What confuses the issue is that as mobile creatures, with a sequential process of perception, in order to navigate and a narrative based culture, we assume time to be the point of the present, moving past to future. The reality is that change turns future to past. tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
Which means there is only this physical state, referred to as the present. There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
The premise of determinism is that since cause leads to effect, it is assumed that all subsequent events, from some initial state, are effectively predetermined by this chain of events.
Yet what is taken for granted is that what yields the cause is a process of calculating the input into an event, but that process only happens as the activity manifesting this physical present. Events are first in the present, then in the past.
As Alan Watts put it, the wake doesn’t steer the boat, the boat creates the wake.
Whether or not the laws determining the outcome are absolute, if the input cannot be known, neither can the output. Since much of this input is occurring at the speed of light, this is impossible.
One could postulate an external frame of reference, in which all is known, but that also doesn’t stand up to logic, as any frame is a finite set extracted from an infinite reality, so the odds of unpredicted input are never zero.
As for free will, it is an oxymoron, as a will free of cause would be equally free of effect and the premise of will is to affect. We are part of nature’s process of selection.
As for consciousness, as the present is the energy manifesting it, this energy is the process which goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.
As consciousness goes past to future, while the thoughts and feelings expressed go future to past.
Which suggests consciousness functions as a form of energy.
As these biological organisms, we have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, while the central nervous system sorts through the forms, internal and external. Motor and steering.
So while thought might be a function of the head, actual consciousness might be considered more of a fire within, constantly seeking fuel to burn, literally and figuratively. The gut and heart.
Which makes us that tension between the anarchy of desire and the tyranny of judgement. The energy radiating out, as forms coalesce in.
Society is that tension, between the organic energies driving it and the cultural and civil forms it evolves. Youth and age, liberal and conservative.
Even galaxies are energy radiating out, as mass coaleces in.
As for morality, good and bad are assumed to be the ultimate deciding factor, but they are actually the elementary biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of life. Even bacteria sense this dichotomy.
Like computer programs, all the higher order social and emotional attainments, such as honor, love, trust, respect, responsibility, etc, as well as the negatives, are complex interactions along this spectrum. As all the colors of the spectrum are between light and dark.
So that when conflicts arise, rather than each side being able to expect the other to hold to higher evolved standards of social development and potentially seeing such conflicts as opportunities to further evolve, it becomes a race tot eh bottom, of us versus them, good, versus bad. Not seeing that those on the other side of the debate are simply other pats of a larger social dynamic, of expansion and consolidation.
The problem remains that we want our cake and eat it too. Both the ideal and the transcendence.
