Determinism, Free Will and Paradox

[Mudhammam]

It does if you consider how fast time "moves" for an unconscious person, a dead one, or a non-existent one.

That sounds like the Berkeleian argument that one cannot without contradiction conceive of trees existing unconceived. Whether time moves "fast" or "slow" is a subjective evaluation. There is no objective "fastness." The question, I think is whether time moves at all (or as I see it, whether there is any change that requires causal priority), and in what direction, regardless if there is or isn't a brain to interpret the change using a concept such as time. Forgive me if I'm missing your argument entirely---all this is admittedly a bit difficult for a man of my caliber---but say there is only "timeness," and the future is fixed in such a way that past and present are driven towards it by necessity, rather than a fixed past and present driving towards future events, though leaving open the question whether this renders the future fixed or unfixed (I personally don't see how it could be hypothetically unfixed but that may be due to my unsophisticated understanding of causation). How does that allow for free will? And could such a dimension which is currently falsely perceived be discovered by brains that---for whatever reason---have a conception of causality that is in fact reversed or illusory? Or are we just speculating for fun here without any hope of such possibilities elucidating our understanding about anything other than a metaphysical (though already poorly, and perhaps, fatally, defined) concept, as in free will?

I will say that you, as well as this technical and difficult book I'm near completing (Cement of the Universe: A Study of Causation), have given me some pause about the concept of determinism, and I would like to renounce whatever dogmatism I may have displayed thus far. I'm a bit confused because people seem to speak of indeterminism as vindicated by science, yet continually speak of the Universe as determined. I think perhaps, given the many different ways causality can be conceived, I may have been giving my concept of determinism too broad, and almost meaningless, of a scope. On the one hand, determinism seems obviously true to me in the sense that the present moment is always determined by all the past moments. On the other hand, that seems completely trivial, and J.L. Mackie may be on to something when he states, though to my inferior mind a bit paradoxically: "If determinism does not hold, the concept of causal priority which I have tried to analyse will apply to the objects, but if determinism holds, it will not. If you have too much causation, it destroys one of its own most characteristic features. Every event is equally fixed from eternity with every other, and there is no room left for any preferred direction of causing." In fact, that last statement seems to coincide with what you've been arguing for here.