Is the Future Open? | Dr. Patrick Todd

I'm joined by Dr. Patrick Todd to discuss whether all future contingents are false. You can also win his book for FREE!

OUTLINE

0:00 Intro
2:56 Thesis and key terms
9:55 The open future
18:20 Problem of future contingents
21:29 Grounding problem
31:40 Symmetry objection
41:50 Future-directed properties and abstracta
47:44 Competing intuitions
53:00 Moorean shift
1:05:44 Credence-based objection clarified
1:13:22 Companions in innocence: CCFs
1:20:20 Logical problem, semantics, and neg-raising
1:32:25 Conclusion and giveaway

LINKS

THE USUAL...

[MajestyofReason]

Small correction: that slide should say "Tuesday, April 25th", not "24th"! :)

[Mentat]

Congratulations on Princeton, Joe! I think you have the makings of a fantastic philosopher.

[Brickeh]

I'm considering Princeton for my doctorate! Need to finish master's, but maybe there will be some overlap and I'll get to say hello in person :) amazing conversation!

[anthonyrowden]

I liked the "breakfast is the most important meal of the day" objection. Breakfast is also my favorite meal of the day.

[ryanhiebert]

It feels to me likely there’s often a conflation between overwhelmingly likely and true, that we need to carefully and forcefully reject. I will often colloquially speak of overwhelmingly likely things as if they are just true, but it is a simplification of scope for the purpose of effective communication, rather than a full and complete reflection of the state of reality.

[wardandrew]

I agree with Dr. Todd's argument that if future contingents have no truth value, then a being like the God of traditional theism can still be "omniscient" _without_ knowing the truth of future contingents. I strongly disagree, however, that Todd's limited version of omniscience poses no difficulties for traditional theism. One of the most basic assumptions theists make is that prior to the creation of the universe, God knew everything that would follow from his creative act. But if God does not know the future, then this obviously cannot be the case. It leads instead to the unpalatable suggestion that in choosing to create the universe, God was essentially rolling the dice, hoping that everything would turn out well. But what if it doesn't? What if God's ignorance of future contingent events leads instead to disaster? Recall also that one of the most common replies to the problem of evil is that God allows some evil, knowing that allowing these evils will ultimately lead to good ends. But if God doesn't know the future, then this reply won't work. There is then no reason to believe (even for God) that allowing some evil won't simply lead to even greater evil, or that the good that God allows won't also lead to evil down the line. There may be even more unfortunate consequences for theism if Dr. Todd is right, but these two are the ones that came immediately to mind.

[QueloKFC]

Congrats and Excellent video, Joe! 1 quick thought and 1 quick question:

1) Your credence worry doesn't seem to have any force weak if one distinguishes the probability of the claim (the future contingent) that it will X (you'll eat breakfast tomorrow) from the probability of X (you actually eat breakfast tomorrow). The strength of the world’s tendency to produce a certain outcome tomorrow (you eating breakfast) and the likelihood of the claim that you'll eat breakfast. The present causal tendencies of the world can make Joe eating breakfast more likely, but not make likely the truth of the proposition that you'll eat breakfast tomorrow.

1) It *could've been* that I was never born since the conditions leading to my birth *could've been* different. Thus, b/c it was true at T1 that T2 would occur, & if the present is T3, we can say it *will be* or the case that T4, T5, etc will occur. There seems to be nothing different about this feature concerning past & present events. It wasn't true at T1 that there wasn't a fact of the matter & we have no reason to think T1 & T3 are different in this regard. Is this a knockdown argument against open future?

Thanks!

[Danicker]

In response to the symmetry argument I would be happy to consider an "open-past" view. From our position there are many possible pasts and why need there be one correct answer? If you're a presentist then I think you have to accept and open past view because of the grounding problem

[iruleandyoudont]

I've actually been talking about these questions a bunch lately. Seems to me that if at t1 I say "tomorrow there will be a sea battle, " and there is a sea battle the following day, then what I said at t1 was true.

[tieferforschen]

As a Christian and an open futurist, I propose modifying the law of excluded middle to a three-tier logic. According to my view, propositions can be true, false, or pending. Pending propositions are those that may collapse into either true or false, or remain pending indefinitely.

However, the view presented in the video implies that all statements about the future are false, which contradicts Christian theism. If all prophecies are false, then God would be a liar, which is incompatible with the belief that God cannot lie.

Furthermore, this view has other strange implications, such as turning everyone who promises anything into a liar. For example, if I promise to be somewhere tomorrow, the statement is false under this view since it has not yet been determined whether or not I will show up. This means that according to this view, people who make promises are always lying.

In contrast, my view allows for pending propositions, which means that some future events are uncertain and contingent upon human decisions. This aligns with our natural language usage, as a proposition like "I will be there tomorrow" is pending until the next day when it will either become true or false.

However, I acknowledge that my view has a potential weakness, which is the idea that some statements about the future can never collapse into falsehood. For example, the statement "At some point in the future, every living creature will have green skin" may remain pending indefinitely or collapse into truth, but it can never be false as long as one believes in an infinite future. While this may seem odd, I believe it is a small price to pay for the linguistic and explanatory gains my view offers.

While it is impossible to know some things about the future, predicting the future as accurately as possible is still feasible. As an omniscient and omnipotent being, God is the best predictor of future events, even when the outcome is uncertain.

The concern that altering the laws of logic is problematic is debatable. If we maintain the current laws of logic, this would imply determinism or that all statements about the future are false. However, by introducing the concept of pending propositions, we can account for uncertain and contingent future events while still upholding the principle of non-contradiction.

Although this view may be unusual, it does not change much for 99% of cases. Nonetheless, it is ultimately up to individuals to decide which philosophical viewpoint they find most compelling and coherent.

[Tylermania]

Surrender your weapons captain! we've waged a contingent sea battle on both sides of the present, we have you surrounded!

[goclbert]

39:12 The way I see it, the asymetry with respect to past and future emerges from the laws of physics and the arrangement of stuff in the universe. If you perform magical transformations that break the laws of physics, then notions of past and future and our intuitions about them vanish along with the universe in this example. If you vanish the entire universe then there is no future. More generally, any future following a physical violation would not be the actual future of the established past. Moreover, there would be a new corresponding past for the new future.

[silverharloe]

When you started talking about future contingents and past contingents, I started thinking, probably wrongly, about Gettier cases - not all of them, but I think some of them are based on prediction or retrodiction? And then I started to wonder how Patrick Todd would address those cases, or if there is anything to address because I'm probably being dumb.

(and then half of my brain kept trying to make coherent a possible Gettier case of my own devising (or I think it's original to me, since I haven't heard it before) where someone takes a pair of loaded dice, so they have a justified belief that they will roll a 7, but unbeknownst to them, someone had swapped the dice with a fair set (or given them a fair set but told them they were loaded), but if they coincidentally roll a 7 making their justified belief true, did they really *know* it? But wasn't that a future contingent before they rolled?)

[fjskfkskfkdkd]

I would say the future is open as long as there is quantum randomness on the play. How "open" it is grows the further we go. If we have exactly all the forces that are being applied to, for example, a ball (considering the time t as 0 in that moment), we could tell how it will be in t=1s almost for sure, but the further we go to the future, the lesser we know for sure in reference with t=0.

[tophersonX]

Wonderful discussion about the huge problems and incoherences with a "libertarian" free will position. I particularly like 40:50 where he pretty much says the future depends causally on the present. Lol

[alithea]

Speaking of your modus ponens shirt, where did you get that? Also, where did you get your other philosophy shirts?

[СергейМакеев-жн]

If Dr. Todd rejects future contingents because of the grounding problem, why not apply that to his own view too?
I don't see in virtue of what can _ontological statements about future contingents_ be true or false.
How can there be, in principle, a fact of the matter about whether the future is open or not?

(That is my actual view btw, not just for the sake of reductio. I am inclined to believe many of these debates are pseudo-questions. So the same worry applies to e.g. ontological statements about counterfactuals)

[chloupichloupa]

But will future Dr Schmid greet us with "hey peeps" or "sup dogs"? If not, I will be sad.

Congratz Joe, good luck for Princeton and thank you for your work.

[ryanhiebert]

I think that you’re misunderstanding what you’re doing when we think about what we will or won’t do, and the possibility space. At least, that’s my guess.

When I say “I will eat breakfast tomorrow”, I am implicitly and intentionally boxing out the possibilities that are “abnormal” flow of events that would prohibit those events. What I’m doing is speaking only about the things that I know how to reason about.

Second, what’s further happening is that you are likely assigning too great a probability to events that would prohibit what you believe to be overwhelmingly likely.

So it is my sense that you do need to make things consistent in order to be rational, yet it is also rational to limit the scope of our verbal contingency space in order to allow us to talk more colloquially.

[anthonyrowden]

I'm excited for your future career at Starbucks with your PhD in philosophy. Jkjk 😜