gds@mit-eddie.UUCP (Greg Skinner) (03/06/84)
<wombat food>
... about the argument between omnisience and free will. Let me
illustrate with another time-line example.
Suppose time travel is possible, i.e. one can actually go into the
future and observe it, then return to the past to report on the acts of
the future.
Now I have a friend, X, who I wish to observe 30 years in the future. I
hop into my time machine and visit his 30-years future, see what he is
doing, then return.
I know what he will be doing 30 years in his future, yet I did not
interfere with his making any of the decisions that led to his actions
30 years in the future (unless I told him what I did, THEN you could say
omni violates free will in that my actions caused his future to become).
I think a lot of people are confusing "controlling" destiny vs.
"knowing" it. I might "know" something is going to happen (because I
acutally saw it happen), that doesn't make me the controller of that
event, and it doesn't violate anyone's free will, in that it would have
happened anyway whether I know it was going to happen or not.
This is to say:
You don't have free will over YOUR ULTIMATE DESTINY which will be known
at the day you die, but you have "local" free will for all the decisions
you make up until you die.
Or:
You can't affect what will ultimately happen to you, but for every
decision you encounter you have the ability to either make or not make
that decision -- it's only after you make the decision (not before) that
it becomes inevitable, because it is what actually happened as opposed
to "what might happen".
I hope I haven't just been rambling ...
--
By the power of Grayskull!
Greg-bo, Prince of Eternia
{decvax!genrad, eagle!mit-vax, ihnp4}!mit-eddie!gdslaura@utzoo.UUCP (Laura Creighton) (03/09/84)
Greg Skinner, I am not saying that *your knowing* implies that *you control* the future. I am saying that *your knowing* implies *something controls* the future -- whatever it is that you use to make your prediction of your future. Therefore, the future is not *free*. Therefore I am not free. The only way that you can escape this with your time machine is to assume that either the world that you visited was only a "potential world" and might not ever be part of the past, or that there is a new world for every decision, and thus there were a *lot* of future worlds that you could have visited but you just happened to visit this one. Personally, I think that the second explanation is too complicated. Better to give up either free will or omniscience. -- Laura Creighton utzoo!laura