[Right Wing Professor]

The key word in that sentence is "perceive".

I agree. Our concept of free will is very much a result of our culture. A Muslim will say 'what is written is written' and has a much more circumscribed view of free will than a Westerner. Ditto a Confucian. Dennett argues that the human sense of having free choice may have evolved, since people who feel they can do something to change their environment will act and survive, while the fatalists will lie down and die. This might also pertain to societies; is one of the reasons America has prospered whereas China spent long centuries in stasis and the Muslim world is in chaos, the fact that most Americans deeply believe they are in control of their destiny?

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your reply!

I agree. Our concept of free will is very much a result of our culture. A Muslim will say 'what is written is written' and has a much more circumscribed view of free will than a Westerner. Ditto a Confucian. Dennett argues that the human sense of having free choice may have evolved, since people who feel they can do something to change their environment will act and survive, while the fatalists will lie down and die.

I don't dispute that culture has a strong influence of our perception of free will; however, when I used the term "aspect" I literally meant a geometric aspect:

'The inability precisely to predict the future is at the core of what we perceive as free will'.

The key word in that sentence is "perceive". Everything we think we know is limited by our aspect in the "lofty structure of all that there is" (as Einstein called it.)

On the one hand, the materialist may say that something appears to be random or unpredictable - but on the other that "the mind is what the brain does" and all physicality abides by physical laws from the beginning over a timeline.

All of this is perception based on a 4D aspect with a single time dimension. IOW, the aspect itself is but a choice of coordinates.

Conversely, I suggest that our aspect is as if we are creatures inhabiting a finite four dimensional, because that is the limitation of our vision and our undisciplined mind.

Likewise, an observer can falsely perceive randomness in a deterministic system because of the aspect - as tortoise put it post 912:

For any system in which Wolfram is correct, there can be deterministic processes that cannot be perceived as anything but random within that system. It is the nature of the beast. Some of the confusion is in that there are processes we cannot treat as anything but random pragmatically even if we know they are deterministic mathematically.