somehow you infered that from something i’ve said, which is fine, but that doesn’t at all characterize what i mean by ‘freewill’. i couldn’t mean that, in fact, because even if a decision is free from physical, causal constraints, it still doesn’t happen ‘independently from what happened in the past.’ the order and connection of ideas is still there and decisions don’t spring spontaneously from nothing.
what i do mean by ‘freewill’ is stated a few times throughout this thread and elsewhere. it is a metaphysical theory dealing with what kinds of causes exist as what kind of substances; fundamentally it is a critique of the classical cartesian ‘second-substance’ theory that posits a second, immaterial substance that both acts as a causal property while also transcending (not being effected by) material causes.
following spinoza’s line of reasoning i would dispute this claim on the following grounds: there cannot be events that are not attributes of the same substance as all other events. that is to say, there can’t be some events that are not effects of antecedent causes while some other events are. this would mean there are two different kinds of events, which would mean there are two different kinds of substances… which would mean there are two kinds of causality.
i was thinking about this on the drive home - and that is indeed part of the main premises of hard-determinism - and i had a eureka moment.
if proof for determinism lies in the ability to predict furture events (provided one has omniscient knowledge of every entity of being, its precise location, its precise motion, etc., before a future event occurs), it would be fallible for this reason; the universe could very well be indeterminate, but events could still proceed in perfect correspondence to their predictions by accident, thereby leading the predictor to believe his prediction was accurate and his knowledge of antecedent causes, complete. see what i mean? predictability cannot be a proof of determinism. for all one knows, there may be no causation, and events happened to fall randomly into succession that one happened to guess right.
please edit the wikipedia page and add this remarkable insight of mine to the controversy/criticism section.
no. i believe hume was correct in saying that determinism cannot be proven a posteriori, and predictability lends no strength to the thesis.
this might be what’s confusing you. there is no cartesian space in which causation is suspended. no ‘inside’ the head and ‘outside’ in the world.
and this argument has everything to do with what we call the ‘subject’. what we mean by that word makes every bit of difference in what the thesis of freewill means.
freewill proponents often confuse the fact that the body is a determining force - that it participates in creating effects - with the idea that there is some ‘self’ in there making the body move. the ‘self’ is a peculiar neurological loop originating during a time lapse in the nervous system. it is an epiphenomenal product, not a cause.
all this metaphysical talk aside, i’m perfectly cool with talk or freewill in ordinary, non-technical terms. it’s just the philosophy of freewill that’s nonsense, not the ordinary uses we make of the word.