Omniscience: A thought experiment

[Anomalocaris]

Yeah, it is a stupidly defined concept. It's a lazy attempt to try and make something sound more impressive without any thought as to how ridiculous it is.

The nearest thing to "omniscience" in my opinion is the universe itself. It "knows" what to do, instantly, all the time, no matter what happens. It's there doing its thing. This is rather metaphorical though.

Just like omnipotence, you can never demonstrate you have this quality to me. I have to take your word for it. Or rather, I have to take someone else's word for it that you exist, and also are omniscient. Erm... no.

It seems to me for the universe to be regarded as omniscient, it is necessary to change the concept of knowing from what might be the conventional "cognitively accurately conceptualize" to "merely containing necessary information and mechanism for processing the information"

Even if criteria for "knowing" is reduced this way,  It is still not clear to me that the universe would be all knowing.    Our understanding of time is not quite up to the task of determining whether the universe does indeed embed in itself all that is required to precisely determine what will happen in it or to it before it happens.

[The Grand Nudger]

.....or even the "knowledge" of what -is- happening..in the present...over vast astronomical distance.  

-Transmission, even internally..has fairly well defined issues. Omniscience as dryly concieved would require not only complete knowledge, complete access, but non localized "processing" or realization..instantaneously. You'd need a "presence" both as large as the universe and simultaneously contained within zero distance between any component parts - or else it may not even know what it knows......hence disqualifying itself as "omniscient".

[robvalue]

I hadn't thought of that aspect before. I guess you could "know" everything but not be able to access that information within any particular timescale.

But then when you're omnipotent as well, I guess you're golden. Probably get a discount on pancakes too.

[JuliaL]

This thread touches on one of my pet issues.
Is God subject to maths?
I don't have the background to understand the proof, but it seems that any sufficiently powerful formal system will have theorems which are true but not provable.   A theist might assert that God doesn't belong to this system.  But they're going to have to show their work.

I think the issues of paradox over omni-whatever Gods (e.g. how does God know She is omniscient.)  She would have to know that there was nothing She didn't know, solve the halting problem and be able to quickly factor large primes.  Just stating She does, doesn't to that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%...s_theorems

[robvalue]

Ouch, nice!

Yes, this comes back to God being governed by logic, and I forgot about the incompleteness theorems. Good point. You'd have to literally say God isn't subject to mathematics or logic for him to be able to prove everything. This brings up the further problems of how exactly do you know this, other than you need it to be true to carry on your other ridiculous claim; and how can we ever investigate or know anything about a being that isn't subject to logic? Being supernatural is barrier enough.

If you used any sort of logic to come to the conclusion that God isn't governed by logic, then surely your argument is invalid?

[Hatshepsut]

I'm about to go through one of two doors, a red and a blue one. ... God knows I was going to go through the red one. Could I have gone through the blue one?

I think your puzzle resembles a formulation of Newcomb's Paradox expressed by Martin Gardner in his July 1973 Scientific American  column. Here, a "predictor" puts $1000 in a clear box, and either $1 million or nothing in an opaque box. Then, you choose either to take both boxes, or to take only the opaque box. If the predictor thought you'll take only the opaque box, then he put $1 million in it. If he thought you'll be greedy enough to take both boxes, he put nothing in the opaque one. So, what do you do? You always get at least $1000 if you take both boxes, and you might get nothing if you choose only the opaque box and the predictor was wrong.

What connects your problem with Newcomb's is that you ask "could I have made the other choice?" while premising that your predictor (God) is correct, while Newcomb asks "could my predictor be wrong?" while premising that he can in fact make the other choice.

The trap here is time-wise. Obviously you cannot go through the blue door if you've already went through the red one. However, before making your choice you presumably can still go through either door. Then the question becomes one of whether God really does know which door you will choose. In other words, pretty much the same as Newcomb's Paradox except without money behind the doors to motivate you.

But let me know if I'm wrong  about all this.  

[robvalue]

Nice

Combining omniscience with omnipotence makes things worse for God. He can create the universe any way he wants, with any rules he wants. He knows exactly how it will all play out forever. So he is actually choosing that entire outcome at the point of creating the universe. If he wanted any outcome at any point to be different, he could simply choose another version which achieved that.

Therefor, he has predetermined absolutely everything about the whole universe, including us. We have no free will. And God is a nob. Why is he doing any of this? It's like making his own reality TV show in which we suffer for his amusement.

Since he predetermined absolutely everything, he is also entirely responsible for everything. That includes all the rapes and terminal diseases given to babies.

This is why these are such stupid claims (omni- claims) and theists would have a much easier time if they dropped them. It's too easy to make a nonsense out of their beliefs this way. I predict most religious theists won't accept my conclusions here, but neither will they be able to refute my logic. Much in the same way a lot of people don't accept 0.9recurring is exactly equal to 1, nor can they refute the various proofs that it is.

Instead they try and put some sort of caveat on the omni claim so as to somehow make God not responsible and to try and shoe horn in free will.

[bennyboy]

Since he predetermined absolutely everything, he is also entirely responsible for everything. That includes all the rapes and terminal diseases given to babies.

That's the thing. Couldn't he give total free will to adults, except give babies magic force fields or something? I mean, why does it have to be all or nothing?

[robvalue]

He certainly could do that, good point. No reason it has to be all or nothing.

[Hatshepsut]

A thought experiment consisting of two scenarios and follow up questions:

Scenario A: In this scenario, we have an apparently omniscient Being. As far as the Being is aware, it knows and understands everything that there is to know and understand. It is also the case, in this scenario, that the being happens to be correct that it knows and understands everything there is to know and understand.

Scenario B: This scenario is identical to the first in, insofar as we have an apparently omniscient Being that appears to know and understand everything there is to know and understand. The only difference is, that in this scenario, the being is wrong.

Question: How could an omniscient Being determine which of the two scenarios it was actually in?

The OP problem and probably nontrivial. The SEP (Stanford Plato) definition for omniscience was that the Being knows every true proposition. If, for each falsehood, there is a corresponding true proposition asserting it is false, then the Being knows the truth value of every proposition as well. However, that leaves out the possibility of propositions that do not have a truth value. Now let Q be the proposition that the Being can  determine whether it is in Scenario A or B, regardless of how it does so. Does Q have a truth value?

I tend to think there are big problems with absolute omniscience or omnipotence. It's a big leap from Apollo knowing a hell of lot and having power to throw lightning bolts to the "omni" stuff. These ideas weren't part of the "original package" of religious belief even for the Christian deity, but introduced much later by thinkers like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. That's despite the "fall of every sparrow" and "number of hairs on your head" bible ditties. Knowing those two and similar things isn't  knowing everything. The good/evil issues like babies that shrivel up are a separate problem, the "problem of evil," related to omnibenevolence, I think.

• (BTW Also unsure if 0.999999... = 1 is ever claimed. I thought it was that the sequence S = {0.9, 0.99, 0.999, ... } has a least upper bound, namely 1. But none of the individual sequence members are equal to 1, they're all less than 1, and the object 0.999999.... may not exist. I dunno, I'm hardly pluripotent much less omni.   )