I made a breakthrough in the compatibility of free will and absolute determinism today. Fundamentally, it's a matter of prediction. Even if every event in the universe was completely predictable, no entity could have the resources to predict it completely, as these resources would need to be the same size as the universe (plus a little for its own awareness), so all predictions of the future, and knowledge about the universe, must necessarily be incomplete.
'One commonly sited problem with absolute determinism is that if a person's life were pre-destined then there could be no morality or judgement; an evil dictator would have always been destined to be bad, and a saint always destined to be good. Today I realised that nobody could know this destiny, even if it were set in stone because the act of predicting a person's life would take as much effort as living it, so only partial and incomplete predictions can ever be possible. It is this fact that allows absolute determinism while permitting feelings of control, or belief in the power to change the future; this belief emerges due to the gaps left by necessarily imperfect prediction. Free will, to some extent, is about predications either made or thwarted - after all, active will is about changing the future. One could say that will, a different aspect of will, can also be about attributing one's actions to past events: 'I made this happen'. Even so, that case or belief is a matter of information about the event, and as with knowledge of the future, total knowledge of an event is also impossible - one event cannot be separated from the universe as a whole, and the whole universe is unknowable.
The fact that no prediction can be perfect would give rise to these feelings of control or belief. When we act, we know for certain that we did something but did not, and cannot, know for certain how the universe would behave or what other things would happen, so our ego attributes the future to our actions, despite the inevitability of them. Which things are considered ours, willed by us, or not can be anything, arbitrary, random. That would not diminish our will or feeling of it.
Well, of course, will is a complex subject. I've written about it before and must one day collate all of this. For me, my belief in absolute determinism is a comfort, like stoicism. No matter what happens, what we did, or what the universe did to us, it was always inevitable. Had we gone back to any moment in our lives, all of the information and knowledge would be the same as it was then, so we would make the same choices, and the same is true of every atom and object; even the falling of the grains of sand would occur the same, it is this very fact that makes the universe one finite object; the only possible alternative is an infinity of all possible universes which, for me, is ridiculous - there is no evidence of infinite anything in the universe, and were there so, all things would spiral to infinity, all things would be equal and therefore also nothing. In an infinite universe there can be no such thing as information because all knowledge would be equal.
In other jobs, I sawed the panel for Monsters of Spring, and cut and made the frame. This is a matter of eight exact 'ninja' cuts - each by hand and done to a very fine degree of accuracy. The fringes of the painting needed painting over too, as the frame has a slightly larger aperture. Overall I've worked for 10.25 8-hour days on this painting - a massive amount for a 30x40cm painting. These days I could probably paint something like this in four days at most.
I also continued work on the Volcanism painting design. In a moment of whimsy I recorded a bagpipe version of the Super Mario Theme using cheap Yahama keyboard bagpipe samples. I also researched Yamaha keyboards, possibly to replace my old, beloved but rather heavy, SY-85 synthesizer. My favoured replacement is the Yamaha MODX7 which is half the weight yet has more keys and more capabilities. It's also half the weight of my so-called portable stage piano, so might be useful for live performances. It's only downside is the fact that it costs £1100 or so.
Generally today I've been extremely anxious and now have a headache. How I miss seeing Deborah. When will this lockdown end? I expect October. The phrase 'when all this is over' is the phrase of our times.
