Michael,

My argument against both sides of the debate goes to our understanding of time. As these mobile organisms, with a sequential process of perception and a narrative based culture, we think of time as the point of the present, moving past to future, but the reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

So there is just this physical state we refer to as the present.

The premise of determinism is that as cause yields effect, the entire course of time is effectively set by the initial conditions.

Yet the fact of determining the outcome of any input is a function of computing that input and that only occurs as the present. 1+1=2, but the operation is a verb. The process has to occur. Otherwise nothing is determined.

Every part of our being, mental, physical, emotional and any combination therof is part of the input. Which goes to the issue of "free will." What is the will supposed to be free of? Cause? If so, than it would be equally free of effect and the premise of will is to affect. We are a small part of nature's process of selection.

As Alan Watts put it, "The wake doesn't steer the boat, the boat creates the wake." Events are first in the present, then in the past.

As for the formal physics, given the field still models time narratively, much as epicycles modeled the earth at the center, that is a much more complex discussion, with much credentialism posing as authority, but there are no multiworlds, even if each of us is a unique point of view. The function and consequence of form and information, is distinction. What is and what is not. What defines, also limits, as what limits, defines. It's like language. There might be a fair number of general rules and quite a few variables, without total clarity as to which is which, but it does ebb and flow as necessary.

There is no form and thus no rules in the void, so both emerge and evolve as one. As the physical reality grows overly complex and often contradictory, it tends then to collapse and coalesce back to a more stable state, then grow out again. “Reset.”

One wonders if the same applies to the rules? Currently math based physics seems to be conjuring up a fair number of conceptual unicorns and dragons. What will stick to the wall and what won't?

Time will tell. The dustbin is never empty.