The determinist's argument is clean. Every thought arises from prior neural events. Every neural event arises from prior physical causes. Every desire, every decision, every apparently spontaneous creative act — all of it is the necessary consequence of the causal chain stretching back to the Big Bang.
There is no self outside this chain that could have done otherwise. The sense of choosing freely is itself a product of the same causal process. Free will, in this framework, is an illusion maintained by a brain too limited to see its own determinism.
If this is correct — and the empirical arguments for it are strong — what does liberation mean? Who is being freed? From what?
The non-dual traditions do not deny causality. They do not claim that liberated beings float above the causal order. They make a more interesting point.
The Advaita position: the self that suffers under determinism is not the ultimate self. The Atman — pure witnessing consciousness — is not part of the causal chain because it is not a produced entity. It is the ground in which the causal chain appears. It is not free from causality in the sense of escaping it. It is free from causality in the sense of not being subject to it — the way the screen is not affected by the film that plays on it.
Kashmir Shaivism adds: Shiva — pure Consciousness — acts from Svātantrya, absolute freedom. Not freedom from causes, but freedom as the uncaused ground from which all causes arise. The liberated person does not escape the causal order. They recognise that at the deepest level, they are the source of it rather than a product of it.
The practical shift: the person who is identified with the causal self — the personality, the history, the conditioned patterns — is, in a meaningful sense, determined. Their responses are predictable. Their growth is constrained by their past. The person who has recognised the witnessing ground — even partially, even temporarily — has access to something that the conditioned self does not. Not freedom from their conditions. Freedom within them. The capacity to respond rather than merely react.
This is not a philosophical escape from determinism. It is a different level of analysis. At the level of the individual self, determinism may well be correct. At the level of Consciousness itself, the question does not arise — because Consciousness is not an effect.