Paradox of omniscience and free will

Lots of theological debates center around the religious idea of free will. Some varieties of theists, i.e. Calvinists, don't believe in free will at all. Some atheists (like my friend Denis Loubet) don't believe in free will either, believing that the notion is incompatible with a completely materialistic universe.

Those are all interesting topics, but one issue I find equally interesting is whether "God," as Christians define him, can have free will. I think I'm borrowing this line of reasoning from an old Raymond Smullyan book, although I can't remember exactly where.

God is supposed to be omniscient. He knows everything about the past, present, and future. In fact, his knowledge is so complete that he must know every action that he himself will take in the future.

Now, suppose you yourself were granted the power of omniscience -- not omnipotence or any of the other useful attributes, but you know everything. Suppose it comes time to make a fairly mundane decision, like what you will eat for breakfast. You can have scrambled eggs or oatmeal. So you wonder, what am I in the mood for? Scrambled eggs, or oatmeal? But this is an easy decision: you are omniscient! Simply use your unlimited knowledge to peer a few minutes into the future, and see what it is that you will have for breakfast. And when you look at your future self, you know, as a matter of absolute certainty, whether you will be eating eggs or oatmeal.

But wait a minute. What if you are in a perverse frame of mind and wish to exercise your free will? So you say to yourself "Okay, here's what I'll do. I'll check the future, but I won't do what it says. If I see myself eating oatmeal, then I'll pick scrambled eggs. If I see myself eating eggs, it'll be oatmeal."

Now what does that mean for your powers? If your vision is guaranteed to be accurate, then you don't have the free will to change your decision. But if you can change your decision, then your vision was wrong, and you are no longer omniscient.

This is one reason why I conclude that no being can be both omniscient and free.

Peak oil worries

I'm not normally someone given to paranoid ravings about the end of the world. I sneered at Y2K panickers, and I regularly laugh at fundamentalists who believe the rapture is coming THIS year... no, NEXT year... no, this time for SURE...

Recently though, the very real prospect of the world's oil supply mostly drying up within our lifetimes has begun to hit me hard. Some scattered readings on the subject:

Collapse by Jared Diamond, describing past civilizations that crumbled, and why it happened. I managed to read about half this book before giving up because it was so depressing. Diamond paints a very vivid picture of what it's probably like to be one of the people living at the end of a civilization, and it's not pretty.

If you don't plan to read Collapse, this post by Adam Cadre is a very good but morbid high level summary of it. Adam (whom I know mostly as an author of very excellent short interactive fiction) is taking this end of the world stuff seriously. He writes:

Reading Collapse along with some rather dire predictions for 2006 put me in a weird mental space as I went down to the Whole Foods to stock my refrigerator. I felt like I'd beamed in Twelve Monkeys-style from a dystopian future and was appalled at the decadent excess I saw before me. I watched people poking through a tastefully presented basket of satsuma oranges and wondered, how will you look back on this evening a few years from now when, like the Anasazi, you are scrabbling in the dirt for mice to pop the heads off of and eat whole?

There is a board on The Motley Fool called Peak Oil Party (membership required) dedicated to this subject. I've started lurking there to learn more about it.

Through this board, I read this half creepy, half hopeful series of editorials called, simply, "Things to Come". Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4. The author is of the opinion that a sharp reduction in oil availability is beginning within the next few years. He tries to soften the blow and speculate how we will continue to get by in a post oil world.

My dad is a fusion research physicist, so naturally I'm biased towards the eventual development of safe nuclear energy as a way of somehow saving us before things get really bad. My dad is of the opinion that science research is pretty much crippled by politics in this country, but he's cautiously hopeful that other countries will beat us to finishing the research.

I brought this up with Ginny, so now she's paranoid about it too. She thinks we should be making emergency plans for when it happens.

Mockery

This post I wrote was deemed (by ongoing vote) the number one best post on the Motley Fool message board system for about four hours yesterday.

The discussion was about a college professor who had ridiculed creationism in private email. Another poster wrote, "Mocking someone else's beliefs is just plain ugly".

I replied:

That is a load of bunk and I will now mock you for having this belief.

(Waggling my finger) Mock, mock, mock.

All beliefs are created equal, but some become harder and harder to maintain with a straight face over time. Anyone in the 21st century who believes, for instance, that the earth is flat, deserves all the ridicule they can be subjected to for this belief. I mock them now.

Mock, mock, mock.

Fundamentalist Muslims believe that women are the property of their husbands and fathers, that they should not be out in public without male escorts and veils, and that they must never speak their mind or contradict their men. For holding those beliefs, I mock fundamentalist Muslims.

Mock, mock, mock.

As recently as 50 years ago, a large number of people in certain areas of this very country believed that blacks were inferior human beings, and that they should not be allowed to sit at the same tables as white people or share the same drinking fountains, and if they tried to marry white women, they deserved to be lynched. Those people were jackasses, and I mock them.

Mock, mock, mock.

You can sit around and come up with rational arguments to use against cretins who believe the holocaust never happened. And you SHOULD be familiar with those arguments, if you want to be solid in the real facts. But at a certain point, you don't legitimize holocaust deniers by giving them equal time in history classes and giving students the opportunity to decide for themselves. You tell them what the best evidence of history points to, and you rightly say that holocaust deniers are morons who have no leg to stand on.

Mock, mock, mock.

Don't get me wrong, I hold that everyone's right to BELIEVE their own ridiculous ideas is sacred, or as close to "sacred" as an atheist can muster. But to tell me that I have no right to POINT OUT that their beliefs really are ridiculous is outrageous. Many ideas are not just stupid, they are downright harmful to a society and the innocent people who live there. And since I do not believe in censorship, the best way to effectively combat these beliefs is to mercilessly mock bad, outmoded, and wrongheaded ideas every chance I get.

Mock, mock, mock.

It is not only GOOD to mock obviously bad ideas for being bad. I argue that it is CRITICALLY IMPORTANT to shoot them down whenever possible. Otherwise, ideas that are completely unreasonable start to sound reasonable to an uneducated populace who never learned how to tell the difference between fact and opinion. And the folks who cynically take advantage of other people's bad education to hoodwink them into believing things, so they can steal their money and commandeer their lives, are the lowest scum of the earth. They should be exposed. And then mocked.

Mock, mock, mock.