Free will and the nature of time

A recent discussion based on a post about a book on time brought up this issue, which I'll use as a starting point:


The "Block Universe" theory states, briefly, that time does not exist in the sense that we experience it, but rather as a sort of spatial dimension. It's called a "block" because, if you can lay out all events in time on a coordinate plane, like you can points in a spatial dimension, then the future is fixed, free will is an illusion, and in fact the whole universe is a sort of stasis, or "block." If this view is right (and it gets circumstantial support from relativity, as well as from Kant and other philosophers who think about metaphysics) then this is a pretty profound subversion of our everyday experience of the world. If time itself, that is our experience of it, is created by the brain, how utterly strange must be the "real" reality underneath!


Then again, the theory isn't quite as far from conventional reality as that summary implies, related to this quote from the post about the book, and based on the author's own explanation:


Still, he says, that argument ultimately “rests on a big confusion about what the block universe theory is saying.  Even the block universe theory agrees that … the only experiences I’m having are the ones I’m having now in this room.” The experiences you had a year ago or 10 years ago are still just as real, Skow asserts; they’re just “inaccessible” because you are now in a different part of spacetime.


Those two takes, the post author's, and the book author's proposing the block universe theory, seem far enough apart that the first may need some adjustment, or could be extending the same ideas to unrelated conclusions.  They really seem to be discussing two different versions of a block theory of time, one that sees the past and present as real and existent with an uncertain future, and one that sees it all as in a sense already fixed (a growing block theory of time versus a different version, where the future is also part of the block, the reality).

At any rate I intend to discuss the issues here from my own perspective, not track down alternatives of what is being proposed and try to make the most sense I can of that.  Google would turn up more, but I'm more interested in a different sort of post.

Free will is an interesting part of the larger picture here.  If the future exists as well as the past, in some sense, then we are completely conditioned by past events, and have no input about what choices we make, since in a sense it all will be exactly as it will be.  On the other hand, it seems like what I've just said and that intro statement both include a lot of assumptions that might not really hold up, and that completely laying bare what is meant by "free will" might not ever work.  If will and making choices is somehow completely determined, in any sense, then the freedom part seems a bit thin, but that doesn't seem necessary by looking at time a different way.

It's a bit odd, but I'll quote my initial take as a comment on the Facebook post (in a philosophy group there, which in general aren't worth looking into, but a couple aren't so bad):


This was standard stuff in metaphysics classes back in philosophy study, but it goes nowhere. We experience reality in the form of moments of time, or a flow, and it doesn't change based on describing it different ways. It doesn't make any sense to describe time outside the framework that we experience it in, other than as a thought model, to consider if there are any alternatives. Maybe there are, maybe there aren't, but even if so it wouldn't mean anything to us.



It's not based on much study of theories on my part but my understanding is that our common sense take is called presentism, the idea that only the present is somehow real.  I was saying that embracing something other than that common sense perspective wouldn't end up making any sense, even if this experience of time is somehow a function of us more than of the physical universe.

credit dilbert.com, also referenced in this blog post on free will

To cut to the crux of all this, even if we see the whole universe, past and future together, as one larger whole, I don't see that as necessarily entailing there is no free will.  Just as there is complex physical cause and effect as part of that universe our own thoughts and inclinations are also an input.  We can change what we do in the present, to the extent that we evaluate external factors and thought and choice are also factors.  A thought model might help where I'm going with all this.

Consider a number of dominos set up to knock each other over as those are arranged to.  Each individual domino action is completely caused; there is no choice, no way a domino could "decide" to fall sideways and break that chain.  Even if we are a product of our own past and generally conditioned by external inputs (immediate circumstances, and also culture, influence of others, etc.) to some extent our will is the activity of our own thought as an input.  We can define that as being externally caused, and try to model even our own thought and judgement in some vaguely mechanistic, determined way, versus seeing us as special for having a different type of judgment as an input, most often expressed as being well beyond the extent to which animals also do.  Both approaches seem to just describe the same thing in different ways, more a judgment about importance of some mental function than a change in modeling some real aspect of reality.

photo credit

But lets consider further.  The issue of free will and determinism seems to hinge on the extent to which we could do the equivalent of a domino falling sideways; could we initiate actions that are not caused by the past or external factors?  It almost doesn't make sense, as if somehow that framing doesn't work.  How could I wake up and quit my job for absolutely no reason, or do anything more reasonable, limited, and positive without any prior cause instead?  We experience our existence and selves as a continuity of the past, and exist along with the rest of reality as a related input.

Other thought models come to mind as options, like the alien character in the one Men in Black movie who could somehow experience alternate realities at the same time.  But that sort of didn't make sense; conditions are what they are moment to moment, so working out how they might be slightly different doesn't work.  All the talk of other possible universes, like the Star Trek episode where Kirk and Spock are evil instead, are also meaningless.  Those people (characters) were the product of all the other moments of their lives, and there couldn't be an identical universe where they shared all the characteristics except being evil, and presumably an entire past.  So many things would be different there wouldn't be genetically identical opposites to only be different in that way.  A movie or television show based on a related but different premise that sets up a fork in time, based on some external change, does sort of work, but it takes careful writing to make up a plausible external event or source of change.  Time travel works, if that can somehow be written in.

So moving into fiction as a reference doesn't seem to shed much light.

Alternate experiences of time are more promising than defining free will out of existence.  We definitely have free will, it's just not so easy to define what that means, to somehow grasp the limits of external factors, or leave space for any freedom from those.  It seems to just boil down to a matter of use of terms, of definition.  But it's vaguely conceivable a different type of organism wouldn't experience time as we do.  How would that be possible?  Based within our own frame of reference, on how we experience things, it's absolutely impossible, but then I am talking about possible range beyond that.  We are based on a certain type of physical reality, on a physical make-up, on chemical processes and physical reactions firmly grounded in our experience of time.  Could a different type of life form not be?  Again, not that we can clearly imagine, but what about beyond that.

Even imagining what that means, or could mean, gets tricky.  The obvious description might be to compare how a three dimensional being might interact with a two dimensional being (not that we have any example of such a thing; again it's a thought model).  Limitations of that being possible aside, experienced reality would be in a very different form.  Any interaction at all would entail some sort of projection, limitation of three dimensions to interact with two.  It kind of makes no sense, but thinking it through gets one a feel for the level of problems.

So the idea is to imagine what a fundamentally different type of experience could be like, not exactly based on a three dimensions + time worldview.  Beyond being impossible it's interesting.  Such a being could only communicate with us by projecting into a form identical to our own, in the same way we could only "talk" to a two dimensional, sheet of paper world type being by somehow being represented in theirs.

Maybe this all goes too far, still based on the input of sci-fi, imagining that a character like the one in Men in Black would be necessary for a different experience of time, or like Q in Star Trek.  Premonition would be an unusual case where someone could experience time differently, not that it's a given anyone actually experiences that.  In such a case or experience scope knowledge of the future is given as a vague input, completely outside normal sensory perception.  It would work better as an example if there were more acceptance of it, or at least one standard model for how people would experience it.

But then I'm kind of drifting off the subject of free will with all this.  These ideas do circle back towards considering, from that first discussion  "If time itself, that is our experience of it, is created by the brain, how utterly strange must be the "real" reality underneath!"


That seems to sweep in a bit more assumption than is necessary, that we are creating the the experience of time, when we might instead just be structured to exist within such a context.  Synapses firing, thoughts occurring, these are our mental reality, in the same way I digest breakfast from this morning now, not from last week.  We are organic and time-bound in both ways.  Separating perception and choice from the immediate moment is impossible, to free up will more than it is free now, without that being based on a fundamentally different form of experience, of life itself.  I would agree that it would be quite strange to have a different kind of experience, but I don't see why it would have to be impossible, it would just have to be based within a different format of being, the kind of thing we couldn't really imagine in detail.  Premonition would fall outside normal experienced scope, if it really ever did occur.

About the physics, the way such theories connect to philosophical explanations, people seem to take all that the wrong way.  Experience is one thing, the first person sense and thought based nature of reality, and physics is another, a model for how reality works, a description.  Under the model of either Newtonian gravity or relativistic gravity an apple still falls to the ground, the latter just describes things better in some subtle ways that don't really matter at the level of apples falling.  If there are really 20-some dimensions to this reality and we experience three physical dimensions plus time it doesn't matter, unless it somehow turns out to matter.  Maybe ghosts live in a different related dimension, and then it really does matter, but only if your house is haunted.  Or maybe astral travel is real, and that somehow ties in;  speculation could go in lots of bizarre directions.

In any case the real-real nature of reality would make absolutely no difference to us, unless it was somehow relevant.  If we can someday, somehow travel across time then that scope becomes relevant, otherwise it's not.  Maybe that's not the best example since it's still interesting to consider, especially since time moving at different rates is really standard stuff.  Going somewhere via "wormhole" and coming back much later poses no problem at all, in relatively ordinary interpretations of physics, but coming back earlier may be completely impossible, to the extent our take on physics says anything at all about it, per my very limited understanding.

Getting to be a bit of a tangent, but related to that time-shift in the movie Insterstellar one might wonder if those gravity fields really could slow time that much, them aging so slowly due to time differences due to being near a black hole.  But how could one tell, who can do calculations related to gravity fields and the flow of time?  Not many people, but I wasted a bit of time reading up, and answers were all more or less similar to this one:


If you find a way to keep a watch working circling around on the rarefied 'surface' of the Sun (where gravitational acceleration is a respectable ~ 28g), and that watch will count about a minute less per year compared to the distant observer.


28 times normal Earth gravity is way more than any person could live to experience, and one minute per year difference is essentially almost none.  It's quite a real difference, and it's the kind of difference that we have to take into account to keep our GPS system working well, but it implies that movie-character astronaut could not experience gravity that causes him to come back when his daughter is old, at least not without being killed by the effects himself.

Someone else might argue that personal experience of gravity or speed could be relative, for example that someone travelling at 99.99% the speed of light related to us is just existing in a normal framework to them, not experiencing any special forces.  To a far lesser extent the same could be true of gravity; someone could orbit a very massive object and feel nothing, they would only get flattened by trying to stand on it.  But in actual practice this wouldn't seem to work.  A gravitational field 28 times that of the surface of the earth is not even close to enough to change time experience, and being exposed to a place experiencing hundreds of times as much gravitational influence as we do on Earth wouldn't be practical, there would be reasons it just wouldn't work.

makes for some cool ideas and images though (credit)

Back to the original point, the "free will" problem has no space to change, at all, unless something in the model of reality shifts.  Free will is either defined as a basic part of us making decisions, a description of an aspect of thinking, or else we might not accept there is anything interesting enough about that for a special term.  Maybe we just do something more similar to what dogs do, react to circumstances, and explaining that as something extra special makes no sense.  Or else maybe dogs have free will too.

About premonition, a friend once mentioned making a decision based on knowing something of non-local events, something he couldn't know anything about, which makes you wonder.  Maybe...  It sounds sketchy, but there is something to that as a possibility for a non-linear experience of time and causation, it's just not much to go on.  Astral travel is a close parallel case.  I'm too agnostic about most things to go in for all that but who knows.  I have experienced things I can't explain but this post isn't about that.