Causality and Time (pi1118 1b)

Is it important, this apparent conflict between having freewill and being causally determined? Some of the problems philosophers pursue only seem intellectually important, important only to those who attach importance to such things. Like perhaps whether the whole of experience is a dream, or Like how many angels can dance on the end of a pin ...

But you can never tell. One of the most esoteric topics until around 1940, one the topics most at home in the ivory tower, was the question of whether there was for all propositions in the predicate calculus a definite procedure for telling whether it was valid. But overnight, with the maturation of computers, this became one of the most interesting practical questions: whether computers could be got to reason.

Implications for how we organize our social life

There have certainly been intellectual agonies over the prospect of determinism being right.

They surfaced most spectacularly in the Romantic Movement at the end of the 18th Century when the science project of applying the causal principle to everything, including human beings, came under challenge. Romanticism said that the most important thing about human beings was their creativity - their capacity to start off lines of causality 'spontaneously'.

The Romantics sought to insist then on a conception which made the human being the originator of activity, and not simply a node in a causal nexus. "Everyone's actions,' says Herder, 'should arise utterly from himself'. (Herder, quoted in Pascal, p. 135. If human beings have no power to initiate change they are mere 'playthings' of forces impinging upon them, and to be a plaything, as proto-Romantic writer Lenz put it, 'is a dismal, oppressive thought,' amounting to ' an eternal slavery, an artificial .... wretched brutishness.' Instead, we should place the capacity to act at the centre of our conception of the human being: 'action, action, is the soul of the world, not enjoyment, not sentimentality, not ratiocination ... " (Lenz, translated in Roy Pascal The German Sturm und Drang, Manchester, 1953, Manchester University Press, p. 148,9).

Though Romanticism quickly lost its impetus, this thought of human beings somehow getting their heads above causality has resonated ever since.

Prompt: Find out from your neighbour what they think. To get a crude sense of the balance of opinion I will then ask you to vote on behalf of the person you have talked to.

The agonizing has not been merely intellectual either. There would appear to be a very practical dimension to the question of whether the future is fixed. You may have heard of the psychologist B.F.Skinner, one of the founders of the psychological school of 'behaviourism', and he is one influential figure who argued that if you believe human behaviour is determined you will organize social affairs differently. You will have a different approach to education, crime-prevention, punishment and so on. "A scientific conception of human behaviour dictates one practice, a philosophy of personal freedom another..." Beyond Freedom and Dignity, 1971.

Skinner went further, offering a diagnosis of the ills of the world as it appeared to him in the nineteen sixties and seventies. '[T]he present unhappy condition of the world' may be traced, he says, 'in large measure' to our inability to make up our minds on this issue. We vacillate, he says, between policies based on personal freedom and policies based on science.

Not sure what quite to make of this - a determinist telling us to make up our minds - but still, here is one writer at least insisting that the issue of freewill versus determinism is significant, important in the most straightforward way. It is no intellectual plaything, no stainless steel conundrum for the busy brain.

Ah. you pedants. hangmen. turnkeys. lawmakers, you shavepate rabble, what will you do when we have arrived. ..[at know- ledge of the human constitution]? What is to become of your laws, your ethics, your religion, your gallows, your Gods and your Heaven and your Hell when it shall be proven that such a flow of liquids, this variety of fibers, that degree of pungency in the blood or in the animal spirits are sufficient to make a man the object of your givings and your takings away?

The Marquis de Sade quoted by Roger Smith in Human Sciences, Fontana, London, 1997, p.232.

Implications for our personal lives

There is a personal angle on this matter of its practical importance too. I'm tempted to say that if we believed everything was fixed we would not try as hard. Could I put it this way?

Sometimes more difficult than others, depending on age I find and on whether you had a spot of spontaneous human combustion the night before. Anyway a lot of us do, sometimes at any rate.

If you are one of these, sometimes finding it difficult, think of this. Suppose you were told and believed that there was something in your drink the night before which would determine what hour you got up. When the alarm buzzed on an important morning and you woke up, very shot to pieces, and remembered about the drink, would you bother to respond to the alarm?

Suppose you are agonizing about whether to close down a relationship. If it were already fixed what you would do, would you agonize any more? Would you just relax and let things take their course?

But of course, if everything were fixed, your feeling agonized or not feeling agonized would be one of the things that was fixed .

If things are fixed you will do what you will do, you will think what you will think, you will feel what you will feel, you will come to believe what you will come to believe.

We have been talking about the possibility of the future being fixed. Now the question I promised: Is the past fixed? Or can we perhaps alter it?

This question catches the public imagination. Remember Back to the Future and Arny's Terminator films. Gilliam's 12 Monkeys is more recent. All toy with the idea of going back in time and altering what happened there. What I propose to do is to remind you of one of these to pin-point one of the real difficulties in thinking about time-travel.

It gives us a concrete example of a story which attempts to be about time travel, suggesting that you might travel back in time and tinker, so that a better future eventuates.

Marthy, the hero, travels backwards in time, but just before he goes he witnesses the shooting by terrorists of Doc, the genius professor.

When he is in the past, he meets up with the time -travelling Doc and tries to warn him about this. He tries to leave a letter, warning the Doc that when the time comes for him to join Marthy in the present, he is destined to be shot.

I.e., that at a certain point in the future he will be shot, so should be careful ... But the Doc appears to condemn the idea. His avowed principle is, You should only time-travel if you are prepared not to interfere.

The clip shows the Doc engineering Marthy's return to the present. This requires connecting the time travelling car to a flash of lightening, via a long cable, with which the Doc struggles, at length.

We see Marthy planning to arrange to get back a little bit ahead of time so that he could warn the Doc directly. But he doesn't get it quit right and returns to 'the present' only to be forced to witness the arrival of the terrorists (I apologize for the racial stereotyping that is all too apparent, well before 9/11 of course) and the shooting of said whacky prof. But all turns out OK, because the prof has taken notice of Marthy's warning and taken precautions. The past has been successfully adjusted.

I want to draw attention to a single film frame very near the end. One the left hand side of the screen appears Marthy looking down on the scene of the shooting. And on the right: Marthy again! - This time wearing yellow, a participant in the shooting action.

So you have a representation of one person being in two places at once. Doing something, and watching himself doing something.

Let me articulate one response. You might say: the situation is that we feel there is something specially impossible-seeming about time-travel.

With some of the things we think are quite impossible, we can imagine how they could have been different. It is impossible for a human being to lift an elephant, unaided: but we can imagine human beings much bigger and stronger who would be able to do this. It is impossible for water to flow uphill: but we can imagine it doing this - weird, but not impossible - and you can see images of it doing so if you run films backwards. But when we say it is impossible for us to go back in time, it is difficult to imagine how this could ever be.

You build this kind of Super de Loran and you sit in it and when you press a button and get out you find yourself in a 1950's type setting.

But as you carry on trying to imagine what it would be like, you run into incoherence, don't you?

One of the people in this 1950s setting looks like you looked at that time, and is living with the family you were living with at that time, and is doing all the things to the last detail that you did at that time: except that he meets you. So he can't really be you, can he?

You might say it seems difficult to develop a coherent account of what time-travel would be like.

Introducing the notion of the a priori

As we think about the possibility of time travel, some of us will probably think it is and some of us will probably think it isn't.

Let me then raise another question on top of the time-travel one. It is this. Can we tell, just by thinking about something, whether it is possible or impossible?

If we think we can arrive at the truth about something just by thinking carefully, we are committed to the idea that we can acquire some knowledge a priori.

The theory that time is a projection

What is it about time that makes even imagining it being different so problematic?

If it were out there, like elephants and atoms and waterfalls we could imagine it being different.

It is inside us, something we project onto the world, something we impose on all our thinking, on all our experience.

Envoi

This time we have been shooting about all over the place. I have mainly been trying to suggest some avenues that would might find enticing. But here are the points I have tried to get across:

1. The free-will question seems to be of practical importance. But if there weren't such a thing as free will perhaps it couldn't have - ?

(a) If you can't give a 'coherent' account of time travel, does that mean it's impossible?

(b) If you can get any knowledge - eg that time travel is impossible - just by shutting your eyes and thinking - the name for such knowledge is a priori.

In the next presentation we will look at some examples of how the scientific focus on causes has been applied to human beings.

Appendix: A couple of other thoughts

Is it possible to think of an 'observer' as outside time?

Perhaps if you were never part of the world you are time-travelling to, some of the incoherence eases. Maybe it is possible to think of God outside time, able to look down as it were at the whole Universe in time and see what is happening in 4000 BC 'at the same time' as what is happening in 1994.

Take something we perceive as instantaneous - as they say. A plate hits the concrete floor and shatters.

Time lapse photography shows lots of different things happening one after the other. There is a sequence here which we perceive as a single instantaneous event.

Some have believed in the possibility of time travel

Some people have said: time is a dimension. There are 3 dimensions of space, and one of time.

In An Experiment with Time John Dunne (not the poet) tries to persuade us that there is more than one dimension of time: and that our dreams take us along some of these.

We are not locked into one time sequence, but that there are other time-dimensions. He thinks we travel in some of these other dimensions when we are asleep. Dreams are our experiences when we move along these other dimensions.

The unreality of time has been argued for by eg the early twentieth century philosopher John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart (1866 -1925)

Free Will and Determinism

Causality and time-travel

IS THE ISSUE OF DETERMINISM IMPORTANT?

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