If Psychics can see the future...

[Rodney]

Here is a link to the transcraipt, titled "Can John Edward Speak to the Dead?
Aired September 10, 2001 - 21:00 ET"

Okay, thanks for documenting. The reason for my confusion may have been that the last Larry King show I watched prior to 9/11 was the one with Condit's daughter, which actually aired on Wednesday, September 5, 2001. See http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0109/05/lkl.00.html

 

[TheChadd]

Um, no, you didn't explain the problem, you restated it.

ok

We are not saying that you are in any sense "bound" by what the psychic tells you you are going to do.

You are bound, because you cannot choose to do otherwise. Let's say in your example that I don't choose to take the million dollars, the psychic can't do what he says he can (or lied). If he's correct, then I can't choose not to.

So, did you have free will? Who is to say?

Well in your example, it was at least limited reguarding the specific event. There was no way that it could choose anything other than the million dollars, If I could then he'd be wrong.

accurately saw what you would eventually freely choose to do.

If someone knows what you will "freely" do, then your free choice no longer exists. Maybe it's true that with free choice I would have done the same thing anyway, but the fact that there is something out there (the psychics precognitions) which I must abide by (even if I don't know it) means that I have fate running all through my life and have no free will.

 

[voidx]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't there still some very overwhelming problems from a scientific viewpoint that would seem to make travelling into the future completely impossible? Travelling into the past may be feasible, but into the future just doesn't make any sense.

Isn't our sense of history, from a time perspective retro-active to a large degree? That the path of the past is only discernable from a viewpoint in the present, and is really in no way predictable? That to see an event in the future that does not come to pass would be to see something completely outside the realm of this particular path of reality and time and space?

I would certainly rule "viewing" the future to be prone to all of these same problems. Of course its not in psychic's generaly nature to scientifically test and probe their talents and beliefs, but to me the entire concept of seeing into the future period is within unknown territory. Knowing how it might impact free will, if it exists, is a useless exercise without knowing the mechanisms by which its even possible to "view" the future.

So while an entertaining side discussion, it really has no possibility of providing any useful answer.

Just my thought on it.

 

[LW]

If someone knows what you will "freely" do, then your free choice no longer exists.

If I offer my niece a choice over a piece of chocolate and a piece of liquorice, she will choose liquorice. I know this. Does this mean that she doesn't have a free will?

 

[Yoink]

ok



You are bound, because you cannot choose to do otherwise. Let's say in your example that I don't choose to take the million dollars, the psychic can't do what he says he can (or lied). If he's correct, then I can't choose not to.



Well in your example, it was at least limited reguarding the specific event. There was no way that it could choose anything other than the million dollars, If I could then he'd be wrong.



If someone knows what you will "freely" do, then your free choice no longer exists. Maybe it's true that with free choice I would have done the same thing anyway, but the fact that there is something out there (the psychics precognitions) which I must abide by (even if I don't know it) means that I have fate running all through my life and have no free will.

TheChadd, you're still not understanding the point here, and I suspect it is because you think I'm trying to sneak in some kind of argument for the plausibility of precognition. I'm not--I think it is woo nonsense and I think it is physically impossible. I'm making a logical point. Now let me try to explain it one more time:

Think about time as a string of moments. Let us assume that each moment is unitary and unchangeable: that is, from moment to moment you can "freely" will to do X or Y, but once X or Y has happened, it is always and for all time either X or Y. OK? With me so far?

Now, imagine that I have a time-machine. It has only one property: it can send dvd's back into the past. Now, time is a string of unitary unchanging moments: that means that whenever I send a DVD back into the past, that DVD HAS ALWAYS EXISTED IN THAT TIME. OK? (I know that opens another can of worms--but let us leave that for the moment: it's not essential to the precognition argument, which is the only part of this that I'm trying to make you see).

Now, I offer you two pieces of chocolate, a white one and a brown one. You choose, say, the brown one. I have videod this utterly free and unconstrained decision of yours. You could have chosen either, but you freely chose brown. O.K? I record this video onto DVD and send it back in time to my "precog" who views it, and thus has foreknowledge of your decision. Foreknowledge of your FREE decision.

"Ah" you say "but what if she told me about this and I decided to confound you!" No, that's not possible--because at the moment in time when you made that decision, the past already included the arrival of the dvd from the future (each moment of time is unitary and unchangeable, remember?), so that if the arrival of the DVD in the past was going to change your action in the future that is what I would have videoed.

Do you see now? That's what I meant about there being certain kinds of "precognition" that would simply not be possible: you would not be able to foresee things whose occurance would be forestalled by the fact of your foreseeing.

Now remember, don't get bogged down in the DVD, time travel conundrum: that's just a mechanism for getting a "vision" of a future free action back into the past. Take that all away and simply say "given the ability to witness future acts of free will, why are we logically bound to say that those acts are now "unfree" simply because someone knows in advance how they will turn out?"

P.S. the point about lw's niece actually makes much the same point very elegantly: just because you know how someone's free choice will turn out, doesn't mean that the choice is unfree.

 

[Yoink]

P.S. to my last: I think the real obstacle to being able to grasp this is that you are clinging to the idea that causes must precede effects in time. But one only has to read Hume to be persuaded that this is is not a logically necessary position--it is just what we happen to observe in fact.

Accept, at least for the moment, that it is logically possible (not physically possible, just logically) to imagine a cause that precedes its effects. Now imagine that all truly "free" acts should be conceived as uncaused causes: that is, little moments of "free will" that start chains of causation, but which cannot be derived from chains of causation (if they could be then that would certainly undermine the notion of free will).

Now, let us also say that although these chains of causation are not time bound, they are determinate, linear, and incapable of self-contradiction. That is, A can cause prior action B but not if B rules out the possibility of A. You follow? We are in a logically plausible universe which just happens to operate on these firm rules. I can cause something in the past, but that past something must be consistent with my later act of causation.

Now, let us get back to the precog. The precog's "psychic vision" of your future freely willed act occurs at the time of your act. It is caused by your act. Your free act is the initiating moment in the causal chain. You, quite freely, choose X rather than Y. This determines the nature of the precog's vision. The content of the precog's vision is dependent upon the choice you make. It just so happens, though, that the knowledge that the precog has of your freely willed action occurs in the past (relative to your act of choosing). Your chain of causality has skipped back in time, but is still non-contradictory, AND is still determinate, AND is still grounded in your free act of will.

At this point we have a precog with a premonition of a free act that you will take in the future. Can the precog act to prevent that act? No, because of the rule that says that no chain of causality can be self-cancelling. The precog has seen what you will choose to do, but everything leading up to that choice already followed from the precogs act of "knowing" at the time that you made that choice. It is logically impossible that the precog should do something to make you choose differently because if the precog did that there could never have been an initiating point for the chain of causality that lead to her "knowing" you were going to choose X.

So--you could logically (though not actually) live in a world in which precogs have foreknowledge of things which you will later freely choose to do but they cannot, logically, have foreknowledge of things which they then prevent you from doing.

Yet another way of putting this would be to say that we may have only one future ahead of us, but that doesn't logically mean it isn't one that we make through free choice.

 

[.13.]

If Psychics can see the future... Does that mean we have, at the best, limited free will?

It's much like the Omniscient being freewill argument, except a little less grand. If a psychic can see the future and knows that in a weeks time I'm going to be fired, does that not impact on the free will of both me (to avoid getting fired) and my boss (to decide to fire me) ? Perhaps this should be more in the 'philosophy etc' section but I thought it related more to general skepticism as it could be a good argument to use against psychics.

That argument is a logical fallacy, argument from consequences. I wouldn't use it.

 

[kitakaze]

I can't believe I posted a Donnie Darko quote in a completely unrelated thread with out seeing this one. Anyway, I think as long a we travel within God's channel we get to keep the free will or something like that.

 

[TheChadd]

and I suspect it is because you think I'm trying to sneak in some kind of argument for the plausibility of precognition.

No it's not that at all.

Now, imagine that I have a time-machine. It has only one property: it can send dvd's back into the past. Now, time is a string of unitary unchanging moments: that means that whenever I send a DVD back into the past, that DVD HAS ALWAYS EXISTED IN THAT TIME. OK? (I know that opens another can of worms--but let us leave that for the moment: it's not essential to the precognition argument, which is the only part of this that I'm trying to make you see).

Now, I offer you two pieces of chocolate, a white one and a brown one. You choose, say, the brown one. I have videod this utterly free and unconstrained decision of yours. You could have chosen either, but you freely chose brown. O.K? I record this video onto DVD and send it back in time to my "precog" who views it, and thus has foreknowledge of your decision. Foreknowledge of your FREE decision.

The problem here is that it means that my current self (in the present time) still has no free will. I now am only able to do what the person who has gone into the future knows I will do, or I will change the future and they didn't go into the 'real' future (for me).

That argument is a logical fallacy, argument from consequences. I wouldn't use it.

I'm not making any such claim about the validity about psychics or anything...

If I offer my niece a choice over a piece of chocolate and a piece of liquorice, she will choose liquorice. I know this. Does this mean that she doesn't have a free will?

If she COULD NOT do anything BUT choose liquorice, because you 'knew' it before hand, then no, she wouldn't have free will. If you guess that she will do this in the future, however there is still the possibility that she will not, then she has free will.

Take that all away and simply say "given the ability to witness future acts of free will, why are we logically bound to say that those acts are now "unfree" simply because someone knows in advance how they will turn out?"

Because they can only turn out how someone knows they will. Free will requires no pre-concieved 'plan' or future.

Yet another way of putting this would be to say that we may have only one future ahead of us, but that doesn't logically mean it isn't one that we make through free choice.

Well that's true, but we should still have multiple POSSIBLE futures. The precog destroys all of those possible futures and makes it so that we have always only one possible future.

Now, let us get back to the precog. The precog's "psychic vision" of your future freely willed act occurs at the time of your act. It is caused by your act. Your free act is the initiating moment in the causal chain. You, quite freely, choose X rather than Y. This determines the nature of the precog's vision. The content of the precog's vision is dependent upon the choice you make. It just so happens, though, that the knowledge that the precog has of your freely willed action occurs in the past (relative to your act of choosing). Your chain of causality has skipped back in time, but is still non-contradictory, AND is still determinate, AND is still grounded in your free act of will.

So I, in the future, choose to jump off a cliff. The precog can then see that I will jump off a cliff because that's already been chosen (by me, in the future).

So I now am a slave not to the precog's vision, but more to my future. My future (as the present self) has already been determined (in a relative sense as all time is apparently visible) by myself in the future. My future self tho, wouldn't he be acting off the decisions in the future of all other selves? It seems to me although in all aspects of my life the decisions have already been made by my 'last' self (i.e. the one just before I die), but he was also the earlier me? My future decisions are already decided for me (by myself in the future) and his decisions (that self in the future) were already decided for him when he was my earlier self. It seems quite odd to me.

 

[Yoink]

Well that's true, but we should still have multiple POSSIBLE futures. The precog destroys all of those possible futures and makes it so that we have always only one possible future.

No: YOU destroyed all other possible futures by making the free choice that the precog observed.

So I, in the future, choose to jump off a cliff. The precog can then see that I will jump off a cliff because that's already been chosen (by me, in the future).

So I now am a slave not to the precog's vision, but more to my future. My future (as the present self) has already been determined (in a relative sense as all time is apparently visible) by myself in the future. My future self tho, wouldn't he be acting off the decisions in the future of all other selves? It seems to me although in all aspects of my life the decisions have already been made by my 'last' self (i.e. the one just before I die), but he was also the earlier me? My future decisions are already decided for me (by myself in the future) and his decisions (that self in the future) were already decided for him when he was my earlier self. It seems quite odd to me.

Of course it is odd: it is breaking all the rules of physical universe that we happen to inhabit. But it isn't logically impossible, which was the point of this exercise. Not only that, it's not even logically incompatible with our experience of the world. The fact that we never have yet seen "backwards causality" doesn't mean, logically, that it could never happen (though there might be many good physical reasons why it's not possible given the physical constants that structure our universe).

By the way, your last restatement of the case is still not quite getting it: you future decision doesn't in any sense "retroactively determine" your past actions. You are happily moving along in a series of normal, forward moving chains of causes and effects. You freely decide to do all the things that bring you to the point where you freely kill yourself. The precog sees this ahead of time (backwards causality)--her seeing of it (in the past) is determined by your doing of it (in the future), but having seen it she is logically incapable of preventing you from commiting suicide: she knows that whatever attempts she might try "already" proved to be useless, because otherwise she wouldn't have "seen" you do it.

Think of it this way: the precog is no more "determining" your future by seeing you do something than I "determine" your present by seeing you do something: the fact that I see you do it certainly means that it can't be undone, but that doesn't mean that I "made it" that way.

 

[.13.]

I'm not making any such claim about the validity about psychics or anything...

But you said in your opening post:

...
Perhaps this should be more in the 'philosophy etc' section but I thought it related more to general skepticism as it could be a good argument to use against psychics.

You seemed to ask wheter your argument was a good argument against psychics. Or have I misunderstood you?

 

[LW]

If she COULD NOT do anything BUT choose liquorice, because you 'knew' it before hand, then no, she wouldn't have free will. If you guess that she will do this in the future, however there is still the possibility that she will not, then she has free will.

I'm not certain how I should put my words here.

Consider two situations:

• I know that she won't choose chocolate. I know it because I have observed her many times and know that she hates the stuff.
• I know that she won't choose chocolate. I know it because I got a mysterious paranormal precognition on the matter.

I don't know why the source of my knowledge matters. In my opinion, if she has free will in the first example, she has it also in the second and vice versa.

Not to mention that the position that real psychics would be 100% accurate is quite a bit strawman. I haven't met any believer who would subscribe to that position [probably for practical reasons, because the "real-life psychics" abysmal hit rates]. Would a psychic with 10% accuracy destroy free will? What abnout 99%? Or 99.9999999999999%?

 

[lolurigeller]

If Psychics can see the future... Does that mean we have, at the best, limited free will?

The problem with it is that's an incorrect view, Psychics can't see the future, they can only predict it.