Determinism, Free Will and Paradox

[The Grand Nudger]

Yes, and given the present state, none of those preceding it could have been different than they have been.

They could have been, all we can say with confidence is that they weren't - every question along this line terminates at a "we don't know" point, we can only work with what we've got, after all. Nothing about our present state is the cause of anything in some past state, in our experience - so the direction that you're trying to make this implication move in is simply unworkable without some additional information.

Tell me, does lightning strike upward, or downward?

Neither, and the experience of a human observer is amusingly inadequate regardless. A person might say, accurately, "I see it striking inward" as a way of communicating that it comes "down" from the sky in the way that they experience it....but they'd be wrong, on both counts, despite providing an accurate representation of how they (and others) experience it, huh? Que "free will".

(lighting follows the path of least resistance, the leader proceeds from the cloud to the ground...but the visible charge is actually headed toward that leader from the ground - the human eye is incapable of perceiving this - nothing about your question refers to what lightning is or does, but to what the human eye is capable of perceiving - better instrumentation gave us a more accurate picture - despite being incapable of changing what we experience or how we experience it...even when we know that we are experiencing it in a manner that is factually incorrect, I would suggest that this is also a factor in "free will"..more accurately our experience thereof.)

[Mudhammam]

So for time: is the current state an expression of the initial state multiplied by factors representing universal laws? Or are the initial state and laws determined by a necessary (and inevitable) end state?

Unless I were to believe that the Universe is a manifestation of converging intentionality, rather than intentionality being, from my point of view, one of the local, infinitesimal manifestations as result of a particular organization of matter/energy, I would say the former (in your case) and the latter (in mine) requires fewer assumptions given the available data.

[Alex K]

Does light really move if someone moving at the speed of light is infinitely close to his destination?

No-one can move at the speed of light.

[Davka]

Does light really move if someone moving at the speed of light is infinitely close to his destination?

No-one can move at the speed of light.

i beg to differ. Convert the mass in their body to light, and voila!

All it takes is a strategically-placed hydrogen bomb.

(ok, ok, some of the mass would convert to heat. so sue me.)

[Alex K]

But let me ask you this: does time really "take time" if there is nobody experiencing it?

I take answer 3: the question is meaningless

Or does it compress into a singularity, as space does as one approaches the speed of light?

Yes, that's why an arbitrary amount of time passes in the world around you if you accelerate in it near light speed and then brake again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation

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No-one can move at the speed of light.

i beg to differ. Convert the mass in their body to light, and voila!

I thought about it for a second: could one have neurons made of hypothetical massless particles, thus having a brain at light speed. I think the problem is that communication between the neurons will be impossible without effectively slowing them down.

[Mudhammam]

Also benny, it's not a trivial question such as your one about lighting or that of even "free will." The differences here aren't simply "upward/downward" or "forward backward"; it's what makes a difference between causal and non-causal sequences versus regular succession/regression, and is the phenomena of directional change merely mental, which if it is, would seem to me to render the entire projects of philosophy and science to be illusory in that they have absolutely no hold on the functionality of the objects in which sense data is drawn out to establish conclusions... about anything, even your argument; I think experience would indicate otherwise.

[bennyboy]

Does light really move if someone moving at the speed of light is infinitely close to his destination?

No-one can move at the speed of light.

Light can. Let me ask you a question: how much does a photon age, in its own framework, while it is traveling say 1000 light years from the perspective of Earth?

[The Grand Nudger]

Do photons age? I'm not sure that this language is going to be very appropriate regarding photons unless we state, very specifically, what we mean.

[bennyboy]

So for time: is the current state an expression of the initial state multiplied by factors representing universal laws? Or are the initial state and laws determined by a necessary (and inevitable) end state?

Unless I were to believe that the Universe is a manifestation of converging intentionality, rather than intentionality being, from my point of view, one of the local, infinitesimal manifestations as result of a particular organization of matter/energy, I would say the former (in your case) and the latter (in mine) requires fewer assumptions given the available data.

Let me make very clear that I'm not talking about the will of God or anything here, nor heading in that direction. I'm only talking about the relationship between determinism, causality, and the local experience of human free will.

You've referred frequently to the human perspective as an affirmation of truth, but does this really make sense? It seems to me we can infer from experience only the relationship BETWEEN people and things or events, and not the nature of those things and events themselves. So clearly, the relationship between people and time is that we experience a dynamic environment, and the particular nature of that dynamism is (for example) the mechanical interaction of objects in space: inertia, gravity, etc. But just because I'm sitting at the back of a spaceship watching new things fly past me doesn't mean that the things I'm about to experience aren't already there.

Why is it that you feel the experience of free will is invalidated by the philosophical idea of determinism, but that other experiences, like the sensation of passage through time, necessarily cannot be? Is there really a necessary separation in these categories of experience, or is it something else? Is it perhaps that determinism waves away some of the apparent paradox implicit in free will (and, more broadly, sentience)? Has determinism, then, become a kind of scientific philosopher's stone, like the magical God which resolves paradox without itself needing to be considered one? Because I very much do still think the existence of a subjective perspective in an objective universe is paradoxical.

I'm suspicious of any answer which claims to be the right one, because it is at odds with my own experience-- that answers usually resolve to perspective rather than to truth. You can take yin and I can take yang, and we can chase each other's tails for a while, but in the end, there's always that little bit of irony there-- because all the learning you've done, and are doing, which leads you to take the position of determinism, has been done free-willfully by you. If someone calls you up for a beer, you don't after all tell them, "It is inevitable that I finish this book about causality," do you?

And that's the thing, for me. People claim to have learned something about reality, but then they consistently, and unapologetically, continue to act in a way which contradicts that knowledge. Why is this? I propose it's mainly because people sense that their intellectual conclusions don't very well represent their actual experience of life.

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Do photons age? I'm not sure that this language is going to be very appropriate regarding photons unless we state, very specifically, what we mean.

I'll rephrase. How much time passes, in the framework of a photon, from the moment it is released from one body (say the sun), to the time it is absorbed by another body (say a moon 1000 light years away)?

[The Grand Nudger]

1000 years. Mostly because a lightyear is defined as the distance that light travels in a single year. If it travelled 1000 of those, it would have taken 1000 years
(oversimplification of the situation, of course - might not have taken a straight-line course - the bodies are in motion - etc)