Determined: Robert Sapolsky on Life without Free Will. A Conversation with HG Moeller 

Or an idiot.

What were they a professor of?

@@MrPDTaylor contemporary philosophy

If you like to listen to prattle.

This is easier than you think. A lot of academics are only too happy to discuss their works with anyone interested, regardless of social clout. This applies both to books and papers. In fact when it comes to the latter, they're often only too happy to send it to you for free if it's locked behind a paywall. The only barrier is whether the academic has the time to spare, so you might have to wait a bit.

he's promoting his new book, he appeared on several podcasts in the last weeks, after a hiatus of almost no appearances for several years, so it's not exceptional for him to appear here.

I don't think those turtles in their example like being grouped that way. ;)

You'd be surprised to be honest. Academics have a lot of flexibility with their time, a lot of passion, and are often super down to earth - particularly scientists. I've had multiple email conversations with top level academics I just messaged completely unsolicited while reading their work.

@@Cyrusislikeawsome The US state for stealing personal data and waging derangement campaigns against little children on social media, destroying their cognitive autonomy for profit. There is no pity for these terrorist scum.

yes this is the simplest and best answer for most people!

Tell that to Sapolsky who states that an abused person with a particular gene is _destined_ to behave in a predictable and specific way. You fan-boys are giving up your humanity on the say-so of a Marxist. You get that, right?

If everything is determined, you can say that things are pre-destined. I do not see where is the problem. The chain of causes and effects goes somewhere.

You need to know that Marxists like Sapolsky despise intellectuals. Don't worry though; you're unlikely to get into his bad book in that regard.

It sure does.

What exactly was good about this interview? Seriously, I want to know.

absolutely one of the best, and definitely more legitimate, of the intellectual/philosophical channels on the youtubes

The great Marx granted.

@ssgdhgsdfff8887 with this style I would say no. There is some popular philosophy channels but not with this rigor, pedagogical outlook and quality.

​@ssgdhgsdfff8887 Jonas Ceika - CCK Philosophy

@ssgdhgsdfff8887 Not as Well-known as this channel, but the Theory & Philosophy channel is also a very good channel. It mainly explains various terms by philosophers in a concise manner (and explains it correctly!)

His lectures on Human Behavioral Biology are much better. I loved every single one of them especially linking behavior to biology and biology to biochemistry. If you understand physical chemistry then you can see how life can start and evolve on earth to get us where we are.

@@winninymeanssweet1920can you expand on it? Seriously curios

Pretentious comment. War and Peace is the best book ever? 😂🙄

@@chutcentral Mean comment. I say every book I just finished is the best book ever .. except the bad ones haha.

What I’m confused about is if we don’t have free will, why does it matter if anyone believes it or not?

Humane? What is that supposed to mean? It is a moral judgements, and moral judgements in a deterministic world have no meaning

@@myself171exactly 😂

@@myself171 It doesn't. But at least you know it.

He doesn't know .

Wat?

​@@shlockofgodAncap learn about Prodhoun for the first time

I didn't watch the whole video yet. They probably are going to talk about that somewhere later haha

You make a good point: Theologically speaking, the notion of the "sovereign individual" is strongly connected to the dogma of a supposed God outside of time and space who is connected with said individual on a fundamental level, e.g. per eternal Soul . - While the ontological or metaphysical alternative would be the "All is One", where either the universe IS God, as in Pantheism ( the "religion" of science) , or where God ( at least) may have a free will, but is in the world; Panentheism.

How brilliant to have a friend you can talk with about morality and free will ❤ *they’re rare gifts!

They are and they will so even more intensely. They call it transhumanism

No free will belongs only to robots. Not human beings

I didn't get past 1:35. lol - can't get past his propaganda. I will catch prof. Sapolsky elsewhere.

@@winninymeanssweet1920 What propaganda?

​@@wstewsteRepresenting his opinion as fact.

​@@wstewsteIt is because he might have mentioned Jordan Peterson without signalling that he agrees with everything he says.

​@@winninymeanssweet1920Saying you disagree isn't propaganda. If you think people shouldn't disagree with Peterson you're the one spewing propaganda

Whether something is hard or difficult is determined by the forces involved

It's 'hard' to get up at 5am everyday and run in the rain. But the perfectionistic athlete is compelled to do it. He has no choice. It would be harder for him not to. Whether or not the world snapping over to accepting determinism is "easy or hard" doesn't enter into it.

I wholeheartedly agree, although maybe "sentient creatures" is too broad a term. I think many would describe people in states such as flow state, enlightenment/moksha or psychedelics induced ego-death as "sentient" despite being free of the "illusion" of Free WIll. I would have used the term "(dualistically) self-conscious creatures" or "subjects" instead of "sentient creatures".

"all sentient creatures must ultimately behave as though choice is possible" Sorry to be so nitpicky, but I feel like either "must" or "behave" are the wrong words to use here. If you mean "must" as a moral or rational imperative, doesn't that imply some capacity to make a choice? If you mean must in the sense of "a quantum system must behave as a superposition of all possible observable states until an observation is made," then that's just empirically not true since plenty of sentient creatures don't actually behave this way. How do you reconcile what seems subjectively to me and I imagine to you like a choice to accept or reject a particular framework with a belief in hard determinism?

@@alynames7171 I don't think you're nit-picking as much as you're merely confused about the language in a way I'd suggest is fairly contrived. All I meant was "must" as in "there is no other alternative". Not at all in moral sense, and absolutely not in the way you're applying this to quantum principles. My analogy to quantum states was not a statement about affairs on the quantum level at all, but just that - an analogy to draw a parallel between how the state of small particles being indeterminate until observed is similar to how our future behavior appears indeterminate to us on a macro level from a first person point of view. Nothing more, nothing less. "Acting as though your behavior is predetermined" is functionally a meaningless statement because unless you know what your behavior is predetermined to be, you are not acting according to the supposed predetermined outcome in any way. This is distinct from saying your behavior isn't determined. What I am talking about is the fact that regardless of whether it is determined or not, what your future is determined to be is not obvious nor determinable to you - hence you cannot act as though it is in any meaningful sense. Even if I were determined to pick A over B, I cannot act as though it was determined I was going to pick A if I do not have precognition of this fact. And, this problem is compounded further if I did have such precognition since we'd have to assume having such precognition would effect the outcome and demand a new causal calculus to reconfirm that proposed future outcome. This, of course, would require the precognition to be updated, which would result in a loop and eternal regress. Hence it is not clear that any conscious creature can act in any meaningful sense on an assumption of determined outcomes. You can act determinalistically, but you cannot act ON determinism. This is also why wasting time on the term "conscious creature" is pointless pedantry in relation to this argument as well. Clearly, there's a spectrum of cognitive complexity as far as consciousness goes. Clearly we can imagine some conscious creature that's entirely reactive, as the poster above yours postulated. Non of that bears any relevance to my argument though. Any conscious creature without an illusion of deliberation isn't relevant to this conversation seeing as they'd be "even less able to act on determinism" than any sophisticated conscious creature to begin with. Again, my argument here is fairly simple: No being capable of considering future events and with a sense of choice, illusory or not, can act according to an appreciation of future determined event because there does not seem to be any coherent model for the antithesis of this claim. With that being the case, it seems we must(as in there are no viable, coherent alternatives) act under the labor of uncertain future outcomes, which is more or less indistinguishable from the illusion of choice-making.

Very well said! Nothing much do add here!

This is incorrect. All sentient creatures behavior would be completely determined. Under determinism no one would have the choice to behave as though choice is possible until the choice is made. Fatalism and determinism are exactly the same thing. If you're fatalistic then it is 100 percent determined. You have absolutely no control over it. Every thing that happens to you was your fate. Trying to "Shrödinger's free will" your way around it is itself a delusion. Because that is also determined. It's not true that free will "straddles people with an impossible to justify responsibility for situations that couldn’t possibly have been otherwise". If determinism / no free will is true then then it's_determinism_ that straddles people with responsibility for things that cannot be any other way. If you have a child then you are responsible for it even though you never chose to have it. If you deliberately kill someone then you still probably get locked up or killed even though you didn't chose to do it. Love becomes an illusion. Virtue is a joke because no one ever chooses to behave virtuously. If you can;t be "blamed" for any wrong doing then you can't also be credited for any right. Even having sex is not your choice. In determinism there is no such thing as justice. Something like the holocaust is simply the playing out of immutable physical laws; neither right or wrong. Once you start to think about, determinism being true is an insane nightmare, over which you have no control and can only wake up from when you're dead. As for blame making and super-naturalism, there's nothing about determinism that prevents people from engaging in these things. After all it would just be determined.

We're not heading into chaos, but into catastrophy, things will still be flowing in order. Just not the kind of order that's good for society :)

makes sense to me@@krischanlive

Your "understanding" first requires that the phenomenon itself is understood, which it isn't.

@@JohnnyTwoFingers I understand it! What’s not understood?

They're not talking about limitations. They saying it doesn't exist at all.

@@shlockofgod trueeee! I corrected it 😊

Is there a connection between the two? Idk i never found free will stuff all that interesting.

The correlation between grammar and culture is basically non-existent. Linguists have found very little evidence for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I don’t think that idea from Nietzsche makes much sense at all. It sounds reasonable on a superficial level, but if you know anything about grammar or linguistics, it actually doesn’t make much sense.

@@ludviglidstrom6924 What if I served you some decent tasting tea biscuits and after you've munched on them, I revealed they're my dog's biscuits? Wouldn't language change the way you felt about them? People build narratives from the very early age, tell themselves stories every day. Talk to themselves more often than not. Language is a carrier of culture, I think it's hard to deny it. It's not about grammar. See studies on e.g.: correlation vocabulary & creativity, vocabulary & IQ, vocabulary & ability to self regulate, build relationships etc. Brains of bilingual & multilingual persons differ functionally and structurally when compared to monolinguals. Everything you do affects your brain, you can silently talk yourself (literally) to do one thing or another. I disagree on the notion that language doesn't affect our perception of reality. Edit: corrected the autofill mistake.

Exactly!

I would have loved a deeper dive into that

"According to Sapolsky, we should not hold individuals accountable for their actions because they are not in control of them. However, he also acknowledges that we live in a society that requires moral responsibility and accountability. Therefore, he suggests that we should still hold individuals accountable for their actions, but we should do so in a way that is more humane and less punitive. This means that we should focus on rehabilitation and prevention rather than punishment. In other words, we should still hold individuals responsible for their actions, but we should do so in a way that is more compassionate and understanding of the factors that led to their behavior." An example would be the few successful programs for juvenile delinquents with dissocial personality disorder: they don't learn by punishment, and that's neurological, so you have to give them a game of incentives for good behavior.

​​@@mistressfreezepeachdoes that not sound the teensiest bit dystopian to you? It seems to at least open the door to some unsettling possibilities.

@@mistressfreezepeach So he thinks we should not hold individuals accountable for their actions but he suggests that we should still hold individuals accountable for their actions?

@@shlockofgod He thinks that those actions were determined by various factors influencing them, and hence we should endeavour to countervail that by rehabilitating them. Rather than hating them for it, we ought to try healing them. They are, in a sense, held accountable for their actions as in they did those actions, but it's not truly their fault that they did them. So we respond to fix, not punish, them.

​​@@ArawnOfAnnwnwhat's the difference between fixing and punishing someone? And who decides? Under what circumstances is doing so allowed?

All roads lead to transhumanism

Bingo. The root of Nihilism. Which is what all those neomarxists are

If i can explain if even though it has no inherent meaning .. Copism ..

If you listened to the discussion, you'd realize that they mentioned multiple times that the context of the decisions is important. Social/cultural and environmental factors modulate how any given brain will react, given the same neuronal states. But yes, in theory if we knew all the relevant factors, we could predict what the brain does next. What is so impossible about that? Logically I mean, I know we don't have the technology or knowledge to do that just yet

Please elaborate on how that second proposition is impossible. After that address the point made in the video that determinacy does not equal predictability.

@@TheJayman213Because it's practically impossible and theoretically too (quantum stuff). It's an "if" proposition and for my taste way too deistic.

@@ArnoWalter1. Its practical impossibility is qualified in the statement itself. 2. Determination does not equal predictability. The outcome of a quantum event is not predictable and may not even be determined in the strictest sense but it is determined in the sense that there is no room for Free Will. Any indeterminacy in the event must be fully random which precludes common notions of Free Will as the basis for "personal responsibility". 3. That "if" proposition is your circumscription of the claim that human behavior is fully determined. You are free to engage with the claim itself.

Yeah there is a lot of data to back his claims but people won’t understand because of their bias and stubborn ego. therefore discussions like this become a matter of faith for most of the audience, unfortunately.

@@gking407 That was my point. Anyone attempting to use science to decide a determinism/free will debate will eventually run into the reductio ad absurdum of what lies beneath the science, which is why we have an absurd turtle metaphor for it. Those who believe in either free will or determinism can likely only do so on mystical or speculative grounds.

@@SuperSk1llz there’s nothing mystical or unknowable about determinism. It’s pretty clear that for every being on the planet there have been, and continue to be, a myriad of influences working on them at all times. To think that freewill is actually free of anything seems the more mystical belief to me.

@@gking407 They are both non-empirical so your belief in determinism is equivalent to a mystical belief in free will. Given the standard of proof, none of us can truly know.

@@SuperSk1llz if you pay closer attention it’s easy to see several reasons why your life is the way it is. And there are reasons for those reasons. And so on.. Direct sight is not a mystery.

What do you mean with "the awful justice system we have now"? Who is "we"?

​​@@madekekgrain this context pretty much every country on Earth. I really didn't expect THAT to be the controversial point, since I'm pretty sure Sapolsky implied determinism would mean it should be abolished anyway.

@@alynames7171 I think that the systems in somewhere like I've been hearing about in Norway would be a good model to replicate. The criminal justice system should be focused exclusively on reducing the amount of harm done to society - in other words, any response should be focused exclusively on rehabilitation. If an individual can be rehabilitated than it should be the goal to do so, and if they can't be rehabilitated then so be it, just keep them locked away to prevent damage to society.

@@DQABlack I agree with you. The system should not only be punitive, but protective of the general public. The penal system in North European countries focus on rehabilitation, but they neglect many times society. Child rapists that strike again after their release in Germany, for example. Mass murderers like Anders Behring Breivik that only get 30 years of "rehabilitation" for murdering 77 people, 69 of which he killed in cold blood. Is he going to be released after 21 years on parole?

​@@DQABlack I guess my issue with that is who decides what the standards are? When we have a political and legal system ostensibly based on democratic decisions made with free will, that's always subject to debate and change. But eliminating those concepts, it would seem like what counts as someone in need of "rehabilitation" and who ought to be "locked away" from society will need to come from an objective, scientific determination. That seems to be building towards a permanent, unalterable legal framework based on the ostensibly objective (in retrospect) standards of whoever had sufficient political power to establish it in the first place. I think the Nordic justice systems generally do a much better job than the present American justice system, for example, but trying to turn it into an objective standard seems frought with danger to me. Like to give a concrete if simplistic hypothetical, who under this line of thinking ought to be rehabilitated or locked away: a person who steals food they can't afford, or a store owner choosing to set prices beyond what many can afford? Whatever your answer, do you feel comfortable declaring it scientifically objective?

I'm a determinist but for a different reason than what's outlined here and my view of this question leaves room for what we call "free choice." Basically I think all of time has already unfolded, but because of our limitations as human beings, we experience time as the present (moment by moment) and the future for us appears to be un-determined. So the choices we make in the moment appear to determine our futures when in reality what we decided throughout our lives has already happened-time has already unfolded-we just don't know it yet. The trouble for defenders of the concept of "free will" is that neither scientists nor philosophers have been able to come to an agreement about what "free will" means and how to test whether it exists or not through experiments. By contrast, the scientific evidence for determinism (whether loose or strict) is pretty strong and compelling, but I would say it doesn't completely rule out the possibility of what we commonly call "free will" just quite yet either. Having a settled scientific definition of it would help us get closer to the truth on this question.

I don't think that an intellectual awareness of determinism necessarily needs to undermine our ability to struggle against self destruction. No matter how hard we try, it's impossible to experience an existence absent of choice. You can ask "how should I behave, now that I know that my choices are not real?" but that is of course a ridiculous question. Determinism says that your choice to make an effort to relieve your suffering is an illusion, but so is your suffering itself! So if your suffering is real to you (which I'm sure it is), then your efforts to better yourself are just as real.

The absence of free will doesnt mean your efforts to make better choices are meaningless What it means is that you'll never really have complete understanding of how you really got to this point, what made you believe what you believe and why you feel the way you do. But you can still make a difference, like you made the decision to write this comment, its the ownership of that choice that is thrown into question. But _you_ still wrote it and posted it, it didn't just vanish into the abyss or appear as gibberish. Your actions had an effect- just like how you you have been trying with incredible braveness to find peace, whether it has been by challenging your cognitive disortions or vour daily routine, I bet your life has been changing a lot. Does it matter what or who made you make this choice to change it? Do you eat your favourite dessert and do you ask yourself why you like it and if you did do you think the answer to it would make it any less delicious? Id hazard to guess not. The changes you have made to your life are the result of your actions, who or what led you to this moment doesnt change how courageous and _willful_ your actions are. Sending love ❤

Thank you, guys, so much. I feel much more safe🤍 x

Determinism doesn’t mean that the hard work you are doing is inconsequential. It only means that your current *ability* to realize the harmful capability of those habits, and to work towards limiting them, has been determined from a long line of factors, just the same as your PTSD came from a long line of factors. A way to not feel so hopeless may be to understand that the hard work you are doing, and the fact you have been able to make progress, is because you possess a determined quality to make this difference in your life right now. Some others may not even have the ability to recognize the habits and pull themselves out, but that is not their fault. Keep strong friend!

Same same

Wtf are you talking about? In his very first segment of the interview he makes it clear that he's engaging with precisely these moderate forms of Free Will. He's arguing from a hard determinist position that all these weak notions of Free Will are just as wrong as the hardest notion. He compares the hard notion of Free WIll to that of the world resting on the back of a giant turtle and progressively softer notions of Free WIll to an increasing number of turtles serving as each other's ground. Admitting that there is external conditioning while clinging to any notion of Free Will is like putting another turtle beneath the bottom turtle: You're still believing in magic. But there is no bottom-most turtle and there is no Free Will, WHATSOEVER.

the problem still with those medieval thinkers is that they still assume that ultimately the choice can be freely made, and they don't go the extra step further and say that even the choosing itself (even when such a choice isn't affected by outside influences etc.) is still determined by mechanisms

Libertarian free will as a gift from god is one of the main apologetics used by theists to justify the existence evil under the power of an all powerful, perfectly benevolent god. Understanding the true nature of free will or the lack thereof is helpful for distancing one’s self from dogmatic thinking. My fiancé is an incredibly smart engineer (though not much of an intellectual) but I have been unsuccessful in convincing him that libertarian free will doesn’t exist and he’s an atheist so… I would have to disagree

There's no real need to deal with the moderates in this respect, because the moderate free will proponents ultimately have the exact same problem in making their view coherent as any extreme proponent of free will would have - exactly what part of the will is supposedly free from temporal causal relationships? It's not at all clear what having "free will" means unless you think some part of the mind is atemporal and can exercise choice in blatant disregard to material facts about the brain and its physical environment.

Believing in "no free will" is like believing in aether. One cannot make claims like no free will if one has no idea how to solve the mind-body problem

that would make you a science denialist even worse than Flat Earthers and Creationists. Since there is great overlap it would mean you're discrediting people like Sapolsky as well.

​@@mistressfreezepeach Strange accusation to make given that Jordan Peterson is a climate science denier.

​@@tomisaacson2762based Peterson

​@@mistressfreezepeach peterson isn't a scientist ..

@@i2keepitrealInreseach ok, troll, muting you now

What _is_ a law, in this context?

@@shlockofgod natural laws

Knowing my behavior is determined doesn't change the fact that I dislike pain and am conditioned to also dislike it when others experience pain. Therefore I argue for eco-socialism. I consider by political opponents to be wrong in the sense that I consider the consequences of their actions to be unethical from my own POV. But I don't need to morally judge my political opponents to argue or potentially even fight against them. It's just like if there were a wild animal running amok killing people. I would consider the fact that people are dying unethical, more unethical than constraining the animal, therefore I would act accordingly, but with no need for morally judging the animal itself.

@@TheJayman213 I don't necessarily disagree with this view, but I'd like to hear his. I will say, though, that your own view seems a bit limited in terms of its metaethical implications. That you are "conditioned to dislike it when others experience pain" does not suggest that there is anything ethical at all, only that you experience emotional distress upon seeing pain. It's quite similar to emotivism, which sees all moral statements as expressions of preference "boo this, yay that".

Ethics in such a framework isn't about moral judgments, but harm reduction. In practice it's like a kinder version of what we already do - we still apprehend criminals, but try to rehabilitate them rather than punishing them cos they did 'evil'. You also try to change society so that such acts are less likely in future, such as by reducing poverty. You're trying to make the world a happier place, including the life of the criminal themselves. There's a field based on this idea known as restorative justice. The point is that you don't hate those who violate the law, you see their actions as a result of their determined circumstances - and so try to change that. To give a concrete example of the difference in perspective, there was a UK documentary a decade ago on the search for a humane way to administer the death penalty. One striking thing that came up towards the end of it was that one of the objections raised against the idea proposed by the presenter (nitrogen hypoxia) was that they don't want the penalty to be painless. The pain is the point, or part of it. Consider that hell - the place for those who do wrong - is literally an eternity of torture. This is the mindset that not blaming people seeks to shift us from. It's more like if you get sick - you don't just do nothing, you treat the illness. But there's no point blaming the bacteria for just doing their thing. There's no malice.

To have morality (right and wrong) you necessarily require choice and some degree of control over your actions. Under determinism, choice is an illusion and you have no control over your actions. So, within a deterministic framework there is no possibility of morality. And changes that happen to you in the future will be determined and cannot be any other way.

​@@TheJayman213Your "therefore" seems a bit magical.

Nice reference.

Love this !

I'd like to see a discussion with Robert and Dan dennett 😊

@@jezah8142 dennett is a charlatan

​@@jezah8142I imagine it'd be similar to discussions between Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett on the topic.

They have nothing to add. Much smarter and wiser philosophers studied it for millennias. Only the Godman and Saviour Jesus Christ saved us from the cardinal sin. Only in His image we can trascend the limitations of the "fallen beast" and the fallen world that comes along with it.

So under that light you got enough free will to save your soul in Christ. Which is the purpose of existence. Communing in the godhood and society of God

Good Point

That might be because you make no distinction between truly free will and simply having a will. Sapolsky's not denying we have a will and thus intentions.

@@bjorsam6979 Yes, maybe.I just find it hard to take a concept seriously, that does not change your behaviour and language at all. Wait ... I might take it seriously, but I guess I am not interested.

​@@bjorsam6979absolute free will can only belong to an eternal, omnipotent, self sufficient God. We can never be absolutely free and that's not why we were made either

@@keylanoslokj1806 That might because you make no distinction between being free and having a free will.

Is it like parthenogenesis?

Ferguson’s is a prescient document, for sure. There is crossover with points raised by Rousseau-basically, around the increasing atomization of society under Modernity-and by the early German Romantics (e.g. Novalis).

Modern version would be a more socially derived systems theory. Very similar to dialectical thinking.

As i said before. Just a glorified social marxist. Even the notion of dialectic materialism itself is an oxymoron contrivance. It's just Nihilism all over again dressed in a new package

Sounds like you have freewill covering the entire life.

It's so relevant I'm doing subtitles al español.

@@Celestity hey, I can help you with that 😳, I’m currently working for a law firm and one of my main duties is translating documents

Well a lot of that stuff is garbage rationalism and obscuritism, so I'm cool with it.

Also.. if you don't have free will and others don't have free will, what's the point of arguing or debating?

​@@MalAnders94 since you'll die anyway, what's the point of living?

@@MalAnders94because that’s what people do, same as all other behavior

​@@MalAnders94 Well, there wouldn't be any debates about free will, because there wouldn't be any people siding with it 😅. Aside jokes, If reality is deterministic, and I think it is, then point of those debates is, that you had to do them, you couldn't do otherwise. Even you making that point about lack of point is determined. We had to change reality and past in order for you to not leaving this comment.

Those statements about unpredictability in the interview caught me off-guard. Which version(s) of physics can have provably unpredictable systems? Does unpredictability of certain systems follow from the uncertainty principle?

Sounds like turtles to me. Where does the grammar(s) of language come from?

You hoping for the best is also determined😅

I felt like Moeller was pushing in the direction of this point a few times in the interview but they never really dove into it.

Sapolsky thinks he argues against compatibilism, but the arguments he makes only ever touch a contra-causal, or libertarian, conception of free will. He's basically doing a Sam Harris: boldly deny the existence of free will thinking you're making a novel philosophical argument because you think everybody else was thinking freedom is contra-causal and deride compatibilist conceptions of free will as "changing definitions" as if you were always in possession of the one truly substantive definition. If he ever elaborates further on how the concept relates to the appearance of choice and volition, subjectivity, desire, responsibility, moral desert, etc. the more he becomes indistinguishable from a compatibilist. I'm getting bored of the "[Thing everybody talks about] doesn't exist" format. Seems to me like it'd be a lot more interesting to develop an argument like: "[Thing everybody talks about] isn't what we thought it was." But I suppose that'd make for a much less popular book.

​@@tomisaacson2762 I don't get that at all from other vids (that he takes a compatible line). Please add timestamps. Also, present your comparable argument.

Not even remotely comparable. He is speaking biologically, neurologically and anthropologically. Jesus is made up with no evidence behind it.

@@shakeyj4523 Evidence? Free will is an imaginative concept.,

@@carlharmeling512 I see words are hard for you.

⁠@@carlharmeling512no it’s a concept that can be tested with knowledge and objective reality.

Excellent analogy!