Determinism, Free Will and Paradox

[bennyboy]

It is maybe mathematically more consistent to talk about the proper time (squared), which can be calculated for any trajectory without encountering any infinities. It corresponds to the total time elapsing for the traveller when having gone through this trajectory. For photons, this is exactly zero.

Finally.

So, it's clear that what we all here already know about relativity-- i.e. that it's relative-- leads us to something like a paradox. While that photon was traveling, did time pass or didn't it? Yes it did, and no it didn't. (and this is directed at Pickup more than you, btw) The difference isn't the reality of changes in state in a universal sense, but rather their relation to an "observer" (and I use this word loosely here).

So am I wrong in stating that for a travelling photon which never encounters another body, no time passes between that photon's release from a body and the end of the universe?

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Anyway, I'm open to different interpretations of time but to dissolve it into nothing but perspective as it exists only between observer and observed makes zero sense in an evolutionary history of subjective beings.

Okay, let me ask you this admittedly philosophical question. Do all beings hear A=440Hz in the same way? I'd argue this wouldn't make evolutionary sense: a very tiny being, like a bug, can hear higher pitches but not the lower ones: those it can only feel, because its ears are (again I'm assuming) too tiny to really manage the longer wavelengths of deeper sounds. It can also react incredibly fast to moving objects (like an incoming angry hand). This makes me suspect that the insect experiences time differently than we do: i.e. that time is "slowed down" for it. Now, let's imagine a massive being, the size of a galaxy. Due to limitations of the speed of light, it would be responding to events that happen over many millenia, and things like A=440Hz would be so trivial as to be imperceptible to it. It would "hear" the vibrations of A=.000000000001Hz, let's say, as a kind of middle tone; and now it is WE who can process this signal only mathematically.

On paper, both A=440Hz and A=880Hz and A.000000000001Hz look exactly identical; it is only the time scale relative to some other event by which those frequencies are differentiated meaningfully. But without a subjective observer, it seems to me that there IS no other event by which to meaningfully "plot" the function of a wave. So how would you represent a sine wave when you cannot establish the time scale of the function? You can't. It is the framework of a subjective entity by which the math is "rendered" into a specific rate or speed.

In fact, I think it's possible that may even be what subjectivity is: not a happenstance byproduct of complex mechanical interactions, but a kind of node by which events at different scales are brought into relation with each other.

Perhaps we're at a different question altogether but it's almost as if you want to, like some do with consciousness, just pretend it really isn't there.

Time is clearly there, since we experience its passage. However, let me coin a new word, "time-ness." I'd say that red, the frequency of light from the sun, exists regardless of a human observer, but red-ness, the experience of color, is a human function.

Time, as the dimension or framework along (or in) which events are organized, clearly exists. However, in determinism, I don't think time and the experience of it are necessarily the same thing: i.e. a one-directional arrow, with origin at one point of the line, and the end at the other.