Hard Determinism vs. Free Will as analyzed through the lens of time perception

Free Will or Determined?

I have always found the hard determinism versus free will debate to be rather interesting, especially since we perceive free will in day to day activities as choices, yet our understanding of the natural world seen through the lens of physical laws indicates that free will must be illusory, as eloquently stated by Sam Harris in his book Free Will.

I view this debate

through a somewhat abnormal lens, which is that of how we perceive time.

If time is perceived as linear, moving from the past to the present (where experience resides) and then into the future, then a deterministic viewpoint is somewhat inevitable as a universe governed entirely by physical laws does not allow for choices, since the factors leading to your present state of mind will govern the outcome of your decisions. This conclusion leads to a large set of moral dilemma related to ethics and legal systems as it removes the concept of authentic responsibility, and even the worst offenders must be seen in the mature way as a malfunctioning robot in order to justify incarceration (and only for the sake of threat removal, no punishment can be logically considered justice within this thought paradigm).

In my honest observations, to believe this is accurate of reality is to fool ourselves. Time is not linear in the most phenomenological sense, you must abstract away the past and future in the mind to characterize time as linear, since humans can only experience now (the present is awareness, attention, perception).

We should only consider linear time as an abstract and arbitrary measurement (or constraint) on reality which is only existent in the human mind as to logically order empirical experience into something useful (similar to the system of mathematics).

If you perceive time in the way it is experienced,

then the past only exists as a set of neurons we access as memory in the present. The past is nothing more than a set of physical neurons until we interpret that data into a functional model of reality. The issue to be confronted is that we have no way to detect if our memory is actually representative of reality, except through affirmation of others (through speech, text, or other forms of physical symbolic representation like photos or computer data).

The future is an abstraction utilizing our capacity for visualization, developed through the extrapolation of available data in accessible neuron networks in the present. Therefore, I believe a far more accurate interpretation of time as experienced would be that of the individual mind as the origin, and both the past and future as abstract mental constructs in order to understand causality and use causality as a tool. It is only in this way we can authentically possess and exercise free will, since even the very concept of causation (and therefore responsibility) begins in the mind of the individual.

It is also in this way I disagree with the French Existentialist school of thought, in which Sartre declared he was not responsible for responsibility. It all begins with interpretation in the mind, you have a choice to be responsible for even your own responsibility; no choice has been revoked.

Imagine the situation

whereby a tree falls on a home and caves in the roof. If one was asked why the roof caved in, they might say, “The tree fell on it” and be correct. But this method of explanation can be indefinitely extended outward further, to the storm which weakened the tree base, to the weather system which caused the storm, on and on to a point of origin so far out of sight we still aren’t quite sure what it is exactly, and don't tend to blame directly for our present condition. In this way, there are additionally consequences to our present actions which are also so far out of sight that it would be absurd to hold ourselves morally accountable for whatever situation we consider to be the end result (which extends far past our death).

In conclusion

to these contemplations, I believe that free will must exist prior to understanding logic, and responsibility as an extension is most properly considered as a sort of non-abstract local function used to better position ourselves in the world, including using our faculties of abstraction to accurately form memories and best predict future consequences. But this consideration does not entail that time as a linear progression is by any means an accurate representation of reality prior to human experience.