4th Dimension
Have you ever thought conceptually about time being the 4th dimension?
As a trained computer scientist I have had to visualize the concept of a fourth dimension in the past. We consider time to be linear… it moves inexorably from birth to death. But that is merely how we perceive our movement through time.
Perhaps you recall in your very early schooling they gave us wooden blocks. They came in singles, a row of 10, a plane of 100, or a block of 1,000. Imagine each one of those single blocks constitutes the entire universe as it exists at a given moment.
We experience our lives as if we move through one of those rows of 10 cubes. But what is there to suggest that it is anything but perceptive convenience?
More to the point why assume we live in one of the rows instead of a block. The path that we experience is just one of many possible paths. Decisions don’t allow us to choose which one of several paths we take. Ultimately some version of us choose differently and experiences a different flow through time.
Perhaps this is the only way quantum mechanics probabilistic universe makes sense. Separation and flow of time is merely a mechanism for us to maintain our sanity. We don’t know how to intuitively understand time as anything but a one way jump from one moment to the next. An almost deterministic view.
But the scenario I’ve outlined makes the question of freewill moot. Do you have freewill if by definition you choose all possible choices? What does you mean when there are an infinite number of yous who have grown up in universes more or less like our own and have made decisions more and less like your own?
Thus we adopt the concept of unique identity, and lineality of time to save our sanity.
There is no how, Mr. Pilgrim, there is no why. The moment simply is.
Slaughterhouse-five (the movie)