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Backwards Causation, Time, and the Open Future

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Metaphysica

Abstract

Here are some intuitions we have about the nature of space and time. There is something fundamentally different about the past, present, and future. What is definitive of the past is that the past events are fixed. What is definitive of the future is that future events are not fixed. What is definitive of the present is that it marks the objective ontological border between the past and the future and, by doing so, instantiates a particularly salient phenomenological property of “nowness.” Call the combination of these intuitions according to which there exists an objective present, a fixed past, and an open future, the intuitive view. I argue that, given the intuitive view, the possibility of backwards causation—and hence, for instance, backwards time travel—is problematic.

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Notes

  1. This, or something like it, is often put in terms of the openness of the future and the closedness of the past. But talking of the past as “closed” conjures up the idea that the past is closed in the sense of being causally closed; so I prefer to talk of the past as being fixed.

  2. Then causation is probabilistic, and, one presumes, different branches have different probabilities of becoming actual.

  3. While I borrow the term “subsisting” from Meinong (1904), I intend to import none of his views regarding such objects.

  4. Sometimes the block universe model incorporates the claim that causal determinism is true. I do not intend this.

  5. Some propositions might be neither true nor false in virtue of the proposition being vague (either in a case of semantic or ontic vagueness, depending on one’s view here). These cases are clearly not pertinent to the issues in this paper; so, in what follows, I will refrain from qualifying hereafter and simply talk of “every proposition” having a determinate truth value.

  6. Necessarily true propositions would not be true only in virtue of truth makers in this world. So, henceforth, I intend to refer only to contingent propositions when I talk of “all” propositions.

  7. On the block universe model, “past” and “future” do not refer to temporal locations that are objectively past or future. So when we are evaluating “past” or “future”-tensed propositions, we are evaluating them at times considered as now, but where “now” is a mere indexical. It should be noted that since the intuitive view embraces an objective present, past- and future-tensed propositions are always propositions about the objective past or future, and when other times are considered as now, they are considered to be the objective present.

  8. Indeed, I take it that is precisely what most physicists think the actual world is like.

  9. Or P is unfixed if P has a fundamental truth maker, and there is a truth maker for some proposition P* that is inconsistent with P.

  10. Of course, if there were only one such proposition, then the future would not be very open!

  11. Or for some proposition P* that is inconsistent with P.

  12. Notice that presentists who think that the past and future are fixed could use the laws of nature plus the totality of facts about the world now, as truth makers for all past and future-tensed statements, and these statements would all be fixed.

  13. It should be noted that I have a robust notion of causation in mind here, according to which there are facts of the matter regarding what causes what: causation is not to be understood as mere Humean constant conjunction nor as some sort of subjective explanatory tool according to which whether something causes something else depends on our particular explanatory requirements.

  14. Or, if you think that cause and effect can occur simultaneously (maybe in certain quantum contexts), then there will be cases where both cause and effect occur. But in general this will not be the case.

  15. This definition of pseudo-necessity is consistent with all three varieties of the intuitive view since it is consistent with it being the case that E is ontologically real in the future or ontologically unreal. A presentist–growing universe definition could better be defined in terms of subcurrence thus: Pseudo-necessary: a future event E is pseudo-necessary relative to a time t, just if when t is the present moment, E subcurs on every possible future branch.The same is true mutatis mutandis for pseudo-contingency.

  16. Notice that this does not presuppose that the causal relationship between C and E is deterministic.

  17. Bell (1964)

References

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Correspondence to Kristie Miller.

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Miller, K. Backwards Causation, Time, and the Open Future. Int Ontology Metaphysics 9, 173–191 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12133-008-0030-2

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