Reply To: Proliferation?

[Brian H]

Aeronaut wrote:

My excuse right at the mo’ is that it’s very late, but I got thinking about causality, time, predestination, intelligence, and boredom. From God’s viewpoint. Einstein said God doesn’t play dice with the universe, but I wonder. He would have reason to.

Consider. Causality and reality are, per the Believers, created by God. His perfect precognition lets Him know everything that can and could have happened (if He’d set things in motion differently). But there are no surprises. Human volition is a very questionable commodity in that view of things; imagine a pair of retarded humans, barely able to function and learn. One grows up in a loose environment, and his powerful limbic drives are far more than a match for his weak intellect and forebrain-conscience. So he’s pointlessly brutal, and suffers an early demise at the hands of society. The other one grows up in much wealthier and more advanced circumstances; his limitations are recognized early, and he is thoroughly conditioned and restrained by social, physical, medical and technological means from acting harmfully. He lives a reasonably full life and dies without having harmed anyone. With our IQs double or triple theirs, we can see that neither was actually responsible for his behavior and criminality or virtue. They were both essentially wind-up meat dolls.

From the point of view of an omniscient God, who knows everything about every sub-atomic particle in the metaverse, and all their mutual influences and possible fates, we are even less “responsible” for our actions and levels of virtue than those dummies were for us. No human “choice and volition” can introduce interest and variability into existence for such a God. And creating beings who operate under the illusion of free will must have been some kind of joke. Christ’s plea/diagnosis from the cross, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani!” (Lord, Lord, forgive them; they know not what they do!”) is true at all times; we are permanently ignorant, and blameless and without virtue.

But perhaps there is an out. If God can and does/did introduce real randomity and indeterminacy into His stew, at some physical or “mental” level, then the future is not knowable in full detail even for Him. Choices and chance matter. God does, in that scenario, indeed “play dice” with the universe — in order prevent it from being an infinitely boring scripted charade. It means that even for God, Shit Happens. Otherwise, what fun would there be?

So Einstein’s sudden rush of Inspiration was “throwing the dice”? I like that. What we’ll probably never have an answer to is that perfect precognition seems to make it impossible to introduce variables.

Einstein was not talking about his inspiration. He was objecting to the idea of probability waves and indeterminacy. He considered that such ideas and terminology merely meant that we didn’t understand the real causal sequences yet.