Massimo,
What if both free will and determinism are logically flawed?
If will were free of cause, wouldn't it consequently be free of effect and isn't the entire premise of will to affect? We are part of nature's process of selection.
As for determinism, it is based on causality, but what is causality? Being mobile organisms with a sequential process of perception, we think of event A being the cause of event B. Yet our perception of sequence is emergent. Yesterday doesn't cause today. The sun shining on a spinning planet creates this cyclical effect of days and nights. It is a physical dynamic by which the total input into an event is only computed by the occurrence of the event.
As Alan Watts put it, "The wake doesn't steer the boat, the boat creates the wake."
There is only this physical state we refer to as the present and it is manifest by a bunch of energy flowing around, changing form. Potential to actual to residual.
There is no "dimension" of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
That our mental processes evolved as a function of navigating our environment, sorting and judging the context, in order to make decisions about what to do, it is both necessary and intuitive to project out consequences, in order to learn, but that temporal dimension is emergent from our biological function. The future isn't determined, because it hasn't been computed and only the physical process does the computing.
The problem is when we begin to see the lessons we learn, especially as large, old cultures, as rules that can only be followed, thus religions, rather than as tools to improve future decision making. We try to eliminate the need to decide, exactly because it is messy and unpredictable. We love order.
It pretty much goes to the essential process of life, as each generation provides the foundation for the next, shaping the world in which further growth becomes defined. Yet occasionally these old forms no longer suffice to explain and sustain the culture for the next generation, creating a reaction to the old, rather than a continuation of it.
That our leading thinkers see this process through the lens of hard determinism is an example of the rules becoming more authoritative than logical.
Determination is emergent from the process, not the other way around.
Not that this will break through that hard crust of academic discourse, but nothing, not even our most cherished assumptions, are immortal.
Angels dancing on the head of a pin.
