https://www.youtube.com/@pbsspacetime
created by diogenesthehopeful on 13/09/2024 at 05:45 UTC
1 upvotes, 2 top-level comments (showing 2)
Comment by mildmys at 13/09/2024 at 05:51 UTC
3 upvotes, 1 direct replies
You know, it would help if you maybe related free will to your posts in some way.
Comment by diogenesthehopeful at 13/09/2024 at 07:28 UTC*
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Okay; I get the message:
In order to coherently argue free will is true or not, a premise for such an argument is if fatalism/determinism is true.
Since fatalism is beyond the grounding of human understanding we are left with determinism.
In order to determine if determinism is true we have to look at the laws of physics.
According to today's physics the most successful science is quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity (GR) and these two are incompatible. What is in fact compatible are the *special* theory of relativity (SR) and QM because together they gave us quantum field theory (QFT) which is the basis of the standard model (not the clockwork universe model).
What scientism won't tell you is that SR works with QM because of relationalism and GR does not because of substantivalism:
https://philpapers.org/rec/DASSVR[1][2]
1: https://philpapers.org/rec/DASSVR
2: https://philpapers.org/rec/DASSVR
Substantivalism is the view that space exists in addition to any material bodies situated within it. Relationalism is the opposing view that there is no such thing as space; there are just material bodies, spatially related to one another.
The elephant in the room for the realist is that QM needs relationalism to be true and gravity needs substantivalism to be true. Substantivalism and relationalism are opposites. In a certain sense waves and particles are opposites, but that doesn't stop QFT from working. It does however stop naive realism[3] from being tenable.
3: https://arxiv.org/abs/1206.6578
The challenge for the determinist is to prove the external world is "out there" the way the naïve realist believes that it must be out there. If he cannot do that, then space and time are the illusion and we cognize free will based on an ontological illusion.
Just because free will is an ontological illusion doesn't imply that it is an epistemic illusion. We perceive the external world via space and time. Therefore space and time are fundamental to *perception*.
The following exposition was first posted on the SEP in 2016 when the problem with the external world was becoming very apparent.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-episprob/#ProbExteWorl[4][5]
4: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-episprob/#ProbExteWorl
5: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-episprob/#ProbExteWorl
The question of *how* our perceptual beliefs are justified or known can be approached by first considering the question of *whether* they are justified or known. A prominent skeptical argument is designed to show that our perceptual beliefs are not justified. Versions of this argument (or cluster of arguments) appear in René Descartes’s *Meditations*, Augustine’s *Against the Academicians*, and several of the ancient and modern skeptics (e.g., Sextus Empiricus, Michel de Montaigne). The argument introduces some type of skeptical scenario, in which things perceptually appear to us just as things normally do, but in which the beliefs that we would naturally form are radically false. To take some standard examples: differences in the sense organs and/or situation of the perceiver might make them experience as cold things that we would experience as hot, or experience as bitter things that we would experience as sweet; a person might mistake a vivid dream for waking life; or a brain in a vat might have its sensory cortices stimulated in such a way that it has the very same perceptual experiences that I am currently having, etc.
All this suggests a “veil of perception” between us and external objects: we do **not** have direct unvarnished access to the world, but instead have an access that is mediated by sensory appearances, the character of which might well depend on all kinds of factors (e.g., condition of sense organs, direct brain stimulation, etc.) besides those features of the external world that our perceptual judgments aim to capture. Paraphrasing David Hume (1739: I.2.vi[6], I.4.ii; 1748: sec 12.1; see also Locke 1690, Berkeley 1710, Russell 1912): nothing is ever directly present to the mind in perception except perceptual appearances.
{italics SEP; bold mine}