Dale said:
Why should you be frightened by it? An interpretation is simply a mental tool, a mnemonic device, for helping you organize your thoughts when thinking about a problem in the theory. My 5 year old sings a little song to remember telephone numbers, an interpretation is nothing more than that song.
Learn the interpretation, not as some frightening concept, but as an organizational tool. Use it where it helps and don't use it where it doesn't.
So... let's first put aside the issue of whether the Block Universe (BU) is a necessary conclusion of a standard interpretation of SR. I believe it is, what
@PeterDonis claims resembles quite a lot with the argument against BU brought by Stein, 1968. It has been refuted by Petkov
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/2408/1/Petkov-BlockUniverse.pdf among others. Successfully, I think. Whether Petkov's response is convincing will be left for another thread and discussion. Again, I desperately want to join
@PeterDonis and Stein, rather than Petkov, but I want to do it in honest conviction, and I must admit that, judging from pure logic and strong arguments, Petkov is more convincing.
Anyway... Let's assume that BU follows from SR (If SR then BU). That implies embracing SR in its standard reading; light always travels with speed c (in any inertial frame) and all inertial frames are equivalent, Einstein's synchronization method is the only genuine one and there is no such thing as a superfluous absolute frame. I believe standard SR is not only elegant and beautiful, I believe it lacks any contradiction and is fully consistent with all modern experiments and can resolve any "paradox" (yeah, twin stuff, Bell spaceship, rod in a barn, etc.) Yep, I take that. So by adopting this view, I contend, one MUST accept the universe as a 4D BU, where past, present and future all co-exist. No, it is not
à la carte, as you suggest,
@Dale . Your future is either there or it isn't...
I personally do not believe in God. This belief of mine shapes my fears about my death and the absence of afterlife, my attitude towards life, pleasures and values, my beliefs about a possible (or impossible) punishment for my doings, my understanding of the world and its "beauty".
When it comes to the 4D BU, to me it is an even more important issue.
Why does it frighten me so much?
There are many reasons, I'll just specify two of them.
1. In a BU all your future moments are set. Yours and everyone's. Maybe your best friend will die in a car crash a year from now after getting into a fight with you. I am not saying it will happen, I am saying that if it must happen it will. It is there, just there, a year from now. In a universe with an open future you may think "well, maybe I won't say those hurtful words to him an hour before the crash" or "maybe he won't get distracted thinking about our fight when driving" or "maybe he will need to check his car the day before and will thus take the bus on that day". But no, in a BU those are not options. In fact, whether any of my words will convince you is also predetermined. Every time you hesitate between making a 1 dollar donation at Walmart to round up your payment this is not a genuine hesitation. Your refusal (or not) to donate is a fact and your hesitation is of spurious origin and only seems to be linked to your decision in any way. And while all of these may happen anyway in an "open future" universe, they don't have to. They may or may not. In BU these facts are there and it is only your inability to get signals from the future that prevents you from seeing them.
2. One must commit to either perdurantism (worm theory) or exdurantism (stage theory) when adopting BU. A spacetime worm is a person with all his life moments glued together. If that is what we really are, why does our experience only reflect one moment (arbitrarily small, maybe infinitely small, I don't know)? Ok, let's throw away perdurantism. Then all we are is a set of stages. Many many many stages. Then how does individuality survive? There are gazillions of Danes, with nothing to glue them.
There are additional issues linked to causality or quantum objects and their temporal parts (see Pashby for the latter one).
But I hope you can understand what I profoundly dislike about the BU. And although I want to embrace SR from my entire heart, my fear of BU obliges me to look for alternatives.