Thursday 15 October 2020

History And Philosophy

There Will Be Time.

More consequences of Jack Havig's time traveling: he reads a lot of history in his spare time and discusses free will and time with one of Robert Anderson's sons, questions like is cosmic history predetermined and "...if so, why do we know we make free choices? if not, how can we affect the course of the future...or the past?" (II, p. 21)

Predetermined choices can be free in the sense of unconstrained and can affect the future but not the past. That reference to affecting the past is a clue to Jack's time traveling.

When we choose, e.g., the fifth option from ten on a menu, we are conscious, first, that there are ten options and, secondly, that no external constraint prevents us from choosing any of the other nine but it might nevertheless be the case that we are causally determined to choose the fifth.  

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And I think Jack Havig also discussed philosophy with a Catholic or Orthodox monk or priest in Caleb Wallis' Eyrie.

Ad astra! Sean