm open to different interpretations of time but to dissolve it into nothing but perspective as it exists only between observer and observed makes zero sense in an evolutionary history of subjective beings. So, there's also that. You've hit on something when you wonder if determinism is like a "scientific philosopher's stone," but rather it's more Darwinism that has been described the "consciousness-raiser" and "universal acid." This is a slight digression but I might wonder what change could occur for the subjective experience to begin if there is no time. Yet even in our own lifetimes we witness our perspective of time emerge from a time measurable with arithmetic. Perhaps we're at a different question altogether but it's almost as if you want to, like some do with consciousness, just pretend it really isn't there.