This is a great post dude, but the problem i have with all of this is one really not so spoken problem nowadays, and it has to do with the way that Immanuel Kant treats this topic, if you haven't read the Critique of Pure Reason, or if you had, but you didn't try hard enough to understand everything that Kant put in there, and the system he created, i really recommend you to do it, that is a great thing to do, even if it takes a very long time. But to adress this topic more directly, the problem with the reductionism that you are talking about, is that is clearly this idea of explaining everything through hard science, which is kind of a strange way of functioning, the natural sciences (and some of psychology) are made in a way they build themselves through laws, and every discovery is normally made in the base of those laws. What i'm trying to say, is that in a rush of explaining really complex problems, we try to see them through the only really reliable discoveries that we had acomplished, the problem that Kant had with this, is one that it may had aged poorly, but is kind of difficult to refute, and it has to do with the distinction of Noumenon and Phenomenon, like you probably know, Noumenon is the things-in-itself, and Kant argues that we can't know them, wich is obviously true, we can only sense things in relation to our senses, our understanding, our reason, etc. So the problem is that most of the metaphysical problems, don't have any sense at all, both options make sense, but contradict each other, in the Antinomy, Kant talks about Free Will and Determinism in reference to this, clearly is difficult being deterministic, i mean, thinking that everything is cause and consecuence, has a problem if you try thinking about how is possible that the universe started, if everything occures in relation of the past, of causes, how is possible that a start exist? that would mean that something appear without a cause, that appear from nowhere, or was a consecuence of nothingness wich is the same thing, but thinking that free will is real is kind of strange for the reasons that probably everyone knows, so the solution is on the Trascendental Aesthetic, in which Kant says that Time and Space are not things-in-itselfs, they are part of our mind, our way to organize the world, and with this we kind of get that determinism is basically how we understand time working, (if all this talk about perception sounds extreme, you got to remember Piaget experiments, things that are obvious to us, like the difference between what i see and what you see, are not a reality to a child, that's why they think covering their eyes will make them invisible.) because time is basically things changing in relation to other things, and ourselves staying in the mid of this, Kant thought that the world of Phenomenon functions deterministically, but that doesn't mean that things-in-themselves do, maybe this is kind of strange, cause it would be confusing if we believe we are things-in-ourselves, but it sits a precedent to understand that this problem is almost impossible to solve if we are still discussing it under the same terms.

I know you mention the "esoteric sounding" but you are just throwing away an option just cause it doesn't go well with your epistemological ideas that are a product of the empiricist and causalist mode, that is not just obvious and irrefutable, is an stance that functions well if you want to explain the "natural world", but has really awful consecuences when you try to do it on everything.

Wow, you really said a lot in a small space! I don’t adhere to reductionism anymore but prefer supervenience. Is that closer to Kant’s thinking? Perhaps the universe started as a quantum fluctuation as all universes start? Perhaps a quantum fluctuation is ordinary just what reality does like as ordinary as a an American, and a universe growing out of one is like as ordinary as a smaller subclass of Americans? Now, what does that mean for free will and determinism if varieties of each of us live throughout the multiverse?

Anyway, thanks for reading and for your thoughts. I really should learn some Kant.

Yeah, thanks for the response, i was kind of insecure about my post, i'm not a native speaker of english, but with internet everyone gets good in this language, i'm not that of an expert on Kant, i seem like one because i've been reading his seminal book for more than a year, and i haven't finish it yet, but i'm really trying to get this guy. I don't think Kant would have that position, you gotta know that he give up in knowing the thing-in-itself because he said it was impossible, like i said, he thought that the laws of human experience where deterministic, what he argues is that is not necessarily real, and if you think so, determinism is like a really easy answer to all, that has haunted philosophers since always, because nobody wants to think that, but thinking everything as cause and effect seems to be a really efective way to organize ideas in our minds, if we weren't capable of that, we couldn't relate ideas with others probably, not in like a line, that would mean everything existing at the same time, which seems impossible.

The one who dared to take Kant ideas and try to know the thing in itself, was Schopenhauer, i haven't read him yet because i want to understand all Kant first, but he basically thinks that will is the thing in itself.

You speak English very well! I will have to put Kant on my to-do list.

After a bit of a hiatus, I decided to come back to this forum to see what people thought about this question in particular. Since I've not yet taken any kind of philosophy course, I was excited to read that my thoughts about cause and effect and how the universe was predetermined had a name and that people had already been thinking about it for years now. I also enjoyed reading the various counter-arguments, and to the extent I've read, I see that most of them point to either the beginning of the universe lacking cause, or the true inner workings of things you can't sense. I think that mostly these are problems that could possibly be solved by further exploration of the universe at large, (Both space travel and quantum research) and exploration of the universe in different ways, (Finding all the ways to sense an object or phenomenon)

Overall, I learned a lot. I can't wait to dig into some of the books mentioned here, but I feel as if I should "build up" to those by reading something simpler and ramping up the difficulty over the years.

We don't need to (and it is probably wrong to) reduce freewill to mental states in order to to refute it. Firstly we operate much of the time on 'automatic', doing things and making decisions without really thinking, in these cases we are obviously following a deterministic path. When we do actually think and consider a possible action or a choice all of our considerations are from nature or nurture. We don't need perfect prediction of human behavior to see the uniformity of it as Hume said, we can't ignore it and can rely on it with the same certainty we rely on natural laws. Ultimately it is our belief causal powers we cannot detect and the rejection of regularity being the only experience we have that leads us to feel that we are free when that kind of freedom does not exist.

Because you have such a strong thinking machine, you need to work on the punctuation of your comments to give us some break, mate.
Perhaps Kant was a mason and wanted to preserve the beliefs of his sect; with a boundless divine realm and a sublunar, cyclic, machine like material plane.
It´s a good one that Reality has an acausal "beginning", which means, mind you, that all of reality past, present and future is not caused ultimately by anything. However, we need to be humble and use what we know about the manifest world; and the way it communicates with itself is always deterministic so far. Besides, Kant doesn´t seem to know how a free-will that is not determined by causality or chance would work. How does that work? how can an entity have "free" thoughts without cause or luck as agents?

If we think we have free will, that it appears we have, then it doesn't matter.

It matters a lot TWI. Because our society is based on the free-will assumption; in fact this belief is very disfunctional as it promotes violence and conflict.

Well if we don't have free will then everything is pre-ordained, having knowledge of that but being unable to influence things would be totally disfunctional. On the other hand if we do have free will then how can we function if we don't use that option, we'd be automatons.

Everything about our human relativity is subject to influence, including free-will. If free-will is something independent of everything else, then it does not exist. Even absolute reality is connected to every part of its relative representations.

I believe we have free-will the same way we have knowledge, that is, we can develop it as far as we can. Also, in the same way our application of knowledge and beliefs are subject to various influences, so also is our free-will. Different people have different degrees of exerting free-will under the various circumstances of our lives.
Free-will cannot imply something absolute when it is the possession of relative beings. I think most people mistake free-will for omnipotence.

Imagine if we thought having knowledge meant omniscience. Then, we would be arguing whether we have knowledge or not. On the one hand, it would be obvious that we know some things and have the capacity to know more; on the other, what we know isn't everything to be known.

If we apply the above to free-will, then it is obvious that we determine some aspects of our lives by exerting our influence over them; however, our influence is not absolute.

So, if free-will means omnipotence, then we do not have it. If free-will means the capacity to exert our influence over circumstances, then we do have it albeit to a limited degree but which can also be improved upon.

An obvious flaw with the deterministic model of the brain is that the stimuli it is exposed to are non deterministic. Like me reading your post - the OP. The concepts it contains stimulated responses in the brain that may be reducible to material effects, but the 'cause' is not deterministic, even if what you wrote is a consequence of activity in your brain - words are not definitive of meaning. They are signifiers that have a more or less different meaning for different people, based on experience. That so, the act of communication is inherently non-deterministic.

You may say what you mean. I hear, or read what you say, but what I understand it to mean, is particular to me. So you can never be in complete control of what you say to me. What I understand as a consequence of what you said, is only the same as what you meant, insofar as we share a common lexicon and concept of reality. Otherwise, it's inherently non deterministic.

I thought I tried to address this with the money multiplier example. The meaning of words/concepts to a given person are predetermined by her beliefs and what she has learned previously, being imprinted on her brain through deterministic causes. At least that’s the argument I was going for at the time of writing this.