Ryan,

Free will and determinism are both flawed concepts.

If our decision making process were free of cause, it would be equally free of effect and the essential premise of will is to affect.

The problem of determinism is that we view time narratively, the present moving past to future and project past determination on the future course of events.

The reality though, is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Potential, actual, residual.

So all determination occurs as a function of the input into every event being computed as a function of the physical dynamic of the present. While the process might be set, the input into an event cannot be fully known, before it occurs, as much of it travels at the speed of light and so it is a function of our survival to react to these situations.

One of the arguments for determinism is that our subconscious operates faster than our conscious, cognitive deliberations. Yet as much of reality does occur quickly, often at near the speed of the light by which we perceive it, our reactions have to be similarly fast. So the function of cognition isn’t to react, but to reflect, in order that our future reactions are better informed.

As Alan Watts put it; “The wake doesn’t steer the boat, the boat creates the wake.”

Then the issue of morality; Good and bad are not some cosmic dual between the forces of righteousness and evil, but the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of life. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken and there is no middle ground, other than the energy of the chicken becoming a moment of the fox.

What drives life is desire, while what steers it is judgement. The heart and the head. So the head has to chose among the multitudes of desires, often competing. Such as between short and longer term preferences.

To argue that we evolved this complex brain to navigate our course in life for no real reason has more to do with the frames we apply to human comprehension, than the functioning of nature.

As for money, it is a contract, with one side an asset and the other a debt, but since we experience it as quantified hope, we try saving and storing it, like a commodity. Given the nearly infinite amounts of monetary assets we desire, similar amounts of debt have to be generated. Eventually this becomes unsustainable.

We still have lots to learn.