Philosophical Issues of Black Holes
Black holes are extremely relativistic objects. Physical p rocesses around them occur in a regime where the gravitational field is extremely i ntense. Under such conditions, our representations of space, time, gravity, and t hermodynamics are pushed to their limits. In such a situation philosophical issues na turally arise. In this chapter I review some philosophical questions related to black holes. In particular, the relevance of black holes for the metaphysical dispute between presentists and eternalists, the origin of the second law of thermodynamics and its relation to black holes, the problem of information, black holes and hypercomputing, the nature of determinisim, and the breakdown of predictability in black hole space-times. I maintain that black hole physics can be used to illuminate some important problems in the border between science and philosophy, either epistemology and ontology.