Free will and omniscience

[Mycroft]

That rather does depend on what version of "Free Will" that you're using. The form that you're using appears to be along the general lines of "Freedom from Outside Coercion." In that case, Omniscience, whatever its form, is indeed not all that relevant.

I agree with your definition, I'm just not sure I follow you next...

Those who are debating, however badly, seem to be using a version that is more along the lines of "Freedom to influence the outcome." In that case, the mere possibility of Omniscience tends to be enough to negate that line of "Free Will."

In the example I give where I know what dessert my wife will choose, she's perfectly free to influence the outcome. My knowing doesn't change her ability to choose. Further, my knowing is a direct result of knowing what the desired outcome is to her.

 

[PiedPiper]

You are not considering the fact that God knew you would take a sip of soda before he created you and he specifically created you to take a sip of soda at that precise moment.

This same definition of free will, could be used to argue that computer programs have free will, as you don't think it is relevant that humans are only doing what they are programmed to do.

Well, I don't know that he specifically created me to take a sip of soda at that precise moment. I don't know why he created me. However, in my belief system, yes, he knew when he created me that I would drink xyz mls of soda at xyz time.

Relating that to a computer program, I don't think it's exactly the same. Say I write a computer program that randomly selects numbers from 1 to 100, and spits one out every second onto a screen. If I'm omniscient, I know in advance what number is going to come up at xyz time. It doesn't change the fact that the program is choosing completely random numbers (please no derails re: validity of computer randomness and seeds etc).

The program makes a choice every second which is random. I didn't write a subroutine to insure that the number 77 would come up at xyz time. I wrote the program to output random numbers. If I'm omniscient, by definition I know exactly what numbers are going to come up at any given time. It doesn't mean the program is rigged; it's doing it's best to put out random numbers.

 

[mutile]

I wrote the OP and explicitly gave my own definition a few posts in, matching the former definition rather than the latter.

I also wrote the OP to explicitly divorce this discussion from the Christian-based discussion on the other thread, and have attempted to keep the issue firmly on omniscience and not any other property ever since. To claim dishonesty is... well... par for the course for GeeMack, but incorrect as usual.

The problem is it doesn't make an interesting discussion divorced from the concept of God, under a definition where only the choice is important regardless whether it is necessarily determined, the conclusion must be that computers have free will, so the debate is about a position which nobody holds.

 

[mutile]

Well, I don't know that he specifically created me to take a sip of soda at that precise moment. I don't know why he created me. However, in my belief system, yes, he knew when he created me that I would drink xyz mls of soda at xyz time.

Relating that to a computer program, I don't think it's exactly the same. Say I write a computer program that randomly selects numbers from 1 to 100, and spits one out every second onto a screen. If I'm omniscient, I know in advance what number is going to come up at xyz time. It doesn't change the fact that the program is choosing completely random numbers (please no derails re: validity of computer randomness and seeds etc).

The program makes a choice every second which is random. I didn't write a subroutine to insure that the number 77 would come up at xyz time. I wrote the program to output random numbers. If I'm omniscient, by definition I know exactly what numbers are going to come up at any given time. It doesn't mean the program is rigged; it's doing it's best to put out random numbers.

If you imagine a set of infinite possible universes God chose the instance where you drank the soda, he chose this over an otherwise identical universe where you did not, so he must have specifically wanted you to drink the soda, it was God's will, there is no choice.

In your computer example the program is making a choice so therefore it has free will, clearly christians believe free will to be something special, which seems to conflict with your definition.

 

[AvalonXQ]

The problem is it doesn't make an interesting discussion divorced from the concept of God, under a definition where only the choice is important regardless whether it is necessarily determined, the conclusion must be that computers have free will, so the debate is about a position which nobody holds.

I don't agree that computers have free will under that definition.

Free will requires an unconstrained capacity to choose. Computers generally have no such ability.

 

[PiedPiper]

If you imagine a set of infinite possible universes God chose the instance where you drank the soda, he chose this over an otherwise identical universe where you did not, so he must have specifically wanted you to drink the soda, it was God's will, there is no choice.

In your computer example the program is making a choice so therefore it has free will, clearly christians believe free will to be something special, which seems to conflict with your definition.

Why does there have to be a set of infinite possible universes? Picture just one universe. I only see one second at a time, and I choose what to do at every second. If God is omniscient, he sees the entire timeline, from beginning to end. He sees me drink the soda. It wasn't his will, necessarily. He sees it happen before I make the choice, because he's outside the timeline and can see past / present / future. He could be a complete nonparticipant in any decision making. He just happens to know what we're going to choose. Is it is will that we make that choice? Not necessarily. I believe in a benevolent deity, so I don't necessary believe it was God's will that my cousin was accidentally shot and killed. He knew it was going to happen before it happened, just as he knows everything that's going to happen before it happens.

I just don't think the two are connected. Somehow knowing (ahead of time) how someone is going to act doesn't mean that it's your will that they make that decision. It's their decision. You just know about it before it happens.

 

[mutile]

I don't agree that computers have free will under that definition.

Free will requires an unconstrained capacity to choose. Computers generally have no such ability.

Neither do humans with a creator God, what is the difference?

 

[mutile]

Why does there have to be a set of infinite possible universes?

God is omnipotent, with infinite power come infinite choices of creation, the specific creation choice must be a product of God's will, there can't be only one possible choice, he pressed creation button X which would inevitably lead to you drinking soda.

If you know the result of a process will be your cousin being accidentally shot and killed and you initiate that process, you cannot deny responsibility.

 

[Mycroft]

The problem is it doesn't make an interesting discussion divorced from the concept of God, under a definition where only the choice is important regardless whether it is necessarily determined, the conclusion must be that computers have free will, so the debate is about a position which nobody holds.

I think the discussion is only interesting when divorced from the concept of God.

Discussions about God are interesting to me so long as they're kept in the abstract and are impersonal. If you want to tell me about your tradition, I'm interested, but I'm only taking the information to increase my overall knowledge, I'm not incorporating your belief system into mine and I'm not trying to change your belief system.

The problem is that most of these discussions are not impersonal and abstract. Most of these discussions about God start with people of different views beginning the debate determined they will not change those view, and also believing there is something wrong with the other person for holding different views. This is just as true of the atheists as it is of the theists.

I also think it's part of the problem in this thread where we see people incapable of separating the issue from God, incapable of separating omniscience from omnipotence or being incapable of discussing the issuer while not being insulting is that for them it's not an abstract intellectual exercise with little or no implications in the real world but an important part of their own Reductio ad Absurdum argument against the existence of God. "Of course God doesn't exist. If he did exist he's be both omniscient and omnipotent. If he were omniscient and omnipotent, then we wouldn't have free will. Obviously we have free will, therefore God doesn't exist!"

 

[mutile]

I think the discussion is only interesting when divorced from the concept of God.

Discussions about God are interesting to me so long as they're kept in the abstract and are impersonal. If you want to tell me about your tradition, I'm interested, but I'm only taking the information to increase my overall knowledge, I'm not incorporating your belief system into mine and I'm not trying to change your belief system.

The problem is that most of these discussions are not impersonal and abstract. Most of these discussions about God start with people of different views beginning the debate determined they will not change those view, and also believing there is something wrong with the other person for holding different views. This is just as true of the atheists as it is of the theists.

I also think it's part of the problem in this thread where we see people incapable of separating the issue from God, incapable of separating omniscience from omnipotence or being incapable of discussing the issuer while not being insulting is that for them it's not an abstract intellectual exercise with little or no implications in the real world but an important part of their own Reductio ad Absurdum argument against the existence of God. "Of course God doesn't exist. If he did exist he's be both omniscient and omnipotent. If he were omniscient and omnipotent, then we wouldn't have free will. Obviously we have free will, therefore God doesn't exist!"

I think the discussion of whether fireball or icebolt is a better spell, is only interesting when you know what magical system you are discussing, how would the omniscience discussion go without context?

 

[Mycroft]

God is omnipotent, with infinite power come infinite choices of creation, the specific creation choice must be a product of God's will, there can't be only one possible choice, he pressed creation button X which would inevitably lead to you drinking soda.

Do you believe in God?

If you do then logically you have to allow that perhaps the attributes of God may be different from your understanding of them.

If you don't, then asserting his attributes as incontrovertible is silly. Sort of like (and I've used this example a couple times already in this thread) arguing about the attributes of Superman. Can he really fly? Or is he able to just leap tall buildings in a single bound? The answer depends on what source material you consider to be "canonical", which interestingly is a religious term often applied to fiction.

If you know the result of a process will be your cousin being accidentally shot and killed and you initiate that process, you cannot deny responsibility.

Carroll Shelby designed and built really hot sports cars. He did this with full knowledge that some people would be killed driving the cars he designed and built.

Is he responsible for their deaths? Why or why not?

 

[Mycroft]

I think the discussion of whether fireball or icebolt is a better spell, is only interesting when you know what magical system you are discussing...

Or if you're designing a new magical system. <shrug>

...how would the omniscience discussion go without context?

With more than 260 posts so far, judge for yourself. I've mostly enjoyed it, it's fun.

 

[mutile]

Do you believe in God?

If you do then logically you have to allow that perhaps the attributes of God may be different from your understanding of them.

If you don't, then asserting his attributes as incontrovertible is silly. Sort of like (and I've used this example a couple times already in this thread) arguing about the attributes of Superman. Can he really fly? Or is he able to just leap tall buildings in a single bound? The answer depends on what source material you consider to be "canonical", which interestingly is a religious term often applied to fiction.



Carroll Shelby designed and built really hot sports cars. He did this with full knowledge that some people would be killed driving the cars he designed and built.

Is he responsible for their deaths? Why or why not?

Did he know exactly when and where his system would cause the deaths and could he have easily avoided the danger but chose to intentionally design the system to be dangerous, in that case I would say yes, he had a duty of care, his product was dangerous, the danger was foreseeable and easily rectified, he is liable.

Discussing Superman's attributes would not be silly if people made decisions based on these attributes and they had an effect on me personally.

 

[Aridas]

In the example I give where I know what dessert my wife will choose, she's perfectly free to influence the outcome. My knowing doesn't change her ability to choose. Further, my knowing is a direct result of knowing what the desired outcome is to her.

I was oversimplifying the matter, honestly, with that description. As it is, though, the matter at hand has nothing to do with someone or something knowing what's going to happen. Knowing that someone will do something does not, after all, remove Free Will, in either version of Free Will that I mentioned. The issue at hand is that, if the results of all decisions *can* be known, with absolute certainty, before they occur (in cases where time is at all relevant, if dealing with an Omniscience that is outside time and potentially completely disconnected, when a slight bit of leeway is given, things get more interesting, but don't really change, effectively), the nature of reality is such that there was never actually any other selectable course of action. If there was never any other option that could be chosen, it becomes a matter where the Will part certainly applies, but not the Free part, because the decision is under the complete constraint of, for ease's sake, physical law. In that case, it's not really your wife influencing the outcome, it's the physical law dictating what the outcome will be, leaving your wife with the illusion of "Free Will."

Neither do humans with a creator God, what is the difference?

Correction. Omniscient Creator God. There are many creator God concepts that don't demand your statement to be a necessary conclusion. Most of the creator gods in various mythologies, for that matter, are not claimed to be Omniscient.

 

[GeeMack]

I wrote the OP and explicitly gave my own definition a few posts in, matching the former definition rather than the latter.

I also wrote the OP to explicitly divorce this discussion from the Christian-based discussion on the other thread, and have attempted to keep the issue firmly on omniscience and not any other property ever since. To claim dishonesty is... well... par for the course for GeeMack, but incorrect as usual.

So you framed a discussion by defining some atemporal being, not necessarily a god of course, which is omniscient but not omnipotent, and by defining free will as possible in that context. And you don't see how that's dishonest?

No, it's not. But if you're willing to concede that omnipotence and intentional meddling are necessary for the negation of free will, great!

The way you've defined your terms it becomes a tautology. It allows for only one conclusion, your predetermined conclusion. I'll concede that you've framed your premise dishonestly. Damn, you did it again.

 

[Roboramma]

The discussion is about the omniscience of some god which is typically endowed with omnipotence. Your persistent effort to move the goalposts is noted.

Actually, it's not. It is specifically about whether omniscience is incompatible with free will. That's the question. Whether or not other attributes of a god might be incompatible with free will, or whether the combination of omniscience with those other aspects is incompatible with free will is a different question.

Here's the OP, in its entirety:

I think the typical problem people have in reconciling these two concepts is that they have an idea in their head of how omniscience works and there's no reason to believe it actually works that way.

Omniscience isn't conceptually any different than considering the past from the viewpoint of the present. Our current knowledge of past decisions don't constrain their freedom; neither does the knowledge of an atemporal being do so.

There's not a mention of omnipotence in there at all. Nor even of a particular god.

 

[nvidiot]

Free will requires an unconstrained capacity to choose.

If the "choice" is determined before it is made, and cannot be anything other than that set selection, it is constrained to that particular selection.

Thus not free will.

 

[GeeMack]

Actually, it's not. It is specifically about whether omniscience is incompatible with free will. That's the question. Whether or not other attributes of a god might be incompatible with free will, or whether the combination of omniscience with those other aspects is incompatible with free will is a different question.

Here's the OP, in its entirety:

There's not a mention of omnipotence in there at all. Nor even of a particular god.

There is mention of "an atemporal being", a being which has the magical ability to exist without any relationship to time. AvalonXQ seems to conveniently want to deny that magical being's magical-ness. But perhaps even more germane, this thread actually began before the opening post as a discussion about the omniscience of the Christian god. It sprang from this post and several above it...

God knows you will pick X.

You can still pick not-X.

You will pick X, but nothing forces you to.

So although it was re-framed as a tautology early in this thread, the discussion was originally about the relationship between omniscience and free will as it relates to a fairly particular god.

 

[Roboramma]

Whether or not AvalonXQ has in mind a particular god (I agree, it obvious, he does), the question he is asking isn't about the other properties of that god.

If I said, "does the fact that this apple has a mass of 200 grams mean that it is safe to eat?" The answer would no. While it's true that the apple happens to be edible that isn't a consequence of it's mass. It's mass is related to it edibility: if it had no mass there would be nothing to eat. But it's clear we can have a discussion about mass as an abstract quality and whether it necessarily implies edibility.

That's the sort of question that Avalon asked. If the answer is "omniscience doesn't mean free will is impossible" it's still possible that "Avalon's conception of god means that free will is impossible." Those are different questions.

My personal view is that the way in which most people consider free will is an absurd concept that is incompatible with any real logical understanding of the world. But more specifically it is incompatible with determinism, and an omniscience implies some sort of determinism (even if not a materialistic determinism), in that all future actions are determined somehow.

I don't disagree with Brian's viewpoint, however, except in so much as his concept of free will seems meaningless to me. When he says an entity has free will what he is really saying is that it has a will: it has some sort of means of making decisions, but that means could be a complex algorithm of a coin flip: I don't see how "free" comes into it.

 

[punshhh]

I think the general claim is that the existence of an omniscient being (however passive) precludes the possibility of free will.

Actually, even the possibility of the existence of an omniscient being (however passive the being or remote the possibility) precludes the possibility of free will.

We do not control the movements of the moon; however, we can predict the movements of the moon with almost perfect precision by applying comprehensive knowledge of the forces that move it. This is strong evidence that the moon does not choose its own course, and it's also strong evidence that no sentient agency with free will chooses the moon's course, because those hypotheses do not account for such predictability.

An omniscient being whose omniscience were based on perfect knowledge of the causal forces that move us (which of course an omniscient being must have, if such forces do exist) would show we lack free will just as our knowledge of the moon's orbit shows the moon lacks free will.

What about an omniscient being whose omniscience were based on direct perception of the world from a future or timeless vantage point? In that case the moon analogy doesn't work, but

The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on
nor all thy Piety nor Wit,
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

We don't, in the present, have free will to choose our past actions; and the immediate existence of any vantage point in which our present is the past likewise precludes (without even the need to posit any observer in that vantage point) any free will to choose our present actions.

----------

So why does the Bible call God omniscient?

Exaggeration. Especially in the face of numerous passages in which God makes decisions, reacts to events with every semblance of surprise (that is, learn things), and changes His mind. An omniscient being by definition cannot learn anything, cannot make a new decision, and could only appear to change his mind if he were deliberately acting silly.

If I were a mighty king of some appalling bronze age civilization, I'd be more insulted by an insinuation that I couldn't learn anything, than by an overt declaration that I didn't already know everything. But that's because I'm an educated member of an industrial civilization. Back in the bronze age, kings (like everyone) were primitive screwheads; they were probably too busy figuring out new ways to shove sharp objects through their own dicks to worry about perceiving the subtle insult in flattering words. So, mighty kings would kill you (probably after shoving sharp objects through your dick) if you didn't agree with them that they know everything.

So when people contemplated God, they had to imagine that God at least is as mighty as King Dickstabber VIII. Hence, God goes down in print as being omniscient.

Respectfully,
Myriad

Precisely.

Omniscience is a symbol for greater than the great, or beyond counting, or beyond understanding. Logically it is a nonsense, in a similar way that to contemplate infinity in anything real is a nonsense.

If there is anything approaching the notion of omniscience in existence, it is clearly beyond the capacity of our simple minds to understand.