I can’t understand why you think that’s the question. Nor do I have a clue about your analysis, which seems entirely irrelevant to the scenario and to any notion of free will or lack thereof.
It seems to me that this can be rephrased that I do not have the ability to decide other than what I decide. But that would be true whatever the case, free will or otherwise.
To me the interesting question is emergence. A bunch of quarks ricocheting around during the big bang can in principle have their movement fully explained in terms of mechanics. When those quarks are bundled up as a person they can loop around a park. That movement does not break mechanics, but cannot be explained solely in terms of mechanical laws either. So if that movement is deterministic, emergent laws have to be identified to account. Our rationality and creativity is emergent, we unavoidably and actively participate in that, and that may be free will enough.
My point is that in the ordinary course of cause and effect it is entirely possible that your telling me of a choice I will make is sufficient to cause me to choose differently. For the FutureViewer to work you cannot tell me the choice that I will make in such a case. Yet in the ordinary course of cause and effect as we understand it there is nothing to guarantee that you cannot tell me what you witnessed through the FutureViewer.
So, either there are cases where the FutureViewer cannot work or there is more to determinism than the ordinary caorse of cause and effect as we understand it, which will either prevent you telling me the prediction or prevent that knowledge from changing my actions.
(I am reminded of a Larry Niven story where a scholar notes that several past civilisations had attempted to build time machines - and all of them were destroyed before the time machine could be completed.)
Yes, I completely agree. if the FutureViewer cannot err, then the thing it predicts will occur, whether because or in spite of people who the prediction is about being aware of the prediction. If revealing the prediction stands to change the future, then the FutureViewer was never inerrant to begin with.
Additionally, if the future is factual, then an inerrant FutureViewer is at least logically possible. If the future is not set in proverbial stone, however, then any FutureViewer must in principle have at least some margin of error.
There’s a common notion that the invention of a time machine will always eventually result in someone going back and changing the past in such a way that the time machine is not invented. Thus reality prunes itself of paradox. Of course that actually creates a paradox, because if the time machine is never invented, nobody could have gone back to change things. The time traveler must come from nowhere and return to nowhere.
Only branching timestreams can resolve a paradox. If I begin in a universe where I had scrambled eggs, go back in time and convince myself to have waffles instead, there’s a universe in which I had one breakfast and a universe in which I had the other. Not sure which universe the time traveler returns to. But still, no free will results; it’s causality all the way.
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No.
They are either wrong, or you don’t understand their position.
But, again, that is no less the case about what you did yesterday. So, sure, if you had scrambled eggs for breakfast yesterday, then that is a truth and no one has the ability to make it not true. Regardless, this by itself is not sufficient to demonstrate that you do not have free will. It only demonstrates that, once you do something as a result of your free will, it can never be true that you did not do it. I remain unconvinced that this state of affairs is changed just by, instead, referring to something you will have done tomorrow.
Yes, exactly.
My model of the Futureviewerscope seems to work somewhat differently than John’s, With my model, once I have seen something will happen, it cannot be changed, any more than something that occurred in the past can be changed. So if I see you eating waffles tomorrow and tell you not to eat waffles tomorrow, I will also know that you disregarded my orders because I have already seen you eating the waffles. That, of course, leaves open the question of whether your decision to disobey me was an act of free will. (I chose this model because it avoids many of the further complications that often arise when discussing time travel, and which will likely only further confuse this discussion.)
Yes, but the story I remembered is different. There is no time travel, just a bunch of uncompleted time machines floating in space (this sort: Tipler. As I recall the implication was that reality wouldn’t permit a working time machine.
That would be a universe running on fate rather than causation.
It is sufficient to demonstrate that I have not the freedom to choose right now what my breakfast yesterday was. If the future is just as factual as the past, then I have just as little freedom to choose right now what my breakfast tomorrow will be. If “free will” means something while the future is fixed in this regard, then it means something other than an ability to change the future in this regard.
Frankly, I do not understand what the argument can possibly be here. We are entertaining a hypothetical, where future events are factual enough for the logically possible existence of a future-o-scope to inerrantly reveal what the future holds. This hypothetical universe is, practically speaking, a block universe, where everything that happens is fixed, and any inhabitants who experience time merely experience a playback, and the future-o-scope would merely give glimpses into other time slices of this block universe. This is what it means for there to be a device that can inerrantly reveal the future: It being inerrant means the device cannot err. Such a universe can therefore absolutely not evolve to bring about events in a fashion that conflicts with the device’s revelations. It is essentially fatalistic. Suggesting that an inerrant future-o-scope is not in conflict with libertarian free will is suggesting that nothing being up for anyone’s choosing is somehow not in conflict with some things being up for someone’s choosing. I do not know how to address a stance like that.
I don’t recognize that as a definition of “free will.”
Sure. But such a universe is not necessarily a deterministic one. All you have specified there is how time operates in that universe. Whether that universe is deterministic remains up for grabs.
Returning to my alternative question: Is it beyond the ability of an omniscient being to always know what a being that has libertarian free will, will do before they do it? For that matter, can it know the outcome of a random event? Or does omniscience entail that randomness cannot exist anywhere? Since a random event cannot be a determined event, it seems to me those question addresses the same issue from a different perspective.
In that respect, yes. Which was pretty much my point regarding the FutureViewer. You needed something similar to avoid paradox.
That’s fine. In that case you are talking about something other than (at least a fairly common definition of) libertarian free will, and there is no conflict.
Correct. The claim is not that it would be deterministic. All I said was that in a universe where the future is a matter of fact, it is not a matter of choice.
As for whether an omniscient being is compatible with libertarian free will, I’d say that kind of changes nothing. If the future is a matter of fact, then there is no libertarian free will. In a universe where the future is a matter of fact, a being who knows all facts (as in, the claims themselves are true, the being believes them, and is justified in its beliefs of them) would know the future, much like the future-o-scope has access to them. In a universe where the future is not factual, an omniscient being would not know the future (since there wouldn’t be any facts there that can be known in the first place).
Randomness, however, is a bit more subtle than that. It’s defining feature is being non-deterministic, i.e. unpredictable with any amount of knowledge shy of a knowledge of the outcomes themselves. The question, again, is, whether there is a fact ahead of the proverbial dice cast, what the outcome will be. If there is, then a being that knows all facts will know that fact. If there is not, it will not. Predictability doesn’t matter here.
Where predictability does matter is for Laplace’s demon. Laplace’s demon is not omniscient in general. It does not necessarily know all facts, it only knows the state of the universe at one point in time, and all the rules that govern its evolution. If the rules are deterministic, then Laplace’s demon knows all of the future and the past. Incidentally, the universe also happens to be fatalistic then, and Laplace’s demon is omniscient in that case. However, if there exists genuine randomness, then knowing the state and rules is insufficient to reconstruct the universe’s entire history. So randomness makes Laplace’s demon non-omniscient, because its omniscience is contingent upon the universe’s deterministicness and the definitiveness of its state in at least one instant. The universe could still be fatalistic, it could still be the case that there are facts about the outcomes of all random events, and it could be still the case that an omniscient being would know them all. But without total determinism, Laplace’s demon just happens to not be one such omniscient being.
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You have that backwards.
Time’s operation does not vary in the iterations of this hypothetical.
Nor does the FACT of a person’s choice being determined (or unfree); that does not vary.
What is up for grabs is the mechanism for HOW the person’s choice is fettered/unfree.
What Faizal means is that the hypothetical future-is-factual universe is not necessarily deterministic in the technical sense of that word. He is saying that the hypothetical universe is not necessarily one that obeys any laws that would allow one to reconstruct its history from an incomplete awareness of facts. Faizal is not saying that there is a variant of that hypothetical where individual events are not fixed or “unfree” as you put it. You are correct in recognizing that the reason why things are unfree is up for grabs. Faizal is saying the same thing, pointing out that “determinism”, in that technical usage of the term we have all been employing in this discussion, is not the only possible account of that unfreeness.
If you can cite any source that defines libertarian free will as “the ability to change future events after they have occurred”, please do. As I said, it is not a definition I recognize.
But it is precisely “knowledge of the outcomes themselves” that is at issue here. Does it matter that omniscient beings are also often considered to exist “outside of time”? in that case it would not matter if an event is occurring in the future from the perspective of a particular being. From the perspective of the omniscient being, all events are equally accessible to his perception.
That is also not a definition I suggested, and you know it. I shall not indulge this.
Frankly “outside of time” is not something I understand, but it also wouldn’t matter. Randomness has to do with predictability, not factuality. Nothing about randomness necessitates that random outcomes be non-factual. The only thing they cannot be is deterministic. If the outcomes of random processes are facts, then a being that knows all facts knows all outcomes of random processes.
It must be a particularly thorough church to use a whole rill, or small stream, of dice, when one would do for most people. Admittedly I can remember one RPG when we’d have to roll up to a dozen or so d6s at once. 
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Not if you are a hobbit.
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Nearsightedness and mobile keypads conspire against me. 
Only a dozen? Of course with lots of dice the Law of Large numbers kicks in and the outcome becomes more predictable. My religion is also likely to suffer a schism between the Polyhedrists and the Orthodox D6-ers.
OK, I’ll stop detailing the thread now. 
Was it ever on rails?