Free will and omniscience

[Bill Thompson 75]

Yes, and we're explaining why we find it nonsensical. That's what these discussions are for. My argument for the nonsensical nature of atemporality is based on the fact that time never holds still and never goes backward. Now if you can find me a proven exception to this fact, then perhaps your defense of atemporality will have some logic or evidence, something it has thus far lacked.

An exception, for purposes of this discussion, is that omniscience is an atemporal way of knowing things. In the common definition of omniscience there is nothing known before or after anything else.

But it is certainly true that I have no illusions that I am going to convince you. However, there may be many people reading this thread, including some who have not seen these arguments before. I think it is important that they see this gobbledygook exposed for the internally contradicting nonsense that it is. Politely, of course.

What you are posting isn't so much gobbledygook as just a stubborn resistance to admit that your argument is based on a false notion of what omniscience means, and the false assumption that omniscience somehow has to follow the law of cause and effect.

 

[Brian-M]

Let me help you out here. To everyone else in this discussion, "omnipotent" essentially means "knows everything". That's pretty much how it's defined in the English language. To you "omnipotent" appears to mean "doesn't know everything".

I think you've got omniscient and omnipotent mixed up.

It's easy to keep these things straight if you know the meaning of the original Latin words:

omni (all)
sciens (knowing)
potens (power)
pre (before)​

Omnipotent = omni + potens= All Powerful
Omniscient = omni + sciens = All Knowing
Prescient = pre + sciens = Before Knowing (knowing in advance)

(I don't think that omniscience in general is really the issue here, but what should be focused on is prescience.)

What does "future" have to do with omniscience?

Many people regard prescience as being a subset of omniscience. It's often assumed that "all knowing" means not just knowing all that is, but also all that will be.

You aren't choosing it if it is pre-written.

But if it's simply a written description of what a prescient entity sees that you'll choose in the future, how is it any different from someone else writing a description of what they saw you choose in the past?

How is the causality any different if the book is written before instead of after?

When you're dealing with the ability to know future events, things don't necessarily happen in order of causality; a response to an action can easily precede the action that caused it. (In this case, writing the description of these actions is a response to the actions.)

Sure. The magical omniscient being knew 1000 years ago that tomorrow you would swipe a tenner from your father's wallet. Tomorrow you wake up, you need some money, you anguish over the morality of stealing a few bucks from Dad, and finally you settle on taking it. The magical being knew it 1000 years ago. You didn't get to change the results. And if you suggest you may have changed the results by deciding not to steal the money, the omniscient one knew that 1000 years ago, too.

But the omniscient being didn't make you take the money. It didn't work you like a puppet on strings. You chose to take the money of your own accord, and would have done so regardless of whether or not the omniscient being existed. The existence of the omniscient being had absolutely nothing to do with your actions.

So how can the existence of an omniscient being knowing what you will choose to do have any effect on the process (free will) by which you make the choice?

 

[Bill Thompson 75]

It seems odd that you would ask for logic, when the whole basis of logic is temporal. Premises first, then conclusions. If you postulate an atemporal being (or really atemporal anything) then you cannot logically defend them, as the rules of logic don't apply, being temporal. Similarly, you can't use cause and effect. Temporal, ya know. There is only one tool you have in your box. Magic. This being exists outside of laws of science, logic or the universe. Sure, believe in it if you like. Harry Potter is more fun and more consistent.

Okay then, you don't understand "atemporal" or the structure of logic.
As an aside to help you grasp your misunderstanding: how long does it take for 1+1 to equal 2?

And you have never once refuted the conclusions without resorting to the magic of "atemporality". When you are shown that effect must follow cause, your response is, "Not if it's atemporal". You think this is good logic?

And now you don't understand that this thread ia about the concept of omniscience, it's not about an actual magical being that may be omniscient.

 

[Bill Thompson 75]

It is, though, as you say, based on sound premises. Is one of your premises that atemporal beings can exist? Do you consider that a sound premise? If so, why?

Only a troll will follow this argument.

 

[Tony]

But if it's simply a written description of what a prescient entity sees that you'll choose in the future, how is it any different from someone else writing a description of what they saw you choose in the past?

It is different because the past has already happened. There is no free will to change it.

How is the causality any different if the book is written before instead of after?

If the book written before describes events that will happen in the future with absolute certainty, it isn't really different. In such a case, you lack the free will to change it, just as you lack the free will to change the past.

When you're dealing with the ability to know future events, things don't necessarily happen in order of causality; a response to an action can easily precede the action that caused it. (In this case, writing the description of these actions is a response to the actions.)

Right, and the agent acting within this system lacks the free will to change the actions which precipitates the response. If he had the freedom to change his actions, the response could be different. And if the response could be different, the omniscient being would be wrong and thus, not omniscient.

 

[Tricky]

Omniscience is a property which is atemporal, which is say, an omniscient being knows everything at all times. The omniscient being doesn't know one thing before or after another; it knows all things at all times. There is no time component involved with this way of knowing things.

Sorry. Atemporal means "without time." (Hint: Here's where you coin the term "Omnitemporal".)

Is this in any way relevant?

In that you're using words that you don't appear to understand, like when you suggest that "knowledge" doesn't mean "knowing".

You are trying really hard to argue the actuality of omniscience, which has nothing to do with this thread.

Really? I could have sworn I saw it in the thread title.

An exception, for purposes of this discussion, is that omniscience is an atemporal way of knowing things. In the common definition of omniscience there is nothing known before or after anything else.

And how exactly does this work? Normally knowledge builds on previous knowledge. Do you know any well-explained exceptions? Your definition may be "common" (although among whom, I'm not clear) but it is still meaningless gobbledygook.

What you are posting isn't so much gobbledygook as just a stubborn resistance to admit that your argument is based on a false notion of what omniscience means, and the false assumption that omniscience somehow has to follow the law of cause and effect.

Your "notion" of omniscience is made up of the whole cloth. You have no examples. You have no logic. You claim it has the magical property of being immune to cause and effect. I'd say that most folks here would disagree which of us have the "false notion". You make up meaningless definitions and expect us to accept your definitions without any sort of support. That carries no water.

Okay then, you don't understand "atemporal" or the structure of logic.
As an aside to help you grasp your misunderstanding: how long does it take for 1+1 to equal 2?

Place one object down. Now place another. Did that take any time? Even if you do it in your head, did it take some time for the neurons to transmit the message? Knowledge takes time. Show me one objectively observable exception. Just one.

Only a troll will follow this argument.

So you refuse to answer? I hope AvalonXQ won't be so reticent to defend the premises he makes. If one proposes that atemporality is required for omniscience, then an honest person would admit that it is a premise.

 

[GeeMack]

I think you've got omniscient and omnipotent mixed up.

Indeed in the post you quoted I used "omnipotent" where I meant "omniscient". My mistake.

 

[Brian-M]

Right, and the agent acting within this system lacks the free will to change the actions which precipitates the response. If he had the freedom to change his actions, the response could be different.

You're suggesting the action should be a response to the response to the action? (ETA: B causes A causes NOT-B.) That's logically circular and absurd, regardless whether or not the response to the action comes before or after the action.

But I think I've come up with a good way do explain the whole thing. Let's take dlorde's scenario...

So let's imagine that the omniscient being takes human form and joins you in the passenger seat of your car as you approach a junction. There appears to be nothing to stop you going left or right - you may not have even made up your mind yet, but your passenger knows which way you will turn. He writes it down on a piece of paper. After you make the turn, he shows you the paper - it is correct. You repeat the experiment 1000 times. He's always right - he even starts writing down what you'll do several turns ahead. He only shows you what he wrote after you've made the relevant turn. To you, they're free choices; to him, no choices at all. You ask him how he knows: "Oh, I just know how your mind works," he says, "exactly how your mind works - every tiniest detail of it."

Let's say that he writes down a direction on the paper, you turn left, and then you discover that he wrote "left" on the paper.

We have here two events:

A. His writing "left".
B. Your turning left.​

Now assuming that these two events are causally linked (in other words, you didn't both pick "left" by chance, that one caused the other) there are two ways these events could be connected.

A caused B
B caused A​

Since we're accustomed to cause preceding effect, in normal experience A always causes B, so it's natural to assume that this is true in this situation too. It seems as if his writing "left" forces us to turn left, that we have no choice or "free will" in the matter.

But in fact it's the other way around. It's our (future) decision to turn left that causes him to write "left". The fact that he happened to write it down before we decided to turn left is irrelevant, because we have no awareness of what he has written, and therefore the fact that he wrote "left" instead of "right" has no influence on our decision.

This applies to all other arguments about omniscience as well.

Someone could argue that if an omniscient being knew a million years ago that you'd have toast instead of cereal for breakfast on your 30th birthday, that you have no choice in the matter, that the existence of this knowledge forces you to have toast instead of cereal.

But they're getting cause and effect backward.

You can choose to have whatever you want for breakfast. Toast, cereal, porridge, noodles, dog food, a sandwich made from real sand, roast suckling pig. Whatever you want.

It's your choice that determines what the omniscient being knew a million years ago, not the other way around.

If you can't wrap your head around that, to quote Dr. Emmett Brown...

"You're not thinking fourth dimensionally!"​

And to address dlorde's final point in that scenario...

Now, the really interesting situation comes when you ask the omniscient being (who, incidentally, never lies) which way you're going to turn next time, and he tells you before you get there...

Do you turn the way he says you will?

He won't say which way I intend to turn because he knows that I intend to turn the opposite direction to the one he tells me, so that any verbal prediction he makes would be self-negating.

If a prescient entity interferes in events, it must take the effect of it's own actions into account.

 

[Lithrael]

Someone could argue that if an omniscient being knew a million years ago that you'd have toast instead of cereal for breakfast on your 30th birthday, that you have no choice in the matter, that the existence of this knowledge forces you to have toast instead of cereal.

But they're getting cause and effect backward.

You can choose to have whatever you want for breakfast. (...) It's your choice that determines what the omniscient being knew a million years ago, not the other way around.

You are on the right track...

If people are saying it's this omniscient's being's knowledge (and presumably existence) that makes the difference though they are not barking up the correct tree. Whatever threat to free will that implies, it is a result of it even being possible for such knowledge to exist. Whether anything actually has that knowledge is not relevant.

It is clear to me that if it's possible to 'step outside time' and view all events, and if all those events are static and unchanging from that perspective, then free will, whatever the definition, is essentially a useless concept.

 

[Aridas]

I don't have anyone on ignore.

Then I do question why the lack of response. And the repeated straw men.

Omniscience, knowing that something will happen, means it will happen, so it certainly does negate any potential that it could happen or not.

And that's a terrible way to put it. Having Omniscience in no way negates any potential. The potential simply couldn't have been there in the first place. Unless, of course, one allows for completely non-interacting systems that do not follow the same basic rules, observation without interaction, and a fair bit of leeway with what constitutes "Omniscience." If all of those are the case, this...

Why can't it be that the actions you take or the choices you make determine what is written in the book, and hence, your free will is intact?

Could be the case. It's rather difficult to call such a relationship co-existence, though, under any reasonable use of the term. If one seeks to add any interaction between the systems, though, the tenuous claim on "Omniscience" becomes untenable.

 

[Chucky]

The property of knowing does not of itself imply necessity. Knowledge of something only implies awareness of it, and for omniscience it implies an awareness without a temporal component and without a causal component.

The problem I see here is an assumption that omniscience is a knowledge of all possible outcomes of all possible things. Which I'd agree is partly true. But omniscience must also include knowledge of the subset of all things that will occur. Without knowledge of that subset an entity is not omniscient. It describes perhaps knowing a huge amount of stuff by an entity, but without that subset of the choices that will be made, one isn't omniscient. As you point out, time may be irrelevant to the linearity of the script (maybe), but the choices that will be made do occur no matter when. It's that subset that you and AvalonXQ overlook, not only the possible outcomes but the ones that will be selected.

 

[cyborg]

There is nothing wrong with starting with a conclusion and trying to work back to the premise; it's used by goal seeking computer programs for instance.

The important thing is that you have to be able to fail to find a logical system where your conclusion exists in order for it to be useful. Otherwise it reduces to tautology.

 

[punshhh]

Sure, it's nonsense. The one quibble then, that I have with that previous post, is where I quoted one statement that you made above. I don't see how there could be an either / or as an omniscience must know all there is to be known in an absolute sense. Again, that must be so or omniscience goes away. Because its knowledge would be perfect and invariant that leaves no wiggle room whatsoever for any possibility of free will no matter how many choices as all choices and their outcomes would be known.

I am not familiar with this debate, which is a bit of a tongue twister. Having thought about it, I now realise that it is only omnipotence which would prevent me from making my own personal choice. A being who is only omniscient would not alter this whatever its knowledge about what I am going to have for dinner.

Its knowledge, like my choice of dinner would coincide by definition.

As to your other point, I'm not sure why we'd need complete knowledge about the full set to know that the set exists if it did. There is no complete knowledge of anything. Yet we can still confirm empirically the existence of things like electromagnetism which was once mysterious and we can conceive of impossibilities which we assume are impossible. We could know some things about it either way. Without knowing everything there is to know about electromagnetism or infinity still allows us to make reasonable assumptions which could be tested. Then again, it's all about the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin, which is irrelevant in itself which I guess makes knowledge of the potential of omniscience irrelevant.

Yes, this debate is so artificial. Essentially I see no way we as humans can hope to understand the knowledge an omniscient being would have. As we are confined to these three dimensions and the arrow of time.

 

[Belz...]

My choice is one of many possibilities.

At this point this is just you saying "la la la la" rather then listening to other people's arguments and explanations.

You should learn to challenge your beliefs.

 

[Belz...]

You seem to be quite confused about the meaning of omniscience.

Ok, then. Give us your definition of the word, then.

Mine: Omniscience means the being in question knows everything that has, is, or will happen. In other words, an omniscient being existing at the creation of the universe knows every event that will happen until its end. "Knowing", of course, precludes the possibility that any of those events will change.

Your turn.

 

[Belz...]

The property of knowing does not of itself imply necessity.

Of course it does. If I know something will happen, it will. Which is why we never know anything for certain. And omniscient being, however, knows everything for certain. It has ALL KNOWLEDGE.

 

[Dave Rogers]

Hi Avalon,

I've been working on making an argument using (quasi) formal logic. While that's not complete yet, I think I've reached a point that illuminates a crucial issue.

Here's the start I've made.

Basic notation:
^ and
v or
~ not (negation)
-> implies

where n stands for any statement,

I means "I choose n"
G means "God [the omniscient agent] knows or predicts n"
P means "n is possible"

I think there's another element you can consider:

C means "n is certain"

If n is certain, rather than just possible, then by definition:

C -> P
C -> ~P(~n)

Omniscience premises:

Omniscience
n -> G
G -> n

It also follows (as contrapositives) that
~G -> ~n
~n -> ~G

It seems to me inherent in omniscience that, if God knows or predicts n, then n is certainly true; in other words,

G -> C

from which it follows trivially that

G -> ~P(~n)

Additionally, from the definition of omniscience, we may say that for all possible binary choices I(A), we may define a statement n that is known by our omniscient agent to be true, such that either n = I(A) or n = ~I(A).

So, for all possible choices, we can say that

G -> P ^ ~P(~n)

Thus we can see that there can be no action A for which:

P(I(A)) ^ P(~I(A))

leading to the conclusion that omniscience contradicts free will.

Dave

 

[Myriad]

Well done, Dave.

The nice thing about both our logical constructions is that there is no temporality in G, P, or C. (Only in I which involves time-localized human actions.) That's exactly why I was not able to to derive G(I(A)) -> ~P(~I(A)), because without assigning a temporality to P one cannot say that P is not possible just because n didn't (or never) actually happen(s). That doesn't appear to be a problem with C.

I don't think Avalon will accept your new premises, but I'll be interested to see where the specific objection lies. That should further clarify his claims.

Without the certainty premises, what my earlier construction appears to represent is what we might term an "omnifortunate" predictor (or equivalently, omnifortunate extratemporal perceiver). That is, a predictor/watcher that is infinitely lucky, continually possessing fallible (non-certain) foreknowledge that nonetheless always turns out to be right.

Respectfully,
Myriad

 

[tsig]

I am not familiar with this debate, which is a bit of a tongue twister. Having thought about it, I now realise that it is only omnipotence which would prevent me from making my own personal choice. A being who is only omniscient would not alter this whatever its knowledge about what I am going to have for dinner.

Its knowledge, like my choice of dinner would coincide by definition.

Yes, this debate is so artificial. Essentially I see no way we as humans can hope to understand the knowledge an omniscient being would have. As we are confined to these three dimensions and the arrow of time.

Your answer to everything is how little we know, how poor our minds are yet you seem unacquainted with what humans do know.

 

[Chucky]

Yes, this debate is so artificial. Essentially I see no way we as humans can hope to understand the knowledge an omniscient being would have. As we are confined to these three dimensions and the arrow of time.

I don't see any question about being able to know the mind of an omniscient being, only whether it would be possible to detect its existence or perhaps to demonstrate its non-existence. Which would need to be allowed in the first instance, and as many argue, without free will in the second. The second however might be possible as suggested by Daniel Dennet (if I understand his take) in a deterministic universe were a sort of free will is allowed through evitability, whereby we can avoid certain outcomes such as by ducking a brick being thrown at us. Unless we choose to be hit in order to bring about a lawsuit. You can find youtube videos about his arguments relating to free will.