Posted: Jan 14, 2017 8:00 am
This is the same sort of argument used against divine omniscience. Suppose you have vanilla icecream and chocolate icecream in front of you, and you really want the vanilla. But then God says to you "I know you will choose the vanilla." So what do you do? You choose the chocolate!ughaibu wrote:Now, imagine a researcher who has access to the set of laws of some empirical science that entails all human behaviour, and a sufficient description of the universe of interest, sufficient computing power, etc. That researcher would be able to stick the required input into a computer and get an answer to the question "after observing the result of the computation, which will I write earliest "-1" or "+1"?" But the researcher can set as their recording procedure the following: if the computation predicts "-1", record this by immediately writing "+1", and if the computation predicts "+1", record this by immediately writing "-1".
I'm not sure I'd conclude from this that humans have freewill. I think the correct conclusion is that humans are assholes.