“That’s free will: were you to rewind the tape of world history, to the instant just before you made your decision, with everything in the universe exactly the same, you’d have been able to make a different one.”
Let me posit a different world view that resolved this dilemma: we live in a present moment which is always unfolding in a chaotic kaleidoscope. QM tells us as much, that we live in a world based on nonlocal probabilistic events and that we can’t ever “rewind”. Under such circumstances “free will” as conceived by a middle schooler doesn’t make sense, but determinism hardly does either.
Determinism brings to mind the idea of a roller-coaster-track of past-present-future. Physicists call this “eternalism”. Eternalism is great if you are calculating how a ball will behave at time t when thrown in a parabolic arc, but I really do believe that time t+1 and time t-1 doesn’t actually “exist”. We remember the past like ripples in a pond remembering the rock that fell in. We anticipate the future based on patterns we have stored up. But it hardly makes sense to say that the future is determined by the past other than to say that our concept of a future is informed by our ability to make inferences from the ephemeral memories we call “the past”.
Like most philosophical problems we let words get in the way of reality. “Could have done otherwise” sounds like a statement of fact but we only ever use it to express our own every-day thought experiments, or to express desire. “He could have taken a shorter route.” “She could have been nicer to me.” In reality neither thing happened differently because /now/ is when everything happens and we only get one shot. And that’s the crux of it to me. Talk of free will is mostly just anxiety over having made the right actions in the moment or not when mulling it over later. Certainly we have no future fate since the present has inflexible probability baked into it.
Let me posit a different world view that resolved this dilemma: we live in a present moment which is always unfolding in a chaotic kaleidoscope. QM tells us as much, that we live in a world based on nonlocal probabilistic events and that we can’t ever “rewind”. Under such circumstances “free will” as conceived by a middle schooler doesn’t make sense, but determinism hardly does either.
Determinism brings to mind the idea of a roller-coaster-track of past-present-future. Physicists call this “eternalism”. Eternalism is great if you are calculating how a ball will behave at time t when thrown in a parabolic arc, but I really do believe that time t+1 and time t-1 doesn’t actually “exist”. We remember the past like ripples in a pond remembering the rock that fell in. We anticipate the future based on patterns we have stored up. But it hardly makes sense to say that the future is determined by the past other than to say that our concept of a future is informed by our ability to make inferences from the ephemeral memories we call “the past”.
Like most philosophical problems we let words get in the way of reality. “Could have done otherwise” sounds like a statement of fact but we only ever use it to express our own every-day thought experiments, or to express desire. “He could have taken a shorter route.” “She could have been nicer to me.” In reality neither thing happened differently because /now/ is when everything happens and we only get one shot. And that’s the crux of it to me. Talk of free will is mostly just anxiety over having made the right actions in the moment or not when mulling it over later. Certainly we have no future fate since the present has inflexible probability baked into it.