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DanielVarga comments on The Dilemma: Science or Bayes? - Less Wrong
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Is this really an empirical fact? How do you define the word "exists"?
Maybe it's not really an empirical fact, but then do you really think that past still "exist" and future already "exist" as well as present does ?
How to define existence ? That is the big question. What is reality ? Why has the past gone, and why isn't the future already there ? And why am I myself ?
I don't have answers, I only blame the many-world interpretation adepts to go straight to conclusions without addressing those deep questions, as if you could step into metaphysics starting only from a predictive mathematical model of reality.
Stepping into metaphysics from a predictive mathematical model of reality sounds like a step backwards to me!
I don't know if it is a step "backwards", as metaphysics encompass science. I would say it's a step outside. Anyway, that's what the many-world interpretation does in my opinion.
My position is very close to the position of Max Tegmark, Gary Drescher and other compatibilist B-theorists, so yes, I really really honestly believe that past and future exist as well as present does. At least in some sense of the word "exists", but this is not a cop-out, the sense I used it must be very similar to the sense you used it. There is another reasonable sense of the word "exists" (corresponding to Tegmark's frog's view), where only some of the past and present exists, and not too much of the future.
The point is, you have several choices about how to consistently formalize your vague statement, but whichever you choose, your "empirical fact" will be factually incorrect.
I really doubt it. how could you factually prove that the past or the future exist ?
Let's say my position is a very narrow version of Tegmark's view, and that I call "present" (with a certain thickness) the parts of the past and future that actually "exist".
First of all, I should have wrote "logically inconsistent", but "factually incorrect" sounded better. :) More importantly, it is possible that I misinterpreted what you wrote:
I interpreted this as a positive statement that an observer-independent present does actually exist, hundred percent. This is in contradiction with special relativity, as someone else already noted. Reading other comments from you in this thread, it seems like this is not what you meant. It is more like you choose the second option of my dichotomy: the frog's view instead of the bird's view. I have no problem with that.