You laid down a gauntlet, ‘there is no free will,’ arguing the point based on an either/or premise. ”Either we live in a deterministic cosmos…or randomness (of the quantum type) is fundamental…”
I disputed the ‘either/or’ by providing a third possibility, that there is no objective reality, in which case there may still be free will.
But, that aside, your arguments against the possibility that there is no objective reality hold no water.
I’ll take them step by step:
“You are making a big assumption about reality.”
I make no assumption. I’m pointing out the simple observation that all experience (at least in my experience!) takes place NOW, and thus (at least from my perspective!) any assertion that reality exists independently of experience, NOW, must be an assumption.
“How do you explain that while I’m asleep others are paying attention?”
How do you know others are paying attention when you’re asleep? Isn’t that your assumption? Do I have to explain your assumption?
“And how do you explain machine-gathered records of the past, like movies or photographs?”
To experience any records is to experience them NOW. You may remember looking at them yesterday, but that’s a memory, and memory can only be accessed, NOW.
“And what do you make of scientific theories that tell us, backed by empirical observations, that the past stretches for about 13 billion years in this universe.”
How does one experience ‘then’? Even if you time-traveled to ‘then’ it would be your NOW when you experienced it. When we see ‘into the past’ by observing the stars, that experience is NOW. The ‘in the past’ part, safe or not, is an assumption.
“Isn’t it simpler to assume that the world exists independently of our minds? At the very least it’s a bit less of a narcissistic view of reality…”
Whoa! Is that what science does, take the ‘simpler’ path of ‘assumptions’? Is that what philosophy should do? Doesn’t it strike you that, if we are to assume objective reality, there should be a basis other than ‘simpler’?
And how is an empirically accurate view ‘narcissistic’? I have made no assumptions to the effect that ‘my’ experience is the only valid experience. I simply say that in my experience, and I suspect in yours as well, all experience is experienced NOW.
It could well be that experience is a reinforcing affair. The tree outside experiences its world in its way, the birds in the tree in their way, I in my way, but there are shared components of each that serve to reinforce each other. This might explain the continuity we NOW (!) experience.
The 'decoherence' we hear of in physics might play into this as well. There are other explanatory possibilities.
Thanks for the reply. Take care!
