Thanks for the prodding in the previous post. Also, thanks to the anonymous comment with that list of readings. I knew there had to be literature on this.
Here is a quick and dirty formulation of the argument that eternalism is incompatible with some robust conception of freewill. Three different people have given me something like this argument. Ultimately, I think it’s unsound.
Past Entails Future Argument
- If eternalism is true, then there is some past fact that entails all of my future actions.
- If there is some past fact that entails all of my future actions, then I do not have freewill.
- Therefore, If eternalism is true, then I do not have freewill.
Motivation for One:
If eternalism is true, then for any of my future actions A, there will be some past fact at any past time of the form Andy will A. But if that’s true, then there will be an entailment relation between that past fact and my future actions.Motivation for Two:
The freewill literature is loaded with premises that fit this form. The idea is that if past facts entail what you do in the future, then what you do in the future is somehow not under your control. So, learning that the past facts entail what you do in the future should be sufficient to think that you’re not free in the future.
My Main Problem:
Premise 2 – is only plausible if you’re thinking like a presentist. If eternalism is true, it may be true that there is an entailment relation between some past fact and what you do in the future, but that past fact is made true by what you do in the future.
It’s only true in the past that you will do some future action (according to the eternalist) because you’re future self is there freely doing it in the future doing it.
If we learn that past facts entail our future actions, we’re inclined to think that this entails we don’t have freedom because we’re inclined to think that we simply cannot have any control whatsoever over the past facts – but we can have control over the past facts if eternalism is true. It’s our engrained presentist way of thinking that (I submit) inclines people to accept (2).
I’ve had some other versions of the argument presented to me, but I’m going to hold off for now.
In other news:
I’ve been reading Paul Boghossian’s Fear of Knowledge and Timothy Williamson’s The Philosophy of Philosophy. Interesting stuff in both. I may be posting something about this soon.
I’m glad you enjoyed my comment in the former post; I apologize for the length and the sloppiness!
Allow me to give a quick and very dirty explanation of the issue:
Imagine that on Wednesday you plan on meeting with your significant other at the movie theater at 2:30 PM. Upon your leaving work today, your co-worker gives you two tickets to the Opera. You read the tickets: “Wednesday Matinee: Curtain opens at 2:30 PM.”
Thus, you will either go to the Opera or the movie theater, right?
The determinist (of some sort) might say that you have no free choice in the matter; that the precluding conditions will determine that you will go to one event and not the other. Your date with your S.O. does not yet exist, but the outcome is entirely determined by what is, or will happen, before Wednesday at 2:30.
The eternalist takes it a step further: “Before” you were born, your Wednesday date is already real.
The whole universe is like a movie on a DVD; you can rewind it; play it, etc., but when you put it back in its case, the exposition, rising action, climax, denouement of the story is already in place.
For the eternalist, time is spatialized like a map and all events are locations on it. This is the reason that it is sometimes called the “Static Theory of Time” or “Blocktime”/”The Block Universe.”
This was the whole point of Prior’s famous article (in response to Smart, et al.) “Thank Goodness That’s Over”; he fears the pain that he’ll experience at the dentist, yet according to the eternalist, in some sense, his dentist appointment is “over and done with.” So too, don’t fear dying, in some sense, your death has–like your 2:30 date with your S.O.–“already happened.” B-Theorists are committed to the view that here are no tensed facts.
One of the main criticisms of the B-Theory (from McTaggart (1908) to today), is that it cannot account for the subjective, phenomenal experience of temporal becoming. One common response (Putnam, Grunbaum, Quine, et al.) is to say that temporal becoming is an illusion created by, say, my mind creeping up a worldvolume in (Minkowsi) space-time (Google “worldsheet” to get the gist of this).
Hermann Weyl, in “Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science,” explains something akin to this:
“The objective world simply is, it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line of my body, does a section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time.”
There is a slight consensus that the special theory of relativity is, on a Einsteinain/Minkowskian interpretation, more compatible with the B-Theory (in response to this, some A-Theorists (mostly motivated by a defense of presentism) are involved in projects to reconcile the A-Theory with it; e.g. W.L. Craig’s project to incorporate the STR with the A-Theory by means of a NeoLorenzian interpretation; or Quentin Smith’s use of Bohmianism, Bell’s Theorems, and, with M. Tooley, Lorentzianism to further defend the tensed/A-Theory.
Nonetheless, there are tons of great papers and a slew of books that will keep you occupied for hours. A quick look at the papers I have on my computer yields a short list of what I would recommend that you check out (should you be obsessively interested in the topic):
Hales, Stephen and Johnson, Tim (2003) “Endurantism and Perdurantism, and Special Relativity.” (Very relevant)
Putnam, Hilary (1967) “Time and Physical Geometry”
Durato, Maruo (2005) “The Irrelevance of the Presentist/Eternalist Debate for the Ontology of Spacetime.”
Christian, Joy (2006) “Absolute Being vs Absolute Becoming”
Smith, Quentin (1989) “A New Typology of Temporal and Atemporal Permanence.”
Diekember, Joseph. (2007) “B-Theory, Fixity, and Fatalism.”
Balashov, Yuri (2008) “Coexistence in Minkowski Spacetime.”
Skow, Bradford (2007) “What Makes Time Different from Space?”
Savitt, Stephen (2004) “Presentism and Eternalism in Perspective.”
Prosser, Simon (2007) “Could We Experience The Passage of Time?”
Petkov, Vesselin (2005) “Is There An Alternative to The Block Universe View?”
Peterson, Dan and Silberstein Michael (2007) “Relativity of Simultaneity and Eternalism: In Defense of Blockworld.”
Tallant, Jon (2007) “What is B-Time?”
Parsons, Josh (2001) “A-Theory for B-Theorists”
Noe, Alva (2008) ‘’Experience of The World In Time”
Nerlich, Graham (1985) “What Ontology Can Be About: A Spacetime Example”
Matthews, Geoffery (1979) “Time’s Arrow and the Structure of Spacetime.”
Markosian, Ned (1994) “The 3D/4D Controversy and Non-Present Objects.”
Le Poidevin, Robin (1992) “On the Acausality of Time, Space, and Space-Time.”
Of course, not all B-Theorists are eternalists, and (oddly enough) there are some eternalists who are A-Theorists. Some philosophers of time are A/B-Theorists (Smith, McCall, etc.), or are presentist four-dimensionalists, etc.
Best,
M
Also…
A timely post from Alex Pruss on “Induction and the A-theory”:
http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2008/02/induction-and-a-theory.html
Hi Andrew,
There seems to be a kind of peculiar blurring of fact and event in your formulation of these arguments. I’m supposing that a fact is a bit of information which describes an event, and is not equivalent to the event itself. If we do treat them as equivalent then we end up with a lot of nonsense statements like, “… that past event is made true.” And if we suppose (as I have) that a fact is not the event itself, then (1) and (2) are nonsensical. That is, since it’s just information describing an event, how could a past fact be the determinate of future events?
Hi M,
Thanks again for another informative and lengthy comment.
I am familiar with most of the papers you’ve mentioned in both comments and have read quite a few.
Whenever I teach Metaphysics, I spend most of the time going through the philosophy of time. Last time, we went through Sider’s book and we spent some time working through a few of the papers you mentioned.
Hi Stewart,
I’m not sure what you mean. I used the word “fact” in the original argument to mean “true proposition” since propositions are the things that stand in the entailment relation.
I suppose where things get blurry would be in the motivation for (2), right? Because the argument starts talking about facts (somehow) making it the case that something is not under your control – and that sounds like a roll that can only be played by an event – since events are the only things one might think stand in the causal relation.
Is that where you were thinking that confusion lies?
You may be on to a more precise way to formulate the argument.
Yes, I suppose that’s about right. And while the argument might be made more precise, I don’t think it’s going to get any more plausible.
At heart of this issue seems to be an empirical question about the universe, and not a logical question about propositions. What determines (for lack of a better word) whether you are ‘free’ is not a past fact’s veracity, which is only a conceptual attribute, but rather the causal relationship between past and present events. It’s ultimately a question of how energy and matter move from one position in space to another, and how time factors into such movement. That relationship doesn’t seem to be touched on by this line of thinking, and it’s unclear to me how an examination of language and epistemology could reliably shed any light on a physical question like this.
Andrew (and others),
Quick questions. I’m really tired, so forgive me if this isn’t making a ton of sense, but there’s no obvious entailment from eternalism to determinism, right? And, if you can believe that the events that take place are not linked by necessary causal connections, I just don’t quite yet feel the force of the argument that eternalism is incompatible with libertarianism.
I suppose I’d ask those who thought that eternalism and libertarianism were incompatible specifically why they thought that there was a threat to libertarian freedom. Whereas the determinist can say that present events are determined by past events, would it not be very misleading for the eternalist to say that past events determined present events in this way simply because they were past? True, there would have to be necessary ‘fit’, as it were between past, present, and future, but the suggestion that present events are asymmetrically dependent on past events seems weird given this ontology. We know that the various regions of space have to ‘fit’ together too, but talk of certain regions asymmetric dependence on other regions sounds odd.
I’m not sure this is helpful, but suppose someone ran the following argument.
Future entails present argument:
1′. If eternalism is true, there is some future fact that entails all of my present actions.
2′. If there is some future fact that entails all my future actions, I do not have free will.
3′. Therefore, if eternalism is true, I do not have free will.
Like the argument that the past entails the future, the argument is valid. I think it’s clear that 1′. could be true (imagine God is watching your every move). 2′ just seems silly. But, this is the problem. Can an eternalist really say that (a) like all spaces all times are equally real, (b) determinism is false, and (c) the ‘past entails future’ argument is more of a threat to free will than the future entails present argument? I can’t see how.
Anyway, I think it’s reasonably clear that entailment is not the same as dependence and if dependence is really the threat to free will, the threat isn’t terribly clear yet.
Hi Clayton,
That all seems right to me, and I have a really hard time seeing how this incompatibility argument would go.
[Update]
We may be getting a stronger version of the argument from a friend on mine.
Said friend, may also be giving us some references to related articles where the compatibility of libertarian freewill and eternalism comes up.
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