Quote:
Originally posted by The_Dude
If somebody could see the future, wouldnt that negate the concept of free will?
I've had this arguement with religious friends of mine and they think that people are still free to decide their future.
I dont understand this reasoning at all. If anyone (including god and prophets) know what's gonna happen to someone at a certain time/certain date, where is the free will?
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That is precisely why it is impossible to see into the future.
Even if we are to forget momentarily about quantum randomness, the universe is still unpredictable. Even a purely deterministic (non-linear) system is unpredictable.
Take for instance a "spherical pendulum". It is a pendulum free to move in two dimensions, rather than one, and will result in coming to rest being held by one of four magnets.
Take the bob and hold it somewhere. Let it go swinging in motion. Over which of the four magnets will it come to rest? Surely we can calculate this? After all, it is obeying completely deterministic laws which are know to us.
Well chaos theory shows that we cannot hope to predict its future motion, as a slight discrepancy in our initial knowledge of the system will result in huge inaccuracies in our prediction, to the point of our predictions being completely useless.
i.e. making measurements which are 99.999% accurate will NOT result in predictions which are even close to being 99.999% accurate!
What is to stop us (in principle) from knowing the initial state of the system completely (ignoring Heisenberg)? Well it is the fact that to specify the position of a single particle
precisely we require an infinite number of decimal places, which of course cannot be used in our equations!
So what was my point? Well, simply that determinism does not equate to predictability
even in principle.
And what of Quantum Randomness?
I always cringe when people make the claim that quantum mechanics shows that it is possible for free will to exist. This is rubbish. People often claim that since there is a level of indeterminism inherent in quantum physics that it somehow opens the door for claims of a physical reality to the magical vitalist "consciousness stuff". This is garbage. Anyone who makes claims such as this, imho, simply does not possess as firm a grasp on quantum mechanics as they claim. Now I'm not claiming that quantum effects play no role in the actions of our brain, in fact I would be quite certain that such is the case, rather I am dismissing claims that "quantum randomness" leaves the room for an Aristotelian
eidos or soul, that Newtonian determinism did not.
Anyway, sorry for the slight off-topic detour. To answer your original question:
You’re not supposed to understand, only God can understand.
