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I do hate to repeat a post, but I just responded to you on a related subject on another thread and thus would like to mention again here what I said there. You said:

The usual explicit (or implicit) method of escaping the problem is either to deny that everything is causal, to assume something else is injected into the stream of causation (like the will of God), or that ignorance somehow provides an escape from it, (if you don't know what is going to happen it is not caused). This last seems absurd, but is essentially the one used by all those who suppose quantum uncertainty provides an escape from determinism. Ask Alamo-Girl or betty boop.

I responded:

Although superposition is one interesting manifestation of it, the actual object of my musings is dimensionality. Within a four dimension block, we cannot see what will happen in the future, etc. We see the movie one frame at a time.
From a higher dimension view the entire movie is seen at once - the entire 4D block. And within the dynamics of such a higher dimension, all of the events within the 4D are malleable. That is where I see free will being manifest to change the script, so to speak. But it is the dynamics of the higher dimension, the will of God, which allows the free will to actualize in 4D - i.e. change the course of events from our 4D view.

And following betty boop's proposal that one or more of the higher dimensions is an extra time dimension - what appears as a timeline to us in the 4D is actually a plane (or brane) and thus also malleable in the same fashion, e.g. superposition, non-locality, etc.

The last point is relevant to your post because where time in 4D is actually a plane (or brane) and not a line, there is not an inviolable cause/effect relationship. Past, present and future are all accessible. The loss of a firm cause/effect relationship is the main objection to the extra time dimension theory.

OTOH, time as a brane also explains many other phenomenon such non-locality, superposition, dark energy, acceleration of the universe, near death experiences, extra sensory perception, precognition, retro-cognition and so on.

Hank: ...all those who suppose quantum uncertainty provides an escape from determinism.

Richard Feynman, paraphrasing, said those who maintained they understood quantum mechanics hadn't studied it enough. I couldn't agree more and with particular reference to this citation. While the development of the probability wave distribution is completely deterministic, its resolution is completely mysterious. Not to mention that I exercise my free will multitudinous times on a daily basis. To assert that free will does not exist, if that is what's being asserted, is absurd and it is precisely the thing with which you and bb are being charged; i.e. an excuse for ignorance. My humble opinion ...

I do hate to repeat a post ...

I'm glad you did. Your input was invited to that post because I knew I did not represent your position correctly, and it also needs to be here for the same reason.

Amazing that something could explain so much! It is too bad I cannot accept it. How much easier it would make life. But alas, I do not accept it, and in fact, I do not believe there are actually "three" dimensions, in the usual sense, and time, is not for me, a dimension at all.

The three dimensions are only a means or method of dealing with positional relationships, and time is nothing more than one of the qualities which describe the relationships between changes in position, that is, motion.

While the, "loss of a firm cause/effect relationship," would never bother me, since that is not that nature of cause in the first place, and since reason and volition are actually confirmed by the true nature of cause, there is no real advantage to these invented extra dimensions. They might be useful devices for picturing certain mathematical relationships pertaining to some phenomena of physics, but to reify them into actual ontological existents is just more mistaken platonism.

Now, for those not familiar with the term "brane:"

Brane: Any of the extended objects that arise in String Theory. A one-brane is a string, a two-brane is a membrane, a three-brane has three extended dimensions, etc. More generally, a p-brane has p spatial dimensions.

This theory would be very difficult to beleive except for the overwhelming evidence and commoness of the "p-brane."

Hank

Even in a unviverse with multidimensional time-like coordinates, there can still be causal connections. One evaluates the distance between points x and y as a quadratic form in the coordinate differences (like the Pythagorean theorem) except that the time-like coordinates contribute negatively. If the overall distance is negative, there is a "time-like" separation between the points and a causal connection can exist between events at these points. If the distance id positive, the distance is "space-like" and no such causal connection is possible.

Only experiment can tell if we need more than one time-like coordinate to describe things.