all these posts, and not one

simply because i know your going to choose option A does not change the fact that you chose it. i am not forcing you to pick A, you still did that on your own. knowledge of something != control of it, necessarily.

You are because there is no other option for me to pick.

If he chooses another option, your knowledge of him choosing option A is invalided. Thus the paradox.

Yeah, but it's only meant as an analogy, not a model. I think to a certain extant it works, even if it is rough.



That's true, but my point is that that's the case for every thing else in the universe as well, so to try to see free will in that it silly.

case in point. you go to a fortune teller. she tells you that within a week you will voluntarily throw yourself in front of a moving train. of course you say "that is ridiculous" and leave. two days later you are walking your small daughter to school, the rout happens to cross several train crossings. upon coming to the second crossing the arms go down and a train approaches so naturally you stop and wait. suddenly your daughter darts out onto the train tracks with the train only a few meters away. you jump onto the tracks and push her out of the way just before the train hits you.

now. as harsh as it sounds no one forced you to jump on the tracks. the "fortune teller" saw it happen. but when the moment came you could have said..."naw don't think so." you still had free will.

I believe we ourselves predetermine our future according to our perception and conditions, however a third party could intentionally or accidently change the conditions, thus shifting our future.

In which case the fortune-teller would have been wrong, invalidating her omniscience, and the universe once again only has one or the other. You're arguing for a universe that has both, remember?

let's assume, for one second, that Albert Einstein was right: God doesn't play with dice. That would mean that every action we make are made by your neurons firing in such a pattern that a specific action evolves from your brain. These actions influence an other being's sensory neurons... etc. No free will possible, ever.

But, if we assume quantumphysics is the way to go, it would assume that your actions are based upon chances in nature. Does that mean we have free will, or are our choices made based on randomness in nature.

Mind-boggeling...

It really doesn't work, though. The impression I'm getting is that you believe the Universe can be modeled past and future, into a four dimensional object of infinite kata. Just to be clear, you can't do this because it is impossible to predict the outcome of events once you move beyond the basic Newtonian mechanics you learn in grade 10. The future doesn't exist yet.

That's pretty much the gist of what I posted originally in this thread. Unless you apply some sort of abstract and inherently unprovable metaphysical weight to the decisions we make, free will simply means we have the ability to use a combination of our life experiences and our parents' genetic material to make proactive choices. Of course, I believe that many animals are sentient too.

Omniscience and prescience are somewhat distinct concepts. I wouldn't expect even the most legitimate prescient fortune teller to be able to, for example, construct a faster than light engine. An omnipotent god, on the other hand, should be able to.

So this is the 'god is omnipotent so he can be logically inconsistent' argument?

So I suppose that if I said omnipotence is inherently contradictory that it wouldn't make any difference?

You've lost me.

I'm pretty sure that a "God", who created not only the people but the universe in which they live, has a developer's console allowing them to work outside the laws of physics that they created. How is that illogical? If they create something, they can undo it. How does that make omnipotence contradictory?

Then God should update the world with a patch.

Many parties are unbalanced, it takes too much grinding to get anywhere and relationships are still buggy and filled with exploits. China needs a nerf and the Bible still requires better documentation.

According to some, there is a patch due to be released any time now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennialism

oh man, thread idea.

Eh... that's all pretty theoretical. Just because it's indeterminate doesn't mean it won't end up happening a certain way. You could take two arbitrary points in the past and say that the first doesn't deterministically predict the second, but even though that's true, the second still happened. It just means that the second point was not deterministically related to the first. Sure, there are a bunch of hypothesis about multiverses, and how every possible outcome creates its own infinitely diverging series of universes. However, until someone finds a way of testing those ideas, they are nothing more than interesting exorcises of theory.

I mean it's possible that all of our guesses and observations are completely wrong, and we've only glimpsed a microcosm of the larger truth which is several levels more incomprehensible than anyone has ever come up with, so I wouldn't get all bent out of shape worrying about how it works, because clearly it's working itself out well enough as it is. At the end of the day the practical application of these new theories are more useful and more interesting that unsatisfied conjecture.



Yeah, but in the end, that doesn't really distinguish us from any other natural process in a meaningful way. Which is guess I what you are saying. I'm trying to speak to the heart of what a person means when they say "freewill". I think the concept is poorly defined, and the concept tends to break down when we discuss it in too much detail. We all end up talking about something else, and many people don't understand what they themselves think it is.

Bringing multiple universes up is failing to address the actual conversation. It's implying that if I make choice A here, parallel me is making choice B in another universe. That is completely absurd.

It's not implying that, and that's not what I said. I am merely referring to a pretty common idea. It's pretty popular so you should at least be familiar with it.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-manyworlds/

On top of that I don't think you read my argument very clearly either. I was (somewhat) discounting the relevance of those theories.

I'm sorry Obi_Kwiet, but I'm honestly having a really hard time understanding what you are saying or how it relates to what I said. I know what all of these words mean but in this specific permutation I'm finding myself at a loss.

The MWI is unfalsifiable, but it makes great Sci Fi fodder. It's antithetical to your swept volume theory. I was under the impression that it was mainly offered as a thought exercise and has long since been discredited as a theory. I don't accept it because MWI either violates the conservation of energy or it implies a countably infinite number of possible points of decoherence. I'm probably reading it wrong, but it seems like you're implying you have to believe in either this or fatalism, which isn't true and I certainly don't.

I find philosophical determinism can be quickly discredited when you observe vacuum fluctuations, which have no causation. I've never heard a reasonable argument explaining how, if you rewound time and let it proceed again without any interference, an event that has no cause would necessarily recur.

ok here's one. bear with me its a little

throughout your life you are going to make certain choices, i dont know what they are but they are the choices you going to make. lets say that A = whatever choice you do make, and B = whatever choice you do NOT make.

tomorrow morning your are going to make choice A, not because i just said so, but because at some point your going to have to decide something and A is representative of that choice. now we dont know what A is yet but you are going to choose it. however your going to choose it of your own free will because its your choice.

you could in effect say that the future has already been determined by the choices you are going to make, of your own free will. by exercising free will the future has been predetermined.

eesh... that is getting a bit matrixish... sorry. and this only applies to individuals not really to the world at large.

That's exactly what I said. I probably should have made a new paragraph there to prevent confusion.

This is the important bit:







You, see I agree with you here. If we did rewind it all, it wouldn't happen the same way, but it would happen some way, and that's the point I guess. I'm not actually arguing for determinism.

When we speak of the future, we can't say for certain what will happen. We can say for certain that something will happen and refer to that something as the future. So in one sense, you could say that the future is undetermined, but in another sense you could say that it is, and not contradict yourself.

Or to put it more succinctly, "that which will happen, will happen, but it could be anything." The word "future" could refer to what will occur as it can occur or as it will occur, and have subtly different meanings either way.

I hope you understand what I'm getting at here, I'm sorry I can't be more clear. I wish I understood this stuff better. I will defiantly pay close attention in Quantum Mechanics.

My swept volume visualization isn't a theory of how everything works, so much as it is a visualization, like the Bohr model. It's fundamentally wrong, but it's functionally useful in certain contexts.

No, that doesn't help me. "Deterministically predict" is redundantly redundant.

Are you trying to say that an event will happen even if you remove its cause? Or that event 'B' is unrelated to event 'A,' so even if event 'A' doesn't happen 'B' will anyway?

What would happen some way?

We can't predict the future at all. Humans aren't really wired for probability (e.g. the Monty Hall problem) so we have a difficult time understanding that an event with high P may still not happen.

You also can't simultaneously claim the future does and does not already exist without contradicting yourself for the very basic reason that those two claims are (by definition) contradictory.

Actually it's more like the Aristotelian elemental model.

I consider the anthropic principle to be sophistry.

Wow, what a coincidence. Just the other day, I thought to myself, "The anthropic principle is an good example of argumentum verbosium, and Barrow and Tipler are hacks." Also, I was eating brownies and listening to Pink Floyd at the time.

what about the anthropic principal?

FAP FAP FAP

What a silly discussion.