If the being living outside of time can see all future actions, maybe that just means the being doesn’t have free will. As we make our decisions, we affect possible future events. I randomly choose from a cans of peas and if I take can A (tainted with botulism), I’ll die shortly after tomorrow’s dinner. The helplessly omniscient creature sees my gory vomit-spewing demise. Spontaneously, though, I choose botulism-free can B. My revised future now involves becoming the first casualty of a tragic space elevator accident in 2059. The omniscient being sees the new future, and as far as it is concerned, that future is and always has been the only one (if concepts like “is” and “has been” have any meaning at all to a creature living out of time). Our free will causes destiny to perpetually rewrite itself. God is at our mercy, not the other way around.
So, how can you prove that free will does not exist? I fail to see the logical progression which leads to me, sprawled backwards across a chair, my toes wiggling a Target bag, and typing these words.
If Free Will does not exist, then the presence of the Domino’s Noid was predictable at the moment of the Big Bang.
I don’t see how that follows from anything. Are we going to wander into a Chinese Box ‘what is free will’ discussion now?
Foreknown future ~ an immovable object
Freewill ~ an unstoppable force
I believe he’s using a differnt standard for free will, which i went over above. You’re arguing from different, and inclusive, points of view. And you’re both right.
You’re free, because you can do whatever you want. You’re also not, because you wouldn’t have done anything else, insofar as the observable universe is concerned, anyway.
Can we get the OPs definition of free will? It’d help solidify the debate.
No – but accurate foreknowledge implies an unalterable future. Is that not incompatible with free will, regardless of whether the prescient being is actually decreeing/causing the future’s course? Just as a subatomic particle of indeterminate (not merely unknown but fundamentally indeterminate, according to quantum theory) position/velocity, once observed, acquires a determinate position/velocity.
Well, I’ve already presented my argument, but since you’re a computer guy I’ll make a computer analogy.
Given that your computer is a collection of interacting transistors, and the transistors make up gates, which implement the logic of the system; the state of your computer is at time t is inevitable given the previous states and including any other inputs.
Isolate any gate, and you’ll see that it is predictable. The system is made of many gates, but predictability is still fundamental, if you have the information to make a prediction.
Over to biology - our bodies (all matter actually) are collections of interacting molecules, and the molecules make up cells which eventually form an organism. All of these molecules and cells follow well known physical laws, isolate one and you’ll see that it is “behaving” predictably, ergo the entire system is also predictable.
The function of a neuron in your brain is an exact analog for a logic gate in a computer, for large n systems of the same why would one have free will (human) and the other not (computer)?
Having all the information is the same as being the omnisicent entity posited by the OP. I think that the presence of constant physical laws and matter/energy subject to same is sufficient to make freewill impossible - no omniscient entity required.
In fact, with some semantic mangling, the universe itself would be the omniscient entity since all the information is there.
Whether a “noid” existed in the big bang is a question of determinism, not quite the same as freewill. Although there are arguments on both sides, current understanding is that the universe has true randomness at the lowest (quantum) level. Since we don’t control this randomness (eg, we can’t “make” a tunneling event occur at a given time) it would appear that the big bang only set up a possibility of noidness and the dice came up boxcars, figuratively.
Back to the analogy, in principle a “random event” such as a nuclear decay and associated particle can glitch up a memory state in your computer or alter the chemistry in your brain, but it would be a long stretch to say that freewill is in such events since we don’t control them and the effect they have on large-scale structures like we’re discussing is tiny.
Entirely true, but we are products of emergent systems. Nigh infinite inputs on an emergent system with actual random events introduced, I believe, could produce something so close to free will as to nullify any actual difference. That said, I think we’re running into an odd place where we literally just don’t know enough to define some of the questions we want to ask. Anyone out there better?
Stalky, it’s true. We need more input from the Op here. And I admit there’s more than one definition of free will… perhaps we could compare and contrast?
I think Thrya’s definition is unusable for considering within the perspective of time travel and ‘outside of time’ events.
That’s the problem here, and why I stepped in. It’s hard to think this way, and a lot of the time you wind up begging the question with your original theory. It’s important to find the actual meaning of your question and phrase it so that it makes sense from an external framework.
B] Thrasymachus** writes:
The idea of the Mad Thinker who knows everything and can predict the future has been around a long time, but it’s untenable. Between quantum indeterminacy (some things aren’t known, and can’t be, by the quantum nature of things), and Sensityive Dependence Upon Initial Conditions (a phrase that became big with studies of chaos and fractals, but was certainly around in the 1970s when Scientific American ran an article called “Time’s Arrow” showing how easy it was to disrupt motions through what would ordinarily be tiny influences so that time didn’t seem to flow backwards), and Godel’s Theorem (Even in a perfect system of matrhematics, there will always be unstatable and unanswerable questions), there’s plenty of reason to doubt that, even given a sufficiently large computer, you could perfectly determine the future.
So I think your initial assertion is incorrect. Thie unibverse is a vastly more complex system than your simple circuit, and unpredictable. If it were, the idea of a lack of free will being implied by the inevitability of the system’s progression through time would be obvious. But no such inevitability exists, even in the absence of minds making decisions.
It’s entirely possible that Free Will is an illusion, or boils down to no more than random choice, but I doubt is anyone outside a handfuil pf philosphers and behaviorists actually believe that. Certainly I can’t give you a good definition of Free Will, or prove that it exists. But I submit that your argument doesn’t disprove it.
Then let’s compare our definitions of free will and see if we can come up with a working definition. Here’s one I proposed in another thread:
An autonomous force or entity that is completely immune to any outside forces such as biology, environment, or learning.
Well, I don’t believe in “free will” and others on this board have also denied it ( the quotes are because people can’t even agree on what it is, much less prove it exists ). There are also likely people who believe in “free will” who don’t believe in your version of free will; my brother for example considers computers to have free will, because as far as he’s concerned the ability of a program to “choose” a path according to it’s input qualifies.
As Daniel C Dennett pointed out, that’s more like a form of insanity than free will, because by definition, it has no correlation with external reality.
I admit it’s a biased definition. I don’t believe free will exists. How how would you define what others describe to you as free will?
I might be off in my estimate of how many disbelievers in “free will” there are, but it’s irrelevant to my argument. nd you don’t know what my definition of “free will” is – I haven’t told you what it is.
I don’t, because when questioned either they have their own definition ( like my brother, as I mentioned ), or they have no definition at all “It’s . . . you know . . . free will ! You know what I mean !” ) I personally consider the idea unsupported by facts, undefined and nonsensical, unless you redefine it in a way most people won’t like, like my brother does.
What I believe the idea of free will is based on, is our own self-ignorance, and some kind of psychological covering mechanism for that ignorance. Our self awareness is too low for us to know most of our own mental processes, and that lack of awareness feels “free” to us; rather like a blind man falling from a great height being convinced he’s flying, instead of being pulled straight down by gravity.
As I said, I consider the idea itself to be incoherent.
Well why don’t you illuminate us for the purposes of informed discussion?
One more thing, I think i’ve changed my mind on whether determinism plays an important role in our free will. Even if the entire universe were unordered semi-chaos, intelligence is an emergent complex ordered system, and therefore responds to external stimuli in a predictable way. Even in an infinate number of infinite universes (to use a ludicrous example straw-man analogous to certain quantum theories) it seems that we would still be a slave to stimuli. Can any of you “Free-Willies” explain objectively why we wouldn’t.
Oh, and i’m copyrighting the term “Free-Willies.” Use at risk of severe civil suits, or burns to the anus.
That’s one viewpoint I allow for, but I’m not convinced it’s really the case. I admit that I don’t have a better definition, but what I think of when I think of “free will” is clearly different from your brother’s, and from random choice. But there are surely other possibilities than a strict determinism, even if of a limited and biological kind.
Right. So wouldn’t it be useful to propose a definition and see where they disagree?
I believe free will is based on ego and wanting to be special in the universe.
I would like to point out that I didn’t write what you have attributed to me.
Maybe we dont have free will but god does. That would require god deciding on whether you ate peas or corn. That does not work god of a billion. billion planets would be way too busy.
Then no god ,so we do have free will. Wait a sec. as we get closer and closer to undersdtanding our genetic makeup we see we are genetically predisposed to some diseases. Therefore these physical decsions are made by our genetic programming. How far does it go. Is it all an illusion. are we little programmed computers whos lives are determined by what our genetic stew has provided. Is our genetic programming responsible for all our decisions and we merely think we decide?We are computers after all.
Oops ! The second quote was from CalMeacham; my error.
Stalky and CalMeacham, both of you have mentioned chaos, and it sounds like both of you believe chaos theory describes non-deterministic systems. It’s important to note that chaos theory merely states that systems can appear to be non-deterministic. The systems in question are still deterministic.
It seems the only question mark (based on current understanding) regarding determinancy, is quantum randomness. But randomness is certainly not a basis for “free will”, quite the opposite actually.
It seems like we are aware of 2 types of events that can occur:
- A random event
- An event caused by prior conditions
To have “free will” you would have to be able to propose a third type of event, but I’m not even sure what that event would look like.
To me it seems like the only possibility for “free will” is if future events are not actually “caused” by prior events like we think they are. On the surface, this seems wrong, but then I remember a recent issue of Scientific American explaining that physicists and philosophers do not think that time moves forward the way we feel that it does. I don’t remember the details, and it’s something they really haven’t figured out anyway, but that seems like it might be the opening for “free will.”
For the record, I was asserting that an organized system (intelligence) would respond to chaotic stimuli in a predictable way. So even with truly random events there would be no true “choice”. Insofar as that is concerned we seem to be in agreement.