Free-Will in The Block Universe? Old and New Problems with Time Travels
Keywords:
El tiempo en el universo-bloque, Experimentos mentales con viajes en el tiempo, La voluntad libre en el universo-bloque.Abstract
This paper discusses Carl Hoefer‘s thesis in his article "Freedom from the inside out": to make the block universe compatible with free-will, one must avoid presentist intuitions intuitively associated to free actions. We show a possible difficulty of this proposal: the assumption of the block universe can imply that certain free actions would be cross-linked in a way incompatible with freedom. This is shown in a graphical way often used in the discussion of freedom in the block universe, by means of a thought experiment with time machines. This difficulty does not depend on the real existence of those machines.
References
EARMANC, John; WÜTHRICH, Christian and MANCHAK, John, "Time machines", in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (Summer 2016 Edition), ed. Edward Zalta, URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2016/entries/time-machine/. (Last time consulted March 2016).
GÖDEL, Kurt, "An example of a new type of cosmological solutions of Einstein‘s field equations of gravitation", Reviews of Modern Physics 21 (1949): 447-450.
HOEFER, Carl, "Causal Determinism", in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (Spring 2016 Edition), ed. Edward Zalta, URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/determinism-causal/. (Last time consulted March 2016).
HOEFER, Carl, "Freedom from the inside out", Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement Vol. 50 (March 2002), 201-222. DOI: 10.1017/S1358246100010572.
MANCHAK, John Byron, "On the Existence of ‘Time Machines‘ in General Relativity" Philosophy of Science, 76 (2009): 1020-1026.
MONTON, Bradley, "Presentists can believe in closed timelike curves", Analysis 63/3 (2003): 199–202.
NAHIN, Paul, Time Machines (New York: Springer, 1999)
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