Free will and temporal becoming: SMM/DTT and Neutral monism and Russellian monism

01The question behind the comparison

A world that becomes is not automatically a world containing free agents. New outcomes may be random, mechanically determined, responsive to reasons, or imposed from elsewhere. SMM/DTT’s emphasis on completion can illuminate when an action becomes a settled event, but freedom concerns how that event relates to the agent’s capacities, deliberation and control. The philosophical task is to explain agency within a source-generated world without erasing the difference between the person’s action and a merely external occurrence.

Determinism and fatalism are also different. A deterministic process can include deliberation as a cause of what happens. Fatalism would make the outcome unavoidable regardless of relevant deliberation or action. Introducing indeterminism does not by itself improve control: an unpredictable coin flip is not an exercise of will. A source-based theory can therefore explore a reasons-responsive form of agency even if its update law is deterministic. A stronger libertarian proposal would need to explain how alternatives remain genuinely open and how their resolution belongs to the agent.

The six nested inner levels should not be treated as six hidden decisions made by a small inner person. That would reproduce the problem inside the model. Their useful role would be to organize capacities such as memory, evaluation and action selection in a physically or conceptually explicit way. These are illustrative functions, not established identities of the six DTT levels. Outer completion could mark when an action yields a stable public consequence. The model would still need to explain how the agent’s own organization participates in that completion.

02The single-source and nested-time proposal

SMM begins with one nonspatial generative source. DTT distinguishes its inner production from the outer order in which completed results become accessible. The six inner levels are nested functional dependencies within that production; the seventh denotes outer completion. They are not six independent clocks, six spatial directions, or six simultaneously occupied temporal axes. This distinction makes the framework more specific than a general claim that everything changes: it asks how a world of persistent relations can be generated before its spatial representation is taken for granted. ^[2]

03The comparator’s explanatory structure

Neutral monism seeks a basis that is not intrinsically classified as either mental or physical, allowing those categories to arise through organization or description. Russell’s Analysis of Mind supplies a primary historical account. Contemporary Russellian monism concerns what the intrinsic nature of the properties described by physics might be; it is a family of views and should not be treated as identical with historical neutral monism.

The useful comparison is about explanatory gaps. A table of physical relations can predict behavior while leaving open how those relations are instantiated or why experience occurs. Calling their basis neutral can mark that openness without resolving it. SMM/DTT gives the common basis a more specific generative role: it proposes a source that produces differentiated records. The additional architecture becomes explanatory only if it constrains the relation between the physical description and the psychical perspective. One common label for both is insufficient. Distinctive bridge principles, rather than the mere presence of monism, determine the theory’s content. ^[1]

04The precise agreement and difference

Neutral monism changes the proposed basis of mind and matter, but does not automatically resolve freedom. A neutral event system can be deterministic or indeterministic, and neither property alone tells us whether a person controls an action. SMM/DTT adds a generative story, yet faces the same distinction between the occurrence of novelty and the exercise of agency.

The useful bridge is organizational. A person’s reasons and bodily actions can be related descriptions of one process rather than rival causes competing across a substance divide. DTT can model how retained history and evaluation constrain completion, while a neutral-monist interpretation explains why the process admits both mental and physical description. The remaining task is to identify which counterfactual dependencies constitute control. If all choices are simply labelled outputs of the source, nothing explains why one output is an action and another a reflex or accident. The six nested levels become relevant only when their functional roles support that distinction. This comparison therefore strengthens the local account of agency instead of treating monism itself as an answer. ^[1]

05Worked example: what follows and what does not

An agent chooses between helping a neighbor and continuing a private task. Suppose better information about the neighbor’s need would change the choice, while coercion would undermine it. A reasons-responsive account regards these counterfactual differences as evidence of agency. Now replace the decision by a random switch with the same observed outcome. The event remains unpredictable, but the relation to the agent’s reasons has vanished. This example shows why temporal openness and agency are separate. A DTT model of becoming can provide the setting for action, yet a theory of freedom must identify the relevant control relations within that setting.

06What this comparison contributes

The constructive opportunity is to distinguish source dependence from the absence of local agency. An organism may be wholly dependent on its underlying physical and metaphysical conditions while still acting through its own organized capacities. Whether that suffices for freedom is a philosophical disagreement worth stating explicitly. DTT becomes clearer when it specifies which account it supports, rather than presenting a new temporal vocabulary as a resolution of every debate about responsibility.

THE SAME QUESTION, DIFFERENT STARTING POINTS

The comparison at a glance

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