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lisper comments on Is Spirituality Irrational? - Less Wrong
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Free will is highly problematic even with a deity. According to the Bible, God created us with free will but without the ability to distinguish between good and evil, and in fact man's first recorded exercise of his free will was acquiring the ability to distinguish good and evil against God's orders. This has always struck me as logically incoherent. We who have the benefit (or the burden, depending on how you look at it) of Eve's rebellion can look back with our 20/20 hindsight and our ability to distinguish good and evil and see that Eve disobeyed God and that this was bad. But how could Eve have known that? I mean, think about it: here she is in the Garden of Eden, the second human ever to walk the face of the earth, no Bible, no history, no education, no literature, no cultural references of any kind, and without the ability to distinguish good and evil. So now there's this big booming voice on her left saying, "Don't eat this fruit" and a snake on her right saying, "Don't listen to that clown, he's lying to you. Go ahead and eat it." How is she supposed to know which one to believe? From her point of view the situation is symmetric. How is she supposed to know that the Voice of God is good and the snake is evil? God has specifically forbidden her from acquiring that knowledge!
So I don't see how the existence of free will is evidence of a deity of any kind, let alone evidence for the god of Abraham and Isaac. At best it would be evidence that our brains are quantum and not classical Turing machines, or maybe evidence for some new physics. But I really don't see how you get from free will to God. Maybe you have an argument I haven't heard?
Personally, I subscribe to the free-will-is-an-illusion school of thought. This is a corollary to the belief that consciousness itself is an illusion, for which there is quite a bit of evidence. I don't have any problem with believing that free will is an illusion because it's a damned good illusion, so I can go ahead and live my life as if I really had free will, just as I can go ahead and live my life as if I'm a classical being living in a Newtonian universe, even though I'm "really" a slice of the quantum wave function living in curved spacetime. That underlying metaphysical reality just doesn't have much impact on my day-to-day life. I can't escape this Matrix, so I may as well suspend disbelief and live as if it were real even though I know it's not.
Hmmm. Yet, she then gives the fruit to Adam. Adam's situation at the time is analogous to Eve's - he has no knowledge of good and evil. But, at this point, Eve does have that knowledge, and she chooses to use it to tempt Adam, an evil act. (Exactly what Adam did, after eating the fruit, before being expelled from the garden, is a matter of conjecture).
Well, the basic idea is that, if the universe is created, then it makes sense to give any intelligent agents in that universe free will. (Any that don't have free will are basically a complicated computer, and it must be easier to create a computer than to create a computer inside a universe that takes a few billion years to produce said computer). So a universe created by a deity which includes intelligent agents is very likely to have free will.
On the other hand, a universe not created by a deity won't be subject to the above argument. A mostly deterministic universe is likely to come up with, if anything, mostly deterministic life. So, it seems that the number of non-created universes containing intelligent life and free will must be much smaller than the number of non-created universes containing intelligent life.
Therefore, a universe containing intelligent life is more likely to have been created by a deity if it also includes free will.
I have never read Dennet's book, and merely seen the wikipedia summary you linked to. However, one thing strikes me in it:
This is a surprise to me, as I do perceive redness when I look at something red, and that is a quale, as I understand it. And I know that either my "red" quale or my "green" quale must be very different to the analogous qualia of a red-green colourblind man. So they clearly do exist (unless Dennet has a definition of "qualia" which is very different to mine).
Assuming that our definitions are not in conflict, I can accept the possibility that Dennet's mental landscape does not include qualia, and his argument thus follows from the typical mind fallacy. Different mental landscapes have been shown to be startlingly different before, after all.
But, whether our disagreement on qualia is a matter of definition or fallacy, the fact that he makes such a claim does leave me deeply suspicious of his conclusions. (Doesn't make them wrong, but does cause me to discount him as a credible authority on the matter).
As to free will being an illusion - hmmm. I don't really have an answer for that. I can say that will seems to act exactly as if it was free in many ways. I certainly feel as though I have free will, but I have no firm proof that that quale corresponds to the actual reality of the matter.
That's not clear. It's ambiguous whether these events in Genesis 3:6 are being recounted in strict chronological order. It's possible that Eve "took" the fruit and gave it to Adam first, and they both ate it together. Gen3:7 sure sounds to me like they were both enlightened simultaneously.
But even if we grant the premise that Eve ate first, by what standard do you classify Eve's tempting of Adam to be evil? The only way you can get there is by assuming God to be good, but are we really justified in making such an assumption? Again, let's look at the situation from Eve's point of view: she's just eaten the fruit. Her eyes have been opened, and she realizes that they're naked and that this is bad (Genesis doesn't actually say explicitly that being naked is bad, but it's strongly implied). Furthermore, the only way to get Adam to see that it's bad to be naked is to get him to eat the fruit. The only reason not to do this is God's order that they should remain ignorant. But the mere fact that God wanted them to remain ignorant is evidence that God is not good and hence should not be obeyed. Maybe that reasoning isn't correct but it seems to me to be defensible. The proposition that getting Adam to eat the fruit was "evil" seems to me to be far from a slam-dunk.
That doesn't make any sense to me at all. For starters, we have a counterexample: humans create lots of things, but none of the things we create have free will because we don't yet know how. But even if we knew how it's far form clear that this would be desirable. Finally, free will seems to me to be logically incompatible with an omnipotent, omniscient deity (which I guess makes me a Calvinist :-)
This is an oversimplification of Dennet's position, which is that consciousness and qualia (and free will) are illusions, exactly analogous to optical illusions. Yes, you do perceive redness when you look at something red, but you also (if you are like most people) perceive motion when you look at this image despite the fact that there is no motion. In exactly the same way you perceive redness where this is no redness, consciousness where there is no consciousness, and free will where there is no free will. Yes, it's weird. You need to read Dennett's book to understand it. The bottom line is that just as you can look at an illusory image in a way that reveals the fact that it is in fact an illusion, so too you can learn to look at your qualia and consciousness and perception of free will in ways that likewise reveal them to be illusions. It's actually a useful skill to cultivate.
BTW, most of the time when people get into disputes over whether or not something exists it's because they are making a fundamental error by assuming that existence is a dichotomy. It isn't.
Of course you do. So do I. It's a very compelling illusion. But it is an illusion nonetheless.
Hmmm. It seems to depend on the translation; some translations are ambiguous about the chronology, and some are not. I have no idea how clear the chronology in the original Hebrew was.
Though this translation suggests that the interval between the two acts implied in the original was very short - perhaps in the range of seconds.
This one's interesting for the footnotes
The tree apparently granted "knowledge of good and evil". So, if it was evil, Eve would have known, as she had that knowledge.
And then, after eating, Adam and Eve hid. If they had thought God evil, I would expect them to have hidden from fear of Him - yet they hid from fear of their own nakedness, implying that they saw fault in their own actions and wanted to avoid the consequences thereof.
Under interrogation, they shifted the blame instead of grovelling for mercy - again, this seems more the act of a person who knows they have done wrong than that of someone fearing an external evil.
...admittedly, it's a thin thread.
Interestingly, it implies that it's not being naked that is bad, but knowingly being naked; thus, a sin committed in ignorance is less evil than a sin committed in full knowledge. For some sins, ignorance might even be completely defensible.
Because we don't know how, yes. If we did know how, what would the result be?
Creating an intelligent agent without free will is, by necessity, limited. A non-free-willed entity can either have every action it can take planned out to the last decimal point (think a calculator, or a computer) which means that it cannot do or calculate anything that its designer can't do or calculate (it might be able to do those things faster, and without getting bored, which is why computers are useful); or it can be deliberately unpredictable, which means it's almost certain to go wrong in some way which it can't correct for.
And if you want something to calculate faster for you, then a fourteen-billion-year input before it gets to the calculating seems a little counter-intuitive. (I suppose if you have enough calculations, it can still be worth it).
My having free will is not entirely incompatible with someone knowing my choices. To take an extreme example; let us assume that, at the age of 90, I release a complete autobiography, detailing my choices at every major decision point in my life. A time traveller from the year 3000 gets hold of this book, and then comes back to the present day, careful to change nothing (perhaps arriving on one of the moons of Jupiter). This time traveller knows what I will decide, yet his presence does not in any way constrain my freedom to make those decisions.
It was taken from the wikipedia summary. I'm not surprised.
...huh. Fascinating. You're right, I do perceive illusory motion. But motion is a thing that exists independent of my perception; if a tree falls in the forest, then the fact of its motion is entirely independent of my observation thereof. A quale is different, in that the perception of the redness is the quale; the optical illusion which you provided somehow gives the quale of motion without actually having motion (which means that qualia don't exactly have a 1:1 mapping to the underlying reality).
I become more and more certain as I continue that what I mean by "quale" differs from what you (and presumably Dennet) mean be "quale".
...I am mystified. This skill seems to me merely convincing yourself that your own consciousness and free will are illusory, that you have no control over your acts and that there is not, in fact, a 'you' to have this complete lack of control? Am I wrong and, if not, then how is this skill useful?
Oh, yes. There are degrees of existence, things that exist only in part, or in potentia, or even things that strongly affect the world despite not existing, sometimes despite not even being possible to exist. No problem with that.
I grew up speaking Hebrew, so I can tell you that the original is ambiguous too. The GNT translation interpolates the word "Then". That word ("az") does not appear in the original. The KJV translation is pretty good, but here's an interesting bit o' trivia: the original of "a tree to be desired to make one wise" is "w'nech'mäd häëtz l'has'Kiyl" which literally means, "and the tree was cute for wisdom." (Actually, it's not quite "wisdom", the meaning of "l'has'Kiyl" is broader than that. A better translation would be something like "smartness" or "brainpower".)
Sure, but 1) I don't grant your premise and 2) the order of events is ambiguous, so even if I grant the premise the possibility remains that Eve didn't know it was evil except in retrospect.
That's the Ethan Couch defense, and it's not entirely indefensible. We don't generally prosecute children as adults. However, it is problematic if you use it as an excuse to game to system by remaining willfully ignorant. A parent who denied their child an education on the grounds that if the child remained profoundly ignorant then it would be incapable of sinning would probably be convicted of child abuse, and rightly so IMHO.
You have to be careful to distinguish what is computable in theory vs what is computable in practice. Even now, computers can do many things that their creators cannot.
You are mistaken.
Time travel, like omniscience, is logically incompatible with free will for exactly the reason you describe. But it's actually deeper than that. Time travel is impossible because your physical existence is an illusion, just like your free will is an illusion. (See also this and this.
Maybe. But if, as you have already conceded, the quale of motion can exist without motion, why cannot the quale of free will exist without free will?
Yes, you are wrong. Coming to the realization that free will (and even classical reality itself) are illusions doesn't make those illusions any less compelling. You can still live your life as if you were a classical being with free will while being aware of the fact that this is not actually true in the deepest metaphysical sense. As for why it's useful, well, for starters it lets you stop wasting time worrying about whether or not you really have free will :-) But it's much more useful than just that. By becoming aware of how your brain fools you into thinking you have free will you can actually take more control of your life. Yes, I know that sounds like a contradiction, but it's not. You can use your knowledge that free will is an illusion to improve the illusion. It's kind of like having a lucid dream.
But why don't you go read the book before we go further.
Not just degrees. Existence is not just a continuum, it's a vector space.
Huh. Maybe I've been playing too many role-playing games, but I tend to think of "wisdom" and "smartness" as somewhat but not entirely correlated; with "smartness" being more related to academics and book-learning and "wisdom" more common-sense and correctness of intuition.
I'll trust you with regards to the Hebrew and abandon this line of argument in the face of point 2.
Granted. Those who are not ignorant have a duty to alleviate the ignorance of others - Ezekiel 3 verses 17 to 21 are relevant here. (Note that the ignorant man is still being punished - just because his sin is lesser in his ignorance does not mean that it is nothing - so education is still important to reduce sin).
Granted. I was talking computable in theory. If we're considering computable in practice, then there's the question of why there was a several-billion-year wait before the first (known to us) computing devices appeared in this universe; that's more than enough time to figure out how to build a computer, than build that computer, then calculate more digits of pi than I can imagine.
I can think of quite a few arguments that time travel is impossible, but this is a new one to me. I can see where you're coming from - you're saying that the idea that someone, somewhere, might know with certainty what I will decide in a given set of circumstances is logically incompatible with the idea that I might choose something else.
I'm not sure that it is, though. Just because I could choose something else doesn't mean that I will choose something else. (Although that gets into the murky waters of whether it is possible for me to do that which I am never observed to do...)
Okay, I've had a look at those. The first one kind of skipped over the math for how one ends up with a negative entropy - that supercorrelation is mentioned as being odd, but nowhere is it explained what that means. (It's also noted that the quantum correlation measurement is analogous to the classical one, but I am left uncertain as to how, when, and even if that analogy breaks down, because I do not understand that critical part of the maths, and how it corresponds to the real world, and I am left with the suspicion that it might not).
So, I'm not saying the conclusion as presented in the paper is necessarily wrong. I'm saying I don't follow the reasoning that leads to it.
I will concede that there is no reason why the quale of free will can't exist without free will. I will, however, firmly maintain that the quale of free will (along with many other qualia, like the quale of redness) can be and has been directly observed, and therefore does exist.
Fair enough, but that seems to be the case when you are not using the skill of being certain that your free will is an illusion.
This is a contradiction. If you don't have free will, then you have no control and cannot take control; if you do take control, then you have the free will to, at the very least, decide to take that control.
I'm not saying that the certainty can't improve the illusion. I'll trust you on that point, that you have somehow found some way to take the certainty that you do not have free will and - somehow - use this to give yourself at least the illusion of greater control over your own life. (I'm rather left wondering how, but I'll trust that it's possible). However, the idea that you are doing so deliberately implies that you not only have, but are actively exercising your free will.
We would probably need to put this line of debate on hold for some time, then. I'd have to find a copy first.
Okay, how does that work? I can see how existence as a continuum makes sense (and, indeed, that's how I think of it), but as a vector space?
Well, they are. Maybe "mental faculties" would be a better translation. But it's neither here nor there.
That hardly seems fair. That means that if Adam and Eve had not eaten the fruit then they would have been punished for the sins that they committed out of ignorance.
Indeed. But God didn't provide any. In fact, He specifically commanded A&E to remain ignorant.
Huh? I don't understand that at all. Your claim was that any designed entity "cannot do or calculate anything that its designer can't do or calculate". I exhibited a computer that can calculate a trillion digits of pi as a counterexample. What does the fact that evolution took a long time to produce the first computer have to do with it? The fact remains that computers can do things that their human designers can't.
In fact, just about anything that humans build can do things humans can't do; that's kind of the whole point of building them. Bulldozers. Can openers. Hammers. Paper airplanes. All of these things can do things that their human designers can't do.
Actually, that's not an argument that time travel is impossible. Time travel is indeed impossible, but that's a different argument :-) Time travel and free will are logically incompatible, at least under certain models of time travel. (If the past can change once you've travelled into it so that you can no longer reliably predict the future, then time travel and free will can co-exist.)
Exactly. This is necessarily part of the definition of free will. If you're predictable to an external agent but not to yourself then it must be the case that there is something that determines your future actions that is accessible to that agent but not to you.
But if you are reliably predictable then it is not the case that you could choose something else. That's what it means to be reliably predictable.
Sorry about that. I tried to write a pithy summary but it got too long for a comment. I'll have to write a separate article about it I guess. For the time being I'll just have to ask you to trust me: time travel into the past is ruled out by quantum mechanics. (This should be good news for you because it leaves open the possibility of free will!)
Yes!!! Exactly!!! That is in fact the whole point of my OP: the quale of the Presence of the Holy Spirit has also been directly observed and therefore does exist (despite the fact that the Holy Spirit does not).
Sorry, that didn't parse. What is "that"?
Well, yeah, at root I'm not doing it deliberately. What I'm doing (when I do it -- I don't always, it's hard work [1]) is to improve the illusion that I'm doing things deliberately. But as with classical reality, a good-enough illusion is good enough.
[1] For example, I'm not doing it right now. I really ought to be doing real work, but instead I'm slacking off writing this response, which is a lot more fun, but not really what I ought to be doing.
Yes. Did you read "31 flavors of ontology"?
The word "could" is a tricksy one, and I think it likely that your disagreement with CCC about free will has a lot to do with different understandings of "could" (and of its associated notions like "possible" and "inevitably").
The reason "could" is tricky is that whether or not something "could" happen (or could have happened) is usually reckoned relative to some state of knowledge. If you flip a coin but keep your hand over it so that you can see how it landed but I can't then from my perspective it could be either heads or tails but from yours it can't.
To assess free will you have to take the perspective of some hypothetical agent that has all of the knowledge that is potentially available. If such an agent can predict your actions then you cannot have free will because, as I pointed out before, your actions are determined by factors that are accessible to this hypothetical agent but not to you. Such agents do not exists in our world so we can still argue about it, but in a hypothetical world where we postulate the existence of such an agent (i.e. a world with time travel in to the past without the possibility of changing the past, or a world with a Newcomb-style intelligent alien) the argument is settled: such an agent exists, you are reliably predictable, and you cannot have free will. (This, by the way, is the resolution of Newcomb's paradox: you should always take the one box. The only reason people think that two boxes might be the right answer is because they refuse to relinquish the intuition that they have free will despite the overwhelming (hypothetical in the case of Newcomb's paradox) evidence against it.)
You sound as though they have some choice as to which box to take, or whether or not to believe in free will. But if your argument is correct, then they do not.
This is questionable, and I would expect many compatibilists to say quite the opposite.
If a man pushes a button that launches a thousand nuclear bombs, is it just for him to avoid punishment on the grounds of complete ignorance?
As I understand the theology, until they had eaten the fruit, the only thing that they could do that was a sin was to eat the fruit. Which they had been specifically warned not to do.
He commanded them not to eat the fruit. Their sin was to eat the fruit, so the command itself might be considered sufficient education to tell them that what they were doing was something they should not be doing.
And then, later, God educated Moses with the Ten Commandments and a long list of laws.
Okay, let me re-state my argument.
1) Any designed object is either limited to actions that its designer can calculate and understand (in theory, given infinite time and paper to write on).
2) In the case of a calculating device like a computer, this means that, given infinite time and infinite paper and stationary, the designer of a computer can in theory perform any calculation that the computer can. (A real designer can't calculate a trillion digits of pi on pencil and paper because his life is not long enough).
3) The universe has been around for something like 14 billion years.
4) If the universe has a designer, and if the purpose of the universe is to perform some calculation using the processing power of the intelligence that has developed in the universe, then could the universe provide the answer to that calculation any more quickly than the designer of the universe with pencil, paper, and a 14-billion-year head start?
Yes, but we can predict what they will do given knowledge of all relevant inputs. In the special case of computers, predicting what they will calculate is equivalent to doing the calculation oneself.
Knowledge of the future is not the same as control of the future.
To take a simpler example; let us say you flip a fair coin ten times, and come up with HHHHHTTHHT. After you have done so, I write down HHHHHTTHHT on a piece of paper and use a time machine to send it to the past, before you flipped the coin.
Thus, when you flip the coin, there exists a piece of paper that says HHHHHTTHHT. This matches with the series of coin-flips that you then make. In what way is this piece of paper influenced by anything that controls the results of the coin-flips?
It does not, actually. The same quantum-mechanical argument tells me (if I understand the diagrams correctly) that there are no free variables in any observation; that is to say, the result of every experiment is predetermined, unavoidable... predestined.
I still don't understand the argument, but it certainly looks like an argument against free will to me. (Maybe that is because I don't understand it).
Let me know if/when you write that separate article.
I'll agree that the quale of the Presence of the Holy Spirit does exist, and I'll agree that this is not, in and of itself, sufficient evidence to prove beyond doubt the existence of the Holy Spirit. (I will argue that it is evidence in favour of the existence of the Holy Spirit, on the basis that everything which there is a quale for and which is directly measurable in itself does exist - even if the quale can occasionally be triggered without the thing for which the quale exists).
The idea that "You can still live your life as if you were a classical being with free will".
I did. The author of the blog post claims that things can be real to different degrees; that Mozilla Firefox is real in a fundamentally different way to the tree outside my window, which in turn is real in a fundamentally different way to Frodo Baggins.
I don't see why this means that existence needs to be more than a continuum, though. All it is saying is that points on that continuum (Frodo Baggins, the tree outside my window) are different points on that continuum.
Yes, if in fact he was completely enough ignorant. What do I mean by "enough"? Well, if you come across a mysterious button then you should at least suspect that pushing it will do something dramatic you would on balance prefer not to have done, and if you push it anyway then that's a bit irresponsible. You aren't completely ignorant, because you have some idea of the sorts of things mysterious buttons might do when pushed.
If a man walking in the woods steps on a twig that was actually attached to a mechanism that launches a thousand nuclear bombs, is it just for him to avoid punishment on the grounds of complete ignorance? Of course it is.
What's the underlying principle here? I mean, would you endorse something like this? "If you find yourself in a nice place with no memory of anything before being there, and someone claiming to be its creator and yours gives you instructions, it is always wrong to disobey them."
Leaving aside the question of the culpability of Adam and Eve in this story, it seems clear to me that God is most certainly culpable, especially in the version of the story endorsed by many Christians where the Fall is ultimately responsible for sending billions of people to eternal torment. He puts A&E in this situation where if they Do The Thing then the consequences will be unimaginably horrendous. He tells them not to do it -- OK, fair enough -- but he doesn't tell them accurately what the consequences will be, he doesn't give them evidence that the consequences will be what he says[1], and most importantly he doesn't in any way prepare them for the fact that in the garden with them is someone else -- the serpent -- who will with great cunning try to get them to do what God's told them not to.
If I put my child in a room with a big red button that launches nuclear missiles, and also put in that room another person who is liable to try to get her to press the button, and if I know that in that case she is quite likely to be persuaded, and if all I say is "now, Child, you can do what you like in the room but don't press that button" -- why then, I am much more at fault than she is if those missiles get launched.
[1] In fact, the only consequence the story represents God as telling them about does not happen; God says that if they eat it then "in that day you will surely die", and they don't; the serpent tells Eve that they won't, and they don't.
I take your point - it is just to avoid punishment for ignorance so complete. (Mind you, whoever deliberately connected that twig to the nuclear launch silo should get into some trouble).
When I was a small child, I found myself in a nice place with two people who called themselves my parents. I did not remember anything before then; my parents told me that this was because I had not yet been born. They claimed to have somehow had something to do with creating me. They informed me, once I had learned to communicate with them, of several rules that, at the time, appeared arbitrary (why was I allowed to colour in in this book, but not my Dad's expensive encyclopedias? Why was I barred from wandering out onto the road to get a close look at the cars? Why should I not accept candy from a stranger?) They may have tried to explain the consequences of breaking those rules, but if they did, I certainly didn't understand them. If some stranger had attempted to persuade me to break those rules, then the correct action for me to take would be to ignore the stranger.
(Which makes the Adam and Eve story a cautionary tale for small children, I guess.)
I'd understood that to mean "on that day your death will become inevitable" - since they were thrown out of the Garden and away from the Tree of Life (which could apparently confer immortality) their eventual deaths did become certain on that day.
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Of course it is just. How could you possibly doubt it? I mean, imagine the scene: you're at home watching TV when you suddenly realize that there's a button on your universal remote that you've never pressed and you have no idea what it does. You're too lazy to get up off the couch to get the manual (and you have no idea where it is anyway, you probably threw it out) so you just push it to see what it does. Nothing happens.
The next day you turn on the TV to discover that nuclear armageddon has broken out at 100 million people are dead. An hour later the FBI shows up at your door and says, "You didn't push that red button on your remote last night, did you?" "Why yes, yes I did," you reply. "Is that a problem?" "Well, yes, it rather is. You see, that button launched the nuclear missiles, so I'm afraid you are now the greatest mass murderer in the history of humanity and we're going to have to take you in. Turn around please."
Yeah, this theory has always struck me as rather bizarre. So before eating the fruit it's perfectly OK to torture kittens, perfectly OK to abuse and rape your children, and after you eat the fruit suddenly these things are not OK. Makes no sense to me.
But why is this a sin? Remember, at this point this is a command issued (according to your theory) by a deity who thinks it's perfectly OK to torture kittens and rape children. Such a deity does not have a lot of moral authority IMHO.
Yeah, that's another weird thing. God educated Moses. Why not educate everyone? Why should Moses get the benefit of seeing God directly while the rest of us have to make do with second-hand accounts of what God said? And why should we trust Moses? Prophets are a dime a dozen. Why Moses and not Mohammed? Or Joseph Smith? Or L. Ron Hubbard?
And as long as we're on the topic, why wait so long to educate Moses? By the time we get to Moses, God has already committed a long string of genocides to punish people for sinning (the Flood, Sodom) despite the fact that they have not yet had the benefit of any education from God, even second-hand. That feels very much like the button scenario above, which I should hope grates on your moral intuition as much as it does on mine.
Your either-or construct is missing the "or" clause.
Of course it could. Why would you doubt it?
No, we can't.
I didn't say it was. But reliable knowledge of the future requires that the future be determined by the present. If it is possible to reliably predict the outcome of a coin toss, then the coin toss is deterministic, and therefore the coin cannot have free will. So unless you want to argue that a coin has free will, your example is a complete non-sequitur.
No, you've got this wrong. Quantum randomness is the only thing in our universe (that we know of) that is unpredictable even in principle. So it is possible that free will exists because quantum randomness exists. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that quantum effects have any bearing on human mental processes. So while one cannot rule out the possibility that quantum randomness might lead to free will in something there is no evidence that it leads to free will in us.
Will do. (UPDATE: the article is here )
Yes, of course it is. That was my whole point.
Ah. Then yes, I agree. You can live in the Matrix with or without the knowledge that you are living in the Matrix. Personally, I choose the red pill.
There are different ways of existing. There is existence-as-material-object (trees, houses). There is existence-as-fictional-character (Frodo). There is existence-as-patterns-of-bits-in-a-computer-memory (Firefox). Each of these is orthogonal to the other. George Washington, for example, existed as a physical object, and he also exists as a fictional character (in the story of chopping down the cherry tree). Along each of these "dimensions" a thing can exist to varying degrees. The transformation of a tree into a house is a gradual process. During that process, the tree exists less and less and the house exists more and more. So you have multiple dimensions, each of which has a continuous metric. That's a vector space.
The real point, though, is that disagreements over whether or not something exists are usually (but not always) disagreements over the mode in which something exists. God clearly exists. The question is what mode he exists in. Fictional character? Material object? Something else?
(BTW, the author of "31 flavors" is me.)
For the analogy to match the Garden of Eden example, the red button needs to be clearly marked "Do Not Press".
And I'm not saying that the just punishment should be same for something done in ignorance. But, at the very least, having pushed the button on the remote, the person in this analogy needs to be very firmly told that that was something that he should not have done. A several-hour lecture on not pushing buttons marked "do not press" is probably justified.
Put like that, is does seem odd. But consider - biting a kitten's tail would be a form of torturing kittens. Is it okay for a three-month-old baby, who does not understand what it is doing, to bite a kitten's tail? (And is it okay for the kitten to then claw at the baby?)
Delegation?
Lots of other people had some idea of what was right and wrong, even before Moses. Consider Cain and Abel - Cain knew it was wrong to kill Abel, but did it anyway. (I have no idea where that knowledge was supposed to have come from, but it was there)
Whoops.
Okay, but we can still predict the output of the computer at any given, finite, time step.
The important thing in the coin example is not the coin, but the time traveller. The prediction of the coin tosses is not made from knowledge of the present state of the world, but rather from knowledge of the future state of the world; that is to say, the state in which the coin tosses have already happened. The mechanism by which the coin tosses happen is thus irrelevant (the coin tosses can be replaced by a person with free will calling out "head!" and "tail!" in whatever order he freely desires to do).
...I'm going to read your further explanation article before I respond to this.
Agreed.
Why? I can see how the rest of your argument follows from this; I'm not seeing why these different types of existence must be orthogonal, why they can't be colinear.
(Incidentally, I'd consider "George Washington the physical object" and "George Washington the fictional character" to be two different things which, confusingly, share the same name).
Here you go.