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6 - “Freedom from the Inside Out”: Revisited

from Part II - The Arrow of Time and Philosophical Issues

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  aN Invalid Date NaN

Cristian López
Affiliation:
Université de Lausanne, Switzerland
Olimpia Lombardi
Affiliation:
Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina
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Summary

In a 2002 paper, I offered a novel way of thinking about the compatibility of free will with determinism, one that depended on appealing to the typical understanding of time of the philosopher of physics as simply one of the four dimensions of the Block Universe, albeit an especially interesting and important one. I argued that rejecting the everyday notion of “passage of time,” and of the explanatory privilege that we usually give to past → future determination as opposed to future → past determination, allowed one to articulate a novel way of defending free action in a Block world subject to deterministic laws. The problem is, most of the time these days I no longer believe in the Block and do believe in the passage of time! But I still believe that human action is (often) free, and that physics poses no genuine threat to our freedom. In this paper I will explore how the core idea behind “Freedom from the Inside Out” can be modified to be compatible with a metaphysical picture in which time passes, and explanation is not fully time-symmetric.

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The Arrow of Time
From Local Systems to the Whole Universe
, pp. 126 - 139
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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References

Albert, D. Z. (2001). Time and Chance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Albert, D. Z. (2015). After Physics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bell, J. S. (1984). “Beables for quantum field theory.” CERN-TH.4035/84.Google Scholar
Frigg, R., and Hoefer, C. (2013). “The best Humean system for statistical mechanics.Erkenntnis, 80: 551574.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hájek, A. (2014). “Most counterfactuals are false.” Unpublished manuscript, https://philarchive.org/rec/HJEMCA.Google Scholar
Hoefer, C. (2002). “Freedom from the Inside Out.” In Callender, C. (ed.), Time, Reality and Experience (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, Vol. 50), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 201222.Google Scholar
Hoefer, C. (2019). Chance in the World: A Humean Guide to Objective Chance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ismael, J. (2016). How Physics Makes Us Free. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lower, B. (2022). “A new probabilistic account of counterfactuals.” Unpublished manuscript, http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/22971/Google Scholar
Loewer, B. (2025), “The consequence argument meets the mentaculus.” In Lopez, C. and Lombardi, O. (eds.), The Arrow of Time: From Local Systems to the Universe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, chapter 5.Google Scholar
Wallace, D. (2023). “The sky is blue, and other reasons quantum mechanics is not underdetermined by evidence.” European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 13 (4): 129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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