‘The more I thought about time and space, the more the problems proliferated. One thing that came to puzzle me very much was that the future was specific yet unknown. The thought first came to me in connection with a soccer match. It was a Friday evening, and the following day my two favourite soccer teams were going to play against each other. My over-excited impatience to know the result bordered on the uncontainable. At first it was merely to calm myself that I said to myself: ‘This time tomorrow I’ll know the result. Only three things can have happened: either Arsenal will have won, or Tottenham will have won, or it’ll be a draw. And whatever it is I’ll know it for the rest of my life.’ But then I found myself thinking: ‘Whatever the truth is, it’s true now. If Spurs win, then it’s true now that Spurs are going to win. And if the score is going to be 3-2, then it’s true now that the score is going to be 3-2. These things will have been true since the beginning of time. If an ancient Roman or Old Testament prophet had said them thousands of years ago they would have been just as true even then. So why can’t I know them the day before? They’ll have been true from the beginning of time, and they’ll be true till the end of time, and yet I shall only be able to know what they are at some particular moment tomorrow afternoon.

And then, inevitably, the fact struck me that the same applied to every event throughout the whole of time: whatever was true of it was true now, and always had been true, and always would be true. Some of these truths we knew and some we didn’t, but all of them were equally true. The fact that we knew some and not others seemed to be, so to speak, a fact about us and not a fact about the truths, which were all equally eternal. Those we knew we called the past, those we didn’t know we called the future; but that seemed scarcely anything other than our way of dividing them up. In fact the dividing point actually was us: we were the shifting division between past and future. For anyone who had lived in the past, the period between his time and mine was future for him, past for me – unknowable by him, knowable by me. But my own future, unknowable by me, would be the knowable past for people in the future. Yet the truths themselves were in all the same boat. How come we were in this strange position of knowing some and not others – and of different people knowing, and not knowing, different ones? It seemed essentially a matter of our situation as individuals.

The more I thought about this the more frustrated I became. It was during these reflections that the terrifying thought occurred to me that if everything was true now, nothing we did could ever change it. It was true now, that everything that was going to happen to me during the course of my life was going to happen to me. It was also true now that nothing else apart from those things was ever going to happen to me. It was true now that I was going to do everything I would ever do. And it was true now that I would never, ever, do anything else, apart from those things. It seemed, then, that everything was fixed and unalterable now. But if that was the case there was no such thing as free will. I was a helpless object at the mercy of fate. I found this thought so frightening that it had a seriously disturbing effect on my equilibrium. I felt real terror every time it entered my mind, and I started trying to prevent myself from thinking about it’

From Confessions of a Philosopher, by Brian Magee, 1997.
 

Questions for you to consider:

Is Bryan Magee correct to state that the future is fixed because he came to the realisation that, ‘everything that was going to happen to me during the course of my life was going to happen to me’?

If he is correct, is this frightening and disturbing, or simply something that we have to get used to and live with?

Are human beings free? What do you understand by the word ‘free’? Did you have any ‘choice’ over what you did today, or is ‘choice’ an illusion that we have simply thought up to comfort ourselves? How psychologically disturbing would it be if we were not actually free?

If we are not ‘free’ (whatever that might mean) are we responsible for our actions? If we are not responsible for our actions, should we punish and reward people?

In the film Minority Report, people are arrested before they commit a crime, due to the foreknowledge of 3 half-human people who are specially able to see what is going to happen – not just what is likely to happen. Is it possible that we will be able to do this one day based on our growing knowledge of genetic behaviour? Is this a good thing? Does it take away any element of choice/chance/changing of mind – or are all of those things not real anyway………….

Source: Brian Poxon, Ballarat Grammar School, Victoria