Determinism, Free Will and Paradox

[bennyboy]

So for time: is the current state an expression of the initial state multiplied by factors representing universal laws? Or are the initial state and laws determined by a necessary (and inevitable) end state?

Unless I were to believe that the Universe is a manifestation of converging intentionality, rather than intentionality being, from my point of view, one of the local, infinitesimal manifestations as result of a particular organization of matter/energy, I would say the former (in your case) and the latter (in mine) requires fewer assumptions given the available data.

Let me make very clear that I'm not talking about the will of God or anything here, nor heading in that direction. I'm only talking about the relationship between determinism, causality, and the local experience of human free will.

You've referred frequently to the human perspective as an affirmation of truth, but does this really make sense? It seems to me we can infer from experience only the relationship BETWEEN people and things or events, and not the nature of those things and events themselves. So clearly, the relationship between people and time is that we experience a dynamic environment, and the particular nature of that dynamism is (for example) the mechanical interaction of objects in space: inertia, gravity, etc. But just because I'm sitting at the back of a spaceship watching new things fly past me doesn't mean that the things I'm about to experience aren't already there.

Why is it that you feel the experience of free will is invalidated by the philosophical idea of determinism, but that other experiences, like the sensation of passage through time, necessarily cannot be? Is there really a necessary separation in these categories of experience, or is it something else? Is it perhaps that determinism waves away some of the apparent paradox implicit in free will (and, more broadly, sentience)? Has determinism, then, become a kind of scientific philosopher's stone, like the magical God which resolves paradox without itself needing to be considered one? Because I very much do still think the existence of a subjective perspective in an objective universe is paradoxical.

I'm suspicious of any answer which claims to be the right one, because it is at odds with my own experience-- that answers usually resolve to perspective rather than to truth. You can take yin and I can take yang, and we can chase each other's tails for a while, but in the end, there's always that little bit of irony there-- because all the learning you've done, and are doing, which leads you to take the position of determinism, has been done free-willfully by you. If someone calls you up for a beer, you don't after all tell them, "It is inevitable that I finish this book about causality," do you?

And that's the thing, for me. People claim to have learned something about reality, but then they consistently, and unapologetically, continue to act in a way which contradicts that knowledge. Why is this? I propose it's mainly because people sense that their intellectual conclusions don't very well represent their actual experience of life.

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Do photons age? I'm not sure that this language is going to be very appropriate regarding photons unless we state, very specifically, what we mean.

I'll rephrase. How much time passes, in the framework of a photon, from the moment it is released from one body (say the sun), to the time it is absorbed by another body (say a moon 1000 light years away)?