(April 19, 2015 at 1:23 am)robvalue Wrote: Hmm, very good efforts to try and get round the paradoxYou're defending God better than theists do!
My question would be: if all these possibilities exist, with "me" doing every possible action, what makes any particular branch more meaningful than any other? Surely that is arbitrary? I'm every single one of them.
If instead "I" am described by just one branch, and all the others are not really me, then does God know which branch will be the real "me" before it happens?
This whole thing lead me to an interesting thought. Theists often say God is "timeless" without giving any thought to what that actually means. So I'll do their work for them. God isn't timeless, but he is independent of our time. He has his own time. Let's say he looks at our universe.
What will he see? Since we have removed our time from the proceedings, what he sees cannot change. So if he sees all possible branches, then none of them will ever be "chosen". If he sees which one does get chosen, then all the possibilities have collapsed just by him looking at the universe. The others are now irrelevant, they cannot be chosen.
This seems to me like a startling analogy to quantum mechanics, where a whole host of possibilities collapse down into a single form when they are observed. When we view the quantum level, are we viewing a time-independent version of another universe, like God is with ours?
One might argue a separate instance of you exists along each possible time trajectory. Each "you" is real and distinct from each other "you". Omniscience would need to know each and every "you".
The subtler point is just because a separate and distinct "you" exist to cover every possibility, that doesn't automatically mean that omniscience can be statistical and Would not need to specifically knowing any individual you and what what trajectory it has taken.
