Probably. How do you define it? Define ‘choice’ as well.
How do you know it is “truly” random? There’s a difference between being truly random and not being able to predict an outcome.
Yeah, just like a “magic” trick is really magic to the naive and uninitiated. The appearance doesn’t mean it’s actually real.
To paraphrase a couple of posts on free will I wrote earlier, the concept of free will only exists because the phenomenon of consciousness is posited to have an independent existence. If consciousness is, as is current scientific dogma, an emergent phenomenon arising from other (physical) elements, then consciousness is not an actor, only a result of its constituents. And so is the change in consciousness (“choices”). The only way ‘free will’ works is if there’s a similarly sentient control element behind humans (sort of a homunculus). Also, this control element must also be “free”. If it has a mechanism governing its behaviour, how is it ‘free’ of that mechanism? If it doesn’t, again, it’s random.
Quantum events are the only cases of “truly random” events physicists know about. (Chaos implies somethings are not predictable, but that is not the same as random. An omnescient being could presumably know the initial conditions of everything so well - infinitely well, that it can predict chaotic behavior.) Radioactive decay is a quantum event that is random; the decay particle must “tunnel” through an energy barrier. Quantum mechanics says that here is a probability of this happening, but you can not know anything other than the statistical nature of the random event. (Mean value, variance.) The “unphysical assumption” is that there exists a being simultaneously cognizent of the entire spacetime continuum.
BTW, you and I do not differ greatly on “free will”. I just disagree that the existence of an omniscient being precludes free will.
This sentence is nonsense. Correctly, it should read “Does the future you knowing what the present you did mean the present you lacks free will?”, and put like that, its point disappears.
Doesn’t this assume that time holds constant over the omniscient being. If it does then that certainly shows more support for this argument though it wouldn’t prove it.
If time is not applicable to the being then it gives more credence to the opposite.
Far from a perfect example but I’ll give it a go, I’m a bit rusty on philosophical debating. If an improv acting group has its session taped and then someone who watched the live version watches the taped version at any given later date, in an extremely limited function that person is omniscient in regards to the actions that will occur on the tape. However, just because the person knows what will happen on the tape, does not make the actions of the actors pre-determined at the time they did the session.
Oh and the person who said “thats what you think” was referring to a joke about philosophers I think. If I recall the joke properly its general idea was that a man was able to challenge all the greatest philosophers to a debate (usually in heaven) and each time the mighty philosoper would spout all manner of arguments, but each time the challenger bested the philosopher with only one phrase and each time he said it the philosophers paused, thought, and then became quiet. The challenger merely said each time “Thats what you think”. It was a lot funnier then how I wrote it out .
Wrong example. The events have already occured. It’s a closed system. Besides, the person can’t predict what will happen next on the tape. What if the tape was overwritten or edited. The ‘free’ in free will means that the future can be routed via multiple paths . And you can’t know how the future will play out. This is different from predicting the future. Omniscience is defined as “Having total knowledge; knowing everything”. If you predict with total accuracy what happens in the next 3 hours, you could still have been wrong somewhere. But that’s not what omniscience is defined as. Omniscience is ‘knowing’. I fail to see how omniscience allows for a “free” will.
But that was my point, that the events have already occured to the being, but not to the people. In the being’s view yes everything is preset, that’s his perspective. But to the people who are limited to viewing time in a linear fashion and to whom the actions are occuring to currently, they have free will to decide what to do next.
Ultimately this is based off the idea of a being which may or may not exist. A god like being cannot be proven nor can it be disproved, depending on the parameters you set.
And I’ll gladly admit that assuming the being is outside time, that doesn’t answer the question of memes to any degree. Nor really for that matter if the being is bound in time.
To me the idea of omniscience infers the knowing of what will happen. But it’s the knowing of how the people will choose, not the way they had to choose.
I don’t understand how just knowing how somone will choose infers that the person did not make the choice.
In regard to the question of whether divine foreknowledge necessitates predestination (i.e., lack of free will), let me throw out a notion I cobbled up in my theist days.
All one needs to do is posit a God whose omniscience is such that He knows not just everything that will happen, but everything that could have happened but doesn’t. So in the ringing phone example: not only does he know that you will answer it and that certain things will ensue, He also knows what would have happened if you didn’t answer the phone. His foreknowledge has no effect on your freedom of choice.
In regard to my discussion with John W. Kennedy: I know most of my fellow reprobates don’t have a Bible at hand, so here’s Luke 23:3b: "And he [Jesus] answered him [Pilate], “You have said so.” (RSV 2d ed.) This is all interesting, but it doesn’t seem to address my question about what standards we can use to evaluate metaphysical claims.
But they have. It’s a taping. The events have occured to the people and been observed by the viewer.
They just don’t know what’s going to happen next. Which is different from free will. If they can choose otherwise to what “got recorded” on the tape, that gets us back to the omniscience/free will paradox. We aren’t dealing with static history, but static future.
Yours seems a different interpretation of choice. In that sense, a body “chooses” to get attracted gravitationally to another body, and “chooses” to do so in a certain manner. If you define all motion as ‘choice’, then yes, a person “chooses” his/her future. But the notion of free will is this:
situation -> choices A, B, C, D considered -> a choice selected.
The key here is that there is some sort of independence/freedom available between step 2 and step 3. If there’s independence, there’s uncertainty. Which precludes omniscience (foreknowledge). To make a seemingly absurd example, knowledge of the past precludes free will of the past. The past is unchangeable. This is not the same as the past changing when it was the present. The past can’t be changed, as the past. The same applies with foreknowledge and the future.
How could anything have happened if it won’t? That would be a prediction, not knowledge.
Random as in “truly”. Really. I’m not quite sure what you mean by “something we can’t ever know”. The only things that can be known for truly random events are the parameters of their statistical distribution, and of course, what happened in the past.
I think, but I might be wrong, that are not understanding what aus55 means by “time not being applicable”. Let us suppose the universe had only two spatial dimensions, with a diameter of 1 meter, one time dimension, lasting for 3x10^8 seconds, and that General Relativity is correct. The universe could then be pictured as a cylinder 1 meter in diameter and 1 meter high (using the speed of light to convert the “time size” from seconds to meters).
I’m a God-like being and I set the universe on my desk and watch it. Now for some of the 2-D critters in the universe, event A happens before event B - and they make choices based on A and B. For other 2-D critters in the universe, events A and B are simultaneous. That means when the 2-D critters "label events with a time tag they do it differently. I see their time tags and can mentally “slice up” the cylinder so that each slice has the time tags of one set of critters, or I can slice it up using the slice of the other set of critters. Either way, I can understand what the critters mean by “time”.
The big difference between God-like me and these critters is that I can observe the whole cylinder “at once”. I say “at once”, because time does not apply to me; it applies to critters. Those critters are making choices, but since I simultaneously see before, during, and after, I know what choices they make and what the outcome of those choices are. I know when the universe starts and when it ends. If my vision is infinitely precise, and I can detect properties that things in the universe can have, then I am omniscient. If the critters are making choices because some part of them, their “soul” or “consciousness”, is truly random, truly chaotic, or truly outside the universe, then they have what passes for “free will”.
That since we humans are part of the universe, there’s a limit to how much we can disassemble ourselves. So, “truly” random events might not be truly random, they could just appear that way because we are fundamentally limited to probing any deeper.
Again, what does it mean to ‘make a choice’ in this scenario, or in general?
Also, if it is ‘truly random’, what does the word “will” connote?
I think I’ve got you. Some argue that it is not possible for one person to completely understand the human brain, basically because one person’s brain does not have the ability to store all the possible states of itself, let alone those of others. That can concern can be addressed by having a suitably large number of people understand the mind, or taking into account the way we understand things - ignore the fine details such as the position of every dendrite.
At any rate, quantum mechanics allows for “truly random” events, and omniscient beings outside of time do not preclude true randomness.
I used random events to demonstrate that free will is possible, even if omniscient beings exist. I agree, free will is not the same thing as unpredictable. (I personally think that there is a strong possibility that what we perceive as free will is merely the chaotic, and hence unpredictable, behavior of the complex system that is our brain and bodies. Here I mean chaos in the physics sense of unpredictible due to sensitivity on initial conditions.) I don’t see how a mind explainable by physics and chemistry can support the notion of free will. At best such minds are unpredicitable. However, omnisicient beings are another matter. I do see how free will could exist in the presence of omnisicient beings.
Randomness means uncertainty. An omniscient being is not uncertain about anything. Things appear random to us, but that doesn’t answer the question whether anything is truly random. In fact, we might never know simply because we have to exhaust all possible mechanisms and patterns before we can declare something truly random. And knowing all possible patterns is effectively impossible.
In any case, true randomness doesn’t allow free will. The whole concept of free will is that a person “chooses” their future action. It is a deterministic paradigm. And like I’ve been saying the parameters are forces, matter, energy, not whatever* is supposed to power free will.
*ignoring omniscience, how is ‘free will’ even supposed to work?
I’m not sure how free will is supposed to work. Somehow a part of us, our soul or mind, must transcend the physical universe, and yet be able to influence the physical universe. I believe Descartes was the first to consider the problem; you would have to ask a philosopher, but I doubt it has been solved to a degree that would satisfy either of us. After all, if you could proffer a physical explanation, then the soul or mind would no longer transcend the physical universe.
I also agree that true randomness is not the same as free will. However, both require that it is not possible for somone who does not somehow transcend time, to know the result of an event (throw of the dice, making a choice). I tried to use randomness to point out that the existence of an omniscient being does not preclude the existence of free will, anymore than it precludes the existence of a random event. As both aus55 and I have tried to point out, a being that exists outside of time can know everything, and yet infinitely clever beings that exist in time can not even theoretically predict what will happen. The omniscient being knows what choices are made, or what occurs in a random process, because it can see the times after the event occurs. The “not knowing” implied by randomness and by free will only applies before random events and choices are made, not after. If you can’t see that, you can’t see that. I can’t think how I can be any clearer.