[INDENT]The possible choices I have on my menu before me still exist and I will still choose of my own accord, I'm simply not aware of the near-infinite variables involved that will lead me to that decision. This doesn't mean I don't have a choice; Even if I could know all the variables that'll ultimately lead me to that decision, I'd still have a choice. Despite how it 'feels', these aren't mutually-exclusive.
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Ummm no? If the variables lead you to the choice you have no choice or else the variables didn't lead you to that choice. If you still have a choice you can not have calculated the variables correctly.

It is not that you are predicting. You are calculating. If EVERYTHING is put into the massive equation there is only ONE final out come. You can't add 2+2 and get 7. You will always get 4. When you calculate everything you don't end up with 2 choices at the end of your calculation or you seriously messed up. Or are you saying that you calculate everything to one response and then choose something else? Well then again you messed up your calculations.

Here's my qualifier and what I think is the Key: We can't know all the variables involved in events, actions or decisions; there's simply too much to take into account - too much to weigh. As you mentioned with your electron-predictability point, there are some aspects of physics we simply can't predict. This does not invalidate the cause-and-effect principle at all, it simply says we haven't the means by which to exploit it to its logical permutation.

My own current thinking is that there are no particles, because the universe is fundamentally an indivisible whole. There are no individual objects, there are also no individual events, and therefore ultimately no causation, all these things are extremely useful fictions, partial descriptions of aspects of the universe as we experience them. If our experience was removed from the picture, the universe would be a very different thing, and we find it difficult to appreciate how different.

Well your view that there are no particles is not one held by most scientists, so I will have to go along with them. It is hard to see why the postulation of particles would be so useful unless it was true.

I think anyone who accepts QM has already accepted that the universe is very different to our experience of it. I'm not sure, though, how those experiences would arise out of your indivisible universe theory. My experiences are not your experiences, and yet both exist in the universe. If the universe is indivisible, why do our experiences seem utterly separated?

My suggestion is that particles are a very useful fiction. The universe is actually indivisible, but we have the ability to make countless artificial distinctions. I think this is initially a passive ability, I think it comes to us as a consequence of consciousness, but higher animals can also actively exploit it. All objects are fictional in this sense, but the fictions are so useful and so densely woven into our existence that we are inclined to assume they are "true".

I find it interesting that scientists and others want to defend the existence of particles, even when the entities in their theories don't seem to have the qualities of particles as we think of them in everyday life. They are wave/particles. Bones-O, if I remember rightly, said he thinks they are more like waves than some other physicists think (I speak very loosely). Some theories talk about wavicles, or strings, and then there are ideas about distant events being linked at this particulate level. Do scientists really believe in particles at all?

Some of the leading scientists in the current paradigm are searching for the fundamental particle: what if there isn't one? If the universe is fundamentally just one thing, we could find smaller and smaller effects at a smaller and smaller scale, ad infinitum.

One of our experiences is the experience of being an individual persisting over time. You're right, our experiences are separated, nobody else could have my childhood memories, even if I lost them.

By the way, it was a just flippant comment that you're taking waaaaay too seriously. But I can defend it if you want me to, if it's really, really important to you personally. :a-ok:

No one can experience the things that led to you having memories in your mind just because they are connected to you, we are all still separate entities, but we are all still connected, like sub-systems in this whole, indivisible, universal system.

Hi Ghost,
How are our experiences connected?

No no, that won't be necessary or useful, I just won't take what you say seriously in future.

Could you possibly enlarge on this? I don't really understand how the breakdown of determinism is affected in this way. I probably lack the background so any pointers would be very gratefully accepted.

I hope that explains it well enough.

Something hit me when you said, "there's simply too much to take into account - too much to weigh", I thought about chaos theory, and it's assumption that when a system reaches a certain level of complexity, it breaks into total, probabilistic, uncertain and undeterministic chaos. The results of a system are chaotic, even if we do know all the variables involved in the events, actions or decisions, we simply can't predict the outcome. Now, I postulate, that we do in fact have free-will, and it is because the amount of variables involved in our decisions, make it so complex that it is extremely chaotic, undeterministic, and unpredictable, therefor, there is no causality and no underlying factor that can be used to state we have no free-will. We are simply so complex, our decisions are our own, and no one, no matter how much they know about us, will be able to predict exactly what we will do next.

... my best guess is that consciousness is an emergent process that appears due to the complex web of interactions of lower-level emergent processes in the brain, which in turn appear due to the complex web of interactions of even lower-level emergent processes - an emergent chain which you can trace all the way down to an emergent process that appears due to a complex web of chemical interactions: life ... and just like the emergent process of life, there is an element of feedback ("downward causation", if you will) where these emergent processes constrain the interactions of the lower-level entities from which they appear in a self-sustaining cycle ... for the emergent process of life, we call this self-sustaining downward causation "autopoiesis"; and if consciousness is indeed an emergent process, do we call this self-sustaining downward causation "conscious will"?