In effect you have three options

1) Whatever happened, happened. Free will is somewhat restrained as per the previous discussions above. As soon as you see something coming out of the time machine (assuming we know it can only come from the future), the fail safe button is unpressable and the machine indestructible. No matter what anyone tries to do nothing can disrupt the flow of events that eventually will lead to somebody sticking his hand into the (fully operational) machine. In this scenario, my changed story can never play out the way I wrote it, but it fully supports your original story.

2) Things can be changed. Free will is fully operational as we would expect, but instead we have to have a way to explain apparent paradoxes as in my story above.

3) Travel back in time is forbidden by the laws of physics. Both our stories are invalid and cannot happen.

Actually, whichever option you buy into (except the third one) there are consequences that make your nose bleed and turns on your ‘no way!’ reflexes.

In option 2 you must account for the fact that things happen without a causal reason. Hands appear from nowhere (it cannot come from the future, since the machine does not exist then), and accidentally destroys the machine.

In Option 1 you have to have a mechanism to prevent certain events from ever taking place, which for thinking beings seems to limit their free will. In this case, as soon as something appears from the machine, it renders the machine indestructible. Effectively, the same goes for the objects that appear from the machine if they exist in both time periods. Let’s say it was Mortimer that briefly stuck his head through the machine, and said “Hello, everything is ok in 10 minutes, bye!”. This would make Mortimer indestructible during these 10 minutes, and also force him with 100% certainty to actually stay put to shove his head through the machine 10 minutes later. No matter how you twist it, this is a real problem for free will.

These are the options at hand, if you want to chose a side then alternative 1-3 is what you have to select from, and you have to be prepared to answer to the difficulties they imply.

Might as well write a story about a man that spontaneously turned into a chicken, and then ask how it happened.

“Before long, a finger tip poked out, hesitantly at first but then suddenly and forcefully, knocking the time machine over in its struggle. Upon hitting the floor, the time machine’s fail safe button accidentally got pressed and the machine exploded into a million pieces with a loud BOOM! Bob and Mortimer stared in surprise and shock at the disintegrated machine. Finally, with shaking voice Bob broke the silence ‘Well, who’s hand was that?’”

Indeed, how did this transpire?

Eight months is a long time to wait…

Hmmm, I just read his wikipedia entry, and I still don’t know if that was that an insult or not.

Interesting side note: Hofstadter was married in Ann Arbor!

And I especially agree on your last point about having the advantage. In the Lost universe and beyond…

I like to think I’d be able to recognize my own hand if I saw it. But I get the idea. I also like to think Bob is correct, because I really dig irony.

My big, fat, uneducated, Amerrikun view of free-will is that it only becomes relevant when thinking – fantasizing – about this idea we call “the universe.” And, since “the universe” is, for me, a construction of language, it only leads back to language. I can infer, or generalize, or analogize, or symbolize, extrapolate, predict. but “everything” is truly beyond my ken.

I think of “free will” as the microcosm, and “destiny” as the macrocosm. We can’t know the macrocosm. We can only know it linearly, retroactively, in bits and pieces. I don’t mind that my microcosmic choices might be part a larger “plan,” or that I might be a “pawn,” in some godly gamesomness. There’s not much I can do about it anyhow. Call me Ishmael.

That’s what important.

Free will nourishes causality/destiny as much as causality/destiny nourishes free will.

There are no bad guys in the Lost world. Only people believing they are doing the right thing according to their school of thought.

In the end, the stakes don’t lie with who’s right, but who is more convincing (meaning who has the advantage).

That’s what I think. But I know nothing.

(Or Mortimer planned everything from the moment he decided to be right about his theory?)