Omniscience leads to pure fatalism

[polytropos]

What I am saying is that if the set of counterfacuals is finite we can be cognitively open to a concept but free will is an illusion if the set of couterfactuals defining it is finite. Why? Because it exist a set Q which leads to P for each state in q it exists a definable state p which completely define the action of an agent governed with this set. This define the behaviour the agent under any given situation hence the agent is not free.

I believe you are underspecifying the problem. You need to articulate what the counterfactuals in your analysis look like. In my opinion, the bolded statement is not necessarily the case (if free will is a primitive/irreducible property of human beings). Here are some of the problems with what I take to be your analysis (I have to make some assumptions here).

A counterfactual is a conditional of the form “if p, then q” where the antecedent p is some state of affairs, and the consequent q is some action on the part of an agent. You are saying that if the set of counterfactuals governing a decision in some circumstance is finite, then free will is an illusion. (By this, I suppose you mean that we are not genuinely free, but we believe that we are free.)

But let us apply this model to an actual decision: I am in the store and I am thinking about buying a red t-shirt or a green t-shirt. There are two possible courses of action here, depending on which shirt I choose to buy (perhaps we could let a third be that I buy no t-shirt at all). Let these options, respectively, be q1, q2, q3. What you seem to be arguing is that if my decision is governed by a finite set of counterfactual, then I am not free. I have a few contentions:
(1) It does not seem that the number of counterfactuals would have anything to do with whether or not I am free. If there are just 3 counterfactuals (one for each possibility), then I would not be free (assuming they are of the form “if p1, then q1”, “if p2, then q2”, “if p3, then q3”). In such a case my actions are completely determined by the state of affairs. But we could obviously let the number of counterfactuals go to infinity and I remain unfree (assuming the counterfactuals remain of the same form), for assume that there are counterfactuals “if p1, then q1”, “if p2, then q2”, “if p3, then q3”, “if p4, then q3”, “if p5, then q3”,… In short, assume that there q3 is realizable by an infinite number of states of affairs. That in itself would not change the fact that my actions are determined.
(2) To abbreviate the above point, the reason free will would be an illusion has nothing to do with the quantity of counterfactuals, but with their form.
(3) I do not believe that another possibility is ruled out. There might be a counterfactual “if p1, then (q1 or q2 or q3)” in which free will is preserved, because the assumption that the counterfactuals need to completely govern the action of the agent is false. I think that our intuitions about the nature of decision making favor this sort of analysis.
(4) There also seems to be a projection of the logic of counterfactual possibilities onto the metaphysics of decision making. Take the first case above in (1) where we just have three basic counterfactuals of the form “if p1, then q1”. p1, p2, and p3 are mutually exclusive, ie. they are inconsistent states of affairs (under the assumption that the person can only choose one of q1, q2, q3), and so cannot all be true. That is to say, they occur in separate possible worlds. To say that there are counterfactuals describing my actions in all possible worlds is not to establish that the consequents are determined by the antecedents. (“If I win the lottery, I would donate some money to charity” seems to be a true counterfactual. But would not follow that my donating the money to charity is determined by winning the lottery.)
(5) There is also the more technical issue that there does not exist a satisfying analysis for counterfactuals.

Any state of affair in nature call it X goes to another state affair Y as result of governing a system of laws that can be explained semantically in term of a set of counterfacuals. We cannot even think of a lawless nature unless you claim otherwise. Can we agree on this?

It seems to me like the analysis runs into several problems.

In another hand any state of affair in nature should be explicable in term of a set of prepositions unless you claim that any state of affair in nature is not reducible in term of a set of prepositions, but there is no room left for free will if we accept later claim. Can we agree on this?

I believe that one could of course describe what has happened or could happen with a set of propositions, but as I’ve laid out above, I see few reasons for believing that that has substantial implications for free will.

Oppositely I think God should be able to explain its knowledge in term of semantic otherwise omniscience is not complete.

But the limitation is on our side and the fact that humans are the ones who have developed semantics. Semantics, as a human creation, are inadequate, not God’s omniscience.

(I believe we can have a limited understanding of omniscience, even on our own. So I naturally believe that God could convey an understanding of omniscience to us which is even less limited. But I do not think we can fully understand omniscience, full stop.)

First, I believe that the only door we have to understand free will and omniscience is through semantic,

I think when we reason about free will and omniscience we are using semantics. But as I’ve argued, it seems to me like it is wrong to say that the semantics needed to understand free will and omniscience involve large sets of counterfactuals.

 

[Hypnotoad]

1. God has omniscience
2. God is cognitively open to free will (since otherwise couldn’t create a being with free will)
3. God knows the decision we perform in a situation as a result being cognitively open to free will and situation, in another word God is cognitively open to creation
4. Creation was performed by first cause and God was cognitively open to first cause
5. We act and God was aware the source of each act in first cause since it was cognitively open to it
6. Free will is an illusion

This means if (6) is right (2) is wrong namely free will can not be real if omniscience is real since God cannot be cognitively open to illusion. In another word omniscience leads to pure fatalism since the source of each action was already known in first cause.

This is really puzzling since God cannot perform creation in one hand if it is not cognitively open to creation in another hand being cognitively open leads to pure fatalism.

The only way to resolve the problem is to reject (5) which requires a proper definition of first cause and redefinition of omniscience in order to preserve free will.

What is the first cause? First cause is the act of creation with the sole knowledge that the act creation leads to free will. God in this picture cannot implement any further constrains in first cause in order to acquire any knowledge of our actions since we have to reject (5) hence God does not know the act we perform since it couldn’t know it at the time of creation. Omniscience in this framework, in what related to creation, is the sole knowledge that the act creation leads to free will.

I find your argument very confusing. I wonder if you understand that an eternal being will not view things in the same way as a being subject to time?

 

[oldcelt]

While I am not certain that it leads to fatalism, it certainly does open many, many questions about the nature of a deity that is presumed to possess this. As mere humans, we don’t have that problem.

 

[Bahman]

This is what I thought your view was. I apologize, I must have worded my response poorly.

Well, then I would say that I disagree with you. To make my claim clear I would like to point one issues here which make the discussion more clear, the difference between macro and micro which the first one is what we introspect, like feeling and thinking and the micro, what we observe that explain the nature of noumena and can be explained in term of a set of prepositions/laws. The fact that we can understand algebra in term of a finite set of prepositions explain what happen in macro level rather than micro. Here we are mostly interested in the propositions in micro level. There are two important question here, first, what is the number of prepositions in micro level which define the behaviour of a system?, and what was the number of preposition in micro level which were used in act creation?

What is my claim is the number of prepositions in micro level has to be infinite to explain a complex phenomena in macro level like free will. To clarify my point, we could stick to micro level and ask this question about the nature of free will. Free will is an ability that should break the chain of causality otherwise we fall in trap of causality and could not be free. Consider a person in a state which define specific mental state and options available for choosing. This state, lets call it X in micro level. This state in micro level which can be translated to macro level, lets call it X*, uniquely undergoes to another micro state namely Y obeying the law of natures which are the set of prepositions which define the motion. I would like to stress that law by definition is deterministic, hence we fall in trap of determinism since given the state of X one can with certainty know what is the outcome namely state of Y. This process in macro level is translated to, X* leads to Y* so we have no free will.

Putting omniscience for a little aside, one could question that how we could grant freedom to an agent knowing the underlying laws in the micro level are deterministic?

Yes, I think you can and here’s why. It is not the case that I am given a pre-defined finite set of options whenever I make a decision. That’s the way a robot would presumably function. Rather, I can determine what is in the set and how large the set is myself by my choosing to understand what options are available to me. Although the set is still finite, it was freely determined by me and could have potentially contained any of the options available in the infinite set covering all possible decisions. Does this make sense?

I think the algebra example given by polytropos is a good analogy. I only need to understand a finite set of algebra problems in order to understand algebra. I understand algebra if I have the potential to answer any conceivable algebra problem. However I get to choose which algebra problems I will work out and put in my “finite algebra set.”

Here’s another example to illustrate the point. I would say that I am a free speaker of the English language. Over the years I have accumulated a finite set of English sentences from which I have abstracted the meaning of words and conventions of English sentence structure and syntax. Using these understandings I am able to formulate any meaningful English sentence of my choosing. It is not the case that every time I decide to speak I am doing a search on an infinite database of sentences and finding the one I want, which is obviously impossible.

The set of prepositions in macro level that a person learn during his/her life is of course is finite. There are however two questions relevant here: First, what is a number of prepositions in macro level that in principle could be constructed? I claim that this is infinite and should be equal to omniscience since otherwise omniscience is not complete. What is the number of preposition in micro level which define a prepositions in macro level? Are they equal or one is smaller that another? I claim that the set of preposition in micro level which translate to one single preposition in macro level is infinite otherwise we cannot be free. How? To answer this question consider that the number of preposition in micro level is finite and it is N. This means that we can always find a cause, lets call it initial cause namely the outcome of being exposed to external stimulus which initiate the second cause in us, this second cause initiate another cause etc until the number of cause/preposition which is N is exhausted. This leads to a unique outcome which is the result of this set of finite prepositions which is finite. In macro level this also relate to a unique behaviour in another word we can never have two true options. There is one true option that we are not aware of it and it is outcome of finite causal chain in micro level. In another word the very fact that we think we can either choose this or that is an illusion.

Lets see if we can agree upon here and we will how we could go further.

 

[Bahman]

I believe you are underspecifying the problem. You need to articulate what the counterfactuals in your analysis look like. In my opinion, the bolded statement is not necessarily the case (if free will is a primitive/irreducible property of human beings). Here are some of the problems with what I take to be your analysis (I have to make some assumptions here).

A counterfactual is a conditional of the form “if p, then q” where the antecedent p is some state of affairs, and the consequent q is some action on the part of an agent. You are saying that if the set of counterfactuals governing a decision in some circumstance is finite, then free will is an illusion. (By this, I suppose you mean that we are not genuinely free, but we believe that we are free.)

But let us apply this model to an actual decision: I am in the store and I am thinking about buying a red t-shirt or a green t-shirt. There are two possible courses of action here, depending on which shirt I choose to buy (perhaps we could let a third be that I buy no t-shirt at all). Let these options, respectively, be q1, q2, q3. What you seem to be arguing is that if my decision is governed by a finite set of counterfactual, then I am not free. I have a few contentions:
(1) It does not seem that the number of counterfactuals would have anything to do with whether or not I am free. If there are just 3 counterfactuals (one for each possibility), then I would not be free (assuming they are of the form “if p1, then q1”, “if p2, then q2”, “if p3, then q3”). In such a case my actions are completely determined by the state of affairs. But we could obviously let the number of counterfactuals go to infinity and I remain unfree (assuming the counterfactuals remain of the same form), for assume that there are counterfactuals “if p1, then q1”, “if p2, then q2”, “if p3, then q3”, “if p4, then q3”, “if p5, then q3”,… In short, assume that there q3 is realizable by an infinite number of states of affairs. That in itself would not change the fact that my actions are determined.
(2) To abbreviate the above point, the reason free will would be an illusion has nothing to do with the quantity of counterfactuals, but with their form.
(3) I do not believe that another possibility is ruled out. There might be a counterfactual “if p1, then (q1 or q2 or q3)” in which free will is preserved, because the assumption that the counterfactuals need to completely govern the action of the agent is false. I think that our intuitions about the nature of decision making favor this sort of analysis.
(4) There also seems to be a projection of the logic of counterfactual possibilities onto the metaphysics of decision making. Take the first case above in (1) where we just have three basic counterfactuals of the form “if p1, then q1”. p1, p2, and p3 are mutually exclusive, ie. they are inconsistent states of affairs (under the assumption that the person can only choose one of q1, q2, q3), and so cannot all be true. That is to say, they occur in separate possible worlds. To say that there are counterfactuals describing my actions in all possible worlds is not to establish that the consequents are determined by the antecedents. (“If I win the lottery, I would donate some money to charity” seems to be a true counterfactual. But would not follow that my donating the money to charity is determined by winning the lottery.)
(5) There is also the more technical issue that there does not exist a satisfying analysis for counterfactuals.

First please accept my apology for long delay. I was a little busy. I like a part of your analyze and that perhaps can take us somewhere.

I am not underspecifying the problem. Lets see if we could agree with definition of the problem. First, I think we can agree that a situation when a decision is involved minimally requires two options related to two mental state, lets call them p1 and p2. There exist two separate actions involve in this problem and lets call them q1 and q2. Q={q1,q2} and P={p1,p2} are subjectively defined in macro level and there exist a translation of them in micro level where a set of prepositions/laws defines the action of the system required in this situation. Lets define the set of laws as L={l1,l2, l3,…} and the number of laws as N. An agent subject to this matter however is aware of P meaning that p1 and p2 are correlating. Using this we can define a mixed mental state p which could lead to q1 or q2. We definitely need this since otherwise p1 leads to q1 and p2 leads to q2 hence depending on where the mental state start from, either p1 or p2, the action would be q1 or q2 respectively. I think we can agree that we need the mixed state p.

In another hand we know that it exist a time at which that one of the option is chosen. Lest call this as a fork at which p can leads to either q1 or q2. I would like to argue that the bifurcation point is singular and it cannot be the solution of a set of prepositions/laws when N is finite.

I believe that one could of course describe what has happened or could happen with a set of propositions, but as I’ve laid out above, I see few reasons for believing that that has substantial implications for free will.

The decision is made at bifurcation point hence we are free when N is infinite. Please read the previous argument.

(I believe we can have a limited understanding of omniscience, even on our own. So I naturally believe that God could convey an understanding of omniscience to us which is even less limited. But I do not think we can fully understand omniscience, full stop.)

Why you think we cannot understand omniscience? Do you mean that the set of prepositions defining omniscience is infinite and we cannot understand infinite set of prepositions?

 

[balto]

What is my claim is the number of prepositions in micro level has to be infinite to explain a complex phenomena in macro level like free will. To clarify my point, we could stick to micro level and ask this question about the nature of free will. Free will is an ability that should break the chain of causality otherwise we fall in trap of causality and could not be free. Consider a person in a state which define specific mental state and options available for choosing. This state, lets call it X in micro level. This state in micro level which can be translated to macro level, lets call it X*, uniquely undergoes to another micro state namely Y obeying the law of natures which are the set of prepositions which define the motion. I would like to stress that law by definition is deterministic, hence we fall in trap of determinism since given the state of X one can with certainty know what is the outcome namely state of Y. This process in macro level is translated to, X* leads to Y* so we have no free will.

Okay, I think I see what you are saying but I am just wondering if you are assuming that the human mind is completely material. If so then that is where the contention is because I would say that the human mind is largely immaterial and cannot be wholly reduced to material functions. I’m taking the brain and mind to mean different things. If we grant that the human mind is really only material then I would agree with you that free will is an illusion because our actions and decisions are completely determined by neuron firings.

If it is immaterial then I don’t think we have an issue. If I am understanding your explanation correctly, X would be the first material micro state that could be observed. X* is the final action or decision and there’s a deterministic set of material steps from X to X*. But I don’t think that free will is destroyed because I could have X* in mind that allows me to choose the proper X that will lead to X*. Is that valid? I think it all hinges on whether the mind is material or not.

The set of prepositions in macro level that a person learn during his/her life is of course is finite. There are however two questions relevant here: First, what is a number of prepositions in macro level that in principle could be constructed? I claim that this is infinite and should be equal to omniscience since otherwise omniscience is not complete.

I would agree that in principle the number of actions available to us is infinite. But as far as humans are concerned it would only be potentially infinite whereas in omniscience it would be an actual infinity.

What is the number of preposition in micro level which define a prepositions in macro level? Are they equal or one is smaller that another? I claim that the set of preposition in micro level which translate to one single preposition in macro level is infinite otherwise we cannot be free. How? To answer this question consider that the number of preposition in micro level is finite and it is N. This means that we can always find a cause, lets call it initial cause namely the outcome of being exposed to external stimulus which initiate the second cause in us, this second cause initiate another cause etc until the number of cause/preposition which is N is exhausted. This leads to a unique outcome which is the result of this set of finite prepositions which is finite. In macro level this also relate to a unique behaviour in another word we can never have two true options. There is one true option that we are not aware of it and it is outcome of finite causal chain in micro level. In another word the very fact that we think we can either choose this or that is an illusion.

Lets see if we can agree upon here and we will how we could go further.

I see what you’re saying but again I think it hinges on whether the mind is material or not. If it is immaterial, then the decision is at the level of the individual. Even if there is deterministic causality involved after the first micro state it doesn’t destroy free will because the individual just needs to understand the “rules” so to speak but they can still freely choose what outcome they want by choosing the X that will get them there. Does that work?

 

[Bahman]

Okay, I think I see what you are saying but I am just wondering if you are assuming that the human mind is completely material. If so then that is where the contention is because I would say that the human mind is largely immaterial and cannot be wholly reduced to material functions. I’m taking the brain and mind to mean different things. If we grant that the human mind is really only material then I would agree with you that free will is an illusion because our actions and decisions are completely determined by neuron firings.

If it is immaterial then I don’t think we have an issue. If I am understanding your explanation correctly, X would be the first material micro state that could be observed. X* is the final action or decision and there’s a deterministic set of material steps from X to X*. But I don’t think that free will is destroyed because I could have X* in mind that allows me to choose the proper X that will lead to X*. Is that valid? I think it all hinges on whether the mind is material or not.

Material or immaterial, including soul, it has to be subject of law. The main question is whether we can comprehend mind in term of set of laws and if this set is finite when we want to accommodate free will. The answer as you notice is no, hence the set has to be infinite.

I would agree that in principle the number of actions available to us is infinite. But as far as humans are concerned it would only be potentially infinite whereas in omniscience it would be an actual infinity.

We are eternal, don’t we? So we could accommodate omniscience if we could agree that the set which describe the mind/free will is infinite.

I see what you’re saying but again I think it hinges on whether the mind is material or not. If it is immaterial, then the decision is at the level of the individual. Even if there is deterministic causality involved after the first micro state it doesn’t destroy free will because the individual just needs to understand the “rules” so to speak but they can still freely choose what outcome they want by choosing the X that will get them there. Does that work?

The main question is how a rule in macro level is translated in micro level and how free will in micro level affects our behaviour.

 

[balto]

Material or immaterial, including soul, it has to be subject of law. The main question is whether we can comprehend mind in term of set of laws and if this set is finite when we want to accommodate free will. The answer as you notice is no, hence the set has to be infinite.

If the rational soul of a human is indeed immaterial, then it is not dependent on any physical laws for its operation. It may be limited in a sense that I could not possibly entertain an infinite number of possible decisions at once. But I don’t think that destroys free will. Like in the example given by polytropos that mentioned deciding on buying a red or green T-shirt. Just because you have limited choices doesn’t mean the act isn’t free. On top of that set of decisions you could still choose not to buy anything at all, shop at another store, or make your own T-shirt. The fact that any given desire we have may not be realized physically (like my desire to fly like a bird) doesn’t destroy free will if that was what you were getting at.

We are eternal, don’t we? So we could accommodate omniscience if we could agree that the set which describe the mind/free will is infinite.

Yes, in the Catholic understanding our souls are immaterial and persist after death. But they are still finite so our understanding of omniscience could only be potentially infinite at best but not actually infinite. I could continue to expand the number of truths I know ad infinitum for eternity, but I would always only understand a finite set of truths even if the cardinality of the set is always increasing.

The main question is how a rule in macro level is translated in micro level and how free will in micro level affects our behaviour.

It’s a good question, but I think the only thing that could maybe remotely count as a law in the micro level (with the understanding that thinking is essentially immaterial) would be limitations on our ability to consider only a finite set of decisions. But that doesn’t invalidate free will.