The Time Illusion (Kindle Single)

by John Gribbin

In his book The Fabric of Reality, Deutsch says: We think of causes as preceding their effects; we imagine the moving present arriving at causes before it arrives at their effects, and we imagine the effects flowing forwards with the present moment. Philosophically, the most important cause-and-effect processes are our conscious decisions and the consequent actions. The common-sense view is that we have free will; that we are sometimes in a position to affect future events . . . But: according to spacetime physics, the openness of the future is an illusion, and therefore causation and free will can be no more than illusions as well . . . In reality, we make no choices. Even as we think we are considering a choice, its outcome is already there, in the appropriate slice of spacetime, unchangeable like everything else in spacetime, and impervious to our deliberations.