The endless ramifications of change
Determinism says that every event ‒ everything that happens ‒ is necessitated by earlier conditions. According to science, those earlier conditions include events going back at least to the “big bang” some 14 billion years ago. But the big bang was an event, so it too was necessitated by even earlier conditions, which themselves include events. And so on forever backward.
It follows that changing any event requires changing an endless series of earlier conditions. Logic tells us that if you change something, you change whatever necessitates it. Your decision to read this post was necessitated by conditions going back forever. If you hadn’t decided to read it, the history of the universe would have differed going back forever. Pause a moment to take that in.
I don’t claim that your decision to read this post caused the infinite history of the universe. As I said before, when doing metaphysics I try not to indulge in talk of causation, which is a concept beholden to our interests. Rather, I claim that the infinite history of the universe counterfactually depends on your decision because the infinite history of the universe would have been different if you hadn’t made that decision. Just how different it would have been is something I’ll address in future posts.
