Determinism

[TheBlackJew]

If a computer was made that could determine everything, to be clear, EVERYTHING.
Now if you used this computer to determine where you will be in 5 minutes from now and it determined that you will be standing on the roof of your house.
You decide to defy what should be inevitable, you decide instead to lay down on your bet for the next 10 minutes.
What does this say about determinism?

[hammock]

No computer that was a resident of this universe and constrained by its limitations could perform such a feat. [Plus, predictability is no longer broadly considered an intrinsic feature of determinism.]

Thus an external influence - the effects of a transcendent computer's calculations about the future of this world upon a member of this world - was introduced, thereby disrupting the normal chain of its causes and derailing what its antecedent conditions would have otherwise produced. IOW, a synonym of "God" intervened in the quasi-mythical or classical clockwork functioning of a machine-cosmos.

There has also been a tendency, however, to confuse determinism proper with two related notions: predictability and fate. ... 19th and 20th century mathematical studies have shown convincingly that neither a finite, nor an infinite but embedded-in-the-world intelligence can have the computing power necessary to predict the actual future, in any world remotely like ours. “Predictability” is therefore a façon de parler that at best makes vivid what is at stake in determinism; in rigorous discussions it should be eschewed. The world could be highly predictable, in some senses, and yet not deterministic; and it could be deterministic yet highly unpredictable, as many studies of chaos (sensitive dependence on initial conditions) show. --Causal Determinism

[HexHammer]

If a computer was made that could determine everything, to be clear, EVERYTHING.
Now if you used this computer to determine where you will be in 5 minutes from now and it determined that you will be standing on the roof of your house.
You decide to defy what should be inevitable, you decide instead to lay down on your bet for the next 10 minutes.
What does this say about determinism?

Then it would be able to predict your change of mind, simple.

[hammock]

Then it would be able to predict your change of mind, simple.

But which in response to the human still perversely does something different at that time. I.e, the computer hasn't been excused from an order to predict where he will specifically be or what he'll specifically be doing. General or unassailable answers like "You'll be doing something somewhere on planet Earth" are disqualified. The effects of the computer's predictions would be part of the antecedent conditions that cause the human to do what he does, but at the expense of the computer's outward answers being wrong.

The thought experiment accordingly makes no dent in determinism -- it's rather any claim it potentially makes about the computer always being accurate in its predictions that becomes contradictory or has to take the nosedive. Which would be the case anyway as far as a computer dependent upon / limited to the circumstances of this world becoming so omniscient about the future.

[The Voice of Time]

The computer isn't very good at its job.

[HexHammer]

The question doesn't have a definitive answer, because you don't know how the machine analyses a person, we already have machines that can depict pictures from human brains, it's just about reading the neurons, so it would be very plausible that a machine in the far future could easily read ones mind.

[hammock]

The computer isn't very good at its job.

This [imaginary, thought-experiment] computer could calculate a prediction based on how its public answer to the human would affect the latter, but "privately" withhold it and instead only give the human enough information to cause it to behave perversely on the belief that the computer did know he would change his mind. Then send its private, thereby-made-correct prediction in a sealed envelope to a lock-box that would be opened after the fact. This would reveal that the computer could indeed forecast accurately within the context of such a scenario, but in a deliberately deceptive manner. An accurate prediction could not be given immediately / directly to the "I'll do something different" person requesting it.

[The Voice of Time]

Good idea hammock x)

I don't if you're in that direction, but if you are, I too agree that any powerful computer that had the power to predict such things, would not be cheated by humans trying to do the opposite.

If it is a right prediction it is a right prediction, else, not all factors have been calculated into the machine. The machine would somehow or another be able to tell where the person would be, it could even go as far as give a riddle that would confuse, or if it had to give exact coordinates only, it would return an error because it did not have sufficient capability to deal with complications.

That is not an argument for free will though, if you want to call it that, because you are merely hindering the computer from being able to perform its job by making it too primitive to solve the task.

[Advocate]

Isn't there a movie or ten about this?