Everyone knows when they will die

We have a theory and strong evidence for it, but no absolute proof, especially not in such an obvious, intuitive way. Free will might be an illusion, but it's a necessary one for life to function, and the complete impossibility of it in the setting would be absolutely destructive.

Read the Hitch Hikers' Guide to the Universe

How would that work though?

Like if EVERYONE knows that, even the very rich and very powerful, what happens when people take precautions against it?

So the owner of the Tyrell-Cyberdine Industries Zaibatsu, a quanti-trillionaire, learns he is going to die in two weeks and six hours. Being that he enough money to throw at literally any problem outside of a global pandemic he decides he isn't going to die.

He gets a thorough physical, has a team of doctors on retainer, hires guards that have had thorough psychological evaluation posted on the outside of a panic room, has redundant oxygen supplies, flame suppression, literally hedges his bets against EVERYTHING. Given the extremes the wealthy go to preserving their own lives from "mundane" worries about death this isn't at all unreasonable.

What happens?

Does he just have an immediately fatal stroke or suddenly die of an undetectable heart disease? Does the building around him improbably collapse or some other Final Destination "no you ARE going to die" plot twist?

Assuming most people have no interest in dying there would have to be many, many improbable causes of death that center on suddenly dying at home. If EVERYONE who was going to die in a car accident, falling off a cliff, being killed at work, etc decided to stay home on "their" day then they would have to die somehow.

*Galaxy.

What evidence is there that free will does not exist? All anyone has ever pointed me to is a study where scientists do something like predict what surface level decision a person is going to make, like what eye they're going to blink.

What happens if someone does something suicidal before it's their time to die?

Are people immortal until their day comes? Or would fate just keep interfering with every attempt to end their life?

It's more a metaphysical thing than specific studies. Science as we understand it is mostly deterministic, there are quantum level uncertainties but it's hard to argue that they create enough unpredictability that could make macro-scale things unpredictable, and if everything can be perfectly predicted if you know the initial state of all things, then free will can't exist.

Of course, it might also just be that our understanding of physics is fundamentally flawed. We've come along way, but whenever we start to believe we actually understand how things work it turns out we're completely wrong.

Either way, it's irrelevant. Human existence is basically impossible without believing in free will, so regardless of the reality maintaining the illusion is a necessity. Along with the whole idea of consciousness and having a sense of self.

>what happens when people take precautions against it?
RATHER DARK HERE, ISN'T IT?

>work in hospital
>guy has 3 days left
>let's not waste time on him
>hell, let's not waste time on anyone, they'll survive it on their own
Wars would be pointless in the same fashion.

>What evidence is there that free will does not exist?
What evidence is there that free will DOES exist? People instinctively believe that they have free will, but that's not really evidence, is it? Around us we see everything acting in a deterministic manner apart from quantum phenomena(though admittedly that's because if something isn't acting as expected, we assume that it's because there's something we don't know, not because it isn't acting deterministically). So what makes humans special? We're made of atoms just like everything else. Absence of evidence isn't necessarily evidence of absence, but Occam's Razor suggests that in the absence of some experiment that would demonstrate its existence one way or another, we should pick the simpler of the two hypotheses: There's just no real reason to think that free will exists apart from that instinctual response.

But that's ignoring the philosophical and psychological side. It's necessary to believe free will exists for human existence to make sense.

Is it necessary for human existence to make sense? Nihilism IS a thing, and it doesn't necessarily imply being depressed or suicidal. Certainly some people would be unable to function in an environment where free will is an impossibility and certainly the sudden revelation would cause problems, but if everyone just knew it, I'm not at all certain that the society wouldn't be able to cope.

How? Everything you do becomes meaningless. If you can have no belief that you're having an impact on the world, that you're not making any decisions, then why try to do anything at all? Why live? Why not commit horrible crimes, or why bother to help someone in trouble? It's all predetermined anyway, nothing you do has any value or meaning in terms of your choices, it's just executing a default program. It fundamentally destroys the illusion of self, and we just aren't built as a species to function with that.

There's also no real reason to think that it doesn't exist. Occam's Razor has always struck me as a stupid copout. Something being simpler doesn't make it right, and it's fallacious to just go with it. Also, what do we see acting in a deterministic manner? Wouldn't that require us to know what will happen? Is it deterministic or is it just something that operates in a pattern? Humans don't operate in a pattern, they do whatever the fuck they want and there's no reliable way to predict it.

Show me the source for this deterministic stuff.

>Everything you do becomes meaningless.
If everything is meaningless then it doesn't matter that everything is meaningless, so you might as well carry on as you always have.

Knowing nothing you do matters? Knowing no action you take is your own, that everything you could ever do is pre-scripted and all the beliefs you had about yourself were lies? That you are not the source of any of your achievements, that your virtues are lies, that literally everything you base your sense of self on is an arbitrary factor completely outside of your control?

The only way to function in that context is to reassert the lie of free will. Otherwise you might as well just lie down and die.

>Also, what do we see acting in a deterministic manner?
EVERYTHING.

>Wouldn't that require us to know what will happen?
If you throw a coin in the air, it's entirely possible to calculate which side it's going to land on. It would merely require LUDICROUS amounts of computing power and accurate data.

>Humans don't operate in a pattern, they do whatever the fuck they want and there's no reliable way to predict it.
That's merely because we have neither accurate models of human brains, nor computing power to simulate it on. And even then I think you'll find that if you know someone really well, you can predict how they'll act more than nine times out of ten. There's no reason to believe our brains aren't deterministic.

>Knowing nothing you do matters? Knowing no action you take is your own, that everything you could ever do is pre-scripted and all the beliefs you had about yourself were lies? That you are not the source of any of your achievements, that your virtues are lies, that literally everything you base your sense of self on is an arbitrary factor completely outside of your control?
All irrelevant.

>Otherwise you might as well just lie down and die.
Without free will you don't get to choose whether you do that or not.

How is any of that irrelevant? How would you interact with a world knowing you had no choices and no impact on things? That kindness and love were illusions, that cruelty and pain were inevitable and unavoidable, that literally nothing you could ever do would have a meaningful impact, because it had all been preordained?

And, yes, choosing to kill yourself would also be predetermined. But at least at that point you would no longer have to suffer the torment of knowing that you were effectively a prisoner, built to believe that you could have hopes and dreams and aspirations, actually doomed to robotic autonomy by the unseen hand of determinism.

>EVERYTHING.
Oh, thanks. That clears it up.

Just point me to your source.

>How is any of that irrelevant? How would you interact with a world knowing you had no choices and no impact on things? That kindness and love were illusions, that cruelty and pain were inevitable and unavoidable, that literally nothing you could ever do would have a meaningful impact, because it had all been preordained?
How is that different from what you do every day? The only difference is certainty. Flowers would smell no less sweet, the embrace of lover would be no less calming. And there is relief, too. It's not your fault. If you err, it is because that was meant to be. If there is pain, that too happens for a reason. Just because you're a member of the audience and not an actor is no reason to storm out of the theatre.

>Just point me to your source.
Physics 101.

But that just replaces the illusion of free will with wilful ignorance of determinism, which is what I said in the first place.

Love does not exist. Your lover is just another automaton, and their touch was going to happen from the moment the universe was born. It means nothing, and any relief you feel from it is just as much of an illusion as your sense of self.

In context, certainty is everything. Not being certain allows you to maintain the illusion that lets you enjoy life and believe in it. Having no hope of the illusion ever returning would be absolutely destructive.

>In context, certainty is everything. Not being certain allows you to maintain the illusion that lets you enjoy life and believe in it. Having no hope of the illusion ever returning would be absolutely destructive.
Not having the illusion doesn't stop you from enjoying life, user. It just requires a slightly different perspective which you seem unable to grasp.

It's a perspective I'm not sure any human would be able to grasp.

It's not like being a member of the audience in a theater, it's like being a prisoner trapped in a room with only a screen, watching a life play out in front of you over which you have no control. How do you get any investment in that? How do you bring yourself to care or believe at all? Nothing you do matters, success or failure is irrelevant to your efforts or intentions, and any choices that seem to exist are just more lies. Actually being confronted with that reality and not retreating into some new manner of delusion would just drive you mad.

For some reason, I remembered that youtuber from "The Newest Testament" who was unsuccessfully suiciding on camera throughout the film.

>avoids providing a source
Ok, this was fun.

>It's not like being a member of the audience in a theater, it's like being a prisoner trapped in a room with only a screen, watching a life play out in front of you over which you have no control. How do you get any investment in that? How do you bring yourself to care or believe at all? Nothing you do matters, success or failure is irrelevant to your efforts or intentions, and any choices that seem to exist are just more lies. Actually being confronted with that reality and not retreating into some new manner of delusion would just drive you mad.
That's like saying that believing in free will would drive everyone mad. If you fail, that's YOUR fault. If someone hurts you, that's because they CHOSE to do that. They willfully hurt someone just like them. And so on. You've merely conditioned yourself to accept that.

The Newest Testament is exactly what OP needs to watch. It's not a great film, probably not even a good film, but its whole concept is "people now know when they are going to die".

I mean, yes. But we're conditioned by dint of being human. We believe we have control of our actions, and that when we do something we are responsible for how it plays out. That's not 'conditioning'. That's fundamentally part of the structure of our minds and how we interact with the world. Breaking that structure, denying those aspects, would shatter any current way of thinking of and interacting with the world.

And, hell, even the thoughts in your head are deterministic. Every emotion, every reaction, every consideration and introspective moment are all predetermined. You aren't even aware or thinking, you're just the illusion of thought existing in a shell, tormented by the lie you were literally built to believe. I don't see how any functional human existence could continue after that point.

Sorry. Old info. Latest hot possibility is that everything isn't fully deterministic.
physics.aps.org/articles/v11/6

So you're not familiar with Newtonian physics? Did you not graduate high school?

>But we're conditioned by dint of being human.
Not true at all. We're conditioned by the dint of growing up in an environment where most people take it for granted that free will exists.

By the way, there are lots of people who actually believe that everything is predetermined by God. Calvinists, for example.

Evolution is literally based on the notion of free will. It is fundamental to the existence of life. That through random mutation we evolve to be more appropriate to our environment, as well as social evolution, that learning behaviours and spreading them through a species will aid with that species survival.

If determinism is true, evolution is a lie, and the evolved structures we developed which are based on the idea that choices matter will leave us utterly crippled as a species.

You do realize that this would cause a chain reaction that would end up in everyone wanting to go out killing/raping/etc on the last day?

Basically, humanity is doomed to end the very day the first human dies.

The fuck are you smoking? None of your post makes any sense.

Evolution doesn't have anything to do with free will. Free will is not at all fundamental to the existence of free will, and the theory of evolution does not require free will in any way or form. In fact, if anything, free will would be a negative trait, because someone with free will might just choose to take deliberately suboptimal actions.

>the existence of free will
*the existence of life

We attain heaven.

>it's like being a prisoner trapped in a room with only a screen
It isn't exactly, though, is it? You still do, think, and feel the same things you always would; all that changes is your awareness of the world. Which might affect the first three, of course, but it's more like realizing that you're an actor in a play where you don't know the script, but a long-dead wizard enchanted you to ensure that you follow it all the same.

I can see how that would mess with someone, but not everyone seems terrified by the idea.

Of course, it would be a different matter entirely if you knew part of the script. Which is what this thread is about.

Read my post again.

Evolution is based on the idea that mutations that create beneficial traits are more successful in the environment they find themselves in, and thus a species adapts over time. If everything is deterministic, then that no longer makes any sense. There is no process of evolution or logic of success and survival, just a predetermined succession of events.

However, we evolved from creatures formed by this process, and have the innate belief that our actions have consequences, and that our choices matter. That if we are presented with two options, choosing the one that is better for us is a good thing as it increases our chances for survival and procreation. It gets more complex than that for human beings, but it boils down to very basic survival instincts that are innate to all forms of intelligent life.

If reality is deterministic, those instincts are a lie, and everything that is based on them is a lie.

But knowing you had no impact, no relevance to anything, that your thoughts were effectively just a byproduct of ongoing processes over which you had no influence wouldn't drive you mad? I can't see it doing anything else.

Some good some bad.
Would lead to humanity with a sort of contentment or none at all. So we either end up as super zen or hyper manics.

>Evolution is based on the idea that mutations that create beneficial traits are more successful in the environment they find themselves in, and thus a species adapts over time. If everything is deterministic, then that no longer makes any sense. There is no process of evolution or logic of success and survival, just a predetermined succession of events.
Saying that makes just as much sense as saying that Newton's law makes no sense if everything is predetermined, because that stone was going to move whether you hit it with the other stone or not. In other words, not at all. The PROCESSES still exist, even if their COURSE is deterministic.

But the underlying function of the process itself is a lie, as is our understanding based on it. There is no success or failure, there is no random mutation, it's all determined and preordained.

Again, it's about survival instincts. We evolved believing our choices mattered. If you weren't careful, you'd get eaten by a tiger. At that very fundamental level, belief in choice is fundamental to intelligent life and has acted as a foundation for everything about us since that point. Without it, in a world where we have no choice, and whether the tiger eats us or not is already set in stone, the way we evolved to understand and interact with the world no longer makes sense.

>But the underlying function of the process itself is a lie, as is our understanding based on it. There is no success or failure, there is no random mutation, it's all determined and preordained.
Success and failure both exists even if you can determine whether something will succeed or fail in advance.

>Again, it's about survival instincts. We evolved believing our choices mattered. If you weren't careful, you'd get eaten by a tiger. At that very fundamental level, belief in choice is fundamental to intelligent life and has acted as a foundation for everything about us since that point. Without it, in a world where we have no choice, and whether the tiger eats us or not is already set in stone, the way we evolved to understand and interact with the world no longer makes sense.
Whether or not you have choice in the matter, you'll still behave in a manner that minimizes the chances of a tiger bite, because getting bitten by a tiger hurts. Is it free will or instinct? Doesn't matter, the end result is the same.

But it does matter because we are constant, self-aware beings. We are built to believe our choices matter and that what we do has an impact on events in the world. The idea that choice does not exist, and that anything we do is predetermined, fundamentally violates the basis for our understanding of the universe. You are not a being which exists, you are a byproduct of an automaton, a cruel cosmic joke tricked into believing you exist and have an impact when in fact you're just a curious, irrelevant property of a complex system that is running on automatic regardless of anything you can ever do. It's existially horrifying.

>The idea that choice does not exist, and that anything we do is predetermined, fundamentally violates the basis for our understanding of the universe.
It really doesn't. In fact, based on the current(scientific) understanding of the universe, free will, if it exists, is an anomaly.

>It's existially horrifying.
As I said before, free will is equally horrifying. You're just numbed to one and not the other by the virtue of your upbringing.

If everything is meaningless then you have the freedom to choose what has meaning to you and make it meaningful.

It's not upbringing. It's inherent to the idea of intelligent life. We are built upon the assumption of free will, it is necessary for our intrinsic understanding of the universe to make sense. I'm not talking about anything external at this point, I'm purely talking about how we function as human beings by our own understanding. And if free will doesn't exist, we don't function in the way we thought. We don't function at all.

But that's just it. In a deterministic universe, we don't even have that. Your thoughts are also predetermined, so anything you would attempt to find value in is yet another predetermined byproduct of events which are going on without any input from what we believe to be our conscious minds. Consciousness itself is a lie, because it's predicated on the idea that we can think and rationalise and consider, when really it's just text playing across a screen that we just happen to be aware of through some strange quirk of complex systems.

>It's inherent to the idea of intelligent life.
You keep saying that, and it's just NOT TRUE. Simple as that.

If your thoughts are predetermined than the whole conversation is pointless, it isn't terrifying it just simply is because it is destined to be and there's is nothing that can change it. To quote you "we don't function at all" then it doesn't matter, you won't realize the difference and will only notice the glitch then continue thinking and feeling exactly as the program tells you. So being aware or unaware that you don't have free will doesn't matter.

But it does, for the reasons I mentioned above.

Intelligent life is predicated on the idea of choice mattering. It is fundamental to how we function both as individuals and as a species. Without choice, we have to fundamentally change our understanding of ourselves, and the new model we arrive at is not at all pleasant to think about.

And I've already refuted those reasons. All you're really doing is trying to appeal to my emotions, because you're somehow unable to comprehend that there exists people whose worldview doesn't match yours.

But that's almost my point. Even if we are deterministic being in a scenario like the one the OP suggests, where free will absolutely cannot exist, breaks the program, because it relies upon the illusion of free will. In normal reality, even if we did find something in physics that disproved free will, most people would ignore it, rationalise around it or find an alternate way of explaining it, and things would function as normal.

If you were constantly aware your life had a preset end date, and that everything you do up until that point was locked in, you would be incapable of not being aware that you are determined, and given that you are being constantly reminded of it it would be the only thing you could think about, making life as we know it impossible.

That is entirely your opinion while there are groups in the world who genuinely believe everything is predetermined. Are they no longer intelligent life simply because you say so? What if they are the only intelligent life because they have noticed the system and therefore are at peace with the good and the bad in life?

It's not about believing free will doesn't exist. It's about, as per the OP, being in a scenario where it is impossible to not be aware that free will does not exist. Those two are very different situations.

I'm talking in terms of evolutionary biology and psychology. My worldview is irrelevant. We are built, as creatures, to absorb information from our environment, evaluate it and make a decision based on it. Intelligence grants us the ability to be aware of this process, think about it and, at least by our perception, change our minds about it.

Without the possibility of free will, that fundamental aspect of conscious existence completely breaks down.

If it would break the program then it would have failsafes in place to either ensure it was never answered or it was a test and it doesn't matter because it was predetermined with the outcome already known. Also ops question only addresses when you die, never that it is predetermined what happens leading up to that just that something will happen that kills you.

See your assumption is that because someone knows the date they will die everything leading up to it is also predetermined. Nothing says such, it merely means there is some final destination shit that happens.

But if what point you die is set in stone, then you live in a deterministic universe.

Well, or a universe ruled by an arbitrary divinity who ensures you die when they decree, regardless of context. Of the two, the free will one is actually scarier to me, but I imagine that'd vary from person to person.

i'd also argue that our actions and our will is still free, and still our own, even if the universe is entirely deterministic.

>Without the possibility of free will, that fundamental aspect of conscious existence completely breaks down.
No it doesn't. Lack of free will merely means that it is possible to calculate in advance what choice you make. The entire process remains the same even if it's deterministic.

I have heard some arguments to that effect, but none have seemed particularly compelling to me. What are your preferred ones?

But our understanding of it as entities is what changes. Again, this is all in the context of a world where you cannot simply lapse back into the delusion of free will, where there is some omnipresent reminder that everything is predetermined. This breaks the system, because it is a constant outside stimulus that defies the decision making structure of our brains, because we cannot make decisions, we can only follow predetermined paths.

So there is absolutely no way that while all your paths lead to the same end there are no different paths that lead there? You still have the free will to determine what paths you take, who you become in that time, it simply changes who is the man that shows up at the end. You can have a predetermined end and still retain some free will.

Simply because one aspect is determined does not mean it is an all or nothing scenario, that is simply what you choose to believe and panic over.

It doesn't break any system because that is exactly how the system is supposed to function. If everything is predetermined then you being aware of it is such and everything along with it, therefore the system is working perfectly.

But that just leads to the alternate conclusion. Existentially horrifying in an entirely different way.

>it is a constant outside stimulus that defies the decision making structure of our brains, because we cannot make decisions, we can only follow predetermined paths.
And that doesn't really change anything. It's only if it were a sudden revelation that some people wouldn't be able to handle it.

But we aren't aware of it. That's the point. Philosophically determinism is much like solipsism, a dead end that doesn't really function as part of practical life. In a world where you were constantly aware of it, life as we know it would not function. There might be an alternate model by which it could function, but if current humanity suddenly had an absolute constant understanding that we have no free will, everything would fall apart.

>In a world where you were constantly aware of it, life as we know it would not function.
Yes it would.

Again, the fundamental structures of our brain, and our fundamental understanding of the self, is based around the idea of making decisions. Without that, so much of what we know no longer functions, so much of what we believe is impossible, that I find it hard to understand how anyone could not fall apart.

>Again, the fundamental structures of our brain, and our fundamental understanding of the self, is based around the idea of making decisions.
Citation fucking needed because they really aren't.

The principle of free will is the principle of alternate options.
In order to be able to say you have free will you must be able to say for every action that you "could have done something else".
However, that statement has an implicit "if" in it, otherwise it would be a nonsense sentence.

Most people would probably agree that the "if" there is "if you had wanted to do something else". Because it's the fact that you acted upon your own desires that makes the action truly yours.
This does not contradict with a deterministic universe, as the hypothetical universe where you had wanted something else has a different current state and a similarly determined future. Just a different one.

Put in an other way, although your actions are the inevitable result of some previous state of the universe that does not mean they do not come from your mind, because your mind is the result of that state too. You are the combination of your nature and your nurture combined, if you weren't and your behaviour was somehow random and based on nothing you would be less free. A slave to a random number generator.

So your understanding of yourself would survive just fine in a world where you had no free will?

But it would be a lie. Your achievements are nothing to do with you, they're things that were always going to happen, and you had no meaningful part in achieving them. Your emotions and relationships are lies, your preferences and dislikes are lies, everything about who you are as a person is a falsehood and a delusion. And you will never be able to forget or distance yourself from that fact, ever. How would you still function as you do now?

How?

Not at all, that simply means at your birth your own subconscious can or will somehow steer you to this because it is what you are told is absolute truth. It could also mean that we are in some kind of Matrix style world and only at the end is your doom calculated based on yup actions. There are several different possibilities, you are just panicking or too narrow focused on the ones you dread.

That's actually interesting, I hadn't heard that one before. Thanks.

>How?
The exact same as it would now, except you would be bitching about the impossibility of life functioning with free will.

Illusion of free will is functionally equivalent of actual free will.

Those seem to fall into the amoral deity model though, just different versions of it. None of them are particularly pleasant, all of them are in some way horrifying.

How? Can you explain how that would function, can you actually articulate it? Because it seems entirely nonsensical to me.

Which wouldn't matter because it was all predetermined and there for the system is still functioning exactly as it wanted. It wouldn't fall apart, because that's exactly the way it was planned so it is still working as intended.

That's kind of my point. I'm talking about a world where the illusion of free will could not exist, and how destructive that would be to intelligent life as we know it.

>So your understanding of yourself would survive just fine in a world where you had no free will?
Since you have no citation, I can confidently say that it would.

>But it would be a lie. Your achievements are nothing to do with you, they're things that were always going to happen, and you had no meaningful part in achieving them. Your emotions and relationships are lies, your preferences and dislikes are lies, everything about who you are as a person is a falsehood and a delusion. And you will never be able to forget or distance yourself from that fact, ever. How would you still function as you do now?
Because I would still be myself. I can still take pride in a job well done even if it was an inevitability. I can still enjoy eating too much chocolate, even more so knowing that it's not my fault. It really doesn't change anything.

By 'Everything', in context I mean 'Humans and human society'.

How? You didn't do a job well, a job happened to be well done and you were aware of it as a byproduct of it. Any pride you feel in it is just an expression of wilful ignorance. The same for the rest. It's just indulging in another kind of delusion.

It's sort of contradictory though.
If you're told what you're going to do your first instinct would be to do the opposite. Unless humans receive a downgrade in sychological complexity predicting the future would change it.

>How? You didn't do a job well, a job happened to be well done and you were aware of it as a byproduct of it.
See, that's just nonsense. Even without free will I still did the job, and I can take pride of it if I don't choose to.

Being aware that the universe is deterministic doesn't necessarily mean you'll know everything was determined. I'm talking about the kind of outside presence in the OP, asserting the awareness on the consciousness.

Which, amusingly, could theoretically lead to a universe where people actually did have free will, and were just fooled into thinking they didn't by that sort of oppressive intrusive thought.

But there is no amoral deity involved, they are not gods but simply beings that over power you in some way. In the subconscious one it is scientists and ourselves that have doomed us to such because they have convinced themselves and us they are correct thus creating the circumstances. Those are not deities, simply man believing they are infallible and have the correct answer with nothing popping up to disprove it.

But 'You' are irrelevant. Your thoughts are a byproduct with no actual relationship to the job getting done, and acting as though you deserve to have pride in it is, again, just indulging in delusion. You're only proving my point that without free will things just don't work. You're having to logic your way around it in bizarre ways just to try and argue the point.