Assume that we know everything there is to know about the world, but nothing about the future. This might not be possible. And it's a tall order anyways.
Yes we know the character of the world and so know that the apple will fall.
Knowing who you are and what (and why) you do doesn't affect what you could have done. The idea that free will is somehow against determinism often seems to boil down as if only things that we don't know how they work are "free". That is as if knowing a thing would affect it directly. The thing that makes things tick and our desciption on how things tick are two separate things. The Force doesn't have the constitution of a formula. In order to exercise will you would need to have some action be correlated with your will state. If there is no such correlation your will is powerless. A natural law doesn't come (atleast directly (you could get killed for holding a solar-centric worldview)) to interfere with those correlations. Thus there is nothing will limiting about knowing how things work.
Yes we know the character of the world and so know that the apple will fall.
Okay, so the world has a character. Lets take all the facts about the character of the world together; this is what I'm calling 'natural laws'. The world obeys natural law in the sense that the world obeys its own character: the character of the world determines how things go. Does that sound right to you?
ErinFlight said:
Thinking about it, I realized that this might be a common concern. There are probably plenty of people who've looked at various more-or-less technical or jargony Less Wrong posts, tried understanding them, and then given up (without posting a comment explaining their confusion).
So I figured that it might be good to have a thread where you can ask for explanations for any Less Wrong post that you didn't understand and would like to, but don't want to directly comment on for any reason (e.g. because you're feeling embarassed, because the post is too old to attract much traffic, etc.). In the spirit of various Stupid Questions threads, you're explicitly encouraged to ask even for the kinds of explanations that you feel you "should" get even yourself, or where you feel like you could get it if you just put in the effort (but then never did).
You can ask to have some specific confusing term or analogy explained, or to get the main content of a post briefly summarized in plain English and without jargon, or anything else. (Of course, there are some posts that simply cannot be explained in non-technical terms, such as the ones in the Quantum Mechanics sequence.) And of course, you're encouraged to provide explanations to others!