Question About Free Will and God's Omniscence

[Freefall]

I'd just like to preface this by saying I'm somewhat playing devil's advocate. I do not actually believe in omnicient/omnipotent beings, and I'm doubtful we live in a purely deterministic universe (from what I can tell, quantum mechanics kind of killed that idea a while ago). I'm just running with the premise that one exists, who I will probably refer to as "God" from time to time for simplicity's sake.

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.

I think it's more like, "a decision that is known to 100% accuracy with absolutely zero possibility of occurring any other way isn't a decision at all."

It may sound like semantics, but "prediction" itself can be kind of a loaded term. Most of the time when people use it, there is an understanding that there is at least some chance for error, which is a lot different from no chance for error. With no chance of error, we are basically talking about a universe running off Newtonian style, absolute laws. You "choosing" cake over an elevator is a result of the initial conditions of the universe leading to a particular set of particles forming a particular set of chemicals in your brain, that would be in a particular configuration at that particular time, such that your body would take the action of choosing the cake.

For example: when I first saw Attack of the Clones, I predicted that Anakin would kill the Tusken Raiders. I think most people probably did. However, now that I have seen the movie, I know that Anakin kills the Tusken Raiders. If I were to watch the movie again, I think it would be a little strange to say, "I predict that Anakin is going to kill the Tuskens," because barring tampering with the DVD, there is no possibility of being wrong.

I'm not entirely sure if this is the case, but it seems to me you and Kuroneko are taking the omniscience to apply only to possible actions you might take, with your thoughts and feelings still your own. This would be the error. With a deterministic universe, every thought and feeling you could ever have would likewise already be known with 100% accuracy, and no possibility of being anything other than what they were predetermined to be at any given time.

We don't normally apply that rule.

Because we never actually know the future with 100% accuracy. Even if we know somebody inside and out, even if we know them better than they know themselves, we still don't actually know with 100% certainty what they will do at any given time. Even if we are right 99.9999% of the time, over decades of life, that will lead to enough wrong guesses to figure you have at least some independent will. With omniscience this isn't the case. Over the course of your whole life, they are never wrong about anything you do, at all. Nor are they ever wrong in knowing exactly how you think and feel at all times.

It's not like having a buddy who just happens to know you really, really well, it's like someone from the future who has already seen your whole life play out.

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.

The problem here is you are working with the premise that you can make decisions, which obviously means you have some degree of free will. The thing is, if you don't have free will, then you can't really make any independent decisions at all. However, the trick is that this doesn't mean you can't think that you're making your own decisions (although, as I mentioned, even the thought that you're making your own decisions is likewise predetermined).

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?

Actually, I would say that if you always do the exact same thing under the same set of circumstances, this would be a decent argument that you do not have free will, at least not in regards to the subject in question.

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?

I think he would be justified in wondering how much control you actually have over your choices in ice cream, yes.

Why does the fact that someone knows what I am going to do rob me of the power to make the decision?

That's the thing, it doesn't rob you of anything. It feels like you keep assuming that at some point you had a choice about something, or made a decision about something, but you didn't, never did.

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.

I would agree that the entity in question, or it's omniscience, would not necessarily force you to do things, but the existence of omniscience would require a deterministic universe, meaning that the nature of the universe itself is forcing you to conform to it's design. You can have a deterministic universe without an omniscient watcher, obviously.

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.

If God already knew the exact resolution of the situation billions of years in advance, I don't really see how his knowledge is then conforming to your decision.

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.

Remember though, Y's nature is also predetermined and cannot possibly be anything other than it is, and the omniscient being already knew in advance what this nature would be, as well as the exact environment it would be part of and all the other nature's of all the other beings and object Y would ever interact with.

The part about making X retroactively aware of things sounds like breaking causality, which I'm actually not prepared to think about too much at the moment.

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.

That doesn't always work. For example, there is a fairly important distinction to be made between "infinitesimal" and "zero," (well, sometimes; dividing, most notably). An object moving close to the speed of light is a very different case than an object moving at the speed of light.

Now (and this is pretty a pretty rough and simplified idea, so I might get beat down for it) I would say that, generally, the more predictable a system is, the fewer degrees of freedom it has. A 100% absolutely predictable system would have zero freedom within it. You set the initial conditions and the outcome is known before you even allow it to run it's course. From the moment the universe was created, all the events of your life (and thoughts and feelings, don't forget) would be known with 100% accuracy. I would say that, to an outside observer watching your life match up perfectly with all of their predictions would lead them to believe that no, you do not really have the power to make actual decisions. I mean, if you can never do anything to actually demonstrate that you can do anything other than what you are predicted to do, then why would anyone conclude that you have free-will?

One last thing, I wanted to touch on the morality issue. While I can understand the idea of a world with no moral accountability being distasteful to people, I would point out that this has no bearing on whether or not it is true, or makes sense. There are many aspects of reality that humanity doesn't particularly like (death and taxes come to mind), but this doesn't mean they are going to stop existing just because we don't like them. Likewise, there are certain things a lot of people do believe exist (God comes to mind), but that doesn't mean they do. If there is no free will, then I would agree that there can be no true moral accountability, but this doesn't mean such a universe couldn't logically exist, we just wouldn't like it (of course, our not liking it would also just be a predetermined result of the initial conditions of the universe and not something that we would have any real power to change).

Sorry if this is a bit long and disjointed, I kind of just jumped in.

[Dark Hellion]

I think you are missing the bigger picture. An absolutely omniscient being does not only know what choice you are going to make. It knows why. It knows everything about every thought you will ever have, know every feeling you will feel, dream you will dream or sensory experience you will experience. It will know everything about everything, everywhere and at every time.

At best it does this through prediction. Which means that all your thoughts and dreams are simply the logical conclusions of some natural laws. In which case we are simply biochemical automatons with no choice but to follow the programming that we came with. Even any education we gain or change we think we make to our thinking process was already preprogrammed or predetermined by some other event that can be tracked back to some natural law. No matter how complex our behavior seems and how independent we may believe we are we have no more choice in what we do than a comet in a complex orbit does.

At worse it actively creates these though its will. Then we are simply puppets in some cruel play, forced to feel and dream according to the designs of a being who is clearly the universe's biggest asshole.

As we can see, this idea of an absolutely omniscient being suffers from some problems. It cannot be reconciled with certain aspects of quantum mechanics, general relativity and epistemology. Christians tend to ignore these facts and yet praise god for this kind of omniscience. I just like to point out the terrible conclusion that such assumption leads to.

Its all just metaphysical bullshit of course.

[Hillary]

I think you are missing the bigger picture. An absolutely omniscient being does not only know what choice you are going to make. It knows why. It knows everything about every thought you will ever have, know every feeling you will feel, dream you will dream or sensory experience you will experience. It will know everything about everything, everywhere and at every time.

At best it does this through prediction. Which means that all your thoughts and dreams are simply the logical conclusions of some natural laws. In which case we are simply biochemical automatons with no choice but to follow the programming that we came with. Even any education we gain or change we think we make to our thinking process was already preprogrammed or predetermined by some other event that can be tracked back to some natural law. No matter how complex our behavior seems and how independent we may believe we are we have no more choice in what we do than a comet in a complex orbit does.

At worse it actively creates these though its will. Then we are simply puppets in some cruel play, forced to feel and dream according to the designs of a being who is clearly the universe's biggest asshole.

As we can see, this idea of an absolutely omniscient being suffers from some problems. It cannot be reconciled with certain aspects of quantum mechanics, general relativity and epistemology. Christians tend to ignore these facts and yet praise god for this kind of omniscience. I just like to point out the terrible conclusion that such assumption leads to.

Its all just metaphysical bullshit of course.

I've always had a problem trying to explain why omniscence excludes free will and is generally a bad thing. This really nails it as far as I'm concerned. Thanks DH.

[Kuroneko]

I do not actually believe in omnicient/omnipotent beings, and I'm doubtful we live in a purely deterministic universe (from what I can tell, quantum mechanics kind of killed that idea a while ago).

That's rather interpretation-dependent. The formalism of QM is completely deterministic.

You "choosing" cake over an elevator is a result of the initial conditions of the universe leading to a particular set of particles forming a particular set of chemicals in your brain, that would be in a particular configuration at that particular time, such that your body would take the action of choosing the cake.

Right, but the point is as long as your act of eating cake is the result of conscious deliberation, you still partake in moral responsibility for your dessert (hmm, this would work better with another example). That your deliberation is itself a deterministic product of the chemicals in your brain isn't directly relevant to this criterion.

I'm not entirely sure if this is the case, but it seems to me you and Kuroneko are taking the omniscience to apply only to possible actions you might take, with your thoughts and feelings still your own.

That is completely not what I (and Simon Jester, I believe) have been arguing. Let me be very explicit in this: the hypothetical fact that my thoughts and feelings are produced completely deterministically by physical processes does not in any way imply that they are not my own, or that my decisions are in any way less "genuine". Many people in this thread treat the contrary position as if it were completely obvious, and hence don't feel any need to provide any substantive reason for it, and by "substantive" I mean something better than stating them in close proximity to each other. But that's exactly what's being disputed. Even in a completely deterministic world, there is still a well-defined sense that I "could have" acted differently, so a better reason is definitely necessary.

Since we can talk about the outcomes in a possible world with an identical state except for the mind of an agent (and hence brain, or whatnot), counter-factual outcomes of different choices are conceptually clear. Hence, the degree to which an agent's mental deliberations affect the outcome is actually more well-defined than an in an indeterministic world. Determinism strengthens moral accountability rather than dissolving it.

This would be the error. With a deterministic universe, every thought and feeling you could ever have would likewise already be known with 100% accuracy, and no possibility of being anything other than what they were predetermined to be at any given time.

No, the real error is going from "predetermined" to "not my own." If I fire up MATLAB and enter "2+2", I know full well the output I will receive, and in a very real sense I've predetermined it. That in no way means that the computer did not genuinely carry out the computation or is not responsible for the output (though of course not morally in this case).

Actually, I would say that if you always do the exact same thing under the same set of circumstances, this would be a decent argument that you do not have free will, at least not in regards to the subject in question. ... I mean, if you can never do anything to actually demonstrate that you can do anything other than what you are predicted to do, then why would anyone conclude that you have free-will?

Why not? As a practical matter, one is never in the same situation. Even a completely dumb system like a ferromagnet behaves differently each time it is immersed in the same external field, because of hysteresis. Similarly, a person is changed by prior experience. Someone that ate too many cakes might decide that he is sick of them. So unless "same set of circumstances" includes both the environment and the person, it's not an issue. And if it does indeed mean everything, then to conclude that there is no free will involved is to beg the question.

If you have a will and your actions are the products of that will, then you have free will. It's irrelevant whether the mind/brain is itself deterministic; what matters is the degree of coercion imposed on your will by the environment or other agents.

One last thing, I wanted to touch on the morality issue. While I can understand the idea of a world with no moral accountability being distasteful to people, I would point out that this has no bearing on whether or not it is true, or makes sense.

You've it backwards--morality should be tailored to the universe, rather than the universe to morality. Thus, if we discover some aspect of the universe that's incompatible with our theory of moral accountability, it means that we need a better theory.

[Surlethe]

provide any substantive reason for it, and by "substantive" I mean something better than stating them in close proximity to each other

Would that be a "proximate" reason?

Anyway -

Since we can talk about the outcomes in a possible world with an identical state except for the mind of an agent (and hence brain, or whatnot)

Why can we do this? Does not determinism imply that it is impossible for a world to be identical to this except for the mind of an agent? For if it were indeed an identical world, then all processes which led up to the mind of the agent must be identical; hence the mind of the agent must also be identical.

[Kuroneko]

Heh.

Why can we do this? Does not determinism imply that it is impossible for a world to be identical to this except for the mind of an agent? For if it were indeed an identical world, then all processes which led up to the mind of the agent must be identical; hence the mind of the agent must also be identical.

An identical state. Determinism means that the state at one time uniquely fixes the state at all times. Hence changing the state affects both past and future, so the possible world is only guaranteed to be "close to" the actual one at that particular time; both future and past histories may radically diverge. Is this a problem?

[Simon_Jester]

I've always had a problem trying to explain why omniscence excludes free will and is generally a bad thing. This really nails it as far as I'm concerned. Thanks DH.

Since this seems so clear to you, and so opaque to me, perhaps you could explain to me why the argument makes so much sense? Because I still don't get it.

I think you are missing the bigger picture. An absolutely omniscient being does not only know what choice you are going to make. It knows why. It knows everything about every thought you will ever have, know every feeling you will feel, dream you will dream or sensory experience you will experience. It will know everything about everything, everywhere and at every time.

Your argument is effectively the same as Freefall's, boiling down to, "But an omniscient being has full knowledge about you and the circumstances around you! It can see why you do what you do before you do it! Therefore, you have no free will!"

My objection is that this begs the question. How, exactly, does someone knowing what I will do before hand make the decision to do it not "mine?"

For more detail, see my response to Freefall.

I think it's more like, "a decision that is known to 100% accuracy with absolutely zero possibility of occurring any other way isn't a decision at all."

But why not?

I mean, you say "well, when I talk about a prediction I don't mean one made with 100% confidence." But what is so special about a prediction made with 100% confidence, one that literally cannot be wrong? What makes it so transcendantly different from one made with 99.9999% confidence: one that can be wrong, but realistically won't be? How does the absolute predictability of my actions make them not "mine" in the sense that "I" no longer have control over them?

I'm not entirely sure if this is the case, but it seems to me you and Kuroneko are taking the omniscience to apply only to possible actions you might take, with your thoughts and feelings still your own. This would be the error. With a deterministic universe, every thought and feeling you could ever have would likewise already be known with 100% accuracy, and no possibility of being anything other than what they were predetermined to be at any given time.

You are mistaken; I know this perfectly well. But knowing how I will feel about an event does not mean that I am no longer having those feelings, or that I am not deciding to act on them.

[Omniscience is] not like having a buddy who just happens to know you really, really well, it's like someone from the future who has already seen your whole life play out.

Why would having such a buddy mean that my actions were not controlled by my own decisions? I would be doing the same things whether the buddy was present or not. The buddy's knowledge does not directly affect my actions, any more than my knowledge that a rock will fall affects the rock.

How can information stored in someone else's brain, regardless of the content or reliability of that information, deprive me of free will?

The problem here is you are working with the premise that you can make decisions, which obviously means you have some degree of free will. The thing is, if you don't have free will, then you can't really make any independent decisions at all. However, the trick is that this doesn't mean you can't think that you're making your own decisions (although, as I mentioned, even the thought that you're making your own decisions is likewise predetermined).

So you argue that, in this case, I don't "really" have free will, only the illusion of it.

And, again, I ask "why?" How could you know that this is an illusion, and not the reality?

This is my problem with the idea that omniscience implies no free will: no one has ever given me an adequate explanation for how the fact that someone knows in advance what I will do deprives me of the power to decide to do it.

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?

I think he would be justified in wondering how much control you actually have over your choices in ice cream, yes.

He would be justified in wondering, but he would not be justified in assuming no control. It could simply be that I enjoy strawberry ice cream much more than any other flavor, and so I always make the same (quite rational) decision to eat what I like instead of what I don't like.

You cannot use the fact that I do something consistently to prove that I don't have the option of not doing it.

Why does the fact that someone knows what I am going to do rob me of the power to make the decision?

That's the thing, it doesn't rob you of anything. It feels like you keep assuming that at some point you had a choice about something, or made a decision about something, but you didn't, never did.

Then this state of affairs has robbed me of something: it has taken away my choices and replaced them with illusory choices. How did it do so? How, mechanically, does this foreknowledge destroy whatever mechanisms I would use to make choices without it?

Or do you intend to argue that I never had free will, even without an omniscient mind knowing in advance what I would do?

I would agree that the entity in question, or it's omniscience, would not necessarily force you to do things, but the existence of omniscience would require a deterministic universe, meaning that the nature of the universe itself is forcing you to conform to it's design. You can have a deterministic universe without an omniscient watcher, obviously.

Two questions:

Why can't we have an omniscient being in a nondeterministic universe? Say, one that observes all outcomes, rather than deducing them all from initial conditions?

And how does the existence of deterministic law prevent me from making choices?

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.

If God already knew the exact resolution of the situation billions of years in advance, I don't really see how his knowledge is then conforming to your decision.

For Q to be omniscient, Q must be achronal in any case- Q must be able to perceive events in the future. If Q can perceive events in the future, there is no reason why my decisions in the present cannot have affected Q's mindstate in the past, giving Q prior knowledge that was caused by my decision, rather than being a cause of my decision.

Remember though, Y's nature is also predetermined and cannot possibly be anything other than it is, and the omniscient being already knew in advance what this nature would be, as well as the exact environment it would be part of and all the other nature's of all the other beings and object Y would ever interact with.

How does this change anything? I'm not asking you to repeat the paragraph. I'm asking you to explain how, mechanically, the fact that someone knows all the circumstances around a decision robs the "decider" of the ability to make it?

Now (and this is pretty a pretty rough and simplified idea, so I might get beat down for it) I would say that, generally, the more predictable a system is, the fewer degrees of freedom it has. A 100% absolutely predictable system would have zero freedom within it. You set the initial conditions and the outcome is known before you even allow it to run it's course. From the moment the universe was created, all the events of your life (and thoughts and feelings, don't forget) would be known with 100% accuracy. I would say that, to an outside observer watching your life match up perfectly with all of their predictions would lead them to believe that no, you do not really have the power to make actual decisions. I mean, if you can never do anything to actually demonstrate that you can do anything other than what you are predicted to do, then why would anyone conclude that you have free-will?

Why would anyone conclude that I do not? What does free will even mean to you, that the only way for me to have it is by acting in ways that are nonsensical and immune to prediction in advance?

Because that's what this seems to be coming down to: that the only way for me to have free will is to act in ways not consistent with my environment. But that isn't free will, that's insanity or perverseness. Why can't I make free-willed decisions that are consistent, logical, and predictable to other minds?

[Dark Hellion]

I don't want to put words in your mouth Kuroneko but it seems that your argument is actually a very subtle appeal to emotion, you feel like you are making a decision thus you are. I want to confirm before I actually go down this route of rebuttal; would you say that you have a decision to be effected by gravity or for cells in your body to undergo mitosis? I ask because in the case of a purely predictive, absolute omniscience everything we do, think, say or feel must necessarily reduce to something that is analogous to such processes in order to maintain the definition of the system. For such a being to absolutely know the present, past and future all of reality must be expressible as some formulation dependent only upon some set of parameters which the omniscient being knows. We can say this because such a being must necessarily know all aspects of everything with absolute certainty. Because of this simple fact we can do absolutely nothing to make the future deviate from this path. Action lacks real consequence because there is nothing that can happen which can make reality deviate from what it is, was and will always be. Without consequence choice becomes irrelevant.

To Simon_Jester: Absolutely certainty removes any possibility of deviation from the assigned path. We must follow the script; we do not get a choice in the matter. It is the only way to maintain the definition of absolute certainty of knowledge. Sure you can say that it was your decision but decision is pointless under such a system. You never had a chance not to decide that. You own your decision in much the same way as I own my cat. I say the cat is mine because I keep it in my house but it does whatever the hell it wants according to its own plan. You own your decision because it was made in your mind but it does whatever the hell the script said it had to do and unlike my cat you don't even have the possibility to wrangle it out of doing that. You cannot truly decide to do something that was already going to be done before you decided it. The actor is following the script of a director that allows no ad libbing. The omniscient being needn't be the director itself but it has a copy of the script and knows how the scenes will play out. The script says you laugh and you laugh; it says you cry and cry; it says you say "hello" and low and behold "hello" comes out. Where is the decision in that?

We will still invariably feel we are making morally relevant decisions. This is only because of our limited perspective and finite knowledge. But by introducing a conscience of infinite perspective and knowledge we change the absolute perspective that can be taken. In reality we ignore such breadth of perspective because the universe is an unconscious and immoral thing. If we imagine we can take a universal perspective we would see that human action is currently of such minuscule relevance to be utterly unimportant. We kill each other on some ball of dirt in a podunk arm of a boring galaxy and pretend we somehow matter despite the universe doing perfectly fine without us for 13 billion years and wouldn't miss us 13 billion years down the road if we nuked ourselves to oblivion tomorrow. We care about what we do to each other because we are not the universe and the universe doesn't care, it is not a moral agent and we are. We can feel that our decisions have outcomes that are morally relevant to ourselves and others. The fact that I choose my actions means I can be held accountable for the consequences and can be praised or condemned for them. If I do not have real choice it becomes more difficult. We do not condemn a lion for eating a gazelle because it is a simple biological function of the creature. If all our actions are just simple biological functions of our creature then any action we make is analogous to the lions. We do not condemn chimps for raping other chimps but we do for people because we feel we have a choice in the matter. If we don't and we are just chimps that are better at self-delusion, we can no more justly condemn ourselves than we do the chimps.

This is very plainly a concept that is hideous. We cannot believe it as such a world is unbearable. But this is a best case scenario of having a conscious, omniscient agent. If all action is totally predictable with absolute certainty and simply an effect of some previous set of causes no action is truly ours because we have no chance to escape the coercive influence of the omniscient knowledge of all our actions.

We do get many intellectually appealing ideas for stories from such metaphysical cane twirling. Let us imagine that the omniscient being is impassioned, benevolent but impotent to do anything. Its world is a nightmare. Every act of barbarism ever committed is always known to it, every feeling of fear and helplessness unavoidably present within its mind. It is the absolute height of torture; to see every genocide of every species to ever exist at all times and to be forced to feel it by your absolute knowledge of those feelings. No human will could withstand such; we would break into sobbing, mewling wrecks. This could be our new vision of Christian hell, to share in god's omniscience and omnibenevolence but be given no power to do anything about it. It should sicken... no one should wish this upon another. No lake of fire burns hot enough to match this.

This is just musing of course. Such things don't exist. It is just a bit of mental gymnastics for a very singular purpose to prove one thing. The worst dystopia that humanity could ever create is a pale shadow compared to the utter depravity of an absolutely omniscient and omnipotent creator god.

[Kuroneko]

I don't want to put words in your mouth Kuroneko but it seems that your argument is actually a very subtle appeal to emotion, you feel like you are making a decision thus you are.

No. My subjective experience does not imply that at all. After all, one can be coerced by drugs or other means that force a change in such.

I want to confirm before I actually go down this route of rebuttal; would you say that you have a decision to be effected by gravity or for cells in your body to undergo mitosis?

Not affected, no. Rather, pretty much the opposite: my mental state of making any decision whatsoever is completely the product of deterministic physical processes.

Because of this simple fact we can do absolutely nothing to make the future deviate from this path.

Correct.

Action lacks real consequence because there is nothing that can happen which can make reality deviate from what it is, was and will always be. Without consequence choice becomes irrelevant.

And here's the major jump which I see as completely unjustified. You're making the wrong analogy:

The omniscient being needn't be the director itself but it has a copy of the script and knows how the scenes will play out. The script says you laugh and you laugh; it says you cry and cry; it says you say "hello" and low and behold "hello" comes out.

But what I and Simon Jester have been arguing is that your laughter is not the product of the external knowledge. A better, if still stretched, analogy, is that of a computer carrying out a computation. What you're arguing is basically analogous to the claim that if I know the output of the computation beforehand, then the computation was not genuinely done by that computer, which is very clearly wrong, for it was still a product of its circuitry. Moreover, my knowledge of the result quite literally has no effect on the computation. If it's calculating 2+2, it would get the same result regardless of whether I was confused about the answer.

The following are completely indistinguishable:
1. The universe is in a state X, which deterministically evolves into state Y, which involves you acting in a particular way Z.
2. The universe is in a state X, which deterministically evolves into state Y, which involves you acting in a particular way Z. Also, God knows it.
And that's part of the point: the hypothetical presence of an omniscient observer has no further consequences than determinism would on its own. Omniscience is completely irrelevant to the issue, except in as much as it is a particularly strange subtype of determinism.

[Surlethe]

Heh.

Why can we do this? Does not determinism imply that it is impossible for a world to be identical to this except for the mind of an agent? For if it were indeed an identical world, then all processes which led up to the mind of the agent must be identical; hence the mind of the agent must also be identical.

An identical state. Determinism means that the state at one time uniquely fixes the state at all times. Hence changing the state affects both past and future, so the possible world is only guaranteed to be "close to" the actual one at that particular time; both future and past histories may radically diverge. Is this a problem?

It seems problematic to me that the two states do not share a common past. The present contains information about the past, so the extent to which the past differs must be indeterminate given all information in the present state (which differs from the "real" universe in only one respect at the current time t0). My suspicion is that, since the universe is a chaotic system, tweaking the state at t0 even slightly will cause extreme divergences for t << t0 and t >> t0], but I am not sure how to show this.

[Kuroneko]

It seems problematic to me that the two states do not share a common past.

It doesn't seem that way to me. Ordinary morality** already supposes that some facts about the universe are morally irrelevant, and the ones that are don't extend very far back time time and are very grossly defined, certainly far from the level of microscopic physical state. Hence we should be able to have all three of the following:
(1) All physical facts about the universe are the same, except in as much as it takes to produce a different mental decision.
(2) The agent's memory of the past is completely identical. (Although this is arguably implied by (1).) Or at least the same about all morally relevant matters.
(3) All morally relevant facts about the universe are the same at all prior times.
Hence the hypothetical agent acts in an identical environment with identical information that's equally correct on all morally relevant matters.

** Except act-utilitarianism, but that in turn doesn't care about the past at all.

[Knife]

Your argument is effectively the same as Freefall's, boiling down to, "But an omniscient being has full knowledge about you and the circumstances around you! It can see why you do what you do before you do it! Therefore, you have no free will!"

My objection is that this begs the question. How, exactly, does someone knowing what I will do before hand make the decision to do it not "mine?"

As I understand their argument, it is a Matrix like illusion of free will. If God made the world, made the people in it, made the rules they operate within, and he has a preplanned outcome he wants to happen and has set it all up to end as such, then all the 'decisions' you make in life were really scripted decisions along with scripted scenery, scripted stimuli that lead to those predictable decisions and thus not really a decision at all. You have the illusion of a choice, but not a real one; like the people in the Matrix think they have a life, but they were really slaves, or worse, a cash crop.

Your assuming, I think if I read your objections right, that each choice is independent and thus really a choice. If; however, you each series of choices lead to other choices and those to another, ad nauseum, to have a plan for it all means each choice has to go as scripted or that part fails. The person thinks they had a choice because in hind sight they can think that they didn't have to do X, they could have done Y, even if they really had no chance of Y.

[Hillary]

I've always had a problem trying to explain why omniscence excludes free will and is generally a bad thing. This really nails it as far as I'm concerned. Thanks DH.

Since this seems so clear to you, and so opaque to me, perhaps you could explain to me why the argument makes so much sense? Because I still don't get it.

Because everything you do, every decision you make, everything and everyone you have contact with is pre-determined. You may feel that you have choice, that you can change your path but you can't. If you could then it would add uncertainty into the overall picture meaning that Omniscence is not possible.

[Surlethe]

It seems problematic to me that the two states do not share a common past.

It doesn't seem that way to me. Ordinary morality** already supposes that some facts about the universe are morally irrelevant, and the ones that are don't extend very far back time time and are very grossly defined, certainly far from the level of microscopic physical state. Hence we should be able to have all three of the following:
(1) All physical facts about the universe are the same, except in as much as it takes to produce a different mental decision.

Right, but I don't think that you can change a person's mental state (very much) without changing gross facts in the past direction that would render the assumption (3) null.

Very Late Edit: That is to say, I see no reason to presume that the past and future are insensitive to small changes in the state at t0, which is what you are implicitly assuming when you argue for considering an alternative state identical in all (morally relevant) respects to the current state save the mind of the agent under discussion.

[Darth Wong]

As far as I can tell, predetermination vs free will is a totally unnecessary debate when discussing the question of whether God allows free will, because the Biblical God routinely claims the ability to control developing events in human society, even to the point of using one empire to punish another (eg- using the Babylonians to punish the Jews for disobedience). Ergo, it is clear that he claims the ability to manipulate human social events on a grandiose scale, which means that he does not allow free will.

Now if you're going to argue about whether predestination is incompatible with free will, you can do so of course, but the whole question of Judeo-Christian sky fairies and free will can be resolved without it.

[Simon_Jester]

Because everything you do, every decision you make, everything and everyone you have contact with is pre-determined. You may feel that you have choice, that you can change your path but you can't. If you could then it would add uncertainty into the overall picture meaning that Omniscence is not possible.

That doesn't prove that omniscience is incompatible with free will. At best, it proves that determinism is incompatible with free will.

I mean, think about it. If the universe is deterministic, then by this argument you have no free will even if no one has knowledge of the future, because everything you do is still the only thing you could have done. So this argument has nothing to do with omniscience: determinism does not require that an omniscient being exist.

Thing is, I still disagree with the argument, but the reason I don't think determinism denies me free will has to do with details of how I define "me" and "free will," so that's a story for another time.

As far as I can tell, predetermination vs free will is a totally unnecessary debate when discussing the question of whether God allows free will, because the Biblical God routinely claims the ability to control developing events in human society, even to the point of using one empire to punish another (eg- using the Babylonians to punish the Jews for disobedience). Ergo, it is clear that he claims the ability to manipulate human social events on a grandiose scale, which means that he does not allow free will.

...It depends. That certainly proves that he does not always allow free will, but it does not prove that he never allows free will, or even denies free will most of the time.

It's like arguing "someone might pick you up and use you as a club and you can't stop them, so you have no control over your own body." It's certainly true that somewhere out there is some Hercules who could pick me up and use me as a club, and that I could not stop him. But since I probably won't be meeting the guy, I can normally assume that I have control over my own body. Likewise, a Christian who stops at the argument you've made so far can normally assume that people control their own minds, except on the rare occasions where Big Sky-Beard is using them as meat puppets.

[Surlethe]

I mean, think about it. If the universe is deterministic, then by this argument you have no free will even if no one has knowledge of the future, because everything you do is still the only thing you could have done. So this argument has nothing to do with omniscience: determinism does not require that an omniscient being exist.

I think you have this backwards. Determinism does not require omniscience, but insofar as the future is known, omniscience trivially implies determinism. So if determinism is incompatible with free will, so is omniscience. (I'm talking Godlike omniscience -- e.g., if an electron's wavefunction is about to collapse, God knows where it will be.)

[Kuroneko]

Right, but I don't think that you can change a person's mental state (very much) without changing gross facts in the past direction that would render the assumption (3) null.

I honestly can't think of a situation where that's even plausible. Can you give me a hypothetical?

Actually, I'm not even convinced that that the past is ever relevant to the situation at hand, since the problem is explicitly the evaluation of future outcomes.

I think you have this backwards. Determinism does not require omniscience, but insofar as the future is known, omniscience trivially implies determinism.

That's completely consistent with what Simon Jester said, and also with what I said several times before: omniscience is irrelevant except in so far as it is a strange subtype of determinism.

Another reason I think Hillary, Dark Hellion, Freefall, et. al.'s position does not hold water is because the same kind of argument can demonstrate that free will is incompatible with physicalism in general, rather than just determinism specifically. For it is not enough to be indeterminate--what good is it to be beholden to physical processes one has no control over? A universe that behaves probabilistically** produces outcomes that are not under the control of any agent, so one can ask "where is the choice in that?" with equal indignation. Or: "the electrons randomly happen to encode 'jump', and you jump."

Thus, I see in their argument the beginnings of a full-blown dualism, as nothing less than that will satisfy that mode argument.

On the opposing side, an understanding of freedom in the will as the lack of coercive external influences, we can understand morality independently of such issues altogether. Dualism vs. Physicalism -- doesn't matter. Determismism vs. Indeterminism -- doesn't matter. Coercion is general enough to deal with all of these cases, and it's a concept that we would need to develop in our ethical theory regardless, because it's a mitigating factor to moral culpability whatever the ultimate nature of the universe really is. "Do I have free will?" becomes just another way of asking "am I morally responsible for what I willingly do?"

(I'm talking Godlike omniscience -- e.g., if an electron's wavefunction is about to collapse, God knows where it will be.)

I very much doubt that wavefunction collapse is a real process, as opposed to a practical approximation.

**[size=-2]Smartass follow-up: by the Loomis-Sikorski representation theorem, every σ-algebra is found by an epimorphism of some set-representable σ-algebra. A probability measure can be reconstructed as a mean over indicator functions of that set-algebra. Thus, random variables reduce to a collection of deterministic Boolean hidden variables. Where is your indeterminism now?[/size]

[Darth Wong]

Another reason I think Hillary, Dark Hellion, Freefall, et. al.'s position does not hold water is because the same kind of argument can demonstrate that free will is incompatible with physicalism in general, rather than just determinism specifically. For it is not enough to be indeterminate--what good is it to be beholden to physical processes one has no control over? A universe that behaves probabilistically** produces outcomes that are not under the control of any agent, so one can ask "where is the choice in that?" with equal indignation. Or: "the electrons randomly happen to encode 'jump', and you jump."

Thus, I see in their argument the beginnings of a full-blown dualism, as nothing less than that will satisfy that mode argument.

No kidding. It seems to me that once one defines "free will" as complete decision-making independence from all factors other than your conscious mind, then free will becomes defined out of existence for any scientist, because your conscious mind itself is nothing more than a collection of physical processes. This sort of conception of "free will" can only make sense if one believes your conscious mind is a magical "soul" which exists on some metaphysical plane, completely separate from physical reality.

On the opposing side, an understanding of freedom in the will as the lack of coercive external influences, we can understand morality independently of such issues altogether. Dualism vs. Physicalism -- doesn't matter. Determismism vs. Indeterminism -- doesn't matter. Coercion is general enough to deal with all of these cases, and it's a concept that we would need to develop in our ethical theory regardless, because it's a mitigating factor to moral culpability whatever the ultimate nature of the universe really is. "Do I have free will?" becomes just another way of asking "am I morally responsible for what I willingly do?"

Unless one decides that "free will" has no bearing on morality. Responsibility could quite practically be assigned purely on a causal basis using the rationale of precedent and deterrent, without reference to free will at all. It does solve a lot of problems, such as the fairly large body of evidence that children raised in certain kinds of environments have a strong compulsion toward criminal behaviour.

[Dark Hellion]

I will note that I am really only playing devil's advocate in this thread for the purpose of showing how the usual properties attributed to Christian god makes him into a petulant, cruel asshole. I find some delight in the irony that even without the bible simply defining god as having the powers they say he does makes him the universe's largest douchebag.

For such end I have been using the theistic definition of free will which usually attaches decision making to some consciousness removed from the purely material world. This is most often tied to that silly soul thing you speak of that they believe we all possess but I believe was primarily possessed by James Brown.

Its amusing that giving the Christians their demands makes for a world far more hellish than one of utter scientific determinism. I find it far more palatable to be a self-delusion biochemical automaton than the marionette for a spoiled brat with omnipotent power. Its a very satisfying rhetorical technique to grant the opponent all his assumptions and show him that his universe is so much bleaker and more depressing than if he grants you yours.

Generally, I just think that the moral implications of predication capabilities far in excess of modern human capacity make for very good story fodder for Science Fiction or Fantasy and are poorly used and generally under-appreciated by the fandom of the genres. There is excellent drama available that is usually wasted to score cheap political points instead.

[Shroom Man 777]

We know what happened in the past, the events the people, etc. Does this mean that people in the past never had free will, just because we know what they did? What if "God"'s omniscience is no different from that of a person, in the future, knowing what people did in the past because for the future-people it already happened? For us, things like World War 2 is a foregone conclusion, we know who lives and who dies, whatever. Does this mean the guys living then and there, in the past, never had free will?

[ray245]

We know what happened in the past, the events the people, etc. Does this mean that people in the past never had free will, just because we know what they did? What if "God"'s omniscience is no different from that of a person, in the future, knowing what people did in the past because for the future-people it already happened? For us, things like World War 2 is a foregone conclusion, we know who lives and who dies, whatever. Does this mean the guys living then and there, in the past, never had free will?

They don't have free will. However, it is not because we know what they did at the end. They don't have free will because there is not possible for them to make a decision without factoring the physical environment that shaped their decision.

We don't need someone who can know exactly what will happen in the future to determine if there is no free will or not.

[Simon_Jester]

I think you have this backwards. Determinism does not require omniscience, but insofar as the future is known, omniscience trivially implies determinism.

I have two problems with this:

-I haven't seen people making it clear that determinism is what's really excluding free will according to their argument. I've mostly seen a lot of references to "how can you act independently when Omniscient Bob already knows the script?" Which definitely implies that someone knowing what I'm going to do in advance is part of the problem.

-I think that arguing that determinism precludes free will relies on a bankrupt definition of free will. It reads to me like: "My will is only free if my decisions can be effects without a cause. All effects have causes, therefore I have no free will." Which relies on "my will is only free if my decisions can be effects without a cause." Which makes no sense to me.

They don't have free will. However, it is not because we know what they did at the end. They don't have free will because there is not possible for them to make a decision without factoring the physical environment that shaped their decision.

We don't need someone who can know exactly what will happen in the future to determine if there is no free will or not.

This is what I'm talking about. Your argument only works if "free will" decisions are defined as "decisions made for no reason," because any reason for making a decision will require me to factor physical things into my decision.

Which makes no sense to me.

[Mayabird]

Alright, my brain is about 70% fried right now, so probably I'm missing some really big point here or it was discussed and I somehow missed it, but are people all working on the assumption that free will must be some binary/you-have-it-completely-or-don't-have-it-at-all sort of thing? Because that's what it seems to be and I don't see why this has to be the case and why there can't be varying degrees of free will ranging from having none at all (something really is predetermined and can't be changed and you can't will yourself out of your fatal stroke) to having complete freedom of choice. Or even different people or creatures having varying degrees of free will. With enough brainwashing/programming/conditioning free will could be reduced or effectively taken away while exposure to different ideas and concepts could increase the range.

...should I just go take a nap and come back after the real players have done their arguing?

[Simon_Jester]

I'm OK with the idea of free will existing in varying degrees. But then, my concept of free will is screwy.