Why would omniscience and free will be mutually exclusive?

As far as I can make out God's omniscience does have a consequence. It means that we live in a pre-determined existence. Therefore God's omniscience does actually do something. It takes away a humans ability to contradict what he already knows to be true. Therefore we don't have free will, but the illusion of free will.

 

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Time and Omniscience

Only if we restrict ourselves to mundane interpretations of time.

That restriction is itself in conflict with omniscience.

 

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You are forgiven.

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My concern is that bringing the discussion to an overtly religious footing introduces concepts that might be unwarranted, irrelevant or misleading.
Surely such discussions, grounded in religion, would be better handled in the religion forum?

Why does that need to be established?

It doesn't need any establishing of seven billion omniscient humans, or even one... just the concepts of omniscience and free-will... and whether certain definitions/understandings of them are mutually exclusive or not.

For example:
If omniscience includes perfect knowledge of future events then that future is set and immutable.
If one considers free-will the ability to alter future events from that which are otherwise immutable, then clearly the two are mutually exclusive.

If one wishes the two not to be mutually exclusive then either omniscience can not include perfect knowledge of the future, OR free-will is something other than the ability to change future events from that which are otherwise immutable.
OR some other working definitions of omniscience and free-will could be used... which is what Signal seems to be raising in the OP - i.e. what assumptions (e.g. definitions / understanding) do people have when they say they are mutually exclusive.

But the fact that someone / anyone / anything is omniscient, or could even merely BE omniscient (i.e. it is merely a possibility), makes free-will merely illusory... and if your working definition is a free-will that is merely a human perception then the two are not mutually exclusive - as previously explained.

If I am omniscient and know perfectly that you will pick a certain number when asked, it doesn't matter whether I tell you that I know, or try to influence you, or interact with you in any way - the very fact that I know (if I was omniscient) means that your "choice" was already known, and thus not actually a choice... at least not as anything other than a concious perception... i.e. you might think you are choosing... but the omniscient person would know otherwise.

This is not an issue if you consider free-will to be merely a conscious perception of activity (either determined or not, predictable or not).
But not everyone holds this position on free-will.

 

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How so?
Maybe you need to expand on this as well, as I may be missing something?
While it may require an omniscient entity to exist outside of time, the very existence of that entity as omniscient negates our having free-will as anything other than an illusion of our consciousness.

 

no one has mentioned probability,
the assumptions seems to exclude probabilities.

 

But don't we have to "restrict ourselves to mundane interpretations of time"?

We humans are restricted. If God isn't I don't see how it makes a difference. He would still know in what order, from our perspective, things happened, and they would have to progress in a strict order once they are 'played out' within our timeline. Would they not? I understand that any entity with omniscience would have to operate outside our interpretations but that doesn't change the fact that we must operate within them.

Or am I wrong? I'm getting confused now. Bloody time. Worse than trying to understand women.

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This and That

Did you ever, by chance, read Slaughterhouse Five?

Not that Vonnegut did a great job of addressing the question, but it's a start. And it's a hard question.

We finite creatures perceive things in sequence according to time. First this, then that, and as a result something else.

Omniscience is essentially infinite knowledge. If that knowledge develops sequentially in time, then there is a period at which that knowledge is, in fact, finite, and thus the omniscience is not, in fact, omniscient.

It helps, I suppose, if one occasionally makes an exercise of looking at reality not as a series of events, but, rather, as one complete event.

The firecracker explosion comes and goes. Its physical effects slip beyond our perception almost as soon as we notice them. Bang, gone.

Similarly, look at the Universe as a "single event". Everything that we perceive is simply part of that single process. The firecracker bang isn't just light and smoke and noise. There fluid and thermal dynamics taking place, to put it simply. And galaxies, for instance, can be looked at similarly. All of the diverse events we perceive in the Universe, whether a galaxy or perhaps a hundred-million year flash of lightning, or human wars, or an orgasm, or even the vortex in the water when you stroke the oar, is all part of one event.

It's all theoretical, of course, but the idea is that when you see the whole thing occur, as an infinite mind would perceive, its outcome is correct and proper insofar as that is how it is supposed to happen. So the grains of sand that scatter away from the firecracker have no observable intelligence that we recognize. So the bits of paper, or particles of smoke have no observable intelligence. That's beside the point. I'm not asking you to feel badly for them. I'm not asking you to rejoice. But it's what is supposed to happen, according to the laws of nature. Action, reaction. Gas explosion. Force, acceleration, physics.

What takes place inside the Universe can be said to be similar. It is simply a component of a larger, single event.

To the other, I cannot say this is the correct way to view the issue. However, the presuppositions lending to the basic question explored in this thread are more intuitive according to our perspective than valid according to reality.

I do not see how that holds until we include other factors.

• • •​

It's all about perspective. We make our choices. God perceives the results. Perhaps it looks predetermined from God's perspective, but we're the ones stuck in the middle of this big-assed explosion that seems to be taking billions of years to play out.

The best way I've found to deal with the confusion is to simply not deal with it. Or, perhaps "simply" is the wrong word. But there is a difference between a logical abstraction and its application in reality. We're trying to drag a logical abstraction pertaining it to infinity and force it to fit inside our microcosmic perspectives. There is necessarily going to be some confusion. Trying to convince people to not be confused is how generations have boxed in their diminutive deities so that the outcomes and applications are inherently confusing.

 

Not really . Probability teaches us that if you roll the dice the number m, it will come up about this many times in x amount of rolls . That shows the lack of free will right there. Your number has come up bro now evolve already . I know you can

 

read Slaughterhouse Five?

great question.




The firecracker explosion comes and goes. Its physical effects slip beyond our perception almost as soon as we notice them. Bang, gone.

look at the Universe as a "single event".

[/QUOTE] By Tiassa James


Consider :: it depends on where you are in the event stream . If you were huge and outside the known universe looking in what would you see? Probably one event ? That would be my guess

 

I don't think there's any escaping from it personally. If God has already seen how the universe is going to unfold then everything is effectively predestined by virtue of there only being one possible conclusion.

Perhaps God knows everything I'm thinking. Perhaps God knows the precise state of every quanta of energy in the entire universe right now (and has perfect recollection of the history of such). I'd be inclined to accept such premises for the sake of argument in spite of the fact that I don't believe they are true. But the idea that God knows the future is an order of magnitude more problematic (ridiculous).

If you want to locate a quanta of energy that that existed 10 billion years ago, you look for it in the present because that's where it is. If you want to locate a quanta of energy that will exist 200 billion years from now, again, you look for it in the present because that's where it is. It only ever exists in the present. Time, rather than being an ontological entity itself, is just a relational property. You can't get to the future without riding along with the process of physical change, and you can't get to the past without rewinding it. Every quanta of energy always exists, but it only exists in this moment. Time is just a measurement of how the configuration of energy changes in the direction of increasing entropy (with the exception of local reversals). Not even God can get around this. If he knows the future, he would have to have played the entire thing out already, and since we're still here, he must have rewound it afterwards. And if that actually worked, it makes the universe deterministic.

 

Yes - good book.

I won't copy the rest... it's only a few posts above.

But I actually think whether an omniscient mind is outside of time or not is irrelevant... whether they observe the entire universe, from start to finish, as a single moment/entity, is irrelevant.

Imagine condensing our 3-dimensions perfectly onto just 2, and capturing a single moment (as we perceive) on a layer of infinitely thin transparent material. And then do this for every moment of the universe... so that the entire history/life of the universe is condensed into a 3-dimensional block of this transparent material... each of those layers is fixed.
The omniscient being can then look at that block and perceive/know the entire history of the universe as a single event/item.
But each of those layers is still fixed.
If they weren't fixed then the omniscient being would need to keep looking as the layers changed... and that would require him to perceive time etc.

And the very fact that those layers are fixed enable him to be omniscient, but also mean that the subject of those layers are fixed in their paths.

However, if one considers free-will to just be a perception by the conscious mind of certain activity, rather than a claim of the underlying nature of that activity, there is no mutual-exclusivity.

What other factors?
Omniscience, if taken to include knowing our future events (whether the omniscient being is atemporal or not), logically (as far as I can tell) precludes free-will from being anything other than illusory.

Sure - so while we consciously perceive ourselves to have free-will... God knows otherwise.

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Because those people are defining the words 'omniscience' and 'free-will' in such a way as to make them incompatible.

They may very well be right.

The problem is, we don't really understand the nature of time, nor do we really understand the philosophy of mind and precisely what 'free will' is supposed to be. All that most of us have are vague intuitions and inchaoate metaphysical faith about those kind of things.

My own intuition is that a lot of the difficulty is very likely conceptual. We might not be thinking about these matters in the best ways.

(It doesn't help that the word 'omniscience' seems to be something of a theological abstraction and isn't something that anyone encounters in real life.)

You know, this thread looks like a reprise of the free-will/determinism thread, except that in this one, the impersonal phrase 'causal determinism' has been personalized and psychologized into 'omniscience'. It's a very similar problem.

 

someone is gonna have to refresh my memory..

where does it say God knows everything?

i believe this, but for sake of argument cite where it says God is all knowing?

 

"It" doesn't.
What you want to consider is an omniscient being who knows everything. If you then want to think this being might be called "God", that's your prerogative.

I think the discussion has to necessarily be about the difference between omniscience and omnipotence, since these can be mutually exclusive (or maybe that isn't true after all?).
Humans obviously aren't omniscient or omnipotent, but do have "freedom" to observe and to act. Or maybe that isn't true either.

BTW, probability is an artefact of conscious beings who are not omniscient. Obviously if you know everything, there is no "probable outcome", there is only what happens and that you know it does. Even "why" things happen doesn't ultimately make sense to an omniscient being; but an omnipotent being who can change what happens must know "why" they can.

 

i could understand if it were 'all knowing' God..as there is a difference between 'all knowing' and 'knows all', one intones a capability(ability?),the other a definitive nature.

God all knowing, God all acting(able to affect reality), just because he knows doesn't mean he will act..

but there is probability that effects our choices,to us these probabilities are immeasurable, but the argument is God can see all our probabilities, (which qualifies for 'all knowing' and 'knows all'), in this scenario, free will is ours, just like he wants(IMO)..

 

Say what?

Oh. Ok.

Yeah, nah.
Probability is measurable, by definition. If it wasn't there wouldn't be any probability.

 

That is exactly what Issac Newton said . He said god wound up the universe and then let it go . For Me there is a strange connection to the past like the future already happened in the past . Maybe it is my delusion ? I don't know , but when I read stuff about the old Mekigal or Enki it feels like a snap shot of me life . Maybe the ancients pondered the same things we do and that is why it seems so familiar. Like we visit the same concepts and end up with the same haunting nag at our guts . I think it is from Man taking the God Head from woman my self , but that is still speculation in a mans world , maybe not so when it becomes women world . You know that is stupid how you can't put an s on the end of woman . Who came up with that stupid shit ? Must of been a Man . What is the reason for it ? Stupid !

 

I'm gonna have to agree with Tiassa. It seems by employing the usage of reductio ad absurdum to show the omniscient being is atemporal and non-physical (not in space-time) we can prove that our free will is intact. Since the omniscient being is not in space-time for the omniscient being the universe is neither temporally predetermined nor is being determined nor will be determined. So omniscience then is categorically without physical modality. Here the universe is not relative to the omniscient being spatio-temporally, the omniscient being has no spatio-temporal relativity.

 

Is there an outside to the universe if we consider spatial dimensions to be of the universe?

 

i wasn't talking about a specific probability, more of the number of probabilities, more than two choices to any given situation...