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Ontological and epistemic doubt in free choice

שו”תCategory: generalOntological and epistemic doubt in free choice
asked 5 years ago

Hello.

In the responses to Part 5, you argued that a state of free choice is not an ontic book because there is no ambiguity in reality.
To quote from one of the comments:
“I answered the questioner above you about this. In my opinion, it is not an ontic interval. The question of what you will choose in the future has one clear answer of two, but now it is unknown. The criterion of Shmaya Galia does not hold here (at least in my opinion that God does not know in advance what will be chosen), but it is not a state of ambiguity. A state of ambiguity is a state in which the world is currently in a combination of two states. In the choice, I do not know what will happen, but in the world itself there is no ambiguity.”

However, in part A of the posts regarding ontic and epistemic doubts, the definition was as follows:
“Epistemic Doubt and Ontological Doubt”
What is the reason for the gap between unpredictability and freedom? … Reality itself is fixed in a univalent way, meaning that every given situation has one and only outcome that is well-defined based on the current situation. The lacuna is with us, humans.
From here on, I say that this is cognitive doubt (=lack of information), and in philosophical terminology, it is epistemic doubt… We must remember that a libertarian view that advocates the existence of free will (as opposed to determinism) believes that reality itself is not univalent. Even given a certain set of circumstances and complete information about it, a person can still freely choose whether to do X or Y. If so, this is not a question of our lack of information (inability to predict), but of reality itself being non-univalent. In such a situation, the point is not that we do not have the right answer, but that there is not one answer at all. We will call such a situation here ontic doubt.”

And I wondered if there was a place in the series (which is quite heavy, it should be noted) where there was a different definition.

If I were Demisphina, I would perhaps argue in a different direction: quantum doubt is a doubt of ambiguity, but it is not a sharp ontic doubt like free choice.
In a state of quantum doubt, both options are present in reality, but in the end there is a collapse to only a single state. In contrast, in a state of free choice, as you defined in Part A of the series, there is a reality that is not vague, but nevertheless it does not lead in a clear and unambiguous way to another state of reality – that is, what exists in reality cannot provide the answer to the doubt, and therefore in such a state the ontic doubt is sharper.

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מיכי Staff answered 5 years ago

I don’t understand why I should open a new thread about this. I can continue the discussion in its place. What’s more, I answered it there.
I explained that quantum doubt is not just a question of what will happen next, but that the current situation is ambiguous (superposition). Maybe that’s what you wrote here.

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