sure but the conatus, that ‘striving’, precedes the personal conception of self and doesn’t begin as/with self-awareness… so we wouldn’t say that one only begins to ‘will’ with the cogito, with consciousness, with self-awareness. so there can be no personal or internal cartesian entity or ‘will’ particular to a person except for the purposes of using the word in ordinary speech. it’s that cross-roads at which we use the word metaphorically (as ‘he has a strong will’ and ‘use your will power’, etc.) and use the word philosophically, that creates confusions. it’s all about the context of the use. discussion here tends to talk of it as if it were a possession or a special property or even a substance in itself. but as i said… and N has said this in so many ways as well… there are no individual ‘wills’. will power is already happening, conatus is already striving for perseverance, long before that long line of complex causes and mechanisms makes it possible in the human being to be conscious and self-aware. now if you realize that these causes are not one’s own - one by no means sets them into motion - then to lay claim to one’s ‘will’ as something distinct and separate from something external is like a false dichotomy of sorts. think of deleuze’s ‘plane of immanence’. no more ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, no more boundaries or closed systems. the conatus pervades through everything, and unities are only temporarily organized forces in cooperation with each other so that some particular thing can persist. but that particular thing doesn’t have it’s own conatus for reasons of there being no cartesian ‘self’ except as a ‘habit of grammar’, as N put it (sort of).
consider how schopenhauer describes the ‘will’. that’s more to the point. individual things are representations of a universal will, not the origins of will… not a moment where a new will comes into being at the conception of the individual.
i’d not call determinism a science, because it’s certainly not empirical and neither is it falsifiable (ecmandu got one right!). the idea of causation is wholly rational… even deductive if one’s premises are self evident… and kant would argue that experience is impossible without causation being first an a priori category of reason. so there’s no science to it… but a helluva lot of logic and rationale.
yeah that’s a big problem with spinoza’s Ethics… something academics are still arguing over. it makes little sense to say at one moment ‘all things happen through necessity’ and then in the next ‘knowledge of causes increases one’s freedom’. what he must mean here is not what i think people think he means. i think he means that in being aware of causation in the sense of being able to identify regularity in nature, one increases one’s capacity to act in the way of being able to utilize that regularity… being able to predict and know in advance what is likely to happen. for example; astrophysicists, in knowing how physical forces work, can successfully send a shuttle into space. this is a great increase in capacity to act… but there is nothing really ‘free’ about any of this. capacity to act can’t mean ‘to stop being caused’, but only to be able to do more, due to one’s awareness of what can be expected by any number of processes of phenomena.