- Yes, it's an objection to libertarian free will. Basically, the intuition is that even indeterminism is a threat to libertarian free will. If we say that the probabilities are the cause for Luke's choice, then it seems that he isn't free anymore.
- After God's action, the situation is exactly as it was juste before the choice. So Luke doesn't know that he got reseted.
- Well, I think that free will doesn't mean unpredactibility. If that was the case, human wouldn't choose freely very often.

The probabilities don't cause the action, it's just the distribution of choices. The rollback objection is pretty weak I think, it's like just imagining different possible worlds in which the person chose differently. Yes, and? The person was still free to choose whatever she wanted, and it may be possible that she would've acted differently in one of the rollbacks, that's just what a choice is: it's motivated by a reason but ultimately caused by the agent who could've chosen differently.

In this sense, free will does give us some unpredictability. You can never really be sure what someone will do. But that doesn't mean we can't have a science of human behavior (or something close to that), because free actions are motivated, they are explicable by motivations and purposes (which are not entailing, however) and by knowing someone's personality we can reasonably predict how they act (or at least how they won't act) in a number of a situations. And knowing that most people are balanced and typically share some basic similar values, we can also extend that more generally. I know a friend of mine won't murder me if I jokingly insult him, even though in principle he could do that, as he's free.

Just goes on to show how mechanicism leads to false problems. Because of the mechanistic obsession of science in the natural world, we sometimes find it difficult to understand causal acts which are neither determined nor random/probabilistic, but that's precisely what free actions are: caused by the agent and explained by different motivations, but neither deterministic nor random. It's you.

Last edited by Miguel (4/12/2018 12:13 pm)

Ouros wrote:

The rollback objection is this:
Let's imagine Luke, in the morning, deciding what he will drink: coffee or tea.
Now, when he will have choose, God will reset the world just before Luke's choice.  He do that again and again, until we get probabilities of what Luke will do: let's say something like 40% of time he take tea, and 60% coffee.

​There need be no such probabilities. It may be that the proportion of coffee selections does not converge upon any number, as the number of resets goes to infinity. It could even be that Luke chooses coffee every​ time, and yet was not determined to. (There's often a supposition that there is some clear way of translating between possibilities and probabilities, as though the probability of A is going to be analyzed as the proportion of possible worlds in which A. But that is of course not the case. If you have a probabilistic model in which the only two options are A and B, and you stipulate that the probability of A is 60%, then you still only have two possible worlds, in one of which A.)

​The libertarian will say that, when Luke chooses coffee, his choice explains that he has the coffee. If that is admitted, at least for the sake of argument, then we don't obviously need anything further than Luke's choices to explain the pattern of Luke's coffee selection in the resets.

Ouros wrote:

The rollback objection is this:
Let's imagine Luke, in the morning, deciding what he will drink: coffee or tea.
Now, when he will have choose, God will reset the world just before Luke's choice.  He do that again and again, until we get probabilities of what Luke will do: let's say something like 40% of time he take tea, and 60% coffee.

Why do you assume that the probabilities are not 100%/0%? I'm confused.
If a choice is always the same because the agent is willingly and freely choosing the choice, how is this possible?
Are you assuming that a choice must be free if it's different in another possible world?
The fact that the other world is possible doesn't mean it actually exists in another reality, even if God resets the world. For "I could have choosen otherwise" is not equal to "if you rewind the world enough times, I will have choosen otherwise".