Bottom line is : there is no random event ( if you think there is, try to name one ) - there is no reaction without previous action. So, when you do something ( with your "free" will) that action is basically a reaction and is determined by many factors and previous actions. When something is free it means it is detached from anything else and other things can not affect it .
Yeah people want "free will" but can't deny the consequences or effects of certain choices which also includes future choices. Why should an free will action have a consequence or a effect?
One new idea I have is to combine Stephen Wolfram's idea of computational irreducibility which means that the future cannot be predicted even for many simple systems, with the idea of strong emergence. So that free will is deterministic yet not in the mechanical sense of Laplace but rather as a part of the universe developing into the future, of which our sense of free will is a necessary part.
@@saimbhat6243 One problem with strong emergence, that events are more than just a result of the past, is likely difficult if not impossible to verify with experiments.
Hard to follow with such heavy presence of filler words, but I'll take it. Imo, I wish the speaker had a few practice sessions before giving his talk, to make him more confident. If you've been binging on other YT philosophy channels and jump to here, the difference in quality is night and day.
Just because we are part of the environment doesn't mean the environment determines what we will do. Just because we are a whole made up of many smaller parts doesn't mean those smaller parts determine what we do. At our level of organization, made up of the intricate parts we have, as part of the intricate environment in which we live, we possess the ability to remember the past and anticipate the future and consider options and ponder their consequences and make real time choices accordingly. We, at the intersection of potent parts and wholes, are the even more potent decision makers and doers. Thus we have free will.
Have you read Behave by Sapolsky? No, we are not making any choices. The brain is doing it motivated by factors like hormones, genetics, indoctrination, environment, circumstances, memories, experience ....
Since we are part of your own environment we don't have the possibility to be free. You are determined by your environment and surroundings. You create you character and personality in your early stages of life, i mean in the first few years ( this is science) and this will infact affect the choices you make and the way you experience the world. Are you responsible for that? I don't think so. You might think that you can change your personality but that's not entirely true. In order to do that you need also external and environmental inputs and some people just doesn't have the possibility do have them. Our microbioms changes as we change our diet. If you eat junk food a proliferation of bacteria will happen in our gut and those bacteria will be asking for more food like that. You will be more likely to eat junk food for example and this is not a decision made by that totality of your being. Lastly: we know something is wrong only when it is already happened. How can we determine whether or not something could have be gone differently if we only know that that's the way the story went? I mean: if Napoleon hadn't fought at Waterloo, he wouldn't have been exiled right? But he did and that's the only thing we know. He did so how can we demonstrate that things could have gone in a different way? We can't because we only know that thing happened that way. We can logically demonstrate that things happened because they just happen but we can't demonstrate that the past could have been different because it's simply not gone different. You only have a limited amount of skills, time, energy, knowledge etc in a certain moment and you act with what you have but with more skill you could have done something better... But you didn't have those skill so you did the better thing with the given skills at the moment.
Our ability to remember the past and anticipate the future is also part of that environment. It's already factored in. The reason we can remember the past is because our circumstances made us remember it in exactly the way we are programmed to do it. The reason we can anticipate the future is because our circumstances allow us to make predictions in exactly the way we are programmed to do it. We make predictions/decisions based on our experience (past circumstances) + a combination of rationality and instincts. All those things are circumstantial. We are programmed by our circumstances... we are entirely determined by external stimuli + internal stimuli that are, on themselves, determined by the experience of our ancestors that are part of our evolutionary history and shaped our genetic makeup. You act the way you want.. but what you want is already deterministic. Your brain is a deterministic computer. Of course you cannot really predict your own behavior yourself, but that doesn't mean it's not deterministic, it just means your brain & decision-making processes are too complex for you yourself to understand. If our brain was simple then we probably would be too stupid to understand it anyway... your brain cannot contain a copy of itself to analyze itself properly, since having that knowledge would already change it, so it wouldn't be the same brain anymore. That's why we experience the naive illusion of free will. but it's just an illusion born out of our own inability to predict ourselves with any level of accuracy.
Not sure why this was recommended since I haven't watched y'all's videos in a hot minute, but as usual, I'm gonna keep editing my comment to take notes and give opinions, which I really don't expect anyone else to read. I like the free will question but I personally think that at the end of the day, it's not a yes or no thing. Like, "does water taste blue?" You could try to answer that for hours but more as an exercise in reasoning (color theory, how media impacts taste, different types of water, lighting, how we perceive color as representing blah blah blah) than because you can get to a definitive answer. Bc everything a person is is at least initially influenced by things out of their control, starting with birth and only getting more anxiety-inducing from there. 😂 Any choice we make isn't necessarily predetermined by something or someone else, but it's determined by [x amount of things outside of ourselves] and [x amount of things internal or otherwise personal to us, how we reason things out, emotions etc]. The choices we make are within this framework of a world that we did not ourselves create, and that's why moral reasoning is so messy and cool and weird - because morality can't exist in a vacuum. The falling man can't be moral or immoral because he can't affect anyone but himself, and he has no point of reference to consider himself an individual with choice at all, does he? Anyway, that's probably off topic. Either our choices are influenced by nothing but ourselves, making them random and disconnected from everything and everyone, and therefore have no moral quality - or they're influenced by outside forces, in which case they can be examined and questioned and criticized and changed. Basically I think of free will as an apparent force - we talk about it as a convenient way to refer to the phenomenon of reasoning and choice, because who wants to give that disclaimer every time we mention a choice every single day? And if we don't have that mental shortcut, if we have to keep defining free will constantly, it's just going to impede any deeper questions into who makes choices and why - or who doesn't and why. But idk, as a kid I was raised Christian and so I did get some of the basics of calvinist predestination as food for thought. Again, it's complicated and neat to think about, but the end result isn't something we can change, so it's not a practical question; it's just, well, philosophical lol. I will say, I don't personally buy into multiuniverse theory, or at least the pop culture one of every choice making a branching timeline. The dice rolls a certain way because of gravity and wind and the table surface. We make certain choices for a million complex reasons. But that has been unexpectedly comforting to me when I'm trying to accept that I don't have power to change the past or to just make the universe fit my needs. I can tell myself, "In no reality would I have ever done [x]" or "If [y] happens, it will always have been going to happen, and it will always have happened." That sounds like it's devaluing my own choices, but it's not - I still do my best. Instead it makes things feel a little more solid - reminding myself that I'm dealing with an external reality that isn't swayed by me feeling guilty about what I should have done or wishing hard enough for something to happen soon. I feel like that gives my choices more meaning, y'know? That they are actions with permanent consequences. It feels much weirder to think that every time I choose not to hold my breath, that my act of breathing is creating an entire new universe. Man, maybe I don't even need to watch videos. Maybe I just need to journal and feel ever-so-smart. Edit - I'm struck at the intro and how it uses "we." It's not necessarily wrong, but who "we" are seems important - this is talked about as a universal problem but these seem to be very narrowly defined by a certain cultural understanding of the world
"Keep in mind that, just because there might be negative practical consequences - supposedly negative practical consequences - for some view, that doesn't mean it's false." ONCE MORE FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK Again, with my upbringing, I still get baffled at people accusing others of wanting to blame people and send them to h*ll (idk what youtube censors). As an adult, I think that's often true. But as a kid who only knew that ideology, it felt awful - I have OCD about religious stuff and guilt and everything, and some symptoms were from my knowing someone was going to h*ll and being unable to stop it. If you truly believe something unpleasant and then act on those beliefs, that doesn't mean you love anything about that situation. It can force you into things that definitely feel wrong in the moment but which you are forced to do as the moral option. I'm sure this background influences my beliefs now lol. I know you can spend decades living in one world and then bam, suddenly everything you know and feel is wrong and you've got to figure it all out from scratch. But yeah, this is true for just plain old logic reasons. Not talking about philosophical possibilities because it feels icky in our tummy is fine but also means we are intentionally not seeing the whole picture, either. And sometimes to get to what you really believe is true, you gotta grit your teeth and let yourself consider some beliefs that you don't like, to weigh them on their own merit.
Man, one of the reasons I love philosophy is because it seems to dredge up all these hypotheticals I come up with over time and take them seriously. When I found out how people with memory loss will repeat the same actions over and over each day, that absolutely influenced how I think of the world - and the mechanism of rewinding the universe and pressing play again. And some of these things are just from car rides when you're 8 and bored and wonder how you could tell if everyone around you was actually a robot that could perfectly mimic humanity. I just. I love it. Very hard to bs or half*ss your way through philosophy if you're thinking about all this stuff constantly. Edit - not to pretend that I came up with all this previously lmao. Just that at some point when you're thinking about this, it gets put on the backburner and then ignored, because you can't figure it out easily and you have other stuff to do. And it seems like you're the only one in the world who wonders or cares about it. And then philosophy is like, no, we're gonna take those hypotheticals you came up with and "yes-and" them to infinity.
I think that strictly speaking, we do have some control over our desires. But that doesn't really matter for the point, because you could get into an infinite recursion of "the desire to change your desires" lol
Rolling my eyes at the agent stuff. you know it's accurate if they made a whole category for us, how the rules don't apply to us, and that it doesn't really make sense except for how it would be a lot more comfy if we just toss out the entire ideological framework when it comes to any aspect that we don't like. The I'm A Special Boy clause Edit: ah and the famous proof, the "well it makes sense to TODDLERS" argument
OK, gotta say, if we're appealing to science. I'm not a scientist. I do have a BS in psychology. And boy, free will did get me thinking about the parallels to how personality (and intelligence) is researched. Because everybody's got their own idea of how to measure it, and then it turns out that whatever that tool measures, all you can substantially say for sure is that it sure does measure that thing. If that thing is personality or intelligence, well, that's pretty iffy. What I mean is that, unless something changes at the graduate level or there was a breakthrough in the last few years that I'm not aware of (which may very well be true but I also kinda doubt), these things only get fuzzier and less set in stone the closer you look at them. Edit - Not to say that the tests have no predictive or useful quality - although in my own experience, intelligence/personality tests fall into two camps... the "astrology/cosmo quiz" type where it categorizes you in a broad way that applies to everyone, or the "predictive of success" tests that reinforce preexisting biases in the system (if you're successful at taking an academic test that requires fluent english, a science based background, and understanding how to prioritize your time when taking standardized test, then you're likely to do well in an environment of native english speakers working in a school or field with a science focus, and you may be pretty good at gaming the system to get a promotion) i was able to go to school for free due to my SAT scores, so I usually joke (?) that I was great at standardized tests, so I was allowed to go study how standardized tests don't matter. heckuva world we're living in. but yknow it's been a long time already, so someone with a deeper understanding of these topics than like 2 undergrad courses will probably be able to school me on this
The world ( that means the universe) is a stochastic system and life is a brownian movement. And despite the fact some basic laws seem to be applying across space and time to all physical objects ( that includes living objects...with life having been described by some as a contradiction to the universal entropy principle...if analyzed separarately from the system that contains it) , like any other concept, free ( will ) needs to be analyzed as related to its metacontext.
The word ”free” in ”free will” doesn’t add much. ”Free” from what? Your genes? Your upbringing, memories and all your experiences? Your friends, your dog and your wife? What do you want to be free from? If you were free from all of these you would just be a mad dog running around without direction. If that is ”free will” I don’t want it.
Yeah, I came to this argument a while back. Even if we take the easier "negative" sense of freedom, as in "freedom-from" it still ends up being a two-place relation. You can quantify over a variable to kind of smother it out and leave you with something that looks like a one-place predicate i.e. "for all y x is free from y" or "there is a y s.t. x is free from y", but if you choose the former, you have to end up saying some silly things like "something can be free from itself" which doesn't make sense causally - meaning you cannot say of anything that it is free, and the latter one ends up being specious since there are things that bear no relation to other things at all, so you'd be forced to say everything is free.
@@Eta_Carinae__ Yes, ”free will” is the same as ”free from yourself”. From a political standpoint ”freedom from” and ”freedom to” make sense but the whole debate is about which conflicting positive rights (freedom to) and negative rights (freedom from) should be granted to each citizen and non-citizen. If you can draw a line between those that convinces everyone then you solve politics :D
@@smolderingtitan Many philosophical problems arise simply because of fuzzy definitions and differences in terminology that don’t actually mean in practice. If you haven’t I recommend that you read William James ”Pragmatism II” where some men in a forrest argue over a squirrel. It’s great :) If free will is simply being able to physically perform an action among many then any animal with sufficient limbs qualifies. Even a robot or a computer program may have free will.
Circa 3:00: if one had 'really good reasons' to A, as supposed, the reflective question posed comes down to: 'Could you have done something unreasonable, viz., not-A?' If that sort of leeway is a necessary condition of free will, Scotistic voluntarism is true. The will cannot be free unless it is subject to no authority, not even Reason. But why would anyone want to be free from Reason? Why would one consider freedom a matter of being able to violate one's own nature- Rationality? Freedom is being unhindered by Violence and Ignorance, so as to be able to deliberatively realize Happiness. RFGA, Ph.D.
Even if in a highly complex closed system with predictable elements, chaos can erupt. There is no absolute knowledge system, there is no God. To have free will (material or spiritual) doesn’t mean that we can order the system’s end outcome. We just can add input in the system, give it a momentum or change it locally and temporarily but we don’t control the outcome (it’s a probability). People generalize and extrapolate determinism and stay quiet on chaos and incompleteness theories, which are more approximate to our reality. We don’t live in a hothouse life, we live in a Pynchonesque entropic world.
Option A) we get free will so we responsible for all = look at your life= not good. Option B) we don't get free will so we can not change a thing =look at your life= not good. Option C) who cares ? Do you really need looking for something which doesn't exist but in your mind. Life's too short.
The notion of free will defines our social interactions, legal system, and essential all foundations of modern society. I think we ought to adapt society to the reality of life without free will.
To me (an uneducated troglodyte) it seems like splitting hairs. Either we are a part of *god and must do what WE will or.. we are a subsystem in an ever-elaborating program that will play out across time to an indeterminate end. But either way the outcome will be the same. Does that make sense? I’m trying to sound smart 😄
Everything is cause and effect. That doesn't mean we don't have free will. Our free will determines our nuances, and the 'devil is in the details'. Accurate philosophy is simply impossible because whatever 'the truth' is, is circular, recursive, and impossible to understand. While I do agree that I started using heroin in 2001 simply because it was illegal (cause and effect), I still made the choice to do so. We simple haven't been educated properly about the nature of duality, and the unity of opposites.
@@TheKingWhoWins Kant calls the dilemma an "antinomy," meaning that both options are reasonable, so we can't tell which is correct. One way to envision this is to see that the Will is more primary (ontologically prior) than the Understanding, so we can never know if our answer/understanding to the question of free will comes from us freely or if it was pre-determined that we would answer it that way.
@@mariaradulovic3203 Thank you for pointing this out to me. Sincerely. I have two thoughts: (1) Of course, Kant believed in free will; it was the cornerstone of his ethics; the antinomies appear in a critique of pure reason. Kant is the original phenomenologist. (2) Harris & Sapolsky equivocate when they claim "contracausal" free will does not count as free will.