Determinism, Free Will and Paradox

[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.