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I've actually read that. I love Siwell. I read his column every week. It was several years ago at this point though so maybe I just don't recall the reason you're making a connection between it and this thread.

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Sowell's philosophy is that there are two types of people in this world:

1) Constrained - these people think that they are what they are. They are a victim or product of circumstance.
2) Unconstrained - these people think that people are primarily who they choose to be. We all have tendencies, but we can all change. People pick up new habits, for better or worse, and make decisions on how to spend their time.

I tend to lead towards the unconstrained view of people, and think that people with the constrained view are either weak willed, unambitious, or lazy.

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This is a very different conversation in my opinion and assumes free will. I would argue we are constrained in the sense that some cannot choose but to think they are victims and some constrained to think they are choosing who to be. If you view yourself as I constrained that is just because of the circumstances you have been brought up in.

I disagree.

It is a choice to have a constrained view of yourself. You could change your mind, and decide to improve yourself. Anyone CAN do that.

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I disagree.

It is a choice to have a constrained view of yourself. You could change your mind, and decide to improve yourself. Anyone CAN do that.

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You assume that to be the case. Perhaps you never had any choice but to decide to improve yourself while another never had any choice but to wallow in victimhood. This is simply how their dominos were set up to fall. If the future is determined they could never choose to do differently in either case.

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I disagree.

It is a choice to have a constrained view of yourself. You could change your mind, and decide to improve yourself. Anyone CAN do that.

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You assume that to be the case. Perhaps you never had any choice but to decide to improve yourself while another never had any choice but to wallow in victimhood. This is simply how their dominos were set up to fall. If the future is determined they could never choose to do differently in either case.

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So my past is pretty interesting:

When I was in high school, I was arguably one of the smartest people in my school, but my grades sucked because I didn't study. I didn't study because I was told I had ADD, and used that as an excuse not to study.

I got good enough grades to get into Blinn, but also got a job on campus at TAMU so that I could get a rec membership. I majored in pick-up basketball at the rec my freshman year, and my grades sucked.

Then, I decided that I didn't want to be a Jr. college dropout, quit going to the rec so much, and started to study. It wasn't hard to make straight A's at Blinn with just a touch of effort, and I was accepted into the business school at A&M after my sophomore year.

At A&M, I did pretty well. Studied hard, only made a few B's. I had one bad semester due to personal issues and illness, but had a very good GPA coming out of A&M, right into a major recession. Enron had just blown up, and my dreams of trading electricity were kind of in ruins.

I got a boring job at a bank, and really kind of mailed it in for a couple of years. Married, DINK, lots of eating out and playing video games.

Then, we got pregnant. Again, I was spurred to make something of myself, applied for an MBA, got into A&M for basically free, worked my ass off, graduated 2nd in my class, and things have been golden ever since.

During that period of time, there were a couple of times where I really felt like the world was pigeon holing me. It wasn't. I was deciding my own fate. For some reason (I would say by the grace of God), I picked myself up by my bootstraps twice, and made a decision to invest in myself.

So, I arguably went from constrained to unconstrained back to constrained back to unconstrained during the course of my younger days. To me, that doesn't feel like being a victim of circumstance. That looks to me more like a person making both good and bad decisions while he grew up.

I'm glad it all worked out for you. I see no reason that can't happen in a world without free will. If there is only one possible future then you never had any choice but to do those things.

But what tools were you given in your upbringing to accomplish what you did when you "decided" to apply yourself? What tools were you given to even desire to apply yourself? what tools were you given to even desire?

Everything you did was just a reaction to stimuli from your first breath. Whether the stimuli was threat of failing out, or having a new human life to look after. It's all reaction to external stimuli.

To take 7nines tangent, I agree with this perspective. I think our brain is a naturally coded program and database. It stores information and spits out reactions to stimuli. I think consciousness is merely the experience of this code running. I don't think we have any real choice but merely feel like we do. It's just an illusion and wonderful trick of nature.

Similar to how there are calculations so complex that scientists just have to run out simulations in order to find the results because it would take forever to calculate all the outcomes in a system of programmed objects that all have predetermined reactions to external stimuli that are all different.

Say if you had a closed in room of 100 differently programmed robots that all basically acted the same but had minor differences in how they were programmed to react to the actions of other robots in the room. Anything from how they react when they run into another robot to how they react when their sensors sense another robot and how close they are.

Sure if you had all the time in the world, you could write out the entire scenario of you had all the data of every routine programmed into every bot and the exact dimensions of the room along with the exact starting points of the robots when they get activated. You would have to run through every calculation and spend years running it all out. Or you could turn all the robots on and just record what happens and quantify the results. And any outside person that had no clue what was going on would walk up and observe robots appearing to all act randomly and without any real predetermined actions. They would almost seem to be making their own decisions if you programmed enough different reactions for them to have for every possible scenario.

Thanks guys, so very interesting.

Sowell's point is not that some people view themselves as constrained, and others as unconstrained. People tend to believe either that all people are constrained, or all people have the ability to choose.

Saying that I was successful due to the environment I was brought up in is a constrained worldview. I did good enough because I am who I am, not due to my free will to make short term sacrifices for long term rewards.

I guess that the beliefs in the constrained view and absence of free will obviously go hand in hand.

I would think the constrained world view aligns more with one of no free will but I Think this is outside the bounds of what Sowell was discussing. He wasn't discussing free will but the idea that is pervasive in society that you can be locked into a class based on circumstances. I don't think being a poor minority from an uneducated family means you cannot succeed. I don't think being from a well off educated white family means you will succeed. These are the types of constraints I understand him to be speaking about. I think there is ample evidence we are not strictly constrained to outcomes like this. If we do not have free will then the poor minority who works his butt off to succeed is no more free to do differently than the one who wastes away. The well off white kid who works his butt off to succeed is no more free than the one who sits around smoking pot in his parents basement. circumstances are incomplete in and of themselves as a predictor. We don't know the hardware they are working with or the minutia of their experience. Just because you are a certain race from a certain income level doesnt tell us if your parents had you work from an early age or if they deeply encouraged education. If you could see every factor and had the power and software to calculate a future I think you could determine the person is constrained. We just try and constrain people or put them in a box based on for too limited information rendering the stereotypes he is addressing inaccurate.

While a lot of studies in neuroscience have challenged whether we have free will a new one may indicate we do have some control. Interesting article somewhat relevant to the topic.

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/02/a-neuroscience-finding-on-free-will.html

Good find.

Interesting article. I wonder what the scientific justification for the concept of free will would be. Heck, how do these scientists even define free will? It seems like they are using the term as a proxy for meaningful consciousness, as in consciousness that is not just an emergent phenomenon of uncontrollable stimuli and response. It seems like an almost impossible thing to try and study.

Random question, does an omniscient God know both the position and momentum of a quantum particle simultaneously?

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Random question, does an omniscient God know both the position and momentum of a quantum particle simultaneously?

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I would think so. We are always going to be limited from knowing both because we must observe the particle in some way shape or form and it is the observation that is limited. An omniscient god would simply know the position and momentum simultaneously without having to observe.

Just to define the conversation, that is not my understanding of the Uncertainty Principle. In my understanding, a quantum wavefunction has both position and momentum existing as ranges of possibilities. Limiting the range of possible positions increases the range of possible momentums and vice versa. The observation is the method of limiting one variable or the other.

I could be wrong though. I'm no physicist or mathematician

From my understanding the quantum wave collapse can never be proven or know to be a direct result of observation due to the fact that we have no other way to know the properties of particles without observing them in one way or another, directly or indirectly.

Simply enough, if you know the position then it cannot be anywhere else. If you know the momentum or spin then it cannot be another. If God were able to know these things without observation then I don't see why he couldn't know both.

I'm going to spin this off to another thread to try to get the attention of our resident physicists. I might bring it back to this topic, though.

Okay, coming back from the other topic. Assume our universe was created by an omnipotent and "omnscient" God. Based on our current understanding of quantum mechanics, God could not know both the position and momentum of a quantum particle with perfect precision simultaneously. The 2 pieces of knowledge are mutually exclusive. God could, however, have a perfect understanding of the waveform which determines both of those features. This includes all possible locations and momentums of a quantum particle and their probability of having those possible values. So God knows a tremendous amount of information and understands completely the nature of quantum particles, but He set it up so that even He couldn't know these two pieces of information simultaneously.

I think this has an interesting parallel to the idea of Open Theism. I mentioned it previously in the thread. The idea is that God understands us perfectly, knows all of our possible choices, and the consequences of all of these choices, but He does not know which choice we are actually going to make. Almost as if our decisions were our "quantum position", and something else (I have no idea what) was our "quantum momentum". God could then tune the uncertainly of our "quantum momentum", but then He would lose the information about our "quantum position". God knows our "waveform" (the perfect equation of each of us), but He could still be uncertain of our individual decisions. Someone noted that this would make God less than omniscient, and I would argue that such a God would be just an omniscient as the one in the quantum example above.

It does bring up the question of the "uncertainty counterweight" to free will. The momentum to free will's position. Could God make a system without one, or even a system with more than one, or an infinite number of counterprinciples?

It is an interesting theory to chew on. However I feel you still are not representing an omniscient god's knowledge of the location and momentum of a given particle.

The way you put it, it is as if there is a definite singular position and definite singular momentum and god just cannot know both of them. However there is not. The position and momentum both exist as a wave. It simultaneously exists in all possible positions. And omniscient god would just know the equation that exactly described those possibilities.

Pretty sure that's what I meant to say, but thanks for the clarification.

It's just that the way you put it, it is as if there is actual data that exists out there that an omniscient god could not know. Knowing the exact wave function is sufficient because that is exactly how the particle exists at a quantum level.

That's sort of my whole point. The data doesn't exist. God can't know both, because of the way He created quantum particles. In regards to those particles, the question doesn't make sense and God understands them perfectly regardless of the "uncertainty" that exists from our perspective. The question is nonsensical and only makes sense from a naive and limited perspective.

Again, maybe knowledge of future choices made by free will is a similar situation. Maybe the question, "How will Texaggie7nine respond in this exact future situation?" is a nonsensical question from God's perspective, but a reasonable one from our more limited and naive perspective.

Well to extend out the uncertainty principle to our lives and our choices, then you would also have to say that when we die, we exist both in hell and heaven at the same time as possibilities.

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Well to extend out the uncertainty principle to our lives and our choices, then you would also have to say that when we die, we exist both in hell and heaven at the same time as possibilities.

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I think you could conjecture such a thing, but I don't see how it necessarily follows from the previous conjecture.

Well does time then only have one particular direction it can go? Once time collapses the wave of possibilities of our choices are they then forever set in stone or does our past exist as our future does, as a probability wave? Is it then time that is to blame for our definite life choices as it forced the collapse of the probability wave in the first place? Are we to be held responsible for simply existing as probabilities that collapsed into definite choices because time forced the collapse?

I think causality and time would still apply. It still applies to waveforms after all. I also wouldn't say that time is what "collapses our free will wavefunction". That's just determinism from another angle. I would say the same as with quantum particles. For example, a proton in a star has a set wavefunction with a "cloud of possibility" until it fuses with another proton. Then they are both a helium atom, which does not usually behave in a quantum way.

One could imagine a range of possibilities until the "free will waveform" collapses due to a non-reversible interaction with another waveform. This could be a marriage (in the traditional life-long monogamy meaning of the word), having kids, choosing a career, going to jail. In economics, the loss of these other possibilities would be call the "opportunity cost". Death would completely collapse your free will waveform as there would be no more choices (based on traditional theology).

Since an omniscient god would exist outside of time then not only would that god know all the probability waves of everyone lives and choices but he would also know which choices the waves would collapse to before we even existed. So all you are doing is adding one more layer of complexity yet you aren't getting away from the inevitable fact that he would still know everything you are going to do before you do it.

Similar to how God would not only know the wave function of the proton before it becomes part of a helium atom but would also know the exact location of the helium atom once formed before it ever formed.

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I see your point. God creates someone and knows the choices they will make from the point they are created. Doesn't that just mean that God made the choices based on how He created the person? However, I think my point above still stands. God knows the person, and He can make sure that all the choices are equally appealing to that person at the time the choice is made. The only thing that determines the decision at that point is the will of the person. To God, our will is predictable, but that doesn't make it less free.

On my earlier thread about prayer, someone mentioned a view of God's omniscience that I found interesting. According to this view, God knows all the consequences and outcomes of every possible permutation of choices from the beginning until the end. However, He doesn't know the results of the choices themselves. He would still be omniscient, because He knows the "future" regardless of which choice is made. However, until the choice is made He wouldn't know "which" future was going to happen. Not saying I ascribe, but it is interesting in the context of the current conversation.

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Can you link the post? That's the argument of counterfactuals. However, God's knowledge of counterfactuals is pre-universe and the "future" is within the scope of God's omniscience.

The argument is that free will does not require the ability to choose other than as one does. The example used by Plantinga is a man whose brain is secretly implanted with a chip. The implanting scientist, being a Clinton supporter, programs the chip to activate and make the man vote for Clinton if he tries to vote for Trump. Although, if the man chooses to vote for Clinton, the chip does not activate. The man votes for Clinton. He's exhibited free will without the ability to do anything different.

If God has counterfactual knowledge and so knows what a person would freely do in any set of circumstance he might place them; he's provident without infringing on free will.

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Since an omniscient god would exist outside of time then not only would that god know all the probability waves of everyone lives and choices but he would also know which choices the waves would collapse to before we even existed. So all you are doing is adding one more layer of complexity yet you aren't getting away from the inevitable fact that he would still know everything you are going to do before you do it.

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Absolutely right. The character of God in Open Theism is incompatible with an "outside of time" God for this very reason.

this was the thread on prayer

http://texags.com/forums/15/topics/2681611/1

and Retired posted this on the first page

http://reknew.org/2015/05/why-prayer-matters/

We've gone over Molinism before, but for the purposes of this thread I think the point is moot. Even if God knows what you would do in any situation, He created you that way. He could have created you so that you would respond differently to those same situations. For example, anyone who has goes to hell could have been created differently so they wouldn't go to hell.

Molinism solves the problem of omniscience and free will, but it does not solve the problem of free will given an omniscient, omnipotent creator.

If you accept God as perfect, you can't logically accept free will.

God is perfect, all knowing, all powerful. Consequently, he would only make the most perfect and complete universe possible, anything else would be less that he is capable of, and imperfect. In the perfect universe God created, there is only one possible outcome for everything, if the universe if perfect, it only works out in one perfect way. With only one possible, perfect set of outcomes, free will cannot happen. Everything that was going to happen, will happen. You could rewind everything to the beginning and it would play out the same perfect way.

All the bad things happening are necessary for the greater good, and ultimately perfection, to occur as well.