A friend of mine has started a blog (separate from his personal one) to explore philosophy and get some of his interpretations gathered into one place. The few posts that he has made already have made me aware of my own philosophical shortcomings: namely, I really don't know what I believe. I've responded deeply to philosophical questions that have passed me by – but I've never sought said questions (nor possible answers), and my positions have not been consistent with themselves. I don't know if I can fix this without dedicating significant portions of my spare time – but maybe uneducated responses to my friend's blog entries will help. So my first helping to pop philosophy: free will versus predestination.
When I hit Wikipedia, (the source of all modern knowledge), I immediately see the issue unfold into several facets. Determinism versus indeterminism, compatibilism versus incompatibilism – there is a lot there to absorb. I don't want to spend all night drawing up charts of pros and cons of varying viewpoints, (and forming additional assertions about them) – heck, a learned man could spend his whole life on it and not come out any the wiser, (since this is one of the oldest questions of human philosophy.)
To me, this comes down to a question of human consciousness. What is human consciousness? Is our awareness just an aggregate of our neuronal pathways, or does the quantum foam itself instill in effable spirit onto the bio-computer we call a brain? Let's consider it differently. Imagine a movie you've seen. If you watch again, the progression and outcome remain the same. From which we can surmise that, in a bubble universe representing the plot of said movie, no one has free will. The problem is – to life, no one has a rewind button. (And even if we did, adding ourselves to the past as an observer constitutes a separate reality from the original one we observed.) Does this mean we are in a movie that we aren't allowed to rewind – and that we still don't have free will? Or maybe free will is a contextual issue. Could you ponder free will and self-awareness, if you lacked the former and couldn't the latter? My guess is no. But watch a mind-bending movie twice or more, and your perspective, as an observer, will change.
So does that mean that an entity with an awareness beyond our own – say, a 5 or 6 dimensional creature – can't predict our outcome? Not at all. When I look at a 2-dimensional drawing on a 3-dimensional piece of paper – the drawing is stateless. Its state is static, locked into the moment. The drawing itself will never be 3-dimensional. Even if I used the 4th dimension of time, in my own context, to ball up the paper – the drawing itself is still on a 2-dimensional plane. I assert that the metaphor can be extended to us 3-dimensional creatures on our fixed path through 4-dimensional space. If we have no soul, and our consciousness will never leave this state – then we have free will in the sense that our own path is uncertain to us and that predestination for us is true but we will never tap it. If we do have a soul, and we will eventually transcend our current context, then we will observe our experiences, become different for it, and make "choices" within this new context.
This leaves questions. (There are always questions, it is the human condition.) Higher states of consciousness may or may not extend limitlessly – and our current level of consciousness as a result may be the only one. For such pondering, I leave you with an XKCD: