Free Will and Theism

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Having a choice is clearly important within the justice system.

But in the realm of metaphysics, having a choice is merely a preamble.

The mere possibility of a deity, or a magician, or a telepath being able to have known YESTERDAY what someone will do tomorrow doesnt entail causation … but it does entail the LACK of freewill (by whatever mechanism imaginable!).

Is there anyone who doesnt understand the entailment behind that reasoning? If it is possible to know yesterday … it is in the past. It is unchangeable.

203

What if you had a Futureviewerscope ™ and looked to see what someone would do tomorrow. And suppose you then do nothing that might alter the circumstances in any way. Are you removing their free will? What if you tell them what you saw and they decide not to do that? Do they now have free will?

Finally, how is this relevant to any of the current discussion?

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@John_Harshman

Whether your method is magical, mystical, divine or technological - - if the Universe some how permits knowing what someone’s choice is a day BEFORE he chooses then there is no Free Will.

It doesnt entail that the method is the CAUSE … but it does entail that the Universe does not permit FREE will.

This is relevant because most compatibilist arguments (variously introduced on these boards with varying degrees of persuasiveness) for Free Will say that it is enough that different circumstances WOULD have led to different choices.

But no version allows for a chooser - - today - - to choose differently yesterday, in order to have a different result today.

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That’s correct. Compatibilists do not find that the possibility of a chooser to have chosen otherwise is necessarily a meaningful use of the label “free will”. Compatibilists do not claim that libertarian free will and determinism and/or fatalism are compatible. They claim that there exists some notion at all that one could reasonably call “free will” and is compatible with determinism and/or fatalism. Whether we are willing to agree to call anything free will that does not meet the libertarian definition, however, is our business.

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There is no libertarian free will. Then again, if the universe doesn’t permit knowing the choice, that doesn’t mean there is libertarian free will. So it isn’t clear why you brought that up.

But what about the other scenario: I look into my Futureviewerscope, see that you will have scrambled eggs for breakfast tomorrow, and tell you that. You then decide to spite me and have waffles instead. Does that mean you have free will?

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The hypothetical, I believe, is assuming that the Futureviewerscope gives you “knowledge” of the future, rather than a mere hint of it. It does not merely predict what is statistically likely to happen based on some currently available information and some currently accepted model of nature, but rather “reveals a true fact” about the future. Obviously, in that sense, it is not possible that the foreseen event does not occur. One underlying and highly contentious assumption is, of course, that there is a fact of the matter (discoverable or otherwise) as to what events do or do not occur in the future.

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I don’t see, however, why libertarianism would entail that it is impossible for John’s device to detect what free will actions will have been taken in the future.

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If libertarian free will exists, then it is not the case that future events are always fixed in advance. Every decision is a juncture whence the universe can evolve in any one of a multitude of ways. Therefore there does not at present exist a fact about which of those ways will definitively be assumed. It is only a fact, that one of the possible branches will be assumed, but not which of them. So John’s device, if libertarianism is true, cannot reveal such facts, but at best only try and predict them. To be sure, it can happen to make a correct prediction, it can even be arbitrarily good at predicting the future. But, if libertarian free will exists, then free agents definitionally retain the freedom to violate the device’s predictions at points where they are free to pick options that conflict with its predictions. Thus, the device will have some margin of error, no matter how it generates its claims about the future, if libertarian free will exists.

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I’d say that it is even inconsistent with compatibilist formulations of Free Will. Certainly it demands some form of fatalism. Ordinary cause-and-effect determinism is not sufficient to let the device work without some constraints.

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You are right, not about constraints, but conditions.
Determinism means that there is only one way for any one state of the system in question to evolve. What’s necessary for deterministic fatalism is the additional supposition, that there is at some point a definitive state. That is to say, if there can exist a complete description of the total state of the universe, and if the laws are deterministic, then there exists a fact of the matter about which state will be assumed at which point in the future. In that case, a being with access to all the laws by which states evolve and the universe’s total state (a.k.a. Laplace’s demon) can also state the future infallibly. Fatalism is indeed necessary for claims about the future to be factual in the present, but determinism is neither required nor sufficient for fatalism to be true. It is, however, compatible with determinism, namely via the additional premise that the deterministically evolving system is in a definitive state at some point in time.

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I am not imagining the Futureviewerscope as a device that predicts the future based on present conditions. Rather, I imagine it as a device that allows us to directly view future events, much as a telescope allows us to view the present, or a security camera the past.

Of course, there may be reasons unrelated to “free will” that make such a device impossible. However, if we disregard those, then the mere fact that we can know you will have eaten waffles tomorrow does not mean you do not have free will, any more than does the fact we know you had scrambled eggs yesterday.

213

The point is, if you know, as a matter of fact, that I will have eaten waffles tomorrow, then me not having had waffles tomorrow is not a way events can go. Whether or not that is what we mean by “free will”, I do not have the ability to make things go another way. In many libertarian formulations, the ability to have done otherwise is what “free will” is a label for. Libertarian free will in that sense requires the possibility for things to go multiple ways, and if in fact they cannot, then it is not the case that they can…

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Then you don’t understand how time travel stories work. Let’s suppose that tomorrow I have scrambled eggs for breakfast. Then, around lunch time I hop into my time machine, travel back to today, and tell myself to have waffle instead. Can’t I take future me’s advice? Now of course that creates a time paradox, and there have been several proposed solutions to that in fiction. But the point is that even if I change my breakfast plans, it’s still deterministic, and there’s no libertarian free will involved.

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It is also true that, if we know you ate scrambled eggs yesterday, then it cannot be true that you ate waffles instead. That, by itself, does not refute libertarian free will. Once an action has been taken it cannot be reversed, regardless of whether it was taken freely.

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Another way to frame the question: Could an omniscient being know what future actions will be taken by another being that has libertarian free will? I see no reason it couldn’t know

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@Faizal_Ali

Is there a typo in that sentence? That action, by itself, means libertarian free will IS refuted. That action is not the cause of its refutation. But it is the self sufficient test.

Let’s suppose that there was a time machine that allowed you to go back and argue with yourself, and the prediction didnt change - - then we could conclude that you were not persuasive enough to change your mind. Or: that someone followed you back and re-persuaded you back to your original choice, cancelling out your efforts.

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@Faizal_Ali

The best philosophers agree that the mere act of correctly knowing, yesterday, what someone chooses tomorrow entails that choice is UN-FREE.

This is why Prof. Dennett was so unrelenting about redefining Free Will in a way that still made sense with human agency.

219

Maybe when I retire I will found The Church of the Polyhedral, whose followers make decisions based on the rill of dice. Maybe we can’t have free will, but we can still be friends unpredictable. :cowboy_hat_face:

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220

Oh well, as long as it’s the best philosophers. Who can argue with that?

221

The question is ultimately what you mean by “let’s suppose”.

I have scrambled eggs.

I have scrambled eggs at some times, and I do not have scrambled eggs at other times. If time is a mode we recognize, then the statement above is not true, because we can specify times to which it does not apply. It is also not false, because we can specify times to which it does apply. It is not a proposition in a logic equipped with the time mode, because it does not have a definitive truth value in such a logic. So, in order to render time-modal logical propositions, we need to include references to specific points or ranges of time:

I will have scrambled eggs for breakfast tomorrow.

The statement is now about a specific time. The question is whether this statement is currently a matter of fact.

If it only becomes factual tomorrow at breakfast, and it is not factual now, then when the time comes it could be that I do indeed have scrambled eggs, or that I do not have scrambled eggs. A machine that tells me now whether I will or not can, in principle, err, because what ever it is accessing is not factual information about the future but a mere guess, how ever well founded.

If, on the other hand, it is currently a matter of fact whether I will have scrambled eggs for breakfast tomorrow, then there is currently a truth of the matter, and truths are not falsehoods. A machine that provides access to that truth cannot reveal an incorrect truth value and therefore I have no ability to violate what it reveals.

At best one could imagine a world where there is a fact about breakfast tomorrow, but not about lunch, say. How the universe would know what class of events or time scale to keep factual, I don’t know, and it would not give back the freedom to contradict those facts, but on the face of it, I suppose one could reconcile the idea that some free will exists with the idea that some statements about the future can be factual.