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If you could know Anything or Everything....would you want to? (1 Viewer)

Patrick_S

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That's an interesting question. I guess in order to answer that I would have to know how much of an affect curing cancer would actually have on the world wide population.

I think it would have some affect but would it result in an explosion in the population? After all people die prematurely all the time from things other than cancer.

Now if you cured all dieses that would cause some major problems.
 

Scott Dautel

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Blu .... sounds to me like you're developing a concept for a movie, particularly with that "what could go wrong question". I think it would be more interesting if we focused on the ability to get answers regarding the past, but not the future .... keeps us away from the whole fate vs parallel universe mess.

There are unlimited possibilities regarding past omniscience.
(Sidebar: Omniscience .... hmmmm, great movie title, huh :wink: )

Think about your ability to rewrite the criminal justice system ... solving crime ... releasing innocent convicts.

Think about the ability to diagnose disease.

Regarding money making ... simply ask questions pertininet to where gold/gems/oil exist underground and purchase the mineral rights.

Damn you ... now you've got my mind racing.
 

Lew Crippen

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From a philosophical perspective, the concept of being able to answer absolute questions about the future (e.g. red or black on the next spin or the date of your (or anyone’s death)) negates free will.

Theologians have considered for years, the question of predestination. You might like to read John Calvin’s The Institutes of the Christian Religion for a considered (but not to my liking) view.
 

RobertR

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That's rather redundant. :) You can ONLY know what it's possible to know. How would you know that you had the right "yes" or "no" answer to EVERY question? You CAN'T. The key is being able to test the answers (such as predicting near future events). But some questions (such as theological or "absolute philosophical" questions) are non-falsifiable and non testable, therefore it's meaningless to talk about "knowing" such answers. But that still leaves a LOT of stuff to know, and yes, I'd love to know all that is knowable.
 

ChristopherDAC

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I desire knowledge, but it's not really the kind of knowledge which comes from two-valued questions. I attempt to accumulate the kind of knowledge which will -- in principle -- eventually provide me with a consistent understanding of the world. "The names of all the stars, and the history of Middle-Earth, Over-Heaven, and the Sundering Seas!"
 

Linda Thompson

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First question: Is this possible?

Answer: NO!

End of session. :D


But, seriously...

If such a yes/no device existed, and was, indeed, 100 percent, unquestionably infallible, it could greatly simplify and improve major portions of our legal and criminal justice systems, simply by applying it to past and current events. (Future stuff gets very messy, and I, personally, wouldn't want to go there.)

Yes/No: By the currently accepted legal definition of the term, is Michael Jackson a child molester?

Yes/No: Did OJ Simpson murder Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman?

Yes/No: Did Robert Blake murder his wife? (If no, proceed to: Did Robert Blake conspire to cause his wife to be murdered? And follow wherever that takes you.)

Yes/No: Was Motorist A indeed speeding as charged by Officer B?

Yes/No: Is Possible Daddy A the father of Idiot Woman B's child? (Who needs DNA with a device like this?!? And, just think of all the idiot brawl shows -- cough, cough, Jerry Springer, cough cough -- that could just fade away into oblivion and obscurity. I'd love for a device like this to exist for that reason alone!)

Yes/No: Is Tom Cruise certifiably insane? (This could be the calibration question!) :D
 

BrianW

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Who says that if we can't alter the future, we don't have free will?

Neither can we change the past. It is written in stone, forever unchangeable. But did we not exercise our free will and make decisions of our own choosing in the past? Of course we did! Do we say that since we cannot change the past, we don't have free will? Of course not. The fact that we can't change the past has no bearing on whether we have free will.

We have no problem believing that it was free will that wrote the unalterable past.

So why is the future any different? Why is free will measured by our ability to change the future and not the past? If we had free will in the past, yet still can't change history, then why is being able to change only the future a prerequisite for possessing free will?

If the future is also written in stone, once the future becomes the past, it will become no less unchangeable. So it is quantitatively no different from the past.

Elsewhere, I discussed how more and more physicists are exploring the ways in which our Universe allows time travel and what the nature of that time travel would be. As time travel theory is being fleshed out, it is becoming more and more apparent that the future is as unchangeable as the past. But why should this bother us so? Our future is simply George Jetson's unalterable past. Why should it be alterable for us, but not for him? The answer, of course, is that it can't be. If time travel is possible, and more physicists are coming to believe that it is, his perspective and demarcation between past and future is just as valid as ours.

In any case, how do we know that we've altered the future? How do we know that anything has changed because of what we did? If we could exempt ourselves from the constraints of time and turn to any page in history, past, present, or future, would we be disturbed to see all of it already unalterably recorded? We seem to take comfort in the notion that we are actors adlibbing on a stage. But time travel theory suggests instead that we are merely characters in a novel, and that all the pages have already been written.

Do characters in a novel have free will? Well, this analogy breaks down in that a novel has an author, whereas history may not. It could be argued that characters in a novel have no free will because they do only what the author wants them to do. But history is determined by cause-and-effect. What happens now will in large part determine what happens next. And what happens now is determined by the decisions we make (among other things), not some author's whim. Does this restore free will in an unalterable time line? Personally, I think it does. Being unalterable isn't the same thing as being "known" or even predetermined.

We are constrained to remember only the past and experience only the present. This gives us the propensity to think of the future as fluid and alterable. That this isn't the case is an artifact of the nature of time itself, not a reflection of our inability to exercise free will. The fact that I am constrained not to remember the future until becomes the past doesn't mean that the future is different from the past. And the fact that there is no difference between past and future doesn't mean I don't have free will.

If it was free will that wrote the unalterable past, then it will be free will that writes the unalterable future.
 

Holadem

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If the device can only answer Yes/No, then the natural thing to do is to interface it with a computer. Imagine the possibilities (not all of them positive).

--
H
 

Mark Dill

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MarkHastings is on the right track with how the Yes/No device would respond to future events.

Just by taking possession of the device you are having an impact on the future already. So when you ask it questions about the future it's going to take your future actions into account. You could even ask it something like, "Will I save someone's life tomorrow?" Then it would say "YES" and you could ask it more questions to figure out who you are supposed to save. But if you never asked it that first question, you would have never saved that life. But see, the device knew you would ask the question and that as a result you would ask more questions and eventually save a life. So the "yes" answer it gave in the beginning was absolutely correct, even though at the time it seemed ludicrous. You could even ask it "Will I make a million dollars tomorrow?" Then, if there is ANY way for you make a million tomorrow, (and you could figure out how through yes/no answers) the ball will say "YES".

I don't know if you could have a massive impact on major events though. Not without revealing the secret of the device, anyway. If you knew a major earthquake or hurricane was about to strike and you told people to evacuate, why would they listen to you?
 

Mark Dill

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BrianW, great post man. Great post.

I often struggle to explain to people how an unalterable future does not take away our free will but they rarely come over to the way I understand it. You did a nice job explaining it.
 

Paul McElligott

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I used to know everything, then I went to college and learned how ignorant I was.

I wouldn't mind the answer to this one: Are all the women who broke up with me now miserable?

Call me a selfish, narcisistic bastard. :D
 

BrianW

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Thanks, Mark, but I'm not sure I did that good of a job explaining it. I've thought about it more, and I think I can summarize it in one sentence: Though time be of a nature that demands its entire history to be fully written before the first tick of its clock can begin, that does not preclude us from being the authors of that history to the extent that it includes us.

Only because of the constraints placed on us in the way we percieve time does it seem like a circular argument that time's inhabitants can author a part of history before time begins.

[Edit: Okay, make that two sentences.]
 

MarkHastings

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I never thought of it that way. It is true that the device itself is what is altering the past. It already knows what you're going to ask it and how you are going to react.

On a lighter note, speaking of time travel, I love the episode on tiny toons where tiny Daffy Duck starts to build a time machine. The minute he starts to build it, his future self immediately appears in the very same time machine he was building. This would make perfect sense because if you ever DID build a time machine, you'd probably go back to the point where you started to build it, to give your past self some confidence in the fact that you'll be successful. :D
 

Holadem

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Brian,

I certainly cannot get into this right now (work is not conducive to this type of discussion) but I will point out that your argument rests entirely on a premise which you seem to take for granted, and I certainly don't:

Did we? Isn't that the whole question?

I find that your (well writen) argument isn't much of one because the conclusions follows inevitably from a premise which you assume, and haven't established. That might be fine, except your premise and conclusion are one and the same... resulting in a circular argument.

If we can take for granted that our past actions were the result of free will, it follows inevitably that our future actions will be as well.

--
H
 

Bob McLaughlin

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I guess the first question I'd ask is "Should I continue using this device?" If it said "no", then I'd stop asking it questions and know I did the right thing.
 

RobertR

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Seems to me you've changed the nature of the device. It was supposed to be a conveyor of yes/no answers regarding facts. Now you've made it a judge of right and wrong.
 

RobertR

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Brian, your posts on the subject of the future are great reads. Was it you who posted in another thread about not being able to alter the future based on astrophysics (wormholes, etc.)? That had a big effect on my thinking.
 

Jeff Cooper

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Such a 'Yes/No' device could never work with 100% accuracy.

For example, if I have a donut in front of me, and I ask the device "Will I eat this donut in the next 5 minutes?", it will give me a YES/NO answer.

At that point there is nothing stopping me from doing the exact opposite of what the device answered, and thus making it fallable.
 

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