Allow me to explain the exact problem, if psychics consider that they can forsee the future in it's entirity, perfectly. If someone knows the future perfectly, then you MUST do what he has already forseen you will do. That negates the possibility of any free will...
Imagine the psychic having a book where he writes in it what is going to happen in the future. You then (If the psychic really is genuine) MUST do what he wrote down in that book, if you don't then he's not a perfect psychic, if you do then you don't have any free will because you COULD NOT do anything other than what he wrote. If you don't have choice, then you don't have free will.
Um, no, you didn't explain the problem, you restated it. Let me stress that I don't for a moment believe that anybody
can in fact foresee the future. My argument is simply that there is no
logical objection to somebody being able to see the future
and the people involved in that future having free will. I'm not quite sure what you think bringing "writing things down in a book" adds to the argument, but let us go with it.
Let us say that I "see into the future" that in one hour's time you will leave the house to take a plane trip to England, even though you currently have no plans to do so. I "write this down in a book" and then I tell you my prediction. "Ha! Ha!" you say, "I am a creature of free will!!!!!! I will not do this, to prove to you that I am a creature of free will!!!!!" Then, the phone rings, you just won some competition (or hear about a sick relative, or inherited the crown of England--it really doesn't matter) that will give you a million dollars if you drop everything and fly to England
right now.
"Oh noes!" you cry, "now I either have to forego one million dollars or show that I am a mere puppet in the hands of fate. Alas and alack!" But, in the end, you say--screw it; if fate wants me to have a million dollars, who am I to argue?
So, did you have free will? Who is to say? I don't see what the "psychic vision" has to say in the matter. Let us postulate that yes, you "freely chose" that you preferred the million bucks to "proving the psychic wrong"--then all that we are saying is that the psychic
accurately saw what you would eventually freely choose to do. We are not saying that you are in any sense "bound" by what the psychic tells you you are going to do.
Let me put this another way, that might make it clearer for you: if we assume that there could be
both free will
and psychic "foreseeing" then there would be certain kinds of visions of the future that the psychics
would not be able to receive. For example, no psychic would be able to get a vision of the following exchange:
A: "I know what word you're going to say next."
B:
quizzical look
A: "The next word you say will be...asparagus"
B: "Asparagus--damn you cursed fate!!!!"
But a psychic in a free-will world would be able to get a vision of the following exchange:
A: "I know what word you're going to say next."
B: "Bollocks"
A: "Yes, see--I wrote it down in this handy book."
Clear enough?
Now remember, no objections from FTL physics or what have you are to be entertained here: we're assuming pure Woo foretelling. The psychic simply "sees" what will happen to happen in the future. Explain to me why this is in any meaningful sense incompatible with free will?
))don't believe that any psychic is that gifted.
