[ale] [OT] Omniscient, Omnipotent, Omnipresent or Not.

[hbbs at comcast.net]

> Your whole argument then boils down to one of timing - if I know the outcome  
> *before* the coin lands, then it cannot be random, but if I know it "after", 
> then it can be random. 
> 
> But who's to say that your concept of linear, uni-directional time flow is the 
> only one in the cosmos? Is it not possible that for someone somewhere, the 
> coin lands *before* it is flipped? If so, would that mean that there could be 
> no such thing as randomness? I think the coin would still have two sides, and 
> would still land Heads sometimes and Tails other times. 

Scientific American had a Special Issue earlier in the year about time, and
different articles explored time from different angles, e.g., philosophical,
cosmological, psychological.  I read the articles several times during my, er,
constitutional moments.

One of the arguments presented came to the conclusion that there is no "now" and
that the "passage of time" is an illusion.  The issue is that the confusion
between "before" and "after" that you refer to here is a real characteristic of
the natural world.  People moving relative to each other and people at distances
from one another have different notions of just when "now" is.  One logical
conclusion one can draw from that is that there is no one "now" and that, in
fact, there is no reason to make special any point in time (given a point in
space) by calling it "now."

This line of thought leads to the concept of "block time," in which all of time,
and therefore all of space in all such time, is frozen as though in a big block
of Jello.  If we were to drop everything down a dimension for the sake of
illustration, it's as though a 2-D spacial universe's path is all spelled out in
an unseen third dimension, time, and the combined structure would be the
"block."  If we were 2-D beings, we would perceive the flow of time as a
movement through the block in that unseen third dimension.  But, relativistic
movement or distances within any 2-D plane in the block leads to "nows" that are
something other than planar, i.e., my now ain't when your now is.  

This does smack of determinism, but that doesn't really bother me because I
don't take determinism as an abrogation of free will.

What I find interesting about the movie MINORITY REPORT with respect to the
block time concept is that its moral stance - that someone who is predicted to
commit a murder by people who can see forward across the block is as much a
criminal as someone who has committed a murder - is at odds with itself, because
the precogs are having visions of things that WILL happen and things that WILL
NOT HAPPEN (i.e., murders that are prevented by the Department of Pre-Crime) due
to the precogs' visions.  

Unfortunately, the film's plot does not plow into this issue but it does bring
it up unsettlingly.  The plot twist that cranks the whole movie is actually
something else entirely - a flaw in the system that someone is able to exploit.

> Perhaps there are even creatures for whom time is not a constraint - they are 
> able to see the outcome of something simultaneously with its beginning.

Humans can do this.  If I shine a flashlight in your face, my turning on the
light and the light hitting your face are simultaneous events to you.  They
aren't to me and they aren't to someone off to the side who is equidistant to
both of us.  "Simultaniety" itself moves at velocity c.  In other words, time is
 *not* a constraint - to anyone.
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