Elbow Room by Daniel C. Dennett

Author:Daniel C. Dennett [Dennett, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780262527798
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 1984-04-09T05:00:00+00:00

5

Acting Under the Idea of Freedom

Time does not really exist without unrest; it does not exist for dumb animals who are absolutely without anxiety.

—Kierkegaard

And one of the deepest, one of the most general functions of living organisms is to look ahead, to produce future as Paul Valéry put it.

—François Jacob (1982, p. 66)

1 How Can You Go On Deliberating at a Time Like This?

We all take deliberation seriously, and would hate to learn that we are deluded to do so. We plan for the future; we lie awake nights gnawing at the bones of indecision, worrying about what to do and why; we promise ourselves that we will be more circumspect in the future. If we find ourselves on a jury, we try especially hard to pay close attention to the evidence presented, so we can render a responsible verdict. Is all this worry and work wasted? Is it somehow a sham or delusion? Many people are afraid that it is, if determinism is true.

Suppose we begin with a God’s-eye view of the universe. We imagine the entire fabric of causation from the dawn of creation (on the left) to the heat death of the universe (on the right) laid out before us along the time line. And we suppose, with Laplace, that its entire history is determined. We see that right in the middle, at time t, sits Alice, trying to decide whether or not to go to London “tomorrow.” We see that there are no branch points to the future of t that would make it the case that it was still possible at t for Alice to go to London the next day. For we would see that even though she had not yet—at time t—decided not to go, it was already determined that she was going to reach that decision. If she thinks, at t, that the possibility of her going to London the next day is a genuine possibility, a “live” option her decision will eventually either kill or embrace, she is wrong; it is only her narrow perspective, her limited knowledge, that permits her to think this.

If she could see the world from our vantage point, she would see that there wasn’t really any possibility of her going to London tomorrow, that there never had been any such possibility, and that the “possibility” she saw at time t was just a figment of her imagination, given free rein to occupy the space left blank by her ignorance. From her perspective, her past looks unitary and fixed, while her future looks “open” and rich with branches of opportunity and possibility; from our imagined perspective her future looks precisely as fixed as her past. In fact from our perspective there is no real now, zipping up the spreading future into the thin line of the past.

If determinism were true, wouldn’t our imagined perspective be the right way to view the world, the Alice’s way be mistaken? The fact that we, like

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.