| cowan:
<> <Foreknowledge, even perfect foreknowledge, doesn't imply causation.> > True, but to the point, perfect foreknowledge does imply the lack of choice. I meant to say "choice", not "causation". The point of the envelope example was to show that even though I foreknew that you would take the $1 mil instead of drinking the battery acid, your choice was perfectly unconstrained by me.> No, you meant "causation" -- you don't constrain the choice (though youmay have forced it a bit), but if you KNOW which choice he will make, then he does not have a choice. For, if he takes the other option, your prediction was wrong and you, consequently, did not know it at all. Just a logical point: a knows that p => p xod: <This is a completely meaningless sentence. C The notion of "doing it over again" is meaningless. It does not correspond to anything in reality.> Well, that is a position, but not one that corresponds well with ordinary usage, of which logic tries to make as much sense as possible. The issue is not doing it over but doing instead. <You can only do one thing! > is a classic modal ambiguity and the sense in which it is obviously true does not cut offthe possibility that I could have done something else then. <Moral strictures and legal punishments appear to have a negative correlation against certain kinds of behaviors. That's all the justification that is necessary,> ["positive correlation"?] In most societies, behavior is not enough, but a variety of circumstantial items enter in, at least one of which is a plausible case that someone could have done otherwise (often even in very remote senses -- look at the Leopold & Loeb verdicts). <The medieval conceptions of the Yahweh are the troublesome ones. All this rot about all-knowing, all-powerful. If you postulate powerful, wise beings, worthy of worship, you don't run into such problems, although you may find it difficult to prove their existence.> Not just Medieval (and not really Medieval either). I always start Philosophy of Religion by pointing out how little the God we are going to talk about has to do with the God that comes up on Sunday-Saturday-Friday. In spite of Neo-Platonism being a heresy in all Western Monotheisms, it pretty much won the game in theology and philosophy. Of course, you are left with the question of whether anything less than The One is really worthy of worship, since it might be a mere lickspittle in the hierarchy of gods. <So I suppose you are asking whether there is a world in which > every stement false IN THAT WORLD is true IN THAT SAME WORLD. Not really. The idea was that there are two classes of facts, ones that are true in this world but might be false in another (John's marriage), and others that must be false everywhere (2 + 2 = 5). But since other worlds do not exist, this isn't an issue.> Well, the other "worlds" do help exlain what is peculiar about "2+2=5" compared to "I am the Pope," why one is easy to conceive and the other is at least a whole lot harder, if not impossible. <It is entirely possible that ANY deviation from our known laws of physics involves a logical contradiction.> No. It may be that any deviation from the actual laws of physics (known and unknown) is physically impoossible -- that no world could actually exist in any other way -- but that is far from LOGICAL impossibility, that the laws imply, in themselves, a contradiction. <I fail to see how speculation on the properties and differences between worlds that DO NOT exist can help us understand anything in this one. They do not, and in a real sense could not exist! If we want to tie our logic to observed reality and derive useable results, we are obliged to ignore such fiction.> The point is that we do talk as though there were other ways that things might be and such talk seems often to make sense, even important sense. So, let's see what we can do to find out what kind of sense it makes and what are the conditions for its making that sense. Possible worlds are a nice fiction for doing this, since we can set them up and examine the effects of various restrictions on them on the truth conditions of what we say using them. We can then come back to wwhat ordinary peple say and poiint out what conditions make certain things true or even plausible and in this way get a bettergrasp on what a person is saying. Ideally, we also get people to be more careful about what they say. And maybe give up saying some things altogether -- or at least thinking that there is any useful content to it. <If we cannot get clean predictions, how can we prove the future is completely determined?.> We can't but that doesn't mean that it isn't -- or that it is, of course. Knowing and proving and being are three very different things. The last guess I read was that the physical universe is deterministic but that complete predictions are inherently impossible because of indetectable parameters on initial conditions (Chinese butterflies). Today balvi came up clear as a bell (well, not quite because of the purple on black, but something different from This Site Ain't Playin') Thanks. |