This post is based on a comment I made to an article by a philosophy professor ( https://steemit.com/philo/@spetey/why-we-don-t-have-the-controversial-kind-of-free-will-why-it-s-okay-and-why-it-s-important-part-2-of-2) and said professor is a materialist who believes free will does not exist, humans only experience the illusion of it. He mentioned a comment I made on his part 1 of 2 article by including a portion of it in his part 2 of 2 article. He thought I said we need to believe in free will because otherwise we'd be sad... which is not at all what I meant so I clarified and expanded. Enjoy!
It is most certainly true that there can be no actual meaning to any part of reality in a determined universe. So one may declare all of the universe to be determined and at the same time "choose" (sic) to feel like there is meaning anyway but that would not be the same as the universe or any life within it *actually* possessing meaning. On a deterministic view it cannot and most sentences become absurd when they attempt to persuade, speak of moral responsibility or use words like "should" and "ought" or "deserved" or "earned". Determinism makes those words bereft of any meaning because all things just **ARE**, all the time and always, and they could not be any other way.
As Nancy Pearcy has written,
“Adherents of scientific naturalism freely acknowledge that in ordinary life they have to switch to a different paradigm. That ought to tell them something. After all, the purpose of a worldview is to explain the world—and if it fails to explain some part of the world, then there’s something wrong with that worldview. …
Since their metaphysical beliefs do not fit the world, their lives will be more or less inconsistent with those beliefs. Living in the real world requires them to function in ways that are not supported by their worldview…
The things that matter most in life, that are necessary for a humane society -- ideals like moral freedom, human dignity, even loving our own children -- have been reduced to nothing but useful fictions. They are tossed into the upper story, which becomes a convenient dumping ground for anything that a materialist paradigm cannot explain.”
If you are a materialist, I can understand why you might believe that it has been discovered that we are not free in any sense but the latest science actually says otherwise. The info-theoretic/digital physics interpretation which has emerged as a result of decades of experiments in quantum mechanics specifically contradicts physical realism and locality (eg. http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.05949 ). An experiment from Anton Zeilinger et all in 2012:
"No naive realistic picture is compatible with our results because whether a quantum could be seen as showing particle- or wave-like behavior would depend on a causally disconnected choice. It is therefore suggestive to abandon such pictures altogether." ( http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.6578 )
And, given everything we know of quantum gravity, spacetime is emergent from information and physical reality is holographic in nature. See people like Seth Lloyd, Fotini Markopoulou, Ed Fredkin, Herman and Erik Verlinde, and Leonard Susskind to name a few. They represent the consensus position and all quantum gravity research to speak of currently is going into emergent spacetime, where spacetime emerges from patterns of entangled quantum information.
Which is all to say that materialism has been falsified - by physicists - and so has deterministic causality. Looks like there is room for free will after all :)
Since my interests tend more toward philosophy, however, I find the Introspective Argument alone sufficient to reject materialism ( http://blog.proof.directory/2014/05/25/introspective-argument/ ) while the science is supportive.
Have you listened to the oxford lectures on philosophy of mind or process ontology at all? They have been very thought provoking for me. I'm really enjoying one that just came out called "Causation".
Not yet but thank you for that recommend; I'll check it out!
The burden is on determinists to show that this sense of free will we all intuitively have is false.
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/free_will_theorem.html