Lorraine,
I happened upon a conversation you were having with Carlo Rovelli, in his thread and I wasn't quite sure whether you were arguing for or against "free will," so I thought I'd get around to reading your entry to understand your position. It seems that by your concluding statement, it is more of a question you are asking, then a particular position you have taken.
May I offer a few insights and speculation on the general topic?
For one thing, "free will" is a bit of an oxymoron. To will is to determine. We don't go to the effort of distinguishing between positive and negative choices in order to randomly select. Our selves and our decision making processes are part of the larger reality that both affects us and we affect in turn.
This goes to a point I keep making here, the subject of my last year's entry, that time is not so much a vector from past to future, but the process by which future potential become past circumstance. For example, does the earth really travel some dimension from yesterday to tomorrow, or does tomorrow become yesterday because the earth rotates?
This makes time an effect of action, similar to temperature. Time is to temperature what frequency is to amplitude.
Thermodynamic activity creates the effect of temperature and temperature is a measure of thermodynamic activity, as change creates time and time is a measure of change.
The problem here is that narrative and cause and effect logic emerge from the sequential effect of time, so we tend to view this vector of events as foundational, but sequence and cause and effect are not the same thing. Yesterday doesn't cause today, anymore than one rung on a ladder causes the next. Cause and effect is a function of energy exchange, ie. the sun radiating on a rotating planet creates this sequence of events we call days. So our start/stop measures of sequence are no more foundational than the level of a thermometer on a hot day. Duration is not some vector along which the point of the present moves, but is the dynamic action occurring between points of measure, like the wave cycling between peaks.
So this issue of free will is based on the notion we are traveling along a narrative vector and as all prior events seemed to coalesce in a deterministic fashion, doesn't it logically follow that all subsequent events will do so as well and doesn't this then mean that all of time must necessarily follow a singular course?
As I point out, that narrative sequence is emergent. Past and future do not physically/ontologically exist, so it is difficult to assign "carved in stone" status to something which doesn't even physically exist. As you point out in your essay, all information is subject to perspective, so even when these events are actually occurring, it is difficult to actually assign objectivity to them, so when they are past as well, perspective continues to evolve, so this is compounded. All we can really say is that "something happened."
Now what does happen is determined by laws of nature, or they wouldn't be laws, so it can be said that what does happen is determined, but the actual input into any event cannot be fully known prior to that event, as the total input only arrives at the moment of occurrence. Prior knowledge of this input would require faster than light transmission of the information and if that were possible, than input could take a similar route and the problem would only repeat itself.
So there is no frame in which the input into future events can be known. Is it possible there is some "God's eye view," that could "know" where everything is and thus all outcomes?
The fallacy there is that an ideal is not an absolute. Our concept of Gods, platonic models, unified field theories, etc. is the ideal. That perfect formulation that explains all. Yet an absolute is a universal state and the problem with a universal state is that it irons out all detail and complexity, which as you pointed out, are subjective. There can be no differences, distinctions, gradients, etc. in an absolute state. Like the temperature of absolute zero, it is completely static and unchanging.
This can be either end of the spectrum, as nothing, the absolute zero, or as everything, infinity, where everything cancels out into fathomless white noise. What we experience inbetween those parameters is relational and subjective.
Regards,
John Merryman