Determinism, Free Will and Paradox

[Alex K]

There is not the time in relativity, so the question is meaningless unless you prescribe which time you are interested in.

You're stealing my line. I'm saying that the universe as a whole has no reference framework to compare against.

That's true in the simplified case of special relativity, but not in reality: the fact that we have nonzero temperature left over from the big bang gives us an absolute rest frame, as measured by the CMB dipole



You see here the blueshift and redshift of the cosmic microwave background due to the movement of earth relative to the heat bath left over from the big bang. You might be able to imagine a hypothetical universe of zero temperature with no special frame though.

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Okay, I'm trying to determine what happens to calculations when there's no reference frame. In the case of a photon traveling very far (say a million light years by Earth measurements), you have one frame of reference in which no time has passed at all, and one in which a million years have passed. Who's "right"? Both/neither/meh whatever.

There is not right or wrong concerning choice of reference frames, or more generally, coordinates - in the same way that one cannot from a modern point of view claim that the earth moves around the sun or vice versa, without imposing additional conditions. There are better and worse choices of coordinates, but if you do things correctly, in the end the physics conclusions may not depend on the choice of reference frame.

The reference "rest" frame of the photon, where no time passes, is a pathological limiting case where the entire universe sits in a 2 dimensional plane of infinite density. That mainly tells you that it's a very bad reference frame to do calculations. Time obviously passes for all non-singular rest frames while the photon travels.

I'm saying for "change" to occur in any measured sense, you must have not only a reference, but a subjective reference, to "pin down" what it means for something to happen at a particular rate.

You can always define the rate of a process as the time it takes in the rest frame of the process. Of course you need one physical system to give you a timing reference, otherwise there is indeed no notion how quickly time passes.

Without this reference point, all you really have is interrelated data-- but do events play out infinitely fast, or infinitesimally fast, without that subjective reference point? What's the "rate of unfolding" of universal events?

As I said above, in our realistic universe, the big bang gives us an absolute timing information via the temperature - that's why it objectively makes sense to say that the big bang was 13.7 billion years ago - as seen from the CMB rest frame.

In a deterministic universe, that subjective reference is discarded as an irrelevant byproduct of mechanistic interactions. The problem is that in this model there's now no standard by which the "rate" of change in the universe could meaningfully be measured. Time ceases to have any meaning, and so, therefore, does causality.

I don't agree - not having an absolute time scaling standard does not mean that there is no causality; special relativity alone has no absolute time standard, but has a strict separation of so-called light cones which preserves causality

1. two events either have a defined time ordering (when they have so-called "time-like" or "light-like" distance), and that's exactly the case in which one event can influence the other, or

2. they have "space-like" distance, in which case they have no defined ordering of before and after, because it depends on the observer which comes first, but precisely in this case they cannot influence each other.

Basically, without anyone there to witness the measured relationships in timed events, time collapses into a singularity.

Again, as I said above, the geometry of special relativity has a defined causal structure even if there is no absolute standard of time scale, and I think this collapse to a singularity is merely an artifact of choosing a mathematically divergent coordinate system

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacetime

[bennyboy]

Again, as I said above, the geometry of special relativity has a defined causal structure even if there is no absolute standard of time scale, and I think this collapse to a singularity is merely an artifact of choosing a mathematically divergent coordinate system

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacetime

Divergence is beyond my level of understanding in math. Can you explain it in principle?

Anyway, with regard to the Big Bang, I don't think it really does provide a universal reference of the type I'm talking about. I have no doubt that the universe is 13.7 billion years old relative to the Earth's reference. However, I'm also introducing the idea of subjective relativity: relating the rate at which an organism processes information (measured perhaps by the mean distance that information travels from its senses and through its processing mechanism).
http://www.scientificamerican.com/articl...ion-world/

So different creatures, in the same physical frame of reference, are not "moving" through time at the same rate, even though they might be sitting in the same room observing the same events. Which is right, to say that time chugs along at whatever speed it chugs along, and it is the creatures who are experiencing at different rates? Or to say that time is only the logical relation between events, but does not have any intrinsic rate in its own right?

[Alex K]

Again, as I said above, the geometry of special relativity has a defined causal structure even if there is no absolute standard of time scale, and I think this collapse to a singularity is merely an artifact of choosing a mathematically divergent coordinate system

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacetime

Divergence is beyond my level of understanding in math. Can you explain it in principle?

It's nothing complicated. Imagine you define your own measurement system for lengths, and call it a bennymeter. You introduce a parameter x and you define a bennymeter to have x meters. You can now ask what is the height of the Eiffel tower, and if you take x = 1, the answer will be roughly 300 bennymeters. If you choose x=1/2 it will be 600 bennymeters. If you take x=0 it will be infinity bennymeters, or, more precisely, as you approach x->0, your measurement will give you arbitrarily large numbers of bennymeters as the height of the eiffel tower, or as the height of anything for that matter. In the limit x->0 your measurement is divergent. That means x=0 is a pathological coordinate choice.

[Mudhammam]

It seems to me trivially obvious that subjective experience of time varies widely from person to person. To a bored small child, an hour is an eternity. To an adult having tons of fun, it zips by like nothing.

But you wouldn't say that a change in one's perception of time actually involves a shortening of duration all else being equal. For example, if one constantly lived near the speed of light, this conversation would b....e.... t...a...k...i...n...g... really long. But that's only speaking relatively, because it's not that duration has in fact increased, it's that a new frame of reference is used in the measurement. We can confirm that a different way, it seems to me, every time we experience time "flying by" or "taking forever" to us while the opposite is true of a friend, yet neither of our clocks reveal an actual difference in duration. When the latter is in a sense affected, both perspectives are correct relative to their point of view, but none of this has much bearing, as far as I can tell, regarding cause-effect or free will.

[Davka]

x=0 is a pathological coordinate choice.

I had an Uncle like that. We couldn't take him anywhere.

[bennyboy]

It seems to me trivially obvious that subjective experience of time varies widely from person to person. To a bored small child, an hour is an eternity. To an adult having tons of fun, it zips by like nothing.

But you wouldn't say that a change in one's perception of time actually involves a shortening of duration all else being equal. For example, if one constantly lived near the speed of light, this conversation would b....e.... t...a...k...i...n...g... really long. But that's only speaking relatively, because it's not that duration has in fact increased, it's that a new frame of reference is used in the measurement. We can confirm that a different way, it seems to me, every time we experience time "flying by" or "taking forever" to us while the opposite is true of a friend, yet neither of our clocks reveal an actual difference in duration. When the latter is in a sense affected, both perspectives are correct relative to their point of view, but none of this has much bearing, as far as I can tell, regarding cause-effect or free will.

It does if you consider how fast time "moves" for an unconscious person, a dead one, or a non-existent one.

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x=0 is a pathological coordinate choice.

I had an Uncle like that. We couldn't take him anywhere.

. . . and yet he randomly popped up everywhere.

[Mudhammam]

It does if you consider how fast time "moves" for an unconscious person, a dead one, or a non-existent one.

That sounds like the Berkeleian argument that one cannot without contradiction conceive of trees existing unconceived. Whether time moves "fast" or "slow" is a subjective evaluation. There is no objective "fastness." The question, I think is whether time moves at all (or as I see it, whether there is any change that requires causal priority), and in what direction, regardless if there is or isn't a brain to interpret the change using a concept such as time. Forgive me if I'm missing your argument entirely---all this is admittedly a bit difficult for a man of my caliber---but say there is only "timeness," and the future is fixed in such a way that past and present are driven towards it by necessity, rather than a fixed past and present driving towards future events, though leaving open the question whether this renders the future fixed or unfixed (I personally don't see how it could be hypothetically unfixed but that may be due to my unsophisticated understanding of causation). How does that allow for free will? And could such a dimension which is currently falsely perceived be discovered by brains that---for whatever reason---have a conception of causality that is in fact reversed or illusory? Or are we just speculating for fun here without any hope of such possibilities elucidating our understanding about anything other than a metaphysical (though already poorly, and perhaps, fatally, defined) concept, as in free will?

I will say that you, as well as this technical and difficult book I'm near completing (Cement of the Universe: A Study of Causation), have given me some pause about the concept of determinism, and I would like to renounce whatever dogmatism I may have displayed thus far. I'm a bit confused because people seem to speak of indeterminism as vindicated by science, yet continually speak of the Universe as determined. I think perhaps, given the many different ways causality can be conceived, I may have been giving my concept of determinism too broad, and almost meaningless, of a scope. On the one hand, determinism seems obviously true to me in the sense that the present moment is always determined by all the past moments. On the other hand, that seems completely trivial, and J.L. Mackie may be on to something when he states, though to my inferior mind a bit paradoxically: "If determinism does not hold, the concept of causal priority which I have tried to analyse will apply to the objects, but if determinism holds, it will not. If you have too much causation, it destroys one of its own most characteristic features. Every event is equally fixed from eternity with every other, and there is no room left for any preferred direction of causing." In fact, that last statement seems to coincide with what you've been arguing for here.

[The Grand Nudger]

It does if you consider how fast time "moves" for an unconscious person, a dead one, or a non-existent one.

Those three things don't have anything to do with what you're referencing. Dilation isn't an issue of whether or not you're conscious, dead, or non-existent. Conscious, unconscious, living, dead, made up or not yet made up.....put em all in one room going the same speed with the same gravity and time will pass the same for all. The only difference between any will be their -experience of it-, but just because they experience it differently that shouldn't be taken to mean or imply that this is somehow equivalent to dilation. There are other very well established explanations for these differences.

Time doesn't seem to progress at variable rates in instances of dilation...it actually does. It's not a subjective experience, even though what is being experienced must, by necessity, be experienced subjectively. On the other end of this - referencing subjective experience in another field of study, just because time seems to be progressing at a variable rates, doesn't mean that this is the same as dilation, or that it actually -is- progressing at variable rates. Different uses of shared terms.

[bennyboy]

On the other hand, that seems completely trivial, and J.L. Mackie may be on to something when he states, though to my inferior mind a bit paradoxically: "If determinism does not hold, the concept of causal priority which I have tried to analyse will apply to the objects, but if determinism holds, it will not. If you have too much causation, it destroys one of its own most characteristic features. Every event is equally fixed from eternity with every other, and there is no room left for any preferred direction of causing." In fact, that last statement seems to coincide with what you've been arguing for here.

I think that's pretty much what I've said, yes, though I haven't read enough to know the literature. It's always depressing when you spend hours imagining and coming up with your own ideas, to discover it's just an aside mentioned in the footnotes of some great man's book.

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Those three things don't have anything to do with what you're referencing. Dilation isn't an issue of whether or not you're conscious, dead, or non-existent. Conscious, unconscious, living, dead, made up or not yet made up.....put em all in one room going the same speed with the same gravity and time will pass the same for all.

The dilation you are talking about is, for the most part, a mathematical construct. What I'm talking about with subjective relativity is that if you remove an entity capable of experiencing the flow of time, time no longer "flows," it exists only as information about state. Time "unfolds" differently for different organisms. To me, this indicates that they are moving through the dimension of time at different rates-- but we can't "get" this fully because we are stuck forever in our own point of reference: much like we can't "get" what it's like for a photon to be at one moment on the sun, and at the SAME moment in its reference at the farthest reaches of the universe.