It’s very fitting that a video more wise than anything on cable tv or the trending tab accumulated less than 10k views in over two years. To say this is a hidden gem is an understatement. From me to you, thank you.
I appreciate your defense of free will because it's the thoughts i had about it but laid down clearly (im 20 and my generation is sadly overwhelmingly convinced we have no free will, possibly because it fits the doomed world narative and nihilism)
Ah! Well, you see Wes, actually people kinda shifted from psychology to philosophy in the marketing business. Only chimpanzees in sales still focus on cognitive-behavioural psychology these days, whereas the really smart boys in marketing started looking into existentialism. Marketing based on finding meaning in an inherently meaningless world, and shoving the God-Hole inside of us with products that define the lifestyles that we have chosen. Great lecture as always.
I feel like that with planes and trains too, that they seem a fantastical way to travel, hopefully even when they're also an everyday experience. The car as a means of A to B travel can be a really dull, wasteful, expensive, sensorially bland, needy, polluting, big, awkward, inefficient, fragile lump.
Marketing being effective seems like a really weak argument for free will to me. If everything leading up to that is predetermined and the way they interact with your brain is then it's decided for you. And if you believe in free will, that may not even have been your decision either. Reducing it down to "well a decision was made therefore I made it freely" is nonsensical imo. I'm not even against free will being true, I just felt your examples were weak.
i see layers upon layers of cause and effect that produces what we call 'decisions' being made by us. i see causality, at the smallest level all the way up
Maybe this is undecidable, that makes sense, but I'm fairly sure… It's not a contradiction to be a biological machine and be able to do the sort of thinking things through iteratively towards a decision that's called free will. If someone says "I don't have free will so I have to come to this decision I'm giving you ahead of deciding" that wouldn't be true either. Practchett calls this sort of, what I'm calling "free but deterministic" "the only free will worth having". In the future (or for each future) you end up having made a decision and that decision was decided by your mind, by you, it was deterministic *and* you were free to make it, change your mind about it, be or think you are open and/or closed to influences, where applicable write proofs about it, etc… Changes can even be made like adding in noise at the level of the rules of physics and I think the reasoning stays the same. Computer code has this same free will too, with the obvious need to be sensible here though as it may not mean much to ask if MS Word is has free will. "Mechanical" seems like such a misleadingly loaded word, easy to imagine two intermeshing cogs and a 1980s oblong shaped robot. But a noisy probabilistic system of quantumly entangled atoms can be in the sense that I think the word is used "mechanical". As can one of the mathematical spaces that contains all the others, even with it's endlessly varied subspaces and properties.
If someone can edit your agency with marketing and you are unaware of the deeper mechanisms of it (which we all are), then you still sort of not have free will.
I always liked your lectures, but this time I'm a little bit disappointed at how you portrait the criticism of free will. First, you belittle the whole discipline of psychology and then continue by proclaiming that only a few nutjob-psychologists could ever call free will into question. Actually, determinism is a pretty popular theory not only in psychology but also und neuroscience and even philosophy (as you hinted at). I think Robert Sapolsky - a neuroendocrinologist from Stanford - explains it best in his book "Behave". He begins by stating the three possible positions on this issue: " 1. We have complete free will in our behavior 2. We have none 3. Somewhere in between" Nearly no one believes the first because we accept there are some instances in which our biology overrides anything resembling free will. "No, that guy didn't want to hit you he has a seizure", "She isn't heartless because she didn't help that elderly woman; she is paralyzed from the neck down", "That woman didn't bump into you on purpose; she is blind." Since many also don't believe the second option, we are left with some sort of mitigated free will, some essence beside our innate biology, that embodies our free will. Then Sapolsky gives the perfected description of what that might look like: "Here's how I always pictured mitigated free will: There's the brain - neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters, receptors, brain-specific transcription factors, epigenetic effects, gene transpositions during neurogenesis. Aspects of brain function can be influenced by someone's prenatal environment, genes, and hormones, whether their parents were authoritative or their culture egalitarian, whether they witnessed violence in childhood, when they had breakfast [...] And then, separate from that, in a concrete bunker tucked away in the brain, sits a little man (or woman, or agendered individual), a homunculus at a control panel. The homunculus is made of a mixture of nanochips, old vacuum tubes, crinkly ancient parchment, stalactites of your mother's admonishing voice, streaks of brimstone, rivets made out of gumption. In other words, not squishy biological brain yuck. And the homunculus sits there controlling behavior. There are some things outside its purview - seizures blow the homunculus's fuses, requiring it to reboot the system check for damaged files. Same with alcohol, Alzheimer's disease, a severed spinal cord, hypoglycemic shock. There are domains where the homunculus and that brain biology stuff have worked out a détente - for example, biology is usually automatically regulating your aspiration, unless you must take a deep breath before singing an aria, in which case the homunculus briefly overrides the automatic pilot. But other than that, the homunculus makes decisions. Sure, it takes careful note of all the inputs and information from the brain, checks your hormone levels, skims the neurobiology journals, takes it all under advisement, and then, after reflecting and deliberating, decides what you do. A homunculus in your brain, but not of it, operating independently of the material rules of the universe that constitute modern science."
I don't agree with Wes statement on the 10 minute mark, "if your group is 'wronger' they eat you'" The presumption is they had correct thoughts not accounting for their physical force or violence in technology. Were the Jews wronger compared to tha nazis? The west African's wronger than their European slave traders? Were the monks of Tibet wronger than communist China? The assumption leaves out too many other factors. Contradicts your previous talks as well, as pointed above. The very notion of wronger or righter is a fallacy. Implies another false notion is that those in the winning side of history is the right or correct side. Even on an individual level this is ridiculous. Im disappointed Wes didn't catch on to this himself. Could have been an honest mistake. Or I need further clarification.
Wes, I love your lectures and your deep understanding has inspired me and given me so much more breath to my view of the world. But, I have to strongly disagree with your claim of transgender identity as being solely influenced by external factors and harmful to oneself, as I think it is completely uninformed and it's a great disservice that you did not have any true dialogue with trans people before making these claims. I will speak on my own empirical evidence as I am a trans woman, and believe strongly that there is a biological cause for gender dysphoria. It wasn't my social belonging as a male that began my discomfort in myself, but rather the advent of puberty. As my body masculinized, it felt as though I was turning into a total and complete monster, diametrically apposed to some underlying layer in the self about how my body should be and should look like. I can use a metaphor to explain to someone who has not experienced this, to say: instead of going through puberty like your peers, you suddenly are slowly being turned into an android, a metallic robot. Your skin starts to become cold, lifeless, hard like iron, you begin to lose the appetite for food and instead crave oil and gasoline, even though the taste yet repulses you. As well, you lose the need for sleep, yet, those who live with you still sleep during the night, and during this time you feel a sense of alienation, confusion, and lack of belonging. People still see you as a human, maybe even complement you on your features becoming more defined and lifelike as the world around you sees you coming into adulthood, but these comments only alienate you further as your sense of self becomes completely lost and then lose any place in society. This is what it's like to be transgender. The feeling is so utterly confusing and it is hard to even pin down to the fact you desire the body of the opposite sex. Many trans people I know had no idea the cause, and felt incredibly depressed their whole lives not truly understanding why, and then finally introspected to sufficient self-understanding and began transitioning, and thus became so much happier. I can only describe to you, just how 'right' it felt in my head when I began hormone replacement therapy, as opposed to how horribly 'wrong; it felt prior to this, when my body and mind was guided by testosterone. Please understand this, Mr. Wes, as I love what you do and would hate for you to continue spreading ideas that may be harmful to people who have already endured much suffering. All the best, Lilith 🌠
It's not, because identity is social, transgenderism is not a thing that exists in physical space that some humans posses or don't. Identity is an abstract idea that comes from society (else wise you would have no notion of what identity even is, and not even a name). All gender is socially constructed, and if that's the case, trans is too. What I say is that people are not at ease with what is given to them, and that leads to changes in gender and "self-awakening". It's not a thing you are born with, it's an internal conflict of ideas you were fed. Your own empirical narrative of it starting around puberty was just you questioning and coming into contact with ideas that you felt you resonated with (along with a melting pot of other ideas in the social stew). By the way, the discomfort you've felt with your body, you said felt like you were becoming a monster, why? Because of just hormones, or was it something else? You feeling like something wasn't right with you IS SOCIAL.
It’s very fitting that a video more wise than anything on cable tv or the trending tab accumulated less than 10k views in over two years. To say this is a hidden gem is an understatement. From me to you, thank you.
If you find a better lecturer than Wes. please let me know.
bernsteintapes (dot) com - thank me later
Sadler is pretty good
Rick roderick is great
There is an entire series of the history of philosophy by Arthur c Holmes.
I appreciate your defense of free will because it's the thoughts i had about it but laid down clearly (im 20 and my generation is sadly overwhelmingly convinced we have no free will, possibly because it fits the doomed world narative and nihilism)
Backwards. Free will is nihilist, we are liberated by being part of the great chain of events.
Wes!!!! I really really really really hope these summer lectures on the history of philosophy are going to be online!
Another great lecture, as always thank you.
I love these, I download these onto my phone and listen to them while driving or walking :D
I love to listen while I play chess.
Same here.
12:24 to hear Wes Cecil say "we live in a society"
And 32:50
Ah! Well, you see Wes, actually people kinda shifted from psychology to philosophy in the marketing business. Only chimpanzees in sales still focus on cognitive-behavioural psychology these days, whereas the really smart boys in marketing started looking into existentialism. Marketing based on finding meaning in an inherently meaningless world, and shoving the God-Hole inside of us with products that define the lifestyles that we have chosen. Great lecture as always.
I feel like that with planes and trains too, that they seem a fantastical way to travel, hopefully even when they're also an everyday experience. The car as a means of A to B travel can be a really dull, wasteful, expensive, sensorially bland, needy, polluting, big, awkward, inefficient, fragile lump.
I miss the railway too
Marketing being effective seems like a really weak argument for free will to me. If everything leading up to that is predetermined and the way they interact with your brain is then it's decided for you. And if you believe in free will, that may not even have been your decision either. Reducing it down to "well a decision was made therefore I made it freely" is nonsensical imo.
I'm not even against free will being true, I just felt your examples were weak.
i see layers upon layers of cause and effect that produces what we call 'decisions' being made by us. i see causality, at the smallest level all the way up
Maybe this is undecidable, that makes sense, but I'm fairly sure…
It's not a contradiction to be a biological machine and be able to do the sort of thinking things through iteratively towards a decision that's called free will. If someone says "I don't have free will so I have to come to this decision I'm giving you ahead of deciding" that wouldn't be true either. Practchett calls this sort of, what I'm calling "free but deterministic" "the only free will worth having". In the future (or for each future) you end up having made a decision and that decision was decided by your mind, by you, it was deterministic *and* you were free to make it, change your mind about it, be or think you are open and/or closed to influences, where applicable write proofs about it, etc… Changes can even be made like adding in noise at the level of the rules of physics and I think the reasoning stays the same. Computer code has this same free will too, with the obvious need to be sensible here though as it may not mean much to ask if MS Word is has free will.
"Mechanical" seems like such a misleadingly loaded word, easy to imagine two intermeshing cogs and a 1980s oblong shaped robot. But a noisy probabilistic system of quantumly entangled atoms can be in the sense that I think the word is used "mechanical". As can one of the mathematical spaces that contains all the others, even with it's endlessly varied subspaces and properties.
Hell Yes
If someone can edit your agency with marketing and you are unaware of the deeper mechanisms of it (which we all are), then you still sort of not have free will.
I always liked your lectures, but this time I'm a little bit disappointed at how you portrait the criticism of free will. First, you belittle the whole discipline of psychology and then continue by proclaiming that only a few nutjob-psychologists could ever call free will into question. Actually, determinism is a pretty popular theory not only in psychology but also und neuroscience and even philosophy (as you hinted at).
I think Robert Sapolsky - a neuroendocrinologist from Stanford - explains it best in his book "Behave". He begins by stating the three possible positions on this issue: "
1. We have complete free will in our behavior
2. We have none
3. Somewhere in between"
Nearly no one believes the first because we accept there are some instances in which our biology overrides anything resembling free will. "No, that guy didn't want to hit you he has a seizure", "She isn't heartless because she didn't help that elderly woman; she is paralyzed from the neck down", "That woman didn't bump into you on purpose; she is blind."
Since many also don't believe the second option, we are left with some sort of mitigated free will, some essence beside our innate biology, that embodies our free will.
Then Sapolsky gives the perfected description of what that might look like:
"Here's how I always pictured mitigated free will:
There's the brain - neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters, receptors, brain-specific transcription factors, epigenetic effects, gene transpositions during neurogenesis. Aspects of brain function can be influenced by someone's prenatal environment, genes, and hormones, whether their parents were authoritative or their culture egalitarian, whether they witnessed violence in childhood, when they had breakfast [...]
And then, separate from that, in a concrete bunker tucked away in the brain, sits a little man (or woman, or agendered individual), a homunculus at a control panel. The homunculus is made of a mixture of nanochips, old vacuum tubes, crinkly ancient parchment, stalactites of your mother's admonishing voice, streaks of brimstone, rivets made out of gumption. In other words, not squishy biological brain yuck.
And the homunculus sits there controlling behavior. There are some things outside its purview - seizures blow the homunculus's fuses, requiring it to reboot the system check for damaged files. Same with alcohol, Alzheimer's disease, a severed spinal cord, hypoglycemic shock.
There are domains where the homunculus and that brain biology stuff have worked out a détente - for example, biology is usually automatically regulating your aspiration, unless you must take a deep breath before singing an aria, in which case the homunculus briefly overrides the automatic pilot.
But other than that, the homunculus makes decisions. Sure, it takes careful note of all the inputs and information from the brain, checks your hormone levels, skims the neurobiology journals, takes it all under advisement, and then, after reflecting and deliberating, decides what you do. A homunculus in your brain, but not of it, operating independently of the material rules of the universe that constitute modern science."
I don't agree with Wes statement on the 10 minute mark, "if your group is 'wronger' they eat you'"
The presumption is they had correct thoughts not accounting for their physical force or violence in technology.
Were the Jews wronger compared to tha nazis?
The west African's wronger than their European slave traders?
Were the monks of Tibet wronger than communist China?
The assumption leaves out too many other factors. Contradicts your previous talks as well, as pointed above.
The very notion of wronger or righter is a fallacy.
Implies another false notion is that those in the winning side of history is the right or correct side.
Even on an individual level this is ridiculous.
Im disappointed Wes didn't catch on to this himself. Could have been an honest mistake. Or I need further clarification.
Wes, I love your lectures and your deep understanding has inspired me and given me so much more breath to my view of the world. But, I have to strongly disagree with your claim of transgender identity as being solely influenced by external factors and harmful to oneself, as I think it is completely uninformed and it's a great disservice that you did not have any true dialogue with trans people before making these claims. I will speak on my own empirical evidence as I am a trans woman, and believe strongly that there is a biological cause for gender dysphoria. It wasn't my social belonging as a male that began my discomfort in myself, but rather the advent of puberty. As my body masculinized, it felt as though I was turning into a total and complete monster, diametrically apposed to some underlying layer in the self about how my body should be and should look like. I can use a metaphor to explain to someone who has not experienced this, to say:
instead of going through puberty like your peers, you suddenly are slowly being turned into an android, a metallic robot. Your skin starts to become cold, lifeless, hard like iron, you begin to lose the appetite for food and instead crave oil and gasoline, even though the taste yet repulses you. As well, you lose the need for sleep, yet, those who live with you still sleep during the night, and during this time you feel a sense of alienation, confusion, and lack of belonging. People still see you as a human, maybe even complement you on your features becoming more defined and lifelike as the world around you sees you coming into adulthood, but these comments only alienate you further as your sense of self becomes completely lost and then lose any place in society. This is what it's like to be transgender.
The feeling is so utterly confusing and it is hard to even pin down to the fact you desire the body of the opposite sex. Many trans people I know had no idea the cause, and felt incredibly depressed their whole lives not truly understanding why, and then finally introspected to sufficient self-understanding and began transitioning, and thus became so much happier. I can only describe to you, just how 'right' it felt in my head when I began hormone replacement therapy, as opposed to how horribly 'wrong; it felt prior to this, when my body and mind was guided by testosterone. Please understand this, Mr. Wes, as I love what you do and would hate for you to continue spreading ideas that may be harmful to people who have already endured much suffering.
All the best, Lilith 🌠
It's not, because identity is social, transgenderism is not a thing that exists in physical space that some humans posses or don't. Identity is an abstract idea that comes from society (else wise you would have no notion of what identity even is, and not even a name).
All gender is socially constructed, and if that's the case, trans is too.
What I say is that people are not at ease with what is given to them, and that leads to changes in gender and "self-awakening". It's not a thing you are born with, it's an internal conflict of ideas you were fed.
Your own empirical narrative of it starting around puberty was just you questioning and coming into contact with ideas that you felt you resonated with (along with a melting pot of other ideas in the social stew).
By the way, the discomfort you've felt with your body, you said felt like you were becoming a monster, why? Because of just hormones, or was it something else? You feeling like something wasn't right with you IS SOCIAL.