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Omnipotence vs Free Will

doppelganger

Through the Looking Glass
Knowing with some certainty some aspect of the future does not take away your free will.
Actually, yes it does. "Free will" is a shadow created by reflecting back on a state of mind in which one had an uncertainty about the future. If you live in a causal universe, there is no free will - only an incomplete understanding of the infinite web of interrelated causal energies and movements that make up the universe. If you live in a causal universe, you see free will only because upon reflection you have made the error of thinking you could have "chosen" other than you did. It is only incomplete knowledge and uncertainty by which we perceive there were unrealized possibilities. If there is knowledge to a certainty, then there are no unrealized possibilities.

Moreover, once a probability collapses and a determination about the "future" moves the event into the "present" moment, it no longer makes any sense to talk about the unrealized possibilities as though they have ever existed.

In a causal universe, "free will" depends on uncertainty in an information system for its very existence.
 
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Wandered Off

Sporadic Driveby Member
So for you the discussion goes no further than whether or not free will exists?
I said earlier in the thread I do not know whether free will exists, but I believe free will is incompatible with the conditions that would allow foreknowledge. Then I was taking issue with your supposition that I would "try to blame God."
 

Thief

Rogue Theologian
I said earlier in the thread I do not know whether free will exists, but I believe free will is incompatible with the conditions that would allow foreknowledge. Then I was taking issue with your supposition that I would "try to blame God."

Okay...so stepping away from the from the topic title....and leaving God out of it.

We might agree there are random events in this....'reality'?
'Possible alternatives'?

And then we humans come along and start making choices.

You can say of the universe ...it is caused....
But when humans change the course...of anything....
That is evidence of ...'choice'...
That we exercise that 'choice' is evidence of free will.

If not...you are a rock...waiting for some mindless action to happen to you.

You might as well be existing...(not living)... on the moon.
 

Wandered Off

Sporadic Driveby Member
We might agree there are random events in this....'reality'?
We might or might not. I honestly don't know. Where we definitely part ways is your contention that certainty of foreknowledge and free will are compatible:
Knowing with some certainty some aspect of the future does not take away your free will.
 

doppelganger

Through the Looking Glass
We might agree there are random events in this....'reality'?
'Possible alternatives'?
Only as a product of uncertainty. When you throw a six-sided die, you might tell yourself that which number comes up is "random" because you lack sufficient knowledge about the web of causes that are acting and are about to act to inexorably make it come up one particular number. It was always going to come up as only one number. To say that it was "random" is merely to say that you lacked the information to predict it at an earlier point with certainty. Likewise, it makes no sense to say that once the die comes up "1" for instance, that there was ever an intrinsic potential for it to be a "6" instead. That potential only existed as an aspect of your perception based on incomplete knowledge.

If "humans" cause things outside of the web of causes and are thus somehow themselves uncaused in their effects on reality, then what are these "humans"? Are they an invisible supernatural homunculus that operates independently of the neurology of the brain and biochemical events involved? Do we have magical souls that are themselves not caused by the universal web of energies the we presume cause everything else?
 

Skwim

Veteran Member
doppelgänger;2076666 said:
Only as a product of uncertainty. When you throw a six-sided die, you might tell yourself that which number comes up is "random" because you lack sufficient knowledge about the web of causes that are acting and are about to act to inexorably make it come up one particular number. It was always going to come up as only one number. To say that it was "random" is merely to say that you lacked the information to predict it at an earlier point with certainty. Likewise, it makes no sense to say that once the die comes up "1" for instance, that there was ever an intrinsic potential for it to be a "6" instead. That potential only existed as an aspect of your perception based on incomplete knowledge.

If "humans" cause things outside of the web of causes and are thus somehow themselves uncaused in their effects on reality, then what are these "humans"? Are they an invisible supernatural homunculus that operates independently of the neurology of the brain and biochemical events involved? Do we have magical souls that are themselves not caused by the universal web of energies the we presume cause everything else?
Moreover, the alternative is utter randomness; something I've never seen any free-willer agree to. For the most part free-willers are stuck between the truth of a deterministic universe and their need to make their religious faith work. The sin/salvation thing, which, as we've seen, leads to all sorts of crazy statements, some quite incoherent.
 

Thief

Rogue Theologian
Let's see....
For every effect there is a cause....and for every cause there is an effect.

Physically...I see this as true.

However, the topic title is omnipotent versus free will.
To be omnipotent, and to lack free will?

Then even the most basic of statements becomes impossible.

God said..'I AM'.
If God lacks the will to say this, then there is no creator.
No creator...and therefore...substance begets spirit....your spirit.
You are then the sum of your chemistry and completely subject to it.
You cannot resist...you cannot say 'no'.
Whatever your chemistry desires, it becomes what you will do.

There is then...no sin.
Law breaking is brought on by poor chemistry.
Imprisonment is therefore not a deterrent, and the convict should not be released.....ever.
Parole is wishful thinking....because no convict can learn his 'lesson', and the convict is not at fault for his lack will...he simply is what he is, and cannot be 'saved'.


I suspect this topic runs deeper than terms expressed so far.

God has the ability to say...I AM. If not, then how is it ...that you do?
If you refrain the words.... how are you more than any mindless item?

And still you could try again to leave God out of it.
Say to the judge....it's not my fault....I have no will of my own.
 

doppelganger

Through the Looking Glass
God said..'I AM'.
If God lacks the will to say this, then there is no creator.

And that's a problem because . . .

No creator...and therefore...substance begets spirit....your spirit.
Grammar begets "you," and then "spirit" and "creator" and a bunch of other classifiers then follow. If there is no magical "I am" except as a grammatical phantom, and what thought says is "I am" is merely an effect of the universe - sort of the the universe looking at itself if you will - then isn't that also a "spirit"?

You are then the sum of your chemistry and completely subject to it.
You cannot resist...you cannot say 'no'.
Does chemistry ask questions? Does it have desires?

There is then...no sin.
Correct.

From Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols:

"There is thinking: therefore there is something that thinks": this is the upshot of all Descartes' argumentation. But that means positing as "true à priori" our belief in the concept of substance-- that when there is thought there has to be something "that thinks" is simply a formulation of our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed. In short, this is not merely the substantiation of a fact but a logical-metaphysical postulate--Along the lines followed by Descartes one does not come upon something absolutely certain but only upon the fact of a very strong belief.

If one reduces the proposition to "There is thinking, therefore there are thoughts," one has produced a mere tautology: and precisely that which is in question, the "reality of thought," is not touched upon--that is, in this form the "apparent reality" of thought cannot be denied. But what Descartes desired was that thought should have, not an apparent reality, but a reality in itself.

The concept of substance is a consequence of the concept of the subject: not the reverse! If we relinquish the soul, "the subject," the precondition for "substance" in general disappears. One acquires degrees of being, one loses that which has being.

Critique of "reality": where does the "more or less real," the gradation of being in which we believe, lead to?--

The degree to which we feel life and power (logic and coherence of experience) gives us our measure of "being", "reality", not appearance.

The subject: this is the term for our belief in a unity underlying all the different impulses of the highest feeling of reality: we understand this belief as the effect of one cause--we believe so firmly in our belief that for its sake we imagine "truth", "reality", substantiality in general.-- "The subject" is the fiction that many similar states in us are the effect of one substratum: but it is we who first created the "similarity" of these states; our adjusting them and making them similar is the fact, not their similarity (--which ought rather to be denied--).

One would have to know what being is, in order to decide whether this or that is real (e.g., "the facts of consciousness"); in the same way, what certainty is, what knowledge is, and the like.-- But since we do not know this, a critique of the faculty of knowledge is senseless: how should a tool be able to criticize itself when it can use only itself for the critique? It cannot even define itself!
Law breaking is brought on by poor chemistry.
Or good chemistry and bad laws maybe? :)

Imprisonment is therefore not a deterrent, and the convict should not be released.....ever.
Parole is wishful thinking....because no convict can learn his 'lesson', and the convict is not at fault for his lack will...he simply is what he is, and cannot be 'saved'.
And this is the dirty little secret of "free will." More from Nietzsche:
The error of free will. Today we no longer have any tolerance for the idea of "free will": we see it only too clearly for what it really is — the foulest of all theological fictions, intended to make mankind "responsible" in a religious sense — that is, dependent upon priests. Here I simply analyze the psychological assumptions behind any attempt at "making responsible."

Whenever responsibility is assigned, it is usually so that judgment and punishment may follow. Becoming has been deprived of its innocence when any acting-the-way-you-did is traced back to will, to motives, to responsible choices: the doctrine of the will has been invented essentially to justify punishment through the pretext of assigning guilt. All primitive psychology, the psychology of will, arises from the fact that its interpreters, the priests at the head of ancient communities, wanted to create for themselves the right to punish — or wanted to create this right for their God. Men were considered "free" only so that they might be considered guilty — could be judged and punished: consequently, every act had to be considered as willed, and the origin of every act had to be considered as lying within the consciousness (and thus the most fundamental psychological deception was made the principle of psychology itself) . . .

Today, we immoralists have embarked on a counter movement and are trying with all our strength to take the concepts of guilt and punishment out of the world — to cleanse psychology, history, nature, and social institutions and sanctions of these ideas. And there is in our eyes no more radical opposition than that of the theologians, who continue to infect the innocence of becoming by means of the concepts of a "moral world-order," "guilt," and "punishment." Christianity is religion for the executioner.

What alone can be our doctrine? That no one gives a man his qualities — neither God, nor society, nor his parents and ancestors, nor he himself. (The nonsense of the last idea was taught as "intelligible freedom" by Kant — and perhaps by Plato.) No one is responsible for a man's being here at all, for his being such-and-such, or for his being in these circumstances or in this environment. The fatality of his existence is not to be disentangled from the fatality of all that has been and will be. Human beings are not the effect of some special purpose, or will, or end; nor are they a medium through which society can realize an "ideal of humanity" or an "ideal of happiness" or an "ideal of morality." It is absurd to wish to devolve one's essence on some end or other. We have invented the concept of "end": in reality there is no end.

A man is necessary, a man is a piece of fatefulness, a man belongs to the whole, a man is in the whole; there is nothing that could judge, measure, compare, or sentence his being, for that would mean judging, measuring, comparing, or sentencing the whole. But there is nothing besides the whole. That nobody is held responsible any longer, that the mode of being may not be traced back to a primary cause, that the world does not form a unity either as a sensorium or as "spirit" — that alone is the great liberation. With that idea alone we absolve our becoming of any guilt. The concept of "God" was until now the greatest objection to existence. We deny God, we deny the responsibility that originates from God: and thereby we redeem the world.
Aside from that, the pragmatic need for a basis upon which to assign guilt simply does not answer the problem of projecting 'the will' as a thing in itself in a supposedly causal universe.
 
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doppelganger

Through the Looking Glass
The alternative is a spirituality of love, which has at its core, a transendence of the ego and return to innocence. This is suggested in the foundational myths and teachings of most wisdom traditions and great spiritual visionaries before they turn into religions. In the context of "free will" is summed up nicely by Spinoza in his Ethics:

“Men believe themselves to be free because they are conscious of their own actions and are ignorant of the causes by which they are determined. The mind is determined to this or that choice by a cause which is also determined by another cause, and this again by another, and so on ad infinitum. This doctrine teaches us to hate no one, to despise no one, to mock no one, to be angry with no one, and to envy no one.”
 

Thief

Rogue Theologian
There's a lot of sloppy discussion going on here.....
I thought it was made clear.

The causality concept doesn't cover your willfulness.

Should someone kick in your front door and point a gun in your face...
your free will has been stolen.

I suppose you won't miss it?
You don't know the difference?
Are you being honest with yourself?

Physical cause is one thing.
See a tornado...and then run.
Or be defiantly stupid and watch it kill you.

Spiritual, political,and economic causes are potent.
But history is thorough in it's display or defiant heroes...who died...
for the 'cause'.

I would prefer to think they were brave, and self sacrificing.
And not mindless in their 'choices' and their endeavors.

You have free will when you nod your head and follow suit.
You have free will when you stand your ground and become defiant.

If you say 'nay' then there no humanity in you.
 
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