Robin
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- Apr 29, 2004
- Messages
- 14,971
Under determinism there would be no time travel paradoxes. You go back to kill your grandfather and you would just find that you were unable to do it.I think it's a better reason to be a lot skeptical about the possibility of sending information back in time. What you've ended up with is a straightforward time travel paradox, in that with the information from the future, you would not do what that information said you would do(/had done).
It wouldn't be for no reason, it would be for the reason that this is the only possible thing that can happen, given the prior state, which is the only reason anything happens under determinism.Take away the time travel and there's no longer any "force of determinism" making you do something detrimental for no reason.
There is no logical reason why determinism would not work given a large amount of information from the future.
But the deterministic force would be the same, whether or not you knew in advance the thing that was inevitably going to happen.
Yes, under determinism something would go wrong with the machine so that it would not operate as programmed. That presents no more logical problem than the fact that if you programmed a robot to walk through a solid wall then it would just crash into the wall.ETA: You can do your time-message thought experiment with a completely deterministic machine and have the same problem. The machine starts in state A, and is programmed to remain that way, unless there's a message from the future that says it's in state A in the future, in which case it's programmed to switch to state B. Now the message from the future comes that says it remained in state A. Would some force prevent the machine from switching to state B as it's designed to do in that situation? If so, it's not the removal of free will causing that, because it never had any in the first place.
Remember I did not mention 'free will' or say that was the problem.
Again there is no logical problem involved in a deterministic system working with any amount of information from the future, just as you can have a deterministic sequence of numbers where the 4th term depends on the 8th term.
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