h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In the cupboard - check out that guitar-shaped hole in your chest, oh soldier-less one!

Hee hee

PS This PostScript contains "Something incredibly wise and intellectual and actually relevant to the thread ..."

To Ganymede and Titan, yes sir I've be...hmmmmm hmm hmmm-Oh sorry, I thought we were talking about something else.
PS I've made Kryten throw out all the vindaloo!

So that's what's stuck to the viewscreen. And I thought we'd entered a previously-uncharted area of yellow, bubbling space.

I hear Holly's made a slideshow of all your wrong answers in the Navigation Exam. And the scutters think it's _very_ amusing.

Can anyone pay attention long enough to explain this figure 8 thing to me in words of no more than two syllables?

No, sorry.

Fair enough!

(scribbles on her hit list)

Anyone for a round of s instead then?

alkerhol issssss veryveryyy bad fer skeweerllss

I really don't like the fatalism concept. It's like saying, "You have free will, but there are things you are not free to do." I guess that maybe you could have free will withing a span of options given you by fatalism, but I tend to have an all-or-nothing policy towards free will; either you can make every choice or you can make no choices.

Of course, if we follow some sort of quantum multiverse thing, where there are an infinite number of universes and traveling back in time takes you to a different one of them, then you can still have free will; you would just not be able to return to your own time and place.

PhysicsMan

I see your point. Pretty clever that for a squirrel!

Equally however I think even if you have free will, that doesn't mean you will be able to do everything you chose to try to do. There can be frustrating events that are outside your power to control. For example, I might choose to bury some nuts in autumn and come back to them in winter. But if the government digs up the SSSI I've been living in, runs over me with a bulldozer and despoils all my nuts, it doesn't matter at all whether or not I've chosen to go back and get them. I won't be able to.

Our choices are constantly frustrated and who's to say if it's fate or chance or just weak-minded governments to blame? I may have free will, but that does not necessarily translate into complete freedom of action.

I'm not sure that I believe 'fate' or 'fatalism' or even 'predestination' would interfere to prevent the grandson killing the grandfather. But I'm pretty sure the killing wouldn't happen, at least not in one single universe. Impossible events are, well, impossible, regardless of the choices we make.

Okay, I've answered the fatalism / determinism confusion in the other thread: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/F84790?thread=177499&latest=1 , ubt there's still an interesting question here. Basically, just because you have a parallel universes account, doesn't mean that fatalism can't hold. Okay, imagine it like this. Either it could be the case that the universe branches - that any decision splits the universe in two, and in each universe a different possibility is acted out. But there is another possibility. What if the two universes exist already, and are simply exactly the same up to that point? So when a decision is made, two universes that look exactly the same start to diverge. If this possibility is the case, then fatalism can still hold. Why? Because you'll already be in a particular universe, so it will already be the case that there are facts about everything that happens in that universe. Every choice that will ever be made will determine which universe you are in, so there is an entire history of the universe plotted out. So we can have fatalism in a multiple universe account. I still don't see why this affects free will. Just because there is a fact-of-the-matter about whether I see a film tomorrow already, doesn't mean that I never had a say in the matter.

If every choice you make determines which universe you're in, you have free will to enter whichever universe you want/do whatever you want. There should be no fatalistic barriers blocking you.

If you are definitely, without question, seeing a movie tomorrow, then it doesn't seem as though you had much free will over the matter. You may think that it is your own free will to go to the movie, but if you *will* go to the movie, no matter what, that's not what I call "free will."

PhysicsMan

Yet clearly we don't always collapse the quantum wave in our own favours - so there must be something blocking our choices.

We don't have free will, it seems, to force the bus to wait at the stop until we arrive, to make the lotto balls come out with the numbers we've chosen, or to make Tony Blair into a better Prime Minister. So what exactly does make the wave collapse the way it does? Are we constantly being outvoted or is it just - gasp - random?

Look. There are two ways of looking at the possible worlds account:
1) We exist in a single world until a choice, at which point it branches and we end up doing one thing or another.
2) There are already infinite possible worlds that we (and our dopplegangers) exist in, and we happen, all along, to be in one where we choose to go to the movies.

But 1) and 2) will be exactly equivalent in every observable way. So you don't have to have terrible strong verificationist tendencies to hold that they *are* the same.

So if you have free will in the first, you have free will in the second.
The first is supposedly unfatalistic, the second fatalistic. Neither is deterministic - if it were deterministic, there would be a *single* possible world for the entire history of the universe.

Ergo, fatalism without determinism. Free will compatible with making true claims about the future.

Buffysquirrel, Imagine a King on a chessboard. It has "free will" in that it can travel in any direction by one square. But, at any given time there are at least 55 squares it can never reach. We may each be able to have a limited influence on which quantum reality comes into existence, and it's up to us to "surf the probabilities" to our advantage.

I set out there to use an inappropriate example to lead to a piece of implausible mystical clap-trap - how'd I do?

If there are an infinite number of parallel universes, then anything could happen in any of them. There could be one universe in which the Earth is destroyed in the next five minutes. You still cannot make any firm statements about the future.

Also, I would say that in the second universe, you do not have free will; you have the *illusion* of free will. This happens to be indistinguishable from actual free will, but it is somewhat different. Anyway, we'll never determine which one we have, so it's pointless to argue the distinction.

PhysicsMan

Ya did good, Peet .

However, since the only thing we seem to agree on is that we can't be sure about anything, that renders this entire conversation a tad pointless.

But then most if not all conversations are pointless!

Personally I reckon if we have free will it's only in that part of the act-field which is under our control. And that part is so infinitesimally small as makes no difference.

Okay. A bit of jargon here then. Either it will clarify things, or I'll win the argument just by using technical terms!

The problem with the claim that they're different, but we'll never know, is that this question isn't just *underdetermined* by the data (which means all the data we currently have doesn't decide the issue) but *radically underdetermined*. That is to say, even if we knew every empirical fact about the universe, its past and its future, we'd still have no grounds upon which to choose between them. The two theories are each compatible with ever single experience we've had, we'll ever have, and which we ever could have.

If there's one thing that the verificationist position did that was important, it was to invite people to be absolutely sure of themselves before claiming that two radically underdetermined theories were different theories.

You say that we'd have the illusion of free will. But if there is no evidence either way, surely you're just kidding yourself if you believe we *do* have free will. You're going to have to admit that there can be *no* evidence that you have free will, and you're just taking that on faith.

Nah, the quantum wave didn't collapse towards your winning the argument!

I never said we *do* have free will. We at least have the *illusion* of free will; there is no way to distinguish between that and actual free will.

PhysicsMan

you are absolutly correct......time travel is impossible, if people from the future traveled to the past, how come we havent seen any??? if they did im sure they r smart enuf in the future to bring somthing to prove they r from the future, like a vid of some1 getting assassinated and then it happens or like super technology, or somthing, u know what im talking about....but, this is pretty scary.......mabye time travel is possible but the human species dont live long enuf to invent it, like the world gets destroyed, by bombs or god, so thats why we havent seen and time travelers