Singular Intellect wrote:Either the all knowing being knows what you're going to do with 100% certainty, or it doesn't. If it does, you are completely unable to deviate from it's 100% accurate prediction. Ergo, your free will is an illusion and your choice is no different than the 'choice' an object has when it hits the floor under the influence of gravity.
You don't need to repeat the argument. I understood it the first time; I just don't agree with it.
See, the problem I have with this, the reason I think it makes no sense, is that it implies that a decision that can be predicted isn't a decision at all. We don't normally apply that rule. If I make a decision very consistently and predictably, that doesn't make me less free-willed than if I made the decision at random. Even if I always, without fail, say I will have strawberry ice cream... how does that mean that I am not choosing strawberry ice cream, rather than having it chosen for me? Would my friend be justified in saying I don't actually decide what kind of ice cream to have, because when I'm given a choice I always take strawberry? How does that make sense?
Why does the fact that someone knows what I am going to do rob me of the power to make the decision?
I think there's a difference between foreknowledge (even perfect foreknowledge) and coercion. Taken by itself, another being's omniscience doesn't force me to do anything. It does not grant coercive power, causing me to choose strawberry even if I really, really want chocolate. It merely grants the omniscient being the knowledge that I do, in fact, like strawberry and will act on that preference.
How is that not free will?
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Dark Hellion wrote:The thing is that an omniscient god (of the past, present, future variety) doesn't predict anything. It already knows.
What is the difference between a perfectly good prediction and a piece of knowledge? What does it mean to say that an omniscient god "doesn't predict anything" because "it already knows?"
You cannot make a choice because you are already going to choose cake. You have to choose cake, otherwise god isn't omniscient.
But I could equally well argue the opposite: I
do not have to choose cake, but if I do, God must know beforehand that I will do so, because otherwise God is not omniscient. In which case it is still very much my choice, and it is the state of God's knowledge that is being forced to conform to events, not the other way around.
Omniscience imposes a constraint: everything that happens must be known to the omniscient being. But "X knows Y will do Z" does not imply "Y did not choose to do Z." It may merely mean that X could somehow observe Y's nature and deduce Z, or that Y's decision to do Z somehow stamps awareness into X's brain retroactively.
This leads us to an oddity. If the omniscient being only knows the future and did not actively make it... We cannot make a choice that hasn't already be made for us in some way by something and cannot be certain whether the choice we make at any specific time was pre-decided arbitrarily or is based upon some objectively determinable qualities.
Why does the ability to predict my actions in advance amount to making the choice for me?
Of course I don't believe in an omniscient entity so all this is just an academic exercise of examining what the logical requirement of a specific definition of omniscience means for our ability to make choices and thus have free will.
Sure, but I still think you're doing it wrong. I would argue that omniscience doesn't have to be anything more than a scaled-up (idealized) version of the kind of predictive ability everyone has: Q or whatever having the ability to figure out my actions in advance.
The question of moral responsibility for one's actions, given that foreknowledge, is a completely separate question, of course. If I can predict that you will choose strawberry ice cream
and the consequences of your choice, and it is in my power to stop you, I am at best an accomplice in whatever choice you make.
Addendum to Kuroneko because his post came in while I was typing this: You say that the degree to which your will is free is the degree to which it is not externally influenced. This is precisely what I was trying to point out; which is that it is only externally influenced. Fate/Destiny/god/Wojack the Celestial Woodchuck is always exerting an influence (passively or actively depending on how you define the omniscience) which means you have to make the decision that is already known to be made.
But that makes no sense. Knowledge does not exert an influence.
I know that a dropped stone will fall. I know that this will invariably happen, without exception. Every time a stone is dropped, I know that it will fall.
This does not mean that a dropped stone falls by my will, or that my knowledge that the stone will fall has any effect on the stone. I could equally well believe that the dropped stone will not fall, and it will make no difference: it falls regardless of what I do or don't know about it.
Likewise, why would the fact that Q knows I will choose strawberry ice cream mean that I choose strawberry ice cream by Q's will, with my own feelings in the matter being irrelevant or illusory? Why should we assume that? Why not believe that my decision is independent of Q's knowledge, even though Q happens to be right?
10 billion years ago Wojack could say that at 10pm CST monday April 12, 2010 Kuroneko is going to eat a waffle and since he knows this with 100% certainty when we get to this time you cannot make a decision not to eat the waffles. You have already been influenced by Wojack's knowledge into eating these waffles.
This falls prey to the same objection: Wojack's knowledge does not, in and of itself, have any effect on you. Kuroneko is not being seized by some kind of force that pushes him around his kitchen to make him eat waffles whether he likes it or not.
