Yes, I have met people who believed it, or thought they did. They problem is, that by the very act of trying to convince me of it, they are acting as if I have freewill. Or maybe that's just part of the plan??
Nothing about determinism says you cant change your mind if your circumstances change. For example, you receive new information or come to look at existing information in a new way.
I've seen this said multiple times but don't understand it. Does the chain of events leading back to the very beginning determine my chemical make up ( brain/thoughts ) or doesn't it? Seems like making a cake and eating it too.
Receiving new information is a part of that causal chain. You can't just skip over it. It has to be included in the chain as well.
Depends on the type of determinism you are talking about. Under a hard deterministic motif, the casual chain is just part of the programming but isn't critical to the end result. It anathema to the notion of the self possession of consciousness.
Under this scenario, you may be
aware of causation, but that awareness is a mere hallucination. You cannot posses what you cannot control.
Under determinism, our whole notion of understanding is simply a delusion, we are robots in somebody else's game.
And this, as it turns out, isn't an atheistic stance, but a Calvinist/ theist stance. If we are being pull by strings their needs to be a string puller.
The succession of causal events works fine in the universe of abstract objects, but it's contrary to self-possessed sentience. That's where determinism falls apart.