@TuringEquivalent,
Quote:It seems sort of contradictory that our choices matter, and we have responsibility when our actions are predetermined...
Something else is making choices for me, ergo meaninglessness? If a terrorist were holding a gun to my head, it's still the workings within me that have to figure-out that I even need to comply, a mannequin isn't going to care squat. The past events and conceptions stored in my head that are involved in determining the choice still pertain to me, they are not a stash in the bloody surroundings being beamed to my brain by Mastermind (Universe / Multi-Universe).
The rest of the cosmos, or the supposed lawful generalizations it is so devoutly conforming to without a single anomalous event ever occurring, seems to be a pretty wimpy heteronomous agency. It needs a functioning body to evolve that can actually perform its own perceiving, understanding, and judgement making -- since nature at large is so intellectually vacant and devoid of motives and direct ability for literally pulling the strings of real puppets incapable of autonomous operation. If the working body scheme/template of John-X, and his past states or the current state determines what he is going to do next with the information his senses receive, then that is still that distinct system or continuing process called John-X (past, present, and future) making his conclusions / choices and participating in his own understanding of life.
It's remarkable that most naturalists probably agree that the general pattern of being a universe (or even multi-universe) is unconscious, without design/purpose, and stupider (in human terms) than a roll of **** standing on a rock in the midday sun. Yet at the same time many of them are hell-bent on hiking their arses up and believing that this vast spatiotemporal Other that they're embedded in is spearing their GI tract and bobbing them about like a hot-dog at the end of a stick. No decision is their own, it's instead the Blind Overarching Natural Dumbass manipulating them about, a stone's toss away from bygone ventriloquist dummy Moses sitting in old Abrahamic God's lap, guiding the Hebrew tribes.