First of all, I don't have a position on whether the universe is predeterministic or not. But it if is, some things follow some things. And what follows is that free will is not possible.
I suspected that, which is why I said at the beginning of my post that I was "jumping back in," meaning that I hadn't read everything between this page and my last post months ago. Going back and reading it now, I do think we're very close to being on the same page. Like you, I was arguing against a chain of reasoning (which you presented), and not so much against
you. [It's nice to have a pure "formal" debate without any partisan entrenchment dividing us.
]
I think I can agree with everything in your last post. So this is just an expansion on my own views.
I don't think existence is entirely physical. While I don't believe in Heaven or a world beyond this universe or souls, I'm not a materialist. I don't subscribe to materialistic reductionism--i.e. the belief that mental states can be
reduced to the physical states which produce them. That's where "more than the sum of the parts" idea comes in. There is the physical brain state which produces consciousness, and then once it's produced, that consciousness "rides on top of" the physical state as an additional set of properties that aren't themselves physical, like qualia, intentionality, and self-consciousness. Qualia are the qualitative "seemings" of mental states and mental objects. There is nothing about any atom or molecule or physical state that "
seems like" red. No equation can capture how this mental state seems to me. Intentionality is the "aboutness" of mental states. There is no property of atoms or molecules or physical states that is
about another atom or physical state. Yet, consciousness can be about atoms, or Donaldson characters. Consciousness can be directed to objects (in fact, it
always is directed to some object, either mental or physical). No physical theory can capture this aboutness, this intentionality, this "directed-to" and "holding-of."
Another way that existence isn't solely physical is when you consider the Ideal. Formal relations. Logic. Numbers. Math. The relations between these immaterial entities are distinct, objective, and timeless. Those relations are true even when we don't "hold them in our head" while we ponder them. They are the same no matter which subjective person ponders them. There is no subjective component to the relation between the numbers 2 and 4 (except the intentionality of the consciousness directed
toward these ideal objects when they are thought--but that doesn't alter or color the objective, ideal relation itself). Unlike physical objects, there is no disturbing the system when we ponder formal systems. For instance, when we look at an object, we are absorbing photons which bounce off of it, and thus becoming part of the physical system itself, collapsing the quantum waves of the photons, and introducing the act of our observation into the system. But this isn't case for ideal objects. There is no Heisenberg Uncertainty problems from "observing" formal systems. We can apprehend them without altering them.
So there is a sense in which these formal structures exist on a level beyond us, beyond the physical. They were "there" before we discovered them. We don't invent these relations. We track them down. We merely explore them. Sure, we invent conceptual tools to explore them, and symbols to relate them to ourselves, but the numerical difference between 2 and 4 was something that always held even before humans existed to know it.
So they are separate from the physical, distinct from us (i.e. "objective"), And yet we can still reach them. Consciousness bridges the "divide" between the actual and the ideal, between the contingent (i.e. depending upon causal chains) and the necessary (i.e. true regardless of context or conditions). Formal relations aren't effects (nothing causes 2 + 2 to equal 4) and they aren't causes. But consciousness can take those relations and produce effects upon the world. Like architecture. Or science. Or art. We can take our awareness of formal relations and build order in the physical world.
And, in fact, the physical world itself "blindly" follows patterns of the ideal. Matter travels along paths that can be traced with numbers (though not necessarily deterministically--got to remember quantum randomness at the root of everything). So there is a deep, mysterious connection between the actual and the ideal even before we come along to make use of that connection--and embody that connection--with our mind/body connection.
This is what I mean about existence being more than merely physical. It is also ideal or formal. And that ideal/formal isn't merely something we invent, because matter was already following these paths long before we existed. But even if no matter existed at all, even if there was no universe, 2 + 2 would still equal 4. That relation doesn't need a universe, or conscious beings, to be true. Its reality transcends physical existence.
So, back to determinism and freewill . . . since there is a part of the universe (us) which can access the ideal with consciousness, and
intentionally make use of these formal structures (meaning, information, etc.), then we are doing something completely different from unconscious matter. Matter can't manipulate and make use of formal structures, information, and meaning. It merely "blindly" follows formal patterns. But we
can make use of the ideal. And thus we can access a level that is beyond the physical state of the universe, and step out of the chain of cause/effect, and bring the ideal back into the universe in a new way that wouldn't have happened without conscious understanding of abstract, immaterial, ideal objects. Thus, there is no way that could have been programmed into the universe from the beginning.
Joe Biden … putting the Dem in dementia since (at least) 2020.