Thread 16706880

Interstellar ends with Cooper communicating through a 5D space that transcends time. He sends signals to the past and saves humanity.

If time is just another coordinate to be navigated, like space, doesn't that imply determinism? Or at least retrocausality?

>>16706880 (OP)

>Or at least retrocausality?

You mean because that could produce possible paradox, requiring a rigid "predetermined" model to exclude these ... well, not exactly. The understanding of dimensionality and causality in such a hypothetical effect might be misleading. Seeing it more by flow dynamics would make more sense. There is an inertia to the general flow direction, so paradox cases of causality might just be incapable of overcoming this. How is this not rigid you might ask? It would not assume isolated causalities in such particular cases, rather the totality of causality. Which a (virtually) isolated node of determination could bend to whatevs degree, yet not break entirely. Free will within degrees of freedom.

>>16706880 (OP)
>image name
>interstellar bullshit ending
>question does not reflect image name
I think you took a wrong turn on your way to take a shit.

You're assuming it's not "turtles all the way up".
You're ALSO ASSUMING that everyone approaches spacetime like being forced to roll down an infinite ramp.

Are 5th directional beings subject to 4th directional choices? Are you directional beings ensnared in only the lowest energy paths 6th directional beings create?

Let's simplify.
Imagine all possible realities like channels on a TV set. A 4D being might stroll through a bit of Channel 3 then a bit of channel 4 then a bit of channel 5 all to go from the left front side of the TV screen to the back right side of the screen.

Using the same scenario.
A 6D being might follow the same path, but go from 7 days from now to the day before, and so on using the same physical path until they are 14 days in your past.

You assume time is linear.
Therein, what happens if creatures don't care about that and see the entirety of your existence as a thin membrane to walk through effortlessly.

Another way to think about it is to imagine a village square in full 3D seen from overhead. That represents a single instant moment of your existence. Beings not bound by your conception or time may simple stroll through everything in the scene unnoticed and untouched in that single instant.

You're vaguely grasping the implications of temporal manipulation and observation, but you're ignoring the fact that these being have far more directions of choice than you.

Let's hit another poor analogy. Your life is a comicbook showing 2D slices of your existence as frames. However, this comicbook is mass produced. Higher directional beings can enter your SINGULAR comicbook instance, create all sorts of chaos, but the mass produced copies? Completely untouched by that singular higher directional being as they exist as individual copies of a singular thing. Is it sinking in yet?

>>16706910
Sounds poetic, but you're just wrapping determinism in metaphor. ‘Degrees of freedom’ is still just determinism with wiggle room. If you can't truly alter the course of the flow—only wobble within it—how is that any more 'free' than a rock tumbling down a hill with style?

>>16707004
You're stacking metaphors without grounding them in coherent models. Invoking higher-dimensional 'directions of choice' doesn’t explain how or why causality remains meaningful across copies or instances. If these beings can interfere with one 'mass-produced' timeline, why not all? If not, then you’re just describing narrative branching, not freedom or agency. It’s metaphysical fanfiction unless you define the mechanics behind it.

>>16707059

>but you're just wrapping determinism in metaphor.

Correct. ^_^

>If you can't truly alter the course of the flow—only wobble within it—how is that any more 'free' than a rock tumbling down a hill with style?

Ah, we have touched an interesting philosophical point here. The definition of "free will" sure is far from complete unpredictability or sheer randomness (although circumstantially they can be employed as part of free will, no doubt). It is all about degrees of freedom after all. Once you have decided to tumble downhill it is all about style. You could equally decide to abstain from tumbling down the hill. Degrees of freedom ...

>>16706880 (OP)
>does that make free will meaningless
what free will?
it's already meaningless by lacking a coherent definition

>>16707124
But if the hill, the rock, and even the illusion of 'choice' to tumble or not are already embedded in the terrain of the timeline, then isn't 'deciding' just another deterministic contour? Degrees of freedom don’t matter if the whole system is constrained from the start. Free will becomes a post-hoc narration of inevitability—just the rock flattering itself on the way down.

>>16707129
Lack of a coherent definition doesn’t mean lack of existence. Consciousness itself resists formal definition, but we still wake up every day acting as if we choose. Dismissing free will because it's hard to box in is like saying motion doesn’t exist because Zeno wrote a paradox.

>>16707138

There is certainly points (or sequences) of unavoidability in this topology, no doubt. You will not reconsider your decision to jump off a tall building mid flight with any chance of changing the chain of events set in motion by your initial choice. Yet it was choice that set everything in motion in this example. The choice of making the decision to jump or not to is sure probabilistic to this or that degree, but not deterministic in the way that it could be predicted accurately. Now even if said "choice" is simply the consequence of a very intricate set of feedback loops ultimately running on a relatively chaotic system influenced by effects like Brownian motion and perhaps even distant gravitiy waves or quantum collapse (the latter two likely too miniscule to matter but not to be discounted by principle!!) ... well, it sure is messy but plenty free will for my tastes. Perhaps I simply fail to see the point here or perhaps other thinkers wrangling this topic have been too caught up in the clockwork model of the universe (was it smart to replace that with computers and simulation theory?) ... but if what it would take to deterministically predict all my life´s actions were some deranged outside the universe observing clockmaker ... know what, let that hypothetical observer go all "I KNEW HE´D DO THAT!!!". Fucks given is approaching zero for me, asymptotically. :)

>>16707175
You're touching a crucial point. namely, that complexity and chaos don't eliminate determinism, they obscure it. The distinction isn't between "free" and "determined," but between computationally predictable and epistemically inaccessible.
Even if your choice to jump arises from chaotic feedback loops, all those loops are still governed by underlying physical laws. however noisy or entangled. That doesn’t mean you're free, just that you're not predictably constrained from a local frame.
Think of it like a Lorenz attractor: sensitive dependence doesn’t abolish determinism, it only makes initial conditions practically unknowable.
As for the hypothetical "I KNEW HE'D DO THAT" observer. whether it’s Laplace’s Demon, a 5D entity, or an oracle beyond the simulation. what matters isn't whether they could predict you, but whether you could ever verify their prediction before the action.
Freedom, then, may not be ontological. but epistemological. And maybe that's enough.

>>16707197

>That doesn’t mean you're free, just that you're not predictably constrained from a local frame.

Jup. And for all practical purposes that should suffice. And perhaps for "free will" that is even the best imaginable scenario. At the very list it would be consistent ... just imagine all your decisions were entirely based on dice rolls (meaning perfectly non-deterministic random effects). Must have psychological reasons that some appear to desperately try and find mechanisms for the latter ... do they not trust their own "free will" deep down? Doubts perhaps that their own very self contained deterministic complexity might not be that self contained after all, hm? A careful observer would rather try to understand its own complexity. The good old know thyself, huh. My constraints my own or something. Subjectively not entirely unknowable. Might just leave me as my own best predictor. :)

>but whether you could ever verify their prediction before the action

Have we arrived at the old "no observation without interaction" point, right?

>>16706910
You're saying that the state of the universe will correct/equalise itself via entropy when a phenomenon from the present/future affects the past?

>>16706880 (OP)
>free will
the closest thing to free will you'll ever find you can find in the nuthouse
and even there you will not find truly free will
Why would one thing have any meaning in the context of another thing that is non-existent and illusory?

>>16707486

Kinda, yes. Do not interpret it too strongly. Call it fuzzy providence. Some actions ought to occur. Either by necessity or retrocausaility ... frankly, you could not tell the difference in that peculiar case. How does this factor free will again? Well, you either fith the inertia or not ... if so, you become it. Steering We are in a downhill regimen now ... :)

>>16706880 (OP)
Its determinism if you can only traverse predetermined timelines, but if a 5d entity can emanate time similarly to how matter can emanate photons, then they could have free will in the sense that they create the timeline that they perceive at will.

>>16707228
Yeah, and honestly, if your "free will" came down to pure randomness, like actual quantum dice rolls, that wouldn't feel like freedom either. It’d just be chaos wearing a mask. People chase that idea because they want some magical escape hatch from determinism, like "if it's random, then I chose it." But randomness ≠ agency.
Thing is, your brain's probably just a crazy complex system, so complex that you can’t predict yourself. But that doesn’t make it fake. It just means “know thyself” is literally a computationally hard problem. You're basically your own best prediction model. Feels like freedom from the inside, and that might be the most legit version of free will we can get.
Also yeah, once you bring prediction into the system, you're interacting with it, no clean outside observer. It’s the measurement problem all over again.

>>16707526
Because meaning is a relational construct, not an absolute one. Even if "free will" is illusory, the illusion itself can have internal structure, consequences, and subjective weight. A dream isn’t "real" in the strict sense, but within the dream, falling feels like falling.
You're chasing an ontological purity that doesn't exist outside idealized logic. Conscious experience is the sandbox, and within it, even illusions have gravity. So no, the nuthouse doesn’t get you closer to free will, it just strips away layers of coherence. But coherence isn't a prison, it’s the frame that makes agency possible at all.

>>16708983
But if I agree with your thusly introduced idea of the freedom of will the discussion has broken out of the bounds set by the original questions>>16706880 (OP) context.
Determinism it is.

>>16706880 (OP)
Meds

>>16706880 (OP)
>If time is just another coordinate
coordinate systems are a lot of what is wrong and limiting about physics
basically anything geometric is a nice shortcut but can't encapsulate the nature of all the interactions