The most irritating thing about self professed determinists is their ignorance of determinism. Why dont you read up about this stuff? You really aren't saying anything coherent.

Let me ask you then, what is the different between something that is alive and something that's dead? Is there a difference?

Of course it is! It's mathematically well defined.

Omnipotence is needed to escape the causal laws of the universe.

There are no causal laws to escape. There are only true statements and true statements don't force anything to happen.

choice is only a conception. You only every do one thing. There's only 1 past, stands to reason there will only be 1 future, since the future is nothing more than the past as yet to come.

Buridan's ass would seem to suggest that we are never truly faced with an "equal" choice to make would it not?

There are no causal laws to escape. There are only true statements and true statements don't force anything to happen.

Maybe it all works something like a river, time ,space, life, all flowing to an inevitable end. We are ,apparently, able to swim against the current.The overwhelming force of the whole always flows to the sea, no matter how many canyons are cut, or dams built. Our free will does not extend farther than our position in the river of time and space.

There are no causal laws to escape. There are only true statements and true statements don't force anything to happen.

I think this is, in fact, the crux of this and many other issues in philosophy: e pluribus unum.

Is time atomic or continuous?

If we don't take note of the issue of perspective, we're apt to miss something about either line of reasoning.

An example of it is this: when I ask for ultimate cause... cause of the universe, I'm answered by a call to examine the idea of the universe. Cause in this case would represent a widening of understanding to relate the universe to something else. If universe means everything, how could there be something else?

That's great, except for one thing. When I asked for cause, I'm not the one who initiated the widening of understanding. Whoever came up with the idea of the universe did. To comprehend the idea of the ultimate all, I have to have a vantage point on all. When you say universe, you have positioned yourself at some place other than the universe.

No matter how wonderful the logic between that point and concluding that there can't be anything other than the ultimate all, I still contradicted myself. If there is nothing other than all, then what about this separation between me and the universe that must be in order for me to talk about the universe? Did I just equate myself with nothing? A little Descartes, please.

Apparently all must be understood to be existent relative to its opposite: the particular. That's why you can't come down finally on either side of continuity vs. discontinuity. I think we have to make room for both. I think free will is going to draw heavily from the idea of discontinuity of time, since it has each event arising from some vaporous realm of possibility.

Is this way of looking at it going to make a case for free will, though?

There are causal laws... All of the interactions with matter attest to this.

I agree with that, but I don't think that implies that causal laws are not physically necessary.

I haven't really made a case for freewill at all. I'm simply getting rid of a tired argument that most people think shows we don't have freewill. There's still a lot of work to be done actually accounting for freewill, if that's even possible. For all I know, someone could make an argument against freewill using only the regularist account of the laws of nature.



Right but we don't need to escape them because they don't control us. They are true statements, nothing more.



Please show me how any true statement can make something physically necessary (without invoking the modal fallacy if you don't mind).

It isnt about controlling because there is only one possibility of reality.

What's the basis of this statement?

I NEVER said they directly control anything by the mere fact that you acknowledge they are true means you have to also acknowledge the fact that everything is predetermined because as you have admitted they are TRUE.

It's the case that these laws are the true because reality is the way it is.

It's not the case that reality is the way it is because these laws are true.

Read my first post in this thread again starting at the part about logical determinism.

I disagree. The laws of the universe are what define it. To say that reality gives the laws meaning is to give reality such an incredibly broad definition, that the word becomes useless.

I see your argument as akin to saying that the parts of my body don't make up my body but that my body exists and therefore the parts of the body exist. This makes NO sense.

So, you don't think the statement "the cat is on the mat" is true if and only if the cat is on the mat? You think that the cat is on the mat because the statement "the cat is on the mat" is true? That seems absurd.



I agree that what you're saying makes no sense but I don't see the analogy between what you're saying and what I'm saying.

The laws and energy/matter exist and this is what defines reality.

What defines the laws? Why do you think that laws can pop out of nothing but reality can't? Why aren't the laws part of reality?

And what defines the laws is simply how the interactions take place, what those interactions are, to what extent they take place.