Originally Posted by
Phaedrus
That's correct. But provability is not the same thing as truth, and it doesn't make sense to doubt the existence of an objective reality. That we may never know for sure the real structure of reality is no argument against its existence. If anything exists it also has an objective structure, it exists objectively.
You can't prove that that is the case, it doesn't follow from your assumptions that that is the case, and there is no reason to believe that that is the case. As so many people tend to do, you confuse truth with knowledge. An interpretation is always an interpretation of something, and that something exists objectively. There are correct interpretations and there are incorrect interpretations of reality. The correct interpretations represent objective truth, the incorrect interpretations represent objective falsehood, and the subjective beliefs of you and me are just what they are -- beliefs. And as such they are either objectively true or objectively false, whether or not we may be able to know that they are true or false.
It doesn't follow from the premise that you only have your perceptions to go on that you can't prove that your beliefs are true. And whether you can prove something to be true or not is irrelevant, because provability is logically independent of truth. Not all objective truths are provable. In fact, it is a proven fact (proven by Gödel and others) that there are objective truths that can't be proven to be true. That we don't know exactly which of our beliefs are unprovable objective truths is another (irrelevant) matter.
No, it does not contradict the existence of determinism, because the world can be deterministic even if we can't prove that it is.
If everything is relative, your statement that everything is relative is also relative, and as such it is not objectively true, which means that it is false, and therefore it should be dismissed as irrelevant.
Everything is not relative, and it is easy to prove that everything is not relative, because that assumption leads to a logical contradiction, and every logical contradiction is necessarily false. Take Einstein's theory of relativity for example. Many people have got the totally wrong idea that it is a relativistic theory, but that is totally false. The speed of light is not relative but absolute according to this theory.
Yes, it is possible that we neither have free will nor determinism. But here you assume the existence of an objective truth, becuase if neither might exist, it is possible the neither might exist, and if neither exists, then it is objectively true that neither exists. There will always be an objective truth of the matter. Either there is an objective world or there isnt'. But either way, there is an objective truth. Either it is objectively true that there is an objective reality, or it is objectively true that there isn't an objective reality. There will always be objective facts, even if the world doesn't exists.
Whether everything is deterministic is logically independent on whether everything has a reason. A casue is something totally different from a reason. There might not be any reasons in a totally deterministic universe. Everthing could just exist without any explanation for why it exists. And similarly, there could be a lot of reasons in a totally indeterministic universe where everything is due to chance. Don't confuse causes with reasons.
How do you know that? Especially since you explicitly say that we can't know anything. If there is a reason for everything within the "normal", then it is true that there is a reason for everything with the "normal". But that logically implies that there is an objective truth, otherwise you are contradicting yourself, and if you are contradicting yourself your statement is false.