RE: Determinism, Free Will and Paradox
January 20, 2015 at 1:08 am
(This post was last modified: January 20, 2015 at 1:10 am by Mudhammam.)
(January 19, 2015 at 7:36 pm)bennyboy Wrote: 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.You could only do so, hypothetically, of course. That doesn't mean that the objects we measure behave differently when we are observing them; it means our observation can vary relative to position and still offer a true account. The meaning we impose on the world when giving an orderly exposition of it IS illusory in the sense that signs are only representations and can never capture the whole essence of the external world, but that doesn't imply that what sense can accomplish isn't descriptive of reality as it actually is.
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.
(January 19, 2015 at 7:36 pm)bennyboy Wrote: 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.I guess I'm not sure what basis you could have for demonstrating this.
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.
He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return - Baruch Spinoza