To address a post I missed, before I get round to newer posts:
The problem is that yes, the steps are as clear as day and I do understand both sides - that’s the whole reason I choose the better one and not the one with internal contradictions. I’m also well aware of Compatibilism, but internal contradictions aren’t dilluted away by compromise. Evolution also shows examples of species going extinct, so this argument from evolution isn’t exactly compelling.
Your attitude sounds like the logical fallacy of “Argument to Moderation”.
Done that, made a whole new original philosophy about it…
Yes, complexity - as has been covered by now - does not yield Free Will. It just means it’s more intellectually demanding to get your head around the deterministic mechanisms that predict complexity. Exploiting the system isn’t breaking the mechanisms, it just means complexity has successfully enabled mechanical manipulation of the mechanisms. This opens up a larger quantity of “things we know how to do within the system”. The layman use of “freedom” is synonymous with this, but it’s a misnomer because you’re still just as bound by the way nature works that can successfully be modelled in terms of rules, which are deterministic. Again, it’s not to say nature has Determinism built into it, I am no Essentialist, all it’s saying is that the authority of the ways in which nature appears to consistently work - in the cases of scientific laws working without exception - map nature with such precision that it may as well be its essence even if it isn’t its essence.
Maybe there will be a next step after Determinism, just like Determinism was the next step after Free Will. No doubt this is why we still have artifacts of its previous reign in our grammar. And to be pedantic, the ocean isn’t blue, it reflects mostly the sky, which is only sometimes blue in accordance with Rayleigh Scattering.
As above, there may very well be a next step, but the one we’re on now that’s up from Free Will, is Determinism. Keeping your backfoot on the lower step sounds more like denial to me. I am biased towards superior ideas, I am afraid, but little else. The whole reason I’ve broken out of a limbo like yours is because I am extremely “self” aware - so much so that the idea of self at all has dissipated away.
Why do you feel the need to assume such negativity in a person who doesn’t think like you? Perhaps you “feel” this is “logical/reasonable” (your words) because you consider yourself to be in such a positive state that can only be reached in the way you’ve reached it. If it’s not the only way then you are fallaciously “affirming the consequent”. Your experience is that most of the time when people dislike religion it’s over fear or ego (pride), which may very well simply be a reflection on the breadth of your inexperience! For example, many people in the modern world simply grow up secularly these days - was their lack of exposure to religion at an early, susceptible and credulous age causing them to not align with religion out of fear or ego (pride)? What about someone who took standards of knowledge seriously - who acquainted themselves with what constitutes knowledge, what the requirements are and what doesn’t pass these requirements? Philosophers ought to be wary of fallacies of questionable cause and improper premise. For example, if you are looking for evidence to support your religion or idea of spirituality, this is circular reasoning: assuming the conclusion. I am well aware of the tendency of the religious and spiritual types to fit evidence to their religion. If you are going to be strict about what constitutes knowledge, you ought to devise controls to isolate specific variables that are causing specific outcomes - you ought to test if what you thought was linked to something quantitatively is linked with more than random chance. Nothing religious or spiritual, however intense and life changing your experiences that you associate with them, turns out to be causal to any extent more than random chance - and this is with people trying their hardest to prove a connection for a very very very long time! Not one has legimitately succeeded. Sure, keep trying - we don’t want to fall for the problem of induction, but it’s worth thinking ruthlessly about what you are testing for when looking for evidence of religious and/or spiritual concepts. How exactly can you test for these things? The only negativity I’ve experienced towards religion/spirituality is how none of it remotely stands up to Epistemological requirements. I was raised around Christian practices, I was interested in Taoism for a few years, tried meditation on many occassions in formative years + would again if I felt like it, experimented with hallcinogenic drugs, I’ve read about a third of the Quran so far - of course I’m still interested in finding something of substance, and by no means am I assuming anything about what I will find even in spite of everything I’ve just said, but do not do not do not assume I’ve not looked hard enough or that I’ve been assuming outcomes in advance. Just because the evidence is all but closed, doesn’t mean my mind isn’t open, and just because I am siding with the overwhelming winner, doesn’t mean I am not looking for contradictory evidence. The only way I can justify being so sure is exactly because I am so open to alternatives - but being open doesn’t mean being accepting without discretion and standards. Saying no after due consideration doesn’t mean prior bias, and it doesn’t make one “negative” as a person.
Continuous experience isn’t “anything”, it just is. Doesn’t mean Free Will is in there somewhere, Free Will is just a model in terms of Discrete Experience much like Determinism, but older and far less refined. You can interpret Continuous Experience in terms of Discrete Experience in line with Free Will all you like, you’re just doing a crappy job compared to advanced evolutions beyond this, like Determinism.
Whether the universe is open, closed or flat is hardly as clear cut as you’re making out here. You shouldn’t proclaim to know these things with such certainty when even the best minds in physics are so far from confirming anything - as far as I know at least. Perhaps you’re on top of these issues or secretly at the cutting edge of research here in which case please enlighten us! I don’t want to assume but I have a good idea that you’re simply assuming.
Then you won’t mind if I too laugh at you for thinking I’m saying we’re not more complex than a cell or simple neuron. There’s a hell of a lot of these things, and their connections with each other outnumber atoms in the universe - and yet they all individually work very simply. They either fire or don’t, subject to deterministic conditions, it’s just keeping track of the sheer number of them that’s the current barrier to reading brains like computer bits. But the size of a problem doesn’t change the fact that it’s all based on extremely simple, understandable mechanisms. It only results in such a compelling outcome because of quantity. Again: quantity/complexity doesn’t yield “Free Will”.
“Confined” by Determinism? I’ll say it again, it’s not Determinism that confines, it’s Determinism that describes the confines of nature - and what is not confined by the four fundamental forces? Even consciousness relies on them by way of the neurons that don’t fire resulting in no conscioiusness. We aren’t any more free from the four fundamental forces now we know what they are and now we can use them to our own advantage, we just have more tools in our Deterministic toolkit. That doesn’t make free, it just gives more options, which is only mistakenly thought of as synonymous because the ways of nature remain - that we are not free from.
“Were you there?” May I laugh one more time? The only way we have to know what happened in the past, or what will happen in the future is Determinism. We know it works because of relentless testing and attempts to find contrary evidence and grounds to discredit theories - this is the scientific method. How can you predict the weather on the other side of the earth when you aren’t there? Determinism. Were you there when they elected a leader in another country? How do you know they did? Are you ever in the future when you predict a ball is going to bounce off a wall that you’re throwing it at? How can you know if you don’t live in the future? Nuff said. Don’t go all Creationist or Flat-Earther on me. The thing about science is that you can test Determinism yourself! I know you’re a nice, well-adjusted gentleman who accepts both sides of the argument, but just there it sounded a lot like you were casting unreasonable doubt on Determinism - not that it’s necessarily impossible that the four fundamental forces will change in the next second but y’know… I’ll take my chances. Again - I’m not being absolutist, but relativism can tend towards the absolute pretty far in certain cases! But we can know that any doubt won’t be replaced by contradictary ideas by means of logic. Perhaps the prevalence of logic will disappear in the next second as well?