Determinism, Free Will and Paradox

[bennyboy]

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.

It would be the standard interpretation to say that no time passes when one follows the trajectory of the photon. This is consistent with the fact that arbitrarily little time passes for observers moving between two points if they are travelling arbitrarily close to the speed of light. As a limiting case, you have light speed with no time passing.

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.

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. 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?

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