Compatibility of Free Will in The Tenseless Theory of Time...

, The debate between free will and fatalism has existed since the conceptualization of time. On one hand, in everyday life, time flows in a uniform fashion. People experience time in which there is a past, present, and a future. Yet, physicists and philosophers see time as something completely different. In fact, they see time as an illusion. Called the tenseless theory of time, time does not flow but this theory views time as a fourth dimension where all past, present, and future events are equal (Callender Edney, 2004). Essentially, this theory proposes that there is no passage of time and no becoming of future events. As a result, one can view this theory as a â€Å"block† universe in which every event that has happened, is happening as of†¦show more content†¦Thus, if fatalism is about the penultimate outcome, then free will is the process about decision-making that leads up to the final outcome. Not only does free will exist, it can also be viewed as compatible with the tenseless theory of time as well. Firstly, fatalism alludes to the idea that what happened was always going to happen. Fatalism is the view in which it implies there are no alternate possibilities. The tenseless theory of time is committed to this belief. Yet, this assumption is still ambiguous. The brain and especially the mind is complex. Experiments done in the field of neuroscience have tried to resolve this particular question. Can it be shown that what will happen has already been pre-determined in the mind? One experiment, conducted by Benjamin Libet (1983), tried to answer this question. In the experiment, he would ask each participant to sit at a desk in front of a timer. He would put electrodes onto the scalp and ask the participant to carry out a motor activity, such as a flick of the wrist. He would also ask the participant to note the position of the timer when the participant felt that they were urged to do the activity. Libet found there was a 200 millisecon d delay, on average, between