All of these are excellent philosophical question, Biggy. If anyone understands the futility in answering them definitively, it would be you. But I don’t think this proves the inherent paradoxical nature of reality as much as the inherent paradoxical nature of the questions (or our thoughts about them). As far as I’m concerned, there are conceivable scenarios we can entertain which could qualify as answers to these questions… just not definitively (because we can’t prove any of this). For example, you say:
…which is true, but you know as well as anyone that this possibility has never stopped you from having a meaningful discussion with people in the past. Life goes on despite the vexation of these questions.
We apprehend meaning in the moment. It’s true that we can always reflect on meaning and question whether it actually means anything at all, but there’s a reason these exchanges work. While engaged in an exchange, we apprehend meaning, and it’s that apprehension which perpetuates the exchange, which keeps us moving forward. If meaning was, in fact, vacuous, this would not be possible.
For example, if I ask you “what’s 4 plus 6?” you are able to says “10” only because you apprehend the meaning of “4” and “6”. 4 means “there are four things” and 6 means “there are six things” and 4 + 6 means “you have 4 things coupled with 6 things.” ← That means there are 10 things all together.
^ You see how meaning is the fuel that keeps thought, and thus exchanges, moving.
^ But all this could be a grand chimera, right?–maybe a simple discussion of what 4 plus 6 equals is, in reality, rambling nonsense, and we’re only determined to think it’s not–but you can only take that seriously when you’re not in the moment. When you are in the moment–actually think “what’s 4 plus 6?”–you patently see that it’s not.
Well, my point was that redness doesn’t have redness, it isn’t given redness, it is redness. Existence isn’t given existence. Things are given existence, brought into existence. Existence is just the word we use to refer to the being of all things. The being of things wasn’t given being itself.
I’m not a Big Bang denier–I’ll go along with the idea that some huge explosion occurred roughly 13 billion years ago–but I would just caution anyone who wants to talk about existence “coming into” existence at that point. If there was a “before” prior to the Big Bang, then time could not have begun with the Big Bang, and that means there must have been existence before the Big Bang (even if empty). If there was no “before” then time has a beginning, but there was no “coming into” existence since that implies time before.
People can believe all sorts of things. My interest here is not in proving the reality of any theory or possible scenario. I just try to take your paradoxical conundrums and see if I can make sense of them.
The what now?
First of all, you can’t have an illusion without subjectivity. Subjectivity just means: how things seem from a first person point of view. The creation of the illusion (if we’re calling it that) is subjectivity.
But that doesn’t really address my point. I was asking why we assume that if we are fully determined, we would necessarily feel determined. I mean, without having to posit that the brain has to supplement the experience of freedom to its already rich repertoire of experiences. It’s like asking: how does the brain create the experience of pain without including the aspect of the wetness of the neurons underlying the experience of pain? Not everything about the physical infrastructure that underlies our experiences necessarily has to be made a part of our experience. As far as I’m concerned, what we call “freedom of choice” is not an illusory “thing” that we experience in addition to all our other experience, but an omission on the part of our brains. The brain omits to add to our experiences the fact of our being determined. So we don’t feel determined. We might then infer that we are free in the sense of being able to violate the laws of nature (or that the laws of nature don’t apply to us) but this is an ordinary run-of-the-mill philosophical mistake, not an insoluble paradox of our existence.