I know there's more to your argument, but what you just said is an example of causality. The network is causing itself to rewire.
(I address your arguments below, so you can skip down if you wish. What follows is background which I think is quite important).
There's more to the argument because defining causality is not an easy task, and it has become MORE difficult in the past century. When Aristotle first wrote about the issue of fatalism using the example of of a sea-battle the next day, concepts like fatalism, determinism, causation, were all very much linked. This is no longer the case. Now, for example, determinism is being increasinlgy replaced by the concept of supervienence. Also, as Paul Humphrey's notes: "Until quite recently, it was almost universally held that causation must be deterministic, in that any cause is sufficient to bring about its effect.
This deterministic dogma has crumbled, but the influence of the prejudices behind it is still strong and underpins many sufficiency accounts." Now there are a plethora of accounts of indeterministic causation, even overdeterministic causation.
A rather difficult issue in addressing these problems is that while all of science, and even the most formal language of its expression (mathematics) rests to some extent on logic and philosophy, concepts such as causation and determinism are far
less formal and much more philosophical in nature, and therefore more difficult to address. That is, while I can mathematically represent an epistemically nondeterministic system, I cannot do so with one that is ontologically nondeterministic. Additionally, what causation
means is a philosophical issue with different answers.
That said, let me try to address your point quoted above.
What is meant by "causation?" Simply put, an event, or the summation of a vast number of particles obeying physical laws, constitutes the state of a system (or the universe), at time Tzero. At time T1, the state of the system has changed, in that the particles are no longer arranged exactly as they were at time Tzero. This is
caused completely by the physical laws which govern the particles, such that no other arrangement at time T1 would have been possible. We might not now or ever be capable of determining the state of the system at T1 given our knowledge of Tzero, but causation does not require us to.
However, in the example I used above, it is not necessarily the case that given the state at Tzero, there is a unique state T1 which
necessarily results from Tzero. This is because the state following Tzero is not subject only to the physical laws governing the totality of the paticles of the system. Rather, in the specific example of neurons, emergent organization results from the interaction of particles in ways that are influenced by, but do not depend on, physical laws. Moreover, this interaction is
nonreducible to the components (the neurons). Finally,
it is not clear that how one can say the state following Tzero is uniquely caused by anything.
What, after all, is the cause? The system is constrained by physical laws. There are not an infinite number of ways in which the neurons could organize, alter, rearrange, etc. But neither do the physical laws governing them cause the state T1, nor do the neurons themselves. Nor is there a unique T1 which
must result given Tzero. So in order to retain a notion of causation, all we can say is that the state at Tzero was followed by the state at T1, understanding T1 as T1a which could have been T1b, T1c, or a number of other states given Tzero. Causation then becomes trivial.
Most importantly, causation as described above does not limit free will because it does not uniquely determine future states of the brain given prior states.
If the causal mechanisms exist and we just can't identify them, then the first objection applies. If the causal mechanisms do not exist, then the second objection applies.
The problem with the two points in your original post is that they conflate two seperate conceptual representations of causation. The first problem is the issue of causal determinism, which I addressed (among other places) above. The second is the ancient argument about all events having causes (which is one of the logical proofs of god). So let me address the second problem using the same example as above.
We go back to the state of the brain at Tzero. At T1, the state has changed in a manner not causally determined by the state at Tzero. However, this is not the same as saying that T1 has
no causes. Rather, certain things influence, constrain, and limit the system so that the particular T1 the brain arrives at is one of a finite number of states. To make this less abstract, let me go back to an example I used earlier.
I'm walking along the street and find a wallet filled with hundred dollar bills and an ID. I realize that I can keep the money, or return it. Now, it cannot be said that there are no causes behind either decision. Lots of events influence my decision at this moment. However, if the first argument I outlined above is accurate (or certain other arguments against ontological causal determinism are), then the decision I make is not guarenteed by the state of my brain immediately prior to that decision.
Therefore, the decision I make is not guaranteed (addressing your first problem), but it is quite connected to the event(s) which preceeded it (addressing problem two).
