I'm a psychologist (albeit a junior one) and in my time I have come across people who have had some realisation (or sometimes they may say 'epiphany' ... rarely in a positive tone) that they don't have free will. It is very rare that this is based on the realisation that comes from understanding quantum mechanics or differential equations, but simply from learning over time how much of the world around them dictates their choices (or rather, limits them). The crisis that emerges is not one to be sniffed at; how would you feel if you had the thought that nothing was in your control? That you were on a fairground ride that you had never chosen to be in and that whatever curves, splashes (or even horrors) were always going to happen regardless of how much you loved of hated being on it? You are on a fixed rail in a single direction and all you can do is hunker down or throw your hands up in the air. Well, in my very humble opinion, I believe determinism to be the correct answer to the the question of free will, but the challenge is how to then answer the devastated people who, for them, this is hideous, terrible and stripping them of the meaning of their existence. I am kinda fortunate that I am a research psychologist and rarely client/patient/service user/insert-correct-name-here facing but also have the task of being pointed at by people who find out what I do and being ordered to "reveal your secrets!" Well ... from what I have seen: some people who seek out psychology due to past trauma (which is pretty much everyone) can take from this a certain comfort: if this was always going to happen to them, then they had no say and they no part and it was not their fault (which is never is), and sort of ... accept that this was 'fate'. They couldn't have done anything to stop it and absolve themselves of the self-hate and self-blame that is often par of the course for these people. Others become extremely bitter: for them, the fact that this would have always happened to them and that no matter how strong, how resilient, how brave they were, would never have made a difference. The cold, indifferent world would have always won. So, the absence of free-will to the individual (who is probably not a physicist/philosopher/etc.) seems to be more complex than the concept itself, because on our level it really does not matter at all if is exists, but what follows from the question of it. Outside of the noble disciplines of the physical sciences, the real world implications are way (WAY) more significant, and the idea may be thousands of years old, but the actuality of it is so new because the noble(er? 😛) disciplines of the social science are still trying to catch up. Some people may paraphrase the Tolkien quote: "Go not to the psychologists for an answer, for they will say both 'yes' and no'." And .... they have a point. My advice is probably going to be: go to a psychologist if you are seriously considering your existence and the doing so is having detrimental effects on your life. My other advice would be: you have as much free-will now as you did before this video/that appointment/that realisation, and consider what you could do now ... which is almost anything you can imagine. If you want to stop reading this rambling comment: do so! If you want to dress up like a chicken and move to Norway to study pine trees and howl at the moon every night: do so! If you have a choice (real or imagined) then that has to be worth something .... right?
I am genuinely puzzled. If the things that happen were always going to happen, then presumably we have no moral authority to punish murderers, child abusers, thieves etc. They were always going to do what they were going to do? Is that part of what you mean? And victims should just accept that this is just what was always going to happen to them? Except, they might not be able to do so as they were always going to be upset and that won't change unless it is predetermined that it will - in which case, is there really any value in psychologists, therapists and psychiatrists who claim to be want to help people with distress?
It's not worth it to me and that should be fine, I'm so angry when people say there's no reason to. People like yours want to deter me from "dressing up in a chicken suit and go to Norway" if you catch my drift, so there's literally nowhere I can go... Are we not adults here? Do we have to step on eggshells because other people might like the idea? We should have more countries like Switzerland to provide that option to citizens but noooo we're all tax paying piggies so it's in your best interest to keep us around. So to that I'll say, I will exercise the little illusion of freedom to nope the f out. See y'all in the next permutation, it's not gonna be any different but hey at least I tried!
It matters absolutely nothing whether the will is "free" or not. There is a will, a choice and a responsibility. There appear to be good choices and bad choices. The individual carefully weighs the options and makes a decision to the best of his knowledge and belief, and from then on is responsible for the outcome. The mysterious "freedom", which nobody can really explain, makes no difference whatsoever.
The scary answer is to accept the idea of god. That is, to accept as such is to realize that all, including your birth and position in life, is a part of a larger plan. After accepting that notion, cast away all concepts of determinism, and force people to live their life AS IF they had free will, yet knowing they don't. When you have acceptance of a grander plan, you calm down a bunch. Every pain, experience, or preference you have becomes meaningful. You don't know what the outcome will be because you can't compute it. Even so, if you accept that model and keep in mind as you're living your life, you won't fret. You won't fear. You won't experience anger. Hopefully, you can reach a point of rejoice. Knowing that there's a grand plan in motion to raise the consciousness of all gives you something to look forward to. Of course, it's crazy to talk about god on a science channel. Even so, I don't believe they're at odds with each other.
I don’t see free will and determinism as mutually exclusive. Just as many events are out of our control, will or no, the universe floods us with far more data and possibilities than we could ever hope to know or explore. It’s like trying to simulate a far larger computer system on a computer - it’s not possible to process. Each decision, free or not, opens up nearly infinite possibilities. Emergent structures aren’t necessary subject to the same basis of rules their constituent parts follow in much the same way many virtual particles do this physically. TLDR whether you have free will or simply find yourself in the universe/future that is entangled with perceived agency and desire is simply looking at the same complex emergent phenomenon from different viewpoints.
11:31 It perhaps makes sense in the notion that although a photon does not have free will, the uncertainty of chance makes the laws of reality uncertain and through an evolution of this chaos 'free will' exists because it's operating in an environment where the strictness of absolute predictability has opened up space for other things.
There is more to response. And attention than what is in the surface. You must look into all forms of information and audial matrices seemed to be quantum in this subject. Mentally quantum not physically quantum.
Let me abbreviate the organized quantum jump and how it's achieved. Using imagery the mind and audial matrix conformative agreements . As work. Amongst information flowing to constantly change what is experienced consciously in awareness. Having this information removed upon enacting the event is what she expressed as involuntary or nonconcious quantum jumps. They can relate to physical light as matter. Seen through a beings eyes. Percievable boundaries like the connection to holomorphic light and sound and what the eyes are. Contrary to what we "know"
@@bobjohnson1633 there is a vast divide between metaphorical "slavery and imprisonment" and actual "slavery and imprisonment." your decision to not distinguish in this case is suspicious.
When the term was first used, it enabled us to talk about human functioning in terms that made sense to us. "Free" was meaningful because it referred to the experience of deliberating and making a choice among alternatives. But when you take the term "free" serious, it suggests that we are free to do anything we put our minds to. Some reflection shows that this ability is not real for us (despite how he might want to, a prisoner can not flap his wings and fly over the prison wall) so obviously this 'sense of freedom' 'is false. Duh. However, there is still the phenomenon, the experience, of willing something and then acting in order that it comes to pass. The meaning of "free" that most freewillers have in mind is not this radical sense, but simply the obvious sense of being able to consider alternatives in the chain of one's actable actions (physical and mental) and realize one from among those considered. Today, freewill is better understood as just an old name (literally false by today's understandings) used to refer to purposeful, meaningful behavior (it's language, ffs). It doesn't require a violation of physics, it just requires more than one system of physico-chemical control and the means to favor one over the other. One way to do it is to have two systems processing but with them having slightly different clocks or perspectives. The freedom/determinism distinction entirely misses the point.
Double slit? I did that at home with a cat toy and a very fine piece of copper wire. I was almost 60 years old and saw it done when I was a kid. So just 4.5 volts was all it took to totally blow my mind.
The mind is actuall experiencing a " light breeze " This is ALL about, in a sense, parallel universes (or reality more accurately ). My toenails have no choice. Dna mixed with so called " light " frequencies dictate their path. The owner, " me " (not the body,) can choose to ignore them untill they cause disruption to the body. The choice being, " I" create comfort or pain and infection. This principle applies to all " planes of relativity ", both physical and mental, where choice is limited to a cause and effect process, which activates the " authority " of " I ", which is where the next " plane " kicks in, being quantum mechanics. Still in the cause and effect realm, but, as with all planes, more subtle than the previous one. As with the foundation of physics and chemistry, ALL arenas of relativity are predictable, which is why metaphysical prophesies and predictians can be recognised (by those past a certain level...NOT catagarised specifically by the intellect. This is why there is such awareness disparity amongs our " brightest ". Ulimiately the self realized amongst us actually " contract out " of the predictable zone, and simply create. The Creator created creators.
We are all limited by our senses and our interpretation of those sense's, once reality is realized it's too late... Unless you are uninterested about the motives of direction photons are spinning, then you're a demon that needs to be excised from "the" cult..ure
"I'm a physicist, please see a psychologist." This cracked me up! Between the content and Sabine's humour, my poor pea brain can barely take it. I love this channel.
The problem is a misunterstand of what Free Will is. David Hume has an great explanation on this. He even give the example of Man sentenced to death by beheading. He looks at the sharpness of the axe and get terrified. He than knows the executioner never gave up on an hundred previous executions and get equally terrified. The Man doesn't get an mystical Idea of the executioner having an non caused free Will that wiill make him to give up. If there was no causuality than free will would be Impossible. An vicious murderer would be no more guilty of anything than anyone else as the very act of mudering had no cause in his inner persona. We would be as free as an adrift boat that goes with the wind. Truth is our actions become our habits and these Will become our persona.
@@juanausensi499 Appeal to consequence is completely rational. It was later adopted by Kant and embraced by William James pragmatism. For instance. Life does have an purpose is 100% logical. Because If It doesnt than there is no purpose believing It either does or doesnt. Even If the the chance It does was close to zero, the rarionale would still bet It does.
@@fernandoc4741 I have not studied these topics in quite a long time, so forgive my ignorance. Is it possible the reality of a situation (i.e. Whether or not we have free will) is actually irrational or illogical? Does everything need to be rational and logical?
@@Moz4rt08 Logical or Ilogical how? I guess the example gave by Hume of the Man sentenced to death was to show that the very concept of undestetministic free will makes no sense to our minds (the executioner is as terrifing as the sharp Blade). Hume also Denied that reason alone had any Power on our minds. It could only have an Power If It brings us some emoticon (ex fear of the consequence it we take an decision instead of another)
I love videos like this because regardless of whether you agree or not with the presenter, they encourage you to think and ask yourself hard questions about what you actually believe in. So much of what we consume with our eyes and ears nowadays attempts to push an agenda or manipulate rather than stimulate thought and discussion.
What all academics have in common - they occupy themselves with dealing with "intangibles". That is "brain work" - they believe. The handling of the "tangible" part they leave up to those who have to work with their hands for money - not just think. And that of course makes them "the elite".
Agreed. She fully discloses she disagrees with the premise and then gives and honest representation of it anyway. Very great to hear and only lends to wanting to hear more from her.
I also agree. It’s good to have a debate with people with the subjects that she raises in her videos. I have to mention how funny Sabine is as well! 😂😂
The entire purpose of mass media is literally manipulation. It's propaganda in the Bernaysian sense. It's either funded by advertising corporations, NGOs or the government itself. All have an agenda to push 100% of the time and view the media as a great Skinner box.
To me, what I think you are getting at, is, we are influenced by waves of influence that come at us by what we can experience, internal and external, coupled by our current mind set. How our mind is set, determines what we think about anything that comes to mind. And what comes to mind is based on how we feel. What we feel is based on what we experience. Experiences, crates mood shifts, that in the end, creates what we think and do. No free will.
We are like travellers on a train and must go where the rails take us, but we can enjoy the views from the window and the company of our fellow travellers.
"No one lives in the slums because they want to. It's like this train. It can only go where the tracks take it." -Cloud Strife That was my favorite line in Final Fantasy 7. It made me realize the whole game was an exploration into the nature of identity and free will
I don't think we *can* enjoy the views from the window. We *must* enjoy or hate the view, just like we *must* stay on the tracks. Our experience are just as much out of our control, as are our actions. At least that's how I understand it...
You could well be right, although many scientists share this view there are others who hold that we do have either some free will or at least the ability to make responsible decisions and control of our emotions .An excellent book putting the case for that position is "Who's in Charge ? " by the neuroscientist Michael S Gazzaniga .
I had this realisation when I was 12 that every action was was caused by every action before it and so on, and nearly had a breakdown trying to find someone else who understood what I was talking about because none of my classmates or teachers or even older 20 year old friends on the internet at that time did. I didn't know that it was called predeterminism at the time and wasn't until a couple years later that I finally found out. Meanwhile all throughout my 12-14 year old school years, I was losing my mind arguing with both religious and non-religious teachers about how free will didn't exist because of this and it was awful because I thought I was going insane because no one else understood what I was saying.
Right, I believe this too. I had this realisation only recently at 27 now that free will is essentially determinism, as Elon Musk puts it. I think that we just constantly reap the karma of our actions from this and also previous lifetimes and that what we experience in this life is thus very little that is created from our own "free will" in this present life. Because of all this, I think some of the things we may truly want we may not experience until future lifetimes; if we are aware enough to sow the right seeds now that is.
Actually, this kind of determinism was used by Aquinas centuries ago to prove the existence of God. Just google his 5 proofs for the existence of God. It's pretty elementary, and it rests on the beliefs you're describing. One of the nice side effects is that God (in the Christian belief) confers free will on humankind from the get-go.
@@macjeffff The "proofs of god" are not scientific proofs, nor are they literal proofs, they can only be called proofs under a very lenient definition of "proof". The same way a doodle on a piece of paper can function as a proof of concept for something totally unrelated.
@@thearchitect5405 Actually, they are well-known logical proofs. Aquinas is still considered one of the finest logicians of all time. Even if you disagree, you would probably be fascinated by the work. Aquinas's proofs for the existence of God are easy to find. Check them out!
Incredibly well explained and very plausible! In short, what I think you're saying is this: from what we know about the world through physics, it seems impossible to rationally explain free as part of the world. Is this correct? I still find it reasonable not to completely abandon Kant, Nagel etc. who seem to explain free will as something going on outside the physical world. This is because we do not really understand the metaphysics of the world (and we won't ever) or even the completely the physical world. Anyway, your video wipes off a lot of nonsense in the free will discussion with clarity and elegance. Thank you for spreading and promoting rational thinking in social media. Subscribed!
It is possible to understand metaphysics, contrary to your pessimism. Sabine has not, as far as I can tell, ever studied the subject. The reason why you believe metaphysics is incomprehensible is that you do not understood the Perennial philosophy. Few people do, so most share your view. But don't give up hope just yet. At any rate, don't assume nobody understands metaphysics. .
So if we make environmental factors a constant, having your appendix removed will change the number of particles in your body in such a way that it would change the 10^30, thus potentially changing your decision probability?
My Grandfather was something of a philosopher, he was also a coal miner, and a doughboy in WW1. He'd been a few places and seen a lot of trouble and he told me once that a man had about as much free will as a rock in an avalanche. I guess that is really true.
this is very inline with easter philosophy. i love how they go hand in hand with science. unlike the dogmas of Christianity and other biblical religions.
This may help to wrap your head around why you feel like you have free will when you actually don't: You can choose any option you want, but you can only choose the one you want. The one that is the result of the "calculation", as Wittgenstein puts it.
you also can't choose any option, you can only choose something your brain is able to imagine which we know is a gjostabulicism, the philosophical equivalent to a mathematical number set, the set of all ideas and thoughts a person has. All subsequent thoughts have to be derivatives of the person's gjostsbuli, so it can only be expanded by exposure to a different gjostsbuli. And of course you couldn't have predicted I would refer to gjostsbulicism because I made up the word, but the idea I used it to describe is most likely as equally foreign to you as the word so it's fitting.
Decisions are by definition commitments to ones desires. Of course you can only choose the choice you're making because that is what a choice is. This argument doesn't really move the debate anywhere.
You don't "choose" anything. Your brain is a complex system of neurons that makes calculations based on the data its given and comes up with answers, and that's it. The regularity in which the brain comes up with an answer is why people swear they are in control of the system in the first place. There's no free will, and nothing extra is going on but a highly complex biological information computing machine in your skull.
Free will as a [literal] concept makes no sense because it doesn't take into account the factors consistently outside our control. For example, the fact we were born humans, the parents who engaged in coitus to create our embryo, the genetic inheritance from those parents (race, height, IQ, various other predispositions), the environment, our family's socioeconomic status and so on. All of these things contribute to who we are and how we develop, thus from the very moment of our conception free will is impossible. I think that most people don't think too deeply about it and its more a shorthand to describe decision making and thus varying levels of personal accountability. Sure, fine. But determinism accounts for that so its still a misleading term.
I once told my psychotherapist that I didn't believe in free will. He was very frustrated with me at that moment. He might have had a point. Even if we do not have true free will, it might not be psychologically healthy to shape your life around that belief.
That's my issue with determinism. It seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy and you run the risk of a defeatist attitude - but then if we don't have free will you probably can't help yourself ;-) I think decision making is far too complex and determinism (in my view) remains a philosophical rather than a scientific viewpoint - I think a lot of findings and studies have been wildly interpreted to support this viewpoint. Scientists don't like to admit that it is hugely intermixed with philosophy and although some findings are really interesting, they are often used to draw rather far fetched conclusions. But that's just my opinion of course.
@@thesupergreenjudy Not believing in free will does NOT mean that you have a defeatist attitude. As Hossenfelder points out in the video, even absent free will, we still must make choices every day. And these choices have consequences in the real world. If you make a good choice, say, by making a good investment, you will will reap the rewards in form of capital gains (money). And, if you are like most people, that will make you happy because you can now use that money to buy stuff, make more investments, or perhaps share some of the money with family or friends. The same is true for the opposite scenario. A bad investment will make you lose money, unhappy, and less able to indulge yourself or others. In other words, your choices very much matter, not only to you, but also others. Thus, there are still good choices and bad choices. And we have plenty of reason to care about making good choices and avoiding bad ones - even without free will. What the lack of free will implies as regards our choices is merely that we can no longer - or at least should no longer - feel pride of our good choices or guilt for our bad choices. That's because we could not have made any other choices under the circumstances (i.e., the totality of our biological and environmental history). Determinism and lack of free will are incompatible with the notions of credit and blame. We deserve credit or blame for our choices no more than a computer does for its output. The absence of pride/credit and guilt/shame does not entail social chaos or psychological despair. We can, and should, still feel lucky and happy when our choices produce good outcomes, and feel unlucky and unhappy when they do not. And we have every reason to treat others with fairness and kindness rather than inequity and hatred, because what goes around, comes around. In fact, I have treated others BETTER since discovering that I lack free will. That's because I realize that whatever behavior of a person I may dislike is not really up to them. Anyone under exactly the same circumstances (= biological + environmental history) would do exactly the same thing. It makes no sense to blame others for things over which they have no control. Instead of blaming others, I try to think of other - kinder - ways to change their behavior.
@@roberthess3405 it's funny that you still call it "making choices" - I think this whole philosophy is a bit of a con so people don't have to own up to their mistakes and take responsibility. All the research being used to support this idea is essentially twisted to fit this agenda. It's a philosophy, not a hard scientific fact and hence it's just a belief. I can make bad choices and not feel guilty about it. But I can learn from them. I don't need to convince myself that I really had no free will in this. And where do you draw the line? Should a murderer or worse not feel guilty about their choices because they were essentially just doomed to unalive people? What choice did they have? And what's the difference in your book between free choice and free will? I would agree that maybe certain desires or tendencies may not be a choice - the question is, do we really not have any choice whether to act upon it or not? I am not saying that people should be shamed by others but feeling a level of guilt is not as horrible as society would like to have us believe. Most of the time it's just that our feelings or lack of feeling of guilt is misdirected . If lack of free will means "I am hungry and there is nothing I can do about it but I choose to have a healthy meal" I agree with you. But that's not what I would call "lack of free will". It's just a biological response. But if you mean "the fact that I chose pizza over a salad" is due to me not having free will I disagree. Now other desires may also be harder to understand like the desire to kill people - is that because it's a trauma response? Again, a cause and effect of something we may have experienced in childhood? Do you think someone should choose killing people over choosing therapy? Just trying to understand your definition better
@@thesupergreenjudy You raise some good questions. Let me try to respond to some of them. First of all, Hossenfelder's view on free will is not a philosophy, but based on hard science. Everything we know about science, including neuroscience, tells us that humans have no free will, i.e., their choices are predetermined by their biological and environmental history. If proponents of free will have a problem with the conclusions supported by science, they have to show why those conclusions are faulty. In science, this means they must offer empirical evidence that is at odds with the conclusion that our choices are predetermined by our biological and environmental history. I am aware of only one such attempt, and do not find it convincing, but see for yourself (See the book "Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will" by Kevin J. Mitchell). In other words, the burden of proof that - contrary to establised science - there IS free will is on the proponents of free will. Learning from our bad choices: You are absolutely right that we can learn from our bad choices without feeling guilty and "without convincing ourselves that we have no free will." In fact, that's what we all do all the time, and that's a good thing. We have evolved to learn from our past mistakes. But that doesn't mean that if we fail to learn from our past mistakes, we could have done otherwise and should feel guilty - guilty in the sense that we violated a moral law. Yes, this seems counterintuitive when applied to a cold-blooded murderer, but, well, the lack of free will simply isn't intuitive. Think of it this way: As you correctly pointed out, a murderer SHOULD feel some sort of regret or other compassionate sensation for having killed another human being and hurting those left behind. That's what any sane person would feel. If a murderer doesn't generate any regret or compassion, this just goes to show that they are suffering from a mental problem - a problem of the brain. In other words, they are insane. Though we have reason to dislike, even hate, and lock up, and perhaps even execute, such a person, just as we would respond if the victim had been killed by a bear or a tiger, the murderer, ultimately, had no more free choice in the matter than a bear or a tiger would. For the same reasons, a person with an inclination to kill other people certainly has reason to seek therapy. That's what any sane person would do. But, almost by definition, a person inclined to kill for no particular reason is NOT sane. And that insanity is not something the person chose or chooses, but rather a mental condition arose due to circumstances over which the insane person had and has no control (traumatic childhood, neurological disorder, etc.). Having said that, I do realize that the absence of free will remains highly counterintuitive. It FEELS like we do have a choice when deciding whether to eat salad rather than pizza. It does to me, too. But our intuitions are highly unreliable when it comes understanding the inner workings of our brains, or any other highly complex matters (it certainly SEEMS that the Earth is flat!). Intuitions evolved tens of thousand of years ago when we lived as hunter-gatherers in small groups. Understanding the absence of free will and such matters was simply not necessary at that time. Nor was any scientific thinking. That's why most of us, myself included, are not really good at science, "out of the box." Science is really hard and, yes, tedious. It's the opposite of a simple, entertaining story. The bottom line: Don't trust your intuitions when thinking about free will. If you cannot manage that, well, don't blame yourself. You didn't choose your intuitions or any other part of your brain. ;-)
@@thesupergreenjudy I must agree with your existentialist take. Sabine said it herself, she still makes choices in her day, she just has found a powerful way of rationalizing failure. I'm with you Green Judy, Super Edition, I try to transmute these weak coping mechanisms into powerful methods of healing, failure is a lesson, and the game is to figure out how to fail frugally, gaining lessons more cheaply and affordably. I wonder how many existentialist authors Sabine has read, because she's weighing in on a convo that is over a millennia old, and like you said, has actually nothing to do with physics, but is more in the psychic's realm. I feel like free will is a beach/coastline between the past, or the continent of fate, abutting the ocean of possibilities. To say we don't have free will, in an era where humans are changing the climate drastically, and contributing to a mass extinction event as complete as we've ever seen in this planet's history, to stand in this time and declare you have no free will sounds like a spiritual incantation for absolution more than a testable or scientific physics hypothesis. I can empathize with the desire for absolution, to shed the excess weight, and level up, vibrate at a faster frequency and shorter wavelength, I love this desire, t'is the fire desire of the journey, yet we can't cheat ourselves/our world of the atonement needed for the forgiveness we crave, even as atheists, one must admit the quantum physics states that all matter is connected, separation is only an illusion in a very physical way, our world is filled with dimensions we don't understand as humans, and those dimensions are filled with life that we don't understand. It is what it is, UFOs are real, the Pentagon admits it, we live in a unique era in human history, to have an immense platform and declare "I don't have free will," tells me, ah I still lack wisdom, yet maintain ego. One must unplug from enough matrixes to be able to find that free will, I agree it does seem there are a lot of humans without free will out there, happy to play the NPC role and wear bland clothes and submit to a bland life. Me, I used UA-cam to learn guitar as well as anyone, now I shred strings and melt faces, and I learned more off UA-cam in 2 days than I did with traditional lessons and books for 2 decades. This is what I mean about the faster vibration, higher frequency, we must level up and learn art and architecture, liberation philosophy, ways and means of community organization, how cannabis oil (RSO) cures cancer and many other ailments, how sugar batteries are 10x more powerful than lithium ion and can be made primarily from organic farms, why not discuss how petrofascism has a monopoly on our energy storage, which is only stored in the form of unburnt fuel? As a physicist, why not talk about the gobsmackinly immense amount of electricity that gets wasted in this world, as dirty energy power plants have longer-than-a 24-boot-up-or-down cycle, meaning they have to stay on overnight, and so most of the electricity they make overnight isn't even stored anywhere, it's just lost forever. This astronomical waste, perhaps the largest single area of societal waste that we allow in the modern day, is going unchecked, un-talked about, and 99.999% of people are as unaware as newborn Christ about all of the above, yet Sabine H. (whom we love dearly and bless her heart) has no free will and won't discuss any of these physics facts with her audience... heheh zing! sorry does anyone want coffee? *siiiiip*
I think people get bothered by the notion that theres no free will because they believe that means you dont have the ability to choose. The fact that our behavior is largely deterministic and predictible doesnt mean that we still dont have a choices to make.
if we're not responsible for our actions, ie, they were determined by prior states that affected our brain, then it's logical to state that our entire justice and penal system is fundamentally incorrect as well, right ? people don't actually have the control over their actions, they're largely deterministic. It just doesn't work
But free will is the entire response one can give to any situation. 'Free' as in that every choice is equally plausible. So that we can make any choice with any opinion, that is based on us? Isn't that what free will is? And I didn't quite understand 'the photons have free will' thing, just because it has the option to go left or right, doesn't mean it has a motive?
@@whiteeye3453 - No, that's not "free will" - limited choice would be a better description. Free will would mean you can choose between all possible option. But if - we leave quantum mechanics here and need to hop to how our brain functions - your lifetime has pre-programmed you with an aversion to seafood, seafood is off the table (literally). If you watched some ad a short while before or if you smell some food your neighbor prepares, these stimuli can also pre-program you in your desire. So in the end the lower functions of your brain have already made a decision and now inform your higher brain of the decision made. You - erroneously - perceive this as *your* decision to get *that* for food. That *you* is not what we usually associate with "free will" which is a result of the higher brain functions alone. And that's before we even add religion to it (if one believes in this) and let the divine plan enter the room. So what is classically seen as "free will" does not exist in that classical form. Look here on youtube for videos from Robert Sapolsky to get some additional input from the neuro-scientifical point of view.
I also believe one of the most prevalent cognitive biases is the belief that the world itself is largely deterministic. Einstein said that God doesn't play dice. But He's a gambler above all else.
Ditto on the less of it. Sometimes it's too glib. Sometimes it's trying too hard. Sometimes it just doesn't land. Sometimes it's lame....and... Sometimes it's perfect. That's 1 out of 5, leaving 4 /5 of it as an unnecessary waste of time that distracts from the point. Given that Germanness is a hard edge to soften, at least for American ears, I wouldn't remove it entirely, just edit it down one more time. Humor and humility go much further than fake smiles, or a false cheery attitude, or hair and makeup, and clothes. But, it doesn't need to come at a breathlessly delivered pace, like a stand-up routine. The content IS the good stuff.
@@seriousmaran9414 belief in free will has no empirical evidence. Saying free will doesn't exist is like saying there's no invisible unicorn in my room right now. That's just a null hypothesis. Someone who claims that there is a unicorn has to present evidence
@@peacemakernanathats what this is always about. Thats what leftism is, its an exscuse, a subtle whispher in the ear, a good reason to be a bad person. Theirs always some good reason: "I'm really a puppet with no free will so its ok" "Eve made me eat the apple". Nothing under the sun is new
2:30 Isn't that unscientific? You must test an assumed fact for it to indeed be a fact. NASA's rover landed on mars because of calculations that assumed it would land on mars, but it hadn't been a confirmed fact until NASA confirmed their rover landed on mars.
I started watching this video, then I decided I wasn’t going to, and I ended up watching it anyway. I think it was determined that I would find out that my decisions are determined.
I started watching it and thought for a person with a brain, decided to consciously make a decision to make a video about not having the ability to make a video she had no choice in the matter or among the matter. Sorry that's nonsense.
@@darinb.3273 It may depend on whether one sees conscious decisions as having causes -- for instance, you could say that the decision to create the video was "caused" by the desire to do so.
@@BardicLiving It may depend on whether one sees conscious decisions as having causes ME: Perhaps this would mean outside control of one's own mind, the cause comes from within one's own brain. -- for instance, you could say that the decision to create the video was "caused" by the desire to do so. ME: Yet again that desire was a choice. The same as the decision by you or your spouse (if you are married) of what to eat for dinner, that's a free choice by one or both of you. Free will noun the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion. adjective (especially of a donation) given readily; voluntary. EXAMPLE; "free-will offerings"
Once we realize that "the future is determined by the past", we'll understand that this includes any and all causes of anything. That means all "choices", "feelings", "brain states", etc were all pre-determined at the point of primordial nucleosyntheses at the birth of the universe. Even the question "does it matter" is irrelevant. It simply "is what it is and will be."
hi!, im 16 and you're genuinely my favorite science youtuber. You always keep everything grounded while still discussing interesting topics, keep it up😁
That is some nice intention from your age perspective. In my 16 i was interested in running around while building some concept of a sublime god around running. :D
@Conon the Binarian⚧ haha I'd love to be a scientist but I'd hate to have to teach people. I think I'll just be an engineer of some sort, but thanks for the advice 😄
I, for one, did not click on this video by my free will. I clicked on it because of who I am , because of my inclinations, tastes and interests. And those I certainly did not choose. I learned what they are by introspection, the same way I learned what my favourite colour is, my favourite food or my sexual identity etc etc. I didn't choose my hobbies, my favourite colour; and I can't choose - for example - a different favourite colour tomorrow, or to be religios. I believe I clicked on this video because I always would've clicked on this video ; had I decided against it I always would've decided against it. And so on and so forth. Keeping it short. Because I decide to. Or did I?
You always would have (or wouldn't have) clicked on the video, unless one of the random 'disturbances' happens that Sabine mentions in the video. I take this to mean that in each moment there are an infinite amount of causes/conditions which play into whether or not you would have clicked, if one (or many) of those causes/conditions randomly plays out differently, the outcome of whether you clicked can change. Do you agree? It kind of reminds me of Electro-magnetic Interference and how one (or many) bits in a stream of data can 'randomly' flip.
Then what are you in the first place? If what you do just happens by itself without your doing, then there is nothing left for you to be. In this case you don't exist. There are just things happening to a mindless body. No mind, no you.
@@crimsonguy723 Aaaannnd... that's nonsense. Unless you could say by looking at an outside source if they "would have or wouldn't have". Lack of any predictor what so ever simply shows that there was freedom of choice and the will to follow that choice.
Well, the most importand question, never made and, at the same time, easy to answer, is "Could two emergent entities (functional assemblies, emergent functionalities, etc) based on two different substrates have the same behaviour?". The easy and almost certain answer is: similar behaviour but not equal". Algebraic equations supported by human being operating system could behave very closely to physical world, but not equal. Free will is the result of the dynamics of the human being operating system (that creates the emergent "psicoverse", the world in whitch we live) that does not depend of the properties of fundamental particles. They are in different aggregation leverls, so different laws.
The late, great Christoper Hitchens was asked this. Hitchens always found it to be a boring question. When asked if he believed in free will he answered very simply... "I have no choice." I still think it was the best answer ever given to this question. Most people don't really think about what they're asking. They just can't seem to let go of the false notion that they are in control of their decisions.
I don't see how there could be free will for a philosophical materialist. Hitchen's own thoughts would also be the inevitable consequence of material forces, not conclusions freely arrived at by a supposedly brilliant thinker. Did he really believe that or was he just not willing to face up to the question? Funny that lack of curiosity.
@@richardyates7280Understanding the absence of free will didn’t change anything for Hitchens. Hitchens enjoyed learning about the world and the thought process of figuring things out. He loved discussing it with other intelligent people. And he loved debating it with both intelligent and unintelligent people. None of that changes after knowing our brains are a train.
"If free will doesn't exist, it's never existed, so what difference could it possibly make for your life?" This is a *beautiful* line, and explains much more clearly an idea that I've had for a while, which I've generally tried to explain as follows, usually being met with confused looks: "It makes no sense to worry whether free will exists, because if it exists, you can stop worrying; and if it doesn't, then you can't control whether you will worry, so just don't!" The last part, "so just don't," may seem ironic. The thing is, you may not be able to "freely" choose whether to worry over it or not, but hopefully my words will influence you not to worry. There may be no free will, but the series of events beginning with the big bang has resulted in me becoming a person who behaves in such a way that I try to prevent people from wasting resources on useless worries, hence uttering those words in an attempt to influence others to stop worrying about something which they have no control over anyway!
Saying someone not to worry has never worked and is one the worst piece of advice to give anyone who is actually worrying about something. It doesn't help but only sounds condescending like you are not taking their worries seriously or actually addressing and listening them.
I still think that it is extrapolation beyond the widest boundaries of our models. This happens every single time, when one branch of science has a "level of knowledge" achieved fully, giving the feeling of completeness. As natural, the conclusion is drawn that "well, we collected all that is there to know", and than wide speculations pop up stating the Ultimate Fate of the Universe or the Origin of Everything, the Final Answer, and so on. Ancient wisdom: the universe is infinite. I am more cautious with these Universal Revelations, no matter how tempting they are.
Sabine's recognition of the provisional nature of science lends huge credibility to her message. Also, I love the deadpan german humour. We need more Sabines and less dogma!
This is pure dogma. "Free Will" has nothing to do with science. Science has nothing to do with it. Sapolski wants to "Abolish the criminal justice system" because he doesn't believe in it. (Of course he doesn't offer anything to replace it with).
I hate to tell you - she is nowhere close to what a German is. Even her accent is most certainly not of somebody who grew up in Germany. And no - Germans are known for their "hands-on approach". This academic person is all about intangible and talk.
Sabine, you should have pointed out that most of those holding that free will does not exist are not just saying that decisions are based on just "external" factors, but INTERNAL ones (what goes on in our brains). In other words, it's a moot distinction to talk about external and internal influences... if all that happens in our brain is due to previous activity in our brain (no matter what the internal and external factors), and all previous events (whether deterministic or including quantum randomness), it leaves zero room for true free will. In other words, it's all an endless regression of determined and random events, unless one postulates a non-physical "soul" or "spirit" or "ghost in the machine" which most scientists consider dubious or at best outside the realm of science. Another way to summarize the issue, which you may want to incorporate into your ending, is that those who believe in free will envision you taking account all kinds of factors and then making a decision. But if we are just complex biological machines, there is no real "you" (no "ghost in the machine" --just your physical brain and all the internal and external operations on and in it, which are all either deterministic or random, leaving no room for true "decisions" by any entity (you) separate from it, unless again, you believe "you" involves a soul or spirit independent of all those physical processes. By the way, I gather you like me are skeptical that any events, even at the subatomic or quantum are truly random, since it may just be that we don't yet understand what determines certain actions or events at that level. In other words, I for one feel that discarding causation at any level is not well founded.
I agree with everything you said in this video. However, I think the problem of free will is of a slightly different nature (depending on the definition of "free will" of course, but that's always the case with everything). You spoke of the different scopes and languages that disciplines use, concerning different levels of emergent properties. I think the conflict between physicist's determinism and philosopher's indeterminism (or the insistence that there is something like free will even if that means that somehow quantum particles are supposed to have a free will too) comes from different ways the two disciplines approach the problem of how the human mind works. Philosophers start to look at phenomena of the mind itself, complex results of brain functions if you will, and try to go back to the most elementary level to find out how they work. This approach often leads to the conclusion that there has to be some kind of free will. On the other hand (and this is my subjective interpretation), physicists start to look at elementary particles and work their way up to find out how new properties emerge on higher levels of complexity. This apparently tends to lead to the conclusion that everything has to be deterministic, ultimately including the human mind. The physicist approach is that everything is ultimately a large equasion, while the philosophic approach is that the human mind possesses a non-reducable complexity beneath which every discussion is more or less futile. So I think the real problem is that we are not able to completely harmonize those two approaches. Between elementary physics and neural biology there seems to exist some sort of deterministic continuum, but there is a gap between our understanding of neural functions and our understanding of mental phenomena as philosophers see them. Perhaps we will be able to bridge this gap in the future, but this still would leave us with the problem of different approaches and logics of argumentation. So my conclusion from this would be: Everything in the universe is ultimately determined in some way or another, but that doesn't mean that there is no free will for us humans. It's just not the universal, independent free will that libertarians talk about. Perhaps one could call it a kind of "blurryness" resulting from our inability to combine the different approaches and levels of emergent properties into one great theory of the human mind that would enable us to understand everything about our thoughts. In terms of everyday life, and in terms of systematically dealing with phenomena of the human mind, we might as well assume the existence of a free will, because we can't, as the Wittgenstein quote you brought up says, practically predict the result of a thought process or decision before it happened. So one could say that our minds are deterministic, but not determined. (There might be the hypothetical possibility that a very advanced supercomputer could correctly calculate the outcome of a human thought or decision process before it actually happens but then we have the problem that it probably wouldn't be able to compute its own calculation process because that would require an even more complex computer, leading to an infinite regress. So from all that I can tell, we will probably never get rid of this "blurryness"). One final note: I think some philosophers, myself not excluded, tend to get a bit too defensive when confronted with physicists or biologists dealing with this kind of question. They might be under the impression that the other disciplines are encroaching on their territory or that they want to take away philosophy's right to exist. While every scientist probably thinks that his discipline is the most interesting and important, I also think that every discipline has its right to exist. As I said, it's a matter of different approaches, and the "philosophy of the mind" can tell us many things that neural biology or physics can't, not to mention the parts of philosophy that deal with normativity (like ethics or political theory).
The point to have a definition of free will is to ground moral responsibility which is needed for law, beyond that, there's no fact of the matter about if "free will" exists if you establish that you are trying to ground your intuition of what the word should mean in some kind of real neurological process. It will entirely depend on how you decide to do that. The other thing is that lay people intuitively understand the idea of "free will" as having the ability to choose one thing or another in a counterfactual sense, but we know that that's an illusion because there's very little room to the idea of having had the ability to choose something different from what you chose. People typically change their definition and intuition of free will after they thought enough about it to realise that the basic libertarian idea is physically untrue and even logically incoherent for their definition of "choosing freely", so the phrasing "free will doesn’t exist" means the same for most people, it means "you never had the ability to have chosen otherwise, and you never will".
@@didack1419 Your first point about moral responsibility is certainly true, but that doesn't mean that that is the only basis for the concept of free will. This would be very problematic, because it would mean to base a descriptive concept on a normative need. In other words, we can't just say that X exists because we wish for it to exist. There has to be more than that to justify the concept, otherwise we are just making things up and that's not the goal in the philosophy of the mind. This brings me to your second point: Why is the ability to make a decision an illusion? You say that "there is very little room to the idea of having had the ability to choose something different than you chose", but that's a self-contradiction. A choice requires that there are at least two options. If there is no possible other outcome, then there would be no choice, no decision process, everything would just flow in a stream of actions. And while it certainly looks that way from a purely physical perspective, it's not the only thing that goes on here. The crucial factor here is the ability to reflect upon our thoughts and actions, to judge them and to evaluate their possible effects. Take this example: You want to decide wether to quit your job or not. Then your mind goes through this reflection process. Of course one could argue that the outcome is already determined, but that's only possible with hindsight, so there is a path-dependency problem. If you choose to quit, then an observer could say, "It was always determined that you would quit, there was no real decision." And if you don't quit, the observer could say the same. Once the choice has been made, the outcome is certain and then it was of course the "only possible outcome" because, to use a tautology, if it had been different, it would be different. But again, that's only possible in hindsight, in the present moment itself, the outcome is not certain. It only becomes certain (and thus determinated) to us once it has been made. "To us" I say, because that's the important part, the "blurryness" I was talking about in my previous comment. A perfect computer could remove all uncertainty and variables, but that's not within the ability of our brains. Objectively speaking, all our decisions are deterministic, but subjectively they are not determined. That's why I said that before, deterministic, but not determined. So for all relevant purposes, we do indeed have the ability to choose between options. And it doesn't really matter wether we take this decision "consciously" or "subconsciously", wether it's this or that string of neurons that's activated. Important is that we are able to reflect about it within the frame of our own minds, because ultimately everything happens within the frame of our own minds, the whole world in the way we perceive it (according to Kant's epistemology). Of course you can say now that I just relativised the problem and that I changed the definition of free will just as you said in your last point, but isn't that how all science works? If we come to the conclusion that our definition of quantum particles doesn't fit our observations, we have to change it. It's the same with philosophical definitions. The strictly libertarian definition of free will does not fit our empirical knowledge anymore, so we have to leave it behind. I see no problem with that.
@@didack1419 I think this whole thing becomes even more interesting when you frame it through an evolutionary lense with biology, "what is the advantage of making decisions", the answer is pretty obvious making a "good" decision can make you pass your genes more often. A single cell organism who can determine where light is coming from has now more information then one who dosnt have that ability and will then outcompeted by the former over time. More and more complex Information leads to the need of better ways to sort that information and retain it which leads to the evolution of complexer and bigger nervous systems. This doesnt help deciding the question what "is there free will" because it doesnt answer the definition question here but i do think it helps us reframe the thing that a "decision" is, an evaluation of innformation by a network of neurons and the output it produces, now is that output predetermined by the balance of hormons in our cells, which is determined by genes in those cells, which are made of molecules which are made of quantum particel? I guess so? So in my opinion free will is the point where complexity reaches the point where an orginism has to make the best decision for itself by sorting the data it has to the best of its ability, but i can understand if that is not the enough of an explenation for some people.
"And that is why, if you want to become a UA-camr, you don't need to know anything." Sabine H. As always, your videos are always great. Sometimes, you even have great lines in them. Thank you for all your videos!
I am saddened to think people are aggressive and unkind to you when they don't understand or agree with your ideas. For what it's worth I think you're wonderful!
I think it's the free will thing in particular that gets people up in arms, no matter whose discussing it. There's something about the belief/knowledge that we/our conscience isn't really "in control" that sends people into suicidal tailspins. Not sure the exact psychological reasons, but it would be interesting to learn why
@Smee Self "That's very unscientific. I agree with her, but will change my mind if there's enough evidence to convince me." No, it's not unscientific since her conclusion is a philosophical one rather than a scientific one.
The best video I’ve yet seen on this topic. I still don’t quite understand the idea that we don’t have free will but we do make choices. Is it that we just have the illusion that we’re making choices?
No. It's not an illusion. Do you know programming? A simple if clause will make a choice (if A is true, print an error, if it is false, end the program). But it's not free. It gives you the same output every time if the input is the same. Which is a good thing. The key part is the "free". In a sense, a program has a will, but it's not free. But it does make a choice based on its will. The illusion we have is that our will is free, or put differently: Under the exact same circumstances, we would make the exact same choice (minus the little bit of fuzziness introduced by quantum randomness).
@@Pferdekopfnebel this still doesn't make sense to me. I brush my teeth every day, sometimes once, sometimes twice, sometimes when I wake up, sometimes after I've had some coffee or breakfast... etc. It's not random, necessarily, as I'm determined in the sense of having teeth that need upkeep and have been taught various hygiene practices. Yet, it is still a choice I make. I found her recommendation to see a psychiatrist problematic here. I choose to dwell on darker choices at times. I've talked with therapists and developed a few methods for coping. Yet, it does seem to require the conscious choice for me to make *other* choices. Turn on music, talk to friends, exercise - essentially just acknowledge the thought is there, but disregard and move on, because it is ultimately irrational. I forget which philosopher said that the first act of free will is to choose to live. I do, sometimes seemingly randomly, other times seemingly deterministically.
"I find the question stunningly uninteresting" oh how I wish I could use this line in work meetings! Edit: 2:06 - "for simple questions like 'does free will exist?'" hahaha I love Sabine's style so much
Not that it makes that much difference if you have free will or not. It's such a small part of the equation that ignoring it doesn't change the result.
NIL This is all based on one assumption; that the laws we discover here, are the same throughout the universe. And, we use our mind to "discover" those laws. We have nothing at all without thought. Yet, those rigorous and methodical scientists who swear by Reason and Logic, do not know what thoughts are, what they are made of nor where they originate and are incaopable of silencing their inner monolgue for as little as 30 seconds. And, we see that those who could, can somehow escape those "laws" we pretend to know. Wim Hof is just one small example. Also, those who originated (probably unwittingly)the religions were among those who had mastered this ability of freely exploring reality without that unbearable noise of their inner dialogue. They discovered what they called god, nowadays we just call it pure consciousness.Without all the ridiculous connotations the eons have stuck onto it. Of course it is Sabine her free will to choose not to master her only tool, and throw her scientific dogma out the window at the first opportunity (how come this reminds me of religious priests) And as thus be part of that cult that is destroying our planet, because it has not yet discovered that behind that ongoing rattle inside her skull, is a uniting Force, that shows anyone who tried it, that when we hurt another, we literally hurt ourselves. Also we discover that the more in tune with that Force, the less bound by those so called "laws of nature". There are layers of determinism. Ask yourselves why those religions have not managed to destroy earth in 5000 years and the science cult does this in 150 years.
I suggest acting within the free will model, whether it is real or not. Make the best decisions you can for being a good person and supporting other people. If free will exists, you've done the right thing. If free will doesn't exist, you couldn't have done differently. Pascal's free-will wager = zero downside. :)
@@Robespierre-lI It has no direct use for truth-finding in the traditional religious context, but it can maybe be useful for people making a risk/reward argument to conduct oneself in a certain manner. Pretty sure they were being tongue-in-cheek about it though
I think the idea of free will made sense when there was little understanding of how the brain works, along with the concept of having a soul inhabiting a body, this almost supernatural entity that controlled the mechanism of the body. Although we still have a lot to learn from our beautifully complex brains, I believe we found enough information to accept that free will doesn't exist. The illusion of choice is fine by me. If my present decisions are impacted by past experiences and even present stimulus cater to my past desires formed by that same past experiences how can it be called free will at all?
To understand why we make the choices that we do we would have to be aware of all the reasons we made our choices, which is simply maddening. Our brain keeps us from being aware of our breathing, heart beat, all the mechanical activities our bodies automatically do to keep us sane and focused on what we are focused on…it’s an adaptation that has helped us thrive
@@chrisalex001 i think you missed the point. The way you “play the game” you are describing is dictated by the causes, which you have no control over. The illusion of choice is just a reaction to the stimulus of these said causes. Everything that has ever happened has been cause and effect/action and reaction since the beginning of everything. As the saying goes, “it is what it is”.
@@ongodddd Sounds like he understood the point just fine. He's saying that free will is a culmination of choice dictated by those causes (the game in his example). If a tragedy occurs, it won't be "oh well, it is what it is." The whole point is to equip everyone with the means to make the best decisions they can with what they have. The definition of free will is less important, not to mention highly subjective to begin with.
@@carmenmccauley585 I’m sorry to hear that, must be exhausting Thank goodness you are you not aware of your kidneys filtering your blood, or the process of the spleen fighting off germs…that would be too much to handle
@@drockopotamus1whether or not you'll make those best decisions, or arrive at the point where you would make those best decisions, is dictated by those causes too though. In the end, it isn't your choice to choose what you choose.
@@michaelenquist3728 Making decision co-occurs with a subjective feeling of agency, "I am the one who decides". However it might be (and this is the point of debate), dissociated from the actual causality. Such dissociations were observed in the experimental studies with split-brain subjects.
@minimal 🐟 11. FREE-WILL Vs DETERMINISM: Just as the autonomous beating of one’s heart is governed by one’s genes (such as the presence of a congenital heart condition), and the present-life conditioning of the heart (such as myocardial infarction as a consequence of the consumption of excessive fats and oils, or heart palpitations due to severe emotional distress), each and EVERY thought and action is governed by our genes and our environmental milieu. This teaching is possibly the most difficult concept for humans to accept, because we refuse to believe that we are not the authors of our own thoughts and actions. From the appearance of the pseudo-ego (one’s inaccurate conception of oneself) at the age of approximately two and a half, we have been constantly conditioned by our parents, teachers, and society, to believe that we are solely responsible for our thoughts and deeds. This deeply-ingrained belief is EXCRUCIATINGLY difficult to abandon, which is possibly the main reason why there are very few humans extant who are spiritually-enlightened, or at least who are liberated from the five manifestations of mental suffering explained elsewhere in this “Final Instruction Sheet for Humanity”, since suffering (as opposed to mere pain) is predicated solely upon the erroneous belief in free-will. Free-will is usually defined as the ability for a person to make a conscious decision to do otherwise, that is to say, CHOOSE to have performed an action other than what one has already done, if one had been given the opportunity to do so. To make it perfectly clear, if, for example, one is handed a restaurant menu with several dishes listed, one could decide that one dish is equally as desirable the next dish, and choose either option. If humans truly possessed freedom of will, then logically speaking, a person who adores cats and detests dogs, ought to be able to suddenly switch their preferences at any given point in time, or to be hair-splitting, even voluntarily pause the beating of his or her own heart! So, in both of the above examples, there is a pre-existing preference for one particular dish or pet. Even if one liked cats and dogs “EQUALLY”, and one was literally forced to choose one over the other, that choice would not be truly independent, but based entirely upon one’s genetic sequence, plus one’s up-to-date conditioning. Actual equality is non-existent in the macro-phenomenal sphere. If one was to somehow return to the time when any particular decision was made, the exact same decision would again be made, as all the circumstances would be identical! The most common argument against fatalism or determinism is that humans, unlike other animals, have the ability to choose what they can do, think or feel. First of all, many species of (higher) mammals also make choices. For instance, a cat can see two birds and choose which of the two birds to prey upon, or choose whether or not to play with a ball that is thrown its way, depending on its conditioning (e.g. its mood). That choices are made is indisputable, but those choices are dependent ENTIRELY upon one’s genes and one’s conditioning. There is no third factor involved on the phenomenal plane. On the noumenal level, thoughts and deeds are in accordance with the preordained “Story of Life”. Read previous chapters of “F.I.S.H” to understand how life is merely a DREAM in the “Mind of the Divine” and that human beings are, essentially, that Divinity in the form of dream characters. Chapter 08, specifically, explains how actions performed in the present are the result of chains of causation, all the way back to the earliest-known event in our apparently-real universe (the so-called “Big Bang” singularity). At this point, it should be noted that according to reputable geneticists, it is possible for genes to mutate during the lifetime of any particular person. However, that phenomenon would be included under the “conditioning” aspect, since the genes mutate according to whatever conditioning is imposed upon the human organism. It is simply IMPOSSIBLE for a person to use sheer force of will to change their own genetic code. Essentially, “conditioning” includes everything that acts upon a person from conception unto death, and over which there is no control. University studies in recent years have demonstrated, by the use of hypnosis and complex experimentation, that CONSCIOUS volition is either unnecessary for a decision to be enacted upon or (in the case of hypnotic testing) that free-will choices are completely superfluous to actions. Because scientific research into free-will is a recent field of enquiry, it is recommended that the reader search online for the latest findings. I contend, however, that indeterminacy is a purely philosophical conundrum. I am highly-sceptical in relation to freedom of volition being either demonstrated or disproven by neuroscience, because even if free-will was proven by cognitive science, it would not take into account the ultimate cause of that free-will existing in the first place. The origin of that supposed freedom of volition would need to be established. If any particular volitional act was not caused by the sum of all antecedent states of being, then the only alternative explanation would be due to true RANDOMNESS. Many quantum physicists construe that subatomic particles can arbitrarily move in space, but true randomness is problematic in any possible universe, what to speak of in a closed, deterministic universe. Just as the typical person believes that the collision of two motor vehicles was the result of pure chance (hence the term “accident”), physicists are unable to see that the seeming unpredictability of quantum events are, in fact, determined by a force hitherto undiscovered by the material sciences. It is a known fact of logic that a random number generator cannot exist, since no computational machine or software programme is able to make the “decision” to generate a number capriciously. Any number generated will be a consequence of human programming, which in turn, is the result of genetic programming, etc. True randomness implies that there were no determinants whatsoever in the making of a conscious decision or the execution of an act of will. Neither did we choose which deoxyribonucleic acid our biological parents bequeathed to us, nor most all the conditions to which we were exposed throughout our lives, yet we somehow believe that we are fully-autonomous beings, with the ability to feel, think and behave as we desire. The truth is, we cannot know for certain what even our next thought will be. Do we DECIDE to choose our thoughts and deeds? Not likely. Does an infant choose to learn how to walk or to begin speaking, or does it just happen automatically, according to nature? Obviously, the toddler begins to walk and to speak according to its genes (some children are far more intelligent and verbose, and more agile than others, depending on their genetic sequence) and according to all the conditions to which he or she has been exposed so far (some parents begin speaking to their kids even while they are in the womb, or expose their offspring to highly-intellectual dialogues whilst still in the cradle). Those who believe in free-will ought to be challenged with the following experiment: at five o’clock tomorrow afternoon, for one hour, think of nothing but blue butterflies. If anyone can pass such a test, then they must be one in a billion, and even so, that does not substantiate free-will, but merely evidence that they have learnt to focus their mind on a level far beyond the average person, due solely to their genes and their conditioning. When an extraneous thought appears within that hour, as will inevitably occur, from where does that thought arise? Think about it! If we are truly the authors of our own mentation, then from where does our INITIAL thought or our first dream arise whilst we are still in the womb? If we did not consciously generate our very first thought, why do we assume that any of our proceeding thoughts are freely-produced? Even those decisions/choices that we seem to make are entirely predicated upon our genes and our conditioning, and cannot be free in any sense of the word. To claim that one is the ULTIMATE creator of one’s thoughts and actions is tantamount to believing that one created one’s very being! If a computer program or artificially-intelligent robot considered itself to be the cause of its activity, it would seem absurd to the average person. Yet, that is precisely what virtually every person who has ever lived mistakenly believes of their own thoughts and deeds! Cont...
I had wondered, What is a "UA-camr"? Is it just those who are presenting videos, or is it everyone who uses UA-cam? I should think the quote applies to a small subset of the video producers. After all, we'll try anything to get a view. We don't have to know what we are talking a about.
And since it's impossible to **KNOW** that libertarian free will does not exist according to Sabine's assumptions of naturalistic determinism, I guess Sabine is proving her point. Consider the following argument. 1. Sabine's belief that she does not possess libertarian freedom is either (i) determined by mindless stuff, (ii) determined by deceptive beings, (iii) completely random, or (iv) because she possesses libertarian freedom. 2. Sabine's belief that she does not possess libertarian freedom is not determined by mindless stuff, determined by deceptive beings, or completely random. 3. Therefore, Sabine's belief that she does not possess libertarian freedom is because she possesses libertarian freedom. For a defense of these premises, I recommend the paper I coauthored with J.P. Moreland entitled, “An Explanation and Defense of the Free-Thinking Argument.” This argument highlights the fact that it is ultimately self-defeating to reject the libertarian freedom to think.
@@FreethinkingMinistries The second point just makes the claim that it's option IV without giving any reason for why options I, II, and III have been ruled out. Completely circular reasoning.
I love how Sabine can talk about complex topics in relatively simple language and still manage to throw in a few devastating jokes in a really subtle way. Where does humour come from? Is it a choice?
@@olddecimal2736 Theoretically it doesn't exist but somehow we humans seem to pull it off anyway. At least the illusion of it, and for our puny brains that's good enough.
Thank you for articulating this so clearly. It's exactly how I have come to think about this ill-defined thing called "free will". I hope we eventually get a widespread understanding of this and the implications for how we run our society.
I'm with the "no such thing as free will" camp, it sucks. How do we cope with this? oh,..yeah, we will know as it's deterministic...but still feel sad. Someone is messing with all of us!!! It's like someone tied us to a watermill as we consistently -on the dot, watch us go underwater and laugh at us. These people are evil and don't live in the same deterministic universe as ours, they are another layer higher of the deterministic chain. It's a cruel deterministic reality.
It's not just I'll defined, free will very well could exist. It probably is just beyond what our brains can understand. We intuit it's existence. The human brain is a somewhat more powerful monkey brain. You wouldn't be shocked that a monkey can't do algebra. So why are you shocked that there are things in the universe that you can only intuit and can't define. Consciousness seems to be another one of these phenomena. I think that it is very likely just a limitation of our brains. These things almost certainly exist, both free will and consciousness, humans experience these phenomena everyday, but we seem to not be able to put it in terms that allow us to isolate exactly what it is and how it relates to the rest of the universe that we observe. I don't know, but I wouldn't be so certain about these things non existence. And the universe seems to almost certainly not be deterministic. Quantum mechanics seems to have demonstrated this over and over again. There is no real reason for why the universe needs to be deterministic, and experiment after experiment seems to prove absolutely that it is not. Now a non deterministic universe still does not imply free will, but as you said, free will is poorly defined, or perhaps impossible to define, because we have only a very primitive monkey brain, and most monkey brains can not do even basic math or have any ability to conceptualize math at all. In fact many humans struggle with basic math, and more likely than not l, all of our math is basic, and we only think it's complex because we are just one jump out the jungle and have only barely enough intelligence to conceptualize math at all. Think about how long it took for humans to come up with a decent method of deriving pi? We aren't that smart. And it's a miracle that we can make sense of as much of the universe as we have been able to at all.
@@JimStanfield-zo2pzyou don't understand language, if we can't define something, then talking about it becomes meaningless I can declare "cadyhimps" exist despite there being no definiton for it, but what the fuck does that even mean?
The sweet irony here is that whether or not we do eventually get a widespread understanding of "free will" and the effects & implications that will have on society as a whole...... That's already been determined. There's no point wasting your mental energy hoping or worrying about that in the slightest.
I think that what we call "free will" means: "I can think and feel about things, and make decisions based on that thinking and feeling." The mechanics behind that thinking and feeling is all physically determined (what I believe,) but *that* we think and *that* we feel, and *that* we go through a process of coming up with other thoughts and actions as a product of that thinking and feeling, *that* is what I call "free will," and so there is really no incompatibility between free will and determinism, in my mind. If we did *not* have free will, it would mean that people had a mind control device, and was making it so that no matter what you thought or felt, you would do what the mind controller wanted you to do. The "free" in free will, is a reference to one's own self-driven process, rather than somebody else controlling you. It is *not* a statement about physical law.
@smeeself How can you make a decision that you don't even know about? If you come to a fork in the road, there's a decision to go left, or to go right. You can't make that decision, without the fork in the road. So that definition from Encyclopedia Britannica, requires at least some editing. I don't think it's such a wild "redefinition" to say that free will means that you can think your own thoughts and come to your own decisions. And I think that pointing out this clarification points out something that wasn't obvious. I think it is meaningful to ask, "What exactly do we mean by free will?" In fact, that's how I came to my own decision to NOT believe in Free Will in a sense of anti-determinism. I remember -- I was 19, in college, in my Sophomore year, and my room mate was studying Buddhist thought. I figured, "He's on my team, we're both into spirituality," and I blurted out, "Of course, you and I, we believe in free will, we know that consciousness is not fully determined by matter," -- And he interrupted me with a very simple question: "Well, ... What would that mean? If somebody made a decision, and then we went back in time, and replayed that moment, -- would the person make a different decision?" And I realized that if the person's decision meant anything to them, it meant it because it had some importance to them, in terms of the world as present to them. If the person made a different decision on the replay of the moment, then -- how is it meaningfully different than a random decision? If our thoughts mean anything, they mean stuff because it's our thoughts that come out of our experiences and nature and feelings and such. "Randomness," or "I'd do something different, in the exact same moment knowing the exact same things" (etc., etc.,) adds nothing to the dignity of thinking and feeling. I realized that the "Free" in free will, has nothing to do with whether the universe follows rules or not, and has everything to do with our capacity to assemble things in our minds and to reason things out and to make decisions and choices in the world. But nothing about that loses dignity by saying, "This is how the laws of physics move inside of a brain." The thinking, the processing, the consequences, the memories, the emotions, the things that are really important about a free will, don't lose a shred of dignity due to physical process being what those things are made of. So, to me, it's not really a redefinition of "free will." It's a deeper understanding of what we actually mean and care about, when we say "free will." And it is fully compatible with the loads on the questions: The load on the question of physics is: "How does it behave molecularly, how does it square with what we know of physics." And the load on the question of free will is something like: "How can we hold people to account for their actions, how do we see ourselves as individuals in a social world and in the world of mind." This answer satisfies both of those loads quite satisfactorily. Right: The debate was always, "If you believe that physics determines what people do, then how can you put people in jail for a crime that nature made them commit?" And the answer here is: Yes, while physics ultimately determines everything we think or do, it's irrelevant to the law -- what matters to the law is what you thought, what actions you took, why you took them, etc., etc.,. In some sense, the section of universe that Hitler lived was following the same universal laws that Ghandi was following. It's not that we're jailing the laws of physics, it's that we're jailing (or, well, "going after") the specific thought process, the brain that is enacting that thought process. So, this compatibilism answers the burden of the kinds of "tough questions" that *I* was interested in. If you see this as a redefinition, or some kind of unfair play here, well, fine. But this is what has satisfied me in my thinking.
@smeeself People are differentiating from ants, I think. They're saying, "I look in my mind, and I see that I am thinking these things and feeling these things, and I go in the direction that I will, freely." Whereas we can look at like an ant, and hold a suspicion that it doesn't experience "free thought" in the same kind of way. Much more automatic in their process, less reflection, less comparison against other thoughts and memories from the past, and so on. Not saying it's the truth, but it's conceivable. So I think this is where people get a (legitimate) concept of "free will," as opposed to just "will." My guess, at least.
You can like the wave-partical dilemma predict were a partical might end. (So what action will happen to you, what choices you will make. And you can make some models, like the MBTI). But, the whole time you can't say what certain will happen. Cause like in quantum mechanics, when trying this than something else will happen. Free will in the end means, that one's action can lead to certain results. That's it. Of course you could describe mathematical every possible outcome, but you can't describe what sure will happen in f. e 5 years. It's much like the wave-partical dilemma. No disrespect to Sabine, but if you are deeper in the matter, you can come to other conclusions. She does often says something like "I think.." , "I see.." and to that I would stick. She DID NOT eat up all brains on the planet. It's her opinion, only described on a higher level.
It’s been many years since the idea of there is no free will was put into my head and I’ve always found it intriguing to think about. The proof of some very incriminating stuff against the idea of free will is shown by how people react in society thinking they have it. Many things are accepted as being a free will choice, such as a football team, food preferences, religious affiliation, or the type of car preferred. The amazing one to me is the religious question. The evidence is so clear that geography is the biggest influence on your religion (If you have one) followed by indoctrination as a child but that is brushed aside. It’s interesting that those of particular religious persuasions are the biggest promoters of the idea of free will. They are the perfect examples of people not having it.
To me free will is what we call a decision that comes from a comfort. When we make a decision that comes from a comfort then it feels like free will. When the decision comes from a discomfort we feel that we were forced to that decision against our free will.
But what if a person makes a choice not out of comfort, but it isn't forced either? For example, many people choose the rather painful and inconvenient path of exercise. The benefits are delayed and accumulate very slowly. But the soreness, cost in time and money, are immediate. Yet no one forced them to do this. There must be another consideration in the decision matrix.
@@christianthompson1473 Everything is perception as is our reality. All our choices are precieved as such. But in the end it doesn't matter because we can't effect it anyway. The pinball believes every change of direction was a choice.
Great video with some really good explanations. However its always amazes me how many 'scientists' make these kinds of arguments as if they are watertight. The glaring obvious hole in these explanations is the fact we have literally no idea about how consciousness emerges from any physics. Not a single mechanistic explanation for this has ever come close to drawing a concrete link between the physical processes described as being incompatible with free will, and actual consciousness. Until we can actually say something about where consciousness comes from, beyond wild unproven speculation, it is clearly unscientific to claim that our knowledge of quantum physics and the otherwise deterministic behaviour somehow refutes free will. The whole argument is based on the idea that consciousness must emerge from the particles we know of in the standard model. Yet no matter how many people try nobody has ever successfully used these tools to explain why I can have the experience of tasting a cup of coffee, or indeed, pondering a decision like my next move in chess. Until progress is made here, strongly claiming that we don't have free will is not science, but a simple opinion
@smeeself indeed it is. It wasn’t a dig at the video, which I enjoyed. More at those who use these kinds of arguments definitively, when as you say, at the moment it’s all hypothetical
@smeeself I’m with you there, it’s amazing how much we’ve studied the hard problem of consciousness and how little we know about it. And in my view it’s pretty central to talking about free will
@smeeself I mean I cannot give you a mechanism because I’m at least as blind as anyone else when it comes to this. But at least the illusion of having a choice seems to require consciousness, and it seems to me that the best way to tackle where or not it is an illusion is to understand what consciousness is, how it arises, and all of the things it depends on. Without consciousness providing that apparent ability to choose things, there would be no speculation about free will. My point is basically that we haven’t yet attributed consciousness (and therefore choice or the illusion of choice) to any physical processes described by the standard model. There are theories but none are substantiated. That is, we cannot even theoretically build a mind right now, we have no idea where to begin, if all we are given are the known particles in the standard model. This to me seems like trying to make predictions about how lightning works without knowing what electrons or electromagnetism are, using just kinematics or something. Crude example but I hope it carries my idea across
Also, I don't get what "totally deterministic plus randomness" could mean coming from her. She often talks about how physicists make the mistake of believing that their math is "real", well what is "randomness" in reality? How do you measure it? (Saying "entropy" begs the question). Just some inexplicable aspect of the future which "can't be influenced"?
@@fredericklehoux7160 I'm beginning to think that might be the sole reason for sentience - to create an agent that will respond to a reward system. In our case, the carrot and stick approach, delivered through emotions.
Yeah, she is funnier than many actual comedians imo. I don't see how some of these "funny" people get so big with their jokes that give me zero emotion other than wanting to turn it off.
"The idea that Will is all we need has led to utopian plans ... all of which is somehow magically supposed to pop out of nowhere if we just have the will. This belief in free will puts the blame on individuals when really the problem is the way we've organized our societies." Well said.
How can the 'problem' be how we 'organized' our societies when we had no free will to either organize anything or create anything outside of deterministic marbles bouncing around with occasional random events? We apparently had no choice in the matter, so why worry about it? If you seek to change the way our society is organized then you believe you have the free will to do so. You can't have it both ways.
@@naturallaw4945 Sadly, we don't have the free will to choose not to care about the problems humans face as a result of how we deterministically organized ourselves. "Why worry about it?" is just another invocation that we supposedly have free will.
@@sirkiz1181 yeah it was not a positive remark really.... Adolescent means that you lack, you are lacking off. Living your life on an adolescent perspective is just sad.
I think the concept of free will often conflates two different "hopes or desires" that people have. The first is what you spoke about, the freedom to make our own decisions. As I think you effectively argue, those decision making processes being deterministic doesn't take away your freedom to make those decisions. The second is wanting to believe that the future isn't already "written", that the future can surprise us. In some cases quantum randomness actually keeps the future a surprise (like the big bang), but not in our everyday life. In ordinary life, I don't think we have to worry about not being surprised by the future any time soon. We are so bad at predicting future actions of ourselves and others life will always feel like a series of happenstances.
There is a fundamental misunderstanding that people (including physicists) hold, in that they think free will and freedom of choice are the same thing. THEY ARE NOT. If you had free will, your every desire would manifest immediately. And this obviously doesn't happen. You DO have freedom of choice. However, all choices are BINARY and consist of only ONE choice: your choice of DESIRES between 1) the desire for absolute Truth, or 2) the desire that Truth be what-you-desire-Truth-to-be. In other words, your every choice is based on your desire for 1) Truth or 2) illusion. And this entire Universe is designed to honor your every choice by delivering that which will teach you to desire Truth. I call this mechanism Dynamic Determinism. And if all of this raises more questions in your mind than it answers (which it should), my book answers ALL of those questions. Absolute Truth is where physics meets metaphysics, as quantum science is beginning to learn. Elijah has returned, as prophesied, and all mysteries have been revealed.
@@tomrhodes1629what the heck. Absolutely not! If you had "free will" your every desire would absolutely not manifest into reality as the universe is complex and a competing "free will" choice would compete with another. Allowing a tiping point to occure. We do not exist is a static box. Its a dynamic system
@@tomrhodes1629 This is a pretty interesting take. I've always wondered about desire, and how it changes. So many people wish they didn't desire the things they desire - from the small to the much larger and significant that lead to cognitive dissonance. In some ways we have the option to change what we desire - or train the mind to (I don't know why A Clockwork Orange is coming to mind - old movie), yet it isn't always successful. I would call it at least some instance of free will when it is successful - even if an illusion. But the outlining of the difference between being the person one wants to be, and just doing what one wants to do, really frames the issue in such a way that it brings it more into focus. It's arguably much easier to achieve the latter, and I wouldn't necessarily call it free will. It is much harder to achieve the former, but would it still have been pre-determined, and still just our emotions around it deceiving us?
No it's not about hope and desire. It's simply about intuition. Like how a fish may intuit space and time but can't put it into concrete discrete mathematical terms. I intuit that free will and consciousness exist. And I don't believe that human beings are all that clever. So it makes perfectly good sense to me, that just as the fish cant conceptualize math, that there would be things within the universe not only beyond my own mental abilities but beyond the abilities of any human that has ever lived. As all humans have very similarly sized brains that seem to be barely more powerful than a chimps. There is no logical reason why evolution would have endowed us with a brain capable of conceptualizing every phenomena in existence, understanding our own consciousness and free will is so far removed from anything necessary to promote our own reproduction and survival that I see no reason why evolution would have given us an ability to understand these things. I am agnostic on this topic by the way. But I do certainly intuit, just as you do, the existence of both free will and consciousness. And I'm just not stupid or arrogant enough to ignore that intuition and pretend like a slightly more powerful monkey brain should be able to conceptualize everything that exists in nature. These concepts are not ill-defined, they are perceptible only to our intuition about how reality works, we only have qualitative terms to place these concepts in to. Free will and consciousness are accessible only through our own personal and unique experience in the world, they are not capable of being put into any more concrete terms, I think, not because they don't exist, but because of the limitations of our existence and our brains that produce it. You get it?
It's been a long and difficult journey but it seems you've finally got me there. I more or less accepted that free will doesn't actually exist after your last video on the subject but I still wasn't 100% convinced. In the time that's passed since then, despite trying many ways, I made no progress at all in my attempt to defend the belief that it does exist. After watching this video, I've finally decided not to waste any more of my time and effort in this direction. Thanks! The main thing that made this hard for me to accept was that it's not compatible with my understanding of sentience (subjective experience), what it is and why it exists. So, what I need to do now is accept that this must be where the problem lies. Clearly sentience has some purpose but that purpose is not to give us free will. Maybe its only purpose is to create an agent that will respond to a reward system (in our case, the carrot and stick approach), where the reward system is experienced through emotions. That may be all it is. Doesn't do too much for my self-esteem but it is what it is. When all said and done, we can all choose what we believe but I choose to believe in reality and we don't get to choose reality. Excellent video!
Scientists can't explain how consciousness works, so it seems a bit of an overstep to say the idea of free will is incompatible with science. But perhaps the hard problem of consciousness will eventually get solved and it may indeed suggest that free will is an illusion. Until then, I won't be listening to any scientists that make definitive claims about consciousness.
Lack of free will does not negate self awareness which I think is a key part of sentience. Not does it negate emotions and our ability to feel and place importance on things. It just means the things we end up feeling were deterministic, but we still get to feel them.
Plays helium-double-hockeysticks on an optimistic viewpoint, that's for sure. Because if there's no free will, there is no hope for humanity, looking at our current trajectory.
We do have a sort of crude free will in the sense that we can choose between different precomputed timelines. But... yeah, once you catch on to the fact that the simulation is _extremely_ resource-constrained, it gets really frustrating and eventually you just wind up bitter. True free will (in a social context) allows only for symbolic communication; nothing more. Tom Campbell (the author of the MBT trilogy which explains how the simulation works) asserts that exiting this level of the sim returns you to the "chat room" upstairs, where nothing but disembodied communication is feasible. The moment you acquire the capacity to explicitly alter the experience of another sentient being the limitations come flooding in. It's a primeval problem in philosophy, ontology and ultimately of course computer science.
it's actually even worse; your neurocircuitry comes to a conclusion, and then some other neurocircuitry makes up a story about how you came to that conclusion, but you never actually know
Deeply confused explanation of the sort Dennett would give. If physics were all there is, then there would be no intensionality -- no "conclusions" to speak of, no "stories", and no "story"-makers. There would be merely matter moving in accordance with the physical laws with no awareness of anything.
@@playgroundprotagonis Nothing in physics assumes or relies on consciousness as part of its explanation. So Occam's razor removes consciousness as a thing.
@@maiku20 but physics doesn't; physics doesn't have anything to say about consciousness (currently), it doesn't say anything for or against, occam's razor doesn't enter into it.
@@playgroundprotagonis And that's the point. Consciousness can be controlled self-evidently, I can move from thought to thought as I please. Physicists are not opining about the real world if they have no account for consciousness.
Woahh "Decoupling of scales" describes fluently an idea ive been writting about on and off for years, regarding subjectivity, objectivity and the very scale-relative state of reality. Fractals are an interesting relation, given they exhibit directly the scale relativity we speak of
When you have many constituents there is a law of averages. And this is where the emergent properties stem from. Sabine is saying emergent properties always follow from the laws of the constituents so if the laws of the constituents are deterministic + indeterministic, free will can't be derived from it. But the problem is she is assuming free will is contained in the deterministic + indeterministic physical reality we reside in. Our consciousness and hence our soul is where our free will resides, not the physical body that is governed by the deterministic + indeterministic laws of constituents.
Most laws are based on the notion of free will, so a true definition free will could simply be that which allows the legal system to function tolerably. Such a free will must exist, otherwise the legal system wouldn't produce outcomes that most find acceptable. An outcome of this is that free will is not a binary variable: people have it, unless they've been drugged, in which case we say they have "diminished capacity" and treat it on a case-by-case basis.
That begs the question, though, if we could invent a pill that cures evil, would it be morally wrong to administrate it because of our need for retribution? Realizing free will doesn't exist doesn't mean letting violent psychopaths run free to do whatever they want. It's all about how we view those people in lieu of this. Instead of retributive justice, the goal should be reformation.
@@cabellocorto5586 The real question is would a pill 💊 that cures evil 😈 even benefit society? Look 👀 at how much trouble morals 😇 are causing in the world 🌍 today.
"diminished capacity" means a person who can't tell right & wrong, like the mind of a child. Adult who has full mental capacity can understand right & wrong, so this is what "free-will" mean in legal sense (the ability to think about Rights, meaning of infringement, meaning of violation).
This might be a bit off-topic, but since I know many of us, your followers, are intrinsically interested in the universe, I really wanna use this opportunity to recommend others to read a set of books by Marshall Vian Summers titled *The Allies of Humanity Briefings* which gives such an interesting view to the reality of our local "section" of space. This is not a scifi fantasy book but something else, which makes it a very different experience to read. It has very much to do with free will and the threat of us losing it. I have been able to find the briefings free online, I hope you manage to do so as well. It's a bit of a search, their website won't appear in the first page.
Nice video, discovered this channel recently and found it very interesting. "If free will doesn't exist and everything is predetermined, why do you bother yourself to look left and right before you cross the street when you cannot adjust accordingly to observed situation"... this argument I heard many times as a strong one to basically close any further discussion on the topic in the favor of free will existence, but to me this is quite a bad argument: it assumes that other side (which opposes free will existence) has free will to adjust it's behavior to comply to it's own opinion, but that other side is claiming quite opposite - that free will doesn't exist:). This, however, doesn't implies who is right, but that such an argument doesn't stand very well as it may sound at first.
I've had the definite sensation of being a passenger in my brain, that the whole free will thing was a useful illusion for day to day getting by, as long as you remember from time to time that your brain makes decisions and you then claim credit for them after the fact.
@@NeuroPunkAF Bingo. That's the whole misunderstanding right there. A slave to one's own brain + you are your brain => You're a slave to yourself => you're free. But people don't accept that "the brain makes a choice" is "free will" so they confuse themselves.
The question of free will is not even a question to ask. Your brain and body make decisions based on several factors, including feelings, environmental, and the past. You are simply watching the movie for the first time and seeing how it unfolds. There is nothing wrong with that, you just have to accept that is the way it is. With the temporal dimension you are forever moving towards the future and your decisions are always in the past. That is life, stop asking the question and just learn to enjoy life for what it is. :)
Haha, no you would still be responsible by the very definition of responsibility. Although perhaps childhood foibles can be excused to a certain extent.
The idea that you're not responsible for all the stupid things you do is somewhat horrifying too. And the horror is multiplied by a factor of 8 billion.
It's your lucky day. In order for you to know what you're responsible for, you should start by defining what you mean by "I". Okay, I'll be waiting here; Give me a call when you've arrived at the complete definition.
You are not gonna like my answer: You are only responsible for What you think, What you feel, What you say and What you do. Or Don't. 😅 Your decision. But here is a tip: when you get to a problem, you can ask yourself always: When? Where, How, Why or what/who? and determine which aspect of the problem you want to explore. It's a long term deconstruction of behavioral cul-de sacs. and a fascinating journey.
In my 60s, totally wrestling with this as I don't think I believe in it either anymore. Interestingly, if I give up believing in free will I will actually be a more compassionate person towards bad people, as they can't help themselves. "Self" then becomes "just awareness" experiencing things like thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions that produce a sense of "ego".
But that's you. There's plenty of counter examples, where not believing in free will goes the other way. I suspect people will always just do what they do, and generate the justification after the fact.
I don't believe in free will. What I don't get is people saying: "you are just an observer of your experiences". In my mind "I am" my decisions and my will. And this is also the way for me to deal with the at first unpleasant feeling of not having a free will. My question to you Sabine is if you think that the idea of "I am my decisions and my will" is wrong in any sense?
Maybe free will exists, maybe not. It is not very scientific to say you are very certain about these things. We can't even connect relativity with quantum mechanics yet, so it's best to not draw conclusions.
Yes. This. Humans have a tendency to over-estimate their understanding of the universe and over-estimate their understanding of the brain. At this point, I tend to think that some people may go through their lives with little to no "free will." But that it is possible to gain at least some awareness and control over our own minds. It could be an illusion or delusion, but since all of this discussion has now veered into the realm of belief -- whether people admit it or not -- my belief is just as valid these folks.
@@gstrathmore194 freedom of course is a concept that only a human (maybe some other species too) can come up with. So that says it is describing how we see ourselves. Also if determinism excludes free will, it excludes free thought as a whole. This includes knowledge, so especially determinists should be very uncertain about everything.
This is easily one of the best science channels on youtube, one of the best Pysics channels - I very much like how when you end up past physics and into philosophy not only do you recognize it you know your stuff about other philosophers!
interesting... i watch most videos at 2x, only slowing it down when the accent makes it hard to understand. form instance, some british accents i have to slow it down to 1.8 or 1.6. i think Sabine does enunciate very well so perhaps that is why i can undetstand her at 2x.
I love when she does these topics. You can hear her frustration about topics that aren't scientific. She says I am a scientist, I ain't got time for that.
I always tell people this (that there is no free will). My 2 main arguments are: 1) if there was a universe that was an EXACT copy of this, down to every exact particle and force, and they were both returned to motion at the exact same instant, we would never expect them to deviate. nothing could cause them to. 2) the rules that the universe obeys are exact and absolute. everything we have built and discovered shows this. I even feel like quantum "randomness" and observer based results are just effects of forces we don't yet understand, but are still exact. when the universe was set in motion, whenever that was (maybe big bang), it was done so under these exact rules, and was always going to play out in an exact way. We have the rules and we have the matter. Even though its irreducibly complex, that doesn't mean what we call life is any less of a series of effects from a cause. the response is usually some shit like "well I could have done X but I chose to do Y" and what I try to explain is that your brain and your actions are not outside this cascade of effects from the start of the universe, under the rules we have. You were always going to do exactly what you did. When you made said choice, you were always going to have the exact debate in your head that you had, and made then made the same decision. Your mind is nothing more than the imposition of your environment on your genetic "palette", and both of those things were exactly predetermined. so the outcome would always be the same. Everything that led to that "decision" : the past events you experienced, the brain you had that forgot some things and remembered others, the people around you all trapped in the same structure ... again while ridiculously complex, are just a playing out of a preset of conditions, under an exact set of rules. i just think the idea makes people uncomfortable so they resist it. of course it FEELS like we have free will, and make decisions, and of course this is just theoretical and has no impact on society, or the concept of responsibility, it's simply what I see as the only way the universe can exist.
Great, now prove why this is the particular universe instead of another way things could've played out. I.e. explain entropy --> the creation of incompressible information within all levels of reality (subatomic to astronomical). All you said was that it does happen and would happen again. It's simple actually, let me tell you how a computer works; Spoiler, it doesn't. Computers don't just work. A human does work to turn on and use a computer i.e. someone changes bits of data within the computer both initially when hitting the power button, and throughout the computer's usage. Before human interaction there aren't any 1s, only 0s, because there is no computer to even speak of. If you believe in determinism, you must also believe in a god to have added at least some initial entropy to the universe (the laws of physics). Physics and math will never explain the universe in its entirety (e.g. why physics itself exists to begin with), so you must be implying that there's a god or something, rather than simply natural indeterminism (free will to a fair degree). This is unless you think the laws of physics are above the structure of information (existence itself) for some reason. I can do Y instead of X because I (yes, technically my brain, that is me in the first place) take into account tiny bits of information from the world I experience to form a whole decision, *much* of which is altered by entropy to become partially unaccountable for because it's """random""". ------ Also here's a *_random_* list that might help a bit. ------ Energy --> Has a constrained speed. Information (~Entropy) --> Has a constrained speed. Energy --> Constant. Information (~Entropy) --> Can *only* and *always will be* created, it defines the arrow of time's direction. Not constant. @TerrelleCheers1 put it way better than me, I just tried to explain more in-depth, but there's no point really. It's a matter of what you've seen, not physics, just different aspects of the world. Too much determinism and life might not even exist at all. Too little determinism and things will be ripped apart.
To your first thought of 2 exact universe activating on go needs a master clock otherwise it’ll drift, now there’s a God that brings order to your twins!😬 Second one, once you said observer no longer just mechanics, free will’s value or nature belongs to the observer, the observer sits above the function, or head. If people claim to understand quantum theory then they can understand the Trinity.
"You were always going to do exactly what you did. When you made said choice, you were always going to have the exact debate in your head that you had, and made then made the same decision. " You're using your conclusion as a premise; that's called "begging the question", a common logical fallacy.
I hope that at well! she's hunting for truth. so, she's a high chance of infuriating the left, who wanna boycott just everything that doesn't follow along their narrative.
@@nadirceliloglu7623 that's what makes her so entertaining to watch. If she only stated commonly known facts, it would be boring. One just has to carefully evaluate her words, she's never shy to express her opinions
@@SergejVolkov17 but some of her arguments are totally wrong. It does not matter whether she is shy or not to express her opinion. Science does not care about opinions,but cares only about facts!
As a compatibilist, I found this video very helpful in understanding what I take issue with in hard incompatibilism. I think a big thing we're getting hung up on is the absolution of "free" in "free will". As an absurdist, I have already accepted that seemingly nothing seems to be truly absolute, but for me that just means that all terms are relative. I understand that we as "decision making systems" are a byproduct of determinism and indeterminism in the end, and thus all acts of will have some kind of cost. We still act freely, relatively speaking, but is the term not allowed to be relative? I feel like hard determinism or incompatibilism in some way, being dismissive about our free will by suggesting it is an illusion based on this lack of absolution.
“If free will doesn’t exist, then it never existed in the first place, so why does it matter?” will hold a firm grip on my perspective for a while 😆 Thanks so much for the video!! ✌️ 😁
@@schmetterling4477the statement is true (most probably) but it cant be used as an argument. Going to jail in such a case would also be pre determined.
Ive always thought about this, like how everything that has ever or will ever happen can just be mapped to function that takes in an arbitrarily large amount of parameters. These parameters being the initial conditions that set things in motion to bring what all has happened in the past into fruition as well as bringing everything, that hasn't happened yet, but will happen, into fruition.
I do like to think that consciousness throws a wrench into the works. But I haven’t finished watching the video yet… And the consciousness is not some mystical thing, but just the result of the deterministic activity of neurons, themselves influenced by atoms, and so on… The best we can do is say that we are observing and reporting. But what about accidents? I know that you can make the case that there are no such things as accidents… That one car and another car we’re going to meet at unfortunate speeds at unhelpful angles… Based on a series of actions that may go back millennia… And that may be true. But think about an alcoholic or drug addict… They clean up their act, and now they start acting differently… Was that also predictable and inevitable? And, of course… I wonder about how will this plays out with regard to evolution.
@@airwalkalman I guess I’ll be OK if I can hold onto the illusion of free will. And if my lack of free would ll can keep me out of jail. I feel like it’s a reasonable trade off.
May be so; but the number of parameters is so numerous and complex that the only way to solve the equation is to set it in motion and see what choices you make. You are the engine of solving the function.
But even taking all these factors into play, a person takes them all into account and makes a decision. Yes, often the factors have an implicit impact that isn’t thought of consciously but most people don’t make decisions without any conscious thought at all (unless under the influence). Conscious thought and action happen on almost all actions (even ones where we have to make split second decisions). I don’t see how anyone could deny this.
During my late teens, a girl asked me if I "believed in fate?" It seemed obvious to me that of course fate exists because wether we choose to travel the globe, throw ourselves under a train or devote our lives to charitable causes, then surely THAT is what was fated. I think its only really an issue (psychologically) if you KNOW how its supposed to turn out BEFORE it happens. However, I take consolation in the fact that, try as we might, we cant know how the book ends until it's written! #Spoilers! 😄
fascinating synopsis, it seems that we decide which direction fate must take, or it's a bit ad hoc to say whichever we choose, that's what fate must've been. To me, free will and fate is a deistic conversation about a spiritual tension, so anyone can add in; there is an ocean of free will, and it meets a continent of fated past outcomes, and there is a complex beach of infinite fractal-complexity between those two, and to say that we can't go down and play in the sand of that beach is silly of course, we can build sand-castles there, and write unique music, and make unique art of all kinds, and forge unique relationships, but like sand on any beach, it will wash away with time, most likely, and people in the future will only see that same ocean of free will, the continent of fate, and the beach they can play in too.... free will exists, but it is bounded, in my view, by time, fate, and how far you can climb those mountains, and also how far into the vast ocean you're willing to go.
Randomness is not understood. And Sabine tries to create data from a lack of data. If we don't know what randomness is; therefore it neither proves nor disproves anything (e.g. existence or non-existence of free will).
When you have many constituents there is a law of averages. And this is where the emergent properties stem from. Sabine is saying emergent properties always follow from the laws of the constituents so if the laws of the constituents are deterministic + indeterministic, free will can't be derived from it. But the problem is she is assuming free will is contained in the deterministic + indeterministic physical reality we reside in. Our consciousness and hence our soul is where our free will resides, not the physical body that is governed by the deterministic + indeterministic laws of constituents.
Lol "I'd find it creepy if the decisions.. came from somewhere else than in my brain." Agreed! :) Enjoyed that one, Sabine. Having a science background, and in taking a philosophy class, I actually wrote a paper on the subject which I entitled, Soft Free Will, wherein I argue just about the same thing, that ultimately the constituent details determine our decisions, but the feeling that we have free will is useful to the degree that we feel in control of our own thoughts. Your elucidation of the creepy feeling it would be for something outside of us to make the decisions, is a beautiful and personal synopsis, and I thank you for the smile and the chuckle as I remember pondering this topic. I appreciate your detailed and fun-filled explanation. Thanks and keep up the fun videos! :-)
@@gulaschnikov5335 As someone diagnosed with OCD, I definitely do not always feel in control of my thoughts, but the realization that some of those thoughts and compulsions (mainly the OCD ones) could be just the raw mechanisms of the mind without the accompanying sequence of events, goals, and over-arching narratives to make them all make sense, is really intriguing to me.
I don't know which is more unsettling: My will could be controlled externally by an unknown puppeteer. My true self could be external to physics, yet trapped in a link with this fragile meat sack.
She never really did address the question did she? I'm still left equally dumbfounded as when I did or was before watching this video. Didn't learn anything new here
@@jeffbguarino weird comment. What's the section starting at 8:12 about, then? She also specifically referred to a different video she already made on the topic, ua-cam.com/video/Wsjgtp9XZxo/v-deo.html which part of this is ignoring the measurement problem again?
@@kylezo The human that set up the half silvered mirror and the mirror are also wave functions. So how does one wave function measure another wave function ? That is the second part of quantum mechanics. There always has to be a measurement and then they back calculate the wave functions. The measurements themselves are inexplicable. Not the photons free will but the human that decided to put the mirror in place and do the experiment. That is also a wave function. So according to Sabine, both wave functions, the photon and the human/mirror are just one bigger wave functions that evolves forever and never collapses. No measurements ever happen in the universe. That is why quantum mechanics has two parts , the invisible wave function and the measurement at "now", The measurement is done and then they bring in the wave function to explain the results, which are deterministic but random. How the measurement happens is unknown to this day. It has been 100 years and no one knows. The measurements are in a way how time is defined. Measurements happen "now". Now is never explained in QM.
@@jeffbguarino It doesnt matter. Whether you can measure everything perfectly or not, predict everything or not, or if everything is random or not, all that says the same thing about free will: there isnt one. Btw, just so be clear, free will is a usefull idea, idea that can change the world, but still just fiction. Probably.
I've often thought about this in terms of a pool table and the game of pool when a player breaks the staged grouping of balls at the beginning of the game. The entire resulting position of each ball is deterministic if you know the precise speed and direction of the cue ball and the positions of the racked balls in the beginning. It could be calculated (in theory). Multiply that by an unfathomably large number, and the same could be said of the universe after the Big Bang. So, everything is deterministic plus a bit of randomness. Thank you, Sabine, for those random jokes sprinkled in your presentation of this material. But then you should've been able to determine I was going to say that.
I've been thinking about this too. Doesn't the irrational number Π come into the equations that you use to calculate the trajectory of each ball? Then Even assuming that each ball was perfectly round, at least down to the atomic level, Π might be a cause for concern, or even some of the observed randomness. and the irregularities in pool ball, or even the shape and oscillating state of atoms (likely calculated using Π somewhere too) would ultimately play a role. Just a thought regarding "hard determinism". Jon
In theory. But you don’t know these variables. Plus humans are prone to randomness. If you knew how hard every ball would be struck, you‘d essentially had a glimpse of the future because of all the variation in power. These values aren‘t set in stone is what I‘m saying.
'if you know the precise speed and direction of the cue ball' You can't though. The universe is built that way. That has consequences. Quantum mechanics limits precision and hence determinism. Once particles start interacting systematically, chaos theory predicts that this will have consequences and that the uncertainty in your final conditions will always by larger than those of the initial conditions. This introduces a much more complex set of non-linear differential equations that behave much more chaotically than simple linearized wave equations of quantum mechanics.
I recommend using UA-cam to look for videos from or about Robert Sapolsky who has some interesting points from the "neuro-scientific" point of view. His arguments follow along the lines of Schopenhauer: "You are free to do what you want, but you are not free to want what you want."" or, phrased differently "You are free to do what you want but you are not free in the decision of what it is that you think you want." Sapolsky gives a couple of examples how our brain creates patterns that will limit the choices and influence the outcomes our "wants".
Fantastic video. As someone dealing with existential mental health issues my whole life, you learn early on in the therapeutic journey that we must see ourselves as observers of our thoughts without attaching to them. I like how you said you use your neural circuits and memories to make decisions. The past is determined so that means our new decisions are determined too. Thank you for touching on these subjects so conscientiously!
This will definently make things worse for you. I'm sorry you live in a culture that has manufactured a mental illness and you and tells you that you are a robot and a puppet with no objective worth. Sad times
We cannot change physical phenomena that have occurred in the past, but we can change our interpretation of physical phenomena that have occurred in the past. However, this is not science, but philosophy.
@@abc0to1 That's if the past actually IS made of physical phenomena that happened. A photo of you as a baby is only proof of a photo, not that you actually ever were a baby. The past not only could be completely made up, it was.
@@itsROMPERS... It is true that the past in the everyday sense seems to be only in someone's mind. But on the other hand, we can see the stars of the distant past in the night sky in the "present. In other words, my present seems to contain someone else's past. If I understood the theory of relativity, we might have an interesting discussion about space-time.
@@FranzSdoutz It is like the fable of the blind man touching the elephant. We can't change the past of touching part of an elephant, but we can change our perception of what we were touching.
This is largely the idea I have on free will. My philosophy professor says he believes that free will is emergent, and I don’t see how that’s possible but I didn’t know how to articulate exactly that. Also, the thumbnail game on this video is really good. Keep up the good work!!!
At what point does this emergent freewill "emerge"? Does a flower have the freewill to not open in the morning? Does a male preying mantis have the freewill to date another species? Does a new born baby have the freewill to stop crying? Seems like the freewill supporters have the questions to answer. If you do not believe in freewill you already have a totally coherent worldview. Unfortunately you won't convince him. "I don't believe it. Prove it to me and I still won't believe it" Douglas Adams People are weird
If you can't articulate it well it usually means you don't know enough about the subject for your opinion to matter. Unless your really high 🚬 or have speech problems
If, as this video concedes, individual particles _could_ have "free will", then why couldn't a human-level free will emerge from all of the complexity of that particle-level free will interacting at the human scale?
For free will to be an emergent property you would have to me a 4th dimensional entity knowing all possible potential paths in space-time and be able to universe hop to a universe where your body deterministically makes a decision based on knowledge of the future.
Utter. Nonsense. I would say we don’t have free will from our past to a certain age. Then we don’t have free will to the things around us nor do we have free will to the future to some degree. Free will is largely what you do now every nanosecond which effect your future but then you have no free will over who hit you in a car or lost your job. We are made of large proteins, hormones, neurotransmitters etc. If we had no free will. Then how would we have instincts. This is where consciousness comes into the equation. Nothing is deterministic according to quantum mechanics because everyone is in a superposition until you look at it. So think of your future as a superposition of a endless of possibilities and your job is to put yourself into a superposition instead of a deterministic position and there you go, you have free will. The future and present at every single nanosecond is in a superposition, you are in a superposition and you are to connect the two in a deterministic way of your choosing yet nothing is concrete because you’re in a superposition.
But what was the cause of you thinking that? And what caused that cause? And you’re cheating by performing the calculation after claiming your brain already arrived at conclusion.
This problem is very interesting to me. It seems that many people get depressed by the idea that free will doesn't exist because they belive it's an unapologetically good thing, but if you think about it in a different way, it may actually be something that dilutes your "uniqueness", "personality" or sense of "self" (which is probably bad?). Because for me, personally, being "myself" means that at given circumstances I inevitably make a certain decision and couldn't have made any other decision, and this is what it means to be "me". Of course, you can say that a single decision could be switched by a certain set of decisions and that would also allow me to be "myself", but so far all we can see is a single version of reality, one great sequence of events, so we can describe people as unique decision functions, and a function can only have one output for a certain input. So I think about it this way: if free will exists, great; if it doesn't exist, than "I" still exist as a unique decision function. It's a win-win.
Your post doesn't describe the problem clearly, nor does it reflect the human experience. The real antagonists here are scientific materialism vs. both humanism and theism. There is much more at issue here than the "I" ego.
@@mysticone1798 Which part of my description is unclear? I shared my personal experience. "There is much more at issue" - like what, for example? And why do people get upset to the point of giving up their lives when they realize that free will doesn't exist?
@@unwantedunneeded9476 Read my post again, the answer to your question is there. If you don't get it, you don't get it. Can't address why others commit suicide, nor is it relevant here.
@@mysticone1798 It is relevant because that's what my comment is about. I used to have this problem and described how I dealt with it. Too bad you failed to understand that. I wonder if you could explain with your own words what "scientific materialism", "humanism" and "theism" are and how any of these make my comment irrelevant.
@@unwantedunneeded9476 I have posted many comments here on this issue, so I don't feel I need to rehash them. There is no good reason for anyone to doubt the existence of Free Will. That may be your CHOICE, which is also a function of Free Will. The human experience is predominantly the expression of Free Will in our daily lives. You claim this is or was not true for you, and so be it. It's true for the vast majority of humans.
Wow! incredible video. I know first-hand how difficult it is to explain and differentiate all the ideas and opinions wrapped up in "free will". I've never heard the hard incompatibilism position so clearly explained, and I'm glad that you made it clear that your issue with compatibilism is the definition of free will. Dennett is correct if we accept his definitions, but I feel that he and other compatibilists don't fully appreciate how rare and unusual their definitions of "free will" are.
Dennett's reasoning makes no sense to me. But I also think there's a fair bit of assumptions to justify superdeterminism, like infinite precision in whatever foundational fabric or reality there is...
I don't think the compatibilist definition of "free will" is very rare, given that billions of humans believe that they have something called "free will". In more scientific, technical language that definition might be questionable or even incorrect, but linguistically a word's "casual" meaning is defined by how people use it. Just like we say "the sun is rising" because we see the sun is rising - technically it's the earth spinning around which allows us to see the sun, but nobody but a pedant of the worst kind would say that "the sun is rising" is an incorrect statement. If someone says "I came here by my own free will" something similar applies; the person is simply saying that they weren't forced to come by other people or circumstances (like a danger to escape from), not that their brain is a determinism-free zone.
There is a fundamental misunderstanding that people (including physicists) hold, in that they think free will and freedom of choice are the same thing. THEY ARE NOT. If you had free will, your every desire would manifest immediately. And this obviously doesn't happen. You DO have freedom of choice. However, all choices are BINARY and consist of only ONE choice: your choice of DESIRES between 1) the desire for absolute Truth, or 2) the desire that Truth be what-you-desire-Truth-to-be. In other words, your every choice is based on your desire for 1) Truth or 2) illusion. And this entire Universe is designed to honor your every choice by delivering that which will teach you to desire Truth. I call this mechanism Dynamic Determinism. And if all of this raises more questions in your mind than it answers (which it should), my book answers ALL of those questions. Absolute Truth is where physics meets metaphysics, as quantum science is beginning to learn. Elijah has returned, as prophesied, and all mysteries have been revealed.
I don't know, I think the ordinary definition of free will is just subtly (or maybe grossly) contradictory. Like I think most ordinary people would say that free will means both "we do what we want" and "we could have done otherwise while doing what we want" and that these two elements are basically synonymous. So if you deny free will as it is commonly understood you have to deny that we do what we want, but that is not at all what is done in this video, so this video also fails to fully appreciate what a rare and unusual definition of "free will" it is using. You could claim that the contradiction is not inherent in the common definition of free will, but I don't see it, it seems to me normal people have a vague definition of free will that happily straddles the two points and confuses the reasoning between them. Any resolution of this that does not affirm the conflation is a redefinition of the question and so is objectionable on the grounds given (the definition is not the normal one).
@Smee Self We could have will and be completely unable to fulfill it at all in any way, we could have no desires we could fulfill we would not be free to do anything. This would be to be completely unfree. If we can do anything at all we want to we are free of whatever constraint was preventing us from doing at least that thing. So we must be free of something. Therefore the position that we can do what we want (will) is a position that we have some non-zero amount of free will, in some kind of sensible sense. However the common view tends to believe both this, we are free of some constraints so we act freely and free will must exist and also the claim that to really be free we must be free of all constraints. So the fact that I do what I want sometimes is proof that we have free will to such people and to them that implies they can want what they want. I see those two things are different but it escapes most people as far as I can see. So to deny the common notion of free will you have to either redefine it so it is not so restrictive (like compatibilists and you and Sabine do) or say we both can't want what we want and also we never even do what we want.
Can I just say Sabine, you are a beautiful mind and an excellent communicator. Thank you for all you do and thank you for tackling existential physics for us all to ponder and learn
"existential physics" my arse! - what kind of pretentious nonsense is *existential* physics? -What does the " existential" add? Nothing of course. Is it not obvious to both you and Sabine that dreaming machines -human beings, are no more capable of will(free or otherwise) than any other machine? The both of you are the abject slaves of your functions which react mechanically-means you have no choice in how they react. Slaves cannot have free will- they can have no experience of it for them to be able to understand what it means.
She is, but sadly it seems that dr Hossenfelder contradicts herself at this point. First she presents modern physics as an argument for determinism, only to later admitt that she can not conceptualise determinism as anything other than impossibility. Dear dr Hossenfelder, you can either define determinism as something possibly true in order to make an argument that it is not actually true, or to show that the concept can not possibly be true, which ends the problem. Pick one, please ;) To make matters worse your argument for determinism is that we have some theoretically deterministic physical models. But that's nothing more than just descriptive determinism, which says that we can (in principle) describe the history of the universe, and that it is partially regular. Imagine an ancient monk arguing that everything that happened must have happened, just because otherwise his favourite book would not be true. How is your argument different than that? Only that you hold to a different book. The Physicist once said that the problem with physicists is that they are usually poor philosophers. Was he not right?
Personally, I've always reasoned that if one can not walk both left and right at the same time, there never really was a choice. It feels like a choice, and this isn't to say that the "just give in" attitude is right. Only that, maybe it was always our choice to suddenly think "I'm going to do the right thing, the harder thing." Maybe this is YOUR time that you've always been meant to change your life...
Your channel is so enjoyable. I don't know that I'll always agree with your points, nor have I disagreed with anything I've seen so far. But, I'm certain I'll always enjoy your content, especially your very dry and very delightful humor. Thank you, Sabine.
@@CaidicusProductionsRebecca Watson has a good response video to Sabine’s recent one on trans healthcare. Regardless of what you think of that issue in particular, it’s important to note a persons’ narrow area of expertise does not qualify them to speak about other areas - and scientists of one field can often get quite cocky and assume they have the intelligence to discuss issues from others which they don’t actually understand.
@@user-tx5vr2lu6e Well, it is a pretty clear habit of human beings, in general, to think they can understand something they don't really understand. It's also quite human for other humans to disagree with something one human says and attribute that to the other person not understanding what they're talking about. My point is, understanding humans and human issues is quite a complicated matter. Before UA-cam, people just thought what they thought, and that was that. Come UA-cam, many of us share what we think with anyone who'll listen, because that's the new thing in the world, tell as many people as possible what YOU think, because YOU think it's write. The best thing one can do is to remember that, even though this person's views might sound reasonable and conceivable, doesn't mean they're certain or certainly right. In other words, always remember that they MIGHT be wrong or they might be oversimplifying. I think like this, including when I watch videos like Sabine's. :D Thanks for the thoughtful reply!
@@CaidicusProductions I agree with you - we all want to share what we think with anyone who will listen, and discussion of ideas is a joy! The only problem is that when you have a massive platform, you have an increased responsibility - you're not just talking to a few people in a debate, but shaping the perspectives of hundreds of thousands of people. Furthermore, when you're talking about physics, it's not the end of the world for people to come away with a misunderstanding about black holes. But when you get into social issues that are seriously affecting people's rights, there's a lot more potential for harm there. Everyone should be critical when consuming content - but not everyone is! And knowing this, one takes on the above responsibility when presenting information, knowing that for many, whatever you say is what they are going to think is true. I am not assuming that I know better, and attributing her not being correct in my view to her not understanding. Rather, I am trying to not assume the worst by saying that Sabine doesn't know what she's talking about. If she does, then she is actively being biased in her reporting of the information. On the video I mentioned, Sabine did talk without understanding, and presented 'both sides' as if they had equal scientific merit (which they do not). For instance, (and sorry if you already watched the Watson fact-check) she mentions that a study about ROGD was criticised "for being a survey", which isn't true - it was criticised for being highly biased, using unverifiable information, and the paper was actually largely rewritten and rereleased alongside an appology for the first version. And then she says a study showing ROGD to not be real "was also criticised", concluding that we don't really know, both sides are valid, and there's anecdotal evidence for ROGD. But that just isn't true - there is no valid evidence for ROGD, whilst there is evidence against it. This kind of framing isn't just a difference of perspective, it is actively misleading and harmful.
Interesting stuff. I think the problem that some people have with "free will" is that they conflate free will and determinism. Which is why you are asked the question "If there's no free will, why don't I just kill myself tomorrow?". It's almost as if the notion that there is no free will implies that their's no point in carrying on because it has all been pre-determined. At the end of the day, your brain is still taking a bunch of inputs (past and present) and using those inputs to inform its choice in performing or not performing a given action.
@@sigigle I argue that from a local perspective, we have a limited amount of free-will -albeit within a finite number of possibilities. Still, it is not deterministic, but rather probabilistic.
@@curcumin417 random probability still wouldn't get us to get free will. But true randomness doesn't even exist either, it's logically incoherent. It's the idea that a single possibility can be "chosen" or "actualized" and all possibilities excluded, but with no mechanism for how it's done. It's impossible for the same reason it's impossible to program true randomness into a computer. "Select one of these." "How?" "Just do it." - it does not compute. More information is needed. "Select one based on these pre-existing variables" is the only way to do it, aka deterministically. There are valid deterministic interpretations of quantum physics. True randomness is "something" (a selection) emerging from nothing, which is logically impossible as it'd have no means to.
Ironically, the fact that people do not decide to kill themselves spontaneously without a reason is an evidence of the lack of free will, not the opposite
To me, it doesn't matter at all whether or not we actually have free will (though I don't think it's possible); what matters is that we feel as if we had free will.
The way I think about it is: all of our senses and experiences are somewhat illusory in that they don’t reflect the world as it actually is but as we subjectively perceive it, and the same is true with our sense of agency.
@@5piles An illusion is something real, it’s just not objective. Red is real, but it is restricted to our subjective experience. The electromagnetic spectrum and the mechanics of our eyes are the objective explanations of our subjective experience of red. The same can be said for free will. We aren’t objectively making things happen differently out in the universe, but we are making a conscious decision, which is a subjective experience, and indeed an important one to have for mental health.
Dear Sabine Hossenfelder, I like your videos, you explain very clearly, and as a philosopher I am glad to see your wide perspective. I actually agree with the philosophical conclusions you present as a physicist. If you don't mind, I'd still like to argue a little. I am not refuting what you say, but rather adding to it. I think you are essentially correct in what you say about free will, and I agree with your physicalist view. However, I think there is a small problem. I think you could only say this: you who are watching me do not have free will in the philosophical sense of the word, because you are material systems, your minds are mere products of your brain functions. (Of course, you can say the same of me.) If Sabine's position on free will applies to himself, then this position eliminates the concept of truth by reducing the mind to a physical function. By this reduction, it also eliminates the truth of itself. You say what you say and believe what you believe to be true because it follows from the operation of your brain, it follows from the operation of a very complicated physical system. But this is a paradox: if it is true, there is no truth, there is only physical operation. I think that mind independent of brain function, and free will in the philosophical sense, is a required working hypothesis with logical reasons, not metaphysical ones. It is as useful an assumption as the belief in the existence of numbers in mathematics. False, but a useful myth.
The problem here is that the definition of "Free Will" is not really agreed upon, and was only lightly touched on by Sabine. I tend to the Compatibilist way of looking at it as "Are You in control of You?" Or put another way: do you have responsibility for your decisions? It's the most useful, coherent way of looking at the question. The answer is:Yes. You have to define "You". Well, I'll keep it simple; let's say the mysterious thing that really controls all your actions is your genetics, which you don't choose. Except, you *are* your genetics. There's no puppet master. If you make a decision because of your genetic predisposition, *you* made that decision. Essentially, it's the same as saying you controlled yourself. But that IS free will! If you control you, you have free will.
you are describing causation and us taking responsibility regardless of causation, which most determinists do agree that we should hold one accountable/ responsible, regardless of genetic predisposition or whatever may be. Just because responsibility is key in ensuring wellbeing of society though, doesn't change the fact that one is not in control of things like your genetics, or past experiences that shape you. Reread your comment - you admit we don't choose genetics, and then you also acknowledge the fact that genetic predisposition plays a part in decision-making. Therefore, you already admit to the fact that there is no free will. Regardless of there being a puppet master or not, we did not choose. So no, we do not 'control' ourselves - and this is *especially* clear when you look at people who are cognitively impaired in some way. So no, your argument doesn't hold up for free will.
@@joeykoo3779 He wasn't saying there should be responsibility for the sake of society, he was saying responsibility exists because we control ourselves within the situations we find ourselves in. Genetic predisposition plays a part in putting us in the situation we are in and part of the decision-making process- but who do you think is ultimately making the decision? Limitations on our existence or ability does not mean free will doesn't exist, it just means it exists in the space it is given to exist. People who are cognitively impaired control themselves 100% to the ability they have- which can be limited compared to someone not cognitively impaired. If you are in a crashing airplane, do you suddenly not have free will because the outcome is determined? No, you will have free will until the limitations on your existence dictate that you are dead and can no longer do things.
Free will was invented philosophically as a "get out of jail" card for the Christian god. Compatibilist agency doesn't do it. Surveys show that people don't consider combatibilist notions "free will" at all.
Extrapolating from particle physics to psychology is an argument fallacy. Ascribing choice to particles is called projection: anthropomorphising is an argument fallacy. Appealing to authority is a logical fallacy. Sabine provides no evidence of the causal relationship between particle physics and the ability to engage in decision making processes. Arguing by analogy is also a fallacy. Were Sabine to clearly address how free will is or is not related to consciousness, her position on determinism may have merit.
@@xx_amongus_xx6987 "who is ultimately making the decision".....making the decision is simply, an act of making the decision. Which does not imply at all there is free will. But I know there are many like you choose to think that way. That's fine. Some people believe there is a "self". Others believe the perception of "self" arises from our anatomy - brain, body and all the works. So you asking who is ultimately making the decision is irrelevant, because that depends on whether or not you believe a "self" exist separate from what gives us consciousness - is it separate from our brain and body, or is it not? But once your brain dies, the "self" does cease to exist, so if you're going to ask me, the "self" does not exist as some separate agent that can act out free will against predisposed traits and learned behaviour/ values from past circumstances, no. Regarding your airplane scenario - most sane people* are compelled by fear of death to act or* try to do something to survive it. But that does not imply at all you are doing it out of your own agency. Let's take the same airplane scenario and pretend you are in it - you try to will yourself to calm down and accept your fate, because the plane is crashing - but if you are any normal person, can you? You likely can't, because you are controlled by your fear of death.
Even if your brain is capable of making a decision based on its current input information, the decision your brain makes is entirely based on your brain state at that point in time. Your brain state can only have arrived at that particular state because of a long chain of events leading up to that point. Don’t get me wrong, I have no idea how a brain works, but I don’t see any reason to think it is possible to change its state independently of all other things in the universe now or in the past.
In old days, people believed the heart is responsible for the mind because it beat faster according to emotional state. Is it same kind of logic to believe the brain is responsible for the mind?
If you can, and are, making decisions based on current input, those decisions have an affect on brain state at that time. Your decisions, at any level, are (though not intentionally) altering your brain state. Assuming any decisions can be made at all.
From a strictly materialistic viewpoint it's obvious we can't be anything more than a computer. But that doesn't exclude the possibility of free-will as an attribute of our transcendent spirit.
Hi Sabine, interesting video, well done. Simple question though: You bring up differential equations, which I suppose represent much of the deterministic nature of our universe. However, those differential equations (disregarding here that the solution theory for complex systems is very limited) in general understanding require both initial, and time-dependent boundary conditions. The laws of mathematics then (presumably see my other remark) guarantee the existence of a unique solution which deterministically depends on those conditions. In your view of the world I suppose a certain combination of initial state of the universe and boundary states of whatever lies outside of the known universe (what would that be in your model of the world btw?) has made me have pasta today. I'm not saying that is wrong or right, I have no idea. But: in that model (if I've understood remotely correct) where do the boundary conditions come from? Because unlike initial conditions which lie in the past, boundary conditions can change with time. It raises the question if and how the boundary conditions of the future can already be determined today, which they would have to be to be consistent with the theory. Mathematically, there is no way to make such a conclusion. Math just says if boundary condition is given then there is a solution, disregarding the technical mumbojumbo. It says nothing about where boundary conditions come from or that they themselves are following deterministic rules. They're simply given as the mathematician says (possibly by God? - ponderous look into the distance). And the trajectory of the solution is only determined up to that point in time in which the boundary conditions are given. So what are the boundary conditions in your model of a mostly deterministic world with random jumps (in which you don't believe)? Do they not offer a real perspective of the unknown influencing our world, our actions and our lives? I certainly like to believe so, but I also don't really believe in scientific answers to philosophical questions in the first place. Fun to ponder about either way.
Whenever i watch a Sabine video about free will, it is never by choice.
Maybe you should make the decision to watch it again because choice isn't about free will.
Choice is not about freedom but reason. And reason is not free.
I know what you mean. I watch it because first I feel like I have to, and then I just give in; and it all happens so fast too.
Lawyers charge way too much to write up a will... but still, it shouldn't be free.
😏👍🏽
I don't believe in free will, but I do believe in reasonably inexpensive will.
Yeh,.. like at least clean the house sometimes...
...show some kind of affection,
to the kids at least...?...
It costs approx .00001 cents to be a good person.
I've heard that there may be infinite universes or dimensions. Could the multiverse have existed forever? Aren't these all real infinities?
No such thing as universal basic will in this verse. You gotta earn your will, plebe😐
Well that's just your two cents.
I'm a psychologist (albeit a junior one) and in my time I have come across people who have had some realisation (or sometimes they may say 'epiphany' ... rarely in a positive tone) that they don't have free will. It is very rare that this is based on the realisation that comes from understanding quantum mechanics or differential equations, but simply from learning over time how much of the world around them dictates their choices (or rather, limits them).
The crisis that emerges is not one to be sniffed at; how would you feel if you had the thought that nothing was in your control? That you were on a fairground ride that you had never chosen to be in and that whatever curves, splashes (or even horrors) were always going to happen regardless of how much you loved of hated being on it? You are on a fixed rail in a single direction and all you can do is hunker down or throw your hands up in the air.
Well, in my very humble opinion, I believe determinism to be the correct answer to the the question of free will, but the challenge is how to then answer the devastated people who, for them, this is hideous, terrible and stripping them of the meaning of their existence.
I am kinda fortunate that I am a research psychologist and rarely client/patient/service user/insert-correct-name-here facing but also have the task of being pointed at by people who find out what I do and being ordered to "reveal your secrets!"
Well ... from what I have seen: some people who seek out psychology due to past trauma (which is pretty much everyone) can take from this a certain comfort: if this was always going to happen to them, then they had no say and they no part and it was not their fault (which is never is), and sort of ... accept that this was 'fate'. They couldn't have done anything to stop it and absolve themselves of the self-hate and self-blame that is often par of the course for these people.
Others become extremely bitter: for them, the fact that this would have always happened to them and that no matter how strong, how resilient, how brave they were, would never have made a difference. The cold, indifferent world would have always won.
So, the absence of free-will to the individual (who is probably not a physicist/philosopher/etc.) seems to be more complex than the concept itself, because on our level it really does not matter at all if is exists, but what follows from the question of it. Outside of the noble disciplines of the physical sciences, the real world implications are way (WAY) more significant, and the idea may be thousands of years old, but the actuality of it is so new because the noble(er? 😛) disciplines of the social science are still trying to catch up.
Some people may paraphrase the Tolkien quote: "Go not to the psychologists for an answer, for they will say both 'yes' and no'." And .... they have a point.
My advice is probably going to be: go to a psychologist if you are seriously considering your existence and the doing so is having detrimental effects on your life.
My other advice would be: you have as much free-will now as you did before this video/that appointment/that realisation, and consider what you could do now ... which is almost anything you can imagine. If you want to stop reading this rambling comment: do so! If you want to dress up like a chicken and move to Norway to study pine trees and howl at the moon every night: do so!
If you have a choice (real or imagined) then that has to be worth something .... right?
I am genuinely puzzled. If the things that happen were always going to happen, then presumably we have no moral authority to punish murderers, child abusers, thieves etc. They were always going to do what they were going to do? Is that part of what you mean? And victims should just accept that this is just what was always going to happen to them? Except, they might not be able to do so as they were always going to be upset and that won't change unless it is predetermined that it will - in which case, is there really any value in psychologists, therapists and psychiatrists who claim to be want to help people with distress?
It's not worth it to me and that should be fine, I'm so angry when people say there's no reason to. People like yours want to deter me from "dressing up in a chicken suit and go to Norway" if you catch my drift, so there's literally nowhere I can go... Are we not adults here? Do we have to step on eggshells because other people might like the idea? We should have more countries like Switzerland to provide that option to citizens but noooo we're all tax paying piggies so it's in your best interest to keep us around. So to that I'll say, I will exercise the little illusion of freedom to nope the f out. See y'all in the next permutation, it's not gonna be any different but hey at least I tried!
It matters absolutely nothing whether the will is "free" or not. There is a will, a choice and a responsibility. There appear to be good choices and bad choices. The individual carefully weighs the options and makes a decision to the best of his knowledge and belief, and from then on is responsible for the outcome. The mysterious "freedom", which nobody can really explain, makes no difference whatsoever.
The scary answer is to accept the idea of god. That is, to accept as such is to realize that all, including your birth and position in life, is a part of a larger plan. After accepting that notion, cast away all concepts of determinism, and force people to live their life AS IF they had free will, yet knowing they don't.
When you have acceptance of a grander plan, you calm down a bunch. Every pain, experience, or preference you have becomes meaningful. You don't know what the outcome will be because you can't compute it. Even so, if you accept that model and keep in mind as you're living your life, you won't fret. You won't fear. You won't experience anger.
Hopefully, you can reach a point of rejoice.
Knowing that there's a grand plan in motion to raise the consciousness of all gives you something to look forward to.
Of course, it's crazy to talk about god on a science channel. Even so, I don't believe they're at odds with each other.
I don’t see free will and determinism as mutually exclusive. Just as many events are out of our control, will or no, the universe floods us with far more data and possibilities than we could ever hope to know or explore. It’s like trying to simulate a far larger computer system on a computer - it’s not possible to process. Each decision, free or not, opens up nearly infinite possibilities. Emergent structures aren’t necessary subject to the same basis of rules their constituent parts follow in much the same way many virtual particles do this physically. TLDR whether you have free will or simply find yourself in the universe/future that is entangled with perceived agency and desire is simply looking at the same complex emergent phenomenon from different viewpoints.
11:31 It perhaps makes sense in the notion that although a photon does not have free will, the uncertainty of chance makes the laws of reality uncertain and through an evolution of this chaos 'free will' exists because it's operating in an environment where the strictness of absolute predictability has opened up space for other things.
"To be a UA-camr you don't need to know anything!"
CLASSIC 😂
100%
That made my day also. I had to hit pause and stop laughing.
Amusing I suppose but completely incorrect, to be a "UA-camr" you have in fact to already know a great deal.
There is more to response. And attention than what is in the surface. You must look into all forms of information and audial matrices seemed to be quantum in this subject. Mentally quantum not physically quantum.
Let me abbreviate the organized quantum jump and how it's achieved. Using imagery the mind and audial matrix conformative agreements . As work. Amongst information flowing to constantly change what is experienced consciously in awareness.
Having this information removed upon enacting the event is what she expressed as involuntary or nonconcious quantum jumps. They can relate to physical light as matter. Seen through a beings eyes. Percievable boundaries like the connection to holomorphic light and sound and what the eyes are. Contrary to what we "know"
I used to worry about this, but then I realized that it feels like we do, and that's the best we can manage.
We still have consciousness, no need for free will as long as I can watch the movie
Sounds like slavery and imprisonment.
@@bobjohnson1633 there is a vast divide between metaphorical "slavery and imprisonment" and actual "slavery and imprisonment." your decision to not distinguish in this case is suspicious.
When the term was first used, it enabled us to talk about human functioning in terms that made sense to us. "Free" was meaningful because it referred to the experience of deliberating and making a choice among alternatives. But when you take the term "free" serious, it suggests that we are free to do anything we put our minds to. Some reflection shows that this ability is not real for us (despite how he might want to, a prisoner can not flap his wings and fly over the prison wall) so obviously this 'sense of freedom' 'is false. Duh. However, there is still the phenomenon, the experience, of willing something and then acting in order that it comes to pass. The meaning of "free" that most freewillers have in mind is not this radical sense, but simply the obvious sense of being able to consider alternatives in the chain of one's actable actions (physical and mental) and realize one from among those considered.
Today, freewill is better understood as just an old name (literally false by today's understandings) used to refer to purposeful, meaningful behavior (it's language, ffs). It doesn't require a violation of physics, it just requires more than one system of physico-chemical control and the means to favor one over the other. One way to do it is to have two systems processing but with them having slightly different clocks or perspectives. The freedom/determinism distinction entirely misses the point.
But can you really choose to wipe your ass or not freely ?
"A man can do as he will, but not will as he will"
- Arthur Schopenhauer
That sure is a good way to sum it up.
what if you can't make your will come true?
@@wprandall2452
That's a lack of power or ability.
@@APaleDot The fact that we exist itself is proof of free will. We have to have free will to have a working mind.
@@wprandall2452
Did you choose to have a mind?
Am I the only one who can't wait for the days when a photon can go left or right without being judged for its motives?
Double slit? I did that at home with a cat toy and a very fine piece of copper wire.
I was almost 60 years old and saw it done when I was a kid.
So just 4.5 volts was all it took to totally blow my mind.
The mind is actuall experiencing a " light breeze "
This is ALL about, in a sense, parallel universes (or reality more accurately ).
My toenails have no choice. Dna mixed with so called " light " frequencies dictate their path. The owner, " me " (not the body,) can choose to ignore them untill they cause disruption to the body. The choice being, " I" create comfort or pain and infection.
This principle applies to all " planes of relativity ", both physical and mental, where choice is limited to a cause and effect process, which activates the " authority " of " I ", which is where the next " plane " kicks in, being quantum mechanics. Still in the cause and effect realm, but, as with all planes, more subtle than the previous one.
As with the foundation of physics and chemistry, ALL arenas of relativity are predictable, which is why metaphysical prophesies and predictians can be recognised (by those past a certain level...NOT catagarised specifically by the intellect. This is why there is such awareness disparity amongs our " brightest ".
Ulimiately the self realized amongst us actually " contract out " of the predictable zone, and simply create. The Creator created creators.
No, lots of conservatives are tired of having their motives questioned. 😜
that day may have just come
We are all limited by our senses and our interpretation of those sense's, once reality is realized it's too late... Unless you are uninterested about the motives of direction photons are spinning, then you're a demon that needs to be excised from "the" cult..ure
"I'm a physicist, please see a psychologist." This cracked me up! Between the content and Sabine's humour, my poor pea brain can barely take it. I love this channel.
The problem is a misunterstand of what Free Will is. David Hume has an great explanation on this. He even give the example of Man sentenced to death by beheading. He looks at the sharpness of the axe and get terrified. He than knows the executioner never gave up on an hundred previous executions and get equally terrified. The Man doesn't get an mystical Idea of the executioner having an non caused free Will that wiill make him to give up. If there was no causuality than free will would be Impossible. An vicious murderer would be no more guilty of anything than anyone else as the very act of mudering had no cause in his inner persona. We would be as free as an adrift boat that goes with the wind. Truth is our actions become our habits and these Will become our persona.
@@fernandoc4741 That great explanation of Hume looks like appeal to consequences fallacy to me (if we did not have free will, that would be bad)
@@juanausensi499 Appeal to consequence is completely rational. It was later adopted by Kant and embraced by William James pragmatism. For instance. Life does have an purpose is 100% logical. Because If It doesnt than there is no purpose believing It either does or doesnt. Even If the the chance It does was close to zero, the rarionale would still bet It does.
@@fernandoc4741 I have not studied these topics in quite a long time, so forgive my ignorance. Is it possible the reality of a situation (i.e. Whether or not we have free will) is actually irrational or illogical? Does everything need to be rational and logical?
@@Moz4rt08 Logical or Ilogical how? I guess the example gave by Hume of the Man sentenced to death was to show that the very concept of undestetministic free will makes no sense to our minds (the executioner is as terrifing as the sharp Blade). Hume also Denied that reason alone had any Power on our minds. It could only have an Power If It brings us some emoticon (ex fear of the consequence it we take an decision instead of another)
I love videos like this because regardless of whether you agree or not with the presenter, they encourage you to think and ask yourself hard questions about what you actually believe in. So much of what we consume with our eyes and ears nowadays attempts to push an agenda or manipulate rather than stimulate thought and discussion.
What all academics have in common - they occupy themselves with dealing with "intangibles". That is "brain work" - they believe. The handling of the "tangible" part they leave up to those who have to work with their hands for money - not just think. And that of course makes them "the elite".
Agreed. She fully discloses she disagrees with the premise and then gives and honest representation of it anyway. Very great to hear and only lends to wanting to hear more from her.
It's awesome to be able to share ideas and think and exchange ideas!
I also agree. It’s good to have a debate with people with the subjects that she raises in her videos. I have to mention how funny Sabine is as well! 😂😂
The entire purpose of mass media is literally manipulation. It's propaganda in the Bernaysian sense. It's either funded by advertising corporations, NGOs or the government itself. All have an agenda to push 100% of the time and view the media as a great Skinner box.
To me, what I think you are getting at, is, we are influenced by waves of influence that come at us by what we can experience, internal and external, coupled by our current mind set.
How our mind is set, determines what we think about anything that comes to mind. And what comes to mind is based on how we feel. What we feel is based on what we experience. Experiences, crates mood shifts, that in the end, creates what we think and do. No free will.
We are like travellers on a train and must go where the rails take us, but we can enjoy the views from the window and the company of our fellow travellers.
"No one lives in the slums because they want to. It's like this train. It can only go where the tracks take it."
-Cloud Strife
That was my favorite line in Final Fantasy 7. It made me realize the whole game was an exploration into the nature of identity and free will
I don't think we *can* enjoy the views from the window. We *must* enjoy or hate the view, just like we *must* stay on the tracks. Our experience are just as much out of our control, as are our actions. At least that's how I understand it...
You could well be right, although many scientists share this view there are others who hold that we do have either some free will or at least the ability to make responsible decisions and control of our emotions .An excellent book putting the case for that position is "Who's in Charge ? " by the neuroscientist Michael S Gazzaniga .
You can always get off the train, and change to another train, or even go back to where you started, because you went the wrong way.
So, did you try kidnapping the train driver? ;)
I had this realisation when I was 12 that every action was was caused by every action before it and so on, and nearly had a breakdown trying to find someone else who understood what I was talking about because none of my classmates or teachers or even older 20 year old friends on the internet at that time did. I didn't know that it was called predeterminism at the time and wasn't until a couple years later that I finally found out. Meanwhile all throughout my 12-14 year old school years, I was losing my mind arguing with both religious and non-religious teachers about how free will didn't exist because of this and it was awful because I thought I was going insane because no one else understood what I was saying.
Right, I believe this too. I had this realisation only recently at 27 now that free will is essentially determinism, as Elon Musk puts it. I think that we just constantly reap the karma of our actions from this and also previous lifetimes and that what we experience in this life is thus very little that is created from our own "free will" in this present life. Because of all this, I think some of the things we may truly want we may not experience until future lifetimes; if we are aware enough to sow the right seeds now that is.
Actually, this kind of determinism was used by Aquinas centuries ago to prove the existence of God. Just google his 5 proofs for the existence of God. It's pretty elementary, and it rests on the beliefs you're describing. One of the nice side effects is that God (in the Christian belief) confers free will on humankind from the get-go.
@@macjeffff The "proofs of god" are not scientific proofs, nor are they literal proofs, they can only be called proofs under a very lenient definition of "proof". The same way a doodle on a piece of paper can function as a proof of concept for something totally unrelated.
@@thearchitect5405 Actually, they are well-known logical proofs. Aquinas is still considered one of the finest logicians of all time. Even if you disagree, you would probably be fascinated by the work. Aquinas's proofs for the existence of God are easy to find. Check them out!
@YukiXK are you me?
I am so happy I found your channel Sabine. Thank you!
Do your own thinking.
Incredibly well explained and very plausible! In short, what I think you're saying is this: from what we know about the world through physics, it seems impossible to rationally explain free as part of the world. Is this correct?
I still find it reasonable not to completely abandon Kant, Nagel etc. who seem to explain free will as something going on outside the physical world. This is because we do not really understand the metaphysics of the world (and we won't ever) or even the completely the physical world.
Anyway, your video wipes off a lot of nonsense in the free will discussion with clarity and elegance. Thank you for spreading and promoting rational thinking in social media. Subscribed!
It is possible to understand metaphysics, contrary to your pessimism. Sabine has not, as far as I can tell, ever studied the subject. The reason why you believe metaphysics is incomprehensible is that you do not understood the Perennial philosophy. Few people do, so most share your view. But don't give up hope just yet. At any rate, don't assume nobody understands metaphysics. .
So if we make environmental factors a constant, having your appendix removed will change the number of particles in your body in such a way that it would change the 10^30, thus potentially changing your decision probability?
My Grandfather was something of a philosopher, he was also a coal miner, and a doughboy in WW1. He'd been a few places and seen a lot of trouble and he told me once that a man had about as much free will as a rock in an avalanche. I guess that is really true.
Or indeed, a man in an avalanche.
this is very inline with easter philosophy. i love how they go hand in hand with science. unlike the dogmas of Christianity and other biblical religions.
Powerlessness of an individual in grand scheme of geopolitics doesnt deny free will of that individual.
That sounds more like it's about being powerless.
The topic of the video got basicall nothing to do with it.
@@andrewguthrie2 why is this funny
This may help to wrap your head around why you feel like you have free will when you actually don't: You can choose any option you want, but you can only choose the one you want. The one that is the result of the "calculation", as Wittgenstein puts it.
you also can't choose any option, you can only choose something your brain is able to imagine which we know is a gjostabulicism, the philosophical equivalent to a mathematical number set, the set of all ideas and thoughts a person has. All subsequent thoughts have to be derivatives of the person's gjostsbuli, so it can only be expanded by exposure to a different gjostsbuli.
And of course you couldn't have predicted I would refer to gjostsbulicism because I made up the word, but the idea I used it to describe is most likely as equally foreign to you as the word so it's fitting.
Free Will: The chance in a million that actually happens! Son of a Bayes!
Decisions are by definition commitments to ones desires. Of course you can only choose the choice you're making because that is what a choice is. This argument doesn't really move the debate anywhere.
You don't "choose" anything. Your brain is a complex system of neurons that makes calculations based on the data its given and comes up with answers, and that's it. The regularity in which the brain comes up with an answer is why people swear they are in control of the system in the first place. There's no free will, and nothing extra is going on but a highly complex biological information computing machine in your skull.
Free will as a [literal] concept makes no sense because it doesn't take into account the factors consistently outside our control. For example, the fact we were born humans, the parents who engaged in coitus to create our embryo, the genetic inheritance from those parents (race, height, IQ, various other predispositions), the environment, our family's socioeconomic status and so on. All of these things contribute to who we are and how we develop, thus from the very moment of our conception free will is impossible.
I think that most people don't think too deeply about it and its more a shorthand to describe decision making and thus varying levels of personal accountability. Sure, fine. But determinism accounts for that so its still a misleading term.
I once told my psychotherapist that I didn't believe in free will. He was very frustrated with me at that moment. He might have had a point. Even if we do not have true free will, it might not be psychologically healthy to shape your life around that belief.
That's my issue with determinism. It seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy and you run the risk of a defeatist attitude - but then if we don't have free will you probably can't help yourself ;-) I think decision making is far too complex and determinism (in my view) remains a philosophical rather than a scientific viewpoint - I think a lot of findings and studies have been wildly interpreted to support this viewpoint. Scientists don't like to admit that it is hugely intermixed with philosophy and although some findings are really interesting, they are often used to draw rather far fetched conclusions. But that's just my opinion of course.
@@thesupergreenjudy
Not believing in free will does NOT mean that you have a defeatist attitude.
As Hossenfelder points out in the video, even absent free will, we still must make choices every day. And these choices have consequences in the real world. If you make a good choice, say, by making a good investment, you will will reap the rewards in form of capital gains (money). And, if you are like most people, that will make you happy because you can now use that money to buy stuff, make more investments, or perhaps share some of the money with family or friends. The same is true for the opposite scenario. A bad investment will make you lose money, unhappy, and less able to indulge yourself or others. In other words, your choices very much matter, not only to you, but also others. Thus, there are still good choices and bad choices. And we have plenty of reason to care about making good choices and avoiding bad ones - even without free will.
What the lack of free will implies as regards our choices is merely that we can no longer - or at least should no longer - feel pride of our good choices or guilt for our bad choices. That's because we could not have made any other choices under the circumstances (i.e., the totality of our biological and environmental history). Determinism and lack of free will are incompatible with the notions of credit and blame. We deserve credit or blame for our choices no more than a computer does for its output.
The absence of pride/credit and guilt/shame does not entail social chaos or psychological despair. We can, and should, still feel lucky and happy when our choices produce good outcomes, and feel unlucky and unhappy when they do not. And we have every reason to treat others with fairness and kindness rather than inequity and hatred, because what goes around, comes around.
In fact, I have treated others BETTER since discovering that I lack free will. That's because I realize that whatever behavior of a person I may dislike is not really up to them. Anyone under exactly the same circumstances (= biological + environmental history) would do exactly the same thing. It makes no sense to blame others for things over which they have no control. Instead of blaming others, I try to think of other - kinder - ways to change their behavior.
@@roberthess3405 it's funny that you still call it "making choices" - I think this whole philosophy is a bit of a con so people don't have to own up to their mistakes and take responsibility. All the research being used to support this idea is essentially twisted to fit this agenda. It's a philosophy, not a hard scientific fact and hence it's just a belief. I can make bad choices and not feel guilty about it. But I can learn from them. I don't need to convince myself that I really had no free will in this. And where do you draw the line? Should a murderer or worse not feel guilty about their choices because they were essentially just doomed to unalive people? What choice did they have? And what's the difference in your book between free choice and free will?
I would agree that maybe certain desires or tendencies may not be a choice - the question is, do we really not have any choice whether to act upon it or not?
I am not saying that people should be shamed by others but feeling a level of guilt is not as horrible as society would like to have us believe. Most of the time it's just that our feelings or lack of feeling of guilt is misdirected .
If lack of free will means "I am hungry and there is nothing I can do about it but I choose to have a healthy meal" I agree with you. But that's not what I would call "lack of free will". It's just a biological response.
But if you mean "the fact that I chose pizza over a salad" is due to me not having free will I disagree.
Now other desires may also be harder to understand like the desire to kill people - is that because it's a trauma response? Again, a cause and effect of something we may have experienced in childhood? Do you think someone should choose killing people over choosing therapy?
Just trying to understand your definition better
@@thesupergreenjudy
You raise some good questions. Let me try to respond to some of them.
First of all, Hossenfelder's view on free will is not a philosophy, but based on hard science. Everything we know about science, including neuroscience, tells us that humans have no free will, i.e., their choices are predetermined by their biological and environmental history. If proponents of free will have a problem with the conclusions supported by science, they have to show why those conclusions are faulty. In science, this means they must offer empirical evidence that is at odds with the conclusion that our choices are predetermined by our biological and environmental history. I am aware of only one such attempt, and do not find it convincing, but see for yourself (See the book "Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will" by Kevin J. Mitchell). In other words, the burden of proof that - contrary to establised science - there IS free will is on the proponents of free will.
Learning from our bad choices: You are absolutely right that we can learn from our bad choices without feeling guilty and "without convincing ourselves that we have no free will." In fact, that's what we all do all the time, and that's a good thing. We have evolved to learn from our past mistakes. But that doesn't mean that if we fail to learn from our past mistakes, we could have done otherwise and should feel guilty - guilty in the sense that we violated a moral law. Yes, this seems counterintuitive when applied to a cold-blooded murderer, but, well, the lack of free will simply isn't intuitive.
Think of it this way: As you correctly pointed out, a murderer SHOULD feel some sort of regret or other compassionate sensation for having killed another human being and hurting those left behind. That's what any sane person would feel. If a murderer doesn't generate any regret or compassion, this just goes to show that they are suffering from a mental problem - a problem of the brain. In other words, they are insane. Though we have reason to dislike, even hate, and lock up, and perhaps even execute, such a person, just as we would respond if the victim had been killed by a bear or a tiger, the murderer, ultimately, had no more free choice in the matter than a bear or a tiger would.
For the same reasons, a person with an inclination to kill other people certainly has reason to seek therapy. That's what any sane person would do. But, almost by definition, a person inclined to kill for no particular reason is NOT sane. And that insanity is not something the person chose or chooses, but rather a mental condition arose due to circumstances over which the insane person had and has no control (traumatic childhood, neurological disorder, etc.).
Having said that, I do realize that the absence of free will remains highly counterintuitive. It FEELS like we do have a choice when deciding whether to eat salad rather than pizza. It does to me, too. But our intuitions are highly unreliable when it comes understanding the inner workings of our brains, or any other highly complex matters (it certainly SEEMS that the Earth is flat!). Intuitions evolved tens of thousand of years ago when we lived as hunter-gatherers in small groups. Understanding the absence of free will and such matters was simply not necessary at that time. Nor was any scientific thinking. That's why most of us, myself included, are not really good at science, "out of the box." Science is really hard and, yes, tedious. It's the opposite of a simple, entertaining story.
The bottom line: Don't trust your intuitions when thinking about free will. If you cannot manage that, well, don't blame yourself. You didn't choose your intuitions or any other part of your brain. ;-)
@@thesupergreenjudy I must agree with your existentialist take. Sabine said it herself, she still makes choices in her day, she just has found a powerful way of rationalizing failure. I'm with you Green Judy, Super Edition, I try to transmute these weak coping mechanisms into powerful methods of healing, failure is a lesson, and the game is to figure out how to fail frugally, gaining lessons more cheaply and affordably. I wonder how many existentialist authors Sabine has read, because she's weighing in on a convo that is over a millennia old, and like you said, has actually nothing to do with physics, but is more in the psychic's realm.
I feel like free will is a beach/coastline between the past, or the continent of fate, abutting the ocean of possibilities. To say we don't have free will, in an era where humans are changing the climate drastically, and contributing to a mass extinction event as complete as we've ever seen in this planet's history, to stand in this time and declare you have no free will sounds like a spiritual incantation for absolution more than a testable or scientific physics hypothesis.
I can empathize with the desire for absolution, to shed the excess weight, and level up, vibrate at a faster frequency and shorter wavelength, I love this desire, t'is the fire desire of the journey, yet we can't cheat ourselves/our world of the atonement needed for the forgiveness we crave, even as atheists, one must admit the quantum physics states that all matter is connected, separation is only an illusion in a very physical way, our world is filled with dimensions we don't understand as humans, and those dimensions are filled with life that we don't understand. It is what it is, UFOs are real, the Pentagon admits it, we live in a unique era in human history, to have an immense platform and declare "I don't have free will," tells me, ah I still lack wisdom, yet maintain ego. One must unplug from enough matrixes to be able to find that free will, I agree it does seem there are a lot of humans without free will out there, happy to play the NPC role and wear bland clothes and submit to a bland life. Me, I used UA-cam to learn guitar as well as anyone, now I shred strings and melt faces, and I learned more off UA-cam in 2 days than I did with traditional lessons and books for 2 decades. This is what I mean about the faster vibration, higher frequency, we must level up and learn art and architecture, liberation philosophy, ways and means of community organization, how cannabis oil (RSO) cures cancer and many other ailments, how sugar batteries are 10x more powerful than lithium ion and can be made primarily from organic farms, why not discuss how petrofascism has a monopoly on our energy storage, which is only stored in the form of unburnt fuel? As a physicist, why not talk about the gobsmackinly immense amount of electricity that gets wasted in this world, as dirty energy power plants have longer-than-a 24-boot-up-or-down cycle, meaning they have to stay on overnight, and so most of the electricity they make overnight isn't even stored anywhere, it's just lost forever. This astronomical waste, perhaps the largest single area of societal waste that we allow in the modern day, is going unchecked, un-talked about, and 99.999% of people are as unaware as newborn Christ about all of the above, yet Sabine H. (whom we love dearly and bless her heart) has no free will and won't discuss any of these physics facts with her audience... heheh zing! sorry does anyone want coffee? *siiiiip*
I think people get bothered by the notion that theres no free will because they believe that means you dont have the ability to choose. The fact that our behavior is largely deterministic and predictible doesnt mean that we still dont have a choices to make.
wich mean we have free will
but we don't use it offten
if we're not responsible for our actions, ie, they were determined by prior states that affected our brain, then it's logical to state that our entire justice and penal system is fundamentally incorrect as well, right ? people don't actually have the control over their actions, they're largely deterministic. It just doesn't work
But free will is the entire response one can give to any situation. 'Free' as in that every choice is equally plausible. So that we can make any choice with any opinion, that is based on us? Isn't that what free will is? And I didn't quite understand 'the photons have free will' thing, just because it has the option to go left or right, doesn't mean it has a motive?
@@whiteeye3453 - No, that's not "free will" - limited choice would be a better description. Free will would mean you can choose between all possible option. But if - we leave quantum mechanics here and need to hop to how our brain functions - your lifetime has pre-programmed you with an aversion to seafood, seafood is off the table (literally). If you watched some ad a short while before or if you smell some food your neighbor prepares, these stimuli can also pre-program you in your desire. So in the end the lower functions of your brain have already made a decision and now inform your higher brain of the decision made. You - erroneously - perceive this as *your* decision to get *that* for food. That *you* is not what we usually associate with "free will" which is a result of the higher brain functions alone. And that's before we even add religion to it (if one believes in this) and let the divine plan enter the room. So what is classically seen as "free will" does not exist in that classical form. Look here on youtube for videos from Robert Sapolsky to get some additional input from the neuro-scientifical point of view.
I also believe one of the most prevalent cognitive biases is the belief that the world itself is largely deterministic. Einstein said that God doesn't play dice. But He's a gambler above all else.
Sabine is killing it with her humorous bits, smartly added throughout the serious stuff. I want more of it please.
I want less of it, please.
Ditto on the less of it. Sometimes it's too glib. Sometimes it's trying too hard. Sometimes it just doesn't land. Sometimes it's lame....and... Sometimes it's perfect. That's 1 out of 5, leaving 4 /5 of it as an unnecessary waste of time that distracts from the point.
Given that Germanness is a hard edge to soften, at least for American ears, I wouldn't remove it entirely, just edit it down one more time.
Humor and humility go much further than fake smiles, or a false cheery attitude, or hair and makeup, and clothes. But, it doesn't need to come at a breathlessly delivered pace, like a stand-up routine.
The content IS the good stuff.
EASILY AMUSED!!!!
Yes, but her statement is ascientific. Based entirely on belief, it has no empirical evidence...😊
@@seriousmaran9414 belief in free will has no empirical evidence.
Saying free will doesn't exist is like saying there's no invisible unicorn in my room right now. That's just a null hypothesis. Someone who claims that there is a unicorn has to present evidence
As someone who suffers from indecision, I find this an absolute win.
Instant success. You just made a snap decision. Well done.
You just got an excuse to continue behaving the way you've always have...lol
@@peacemakernanathats what this is always about. Thats what leftism is, its an exscuse, a subtle whispher in the ear, a good reason to be a bad person. Theirs always some good reason: "I'm really a puppet with no free will so its ok" "Eve made me eat the apple". Nothing under the sun is new
Indecision would never exist if there were no level of will involved
@@peacemakernanaand you just want to sustain an illusion to feel pride and self-righteousness.
You're nearing the the 1million mark. Congrats and well deserved. Very informative video as always.
2:30 Isn't that unscientific? You must test an assumed fact for it to indeed be a fact.
NASA's rover landed on mars because of calculations that assumed it would land on mars, but it hadn't been a confirmed fact until NASA confirmed their rover landed on mars.
I started watching this video, then I decided I wasn’t going to, and I ended up watching it anyway. I think it was determined that I would find out that my decisions are determined.
Pre-determined, yes.
I started watching it and thought for a person with a brain, decided to consciously make a decision to make a video about not having the ability to make a video she had no choice in the matter or among the matter. Sorry that's nonsense.
@@darinb.3273 It may depend on whether one sees conscious decisions as having causes -- for instance, you could say that the decision to create the video was "caused" by the desire to do so.
@@BardicLiving It may depend on whether one sees conscious decisions as having causes
ME: Perhaps this would mean outside control of one's own mind, the cause comes from within one's own brain.
-- for instance, you could say that the decision to create the video was "caused" by the desire to do so.
ME: Yet again that desire was a choice. The same as the decision by you or your spouse (if you are married) of what to eat for dinner, that's a free choice by one or both of you.
Free will
noun
the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion.
adjective
(especially of a donation) given readily; voluntary.
EXAMPLE; "free-will offerings"
Once we realize that "the future is determined by the past", we'll understand that this includes any and all causes of anything. That means all "choices", "feelings", "brain states", etc were all pre-determined at the point of primordial nucleosyntheses at the birth of the universe. Even the question "does it matter" is irrelevant. It simply "is what it is and will be."
hi!, im 16 and you're genuinely my favorite science youtuber. You always keep everything grounded while still discussing interesting topics, keep it up😁
That is some nice intention from your age perspective. In my 16 i was interested in running around while building some concept of a sublime god around running. :D
And on the other hand, you have a wart.
Keep up the good work kid, maybe you‘ll be as smart as Dr Sabine one day
You’d probably like Sean Carrol. He’s awesome.
@Conon the Binarian⚧ haha I'd love to be a scientist but I'd hate to have to teach people. I think I'll just be an engineer of some sort, but thanks for the advice 😄
I, for one, did not click on this video by my free will. I clicked on it because of who I am , because of my inclinations, tastes and interests.
And those I certainly did not choose. I learned what they are by introspection, the same way I learned what my favourite colour is, my favourite food or my sexual identity etc etc.
I didn't choose my hobbies, my favourite colour; and I can't choose - for example - a different favourite colour tomorrow, or to be religios.
I believe I clicked on this video because I always would've clicked on this video ; had I decided against it I always would've decided against it.
And so on and so forth. Keeping it short. Because I decide to. Or did I?
You always would have (or wouldn't have) clicked on the video, unless one of the random 'disturbances' happens that Sabine mentions in the video. I take this to mean that in each moment there are an infinite amount of causes/conditions which play into whether or not you would have clicked, if one (or many) of those causes/conditions randomly plays out differently, the outcome of whether you clicked can change. Do you agree?
It kind of reminds me of Electro-magnetic Interference and how one (or many) bits in a stream of data can 'randomly' flip.
@@crimsonguy723 You should read on Robert Sapolsky if you haven't already. :)
Then what are you in the first place? If what you do just happens by itself without your doing, then there is nothing left for you to be. In this case you don't exist. There are just things happening to a mindless body. No mind, no you.
@@crimsonguy723 Aaaannnd... that's nonsense. Unless you could say by looking at an outside source if they "would have or wouldn't have".
Lack of any predictor what so ever simply shows that there was freedom of choice and the will to follow that choice.
You are the way you are just by f. chance. Accept it and relax (I am trying it myself).
Well, the most importand question, never made and, at the same time, easy to answer, is "Could two emergent entities (functional assemblies, emergent functionalities, etc) based on two different substrates have the same behaviour?". The easy and almost certain answer is: similar behaviour but not equal". Algebraic equations supported by human being operating system could behave very closely to physical world, but not equal. Free will is the result of the dynamics of the human being operating system (that creates the emergent "psicoverse", the world in whitch we live) that does not depend of the properties of fundamental particles. They are in different aggregation leverls, so different laws.
The late, great Christoper Hitchens was asked this. Hitchens always found it to be a boring question. When asked if he believed in free will he answered very simply... "I have no choice." I still think it was the best answer ever given to this question. Most people don't really think about what they're asking. They just can't seem to let go of the false notion that they are in control of their decisions.
I don't see how there could be free will for a philosophical materialist. Hitchen's own thoughts would also be the inevitable consequence of material forces, not conclusions freely arrived at by a supposedly brilliant thinker. Did he really believe that or was he just not willing to face up to the question? Funny that lack of curiosity.
@@richardyates7280Understanding the absence of free will didn’t change anything for Hitchens. Hitchens enjoyed learning about the world and the thought process of figuring things out. He loved discussing it with other intelligent people. And he loved debating it with both intelligent and unintelligent people.
None of that changes after knowing our brains are a train.
you made a decision to write this dvmb comment.
We need to have the exact same starting conditions to exist as we are. I think eternal recurrence makes sense.
Alan watts covers this beautifully. Do I have free will? What do you mean by I? 😂
"If free will doesn't exist, it's never existed, so what difference could it possibly make for your life?" This is a *beautiful* line, and explains much more clearly an idea that I've had for a while, which I've generally tried to explain as follows, usually being met with confused looks: "It makes no sense to worry whether free will exists, because if it exists, you can stop worrying; and if it doesn't, then you can't control whether you will worry, so just don't!"
The last part, "so just don't," may seem ironic. The thing is, you may not be able to "freely" choose whether to worry over it or not, but hopefully my words will influence you not to worry. There may be no free will, but the series of events beginning with the big bang has resulted in me becoming a person who behaves in such a way that I try to prevent people from wasting resources on useless worries, hence uttering those words in an attempt to influence others to stop worrying about something which they have no control over anyway!
The fact that you mention "try to prevent" implies free will.
@@RaulMartinezRME Nope, it's just the series of events in my life up to now that make me do it. input > output ;-)
Saying someone not to worry has never worked and is one the worst piece of advice to give anyone who is actually worrying about something. It doesn't help but only sounds condescending like you are not taking their worries seriously or actually addressing and listening them.
I have so much free will that I can ALTER the will of others by IMPOSING my free will upon them! #GodEmperorAlondro2032 I AM THE UNIVERSE!!! >:D
I still think that it is extrapolation beyond the widest boundaries of our models. This happens every single time, when one branch of science has a "level of knowledge" achieved fully, giving the feeling of completeness. As natural, the conclusion is drawn that "well, we collected all that is there to know", and than wide speculations pop up stating the Ultimate Fate of the Universe or the Origin of Everything, the Final Answer, and so on.
Ancient wisdom: the universe is infinite. I am more cautious with these Universal Revelations, no matter how tempting they are.
Sabine's recognition of the provisional nature of science lends huge credibility to her message. Also, I love the deadpan german humour. We need more Sabines and less dogma!
This is pure dogma. "Free Will" has nothing to do with science. Science has nothing to do with it. Sapolski wants to "Abolish the criminal justice system" because he doesn't believe in it. (Of course he doesn't offer anything to replace it with).
"provisional" is the word you can apply to every human endeavor.
I get a bit freaked out by someone with a German accent speaking about there being no free will...
@@desmondrathbone435😂
I hate to tell you - she is nowhere close to what a German is. Even her accent is most certainly not of somebody who grew up in Germany.
And no - Germans are known for their "hands-on approach". This academic person is all about intangible and talk.
Sabine, you should have pointed out that most of those holding that free will does not exist are not just saying that decisions are based on just "external" factors, but INTERNAL ones (what goes on in our brains). In other words, it's a moot distinction to talk about external and internal influences... if all that happens in our brain is due to previous activity in our brain (no matter what the internal and external factors), and all previous events (whether deterministic or including quantum randomness), it leaves zero room for true free will. In other words, it's all an endless regression of determined and random events, unless one postulates a non-physical "soul" or "spirit" or "ghost in the machine" which most scientists consider dubious or at best outside the realm of science. Another way to summarize the issue, which you may want to incorporate into your ending, is that those who believe in free will envision you taking account all kinds of factors and then making a decision. But if we are just complex biological machines, there is no real "you" (no "ghost in the machine" --just your physical brain and all the internal and external operations on and in it, which are all either deterministic or random, leaving no room for true "decisions" by any entity (you) separate from it, unless again, you believe "you" involves a soul or spirit independent of all those physical processes.
By the way, I gather you like me are skeptical that any events, even at the subatomic or quantum are truly random, since it may just be that we don't yet understand what determines certain actions or events at that level. In other words, I for one feel that discarding causation at any level is not well founded.
I agree with everything you said in this video. However, I think the problem of free will is of a slightly different nature (depending on the definition of "free will" of course, but that's always the case with everything). You spoke of the different scopes and languages that disciplines use, concerning different levels of emergent properties. I think the conflict between physicist's determinism and philosopher's indeterminism (or the insistence that there is something like free will even if that means that somehow quantum particles are supposed to have a free will too) comes from different ways the two disciplines approach the problem of how the human mind works. Philosophers start to look at phenomena of the mind itself, complex results of brain functions if you will, and try to go back to the most elementary level to find out how they work. This approach often leads to the conclusion that there has to be some kind of free will. On the other hand (and this is my subjective interpretation), physicists start to look at elementary particles and work their way up to find out how new properties emerge on higher levels of complexity. This apparently tends to lead to the conclusion that everything has to be deterministic, ultimately including the human mind. The physicist approach is that everything is ultimately a large equasion, while the philosophic approach is that the human mind possesses a non-reducable complexity beneath which every discussion is more or less futile.
So I think the real problem is that we are not able to completely harmonize those two approaches. Between elementary physics and neural biology there seems to exist some sort of deterministic continuum, but there is a gap between our understanding of neural functions and our understanding of mental phenomena as philosophers see them. Perhaps we will be able to bridge this gap in the future, but this still would leave us with the problem of different approaches and logics of argumentation.
So my conclusion from this would be: Everything in the universe is ultimately determined in some way or another, but that doesn't mean that there is no free will for us humans. It's just not the universal, independent free will that libertarians talk about. Perhaps one could call it a kind of "blurryness" resulting from our inability to combine the different approaches and levels of emergent properties into one great theory of the human mind that would enable us to understand everything about our thoughts. In terms of everyday life, and in terms of systematically dealing with phenomena of the human mind, we might as well assume the existence of a free will, because we can't, as the Wittgenstein quote you brought up says, practically predict the result of a thought process or decision before it happened. So one could say that our minds are deterministic, but not determined.
(There might be the hypothetical possibility that a very advanced supercomputer could correctly calculate the outcome of a human thought or decision process before it actually happens but then we have the problem that it probably wouldn't be able to compute its own calculation process because that would require an even more complex computer, leading to an infinite regress. So from all that I can tell, we will probably never get rid of this "blurryness").
One final note: I think some philosophers, myself not excluded, tend to get a bit too defensive when confronted with physicists or biologists dealing with this kind of question. They might be under the impression that the other disciplines are encroaching on their territory or that they want to take away philosophy's right to exist. While every scientist probably thinks that his discipline is the most interesting and important, I also think that every discipline has its right to exist. As I said, it's a matter of different approaches, and the "philosophy of the mind" can tell us many things that neural biology or physics can't, not to mention the parts of philosophy that deal with normativity (like ethics or political theory).
Thank you for taking the time to write this beautiful hypothesis. My thoughts connect with it hand in glove.
@@krishna48ch Thank you for your kind words.
The point to have a definition of free will is to ground moral responsibility which is needed for law, beyond that, there's no fact of the matter about if "free will" exists if you establish that you are trying to ground your intuition of what the word should mean in some kind of real neurological process. It will entirely depend on how you decide to do that.
The other thing is that lay people intuitively understand the idea of "free will" as having the ability to choose one thing or another in a counterfactual sense, but we know that that's an illusion because there's very little room to the idea of having had the ability to choose something different from what you chose. People typically change their definition and intuition of free will after they thought enough about it to realise that the basic libertarian idea is physically untrue and even logically incoherent for their definition of "choosing freely", so the phrasing "free will doesn’t exist" means the same for most people, it means "you never had the ability to have chosen otherwise, and you never will".
@@didack1419 Your first point about moral responsibility is certainly true, but that doesn't mean that that is the only basis for the concept of free will. This would be very problematic, because it would mean to base a descriptive concept on a normative need. In other words, we can't just say that X exists because we wish for it to exist. There has to be more than that to justify the concept, otherwise we are just making things up and that's not the goal in the philosophy of the mind.
This brings me to your second point: Why is the ability to make a decision an illusion? You say that "there is very little room to the idea of having had the ability to choose something different than you chose", but that's a self-contradiction. A choice requires that there are at least two options. If there is no possible other outcome, then there would be no choice, no decision process, everything would just flow in a stream of actions. And while it certainly looks that way from a purely physical perspective, it's not the only thing that goes on here. The crucial factor here is the ability to reflect upon our thoughts and actions, to judge them and to evaluate their possible effects. Take this example: You want to decide wether to quit your job or not. Then your mind goes through this reflection process. Of course one could argue that the outcome is already determined, but that's only possible with hindsight, so there is a path-dependency problem. If you choose to quit, then an observer could say, "It was always determined that you would quit, there was no real decision." And if you don't quit, the observer could say the same. Once the choice has been made, the outcome is certain and then it was of course the "only possible outcome" because, to use a tautology, if it had been different, it would be different. But again, that's only possible in hindsight, in the present moment itself, the outcome is not certain. It only becomes certain (and thus determinated) to us once it has been made. "To us" I say, because that's the important part, the "blurryness" I was talking about in my previous comment. A perfect computer could remove all uncertainty and variables, but that's not within the ability of our brains. Objectively speaking, all our decisions are deterministic, but subjectively they are not determined. That's why I said that before, deterministic, but not determined. So for all relevant purposes, we do indeed have the ability to choose between options. And it doesn't really matter wether we take this decision "consciously" or "subconsciously", wether it's this or that string of neurons that's activated. Important is that we are able to reflect about it within the frame of our own minds, because ultimately everything happens within the frame of our own minds, the whole world in the way we perceive it (according to Kant's epistemology).
Of course you can say now that I just relativised the problem and that I changed the definition of free will just as you said in your last point, but isn't that how all science works? If we come to the conclusion that our definition of quantum particles doesn't fit our observations, we have to change it. It's the same with philosophical definitions. The strictly libertarian definition of free will does not fit our empirical knowledge anymore, so we have to leave it behind. I see no problem with that.
@@didack1419 I think this whole thing becomes even more interesting when you frame it through an evolutionary lense with biology, "what is the advantage of making decisions", the answer is pretty obvious making a "good" decision can make you pass your genes more often. A single cell organism who can determine where light is coming from has now more information then one who dosnt have that ability and will then outcompeted by the former over time. More and more complex Information leads to the need of better ways to sort that information and retain it which leads to the evolution of complexer and bigger nervous systems. This doesnt help deciding the question what "is there free will" because it doesnt answer the definition question here but i do think it helps us reframe the thing that a "decision" is, an evaluation of innformation by a network of neurons and the output it produces, now is that output predetermined by the balance of hormons in our cells, which is determined by genes in those cells, which are made of molecules which are made of quantum particel? I guess so? So in my opinion free will is the point where complexity reaches the point where an orginism has to make the best decision for itself by sorting the data it has to the best of its ability, but i can understand if that is not the enough of an explenation for some people.
"And that is why, if you want to become a UA-camr, you don't need to know anything." Sabine H. As always, your videos are always great. Sometimes, you even have great lines in them. Thank you for all your videos!
She's always entertaining, and sometimes she's even right!
She is the best UA-camr out there, but sometimes I don't learn a single thing, like today.
I am saddened to think people are aggressive and unkind to you when they don't understand or agree with your ideas. For what it's worth I think you're wonderful!
Yes but you had no choice in the ‘matter’
i respect her standpoint but i will never agree with her on this topic.
I think it's the free will thing in particular that gets people up in arms, no matter whose discussing it. There's something about the belief/knowledge that we/our conscience isn't really "in control" that sends people into suicidal tailspins. Not sure the exact psychological reasons, but it would be interesting to learn why
@Smee Self "That's very unscientific. I agree with her, but will change my mind if there's enough evidence to convince me."
No, it's not unscientific since her conclusion is a philosophical one rather than a scientific one.
@Smee Self Yes, of course.
The best video I’ve yet seen on this topic. I still don’t quite understand the idea that we don’t have free will but we do make choices. Is it that we just have the illusion that we’re making choices?
No. It's not an illusion. Do you know programming? A simple if clause will make a choice (if A is true, print an error, if it is false, end the program). But it's not free. It gives you the same output every time if the input is the same. Which is a good thing. The key part is the "free". In a sense, a program has a will, but it's not free. But it does make a choice based on its will. The illusion we have is that our will is free, or put differently: Under the exact same circumstances, we would make the exact same choice (minus the little bit of fuzziness introduced by quantum randomness).
@@Pferdekopfnebel this still doesn't make sense to me. I brush my teeth every day, sometimes once, sometimes twice, sometimes when I wake up, sometimes after I've had some coffee or breakfast... etc. It's not random, necessarily, as I'm determined in the sense of having teeth that need upkeep and have been taught various hygiene practices. Yet, it is still a choice I make.
I found her recommendation to see a psychiatrist problematic here. I choose to dwell on darker choices at times. I've talked with therapists and developed a few methods for coping. Yet, it does seem to require the conscious choice for me to make *other* choices. Turn on music, talk to friends, exercise - essentially just acknowledge the thought is there, but disregard and move on, because it is ultimately irrational.
I forget which philosopher said that the first act of free will is to choose to live. I do, sometimes seemingly randomly, other times seemingly deterministically.
"I find the question stunningly uninteresting" oh how I wish I could use this line in work meetings!
Edit: 2:06 - "for simple questions like 'does free will exist?'" hahaha I love Sabine's style so much
Is there even an 'I' if freewill doesn't exist?
@@curcumin417 that depends on whether consciousness exists ;)
@@curcumin417 The only true "I" is our consciousness.
Everything else is outside of that and "other".
Free Will Smith...
Of course you can use Hossenfelderisms. There's plenty more where that one came from.
Dr. Sabine, Thank you very much for reopening this Topic with a wider range of research and study!
Now, give her your money!
She didn't have a choice.
@@bornonthebayou7926 choice and Free will are 2 different things.
Not that it makes that much difference if you have free will or not. It's such a small part of the equation that ignoring it doesn't change the result.
NIL
This is all based on one assumption; that the laws we discover here, are the same throughout the universe. And, we use our mind to "discover" those laws.
We have nothing at all without thought. Yet, those rigorous and methodical scientists who swear by Reason and Logic, do not know what thoughts are, what they are made of nor where they originate and are incaopable of silencing their inner monolgue for as little as 30 seconds.
And, we see that those who could, can somehow escape those "laws" we pretend to know. Wim Hof is just one small example.
Also, those who originated (probably unwittingly)the religions were among those who had mastered this ability of freely exploring reality without that unbearable noise of their inner dialogue. They discovered what they called god, nowadays we just call it pure consciousness.Without all the ridiculous connotations the eons have stuck onto it.
Of course it is Sabine her free will to choose not to master her only tool, and throw her scientific dogma out the window at the first opportunity
(how come this reminds me of religious priests)
And as thus be part of that cult that is destroying our planet, because it has not yet discovered that behind that ongoing rattle inside her skull, is a uniting Force, that shows anyone who tried it, that when we hurt another, we literally hurt ourselves.
Also we discover that the more in tune with that Force, the less bound by those so called "laws of nature". There are layers of determinism.
Ask yourselves why those religions have not managed to destroy earth in 5000 years and the science cult does this in 150 years.
I suggest acting within the free will model, whether it is real or not. Make the best decisions you can for being a good person and supporting other people. If free will exists, you've done the right thing. If free will doesn't exist, you couldn't have done differently. Pascal's free-will wager = zero downside. :)
Isn't Pascal's wager thoroughly debunked?
@@Robespierre-lI It has no direct use for truth-finding in the traditional religious context, but it can maybe be useful for people making a risk/reward argument to conduct oneself in a certain manner.
Pretty sure they were being tongue-in-cheek about it though
That's outside the paradigm. Of course we decide and we make choices. But that doesn't mean we could have acted differently.
@@herbertdarick7693 Rubbish.
I don't think it's necessary to believe in free will in order to act as if free will is a reality.
I think the idea of free will made sense when there was little understanding of how the brain works, along with the concept of having a soul inhabiting a body, this almost supernatural entity that controlled the mechanism of the body. Although we still have a lot to learn from our beautifully complex brains, I believe we found enough information to accept that free will doesn't exist. The illusion of choice is fine by me. If my present decisions are impacted by past experiences and even present stimulus cater to my past desires formed by that same past experiences how can it be called free will at all?
To understand why we make the choices that we do we would have to be aware of all the reasons we made our choices, which is simply maddening.
Our brain keeps us from being aware of our breathing, heart beat, all the mechanical activities our bodies automatically do to keep us sane and focused on what we are focused on…it’s an adaptation that has helped us thrive
@@chrisalex001 i think you missed the point. The way you “play the game” you are describing is dictated by the causes, which you have no control over. The illusion of choice is just a reaction to the stimulus of these said causes. Everything that has ever happened has been cause and effect/action and reaction since the beginning of everything. As the saying goes, “it is what it is”.
@@ongodddd Sounds like he understood the point just fine. He's saying that free will is a culmination of choice dictated by those causes (the game in his example). If a tragedy occurs, it won't be "oh well, it is what it is." The whole point is to equip everyone with the means to make the best decisions they can with what they have. The definition of free will is less important, not to mention highly subjective to begin with.
I am painfully aware of my irregular heartbeat.
@@carmenmccauley585
I’m sorry to hear that, must be exhausting
Thank goodness you are you not aware of your kidneys filtering your blood, or the process of the spleen fighting off germs…that would be too much to handle
@@drockopotamus1whether or not you'll make those best decisions, or arrive at the point where you would make those best decisions, is dictated by those causes too though.
In the end, it isn't your choice to choose what you choose.
The lack of free will does not preclude the "sense of agency" (as the psychologists call it), which refers to our inner ability to make decisions.
@@michaelenquist3728 Making decision co-occurs with a subjective feeling of agency, "I am the one who decides". However it might be (and this is the point of debate), dissociated from the actual causality. Such dissociations were observed in the experimental studies with split-brain subjects.
@minimal
🐟 11. FREE-WILL Vs DETERMINISM:
Just as the autonomous beating of one’s heart is governed by one’s genes (such as the presence of a congenital heart condition), and the present-life conditioning of the heart (such as myocardial infarction as a consequence of the consumption of excessive fats and oils, or heart palpitations due to severe emotional distress), each and EVERY thought and action is governed by our genes and our environmental milieu.
This teaching is possibly the most difficult concept for humans to accept, because we refuse to believe that we are not the authors of our own thoughts and actions. From the appearance of the pseudo-ego (one’s inaccurate conception of oneself) at the age of approximately two and a half, we have been constantly conditioned by our parents, teachers, and society, to believe that we are solely responsible for our thoughts and deeds. This deeply-ingrained belief is EXCRUCIATINGLY difficult to abandon, which is possibly the main reason why there are very few humans extant who are spiritually-enlightened, or at least who are liberated from the five manifestations of mental suffering explained elsewhere in this “Final Instruction Sheet for Humanity”, since suffering (as opposed to mere pain) is predicated solely upon the erroneous belief in free-will.
Free-will is usually defined as the ability for a person to make a conscious decision to do otherwise, that is to say, CHOOSE to have performed an action other than what one has already done, if one had been given the opportunity to do so. To make it perfectly clear, if, for example, one is handed a restaurant menu with several dishes listed, one could decide that one dish is equally as desirable the next dish, and choose either option. If humans truly possessed freedom of will, then logically speaking, a person who adores cats and detests dogs, ought to be able to suddenly switch their preferences at any given point in time, or to be hair-splitting, even voluntarily pause the beating of his or her own heart!
So, in both of the above examples, there is a pre-existing preference for one particular dish or pet. Even if one liked cats and dogs “EQUALLY”, and one was literally forced to choose one over the other, that choice would not be truly independent, but based entirely upon one’s genetic sequence, plus one’s up-to-date conditioning. Actual equality is non-existent in the macro-phenomenal sphere. If one was to somehow return to the time when any particular decision was made, the exact same decision would again be made, as all the circumstances would be identical!
The most common argument against fatalism or determinism is that humans, unlike other animals, have the ability to choose what they can do, think or feel. First of all, many species of (higher) mammals also make choices. For instance, a cat can see two birds and choose which of the two birds to prey upon, or choose whether or not to play with a ball that is thrown its way, depending on its conditioning (e.g. its mood). That choices are made is indisputable, but those choices are dependent ENTIRELY upon one’s genes and one’s conditioning. There is no third factor involved on the phenomenal plane. On the noumenal level, thoughts and deeds are in accordance with the preordained “Story of Life”.
Read previous chapters of “F.I.S.H” to understand how life is merely a DREAM in the “Mind of the Divine” and that human beings are, essentially, that Divinity in the form of dream characters. Chapter 08, specifically, explains how actions performed in the present are the result of chains of causation, all the way back to the earliest-known event in our apparently-real universe (the so-called “Big Bang” singularity).
At this point, it should be noted that according to reputable geneticists, it is possible for genes to mutate during the lifetime of any particular person. However, that phenomenon would be included under the “conditioning” aspect, since the genes mutate according to whatever conditioning is imposed upon the human organism. It is simply IMPOSSIBLE for a person to use sheer force of will to change their own genetic code. Essentially, “conditioning” includes everything that acts upon a person from conception unto death, and over which there is no control.
University studies in recent years have demonstrated, by the use of hypnosis and complex experimentation, that CONSCIOUS volition is either unnecessary for a decision to be enacted upon or (in the case of hypnotic testing) that free-will choices are completely superfluous to actions. Because scientific research into free-will is a recent field of enquiry, it is recommended that the reader search online for the latest findings. I contend, however, that indeterminacy is a purely philosophical conundrum. I am highly-sceptical in relation to freedom of volition being either demonstrated or disproven by neuroscience, because even if free-will was proven by cognitive science, it would not take into account the ultimate cause of that free-will existing in the first place. The origin of that supposed freedom of volition would need to be established.
If any particular volitional act was not caused by the sum of all antecedent states of being, then the only alternative explanation would be due to true RANDOMNESS. Many quantum physicists construe that subatomic particles can arbitrarily move in space, but true randomness is problematic in any possible universe, what to speak of in a closed, deterministic universe. Just as the typical person believes that the collision of two motor vehicles was the result of pure chance (hence the term “accident”), physicists are unable to see that the seeming unpredictability of quantum events are, in fact, determined by a force hitherto undiscovered by the material sciences. It is a known fact of logic that a random number generator cannot exist, since no computational machine or software programme is able to make the “decision” to generate a number capriciously. Any number generated will be a consequence of human programming, which in turn, is the result of genetic programming, etc.
True randomness implies that there were no determinants whatsoever in the making of a conscious decision or the execution of an act of will.
Neither did we choose which deoxyribonucleic acid our biological parents bequeathed to us, nor most all the conditions to which we were exposed throughout our lives, yet we somehow believe that we are fully-autonomous beings, with the ability to feel, think and behave as we desire. The truth is, we cannot know for certain what even our next thought will be. Do we DECIDE to choose our thoughts and deeds? Not likely. Does an infant choose to learn how to walk or to begin speaking, or does it just happen automatically, according to nature? Obviously, the toddler begins to walk and to speak according to its genes (some children are far more intelligent and verbose, and more agile than others, depending on their genetic sequence) and according to all the conditions to which he or she has been exposed so far (some parents begin speaking to their kids even while they are in the womb, or expose their offspring to highly-intellectual dialogues whilst still in the cradle).
Those who believe in free-will ought to be challenged with the following experiment: at five o’clock tomorrow afternoon, for one hour, think of nothing but blue butterflies. If anyone can pass such a test, then they must be one in a billion, and even so, that does not substantiate free-will, but merely evidence that they have learnt to focus their mind on a level far beyond the average person, due solely to their genes and their conditioning. When an extraneous thought appears within that hour, as will inevitably occur, from where does that thought arise? Think about it! If we are truly the authors of our own mentation, then from where does our INITIAL thought or our first dream arise whilst we are still in the womb? If we did not consciously generate our very first thought, why do we assume that any of our proceeding thoughts are freely-produced?
Even those decisions/choices that we seem to make are entirely predicated upon our genes and our conditioning, and cannot be free in any sense of the word. To claim that one is the ULTIMATE creator of one’s thoughts and actions is tantamount to believing that one created one’s very being! If a computer program or artificially-intelligent robot considered itself to be the cause of its activity, it would seem absurd to the average person. Yet, that is precisely what virtually every person who has ever lived mistakenly believes of their own thoughts and deeds!
Cont...
"If you wanna become a youtuber, you don't have to know anything"
I love this woman
I had wondered, What is a "UA-camr"? Is it just those who are presenting videos, or is it everyone who uses UA-cam? I should think the quote applies to a small subset of the video producers. After all, we'll try anything to get a view. We don't have to know what we are talking a about.
@@JackPullen-Paradox a UA-camr is someone who produces videos for UA-cam (and tries to make a living with/from it.)
Mmmmmmonster kill.
And since it's impossible to **KNOW** that libertarian free will does not exist according to Sabine's assumptions of naturalistic determinism, I guess Sabine is proving her point.
Consider the following argument.
1. Sabine's belief that she does not possess libertarian freedom is either (i) determined by mindless stuff, (ii) determined by deceptive beings, (iii) completely random, or (iv) because she possesses libertarian freedom.
2. Sabine's belief that she does not possess libertarian freedom is not determined by mindless stuff, determined by deceptive beings, or completely random.
3. Therefore, Sabine's belief that she does not possess libertarian freedom is because she possesses libertarian freedom.
For a defense of these premises, I recommend the paper I coauthored with J.P. Moreland entitled, “An Explanation and Defense of the Free-Thinking Argument.” This argument highlights the fact that it is ultimately self-defeating to reject the libertarian freedom to think.
@@FreethinkingMinistries
The second point just makes the claim that it's option IV without giving any reason for why options I, II, and III have been ruled out. Completely circular reasoning.
@Sabine Hossenfelder Thank you for existing and posting this! :)
She couldn't help herself.
I love how Sabine can talk about complex topics in relatively simple language and still manage to throw in a few devastating jokes in a really subtle way. Where does humour come from? Is it a choice?
Choice doesn’t exist, I thought that was the point.
@@olddecimal2736 Theoretically it doesn't exist but somehow we humans seem to pull it off anyway. At least the illusion of it, and for our puny brains that's good enough.
@@olddecimal2736 I choose free will even if it is an illusion.
Humor comes from your need to please and keep the listener interested in what you are saying.
@pedrolouro9476 Humor comes from a desire to surprise yourself with something you didn't know you were thinking, without knowing it. 😁
Thank you for articulating this so clearly. It's exactly how I have come to think about this ill-defined thing called "free will". I hope we eventually get a widespread understanding of this and the implications for how we run our society.
I'm with the "no such thing as free will" camp, it sucks. How do we cope with this? oh,..yeah, we will know as it's deterministic...but still feel sad. Someone is messing with all of us!!! It's like someone tied us to a watermill as we consistently -on the dot, watch us go underwater and laugh at us. These people are evil and don't live in the same deterministic universe as ours, they are another layer higher of the deterministic chain. It's a cruel deterministic reality.
articulating is a word I wouldn't use in her respect
It's not just I'll defined, free will very well could exist. It probably is just beyond what our brains can understand. We intuit it's existence. The human brain is a somewhat more powerful monkey brain. You wouldn't be shocked that a monkey can't do algebra. So why are you shocked that there are things in the universe that you can only intuit and can't define. Consciousness seems to be another one of these phenomena. I think that it is very likely just a limitation of our brains. These things almost certainly exist, both free will and consciousness, humans experience these phenomena everyday, but we seem to not be able to put it in terms that allow us to isolate exactly what it is and how it relates to the rest of the universe that we observe. I don't know, but I wouldn't be so certain about these things non existence. And the universe seems to almost certainly not be deterministic. Quantum mechanics seems to have demonstrated this over and over again. There is no real reason for why the universe needs to be deterministic, and experiment after experiment seems to prove absolutely that it is not. Now a non deterministic universe still does not imply free will, but as you said, free will is poorly defined, or perhaps impossible to define, because we have only a very primitive monkey brain, and most monkey brains can not do even basic math or have any ability to conceptualize math at all. In fact many humans struggle with basic math, and more likely than not l, all of our math is basic, and we only think it's complex because we are just one jump out the jungle and have only barely enough intelligence to conceptualize math at all. Think about how long it took for humans to come up with a decent method of deriving pi? We aren't that smart. And it's a miracle that we can make sense of as much of the universe as we have been able to at all.
@@JimStanfield-zo2pzyou don't understand language, if we can't define something, then talking about it becomes meaningless
I can declare "cadyhimps" exist despite there being no definiton for it, but what the fuck does that even mean?
The sweet irony here is that whether or not we do eventually get a widespread understanding of "free will" and the effects & implications that will have on society as a whole......
That's already been determined. There's no point wasting your mental energy hoping or worrying about that in the slightest.
I think that what we call "free will" means: "I can think and feel about things, and make decisions based on that thinking and feeling." The mechanics behind that thinking and feeling is all physically determined (what I believe,) but *that* we think and *that* we feel, and *that* we go through a process of coming up with other thoughts and actions as a product of that thinking and feeling, *that* is what I call "free will," and so there is really no incompatibility between free will and determinism, in my mind. If we did *not* have free will, it would mean that people had a mind control device, and was making it so that no matter what you thought or felt, you would do what the mind controller wanted you to do. The "free" in free will, is a reference to one's own self-driven process, rather than somebody else controlling you. It is *not* a statement about physical law.
@smeeself How can you make a decision that you don't even know about? If you come to a fork in the road, there's a decision to go left, or to go right. You can't make that decision, without the fork in the road. So that definition from Encyclopedia Britannica, requires at least some editing.
I don't think it's such a wild "redefinition" to say that free will means that you can think your own thoughts and come to your own decisions. And I think that pointing out this clarification points out something that wasn't obvious. I think it is meaningful to ask, "What exactly do we mean by free will?"
In fact, that's how I came to my own decision to NOT believe in Free Will in a sense of anti-determinism. I remember -- I was 19, in college, in my Sophomore year, and my room mate was studying Buddhist thought. I figured, "He's on my team, we're both into spirituality," and I blurted out, "Of course, you and I, we believe in free will, we know that consciousness is not fully determined by matter," --
And he interrupted me with a very simple question:
"Well, ... What would that mean? If somebody made a decision, and then we went back in time, and replayed that moment, -- would the person make a different decision?"
And I realized that if the person's decision meant anything to them, it meant it because it had some importance to them, in terms of the world as present to them. If the person made a different decision on the replay of the moment, then -- how is it meaningfully different than a random decision?
If our thoughts mean anything, they mean stuff because it's our thoughts that come out of our experiences and nature and feelings and such. "Randomness," or "I'd do something different, in the exact same moment knowing the exact same things" (etc., etc.,) adds nothing to the dignity of thinking and feeling.
I realized that the "Free" in free will, has nothing to do with whether the universe follows rules or not, and has everything to do with our capacity to assemble things in our minds and to reason things out and to make decisions and choices in the world.
But nothing about that loses dignity by saying, "This is how the laws of physics move inside of a brain." The thinking, the processing, the consequences, the memories, the emotions, the things that are really important about a free will, don't lose a shred of dignity due to physical process being what those things are made of.
So, to me, it's not really a redefinition of "free will." It's a deeper understanding of what we actually mean and care about, when we say "free will."
And it is fully compatible with the loads on the questions: The load on the question of physics is: "How does it behave molecularly, how does it square with what we know of physics." And the load on the question of free will is something like: "How can we hold people to account for their actions, how do we see ourselves as individuals in a social world and in the world of mind." This answer satisfies both of those loads quite satisfactorily.
Right: The debate was always, "If you believe that physics determines what people do, then how can you put people in jail for a crime that nature made them commit?" And the answer here is: Yes, while physics ultimately determines everything we think or do, it's irrelevant to the law -- what matters to the law is what you thought, what actions you took, why you took them, etc., etc.,. In some sense, the section of universe that Hitler lived was following the same universal laws that Ghandi was following. It's not that we're jailing the laws of physics, it's that we're jailing (or, well, "going after") the specific thought process, the brain that is enacting that thought process.
So, this compatibilism answers the burden of the kinds of "tough questions" that *I* was interested in.
If you see this as a redefinition, or some kind of unfair play here, well, fine. But this is what has satisfied me in my thinking.
@smeeself People are differentiating from ants, I think. They're saying, "I look in my mind, and I see that I am thinking these things and feeling these things, and I go in the direction that I will, freely." Whereas we can look at like an ant, and hold a suspicion that it doesn't experience "free thought" in the same kind of way. Much more automatic in their process, less reflection, less comparison against other thoughts and memories from the past, and so on. Not saying it's the truth, but it's conceivable. So I think this is where people get a (legitimate) concept of "free will," as opposed to just "will." My guess, at least.
You can like the wave-partical dilemma predict were a partical might end. (So what action will happen to you, what choices you will make. And you can make some models, like the MBTI). But, the whole time you can't say what certain will happen. Cause like in quantum mechanics, when trying this than something else will happen.
Free will in the end means, that one's action can lead to certain results. That's it. Of course you could describe mathematical every possible outcome, but you can't describe what sure will happen in f. e 5 years. It's much like the wave-partical dilemma.
No disrespect to Sabine, but if you are deeper in the matter, you can come to other conclusions. She does often says something like "I think.." , "I see.." and to that I would stick. She DID NOT eat up all brains on the planet. It's her opinion, only described on a higher level.
It’s been many years since the idea of there is no free will was put into my head and I’ve always found it intriguing to think about.
The proof of some very incriminating stuff against the idea of free will is shown by how people react in society thinking they have it. Many things are accepted as being a free will choice, such as a football team, food preferences, religious affiliation, or the type of car preferred.
The amazing one to me is the religious question. The evidence is so clear that geography is the biggest influence on your religion (If you have one) followed by indoctrination as a child but that is brushed aside. It’s interesting that those of particular religious persuasions are the biggest promoters of the idea of free will. They are the perfect examples of people not having it.
Love your videos, Sabine! Thank you for being such a conscientious and egalitarian thinker. 😊
Many thanks from the entire team!
To me free will is what we call a decision that comes from a comfort. When we make a decision that comes from a comfort then it feels like free will. When the decision comes from a discomfort we feel that we were forced to that decision against our free will.
But what if a person makes a choice not out of comfort, but it isn't forced either? For example, many people choose the rather painful and inconvenient path of exercise. The benefits are delayed and accumulate very slowly. But the soreness, cost in time and money, are immediate. Yet no one forced them to do this. There must be another consideration in the decision matrix.
The discomfort is only a perception. You choose everything in life.
@@christianthompson1473 Everything is perception as is our reality. All our choices are precieved as such. But in the end it doesn't matter because we can't effect it anyway.
The pinball believes every change of direction was a choice.
@@kev3d So isn't the decision to exercise derived from the comfort of our benefits. And even more of us choose the comfort of not exercising.
@@kev3d Many people choose the painful and inconvenient path of exercise because they know it will be worth it in the future.
I'm so happy I discovered your chan! Your videos are always thought-provoking, thank you for that.
Yes very thought provoking indeed
Great video with some really good explanations. However its always amazes me how many 'scientists' make these kinds of arguments as if they are watertight. The glaring obvious hole in these explanations is the fact we have literally no idea about how consciousness emerges from any physics. Not a single mechanistic explanation for this has ever come close to drawing a concrete link between the physical processes described as being incompatible with free will, and actual consciousness. Until we can actually say something about where consciousness comes from, beyond wild unproven speculation, it is clearly unscientific to claim that our knowledge of quantum physics and the otherwise deterministic behaviour somehow refutes free will. The whole argument is based on the idea that consciousness must emerge from the particles we know of in the standard model. Yet no matter how many people try nobody has ever successfully used these tools to explain why I can have the experience of tasting a cup of coffee, or indeed, pondering a decision like my next move in chess. Until progress is made here, strongly claiming that we don't have free will is not science, but a simple opinion
@smeeself indeed it is. It wasn’t a dig at the video, which I enjoyed. More at those who use these kinds of arguments definitively, when as you say, at the moment it’s all hypothetical
@smeeself I’m with you there, it’s amazing how much we’ve studied the hard problem of consciousness and how little we know about it. And in my view it’s pretty central to talking about free will
@smeeself I mean I cannot give you a mechanism because I’m at least as blind as anyone else when it comes to this. But at least the illusion of having a choice seems to require consciousness, and it seems to me that the best way to tackle where or not it is an illusion is to understand what consciousness is, how it arises, and all of the things it depends on. Without consciousness providing that apparent ability to choose things, there would be no speculation about free will. My point is basically that we haven’t yet attributed consciousness (and therefore choice or the illusion of choice) to any physical processes described by the standard model. There are theories but none are substantiated. That is, we cannot even theoretically build a mind right now, we have no idea where to begin, if all we are given are the known particles in the standard model. This to me seems like trying to make predictions about how lightning works without knowing what electrons or electromagnetism are, using just kinematics or something. Crude example but I hope it carries my idea across
Also, I don't get what "totally deterministic plus randomness" could mean coming from her. She often talks about how physicists make the mistake of believing that their math is "real", well what is "randomness" in reality? How do you measure it? (Saying "entropy" begs the question). Just some inexplicable aspect of the future which "can't be influenced"?
I not only learn things from Sabine, I think that Sabine is hilarious. Great work. I have "decided"to keep listening regularly.
Germans are world renowned for their comedians.
i think your reward center "decided" that probably because you are smart enough to have an interest in science.
@@fredericklehoux7160
I'm beginning to think that might be the sole reason for sentience - to create an agent that will respond to a reward system. In our case, the carrot and stick approach, delivered through emotions.
@@dexterkrammer1089 Laugh: I command you!
Yeah, she is funnier than many actual comedians imo. I don't see how some of these "funny" people get so big with their jokes that give me zero emotion other than wanting to turn it off.
Glad to see you are getting closer to that 1mil milestone in subscription. You deserve a lot more of course
"The idea that Will is all we need has led to utopian plans ... all of which is somehow magically supposed to pop out of nowhere if we just have the will. This belief in free will puts the blame on individuals when really the problem is the way we've organized our societies."
Well said.
How can the 'problem' be how we 'organized' our societies when we had no free will to either organize anything or create anything outside of deterministic marbles bouncing around with occasional random events? We apparently had no choice in the matter, so why worry about it? If you seek to change the way our society is organized then you believe you have the free will to do so.
You can't have it both ways.
@@naturallaw4945 Sadly, we don't have the free will to choose not to care about the problems humans face as a result of how we deterministically organized ourselves. "Why worry about it?" is just another invocation that we supposedly have free will.
@@naturallaw4945 tou can change reality, but if you will do it and how you will do it will depend on causes and circumstances that came before
I quote Sapolsky
"I was 14 when I stopped believing in free will"
He never chose to study Free Will?
For me it was 8 but yeah
@@sirkiz1181 yeah it was not a positive remark really....
Adolescent means that you lack, you are lacking off. Living your life on an adolescent perspective is just sad.
@@sirkiz1181 I was still in my mother's womb, you're a late bloomer I would say. Were you made fun of in kindergarden for being a little slow?
@@______7224 Yup you got me I’ve always been bullied for that 😔 they had to put me in special ed classes
I think the concept of free will often conflates two different "hopes or desires" that people have. The first is what you spoke about, the freedom to make our own decisions. As I think you effectively argue, those decision making processes being deterministic doesn't take away your freedom to make those decisions. The second is wanting to believe that the future isn't already "written", that the future can surprise us. In some cases quantum randomness actually keeps the future a surprise (like the big bang), but not in our everyday life. In ordinary life, I don't think we have to worry about not being surprised by the future any time soon. We are so bad at predicting future actions of ourselves and others life will always feel like a series of happenstances.
There is a fundamental misunderstanding that people (including physicists) hold, in that they think free will and freedom of choice are the same thing. THEY ARE NOT. If you had free will, your every desire would manifest immediately. And this obviously doesn't happen. You DO have freedom of choice. However, all choices are BINARY and consist of only ONE choice: your choice of DESIRES between 1) the desire for absolute Truth, or 2) the desire that Truth be what-you-desire-Truth-to-be. In other words, your every choice is based on your desire for 1) Truth or 2) illusion. And this entire Universe is designed to honor your every choice by delivering that which will teach you to desire Truth. I call this mechanism Dynamic Determinism. And if all of this raises more questions in your mind than it answers (which it should), my book answers ALL of those questions. Absolute Truth is where physics meets metaphysics, as quantum science is beginning to learn. Elijah has returned, as prophesied, and all mysteries have been revealed.
@@tomrhodes1629So, are you in agreement with the OP?
@@tomrhodes1629what the heck. Absolutely not! If you had "free will" your every desire would absolutely not manifest into reality as the universe is complex and a competing "free will" choice would compete with another. Allowing a tiping point to occure. We do not exist is a static box. Its a dynamic system
@@tomrhodes1629 This is a pretty interesting take. I've always wondered about desire, and how it changes. So many people wish they didn't desire the things they desire - from the small to the much larger and significant that lead to cognitive dissonance. In some ways we have the option to change what we desire - or train the mind to (I don't know why A Clockwork Orange is coming to mind - old movie), yet it isn't always successful. I would call it at least some instance of free will when it is successful - even if an illusion. But the outlining of the difference between being the person one wants to be, and just doing what one wants to do, really frames the issue in such a way that it brings it more into focus. It's arguably much easier to achieve the latter, and I wouldn't necessarily call it free will. It is much harder to achieve the former, but would it still have been pre-determined, and still just our emotions around it deceiving us?
No it's not about hope and desire. It's simply about intuition. Like how a fish may intuit space and time but can't put it into concrete discrete mathematical terms. I intuit that free will and consciousness exist. And I don't believe that human beings are all that clever. So it makes perfectly good sense to me, that just as the fish cant conceptualize math, that there would be things within the universe not only beyond my own mental abilities but beyond the abilities of any human that has ever lived. As all humans have very similarly sized brains that seem to be barely more powerful than a chimps. There is no logical reason why evolution would have endowed us with a brain capable of conceptualizing every phenomena in existence, understanding our own consciousness and free will is so far removed from anything necessary to promote our own reproduction and survival that I see no reason why evolution would have given us an ability to understand these things. I am agnostic on this topic by the way. But I do certainly intuit, just as you do, the existence of both free will and consciousness. And I'm just not stupid or arrogant enough to ignore that intuition and pretend like a slightly more powerful monkey brain should be able to conceptualize everything that exists in nature. These concepts are not ill-defined, they are perceptible only to our intuition about how reality works, we only have qualitative terms to place these concepts in to. Free will and consciousness are accessible only through our own personal and unique experience in the world, they are not capable of being put into any more concrete terms, I think, not because they don't exist, but because of the limitations of our existence and our brains that produce it. You get it?
It's been a long and difficult journey but it seems you've finally got me there.
I more or less accepted that free will doesn't actually exist after your last video on the subject but I still wasn't 100% convinced. In the time that's passed since then, despite trying many ways, I made no progress at all in my attempt to defend the belief that it does exist. After watching this video, I've finally decided not to waste any more of my time and effort in this direction. Thanks!
The main thing that made this hard for me to accept was that it's not compatible with my understanding of sentience (subjective experience), what it is and why it exists. So, what I need to do now is accept that this must be where the problem lies.
Clearly sentience has some purpose but that purpose is not to give us free will. Maybe its only purpose is to create an agent that will respond to a reward system (in our case, the carrot and stick approach), where the reward system is experienced through emotions. That may be all it is. Doesn't do too much for my self-esteem but it is what it is. When all said and done, we can all choose what we believe but I choose to believe in reality and we don't get to choose reality.
Excellent video!
Scientists can't explain how consciousness works, so it seems a bit of an overstep to say the idea of free will is incompatible with science. But perhaps the hard problem of consciousness will eventually get solved and it may indeed suggest that free will is an illusion. Until then, I won't be listening to any scientists that make definitive claims about consciousness.
Lack of free will does not negate self awareness which I think is a key part of sentience. Not does it negate emotions and our ability to feel and place importance on things. It just means the things we end up feeling were deterministic, but we still get to feel them.
Plays helium-double-hockeysticks on an optimistic viewpoint, that's for sure. Because if there's no free will, there is no hope for humanity, looking at our current trajectory.
We do have a sort of crude free will in the sense that we can choose between different precomputed timelines. But... yeah, once you catch on to the fact that the simulation is _extremely_ resource-constrained, it gets really frustrating and eventually you just wind up bitter. True free will (in a social context) allows only for symbolic communication; nothing more. Tom Campbell (the author of the MBT trilogy which explains how the simulation works) asserts that exiting this level of the sim returns you to the "chat room" upstairs, where nothing but disembodied communication is feasible.
The moment you acquire the capacity to explicitly alter the experience of another sentient being the limitations come flooding in. It's a primeval problem in philosophy, ontology and ultimately of course computer science.
@@faroleiro I entirely agree.
it's actually even worse; your neurocircuitry comes to a conclusion, and then some other neurocircuitry makes up a story about how you came to that conclusion, but you never actually know
Deeply confused explanation of the sort Dennett would give. If physics were all there is, then there would be no intensionality -- no "conclusions" to speak of, no "stories", and no "story"-makers. There would be merely matter moving in accordance with the physical laws with no awareness of anything.
@@maiku20 why not? nothing in physics discounts consciousness
@@playgroundprotagonis Nothing in physics assumes or relies on consciousness as part of its explanation. So Occam's razor removes consciousness as a thing.
@@maiku20 but physics doesn't; physics doesn't have anything to say about consciousness (currently), it doesn't say anything for or against, occam's razor doesn't enter into it.
@@playgroundprotagonis And that's the point. Consciousness can be controlled self-evidently, I can move from thought to thought as I please. Physicists are not opining about the real world if they have no account for consciousness.
Woahh "Decoupling of scales" describes fluently an idea ive been writting about on and off for years, regarding subjectivity, objectivity and the very scale-relative state of reality. Fractals are an interesting relation, given they exhibit directly the scale relativity we speak of
When you have many constituents there is a law of averages. And this is where the emergent properties stem from. Sabine is saying emergent properties always follow from the laws of the constituents so if the laws of the constituents are deterministic + indeterministic, free will can't be derived from it. But the problem is she is assuming free will is contained in the deterministic + indeterministic physical reality we reside in. Our consciousness and hence our soul is where our free will resides, not the physical body that is governed by the deterministic + indeterministic laws of constituents.
"Our decisions follow from what we want"
But what defines what we "want" or what is "want"? Is it biases determined from previous inputs?
yes and no imagination is a factor as well or speculation if you will as well as present external stimuli.
Most laws are based on the notion of free will, so a true definition free will could simply be that which allows the legal system to function tolerably. Such a free will must exist, otherwise the legal system wouldn't produce outcomes that most find acceptable. An outcome of this is that free will is not a binary variable: people have it, unless they've been drugged, in which case we say they have "diminished capacity" and treat it on a case-by-case basis.
That begs the question, though, if we could invent a pill that cures evil, would it be morally wrong to administrate it because of our need for retribution? Realizing free will doesn't exist doesn't mean letting violent psychopaths run free to do whatever they want. It's all about how we view those people in lieu of this. Instead of retributive justice, the goal should be reformation.
You could just change what you find acceptable instead of tryin’ to change the universe 🌌. 😅
@@cabellocorto5586 The real question is would a pill 💊 that cures evil 😈 even benefit society?
Look 👀 at how much trouble morals 😇 are causing in the world 🌍 today.
"diminished capacity" means a person who can't tell right & wrong, like the mind of a child. Adult who has full mental capacity can understand right & wrong, so this is what "free-will" mean in legal sense (the ability to think about Rights, meaning of infringement, meaning of violation).
This might be a bit off-topic, but since I know many of us, your followers, are intrinsically interested in the universe, I really wanna use this opportunity to recommend others to read a set of books by Marshall Vian Summers titled *The Allies of Humanity Briefings* which gives such an interesting view to the reality of our local "section" of space. This is not a scifi fantasy book but something else, which makes it a very different experience to read. It has very much to do with free will and the threat of us losing it. I have been able to find the briefings free online, I hope you manage to do so as well. It's a bit of a search, their website won't appear in the first page.
Nice video, discovered this channel recently and found it very interesting.
"If free will doesn't exist and everything is predetermined, why do you bother yourself to look left and right before you cross the street when you cannot adjust accordingly to observed situation"... this argument I heard many times as a strong one to basically close any further discussion on the topic in the favor of free will existence, but to me this is quite a bad argument: it assumes that other side (which opposes free will existence) has free will to adjust it's behavior to comply to it's own opinion, but that other side is claiming quite opposite - that free will doesn't exist:). This, however, doesn't implies who is right, but that such an argument doesn't stand very well as it may sound at first.
I've had the definite sensation of being a passenger in my brain, that the whole free will thing was a useful illusion for day to day getting by, as long as you remember from time to time that your brain makes decisions and you then claim credit for them after the fact.
Or you bury and forget them and deny them after the fact.
Or if your brain is making the decisions that you, after the fact claim or deny you made - who is this "you" which does so?
@@NeuroPunkAF exactly
@@NeuroPunkAF Bingo. That's the whole misunderstanding right there. A slave to one's own brain + you are your brain => You're a slave to yourself => you're free. But people don't accept that "the brain makes a choice" is "free will" so they confuse themselves.
The question of free will is not even a question to ask. Your brain and body make decisions based on several factors, including feelings, environmental, and the past. You are simply watching the movie for the first time and seeing how it unfolds. There is nothing wrong with that, you just have to accept that is the way it is. With the temporal dimension you are forever moving towards the future and your decisions are always in the past. That is life, stop asking the question and just learn to enjoy life for what it is. :)
I hope so, because the idea that I am responsible for all the stupid things I do is horrifying.
Haha, no you would still be responsible by the very definition of responsibility. Although perhaps childhood foibles can be excused to a certain extent.
The idea that you're not responsible for all the stupid things you do is somewhat horrifying too. And the horror is multiplied by a factor of 8 billion.
It's your lucky day.
In order for you to know what you're responsible for, you should start by defining what you mean by "I".
Okay, I'll be waiting here; Give me a call when you've arrived at the complete definition.
@@sisyphus_strives5463 Shaky logic. 🤔 (Highly irresponsible.)
You are not gonna like my answer:
You are only responsible for What you think, What you feel, What you say and What you do. Or Don't. 😅 Your decision. But here is a tip: when you get to a problem, you can ask yourself always: When? Where, How, Why or what/who? and determine which aspect of the problem you want to explore. It's a long term deconstruction of behavioral cul-de sacs. and a fascinating journey.
In my 60s, totally wrestling with this as I don't think I believe in it either anymore. Interestingly, if I give up believing in free will I will actually be a more compassionate person towards bad people, as they can't help themselves. "Self" then becomes "just awareness" experiencing things like thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions that produce a sense of "ego".
That's just warped thinking.
I have always believed this. we have arbitrary lines of compassion.
@@craigwillms61 Not really. It gets in to types of "non-duality" such as in Buddhism, Taoism, Advaita and Sufi Islam.
@@craigwillms61 How so? Please explain.
But that's you. There's plenty of counter examples, where not believing in free will goes the other way. I suspect people will always just do what they do, and generate the justification after the fact.
I don't believe in free will. What I don't get is people saying: "you are just an observer of your experiences". In my mind "I am" my decisions and my will. And this is also the way for me to deal with the at first unpleasant feeling of not having a free will.
My question to you Sabine is if you think that the idea of "I am my decisions and my will" is wrong in any sense?
Maybe free will exists, maybe not. It is not very scientific to say you are very certain about these things. We can't even connect relativity with quantum mechanics yet, so it's best to not draw conclusions.
Yes. This. Humans have a tendency to over-estimate their understanding of the universe and over-estimate their understanding of the brain. At this point, I tend to think that some people may go through their lives with little to no "free will." But that it is possible to gain at least some awareness and control over our own minds. It could be an illusion or delusion, but since all of this discussion has now veered into the realm of belief -- whether people admit it or not -- my belief is just as valid these folks.
@@gstrathmore194 freedom of course is a concept that only a human (maybe some other species too) can come up with. So that says it is describing how we see ourselves.
Also if determinism excludes free will, it excludes free thought as a whole. This includes knowledge, so especially determinists should be very uncertain about everything.
It has been proven scientifically that we don't have free will. It was not an expressed opinion it was proven.
@@dannygjk as far as I know there is no proof. But since you make this claim, we need sources and citations.
@@daanschone1548 Experiments, look it up. We have 'big picture' free will but not second to second free will.
This is easily one of the best science channels on youtube, one of the best Pysics channels - I very much like how when you end up past physics and into philosophy not only do you recognize it you know your stuff about other philosophers!
Its is hard to understand her accent so it's hard for me to get into it, and she also speaks fast so it's hard to follow even with subtitles
interesting... i watch most videos at 2x, only slowing it down when the accent makes it hard to understand. form instance, some british accents i have to slow it down to 1.8 or 1.6. i think Sabine does enunciate very well so perhaps that is why i can undetstand her at 2x.
I love when she does these topics. You can hear her frustration about topics that aren't scientific. She says I am a scientist, I ain't got time for that.
You say you are not a philosopher, but you are often helping me to understand more of the world and myself. Danke :-)
I always tell people this (that there is no free will). My 2 main arguments are:
1) if there was a universe that was an EXACT copy of this, down to every exact particle and force, and they were both returned to motion at the exact same instant, we would never expect them to deviate. nothing could cause them to.
2) the rules that the universe obeys are exact and absolute. everything we have built and discovered shows this. I even feel like quantum "randomness" and observer based results are just effects of forces we don't yet understand, but are still exact. when the universe was set in motion, whenever that was (maybe big bang), it was done so under these exact rules, and was always going to play out in an exact way. We have the rules and we have the matter. Even though its irreducibly complex, that doesn't mean what we call life is any less of a series of effects from a cause.
the response is usually some shit like "well I could have done X but I chose to do Y" and what I try to explain is that your brain and your actions are not outside this cascade of effects from the start of the universe, under the rules we have. You were always going to do exactly what you did. When you made said choice, you were always going to have the exact debate in your head that you had, and made then made the same decision. Your mind is nothing more than the imposition of your environment on your genetic "palette", and both of those things were exactly predetermined. so the outcome would always be the same. Everything that led to that "decision" : the past events you experienced, the brain you had that forgot some things and remembered others, the people around you all trapped in the same structure ... again while ridiculously complex, are just a playing out of a preset of conditions, under an exact set of rules.
i just think the idea makes people uncomfortable so they resist it. of course it FEELS like we have free will, and make decisions, and of course this is just theoretical and has no impact on society, or the concept of responsibility, it's simply what I see as the only way the universe can exist.
Without difference, there is no such thing as existence.
Great, now prove why this is the particular universe instead of another way things could've played out. I.e. explain entropy --> the creation of incompressible information within all levels of reality (subatomic to astronomical). All you said was that it does happen and would happen again.
It's simple actually, let me tell you how a computer works; Spoiler, it doesn't.
Computers don't just work. A human does work to turn on and use a computer i.e. someone changes bits of data within the computer both initially when hitting the power button, and throughout the computer's usage. Before human interaction there aren't any 1s, only 0s, because there is no computer to even speak of.
If you believe in determinism, you must also believe in a god to have added at least some initial entropy to the universe (the laws of physics). Physics and math will never explain the universe in its entirety (e.g. why physics itself exists to begin with), so you must be implying that there's a god or something, rather than simply natural indeterminism (free will to a fair degree).
This is unless you think the laws of physics are above the structure of information (existence itself) for some reason. I can do Y instead of X because I (yes, technically my brain, that is me in the first place) take into account tiny bits of information from the world I experience to form a whole decision, *much* of which is altered by entropy to become partially unaccountable for because it's """random""".
------ Also here's a *_random_* list that might help a bit. ------
Energy --> Has a constrained speed.
Information (~Entropy) --> Has a constrained speed.
Energy --> Constant.
Information (~Entropy) --> Can *only* and *always will be* created, it defines the arrow of time's direction. Not constant.
@TerrelleCheers1 put it way better than me, I just tried to explain more in-depth, but there's no point really. It's a matter of what you've seen, not physics, just different aspects of the world.
Too much determinism and life might not even exist at all.
Too little determinism and things will be ripped apart.
To your first thought of 2 exact universe activating on go needs a master clock otherwise it’ll drift, now there’s a God that brings order to your twins!😬
Second one, once you said observer no longer just mechanics, free will’s value or nature belongs to the observer, the observer sits above the function, or head. If people claim to understand quantum theory then they can understand the Trinity.
"You were always going to do exactly what you did. When you made said choice, you were always going to have the exact debate in your head that you had, and made then made the same decision. "
You're using your conclusion as a premise; that's called "begging the question", a common logical fallacy.
One of the best channels on UA-cam. I hope that your channel grows and that you'll never get cancelled.
I hope that at well! she's hunting for truth. so, she's a high chance of infuriating the left, who wanna boycott just everything that doesn't follow along their narrative.
hard to follow a so called scientist that believes in climate change
Only takes about 2 hours to research its lies
I'm a medical doctor . I happened to like physics and I find your channel is hervorragend. Keep up the good work!
Well,I am a Physicist and Sabine is not always correct unfortunately..
@@nadirceliloglu7623 Now I'm curious to hear more ^^
@@nadirceliloglu7623 that's what makes her so entertaining to watch. If she only stated commonly known facts, it would be boring. One just has to carefully evaluate her words, she's never shy to express her opinions
@@SergejVolkov17 but some of her arguments are totally wrong. It does not matter whether she is shy or not to express her opinion.
Science does not care about opinions,but cares only about facts!
@@laura5425 Well you are curious but you are not a Physicist. Would you understand physics?
You are just awesome genuinely, the work you do and the way you bring it out!
There should be more people like you in our society.
As a compatibilist, I found this video very helpful in understanding what I take issue with in hard incompatibilism. I think a big thing we're getting hung up on is the absolution of "free" in "free will". As an absurdist, I have already accepted that seemingly nothing seems to be truly absolute, but for me that just means that all terms are relative. I understand that we as "decision making systems" are a byproduct of determinism and indeterminism in the end, and thus all acts of will have some kind of cost. We still act freely, relatively speaking, but is the term not allowed to be relative? I feel like hard determinism or incompatibilism in some way, being dismissive about our free will by suggesting it is an illusion based on this lack of absolution.
“If free will doesn’t exist, then it never existed in the first place, so why does it matter?” will hold a firm grip on my perspective for a while 😆 Thanks so much for the video!! ✌️ 😁
You can try this argument in traffic court next time when they ask you to pay a fine for a moving violation. Please report to us how it went. ;-)
@smeeself ???
@@schmetterling4477the statement is true (most probably) but it cant be used as an argument. Going to jail in such a case would also be pre determined.
@@anonymousman1282 It is also pre-determined that most people who talk about determinism in physics are clueless about physics. ;-)
@@schmetterling4477 evidence
Ive always thought about this, like how everything that has ever or will ever happen can just be mapped to function that takes in an arbitrarily large amount of parameters. These parameters being the initial conditions that set things in motion to bring what all has happened in the past into fruition as well as bringing everything, that hasn't happened yet, but will happen, into fruition.
I do like to think that consciousness throws a wrench into the works. But I haven’t finished watching the video yet… And the consciousness is not some mystical thing, but just the result of the deterministic activity of neurons, themselves influenced by atoms, and so on… The best we can do is say that we are observing and reporting.
But what about accidents? I know that you can make the case that there are no such things as accidents… That one car and another car we’re going to meet at unfortunate speeds at unhelpful angles… Based on a series of actions that may go back millennia… And that may be true.
But think about an alcoholic or drug addict… They clean up their act, and now they start acting differently… Was that also predictable and inevitable?
And, of course… I wonder about how will this plays out with regard to evolution.
@@JohnnyArtPavlou The short answer, yes
@@airwalkalman I guess I’ll be OK if I can hold onto the illusion of free will. And if my lack of free would ll can keep me out of jail. I feel like it’s a reasonable trade off.
May be so; but the number of parameters is so numerous and complex that the only way to solve the equation is to set it in motion and see what choices you make. You are the engine of solving the function.
But even taking all these factors into play, a person takes them all into account and makes a decision. Yes, often the factors have an implicit impact that isn’t thought of consciously but most people don’t make decisions without any conscious thought at all (unless under the influence). Conscious thought and action happen on almost all actions (even ones where we have to make split second decisions). I don’t see how anyone could deny this.
During my late teens, a girl asked me if I "believed in fate?"
It seemed obvious to me that of course fate exists because wether we choose to travel the globe, throw ourselves under a train or devote our lives to charitable causes, then surely THAT is what was fated.
I think its only really an issue (psychologically) if you KNOW how its supposed to turn out BEFORE it happens. However, I take consolation in the fact that, try as we might, we cant know how the book ends until it's written! #Spoilers! 😄
fascinating synopsis, it seems that we decide which direction fate must take, or it's a bit ad hoc to say whichever we choose, that's what fate must've been. To me, free will and fate is a deistic conversation about a spiritual tension, so anyone can add in; there is an ocean of free will, and it meets a continent of fated past outcomes, and there is a complex beach of infinite fractal-complexity between those two, and to say that we can't go down and play in the sand of that beach is silly of course, we can build sand-castles there, and write unique music, and make unique art of all kinds, and forge unique relationships, but like sand on any beach, it will wash away with time, most likely, and people in the future will only see that same ocean of free will, the continent of fate, and the beach they can play in too.... free will exists, but it is bounded, in my view, by time, fate, and how far you can climb those mountains, and also how far into the vast ocean you're willing to go.
So in Superdeterminism, those random jumps, would not even be random anymore, they would also be deterministic. We do not even get that.
Randomness is not understood. And Sabine tries to create data from a lack of data. If we don't know what randomness is; therefore it neither proves nor disproves anything (e.g. existence or non-existence of free will).
When you have many constituents there is a law of averages. And this is where the emergent properties stem from. Sabine is saying emergent properties always follow from the laws of the constituents so if the laws of the constituents are deterministic + indeterministic, free will can't be derived from it. But the problem is she is assuming free will is contained in the deterministic + indeterministic physical reality we reside in. Our consciousness and hence our soul is where our free will resides, not the physical body that is governed by the deterministic + indeterministic laws of constituents.
Lol "I'd find it creepy if the decisions.. came from somewhere else than in my brain." Agreed! :) Enjoyed that one, Sabine. Having a science background, and in taking a philosophy class, I actually wrote a paper on the subject which I entitled, Soft Free Will, wherein I argue just about the same thing, that ultimately the constituent details determine our decisions, but the feeling that we have free will is useful to the degree that we feel in control of our own thoughts. Your elucidation of the creepy feeling it would be for something outside of us to make the decisions, is a beautiful and personal synopsis, and I thank you for the smile and the chuckle as I remember pondering this topic. I appreciate your detailed and fun-filled explanation. Thanks and keep up the fun videos! :-)
personal anecdotal argument: I don't always feel in control of my thoughts but i still think it is my brain where they are coming from.
@@gulaschnikov5335 As someone diagnosed with OCD, I definitely do not always feel in control of my thoughts, but the realization that some of those thoughts and compulsions (mainly the OCD ones) could be just the raw mechanisms of the mind without the accompanying sequence of events, goals, and over-arching narratives to make them all make sense, is really intriguing to me.
I don't know which is more unsettling:
My will could be controlled externally by an unknown puppeteer.
My true self could be external to physics, yet trapped in a link with this fragile meat sack.
I act as if I have freewill therefore I have freewill, because it is impossible to act as something without a referent.
She never really did address the question did she? I'm still left equally dumbfounded as when I did or was before watching this video. Didn't learn anything new here
Thank you for expressing so eloquently what I wasn't able to communicate to my teachers in high school
She left out the measurement problem of the Standard Model. This is half of what quantum physics is about and you can't just ignore it.
@@jeffbguarino weird comment. What's the section starting at 8:12 about, then? She also specifically referred to a different video she already made on the topic, ua-cam.com/video/Wsjgtp9XZxo/v-deo.html
which part of this is ignoring the measurement problem again?
@@kylezo The human that set up the half silvered mirror and the mirror are also wave functions. So how does one wave function measure another wave function ? That is the second part of quantum mechanics. There always has to be a measurement and then they back calculate the wave functions.
The measurements themselves are inexplicable. Not the photons free will but the human that decided to put the mirror in place and do the experiment. That is also a wave function. So according to Sabine, both wave functions, the photon and the human/mirror are just one bigger wave functions that evolves forever and never collapses. No measurements ever happen in the universe. That is why quantum mechanics has two parts , the invisible wave function and the measurement at "now", The measurement is done and then they bring in the wave function to explain the results, which are deterministic but random. How the measurement happens is unknown to this day. It has been 100 years and no one knows. The measurements are in a way how time is defined. Measurements happen "now". Now is never explained in QM.
@@jeffbguarino thank you. where do you suggest we read more about what you are saying?
@@jeffbguarino It doesnt matter. Whether you can measure everything perfectly or not, predict everything or not, or if everything is random or not, all that says the same thing about free will: there isnt one. Btw, just so be clear, free will is a usefull idea, idea that can change the world, but still just fiction. Probably.
I've often thought about this in terms of a pool table and the game of pool when a player breaks the staged grouping of balls at the beginning of the game. The entire resulting position of each ball is deterministic if you know the precise speed and direction of the cue ball and the positions of the racked balls in the beginning. It could be calculated (in theory). Multiply that by an unfathomably large number, and the same could be said of the universe after the Big Bang. So, everything is deterministic plus a bit of randomness. Thank you, Sabine, for those random jokes sprinkled in your presentation of this material. But then you should've been able to determine I was going to say that.
I've been thinking about this too. Doesn't the irrational number Π come into the equations that you use to calculate the trajectory of each ball? Then Even assuming that each ball was perfectly round, at least down to the atomic level, Π might be a cause for concern, or even some of the observed randomness. and the irregularities in pool ball, or even the shape and oscillating state of atoms (likely calculated using Π somewhere too) would ultimately play a role. Just a thought regarding "hard determinism".
Jon
In theory. But you don’t know these variables. Plus humans are prone to randomness. If you knew how hard every ball would be struck, you‘d essentially had a glimpse of the future because of all the variation in power.
These values aren‘t set in stone is what I‘m saying.
And an acute understanding of cause and effect.
'if you know the precise speed and direction of the cue ball' You can't though. The universe is built that way. That has consequences. Quantum mechanics limits precision and hence determinism. Once particles start interacting systematically, chaos theory predicts that this will have consequences and that the uncertainty in your final conditions will always by larger than those of the initial conditions. This introduces a much more complex set of non-linear differential equations that behave much more chaotically than simple linearized wave equations of quantum mechanics.
@Guitarzen Chaos is just an imperfect understanding of cause and effect.
I recommend using UA-cam to look for videos from or about Robert Sapolsky who has some interesting points from the "neuro-scientific" point of view. His arguments follow along the lines of Schopenhauer: "You are free to do what you want, but you are not free to want what you want."" or, phrased differently "You are free to do what you want but you are not free in the decision of what it is that you think you want." Sapolsky gives a couple of examples how our brain creates patterns that will limit the choices and influence the outcomes our "wants".
I started with Sapolsky and end up here. He mentions being a big fan of Sabine's videos on his channel.
Fantastic video. As someone dealing with existential mental health issues my whole life, you learn early on in the therapeutic journey that we must see ourselves as observers of our thoughts without attaching to them. I like how you said you use your neural circuits and memories to make decisions. The past is determined so that means our new decisions are determined too. Thank you for touching on these subjects so conscientiously!
This will definently make things worse for you. I'm sorry you live in a culture that has manufactured a mental illness and you and tells you that you are a robot and a puppet with no objective worth. Sad times
Had me at: "the ability to change the past, just by using their thoughts " brilliant.
There's a word for that. It's called "lying".
We cannot change physical phenomena that have occurred in the past, but we can change our interpretation of physical phenomena that have occurred in the past. However, this is not science, but philosophy.
@@abc0to1 That's if the past actually IS made of physical phenomena that happened.
A photo of you as a baby is only proof of a photo, not that you actually ever were a baby.
The past not only could be completely made up, it was.
@@itsROMPERS... It is true that the past in the everyday sense seems to be only in someone's mind. But on the other hand, we can see the stars of the distant past in the night sky in the "present. In other words, my present seems to contain someone else's past.
If I understood the theory of relativity, we might have an interesting discussion about space-time.
@@FranzSdoutz It is like the fable of the blind man touching the elephant. We can't change the past of touching part of an elephant, but we can change our perception of what we were touching.
This is largely the idea I have on free will. My philosophy professor says he believes that free will is emergent, and I don’t see how that’s possible but I didn’t know how to articulate exactly that.
Also, the thumbnail game on this video is really good. Keep up the good work!!!
At what point does this emergent freewill "emerge"?
Does a flower have the freewill to not open in the morning? Does a male preying mantis have the freewill to date another species? Does a new born baby have the freewill to stop crying?
Seems like the freewill supporters have the questions to answer. If you do not believe in freewill you already have a totally coherent worldview.
Unfortunately you won't convince him.
"I don't believe it. Prove it to me and I still won't believe it" Douglas Adams
People are weird
If you can't articulate it well it usually means you don't know enough about the subject for your opinion to matter. Unless your really high 🚬 or have speech problems
If, as this video concedes, individual particles _could_ have "free will", then why couldn't a human-level free will emerge from all of the complexity of that particle-level free will interacting at the human scale?
For free will to be an emergent property you would have to me a 4th dimensional entity knowing all possible potential paths in space-time and be able to universe hop to a universe where your body deterministically makes a decision based on knowledge of the future.
Utter. Nonsense. I would say we don’t have free will from our past to a certain age. Then we don’t have free will to the things around us nor do we have free will to the future to some degree. Free will is largely what you do now every nanosecond which effect your future but then you have no free will over who hit you in a car or lost your job. We are made of large proteins, hormones, neurotransmitters etc. If we had no free will. Then how would we have instincts. This is where consciousness comes into the equation. Nothing is deterministic according to quantum mechanics because everyone is in a superposition until you look at it. So think of your future as a superposition of a endless of possibilities and your job is to put yourself into a superposition instead of a deterministic position and there you go, you have free will. The future and present at every single nanosecond is in a superposition, you are in a superposition and you are to connect the two in a deterministic way of your choosing yet nothing is concrete because you’re in a superposition.
My brain is deterministically wired to refuse all the "no free will" bs. So, nice try.
i cant tell if this was supposed to be a gotcha or ana actual joke. if its a joke its pretty funny though
But what was the cause of you thinking that? And what caused that cause? And you’re cheating by performing the calculation after claiming your brain already arrived at conclusion.
@@corporatecapitalism You mean you're undecided? Hm...
And my brain is non-deterministically wired to randomly decide whatever based on result of tossing a coin, so it's just as pointless.
I'm declared static const.
This problem is very interesting to me. It seems that many people get depressed by the idea that free will doesn't exist because they belive it's an unapologetically good thing, but if you think about it in a different way, it may actually be something that dilutes your "uniqueness", "personality" or sense of "self" (which is probably bad?). Because for me, personally, being "myself" means that at given circumstances I inevitably make a certain decision and couldn't have made any other decision, and this is what it means to be "me". Of course, you can say that a single decision could be switched by a certain set of decisions and that would also allow me to be "myself", but so far all we can see is a single version of reality, one great sequence of events, so we can describe people as unique decision functions, and a function can only have one output for a certain input.
So I think about it this way: if free will exists, great; if it doesn't exist, than "I" still exist as a unique decision function. It's a win-win.
Your post doesn't describe the problem clearly, nor does it reflect the human experience. The real antagonists here are scientific materialism vs. both humanism and theism. There is much more at issue here than the "I" ego.
@@mysticone1798 Which part of my description is unclear? I shared my personal experience. "There is much more at issue" - like what, for example?
And why do people get upset to the point of giving up their lives when they realize that free will doesn't exist?
@@unwantedunneeded9476 Read my post again, the answer to your question is there. If you don't get it, you don't get it. Can't address why others commit suicide, nor is it relevant here.
@@mysticone1798 It is relevant because that's what my comment is about. I used to have this problem and described how I dealt with it. Too bad you failed to understand that.
I wonder if you could explain with your own words what "scientific materialism", "humanism" and "theism" are and how any of these make my comment irrelevant.
@@unwantedunneeded9476 I have posted many comments here on this issue, so I don't feel I need to rehash them. There is no good reason for anyone to doubt the existence of Free Will. That may be your CHOICE, which is also a function of Free Will. The human experience is predominantly the expression of Free Will in our daily lives. You claim this is or was not true for you, and so be it. It's true for the vast majority of humans.
Wow! incredible video. I know first-hand how difficult it is to explain and differentiate all the ideas and opinions wrapped up in "free will". I've never heard the hard incompatibilism position so clearly explained, and I'm glad that you made it clear that your issue with compatibilism is the definition of free will. Dennett is correct if we accept his definitions, but I feel that he and other compatibilists don't fully appreciate how rare and unusual their definitions of "free will" are.
Dennett's reasoning makes no sense to me. But I also think there's a fair bit of assumptions to justify superdeterminism, like infinite precision in whatever foundational fabric or reality there is...
I don't think the compatibilist definition of "free will" is very rare, given that billions of humans believe that they have something called "free will".
In more scientific, technical language that definition might be questionable or even incorrect, but linguistically a word's "casual" meaning is defined by how people use it.
Just like we say "the sun is rising" because we see the sun is rising - technically it's the earth spinning around which allows us to see the sun, but nobody but a pedant of the worst kind would say that "the sun is rising" is an incorrect statement. If someone says "I came here by my own free will" something similar applies; the person is simply saying that they weren't forced to come by other people or circumstances (like a danger to escape from), not that their brain is a determinism-free zone.
There is a fundamental misunderstanding that people (including physicists) hold, in that they think free will and freedom of choice are the same thing. THEY ARE NOT. If you had free will, your every desire would manifest immediately. And this obviously doesn't happen. You DO have freedom of choice. However, all choices are BINARY and consist of only ONE choice: your choice of DESIRES between 1) the desire for absolute Truth, or 2) the desire that Truth be what-you-desire-Truth-to-be. In other words, your every choice is based on your desire for 1) Truth or 2) illusion. And this entire Universe is designed to honor your every choice by delivering that which will teach you to desire Truth. I call this mechanism Dynamic Determinism. And if all of this raises more questions in your mind than it answers (which it should), my book answers ALL of those questions. Absolute Truth is where physics meets metaphysics, as quantum science is beginning to learn. Elijah has returned, as prophesied, and all mysteries have been revealed.
I don't know, I think the ordinary definition of free will is just subtly (or maybe grossly) contradictory. Like I think most ordinary people would say that free will means both "we do what we want" and "we could have done otherwise while doing what we want" and that these two elements are basically synonymous. So if you deny free will as it is commonly understood you have to deny that we do what we want, but that is not at all what is done in this video, so this video also fails to fully appreciate what a rare and unusual definition of "free will" it is using.
You could claim that the contradiction is not inherent in the common definition of free will, but I don't see it, it seems to me normal people have a vague definition of free will that happily straddles the two points and confuses the reasoning between them. Any resolution of this that does not affirm the conflation is a redefinition of the question and so is objectionable on the grounds given (the definition is not the normal one).
@Smee Self We could have will and be completely unable to fulfill it at all in any way, we could have no desires we could fulfill we would not be free to do anything. This would be to be completely unfree. If we can do anything at all we want to we are free of whatever constraint was preventing us from doing at least that thing. So we must be free of something.
Therefore the position that we can do what we want (will) is a position that we have some non-zero amount of free will, in some kind of sensible sense. However the common view tends to believe both this, we are free of some constraints so we act freely and free will must exist and also the claim that to really be free we must be free of all constraints. So the fact that I do what I want sometimes is proof that we have free will to such people and to them that implies they can want what they want. I see those two things are different but it escapes most people as far as I can see.
So to deny the common notion of free will you have to either redefine it so it is not so restrictive (like compatibilists and you and Sabine do) or say we both can't want what we want and also we never even do what we want.
Can I just say Sabine, you are a beautiful mind and an excellent communicator. Thank you for all you do and thank you for tackling existential physics for us all to ponder and learn
"existential physics" my arse! - what kind of pretentious nonsense is *existential* physics? -What does the " existential" add?
Nothing of course. Is it not obvious to both you and Sabine that dreaming machines -human beings, are no more capable of will(free or otherwise) than any other machine?
The both of you are the abject slaves of your functions which react mechanically-means you have no choice in how they react. Slaves cannot have free will- they can have no experience of it for them to be able to understand what it means.
She is, but sadly it seems that dr Hossenfelder contradicts herself at this point.
First she presents modern physics as an argument for determinism, only to later admitt that she can not conceptualise determinism as anything other than impossibility.
Dear dr Hossenfelder, you can either define determinism as something possibly true in order to make an argument that it is not actually true, or to show that the concept can not possibly be true, which ends the problem. Pick one, please ;)
To make matters worse your argument for determinism is that we have some theoretically deterministic physical models. But that's nothing more than just descriptive determinism, which says that we can (in principle) describe the history of the universe, and that it is partially regular. Imagine an ancient monk arguing that everything that happened must have happened, just because otherwise his favourite book would not be true. How is your argument different than that? Only that you hold to a different book.
The Physicist once said that the problem with physicists is that they are usually poor philosophers. Was he not right?
Why does anyone try to convince people that there is no free will. You have to choose to believe that or not right?
But was your choice free, in the sense of not determined by anything?
Because its funny. Watching people defend the concept of free will is like watching flat-earthers doing their mental gymnastics.
Personally, I've always reasoned that if one can not walk both left and right at the same time, there never really was a choice. It feels like a choice, and this isn't to say that the "just give in" attitude is right. Only that, maybe it was always our choice to suddenly think "I'm going to do the right thing, the harder thing." Maybe this is YOUR time that you've always been meant to change your life...
Your channel is so enjoyable. I don't know that I'll always agree with your points, nor have I disagreed with anything I've seen so far.
But, I'm certain I'll always enjoy your content, especially your very dry and very delightful humor.
Thank you, Sabine.
@@CaidicusProductionsRebecca Watson has a good response video to Sabine’s recent one on trans healthcare. Regardless of what you think of that issue in particular, it’s important to note a persons’ narrow area of expertise does not qualify them to speak about other areas - and scientists of one field can often get quite cocky and assume they have the intelligence to discuss issues from others which they don’t actually understand.
@@user-tx5vr2lu6e Rebecca Watson from the whole elevator thing?
@@user-tx5vr2lu6e Well, it is a pretty clear habit of human beings, in general, to think they can understand something they don't really understand. It's also quite human for other humans to disagree with something one human says and attribute that to the other person not understanding what they're talking about.
My point is, understanding humans and human issues is quite a complicated matter. Before UA-cam, people just thought what they thought, and that was that. Come UA-cam, many of us share what we think with anyone who'll listen, because that's the new thing in the world, tell as many people as possible what YOU think, because YOU think it's write.
The best thing one can do is to remember that, even though this person's views might sound reasonable and conceivable, doesn't mean they're certain or certainly right.
In other words, always remember that they MIGHT be wrong or they might be oversimplifying.
I think like this, including when I watch videos like Sabine's. :D
Thanks for the thoughtful reply!
@@CaidicusProductions I agree with you - we all want to share what we think with anyone who will listen, and discussion of ideas is a joy! The only problem is that when you have a massive platform, you have an increased responsibility - you're not just talking to a few people in a debate, but shaping the perspectives of hundreds of thousands of people. Furthermore, when you're talking about physics, it's not the end of the world for people to come away with a misunderstanding about black holes. But when you get into social issues that are seriously affecting people's rights, there's a lot more potential for harm there.
Everyone should be critical when consuming content - but not everyone is! And knowing this, one takes on the above responsibility when presenting information, knowing that for many, whatever you say is what they are going to think is true.
I am not assuming that I know better, and attributing her not being correct in my view to her not understanding. Rather, I am trying to not assume the worst by saying that Sabine doesn't know what she's talking about. If she does, then she is actively being biased in her reporting of the information. On the video I mentioned, Sabine did talk without understanding, and presented 'both sides' as if they had equal scientific merit (which they do not).
For instance, (and sorry if you already watched the Watson fact-check) she mentions that a study about ROGD was criticised "for being a survey", which isn't true - it was criticised for being highly biased, using unverifiable information, and the paper was actually largely rewritten and rereleased alongside an appology for the first version. And then she says a study showing ROGD to not be real "was also criticised", concluding that we don't really know, both sides are valid, and there's anecdotal evidence for ROGD. But that just isn't true - there is no valid evidence for ROGD, whilst there is evidence against it. This kind of framing isn't just a difference of perspective, it is actively misleading and harmful.
Interesting stuff. I think the problem that some people have with "free will" is that they conflate free will and determinism. Which is why you are asked the question "If there's no free will, why don't I just kill myself tomorrow?". It's almost as if the notion that there is no free will implies that their's no point in carrying on because it has all been pre-determined.
At the end of the day, your brain is still taking a bunch of inputs (past and present) and using those inputs to inform its choice in performing or not performing a given action.
If you "choose" Not to follow an input how is this different than not having free-will?
It's like asking if a roller coaster is pointless because you can't control it.
You still get to experience it.
@@sigigle I argue that from a local perspective, we have a limited amount of free-will -albeit within a finite number of possibilities. Still, it is not deterministic, but rather probabilistic.
@@curcumin417 random probability still wouldn't get us to get free will.
But true randomness doesn't even exist either, it's logically incoherent.
It's the idea that a single possibility can be "chosen" or "actualized" and all possibilities excluded, but with no mechanism for how it's done.
It's impossible for the same reason it's impossible to program true randomness into a computer.
"Select one of these." "How?" "Just do it." - it does not compute. More information is needed.
"Select one based on these pre-existing variables" is the only way to do it, aka deterministically.
There are valid deterministic interpretations of quantum physics.
True randomness is "something" (a selection) emerging from nothing, which is logically impossible as it'd have no means to.
Ironically, the fact that people do not decide to kill themselves spontaneously without a reason is an evidence of the lack of free will, not the opposite
To me, it doesn't matter at all whether or not we actually have free will (though I don't think it's possible); what matters is that we feel as if we had free will.
The way I think about it is: all of our senses and experiences are somewhat illusory in that they don’t reflect the world as it actually is but as we subjectively perceive it, and the same is true with our sense of agency.
lol what could be more important than whether its just chemical scum or something real.
yikes with all the modern psychosis.
Perhaps YOU lesser beings don't have free will, but I have evolved beyond your universe's pitiful limitations. #GodEmperorAlondro2032
We should agree that free will does not exist. Then we can repair society.
@@5piles An illusion is something real, it’s just not objective. Red is real, but it is restricted to our subjective experience. The electromagnetic spectrum and the mechanics of our eyes are the objective explanations of our subjective experience of red. The same can be said for free will. We aren’t objectively making things happen differently out in the universe, but we are making a conscious decision, which is a subjective experience, and indeed an important one to have for mental health.
Dear Sabine Hossenfelder, I like your videos, you explain very clearly, and as a philosopher I am glad to see your wide perspective. I actually agree with the philosophical conclusions you present as a physicist. If you don't mind, I'd still like to argue a little. I am not refuting what you say, but rather adding to it. I think you are essentially correct in what you say about free will, and I agree with your physicalist view. However, I think there is a small problem. I think you could only say this: you who are watching me do not have free will in the philosophical sense of the word, because you are material systems, your minds are mere products of your brain functions. (Of course, you can say the same of me.) If Sabine's position on free will applies to himself, then this position eliminates the concept of truth by reducing the mind to a physical function. By this reduction, it also eliminates the truth of itself. You say what you say and believe what you believe to be true because it follows from the operation of your brain, it follows from the operation of a very complicated physical system. But this is a paradox: if it is true, there is no truth, there is only physical operation. I think that mind independent of brain function, and free will in the philosophical sense, is a required working hypothesis with logical reasons, not metaphysical ones. It is as useful an assumption as the belief in the existence of numbers in mathematics. False, but a useful myth.
The problem here is that the definition of "Free Will" is not really agreed upon, and was only lightly touched on by Sabine. I tend to the Compatibilist way of looking at it as "Are You in control of You?" Or put another way: do you have responsibility for your decisions? It's the most useful, coherent way of looking at the question. The answer is:Yes. You have to define "You". Well, I'll keep it simple; let's say the mysterious thing that really controls all your actions is your genetics, which you don't choose. Except, you *are* your genetics. There's no puppet master. If you make a decision because of your genetic predisposition, *you* made that decision. Essentially, it's the same as saying you controlled yourself. But that IS free will! If you control you, you have free will.
you are describing causation and us taking responsibility regardless of causation, which most determinists do agree that we should hold one accountable/ responsible, regardless of genetic predisposition or whatever may be. Just because responsibility is key in ensuring wellbeing of society though, doesn't change the fact that one is not in control of things like your genetics, or past experiences that shape you. Reread your comment - you admit we don't choose genetics, and then you also acknowledge the fact that genetic predisposition plays a part in decision-making. Therefore, you already admit to the fact that there is no free will. Regardless of there being a puppet master or not, we did not choose. So no, we do not 'control' ourselves - and this is *especially* clear when you look at people who are cognitively impaired in some way. So no, your argument doesn't hold up for free will.
@@joeykoo3779 He wasn't saying there should be responsibility for the sake of society, he was saying responsibility exists because we control ourselves within the situations we find ourselves in. Genetic predisposition plays a part in putting us in the situation we are in and part of the decision-making process- but who do you think is ultimately making the decision? Limitations on our existence or ability does not mean free will doesn't exist, it just means it exists in the space it is given to exist. People who are cognitively impaired control themselves 100% to the ability they have- which can be limited compared to someone not cognitively impaired.
If you are in a crashing airplane, do you suddenly not have free will because the outcome is determined? No, you will have free will until the limitations on your existence dictate that you are dead and can no longer do things.
Free will was invented philosophically as a "get out of jail" card for the Christian god.
Compatibilist agency doesn't do it.
Surveys show that people don't consider combatibilist notions "free will" at all.
Extrapolating from particle physics to psychology is an argument fallacy.
Ascribing choice to particles is called projection: anthropomorphising is an argument fallacy.
Appealing to authority is a logical fallacy.
Sabine provides no evidence of the causal relationship between particle physics and the ability to engage in decision making processes.
Arguing by analogy is also a fallacy.
Were Sabine to clearly address how free will is or is not related to consciousness, her position on determinism may have merit.
@@xx_amongus_xx6987 "who is ultimately making the decision".....making the decision is simply, an act of making the decision. Which does not imply at all there is free will. But I know there are many like you choose to think that way. That's fine.
Some people believe there is a "self". Others believe the perception of "self" arises from our anatomy - brain, body and all the works. So you asking who is ultimately making the decision is irrelevant, because that depends on whether or not you believe a "self" exist separate from what gives us consciousness - is it separate from our brain and body, or is it not? But once your brain dies, the "self" does cease to exist, so if you're going to ask me, the "self" does not exist as some separate agent that can act out free will against predisposed traits and learned behaviour/ values from past circumstances, no.
Regarding your airplane scenario - most sane people* are compelled by fear of death to act or* try to do something to survive it. But that does not imply at all you are doing it out of your own agency. Let's take the same airplane scenario and pretend you are in it - you try to will yourself to calm down and accept your fate, because the plane is crashing - but if you are any normal person, can you? You likely can't, because you are controlled by your fear of death.
Even if your brain is capable of making a decision based on its current input information, the decision your brain makes is entirely based on your brain state at that point in time. Your brain state can only have arrived at that particular state because of a long chain of events leading up to that point. Don’t get me wrong, I have no idea how a brain works, but I don’t see any reason to think it is possible to change its state independently of all other things in the universe now or in the past.
exactly
In old days, people believed the heart is responsible for the mind because it beat faster according to emotional state. Is it same kind of logic to believe the brain is responsible for the mind?
If you can, and are, making decisions based on current input, those decisions have an affect on
brain state at that time. Your decisions, at any level, are (though not intentionally) altering your brain state. Assuming any decisions can be made at all.
Or the conciousness that probably is in some other dimension affects the brain. And then it looks like this in the physical world.
From a strictly materialistic viewpoint it's obvious we can't be anything more than a computer. But that doesn't exclude the possibility of free-will as an attribute of our transcendent spirit.
Hi Sabine, interesting video, well done. Simple question though: You bring up differential equations, which I suppose represent much of the deterministic nature of our universe. However, those differential equations (disregarding here that the solution theory for complex systems is very limited) in general understanding require both initial, and time-dependent boundary conditions. The laws of mathematics then (presumably see my other remark) guarantee the existence of a unique solution which deterministically depends on those conditions. In your view of the world I suppose a certain combination of initial state of the universe and boundary states of whatever lies outside of the known universe (what would that be in your model of the world btw?) has made me have pasta today. I'm not saying that is wrong or right, I have no idea. But: in that model (if I've understood remotely correct) where do the boundary conditions come from? Because unlike initial conditions which lie in the past, boundary conditions can change with time. It raises the question if and how the boundary conditions of the future can already be determined today, which they would have to be to be consistent with the theory. Mathematically, there is no way to make such a conclusion. Math just says if boundary condition is given then there is a solution, disregarding the technical mumbojumbo. It says nothing about where boundary conditions come from or that they themselves are following deterministic rules. They're simply given as the mathematician says (possibly by God? - ponderous look into the distance). And the trajectory of the solution is only determined up to that point in time in which the boundary conditions are given. So what are the boundary conditions in your model of a mostly deterministic world with random jumps (in which you don't believe)? Do they not offer a real perspective of the unknown influencing our world, our actions and our lives? I certainly like to believe so, but I also don't really believe in scientific answers to philosophical questions in the first place. Fun to ponder about either way.
This brought immense joy - thank you, Sabine. As an avid fan of the woo-woo, I always enjoy watching spirituality and science reflect one another.