Notes on the Nature of Time and Determinism

May 28

Fatalism does not mean giving up. It is precisely because we cannot control the course of things that we can never know what the future holds: life may become worse or better.

It's entirely possible that human perception of time is the result of evolution and nothing more.

Aristotle conceived of time as simply a measure of things moving and changing, as compared to other things moving and changing.

Hume’s philosophy of time shows the fundamental relevance of the relation between an observer and a reference object. There is no evidence for absolute, self-existing time. Nor is there evidence for one universal time. There are different times, depending on the observer/reference-object relation. Hume’s rejection of absolute/universal time ‘would later echo in Einstein’s theory of relativity’.

Newton claims that the quantity of time (along with space, place and motion) is ‘popularly conceived solely with reference to the objects of sense perception’. Then he goes on to distinguish between absolute, mathematical time and relative, measurable time, like clock time. Absolute time exists substantially by itself. Its existence is independent of change. Whatever physical there is in the Universe, and however it moves, it does not have an influence on time itself. Time has a definite structure: it flows equally and unidirectionally. Consequently, the time difference between two simultaneous events is zero, and the time difference between two successive events is not zero. Everyone would agree on this, according to Newton. Temporal order and direction is grounded in time itself.

Kant thinks that time is not a thing in itself; it is a subjective human precondition. In Kantian terminology, time is an a priori form of sensibility. Kant doesn’t think that time is an innate idea. Rather, our minds impose the temporal order we experience. He puts the point as follows:

Time is not an empirical concept that is somehow drawn from an experience. For simultaneity and succession would not themselves come into perception if the representation of time did not ground them a priori. Only under its presupposition can one represent that several things exist at one and the same time (simultaneously) or in different times (successively).

There is no room in Einstein’s philosophy for free will: ‘Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control … we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player.’

It is stunning how Humean Einstein is in his opposition to Newton and Kant. The application of concept empiricism gave Einstein the means to discard the absolutist and transcendental arguments. Postulating that light’s speed is the same in all directions, the empiricist argument destroys absolute simultaneity. There is no time itself that exists independently of the selection of the frame of reference, as Newton has it. And time is not grounded in human intuition, because it is an empirical concept, unlike how Kant thought.

According to a widespread view, Einstein’s definition of time in his special relativity is founded on the positivist verification principle. Einstein’s position on the concept of time, to wit, simultaneity, is best understood as a mitigated version of concept empiricism. He contrasts his position to Newton’s absolutist and Kant’s transcendental arguments, and in part sides with Hume’s and Mach’s empiricist arguments

Hume would very much nod to this conclusion. Absolutist argument invokes an utterly imperceptible structure of time, and the transcendental argument leans on a priori factors of cognition. The copy principle rules out both. For Hume as for Einstein, time is an empirical concept.

The concept of time is just an idea, the present moment does not move.

The present is eternity.

The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life.

"Nothing occurs at random, but everything for a reason and by necessity."

The past and the future are already out there, in place, just waiting for us to come to where they are.

“Whatever happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time. The twining strands of fate wove both of them together: your own existence and the things that happen to you.”

~ Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

Marcus Aurelius regarding free will:

All events are determined by the logos, and follow in an unbreakable chain of cause and effect. Stoicism is thus from the outset a deterministic system that appears to leave no room for human free will or moral responsibility. In reality the Stoics were reluctant to accept such an arrangement, and attempted to get around the difficulty by defining free will as a voluntary accommodation to what is in any case inevitable. According to this theory, man is like a dog tied to a moving wagon. If the dog refuses to run along with the wagon he will be dragged by it, yet the choice remains his: to run or be dragged. In the same way, humans are responsible for their choices and actions, even though these have been anticipated by the logos and form part of its plan. Even actions which appear to be—and indeed are—immoral or unjust advance the overall design, which taken as a whole is harmonious and good. They, too, are governed by the logos.

Einstein's use of the phrase "For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

What he means is that all of spacetime - from the moment of initial existence to however things "end" - exists fully and completely all at once. Things don't "come into being" in the future or recede into the past - that's just an illusion. All of it exists right now, has since the beginning of spacetime, and never goes away. We just "travel" through it, and it is only our experience that makes it seem as if there's a difference between past and future, and hence an experience of "time."

Think of the entirety of spacetime as being a giant loaf of bread - at one crust slice is the start of spacetime, and the other crust slice is the end of spacetime. But the entire loaf exists all at once and came out of the oven fully baked - it's not changing at all. Imagine a tiny ant starting at the beginning crust and eating its way through in a straight line from one end to the other. It can't back up and it can't change its pace. It can only move steadily forward and with each bite it can only get sensory input from the part of the loaf its sensory organs are touching. To the ant, it seems that each moment is unique, and while it may remember the moments from behind it, it hasn't yet experienced the moments to come. It seems there's a difference in the past and future, but the loaf is already there on both ends. Now what makes it weirder is that the ant itself is baked into the loaf from start to finish so in a sense it's merely "occupying" a new version of itself from one moment to the next. This also isn't quite right, since it's more accurate to say that the ant is a collection of all the separate moments the ant experiences. It's not an individual creature making it's way from one end to the other - it's the entire "history" of the creature from start to finish.

Doesn't make a lot of intuitive sense to us mere humans, and the concepts have serious repercussions for the concept of free will, but that's a different discussion.

Eternalism is a philosophical approach to the ontological nature of time, which takes the view that all existence in time is equally real, as opposed to presentism or the growing block universe theory of time, in which at least the future is not the same as any other time.

Under eternalism, the question of free will and determinism becomes much less clear because it seems that everything in the universe has already happened under eternalism.

The theory known as the ‘block universe’ states that the past, present and future already exist.

Everything has, in a sense, a manner of speaking, already happened. And this would mean that what we think of as free will is, in a sense, an illusion. But I think part of the challenge there is coming to terms of what free will means. I think in reality from a neuroscience basis, what we should think of free will is simply a subjective feeling of your unconscious brain making decisions. Pain might be a sense of what happens when somebody steps on our toe. Free will is the subjective sense — the feeling we get when the unconscious brain makes the decision giving us the impression that it was the conscious mind that just made that decision.

It is sometimes referred to as the "block time" or "block universe" theory due to its description of space-time as an unchanging four-dimensional "block", as opposed to the view of the world as a three-dimensional space modulated by the passage of time.

Some forms of eternalism give time a similar ontology to that of space, as a dimension, with different times being as real as different places, and future events are "already there" in the same sense other places are already there, and that there is no objective flow of time.

Does eternalism really imply hard determinism?

Predeterminism? I'm very sure the strongest case for it could be made by physicists.

It's a good philosophical topic too but its physical aspect is the most concrete of all. Free will is best challenged by physics, not theology.

Quantum mechanics, and in particular Aspects experimental tests of Bell's Inequality and those that follow, plus experiments on quantum entanglement, suggest that there is a truly random element in quantum interactions. Hidden variable theories are finding it very hard to explain those results. Within a block universe then while each interaction will have a definite outcome, that outcome cannot be predicted even given perfect knowledge of the preceding conditions. The real question is whether "free will" can be equated with "not predictable even in principle", or whether decisions being in part random is not free will, just noise in the machine.

Quantum Theory does not suggest determinism is false, all it shows is that hidden variable theories (theories which assume determinism and try to predict the future given initial conditions) cannot give you knowledge of the future. In other words, you cannot, in principle, predict the position of a particle given that you know it's momentum to a certain degree. Further you cannot, in principle, predict the location of an electron exactly given you know that it was in some other location before. Neither of these facts in any way suggest that there was not only one possible future location for the electron, or that there is not a precise momentum to a particle when it is at a certain position. All they mean is that you cannot know either of these for certain, or even to a reasonable degree.

Eternalism is perfectly consistent with the indeterminacy of quantum interactions.

Albert Einstein contends that this randomness is merely a sign of our ignorance of a deeper level of deterministic causation.

perhaps sub-quantal?

“The Future is a Concept, it doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There will never be, because time is always NOW. That’s one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only present, only an eternal NOW.” Alan Watts.

First, it's crucial to understand that the feeling of making a "choice" is not evidence of free will; rather, it's more like a narrative our minds construct after a series of events have already been set into motion. By the time you "decide" to reach for a cup of coffee, neural processes and a myriad of environmental factors have already played their roles. Your brain has engaged in a complicated interplay of variables, most of which you're entirely unaware of, to arrive at that action.

So, when we talk about the "illusion" of free will, what we're saying is that the subjective experience of choosing, of exerting control over our actions, is not rooted in any objective capacity to actually do so. It's a story the conscious mind tells itself to make sense of its own behavior, but it's not the causal agent it believes itself to be.

Now, in a world devoid of free will, decisions are still "made," but not by a "self" or "soul" separate from physical processes. Our brains are shaped by a complex web of prior causes, including genetic factors, environmental circumstances, and the architecture of the brain itself. Therefore, the choices you make are the inevitable products of these variables—this includes everything from the mundane, like choosing coffee over tea, to the profound, like ethical and moral decisions.

While this viewpoint may seem to undermine the notion of personal responsibility, it does not absolve us from the outcomes of our actions. Our legal and ethical systems still function, because whether or not free will exists, we can still differentiate between intentional and unintentional actions, sane and insane individuals, and so on. Moreover, understanding the illusory nature of free will can lead to greater empathy and compassion, as we recognize that even the worst actions are the result of factors that the individual in question did not choose.

In sum, the absence of free will doesn't negate the experience of making decisions; rather, it changes our understanding of what that experience means and how it comes about.

I do not believe that free will – defined in terms of 'evitability' (Daniel Dennett's definition) – is incompatible with determinism.

Predeterminism is the philosophy that all events of history, past, present and future, have been already decided or are already known, including human actions.

Predeterminism is the idea that all events are determined in advance.

It is information conserving.

The concept of time is simply an illusion made up of human memories, everything that has ever been and ever will be is happening RIGHT NOW.

Time is simply human construct.

What we perceive as the past is simply an illusion formed in our brain.

The laws of physics are symmetric ultimately meaning that time could have easily moved in a backward direction as it does forward.

There is a ‘block-universe’ where time and space are connected, otherwise known as spacetime.

Einstein, Weyl, and Godel were three of the more renowned physicists who are referenced as embracing the block universe concept.

I think most physicists would agree that the block universe concept is as a minimum at least consistent with special and general relativity.

Source https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/block-universe-theory.567395/

The theory, which is backed up Einstein’s theory of relativity, states that space and time are part of a four dimensional structure where everything thing that has happened or ever will happen has its own co-ordinates in spacetime.

When Einstein unified space and time in his general theory of relativity in 1915, he gave us a new way to picture our Universe.

Imagine a regular chunk of cement. It has three dimensions but we live in four dimensions: the three spatial dimensions plus one time dimension. A block universe is a four-dimensional block, but instead of being made of cement, it is made of spacetime. And all of the space and time of the Universe are there in that block.

We can't see this block, we're not aware of it, as we live inside the cement of spacetime.

And we don't know how big the block universe we live in is: "We don't know if space is infinite or not. Or time - we don't know whether it has a beginning or if it will have an end in the future. So we don't know if it's a finite chunk of spacetime or an infinite chunk.

The only evidence we have of the Earth's past is rocks and fossils. But these are just stable structures in the form of an arrangement of atoms and minerals we examine in the present.

The past, present and future are all happening simultaneously because there is only one moment in time that exists, has ever existed or will ever exist.

The name we have collectively agreed upon to give to that single moment is..."NOW".

So time is always relative to a starting point that we define as a beginning. We invent calendars and clocks to record the passage of time from the starting point, which is a collective arbitrary decision, and there can be no space without this arbitrary time that we invented.

Think about it. It takes time to travel the distance or space between A to B, but without time that space doesn’t exist, cannot exist. Thus, space and time are inseparable like two sides of the same coin; they’re a single unit of measurement.

So time and, by definition, space, are always relative and are both concepts that are created and used by our collective consciousness to navigate this 4 dimensional time-space reality called life on Earth.

Once we grasp this truth, we begin to remember and understand that the only real time is now and the only real place is here. Be Here now.

Our limited consciousness cannot, by its very nature, process this because we are not aware of any dimensions beyond the four which make up our “universe”. It we were able to look at our block universe from the “5th dimension”, from ‘above’, time would look like space looks to us today, spreading everywhere, encompassing all. We would see all of our past and all of our future simultaneously. If you look a little bit behind in the block you may see dinosaurs ruling the earth, look a little ahead and you see our future…all happening now….at the same time. You can see it all at the same time.

A slice through the block of spacetime, corresponds to a specific time.

This seems surprising but is a straightforward consequence of general relativity being a deterministic theory.

General relativity says that if I know the conditions in this instant, I can predict the entire future because the laws of physics that govern this chunk of spacetime are deterministic.

The experiences you had a year ago or 10 years ago are still just as real, they’re just “inaccessible” because you are now in a different part of spacetime.

The future is entirely written, it's just not accessible to us inside the block at this point.

We’ll never fully understand everything and definitely not from our limited physical human perspective, as everything ends up in paradox anyway.

For instance, while we perceive reality from our unique perspective, one of an infinite number of probable and possible Universal points of view; all realities must be happening now because chronological or linear time is a construct of this reality: it doesn’t exist independently.

It might come as a surprise that this orthodox “block universe” view of time in fact leads us to conclude that we possess a form of eternal life! This is a consequence of the principle that in the block time model all periods of time are equally real. If a loved one dies, you might take some comfort from the knowledge that this period of time in which your loved one is dead has, in fact, no greater reality than the time when your loved one was alive. According to physics, it is just as valid to consider your loved one as alive as it is to consider them dead!

Einstein took comfort from this knowledge when his lifelong friend Michele Besso died. He wrote a letter consoling Besso’s family: “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

Of course, the flip-side is that you’re already dead!

The conclusions presented here relating to the block universe model follow directly from Einstein’s theory of general relativity and so should be considered to be orthodox physics.

It is meaningless to talk of the “start” of the universe, or the “emergence of the universe from nothing”, or any other term which implies change of the entire block universe structure over time. The entire spacetime block is laid out as one unchanging structure. Here’s a quote from Stephen Hawking’s book “A Brief History of Time”: “If the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be.”

We “perceive” the universe to be expanding because our brains determine our feeling of directional time flow in the forward time direction. But that psychological arrow of time is always going to align itself from a low entropy universe state to a high entropy universe state.

That is no basis to say “the universe is expanding” – that just says something about the distribution of entropy in the entire universe structure. It is more accurate to say the universe is neither expanding nor contracting. It just has a structure. It just is.

The block universe model provides a solution to the grandfather paradox. According to the block universe model, all of space and time is laid-out in an unchanging spacetime block.

There can be no place for an oscillatory grandfather: the grandfather must be defined as being in an unchanging state of either dead or alive. It can never be possible to change that state. The only possible time loops would be consistent time loops.

The Wheeler-DeWitt equation agrees with our earlier analysis of the nature of time because it suggests a block universe model in which all of time is laid-out (just as the space dimension is laid-out), and all times are equally real: there is no special “now”, no distinction between past and future. In fact, “past” and “present” do not exist – the movement of time is considered to be just an illusion of human perception.

The block universe is completely compatible with the notion of free will.

Free will is defined as the ability to make decisions.

EVENT 1) You walk along the road and come to a fork in the road.

EVENT 2) You decide to turn to the left.

EVENT 3) You continue your journey along the left road.

This is just a sequence of three events, and that’s all the block universe is: a sequence of successive events. So these three events can easily be incorporated into the block universe model.

In the block universe model, events are unchanging and “frozen-in-time”. But that does not mean that those events do not represent the expression of free will. For example, when we look back into the past we consider those past events to be “frozen”, and nothing could change those events. However, we might also remember some of those past events as representing moments when we made decisions, i.e., expressed our free will.

So the notion of free will is in no way incompatible with the block universe “frozen-in-time” representation of unalterable events.

As each decision can only ever have one outcome, no branching “multiverses” are necessary.

That may take a chunk of, well, time to digest.

But by treating the past, present, and future as materially identical, the theory is consistent with the laws of physics as we understand them.

The Block Universe of Special Relativity

http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/special_relativity.html

Predeterminism is the idea that all events are determined in advance. The concept of predeterminism is often argued by invoking causal determinism, implying that there is an unbroken chain of prior occurrences stretching back to the origin of the universe. In the case of predeterminism, this chain of events has been pre-established, and human actions cannot interfere with the outcomes of this pre-established chain.

Determinism is not the thesis that you can know what will happen in the future given certain facts about the past that are known by you.

Chrysippus, the leader of the Stoic philosophy, defined fate, which the Greeks call εἱμαρμένη, in about the following terms: "Fate," he says, "is an eternal and unalterable series of circumstances, and a chain rolling and entangling itself through an unbroken series of consequences, from which it is fashioned and made up."

Determinism is the thesis that given certain facts about the past, and certain natural laws, there is only one way the future could be. E.g. there is only one possible future given such and so initial circumstances and the laws of physics. E.g. there is only one possible consequence to a certain event.

Determinism is unfalsifiable in the scientific sense. Just like any philosophical view is unfalsifiable in the scientific sense. You cannot do any experiments to figure out whether it is true or false and including it in your models does not affect the probability of your data being replicated by your models. Nevertheless you might say determinism is falsifiable in a non-scientific sense. I can have good reasons to be a determinist, namely, in the form of arguments for determinism, just like in the case of any other philosophical view (I can also have good reasons to not be a determinist via arguments against determinism). Here is an example argument:

Moral responsibility exists.
If determinism is true, it is not true that moral responsibility exists.
So determinism is false.

Galen Strawson is unique in that he thinks that even this claim is not true. He thinks that you can have no reason to accept or deny determinism, it is just about intuition and your gut feelings. Another word for this kind of belief is a Non-inferential belief. Also a "primitive belief". Sometimes these are also called "first principles" (descartes' I think is an example of a first principle for many people). Strawson likely thinks that all of the arguments for or against determinism are just confusing the premises with the conclusion. People accept the premises of those arguments based on whether or not they are determinists, so Strawson thinks that determinism is the foundational issue on which all arguments are based here. Most metaphysicians do not agree with him, hence why there is a big debate about determinism. They think that the first principles are not "determinism is true" or "determinism is false" but simpler principles like "causation exists" or "the A theory of time is right" or "moral responsibility exists" or "reverse causation is impossible" and so on, and that you can use these principles to infer determinism or indeterminism.

Fatalism is normally distinguished from "determinism", as a form of teleological determinism. Fatalism is the idea that everything is fated to happen, so that humans have no control over their future.

Theological determinism is a form of determinism that holds that all events that happen are pre-ordained, or predestined to happen, by a monotheistic deity, or that they are destined to occur given its omniscience.

Determinism was developed by the Greek philosophers during the 7th and 6th centuries BC by the Pre-socratic philosophers Heraclitus and Leucippus, later Aristotle, and mainly by the Stoics.

Some of the main philosophers who have dealt with this issue are Marcus Aurelius, Omar Khayyám, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, David Hume, Baron d'Holbach (Paul Heinrich Dietrich), Pierre-Simon Laplace, Arthur Schopenhauer, William James, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Ralph Waldo Emerson and, more recently, John Searle, Sam Harris, Ted Honderich, and Daniel Dennett.

Actualism is the idea that the events that do happen are the only possible events that could possibly have happened. Actualism denies the existence of alternative possibilities. Philosophers from Diodorus Cronus to Daniel Dennett argue that Actualism is true, that there is only one possible actual future.

If determinism is true, then our acts are the consequences of the laws of nature and events in the remote past. But it is not up to us what went on before we were born, and neither is it up to us what the laws of nature are. Therefore, the consequences of these things (including our present acts) are not up to us.

I shall call this argument the Consequence Argument.

[A variant argument van Inwagen called the Mind Argument] proceeds by identifying indeterminism with chance and by arguing that an act that occurs by chance, if an event that occurs by chance can be called an act, cannot be under the control of its alleged agent and hence cannot have been performed freely. Proponents of [this argument] conclude, therefore, that free will is not only compatible with determinism but entails determinism. [This has been dubbed "supercompatibilism."]

From Gellius's Attic Nights:

But the authors of other views and of other schools of philosophy openly criticize this definition as follows: "If Chrysippus," they say, "believes that all things are set in motion and directed by fate, and that the course of fate and its coils cannot be turned aside or evaded, then the sins and faults of men too ought not to cause anger or be attributed to themselves and their inclinations, but to a certain unavoidable impulse which arises from fate," which is the mistress and arbiter of all things, and through which everything that will happen must happen; and that therefore the establishing of penalties for the guilty by law is unjust, if men do not voluntarily commit crimes, but are led into them by fate.

Against these criticisms Chrysippus argues at length, subtlety and cleverly, but the purport of all that he has written on that subject is about this: "Although it is a fact," he says, "that all things are subject to an inevitable and fundamental law and are closely linked to fate, yet the peculiar properties of our minds are subject to fate only according to their individuality and quality. For if in the beginning they are fashioned by nature for health and usefulness, they will avoid with little opposition and little difficulty all that force with which fate threatens them from without. But if they are rough, ignorant, crude, and without any support from education, through their own perversity and voluntary impulse they plunge into continual faults and sin, even though the assault of some inconvenience due to fate be slight or non-existent. And that this very thing should happen in this way is due to that natural and inevitable connection of events which is called 'fate.' For it is in the nature of things, so to speak, fated and inevitable that evil characters should not be free from sins and faults."

A little later he uses an illustration of this statement of his, which is in truth quite neat and appropriate: "For instance," he says, "if you roll a cylindrical stone over a sloping, steep piece of ground, you do indeed furnish the beginning and cause of its rapid descent, yet soon its speeds onward, not because you make it do so, but because of its peculiar form and natural tendency to roll; just so the order, the law, and the inevitable quality of fate set in motion the various classes of things and the beginnings of causes, but the carrying out of our designs and thoughts, and even our actions, are regulated by each individual's own will and the characteristics of his mind."

Many scientists say that the American physiologist Benjamin Libet demonstrated in the 1980s that we have no free will. It was already known that electrical activity builds up in a person’s brain before she, for example, moves her hand; Libet showed that this buildup occurs before the person consciously makes a decision to move. The conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs after the brain has already set the act in motion.

The challenge posed by neuroscience is more radical: It describes the brain as a physical system like any other, and suggests that we no more will it to operate in a particular way than we will our heart to beat. The contemporary scientific image of human behavior is one of neurons firing, causing other neurons to fire, causing our thoughts and deeds, in an unbroken chain that stretches back to our birth and beyond. In principle, we are therefore completely predictable. If we could understand any individual’s brain architecture and chemistry well enough, we could, in theory, predict that individual’s response to any given stimulus with 100 percent accuracy.

This development raises uncomfortable—and increasingly nontheoretical—questions: If moral responsibility depends on faith in our own agency, then as belief in determinism spreads, will we become morally irresponsible? And if we increasingly see belief in free will as a delusion, what will happen to all those institutions that are based on it?

From Gellius's Attic Nights:

Perhaps when people stop believing they are free agents, they stop seeing themselves as blameworthy for their actions. Consequently, they act less responsibly and give in to their baser instincts?

Believing that free will is an illusion has been shown to make people less creative, more likely to conform, less willing to learn from their mistakes, and less grateful toward one another. In every regard, it seems, when we embrace determinism, we indulge our dark side.

Determinism not only undermines blame, Smilansky argues; it also undermines praise. Imagine I do risk my life by jumping into enemy territory to perform a daring mission. Afterward, people will say that I had no choice, that my feats were merely, in Smilansky’s phrase, “an unfolding of the given,” and therefore hardly praiseworthy. And just as undermining blame would remove an obstacle to acting wickedly, so undermining praise would remove an incentive to do good. Our heroes would seem less inspiring, he argues, our achievements less noteworthy, and soon we would sink into decadence and despondency.

Nietzsche called free will “a theologians’ artifice” that permits us to “judge and punish.” And many thinkers have believed, as Smilansky does, that institutions of judgment and punishment are necessary if we are to avoid a fall into barbarism.

Sam Harris, who, in his 2012 book, Free Will, set out to bring down the fantasy of conscious choice. Like Smilansky, he believes that there is no such thing as free will. But Harris thinks we are better off without the whole notion of it.

Social problems may arise from seeing our own actions as determined by forces beyond our control—weakening our morals, our motivation, and our sense of the meaningfulness of life

Determinism, Sam Harris’s writes in book, does not mean “that conscious awareness and deliberative thinking serve no purpose.” Certain kinds of action require us to become conscious of a choice—to weigh arguments and appraise evidence. True, if we were put in exactly the same situation again, then 100 times out of 100 we would make the same decision, “just like rewinding a movie and playing it again.” But the act of deliberation—the wrestling with facts and emotions that we feel is essential to our nature—is nonetheless real.

The big problem, in Harris’s view, is that people often confuse determinism with fatalism. Determinism is the belief that our decisions are part of an unbreakable chain of cause and effect. Fatalism, on the other hand, is the belief that our decisions don’t really matter, because whatever is destined to happen will happen—like Oedipus’s marriage to his mother, despite his efforts to avoid that fate.

When people hear there is no free will, they wrongly become fatalistic; they think their efforts will make no difference. But this is a mistake. People are not moving toward an inevitable destiny; given a different stimulus (like a different idea about free will), they will behave differently and so have different lives. If people better understood these fine distinctions, Harris believes, the consequences of losing faith in free will would be much less negative than Vohs’s and Baumeister’s experiments suggest.

Maybe free will and determinism are not the opposites they are often taken to be; they simply describe our behavior at different levels.

Against Determinism

Quantum theory, i.e. quantum science arises as probably the strongest denial of mechanism and determinism.

Entanglement can be understood as the strongest argument against mechanism and determinism, for it supersedes individuality.

Reality and consciousness are closely and deeply entangled stances, so they do not exist isolated.

The measurement problem, or also the act of observation is grasped and explained differently once entanglement is incorporated in the corpus of science.

Consciousness is in an entangled state with the physical universe, so much so that neither can be explained without the other.

It is this relationship that gives meaning to any further phenomenon – the entangled relationship between subjective experience (i.e. consciousness) and the physical universe is life.

Santa Cruz Man

Notes on the Nature of Time and Determinism

Against Determinism

Notes on Story Ideas