E-032 SEP HDET - Determinism Hard (Thesis 1 Excerpt)

Exact excerpt

In the introduction, we noted the threat that determinism seems to pose to human free agency. It is hard to see how, if the state of the world 1000 years ago fixes everything I do during my life, I can meaningfully say that I am a free agent, the author of my own actions, which I could have freely chosen to perform differently. After all, I have neither the power to change the laws of nature, nor to change the past! So in what sense can I attribute freedom of choice to myself?
Philosophers have not lacked ingenuity in devising answers to this question. There is a long tradition of [compatibilists](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/) arguing that freedom is fully compatible with physical determinism; a prominent recent defender is John Fischer (1994, 2012). Hume went so far as to argue that determinism is a _necessary condition_ for freedom—or at least, he argued that some causality principle along the lines of “same cause, same effect” is required. There have been equally numerous and vigorous responses by those who are not convinced. Can a clear understanding of what determinism is, and how it tends to succeed or fail in real physical theories, shed any light on the controversy?
Physics, particularly 20th century physics, does have one lesson to impart to the free will debate; a lesson about the relationship between _time_ and determinism. Recall that we noticed that the fundamental theories we are familiar with, if they are deterministic at all, are time-symmetrically deterministic. That is, earlier states of the world can be seen as fixing all later states; but equally, later states can be seen as fixing all earlier states. We tend to focus only on the former relationship, but we are not led to do so by the theories themselves.
Nor does 20th (21st) century physics countenance the idea that there is anything ontologically special about the past, as opposed to the present and the future. In fact, it fails to use these categories in any respect, leading some philosophers to argue that they are merely perspectival and, in a physical sense, illusory.[[10](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/notes.html#note-10)] So there is no support in physics for the idea that the past is “fixed” in some way that the present and future are not, or that it has some ontological power to constrain our actions that the present and future do not have. It is not hard to uncover the reasons why we naturally do tend to think of the past as special, and assume that both physical causation and physical explanation work only in the past present/future direction (see the entry on [thermodynamic asymmetry in time](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-thermo/)). But these pragmatic matters have nothing to do with fundamental determinism. If we shake loose from the tendency to see the past as special, when it comes to the relationships of determination, it may prove possible to think of a deterministic world as one in which each part bears a determining—or partial-determining—relation to other parts, but in which no particular part (region of space-time, event or set of events, ...) has a special, privileged determining role that undercuts the others. Hoefer (2002a), Ismael (2016), and Loewer (2020, Other Internet Resources) use such considerations to argue in distinct but closely related ways for the compatibility of determinism with human free agency.
## Bibliography
  * Batterman, R. B., 1993, “Defining Chaos,” _Philosophy of Science_ , 60: 43–66.
  * Belot, G. and Earman, J., 2001, “Pre-Socratic Quantum Gravity,” in C. Callender and N. Huggett (eds.), _Physics Meets Philosophy at the Planck Scale_ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 213–255.
  * Bishop, R. C., 2002, “Deterministic and Indeterministic Descriptions,” in _Between Chance and Choice_ , H. Atmanspacher and R. Bishop (eds.), Imprint Academic, 5–31.
  * Butterfield, J., 1998, “Determinism and Indeterminism,” in _Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy_ , E. Craig (ed.),
  * Callender, C., 2017, _What Makes Time Special_ , Oxford University Press.
  * Callender, C., and Hoefer, C., 2001, “Philosophy of Space-time Physics,” in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Science, P. Machamer and M. Silberstein (eds), Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 173–198.