Time and Freedom: Reconciling the transcendent view with the view through the eyes of the participant in history

As our scientific knowledge has grown in both depth and scope, it has supplanted philosophy or religion in many parts of our culture as source of a world-view. Science, however, confronts us with a vision of ourselves and our place in the Cosmos that challenges our ideas about who we are. Many people have claimed, for example, that it tells us that free will is a pre-scientific fantasy and that the passage of time is an illusion. These claims are so directly at odds with our experience that they call into question whether the lessons of the science have been properly understood.
The reason that people make these claims is rooted in the fault-line between a view of the cosmos from outside of space and time and a view through the eyes of an agent whose actions are part of the universe. My project focuses in on that fault-line. It looks at immanent and transcendent approaches to time, freedom, and physics. On the philosophical side, I want to bring new insight into how the two views - the immanent view and the transcendent view – relate to one another, and show how to recover the proper understanding of ourselves as agents in a universe of the kind that physics (in particular, modern cosmology) describes in transcendent terms. I will write three papers that will be presented in talks, and prepared in longer form for publication. On the scientific side, I will write two papers addressing scientific controversies associated with the relationship between immanent and transcendent approaches to physics.
All of this work will lay the foundation for a book in the next few years that I hope will lay out a new way of seeing what science tells us about our place in the Cosmos.