Time, Free Will, and Death

(A) If you think about four dimensional space-time a lot, it will change your perspective on things.  It certainly affected the man who arguably spent the most time thinking about it, Herr Albert Einstein. 

(B) Lately, AP and I have been talking a lot about free will and determinism.  

(C) I once read that if you think about life as a process with birth and death marking the beginning and end points rather than thinking about life as a state function (where life is a '1' and death is a '0' I suppose) then it is much easier to deal with the death of a loved one or to contemplate one's own death.

(A+B+C) Imagine, if you will, the dimension of time as a visible dimension like heading West on a map.  Imagine yourself having a high altitude above such a map such that you can look both East (back in time) and West (forward in time).  Your life would be some kind of line segment embedded in this terrain.  The thing is, the line was always there and will always be there.  In this vision of time there may be no free will but it is hard to argue that your life didn't matter either.  Einstein apparently had this kind of vision of time and weighed in on free will as being illusory.  

    Sometimes I have dreams about flying.  Sometimes I have dreams about an out-of-body experience.  But my favorite dreams of all are when I am flying out and over time itself: I am moving over a huge rolling map that began somewhere far to the East with the Big Bang and ends impossible far to the West with the Heat Death of the Universe.  There's so much real-estate beneath me, but I never manage to fly too far from my own world line before I wake up from that place beyond space and time.