The Pope, The Almighty, and Logic

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RandomCasualty
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Re: Fire-breathing T-Rex's

Post by RandomCasualty »

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1113268041[/unixtime]]RC, if you put a dirty fork on the kitchen table, and then I come in and see a dirty fork on the table, can I not remove that dirty fork and put it in the dishwasher?

Who has the final say, the reporter or the editor?

You're again too worried about actual effect. Free will isn't about how much power you have. It's simply about making a decision. Choosing to hate Hitler is free will. You don't need to have the power to kill Hitler or bring down the whole Nazi regime to have free will. So long as you can choose to hate him, it doesn't matter.

If you can formulate an independent choice within your own mind, then you have free will.


Ultimately, when I decide to make an omelette, there is only one decision being made. Who is making that decision?

If there's an oob around, it sure as hell isn't me. The oob arbitrarily decides to allow me to decide to make an omelette. Or it arbitrarily decides to change my decision from not making an omelette into making an omelette. Either way, the final say is the oob. And therefore, that's the being which is making the decision.

So what? if the oob doesn't step in, then you still have free will. Simply because it can step in doesn't mean anything. Sure, the police could step into your life and imprison you at any time, but that isn't to say you possess freedom right now, even though at some arbitrary point later someone else can make a decision to take away your freedom.

You're entire argument is based on the fact that some point later someone can take away your free will, so you don't have it. But you have to have it for it to be able to be removed from you. And the presence of an omnipotent being who spends all day sitting on the couch doing nothing doesn't in any way change your free will status simply because "he could have acted."

It's like a doctor just stopping treating people because "hey they could die of a heart attack tomorrow and it'd be beyond my control. So I might as well let them die, since there is stuff I can't control that can override anything I do."

That's what your saying. Basically if there is any element in the universe that can dictate and control your actions that you cannot control then you have no free will. Basically under your criteria, only an omnipotent being could have free will, since any choice you make is already constrained by the laws of physicals, chemistry and all sorts of other stuff. When I choose to try to fly, I can't fly because physics has the final say, therefore I have no free will.

Your point of view just isn't very logical at all. Up until the oob actually steps in, it seriously doesn't matter if it exists or not. What it can or can't do is actually irrelevant if it chooses to do nothing. In fact its existence has less of an impact on you than gravity does.

The oob doesn't make any choice for you unless it actually forces you to do something. If it sits on its ass and lets you decide on your own, you have free will. To remove free will, it must do more than observe. And there's no guarantee that it will.

Granted an oob can remove free will at its whim, but if it sits on its ass and doesn't affect you at all, I fail to see how its existence does anything. Just because it could control you doesn't mean that it does. And as stated earlier, the laws of physics could easily be substituted as the omnipotent power in your proof to deny free will. Indeed any absolute restriction or law could be substituted.
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Re: Fire-breathing T-Rex's

Post by Username17 »

RC wrote:Free will isn't about how much power you have. It's simply about making a decision.


And making a decision is just like making an omlette. If someone farther down the assembly line chooses every ingredient in the omlette, I didn't make the omlette. The guy farther down the assembly line made the omlette.

If there's an oob, you can't make an omlette, and you can't make a decision. All you can do is suggest an omlette. Or suggest a decision. But even that suggestion is meaningless, because the oob actually determines what you are going to suggest.

So you have no part in this at all. If there's an oob on the control panel, you don' just not have the final say, you don't have any say. Because someone else has the final say as to what "your say" even is.

At no time in this process is any decision being made by you. Or me. Because wherever your choice goes, there is another bigger choice which is being made just before that as to what your choice is going to be and another one just after it as to whether your decision is going to stand. It's not just that you don't have any power - you don't even have any agency.

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Re: Fire-breathing T-Rex's

Post by User3 »

RandomCasualty at [unixtime wrote:1113269501[/unixtime]]And as stated earlier, the laws of physics could easily be substituted as the omnipotent power in your proof to deny free will. Indeed any absolute restriction or law could be substituted.


At the deterministic level of free will, Natural Law works probabilistically. And once 'God playes dice with the universe,' you're talking about a pretty messed up "oob."

And because probability does not allow for absolute prediction (determinism), unless there is an "oob" (unlikely) or our estimations of reality are incorrect (more probable), we have a sort of "Free Will." Even if it is only a "Free Will" brought about by the convergance of innumerable random chances.
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Re: Fire-breathing T-Rex's

Post by PhoneLobster »

Not to derail the oobyness but on the pope front I just tollerated an hour long community debate show about the future direction of the papacy.

I find it interesting to note that the people in favour of the last pope's actions have absolutely no grip of reality or compassion for their fellow human beings. EVERYTHING is a faith based issue for them and they expressed several articles of their isane faith, repeatedly and with unity, and with smug self congratulatory applause.

These were some articles of faith the yuppie fundamentalists seemed to be pretty unified in sharing...

1) The pope is really really truly chosen by god, not by a bunch of "celibate men" who wear dresses and routinely do bad bad (sometimes illegal) things (sometimes involving children).

2) The vatican laws were laid down by god and saint peter 2000 years ago, history does not exist, papal infallibility is NOT just a hundred and fifty years old and priests and popes before the sixteen hundreds were NOT allowed to marry, and don't even DARE mention that female pope fiasco or the wacky three popes at once incident. And papal infallibility and the reversal of Vatican 2 is in no way problematic.

3) The vatican vilifying and refusing communion to homosexuals but protecting a cardinal who knowingly protected child molesters (and giving him a new big time church in Italy and leaving him in a position of strong influence over who will be next pope) is in no way problematic for their faith in the Vatican. And no ones going to talk about the wider issues and many other priests, cardinals and papal implications of that whole business, nonono.

4) Condoms are so bad its better that sinners die, and kill, than commit another sin no worse than the sexy one they are obviously already committing. But also condoms just plain don't work, because their function is "disputable" who's disputing it, they are, hmmm. And bible thumper alternatives definitely aren't proven to cause not only more aids deaths but also more acts of adultry, nonono.

5) Lalalala I have my fingers in my ears your "facts", "history" and "compassion" mean nothing to me for I have faith. YOUR lack of faith disturbs me! The Pope was a good man! The Papacy is God! The church is not a democracy! Crawl off and die of aids you sex loving historian heretics, we don't need your stinking "congregation"!

Of them all 2 and 4 REALLY piss me off. Those pro John Paul nutters should go and know their own zany history and stop blithely advocating mass murder, chumps.

Feel free to return to the Omni-dealyo.
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Re: Fire-breathing T-Rex's

Post by RandomCasualty »

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1113270763[/unixtime]]
If there's an oob, you can't make an omlette, and you can't make a decision. All you can do is suggest an omlette. Or suggest a decision. But even that suggestion is meaningless, because the oob actually determines what you are going to suggest.

Yeah, but that's what free will is all about. You can't necessarily kill Hitler, simply because you decide you want to. You may not have the power to do that. You may get stopped before you even get there. Free will isn't about infinite power or the ability to make all your decisions come true. It's just about the ability to formulate a decision.

Look at it this way. Basic biology can hold you back. If you don't have a brain, you cannot come to decisions. Therefore, your free will can be taken away at any time by your brain simply ceasing to function. Even if you can formulate a choice, you can only execute it if your nervous system is functioning properly. So in this case your body happens to take the place of the oob. You are always placing your suggestion down the assembly line to your nervous system and your brain to execute. Later it actually has to interact with the physical world through the laws of physics. Try as you might to fly, you just can't by force of will alone. Does that mean you have no free will?


So you have no part in this at all. If there's an oob on the control panel, you don' just not have the final say, you don't have any say. Because someone else has the final say as to what "your say" even is.


Your conclusion is flawed. Basically you're saying that since some other factor can have the last laugh, that you never have free will even if those other factors don't rise up to stop you. Well, you don't need an oob for that theory. You can just use the laws of physics and biology. So long as I am bound by physics, factors *could* always exist such that any decision I make could be stopped.

And I could make that argument for pretty much everything in the world to deny free will. If that's your thinking then free will cannot exist at all.

Which is an ok way of looking at things I guess, as I don't really have an opinion as to whether free will actually exists or not. The important thing that I want to get across is that if you presuppose that free will can exist at all, then free will can still exist in a universe with an omnipotent being, assuming that omnipotent being doesn't wish to eradicate all free will.

As far as whether free will really exists, I'm with you Frank about how people behave as though they had free will whether they really have it or not, so it really doesn't matter if it truly exists or not. Though I don't think the presence of an omnipotent being changes all that, at least no more than having immutable laws of nature that are resistant to human will.

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Re: Fire-breathing T-Rex's

Post by Username17 »

RC wrote:Your conclusion is flawed.


Do tell answer boy.

RC wrote:Basically you're saying that since some other factor can have the last laugh,


No. I'm saying that if some other factor has the first laugh, and the last laugh, and an infinite number of laughs in between that there isn't a unique laugh available to me. And that's the important thing: is there a unique laugh that is mine alone. And with the presence of an omnipotent blah blah blah, the answer is no. It is impossible to have a will distinct from the infinite, because the infinite includes "your" will.

RC wrote:that you never have free will even if those other factors don't rise up to stop you.


No. That's not important at all. You can choose to jump out the window and be thwarted by the fact that that it's made of armorglass. But with the presence of an oob, you can't even make the choice unless it makes the decision that you make the choice.

That's the difference. A physical impediment renders your choice meaningless, an omnipotent impediment proactively prevents the decision from being made in the first place.

---

Note: Free Will is not necessary to explain the universe. It is entirely possible that we are all actually response boxes that are incapable of acting any other way than the singular fashion in which history will inevitably perceive our actions as having been. But while it's possible, it's also unprovable. And unfalsifiable.

The future is unpredictable, at least to the planck's constant, because the present is uncertain to that degree. If the future is, at least on the small scale, unpredictable: it is impossible to definitively show that those predictions have been broken. That's what you'd need to actually prove the existence of Free Will - you'd have to know the future absolutely and then voluntarily change it. And you can't know the future absolutely, so you can't ever know if your actions are actually voluntary or not.

And so science has no verdict on Free Will. It's neither necessary nor impossible, and the question itself is unanswerable and unhelpful. As a scientist, I don't give a damn whether people actually have Free Will. It's literally completely unimportant.

---

But monotheism does depend upon Free Will. And not only is the monotheist big blobby an impossibility, but Free Will is itself incompatible with that model. So while my worldview will survive intact with or without Free Will - the world view I am debunking simultaneously demands and cannot support the notion.

Ha ha. In your face. And all that.

But this is all pretty boring, 1st grade stuff. If you haven't figured out that an omnipotent being is incompatible with a logical world view by the time ou can consistently tie your own shoes, there's probably something fundamentally wrong with your logic circuits and I am willing to concede that you are essentially impervious to logical discourse on this subject. I think my work is done here.

---

PL wrote:Of them all 2 and 4 REALLY piss me off.


Why does 2 piss you off? Religion is all about accepting legends as fact. And let's face it, nationalism is like that too. If you can accept that you are "American" or "Dutch" or "Chinese", then I see no reason why you can't accept that Papal Infallibility is thousands of years old. Just because it isn't shouldn't necessarily dissuade you.

Let's take China for instance. The country was founded in 1949. People are alive today who were actually alive when it was founded. You can walk right over and ask them about it. Nevertheless, people talk about China being thousands of years old with a straight face. And not just in China.

CIA Factbook: China wrote:Independence:

221 BC (unification under the Qin or Ch'in Dynasty)


Right... and in 260 CE, the map of "China" looks like this:

Image

So why do people talk about China being founded in 221 BCE, if 480 years later it didn't even exist? Simple, it's a convenient lie. And it's the same for Catholicism. The Vatican is a nation, if it wants to pretend to have ancient traditions and existence, why should I care?

The AIDS thing, though, that's just pure evil. Pope John Paul, in his life, managed to explicitly support genocide campaigns on every single continent except Antarctica. And I'm certain that's just because that smack tard didn't live long enough to figure out that Pen Pen stands in opposition to the angels.

Image

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Re: Fire-breathing T-Rex's

Post by RandomCasualty »

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1113342839[/unixtime]]
No. That's not important at all. You can choose to jump out the window and be thwarted by the fact that that it's made of armorglass. But with the presence of an oob, you can't even make the choice unless it makes the decision that you make the choice.

Only if it acts. You can only say "God made me do it" if God actualyl did make you do it. If he does nothing, the fact that he could have acted is actually meaningless. Allowing something to happen is not causing it to happen. That's the fundamental flaw in your reasoning.

With free will you are still making the decision to do stuff, and if the oob doesn't intervene, it is still your choice. God didn't make you do it, you chose to do it. While God could have stopped it, you still initiated the choice and God simply let it happen. If the oob does not intervene then the action only happens because you want it to happen, and for no other reason.
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Re: Fire-breathing T-Rex's

Post by Username17 »

RC wrote:Allowing something to happen is not causing it to happen.


If it took an action on your part, yes it is. And if you have infinite powers of action, it does. It is just as much effort to make something occur as to make it not occur.

Even for you or I, the decision to do nothing is as important a decision as any other. And it carries moral significance as great as anything. For something with infinie power, that decision carries with it an equal amount of action.

There is no flaw in the reasoning, you're just being obtuse.

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Re: Fire-breathing T-Rex's

Post by RandomCasualty »

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1113352370[/unixtime]]
RC wrote:Allowing something to happen is not causing it to happen.


If it took an action on your part, yes it is. And if you have infinite powers of action, it does. It is just as much effort to make something occur as to make it not occur.

Even for you or I, the decision to do nothing is as important a decision as any other. And it carries moral significance as great as anything. For something with infinie power, that decision carries with it an equal amount of action.

There is no flaw in the reasoning, you're just being obtuse.


I would say you are being obtuse here. Your explanation of causality simply isn't any recognizeable form of it.

Look at it this way. If the oob doesn't intervene you can do what you want. If you for instance wanted to eat a slice of pie, you would. If you didn't want to eat a slice of pie then you wouldn't. The deciding factor is in fact your personal decision, not the choice of the oob. Your personal decision does determine the outcome therefore, there is free will involved as to the decision of whether to eat that pie or not. So while the oob can have the last laugh, your input is nonetheless a deciding and meaningful factor if the oob chooses inaction.

If you choose to eat, then you eat, if not then you don't eat. Your choice is a direct cause of eating the pie or leaving it alone. That certainly sounds like free will to me.

If the oob doesn't intervene then it is as if it didn't exist at all. And if free will can exist without an oob, then it can certain exist with a lazy oob too.
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Re: Fire-breathing T-Rex's

Post by Username17 »

That's exactly Deng Xiaoping's argument for why the PRC has/had a free press, so just never mind.

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Re: Fire-breathing T-Rex's

Post by Lago_AM3P »

RandomCasualty, it's impossible for a being with infinite powers to not make a decision.

You should know this, because in D&D it's impossible for you not to take any action when it's your turn to make a decision. Even if you stammer and can't think of anything so you just pass a turn, that is STILL a decision and it still has consequences. Even if the DM gets pissed at you and makes you forfeit your turn, that's STILL a decision and it still has consequences.

There's no such thing as letting things be even in the Dungeons and Dragon model, let alone an infinitely more complex one like the world we live in.

So while the oob can have the last laugh, your input is nonetheless a deciding and meaningful factor if the oob chooses inaction.


No, it isn't, not if the oob has the omniscient ability. He knows ahead of time what your input will be before you can even fathom it and has to make adjustments accordingly. Otherwise he's not omniscient. The same thing happens in D&D when you're fighting constructs and you have a copy of their instructions.
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Re: Fire-breathing T-Rex's

Post by RandomCasualty »

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1113353840[/unixtime]]That's exactly Deng Xiaoping's argument for why the PRC has/had a free press, so just never mind.


Free will means that you can form thoughts and opinions unhindered by some outside force.

Free press means that the press can publish stuff unhindered by the government.

A prerequisite for free will is certainly that the oob doesn't intervene in matters of individual will, just like a prerequisite for free press is that the government doesn't squash stories it doesn't like. In both cases inaction of the powerful entity is a necessity.

By your definition, no nation can have a free press, since the government *could* squash any story by storming the building with its army. Even if it never uses that power, it still could do it, thus the ability to let any story hit print is made by the government, not by the press. It is essentially what you're saying about oobs. Solely because they possess a given power, that automatically makes any freedom irrelevant simply becuase they could override any decision.

When you think that way, then free press cannot exist at all.
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Re: Fire-breathing T-Rex's

Post by Neeek »

RandomCasualty at [unixtime wrote:1113354095[/unixtime]]

Free will means that you can form thoughts and opinions unhindered by some outside force.


Yes. Exactly. And if there is an oob, you are hindered because no matter what your choice was, it was because that's what the oob wanted it to be. There is no way around it RC, which is why no one agrees with you. The oob, by doing nothing, has made your choice for you just as surely as if he acted. You aren't having free will taken away if there is an oob, you never had it in the first place.
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Re: Fire-breathing T-Rex's

Post by RandomCasualty »

Neeek at [unixtime wrote:1113355884[/unixtime]]
Yes. Exactly. And if there is an oob, you are hindered because no matter what your choice was, it was because that's what the oob wanted it to be. There is no way around it RC, which is why no one agrees with you. The oob, by doing nothing, has made your choice for you just as surely as if he acted. You aren't having free will taken away if there is an oob, you never had it in the first place.


Dude, that's total BS.

An oob that does not act is not having an effect, on anything. Something that has no effect cannot be a hindrance, that doesn't even make any sense. It's totally contrary to the nature of causality itself.

Basically you're saying that because the oob *could* controly your mind, that it automatically controls you even if it really doesn't do anything to you. That doesn't make a single bit of sense. At best it's some kind of crazy circular logic.

Person A:"Hey, God made me kill that guy!"

Person B:"Why? Did God force you to do it? Did he control your mind?"

A:"No dude, he just allowed me to do it. He didn't stop it, ya know... so he forced my hand."

B:"So wait a minute, didn't you want to kill the guy, didn't you make the choice. How is that not your choice?"

A:"Cause God could have stopped it and he didn't. So it's not my fault, I had no control over my actions."

B:"But you made the decision! You pulled the trigger on the gun! God didn't even affect you at all, so how can he be responsible?"

A:"Yeah, so what?... God could have stopped me from making the decision, he could have made the gun misfire, and that makes it his fault for not stopping me. So the cops should go and arrest God for murder. Not me, because I'm totally innocent, I had no choice in the matter. The cops should totally go and arrest God and everyone else who 'did nothing' to make this murder possible. They're the real killers."

If you make claims like this, you can easily be defined as insane.

Seriously what you guys are saying isn't rational. It's straight up crazy talk.
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Re: Fire-breathing T-Rex's

Post by Username17 »

RC wrote:Basically you're saying that because the oob *could* controly your mind, that it automatically controls you even if it really doesn't do anything to you.


No. Since it does have the power to decide what your decision is, and it does know what your decision is going to be, it controls your decision. And if it controls your decision, you don't.

Seriously what you guys are saying isn't rational.


Right. It's a contradiction. And the fact that it can't be reconciled in a logical universe disproves the conjunction of the premises.

If you make claims like this, you can easily be defined as insane.


Exactly. Since the omnipotent being is logically impossible, society does not recognize the possibility of such an entity contorlling your mind. If it existed, which it can't, it would of course be doing that. But since it can't exist, society is going along as if it didn't. Which seems to be working out pretty well.

No bolts of fire from the sky or anything. Which is logically exactly what we would expect.

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Re: Fire-breathing T-Rex's

Post by User3 »

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the issue here isn't whether god intervenes or not, but it's where the thought originated from. Now, unless we assume god to be the creator or omnipresent, then it is difficult to say whether the thought originted from him or the individual in question.
Think of it this way: god cannot intervene in the thought process before the first step. That would just be impossible because he the first step is what creates the process; you can't alter something that doesn't exist. We have already established that his omnipotence allows him to alter anything after the first step. This eliminates all steps in the process except for the first one, meaning that the only way the individual can have free will is to control the initiation of the thought. Also, it should be noted that if god only sometimes controls the first step then the individual still has free will. At this point it seems impossible to determine who gets the first say since the entire discussion is entirely hypothetical to begin with.
Now, suppose that instead of a merely omnipotent god we also have an omniscient one. Under these circumstances, this god would have the power to influence decisions before they even start, effectively getting the "first step" in the process. The only problem with this is that the god is not necessarily also the creator and was not necessarily around when things were created (even if his omniscience allows him to perceive those times) meaning that free will could very easily have existed back then. Furthermore, those events would influence future events, causing there to be chains of causality in effect that exist on their own independent of godly intervention. This probably means that people who were born after god came into existence lack free will because they are either being manipulated by god or the chains of causality.
Or does it? In order for free will to exist, we must accept that people are not input/output machines. From this premise it follows that they have some factor involved in their process for determining action that exists independent of the universe as we know it. If it were not independent then it would just be another type of input, which would violate the premise. What form this factor would take is, of course, undeterminable , for it is hypothetical to begin with. We may as well just call it a random number generator or somesuch. Such a factor might well be called "free will," though the term is probably beginning to lose its meaning. However, it does represent the first step in the thought process, though it may well be a totally arbitrary one. Now, presumably god's omnipotence allows him to manipulate this factor, though once again we reach the problem of whether this happens before or after the factor is generated. He can know that the factor is coming through his omniscience, but if the factor is truly random then it cannot be based on anything that can be manipulated because it cannot be based on anything at all. So I don't really have any idea how this resolves itself at all.

However, there does seem to be another angle to approach the problem from. Forgive me if someone already posted this, but I don't seem to recall that happening. Anyway, I am going to assert than an omniscient god necessitates a definite timeline. After all, if you can predict the future, but the future is changeable, then you cannot actually predict the future at all, at least not with 100% accuracy. However, if you are omnipotent, or, in fact, able to manipulate the universe at all, then you can change the future simply by doing the opposite of what you predicted yourself doing. Now, being able to predict the future and actually existing in the present and the future (not to mention the past) simultaneously are two very different things, meaning that god's predictions have a definite form at a given time. Existing in all parts of the timeline would involve a god with some sort of weird ass omnipresence. Therefore, unless the god's predictions all involve actions that god is somehow unwilling to change, which I suspect is impossible for any meaningful sort of god anyway, then omnipresence and the ability to affect the world cannot exist in the same being.

There are a few terms that I think ought to be defined as well. First of all, is time infinite or finite. An infinite timeline would necessitate a being with infinite mental capacity, which is definetly impossible through consciousness as we know it, and discussing beings that exist outside of our universe or have incomprehensible consciousnesses is sort of difficult. Furthermore, we also need to decide if omniscience implies presence throughout the timeline and, if so, how this interacts with an infinite timeline. I implied in the second section of this post that it does not, but I'd be interested to hear what others have to say.
Finally, it should be noted that, as Frank said way earlier in the discussion, the logical impossibility of an omniscient, omnipotent god does not preclude the existence of an arbitrarily powerful and aware one, which is, for all intents an purposes other than logical comparisons, the same thing. After all, "arbitrarily high" is essentially a synonym for infinite because, for all intents and purposes other than affecting other arbitrarily high quantities, such a quantity is big enough to be effectively infinite. In other words, it doesn't really matter if god can pick up his own rock if he can still pick up the Earth and fling it into the sun using only the power of his mind and could do the same for the rest of the galaxy and, in fact, all the other galaxies as well.
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Re: Fire-breathing T-Rex's

Post by RandomCasualty »

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1113360318[/unixtime]]
No. Since it does have the power to decide what your decision is, and it does know what your decision is going to be, it controls your decision. And if it controls your decision, you don't.

Just because it can change your mind and it can predict what you would do without intervention does not mean it controls it. It could control it, if it so desired, but it doesn't not control it by default by simply sitting on its ass and radiating an aura of omnipotence.

The omnipotent aura crap is BS. Yes, it is a prereq that the oob doesn't alter your decision, but this can still happen and you can still have free will. Just like the government doesn't destroy free press by merely presenting a governmental authority. All it has to do to allow a free press is to not restrict the press. The same is true of an oob. You just sit back, don't control people's minds, and they have free will.


Exactly. Since the omnipotent being is logically impossible, society does not recognize the possibility of such an entity contorlling your mind. If it existed, which it can't, it would of course be doing that. But since it can't exist, society is going along as if it didn't. Which seems to be working out pretty well.

I seriously doubt that, considering that the majority of society believes in an omnipotent being. And the general dogma behind almost every religion and justice system is that people have free will. Society certainly isn't going along as if it didn't exist.

Second, if it did exist, but did nothing and you didn't know about it, I fail to see how that would in any way affect reality. Would that fact suddenly mean that nobody is guilty of crimes? Would it totally destroy any personal accountability because it's now the fault of an omnipotent being?

I simply cannot see how a being can be the sole cause of all events simply by doing nothing. The ability to prevent something doesn't mean you were the cause. It's like saying that a firefighter who was too lazy to put out a fire was the cause of the fire, and started the fire. And then going on to say that if the firefighter never existed, the fire wouldn't have existed either.

The fact that something else could prevent you from exercising free will is only a factor if that thing actively prevents you. The fact that it *could* is totally irrelevant. If it doesn't then you're free to act how you want.


However, there does seem to be another angle to approach the problem from. Forgive me if someone already posted this, but I don't seem to recall that happening. Anyway, I am going to assert than an omniscient god necessitates a definite timeline. After all, if you can predict the future, but the future is changeable, then you cannot actually predict the future at all, at least not with 100% accuracy. However, if you are omnipotent, or, in fact, able to manipulate the universe at all, then you can change the future simply by doing the opposite of what you predicted yourself doing. Now, being able to predict the future and actually existing in the present and the future (not to mention the past) simultaneously are two very different things, meaning that god's predictions have a definite form at a given time. Existing in all parts of the timeline would involve a god with some sort of weird ass omnipresence. Therefore, unless the god's predictions all involve actions that god is somehow unwilling to change, which I suspect is impossible for any meaningful sort of god anyway, then omnipresence and the ability to affect the world cannot exist in the same being.


Well, whether an omniscient being can have free will is actually an entirely different point. Simply knowing everything and knowing what you'll do when you'll do it actually can prevent a god from having free will, simply because he is a slave to his own predictions. And it's possible that oobs cannot have free will. To have free will you can't know what it is you're going to do in the future. Someone else can know it, but you can't. The moment you know it, you're just following the timeline.


Or does it? In order for free will to exist, we must accept that people are not input/output machines. From this premise it follows that they have some factor involved in their process for determining action that exists independent of the universe as we know it. If it were not independent then it would just be another type of input, which would violate the premise. What form this factor would take is, of course, undeterminable , for it is hypothetical to begin with. We may as well just call it a random number generator or somesuch. Such a factor might well be called "free will," though the term is probably beginning to lose its meaning. However, it does represent the first step in the thought process, though it may well be a totally arbitrary one. Now, presumably god's omnipotence allows him to manipulate this factor, though once again we reach the problem of whether this happens before or after the factor is generated. He can know that the factor is coming through his omniscience, but if the factor is truly random then it cannot be based on anything that can be manipulated because it cannot be based on anything at all. So I don't really have any idea how this resolves itself at all.


Well, free will doesn't necessarily mean random. It simply means something beyond the laws of physics and chemistry and such. A consciousness on another level. Programming a computer with a perfect RNG does not make it have free will. Free will is simply the ability to make your own decisions. Now it's also possible something can know what those decisions are going to be. But this doens't mean that it actively eliminates the possibiltiy of free will, or that it makes your actions any less meaningful.

So long as you don't know the timeline yourself, free will can be predictable. It's just that you cannot be omniscient and possess free will at the same time. Something else of course can be omniscient and it doens't do anything.
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Re: Fire-breathing T-Rex's

Post by Neeek »

RandomCasualty at [unixtime wrote:1113384796[/unixtime]]
The omnipotent aura crap is BS. Yes, it is a prereq that the oob doesn't alter your decision, but this can still happen and you can still have free will. Just like the government doesn't destroy free press by merely presenting a governmental authority. All it has to do to allow a free press is to not restrict the press. The same is true of an oob. You just sit back, don't control people's minds, and they have free will.


See, this is where you go wrong. You flat out don't understand the issue at all. The oob *is* making the decision for you. It already has. It always does. There is no way around it. As long as it is an oob, it *must* make every decision for everything. Nothing else is possible. Your "sitting back and not controlling people's minds" argument is the BS here. As a oob, you have already decided what people are going to do, so either you are actively controlling them or passively controlling them, and either way they have no say in the matter as long as you are omnipotent.


I seriously doubt that, considering that the majority of society believes in an omnipotent being. And the general dogma behind almost every religion and justice system is that people have free will. Society certainly isn't going along as if it didn't exist.

And a majority of society couldn't pass a basic logic test. I fail to see how what a majority of society believes has anything to do with the way reality works.


Second, if it did exist, but did nothing and you didn't know about it, I fail to see how that would in any way affect reality. Would that fact suddenly mean that nobody is guilty of crimes? Would it totally destroy any personal accountability because it's now the fault of an omnipotent being?

Considering one of the most famous lawyers in American history(Clarence Darrow) used to use the somewhat well-supported philosophical claim that people do not, in fact, have free will at all to defend his clients(successfully, I might add), yeah, I think you could easily argue that.

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Re: Fire-breathing T-Rex's

Post by Maj »

Lago wrote:RandomCasualty, it's impossible for a being with infinite powers to not make a decision.


If it's sentient... Which in the big three, It usually is, but not everywhere.
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Re: Fire-breathing T-Rex's

Post by RandomCasualty »

Neeek at [unixtime wrote:1113394968[/unixtime]]
As a oob, you have already decided what people are going to do, so either you are actively controlling them or passively controlling them, and either way they have no say in the matter as long as you are omnipotent.

Huh? How is deciding not to affect anything denying anyone a say in the matter? It makes no sense.

Here's the bottom line. You want to eat a slice of pie, you eat it. Whether you have an oob or not, it was your choice that directly affected what happened. You have a say in the matter. There is no control at all here, passive or otherwise. The oob hasn't done a damn thing. To have control, you must have some form of coersion. Here there is none. The oob doesn't control your mind directly, he doesn't threaten you or otherwise interact with your mind. The world is going on like he wasn't there, because he hasn't affected it at all. And if he does nothing it seriously doesn't matter what he *could* or *might* have done.

If you had world A, which has an inactive oob and world B which is exactly the same as A except it has no oob, events would unfold exactly the same in both worlds. In both worlds, when you got hungry and ate something, it would be caused by you making a decision to eat it. The presence of an oob does not change anything.

I continue to be baffled how you can somehow claim an effect from a being that does nothing.



Considering one of the most famous lawyers in American history(Clarence Darrow) used to use the somewhat well-supported philosophical claim that people do not, in fact, have free will at all to defend his clients(successfully, I might add), yeah, I think you could easily argue that.


Well, if you truly believe that then your basic definition of free will is so inherently different than mine that there's little point holding a discussion. Though I'm guessing if someone murdered someone close to you, you'd be calling out for vengeance against the guy who did it and not God. So I don't really think you believe that.

Anyone who buys into the "just blame God" defense is dumber than the jury that let off OJ.

The main point is that even though something happens and God could have stopped it, does not mean that God wanted it to happen. Going back to free press, the government allows stories to be published which it might not particularly like. It could have called in the army and stopped the story from ever hitting print, but it allows it anyway. This does not mean that the government wanted it to be published, it's simply that they gave in to the will of another.

Sometimes the oob may not care either way. There is actually nothing suggesting an oob has to have any desires or morality, so it may not have any opinion towards what you're doing, so it just lets you do whatever you want. And regardless there's no use speculating about what it might have done if it had an opinion and decided to act. The US congress might pass a law that eliminates freedom of the press. This does not mean that we don't have a free press because they might do something tomorrow.
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Re: Fire-breathing T-Rex's

Post by Username17 »

RC wrote:How is deciding not to affect anything denying anyone a say in the matter?


Um... if it has ever done anything, it's already forfeited that possibility. Remember your butterfly effect, any ction eventually effects all others (even if in a very very small fashion). And since it knows all future events and all causal relations, if it has performed any action in the entire history of the universe, no matter how small, it has seen in entirety the universe that will happen thanks to that action and the decisions you will therefore take in response.

It knows that one more or less snowflake in Timbuctu in 57 million BCE is going to end up with you getting in the car a moment later and not getting hit by the bus. And yet, it chose to have the exact number of snowflakes back then that end up with you getting t-boned.

---

And you know what? If it exists at all, then the fact that it knows all this shit and somehow decided to never perform any actions at all - means that it's still choosing a result. It might be the "default" result somehow, but it's still only one result out of an infinite number of possibilities. If it's the one where a bus runs right through your car, it's also the one out of the infinite that the oob chose. Not the one you chose.

If it ever makes any action, you have no free will. And if it never takes any action, you still have no free will. The first last and only choice is never made by you, always by the oob.

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Re: Fire-breathing T-Rex's

Post by RandomCasualty »

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1113415154[/unixtime]]
If it ever makes any action, you have no free will. And if it never takes any action, you still have no free will. The first last and only choice is never made by you, always by the oob.


What about people making choices?

It's not some oob that makes you decide to read Lord of the Rings instead of Harry Potter. It's not some oob that makes you decide to post on this message board instead of the Wizards of the coast message board.

You're claiming that the oob is making the only choice, but that's just flat out absolutely untrue. People make choices all the time, with or without oobs.

The reason you're responding to my posts is not because God wanted you to, the reason you're doing it is because you decided to. You're the one making the choice and if you didn't make that choice you wouldn't be posting here, whether God really exists or not. And that's the fact of the matter.

The actual decision to post here was made by you, not God. Regardless of whether God actually exists, if you didn't want to post here, you wouldn't have. But since you did, then you have done so. You cannot write that off as meaningless. No oob intervened so you made the choice for yourself.

Every action has only one final result, the ability to see that result before it actually occurs doesn't actually change anything. The future is still a result of choices and conciquences. The fact that you can predict the choices and consequences does not mean you automatically control them.

As to actual cause of events, that may ultimately be futile. The oob can pretty much set things up so that you die in a car crash or whatever when it wants to. But that doesn't have anything to do with free will. Free will is not power to change the world, it's not even power to preserve your own life. It's simply the abiltiy to make your own decisions.

Don't get wrapped up in the fact that free will has to give you power over the universe. It doesn't. You can still be powerless and have free will.
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Re: Fire-breathing T-Rex's

Post by Username17 »

RC wrote:What about people making choices?


Those choices, from now until the end of time, are by definition determined the very instant that the oob takes any action at all.

Remember, it's an omniscient being, so it automatically knows what events are going to happen in response to its actions. It already knows what every person is going to choose in response to those events.

It must know these things, because otherwise there are things that it wouldn't know, and it's supposed to be omniscient.

RC wrote:People make choices all the time, with or without oobs.


That's by no means guaranteed. It's entirely possible that noone ever makes any choices despite the lack of an oob. But certainly if there is an oob, noone ever makes any choices. If there's an oob, it knows what your choices are going to be, and it takes precisely the actions it wants to such that your choices are going to be exactly as it wants.

With no oob, it is equally plausible such that everything is determined to a degree beyond our ability to predict - including our own actions and opinions - as it is that we are confronted with sense data from which we make actual decisions.

With no oob, we may or may not be able to make choices. With an oob, only the oob has a choice.

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Re: Fire-breathing T-Rex's

Post by RandomCasualty »

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1113443800[/unixtime]]
That's by no means guaranteed. It's entirely possible that noone ever makes any choices despite the lack of an oob. But certainly if there is an oob, noone ever makes any choices. If there's an oob, it knows what your choices are going to be, and it takes precisely the actions it wants to such that your choices are going to be exactly as it wants.

Well this does make the oob the ultimate chess player, but I still don't think this is necessarily an end to free will. Simply knowing the perfect moves to evoke a countermove is manipulation, though admittedly a highly complex manipulation. Free will can exist side by side with manipulation, so long as the manipulation still allows you to come up with your own opinions.

Even if ultimately you are a pawn of an oob, so long as you're actively making the moves that he expects you to make, you're exercising free will. Because the oob is merely creating circumstances and you are coming to a conclusion based on those circumstances. Your opinions and actions are still your own, it's just that it knows what those will be before you do. Just because you cannot outwit the chess master doesn't mean you aren't playing the game.

From the point of the oob, you may be merely a machine that follows a predefined program, but from the human point of view you still possess free will. And given free will is a uniquely human concept, I think the human point of view is the important one.

And so long as humanity is not omniscient and possesses sentience, it can still have free will, at least from its own point of view.

As for trying to imagine what humanity would look like to an oob, I wouldn't even bother. There's no way to comprehend what kinds of alien thought processes would be bouncing around in its omnipresent head. Knowing what an oob thought of humanity would likely drive a human insane, or possibly cause his head to explode with knowledge.


With no oob, it is equally plausible such that everything is determined to a degree beyond our ability to predict - including our own actions and opinions - as it is that we are confronted with sense data from which we make actual decisions.

The same is true with an oob too. From the human point of view, you cannot perceive or even know that an inactive oob exists. Therefore the human condition isn't changed in anyway because there's no way of knowing it has been changed.
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Re: Fire-breathing T-Rex's

Post by Ramnza »

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We're going around in circle folks.
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