Thanks for the clarification. I want to say that this sort of thing doesn't hold water. You could hold that determinism is inaccessible to humans, such that we would never be able to infallibly predict the future even if determinism is true, but this isn't a justification for saying there is no contradiction between causality and free will. This does relate to the ontological/epistemic distinction that has been raised. Just because humans cannot leverage the truth of determinism with respect to their knowledge does not mean that it doesn't contradict free will. Just because prediction is possible neither in principle nor in practice does not mean that free will and determinism are compatible. It seems that you are a compatibilist, but my point is that this isn't a valid argument for compatibilism. Compatibilism and incompatibilism are concerned with the ontological nature of free will and determinism, not with the human ability or inability to predict the future. Even if we agree that humans cannot infallibly predict the future, even in principle, it remains possible that free will and determinism are incompatible. I hope that makes sense.Steve3007 wrote: ↑August 4th, 2021, 12:18 pmNo, not quite. My view is that it is possible for a system to be deterministic while also being fundamentally unpredictable, not merely currently unpredictable. I think that this is where what is possible in practice and what is possible in principle become the same thing.Leontiskos wrote: ↑August 4th, 2021, 12:00 pmYou seem to be saying that free will is deterministic but we are not currently able to predict it (or something like that). So it is deterministic in principle but not in practice.
It's this view that leads me to the view that there is no contradiction between causality and free will. I don't buy what appears to me to be a dualistic distinction between things to which the principle of causality can be meaningfully applied and things to which it can't be applied. I think causality, if it is applicable at all, applies to brains in the same way that it applies to anything else, but I don't see that as contradicting the notion that brains have free will.
Granted, there is a common argument against determinism that focuses on epistemology, and I think you successfully avoid that argument, but the ground-level issues persist.