Essay Abstract
In my recently published article, "A New Theory of Free Will" , I argued that several serious philosophical and empirical hypotheses - hypotheses which have all received and continue to receive serious discussion by philosophers and physicists, and which may all turn out to be true - jointly entail that we are living in the functional equivalent of a peer-to-peer (P2P) networked computer simulation. Not only that, I argued that this P2P Hypothesis explains the very existence of almost all of the most puzzling features of our world: 1. Quantum indeterminacy and measurement problems. 2. Quantum entanglement. 3. The apparent irreducibility of conscious experience to physical objects, properties or functions. 4. The intuition that our personal identity, as conscious subjects of experience, is irreducible to any form of physical or psychological continuity. 5. The apparent "unreality of time" in the objective physical world, along with our subjective experience of the passage of time. 6. Our experience of ourselves as having free will despite our experiencing the physical world as causally closed under the laws of physics. §1 of this essay briefly summarizes (a) the philosophical and empirical hypotheses that jointly entail the P2P Hypothesis, (b) how the P2P Hypothesis explains all six features of our mentioned above, and (c) the P2P Hypothesis's four distinct empirical predictions. §2 then shows something new: that even if the P2P Hypothesis is true, our world differs from the kind of P2P simulations we have constructed in one profound, fundamental way: a way that implies that reality cannot be reduced to mere quantitative information of the sort dealt with in the hard-sciences. Reality has fundamentally qualitative elements that cannot be understood as "information" in any traditional sense.
Author Bio
The author is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tampa. He received his PhD from the University of Arizona in 2008. His doctoral dissertation, "A Nonideal Theory of Justice", developed a comprehensive theory of how to respond to injustices. He is currently writing a book entitled, "Re-laying Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: A Simple, Intuitive Case for the Categorical Imperative, the Unity of its Formulas, and Beyond." In addition to social-political philosophy and ethics, the author also does work in metaphysics and the philosophy of science, including work on free will.