An Asterisk of One's Own

I wonder if I wasn't clear enough in my last, emdash-riddled line: I think determinism shouldn't (and, in any case, usually doesn't) have a practical effect on how we deal with others. We live in a world that seems very much as if it's run by free will, cause and effect, etc. They may be persistent illusions, but they're still the illusions by which we're bound to run our lives, which is exactly what I take Ben's final paragraph to mean.

I do want to challenge this a bit:

For practices such as giving and accepting reasons, coming to conclusions, making distinctions between good and bad arguments, etc. to be sensible, a prima facie assumption of agency must exist; and this assumption does much to work against the argument of the determinist, who is at pains not to find some sort of notion of agency Trojan Horsed into his position....

That may be, but the fault, dear Brutus, lies in our determinists, not in ourselves. It's consistent to say the world is (or is likely) a determined one, which one is bound to discuss through the lens and in the vocabulary of perceived free will. Is it so absurd to believe a consciousness could believe itself to be "choosing" among alternatives -- selecting among them through some mystical process, in other words, by appeal to deity, explicit or not -- when in fact he is carrying out a program? The belief in choice remains the one that requires an odd sort of faith. Belief in the "human program" running on wetware requires none.

All of this fails even to address the modern physical evidence that the universe is way more complex than determism or free will can even begin to cover; they border on absurd oversimplifications, of course.