Sam Harris: "A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings." Lauren Southern: "You only feel your shackles when you move." Someone else whose name I have forgotten: "Happiness is not about doing what you love - it's about always loving what you do."
Compatibilism is based upon two simple empirical observations. (1) We objectively observe reliable cause and effect in all events (determinism). (2) We objectively observe ourselves and others choosing for themselves what they will do (free will). So, it would be paradoxical to suggest that these two facts somehow contradict each other. And that is what the longstanding debate is, a paradox. A paradox is a self-induced hoax created by one or more false suggestions. The key false suggestion in the debate is the notion that reliable causation is some form of constraint, something that we somehow need to be free of. And this creates a paradox, because every freedom we have, to do anything at all, REQUIRES reliable cause and effect. Are we free to walk? Yes. Because gravity reliably causes us to remain upon the surface of the earth, and because we are equipped with the reliable physical mechanisms, muscles, bones, tendons, nerves, to lift one foot in front of us and shift our weight forward while maintaining our balance, and then do the same with the other foot. Without reliable cause and effect, we could never reliably cause any effect, and would have no freedom to do anything at all. What about universal causal necessity/inevitability? What's the big deal? The truth is that what we will inevitably do is exactly identical to us just being us, choosing what we choose, and doing what we do. And that is NOT a meaningful constraint. It's basically what we would have done anyway. It is not causation generally, but rather specific causes that constrain our freedom to do what we want. Each use of the terms "free" or "freedom", to be meaningful, must implicitly or explicitly refer to some meaningful and relevant constraint (something that we can actually be "free from" or "free of"). For example: 1. We set the bird free (from its cage). 2. We enjoy freedom of speech (free from political censorship). 3. The bank is offering a free toaster (free of charge) to anyone opening a new account. 4. I participated in Libet's experiment of my own free will (free of coercion and undue influence). In none of those uses of "free" is causation "in general" ever implied. Only specific causes can constrain us. The bird still requires general causation in order for him to fly, otherwise flapping his wings would have no reliable effect. So, there are at least three IMPOSSIBLE freedoms: "freedom from causation", "freedom from oneself", and "freedom from reality". Because these things are impossible, no use of the terms "free" or "freedom" can ever validly imply any one of them. Because it cannot, it does not. Therefore, "free will" never has, nor ever could, imply freedom from general causation. Fortunately, that's not what most people mean when they use the term "free will". Most people use "free will" to refer to cases where a person decides for themselves what they WILL do, while FREE of coercion and other forms of undue influence (mental illness, hypnosis, manipulation (as in the neural implant in your example), authoritative command, etc.). And this is the definition used when assessing a person's moral or legal responsibility for their acts. Several studies have demonstrated that this is the definition that people ordinarily use: www.brown.uk.com/brownlibrary/nahmias.pdf www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027714001462 link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13164-009-0010-7 Once we get our definitions right, the paradox resolves.
Hey Marvin, I always enjoy seeing your comments on these determinism/free will videos. You are much better at expressing these ideas than I am, plus you are much more patient and methodical in laying out the seemingly obvious reality that people make choices. I have gotten much less understanding of determinists over time since they go through the usual canards about mindless particles controlling your mind or that your brain is a computer, or like you pointed out, expecting to be free from the physical restraints of reality. I know that in the end they are just going to assert their article of faith, "It's still determined", which pretty much covers any contingency, so I often get snarky and don't bother going through the whole chain of reasoning. Throwing pearls before swine, as they say. You are doing good work, but they are impervious to reason. I've come to believe that this seeming irrational thinking from otherwise smart people is motivated by a deep seated need to avoid personal responsibility. Apparently, for some people, it is preferable to pervert the entire language and common sense than regulate their own behavior. It almost makes you wonder how much free will is left inside a human in this state of denial.
"Get in touch with my desire to do X" is a great way of putting it 😁. You still can't control which of your desires you get more in touch with, but you can make more reliable predictions about yourself in terms of "if, then". And that perspective in itself will then exert its influence on you and might change your behaviour for the better. In the meantime, we can only hope we will expose ourselves to, and get exposed to, a sufficient number of "healthy" internal and external stimuli.
I have a question about your view regarding choice 🙋♂(one that I wish I could ask Sam Harris as well, as you seem to have a view point in common). You say: "Although true free will and moral responsibility clearly don't exist, WE CAN CHOOSE WHICH EXTERNAL STIMULI TO RESPOND TO." This is the piece I keep tripping about. How can I choose, if I don't have the true freedom to do so, as my behaviour is determined by the external and internal environment? Now I'm fully on board with the arguments that free will doesn't exist and that we live in a deterministic universe. I love David Deutsch's argument for the deterministic, but not predetermined universe by way of the multiverse reasoning. Whenever choice exists, there is a quantum event which leads to a splitting of possbilities. He argues that we tend to experience the most probable of outcomes - but that all POSSIBLE outcomes must take place in the mamny worlds. Wonderful. It say All probabilities CAN in theory be computed, but which one we experience can't be determined and is simply a matter of But that still doesn't explain to me, how I get to choice, if free will doesn't exist. Am I getting it right, that Sam Harris might define choice simply as the junction where multiple behaviors can be elicited without an external agent taking away my choice? For example, who I am going to spend time with today, is my choice, constrained by who is available, who comes to mind and who I have kept good enough relationships with to meet for a coffee? And whether I hang out with my drunkard soccer friends or my driver entrepeneurial buddies can have huge implications for my coming years (a night spent engaging in criminal activities vs. making the buiz connection of my life). If I get it right, then according to Sam Harris that qualifies as a choice. But I am not free in making it, because as I observe my thoughts I can maximally witness the needle landing on any of the choices. So far, we might still be in the same boat? If yes, then I can clarify - the part that I stumbled over in this particluar video of yours Ben is that you write 'we can choose'. Which implies the ability, the freedom to choose. Whenever I listen to Sam, I notice that he is very careful using phrases like 'choices are essential and shape our future' but is unlikely to say 'we can choose to do better or worse things'. Do you know what I mean here? Sorry for the lengthy comment - love the work you're doing, it's helping me massively to sharpen my understanding. Thank you Ben, Aaron
way late here. Freedom is not a state of true or false. At least depending on how you view freedom. Let's assume that freedom (and by extension free will) can exist. Similar to the ego we can try and dissect when freedom stops. Let's also say that you really like your neighbors new car. Technically you can steal the car of your neighbor. But social norms and laws are set in place to stop you from doing so. In fact doing so will definitely lead to you getting fined or jailed. Are you a free person before you have stolen that car? Some people might say you are free to steal that car but you aren't free from consequences. But the question is, do you agree or disagree that you are free in that situation? Furthermore. Let's say you life in a society that allows you to get and drive any car that you want. Are you more free than the other version that doesn't live in the society that prohibits you from taking and driving any car you want? If you say you are more free in one thought experiment than the other we have proven that you -- at least internally -- accept that freedom is a gradient. I personally extrapolate from that that free will also possibly exists on a gradient. Intrusive thoughts, external inputs, etc are all actors impressing onto you an idea of "what to do now". But your free will dictates which of those inputs you want to act upon. You might be less free in a world where determinism is existent, but the compatibilist posits that the idea that "A is true" does not mean "B is not true" A (Free Will) is not necessarily in contradiction with B (Determinism). And vice versa. The one main reason I ascribe to determinism myself is that it correlates the most with everything we know so far. We also cannot prove or disprove determinism or free will. Which makes both not falsifiable and thus illogical. Let's assume we can travel back in time. We set up an experiment where one person has to choose between Vanilla and Chocolate. We repeat the same test in time hundreds of times. We get 70% vanilla and 30% chocolate. Have we just proven free will? No. Because traveling back in time might have just given us a new roll of the dice. And the person we are testing might just be 70% likely to choose vanilla. The person might still not have exerted any kind of free will. Determinism is also not proven. Because the person could just be more likely to chose Vanilla but the person might also be just choosing out of their own free will. To me this thought experiment is enough to think that both determinism and free will are somewhat dubious concepts that we don't understand fully.
I think there is a primitive question that is compatible with many philosophical questions: can we know what we do not know? This question has many answers because of one, and only one, ability of the mind: categorization. In journalism and history this ability is displayed by the use of the term "fact". In science this ability is displayed by the term "measurement". Categorization is what human wills in Nature rely on to "survive". Consciousness by itself will sense hot and cold and will register pain from each. The differentiation comes from the human presence and consciousness. Hot and cold starts with the human senses. After humans attained, acquired or were induced into language this ability, categorization, took on a conceptual use. It became a matter of linguistic definition forgetting its perceptual origins. Categories are only assembled by human wills in the world. If a computer or "A.I." can show any ability in this department, can invent valid categories, then something will have been achieved. The issue of compatibilism or any other philosophical jargon is does it have its origin in nature or just in human nature, which is part of nature. If we can know in the future (even though we don't know now) then new categories must be involved, mustn't they?
I don’t think moral responsibility can really be attributed based on logic. If someone commits a crime because they had a tumor in their brain, people would say the criminal isn’t guilty. But who isn’t to say the normal brain isn’t a sort of “tumor” in itself? I mean think of it like this: Imagine theres some “superior” race of humans with special brains that make the right choices and act in a morally upright way far more often than we do on average. Now suppose they have a group of babies with a genetic mutation or tumor, (really any brain abnormality) that makes them like us regular humans. Now anything those babies later do wrong will also be attributed to the brain abnormality and they will be absolved of guilt. The same applies to the new race of humans. They might be some dysfunctional version of some even more superior race and so on. I think you can see based on this that moral responsibility is really just a matter of perspective. We are all physical systems and our actions are determined by the natural progression of the systems. Whether those actions are seen as wrong or not just depends what is considered normal in that society, not on some fundamental logical reason.
"We are all physical systems and our actions are determined by the natural progression of the systems." I don't think that individual actions are purely deterministic. I think that there is a range of actions we can choose from determined by past interactions. One may be predisposed toward one action but can choose to act contrary to their predispositions.
@@NoOne-vm2wd I suppose there is a range of actions you could choose from but I think we only see that because we aren’t intelligent enough to process our own brains and predict what we’ll do in the future. I mean the way I see it, a choice is just a battle of desires and if you could sort if measure the strength of those desires you could predict which one people will do
There are three distinct classes of causal mechanisms: physical, biological, and rational. (1) Inanimate objects behave passively, responding to physical forces so reliably that it is as if they were following “unbreakable laws of Nature”. These natural laws are described by the physical sciences, like Physics and Chemistry. A ball on a slope will always roll downhill. (2) Living organisms are animated by a biological drive to survive, thrive, and reproduce. They behave purposefully according to natural laws described by the life sciences: Biology, Genetics, Physiology, and so on. A squirrel on a slope will either go uphill or downhill depending upon where he expects to find the next acorn. (3) Intelligent species have evolved a neurology capable of imagination, evaluation, and choosing. They can behave deliberately, by calculation and by choice, according to natural laws described by the social sciences, like Psychology and Sociology, as well as the social laws that they create for themselves. A naïve Physics professor may suggest that, “Everything can be explained by the laws of physics”. But it can’t. A science discovers its natural laws by observation, and Physics does not observe living organisms, much less intelligent species. Physics, for example, cannot explain why a car stops at a red traffic light. This is because the laws governing that event are created by society. While the red light is physical, and the foot pressing the brake pedal is physical, between these two physical events we find the biological need for survival and the calculation that the best way to survive is to stop at the light. It is impossible to explain this event without addressing the purpose and the reasoning of the living object that is driving the car. This requires nothing that is supernatural. Both purpose and intelligence are processes running on the physical platform of the body’s neurology. But it is the process, not the platform, that causally determines what happens next. We must conclude then, that any version of determinism that excludes purpose or reason as causes, would be invalid. There is no way to explain the behavior of intelligent species without taking purpose and reason into account.
@@randywa but people with such kind of illness don't have free won't but in normal cases people do have the ability to say no, the aliens in this analogy are no different from us despite the fact that they may have more control on their desires.
How can we "choose which external stimuli to respond to" if we don't have the freedom to choose? Wouldn't that choice have been physically determined? Oh wait, I see some else asked this same question 2 years ago and never got a response, never mind.
0:49 "1) An agent is responsible for an action only if the agent could have done otherwise" This is obviously backwards. If you are REALLY in control of your actions, then you will always do the ONE action that you want most. If there are _multiple_ possibilities, then this implies free will is FALSE since we only have ONE top preference. For free will to be true, there must be one and only one possible outcome: the action that the brain most wants to perform at that time.
On the assumption you're referring to Ben's notion of freedom at the end of the video, if you can't stop having junk food this simply means that abstaining from junk food is not an option available to you. But, presumably, you still have myriad options in your life. The freedom of options is ultimately a freedom that is hypothetical. You could hypothetically pick option A or B if we assume that at the macro level there are no obvious constraints that would rule out one of those options. Of course, whatever you actually end up choosing is still determined, but that determination was made between a plurality of options that, at a macro level, were very much possible. At the level of my lived experience, I can choose to brush my teeth or wash my face first thing after waking up in the morning. There are no obvious constraints at the macro level that would prohibit me from picking either option, therein lies the type of freedom. At a more reductive level, say, the level of the operation of neurons in my brain, the option will be decided by the causal conditions present. A flow chart or a decision tree in programming is an excellent analogy. We can see that, on paper, multiple logical pathways exist for a given process. The pathway taken is ultimately decided by the truth value (is or is not), and at no point in the decision tree is a choice freely willed, but there is still value in appraising the possible pathways despite the fact that only one will be deterministically chosen. In like fashion, reviewing our multiplicity of options in life may, for some, constitute a kind of value they'd call freedom. In our ignorance of the future, we have the sense that things could go either way. If pre-determinism is false (while causal determinism remains true), events really could go either way, at least until the point of determination is reached and other possibilities are extinguished.
I guess maybe its not much about morality, but its more about how much one can resist temptation for doing cruel things without becoming devoted to a deity or something.
But are you in control of your decision to get rid of the junk food or not? Depending on your nature and past experiences (neither of which you have full control of), you will make one decision or another
I don't like how compatibilism, or specifically the notion of free will, tries to take monopoly over morality. Surely there's other conceptions of free will that can have morality too. Even causally determinist ones.
Hey there I really like what you cover in this channel but I'm not native English speaker can I ask you to use more simple worlds and speak slower so I can understand it better
Compatibalism is an attempt to bridge a category gap. We are absolutely not free and everything in the universe is infinitely causal. However, we may Feel free to the extent we are ignoring of causality.
Sam Harris: "A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings."
Lauren Southern: "You only feel your shackles when you move."
Someone else whose name I have forgotten: "Happiness is not about doing what you love - it's about always loving what you do."
Compatibilism is based upon two simple empirical observations. (1) We objectively observe reliable cause and effect in all events (determinism). (2) We objectively observe ourselves and others choosing for themselves what they will do (free will). So, it would be paradoxical to suggest that these two facts somehow contradict each other. And that is what the longstanding debate is, a paradox. A paradox is a self-induced hoax created by one or more false suggestions.
The key false suggestion in the debate is the notion that reliable causation is some form of constraint, something that we somehow need to be free of. And this creates a paradox, because every freedom we have, to do anything at all, REQUIRES reliable cause and effect. Are we free to walk? Yes. Because gravity reliably causes us to remain upon the surface of the earth, and because we are equipped with the reliable physical mechanisms, muscles, bones, tendons, nerves, to lift one foot in front of us and shift our weight forward while maintaining our balance, and then do the same with the other foot. Without reliable cause and effect, we could never reliably cause any effect, and would have no freedom to do anything at all.
What about universal causal necessity/inevitability? What's the big deal? The truth is that what we will inevitably do is exactly identical to us just being us, choosing what we choose, and doing what we do. And that is NOT a meaningful constraint. It's basically what we would have done anyway.
It is not causation generally, but rather specific causes that constrain our freedom to do what we want. Each use of the terms "free" or "freedom", to be meaningful, must implicitly or explicitly refer to some meaningful and relevant constraint (something that we can actually be "free from" or "free of"). For example:
1. We set the bird free (from its cage).
2. We enjoy freedom of speech (free from political censorship).
3. The bank is offering a free toaster (free of charge) to anyone opening a new account.
4. I participated in Libet's experiment of my own free will (free of coercion and undue influence).
In none of those uses of "free" is causation "in general" ever implied. Only specific causes can constrain us. The bird still requires general causation in order for him to fly, otherwise flapping his wings would have no reliable effect.
So, there are at least three IMPOSSIBLE freedoms: "freedom from causation", "freedom from oneself", and "freedom from reality". Because these things are impossible, no use of the terms "free" or "freedom" can ever validly imply any one of them. Because it cannot, it does not.
Therefore, "free will" never has, nor ever could, imply freedom from general causation.
Fortunately, that's not what most people mean when they use the term "free will". Most people use "free will" to refer to cases where a person decides for themselves what they WILL do, while FREE of coercion and other forms of undue influence (mental illness, hypnosis, manipulation (as in the neural implant in your example), authoritative command, etc.).
And this is the definition used when assessing a person's moral or legal responsibility for their acts. Several studies have demonstrated that this is the definition that people ordinarily use:
www.brown.uk.com/brownlibrary/nahmias.pdf
www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027714001462
link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13164-009-0010-7
Once we get our definitions right, the paradox resolves.
Hey Marvin, I always enjoy seeing your comments on these determinism/free will videos. You are much better at expressing these ideas than I am, plus you are much more patient and methodical in laying out the seemingly obvious reality that people make choices. I have gotten much less understanding of determinists over time since they go through the usual canards about mindless particles controlling your mind or that your brain is a computer, or like you pointed out, expecting to be free from the physical restraints of reality. I know that in the end they are just going to assert their article of faith, "It's still determined", which pretty much covers any contingency, so I often get snarky and don't bother going through the whole chain of reasoning. Throwing pearls before swine, as they say. You are doing good work, but they are impervious to reason. I've come to believe that this seeming irrational thinking from otherwise smart people is motivated by a deep seated need to avoid personal responsibility. Apparently, for some people, it is preferable to pervert the entire language and common sense than regulate their own behavior. It almost makes you wonder how much free will is left inside a human in this state of denial.
@@caricue Thanks!
Paradox only exists in language, never in reality.
@@havenbastion Exactly.
How do we account for people like Charles Whitman?
"Get in touch with my desire to do X" is a great way of putting it 😁. You still can't control which of your desires you get more in touch with, but you can make more reliable predictions about yourself in terms of "if, then". And that perspective in itself will then exert its influence on you and might change your behaviour for the better. In the meantime, we can only hope we will expose ourselves to, and get exposed to, a sufficient number of "healthy" internal and external stimuli.
I have a question about your view regarding choice 🙋♂(one that I wish I could ask Sam Harris as well, as you seem to have a view point in common).
You say: "Although true free will and moral responsibility clearly don't exist, WE CAN CHOOSE WHICH EXTERNAL STIMULI TO RESPOND TO."
This is the piece I keep tripping about. How can I choose, if I don't have the true freedom to do so, as my behaviour is determined by the external and internal environment?
Now I'm fully on board with the arguments that free will doesn't exist and that we live in a deterministic universe. I love David Deutsch's argument for the deterministic, but not predetermined universe by way of the multiverse reasoning. Whenever choice exists, there is a quantum event which leads to a splitting of possbilities. He argues that we tend to experience the most probable of outcomes - but that all POSSIBLE outcomes must take place in the mamny worlds. Wonderful. It say All probabilities CAN in theory be computed, but which one we experience can't be determined and is simply a matter of
But that still doesn't explain to me, how I get to choice, if free will doesn't exist.
Am I getting it right, that Sam Harris might define choice simply as the junction where multiple behaviors can be elicited without an external agent taking away my choice? For example, who I am going to spend time with today, is my choice, constrained by who is available, who comes to mind and who I have kept good enough relationships with to meet for a coffee? And whether I hang out with my drunkard soccer friends or my driver entrepeneurial buddies can have huge implications for my coming years (a night spent engaging in criminal activities vs. making the buiz connection of my life). If I get it right, then according to Sam Harris that qualifies as a choice. But I am not free in making it, because as I observe my thoughts I can maximally witness the needle landing on any of the choices.
So far, we might still be in the same boat? If yes, then I can clarify - the part that I stumbled over in this particluar video of yours Ben is that you write 'we can choose'. Which implies the ability, the freedom to choose.
Whenever I listen to Sam, I notice that he is very careful using phrases like 'choices are essential and shape our future' but is unlikely to say 'we can choose to do better or worse things'.
Do you know what I mean here?
Sorry for the lengthy comment - love the work you're doing, it's helping me massively to sharpen my understanding. Thank you Ben,
Aaron
way late here.
Freedom is not a state of true or false. At least depending on how you view freedom.
Let's assume that freedom (and by extension free will) can exist.
Similar to the ego we can try and dissect when freedom stops.
Let's also say that you really like your neighbors new car.
Technically you can steal the car of your neighbor.
But social norms and laws are set in place to stop you from doing so.
In fact doing so will definitely lead to you getting fined or jailed.
Are you a free person before you have stolen that car?
Some people might say you are free to steal that car but you aren't free from consequences.
But the question is, do you agree or disagree that you are free in that situation?
Furthermore. Let's say you life in a society that allows you to get and drive any car that you want. Are you more free than the other version that doesn't live in the society that prohibits you from taking and driving any car you want?
If you say you are more free in one thought experiment than the other we have proven that you -- at least internally -- accept that freedom is a gradient.
I personally extrapolate from that that free will also possibly exists on a gradient.
Intrusive thoughts, external inputs, etc are all actors impressing onto you an idea of "what to do now".
But your free will dictates which of those inputs you want to act upon.
You might be less free in a world where determinism is existent, but the compatibilist posits that the idea that "A is true" does not mean "B is not true"
A (Free Will) is not necessarily in contradiction with B (Determinism). And vice versa.
The one main reason I ascribe to determinism myself is that it correlates the most with everything we know so far.
We also cannot prove or disprove determinism or free will.
Which makes both not falsifiable and thus illogical.
Let's assume we can travel back in time.
We set up an experiment where one person has to choose between Vanilla and Chocolate.
We repeat the same test in time hundreds of times.
We get 70% vanilla and 30% chocolate.
Have we just proven free will?
No. Because traveling back in time might have just given us a new roll of the dice.
And the person we are testing might just be 70% likely to choose vanilla.
The person might still not have exerted any kind of free will.
Determinism is also not proven.
Because the person could just be more likely to chose Vanilla but the person might also be just choosing out of their own free will.
To me this thought experiment is enough to think that both determinism and free will are somewhat dubious concepts that we don't understand fully.
I think there is a primitive question that is compatible with many philosophical questions: can we know what we do not know?
This question has many answers because of one, and only one, ability of the mind: categorization.
In journalism and history this ability is displayed by the use of the term "fact". In science this ability is displayed by the term "measurement".
Categorization is what human wills in Nature rely on to "survive". Consciousness by itself will sense hot and cold and will register pain from each. The differentiation comes from the human presence and consciousness. Hot and cold starts with the human senses.
After humans attained, acquired or were induced into language this ability, categorization, took on a conceptual use. It became a matter of linguistic definition forgetting its perceptual origins.
Categories are only assembled by human wills in the world. If a computer or "A.I." can show any ability in this department, can invent valid categories, then something will have been achieved.
The issue of compatibilism or any other philosophical jargon is does it have its origin in nature or just in human nature, which is part of nature. If we can know in the future (even though we don't know now) then new categories must be involved, mustn't they?
I don’t think moral responsibility can really be attributed based on logic. If someone commits a crime because they had a tumor in their brain, people would say the criminal isn’t guilty. But who isn’t to say the normal brain isn’t a sort of “tumor” in itself? I mean think of it like this: Imagine theres some “superior” race of humans with special brains that make the right choices and act in a morally upright way far more often than we do on average. Now suppose they have a group of babies with a genetic mutation or tumor, (really any brain abnormality) that makes them like us regular humans. Now anything those babies later do wrong will also be attributed to the brain abnormality and they will be absolved of guilt. The same applies to the new race of humans. They might be some dysfunctional version of some even more superior race and so on. I think you can see based on this that moral responsibility is really just a matter of perspective. We are all physical systems and our actions are determined by the natural progression of the systems. Whether those actions are seen as wrong or not just depends what is considered normal in that society, not on some fundamental logical reason.
I agree emphatically!
"We are all physical systems and our actions are determined by the natural progression of the systems."
I don't think that individual actions are purely deterministic. I think that there is a range of actions we can choose from determined by past interactions. One may be predisposed toward one action but can choose to act contrary to their predispositions.
@@NoOne-vm2wd I suppose there is a range of actions you could choose from but I think we only see that because we aren’t intelligent enough to process our own brains and predict what we’ll do in the future. I mean the way I see it, a choice is just a battle of desires and if you could sort if measure the strength of those desires you could predict which one people will do
There are three distinct classes of causal mechanisms: physical, biological, and rational.
(1) Inanimate objects behave passively, responding to physical forces so reliably that it is as if they were following “unbreakable laws of Nature”. These natural laws are described by the physical sciences, like Physics and Chemistry. A ball on a slope will always roll downhill.
(2) Living organisms are animated by a biological drive to survive, thrive, and reproduce. They behave purposefully according to natural laws described by the life sciences: Biology, Genetics, Physiology, and so on. A squirrel on a slope will either go uphill or downhill depending upon where he expects to find the next acorn.
(3) Intelligent species have evolved a neurology capable of imagination, evaluation, and choosing. They can behave deliberately, by calculation and by choice, according to natural laws described by the social sciences, like Psychology and Sociology, as well as the social laws that they create for themselves.
A naïve Physics professor may suggest that, “Everything can be explained by the laws of physics”. But it can’t. A science discovers its natural laws by observation, and Physics does not observe living organisms, much less intelligent species.
Physics, for example, cannot explain why a car stops at a red traffic light. This is because the laws governing that event are created by society. While the red light is physical, and the foot pressing the brake pedal is physical, between these two physical events we find the biological need for survival and the calculation that the best way to survive is to stop at the light.
It is impossible to explain this event without addressing the purpose and the reasoning of the living object that is driving the car. This requires nothing that is supernatural. Both purpose and intelligence are processes running on the physical platform of the body’s neurology. But it is the process, not the platform, that causally determines what happens next.
We must conclude then, that any version of determinism that excludes purpose or reason as causes, would be invalid. There is no way to explain the behavior of intelligent species without taking purpose and reason into account.
@@randywa but people with such kind of illness don't have free won't but in normal cases people do have the ability to say no, the aliens in this analogy are no different from us despite the fact that they may have more control on their desires.
I hope this channel will also cover the position of hard incompatibilism (coined by derk pereboom)!
Here trying to get ideas on a topic for my paper.
How can we "choose which external stimuli to respond to" if we don't have the freedom to choose? Wouldn't that choice have been physically determined? Oh wait, I see some else asked this same question 2 years ago and never got a response, never mind.
0:49 "1) An agent is responsible for an action only if the agent could have done otherwise"
This is obviously backwards. If you are REALLY in control of your actions, then you will always do the ONE action that you want most. If there are _multiple_ possibilities, then this implies free will is FALSE since we only have ONE top preference. For free will to be true, there must be one and only one possible outcome: the action that the brain most wants to perform at that time.
What if I can't stop having junk food and I have compulsive disorders?
On the assumption you're referring to Ben's notion of freedom at the end of the video, if you can't stop having junk food this simply means that abstaining from junk food is not an option available to you. But, presumably, you still have myriad options in your life. The freedom of options is ultimately a freedom that is hypothetical. You could hypothetically pick option A or B if we assume that at the macro level there are no obvious constraints that would rule out one of those options. Of course, whatever you actually end up choosing is still determined, but that determination was made between a plurality of options that, at a macro level, were very much possible.
At the level of my lived experience, I can choose to brush my teeth or wash my face first thing after waking up in the morning. There are no obvious constraints at the macro level that would prohibit me from picking either option, therein lies the type of freedom. At a more reductive level, say, the level of the operation of neurons in my brain, the option will be decided by the causal conditions present.
A flow chart or a decision tree in programming is an excellent analogy. We can see that, on paper, multiple logical pathways exist for a given process. The pathway taken is ultimately decided by the truth value (is or is not), and at no point in the decision tree is a choice freely willed, but there is still value in appraising the possible pathways despite the fact that only one will be deterministically chosen. In like fashion, reviewing our multiplicity of options in life may, for some, constitute a kind of value they'd call freedom. In our ignorance of the future, we have the sense that things could go either way. If pre-determinism is false (while causal determinism remains true), events really could go either way, at least until the point of determination is reached and other possibilities are extinguished.
Great video. I'm just wondering. Why are we making the assumption that there is such a thing as morality? I
I guess maybe its not much about morality, but its more about how much one can resist temptation for doing cruel things without becoming devoted to a deity or something.
But are you in control of your decision to get rid of the junk food or not? Depending on your nature and past experiences (neither of which you have full control of), you will make one decision or another
U deserve more subscriber...🙏🏻
I don't like how compatibilism, or specifically the notion of free will, tries to take monopoly over morality. Surely there's other conceptions of free will that can have morality too. Even causally determinist ones.
Hey there I really like what you cover in this channel but I'm not native English speaker can I ask you to use more simple worlds and speak slower so I can understand it better
If you cannot make yourself want what you want to want, freedom is a non-starter.
You already want what you want to want, by definition.
You can also do something you don't want to do, isn't that "being free"...?
Compatibalism is an attempt to bridge a category gap. We are absolutely not free and everything in the universe is infinitely causal. However, we may Feel free to the extent we are ignoring of causality.
"everything in the universe is infinitely causal"
Yes, the universe is deterministic. That doesn't debunk compatibilism 😂