Predestination and Free Will

[Bdoomed]

This only functions on an individual level, of course. The predestination question gets at more cosmic truths. If we rewind time and replay it, will it replay out the same way again? Chaos theory might suggest otherwise. But if we agree that it does, then reality is predestined -- from first cause, all other actions and reacitons are predetermined; they exist within the potential of first cause. And if that's the case, then free will -- as it is theologically defined as the possibility for a person to make moral or immoral decisions without constraint -- is a logical impossibility.

Hmm i dont know, replaying time with the same outcome might be explained by psychohistory
i just recently finished Foundation, and honestly the concept of psychohistory makes a whole lot of sense.  Would history repeat itself because of predestination or because of human nature? or is that the same thing? is human nature the agent of predestination?

[slic]

And if that's the case, then free will -- as it is theologically defined as the possibility for a person to make moral or immoral decisions without constraint -- is a logical impossibility.

Still lost.  If you are saying that any decision you make that is constrained by other factors is not free will then none of us will ever have it.  Here is a ridiculous example:  I cannot fly under my own power therefore because of that constraint, I lack free will to decide how to get downtown.
It smacks of the "he's not bad, he was just raised that way" kind of arguement.  Absolutely, enviroment is a large factor in a person's attitudes/behaviour, peer pressure will likely cause someone to behave in ways they know they shouldn't, but that is what free will is all about, it's your answer to that multiple choice question, "What do I do now?"

Isn't there a lot of research suggesting that the brain activity for justifying decisions only occurs after the actions have already been carried out?

I just read "Second Person, Present Tense" by Daryl Gregory that touched on that.  So I went looking for more info (one of the main reasons I love sci-fi - all the new ideas). 
So this is a tough one - my subconscious mind tells me I'm thirsty and starts my arm moving towards the glass.  I'm only consciously aware after this has started, but still feel I consciously made the decision to move my arm.  Did I really decide? 
For me the rub is whether I continue in the action.  There is little that I can't change in the half second or so between the act and being aware of it.  I think of when I'm on the soccer field, and I'm very thirsty, I don't immediately leave the field to get something to drink.  Or when it hurts to walk the next day (I'm old ), I override my brain's desire to just sit with my legs up watching old World Cup games.

In regards to God's all-knowingness and my mortal sins, my wife came up with an excellent anology:
When our kids were learning to walk there were times when they were teetering and it was pretty clear they were about to fall down.  We let them fall down.  We knew they would fall, but chose not to interfere - otherwise how would they learn?  To take it a step further, when my first daughter was born, I knew she would learn to walk, and I knew that she would fall down doing so.  Does that mean I should have done something to prevent her from falling, like padding the floors or letting her only ride in a cart - should I have never let her try to walk?  Being all-knowing doesn't mean I have to interfere.

Would history repeat itself because of predestination or because of human nature? or is that the same thing? is human nature the agent of predestination?

My quick take is that predictability is not predestination.  If I always ask for an extra slice of cake, that doesn't mean I have no free will, just no will power
I've always felt that psychohistory is a "refinement" of things like Chaos Theory.  My thumbnail understanding of Chaos Theory is that there randomness in a system - but isn't that more because there isn't enough refinement of understanding.  Think of how much better weather prediction has become. 

[Rachel Swirsky]

I think we're arguing from different definitions, which is more or less how it always goes.

The question is in essence theological because of certain claims which were made by the church regarding free will, which someone eventually figured out contradicted other claims made by the church regarding omniscience.

Hobbes and Bramhall: http://www.diesel-ebooks.com/cgi-bin/item/0511034938/Hobbes-and-Bramhall-on-Liberty-and-Necessity-eBook.html

I was hoping to find it online for free since it's in the public domain, but unfortunately, it looks expensive.

[sirana]

I would say that all religions have some truth in them.  An idea that is totally divorced from reality won't last very long, so the fact that these religions have endured shows that they all have something going for them. 

I disagree on that one, not only on the scope of religions but on the scope of ideas in general. I think there are a lot of ideas that have endured for a really long time, but that I don't view as something positive. Xenophobia, blind obedience, the desire to dominate weaker ones.
I don't think just because an idea (or a religion) has been capable of surviving for a long time it gets any more true or false than it were if it had just lasted a week.



   

[FNH]

*12378411*.drw
*12378419*.drw
*12378420*.drw
...

[slic]

I would say that all religions have some truth in them.  An idea that is totally divorced from reality won't last very long, so the fact that these religions have endured shows that they all have something going for them. 

I disagree on that one...

Sirana is exactly right on that one.  And I strongly feel that the Mr. Tweedy's belief is terribly dangerous.  How long did we believe the idea that the Sun revolved around the Earth?  What could be more divorced from reality than that?

[Rachel Swirsky]

With respect to Mr. Tweedy, I doubt he entirely believes what he's saying. Lots of ideas have survived that I doubt he'd endorse simply because they've been around for a long time. Slic's example of the sun revolving around the world is one example. FGM (female genital mutilation) is another -- would Tweedy argue that there's a core of truth to the idea that women with intact genitalia are unable to birth healthy children, simply because this is an idea which has survived for milennia, often in a spiritual context? Or that removing women's external genitalia as a good reflects some kind of "truth", simply because it's a tradition -- often spiritual -- which has endured?
 
--

Ideas don't travel just because of veracity or non-veracity. The author of Stumbling on Happiness talks about it more or less like this:

Some concepts are super-replicators. They replicate because they have some function. That function may or may not be overt.

Let's talk about it with genes. If there were a gene for making people enjoy orgasms, then that gene would replicate like mad, because it would make people more likely to have sex, and thus more likely to reproduce. If that gene were to carry bad things -- say, tooth decay -- it would still replicate because if there's a population of healthy, fertile toothy people but don't enjoy sex, and a population of healthy, fertile toothless people who love sex, who's going to reproduce?

So, a gene can replicate like crazy, producing benefit A (so positive that it needs to be replicated), but having side-effect B (which is negative).

(This is not a real gene; however, it's a description of a real process.)

We can see the same things happen with ideas. Stumbling on Happiness brings out a hypothetical game to prove the example. Imagine you have two teams that were in phone contact, and told them that there was a game where they had to pass ideas along by phone, and that the team that had the most correct ideas at the end of the game will win. One point will be given for each correct idea, and one point taken away for each incorrect idea. One team, the Perfects, only passes on correct ideas. The other team, the Imperfects, passes on correct and incorrect ideas.

You expect the Perfects will win, but they won't necessarily. Stumbling on Happiness suggests that an idea like "Talking on the phone all day will make you healthy" would help the Imperfects win. Although it's not a true idea, the falsehood will probably have the effect of getting the Imperfects to share more ideas (in bulk). Thus, by the end, they may have so many correct ideas, that even with the incorrect ones deducted, they still have more points than the Perfects team. The idea is false, but its side effect is to facilitate the task at hand.

So, it's not necessary for a religious concept -- or any concept -- to be truthful in order for it to be widely replicated. It only has to address some need, whether covert or overt.

[Bdoomed]

An idea that is totally divorced from reality won't last very long

The idea that blacks are inferior to whites was probably the most divorced idea from reality ever, yet it survived for centuries.

the sun example is weak.  to our point of view at the time, in our reality, we could not see the earth revolving around the sun.  yes it was divorced from reality, but we can only have the reality we percieve.  "Truth is but the shadow of artificial things."

[Rachel Swirsky]

That means that any argument is weak, bdoomed, including yours about racial disparities in intelligence. If truth is only in perception, then white people perceived black people as unintelligent, and so that was true. (And black people perceived white people as unintelligent, cruel asshats in return, and that was true*)

*and you can't really say "cruel" and "asshats" are off the mark.

[slic]

I chose the example of the Sun and Earth for exactly the reason you pointed out, Bdoomed.  Unfortunately, I often get pulled away from the 'puter for various reasons, and don't explain my thoughts completely.  Palimpsest touched on it, somewhat but let me explain.

In the case of the Sun revolving around the Earth, it couldn't be more obvious to my senses that it travels through the sky while the Earth remains unmoving.  However, the fact that the planet Earth rotates around the Sun is a cosmic, no, a universal, truth.  Anyone except the few bodies on this mudball can clearly see that is the case.  How much more parochial can an idea get? 
So if our senses trick us about something as "obvious" as the rotation of the planet, how can we believe them when it comes to something as esoteric as an invisble god?  Or other ideas that purport to be "Truth"?

The foundation of our reality is based on what we believe.  I stay away from absolutes and anything that tells me one group/species/whatever is supposed to be better than another.

[ClintMemo]

I step away from my computer for the weekend and I miss way too many posts.

Let my try and catch up.

This is what I think:
Predestination means that some event or events WILL occur in the future and cannot be stopped or changed.

Predestination and free-will are mutually exclusive.  If my path is predetermined, it doesn't matter if I can see it or not. I still can't get off of it.  All the theories involving time and multiple dimensions may muddy the waters but they change nothing.  If something is fated to happen then I lack the ability to choose otherwise.

If I only *think* I have free will then God is deluding me.  (and what that would be saying about God is another topic )

Asimov's fictional Psycho-history only applied to masses. There were several places in the trilogy where someone warned about applying the equations to an individual (yet he always did and it almost always worked out - except for when the mule showed up).  It was statistics applied to psychology.

The sun is an interesting example. IIRC, the Greeks knew that the earth revolved around the sun. One of them even measured the diameter of the earth fairly accurately using some clever geometry (sorry - don't remember the details). It was the Europeans of the middle ages that got things so fouled up.

[slic]

This is what I think:
Predestination means that some event or events WILL occur in the future and cannot be stopped or changed.

Predestination and free-will are mutually exclusive.  If my path is predetermined, it doesn't matter if I can see it or not. I still can't get off of it.  All the theories involving time and multiple dimensions may muddy the waters but they change nothing.  If something is fated to happen then I lack the ability to choose otherwise.

Well, I certainly can't tell you what you think is wrong, and I think our difference in the definitions is semantics - I see free will as being able to make my own choice.  This means to me that predestination and free-will are not mutually exclusive.

So let me ask you this - if the future is not set, how is it that the past is?  Although you and I are seeing this part of the timeline as the present, my grandchildren are seeing this part of the timeline as the past.

[Rachel Swirsky]

Do you have the physics to back up the assertion that your grandchildren are, in some kind of quasi-temporal now, viewing these events as past?

[slic]

No, I don't have any mathematical equation to prove that time is a fourth dimension extending backwards as well as forwards, that cause leads to effect or that my children will actually grow up and have children.  But take any historical figure, including "unfamous" ones like relatives, and use their perspective.  Let's try my paternal Grandfather - if we could go back in time to October 15, 1935 and ask him where is son would be living in September 23, 2005, he would not know.  He wouldn't know how many grandchildren he would have. 
He couldn't see that part of the timeline from his perspective in 1935, but I can in 2007.  Does that mean the timeline didn't exist then that it is built as we go, or is it more likely (Occam's Razor likely) that the timeline is like a road already built and we are just travelling along it.
Just before you crest a hill and see a city laid out before you, was it built just before you saw it or had it already been built and you just hadn't got there yet?

[Rachel Swirsky]

It's no clearer with historical figures than it is with hypothetical grandchildren. It's a compelling metaphorical construction, but I am not convinced that the initial assumptions are correct.

We may think of time as being like space, but the two aren't identical. The question is whether time unfolds, or is simultaneous, or whether our metaphors for it are broken. I'm sure any physicists hanging out can clarify.

[Heradel]

IANAP (physicist), but well, I read, and from the last I knew there's no widely accepted theory/law why the arrow of time is only going one way. Best bet's Wikipedia, which doesn't have a good quick explanation so you'll have to read the articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_physics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time
~~~~~~~

I hold that life without free will, or with an omnipotent being that takes an interest in mortal affairs, is a meaningless exercise. Which is the last I'll say because I'm taking a break from debates due to their tendency to suck me in and I'm summer-job-hunting due to unforeseeable circumstances in relation to a planned job.

[ClintMemo]

No, I don't have any mathematical equation to prove that time is a fourth dimension extending backwards as well as forwards, that cause leads to effect or that my children will actually grow up and have children.  But take any historical figure, including "unfamous" ones like relatives, and use their perspective.  Let's try my paternal Grandfather - if we could go back in time to October 15, 1935 and ask him where is son would be living in September 23, 2005, he would not know.  He wouldn't know how many grandchildren he would have.  He couldn't see that part of the timeline from his perspective in 1935, but I can in 2007.

And he were not predestined to have those children, then you would not be here now to go back and ask him.  If his path is set, then he has no ability to choose not to have children.  He has no free will.

  Does that mean the timeline didn't exist then that it is built as we go, or is it more likely (Occam's Razor likely) that the timeline is like a road already built and we are just travelling along it.

How is that in any way a simpler and more likely explanation?
It seems much more likely that the future is not set (which coincides nicely with my observations) and that traveling back in time is not possible. Since all the theories on time travel that I have seen are based on abilities that are themselves not theoretically possible (like traveling at the speed of light), it seems likely that traveling back in time is not possible.

Just before you crest a hill and see a city laid out before you, was it built just before you saw it or had it already been built and you just hadn't got there yet?

You are confusing space and time. Moving over the crest of the hill is traveling through space.

[slic]

No, I don't have any mathematical equation to prove that time is a fourth dimension extending backwards as well as forwards, that cause leads to effect or that my children will actually grow up and have children.  But take any historical figure, including "unfamous" ones like relatives, and use their perspective.  Let's try my paternal Grandfather - if we could go back in time to October 15, 1935 and ask him where is son would be living in September 23, 2005, he would not know.  He wouldn't know how many grandchildren he would have.  He couldn't see that part of the timeline from his perspective in 1935, but I can in 2007.

And he were not predestined to have those children, then you would not be here now to go back and ask him.  If his path is set, then he has no ability to choose not to have children.  He has no free will.

Again this is semantics - you feel that not being able to chose removes free will ipso facto there is no free will unless the timeline is made up as we go.

  Does that mean the timeline didn't exist then that it is built as we go, or is it more likely (Occam's Razor likely) that the timeline is like a road already built and we are just travelling along it.

How is that in any way a simpler and more likely explanation?
It seems much more likely that the future is not set (which coincides nicely with my observations) and that traveling back in time is not possible. Since all the theories on time travel that I have seen are based on abilities that are themselves not theoretically possible (like traveling at the speed of light), it seems likely that traveling back in time is not possible.

One theory relies on the idea that the timeline is constantly in flux reacting to the decisions of billions of people (not to mention other alien life spread throughout the universe), being built pico second, by pico second (or smaller).  The other theory is that it is a complete line, and we are travelling along it, only able to percieve it in one direction.  Which is simpler?

Just before you crest a hill and see a city laid out before you, was it built just before you saw it or had it already been built and you just hadn't got there yet?

You are confusing space and time. Moving over the crest of the hill is traveling through space.

No, it was a metaphor.
[/quote]

[ClintMemo]

And he were not predestined to have those children, then you would not be here now to go back and ask him.  If his path is set, then he has no ability to choose not to have children.  He has no free will.

Again this is semantics - you feel that not being able to chose removes free will ipso facto there is no free will unless the timeline is made up as we go.

Well since Free Will is defined as the ability to make choices (if it isn't, then what is it?), then lacking the ability to make choices clearly means lacking free will.

One theory relies on the idea that the timeline is constantly in flux reacting to the decisions of billions of people (not to mention other alien life spread throughout the universe), being built pico second, by pico second (or smaller).  The other theory is that it is a complete line, and we are travelling along it, only able to percieve it in one direction.  Which is simpler?

It is only simpler if you are trying to reconcile predestination and free will. The simplest explanation is the unlisted "option c) the future is not set."

Just before you crest a hill and see a city laid out before you, was it built just before you saw it or had it already been built and you just hadn't got there yet?

You are confusing space and time. Moving over the crest of the hill is traveling through space.

No, it was a metaphor.

Ok, just to nitpick.  It is a bad analogy because it requires both space (over the hill) AND time (before).  I'm not sure how a good analogy could be constructed using just a single dimension since time is like no other dimension.

[slic]

Got my nitpick comb out so here goes:

And he were not predestined to have those children, then you would not be here now to go back and ask him.  If his path is set, then he has no ability to choose not to have children.  He has no free will.

Again this is semantics - you feel that not being able to chose removes free will ipso facto there is no free will unless the timeline is made up as we go.

Well since Free Will is defined as the ability to make choices (if it isn't, then what is it?), then lacking the ability to make choices clearly means lacking free will.

I have always been saying in my theory that people still have the ability to make choices.  That is why I see them as not mutually exclusive.  Where people disagree with me is that they feel it is an illusion.  "How is it free will, if the outcome is already known (to God, future people, whomever)?"  And I say it is free will because the decider doesn't know the outcome.  Take Columbus deciding which ship to sail in - he freely chose to ride in Mariagalante of his own will - from his vantage point ten minutes before he made the choice he doesn't know what he will chose, from my vantage point in the future, I can still look into the past and see what it was - before he himself made that choice.

For the record, my wife feels that the future is also "not set".

One theory relies on the idea that the timeline is constantly in flux reacting to the decisions of billions of people (not to mention other alien life spread throughout the universe), being built pico second, by pico second (or smaller).  The other theory is that it is a complete line, and we are travelling along it, only able to percieve it in one direction.  Which is simpler?

It is only simpler if you are trying to reconcile predestination and free will. The simplest explanation is the unlisted "option c) the future is not set." 

How is that not the same as A?  The future is not set in A, it is being built as we move forward in time.  At some point Future becomes the Present.

Just before you crest a hill and see a city laid out before you, was it built just before you saw it or had it already been built and you just hadn't got there yet?

You are confusing space and time. Moving over the crest of the hill is traveling through space.

No, it was a metaphor.

Ok, just to nitpick.  It is a bad analogy because it requires both space (over the hill) AND time (before).  I'm not sure how a good analogy could be constructed using just a single dimension since time is like no other dimension.

I won't argue this - you understand the point.

[SFEley]

IANAP (physicist), but well, I read, and from the last I knew there's no widely accepted theory/law why the arrow of time is only going one way. Best bet's Wikipedia, which doesn't have a good quick explanation so you'll have to read the articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_physics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time

The definitive layman's version of this is of course Hawking's A Brief History of Time, but Brian Greene had a shorter and pretty clear explanation for it in his book The Fabric of the Cosmos.  I can't do it justice, but in a nutshell it runs like this:

There is no physical law says time can only happen in one direction (in theory, all physical processes are completely reversible) but entropy creates an overwhelming statistical force that pushes time in one direction.  Entropy isn't a fundamental force, it's just statistics: any time a system changes, it's far more likely to become more disordered than more ordered.  This is true because there are far more disordered states than ordered ones.  (As a simple example, consider shuffling a deck of cards.  They come out of the box in sorted order, right?  It is not physically impossible that shuffling it many times could put them back in sorted order, but it never happens.  The number of unsorted combinations exceeds the sorted ones by many orders of magnitude.  Once the deck is highly unsorted, it tends to stay highly unsorted.)

From an entropy perspective, reversing time would simply mean moving from a disordered system to an ordered one.  The cards are resorted, the pieces of the shattered cup come back together again, the gas pours back into the smokestack and condenses into coal.  None of this stuff is physically impossible.  For any process, it's conceivable that the energy lost due to the process's inefficiencies (i.e., creation of disorder) will eventually come back and undo the process exactly.  But it doesn't happen on the whole.  Once energy becomes waste heat it tends to stay wasted.  It doesn't have to, but the probability is overwhelming.

Obvious conclusion from this?  Well, if the universe moves statistically toward more and more disorder all the time, then it must have started with the highest degree of order (the lowest entropy) it will ever have.  This is backed up by cosmology and Big Bang theory.  If gravity ever pulled things back into that "cosmic egg" singularity again, then we'd move back from higher entropy to lower entropy and time would in fact be reversed during the compression.  Right now our best observations indicate that this is not the fate of the universe; instead, the universe will likely just keep diffusing forever and becoming less and less ordered.  We can have some interesting local reversals of entropy (I like to call that "life") but they never last, and they very rarely undo anything. 

I personally like this idea a lot: that time and its immutability are not strictly a physical reality at all, but rather a sort of statistical illusion.  Time, then, is just the thing that allows us to perceive the difference between order and disorder. 

What does this say for free will?  ...No idea.  But I thought it was cool.  >8->

[Thaurismunths]

Can this question of predestination vs. free will ever have a real answer?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if we have free will than the answer is "yes" but we may not ever be able to prove it empathically (so the answer could be "yes" or "no"). However, if we don't have free will, we will reach whichever answer we were predestined to reach (either "yes" or "no"), and think we reached it all on our own.
If we have free will, than laws are an important to guide society.
If we don't have free will, than laws aren't necessary, but we are (apparently) predestined to write, enforce, and re-write them.
If we have free will, we'll make our own decisions.
If we don't have free will, we'll never know we don't make our own decisions.

[ClintMemo]

Got my nitpick comb out so here goes:

And he were not predestined to have those children, then you would not be here now to go back and ask him.  If his path is set, then he has no ability to choose not to have children.  He has no free will.

Again this is semantics - you feel that not being able to chose removes free will ipso facto there is no free will unless the timeline is made up as we go.

Well since Free Will is defined as the ability to make choices (if it isn't, then what is it?), then lacking the ability to make choices clearly means lacking free will.

I have always been saying in my theory that people still have the ability to make choices.  That is why I see them as not mutually exclusive.  Where people disagree with me is that they feel it is an illusion.  "How is it free will, if the outcome is already known (to God, future people, whomever)?"  And I say it is free will because the decider doesn't know the outcome.  Take Columbus deciding which ship to sail in - he freely chose to ride in Mariagalante of his own will - from his vantage point ten minutes before he made the choice he doesn't know what he will chose, from my vantage point in the future, I can still look into the past and see what it was - before he himself made that choice.

For the record, my wife feels that the future is also "not set".

If you abstract that more, it looks like "I am defining A and B as two mutually exclusive things that can exist at the same time.  This is allowable because I am defining it that way."

One theory relies on the idea that the timeline is constantly in flux reacting to the decisions of billions of people (not to mention other alien life spread throughout the universe), being built pico second, by pico second (or smaller).  The other theory is that it is a complete line, and we are travelling along it, only able to percieve it in one direction.  Which is simpler?

It is only simpler if you are trying to reconcile predestination and free will. The simplest explanation is the unlisted "option c) the future is not set." 

How is that not the same as A?  The future is not set in A, it is being built as we move forward in time.  At some point Future becomes the Present.

Doh!
Sorry - I misread that originally.

[ClintMemo]

Part of the problem lies with the definitions.
"all powerful" and "all knowing" are logical impossibilities.  Predestination aside, something can't know everything because some things are false and cannot be known - for example, a four sided triangle.  The temptation is to define all knowing as "knows all that is knowable",  but that just begs us to define all powerful as "can do all that can be done." 

Getting back to predestination,
if God is all knowing and all powerful by the revised versions above, then maybe God does not know the future exactly. That leaves predestination out of it an free will is intact.  (and for those wondering about biblical prophecies, maybe God is really good at God's version of psycho-history.  )

[slic]

If you abstract that more, it looks like "I am defining A and B as two mutually exclusive things that can exist at the same time.  This is allowable because I am defining it that way."

This is why terms need to be defined in an arguement.  You are doing the same thing, by basically saying Free Will cannot exist if the future is set.

And since the nitpick comb is still out, I'm saying that Free Will and a Set Future are not mutually exclusive.

What I have also found is that this topic is almost like religion - you can't really argue the facts and some people find comfort in the idea that the future is always open to change, while others find comfort in the idea that the timeline is static.