Great article on an interesting subject.
I have always been confused by the presentation of free will and determinism as mutually exclusive. Here is how I think about it:
A group of people makes a decision. This decision is 100% determined by the votes of each member. It is therefore totally deterministic. But does the group also have free will? Of course it does, because the group is its members and can choose as it collectively wishes.
I think you're talking about the emergent properties of large groups of autonomous actors. That's definitely an interesting perspective. Does a cell "choose" to function as it does? Does a neuron "choose" to fire? And yet, what we call consciousness is just an emergent property of various aspects of our brain. When we better understanding the brain, I think we'll better understand consciousness and ourselves.
This goes back to my explanation of what I tend to believe the 4th dimension is - which is the simultaneous existence in 4D space of all events that occur in 3D space from the birth to the death of the universe. If in fact that IS how it is, then all events have already been determined. We simply haven't gotten to the end yet. Very much like watching a movie for the first time - the end of the movie is already there on the reel. We just need to wait for it.
(source: wikipedia)
The tesseract confuses me because it doesn't resemble what my mind envisions the 4th dimension to look like. A geometric shape doesn't seem to do the concept justice or portray it in a way which us mere mortals can understand it.
In fact, I think photographs are capable of encapsulating it better, if not imperfectly.
These traffic lights are an example:
Having said that, if the dimensions stop at 4, then we have no free will.
For free will to exist, we need more dimensions, which would provide more "movie reels", each one with a different ending.
Terence McKenna used to talk about this thing when referring to chaos, which is that out of all possible occurrences, only one in each situation will happen, undergoing what he called "the formality of actually occurring". When we look at the future, all possibilities for any given scenario lie ahead on all the "movie reels" (possible realities). But when an outcome is chosen (by free will), that is the one that gets solidified in stone (the past). In other words, the future looks like a tree with each branch representing possible outcomes, while the past looks like the tree's trunk - a single stream of events that underwent the formality of occurring.
You talking multiverse theory now?
And yes, I agree about the tesseract but I figured this comment thread needed a kickass animation. :)
No reply button for you. I think after nesting replies more than 5 times it disappears.
Yes, multi-verse theory. Except that in contrast to the idea that the universe simply exists in a bubble that is adjacent to other bubbles with their own universe inside them, the future would simply be a combination of all of those universes existing on top of one another, and is funneled down to one determined outcome when that present moment arrives to make it happen before it becomes a permanent fixture in what would be called the past. This is partly why I don't think time travel can ever be possible if reality is constructed this way. The past is the past - it can't be changed. It's in stone, essentially. And the future - well...if the future contains all possible outcomes, where are you going to travel to? Any future you go to, you can't really say anything about it when you come back to the present to tell anyone because there's no guarantee that where you went is going to be where we actually end up. In fact, the simple fact that you traveled to the future could be what determines which future you arrive at. So it's fruitless.
I just wrote a short story that's sort of about this multi-verse topic https://steemit.com/fiction/@dcsignals/a-wormhole-on-the-war-in-heaven