The Time Traveler's Freedom

At the moment I'm reading Audrey Niffenegger's relatively new book called The Time Traveler's Wife, and although I'm not usually one for novels (I mostly stick with philosophy, for some reason), I'm really enjoying it.  It's a fascinating story about a man who has a condition that forces him to involuntarily travel through time -- he visits his wife when she is a child, befriends her in the past, and she grows up always knowing who her future husband will be.  And it's consistent time travel, too, which makes it all the more enjoyable.  Anyway, I thought the following exchange might be of interest to you all -- this is a scene in which Henry's March 1979 self has involuntarily traveled back to visit his November 1978 self.  The dialogue (or perhaps it's a soliloquy?) runs as follows:

Henry 1: Free Will?

Henry 2: I was just talking about that with a self from 1992.  He said something interesting: he said that he thinks there is only free will when you are in time, in the present.  He says in the past we can only do what we did, and we can only be there if we were there.

Henry 1: But whenever I am, that's my present.  Shouldn't I be able to decide...

Henry 2: No. Apparently not.

Henry 1: What did he say about the future?

Henry 2: Well, think.  You go to the future, you do something, you come back to the present.  Then the thing that you did is part of your past.  So that's probably inevitable too.

Henry 1: But then I'm not responsible for anything I do while I'm not in the present.

Henry 2: Thank God.

Henry 1: And everything has already happened.

Henry 2: Sure looks that way.  But he said that you have to behave as though you have free will, as though you are responsible for what you do.

Henry 1: Why?  What does it matter?

Henry 2: Apparently, if you don't, things are bad.  Depressing.

Comments

[Kip Werking]

On a tangent, time travel provides a good context in which to explore just how demanding Galen Strawson's notion of free will ("U-freedom") is. Fischer has considered this sort of freedom a "kind of metaphysical megalomania" (that alliteration has a really nice ring to it). Fischer further suggests (and I think he's mostly right) that in order to have U-freedom, a person would have to have "Total Control," which implies control over everything involving the agent's self (his definition is more precise). So a person with U-freedom would have control over hir own genome and, perhaps, over whether the sun shines.

The relevance of time-travel to the free will problem becomes more apparent when we consider Total Control: might a *time-traveller* have Total Control, even though us mere mortals can't? And, only upon reflection, did I realize that even time-travellers can't have U-freedom. One might have supposed, for example, that a time-traveller looked out before his birth and decided exactly what kind of genome, childhood, and so on to have. Of course, if the agent chose other than the genome/environment he actually had, then this would be a time-travel paradox, and impossible.

But consider the Perfectly Consistent Time-Traveller who chooses the exact genome/environment (and everything else) that the time traveller originally had. Might this agent have Total Control *? Upon reflection, I realized that the answer is no. One might say: so close, and yet so far. The Basic Argument applies to this argument just as well as the non-time-traveller. One can always say: the agent is consistent because it has the original desires/character that it didn't choose, and it's choosing them again is just a result of their already-being-given-to-hir. Perhaps the agent would have Total Control if it didn't have to be consistent. If an agent could choose an entirely different genome and environment. But that is impossible even for time-travellers. And even if it were possible, the agent still wouldn't have free will, because the desire to be *inconsistent* would be just as infected with givenness as the Perfectly Consistent Time-Traveller's desire to be consistent. This helps explain why Fischer calls the desire for U-freedom to be "a kind of metaphysical megalomania."

* One needs to consider, I think, analogously consistent agents in the context of Newcomb's Paradox, if such agents are to learn of the predictions of how their lives will be: either they are consistent or impossible.