Time is a fascinating thing. Elusive, intangible, and invisible unless a physical change in one of the other dimensions is made. You can only move in one direction through it. Even being completely still, you are helpless against it's progression. And when you consider time, you also have to consider free will, and whether or not you actually have it.
What follows are some seemingly simple thought experiments. Take your time (no pun intended), do some deep thinking, and ponder the possibilities. You're doing it right if you reach a point where you either say "whoaaaaa", get really confused, or get a brain cramp. Or at least I hope you do.
1. If you fancy the idea of time as an ever present eternity in both directions with you traversing along a line, then you automatically lose the concept of free will. You are doing exactly what you are supposed to be doing at the exact time you are supposed to be doing it. Everyone is. You can't help it, you can't change it. If you feel the sudden urge to defy that statement and do something silly like jump around and wave your arms, it's because you were supposed to. If you don't, you weren't. Every action you make already exists at a point in time that you have not yet reached or have already passed. You can't even throw your hands up and say "screw it! I give up!", because you were meant to do that too.
2. If you're more of a "create it as we go" kind of person, well, you still don't get free will because of causality. Everything that has ever happened has led up to and directly narrated this moment in time. It could be no other way. If things happened another way, this would be a different moment. Instead of reading this, you'd be driving or sleeping or eating or on a plane to Peru. But you're not. You're here reading this because every single second of your existence was shucking you down an inescapable path to right here, right now. Welcome. Glad you could make it. No, I don't have snacks.
3. I hate to say it, but even the 3rd option poo-poo's on the whole free will thing. Whether or not the past is obliterated, it doesn't really matter. You've done what you've done and set things in motion, like breaking a rack of balls on a pool table. When the past comes back to haunt you, it's because you've set the balls rolling, their speed and trajectory are already laid out by your actions. They can only go where you've sent them.
Now, I know I dumped all over the prospects of free will. It kind of sucks to think that you might not be the master of your own reality. So lets consider what it would take to reclaim it.
Quite a lot, actually.
Lets go back and take another look at proposition #1: infinite time on a line since it's the easiest and the one most people seem to relate to. Grab some paper and a pencil or pen or crayon for this one. You'll run out of paper fast, but that's ok, you'll get the idea.
Draw a line from one end to the other long ways down the center of the paper. This will represent an hour of your life and everything you did or will do in it. Make a little dot or an X in the middle to represent "now". To the left will be the last half hour, to the right, the next half hour.
Next, think back to what you were doing 30 minutes ago. Now think of something different you might have done. Congratulations, you just made an alternate time line in an alternate universe. Draw it like this...
Technically you could do this infinitely or at the very least, one alternate for every thing you can thing of to do in that moment (told you you'd run out of paper), but we're not going to do that. If you want to add a few more options to make it look like you're working hard, go ahead.
What you have now are 4 decisions, all existing at once, but in different realities. There's a whole lot of you doing a whole lot of things. Now think back to what you were doing 15 minutes ago, and what you could be doing if you had made a different decision. Draw a line for that on not only the main timeline, but the alternates as well. You wanted choices...
Starting to get pretty busy, isn't it. Add some more options below the main line if you want.
Wa-la! You've just created 15 separate and individual realities, all existing at once. Two points among the hundreds or thousands of decisions you might have made subconsciously in that time frame was all it took. Infinite options, infinite timelines, infinite realities. And that's just for you alone, that doesn't include the people around you, all the people that you share this planet with, or all the people that have come before or will come after you. Infinity ad infinitum.
So there's your free will, but is it really? If every point has an infinite amount of options, then there are an infinite amount of yous living out every option. Only one of you is calling the shots, the others are doomed to live with the leftovers. No one would ever know which one they were because from their perspective, they are in control.
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