Rough Beast: Free Won't:: OMG 1.0

What can be told about Jehovah's purpose for me? Did he discuss this with Zoraster and Odin? When as it Bob Dylan's will that the little steel needle followed the path that he had planned for it on my 45rpm version of Like A Rolling Stone? Did this media delivery system have free will -or- was the outcome predestined? Was he went electric? Some things obviously confuse even the Lord of Hosts (that is the war-god persona Yahweh-Jehovah-Elohim-Sophia-Skyfather-Allah aka Back Heaven Boys aka the God Pack)

~~Most, if not all~~ Some Supernaturalists (animists, pantheists, Yahweh-ists, Jehovah-ist, Elohim-ists,..., Allah-ists) can be characterized as pre-rational or pre-cognitive and mighty incurious about the natural world. Faith does not explain - faith ends inquiry. Thor said it, I believe it, that's final. Religions and superstitions may stem from the brain's ability to spot patterns and intent - many times resulting in mistaken attribution of intent or agency. Squeaky doors are ghosts, squirrels on the roof are dragons, etc. In other words, the beliefs are simply 'just so stories' propped up by cognitive bias, motivated reasoning and woolgathering. Thor hovered over my house last night flinging lightening bolts - I was there and I know Thor better than you do. He lives in my heart still.

What sensible thought can I think about determinism? How about looking at causes and conditions.

Unmotivated Belief
~~Most if not all~~ Some Christians I have met are unaware that Calvinist predestination suffuses Fundamentalist and Evangelical belief. They do not understand why they believe what they understand as belief. These supernaturalist do not want to break the spell.

Jean Calvin, following the dictates of madness, preached double predestination - the Lord God of Hosts has chosen at the beginning of time (sic) a vanishingly small cadre (120,000 proto-angels) of the elect that will definitely rise to heaven. No one outside of the elect - not even through grace, luck, proper living or guile - will go to heaven. The union of the two sets is the null set. The motivation to believe that I am personally saved takes on an air of urgency since I am either

a) obviously successfully pious and rightly blessed or
b) screwed.

Uncle Manut is Coming to Stay for a Month

Multiple Universes from Multiple Determinisms

This is determinism the first - the most consistently prosaic and incomprehensible form of determinism. I have illustrated above in the snap shot of God I took on my summer vacation with the voice of the Lord added for the lulz. This is the root of the 'everything happens for a reason' school of determinism. The glaring paradox of unimpeded and autonomous free will that somehow gives this believer a confirming emotional state that passes for an actual choice of actions, behaviors and speech production can change fate while at the same time preserving predestined fate. Praise God from whom all blessings flow. I cannot even finish this explanation without a spit take.

Network of Causation

Determinism the second - or the determinism of Pierre Laplace is an improvement of the prosaic muddle of determinism the first. In this schematic, a daemon or imaginary referee of all action and reaction, tracks every atom at every time and every place. This is the tick-tock universe of Newton and any future or any past can be accessed by "running the clock" forward or back. This is the Tivo universe. Record you life for playback after your racket ball tournament. Einstein, Bohr, Schrodinger, and especially Heisenberg demolished this in the same manner that introduction to logic and the scientific method destroys determinism the first. Since this is the most rudimentary version of determinism, or the determinism grokable by the masses of human minds, the bald fact that people hold this view while at the same time having a subjective mental state 'I can do whatever I want" is unmotivated. To add insult to ignorance, most people actually report a subjective mental state of 'I can do what I want while at the same time I can only do what Zoroaster intends' is a category error conflating dinosaurs and Louis Vuitton luggage. Correlation rises like the mists to Causation in this illogical pretzel of confusion.

Trajectories produce Collisions

Determinism the third is the last straw man standing at this point. Dan Dennett in several books but most notably Freedom Evolves, describes a defensible, updated deterministic universe. In this deterministic universe each effect depends upon a notion of determined trajectories (the domino falls forward (the vector of the trajectory is forward w.r.t. the dots on the face of the domino) as the domino in back falls against it (the vector of the trajectory is in nearly the same direction). These two objects may collide with many other determined trajectories. Perforce, each trajectory emerges from each collision on 'another' trajectory - not trajectory in a crowded rank of dominoes lasts forever since everything in the real world collides with something sooner or later.

Dennett's tableau posits a continuing reassessment of my personal determined outcomes with shared or multiplexed cognition - the wisdom of my crowd of friends. By discussing my next move with other people with whom I share knowledge, ideas and intentions I 'simulate' with foresight borne of experience of a crowd of plausible next moves in design space (the design stance) or prosaically - what will most likely happen next. I can choose to take my planned action (in which case I have acted from conditioned experience) or I can resist my impulse to act "like I want to" (free won't). This is an example of the intentional stance. I can behave 'as if' a meat puppet like me would plausibly act as a skin job with intention. But that is only a comforting 'just so story' about free will in a deterministic universe. Life is just one damn thing after another.

Julia Set

Determinism the fourth comes from chaos and complexity theory. This theory confirms or encapsulates almost all of our observations about the world. BTW - God is never observable so this eliminates any "I feel the hand of providence in my boxer shorts" foolishness. The theory states that the material world emerges from very simple rules that all natural processes follow. I this sense the universe is determined or instructed or simulated via incremental adjustments. As Benoit Mandelbrot wrote -
$f_c(z) = z^2 + c\,$

Where Z0 (zee zero) is a point in the complex plane (x=real, y=imaginary) that represents a starting point or first position. If Zn (the n-th version of the algorithm) never 'ends up' far away from Z0, that point in the complex plane where the series of points Z1, Z2, Z3, ...Zn 'stays close' to the initial point, Z0. Any Zn behaving thusly over time is a member of the Mandelbrot Set. This is the kind of determinism we can use. Notably three of the most astute philosophers of science and math (Mandelbrot, Prigogine and Wolfram) content that where "I end up" comes from pruning rules. This says that I can't go across the room without moving - that option is pruned from the list of things I can actually do. There is not a possible world I can try on where a change of position can be pulled off without motion.

According to Asimov
The thinkers that came up with determinism the second were wrong. The philosophers that came up with determinism the third were wrong. But if you thing that they were both equally wrong you are more wrong than both camps. [ed. I am slightly disrespecting Popper and his Open Universe but that's how I roll]