Free Will in the Block Universe

Some say that there is no free will because of the way relativity uses time as the fourth dimension.

The philsophical questions about free will go back to the ancient Greeks. Modern science has not settled those questions. The questions are certainly not settled by just declaring that time is a coordinate.

SciAm reports:

As troubling as quantum mechanics (or at least certain versions of it) may be for the idea of free will, relativity—the other pillar of modern physics—isn’t off the hook. Many theorists think of relativity as describing a universe in which past, present and future are all equally real: a static cosmos that just sits there like a big block of spacetime (sometimes called the “block universe”). It’s not that time disappears in this picture—but it no longer “passes” or “flows.” (As Albert Einstein famously put it, the passage of time is a “stubbornly persistent illusion.”) Conceptually speaking, the strongly deterministic quantum universe and the block universe of relativity may not be so far apart. The quantum version can be thought of as “a kind of enriched block universe,” says Alastair Wilson, a philosopher of science at the University of Leeds in England. “Imagine taking a block universe and adding an extra dimension to it—the dimension of possibility.” ...

Even without relativity, you could use a time coordinate to make a block universe. You can use any coordinates you want. Choosing some coordinates cannot possibly say anything about free will.

Many-worlds theory takes this to the next step, if you put all those many worlds in a big block multiverse.

While physicists continue to debate the idea of strong determinism, Emily Adlam, a philosopher of physics at Chapman University, agrees with Chen that it appears to present more of a threat to free will than traditional determinism, particularly because of its ties to the Everettian multiverse. “In a standard deterministic picture, sure, everything that happens was determined from the past—but your mind was a key part of the causal process by which future events get realized,” Adlam says. “So in some meaningful sense, future events—even though they were predetermined—were mediated through processes that you identify with yourself.” But in the Everettian picture, she says, it’s harder to see where decision-making would fit in. “If you always make every possible decision, that does seem to severely undermine the sense in which you are exercising any meaningful kind of choice,” she says. “So in that sense, you do seem worse off than in the standard picture, where one outcome occurs and you play a role in bringing it about.”

It goes on to say that this is controversial, as there are compatibilists who can rationalize belief in free will no matter what soft of determinism there is.

There is no mention of anyone who believes in true free will, now called libertarian free will.

The whole point of the article is to say that many-worlds theory presents a new argument against free will. Since all choices happen in parallel worlds simultaneously, then all choice possibilities are real, and humans cannot make any free will choices. That are all illusions.

This is absurd.

I wonder what Plato and Aristotle would say if we could go back in time, and tell them about our progress. We could tell them about rockets, cars, lasers, electronics, and drugs, and they would be impressed.

And then we would tell them that our best and finest theory of matter, quantum mechanics, has been interpreted to say that there is no free will, because we can imagine parallel universes where alternative decisions are made. They would rightfully conclude that we have made no progress in philosophy at all, and even regressed to some very silly ideas.