If destroying/altering the past is impossible, then wouldn’t that imply that it would be impossible to change the future by trying to alter the conditions of the present.

Correct. In that sense of “change.” That just isn’t the sense of “change” most people use.

That’s the whole point of Block Universe / B Theory of time: it is inherently ontologically deterministic. The future has already happened. We are just living through it.

This doesn’t mean our reasoning and choices have no causal role to play in that future, though. To the contrary, that future only exists as it does because of our reasoning and choices. They are an inalienable part of the whole causal structure.

On these points see my article on the scientific Ontology of Time and my articles on Free Will, maybe starting with Free Will in the Real World.

I also cover all of this in corresponding sections on time and free will in Sense and Goodness without God.

For example, if a person somehow built a machine that gave him information about the future and discovered that something bad was going to happen using the machine, would that mean that it would be logically impossible for him to stop the event from happening?

The scenario is impossible as described. A machine that could predict the future would just be doing that: guessing, not reporting. It thus is not describing the actual future, just a possible one.

It is logically impossible to “get information” from the future because of time asymmetry. It’s the same reason we can’t remember the future: memory only builds along the arrow of time. It can never “act in reverse” to build backwards in time. That is why the future is always unknown to us but for intelligent guessing.

We already know this because we have things traveling backwards in time already: antimatter is normal matter moving backwards in time. But because it is moving backwards, it looks indistinguishable from moving forwards to us, and thus we can get no information from it (like its starting position or momentum when it came into existence; like everything else, we have to just wait until we “get” to that location in time to see it—apart from intelligent guessing, again, as always).

-:-

To think of it in “movie time travel” terms, time travel is impossible because it literally entails devolution: if you stepped into a time machine and went back to your birth, you wouldn’t step out the other side as an adult; you’d devolve into a fetus, forgetting your future with every backwards second. And yet the “you” inside that machine would experience time moving forward from no to full memories, even though “really” you were moving in the other direction. You could never tell the difference, and importantly, you could never bring information back with you—it stays in your future.

The logical contradiction here is that “movie time travel” actually is imagining two things, not one: the traveler moving backwards in time and moving forwards in time (as they experience the travel back in the machine) or remaining stationary in time (if the transport is instant). But that’s a logical impossibility and thus fully impossible. You can’t both be moving in one direction and not be moving in that direction. So, movie time travel is fun, but it’s an incoherent fiction, nothing we can ever do.

Real time travel would simply erase all information as you went, not bring any back with you. And the same goes for any “machine” in the future that tried to warn you about what’s to come. That’s why it couldn’t.

If destroying/altering the past is impossible, then wouldn’t that imply that it would be impossible to change the future by trying to alter the conditions of the present. For example, if a person somehow built a machine that gave him information about the future and discovered that something bad was going to happen using the machine, would that mean that it would be logically impossible for him to stop the event from happening?

This is logically impossible without some second time dimension in which the block can exist in two forms (whole, and half deleted). Since there is no evidence of any such second time dimension, your question is moot.

But even in terms of its own internal coherence, all facts today are dependent on events in the past (down to the last photon from every star and cosmic event). So we would never notice if it was all changed. Our memories would change with it.

Took me a second to stop trying to figure out what god’s name that was.

I suppose I generally find it to be a low priority enterprise to embark on considering possible ontologies for things that we don’t expect to have unexpected properties as a result. Even if I were to assume that logic is only the property of humans, and thanks to computers I don’t need that assumption, I don’t need to answer questions about why logic works literally the only way that it can work.

I know that American football also has defined rules made by people. I know that it makes no sense to talk about football being played without players and equipment. That’s all true by definition.

It’s the burden of anyone else to say that there’s anything more to logic than the fact that it’s a prerequisite for what all speech and all statements are even doing, and theists fail at it. Rereading your article, I read it as making that same point: Explaining that anything else is an epicycle and that of course things that can do reasoning or process propositions of any kind can do logic. For the exact same reason that a building necessarily requires building materials: It’s not just that there’s no physical way to build a building without materials, it’s that what we call a structure made with materials is a “building” and if it wasn’t that we wouldn’t call it that. And I am sure we agree that the laws of logic would still hold in a totally undifferentiated sludge universe, because you could make distinctions even though there’s nothing to do it on, just like the number 2 is still meaningful even in a universe with only one object to count.

I am not sure I follow, but isolating solely the quoted argument of Leon, since P(obeys-logic|no-god) is 100%, “obeys-logic” can never produce a likelihood ratio favoring “is-god.” So, what he is claiming is itself literally logically impossible. Even if God exists, the applicability logic to reality can never evince that fact (it can never increase the probability that God exists). Even God himself could not make a reality that didn’t obey logic. So there certainly isn’t going to be one by mere chance accident either.

I suspect Leon just doesn’t understand how to run likelihood ratios in Bayesian arguments; or else he is insisting it is physically possible to have logically contradictory states of affairs, which then puts the burden on him to demonstrate that, as we’ve already demonstrated the opposite.

Most ontology is like this:

It is asking what physically explains observed conclusions, like “this is gibberish.”

In other words, it is not enough to say something is gibberish; you need to know why it is gibberish. For example, maybe it is gibbersh because of a limitation or defect in our cognition, and not because what we merely perceive as gibberish (“that which we are incapable of understanding”) does not correspond with any actual thing in the world.

Ontology resolves this question, getting us to the conclusion that, no, it’s not gibberish because we can’t understand it; it’s gibberish because it can’t, even in principle, correspond to any actual (or indeed even potential) thing.

And that has causal consequences that have significant explanatory value, e.g. the Trinity cannot exist; Schrödinger’s objects manifest a distinct third state of being, not a contradictory one; and since an actually or even just potentially existent state of absolutely nothing cannot exhibit contradictory behaviors, it can be deduced what its most probable behavior is, and that deduction matches observation—quite peculiarly, thus making it a viable explanation of existence itself (contrary to the exactly opposite theistic insistence that it cannot). And so on.

All applications of the LNC are therefore reliable descriptions of reality and not just a limitation on what we can compute.

Forming statements that violate the laws of logic is the same thing as saying gibberish. “How many married bachelors are there?” is exactly akin to saying “How many x!gbas are there?” It’s not that the answer is even zero, it’s that you can’t parse the question.

So why is the universe that we see orderly? Because it has patterns of order thanks to a low-entropy state and rules that follow from it. Are there parts of the universe where weird things that seem illogical happen? Maybe. Who knows? I haven’t seen it and neither has anyone else. The theist is making an unjustified extrapolation.

But as you point out, it’s not even coherent to talk about things being illogical. That’s literally the point. The theist is asking why statements that are gibberish are gibberish.

To me, it’s exactly like the problem with Platonism. “Socrates”/Plato did really identify an interesting point when they identified that humans can talk about all sorts of things, like abstract concepts, geometric shapes that can’t exist in a singular form (e.g. triangles which can’t be simultaneously right and isosceles and all others), and objects of an array of types. The problem is that Forms is a bad explanation. Do new Forms appear when we come up with new abstractions and new ways of dividing up the world? What about when we think of something that can’t logically exist? What about when we express an idea poorly? No, modern linguistic theory is the answer. It’s useful to be able to construct models, to generalize, to have proxies for ideas.

Yeah, these questions are certainly fascinated; and I was wrong if I implied naturalists and materialists shouldn’t be interested in them for their own sake.

One thing I was thinking, however, was whether you ever encountered or thought about probabilistic arguments from logic.

One thing which comes to mind, is from the debate book between Rasmussen and Felipe Leon. It’s been a long while since I closely read and followed the dialogue there; so I don’t mean to misrepresent anyone’s position intentionally: but I think, from what I recall, that it gives a good example of what I mean. Iirc Rasmussen argued that rules of reason(“like the law of non-contradiction”) are “the most powerful, yet least considered clue ~relevant to our inquiry~”. Leon summerized his argument as follows:

“The core argument is another Bayesian argument, according to which the existence and nature of the rules of reason are better explained on the hypothesis that there is a foundational mind than on the hypothesis of its negation”

Which means he’s not a strict presup; but it’s still weird hearing this argumentation coming from a “respected” philosopher of religion.