The omniscience issue

[Blaggard]

In early days Plato et al, questioned how man can have free will and be fated, only the Gods it seemed had free will and heroes if sponsored by the Gods sometimes and demi Gods like Hercules. Later Arab and Jewish scholars inspired by earlier works and an influx of material also debated the issue of Gods will which culminated in compatibilism in the enlightenment era.

But is compatibilism logical? Can a God know everything and you remain a free agent, what would it take to justify this assertion or do you think compatibilism and religious apologetics therein are ultimately doomed to fail?

It was suggested by Arab scholars that perhaps Gods knowledge was hazy on details giving man at least an element of free will, can you be determined and free?

[HexHammer]

Free will is an illusion, insurance statistics tells an eery tale about how consistent our actions are, and there's only little room for free will.

[jackles]

there is only free will in terms of doing good or evil in other words free will is orientated meaning.you have free will in meaning to do good or evil.the rest is ant mechanics

[Blaggard]

Free will is an illusion, insurance statistics tells an eery tale about how consistent our actions are, and there's only little room for free will.

Actually insurance salesmen rely on probability actuary based on the inherently unpredictable nature of human behaviour, if humans behaved predictably then you could invest in the stock market certain that x would happen if y happened, barring natural disaster etc. Another example of chaotic systems is what people do when there is a fire, some people run towards it even when it becomes obvious you can't put it out, some people bottle neck exits, some people are calm others hysterical, and when panicked humans can do some pretty irrational things. That said though none of that says anything about free will since chaotic systems are complex but not random; entropy however is non reversible if you reversed time and ran it back there is no guarantee things would turn out the same either thermodynamically or physically, as are any quantum systems, for example a macro version of entropy is breaking a vase, there is no guarantee if it will either break in the same way twice, or that it will have the same atomic configuration or even at the extreme that it will even revert to being a vase in the first place. That has implications on free will, but it still does not resolve the question. Compatibilism is apologetics either religious or philosophical if used to affirm free will IMHO. An intersting fact though is that any broken object will tend to break into exactly pi pieces at the limit of infinity. This has been proven in reiterative experiments, and is it seems a law of nature.

If you take a limited example say the number of people who will crash their red car in the next year you can use trends to predict the sort of ball park figure but even this can be way off. Insurance is a sort of gamble, and of course with any gambling, the house always wins.

Just AAMOI here are some odds on Casino games:

Roulette 47/1 on any number

2/1 ish on any colour or odds or even allowing for 0 or 00.

Craps AKA knucklebones: depends on what you are shooting for 7 or 11 is obviously the best odds with just over 50/50, with snake eyes and 12 being roughly 18 to 1 both or 36/1 if you bet on 2 or 12 separately.

counting cards, black jack aka pontoon or 21, average 1% return on initial outlay given x amount of time. If you don't count cards the odds are fairly pitiful, because you have to beat the banker but the odds in each hand are too complicate to go into here.

Poker: Texas Hold 'em: against other players, ie not the house. Depends on skill but approximately 50/50 skill/luck if you are extremely good at it ie professional/world class or better, otherwise odds slide drastically.

The stock market, obviously not a casino 10% return on average +/- 10% because if someone makes money someone will have lost it. At the end of the day the ledger must balance, that said though the stock market always generally, over time, goes up so the odds are slightly better (and of course worse) than 10% depending when you trade, as a rule though it evens out to 10%.

If there is free will and I am agnostic, then libertarian free will is the best option, although completely unprovable.

[Blaggard]

there is only free will in terms of doing good or evil in other words free will is orientated meaning.you have free will in meaning to do good or evil.the rest is ant mechanics

Well if determinism is true that is of course correct, one could question if the universe operates deterministically at any level though: a scientist would say, no not at any level, a philosopher would say yes it is fundamentally deterministic. Reality it seems at least in experiment is a complex mix of random and causal.

This only muddies the question though, see Leplaces demon and entropy/thermodynamics and quantum mechanics:

Good overview here:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/

It's inaccurate only in assuming interpretational issues can or will result necessarily in deterministic physics (a bias I have noticed in philosophy that in itself is at best misguided and ignorant and at worse hopelessly easy to criticise (if you do not know then you can not judge the veracity of one interpretation over another at all or likelihood it is correct) in the case of Many Worlds interpretation and Many Minds and the other best hope Bohmian mechanics does not distinguish itself in any experimental way and is fringe anyway), they need to get a physicist to explain them, because the deterministic theories of quantum mechanics are completely unprovable and probably always will be. That said they could be right it's just premature to say QM will ultimately be deterministic because as yet no one knows if this is true, I can assure you there are a lot of scientists that hope it is true, but I don't think the universe gives a damn about hope or human hubris. hence for better or worse Copenhagen is mainstream only by virtue of being first, and the rest are indistinguishable from it. Even the term promising is a lie, promising in what way? Sadly pop science magazines don't help by proclaiming Stephen hawking thinks Many Worlds is the best explanation or x or y.

"What is your favourite interpretation of physics?"

"Shut up and calculate, (a version or allusion to Copenhagen or a more modern version there of)"

Attributed to Richard P. Feynman and others but probably others.

You can't even trust university peer reviewed encyclopaedias.

There has recently been proposed a limit on the computational power of the universe, i.e. the ability of Laplace's Demon to process an infinite amount of information. The limit is based on the maximum entropy of the universe, the speed of light, and the minimum amount of time taken to move information across the Planck length, and the figure was shown to be about 10120 bits.[9] Accordingly, anything that requires more than this amount of data cannot be computed in the amount of time that has elapsed so far in the universe.

Another theory suggests that if Laplace's demon were to occupy a parallel universe or alternate dimension from which it could determine the implied data and do the necessary calculations on an alternate and greater time line the aforementioned time limitation would not apply. This position is for instance explained in David Deutsch's The Fabric of Reality, who says that realizing a 300-qubit quantum computer would prove the existence of parallel universes carrying the computation.

It must be admitted that the openness of the future would be hard to defend in the rigidly deterministic universe that Laplace regarded as the inexorable consequence of taking Newtonian ideas seriously. We have seen that in that world, full knowledge of the present, together with unlimited calculating power, implies total knowledge of a rigorously entailed past and future. Nothing really novel ever happened; history was a reiterated tautology. However, the iron grip of Laplace's calculating demon has been relaxed by the twentieth century discovery of widespread intrinsic unpredictabilities present in nature, both at the microscopic level of quantum events and also at the macroscopic level of the behavior of exquisitely sensitive chaotic systems. We have noted already that the question of whether these epistemological deficiencies are to be interpreted as signs of an ontological openness is a metaphysical issue, not to be settled by the natural sciences alone. In the case of chaotic systems, we have seen that it is possible to develop an interpretation that leads to the existence of extra causal principles with the form of the 'active information', and that these might well be capable of accommodating the action of both human and divine agency. Such a program would then achieve Pannenberg's desired defense of the openness of history, as theology wishes to understand it, not by appeal to field theory but to the ideas of the top-down effects of active information. There is much that is necessarily speculative here, but I believe that these ideas afford a better model than field for the presence and activity of the Spirit.[10]
—John Polkinghorne, Faith, Science and Understanding

4.4 Quantum mechanics

As indicated above, QM is widely thought to be a strongly non-deterministic theory. Popular belief (even among most physicists) holds that phenomena such as radioactive decay, photon emission and absorption, and many others are such that only a probabilistic description of them can be given. The theory does not say what happens in a given case, but only says what the probabilities of various results are. So, for example, according to QM the fullest description possible of a radium atom (or a chunk of radium, for that matter), does not suffice to determine when a given atom will decay, nor how many atoms in the chunk will have decayed at any given time. The theory gives only the probabilities for a decay (or a number of decays) to happen within a given span of time. Einstein and others perhaps thought that this was a defect of the theory that should eventually be removed, by a supplemental hidden variable theory[6] that restores determinism; but subsequent work showed that no such hidden variables account could exist. At the microscopic level the world is ultimately mysterious and chancy.

So goes the story; but like much popular wisdom, it is partly mistaken and/or misleading. Ironically, quantum mechanics is one of the best prospects for a genuinely deterministic theory in modern times! Even more than in the case of GTR and the hole argument, everything hinges on what interpretational and philosophical decisions one adopts. The fundamental law at the heart of non-relativistic QM is the Schrödinger equation. The evolution of a wavefunction describing a physical system under this equation is normally taken to be perfectly deterministic.[7] If one adopts an interpretation of QM according to which that's it—i.e., nothing ever interrupts Schrödinger evolution, and the wavefunctions governed by the equation tell the complete physical story—then quantum mechanics is a perfectly deterministic theory. There are several interpretations that physicists and philosophers have given of QM which go this way. (See the entry on quantum mechanics.)

More commonly—and this is part of the basis for the popular wisdom—physicists have resolved the quantum measurement problem by postulating that some process of “collapse of the wavefunction” occurs from time to time (particularly during measurements and observations) that interrupts Schrödinger evolution. The collapse process is usually postulated to be indeterministic, with probabilities for various outcomes, via Born's rule, calculable on the basis of a system's wavefunction. The once-standard, Copenhagen interpretation of QM posits such a collapse. It has the virtue of solving certain paradoxes such as the infamous Schrödinger's cat paradox, but few philosophers or physicists can take it very seriously unless they are either idealists or instrumentalists. The reason is simple: the collapse process is not physically well-defined, and feels too ad hoc to be a fundamental part of nature's laws.[8]

In 1952 David Bohm created an alternative interpretation of QM—perhaps better thought of as an alternative theory—that realizes Einstein's dream of a hidden variable theory, restoring determinism and definiteness to micro-reality. In Bohmian quantum mechanics, unlike other interpretations, it is postulated that all particles have, at all times, a definite position and velocity. In addition to the Schrödinger equation, Bohm posited a guidance equation that determines, on the basis of the system's wavefunction and particles' initial positions and velocities, what their future positions and velocities should be. As much as any classical theory of point particles moving under force fields, then, Bohm's theory is deterministic. Amazingly, he was also able to show that, as long as the statistical distribution of initial positions and velocities of particles are chosen so as to meet a “quantum equilibrium” condition, his theory is empirically equivalent to standard Copenhagen QM. In one sense this is a philosopher's nightmare: with genuine empirical equivalence as strong as Bohm obtained, it seems experimental evidence can never tell us which description of reality is correct. (Fortunately, we can safely assume that neither is perfectly correct, and hope that our Final Theory has no such empirically equivalent rivals.) In other senses, the Bohm theory is a philosopher's dream come true, eliminating much (but not all) of the weirdness of standard QM and restoring determinism to the physics of atoms and photons. The interested reader can find out more from the link above, and references therein.

This small survey of determinism's status in some prominent physical theories, as indicated above, does not really tell us anything about whether determinism is true of our world. Instead, it raises a couple of further disturbing possibilities for the time when we do have the Final Theory before us (if such time ever comes): first, we may have difficulty establishing whether the Final Theory is deterministic or not—depending on whether the theory comes loaded with unsolved interpretational or mathematical puzzles. Second, we may have reason to worry that the Final Theory, if indeterministic, has an empirically equivalent yet deterministic rival (as illustrated by Bohmian quantum mechanics.)

Ironically in this case best means more hopeful than better chance. They do however have the decency to say it is unresolved, but they have unfairly loaded a bias onto the issue that is impossible to justify by use of prose IMHO. Logically speaking there is no reason to assume that QM is deterministic given the evidence, and no reason to assume it ever will be given the lack of evidence likely to come from the other interpretations. So we are at a sort of impasse...

[bobevenson]

Speaking of omniscience, before Ouzo existed, and after playing 9 holes of golf in the Cincinnati area, a large group of us decided to play liar's poker in the clubhouse. On one particular hand, the bidding seemed to be concentrated on a number that I had two or three of, but for the first time ever, I decided to challenge every bid, until the bidding on that number reached a high level between two other players. Finally, I made a bid two levels higher than the last bid. My bid was challenged all around, but I knew I had a winning bid and that any higher bid would be a losing bid. When we showed our dollar bills, I was able to immediately announce the quantity of my bid that each player had. It wasn't like I had a hunch or was making a strategic bid, it was as though I had the omniscience of God, and knew what was in everybody's hand without seeing his bill. That was the last hand we played; it was like everybody's ego had been totally crushed by my winning bid.

[Blaggard]

Speaking of omniscience, before Ouzo existed, and after playing 9 holes of golf in the Cincinnati area, a large group of us decided to play liar's poker in the clubhouse. On one particular hand, the bidding seemed to be concentrated on a number that I had two or three of, but for the first time ever, I decided to challenge every bid, until the bidding on that number reached a high level between two other players. Finally, I made a bid two levels higher than the last bid. My bid was challenged all around, but I knew I had a winning bid and that any higher bid would be a losing bid. When we showed our dollar bills, I was able to immediately announce the quantity of my bid that each player had. It wasn't like I had a hunch or was making a strategic bid, it was as though I had the omniscience of God, and knew what was in everybody's hand without seeing his bill. That was the last hand we played; it was like everybody's ego had been totally crushed by my winning bid.

Lol sometimes you just get lucky, I wouldn't read too much into it. Although strictly speaking there is no luck and its all probabilities, but hell nicely played anyway.

A lot of the skill element in poker is not knowing the odds of a royal flush 5600fhdjh to 1 and so on, any idiot can look them up, the world champions are world champions not because they are specially skilled as in knowing the odds, they just read people at a higher level than most. Hence if it's knowing the people you are playing, you got that down, in that case. Ironically the last few winners of the world championship in Texas hold 'em have been internet players but the same thing applies whether you can see someone or not, reading trends of behaviour is not something you need to see necessarily, and tells amongst the best are of limited use, cause they fake tells.

Pokers a good game to play for fun, but unless you are really really good you will lose against the experts more often than not, those guys are something else. It's like going up against Usain bolt in the 100m: you will cross the line, but it'll be 5 seconds after he does at least, even if you are on PCP and amphetamines, and then you will collapse.

[bobevenson]

I don't know if you're familiar with liar's poker, played with the serial number of a dollar bill, but it's not like poker, played with a deck of cards. In liar's poker, you are trying to predict the highest quantity of a number contained in everybody's hand combined. Ouzo adds an escape bid, and doubling and redoubling in order for the game to be played at a much higher level., and is not played with the serial number of a dollar bill, but with a computer-generated set of eight random numbers printed in rank-order sequence.

[thedoc]

In early days Plato et al, questioned how man can have free will and be fated, only the Gods it seemed had free will and heroes if sponsored by the Gods sometimes and demi Gods like Hercules. Later Arab and Jewish scholars inspired by earlier works and an influx of material also debated the issue of Gods will which culminated in compatibilism in the enlightenment era.

But is compatibilism logical? Can a God know everything and you remain a free agent, what would it take to justify this assertion or do you think compatibilism and religious apologetics therein are ultimately doomed to fail?

It was suggested by Arab scholars that perhaps Gods knowledge was hazy on details giving man at least an element of free will, can you be determined and free?

This is like you've been reading my mind, I have been contemplating this question for some time now. One answer that I can suggest is that God is Omniscient, but also having free will, (which some people seem to overlook), can choose to not know, and therefore man can have free will.

[HexHammer]

Actually insurance salesmen rely on probability actuary based on the inherently unpredictable nature of human behaviour, if humans behaved predictably then you could invest in the stock market certain that x would happen if y happened, barring natural disaster etc.

Sure insurance reloy on probability, but still it does range from a relative stable point of view, with only minor fluxuation, it's only when a direct change can cause a greater fluxuation. Ie when airbags was introduced in cars, fatalaties dropped drasticly.

We'r talking about 10-20% fluxuation iirc, not 0-100,000%

Imo human behaviour is in many cases very predictable, it's only a matter of good analysis, lawyers in USA chooses carefully the jury to easily sway them, the same with skilled spindoctors who can manipulate the masses.

I myself have been in marketing when I was working back in the days, and found that basic human nature is very predictable and I heavily exploited it.

[Blaggard]

Basic human nature is very exploitable in controlled circumstances I think is the point, you place a human on a desert island and wait until they start hammering in stakes and declaring a pig lord of the flies if you want to see what happens in unusual circumstances.

Basic human behaviour within very fine lawful social constructs is and always has been predictable for the very reason laws exist. However there is no way to predict human nature outside of such narrow margins, we are after all just apes with no fur.

"Only two things are infinite human stupidity and the universe and I am not so sure about the last one."

Albert Einstein.

[Blaggard]

In early days Plato et al, questioned how man can have free will and be fated, only the Gods it seemed had free will and heroes if sponsored by the Gods sometimes and demi Gods like Hercules. Later Arab and Jewish scholars inspired by earlier works and an influx of material also debated the issue of Gods will which culminated in compatibilism in the enlightenment era.

But is compatibilism logical? Can a God know everything and you remain a free agent, what would it take to justify this assertion or do you think compatibilism and religious apologetics therein are ultimately doomed to fail?

It was suggested by Arab scholars that perhaps Gods knowledge was hazy on details giving man at least an element of free will, can you be determined and free?

This is like you've been reading my mind, I have been contemplating this question for some time now. One answer that I can suggest is that God is Omniscient, but also having free will, (which some people seem to overlook), can choose to not know, and therefore man can have free will.

Yeah that seems like a reasonable compromise. Like the God is hazy on the details one that the Arabs and Jews came up with in the dark ages.

The only problem is of course is omniscience denotes absolute knowledge of everything, and it seems a little odd that he would chose not to know just to grant free will, in that case he might as well not be omniscient at all and stumble around randomly, because he would have to not know almost everything by choice. Whilst that would explain a lot about religion it probably wouldn't be very satisfying to the religious.

[Blaggard]

I don't know if you're familiar with liar's poker, played with the serial number of a dollar bill, but it's not like poker, played with a deck of cards. In liar's poker, you are trying to predict the highest quantity of a number contained in everybody's hand combined. Ouzo adds an escape bid, and doubling and redoubling in order for the game to be played at a much higher level., and is not played with the serial number of a dollar bill, but with a computer-generated set of eight random numbers printed in rank-order sequence.

Ah sorry my bad. Ok. Did not know that.


If it's done by a computer it is not random only a seeded RNG with predictable outcomes if you know the algorithms. but ok. The only truly random processes are natural ones such as radioactive decay, observations of the fine structure constant, and anything that is outside of an algorithm. Probably not really worth bringing up but still...

If you can see the outputs you can eventually figure out the algorithm with "R"NG ("Random" Number Generation) you'll have no such luck predicting what state an entangled photon is in or when something is going to decay. You can make a computerised random number generator but it would involve taking numbers from a real world process such as the afore mentioned, and there is usually no reason to do that, because even uber nerds are not that dull that they want to sit there watching series of numbers until they see a pattern... Oh no wait forget I mentioned that.

[bobevenson]

I don't know if you're familiar with liar's poker, played with the serial number of a dollar bill, but it's not like poker, played with a deck of cards. In liar's poker, you are trying to predict the highest quantity of a number contained in everybody's hand combined. Ouzo adds an escape bid, and doubling and redoubling in order for the game to be played at a much higher level., and is not played with the serial number of a dollar bill, but with a computer-generated set of eight random numbers printed in rank-order sequence.

Ah sorry my bad. Ok. Did not know that.


If it's done by a computer it is not random only a seeded RNG with predictable outcomes if you know the algorithms. but ok. The only truly random processes are natural ones such as radioactive decay, observations of the fine structure constant, and anything that is outside of an algorithm. Probably not really worth bringing up but still...

If you can see the outputs you can eventually figure out the algorithm with "R"NG ("Random" Number Generation) you'll have no such luck predicting what state an entangled photon is in or when something is going to decay. You can make a computerised random number generator but it would involve taking numbers from a real world process such as the afore mentioned, and there is usually no reason to do that, because even uber nerds are not that dull that they want to sit there watching series of numbers until they see a pattern... Oh no wait forget I mentioned that.

Actually, the randomness of the numbers is not a critical issue since liar's poker is played with the serial number of a dollar bill, which is certainly less random than a computer-generated set of numbers. There are 12 bidding ploys that are more important than the numbers being truly random. The chance of having 8 numbers with no matches is 2%; exactly 2 of a kind, 62%; exactly 3 of a kind, 31%; exactly 4 of a kind, 5%; and exactly 5-8 of a kind, less than 1%. In other words, 93% of the time, a player will have either 2 or 3 of a particular number.

[Blaggard]

I don't know if you're familiar with liar's poker, played with the serial number of a dollar bill, but it's not like poker, played with a deck of cards. In liar's poker, you are trying to predict the highest quantity of a number contained in everybody's hand combined. Ouzo adds an escape bid, and doubling and redoubling in order for the game to be played at a much higher level., and is not played with the serial number of a dollar bill, but with a computer-generated set of eight random numbers printed in rank-order sequence.

Ah sorry my bad. Ok. Did not know that.


If it's done by a computer it is not random only a seeded RNG with predictable outcomes if you know the algorithms. but ok. The only truly random processes are natural ones such as radioactive decay, observations of the fine structure constant, and anything that is outside of an algorithm. Probably not really worth bringing up but still...

If you can see the outputs you can eventually figure out the algorithm with "R"NG ("Random" Number Generation) you'll have no such luck predicting what state an entangled photon is in or when something is going to decay. You can make a computerised random number generator but it would involve taking numbers from a real world process such as the afore mentioned, and there is usually no reason to do that, because even uber nerds are not that dull that they want to sit there watching series of numbers until they see a pattern... Oh no wait forget I mentioned that.

Actually, the randomness of the numbers is not a critical issue since liar's poker is played with the serial number of a dollar bill, which is certainly less random than a computer-generated set of numbers. There are 12 bidding ploys that are more important than the numbers being truly random. The chance of having 8 numbers with no matches is 2%; exactly 2 of a kind, 62%; exactly 3 of a kind, 31%; exactly 4 of a kind, 5%; and exactly 5-8 of a kind, less than 1%. In other words, 93% of the time, a player will have either 2 or 3 of a particular number.

Sounds fun, I Think I'll stick to Texas hold 'em for pennies and dimes though if it's all the same to you.