Personal accountability is at the heart of Republican political ideology. However universal causality renders personal accountability, and the free will upon which that accountability is founded, as illusory and misleading.
Causality is THE basic physical process, without which the universe would be COMPLETELY static, still, and without ANY manner of change. Time could not exist without causality, and causality could not exist without time. A decision is an event in time. It is, therefore, also an effect in time. All effects, which would clearly include human decisions, must, by definition, have a cause.
Human decisions, regardless of their physicality or lack thereof, are events that occupy a specific and precise location within time, and these decisions are caused. Whether or not the decisions are "physical" is inconsequential. The decisions are causality determined, and therefore cannot be freely willed. In other words, it is their existence as EVENTS along the timeline that renders them subject to causality.
The best way to understand the universal governance of causality is to consider the evolution of the universe from one state (literally, and as a singularity, which addresses misnomered references to multi-universes) to the next.
Our best physics holds this state-to-state, moment-by-moment, evolution of our universe as axiomatic, and founded on the following two premises:
- There exists an "arrow of time," meaning that time always moves from past to present to future, and never in reverse.
- Our universe does not exist outside of time.
Thus, if we consider that the universe in its entirely is the only TRULY closed system in nature (all other systems being open to outside influences), it MUST evolve as a unity from state to state via a singular causal progression. To suggest otherwise invites the notion of more than one universe, which, of course, by definition, would be incoherent.
When the universe is considered in its entirety as a singularity, relativity no longer applies, (there being no other object the universe could be relative to), and no manner of interdependent causal chains, (a closed system singularity permitting only one causal chain). Also, because the universe is a singularity, this causal progression is not a "multi-event" phenomena. Such universal, singular, and inviolable state causality is why free will is absolutely impossible. Any and all logical/rational refutations clearly fall under the weight of the singular, all-encompassing causality demonstrated by the evolution from one state of the universe to the next.
Simon LaPlace described determinism, which is essentially analagous to causality, as follows:
We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.
LaPlace was, of course, completely right in asserting that if one were to know completely the entire state of the universe at one moment, one could accurately predict the state of the universe at any future moment. Of course the subjectivity that prohibits the simultaneous measurement of particle momentum and position, and the lack of a complete description of any universal state, render that prospect potentially possible only to a universe with complete self-knowledge (as certain definitions of God would allow).
To meet the necessary criteria for such prediction and foreknowledge, the intellect LaPlace refers to would need to encompass our universe in its entirety. If our universe is, in fact, completely conscious of itself, and can subject itself to the kind of analysis LaPlace describes, it does indeed have all of the information necessary for both universal predictability and complete foreknowledge.
While we cannot yet/ever? know whether or not our universe has such a complete consciousness of itself, nor whether or not it can subject that knowledge to the analysis necessary for universal predictability and complete foreknowledge, LaPlace's statement, expressed with its all-important qualifier "IF" is absolutely correct. Predictability and foreknowledge are, in fact, a logical consequence of the determinism he described.
Quantum uncertainty, which prohibits subjective knowledge of simultaneous particle position/momentum, does not prohibit such knowledge for an objective, completely self-conscious and fully analytical universe. As LaPlace noted, the state of the universe at one moment is COMPLETELY determined by the state of the universe during the previous moment. The ensuing causal chain is universal, absolute, and not subservient to even quantum interpretations of particle behavior as random.
Because the universe as a singularity is completely deterministic, as is clear by considering it's state-to-state evolution, every specific event, including the actions of human will, would need to be completely constrained by that same state-universe causality. Humans freely willing actions that somehow violate determinism would pose a huge problem in that one would then have to explain how the universe was presumably completely deterministic pre-humans, and with the first human suddenly became a curious combination of acausality in the human-specific existing alongside complete and absolute causality in the state universe-general.