Sure of course. It was a trap question. You tried to make me “look bad” because i dont bemieve in free will.
Your question
was implying that you waited for me to say something along the lines of “ohh yeah since they didnt had a choise their actions shouldnt be taken into consideration so they should have been set free”
If that wasnt the case and you were asking for something else then explain how my answer above was not sufficient to your question?
Is this not an answer?
Elaborate because this is turning into a missunderstanding
The point in the story with time travel is that (pre)knowing what one will chose does not change free choice to predestination.
Predestination seems to be a framework that dominates all interpretations made by a person believing in predetermination. Whatever the story, it can be forced into the framework. I believe this kind of one-sided, almost violent, twisting of reality is sad.
To give a balanced view, comparable forcing of stories into a fixed framework may sometimes be done by those believing in free will.
Personally, I believe that we have free will but in a constrained sense. We are not completely free to chose anything possible as history, our raising, external conditions and our personal handicaps leave a very limited set of options available. This world is not fair, what is possible for one may be impossible for another.
Quantum physics says and demonstrates otherwise. Either the future is in a superposition of possibilities or not – this is a measurable difference. If you exercise power to determine which possibility it is then you change it and the superposition collapses. Otherwise, there is no one future outcome of events to be known but only a superposition of many possibilities.
Just because a decision making process is gone through doesn’t mean it is a free will choice. This is demonstrable with computers. But not everything is like that – and this difference is also demonstrable.
Yes, I believe the same. Many can often choose how to respond to circumstances. They certainly cannot choose their whole life and being. Our freedom is not only limited, but fragile and far from universal. Free will varies between people, and it can be destroyed or diminished by any number of things such as disease, chemistry, and bad habits.
This is not obvious to me - does time/future follow the rules of quantum physics? Does future ‘collapse’ like a superposition if an observer manages to see something from the future?
If future acts like a superposition, what kind of observer would collapse the future - a prophet, a time traveler, God?
I don’t know so I am not saying yes or no, just asking.
How not? Time and space are equally a part of the structure of the universe – so how is time any different? Measurements and interactions which transform a superposition into a singular choice of the possibilities is something which happens at a point in time. As a result, decoherence is an even more substantial arrow of time than entropy.
That is what happens in the real world (seeing something alters what you see), so the real question is why should we credit something which only happens in someone’s imagination (seeing something without altering what you see). I think that imagination is more like the inconsistent demands of child to keep his cake and eat it too.
Any physicist can do it with a measuring device. I don’t personally believe in fortune telling psychics or time travelers. But yes I not only think God can see the future as it is with all of its possibilities, but that God could interfere to determine which of those possibilities comes to pass – and a prophet only has what God communicates to him. But after going to all the effort to create a universe which supports the free will process of life, it hardly makes much sense for God to negate that free will in such a way – we do that to ourselves quite well without any help from God.
And like Kierkegaard, I would say that a philosophy which is so contrary to our experience as human beings is pointless and useless. Free will exists because at least some of us experience it. Discounting it as illusory is as pointless as deciding the universe was created this morning with all our memories and evidence as they are, telling us of a past which does not exist. Furthermore, if the world were just a holo-novel, then I see little reason to believe that we would have any more consciousness that the characters in a book of Dr. Seuss. A future which exists as a superposition of possibilities is the only significant difference I can see between the real world and such a book or film.
My reasoning goes deeper than that. Examining the very experience of consciousness – I think it revolves around a sense of ownership of the choices we make. Why should the characters of a novel feel any such ownership when they have all been chosen by the author, and why should we feel any more ownership over our actions than the wind and rain if our choices are just as much a product of the forces of nature? Therefore I think our experience of consciousness is evidence that we do not live in a holo-novel, and thus the future is not written already but full of possibilities.