Will determinism drive us crazy, or undermine an open society?

Writing at the Edge forum on dangerous ideas, neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger (scroll down after click) worries we might go literally insane believing in determinism: we won’t be able to integrate our conceptual understanding that we are determined creatures with our phenomenal self-models. But these don’t conflict precisely because the former is conceptual, the later phenomenal. How does it feel to be a perfectly determined creature (on the assumption we are)? Just as we presently do, even if that feeling might involve what we conceptually know is the illusion of being undetermined or ultimately self-caused in some respect. We stay sane since the conscious self-model, as Metzinger himself shows in his tour de force Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity, is an extremely robust phenomenal construction of the brain, generally impervious to mere concepts. And besides, it’s not clear that the feeling of being a contra-causal agent is essential to the self-model anyway. There’s probably cultural variability in the contra-causal agent illusion, in that the feeling of being a self may not always be interpreted as having contra-causal freedom. And some people (such as Susan Blackmore) have gotten rid of it; they deny feeling as if they’re ultimately self-caused or uncaused in any respect, and they get around in the world just fine. So there’s no insurmountable problem here.

Currents

Has anyone been like Blackmore and subjectively broken past the illusion of indeterminacy? I tried once, and I felt like I was possessed or schizo or something.