What if both determinism and free will are wrong?

The problem is that as mobile creatures with a sequential process of perception and a narrative based culture, we model time as 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. Potential, actual, residual.

There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, sound. Think frequency and amplitude. Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but we don’t call them the 5th and 6th dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, not the sequence of thought.

Time is asymmetric because it is a measure of action and action is inertial. The earth only turns one direction. Entropy is a second order effect and is not what is measured.

Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism.

The premise of determinism is based on the fact that a given cause yields a given effect, but the process has to occur, in order for this is to be determined and the process only occurs as this state we refer to as the present. The input into a particular event has to be known to compute the output and knowing this beforehand requires a point of view that is outside reality, since much of this input travels at the speed of light. As a frame of reference is a distillation, a map, of the larger reality, there is no “outside” point of view.

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

As for free will, a will free of cause would be equally free of effect and the entire premise of will is to affect. We are part of nature’s process of selection.