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If the judeo-christian god is omni-powerful why would he instruct Adam and Eve not to eat the apple? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 5 months ago* by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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[–] 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Free will is incompatible with omniscience. People really want it to work, but it doesn't.

Free will is observer-dependent, and is short for "I can't predict the behavior of this thing". For an omniscient observer, there is no thing that it can say that about.

Free will is not an inherent property of a thing, and that's what trips people up so much.

To ponder it a bit, does a rock have free will? A dog? A human? A super-intelligent AI that we can't hope to comprehend? Why or why not for each step?

The definition above explains it all. Of course a rock doesn't, we can predict its behavior with physics! Maybe a monkey does, people disagree on that. Of course human do though, because I do!

Now ponder what the super-intelligent AI would think. "Of course the first three don't have free will, their behavior is entirely predictable with physics"

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    If free will is observer dependent than why would the omniscience of some other observer relieve us, the observer who is not omniscient, of free will? Something else being able to predict my actions has no effect on my ability to predict the actions of others.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    We're not "relieved" of free will. It's not an intrinsic property that one "has". It would be like having "big" or "near". You don't "have" big, it's a relative term.

    It's simply a description of observed behavior. That's all it really is in the end, even though people treat it as this super mysterious thing.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    That is my point. I can be near a rock and an ant can be closer to the rock. The observer dependent position of the ant does not affect my proximity to the rock. We would have to agree on a frame of reference before we could begin debating my absolute position relative to said rock.

    Your post and the previous are making the materialist argument (which in real life I agree with.) I was trying to further explain the Christian argument for free will in a world where omniscience is possible. An omniscient observer doesn't affect the lived experience of free will for anything else. The watchmaker god theory is a popular way to reconcile this point. Even if free will as a discrete and measurable phenomenon does not exist e.g. one cannot show me they have x units of free will or whenever, that does not change the experience of free will for the individual.

    Arguing for or against some imagined omniscience by switching the frame of reference to that of an imagined all knowing system or all encompassing formula and then using that framing to invalidate choice isn't very sound reasoning. It may or may not be correct and it is falsifiable but we can't test it in any meaningful way.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    I think we generally agree with each other. The existence of an omniscient AI or deity doesn't change the "experience" of free will. It doesn't "invalidate choice" from the point of view of the observed. It does "invalidate choice" from the point of view of the observer, who can now say "This thing exhibits no unpredictable behavior to me". You and I both think we have free will, because we can't predict our own behavior. Our experience is unchanged, whether or not some other observer exists or could exist that could predict our behavior.

    Agreeing on a frame of reference is exactly my point. "Does something have free will?" requires the follow-up question, "According to whom?". Just like "I'm far from that rock" requires the followup question, "According to whom?". The ant might think you're far from the rock, something else might think you're near the rock.

    To boil it down a bit more, my point is just that you can always replace the phrase "free will" in speech with "unpredictable behavior" without loss of meaning, because that is what people actually mean when they say it, whether they realize that or not.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    So, subatomic particles have free will, but humans don't?

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    Why not? It might seem absurd, but can you prove they don't "choose" to flit about here or there? A super-intelligent AI might also be able to "pierce the veil" and determine the underlying mechanics, like a video game character determining the math behind the random number generator that powers their world.

    That's also only one interpretation of quantum mechanics, mechanistic interpretations aren't ruled out (though a number of variants have been).

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