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Free will

giospurs
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Posted 04/28/08 - 02:38 PM: Subject: Free will	#1
Hi, this is my first post here, so bear with me. I believe or find that there is some credence to the theory that time has already happened. What I mean by that is that if you imagine time as a loop (which some scientists do) that we are just living a certain point in time but in the future people have already lived and died or some are still living. It's a very hard thing to explain without referring to points in time. Anyway, I'm sure there is a formal name for this but I've never read about it. However, unlike most other people that state this theory, I do not believe that this necessarily means you can't have free will. I'm not talking about this in a religious sense at all btw. Isn't it possible that all our decisions and life has been made already. BUT not by somebody else, or a God, by us. This means we can still have free will, but just we can't do anything differently that we did before. We cannot change the history of time, but we've already made our decisions and are living them and actually making them now (now, in the sense of our perception of the word and time). I apologise if this is too confused for you to make any sense out of it, but it's very hard to be succint when trying to lay out something like this.

giospurs
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Posted 04/28/08 - 02:45 PM:	#2
I just read reincarnated's post in the certainty of future, I favour the deterministic "Block-Universe" interpretation where all of past and future space-time "exists" in a 4-dimensional sense, and the future is just as much "fixed" as the past. In this scenario, the only reason we think the future is uncertain is because we simply do not have enough information to be able to know the future with certainty. Indeed, we also do not know most of the past with certainty - there are definite limits to what we can know about both past and future. This is put much better than what I was trying to say. But the main point of the thread is "Does this theory contradict a theory of free will?" I don't believe it does.

Kreius
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Posted 04/28/08 - 02:46 PM:	#3
giospurs wrote: This means we can still have free will, but just we can't do anything differently that we did before. This goes against the concept of free-will once the initial free-willing has been done. Let's say we have loop 1, where we have freewill, and you decide to make this thread; we are now stuck in a deterministic system (i.e. the usual opposite of free-will) where you cannot deviate from it. So ideally we can't have freewill, because we can assume that our actions have already been made, and thus cannot deviate from them.
"Challenge your professors, even when you agree with them." -Herr Iosity

giospurs
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Posted 04/28/08 - 02:50 PM:	#4
Kreius wrote: This goes against the concept of free-will. Let's say we have loop 1, where we have freewill, and you decide to make this thread; we are now stuck in a deterministic system (i.e. the usual opposite of free-will) where you cannot deviate from it. So ideally we can't have freewill, because we can assume that our actions have already been made, and thus cannot deviate from them. But if we have already made our decisions, the only way we could possibly deviate from our decisions that we made before, is if we had knowledge of the future, because nothing else would be different. And even if we did have knowledge of the future, we would have had this knowledge before. Basically, our conditions and our surroundings do not change, so there'd be no reason to change from the decisions we made before. I still think we can have free will in such a theory.

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Posted 04/28/08 - 02:59 PM:	#5
Kreius wrote: This goes against the concept of free-will once the initial free-willing has been done. Let's say we have loop 1, where we have freewill, and you decide to make this thread; we are now stuck in a deterministic system (i.e. the usual opposite of free-will) where you cannot deviate from it. So ideally we can't have freewill, because we can assume that our actions have already been made, and thus cannot deviate from them. Free will does not imply an ability to deviate from what you did last time, merely that you can make a choice independent of circumstance. As such, it appears to me consistent with a time loop phenomena, in which the events of the universe repeats itself. It is important to recognize that free will does not per definition belong to a causal chain of events, and even if determinism applies, it does not even have to be an event, but exist outside time.
All about making money Free Europe Now How to fix your country In thought, men distance themselves from nature in order thus imaginatively to present it to themselves--but only in order to determine how it is to be dominated - Adorno and Horkheimer

Lex
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Posted 04/28/08 - 03:02 PM:	#6
Well, it's rather simple. If it is impossible to gather enough information to predict the future (Heisenberg uncertainty principle), and there is no feedback at all into this time from the "future time", (and there is none or we could alter it), then it is impossible to prove the existence of such a loop without having a grasp on space-time and quantum physics WELL BEYOND what we know now.

Abiathar
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Posted 04/28/08 - 03:12 PM:	#7
Though, I believe, this topic has been ground steadily into the ground, allow me to respond. In order to have free will one must be able to make any choice that one so desires at any given time. Without even the intervention of a diety or god-figure situations do not allow you to have any choice you may wish. Hence, Free will is moot by definition as there are no beings inwhich environmental or universal conditions that any entity is not in some way confined by. Even if this is the physical designation as Human. Free will MUST be able to be that, free, a lack of restriction upon choices. However, less litterally free will would also include the fact that other people will hold you accountable for your choices. Therefore, that choice was still not free and came with rammifications. Granted you could make the choice, the choice that was made removed your own free will, as such that choice was folly and again you lose said free will. If you decide not to eat you die, though you can attempt to decide that this should not be the case. Free will requires omnipotence. If an entity had projected the path of your life before you were born or made such an action, then you again have no free will. The issue with this is that in order for your life to be lived under this plan, therefore there are no random events. So, shooting yourself is part of the plan, though supposedly suicide is against every religious plan, save for confused cultists with a kool-aide addiction. Therefore, either way, you have no free will.

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Posted 04/28/08 - 11:37 PM:	#8
I'm not sure that knowing what choice someone will make means that person does not have the free-will to make that choice. Similarly, I do not think being able to know because the world is causally deterministic eliminates the possibility that free-will. Of course, it depends on what one means by free-will.
Short and to the point. \| Online Philosophy Club \| Book & Reading Forums \| My Philosophy Articles "Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness." ~Immanuel Kant

Abiathar
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Posted 04/29/08 - 12:56 AM:	#9
Precisely

yiming
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Posted 04/29/08 - 01:32 PM:	#10
Why can't we be simple and just define free-will in the conventional everyday sense and not junk it with pseudo-philosophical crap. Let's say free-will is the freedom to choose anything regardless of whether or not mom likes it. Having said that, let's go back to the topic. Giospur proposes that we could be actually re-living a free-willing life lived before in a past life. That's a theoretical possibility. Imagine that this life is actually a replay, not unlike watching a movie about everything that has already happened.

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