Reddit mentions of Uncertainty

>As such, I don't see any reason to isolate philosophers as uniquely apt to have commitments beyond the empirical.

True, and it is unjust of me to suggest otherwise. I meant it as an example of scientists embracing counterfactual ideals as a means of defeating a theory to which they were philosophically opposed to. (By the way, I HIGHLY recommend Uncertainty by David Lindley , as it's a supremely interesting historical study of the development of quantum physics and the results thereof.)

I've read through about half of that review so far, and I do have to say that it's fascinating. I don't perfectly understand the nuances of his view of free will, and won't probably for a long time, but I get what you were trying to say I believe. Indeed, I haven't spelled out what agency means in terms that are satisfactorily comparable to a compatabilistic viewpoint. To clarify, I think I struggle with the concept that agency is involved so long as the results are allowable under the physics required; that so long as a feasible narrative (or timeline, or what have you) can be drawn through the actions, that the agency exists. Am I correct there, in that this is a tenet of compatabilism? Please correct me if I am not, because this entire topic becomes more fascinating the longer I look at it.

>As an aside, I find this particular paradox unconvincing.

As do I. I am afraid that I was typing without thinking there, because that's not precisely what I meant. I am, I believe, a strict determinist by the definitions we supply. I think when I mentioned that paradox, what I meant is that I do not consider the issue to be troubling (in the existential way some in the libertarian camp might) because I believe knowledge of the universe to be functionally impossible. As perfect knowledge of the universe is literally impossible by the Heisenberg principle, and nearly-perfect knowledge similarly nearly-impossible, I feel less urgency therein. I accept this is shirking my responsibility as an educated guy, but I have trouble accepting the compatabilist viewpoint for similar reasons. The past happened; the future will happen. So long as the future is unknown, agency (or the illusion of agency) can exist. When the future is KNOWN, only the illusion of agency can remain. I believe the key to the similarity between my viewpoint and compatabilism is that I believe the future to be unknown, though fundamentally knowable (or if you like, mostly-knowable), and as such that agency can retain it's appearances.

>Einstein was certainly heavily influenced by various the metaphysics of various philosophers, but his work seems to me to have been fundamentally physics (albeit, physics that was influential on later work in metaphysics).

In his later years, Einstein garnered a bit of a reputation for,for lack of a better phrase, "old guard syndrome". His work in relativity and gravity are phenomenal, but his attempts to deal with the problems in quantum mechanics and astrophysics were less than stellar (again, I recommend Uncertainty) and relied very much upon his intuition on how the world ought to work, rather than how it was experimentally demonstrated to work. It's that kind of reasoning that I describe, perhaps wrongly, as metaphysical.

By the way, I feel that I need to thank you; this discussion has been amazing and very informative.