Do you have free will?

[Admiral Yi]

Like it says in Sav's story.  The dude pulls the trigger after the other dude dies, and the conclusion is that causality is violated because of the order the acts are performed.  I'm saying maybe that's an incorrect assumption about causality.  Just because an act (pulling the trigger of a tachyon ray gun) comes after the thing it's supposed to cause (dude dying) doesn't mean the first didn't cause the second.

[Valmy]

So if the shooter sees the man get shot and feels guilt and has second thoughts and decides not to pull the trigger...does the past change?

*head explodes*

[Savonarola]

Like it says in Sav's story.  The dude pulls the trigger after the other dude dies, and the conclusion is that causality is violated because of the order the acts are performed.  I'm saying maybe that's an incorrect assumption about causality.  Just because an act (pulling the trigger of a tachyon ray gun) comes after the thing it's supposed to cause (dude dying) doesn't mean the first didn't cause the second.

But that still eliminates the possibility of free will.  The person dying necessitates the shooter to pull the trigger; even if you state it as his death is the cause of him being shot.  The shooter doesn't have a choice.

[frunk]

But that still eliminates the possibility of free will.  The person dying necessitates the shooter to pull the trigger; even if you state it as his death is the cause of him being shot.  The shooter doesn't have a choice.

It's moving the point of choice from when the shooter pulls the trigger to when the person is shot.  There's still free will, it just isn't at the moment the shooter pulled the trigger from all reference frames.

[PDH]

Woody Allen - "Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once."

You folks are too caught up on cause and effect, free will and no free will.  Instead, worry about Ide not having a job.

[Savonarola]

But that still eliminates the possibility of free will.  The person dying necessitates the shooter to pull the trigger; even if you state it as his death is the cause of him being shot.  The shooter doesn't have a choice.

It's moving the point of choice from when the shooter pulls the trigger to when the person is shot.  There's still free will, it just isn't at the moment the shooter pulled the trigger from all reference frames.

I don't think I'm following here.  Four years ago I build the Death Star with a Tachyon Beam canon with Tachyons which travel at 10 times the speed of light.  I then decide to blow up planet Alderaan which is 10 light years away.  From Alderaan's frame of reference they are destroyed five years before I started building the Death Star.  How can I choose not to build the Death Star when I already used it to destroy Alderaan five years ago?

[frunk]

I don't think I'm following here.  Four years ago I build the Death Star with a Tachyon Beam canon with Tachyons which travel at 10 times the speed of light.  I then decide to blow up planet Alderaan which is 10 light years away.  From Alderaan's frame of reference they are destroyed five years before I started building the Death Star.  How can I choose not to build the Death Star when I already used it to destroy Alderaan five years ago?

The presumption is that the act of choosing has to occur at the same moment as the action that proceeds from it.  I don't see why that's true.

[Maximus]

Not being a physicist, I was unaware of the tachyon problem. However the question has come up in the context of computer science. Konrad Zuse proposed that the universe was a cellular automaton, which means that both time and space are discretized at some level and the transition of every state of the universe to the following state is entirely deterministic. If this is the case, and I don't know that it has been disproven, then it would suggest that there is no such thing as free will.

[crazy canuck]

Not being a physicist, I was unaware of the tachyon problem. However the question has come up in the context of computer science. Konrad Zuse proposed that the universe was a cellular automaton, which means that both time and space are discretized at some level and the transition of every state of the universe to the following state is entirely deterministic. If this is the case, and I don't know that it has been disproven, then it would suggest that there is no such thing as free will.

If that was the case we could save a lot of money by getting rid of the criminal justice system.  Or are we predetermined to waste money on things that dont matter because everything is predetermined? 

[Maximus]

Not being a physicist, I was unaware of the tachyon problem. However the question has come up in the context of computer science. Konrad Zuse proposed that the universe was a cellular automaton, which means that both time and space are discretized at some level and the transition of every state of the universe to the following state is entirely deterministic. If this is the case, and I don't know that it has been disproven, then it would suggest that there is no such thing as free will.

If that was the case we could save a lot of money by getting rid of the criminal justice system.  Or are we predetermined to waste money on things that dont matter because everything is predetermined? 

Either it is true or it is not true. If it is true, we waste money on criminal justice because we are predetermined to do so. If it is not true, we are not wasting money.

In other words, and this is my own take on it, there is no case I can think of where it functionally matters whether this is true or not.

[Barrister]

Not being a physicist, I was unaware of the tachyon problem. However the question has come up in the context of computer science. Konrad Zuse proposed that the universe was a cellular automaton, which means that both time and space are discretized at some level and the transition of every state of the universe to the following state is entirely deterministic. If this is the case, and I don't know that it has been disproven, then it would suggest that there is no such thing as free will.

I'm not sure how much of a problem a purely hypothetical and never proven to exist tachyon can have.

[crazy canuck]

Not being a physicist, I was unaware of the tachyon problem. However the question has come up in the context of computer science. Konrad Zuse proposed that the universe was a cellular automaton, which means that both time and space are discretized at some level and the transition of every state of the universe to the following state is entirely deterministic. If this is the case, and I don't know that it has been disproven, then it would suggest that there is no such thing as free will.

If that was the case we could save a lot of money by getting rid of the criminal justice system.  Or are we predetermined to waste money on things that dont matter because everything is predetermined? 

Either it is true or it is not true. If it is true, we waste money on criminal justice because we are predetermined to do so. If it is not true, we are not wasting money.

In other words, and this is my own take on it, there is no case I can think of where it functionally matters whether this is true or not.

Except that if it is true predetermination doesnt operate very efficiently. 

[Maximus]

Not being a physicist, I was unaware of the tachyon problem. However the question has come up in the context of computer science. Konrad Zuse proposed that the universe was a cellular automaton, which means that both time and space are discretized at some level and the transition of every state of the universe to the following state is entirely deterministic. If this is the case, and I don't know that it has been disproven, then it would suggest that there is no such thing as free will.

If that was the case we could save a lot of money by getting rid of the criminal justice system.  Or are we predetermined to waste money on things that dont matter because everything is predetermined? 

Either it is true or it is not true. If it is true, we waste money on criminal justice because we are predetermined to do so. If it is not true, we are not wasting money.

In other words, and this is my own take on it, there is no case I can think of where it functionally matters whether this is true or not.

Except that if it is true predetermination doesnt operate very efficiently. 

It still doesn't matter as there are no choices

[Ideologue]

Not being a physicist, I was unaware of the tachyon problem. However the question has come up in the context of computer science. Konrad Zuse proposed that the universe was a cellular automaton, which means that both time and space are discretized at some level and the transition of every state of the universe to the following state is entirely deterministic. If this is the case, and I don't know that it has been disproven, then it would suggest that there is no such thing as free will.

If that was the case we could save a lot of money by getting rid of the criminal justice system.

Why?  We don't generally ascribe free will to termites, but we don't let them eat our houses.

[frunk]

Not being a physicist, I was unaware of the tachyon problem. However the question has come up in the context of computer science. Konrad Zuse proposed that the universe was a cellular automaton, which means that both time and space are discretized at some level and the transition of every state of the universe to the following state is entirely deterministic. If this is the case, and I don't know that it has been disproven, then it would suggest that there is no such thing as free will.

Under quantum mechanics there are states that can't be predicted despite knowing as much as is possible to know about the system.  This is described pretty well by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, where the more precisely you know the position of a particle the less certain you are about its velocity and vice versa.

It doesn't exclude the possibility that the universe when viewed from outside of it is deterministic.  If QM holds true, from inside the universe it is impossible to perfectly describe the universe (or even a small portion of it).