Fabio Scardigli - Determinism and Free Will: New Insights from Physics, Philosophy, and Theology

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1. In Severinos vision, becoming (understood as the coming out of and the return to nothing of things) does not exist, i.e., it is not an element of reality. Becoming, far from being the most obvious, trivial, and undeniable evidence of the world, is indeed a theory, that is, just one interpretation of events among the many possible. Indeed, Severino thinks, and thinks he has shown, that the interpretation of becoming, manifested since the Greek origins of Western thought as the oscillation of things between being and nothing, is just a very stubborn illusion, a misinterpretation of events (words very similar to those with which Einstein described time in a letter to the sister of his beloved friend Michele Besso, who had just passed away). With his philosophical research, Severino thinks he has provided a foundation for the eternity of beings, the eternity of each single entity, of each single event. This vision is undeniably similar to the vision proposed in general relativity, in which all events, past, present, and future, have always coexisted and will do so forever more, remaining eternally as points on the space-time manifold. The problem for this vision comes from the very heart of the other great theoretical construction of 20th century physics, quantum physics (at least perhaps until the recent studies by t Hooft). Here in fact this vision clashes against Heisenbergs uncertainty principle, according to which the future is not strictly determined by the present, and the present is not strictly determined by the past, because there is a non-eliminable role played by chance in generating even elementary events. Physics, at least from the days of Maxwell and Boltzmann, has long been accustomed to using probabilistic laws to describe complex events where it is reasonable to expect chance to play an important role. The novelty in the standard formulation of quantum mechanics was that even the elementary event, the absolutely simple event (think for example of a photon emitted by an electron in an atom) happens by pure chance. On the contrary, in the deterministic interpretation that t Hooft proposes, quantum mechanics is instead brought back to the most complete, strict Einsteinian determinism. t Hoofts vision is thus somehow close to Severinos idea of the eternity of every single event, of the non-existence of becoming (which has always been thought of by Western philosophy as the random emergence of things from nothing).