Predestination and Free Will

[RoccoR]

Syne,

I don't disagree.

Omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence are not logically contradictory, so they do not require any mythical transcendent logic.

(COMMENT)

But in this case, the argument is that "omniscience" (knowing the future - infallible) cancels "free-will" (choice in the future).

The Standard Argument has two parts. (http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/standard_argument.html)

• First, if determinism is the case, the will is not free. We call this the Determinism Objection.
• Second, if indeterminism and real chance exist, our will would not be in our control, we could not be responsible for random actions. We call this the Randomness Objection.

But there are many rebuttals.

v/r
R

 

[Syne]

Second, if indeterminism and real chance exist, our will would not be in our control, we could not be responsible for random actions. We call this the Randomness Objection.

Indeterminism, as evidenced in quantum physics, is not random. It is probabilistic. This means that the probability for one outcome over many opportunities is deterministic while the individual outcomes cannot be predicted. Now you can chose to define random as unpredictable, but then how would you reconcile a collection of random results as being predictable? One way is to assume that a person will generally act to their nature, but that they do possess the free agency to be unpredictable in any given situation.

This is why I was asking Rav about the specificity of such predestination.

 

[Rav]

Relativity does not necessitate any adoption of eternalism at all. The people who think it does are philosophers and laymen who are not fully cognizant of its consequences. It requires no "predefined end-point" whatsoever.

Eternalism is precisely what you're positing when you say that each slice of time, whether it be in the past or the future, is as equally real as the present (as in physically "there"). I'm not saying that relativity necessitates it's adoption, but rather that you've already proposed it.

It's important to relate this back to a creation event because that's our context.

I assume that you're not suggesting that each slice of time exists in some superposition of different possible states, and if you're not, then we're talking about a future that is immutable. This is what follows from a creation event that includes the creation of the future, which it obviously does if you're saying that it has always existed.

I have to ask, too, why you're even bothering to defend this notion, since it doesn't appear to be your preferred view anyway. Earlier you dealt with the issue of foreknowledge and free will by talking about maximal knowledge (which I agree could theoretically result in scarily inhuman accuracy even in a nondeterministic universe).

Further, I'm curious about what sort of theist you are. If I had to guess, I'd say a deist of some sort, but other than the fact that you seem quite liberal compared to some of the other theists around here, I don't have anything to go on.

 

[Sarkus]

Indeterminism, as evidenced in quantum physics, is not random. It is probabilistic. This means that the probability for one outcome over many opportunities is deterministic while the individual outcomes cannot be predicted. Now you can chose to define random as unpredictable, but then how would you reconcile a collection of random results as being predictable? One way is to assume that a person will generally act to their nature, but that they do possess the free agency to be unpredictable in any given situation.

But this is confusing "free agency" with merely acting randomly within a probability function.
If you roll a die and lack the knowledge to perfectly predict the number it will land on, are you saying that the die has "free agency" to be unpredictable?
Or does it merely obey the laws of physics?

Randomness is also considered to be unpredictability due to the lack of perfect knowledge of conditions.
If you had perfect knowledge of conditions... there would be no probability function - there would just be foreknowledge of the output.

The more knowledge you do have of the starting conditions, the more you can limit your expectations of the output to a function.
When we role a 6-sided-die, we don't expect it to turn into an elephant.
We have knowledge that at least limits the options to one of six outcomes.
We also have knowledge that if the die is a perfect cube then the six outcomes should be equally likely.
If we had any additional knowledge, such as the way in which it is rolled, the position at the start of the role etc, then we could limit the expectations even further.
But this all allows for randomness within a probability function... and probability functions are the output functions that describe the outputs of an infinite sample-size... i.e. as the sample of events approaches the infinite, the output function approaches the probability function.

There is nothing to reconcile, if you appreciate what probability is, and what randomness is.

Our own knowledge of conditions is limited at the quantum level, where we conclude there is randomness.
But this may be due to just not having the knowledge of what is actually going on... i.e. we can only ever have imperfect knowledge.

 

[wynn]

Foreknowledge simply means that an event is regular enough or operates under well enough known rules to be anticipated. Just because you may be able to anticipate a certain reaction to a given stimuli does not mean that the stimuli is predestined. Only that, given the stimuli, the reaction can be anticipated.

So you wish to arbitrarily redefine "foreknowledge", ad hoc, as it applies to a god?

??

I mean "foreknowledge" as generally synonymous with "prescience" and "prophecy" - ie. not something that would be based on an intelligent guess or a reasonable anticipation based on so-far observed regularities.

Foreknowledge as in someone "just knowing" that a particular Peter will marry a woman whose middle name is "Mary," for example, or that a particular Thomas will have a car accident in which the left headlight on his car will be broken, or that the accident will be on the 12th in the month, etc..

Most theists and atheists alike have a naive understanding of the logic necessary to the possible existence of any creator god. Such a god would not create using preexisting substances or materials, as that is construction, not creation (and leaves the source of any such material in question). A god would create wholly of its own essence (whatever that may be), which automatically makes the god omnipresent with any existence.

Sure. I don't think we are in much disagreement here.

Any knowledge held by any existence is, by default, the knowledge of such a god.

I don't understand this?

There is no need to posit any motives to a god at all.

For the purpose of discussion itself, I think it is.

As you yourself noted, for fatalists, the problem of evil crops up. People not having free will and instead being fully determined can be part of the problem of evil (esp. in relation to, for example, mainstream Christianity and the problem of whether people are predestined to choose for Jesus and thus avoid eternal damnation, or not).
Arguably, the whole issue of predestination vs. free will crops up precisely because there is suspicion about God's motives.

 

[wynn]

But this is confusing "free agency" with merely acting randomly within a probability function.
If you roll a die and lack the knowledge to perfectly predict the number it will land on, are you saying that the die has "free agency" to be unpredictable?
Or does it merely obey the laws of physics?

"Free will", for the concept to be relevant to human beings, has to entail more than mere randomness or probability.
It has to be some kind of irreducible substance.

 

[kx000]

compatibilism.

 

[Sarkus]

"Free will", for the concept to be relevant to human beings, has to entail more than mere randomness or probability.
It has to be some kind of irreducible substance.

"Substance" as in something physical? If so, pour me a glass and we can discuss it.
It only has to be irreducible on a conscious activity level.
But that doesn't mean it need be absolutely irreducible - only to the same level as consciousness.
If one considers consciousness a non-material thing, distinct from the material universe, then it is likely one will consider free-will to be similar.

 

[wynn]

"Substance" as in something physical?

No, "substance" as in substantial - as opposed to irrelevant, superficial.

It only has to be irreducible on a conscious activity level.
But that doesn't mean it need be absolutely irreducible - only to the same level as consciousness.

No, it has to be absolutely irreducible, it has to be a fundamental.

Because as soon as we posit that free will is reducible (in any way, even if we are not consciously aware of said way), we will have to conclude that our free will is neither an actual will nor free (ie. instead of being a will, it's simply a kind of impersonal probability or tendency).

 

[Sarkus]

No, "substance" as in substantial - as opposed to irrelevant, superficial.

Got ya.

No, it has to be absolutely irreducible, it has to be a fundamental.

Because as soon as we posit that free will is reducible (in any way, even if we are not consciously aware of said way), we will have to conclude that our free will is neither an actual will nor free (ie. instead of being a will, it's simply a kind of impersonal probability or tendency).

This is an argument from consequence, and possibly emotion thereof.
I, for one, do not think our free will is an actual will, nor free, but is merely an illusion of that.
BUT, from the view point of how we consciously perceive it and its practical implications, it is as though it is a fundamental.
It is merely a perspective.

One could argue that a "car" is absolutely irreducible because as soon as we posit that it is reducible we conclude that it is not a "car", but merely a collection of parts.
In this context the "car" is merely the term we give for a perceived arrangement of those parts that acts in a certain way.
And I do not see it being any different with regard free-will: free-will is just the term for a certain type of pattern of activity that we consciously perceive as the ability to choose. But this covers what is beneath the surface.

But maybe I am misunderstanding what you mean by "it has to be a fundamental"?

 

[Syne]

Eternalism is precisely what you're positing when you say that each slice of time, whether it be in the past or the future, is as equally real as the present (as in physically "there"). I'm not saying that relativity necessitates it's adoption, but rather that you've already proposed it.

It's important to relate this back to a creation event because that's our context.

I assume that you're not suggesting that each slice of time exists in some superposition of different possible states, and if you're not, then we're talking about a future that is immutable. This is what follows from a creation event that includes the creation of the future, which it obviously does if you're saying that it has always existed.

I have not posited eternalism, and I invite you to find any quote of mine in this thread that comes anywhere near saying "each slice of time, whether it be in the past or the future, is as equally real as the present". These are your assumptions. It seems you are only running with your misunderstanding of relativity, and incidentally arguing a straw man.

Do you understand the notion that several minutes can pass for one observer while only one minute passes for another? There is no complicated "superposition", only a difference in rates of time observed. It is not a matter of the beginning and end being one in the time frame of a god, but that this time rate is simply a different rate running concurrently with what we commonly experience.

The naive mistake people usually make is in relating a god's minute to our own as a one for one equivalence, when the time rates are as dramatically different as they can get.

I have to ask, too, why you're even bothering to defend this notion, since it doesn't appear to be your preferred view anyway. Earlier you dealt with the issue of foreknowledge and free will by talking about maximal knowledge (which I agree could theoretically result in scarily inhuman accuracy even in a nondeterministic universe).

Further, I'm curious about what sort of theist you are. If I had to guess, I'd say a deist of some sort, but other than the fact that you seem quite liberal compared to some of the other theists around here, I don't have anything to go on.

Maybe you can now see that I am not defending the notion you have assumed. I do not really pigeon hole what I think by actively seeking a label. I do not really feel it necessary to my identity. Like everything else, there are aspects of deism I do not agree with. I will say that many would probably be hard pressed to call my view theistic.

But this is confusing "free agency" with merely acting randomly within a probability function.
If you roll a die and lack the knowledge to perfectly predict the number it will land on, are you saying that the die has "free agency" to be unpredictable?
Or does it merely obey the laws of physics?

Randomness is also considered to be unpredictability due to the lack of perfect knowledge of conditions.
If you had perfect knowledge of conditions... there would be no probability function - there would just be foreknowledge of the output.
...

Our own knowledge of conditions is limited at the quantum level, where we conclude there is randomness.
But this may be due to just not having the knowledge of what is actually going on... i.e. we can only ever have imperfect knowledge.

I am not confusing anything. I am simply avoiding a naive conflation of quantum theory and human behavior. That is a very broad domain across which to assume, between randomness and apparent determinism, no admixture exists. Assuming that everything is either ultimately deterministic or random could very well be a false dilemma.

I don't understand this?

If all existence is necessarily a creator god's essence, then it follows that anything available to any existence is available to the essence of the god. A god's essence does not suffer from the sort of separation we commonly perceive between our minds and bodies.

As you yourself noted, for fatalists, the problem of evil crops up. People not having free will and instead being fully determined can be part of the problem of evil (esp. in relation to, for example, mainstream Christianity and the problem of whether people are predestined to choose for Jesus and thus avoid eternal damnation, or not).

I have already pointed out that religion is not generally fatalistic, so it seems only atheists have any problem reconciling the problem of evil.

 

[Rav]

I have not posited eternalism

Let's backtrack:

There is also the matter of what may be "future" to a god. If our future is a god's present then there is nothing "yet to unfold". In that case, it does not even take omniscient, only omnipresence, to know what happens.

I assume that you're not saying that God may be present at just one arbitrary point in the future, but that he may be present at all points in the future. For God to be present at all points in the future, all points in the future must exist. If this was true at the creation event, then every possible point in time existed as a part of creation. That's eternalism.

 

[Sarkus]

I am not confusing anything. I am simply avoiding a naive conflation of quantum theory and human behavior. That is a very broad domain across which to assume, between randomness and apparent determinism, no admixture exists.

Yet you are saying quantum mechanics does not act randomly, yet failing to appreciate that one can act randomly within a probability function, i.e. with constraints that, after an infinite such identical cases, the overall outcomes would map to the probability function.
But it would depend on what you mean by random.

Assuming that everything is either ultimately deterministic or random could very well be a false dilemma.

It could be, but it would depend on what one means by "random", and whether anything truly is random or just appears so due to lack of knowledge/information... including at the quantum level.

 

[LoRaan]

I never knew how simplistic some people thought. I'll expalin how knowledge of the future influences nothing.

Let us say you travel throug time to the past with a perfect understanding of what happened to a certain person. If you never acted to change what that person does, did you take away their free will when they make the choice you knew they would make?

 

[wynn]

Got ya.
This is an argument from consequence, and possibly emotion thereof.
I, for one, do not think our free will is an actual will, nor free, but is merely an illusion of that.
BUT, from the view point of how we consciously perceive it and its practical implications, it is as though it is a fundamental.
It is merely a perspective.

One could argue that a "car" is absolutely irreducible because as soon as we posit that it is reducible we conclude that it is not a "car", but merely a collection of parts.
In this context the "car" is merely the term we give for a perceived arrangement of those parts that acts in a certain way.
And I do not see it being any different with regard free-will: free-will is just the term for a certain type of pattern of activity that we consciously perceive as the ability to choose. But this covers what is beneath the surface.

But maybe I am misunderstanding what you mean by "it has to be a fundamental"?

We've discussed this before ...

This is an argument from consequence, and possibly emotion thereof.
I, for one, do not think our free will is an actual will, nor free, but is merely an illusion of that.
BUT, from the view point of how we consciously perceive it and its practical implications, it is as though it is a fundamental.
It is merely a perspective.

I think this is a damning outlook.

Sure, as long as one's health and wealth are relatively intact, one can afford to think the way you suggest above.

However, when the going gets tough, when aging, illness and death strike, this is when the outlook as the one above really shows itself to be debilitating.

Tony Nicklinson, after hearing the court’s decision (Matt Cardy – Getty Images)


An argument from consequence, and possibly emotion thereof?

You really think that this man's suffering - both from being paralyzed after a stroke, as well from being denied physician-assisted suicide - you really think that this man's suffering is somehow not real, an illusion, "an argument from consequence, and possibly emotion thereof" -?

Do you really think that suffering is to be dismissed, as somehow irrelevant to "how things really are" -?
Should we say, "Yes, people suffer, but that doesn't change the fact that free will is nothing but an illusion" -?

 

[Saint]

I never followed up with all threads,
can someone summarized what had been discussed?
Do we have absolute free will?

 

[Sarkus]

I think this is a damning outlook.

You're certainly welcome to your opinion, as are we all.
But to me it is no more damning than any other outlook.

Sure, as long as one's health and wealth are relatively intact, one can afford to think the way you suggest above.

However, when the going gets tough, when aging, illness and death strike, this is when the outlook as the one above really shows itself to be debilitating.

No it doesn't. That is merely you arguing from emotion.

An argument from consequence, and possibly emotion thereof?

You really think that this man's suffering - both from being paralyzed after a stroke, as well from being denied physician-assisted suicide - you really think that this man's suffering is somehow not real, an illusion, "an argument from consequence, and possibly emotion thereof" -?

Other than as an attempt by to appeal to emotion, I fail to see how his suffering is relevant to this discussion.
Where have I said that his suffering is an argument from consequence, and possibly emotion thereof? How do you manage to equate the argument
you made to his physical suffering?

Do you really think that suffering is to be dismissed, as somehow irrelevant to "how things really are" -?
Should we say, "Yes, people suffer, but that doesn't change the fact that free will is nothing but an illusion" -?

I'm struggling to see how you have moved on to suffering as the focus of your argument, away from free-will? How does one equate to the other?
You think whether free-will is illusory or real will change the outcome of things?
If so then you fail to comprehend what is meant when someone says that free-will is illusory. It does not mean that free-will does not exist... it merely means that it does not exist as perceived.
But how it exists does not change the perception of how it operates at a practical level.

And all your examples speak to the practical perception of free-will (illusory or otherwise), which since the practical perception is the same in both cases, makes your examples moot.

 

[Syne]

I have not posited eternalism

Let's backtrack:

There is also the matter of what may be "future" to a god. If our future is a god's present then there is nothing "yet to unfold". In that case, it does not even take omniscient, only omnipresence, to know what happens.

I assume that you're not saying that God may be present at just one arbitrary point in the future, but that he may be present at all points in the future. For God to be present at all points in the future, all points in the future must exist. If this was true at the creation event, then every possible point in time existed as a part of creation. That's eternalism.

Let me make this simple. If a god is eternal then it is, de facto, "present at all points in the future". The future does not need to have any preexistence, just as tomorrow does not need to already exist for you to be present when it occurs. Like I already tried to explain, just because one second to a god could encompass the entirety of man's time, this does not mean that the duration of a god's and man's second are the same.

I am afraid I cannot explain any better without you having a fairly firm grasp of relativity.

Yet you are saying quantum mechanics does not act randomly, yet failing to appreciate that one can act randomly within a probability function, i.e. with constraints that, after an infinite such identical cases, the overall outcomes would map to the probability function.
But it would depend on what you mean by random.
It could be, but it would depend on what one means by "random", and whether anything truly is random or just appears so due to lack of knowledge/information... including at the quantum level.

There is a distinction between random and probabilistic. Probability is primarily employed for things that are too complex to be feasibly and deterministically described otherwise, but not necessarily random. Only in quantum mechanics does the randomness come forefront, but this does not undercut the basis of probability. Probability is all about the expectation for a particular result. Even in results that, taken individually, would be completely random, we can only predict them because their collective values display a central tendency. While each QM result is random, how the probability evolves (the central tendency changes over time) is deterministic.

So how someone can take the microcosmic randomness and assert it as the end-all of human behavior is beyond me. Seems like a rebuttal to a very specific argument rather than making a case in its own right.

But there is no "lack of knowledge/information" in quantum mechanics, as if a only a shortcoming of our measurements. The indeterminacy is inherent.

 

[Mazulu]

I think that free will depends upon our inner strength. Without inner strength, we will behave in whatever way leads to less pain or more pleasure. We will act according to our base nature. But when we have inner strength, we will do what is right, even if we have to suffer for it.

 

[Sarkus]

There is a distinction between random and probabilistic. Probability is primarily employed for things that are too complex to be feasibly and deterministically described otherwise, but not necessarily random. Only in quantum mechanics does the randomness come forefront, but this does not undercut the basis of probability. Probability is all about the expectation for a particular result. Even in results that, taken individually, would be completely random, we can only predict them because their collective values display a central tendency. While each QM result is random, how the probability evolves (the central tendency changes over time) is deterministic.

I'm not entirely sure what you're arguing about with this... given this matches fairly much to what I stated?
Unless it was to reiterate where we seem to agree?

So how someone can take the microcosmic randomness and assert it as the end-all of human behavior is beyond me. Seems like a rebuttal to a very specific argument rather than making a case in its own right.

Not sure anyone is saying that it is the end-all of human behaviour. Can you point to where I/they have said or suggested it, just so I can understand where you're coming from?

All I think has been commented is that an alternative to strict determinism is the probabilistic determinism - that allows for random events that conform/tend to a probability function.
So any argument here is not with regard the issue of randomness per se, as it is merely building randomness into the more widely understood strict-determinism concept... and the argument is that of the otherwise standard determinism v free-will.

But there is no "lack of knowledge/information" in quantum mechanics, as if a only a shortcoming of our measurements. The indeterminacy is inherent.

Sure - I was not claiming otherwise - merely differentiating between truly random and merely perceived randomness.