Free-Will in The Block Universe? Old and New Problems with Time Travels

• Soler Gil, Francisco José ^[1] ; Alfonseca, Manuel ^[2]
  1. [1] Universidad de Sevilla

     Universidad de Sevilla

     Sevilla, España

     
  2. [2] Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

     Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

     Madrid, España

     
• Localización: Philosophia: anuario de Filosofía, ISSN-e 2313-9528, ISSN 0328-9672, Vol. 76, Nº. 1, 2016, págs. 85-101
• Idioma: español
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo (pdf)
• Resumen

  • 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.

• Referencias bibliográficas
  • EARMANC, John; WÜTHRICH, Christian and MANCHAK, John, "Time machines", in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (Summer 2016 Edition),...
  • GÖDEL, Kurt, "An example of a new type of cosmological solutions of Einstein‘s field equations of gravitation", Reviews of Modern...
  • 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/....
  • 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)