To the prospective viewer: Harris wanted to talk about whether or not a murderer has the ability to be anything else, and Dennet wanted to talk about whether or not that murderer should be punished for his crime. They went on like this having two separate conversations for an hour and a half. You as the viewer get to see both of their view points elucidated on these two separate subjects, but it would be a stretch to call it a debate.
Nor did he even try and reconsider, he just leisurely pontificated whilst shoving food down his face and spitting it out as he spoke. Dan is beyond infuriating
I’m an hour in and still have no idea what Dans position is. He seems to be simply just explaining how humans should be responsible people?!? Sam is trying to talk about determinism, something Dan should be very well versed in yet it seems that it’s going right over his head. Wtf is going on here?
What's going on is that Sam talks about a subject that is philosophical in nature, without reading or understanding philosophy. He is like a kid shocked at the possibility that ''we might not have free will because of determinism''. Dan is just saying ''Free will means choosing an apple over an orange''' or ''deciding to sign a contract or not''' while Sam wants a religious definition of free will, where you had the option to choose otherwise, and than he argues against his own definition of free will. To makes things even more comical, Sam is engaged in double think, and he actually believes in religious definition of free will, because he thinks that he can change the world for the better, by convincing people that there is no free will. Complete mindfuck.
My take of Dan is; "sam is having a little fun with 'what if we are all brains in a wat' play with the fundamentals of free will, while in the real world that is irrelevant."
@@1GTX1 No, that's nonsense. Everything Dan and most compatibilists say is nonsense. By analogy, being able to understand roughly what "God" is supposed to mean, then saying "God doesn't exist", is not a religious position. Trying to redefine God to mean something completely different is the double think-y position. This is what people need to say to compatabilism trolls like Dan: If we had *infinite* introspection, the ability to understand and control and predict every facet of our thought process and fully understand all of the consequences of every possibility--and this would *necessarily* involve a (nonexistent) process that was neither deterministic nor random (because no such process can do all of that due to not only finite computing power but also the halting problem, Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, etc--then we would have free will. We do not possess this super-human and transcendent-of-determinism ability, and thus we do not appear to have free will. It is not double-think or religious to speculate about and then reject the existence of things like this. Mathematicians do it all of the time--for example, there is a hypothetical "Oracle" machine that is better than a Turing-complete computer that they have analyzed the capabilities of. It's impossible to build one. Physically speaking, an Oracle machine is a contradiction in terms. It cannot ever be realized. But it can still be thought about and reasoned about. So, too, it is with free will. Sam is entirely correct; "compatibilism" is just childish and very annoying changing of the subject.
I dislike the findings of Sam Harris as it challenges many of my beliefs, however I must say the evidence in the lab is too compelling to ignore. Mr. Daniel Dennett’s attempt to hold onto a more conventional free will and his version of compatiblism is attractive to the part of me that does not want to understand deeper what the actual evidence supports. Sadly I find many a philosopher willing to dig in where they ought not.
Im not too convinced by the lab data, the time between when a person makes a decision and when they react to say theyve made it is so small as to account for reaction speed. I mean look at drag racers they are reacting to a light turning green and the time between them hitting gas and making the decsion to hit gas at the green light as a premade decision isnt immediate.
The experiment design is suspect to me, it does not seek to explore the kinds of decisions where one would most expect to find free will at work, such as complex moral decisions where we feel at odds with an innate impulse on one hand and our moral reasoning on the other. Taking only the set of cases studied so far in the lab and extrapolating them to cases where much more moral complexity and consideration is required seems invalid to me, and I don’t see an honest discussion of this problem or an attempt to explain how this extrapolation is justified by Sam. The cause-effect line from known determinate/indeterminate molecular processes to the sentient decision of complex life such as humans intersects processes that are not known to be determinate/indeterminate, such as the Big Bang, the origin of life, and the evolutionary jumps from single cell to multi cell, from decentralized to central nervous control systems, and from autonomic to real-time conscious control systems. This creates a sufficiently large uncertainty in the determinant/indeterminate dichotomy of human decision, making confident assertions of this dichotomy quite falsely confident. A third option is possible, a type of indeterminate cause that is not random or probabilistic, but characterized by some kind of control. It is interesting that, despite claiming otherwise, Sam’s definition of free will requires an atheist world view. Since the requirement for atheism is not advertised, his argument tries to smuggle it in under the cover of lofty scientific principles that are not well understood (determinism), and not fully understood or explained even by the best modern science has to offer. Sam should wait for science to provide more than hypothesis and speculation of the origin of life before he asserts that this creation is governed by simple deterministic atom smashing, and uses such a speculative assertion as the foundation for one of his best selling books, under the promotional guise of it being scientific fact. Sam vigorously holds that the libertarian sense of free will is what people hold dear, but is it? Where is the data to establish such a claim, other than anecdotes? No, this is surely not what people value about themselves, the ability to wind back the universe (which is causally impossible btw) and do things differently on a do over. People want to know they can direct their learning, it gives them hope that they are capable of almost anything, the idea that they have no agency makes them merely a passenger along for the ride, which is devoid of hope. Blame is a form of describing a person to have deficient characteristics, specifically those characteristics of exercising impulse control. Anger is our way of releasing us from endless compassion that is only justified by omniscience, so that we can carry out acts of seeming cruelty for the greater good of the human race. There is a very common human nature that seeks to avoid anger and blame by means of making the exact arguments Sam champions, and if given credence, especially in the modern woke era, one can see these arguments as being highly successful at neutering the justice system as we know it, resulting in unfathomable pain and suffering at the hands of evil. In the face of obvious uncertainty in the voracity of claims of no moral standing to blame or be angry, perhaps Sam should take a more conservative approach before attempting to effect such fundamental changes to the philosophical underpinnings of a justice system that has taken centuries to evolve? Wokism is at it’s core the demonization of human systems of society as inherently oppressive and evil, necessitating the dismissal and diminishing of any good, important, or beneficial characteristic the system exhibits. While Sam is often on the anti-woke side defending truth over political correctness, in the case of free will and how this influences our justice system, he falls on the woke side. Intellectuals, strident for truth as they may be, often fall for the trappings of wokism as it tends to synthetically inflate their importance to the improvements of the systems of tomorrow. That said, clearly Sam is brilliant and insightful (and funny), I just wish he avoided the trappings of wokism on this topic because it is too important that we get it right.
Do you have free will? No, because there is no "you" The existence of free will is a trivial debate once you realize "you" are nowhere to be found. There is no "you" to will anything.
Also the experiment is completely irrelevant to the problem of free will. It might help people conceptualist it who are having a difficult time, but it doesn’t really get to the root of the problem. The problem is much deeper then materialism vs. anything else. It’s an incoherent concept altogether.
00:00 - Harris's introduction (history of the debate). 02:25 - Dennett's introduction (history of the debate). 05:15 - Dennett calls Harris a "compatibilist in all but name"; lists points of agreement. 08:02 - Harris returns to the history of the debate. 11:22 - Dennett explains his "tactic" with regard to free will: "sure it exists, it just isn't what you think it is". 13:42 - Harris accuses Dennett of changing the subject; compatiblism drops core features of free will. 14:19 - Dennett accuses Harris of clinging to a limited definition. 15:08 - Dennett introduces the idea of "degrees of freedom" from engineering; this is the real "freedom" in "free will". Most humans have all the degrees of freedom they need for moral responsibility as well as control of these (unless they are being manipulated). This has nothing to do with determinism or indeterminism. 19:12 - Harris claims that the durability of the notion of free will is based on people's first person experience i.e the illusion that they are the author of their thoughts, intentions and actions. Harris claims to have once felt that "he could have done otherwise" but has now transcended this illusion. 22:36 - Harris pitches his Atlantis analogy; taking this vivid first person feeling of freedom out of free will is like substituting Sicily for Atlantis. 24:02 - Dennett summarises Harris's position: "If you don't think free will is magical, then you don't believe in free will". He disagrees. Compatiblist free will explains moral responsibility, justifies the way we treat each other, explains who we hold responsible and who we don't. Dennett thinks this is good enough. 25:28 - Dennett confronts Harris point's about the first person "feeling" of free will. It's not about how you feel, it's about the theories you explain your feelings with. Compatiblism can account for the feelings people have in a perfectly naturalistic way, including the feeling of "could have done otherwise". 27:22 - Dennett pitches his chess program analogy: In cases where there are two equally good moves a chess program will consult a random number generator. If by the end of the game a particular move looks like a mistake, the designer may say "oh well, it could have castled". The distinction the designer is drawing is between a completely disabled chess program that couldn't under any circumstance move the castle, and a well-designed chess program that could indeed have castled given a different random number. 28:48 - Harris objects that if human decisions rely on the equivalent of a random number generator - e.g. a single charge on a synapse, or a mouthful more of lunch - then that completely undermines the illusion that most people have of being in control of their decisions. 30:01 - Dennett discusses the red-herring of indeterminism. People want to be completely free of determinism, but indeterminism wouldn't make them free either. So we have to look to something else. 30:44 - Dennett is unmoved by Harris's point about tiny randomness dictating one's decisions; we all know what it's like when we have thought hard about a decision, but there's good reasons on either side, so we perform a kind of mental coin-flip. But not all decisions are like that. When the evidence and the reasons are overwhelmingly on one side, we go with that. 31:59 - Dennett relates his dispute with believers in libertarian (i.e. uncaused) free will. Dennett presents these people with the case of Martin Luther who, on trial for his heresies, claimed he was so moved by truth that "he could do no other". The libertarians claim that his decision to promote his heresies must have been uncaused, but Luther says no - he is caused by his reasons. 33:25 - Dennett admits that in other cases, chance certainly does enter into our lives, but this doesn't disable us for responsibility. In fact, free and responsible agents recognise that when they act, they are going to be held responsible, whether or not they are in complete control of their decision making. 35:30 - Harris flags a potential disagreement; he thinks his denial of free will has bigger implications for morality than compatiblism. 35:50 - Harris agrees with and emphasises Dennett's point that indeterminism can't give you free will; if you made a choice completely untethered from your thoughts, history, preferences etc. that wouldn't feel like it came from you at all. 36:20 - Harris objects to Dennett's dismissal of 50/50 coinflip decisions as irrelevant. There can be hugely consequential decisions that come down to luck e.g. thinking something and saying it out loud, sending an angry email to your boss or scrapping it. These can come down to how much sleep you've had and so forth. 37:35 - Dennett compares this with the Remain-supporting Brits who didn't vote in the very close Brexit referendum for trivial reasons (e.g. having one more piece of toast instead). They're surely kicking themselves. But we factor these kinds of things in our notion of responsibility. Some people have better self-control in such matters than others. 38:17 - Dennett discusses the role of regret in our thinking about free will. When we've done something we're ashamed of, we like to pretend we're not responsible. "The folk notions have a lot of baggage on them." 38:57 - Harris concedes that they have been talking past one another; for Dennett free will is about degrees of freedom and the ability to act lawfully and meet one's goals. For Harris, you should just deny it, and only then go on to talk about the other things you care about. 39:45 - Harris discusses his favourite example of Charles Whitman, the mass shooter who was found to have a brain tumour, and who himself recognised that he couldn't explain his own actions. Why - if we would excuse Whitman, and give him brain surgery - do we blame people for decisions that come down to a single electron in the brain? Isn't that a tiny brain tumour? Is this a difference with regards to Harris's and Dennett's morality? 41:46 - Dennett quotes Tom Wolfe: "What we've learned from neuroscience is that we're wired wrong". He completely disagrees. No - most of us are wired right for responsibility. It's perfectly true that a brain tumour is exculpatory but that's a special case. It's a mistaken extrapolation to say that every case is like that. It's perfectly possible that neuroscience might teach us that some people are *more* responsible than we thought, not less. 44:15 - Harris says he isn't denying that some people have more self-control than others - but given that this is *all* a matter of luck, that changes something with regards to morality. All that exists are genes, brains and the environment. Everything is as it is and nothing can be taken responsibility for. Take the case of Saddam Hussein's son, a murderous psychopath. He's a product of his upbringing. If we could intervene at an early age we would help him. It doesn't make any sense to magically - at some point in later life - treat him like the author of his behaviour. 47:52 - Dennett objects to the way in which Harris is trying to remove the notion of "control" from the universe. There's nothing magic about control. A computer can control an airplane, and when the pilot turns the computer off, the pilot controls it instead. The fact that you can't control every aspect of the world (e.g. your genes) is _irrelevant_. A sailor can't control the wind, and he can't control the waves, but he _can_ control the boat. The very notion of control has to do with responding to the factors outside of your control by reacting with skill in order to achieve your goal. 49:34 - Dennett agrees with Harris that one ought to intervene in a child's early years to turn them into a reliable, self-controlling person. But that's what free will is. Dennett agrees that Sadam Hussein Jr isn't responsible because he wasn't raised with free will. 50:34 - Dennett stresses that moral responsibility is never absolute, it's pragmatic. 50:51 - Dennett introduces the interesting notion that humans do indeed make themselves over time; 21 year old you makes 30 year old you makes 50 year old you. And at every stage we have a responsibility to keep improving and maintaining ourselves as moral agents. 51:47 - Dennett notes that we used to excuse drunk driving because one couldn't be expected to control oneself when drunk. But we've made a wise change to the standard where we hold people responsible for getting drunk, and their friends, and the bartender too. The general moral here is that people can learn to take responsibility for keeping themselves responsible. And in exchange we grant them the freedom of the state. To be completed...
53:01 - Harris concedes that there is a difference between reliable self-controllers and wild untameable people. But what about reliable self-controllers when they occasionally lapse? If Tiger Woods misses an easy putt in golf, we are extremely condemnatory. But why should we condemn someone for such a lapse when that lapse says almost nothing about their general capacities? The lapse must have been caused by random static in the brain and not by his general character. 55:52 - Dennett says there's no paradox here. We hold some people to higher standards because they have voluntarily taken on greater responsibilities. People are counting on Tiger Woods in ways they don't count on others. And who says these things are caused by random static? Tiger Wood may self-reflect and realise he should not have stayed out so late last night and improve his daily discipline as a result. 58:16 - Harris thinks Dennett is not acknowledging what it is like for Tiger Woods to miss the putt, or a supreme court justice to go on a shoplifting spree, from the first person perspective. They would feel like outside forces had directed their will. Let's say Tiger Woods did stay out all night. Maybe he caught the eye of a pretty girl in a bar and that was what caused him to err. These are all "missed putts" when you look closely at them. They're all luck. 59:33 - Harris accuses Dennett of distorting the truth because of concern for the social consequences of denying free will. But Harris thinks we can retain the pragmatic systems of law and order, reward and punishment, for practical reasons. We don't have to believe the lie that people really author themselves. 01:00:44 - Dennett says we can't absolutely author ourselves, but who needs absolutism? People do non-absolutely author themselves, even if there's limits to that. 01:01:10 - Dennett thinks that because responsibility is a good thing, we need systems of reward and punishment, and that even in situations where we get _really_ unlucky, we should take punishment in good grace. 01:02:13 - Harris thinks Dennett is changing the subject from free will to the moral/legal practicalities. And he is founding those moral/legal practicalities on thin ice which is always vulnerable to more information. Let's say that the tweet of a bird caused Tiger Woods to miss the putt. He's not _actually_ responsible. Maybe we hold him practically responsible, because there's no way to change the game of golf to accommodate such random influences, but he isn't in fact. 01:03:32 - Dennett defends the idea of law and order. 01:05:50 - Harris: Shouldn't we treat psychopaths with a pill if we could? 01:07:44 - Dennett agrees that psychopaths do not have free will and are hence less responsible. But the more difficult case is someone like Bernie Madoff. 01:08:21 - Harris thinks this is the same case. He proposes a Madoff pill instead of a psychopathy pill. 01:09:41 - Dennett thinks Harris is forgetting about the role of deterrence. If there was a Madoff pill, then people would know there was a Madoff pill, and carry on acting like Madoff until they got caught, pilled, and forgiven. That's not good enough. 01:14:03 - Harris thinks Dennett is sliding back into practicalities. Harris is trying to establish the fact that - ethically speaking - Madoff is not responsible. 01:16:13 - Wresting the conversation back to the first-person feeling of free will, which Harris thinks underlies the moral considerations, Harris suggests that a sufficiently advanced neuroscience would be able to know what you know before you know it, and a practical demonstration of this would fundamentally undermine people's belief in free will. 01:17:15 - Dennett points out that current neuroscience can't make predictions in real time. 01:19:35 - But it's possible in principle. If Harris could pull out of his pocket a perfect transcript of this conversation, written before the conversation played out, that would undermine Dennett's sense of free will. 01:20:29 - Dennett 01:22:50 - Dennett thinks Harris has an unrealistic expectation of what authorship should be. If it's not fully conscious, it doesn't count. Examples from tennis and music. 01:26:46 - Harris 01:27:26 - Dennett defends a respectable notion of "could have done otherwise". 01:28:10 - That's not "could have done otherwise". That's "will do otherwise next time". 01:28:44 - A common confusion about determinism. A coinflip isn't random. But it could have been otherwise. It is - in an important sense - uncaused. There's no salient cause. Random ones could have been otherwise. 01:30:38 - Harris thinks the first-person sense of free will is anchored the idea of complete control. He agrees with Dennett that no one has ever had this kind of control. But people imagine they do, and that should be challenged. 01:32:34 - Dennett effectively agrees. But he thinks you can show people they don't need this kind of pure free will in order to have moral responsibility. Compatiblist free will is good enough. 01:33:45 - Harris wraps up.
There's no defining and redefining - there's just the shared agreement of a definition necessary for successful communication.... so many of these debates would be better if the first 10 minutes was defining terms so everyone was on the same page
@x0rn312 Yeah but that is ultimately the problem with Dan here. They already know the definition of the terms. The issue is, Dan simply rejects the definition because it holds no explanatory power. Him and Sam both agree that the libertarian definition of free will is nonsensical. It's just that Dan decides to substitute in his own definition because of that fact. When that just isn't how things work. Notice how he didn't respond to Sams' "Atlantis" analogy. Because it fully encapsulates what Dan is doing. Dan brushes that analogy off with no acknowledgement. And it's clear to see why.
To me Sam Harris is a lot more convincing. Most of the arguments by Daniel Dennett are based on a semantical distortion of the term "free will" into something vague and undefined, which is the case with most supporters of free-wiil among scientists, and I really don't understand why anyone would do that. You want to talk about something else rather than an actual free will? - Come up with a different term, and stop confusing your audience.
I think Dennet is constructing a strawman to argue with whereby he says that Harris means that no one can be held responsible for raping and killing in a practical sense. While Harris is arguing that they should be punished in a practical sense but that does not mean you can't evaluate the circumstances that made him into a rapist or murderer. Those two are not mutually exclusive.
@@graham6132 I'm guessing you don't see the irony of your own comment :) Common-sense is a subjective tool (also called intuition) and as such it differs from person to person. Semantical definition of words cannot be subjected to personal interpretation (or at least should not be) unless we don't really want to speak the same language. If we start using language containing words without unambiguous meaning, we won't be able to understand each other. I'll ask a person to bring me a red apple, and he'll bring me a yellow chair, because this is his intuitive common-sense based interpretation of the words "red" and "apple". But just for the sports of it. What is the definition of "free will" based on your understanding of Daniel Dennet (and based on YOUR SUBJECTIVE common-sense ofcorse) ? (I should note that if you can''t define a term in one or 2 sentences, it usually means you don't undertsnd it yourself)
@@graham6132 Well, since you didn't provide a definition to the term "free" will" based on your common-sense, here's a semantical definition of the term: Free wiil - ability to make a counscious choice, which is a not a resulf of the deterministic cause and affect reletionship dectated by the laws of nature as we know it. In other words, if the processes of your brain are dectated by the deterministic laws of physics, you have no free will. You may talk about many amazing traits of our mind allowing us to behave in a complex way, but you should find different terms to name those traits, unless their definition is compliant with an already defined one, like "free will".
@@AlonGutmanOfficial Thanks, despite not being able to spell, nor use the word "semantical" properly, you have made a significant contribution to the philosophical debate over free will.
This debate is not doing Daniel any justice. He misses the point frequently and says thing like “ I think your wrong” in place of a persuasive argument. I rather read his stuff.
Dennett keeps saying "I can control" x, y, z. He is confused about "I" -- the sense of I that he presupposes does not exist outside of his genes and environment. It's all part of the same process .
In his sea and ship analogy (I can't control the sea but I can control the ship), I think he misses the point that he is a sea himself. To rein in my analogy a little - a sea of neurotransmitters, hormones, the external circumstances (the winds, the terrain). The movement of the ship is directly caused by him, but he seems to think that by some magic he isn't directly controlled by other circumstances.
it really is laughable, yet the majority of philosophers are identifying as compatibilists. It just goes to show that ANYONE can be a philosopher, apparently.
No, you have to be very stupid to be a philosopher. I have never had a conversation with someone who identifies himself as a philosopher that was not stultifying and useless. I cannot believe that they still hand out doctorates to people who have not managed to make a contribution to a single field of legitimate science, of which there are DOZENS today. @@pedestrian_0
@@liallhristendorff5218 in my opinion, he’s defining it in a way that extracts almost all of the importance and meaning of the term. It seems to me like he’s doing it and holding on to the notion of free will to justify how we handle responsibility.
It seems Daniel is trying to hold unto his ego, where Sam has accepted reality. Also Daniel can't seen to follow Sam's logic, he just misunderstands half the things Sam is trying to explain, then goes on some unintelligible tangent that is not very related.. Not to mention Daniel seems to be purposefully dense, just because it is going against his beliefs.
@@Sylar-451 I don't think Sam is motivated by the truth. He's motivated by the idea that free will denial will create more compassion. And also by the feeling he's reached a more enlightened state than the peasantry.
I came to this conclusion a while back. Dennett is extremely proud of himself and what a great thinker he is. He simply wants to feel like he deserves credit for being so amazing! 😅 He can't handle the idea that he isn't responsible for any of it.
I don't know why Harris or anyone else struggles so hard with this. All Dennett is saying is that by virtue of their biology, their upbringing, and their moment by moment self-reinforcing, most people develop the capacity to be reliable self-controllers who can keep promises to themselves and to others and not get hijacked by distractions, addictions, short-term thinking etc. This answers perfectly well to the commonsense definition of "free will", even if it pisses off people wedded to the academic tradition of pitching free will vs. determinism. For people with Dennett's kind of free will, perpetual forgiveness for wrongdoing is a huge mistake. They _were_ capable of being decent friends, spouses, colleagues, politicians, you name it. But they cheated because they thought you wouldn't hold them accountable. You should, actually.
@@joeboswellphilosophybut they weren't capable and would never have been capable. How is this so hard to accept? Why can't you accept that the common definition of free will says that people are all capable of everything equally despite their circumstances?
@@thomascromwell6840 They _were_ capable. Capability is about one's general capacity over time, it's not about isolated incidents. The denialist position isn't difficult to accept - it's moronically easy. I accepted it for many years. But I grew out of it. I think compatibilism is the mature position. Where are you getting this "common definition of free will" from? I expect you're getting it from the denialists, not from the history of philosophy, or the history of theology, or from polling people on the street.
Around the 49 minute mark Bennet completely falls apart. He may be a smart guy but, for whatever reason, he is irrationally attached to the idea of free will. His brand of compatibalism is just his way of coping with what he cannot accept.
I think another component of a deterministic free will is what you might call a tendency for creative self "poetry" (construction). The question is what is a free person free of ? Arguably, that includes freedom of compulsion of habit or inflexible models of seeing reality, self and life. A deterministic random generator is a good mechanism to drive creativity, and the freedom of the person would be defined by the ability to pop out of the routine way of being and evaluating and engaging the new possibility suggested by the "random generator".
Dan's ego seems to be preventing him from understanding what Sam is saying. Dan really did himself no favours in this discussion, borderline embarrassing by his normally high standard.
Sam is saying the exact same thing as Dan. Their view on free will is the same. You don't understand it so you throw insults. Dan calls out Sam at the start of this video.
The "I could have chosen otherwise" belief is just as reasonable as rewinding a videotape and expecting that, when you play it again, somehow the film will turn out differently. Dennett seems to argue that this is not important whereas Sam argues that the very belief is important to people's illusion that it makes no sense to believe that. I tend to agree with Sam on that. It is important bc many people dwell on the what if thought and that it is not reasonable given that replaying a video will not result in a different film.
Youre both overthinking it in my mind. When someone says they wish they could go back in time that they would have made a different decision is based on them having thought of more than one choice in that moment and chose the wrong option and that the other choice was apparent to them but they didnt choose it. Not that if they went back wothout prior knowledge that they wouldnt make the same decision, or they are using hindsight to say they could make a different decision if they went back with what they know of the outcome.
@@robkrieg8301 The fact that you were in no position to have done otherwise and that everything was predetermined it takes responisbility out of you. And that s why it s stupid to hold people accountable for their actions.
I love this discussion, every morsel. Despite their continued disagreement, it is so much more satisfying to get into the depths of who we are without an appeal to spirit, gods, and religious language.
Atheists being dishonest about telepathy makes the christians more honest, yet more wrong in the intergalactic problems, yet better at the lived world type of problems
@@elenabalyberdina2393thank God there are believers in God out there 😂 in a Deterministic world view we can’t know if any of us are right or wrong. There are no absolute truths. Regardless, both worldviews are of equal value, if you’re consistent you would agree.
I loved Dr. Daniel Dennett, very sad to hear about his passing, I would have loved to meet him, he was my absolute favorite, an intellectual giant, a legend, true sage, heard he was also very kind gentle person, huge loss to civilization, I will watch tons of his lectures in the next few weeks in his memory, I made a playlist of his lectures and interviews for myself to work through, listening to Dr Dennett lectures would be my idea of Heaven 1:32:06
@@DouwedeJong It is not. As I've said elsewhere, all the fuzzy sophistry surrounding free will and compatibilism has real and harmful effects, most notably in the Superdeterminism theory response to Bell's Inequalities. Scientists have outright said that they don't want to work on this fascinating theory (in my opinion probably the best rival to the Many Worlds / "Alternate Universes" interpretation of QM) because they find the deterministic element to be so distasteful. This silly sophistry called "compatibilism" just shields people from the truth, makes the truth unpalatable for them.
I can’t help but get the feeling that Daniel is playing to a level far below his intellect, dancing around the surprisingly simple definition of free will with confusing word salad. It shouldn’t be this difficult.
Im still confused by Sam's apparent contradiction that we dont have free will and every outcome of every decision we make is deteremined already and that we can become better people or train ourselves to make better or dofferent decisions as if it wasnt determined we would or wouldnt have done so.
@Hunter Green because according to him we dont have a choice whether we become better or worse people since we didnt make the decision and we cant influence said decision because if we could thay would mean we had free will. He said in one talk that we couldn't even change what type of ice cream we would have gotten for lunch. How do we change or influence further decisions when its already basically decided that we couldn't do otherwise.
@Hunter Green that's what im saying, he states clearly in one of his talks that even though there is no free will you can still chamge your self etc and become a bettwr person. Those 2 things dont mesh.
I think if Daniel would simply change the term “free will choice” to a “voluntary choice”, it would end the debate as “free will” implies a “non caused” choice.
well, i think you are mistaken about Daniel’s view. He doesn’t think that free will implies “non caused” choice. there are causes for choices made under free will. But what he argues is that we could have made different choices in similar situations, and that’s what free will means from the outset.
@@Jay-p2x8b yes, the ability to make a different choice is what free will means, therefore the argument that free will does not exist because one can not/would not make a different choice given the same circumstances. So Daniel would be wrong in that the preceding causes are the factors in choice making, so one does not possess such an ability.
@@edwardprokopchuk3264 that's a very standard or typical objection to Daniel and i believe it is not so persuasive. First, you should't assume "the same circumstances", because what it only implies is that you are merely replaying the situation or the process, and that does not refute the claim that free will does exist. You can't say , for example, Tiger Woods doesn't have the ability to do better, merely replaying a video where he made a mistake. He could have done better in different but largely similar situations, and this is what 'ability' means. You measure ability by actions done in many different situations, not by merely replaying an action done in a certain situation. in this sense, free will exists, because you have the ability to make different choices.
@@Jay-p2x8b abilities and evolution of potential are not part of the discussion here. But yes, we should assume the same circumstances, because if the circumstances change, so do your choices. What free will argues is that under exactly the same circumstances, one could have made a different choice. Based on the law of cause and effect, it is very much a rewinding of the tape.
@@edwardprokopchuk3264 yes, ability is in the part of the discussion. First, because it is one of the concepts that constitute the very concept of free will. Second, the free will related with ability is what Daniel has in mind when he mentions free will. What free will argues is that under the exactly same circumstances, one could have made a different choice. : NOT TRUE. (At least for Daniel) As you said, the “ability” to make a different choice is what free will means. But, how do you know that one has an ability? You know one has the ability by looking at what he or she has done in “different circumstances”, not by rewinding the same tape over and over again. You know Tiger Woods is a great golfer because he has performed very well in different circumstances. That is, we find free will by observing that one has the ability to make different choices in different(but similar in many respects) circumstances. If Woods made a mistake, it doesn’t imply that he was lacking free will, because he could have done differently in the sense that he had the ability to perform better.
I think this can be answered using Orgel's third rule. Is it cheaper(energy/cost effective) to build a brain that has true, non-deterministic, free will, or is it cheaper to build a brain that is deterministic but fools its user into thinking it has true free will? I'd be interested to know what Dan Dennett's view on true free will of other mammals like primates, canines, ungulates etc is. I know Harris' view is that the free will of these animals is the same as Homo sapiens, but it is unclear if Dennett believes this or not. If Dennett believes that the free will of Homo sapiens is different from other animals and that Homo sapeins are special in some way, one cannot deny that that is a religious-esque view.
It's cheaper to ''build'' non deterministic brain. Non deterministic block universe, that has no beginning or an end, and no causality is as cheap as you can get.
A non-deterministic free will would be experienced as alien, more akin to being possessed, and not something arising from the self ! It would feel alien or maybe even external because it wouldn't be informed (constrained) by any aspect of the situation of the person, including the timing of the "intervention" of the will. Usually, this is not the case - the interesting exception is creativity (see next comment).
You'd be right, he addresses this type of idea in his book elbow room, except he would cap its amount of free will. What a shame that philosophers and now scientists have taken this detour, but I believe in time it will die out, as it should.
@@pedestrian_0then you could imagine programming a computer that has the potential to make far more decisions than we do; so in that sense the computer would have more free will than we do. It’s not about choice. It’s about how you don’t choose to choose what you choose. You have an illusion of free will
A chess program is completely deterministic. It has an evaluation algorithm that evaluates any given position based on various factors. It does not have free will.
Dennett proceeds as though there is a separate mental agency with control over the brain. It’s so maddening. The experience of being is produced at the same time as the being. Is this a category error?!
It's incredible how a single table can host so much intellect and misunderstanding simultaneously. Dennett was, by far, the most determined person I've ever seen beating the same dead horse over and over - for over an hour! Simply astonishing.
1:21:00 A note about the Turing comment...what Turing actually showed was that there cannot be a computer program that is able to determine what any other program will do on a given input IN GENERAL. More specifically, no program can, in general, always determine if a given program will halt and produce an output from a given input, or run forever in an infinite loop from a given input. In other words, there can't be some master program that can look at ALL other programs that are running, and completely determine if they will ever stop or not. However, it is VERY possible for a program/person to correctly predict its own outputs/actions, or the outputs/actions of others. They just can't do it for all other programs in general. So there definitely could be an entity capable of predicting the entire conversation between itself and someone else perfectly.
Responsibility morals and luck should be a debate since it has so much effect on if free will is real or not. These two guys are great and this was great
I appreciate this conversation. I don't find Dennett's arguments convincing though. He seems to be more concerned about the implications to society than trying to objectively find the correct answer to this problem. We cannot approach the issue from that direction. Sam's position is much more convincing to me. Though I do keep a door open to the possibility that our consciousness sets limits to our understanding of our own consciousness and free will. It is possible we'll never be able to fully comprehend the concept of free will. Like an advanced AI within a game (let's say a million times more advanced than any current AI we have) that genuinely thinks it's conscious. It would only be able to try to understand its own nature within the limits of the game, never being able to see it from our perspective. We could have similar boundaries.
Right now you can either believe in free will, or believe that there is no free will. How usefull is the free will concept for society? There are 2 options 1) free will is real or 2) Free will is an illusion. If you believe in free will, you are either right, or you had no option but to believe in something that is not real, but there is no harm involved, you had no choice. If you 100% believe that we have no free will, you are wrong (epic fail), or you are right that we have no free will, but it doesn't matter since you had no choice, everything is just like a movie. Since we don't know if there is free will, how smart would it be to take a risk and believe that we are robots.
I enjoy listening to Sam on this topic, but I think he could make things much simpler if he just reconciled morality as a determined, human construct in the first place. Not a lot of need for complex argument there.
Our brains are complicated but breakthroughs in philosophy/science are going to continue to happen. We aren't far removed from not even asking anything close to these types of questions
Dans ability to misconstrue or completely misunderstand Sam's points at the crux of his argument against free will parallel Jordan Petersons on the topic of God
It's so strange, having followed this debate when it came out (reading the written exchange), and believing Sam trounced him, only to return now, and have the strange impression that in fact Dennett was completely right. Harris is a better communicator, but taking the libertarian conception of free will as *the* definition of free will feels a bit like straw-manning... like criticizing science because some IFLS redditors imagine institutional consensus is the same thing as science. That some people truly believe in a clawed conception of a thing doesn't mean that's the proper definition, and you haven't destroyed free will just because you can point out flaws in one particularly weak notion of it.
I think the main reason the majority of people side with Harris is because his view is like 80% science and 20% philosophy whereas Dennetts is like 50%/50%. Dennett sees philosophy and science as deeply integrated and work together and Harris sees science as this is what science says and let's mix a little philosophy in there so it's easier for people to understand. This plus Harris' ability to articulate what he's thinking well is very attractive to people, but in the end, a deeper look shows that Dennett is completely right and I just wish people took the time to really look at Dennetts work rather than taking their view on this from the 40 minutes that he talked about it in this video.
Dennett's only response to this is that it can't be right because most people conform to social expectations -- therefore their the brains are "wired normally". This is an extremely culture-bound response: "normal" wirings vary tremendously from culture to culture. What Dennett reads as a "normal" wiring is actually cultural determinacy of behavior. It is an argument against free will, not for it.
But using that argument, computer programs like Chat GPT definitely already have free will (and it's not hard to push the argument even further down to very basic physical interactions, even saying that a bowling ball can "choose" to drift right or left based on its spin.)
@@happywednesday6741 How are you going to define a "degree" of free will that privileges the "choices" of your neurons but discriminates against the silicon sitting on the desk in front of you? When you speak, you are both iterating through a set of rules (plus "impulses", i.e. a mix of hardcoded bootstrapping stuff) to determine what you say next. How are you going to claim that Chat GPT doesn't have a "degree of freedom" when it clearly operates by weighing the validity of different sentences, just as you do?
The brain pops up thoughts, options, solutions because its what its supposed to do, but finally you have the choice to act on them or not. That choice is called free will.
@@enemarius But it is prior conditions beyond one’s control that molded them into the type of person that would want to act on the particular thoughts that come up and to reject others.
@@enemarius There’s no chooser. There’s no free will because there’s no one to have it. This world is a reaction to a reaction to a reaction ad infinitum. It’s a verb verbing itself. It doesn’t require an intermediary to make it happen.
Sometimes we made choices consciously, sometime we act and behave sub consciously or even lack of total awareness. The fact that even if we made our choice to do anything, it's determined by many factors, our genetics, our upbringing, our life experiences, our intelligence, our hormones are many times not within our control, there's hardly much free will that your decision is never influenced by anything at all.
When Dan talks of “control”, I wish Sam would have asked “and what I are the mechanisms by which humans exert their alleged control?”. The only answer science has shown is that self-“control” uses neurobiological mechanisms. I agree with Dan, humans seem to have some type of self-control, but that control is just as biologically, psychologically, neurologically, and sociologically determined as every other behavior humans exhibit. This isn’t the strong argument that Dan thinks it is. It only pushes the spotlight of determinism onto a different part of human mechanisms.
They both took so long, and rambled on, so that it was hard for the other to respond in a coherent manner to each point. They should be allotted something like one minute, and take turns. Neither one did a fantastic job at stating the positions clearly, although it is a thorny issue. And that brings up how preachy and adamant in their position they were, on a topic with basically no concrete facts. .
Totally agree about the rambling. What that supposed to demonstrate intelligence? It just seemed to me that neither could explain things in a concise and simple way.
I revisit these discussions between Harris and Dennett quite often and at this point I think I just need to accept that there is something fundamental I am just not understanding. That being said, if someone can explain to me HOW in the world bringing “degrees of freedom” into the discussion matters at all, please do. Dennett explicitly states in the first few minutes of the discussion that libertarian free will is a “philosopher’s fantasy”. If that is the case (and you are biting the bullet and saying everything is determined) how does that not immediately make the “degrees of freedom” a moot point? Sure there are many “options” in actions, but if only one path forward is ever possible, why does this matter and what is it adding to the discussion? What utility does es this reframing of free will have besides just being able to state that it exists? Does this not just add an obligation to explain your stance when claiming free will exists to someone without the same definition of free will for no reason?
I can see two questions in your comment. I will try to restate them and then provide some response that may or may not be helpful. Q1) Why does Dennett bring in the concept of degrees of freedom? A1) Think of determinism as a force of nature that brings about change through causality. The more complex I am (the more degrees of freedom I have) the more complexity there is in my reaction to determinism. The more complexity there is, the better the chance that my actions will match my will. Q2) Why do we even still call it free will? A2) Because the whole point of having ‘free will’ in the magical libertarian sense is to be able to be free to choose actions that match your will. Libertarian free will is like a magical ideal. You could be so free that you could always choose the action that matches your will. Compatibility free will is much less powerful but it is saying that your complexity allows for so many decision making algorithms that most of the time determinism will pick the action that matches your will (if you have enough degrees of freedom). Libertarian magical free will is like compatibility free will in the limit as the complexity (or degrees of freedom) tends to infinity. So they are very much related concepts. I hope this is helpful in some way.
@@JamesGriffinC to boil down what you're saying in simpler terms, compatibilism is much like libertarian free will, however, confined to the limits of the environment and the past events that have formed the choice making agent. I find this to be silly, as it attempts to salvage the inevitable unsalvageable, in my opinion. I would've been a compatibilist had I not gone through my experiences with mindfulness and meditation.
@@JamesGriffinC interestingly put. As for A2) Im still confused on to whats the point of a compatibilist calling it "free" will then? Why not just will? Isnt this like basically saying we observe our actions, and sometimes we own them as they align with our mental model and sometimes they dont align with our desired mental model? At what point is there any degrees of freedom were we had a say on what our will was/is nor on what our actions were/are as a consequence of past causation?
I wonder if this is just another example of someone hanging on to what has been against someone bringing what's to come, and not surprisingly being shown by the age of both.
Very uncomfortable. The late Professor Dennett didn’t seem to grasp the fact that he was constantly moving away from the point to grab another apple when the subject is being discussed is oranges.
He is not moving away from the subject. He is simply saying that there is a philosophical error in thinking that there is an absolute truth to free will. Epistemic truths are tricky since their groundworks are established in our minds. Scientists try to conclude epistemic truths directly from their ontological discoveries which is not always possible. A robot is both natural and unnatural at the same time in our realm of existence, but technically a robot is just natural. There is a "what for?" question and there is a "how come?" question in the evolution of purposes and reason.
"The squirrel climbed up the tree, but it is capable of running across the ground, therefore it has free will" - My understanding of Daniel Denett's *'Compatibility'*
Nonono you don't understand, evolution has shaped the squirrel's configuration over the years to allow for *reasoning* while it confronts the environment, therefore it has free will. What an embarrassment that the majority of philosophers consider themselves compatibilists.
@@pedestrian_0you could have quoted your first statement. Not sure if you reject compatibility but accept free will, but I think you are more of a determinist. I think we don't have free will, but I am more of an "inevitabilist", if such a word exist 😂, as quantum randomness also has an influence on our decisions and outcomes
@@defenestratedalien1448 my first statement was satirical, arguing from the point of view of a compatibilist like dan dennett. My second statement reflected how I truly feel, compatibilists are lame. Like yourself, I don't believe there is any free will.
@@1GTX1 You are confused. There is no free will, but changes do happen based on perceived stimuli. Sam (or anyone else) talking about stuff is one of those stimuli. Just because we have no control of (or awareness of) the underlying causes of our actions does not mean that our actions do not cause other things to happen. It's like claiming Chat GPT can't optimize itself because it doesn't have free will. I mean, yes it can. That's what the machine was built to do. And us human machines were built to talk, analyze and try different stuff. But we're still just machines with no more free will than Chat GPT has.
Dennet conflates free will with being rational, he also conflates 2 different questions that are independent of each other, the questions are: 1) do people have free will?, 2) if people think they dont have free will would that encourage them to not take responsability for their actions?.
Sam is describing the paint strokes and Dan is describing the painting. The paint strokes build an illusion of meaning, as they're arranged upwards towards their macro form. Similar to the survival of the fittest.
IMHO, it all depends on how free will is defined. IMHO, the "classic" definition "if you had the ability to decide otherwise" is just a useless philosophical device. Why? Because I'm a physicalist, because we cannot test philosophical propositions as we can test physical hypothesis in a lab, under the incisive scrutiny of the Scientific Method. Notice that the expression "free will" is composed by "free" and "will", where "free" can be mapped to physical reality via determinism (or indeterminism) and where "will" involves a very complex physical device called "brain". Still, both words can be mapped to physical objects which, in principle, can be tested under the framework of the Scientific Method. Whilst I find discussions involving moralism, accountability and even pragmatism useful from their social perspective, I found these discussions absolutely useless from the perspective of physicalism.
Dennett seems to be working backwards from a desire to protect legal/moral consequentialism. He would agree with the Supreme Court justices who proclaimed that free will is the foundation of the legal system. Harris is open to the possibiliy that neuroscience could open up a future the Supreme Court cannot envision, and might be shocked by. It's very much like the Church telling Galileo that it is intolerable if they have to pay attention to science rather than the Bible when discussing the heavens. Their society was founded on the inerrancy of religion, and ours is founded on the inerrancy of free will. Harris recognizes that this is a "culture war" that dwarfs all current culture wars. Dennett wants to be an atheist but to reassure the Supreme Court that free will and consequentialism are not in danger from atheism and science. I think Harris is right. Free will and consequentialist legal theory are likely to be changed enormously by the future development of neuroscience (and AI).
Every time I hear Sam debate someone on free will, the person argues against a definition of free will that Sam is not putting forth. Can someone recommend a video where this is not the case? Thx
To me it seems clear that Dennet as he often says there's no absolute responsibility he's saying there's no absolute free will as in from the third person perspective. So all his notions of there still being free will are based within the illusion of first person free will. So he should actually clarify each time clearly that the free will and any argument he makes is merely a argument based on the first person illusion of free will.
You can't base your argument on "what if we rewind the time, will things happen the same way". You can't go back in time, this is just an illusion and you can't use that for anything at all.
This is the libertarian notion of free will (and really the only comprehensible notion of it, everything else is changing the subject on what people think when they say the words "free will". That there is some property of the universe where, given the same choice again, you could somehow choose differently.
I don't like any of these goons, but Daniel laid out his argument rather clearly in the first 10 min. Sam used his free will to hide the book from Dennett and act the innocent when he gets just due.
I do believe in punishment and keeping people responsible even though I do understand that these people don't have free choice, but knowing that and how much (all) of our actions are influenced by something, it makes sense to use this power of influencing people to make better choices. One way to do it is by punishing them when they act badly, which will make them act differently than they perhaps would've if they were not held accountable. I think you can't morally blame them, because in a way is not their fault and they were influenced (genes, environment, etc,) to commit a bad action, however, if we think about keeping society better and safer it is necessary to punish the person who may not be in control of their action, so he can actually change his action or just not cause problems to the society by being held in a prison. I think knowing we aren't in control and our choices are influenced, we can use this knowledge and influence ourselves or make the environment that will produce better outcomes. In a way, I see this as a type of control we have, even though is technically still influenced and is just an effect of a cause.
Re: the topic of Sam being able to produce a transcript of their talk before it began…. A.I. is proving this point already, a little bit. Daniel says it would be a greater feat if Sam produced a poem he asked Daniel to write. A.I., if exposed to enough works of Dennet’s, will come up with one that “sounds” like him. Of course, the AI isn’t going to be able to predict it, because it’s still lacking huge amounts of data. But, it’s getting there.
Wow, Dennett cannot even talk clear and straight. He does not argue, only waffles incomprehensibly and keeps attacking Sam personally instead of stating any point.
There's such an obsession with the word "free" that compatibilists seem to need to use the word, when it's not necessary and it causes equivocation problems. People have will. This will is generated by countless things that precede conscious awareness. Conscious awareness seems to follow will, it does not appear to cause will. There is nothing "free" about the will, as we do not choose the will. This is a terminological dispute. You can simply call it will, no freedom necessary. Determinism and compatibilistic free will are effectively the same, and only semiotically distinct. If compatibilists think that determinism is true, then the concept of moral responsibility is not saved on compatibilism. That said, people who think that determinism eliminates the ability to hold people accountable for their actions are just incorrect. We don't blame a man-eating shark for killing people, but we treat the shark as a man-eater nonetheless. It's still a force of nature to deal with, just as people who are harmful to other in society are themselves forces of nature to deal with. We don't need to add the word "free" before will to deal with these situations.
Dennet is just mudding the water. Talks too long remaining unclear. Sam is very quick, clear and precise in formulating key points putting dennet in , as I see it, helpless position
Absolutely. Dennet keeps embarrassing himself from start to end. That seems to happen all the time, for example also in his debates with Robert Sapolsky. It's beyond me how he can be a recognized philosopher, or whatever it was he was doing.
It is unbelievable, right? Yet, there he is, carrying his name around the internet, doing debates and podcasts.... Sapolski is great, he knows his stuff.
Sam Harris doesn't disagree with Dennett's version of compatibilism. He disagrees with what compatibilism ACTUALLY is, scientifically speaking. It seems that Dennett doesn't grasp that. To the Dennett's "Consciousness exists, it just isn't what you think it is," I'd respond with, "Will exists, it just isn't free." Nobody's asserting that will doesn't exist when they say free will doesn't exist. They're just saying it's not free. Dennett's whole issue is with the way this would affect society, yet he's almost purposefully ignoring the point Sam kept making about how society and the law wouldn't work differently because it would still be PRAGMATIC to work the way it does. A better understanding of what lack of free will ACTUALLY means wouldn't negate that pragmatism. Sam wasn't trying to say that some people are wired right and others wrong, but that being wired at all implies lack of freedom. When Dennett says that we have the capacity to respond to circumstances, he's failing to overlook that that doesn't imply our responses are totally in our control. I won't deny we have a sense of agency. But not total control. If you're to say that we act in accordance with our will, you have to acknowledge that we have a will to act in accordance with. And we don't get to initially choose our will. If you think you can choose your will, you'd have to be able to defend how you chose it, if not with a prior will as to what your will is to be, and apply your own argument perpetually, in a chicken-or-egg cycle that would always lead back to an initial, unchosen will. "Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills." "Are you signing this of your own free will?" translates to "Are you signing this of your own will?" If you're going to define "free will" the same way anyone would simply define "will," is there really any reason to apply it in everyday life? "I will do this," and "I will do that" doesn't require the "free." The only reason there's even so much confusion and dichotomy and debate on this topic in the first place is because "free" was vaguely attached there without context.
I've just watched his debate with Robert Sapolsky, and the same thing happened. It at times feels like Dennett is just missing a part of the brain that comprehends these points, and sometimes it feels like he ignores it so he can be right.
At every moment for any acting agent under whatever set of circumstances prevail at that moment, and given the range and scope of actions which that particular agent can properly execute, there is one and only one course of action that will absolutely maximise//optimise that, or any, acting agent’s own personal well being//evolutionary fitness, and which action the acting agent would unhesitatingly execute if he, she or it knew exactly what that particular fitness maximising//optimising action was. Choosing to do that one thing which would optimally contribute to one’s fitness is the only one right choice to make. But none that we know of can grasp the full spectrum of factors bearing on any one or more moments of their existential sojourn here in this unimaginably vast Universe. Both Sam & Daniel are like kindergarten kids trying, completely unsuccessfully, to understand adult behaviour - and then, worse, explain it to their fellow inmates at the sand box emporium. Kindergarten children are manifestly incapable of apprehending either the kind and number of adult skills adults routinely bring to bear on any one or more moment/s of their adult lives, or the consequences any of these adult actions engender on either the executors of those actions themselves, or on others. No sane, healthy, normal, well informed, well equipped ‘agent’ capable of acting in its own best interests to any significant degree, would choose to act contrary to its own best fitness interests. Two considerations. One - As it is absolutely impossible for any agent to either know or understand all of the details of the full spectrum of an entire Universe full of whatever particular constraints, influences and enabling factors, etc come to bear at any one (or more) moments of time on him-, her- or it’s self - factors either physical, mental, rational, emotional, social &/or psychological, etc - it will be absolutely impossible for that agent to make anything other than a suboptimal choice of action. So cannot be held ultimately responsible for any ensuing suboptimal consequences. Let alone punished. Suboptimal choices call for loving, caring rectification. Another compounding/confusing factor for any obligate social - or symbiotic - agent - such as ourselves, that is to say any agent’s personal well being//evolutionary fitness which latter is necessarily and inextricably relies interdependently on other more or less separate, but equally interdependent, individual/s//colonies - is the fact that the efficacy//propriety of his, her or it’s actions are, inextricably, linked with whatever other/s her, his or it’s well-being on which they together mutually depend. We now know that we each possess, for example, within and on our bodies truly vast contingents of ‘separate’ microbial helping agents on which our very lives depend, and the welfare of which agents our own dining on certain diets - say those preponderantly made up of carbs and trans fats, etc - put in dire jeopardy such that the legions of good helpers die out, and they become replaced by colonies of microbes which are toxic - sometimes lethally - to our well being. There are only around one gazillion factors bearing on any one moment of our lives for either good or ill, which our own responses - our own subsequent actions - can either embrace, amplify, resist or avoid. Including that in being an obligate social entity or obligate symbiont means that all choices and decisions must be made with many others, factored into and included in the equation of our own well-being and/or fitness maximisation//optimisation. No man is an island. And again, only a flawed, damaged, ill-informed, ill-equipped actor//agent would choose anything other than the ONE action which would, under whatever circumstances prevail at any one moment of choosing (which is every moment) to do other than optimise/maximise its own personal and/or collective//societal//symbiotic fitness. No sane, healthy, normal well informed, well-equipped agent is FREE TO ACT (OR CHOOSE TO ACT) AGAINST THEIR OWN BEST INTERESTS. TO DO SO IMMEDIATELY MARKS THAT INDIVIDUAL OUT AS BEING INADEQUATE (INSANE) IN SOME MANNER. FOR WHICH INADEQUACY NO AMOUNT OF PAIN & PUNISHMENT OF ANY KIND WILL RECTIFY. THEREFORE it must be known that any wrong-acting agent is simply flawed in some way, and the very LAST THING any sane, healthy, normal, well informed, well-equipped social milieu in which the wrong deed was perpetrated, will PUNISH the wrong doer, rather than seek out the nature of his, hers or it’s flaws and/or inadequacies - and FIX THEM. Which ‘fixing’ would always include making full restitution to the victim - plus damages……. AND ULTIMATELY NEGOTIATE FULL AND HEARTFELT RECONCILIATION BETWEEN PERP AND VICTIM. Inflicting pain and punishment on ANYTHING AT ANY TIME SOLVES NOTHING…. Get out of the kindergarten sand box, Sam and Daniel, ‘wrong doers’ must be, yes, apprehended, but secured in a location where their flaws are fixed//cured - not exacerbated by further pain, deprivation and punishment. ‘Fixing//curing these damaged individuals can be quite easily accomplished - & at a fraction of the cost of our present totally punitive system - with every good thing which was absent in their formative years…. Just saying.
The way I like to state one of you points is that a non-deterministically free person would sometimes be seen chewing a light bulb because that kind of freedom could not be constrained or informed even by the preferences of the person. We should all be grateful that we don't have that kind of free will. That said, the moments of creativity do feel external to us. One important aspect of being "free" as a person is how and to what extent we can step out of the constraints of habit, and entertain new ways of being suggested by some internal random generator (creativity generator).
Margriet, may i ask what is your occupation? You seem very steeped in psychology. I'd be curious to hear you say what you think of origins of subjectivity and how it fits in the deterministic object world?
I have an issue with the claim around the 16:20 mark. Varying degrees of freedom amongst living organisms is entirely subjective. Because a plant can convert the rays of the sun into food, does that mean I am more or less free than the plant? How am I even supposed to compare my degree(s) of freedom to that of a plant? That being said, I disagree with the level of control that we possess is “completely absent in any other creature” 16:22. Also, I want to quickly make the point that different rocks will not melt at the same time. Two pieces of Limestone that differ in sizes will not turn into quicklime at the same time. How does this fact relate to a Human’s response to the environment?
The only reasonable response to that argument would have to reference our ability to manufacture devices that allow us to do such. For example, like a cat, we can see in the dark with night-vision goggles. But even this circles back to the subjectivity of varying degrees of freedom. Okay, so I can do everything a cat does (with the right technology, of course), EXCEPT be the actual cat.
1:30:03 Dan is right it doesn’t matter that the coin will be head IF IF you make the conditions of trillions and trillions of atoms to be exactly the same for billions of years, in practical terms a coin flip is undetermined
Daniel Dennett - in this exchange - is an expert on talking too much but not saying anything of relevance. He fails to, clearly and simply, verbalize what his views and positions are and basically rambles the whole time... This was hard to listen to and a pretty disappointing appearance by Dennett.
Yes. I'm actually convinced at this point that he doesn't actually have any real structured arguments. I've tried really hard to read and listen to Dennett, but nothing he ever says feels like a complete thought.
@@123unknownsoldier126 Yeah... and I mean he's supposed to be one of the *good* and clear philosophers, enemy of Derrida and the rest of the postmodernists who had declared a war on clarity. If Dennett is a good example of what clear and reasonable "philosophy" sounds like then I can only say we should give up and stop subsidizing university philosophy departments immediately.
I believe the claim that laypersons have "libertarian" notions of free-will is a myth. If we ask anyone why they made a specific choice, they will happily explain to us why it was the best option. The person is aware that their own reasoning caused the choice. They do not believe it was an "uncaused" event. If we want to pursue it further, we can ask them to explain the source of their reasons. Was it something they read, or something they were taught, or just something they had believed all their lives. Even if they cannot recall the source of their reasons, they would not be surprised by the question, because they are aware of others who might make a different choice due to "bad" reasons. The layperson would have no clue what "libertarian" free will was about. Nor would they know what "determinism" was about. But they would know what choosing was about, because they've been doing that all their lives. And they would know the difference between a choice they make for themselves versus a choice imposed upon them by someone else. The layperson also correctly understands the difference between what he "could have done" versus what he "would have done". Given his reasons, he "would" not have made any other choice, even though he certainly "could" have. And he would correctly assert that anyone who said that he "could not have" chosen otherwise would be lying. But he will agree that, given his own reasoning, he "would not have" chosen otherwise. It seems then that the idea that a layperson's notion of free will is "libertarian" is bogus. The layperson is quite familiar with the ordinary notion of free will that is used when assessing moral and legal responsibility. And the layperson is also quite familiar with the notion of cause and effect, because he sees it in everything that happens every day. To the layperson, free will and causation cannot be incompatible, because he objectively observes them both every day of his life.
This whole *deeply* erroneous spiel of yours dodges the question of where the layman thinks that the initial cause is rooted in. The only answer it would be realistic to expect out of a layman is something that the layman directly controls and is aware of. This is plainly not the case. We are NOT aware or in control of the deep, ultimate causes for our actions. Just because the layman doesn't use terms like "uncaused event" doesn't mean he/she accepts the fact that their thoughts and actions are ultimately arising out of processes that they have no awareness of, let alone control over.
@@tobiasyoder "Good faith" has nothing whatsoever to do with being extra-nice. The whole explanation he presented is wrong in every way, shape and form despite some of the arguments appearing reasonable on the surface because he skips over a critical foundational assumption. It almost looks intentionally deceptive the way he's avoiding the absolute central question: whether or not laymen believe that they are in control of the ultimate causes of their actions.
There were several points when Dan Dannett clearly lost the debate and I think deep down he knows it. I am surprised that he is stuck the way that he is. He is a brilliant man, clearly. It is hard for me to accept that he cannot see the obstacle he has run into in his own thinking. He must see it. If he does not see it then there is a weakness in his ability to debate. And if he does he really ought to put his ego aside, accept it and move beyond it. But alas, ultimately it is not for him to decide. Dennett doesn’t appreciate the “change the subject retort” that is, according to him, so often leveled against him. I think it is clear to any of us listening to this why the retort is so often leveled against him: Because he continuously changes the subject! Over and over again he responds to Harris’ points against free-will with commentaries about the pragmatism of the position that free-will does exist. Sam is much, much sharper in this debate than Dan is.
It's a pointless debate which cannot be resolved . It can certainly be won and it therefore can be lost as well and that's fine as long as people understand the underlying pointlessness of the exercise .
I think this is exactly where Dan seems to be misunderstanding Sam. Sam's whole point is that we are ABSOLUTELY controlled by things that are not within our control, be it our genes or our environmental influences. Dan's insistence in saying we are in control of some things but not everything is the classic case of the person who proves they have free will by lifting their arm and saying "See? I have free will." I can't believe someone as bright as Dan is saying this.
Whether you think Sam is wrong,Dan loses this simply because he wants to live in a philosophical world and not the real world. It is an age thing and he clearly is holding on to the debates of the 70s when he speaks. Also Dan is one of the reasons I am an atheist and one of the reasons I am liberal rather than independent so this is not a bias towards Sam whom I am also a big fan of his ideas.
@@skullkrusher4418 Dan was always this dense. He likes to sophisticate and appear reasonable at the cost of logical coherency - always has, always will. I'm starting to lean on the conclusion that some people at some point loose the capacity to develop a truely strict logical intution and mental process. I think it has something to do with comfort. Unless deeply uncomforable feeling they are loosing their social standing or life, people don't really change their minds. In our teens and twenties, we're still struggling to find our place, and so we stay open to change. As soon as we settle into a comfortable life, we settle mentally as well.
I think this is a deeply political discussion masquerading as something else. Dennett wants to preserve consequentialism in order to preserve the legal and moral status quo that has benefitted him. Hence, his compatiblism. Harris is more open to significant social change resulting from discoveries in neuroscience. Dennett is rationalizing contemporary legal and moral theory to protect it against destabilization from new knowledge.
Very interestingly put. Rewatching it that way it does at a point look like Dan was here to further some political propaganda: our current society is a marvel, we got to preserve it, society needs "Law and Order"(tm), and that all of it depends on the freedom of will.
Persons with libertarian free will would on occasion be observed chewing a light bulb or stabbing themselves in the eye with a pencil because their decisions (will) would be free of all constraints. This is because being non-deterministic means to have no constraints which inescapably implies that non-deterministic free will would render choice blind to even those things that the person cares about, goal, values or even avoidance of pain. Moreover, as Dennett points out, being completely non-deterministic in THAT sense is to have no free will at all because that also precludes having the capacity of willing per se.
Extremely naive take but don't worry, you're in good company. The mental confusion that surrounds this issue is amazing. To figure out the flaw in your reasoning, please explain to me how the thought experiment "oracle machine" (you can look it up on wikipedia) would operate. Hint: It could not operate via determinism. And it could not operate via randomness. And yet there is a LOT of literature written about it and no computer scientist starts babbling about "uncaused actions" or any such nonsense. Libertarian free will implicitly presupposes a third mode of causality. (The fact that such a causality doesn't appear to actually exist in reality is immaterial.)
It's odd how Sam keeps talking about the self as something other than the state of our bodies, including brains. Who are you other than your body/brain state?
Sam is not saying we should not hold people responsible for their acts. Dan thinks he is. I believe rehabilitation should get nods over sever punishment. Look at countries where this is the case vs the US where so many are pure victims of their backgrounds. Dan makes a point of control but he acts as control is something not subject to determinism. All in all I feel Dan lost something on his fastball. Sam is right on. Great discussion and they kept saying their starting positions over and over and over. Great subject. I think meditation has really helped my actions. Wish more got better education.
This discussion totally lacks a moderator. Very unsatisfactory, they don't get anywhere. Sam, unfortunately is being too nice, he should have sticked with his own line of argumentation instead of let himself being drawn into Dennetts muddy, confused examples.
Dennett was having a circular conversation with himself. He didn't want to come to an agreement or conclusion. Sam's pov were concise and to the point. I did get a sense of disgust from Dennett, mostly from his underlying racist way of thinking. I never did like him.
@@myzamau428more like "entitled". He keeps repeating that HE is morally responsible and HE knows how to control a boat and therefore HE has free will, but many other people can not and are not, and therfore THEY have no free will. What a deplorably stupid person.
I would say that there should be a distinction between retrospective free will and prospective free will. It seems to me time and uncertainty play a role in defining the degree of freedom someone has in acting or choosing a specific path. I understand Sam's idea of what happened couldn't be otherwise, and it seems logical to apply the same rule to future events. But past events, when seen in retrospect, are not uncertain because we were able to testify to the causation and effect of that phenomenon. Future events are more like bets than stories because, in many cases, the phenomena or the causation are NOT predictable. If you take Sam's idea to the extreme, it would mean, given the correct information and computation, we would be able to predict any future event with perfect certainty because the future is deterministic. But once we had those predictions, wouldn't we be able to change the future?
Dan is talking about freedom. Sam is talking about free will. My argument which I've never heard anybody argue is that neither fate or free will exist and that both her man-made concepts. I believe we are living in a complex cause and effect, Domino effect, weather pattern existence. Some may argue that that means that I don't believe in free will then, That's true but I also don't believe in fate. Because Fate would mean that the future can be predicted which I don't think that life can be predicted. Not unlike a three body problem.
Isn't it strange though that the Universe has no cause. I don't mean ''our'' part of the universe, but anything that has always existed, even if it's a rock. So we are part of something that was not a product of ''cause and effect'' there was nothing before it, it was always there. Other option is that it came from nothing, but that's also weird, same as infinite cause and effect.
@@1GTX1 It's kind of like the chicken and egg conundrum. Yeah never mind the material, a single atom, a rock, or a planet. Where did the empty envelope itself come from, where did space come from. How does something come from nothing. How can something always have been. Why can't we wrap our heads around those concepts.
I don't think Dennett realizes how he dances in circles anytime he is asked about the fatalistic undertones of his viewpoint. He just says things like "of course we have control," but that control is not free if we are physically and biologically determined beings, it is merely an epiphenomenal illusion, and there seems to be no way to reconcile the purpose of the self with a deterministic/fatalistic universe. If all is determined, then there is no need of the self and no purpose for it. Why, then, are there selves, or the "illusion" of selves at all? Evolution might as well have designed zombies with no sense of self who behaved exactly as we do. In saying free will (in the classical or libertarian sense) is an illusion is in fact to deny the ontological status of morality and moral responsibility. He wants to have it both ways, but his arguments dissolve people, morality, and freedom to the point where he doesn't get any of them really.
So you want him to believe in something (no logic, or evidence to back it up) because you think that it might benefit society. Fair enough, it's the best argument for any belief system (religion, libertarian free will..), if it works than it should be promoted, but it doesn't mean that what we believe in is true, or that it makes any sense at all. As far as i'm aware most scientists would agree with Dan, not because they feel like it, or believe in it, but based on science experiments, math. I would agree that they might be wrong, since we can only be sure that we are conscious, everything else could be an illusion, even space and time.
@@1GTX1 Not really because of the benefit to society, no. That is a secondary issue. The main issue is that epiphenomenalism cannot explain why consciousness exists. It just says it is there as an illusion. The question to answer is: why is the illusion there at all? In his books, Dennett tries to explain the illusion as some self-monitoring mechanism developed by evolutionary processes, but that doesn't solve the zombie problem, which is the idea that you can have self-monitoring systems without conscious experience. For instance: why am I here to experience the suffering of pain, when evolution could have just made bodies with mechanisms to avoid bodily harm, and no minds to experience the suffering?
To the prospective viewer: Harris wanted to talk about whether or not a murderer has the ability to be anything else, and Dennet wanted to talk about whether or not that murderer should be punished for his crime. They went on like this having two separate conversations for an hour and a half. You as the viewer get to see both of their view points elucidated on these two separate subjects, but it would be a stretch to call it a debate.
Thank you so much!
Lol I love how Sam is trying to be civil in the beginning but Daniel just goes straight for his guts and won't let off...
Sam opens by praising Dan for his WILLINGNESS to reconsider… except of course he deserves no such credit because he had no control over that.
Nor did he even try and reconsider, he just leisurely pontificated whilst shoving food down his face and spitting it out as he spoke.
Dan is beyond infuriating
@@DeadlyPig3oncriticise his arguments, not manners? Tried?
I’m an hour in and still have no idea what Dans position is. He seems to be simply just explaining how humans should be responsible people?!? Sam is trying to talk about determinism, something Dan should be very well versed in yet it seems that it’s going right over his head. Wtf is going on here?
What's going on is that Sam talks about a subject that is philosophical in nature, without reading or understanding philosophy. He is like a kid shocked at the possibility that ''we might not have free will because of determinism''. Dan is just saying ''Free will means choosing an apple over an orange''' or ''deciding to sign a contract or not''' while Sam wants a religious definition of free will, where you had the option to choose otherwise, and than he argues against his own definition of free will. To makes things even more comical, Sam is engaged in double think, and he actually believes in religious definition of free will, because he thinks that he can change the world for the better, by convincing people that there is no free will. Complete mindfuck.
Dan recently gave the Johns Hopkins Natural Philosophy Forum Distinguished Lecture. Have a listen that.
My take of Dan is; "sam is having a little fun with 'what if we are all brains in a wat' play with the fundamentals of free will, while in the real world that is irrelevant."
@@1GTX1Lol. Sam Harris is a philosopher. You are not. Free will is an illusion. Cry.
@@1GTX1 No, that's nonsense. Everything Dan and most compatibilists say is nonsense. By analogy, being able to understand roughly what "God" is supposed to mean, then saying "God doesn't exist", is not a religious position. Trying to redefine God to mean something completely different is the double think-y position. This is what people need to say to compatabilism trolls like Dan: If we had *infinite* introspection, the ability to understand and control and predict every facet of our thought process and fully understand all of the consequences of every possibility--and this would *necessarily* involve a (nonexistent) process that was neither deterministic nor random (because no such process can do all of that due to not only finite computing power but also the halting problem, Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, etc--then we would have free will. We do not possess this super-human and transcendent-of-determinism ability, and thus we do not appear to have free will.
It is not double-think or religious to speculate about and then reject the existence of things like this. Mathematicians do it all of the time--for example, there is a hypothetical "Oracle" machine that is better than a Turing-complete computer that they have analyzed the capabilities of. It's impossible to build one. Physically speaking, an Oracle machine is a contradiction in terms. It cannot ever be realized. But it can still be thought about and reasoned about. So, too, it is with free will. Sam is entirely correct; "compatibilism" is just childish and very annoying changing of the subject.
I dislike the findings of Sam Harris as it challenges many of my beliefs, however I must say the evidence in the lab is too compelling to ignore. Mr. Daniel Dennett’s attempt to hold onto a more conventional free will and his version of compatiblism is attractive to the part of me that does not want to understand deeper what the actual evidence supports. Sadly I find many a philosopher willing to dig in where they ought not.
Im not too convinced by the lab data, the time between when a person makes a decision and when they react to say theyve made it is so small as to account for reaction speed. I mean look at drag racers they are reacting to a light turning green and the time between them hitting gas and making the decsion to hit gas at the green light as a premade decision isnt immediate.
The experiment design is suspect to me, it does not seek to explore the kinds of decisions where one would most expect to find free will at work, such as complex moral decisions where we feel at odds with an innate impulse on one hand and our moral reasoning on the other. Taking only the set of cases studied so far in the lab and extrapolating them to cases where much more moral complexity and consideration is required seems invalid to me, and I don’t see an honest discussion of this problem or an attempt to explain how this extrapolation is justified by Sam.
The cause-effect line from known determinate/indeterminate molecular processes to the sentient decision of complex life such as humans intersects processes that are not known to be determinate/indeterminate, such as the Big Bang, the origin of life, and the evolutionary jumps from single cell to multi cell, from decentralized to central nervous control systems, and from autonomic to real-time conscious control systems. This creates a sufficiently large uncertainty in the determinant/indeterminate dichotomy of human decision, making confident assertions of this dichotomy quite falsely confident. A third option is possible, a type of indeterminate cause that is not random or probabilistic, but characterized by some kind of control.
It is interesting that, despite claiming otherwise, Sam’s definition of free will requires an atheist world view. Since the requirement for atheism is not advertised, his argument tries to smuggle it in under the cover of lofty scientific principles that are not well understood (determinism), and not fully understood or explained even by the best modern science has to offer. Sam should wait for science to provide more than hypothesis and speculation of the origin of life before he asserts that this creation is governed by simple deterministic atom smashing, and uses such a speculative assertion as the foundation for one of his best selling books, under the promotional guise of it being scientific fact.
Sam vigorously holds that the libertarian sense of free will is what people hold dear, but is it? Where is the data to establish such a claim, other than anecdotes? No, this is surely not what people value about themselves, the ability to wind back the universe (which is causally impossible btw) and do things differently on a do over. People want to know they can direct their learning, it gives them hope that they are capable of almost anything, the idea that they have no agency makes them merely a passenger along for the ride, which is devoid of hope.
Blame is a form of describing a person to have deficient characteristics, specifically those characteristics of exercising impulse control. Anger is our way of releasing us from endless compassion that is only justified by omniscience, so that we can carry out acts of seeming cruelty for the greater good of the human race.
There is a very common human nature that seeks to avoid anger and blame by means of making the exact arguments Sam champions, and if given credence, especially in the modern woke era, one can see these arguments as being highly successful at neutering the justice system as we know it, resulting in unfathomable pain and suffering at the hands of evil. In the face of obvious uncertainty in the voracity of claims of no moral standing to blame or be angry, perhaps Sam should take a more conservative approach before attempting to effect such fundamental changes to the philosophical underpinnings of a justice system that has taken centuries to evolve?
Wokism is at it’s core the demonization of human systems of society as inherently oppressive and evil, necessitating the dismissal and diminishing of any good, important, or beneficial characteristic the system exhibits. While Sam is often on the anti-woke side defending truth over political correctness, in the case of free will and how this influences our justice system, he falls on the woke side. Intellectuals, strident for truth as they may be, often fall for the trappings of wokism as it tends to synthetically inflate their importance to the improvements of the systems of tomorrow. That said, clearly Sam is brilliant and insightful (and funny), I just wish he avoided the trappings of wokism on this topic because it is too important that we get it right.
Do you have free will?
No, because there is no "you"
The existence of free will is a trivial debate once you realize "you" are nowhere to be found.
There is no "you" to will anything.
Why don’t you like having your beliefs challenged?
Also the experiment is completely irrelevant to the problem of free will. It might help people conceptualist it who are having a difficult time, but it doesn’t really get to the root of the problem. The problem is much deeper then materialism vs. anything else. It’s an incoherent concept altogether.
00:00 - Harris's introduction (history of the debate).
02:25 - Dennett's introduction (history of the debate).
05:15 - Dennett calls Harris a "compatibilist in all but name"; lists points of agreement.
08:02 - Harris returns to the history of the debate.
11:22 - Dennett explains his "tactic" with regard to free will: "sure it exists, it just isn't what you think it is".
13:42 - Harris accuses Dennett of changing the subject; compatiblism drops core features of free will.
14:19 - Dennett accuses Harris of clinging to a limited definition.
15:08 - Dennett introduces the idea of "degrees of freedom" from engineering; this is the real "freedom" in "free will". Most humans have all the degrees of freedom they need for moral responsibility as well as control of these (unless they are being manipulated). This has nothing to do with determinism or indeterminism.
19:12 - Harris claims that the durability of the notion of free will is based on people's first person experience i.e the illusion that they are the author of their thoughts, intentions and actions. Harris claims to have once felt that "he could have done otherwise" but has now transcended this illusion.
22:36 - Harris pitches his Atlantis analogy; taking this vivid first person feeling of freedom out of free will is like substituting Sicily for Atlantis.
24:02 - Dennett summarises Harris's position: "If you don't think free will is magical, then you don't believe in free will". He disagrees. Compatiblist free will explains moral responsibility, justifies the way we treat each other, explains who we hold responsible and who we don't. Dennett thinks this is good enough.
25:28 - Dennett confronts Harris point's about the first person "feeling" of free will. It's not about how you feel, it's about the theories you explain your feelings with. Compatiblism can account for the feelings people have in a perfectly naturalistic way, including the feeling of "could have done otherwise".
27:22 - Dennett pitches his chess program analogy: In cases where there are two equally good moves a chess program will consult a random number generator. If by the end of the game a particular move looks like a mistake, the designer may say "oh well, it could have castled". The distinction the designer is drawing is between a completely disabled chess program that couldn't under any circumstance move the castle, and a well-designed chess program that could indeed have castled given a different random number.
28:48 - Harris objects that if human decisions rely on the equivalent of a random number generator - e.g. a single charge on a synapse, or a mouthful more of lunch - then that completely undermines the illusion that most people have of being in control of their decisions.
30:01 - Dennett discusses the red-herring of indeterminism. People want to be completely free of determinism, but indeterminism wouldn't make them free either. So we have to look to something else.
30:44 - Dennett is unmoved by Harris's point about tiny randomness dictating one's decisions; we all know what it's like when we have thought hard about a decision, but there's good reasons on either side, so we perform a kind of mental coin-flip. But not all decisions are like that. When the evidence and the reasons are overwhelmingly on one side, we go with that.
31:59 - Dennett relates his dispute with believers in libertarian (i.e. uncaused) free will. Dennett presents these people with the case of Martin Luther who, on trial for his heresies, claimed he was so moved by truth that "he could do no other". The libertarians claim that his decision to promote his heresies must have been uncaused, but Luther says no - he is caused by his reasons.
33:25 - Dennett admits that in other cases, chance certainly does enter into our lives, but this doesn't disable us for responsibility. In fact, free and responsible agents recognise that when they act, they are going to be held responsible, whether or not they are in complete control of their decision making.
35:30 - Harris flags a potential disagreement; he thinks his denial of free will has bigger implications for morality than compatiblism.
35:50 - Harris agrees with and emphasises Dennett's point that indeterminism can't give you free will; if you made a choice completely untethered from your thoughts, history, preferences etc. that wouldn't feel like it came from you at all.
36:20 - Harris objects to Dennett's dismissal of 50/50 coinflip decisions as irrelevant. There can be hugely consequential decisions that come down to luck e.g. thinking something and saying it out loud, sending an angry email to your boss or scrapping it. These can come down to how much sleep you've had and so forth.
37:35 - Dennett compares this with the Remain-supporting Brits who didn't vote in the very close Brexit referendum for trivial reasons (e.g. having one more piece of toast instead). They're surely kicking themselves. But we factor these kinds of things in our notion of responsibility. Some people have better self-control in such matters than others.
38:17 - Dennett discusses the role of regret in our thinking about free will. When we've done something we're ashamed of, we like to pretend we're not responsible. "The folk notions have a lot of baggage on them."
38:57 - Harris concedes that they have been talking past one another; for Dennett free will is about degrees of freedom and the ability to act lawfully and meet one's goals. For Harris, you should just deny it, and only then go on to talk about the other things you care about.
39:45 - Harris discusses his favourite example of Charles Whitman, the mass shooter who was found to have a brain tumour, and who himself recognised that he couldn't explain his own actions. Why - if we would excuse Whitman, and give him brain surgery - do we blame people for decisions that come down to a single electron in the brain? Isn't that a tiny brain tumour? Is this a difference with regards to Harris's and Dennett's morality?
41:46 - Dennett quotes Tom Wolfe: "What we've learned from neuroscience is that we're wired wrong". He completely disagrees. No - most of us are wired right for responsibility. It's perfectly true that a brain tumour is exculpatory but that's a special case. It's a mistaken extrapolation to say that every case is like that. It's perfectly possible that neuroscience might teach us that some people are *more* responsible than we thought, not less.
44:15 - Harris says he isn't denying that some people have more self-control than others - but given that this is *all* a matter of luck, that changes something with regards to morality. All that exists are genes, brains and the environment. Everything is as it is and nothing can be taken responsibility for. Take the case of Saddam Hussein's son, a murderous psychopath. He's a product of his upbringing. If we could intervene at an early age we would help him. It doesn't make any sense to magically - at some point in later life - treat him like the author of his behaviour.
47:52 - Dennett objects to the way in which Harris is trying to remove the notion of "control" from the universe. There's nothing magic about control. A computer can control an airplane, and when the pilot turns the computer off, the pilot controls it instead. The fact that you can't control every aspect of the world (e.g. your genes) is _irrelevant_. A sailor can't control the wind, and he can't control the waves, but he _can_ control the boat. The very notion of control has to do with responding to the factors outside of your control by reacting with skill in order to achieve your goal.
49:34 - Dennett agrees with Harris that one ought to intervene in a child's early years to turn them into a reliable, self-controlling person. But that's what free will is. Dennett agrees that Sadam Hussein Jr isn't responsible because he wasn't raised with free will.
50:34 - Dennett stresses that moral responsibility is never absolute, it's pragmatic.
50:51 - Dennett introduces the interesting notion that humans do indeed make themselves over time; 21 year old you makes 30 year old you makes 50 year old you. And at every stage we have a responsibility to keep improving and maintaining ourselves as moral agents.
51:47 - Dennett notes that we used to excuse drunk driving because one couldn't be expected to control oneself when drunk. But we've made a wise change to the standard where we hold people responsible for getting drunk, and their friends, and the bartender too. The general moral here is that people can learn to take responsibility for keeping themselves responsible. And in exchange we grant them the freedom of the state.
To be completed...
53:01 - Harris concedes that there is a difference between reliable self-controllers and wild untameable people. But what about reliable self-controllers when they occasionally lapse? If Tiger Woods misses an easy putt in golf, we are extremely condemnatory. But why should we condemn someone for such a lapse when that lapse says almost nothing about their general capacities? The lapse must have been caused by random static in the brain and not by his general character.
55:52 - Dennett says there's no paradox here. We hold some people to higher standards because they have voluntarily taken on greater responsibilities. People are counting on Tiger Woods in ways they don't count on others. And who says these things are caused by random static? Tiger Wood may self-reflect and realise he should not have stayed out so late last night and improve his daily discipline as a result.
58:16 - Harris thinks Dennett is not acknowledging what it is like for Tiger Woods to miss the putt, or a supreme court justice to go on a shoplifting spree, from the first person perspective. They would feel like outside forces had directed their will. Let's say Tiger Woods did stay out all night. Maybe he caught the eye of a pretty girl in a bar and that was what caused him to err. These are all "missed putts" when you look closely at them. They're all luck.
59:33 - Harris accuses Dennett of distorting the truth because of concern for the social consequences of denying free will. But Harris thinks we can retain the pragmatic systems of law and order, reward and punishment, for practical reasons. We don't have to believe the lie that people really author themselves.
01:00:44 - Dennett says we can't absolutely author ourselves, but who needs absolutism? People do non-absolutely author themselves, even if there's limits to that.
01:01:10 - Dennett thinks that because responsibility is a good thing, we need systems of reward and punishment, and that even in situations where we get _really_ unlucky, we should take punishment in good grace.
01:02:13 - Harris thinks Dennett is changing the subject from free will to the moral/legal practicalities. And he is founding those moral/legal practicalities on thin ice which is always vulnerable to more information. Let's say that the tweet of a bird caused Tiger Woods to miss the putt. He's not _actually_ responsible. Maybe we hold him practically responsible, because there's no way to change the game of golf to accommodate such random influences, but he isn't in fact.
01:03:32 - Dennett defends the idea of law and order.
01:05:50 - Harris: Shouldn't we treat psychopaths with a pill if we could?
01:07:44 - Dennett agrees that psychopaths do not have free will and are hence less responsible. But the more difficult case is someone like Bernie Madoff.
01:08:21 - Harris thinks this is the same case. He proposes a Madoff pill instead of a psychopathy pill.
01:09:41 - Dennett thinks Harris is forgetting about the role of deterrence. If there was a Madoff pill, then people would know there was a Madoff pill, and carry on acting like Madoff until they got caught, pilled, and forgiven. That's not good enough.
01:14:03 - Harris thinks Dennett is sliding back into practicalities. Harris is trying to establish the fact that - ethically speaking - Madoff is not responsible.
01:16:13 - Wresting the conversation back to the first-person feeling of free will, which Harris thinks underlies the moral considerations, Harris suggests that a sufficiently advanced neuroscience would be able to know what you know before you know it, and a practical demonstration of this would fundamentally undermine people's belief in free will.
01:17:15 - Dennett points out that current neuroscience can't make predictions in real time.
01:19:35 - But it's possible in principle. If Harris could pull out of his pocket a perfect transcript of this conversation, written before the conversation played out, that would undermine Dennett's sense of free will.
01:20:29 - Dennett
01:22:50 - Dennett thinks Harris has an unrealistic expectation of what authorship should be. If it's not fully conscious, it doesn't count. Examples from tennis and music.
01:26:46 - Harris
01:27:26 - Dennett defends a respectable notion of "could have done otherwise".
01:28:10 - That's not "could have done otherwise". That's "will do otherwise next time".
01:28:44 - A common confusion about determinism. A coinflip isn't random. But it could have been otherwise. It is - in an important sense - uncaused. There's no salient cause. Random ones could have been otherwise.
01:30:38 - Harris thinks the first-person sense of free will is anchored the idea of complete control. He agrees with Dennett that no one has ever had this kind of control. But people imagine they do, and that should be challenged.
01:32:34 - Dennett effectively agrees. But he thinks you can show people they don't need this kind of pure free will in order to have moral responsibility. Compatiblist free will is good enough.
01:33:45 - Harris wraps up.
36:32 “moral responsibility is something that we have to redefine, in the way that you are eager to redefine free will”….. 😂 Sam is such a savage!
There's no defining and redefining - there's just the shared agreement of a definition necessary for successful communication.... so many of these debates would be better if the first 10 minutes was defining terms so everyone was on the same page
@x0rn312 Yeah but that is ultimately the problem with Dan here. They already know the definition of the terms. The issue is, Dan simply rejects the definition because it holds no explanatory power. Him and Sam both agree that the libertarian definition of free will is nonsensical. It's just that Dan decides to substitute in his own definition because of that fact. When that just isn't how things work. Notice how he didn't respond to Sams' "Atlantis" analogy. Because it fully encapsulates what Dan is doing. Dan brushes that analogy off with no acknowledgement. And it's clear to see why.
To me Sam Harris is a lot more convincing. Most of the arguments by Daniel Dennett are based on a semantical distortion of the term "free will" into something vague and undefined, which is the case with most supporters of free-wiil among scientists, and I really don't understand why anyone would do that. You want to talk about something else rather than an actual free will? - Come up with a different term, and stop confusing your audience.
I think Dennet is constructing a strawman to argue with whereby he says that Harris means that no one can be held responsible for raping and killing in a practical sense. While Harris is arguing that they should be punished in a practical sense but that does not mean you can't evaluate the circumstances that made him into a rapist or murderer. Those two are not mutually exclusive.
Dennett's definition of "free will" is not vague, it is a common-sense definition.
@@graham6132
I'm guessing you don't see the irony of your own comment :)
Common-sense is a subjective tool (also called intuition) and as such it differs from person to person.
Semantical definition of words cannot be subjected to personal interpretation (or at least should not be) unless we don't really want to speak the same language.
If we start using language containing words without unambiguous meaning, we won't be able to understand each other.
I'll ask a person to bring me a red apple, and he'll bring me a yellow chair, because this is his intuitive common-sense based interpretation of the words "red" and "apple".
But just for the sports of it.
What is the definition of "free will" based on your understanding of Daniel Dennet (and based on YOUR SUBJECTIVE common-sense ofcorse) ?
(I should note that if you can''t define a term in one or 2 sentences, it usually means you don't undertsnd it yourself)
@@graham6132 Well, since you didn't provide a definition to the term "free" will" based on your common-sense, here's a semantical definition of the term:
Free wiil - ability to make a counscious choice, which is a not a resulf of the deterministic cause and affect reletionship dectated by the laws of nature as we know it.
In other words, if the processes of your brain are dectated by the deterministic laws of physics, you have no free will.
You may talk about many amazing traits of our mind allowing us to behave in a complex way, but you should find different terms to name those traits, unless their definition is compliant with an already defined one, like "free will".
@@AlonGutmanOfficial Thanks, despite not being able to spell, nor use the word "semantical" properly, you have made a significant contribution to the philosophical debate over free will.
This debate is not doing Daniel any justice. He misses the point frequently and says thing like “ I think your wrong” in place of a persuasive argument. I rather read his stuff.
Dennett keeps saying "I can control" x, y, z. He is confused about "I" -- the sense of I that he presupposes does not exist outside of his genes and environment. It's all part of the same process .
exactly. Some people can NOT control x, y, z
In his sea and ship analogy (I can't control the sea but I can control the ship), I think he misses the point that he is a sea himself. To rein in my analogy a little - a sea of neurotransmitters, hormones, the external circumstances (the winds, the terrain). The movement of the ship is directly caused by him, but he seems to think that by some magic he isn't directly controlled by other circumstances.
I am astounded that such a celebrity as Daniel Dennett just does not get it. His example of controlling the boat is downright ridiculous.
it really is laughable, yet the majority of philosophers are identifying as compatibilists. It just goes to show that ANYONE can be a philosopher, apparently.
No, you have to be very stupid to be a philosopher. I have never had a conversation with someone who identifies himself as a philosopher that was not stultifying and useless. I cannot believe that they still hand out doctorates to people who have not managed to make a contribution to a single field of legitimate science, of which there are DOZENS today. @@pedestrian_0
I think it's a great example. What's your beef with it?
It’s astounding you don’t understand his boat analogy.
@QuintEssential-sz2wn i understand it and hence I said it's ridiculous
This is the first time I agree with Sam. He was very well on point here. Daniel never touched the subject of free will.
He did. But he’s defining it somewhat differently. He and Sam agree on almost everything
@@liallhristendorff5218 in my opinion, he’s defining it in a way that extracts almost all of the importance and meaning of the term. It seems to me like he’s doing it and holding on to the notion of free will to justify how we handle responsibility.
It seems Daniel is trying to hold unto his ego, where Sam has accepted reality. Also Daniel can't seen to follow Sam's logic, he just misunderstands half the things Sam is trying to explain, then goes on some unintelligible tangent that is not very related.. Not to mention Daniel seems to be purposefully dense, just because it is going against his beliefs.
yeah agreed. I might be wrong but I get the sense that Dan want free will to exist and Sam just wants the truth either way.
@@Sylar-451 I don't think Sam is motivated by the truth. He's motivated by the idea that free will denial will create more compassion. And also by the feeling he's reached a more enlightened state than the peasantry.
I came to this conclusion a while back. Dennett is extremely proud of himself and what a great thinker he is.
He simply wants to feel like he deserves credit for being so amazing! 😅
He can't handle the idea that he isn't responsible for any of it.
@joeboswellphilosophy I think you are partially right on the first point. Really don't understand where you get the second one from.
59 minutes in and Dan still hasn’t articulated his point in any solid fashion.
I don't know why Harris or anyone else struggles so hard with this. All Dennett is saying is that by virtue of their biology, their upbringing, and their moment by moment self-reinforcing, most people develop the capacity to be reliable self-controllers who can keep promises to themselves and to others and not get hijacked by distractions, addictions, short-term thinking etc. This answers perfectly well to the commonsense definition of "free will", even if it pisses off people wedded to the academic tradition of pitching free will vs. determinism. For people with Dennett's kind of free will, perpetual forgiveness for wrongdoing is a huge mistake. They _were_ capable of being decent friends, spouses, colleagues, politicians, you name it. But they cheated because they thought you wouldn't hold them accountable. You should, actually.
82 years in and Dan still articulated his point in a solid fashion ❤
@@joeboswellphilosophybut they weren't capable and would never have been capable.
How is this so hard to accept? Why can't you accept that the common definition of free will says that people are all capable of everything equally despite their circumstances?
@@thomascromwell6840 They _were_ capable. Capability is about one's general capacity over time, it's not about isolated incidents.
The denialist position isn't difficult to accept - it's moronically easy. I accepted it for many years. But I grew out of it. I think compatibilism is the mature position.
Where are you getting this "common definition of free will" from? I expect you're getting it from the denialists, not from the history of philosophy, or the history of theology, or from polling people on the street.
Around the 49 minute mark Bennet completely falls apart. He may be a smart guy but, for whatever reason, he is irrationally attached to the idea of free will. His brand of compatibalism is just his way of coping with what he cannot accept.
Dennett doesn't make a lot of good points in my oppinion here, he also doesn't seem to fully grasp the points.
I think another component of a deterministic free will is what you might call a tendency for creative self "poetry" (construction). The question is what is a free person free of ? Arguably, that includes freedom of compulsion of habit or inflexible models of seeing reality, self and life. A deterministic random generator is a good mechanism to drive creativity, and the freedom of the person would be defined by the ability to pop out of the routine way of being and evaluating and engaging the new possibility suggested by the "random generator".
Dennett's problem is his dogmatic attachment to his idea of what moral responsibility is.
Dan's ego seems to be preventing him from understanding what Sam is saying. Dan really did himself no favours in this discussion, borderline embarrassing by his normally high standard.
Yes, he was almost religious in his ego defense.
Agreed. Very poor.
Sam is saying the exact same thing as Dan. Their view on free will is the same. You don't understand it so you throw insults. Dan calls out Sam at the start of this video.
Normally high standard? This man believes that consciousness is an illusion, I cannot think of a much lower standard than that.
@@philosophicast2122 He thinks consciousness is an illusion your mind generates. He does not think it is an illusion in itself.
The "I could have chosen otherwise" belief is just as reasonable as rewinding a videotape and expecting that, when you play it again, somehow the film will turn out differently. Dennett seems to argue that this is not important whereas Sam argues that the very belief is important to people's illusion that it makes no sense to believe that. I tend to agree with Sam on that. It is important bc many people dwell on the what if thought and that it is not reasonable given that replaying a video will not result in a different film.
Youre both overthinking it in my mind. When someone says they wish they could go back in time that they would have made a different decision is based on them having thought of more than one choice in that moment and chose the wrong option and that the other choice was apparent to them but they didnt choose it. Not that if they went back wothout prior knowledge that they wouldnt make the same decision, or they are using hindsight to say they could make a different decision if they went back with what they know of the outcome.
@@robkrieg8301 The fact that you were in no position to have done otherwise and that everything was predetermined it takes responisbility out of you. And that s why it s stupid to hold people accountable for their actions.
@@theodorp6305 even sam harris says we should hold people accountable for their actions because he doesnt believe his own bullshit
@@robkrieg8301 you clearly haven't watched none of sam harris video's.
@@theodorp6305 i have he says it multiple times.
I love this discussion, every morsel. Despite their continued disagreement, it is so much more satisfying to get into the depths of who we are without an appeal to spirit, gods, and religious language.
thanks goodness there are still atheists out there
Atheists being dishonest about telepathy makes the christians more honest, yet more wrong in the intergalactic problems, yet better at the lived world type of problems
@@elenabalyberdina2393thank God there are believers in God out there 😂 in a Deterministic world view we can’t know if any of us are right or wrong. There are no absolute truths. Regardless, both worldviews are of equal value, if you’re consistent you would agree.
who said the world is deterministic/@@Fortheloveoforthodoxing
I loved Dr. Daniel Dennett, very sad to hear about his passing, I would have loved to meet him, he was my absolute favorite, an intellectual giant, a legend, true sage, heard he was also very kind gentle person, huge loss to civilization, I will watch tons of his lectures in the next few weeks in his memory, I made a playlist of his lectures and interviews for myself to work through, listening to Dr Dennett lectures would be my idea of Heaven 1:32:06
Dan could never admit that his opinions might be incorrect.😂
Sam is even worse.
History is going to be on the side of Dan.
@@DouwedeJong history of what? If free will is real or not lol how will that be proven?
@@DouwedeJongEvidently not. More and more people are realizing that free will is an illusion. Practically every scientist too 😂
@@DouwedeJong It is not. As I've said elsewhere, all the fuzzy sophistry surrounding free will and compatibilism has real and harmful effects, most notably in the Superdeterminism theory response to Bell's Inequalities. Scientists have outright said that they don't want to work on this fascinating theory (in my opinion probably the best rival to the Many Worlds / "Alternate Universes" interpretation of QM) because they find the deterministic element to be so distasteful. This silly sophistry called "compatibilism" just shields people from the truth, makes the truth unpalatable for them.
I can’t help but get the feeling that Daniel is playing to a level far below his intellect, dancing around the surprisingly simple definition of free will with confusing word salad. It shouldn’t be this difficult.
Im still confused by Sam's apparent contradiction that we dont have free will and every outcome of every decision we make is deteremined already and that we can become better people or train ourselves to make better or dofferent decisions as if it wasnt determined we would or wouldnt have done so.
Im not just referencing this video but others talks ive seen him give on the subject.
@Hunter Green because according to him we dont have a choice whether we become better or worse people since we didnt make the decision and we cant influence said decision because if we could thay would mean we had free will. He said in one talk that we couldn't even change what type of ice cream we would have gotten for lunch. How do we change or influence further decisions when its already basically decided that we couldn't do otherwise.
@Hunter Green that's what im saying, he states clearly in one of his talks that even though there is no free will you can still chamge your self etc and become a bettwr person. Those 2 things dont mesh.
@Hunter Green ua-cam.com/video/hq_tG5UJMs0/v-deo.html
I think if Daniel would simply change the term “free will choice” to a “voluntary choice”, it would end the debate as “free will” implies a “non caused” choice.
well, i think you are mistaken about Daniel’s view. He doesn’t think that free will implies “non caused” choice. there are causes for choices made under free will. But what he argues is that we could have made different choices in similar situations, and that’s what free will means from the outset.
@@Jay-p2x8b yes, the ability to make a different choice is what free will means, therefore the argument that free will does not exist because one can not/would not make a different choice given the same circumstances. So Daniel would be wrong in that the preceding causes are the factors in choice making, so one does not possess such an ability.
@@edwardprokopchuk3264 that's a very standard or typical objection to Daniel and i believe it is not so persuasive. First, you should't assume "the same circumstances", because what it only implies is that you are merely replaying the situation or the process, and that does not refute the claim that free will does exist.
You can't say , for example, Tiger Woods doesn't have the ability to do better, merely replaying a video where he made a mistake. He could have done better in different but largely similar situations, and this is what 'ability' means. You measure ability by actions done in many different situations, not by merely replaying an action done in a certain situation. in this sense, free will exists, because you have the ability to make different choices.
@@Jay-p2x8b abilities and evolution of potential are not part of the discussion here. But yes, we should assume the same circumstances, because if the circumstances change, so do your choices. What free will argues is that under exactly the same circumstances, one could have made a different choice. Based on the law of cause and effect, it is very much a rewinding of the tape.
@@edwardprokopchuk3264 yes, ability is in the part of the discussion. First, because it is one of the concepts that constitute the very concept of free will. Second, the free will related with ability is what Daniel has in mind when he mentions free will.
What free will argues is that under the exactly same circumstances, one could have made a different choice. : NOT TRUE. (At least for Daniel)
As you said, the “ability” to make a different choice is what free will means. But, how do you know that one has an ability? You know one has the ability by looking at what he or she has done in “different circumstances”, not by rewinding the same tape over and over again. You know Tiger Woods is a great golfer because he has performed very well in different circumstances. That is, we find free will by observing that one has the ability to make different choices in different(but similar in many respects) circumstances. If Woods made a mistake, it doesn’t imply that he was lacking free will, because he could have done differently in the sense that he had the ability to perform better.
I think this can be answered using Orgel's third rule. Is it cheaper(energy/cost effective) to build a brain that has true, non-deterministic, free will, or is it cheaper to build a brain that is deterministic but fools its user into thinking it has true free will? I'd be interested to know what Dan Dennett's view on true free will of other mammals like primates, canines, ungulates etc is. I know Harris' view is that the free will of these animals is the same as Homo sapiens, but it is unclear if Dennett believes this or not. If Dennett believes that the free will of Homo sapiens is different from other animals and that Homo sapeins are special in some way, one cannot deny that that is a religious-esque view.
It's cheaper to ''build'' non deterministic brain. Non deterministic block universe, that has no beginning or an end, and no causality is as cheap as you can get.
@@1GTX1 Orgel's rules only apply to biology/Natural Selection, they do not extend to physics or the universe.
A non-deterministic free will would be experienced as alien, more akin to being possessed, and not something arising from the self ! It would feel alien or maybe even external because it wouldn't be informed (constrained) by any aspect of the situation of the person, including the timing of the "intervention" of the will. Usually, this is not the case - the interesting exception is creativity (see next comment).
Pretty good audio quality for a bar-located conversation.
Indeed. Nowadys the mobile recording devices can produce great quality.
Post production, sometimes even using a.i. does the final polishing.
By Dennett’s definition of free will ( Compatibilism dressed up), a computer chess game has free will.
You'd be right, he addresses this type of idea in his book elbow room, except he would cap its amount of free will. What a shame that philosophers and now scientists have taken this detour, but I believe in time it will die out, as it should.
@@pedestrian_0 I enjoyed that book many years ago. I think Dennett is desperate to give responsibility to people for their actions.
@@pedestrian_0then you could imagine programming a computer that has the potential to make far more decisions than we do; so in that sense the computer would have more free will than we do.
It’s not about choice. It’s about how you don’t choose to choose what you choose. You have an illusion of free will
@@pedestrian_0Elbow room implies like puppet is free as long as it Loves it's strings
A chess program is completely deterministic. It has an evaluation algorithm that evaluates any given position based on various factors. It does not have free will.
Dennett proceeds as though there is a separate mental agency with control over the brain. It’s so maddening. The experience of being is produced at the same time as the being. Is this a category error?!
It's incredible how a single table can host so much intellect and misunderstanding simultaneously. Dennett was, by far, the most determined person I've ever seen beating the same dead horse over and over - for over an hour! Simply astonishing.
1:21:00 A note about the Turing comment...what Turing actually showed was that there cannot be a computer program that is able to determine what any other program will do on a given input IN GENERAL. More specifically, no program can, in general, always determine if a given program will halt and produce an output from a given input, or run forever in an infinite loop from a given input. In other words, there can't be some master program that can look at ALL other programs that are running, and completely determine if they will ever stop or not.
However, it is VERY possible for a program/person to correctly predict its own outputs/actions, or the outputs/actions of others. They just can't do it for all other programs in general. So there definitely could be an entity capable of predicting the entire conversation between itself and someone else perfectly.
Either I do not understand Dennett's thinking, or he is schizophrenic on the subject of "free will."
"If you say you don't have free will,
Why bother speaking" ~Noam Chomsky 😂😂😂
Because you had no choice but to speak. People aren't always logical, just pre-determined.
@@architennis a men can lie to anyone,i don't have any problem but he should try not to lie to himself.
@@architennis you don't know that..
Responsibility morals and luck should be a debate since it has so much effect on if free will is real or not. These two guys are great and this was great
Dan Dennet sure lacks emotional intelligence. Fortunately he had no choice in its development.
I appreciate this conversation.
I don't find Dennett's arguments convincing though. He seems to be more concerned about the implications to society than trying to objectively find the correct answer to this problem. We cannot approach the issue from that direction.
Sam's position is much more convincing to me. Though I do keep a door open to the possibility that our consciousness sets limits to our understanding of our own consciousness and free will.
It is possible we'll never be able to fully comprehend the concept of free will. Like an advanced AI within a game (let's say a million times more advanced than any current AI we have) that genuinely thinks it's conscious. It would only be able to try to understand its own nature within the limits of the game, never being able to see it from our perspective. We could have similar boundaries.
Right now you can either believe in free will, or believe that there is no free will. How usefull is the free will concept for society? There are 2 options 1) free will is real or 2) Free will is an illusion. If you believe in free will, you are either right, or you had no option but to believe in something that is not real, but there is no harm involved, you had no choice. If you 100% believe that we have no free will, you are wrong (epic fail), or you are right that we have no free will, but it doesn't matter since you had no choice, everything is just like a movie. Since we don't know if there is free will, how smart would it be to take a risk and believe that we are robots.
I enjoy listening to Sam on this topic, but I think he could make things much simpler if he just reconciled morality as a determined, human construct in the first place. Not a lot of need for complex argument there.
Agreed.
Agree.
Appears that Dr Denial Dennetts’ disability/cancer here is his theological conditioned attachment to moral-responsibility.
Something is causing you to think you have a free will.😂
Such is life.
Our brains are complicated but breakthroughs in philosophy/science are going to continue to happen. We aren't far removed from not even asking anything close to these types of questions
Dans ability to misconstrue or completely misunderstand Sam's points at the crux of his argument against free will parallel Jordan Petersons on the topic of God
I like that analogy
It's so strange, having followed this debate when it came out (reading the written exchange), and believing Sam trounced him, only to return now, and have the strange impression that in fact Dennett was completely right.
Harris is a better communicator, but taking the libertarian conception of free will as *the* definition of free will feels a bit like straw-manning... like criticizing science because some IFLS redditors imagine institutional consensus is the same thing as science. That some people truly believe in a clawed conception of a thing doesn't mean that's the proper definition, and you haven't destroyed free will just because you can point out flaws in one particularly weak notion of it.
I think the main reason the majority of people side with Harris is because his view is like 80% science and 20% philosophy whereas Dennetts is like 50%/50%. Dennett sees philosophy and science as deeply integrated and work together and Harris sees science as this is what science says and let's mix a little philosophy in there so it's easier for people to understand.
This plus Harris' ability to articulate what he's thinking well is very attractive to people, but in the end, a deeper look shows that Dennett is completely right and I just wish people took the time to really look at Dennetts work rather than taking their view on this from the 40 minutes that he talked about it in this video.
"It is brain tumours all the way down." Perfect. Sam nails the whole argument in that one line.
🤣
no he doesn't at all
Dennett's only response to this is that it can't be right because most people conform to social expectations -- therefore their the brains are "wired normally". This is an extremely culture-bound response: "normal" wirings vary tremendously from culture to culture. What Dennett reads as a "normal" wiring is actually cultural determinacy of behavior. It is an argument against free will, not for it.
@@ellenmcgowenThat as to be sarcastic 😂😂😂
Seems like I'm the only one in the comments moved by the degrees of freedom argument from Dennet
Sam Harris is the much more publicly popular figure so its no surprise.
To me, it's binary. Either we live in a determined world or we don't.
But using that argument, computer programs like Chat GPT definitely already have free will (and it's not hard to push the argument even further down to very basic physical interactions, even saying that a bowling ball can "choose" to drift right or left based on its spin.)
@@vigilante8374 With all due respect, that makes no sense at all
@@happywednesday6741 How are you going to define a "degree" of free will that privileges the "choices" of your neurons but discriminates against the silicon sitting on the desk in front of you? When you speak, you are both iterating through a set of rules (plus "impulses", i.e. a mix of hardcoded bootstrapping stuff) to determine what you say next. How are you going to claim that Chat GPT doesn't have a "degree of freedom" when it clearly operates by weighing the validity of different sentences, just as you do?
I feel like a tennis ball
I did too 🤣🤣🤣
same
Soooo... Who changed his opinion? Harris or Dennet?
30 minutes in. I’m loving this back and forth
If you have a free will; why are you always thinking thoughts you don’t want to have? Or always saying,” I don’t why I did that.”😂
"Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.
The brain pops up thoughts, options, solutions because its what its supposed to do, but finally you have the choice to act on them or not. That choice is called free will.
@@enemarius But it is prior conditions beyond one’s control that molded them into the type of person that would want to act on the particular thoughts that come up and to reject others.
@@enemarius There’s no chooser. There’s no free will because there’s no one to have it. This world is a reaction to a reaction to a reaction ad infinitum. It’s a verb verbing itself. It doesn’t require an intermediary to make it happen.
@@the-absolute-light still I don't see how that can decide what your choice would be. Such conditions would factor in but cannot really decide.
Sometimes we made choices consciously, sometime we act and behave sub consciously or even lack of total awareness. The fact that even if we made our choice to do anything, it's determined by many factors, our genetics, our upbringing, our life experiences, our intelligence, our hormones are many times not within our control, there's hardly much free will that your decision is never influenced by anything at all.
When Dan talks of “control”, I wish Sam would have asked “and what I are the mechanisms by which humans exert their alleged control?”. The only answer science has shown is that self-“control” uses neurobiological mechanisms. I agree with Dan, humans seem to have some type of self-control, but that control is just as biologically, psychologically, neurologically, and sociologically determined as every other behavior humans exhibit. This isn’t the strong argument that Dan thinks it is. It only pushes the spotlight of determinism onto a different part of human mechanisms.
They both took so long, and rambled on, so that it was hard for the other to respond in a coherent manner to each point. They should be allotted something like one minute, and take turns. Neither one did a fantastic job at stating the positions clearly, although it is a thorny issue. And that brings up how preachy and adamant in their position they were, on a topic with basically no concrete facts. .
Totally agree about the rambling. What that supposed to demonstrate intelligence? It just seemed to me that neither could explain things in a concise and simple way.
I revisit these discussions between Harris and Dennett quite often and at this point I think I just need to accept that there is something fundamental I am just not understanding. That being said, if someone can explain to me HOW in the world bringing “degrees of freedom” into the discussion matters at all, please do. Dennett explicitly states in the first few minutes of the discussion that libertarian free will is a “philosopher’s fantasy”. If that is the case (and you are biting the bullet and saying everything is determined) how does that not immediately make the “degrees of freedom” a moot point? Sure there are many “options” in actions, but if only one path forward is ever possible, why does this matter and what is it adding to the discussion? What utility does es this reframing of free will have besides just being able to state that it exists? Does this not just add an obligation to explain your stance when claiming free will exists to someone without the same definition of free will for no reason?
I can see two questions in your comment. I will try to restate them and then provide some response that may or may not be helpful. Q1) Why does Dennett bring in the concept of degrees of freedom? A1) Think of determinism as a force of nature that brings about change through causality. The more complex I am (the more degrees of freedom I have) the more complexity there is in my reaction to determinism. The more complexity there is, the better the chance that my actions will match my will. Q2) Why do we even still call it free will? A2) Because the whole point of having ‘free will’ in the magical libertarian sense is to be able to be free to choose actions that match your will. Libertarian free will is like a magical ideal. You could be so free that you could always choose the action that matches your will. Compatibility free will is much less powerful but it is saying that your complexity allows for so many decision making algorithms that most of the time determinism will pick the action that matches your will (if you have enough degrees of freedom). Libertarian magical free will is like compatibility free will in the limit as the complexity (or degrees of freedom) tends to infinity. So they are very much related concepts. I hope this is helpful in some way.
@@JamesGriffinC to boil down what you're saying in simpler terms, compatibilism is much like libertarian free will, however, confined to the limits of the environment and the past events that have formed the choice making agent. I find this to be silly, as it attempts to salvage the inevitable unsalvageable, in my opinion. I would've been a compatibilist had I not gone through my experiences with mindfulness and meditation.
@@JamesGriffinC interestingly put. As for A2) Im still confused on to whats the point of a compatibilist calling it "free" will then? Why not just will? Isnt this like basically saying we observe our actions, and sometimes we own them as they align with our mental model and sometimes they dont align with our desired mental model? At what point is there any degrees of freedom were we had a say on what our will was/is nor on what our actions were/are as a consequence of past causation?
Free will or no. Both of these guys are class acts.
Sam is yeh
I wonder if this is just another example of someone hanging on to what has been against someone bringing what's to come, and not surprisingly being shown by the age of both.
What?????
@@tommyhennessy and yet it has 7 likes and literally makes no sense lol
Ahahaha yeh, comment made no sense. I'm not sure what is more concerning though: the incoherent comment or those who understood and liked it! 😂
@@juntus89 It's a bot. Whether or not the upvotes are also bots is an open question.
Very uncomfortable. The late Professor Dennett didn’t seem to grasp the fact that he was constantly moving away from the point to grab another apple when the subject is being discussed is oranges.
He is not moving away from the subject. He is simply saying that there is a philosophical error in thinking that there is an absolute truth to free will. Epistemic truths are tricky since their groundworks are established in our minds. Scientists try to conclude epistemic truths directly from their ontological discoveries which is not always possible. A robot is both natural and unnatural at the same time in our realm of existence, but technically a robot is just natural. There is a "what for?" question and there is a "how come?" question in the evolution of purposes and reason.
"The squirrel climbed up the tree, but it is capable of running across the ground, therefore it has free will" - My understanding of Daniel Denett's *'Compatibility'*
A roulette ball landed on a black number, but it's also capable of landing on a red number. Therefore, a roulette ball has free will.
Nonono you don't understand, evolution has shaped the squirrel's configuration over the years to allow for *reasoning* while it confronts the environment, therefore it has free will. What an embarrassment that the majority of philosophers consider themselves compatibilists.
@@pedestrian_0you could have quoted your first statement. Not sure if you reject compatibility but accept free will, but I think you are more of a determinist.
I think we don't have free will, but I am more of an "inevitabilist", if such a word exist 😂, as quantum randomness also has an influence on our decisions and outcomes
@@defenestratedalien1448 my first statement was satirical, arguing from the point of view of a compatibilist like dan dennett. My second statement reflected how I truly feel, compatibilists are lame. Like yourself, I don't believe there is any free will.
Do you know how many silly or contradictory scenarios that are made within the deterministic worldview? Come on……
Dan argues against Free Will when he says that people will change his or her behavior by the suggestion that there is no Free Will.😂
Sam does that, he thinks that there is no free will but that he can change behaviour of people, and that is why Dan thinks that Sam is an idiot.
@@1GTX1 This comment says more about you than either Dan or Sam.
@@LukasOfTheLight ''Marionettes lament'' says a lot about Sam.
@@1GTX1 Uh-huh.
@@1GTX1 You are confused. There is no free will, but changes do happen based on perceived stimuli. Sam (or anyone else) talking about stuff is one of those stimuli. Just because we have no control of (or awareness of) the underlying causes of our actions does not mean that our actions do not cause other things to happen. It's like claiming Chat GPT can't optimize itself because it doesn't have free will. I mean, yes it can. That's what the machine was built to do. And us human machines were built to talk, analyze and try different stuff. But we're still just machines with no more free will than Chat GPT has.
Dennet conflates free will with being rational, he also conflates 2 different questions that are independent of each other, the questions are: 1) do people have free will?, 2) if people think they dont have free will would that encourage them to not take responsability for their actions?.
Sam is describing the paint strokes and Dan is describing the painting.
The paint strokes build an illusion of meaning, as they're arranged upwards towards their macro form. Similar to the survival of the fittest.
Was Dennet paid by the word for this debate?
IMHO, it all depends on how free will is defined. IMHO, the "classic" definition "if you had the ability to decide otherwise" is just a useless philosophical device. Why? Because I'm a physicalist, because we cannot test philosophical propositions as we can test physical hypothesis in a lab, under the incisive scrutiny of the Scientific Method. Notice that the expression "free will" is composed by "free" and "will", where "free" can be mapped to physical reality via determinism (or indeterminism) and where "will" involves a very complex physical device called "brain". Still, both words can be mapped to physical objects which, in principle, can be tested under the framework of the Scientific Method. Whilst I find discussions involving moralism, accountability and even pragmatism useful from their social perspective, I found these discussions absolutely useless from the perspective of physicalism.
Dennett seems to be working backwards from a desire to protect legal/moral consequentialism. He would agree with the Supreme Court justices who proclaimed that free will is the foundation of the legal system. Harris is open to the possibiliy that neuroscience could open up a future the Supreme Court cannot envision, and might be shocked by. It's very much like the Church telling Galileo that it is intolerable if they have to pay attention to science rather than the Bible when discussing the heavens. Their society was founded on the inerrancy of religion, and ours is founded on the inerrancy of free will. Harris recognizes that this is a "culture war" that dwarfs all current culture wars. Dennett wants to be an atheist but to reassure the Supreme Court that free will and consequentialism are not in danger from atheism and science.
I think Harris is right. Free will and consequentialist legal theory are likely to be changed enormously by the future development of neuroscience (and AI).
Every time I hear Sam debate someone on free will, the person argues against a definition of free will that Sam is not putting forth. Can someone recommend a video where this is not the case? Thx
Consciousness is a continuous act, not a result of emergent momentary acts.
To me it seems clear that Dennet as he often says there's no absolute responsibility he's saying there's no absolute free will as in from the third person perspective. So all his notions of there still being free will are based within the illusion of first person free will. So he should actually clarify each time clearly that the free will and any argument he makes is merely a argument based on the first person illusion of free will.
You can't base your argument on "what if we rewind the time, will things happen the same way".
You can't go back in time, this is just an illusion and you can't use that for anything at all.
scientific hypotheses are a useful tool
@@gsgourosremind me the part where he says scientific hypothesis aren’t useful ?
This is the libertarian notion of free will (and really the only comprehensible notion of it, everything else is changing the subject on what people think when they say the words "free will".
That there is some property of the universe where, given the same choice again, you could somehow choose differently.
I don't like any of these goons, but Daniel laid out his argument rather clearly in the first 10 min. Sam used his free will to hide the book from Dennett and act the innocent when he gets just due.
Hm. A lapse paradox seems a useful thinking tool. Personally, I can think of a few.
I do believe in punishment and keeping people responsible even though I do understand that these people don't have free choice, but knowing that and how much (all) of our actions are influenced by something, it makes sense to use this power of influencing people to make better choices. One way to do it is by punishing them when they act badly, which will make them act differently than they perhaps would've if they were not held accountable. I think you can't morally blame them, because in a way is not their fault and they were influenced (genes, environment, etc,) to commit a bad action, however, if we think about keeping society better and safer it is necessary to punish the person who may not be in control of their action, so he can actually change his action or just not cause problems to the society by being held in a prison.
I think knowing we aren't in control and our choices are influenced, we can use this knowledge and influence ourselves or make the environment that will produce better outcomes. In a way, I see this as a type of control we have, even though is technically still influenced and is just an effect of a cause.
Re: the topic of Sam being able to produce a transcript of their talk before it began…. A.I. is proving this point already, a little bit. Daniel says it would be a greater feat if Sam produced a poem he asked Daniel to write. A.I., if exposed to enough works of Dennet’s, will come up with one that “sounds” like him. Of course, the AI isn’t going to be able to predict it, because it’s still lacking huge amounts of data. But, it’s getting there.
Wow, Dennett cannot even talk clear and straight. He does not argue, only waffles incomprehensibly and keeps attacking Sam personally instead of stating any point.
There's such an obsession with the word "free" that compatibilists seem to need to use the word, when it's not necessary and it causes equivocation problems. People have will. This will is generated by countless things that precede conscious awareness. Conscious awareness seems to follow will, it does not appear to cause will. There is nothing "free" about the will, as we do not choose the will.
This is a terminological dispute. You can simply call it will, no freedom necessary. Determinism and compatibilistic free will are effectively the same, and only semiotically distinct.
If compatibilists think that determinism is true, then the concept of moral responsibility is not saved on compatibilism. That said, people who think that determinism eliminates the ability to hold people accountable for their actions are just incorrect. We don't blame a man-eating shark for killing people, but we treat the shark as a man-eater nonetheless. It's still a force of nature to deal with, just as people who are harmful to other in society are themselves forces of nature to deal with. We don't need to add the word "free" before will to deal with these situations.
Dennet is just mudding the water. Talks too long remaining unclear. Sam is very quick, clear and precise in formulating key points putting dennet in , as I see it, helpless position
Absolutely. Dennet keeps embarrassing himself from start to end. That seems to happen all the time, for example also in his debates with Robert Sapolsky. It's beyond me how he can be a recognized philosopher, or whatever it was he was doing.
It is unbelievable, right? Yet, there he is, carrying his name around the internet, doing debates and podcasts....
Sapolski is great, he knows his stuff.
Sam Harris doesn't disagree with Dennett's version of compatibilism. He disagrees with what compatibilism ACTUALLY is, scientifically speaking. It seems that Dennett doesn't grasp that.
To the Dennett's "Consciousness exists, it just isn't what you think it is," I'd respond with, "Will exists, it just isn't free." Nobody's asserting that will doesn't exist when they say free will doesn't exist. They're just saying it's not free.
Dennett's whole issue is with the way this would affect society, yet he's almost purposefully ignoring the point Sam kept making about how society and the law wouldn't work differently because it would still be PRAGMATIC to work the way it does. A better understanding of what lack of free will ACTUALLY means wouldn't negate that pragmatism.
Sam wasn't trying to say that some people are wired right and others wrong, but that being wired at all implies lack of freedom.
When Dennett says that we have the capacity to respond to circumstances, he's failing to overlook that that doesn't imply our responses are totally in our control. I won't deny we have a sense of agency. But not total control. If you're to say that we act in accordance with our will, you have to acknowledge that we have a will to act in accordance with. And we don't get to initially choose our will. If you think you can choose your will, you'd have to be able to defend how you chose it, if not with a prior will as to what your will is to be, and apply your own argument perpetually, in a chicken-or-egg cycle that would always lead back to an initial, unchosen will.
"Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills."
"Are you signing this of your own free will?" translates to "Are you signing this of your own will?"
If you're going to define "free will" the same way anyone would simply define "will," is there really any reason to apply it in everyday life? "I will do this," and "I will do that" doesn't require the "free." The only reason there's even so much confusion and dichotomy and debate on this topic in the first place is because "free" was vaguely attached there without context.
Will someone please tell me what he’s saying at ~4:01? Something like “rapid course rules?”
rapaport rules
Wow is this frustrating . Continually talking past each other
I've just watched his debate with Robert Sapolsky, and the same thing happened. It at times feels like Dennett is just missing a part of the brain that comprehends these points, and sometimes it feels like he ignores it so he can be right.
At every moment for any acting agent under whatever set of circumstances prevail at that moment, and given the range and scope of actions which that particular agent can properly execute, there is one and only one course of action that will absolutely maximise//optimise that, or any, acting agent’s own personal well being//evolutionary fitness, and which action the acting agent would unhesitatingly execute if he, she or it knew exactly what that particular fitness maximising//optimising action was.
Choosing to do that one thing which would optimally contribute to one’s fitness is the only one right choice to make.
But none that we know of can grasp the full spectrum of factors bearing on any one or more moments of their existential sojourn here in this unimaginably vast Universe.
Both Sam & Daniel are like kindergarten kids trying, completely unsuccessfully, to understand adult behaviour - and then, worse, explain it to their fellow inmates at the sand box emporium. Kindergarten children are manifestly incapable of apprehending either the kind and number of adult skills adults routinely bring to bear on any one or more moment/s of their adult lives, or the consequences any of these adult actions engender on either the executors of those actions themselves, or on others.
No sane, healthy, normal, well informed, well equipped ‘agent’ capable of acting in its own best interests to any significant degree, would choose to act contrary to its own best fitness interests.
Two considerations.
One - As it is absolutely impossible for any agent to either know or understand all of the details of the full spectrum of an entire Universe full of whatever particular constraints, influences and enabling factors, etc come to bear at any one (or more) moments of time on him-, her- or it’s self - factors either physical, mental, rational, emotional, social &/or psychological, etc - it will be absolutely impossible for that agent to make anything other than a suboptimal choice of action. So cannot be held ultimately responsible for any ensuing suboptimal consequences. Let alone punished.
Suboptimal choices call for loving, caring rectification.
Another compounding/confusing factor for any obligate social - or symbiotic - agent - such as ourselves, that is to say any agent’s personal well being//evolutionary fitness which latter is necessarily and inextricably relies interdependently on other more or less separate, but equally interdependent, individual/s//colonies - is the fact that the efficacy//propriety of his, her or it’s actions are, inextricably, linked with whatever other/s her, his or it’s well-being on which they together mutually depend.
We now know that we each possess, for example, within and on our bodies truly vast contingents of ‘separate’ microbial helping agents on which our very lives depend, and the welfare of which agents our own dining on certain diets - say those preponderantly made up of carbs and trans fats, etc - put in dire jeopardy such that the legions of good helpers die out, and they become replaced by colonies of microbes which are toxic - sometimes lethally - to our well being.
There are only around one gazillion factors bearing on any one moment of our lives for either good or ill, which our own responses - our own subsequent actions - can either embrace, amplify, resist or avoid.
Including that in being an obligate social entity or obligate symbiont means that all choices and decisions must be made with many others, factored into and included in the equation of our own well-being and/or fitness maximisation//optimisation. No man is an island.
And again, only a flawed, damaged, ill-informed, ill-equipped actor//agent would choose anything other than the ONE action which would, under whatever circumstances prevail at any one moment of choosing (which is every moment) to do other than optimise/maximise its own personal and/or collective//societal//symbiotic fitness.
No sane, healthy, normal well informed, well-equipped agent is FREE TO ACT (OR CHOOSE TO ACT) AGAINST THEIR OWN BEST INTERESTS. TO DO SO IMMEDIATELY MARKS THAT INDIVIDUAL OUT AS BEING INADEQUATE (INSANE) IN SOME MANNER.
FOR WHICH INADEQUACY NO AMOUNT OF PAIN & PUNISHMENT OF ANY KIND WILL RECTIFY.
THEREFORE it must be known that any wrong-acting agent is simply flawed in some way, and the very LAST THING any sane, healthy, normal, well informed, well-equipped social milieu in which the wrong deed was perpetrated, will PUNISH the wrong doer, rather than seek out the nature of his, hers or it’s flaws and/or inadequacies - and FIX THEM.
Which ‘fixing’ would always include making full restitution to the victim - plus damages…….
AND ULTIMATELY NEGOTIATE FULL AND HEARTFELT RECONCILIATION BETWEEN PERP AND VICTIM.
Inflicting pain and punishment on ANYTHING AT ANY TIME SOLVES NOTHING….
Get out of the kindergarten sand box, Sam and Daniel, ‘wrong doers’ must be, yes, apprehended, but secured in a location where their flaws are fixed//cured - not exacerbated by further pain, deprivation and punishment.
‘Fixing//curing these damaged individuals can be quite easily accomplished - & at a fraction of the cost of our present totally punitive system - with every good thing which was absent in their formative years….
Just saying.
Looks like you need to get that off your chest. Put a lot of thought into this one.
The way I like to state one of you points is that a non-deterministically free person would sometimes be seen chewing a light bulb because that kind of freedom could not be constrained or informed even by the preferences of the person. We should all be grateful that we don't have that kind of free will. That said, the moments of creativity do feel external to us. One important aspect of being "free" as a person is how and to what extent we can step out of the constraints of habit, and entertain new ways of being suggested by some internal random generator (creativity generator).
underrated comment, thank you
Margriet, may i ask what is your occupation? You seem very steeped in psychology. I'd be curious to hear you say what you think of origins of subjectivity and how it fits in the deterministic object world?
I have great respect for Dennett as a philosopher of mind, but my position is closer to Sam
I have an issue with the claim around the 16:20 mark. Varying degrees of freedom amongst living organisms is entirely subjective.
Because a plant can convert the rays of the sun into food, does that mean I am more or less free than the plant? How am I even supposed to compare my degree(s) of freedom to that of a plant? That being said, I disagree with the level of control that we possess is “completely absent in any other creature” 16:22.
Also, I want to quickly make the point that different rocks will not melt at the same time. Two pieces of Limestone that differ in sizes will not turn into quicklime at the same time.
How does this fact relate to a Human’s response to the environment?
The only reasonable response to that argument would have to reference our ability to manufacture devices that allow us to do such. For example, like a cat, we can see in the dark with night-vision goggles.
But even this circles back to the subjectivity of varying degrees of freedom. Okay, so I can do everything a cat does (with the right technology, of course), EXCEPT be the actual cat.
It’s good to see people on the comments rightly siding against Dennet. The guy is idiotic on this concept
1:30:03 Dan is right it doesn’t matter that the coin will be head IF IF you make the conditions of trillions and trillions of atoms to be exactly the same for billions of years, in practical terms a coin flip is undetermined
Daniel Dennett - in this exchange - is an expert on talking too much but not saying anything of relevance. He fails to, clearly and simply, verbalize what his views and positions are and basically rambles the whole time... This was hard to listen to and a pretty disappointing appearance by Dennett.
Is Daniel always so vague?
Yes. I'm actually convinced at this point that he doesn't actually have any real structured arguments. I've tried really hard to read and listen to Dennett, but nothing he ever says feels like a complete thought.
@@123unknownsoldier126 Yeah... and I mean he's supposed to be one of the *good* and clear philosophers, enemy of Derrida and the rest of the postmodernists who had declared a war on clarity. If Dennett is a good example of what clear and reasonable "philosophy" sounds like then I can only say we should give up and stop subsidizing university philosophy departments immediately.
I believe the claim that laypersons have "libertarian" notions of free-will is a myth. If we ask anyone why they made a specific choice, they will happily explain to us why it was the best option. The person is aware that their own reasoning caused the choice. They do not believe it was an "uncaused" event.
If we want to pursue it further, we can ask them to explain the source of their reasons. Was it something they read, or something they were taught, or just something they had believed all their lives. Even if they cannot recall the source of their reasons, they would not be surprised by the question, because they are aware of others who might make a different choice due to "bad" reasons.
The layperson would have no clue what "libertarian" free will was about. Nor would they know what "determinism" was about. But they would know what choosing was about, because they've been doing that all their lives. And they would know the difference between a choice they make for themselves versus a choice imposed upon them by someone else.
The layperson also correctly understands the difference between what he "could have done" versus what he "would have done". Given his reasons, he "would" not have made any other choice, even though he certainly "could" have. And he would correctly assert that anyone who said that he "could not have" chosen otherwise would be lying. But he will agree that, given his own reasoning, he "would not have" chosen otherwise.
It seems then that the idea that a layperson's notion of free will is "libertarian" is bogus. The layperson is quite familiar with the ordinary notion of free will that is used when assessing moral and legal responsibility. And the layperson is also quite familiar with the notion of cause and effect, because he sees it in everything that happens every day. To the layperson, free will and causation cannot be incompatible, because he objectively observes them both every day of his life.
Honestly well out version of how a lay person may have something closer to compatibilism.
This whole *deeply* erroneous spiel of yours dodges the question of where the layman thinks that the initial cause is rooted in. The only answer it would be realistic to expect out of a layman is something that the layman directly controls and is aware of. This is plainly not the case. We are NOT aware or in control of the deep, ultimate causes for our actions. Just because the layman doesn't use terms like "uncaused event" doesn't mean he/she accepts the fact that their thoughts and actions are ultimately arising out of processes that they have no awareness of, let alone control over.
@@vigilante8374 "**deeply** erroneous spiel" fyi thats not how you begin a good faith response
@@tobiasyoder "Good faith" has nothing whatsoever to do with being extra-nice. The whole explanation he presented is wrong in every way, shape and form despite some of the arguments appearing reasonable on the surface because he skips over a critical foundational assumption. It almost looks intentionally deceptive the way he's avoiding the absolute central question: whether or not laymen believe that they are in control of the ultimate causes of their actions.
@@vigilante8374 Just sayin, you're not going to get through to many people when you immediately go into sneering debate mode.
Ah, Bamf. Dont feed the unicorns.
There were several points when Dan Dannett clearly lost the debate and I think deep down he knows it. I am surprised that he is stuck the way that he is. He is a brilliant man, clearly. It is hard for me to accept that he cannot see the obstacle he has run into in his own thinking. He must see it. If he does not see it then there is a weakness in his ability to debate. And if he does he really ought to put his ego aside, accept it and move beyond it. But alas, ultimately it is not for him to decide. Dennett doesn’t appreciate the “change the subject retort” that is, according to him, so often leveled against him. I think it is clear to any of us listening to this why the retort is so often leveled against him: Because he continuously changes the subject! Over and over again he responds to Harris’ points against free-will with commentaries about the pragmatism of the position that free-will does exist. Sam is much, much sharper in this debate than Dan is.
Love both of these guys (and especially Harris! 😁
It's a pointless debate which cannot be resolved . It can certainly be won and it therefore can be lost as well and that's fine as long as people understand the underlying pointlessness of the exercise .
I love Sam but I think Daniel pinned him down at 1:03:44 when he called Sam out on absoluteness.
I think this is exactly where Dan seems to be misunderstanding Sam. Sam's whole point is that we are ABSOLUTELY controlled by things that are not within our control, be it our genes or our environmental influences. Dan's insistence in saying we are in control of some things but not everything is the classic case of the person who proves they have free will by lifting their arm and saying "See? I have free will." I can't believe someone as bright as Dan is saying this.
Whether you think Sam is wrong,Dan loses this simply because he wants to live in a philosophical world and not the real world. It is an age thing and he clearly is holding on to the debates of the 70s when he speaks. Also Dan is one of the reasons I am an atheist and one of the reasons I am liberal rather than independent so this is not a bias towards Sam whom I am also a big fan of his ideas.
@@skullkrusher4418 Dan was always this dense. He likes to sophisticate and appear reasonable at the cost of logical coherency - always has, always will. I'm starting to lean on the conclusion that some people at some point loose the capacity to develop a truely strict logical intution and mental process. I think it has something to do with comfort. Unless deeply uncomforable feeling they are loosing their social standing or life, people don't really change their minds. In our teens and twenties, we're still struggling to find our place, and so we stay open to change. As soon as we settle into a comfortable life, we settle mentally as well.
The bar tender cant be breatblyzing clients and all friends can TRY do is get keys and that depends on whose stronger.
I think this is a deeply political discussion masquerading as something else. Dennett wants to preserve consequentialism in order to preserve the legal and moral status quo that has benefitted him. Hence, his compatiblism. Harris is more open to significant social change resulting from discoveries in neuroscience. Dennett is rationalizing contemporary legal and moral theory to protect it against destabilization from new knowledge.
Very interestingly put. Rewatching it that way it does at a point look like Dan was here to further some political propaganda: our current society is a marvel, we got to preserve it, society needs "Law and Order"(tm), and that all of it depends on the freedom of will.
Persons with libertarian free will would on occasion be observed chewing a light bulb or stabbing themselves in the eye with a pencil because their decisions (will) would be free of all constraints. This is because being non-deterministic means to have no constraints which inescapably implies that non-deterministic free will would render choice blind to even those things that the person cares about, goal, values or even avoidance of pain. Moreover, as Dennett points out, being completely non-deterministic in THAT sense is to have no free will at all because that also precludes having the capacity of willing per se.
Very interesting take!
😂
Underrated comment
Extremely naive take but don't worry, you're in good company. The mental confusion that surrounds this issue is amazing.
To figure out the flaw in your reasoning, please explain to me how the thought experiment "oracle machine" (you can look it up on wikipedia) would operate. Hint: It could not operate via determinism. And it could not operate via randomness. And yet there is a LOT of literature written about it and no computer scientist starts babbling about "uncaused actions" or any such nonsense.
Libertarian free will implicitly presupposes a third mode of causality. (The fact that such a causality doesn't appear to actually exist in reality is immaterial.)
It's odd how Sam keeps talking about the self as something other than the state of our bodies, including brains. Who are you other than your body/brain state?
The self is separate from the organism. It’s a model the organism runs to maximize coherence.
Sam: brain tumor argument
Dan: nuh uh
-refuses to elaborate🗿
Sam is not saying we should not hold people responsible for their acts. Dan thinks he is. I believe rehabilitation should get nods over sever punishment. Look at countries where this is the case vs the US where so many are pure victims of their backgrounds. Dan makes a point of control but he acts as control is something not subject to determinism. All in all I feel Dan lost something on his fastball. Sam is right on. Great discussion and they kept saying their starting positions over and over and over. Great subject. I think meditation has really helped my actions. Wish more got better education.
This discussion totally lacks a moderator. Very unsatisfactory, they don't get anywhere. Sam, unfortunately is being too nice, he should have sticked with his own line of argumentation instead of let himself being drawn into Dennetts muddy, confused examples.
Dennett was having a circular conversation with himself. He didn't want to come to an agreement or conclusion.
Sam's pov were concise and to the point.
I did get a sense of disgust from Dennett, mostly from his underlying racist way of thinking. I never did like him.
How exactly does he have a 'racist' way of thinking?
@@myzamau428more like "entitled". He keeps repeating that HE is morally responsible and HE knows how to control a boat and therefore HE has free will, but many other people can not and are not, and therfore THEY have no free will. What a deplorably stupid person.
So the question is: did Joe do it? But who is Joe?
I would say that there should be a distinction between retrospective free will and prospective free will. It seems to me time and uncertainty play a role in defining the degree of freedom someone has in acting or choosing a specific path. I understand Sam's idea of what happened couldn't be otherwise, and it seems logical to apply the same rule to future events. But past events, when seen in retrospect, are not uncertain because we were able to testify to the causation and effect of that phenomenon. Future events are more like bets than stories because, in many cases, the phenomena or the causation are NOT predictable. If you take Sam's idea to the extreme, it would mean, given the correct information and computation, we would be able to predict any future event with perfect certainty because the future is deterministic. But once we had those predictions, wouldn't we be able to change the future?
Dan is talking about freedom.
Sam is talking about free will.
My argument which I've never heard anybody argue is that neither fate or free will exist and that both her man-made concepts. I believe we are living in a complex cause and effect, Domino effect, weather pattern existence. Some may argue that that means that I don't believe in free will then, That's true but I also don't believe in fate. Because Fate would mean that the future can be predicted which I don't think that life can be predicted. Not unlike a three body problem.
Isn't it strange though that the Universe has no cause. I don't mean ''our'' part of the universe, but anything that has always existed, even if it's a rock. So we are part of something that was not a product of ''cause and effect'' there was nothing before it, it was always there. Other option is that it came from nothing, but that's also weird, same as infinite cause and effect.
@@1GTX1 It's kind of like the chicken and egg conundrum. Yeah never mind the material, a single atom, a rock, or a planet. Where did the empty envelope itself come from, where did space come from. How does something come from nothing. How can something always have been. Why can't we wrap our heads around those concepts.
I don't think Dennett realizes how he dances in circles anytime he is asked about the fatalistic undertones of his viewpoint. He just says things like "of course we have control," but that control is not free if we are physically and biologically determined beings, it is merely an epiphenomenal illusion, and there seems to be no way to reconcile the purpose of the self with a deterministic/fatalistic universe. If all is determined, then there is no need of the self and no purpose for it. Why, then, are there selves, or the "illusion" of selves at all? Evolution might as well have designed zombies with no sense of self who behaved exactly as we do. In saying free will (in the classical or libertarian sense) is an illusion is in fact to deny the ontological status of morality and moral responsibility. He wants to have it both ways, but his arguments dissolve people, morality, and freedom to the point where he doesn't get any of them really.
So you want him to believe in something (no logic, or evidence to back it up) because you think that it might benefit society. Fair enough, it's the best argument for any belief system (religion, libertarian free will..), if it works than it should be promoted, but it doesn't mean that what we believe in is true, or that it makes any sense at all. As far as i'm aware most scientists would agree with Dan, not because they feel like it, or believe in it, but based on science experiments, math. I would agree that they might be wrong, since we can only be sure that we are conscious, everything else could be an illusion, even space and time.
@@1GTX1 Not really because of the benefit to society, no. That is a secondary issue. The main issue is that epiphenomenalism cannot explain why consciousness exists. It just says it is there as an illusion. The question to answer is: why is the illusion there at all? In his books, Dennett tries to explain the illusion as some self-monitoring mechanism developed by evolutionary processes, but that doesn't solve the zombie problem, which is the idea that you can have self-monitoring systems without conscious experience. For instance: why am I here to experience the suffering of pain, when evolution could have just made bodies with mechanisms to avoid bodily harm, and no minds to experience the suffering?