Exploring the Relationship between Time, Totality and Determinism

Jenann Ismael (University of Arizona)

The problem of fatalism was around long before relativity, but gained some affirmation in many people’s minds from the relativistic image of time. Classical fatalism, associated with Parmenides, is a statement about the nature of time. The claim is thatrelativity treats time just like the spatial dimensions. Past, present and future all exist already, and there’s no good sense in which they remain to be fixed.    Determinism has to do with physical laws. Again, there were some early versions, but it really received a precise and pressing form that with the establishment of Newton’s Mechanics when it became possible to write down equations that would in principle allow one to calculate everything that will happen – including everything that we will do - from a complete specification of the initial conditions of the universe.    These are usually treated as quite different problems. Determinism seems a much stronger, and more worrisome, problem because it seems to entail that there are facts in place already – not in the future, but in the here and now - that necessitate that things will be as they will be.  Determinism, however, holds only at the level of totality in classical physics. I’m going to spend most of the talk showing how the notion of totality comes into play, and explore how it blurs the line between fatalism and determinism, while also (I hope) raising a host of interesting questions about the relationship between the physics of totalities and the physics of the on-the-ground causal order, and about the logic and metaphysics of totality facts.