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[penguinofhonor]

Does knowledge of something's existence necessitate its existence, though?

[i2amroy]

Not only this, but time (in the simulated areas) would also be an illusion, because everything would exist simultaneously (I would imagine it kind of like a 4th dimensional universe in his head existing as a single shape or something (assuming that we only have three space dimensions, we probably have more)).

Of course that's the point when lots of people start to throw around terms like "predestination" or "free will".

[lemon10]

Spoiler: KXCD comic to reinforce my point (click to show/hide)

http://xkcd.com/505/

Perfect knowledge does, the best possible map of a province is the province itself, if you are perfectly accurate, then there is no difference from the real thing.
A simulation is a system. It doesn't matter where it is, or what its made up of, it doesn't matter if its on a computer (or as in the comic, made out of rocks).
Or, in this case, entirely mental.

Imagine that a simulation exists.
A omniscient being would know every single part of that simulation, every frame from start to finish, all existing at once within its head.
And not only that simulation, every single possible simulation as well.

Not only this, but time (in the simulated areas) would also be an illusion, because everything would exist simultaneously (I would imagine it kind of like a 4th dimensional universe in his head existing as a single shape or something (assuming that we only have three space dimensions, we probably have more)).

Of course that's the point when lots of people start to throw around terms like "predestination" or "free will".

Free will makes no sense with a omniscient god. Any action you would choose would already be known and already determined. You can choose to do something as much as a computer program can choose to print out "Hello World" when its run, humans are just a few orders of magnitude harder to predict.

EDIT: I might not be saying everything perfectly, because its a bit hard to wrap my head around the exact mechanics, and even harder to explain it properly, but I think what I am saying is fundamentally sound.

[EveryZig]

Want to boggle your mind even further? In order to actually be all knowing (rather than just described as such), a being must first exist. If a being is all knowing, then they know about everything about everything that exists. Including itself. So an all-knowing god would itself have no free will.
(Of course, you could say the future is only partly determined and that being all-knowing only encompasses knowledge of current things and the best predictions, in which case you are only left with the problem of a mind containing multiple complete copies of itself.)

(Technically omniescent just means all-seeing.)

[Bauglir]

Why do you not have free will if choosing to do something means you always were going to choose that? Surely you still chose it.

[Graknorke]

Why do you not have free will if choosing to do something means you always were going to choose that? Surely you still chose it.

Because there was no possibility of you not choosing it. It's like those things people like Derren Brown where they get people to choose cards at random from a layout, but they are laid out in such a way that most people will be drawn to a certain collection.
The Seance one does it with photographs. 49:45 ish. Basically, people thing they're choosing what they do, but it doesn't really matter. 17:20 or so for the actual card thing. Viewer instructions were obviously rigged, but for the actual participants it was entirely based on the layout of the cards that made them choose the same thing Darren wanted them to choose.

[MagmaMcFry]

On the topic of free will: If you include enough things, the system in which you exist is always deterministic. Even assuming souls existed, then the system consisting of the universe and the souls would be deterministic. If you also believe in quantum indeterminism, then the system consisting of the universe, the souls, and the universe's RNG would be deterministic. Simple as that. So there is no free will, no matter the reality, and the only thing that matters is essentially that you are conscious, and that's good enough for me.

[Osmosis Jones]

On the topic of free will: If you include enough things, the system in which you exist is always deterministic. Even assuming souls existed, then the system consisting of the universe and the souls would be deterministic. If you also believe in quantum indeterminism, then the system consisting of the universe, the souls, and the universe's RNG would be deterministic.

How? If the universe is maybe up of quantumly probabilistic things, then the sum is likewise probabilistic.

Yes, massive things like the universe are generally going to look pretty similar, but quantum probabilistic effects could conceivably have a pretty huge effect in human terms; consider radioactive decay -> interacts with DNA -> mutation or cancer, for example.

That said, yeah, that doesn't mean conscious free will exists; I ultimately believe that the way our brains work is a determinstic result of our initial inputs, but that those inputs can be set probabilistically. So, the universe isn't fixed, but once it's decision are made, we will act on them in a reproducible way.

So, anyway, let's say we have a potential for *quantum* free will. Now, as a thought experiment, how is this compatible with omniscience?

One option is an omniscient being could see all alternate paths, branching constantly, possibly (:p) weighted by the probability. Still wouldn't be able to change it's path (at least, not if it's a rational being), but it could see how unlikely it was.

[EveryZig]

Why do you not have free will if choosing to do something means you always were going to choose that? Surely you still chose it.

I was talking in the context of a deity who knows a set future, which would mean that their future choices will remain unchanged by their knowledge of the complete consequences of their every decision. Once the deity considers anything they wish to change about the future, the only thing that can stop them from doing so is a lack of free will.
What I had not considered in my previous post (which is odd because I have speculated about this subject a lot previously) is the possibility that the deity doesn't ever want to change the future, through every action of theirs already being optimized for their purposes. (Basically, they will have the knowledge to have effectively save-scummed their entire life.)

As such a scenario is implausible outside of speculations, I think it is fairly safe to say that a system can not both be deterministic and have its outcome known by people inside the system.

[lemon10]

On the topic of free will: If you include enough things, the system in which you exist is always deterministic. Even assuming souls existed, then the system consisting of the universe and the souls would be deterministic. If you also believe in quantum indeterminism, then the system consisting of the universe, the souls, and the universe's RNG would be deterministic. Simple as that. So there is no free will, no matter the reality, and the only thing that matters is essentially that you are conscious, and that's good enough for me.

Personally, I don't believe in true randomness (and anything but perfectly random isn't random at all), but that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, unless you can come up with some logic or evidence, we can't just say it doesn't exist.

Why do you not have free will if choosing to do something means you always were going to choose that? Surely you still chose it.

According to some dictionaries:

Wiktionary: Philosophy, The ability to choose one's actions, or determine what reasons are acceptable motivation for actions, without predestination, fate etc.
Dictionary.com: Philosophy . the doctrine that the conduct of human beings expresses personal choice and is not simply determined by physical or divine forces.
Merriam Webster: freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention

Now according to every dictionary that I checked, if god knows what you are going to do, or if physical circumstances perfectly control it, then you have no free will.
Yes, you still make a choice, just like a rock makes a choice to get picked up when you pick it up, or a electron makes a choice to orbit around an atom E:nucleus, they don't orbit around atoms, since they ARE part of the atom.

Want to boggle your mind even further? In order to actually be all knowing (rather than just described as such), a being must first exist. If a being is all knowing, then they know about everything about everything that exists. Including itself. So an all-knowing god would itself have no free will.
(Of course, you could say the future is only partly determined and that being all-knowing only encompasses knowledge of current things and the best predictions, in which case you are only left with the problem of a mind containing multiple complete copies of itself.)

(Technically omniescent just means all-seeing.)

(Nope, the commonly accepted definition is all knowing, all-seeing is acceptable, but all knowing is the primary one).
Yeah, a omniscient being would have no free will, it would know everything that would happen, well, it would simply wouldn't be under any illusion that it had any free will at least.
Actually, if it knew everything about itself perfectly (including exactly how it worked), wouldn't that mean that there is a recursive and infinite set of omniscent beings?

EDIT: missed the last two replies in my post, because I wanted to have mine down before I got further behind.

[Grek]

How? If the universe is maybe up of quantumly probabilistic things, then the sum is likewise probabilistic.

Depends on which interpretation you use. If you're using one of the many-worlds variants, where there are multiple worlds and you find yourself in a world with probablity equal to the squared modulus of the amplitude, then the sum across all of the many worlds is deterministic. It's deterministic in a way where everything that can happen, quantumly speaking, does happen, but that's still determinism - stuff is just happening where you can't see it, giving the superficial appearance of nondeterminism. On the other hand, if you're a goober that prefers collapse postulates, where the wave fuction collapses into a single world, selecting between 'possible' worlds with probablity equal to the squared modulus of the amplitude, then the single universe that exists + the RNG for the universe's "which way does the waveform collapse" function (which may just be a string of numbers that cannot be discovered from within the universe), then that is also deterministic, since if you had both, you could write a deterministic Turing machine to perfectly simulate the universe.

[Osmosis Jones]

Depends on which interpretation you use. If you're using one of the many-worlds variants, where there are multiple worlds and you find yourself in a world with probablity equal to the squared modulus of the amplitude, then the sum across all of the many worlds is deterministic. It's deterministic in a way where everything that can happen, quantumly speaking, does happen, but that's still determinism - stuff is just happening where you can't see it, giving the superficial appearance of nondeterminism. On the other hand, if you're a goober that prefers collapse postulates, where the wave fuction collapses into a single world, selecting between 'possible' worlds with probablity equal to the squared modulus of the amplitude, then the single universe that exists + the RNG for the universe's "which way does the waveform collapse" function (which may just be a string of numbers that cannot be discovered from within the universe), then that is also deterministic, since if you had both, you could write a deterministic Turing machine to perfectly simulate the universe.

That's just it though; there isn't a hidden variable for some universal RNG!

Spoiler: Spoilered for increasingly off-topic (click to show/hide)

The interactions themselves are inherently undeterminable. To reiterate; according to our best understanding of quantum physics, the world does not operate like Dwarf Fortress, where you plug a seed into some black box and get the same result everytime (well, macro scale it almost does, but not on the quantum scale).

If you run the exact same interaction a thousand times (literally rewinding time so that EVERY single number is the same), everything we know about QM suggests you will still get a probabilistic distribution of results. You can model the out come of each option, but you can't say whether one option wil be chosen over the other.

If we go with your many worlds theory¹, then there is still the issue that what you described is a probabilistic system, only 2 fold.

If you're using one of the many-worlds variants, where there are multiple worlds and you find yourself in a world with probablity equal to the squared modulus of the amplitude, then the sum across all of the many worlds is deterministic. It's deterministic in a way where everything that can happen, quantumly speaking, does happen, but that's still determinism - stuff is just happening where you can't see it, giving the superficial appearance of nondeterminism.

To explain; after an event, instead of one universe, we have x many branches. We can observe an event that can give A or B yielding A with 70% probability. Since the universe is the same, except for this quantum result, during the split from 1 to x universes, we can assume there is no preference for which universe branch the hypothetical observer recording this goes down, it can be anything from universe 1 to universe x. Thus, what dictates whether A or B is seen would ultimately be the ratio of universes created (e.g. approximately 70% of the created universes are A, 30% B).²

Thus, we just chose a universe at random. We can't say which one, beforehand, our hypothetical observer was going to take, hence not deterministic. There can't be some predefined 'hidden variable' that does, either, because that variable would be inherited by all branches from a given progenitor universe. Either that, or there is a probabilistic function in the number of universes created with A, and the number created with B.


¹I personally dislike Many-worlds theory; we're talking the endless creation of new universes from a prior one here, but without a corresponding input of energy. Since thermodynamics is pretty well one of the most fundamental laws of phsics, that's just painful.
Before anyone says "but what about this universe", yes, I don't know what caused the big bang. However, suggested possibilities include both this universe being a black hole from another earlier one, or collisions between multiversal membranes; basically some large event that could conceivably impart the necessary energy. A complete replication of the universe because an electron in the 2nd orbit of a H atom decided to drop then and there into the 1st just doesn't make mathematical (or common, for that matter) sense.

² Alternatively, there are 2 worlds produced, strictly A and strictly B. However, there is a weighted chance that A or B is observed. Then you still have a probabilistic choice, because, as discussed above, whatever the starting conditions (hidden or otherwise) that lead to universe A, they are also the ones that lead to universe B.

[Graknorke]

That's just it though; there isn't a hidden variable for some universal RNG!
The interactions themselves are inherently undeterminable. To reiterate; according to our best understanding of quantum physics, the world does not operate like Dwarf Fortress, where you plug a seed into some black box and get the same result everytime (well, macro scale it almost does, but not on the quantum scale).

Well, those understandings aren't really based on anything. They're pretty much just guesses that could be right. There would be no way to actually know without inventing time travel and watching the same experiment over and over again. Really most of the understandings of quantum physics are just plausible explanations that would result in the observations we see.
But that's the sort of thing that can easily end up with big horses in the sky pulling the sun along in a chariot.

[Osmosis Jones]

Except we can make testable predictions with the current theory that explicitly require there to be probabilistic interactions, but making it a deterministic model breaks it, so yes, they are based on something. Yes, it's not knowable if that model is absolutely correct, but if our best understanding of something suggests something, why disregard it? (Oh hey, we're back where we were two pages ago! )

[Grek]

I'd say that you're not quite groking what the many-worlds theories are saying. According to many-worlds, here's what actually happens:

Spoiler: Quantum Physics (click to show/hide)

1. We start out with an approximately factorable blob of quantum amplitude in a configuation space. Let's say it represents a photon.
2. This photon blob undergoes a quantum event. Let's say we shoot it at a half-silvered mirror, which results in observations of the photon either getting reflected or being absorbed.
3. The photon does NOT randomly either get reflected or absorbed. Instead, what happens is the mirror splits the universal waveform (of which the photon is a single approximate factor) into two (mostly) disconnected nodes. This includes spliting the amplitude that makes up your brain into two nodes in configuration space.
4. Brain-node A is entangled with photon-node A, the one that gets reflected. The mind arising from that node of amplitudes (that "world") observes that "world's" photon being reflected, and cannot detect photon-node B. This is because brain-node A is not entangled with photon-node B. The inverse occurs with Brain-node B getting entangled with photon-node B and not seeing photon-node A.
5. Brain-node A, seeing photon-node A getting reflected and not seeing any photon node getting absorbed, concludes that the mirror randomly decided to reflect the photon this time. Brain-node B concludes the opposite, that the mirror randomly decided to absorb the photon. Both think (for now) that the universe is random on a quantum scale.
6. But wait! If we're especially cunning, and keep the experimental isolated from other photons, we can detect the influence that photon-node A's amplitude has on photon-node B and vis versa. Remember, they're only mostly disconnected at this point, not completely disconnected. That doesn't happen until they interact with other photons, causing more quantum events that move the two aplitude nodes further and further apart, rendering their influence upon eachother indetectable.
7. Having seen those results, and eventually deriving the math that predicts those quantum influences, both brain-nodes figure out that the math is pointing the fact that the photon (or, as it turns out, the amplitude configuration arising from the photon) is actually going both ways, even if it doesn't appear to be doing so on the surface.
8. Hopefully, both brain-nodes realize that while a collapse postulate seems intuitively appealing, as it only postulates a single world (after all, each brain-node only ever gets to see a single world) many-worlds makes more sense mathmatically and doesn't require a magical, despair-inducingly-antioccumian and nondeterministic wave-function collapser.

The key thing to keep in mind here, and this IS actually on topic for the religion thread, is that that The Map Is Not The Territory and, while your map (ie. your understanding of reality) can be uncertain and have probabilities in it, the actual territory (ie. reality itself) cannot be. Reality is exact, unambigious, non-fuzzy and, well, real.