Determinism, Free Will and Paradox

[bennyboy]

On the other hand, that seems completely trivial, and J.L. Mackie may be on to something when he states, though to my inferior mind a bit paradoxically: "If determinism does not hold, the concept of causal priority which I have tried to analyse will apply to the objects, but if determinism holds, it will not. If you have too much causation, it destroys one of its own most characteristic features. Every event is equally fixed from eternity with every other, and there is no room left for any preferred direction of causing." In fact, that last statement seems to coincide with what you've been arguing for here.

I think that's pretty much what I've said, yes, though I haven't read enough to know the literature. It's always depressing when you spend hours imagining and coming up with your own ideas, to discover it's just an aside mentioned in the footnotes of some great man's book.

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Those three things don't have anything to do with what you're referencing. Dilation isn't an issue of whether or not you're conscious, dead, or non-existent. Conscious, unconscious, living, dead, made up or not yet made up.....put em all in one room going the same speed with the same gravity and time will pass the same for all.

The dilation you are talking about is, for the most part, a mathematical construct. What I'm talking about with subjective relativity is that if you remove an entity capable of experiencing the flow of time, time no longer "flows," it exists only as information about state. Time "unfolds" differently for different organisms. To me, this indicates that they are moving through the dimension of time at different rates-- but we can't "get" this fully because we are stuck forever in our own point of reference: much like we can't "get" what it's like for a photon to be at one moment on the sun, and at the SAME moment in its reference at the farthest reaches of the universe.