Extrinsic well-being and the open future

Klaus: Sometimes how well or badly off you are at time t₁ depends on what happens at a later time t₂. A particularly compelling case of this is when at t₁ you performedan onerous action with the goal of producing some effect E at t₂. How well off you were in performing the action depends on whether the action succeeded—which depends on whether E eventuates at t₂. But now suppose the future is open. Then in a world with as much indeterminacy as ours, in many cases at t₁ it will be contingent whether the event at t₂ on which your well-being at t₁ depends eventuates. And on open future views, at t₁ there will then be no fact of the matter about your well-being. Hence, the future is not open.

Opie: In such cases, your well-being should be located at t₂ rather than at t₁. If you jump the crevasse, it is only when you land that you have the well-being of success.

Klaus: This does not work as well in cases where you are dead at t₂. And yet our well-being does sometimes depend on what happens after we are dead. The action at t₁ might be a heroic sacrifice of one’s life to save one’s friends—but whether one is a successful hero or a tragic hero depends on whether the friends will be saved, which may depend on what happens after one is already dead.

Opie: Thanks! You just gave me an argument for an afterlife. In cases like this, you are obviously better off if you manage to save your friends, but you aren’t better off in this life, so there must be life after death.

Klaus: But we also have the intuition that even if there were no afterlife, it would be better to be the successful hero than the tragic hero, and that posthumous fame is better than posthumous infamy.

Opie: There is an afterlife. You’ve convinced me. And moral intuitions about how things would be if our existence had a radically different shape from the one it in fact has are suspect. And, given that there is an afterlife, a scenario without an afterlife is a scenario where our existence has a radically different shape. Thus the intuition you cite is unreliable.

Klaus: That’s a good response. Let me try a different case. Suppose you perform an onerous action with a goal within this life, but then you change your mind about the goal and work to prevent that goal. This works best if both goals are morally acceptable, and switching goals is acceptable. For instance you initially worked to help the Niners train to win their baseball game against the Logicians, but then your allegiance shifted to the Logicians in a way that isn't morally questionable. And then suppose the Niners won. Your actions in favor of the Niners are successful, and you have well-being. But it is incorrect to locate that well-being at the time of the actual victory, since at that time you are working for the Logicians, not the Niners. So the well-being must be located at the time of your activity, and at that time it depends on future contingents.

Opie: Perhaps I should say that at the time Niners beat the Logicians, you are both well-off and badly-off, since one of your past goals is successful and the other is unsuccessful. But I agree that this doesn’t quite seem right. After all, if you are loyal to your current employer, you’re bummed out about the Logicians’ loss and you’re bummed out that you weren’t working for them from the beginning. So intuitively you're just badly off at this time, not both badly and well off. So, I admit, this is a little bit of evidence against open future views.

Consciousness and the open future

Plausibly:

1. There is a “minimal humanly observable duration” (mhod) such that a human cannot have a conscious state—say, a pain—shorter than an mhod, but can have a conscious state that’s an mhod long.

The “cannot” here is nomic possibility rather than metaphysical possibility.

Let δ denote an mhod. Now, suppose that you feel a pain precisely from t₀ to t₂. Then t₂ ≥ t₀ + δ. Now, let t₁ = t₀ + δ/2. Then you feel a pain at t₁. But at t₁, you only felt a pain for half an mhod. Thus:

2. At t₁, that you feel pain depends on substantive facts about your mental state at times after t₁.

For if your head were suddenly zapped by a giant laser a quarter of an mhod after t₁, then you would not have felt a pain at t₁, because you would have been in a position to feel pain only from t₀ to t₀ + (3/4)δ.

But in a universe full of quantum indeterminacy:

3. These substantive facts are contingent.

After all, your brain could just fail a quarter of an mhod after t₁ due to a random quantum event.

But:

4. Given an open future, at t₁ there are no substantive contingent facts about the future.

Thus:

5. Given an open future, at t₁ there is no fact that you are conscious.

Which is absurd!

What if there is no tomorrow?

There are two parts of Aristotle’s theory that are hard to fit together.

First, we have Aristotle’s view of future contingents, on which

1. It is neither true nor false that tomorrow there will be a sea battle

but, of course:

2. It is true that tomorrow there will be a sea battle or no sea battle.

Of course, nothing rides on “tomorrow” in (1) and (2): any future metric interval of times will do. Thus:

3. It is true that in 86,400,000 milliseconds there will be a sea battle or not.

(Here I adopt the convention that “in x units” denotes the interval of time corresponding to the displayed number of significant digits in x. Thus, “in 86,400,000 ms” means “at a time between 86,399,999.5 (inclusive) and 86,400,000.5 (exclusive) ms from now.”)

Second, we have Aristotle’s view of time, on which time is infinitely divisible but not infinitely divided. Times correspond to what one might call happenings, the beginnings and ends of processes of change. Now which happenings there will be, and when they will fall with respect to metric time (say, 3.74 seconds after some other happening), is presumably something that is, or can be, contingent.

In particular, in a world full of contingency and with slow-moving processes of change, it is contingent whether there will be a time in 86,400,000 ms. But (3) entails that there will be such a time, since if there is no such time, then it is not true that anything will be the case in 86,400,000 ms, since there will be no such time.

Thus, Aristotle cannot uphold (3) in a world full of contingency and slow processes. Hence, (3) cannot be a matter of temporal logic, and thus neither can (2) be, since logic doesn’t care about the difference between days and milliseconds.

If we want to make the point in our world, we would need units smaller than milliseconds. Maybe Planck times will work.

Objection: Suppose that no moment of time will occur in exactly x₁ seconds, because x₁ falls between all the endpoints of processes of change. But perhaps we can still say what is happening in x₁ seconds. Thus, if there are x₀ < x₁ < x₂ such that x₀ seconds from now and x₂ seconds from now (imagine all this paragraph being said in one moment!) are both real moments of time, we can say things about what will happen in x₁ seconds. If I will be sitting in both x₀ and x₂ seconds, maybe I can say that I will be sitting in x₁ seconds. Similarly, if Themistocles is leading a sea battle in 86,399,999 ms and is leading a sea battle in 86,400,001 ms, then we can say that he is leading a sea battle in 86,400,000 ms, even though there is no moment of time then. And if he won’t lead a sea battle in either 86,399,999 ms or in 86,400,000 ms, neither will he lead one in 86,400,000 ms.

Response: Yes, but (3) is supposed to be true as a matter of logic. And it’s logically possible that Themistocles leads a sea battle in 86,399,999 ms but not in 86,400,001 ms, in which case if there will be no moment in 86,400,000 ms, we cannot meaningfully say if he will be leading a sea battle then or not. So we cannot save (3) as a matter of logic.

A possible solution: Perhaps Aristotle should just replace (2) with:

4. It is true that will be: no tomorrow or tomorrow a sea battle or tomorrow no sea battle.

I am a bit worried about the "will" attached to a “no tomorrow”. Maybe more on that later.