I.e. just because you label a process "self determine" does not mean that the self is actually determining things.
You have to provide argument to support it, which you have not done.
You have accepted from QQ a misleading and largely incorrect meaning of the term "self determination".
It means that the self determines the self, rather than some outside agency determining the self. The argument is indifferent to that.
It does not mean, as the argument requires, that there is an entity both nameable (distinct) and named ("self") that determines other things.
So its use here misleads: a "self" whose behavior is part of the process of the universe's determining other things - such as car behavior - is being overlooked, despite being central to these threads and the key, significant matter involved in naming a "self" in the first place.
And being significant and all that, posters here have presented lots of argument from evidence that such entities exist, are observed, and are observed determining these other things, just as the universe determined they would - drivers exist who can make cars stop, or go (they have the capability of doing either), for example.
The deterministic universe has produced, over time, entities of increasing capability and logical levels of capability, entities in which appear the capability of choosing among other, governed, lower level capabilities - and the yet "higher" or governing capability of guiding and choosing that second level capability from others on its second level, in given circumstances. This third level capability has been located with enough precision to place an array of electrodes and identify its employment in a scan of brainwaves and neural firing patterns. It has been observed in action, in other words.
And it's not, apparently, by observation, the highest level possessed by human decisionmakers. Improvising musicians in fugue state, monks in meditation, audiences an hour or so into a skilled performance of epic poetry, mothers with infants and vice versa, the enchanted and legitimately enthralled in a variety of situations, the focused and completely concentrating in situations of aesthetic "judgment" or "assessment", apparently govern it somehow - have that capability.
Takehome: as humans have learned to analyze events in the physical world, they have begun to get a handle on just what that means for the degrees of freedom involved in all such analyses, all such description of real world phenomena. One of the apparent discoveries seems to be that - just as the pioneers in this subject often hypothesized (Bateson's levels of learning come to mind) - such capabilities have and can bestow on willful behavior every property and attribute characteristic of freedom of will as it is normally recognized in the real, physical, living, natural world. Every single one - in the natural world, the one determined.
That would appear to be relevant and interesting in thread devoted to freedom of will from a scientific perspective, no?
