»Choice vs. An Omniscient Being«

sure blondie

Tiefling wrote:

Here's how I would home.nc.rr.com... my argument. But I quite understand if you don't want to discuss any of this further. That's your prerogative, .

It's not a case of me wanting to discuss it further, I feel there is little more to discuss unless someone brings something new to the table. All we're doing a the moment is restating the same viewpoints in different ways.

I followed your link, but found the same arguments used here already so unless you have anything to add...

marl64 wrote:

I followed your link, but found the same arguments used here already

Thus my use of the word "summary," .

See ya around.

Hello again!

Right now this little problem was about whether an omniscient being refutes free will. I have now come across Laplace's demon which is the traditional version of that argument.

The problem with this argument is obviously that you start bringing in some kind of other worldly being and the argument becomes ontological. The demon can't be some machine within the world itself because it will have to deal with infinite numbers with perfect accuracy. Instead some kind of otherwordly mind capable of dealing with all these huge pieces of information at once is required. Anyone who has seen the ontological argument for God's existence will know that such arguments are ridiculous and end up becoming simple word play.

Popper suggests we replace the Laplace demon with a super scientist (Karl Popper - last two names of The Kid - neat eh?) The super scientist . This is simply a person finitely (not INfinitely) more intelligent than ourselves. Popper uses this to follow what he calls the principle of accountability:

Principle of Accountability: For any finite degree of accuracy in predicating some outcome, we can by inspecting the nature of the prediction task and our theories, determine a degree of precision in measurement that will deliver that result.

The super-scientist uses his extra accurate credance to predict to a high level of accuracy what will happen in the future. However, the fact remains that Popper's whole suggestion of this character is simply to disprove determinism.

For example Popper points out that we might be able to look at the behaviour of a fly and work out where it is likely to land but we might be off by a few inches. How would we correct this level of accuracy. Well it seems that we can't know where to look. 'How about physiological aspects concerning the nervous system' someone might argue? Well that means that unlike the intuitive idea that we can predict behaviour by looking at intentions and motives we should instead look elsewhere, and this is worrying. The deterministic theory also suggests that we could know what kinds of compositions Mozart might have come up with in other circumstances and this idea of accurately discovering pieces of music that were never created seems quite absurd.

Having read Earman's work it seems that (in another thread) Vibers was actually right to focus on time as a problem with Russell's idea. He claims that the whole of time can be worked out as a function. But that suggests that if time had any kinds of fluctuations other than simply 'the lapse of time' as we normally know it, then we would suddenly have an indeterminate universe.

Hmmm going into the multiple possible universes stuff now. This is tricky stuff!

its hard to prove anything nowaday....