Don’t Look Back in Anger. Freedom, Fatalism and the Future Giacomo Andreoletti Contents 1 A Journey into Fatalism 5 1.1 What Fatalism amounts to . .5 1.1.1 Three claims . .5 1.1.2 Definitions . 10 1.1.3 Why should we be worried? . 16 1.2 Two classic Arguments for Modal Fatalism . 19 1.2.1 A bit of Modal Logic . 19 1.2.2 The Main Argument . 21 Prior Truths . 26 Ockhamism and the freedom to do otherwise . 30 Introducing a Third Truth Value . 33 The Mutable Future . 41 1.2.3 Taylor’s Argument . 44 The Argument . 44 Taylor’s Argument Modal Structure . 51 Standard responses . 52 1.3 Again on Definitions . 57 1.3.1 Another bit of Modal Logic . 57 1.3.2 Modal Fatalism Principles . 59 1.3.3 What is wrong with the Main Argument and Taylor’s 62 1.4 Why I am not worried . 65 1.4.1 Lazy Argument . 65 1.4.2 Deliberation . 68 1.4.3 Moral Responsibility . 70 2 A New Argument for Modal Fatalism 77 2.1 Two Principles which imply Modal Fatalism . 77 2.2 The Disagreement on (SUF) . 79 1 CONTENTS 2 2.3 What are we left with . 84 3 Time Travel and Fatalism 86 3.1 Time Travel in One-Dimensional Time . 86 3.2 Another Odd Story . 95 3.3 The Specter of Fatalism with respect to Mit and Time Travel 98 3.4 The Specter fades away . 100 3.5 Powers, Fatalism and Abilities . 102 3.6 Protecting the Past . 105 4 Changing the Past 110 4.1 An Attempt to Change the Past . 111 4.2 Two Problems . 114 4.3 Times and T-slices . 116 4.4 The Past has not changed . 121 5 Defending A Mutable Future 124 5.1 Free Will and the Future . 125 5.2 Geach and the Changing Future . 127 5.3 A case in favor of the Changing Future . 130 5.4 Conclusion . 132 Acknowledgements On this occasion there is no one I wish to acknowledge. Thank you1. 1Actually, I am profoundly in debt with several people and friends who had the patience to discuss and read the material of this work. I am sure those people — let me just mention my advisors Giuliano Torrengo and Achille Varzi — know how much I am thankful to them. Also, I am even more sure they have enough sense of humor to appreciate my acknowledgment. Introduction “Oh, if only I’d bought that stock! If only I, if only I purchased THAT house years ago! If only I’d made a move on THAT woman. If this, if that.” You know what? Give me a break with your could have’s and should have’s. Like my mother used to say, “If my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a trolley car.” My mother didn’t have wheels. She had varicose veins. Whatever Works — Woody Allen We sometimes regret things we have done in the past. We may even despise ourselves for deeds we have done in the past. If I had not done that, I would not have ended up like this. All of us have plenty of examples which fall into this category. This kind of attitude toward the past might be overwhelming and lead to total despair. As a remedy, people are told that it’s no use crying over spilt milk. What is done is done, and cannot be undone. However, the disappointment remains. The thought that we could have done otherwise and act better than what we have done is still there. Fatalism, the topic I will be mostly dealing with in this work, offers a better medicine. There’s no point thinking that things could have gone otherwise. A fatalist would say that the way they went was the only way they could have gone, and this should be consoling. So, we are done with the past. But what about the present and the future? A fatalist, 3 CONTENTS 4 very straightforwardly, claims that there is no difference between past and future. According to him or her, we should have the same attitude toward the future. There is only one way things could go. And here, if the fatalist is correct, we are again overwhelmed. How can we claim to be free to want or do anything? Are we just living a life which is already pre-determined? What is the point of living such a life? In what follows I will try to carefully address these questions. My answer will be that we should not be too much worried if the kind of fatalism I favor turns out to be true. In the novel “Jacques the Fatalist” by Diderot, the protagonist claims all the time that what happens to him was already written on high. What this ’high’ might consist of will be investigated throughout this work. In fact, we shall see that there are different kinds of fatalism and different sources that seem to point to fatalism. Fatalism is often quickly dismissed as an untenable doctrine, which at best can count as sophistry. I don’t agree with this judgment. One of my goals is to convince the reader that fatalism, at least one kind of it, has to be taken seriously and that it deserves respect and attention within our metaphysical investigations. In chapter 1 we shall see what different kinds of fatalism there are and what is their nature. Then, we will focus on two classic arguments to the conclusion that fatalism holds. In chapter 2 I will give my own argument in favor of fatalism. In chapter 3 I will take time travel in one dimensional time as a case study. I will argue that issues which arise within the debate of the metaphysical possibility of time travel can be resolved by fatalism. In chapter 4 I try to refute a recent attempt which has been made to show that the past could change, even if time is one-dimensional. Ultimately, in the final chapter I will talk about a theory according to which the future might literally change. The theory provides two interesting ways to refute fatalism. I will provide an example which is supposed to favor the changing future. I’ve been told that a dissertation should have a single main thesis. Mine has it, but it has the form of a disjunction. The received view is that the future cannot change and yet fatalism is false. I want to negate this conjunction. This denial gives us a disjunction. Either we should be fatalists — and it’s not so bad after all — or we should believe that we can change the future. Hence, don’t look back in anger. Go and change your future, it might work. Chapter 1 A Journey into Fatalism In this first chapter I introduce fatalism and its different understandings. I try to make it clear in the first section that there are at least two different kinds of fatalism, here labeled lazy and modal fatalism. The following sec- tion on modal logic is needed to understand the nature of modal fatalism. I then address two classic arguments to the conclusion that modal fatalism holds, and the standard responses which are found in the literature on this topic. I then provide a new reason that should incline us to think that those two arguments do not get through. Ultimately, I will try to show that although fatalism has always been seen as an untenable doctrine because of its consequences, this is not necessarily correct. Even though lazy fa- talism does have unpleasant and seemingly fallacious implications, modal fatalism can perfectly address the problems which are usually associated to fatalism. 1.1 What Fatalism amounts to I start this section by discussing three claims. These claims are going to help us with defining lazy and modal fatalism. Ultimately, I will show why fatalism has to be taken seriously and what consequences it might seem to have. 1.1.1 Three claims We are about to start the discussion on fatalism by putting on the table three claims. The first two are admittedly vague, whereas the third is often employed as a definition of fatalism. These three claims will help us to 5 CHAPTER 1. A JOURNEY INTO FATALISM 6 provide a distinction between different kinds of fatalism. Here are the three claims. The Symmetry Thesis. There is a symmetry between the past and the future. Causal Connectedness. What happens at a time causally depends on what happens at other times. Powerlessness. Agents are powerless to do anything other than what they actually do. Let’s start with the first claim. What does it mean to say that the future is like the past? It probably depends on what we are talking about. One way to argue for the symmetry (or the asymmetry) of past and future is to put it in ontological terms. Suppose I now have to provide a full inventory of what exists. To start, it seems that I need to include all entities that exist at this very moment in time I am making the list. Should I include past entities, say Socrates, and future entities like the event of my grandson taking his first college class? Here there is disagreement. An eternalist would be willing to claim that it is reasonable to put in the inventory all past, present and future entities. He or she would probably argue for this in virtue of the fact that our best scientific theories, like special theory of relativity, treats the time-dimension in the same way the three space-dimensions are treated.