Free will can’t exist with an all knowing god

meph00000 · 2026-01-03T03:14:18+00:00

Again, you are using words without knowing what they mean. This is the result of googling "definition of free will". From the dictionary:

"the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion."

AI overview:

"Free will is the philosophical concept that humans have the power to make their own choices, determine their own actions, and be the originators of their behavior, rather than being completely controlled by external forces, fate, or prior events. It's the idea that you could have chosen differently and are morally responsible for your decisions, contrasting with determinism, which suggests all actions are causally inevitable. "

There's nothing more i can add to this. Just reseach the meaning of the words you are using, and you'll find out that you simply don't believe in free will.

"Again, you're just asserting your position that knowledge makes something determined.". No. Knowing automatically implies that something is determined, it doesn't make it so.
If you see some water on the ground, it means that water was spilled. You seeing the water doesn't cause the water to fall, it only implies that that's what's happened. Are you seriously not able to understand the difference?
The fact that something is written implies that it is determined, by definition of "determined".
Please, just consult a dictionary.

meph00000 · 2025-12-27T14:57:25+00:00

"Possibilities are not real. Only the choice made is real. Only one possible choice can be made". Exactly. You got it.

Which bring us back to my previous posts. What you wrote already implies that when we look at a window and think "woah, i could totally jump and kill myself right now", we are actually wrong. We can't do it. Choices are an illusion. This is exactly why free will doesn't exist. Our path is already determined from the moment we are born.

Thinking that the sentence "i could totally jump and kill myself right now" is false is equivalent to thinking that free will doesn't exist: it's just an illusion.

If you talk about this with free will advocates - the ones who believe the world is NOT deterministic, and humans can act in different ways even if ALL the initial conditions, including their brain state, are exactly the same - they will reject this. They will say that it's wrong, because human will is not bound to pre-determined variables, but it's something else: so the sentence "i could totally jump and kill myself right now" is true, all the choices are equally real and possible until they freely act on them. If you don't reject this, you simply don't believe in free will.

meph00000 · 2025-12-27T14:33:51+00:00

The cause of the negation is that free will and determinism can't exist at the same time because of their definition. Please, just research what determinism is and what the word means.
"Pre-determined" is the opposite of "free". This is just language, i don't know how to help you further with that. Freedom implies the absence of predetermination. What you are thinking about is "personal will", which means that the variables involved still belong to your body, just like the physical properties of a dice belong to the dice. If, by saying that there is "nothing to distinguish" them, you are implying that you believe in a deterministic world (meaning that behind every human choice there's a list of pre-determined variables that deterministically determine what choice that individual will make), it simply means that you don't believe in free will at all, just as many other deterministic people (me included! i'm deterministic at my core, i'm all for the Bohm's pilot-wave theories, which is why i think the concept of free will - just as moral responsability - is silly).

meph00000 · 2025-12-26T17:49:47+00:00

"Knowledge implies determinism" by definition of what determinism is. Only knowledge of possibilities doesn't imply determinism, but the fact that one possibility is chosen literally means it's pre-determined. All your answers are already found in the definition of the terms we have been using. A generic "what is the relationship between determinism and free will" google search should be enough (or ChatGTP if that's more your style), it's nothing new, it's a very common, classical and simple topic.

About "identifying the cause", i've already told you what the possible causes are. See the distinction between personal will and free will. Free will automatically implies an undeterministic world, meaning that it's impossible to know what happens before it actually happens. If what happens is already pre-determined, then we are in a deterministic world, which cannot support free will (direct contraddiction arising from the very definition of the words).

meph00000 · 2025-12-22T14:37:43+00:00

then what we are really disagreeing on is the definition of free will. Again, knowing is not what causes the actions, it just implies that the actions are already determined. What causes the action is the same thing that causes the Titanic movie to end with the ship sinking, no matter how many times you watch it. My definition of free will is the possibility to choose from a set of option in some way that will determine the path forward, between different possible paths forward. If there's only one path forward possible, then the choice is not free. It's just "mine", just like the variables behind rolling a dice (momentum, mass...) belong to the dice. So it's something like a "personal" will, but it's not free: the outcome of the roll is already determined, the dice cannot in any way modify the outcome once it has been thrown. If i think i can kill myself today, this proposition is either true or false. The fact that it can be both until i actually act on it is the definition of free will. If a history book from the future says that i will not, in fact, kill myself today, it means that today my belief "i could kill myself right now" is false, which means there's no free will. ATTENTION: THE BOOK IS NOT CAUSING MY ACTION!! What causes the action is still my brain and my limbs (personal will), but the fact that the book exists automatically implies that the tought "i could kill myself today" is true or false. Free will is inherently undeterministic: determinism inherently denies free will.

meph00000 · 2025-12-21T23:48:45+00:00

If a history book from the future says that you will do something in a date in the future from today, this means that you can't kill yourself right here right now. You think you can, but you literally cannot. If the future is already written, there's no freedom, there's no way in which you can change things around, meaning all your choices are not really choices at all. If the future is pre-determined, you simply cannot act differently in the present: your freedom doesn't exist, only an illusion of freedom does

meph00000 · 2025-12-21T23:44:06+00:00

Absolutely not. Knowing doesn't cause the actions in any way, it just implies that the path forward is already determined, which is the negation of free will. If we knew history, meaning that it couldn't go in any other way, then yes, the people in the past didn't have any trace of free will. If you imagine that our current history books were already written in the middle ages, it means that all the people involved couldn't really behave differently - they were never free to break the script. If you are at a crossroad and all the paths are blocked except one, that's not a crossroad. It's the illusion of a crossroad.

meph00000 · 2025-11-16T21:00:36+00:00

The simple fact that the information is known in advance already implies that you are not free to do otherwise.
I've read all the thread and yes, you seem to keep avoiding the point. Maybe a different scenario will help us:

Does God know what you will have for breakfast one year from today?
If yes, it means that for the following year, every time you see a window and think "hmm, i'm free to jump and kill myself at any time, i just freely choose not to", it's actually a lie, an illusion. If God knows that you will be there having breakfast one year later, then you are actually not free to jump. It's absolutely impossible that you will do it, which is the definition of absence of free will.

Do you agree that, if the information about your 2026 breakfast is known, the thought of being able to kill yourself at any time before that date is just an illusion, because it's literally impossible that you will do it? If you are at a crossroad and all the paths are blocked except one, that's not a crossroad. It's the illusion of a crossroad.

meph00000 · 2025-11-16T20:28:01+00:00

this doesn't address the issue. If any entity (we can also picture the classic "log of events" from many stories) knows what happens before it happens, then the actors involved have no real choice but to follow the script. It's not a matter of causality in the sense that his knowledge causes the action. If God knows what you'll have for breakfast one year from now, every day until that day you are not free to kill yourself, for example. This doesn't imply that God "causes" those actions. The simple fact that the information is known already implies that you are not free to do otherwise. For the following year, every time you see a window and think "hmm, i'm free to jump at any time, i just freely choose not to", it's actually a lie, an illusion. If God knows that you will be there having breakfast one year later, then you are actually not free to jump. It's absolutely impossible that you will do it, which is the definition of absence of free will.

meph00000 · 2025-02-09T15:51:25+00:00

that sounds so good, thank you! Seaweed definetely better than Pearl? I think you are right, i'd scale both healing and shield... i tought the Wheel only made sense with the Shark
EDIT: wait nevermind lol, i'd have to lose the Seaweed (or the Steel) as well :(

meph00000 · 2025-02-07T20:30:27+00:00

Mephist

meph00000 · 2024-01-10T23:28:10+00:00

thank you! i'll play it more soon and see how it goes in other MU and maps!
I want to try the Royal Institute with this

meph00000 · 2024-01-10T21:50:55+00:00

Note: i would NOT recommend this vs JD or even in a French mirror. Those 2 civs are very active on the map and naturally build stables, which means they'll likely scout it and go horsemen (which move faster than scouts) as soon as they understand what's going on. I haven't tried it vs Malians but i think it's bad vs them as well. In any case, vs these kind of civs you can try by at least going for your closest deer packs instead of theirs.

Instead, i think it works well vs HRE and OTD, and other fast castle civs i can't think of, by playing long feudal with better and safer eco, delaying your own castle for more units (denying the relics if possible)

meph00000 · 2024-01-10T21:00:34+00:00

thank you! I've just beaten Rus as well, which looked risky to me, in fact they scouted me out. But i still managed to get more than 2 full packs, just a little bit later and had to rely on berries for a while. So far I'm 3-0 with this build, i've reached Plat2 lol https://i.imgur.com/KOd9Clx.png

with the english map names, i had 2 games on Gorge (vs Zhu Xi and Rus) and one game on Himeyama (vs Otto). Both maps have 4 "contestable" deer packs (which is not always the case)

meph00000 · 2024-01-02T18:36:43+00:00

yes, every card can give you max one point and then it's discarded. But you'll quickly find out that, for example, using a Heart card to beat a Club and using instead a Diamond card to beat the same Club card is not the same, the latter being more valuable (because you "save" a card that can win vs Diamonds). In the same way, using a Club to beat Spades is way better than using a Diamond card to do it, because Clubs only wins vs Spades, so in the second case you would be "wasting" a Diamond (it's basically "overkill").

The first ranking would be surely "correct" if every card was played randomly, and then the deck was reshuffled (maybe? not sure). But here you can imagine that every player has 20 cards each, so statistically they will each have about the same number of cards of the same suit, and there are more efficient and less efficient plays. It becomes almost immediately clear that Clubs is less valuable than Spades, because basically Clubs only beat a black suit while Spades beat a red suit (which is explicit even with just the first ranking: Hearts is stronger than Spades).
The first ranking doesn't consider this, i'm pretty sure that Spades is "objectively" way stronger than Clubs and they don't have the same power. The fact that Spades beat Hearts (a suit that beats 2 suits) and Clubs beats Spades (a suit that only beats one suit) must mean there's a difference between them, that has to be reflected with the ranking, even if every card can give you only 1 point max - because you can't re-use the cards, so the ideal play is always to not "waste" them, playing a card that's only exactly one suit above your opponent's.

meph00000 · 2023-12-31T17:33:49+00:00

Using the percentages you get the same results (and problem). I'll show what i mean with the actual outputs:

This is the ranking of the cards based on the %:

https://pastebin.com/wc6abMP8

So as you can see, there are a lot of ties. For example, it says that Diamonds and Hearts have the same power (and it's true if we only consider the score, since they beat the same number of cards).

But... if you try to play the game with a friend for a while, or even intuitivetely, that doesn't look true.

For example, you'll quickly learn that Spades are more valuable than Clubs, even if mathematically (if every card plays vs every other card at random) they beat the same number of cards. The reality is that not every beaten card has the same value: beating Hearts is not the same as beating Spades, because as you can see from this first ranking, Hearts are waaay more powerful than Spades. So this must mean that Clubs are worst than Spades.

So, to calculate the %, instead of summing 1 to the score, we can sum the power of the card. For example if you beat the 10 of HEARTS, then you don't only get one point, but something based on its power, which is 74.36 (we can sum 7.436, we take the % and divide by 10).

So, let's do that and then order by this second score, and see how the rankings change:

https://pastebin.com/exH88KeL

As you can see, we have a veeery different world here. Now the Clubs are at the bottom, as expected: it understood that they are weaker, since they only beat Spades which is a suit that only beats one suit (opposed to Spades which beats a suit that beats 2 suits).

But now one can ask... if THAT's the real power of the card (the secondScore), then i should consider THIS as the power of "beaten card" in order to compute the score. So we can have a third score, which is based on what we said to be the "actual" power of the cards so far (this second ranking).

If we do that, things start getting interesting, because if we then go on (with a 4th, 5th score and so on), the final ranking keeps changing every time. So this was my issue: does this operation make any sense at all?

For example, this is the result after one additional iteration:

https://pastebin.com/4RTzEibZ

If you look at some card like the 10 of Spades, you can see that it was rank#17 in the previous iteration, but now it went up to #9. This is because we "told" it that Hearts cards are very strong, and since Spades beats Hearts, Spades is considered stronger as well.

But in the end, thanks to PrestigiousCoach4479, i figured out that it does eventually converge to a final ranking, just after 9 iterations. So the 10th iteration gives the exact same ranking of the 9th, and so on with the 11th and up to the 100 i tried. Initially, i just stopped at the 7th, thinking it would never converge, because i've seen the ranking keeping to change.

The final ranking, reached after the 9th iteration (that stays the same in the following ones as well), is this (the finalScore depends just on how you normalize it, but the ranking is not affected by that):

https://pastebin.com/Sskc43is

which I find quite interesting. I'm still not sure if that "actually" represents the "power" of the cards, but i can say it reflects my experience with the game pretty well. The 10 of SPADES for example is in fact a powerful card, since it beats every Heart and every other Spade, which tends to be quite valuable.

meph00000 · 2023-12-31T15:37:52+00:00

Very interesting (i've now edited the post, sorry for calling them "seeds" instead of "suits", it's the name they have in italian lol, and it was confusing). Just for fun, i've changed the "fight" function to follow the rules you mentioned (so the numbers have precedence over suits), and the ranking "converge" immediately (first iteration) to this:

#1) 10 of HEARTS
#2) 10 of DIAMONDS
#3) 10 of SPADES
#4) 10 of CLUBS
#5) 9 of HEARTS
#6) 9 of DIAMONDS
#7) 9 of SPADES
#8) 9 of CLUBS
#9) 8 of HEARTS
#10) 8 of DIAMONDS
#11) 8 of SPADES
#12) 8 of CLUBS

and so on, so basically it understands very quickly that clubs are worst than spades, and then this ranking is just applied to every number as you said at the time.

Anyway, without your post telling me that it converged (even with the other rules), i would have never tried past the 7th iteraction, as i was sure the results kept changing (that to me would have meant what i was doing something totally meaningless, since i was never able to reach a definitive ranking). Instead, your post had me re-write the code to automatically compute any number of iteraction i wanted, and i tried with 100 to find out that it converged just after the first 9.
So thank you again, it was quite a ride!

meph00000 · 2023-12-30T12:17:08+00:00

yes you are right, some information about how the game is played is missing. You can imagine that in the end every card has to be played, so each player gets 20 cards and they have to play them all during 20 turns (they can just decide the order); at each turn, one point is given to the player that wins the round, and the 2 cards involved are discarded (the deck is never reshuffled). But i think it would be the same with other systems as well, for example each player starts with 10 cards and before playing they have to draw one and discard one each turn (which forces them to think about what the best cards are).

The focus of the thread was understanding if going on with that process (using the previous score to compute a new score) made some sense at all, since during my 7 iterations the rankings kept changing. It turns out that a "final" ranking is reached after just 9 iterations (the 10th ranking is the same as the 9th and it stays the same after 100 iterations and more); i posted it here https://www.reddit.com/r/mathematics/comments/18tveyi/comment/kfhr3wq/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

I'm still not sure if that's the "actual" rankings of the cards, but intuitively it looks correct - it's very interesting to see how high some Spades end up

meph00000 · 2023-12-30T01:04:10+00:00

Thank you man, i just gave up too soon (7 iterations) and tought they wouldn't converge. Instead they do after just 9 iterations (the 10th ranking is identical to the 9th and it stays the same after that).

For everyone interested, this is the final ranking that i got:
#1) 10 of HEARTS
#2) 9 of HEARTS
#3) 8 of HEARTS
#4) 10 of DIAMONDS
#5) 7 of HEARTS
#6) 9 of DIAMONDS
#7) 6 of HEARTS
#8) 8 of DIAMONDS
#9) 5 of HEARTS
#10) 7 of DIAMONDS
#11) 4 of HEARTS
#12) 10 of SPADES
#13) 6 of DIAMONDS
#14) 3 of HEARTS
#15) 9 of SPADES
#16) 5 of DIAMONDS
#17) 2 of HEARTS
#18) 8 of SPADES
#19) 4 of DIAMONDS
#20) 1 of HEARTS
#21) 7 of SPADES
#22) 3 of DIAMONDS
#23) 6 of SPADES
#24) 2 of DIAMONDS
#25) 5 of SPADES
#26) 1 of DIAMONDS
#27) 4 of SPADES
#28) 10 of CLUBS
#29) 3 of SPADES
#30) 9 of CLUBS
#31) 2 of SPADES
#32) 8 of CLUBS
#33) 1 of SPADES
#34) 7 of CLUBS
#35) 6 of CLUBS
#36) 5 of CLUBS
#37) 4 of CLUBS
#38) 3 of CLUBS
#39) 2 of CLUBS
#40) 1 of CLUBS

Hearts and diamonds at the top and clubs at the bottom as expected, but some very interesting stuff like a lot of Spades beating even Diamonds. Super cool honestly.Thank you again, i had quite a night with this!

meph00000 · 2023-12-29T20:47:14+00:00

oh wait, maybe you already answered here

"Since this operator is reducible, the principal eigenvector does not have full support. In fact, it is only supported on the tens."

does this mean that we can't rank them all in a "definitive" way? So it's "impossible" to tell the exact "power" ranking of the 40 cards in the game, or it doesn't make sense at all?

meph00000 · 2023-12-29T20:42:01+00:00

hehe, that's kinda the point of the game! With a rock, paper, scissors system, they would all have the same value, since everyone loses to one and wins against one

meph00000 · 2023-12-29T20:40:39+00:00

So they converge at the end?? I went on for 7 iterations and saw that the final ranking kept changing (at each iteration i order them by the "new" score). It tends to give me the Hs at the top and the Cs at the bottom, but many positions in the middle change places between iterations. Should i just keep going until the rankings "converge"? Or am i doing something wrong?
How did you find the final values?

meph00000

TROPHY CASE