Philip Goff disagreement with Sam Harris about free will | Lex Fridman Podcast Clips
Вставка
- Опубліковано 19 жов 2024
- Lex Fridman Podcast full episode: • Philip Goff: Conscious...
Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
InsideTracker: insidetracker.... and use code Lex25 to get 25% off
Grammarly: grammarly.com/lex to get 20% off premium
Indeed: indeed.com/lex to get $75 credit
Magic Spoon: magicspoon.com... and use code LEX to get $5 off
BetterHelp: betterhelp.com... to get 10% off
GUEST BIO:
Philip Goff is a philosopher of mind and consciousness at Durham University and author of Galileo's Error.
PODCAST INFO:
Podcast website: lexfridman.com...
Apple Podcasts: apple.co/2lwqZIr
Spotify: spoti.fi/2nEwCF8
RSS: lexfridman.com...
Full episodes playlist: • Lex Fridman Podcast
Clips playlist: • Lex Fridman Podcast Clips
SOCIAL:
Twitter: / lexfridman
LinkedIn: / lexfridman
Facebook: / lexfridman
Instagram: / lexfridman
Medium: / lexfridman
Reddit: / lexfridman
Support on Patreon: / lexfridman
what? the responsive reasoning argument does not counter the causal hypothesis, it just illustrates some faculties like memory and capacity for logic reasoning. If the hypothesis relied only on sudden decisions it would be a very weak one. You can take as long as you want to make your decision, go back and forth, do some flips, that does nothing to show you have free will.
@@jackd6129 agreed
I am happy with the mundane version of free will. If you give me a choice between eating a cockroach or a snickers bar I will choose the snickers bar. I have the decision making capacity to do that. Whether you can give some infinite causal explanation as to how I ultimately chose the snickers bar is besides the point. I still have the freedom to choose the snickers bar. If you said eat a cockroach or i'll shoot you then I would not have the freedom to choose and would have to eat the cockroach (something I would not otherwise choose given the freedom to choose). It's not clear probing the topic beyond that is worth much.
@@danielm5161 if you are happy not knowing, thats great. Save your time for things that interest you.
@@budaraivoso I am interested in diving deeper into topics that provide wisdom and clarity. It's not clear to me that free will is one of those topics. Freewill is a semantically bundled mess of a concept. It's a primitive word that we should probably just stop using. Lets focus on complex decision theory and the process of goal attainment, those topics are more interesting and useful.
@@danielm5161 yeah i agree that its not that much consequential of a discussion. Harris would argue that his view would enable more compassionate and rational behaviour as opposed to vengefull and ragefull. He has a point but im not so sure.
Free will is indeed a very beaten term but there are some fairly well conceptualized ways to define it and when one wants to engage in this question thats the first step, to agree on the term, i have an idea what definition he was using because he used the term libertariam freewill. I agree that decision theory is way more usefull, and to assume agency on the part of individuals is the way to go, so we dont disagree there.
While I’m not entirely convinced by Sams arguments, He’s not addressing Sam’s stronger points around free will. His counter arguments are a bit vague and fuzzy
Only a bit? What is "responsiveness to reasons" supposed to even mean? That's not an argument, those are just words.
@@felipec Yeah, it's a reasonable criticism they i overly softened my wording. Responsiveness to Reasons isn't actually an argument. As he doesn't address Sams position at all.
Sam would likely say that the "responsiveness" is determined prior to the awareness of a decision to respond and if you look closely at the thinking process, there is no phenomenological experience of choosing that response. Even in extended deliberation, the actual decision of what to do eventually just appears in consciousness without any expression of agency.
Also if you've deconstructed the illusion that you are a discreet entity, then the question of free will no longer is even a coherent question as there is no entity to be free or with agency. It's more like there is a self deception of the sense of free will while you are under the conditioned deception of being a discreet being
@@leegmoore111 Completely agree. Sounds like you've read Waking Up, and understood it.
Most people not only don't think about what the self even means, but they are actually incapable of doing so.
But if you see it clearly your true self is merely a consciousness.
@@felipec I haven’t actually read it, but I have spent thousands of hours in intensive meditation retreats deconstructing my own experience of the world and debunking the profound self deception that we have any real direct control over our cognitive processes. So when I heard the clip of Sam breaking down his position on the other Lex podcast, it was fairly easy to grasp. Also I reasoned to a rudimentary version of Sam’s core argument as a teenager and haven’t heard a compelling rebuttal since (35 years ago) but I am certainly open to it and excited at the prospect of someone actually presenting one. But this guy clearly didn’t do that.
@@leegmoore111 There's an interesting example in the book Waking Up that pretty much proves that we are not a single entity.
Essentially inside your brain there's **two** entities living (right and left brain), and your consciousness being unable to discern that shows that it's pretty detached from the actual processes inside your brain.
It's demonstrated with scientific neurological experiments.
Of course, you don't need the experiment, you can figure that out by simply paying close attention to your thoughts, which most people don't do.
If the mind always defaults to its best interpreted logical choice for every single circumstance it has encountered, then every single one of us would constantly be in a state of the best version of ourselves. In other words, whenever we make a choice against our better judgement, then the better and more logical choice was not made.
Precisely my point, nicely worded.
“Responsiveness to reasons” is absurd. What determines whether you’re responsive to certain reasons or not is the kind of brain you have that fires neurons in a certain way in response to any given situation. You didn’t choose your brain, you didn’t choose how your neurons would fire, therefore you did not choose how you would respond to the relevant reasons in any given situation.
Dan Dennett brought up the same nonsense argument, with slightly different wording, in a debate at Oxford or Cambridge recently (can’t remember which university, which is no fault of mine, since I have no free will). He said that we have free will because we are “moved by reasons”. That logic makes no sense. What’s doing the moving in any given situation is not the person, it’s the reasons. The reasons are moving you, how can you have free will over that? You have no choice but to respond to particular reasons the way that your individual brain is inevitably going to respond to those particular reasons in a particular way in any given situation. You didn’t choose the makeup of your brain, therefore you didn’t choose how your brain would react to anything. His argument is absurd.
An ant has "responsiveness to reasons", that means diddly squat.
What causes that responsiveness is the question, and if isn't you, you don't have free will. Period.
Dan Dennett avoids the question altogether by claiming that even in a deterministic universe you have "free will". How? By changing what "free will" means.
@@felipec free will in the cartoony libertarian sense may be an illusion but the arguments about not choosing your brain therefore you don't have will is also pretty silly
@@kaga13 Everyone has will, or drives, we’re not talking about will. We’re talking about free will. You didn’t choose your brain and therefore didn’t choose how your brain would react to anything in any given situation. It’s all happening to you, nothing’s being authored by you. Where is the free will coming from?
@@voidoflife7058 Obviously you can't choose you're brain without having a brain. You are effectively saying that since nothing can make decisions from outside of the universe then it logically follows that it's impossible for anything to make decisions from within the universe. That is a fallacy. The brain, a thing within the universe...is the thing we are debating about from within the universe. You can't use an argument that sits outside of the universe (you didn't choose your brain, parents, physical appearance, special powers etc.) as a reason to conclude things Within the universe don't have epistemological functions.
@@danielm5161 This outside/inside the universe distinction you’re trying to use as an argument makes no sense. I’m not the one that brought up anything about being outside of the universe, you are. What I said previously isn’t contingent on some outside/inside the universe distinction. I’m perfectly willing to be given evidence or some logical reasoning as to how something within this universe produces free will, I just haven’t been given anything sufficient for that so far.
The brain is a part of the universe. It’s subject to all the same physical limits and laws that everything in the universe is subject to. Your brain may be thinking, but your thoughts appear to you without you choosing them, and the way you respond to those thoughts, the thoughts you didn’t choose, is a product of the way your brain is made up, which you didn’t choose. Everything is outside of your control, where does the control come from? Simply saying that you’re thinking with your brain doesn’t demonstrate that you have any control over that thinking.
Lastly, saying I can’t use arguments such as “you didn’t choose your brain, parents, etc” because in your estimation those arguments “sit outside the universe” is absurd. I also never said things within this universe don’t have epistemological function, there’s just no evidence they have any free will to make events in this universe play out differently than they do in each moment. That doesn’t mean that epistemology doesn’t exist or something.
If you reach a fork in the road and carry on travelling, you will have taken one path or the other. Did you choose the path you took or not?
Can I test to see if I chose a path? Well, I can't go back and realign all of my brain and test to see if I could or not.
So, there is no scientific replication that will give data either way. It is therefore a "leap" from a form of causal determinism to complete universal determinism. It's like a "black box" problem where we have multiple inputs and a single output and the same box, but every time we run any tests we are at a different point in time and the box can never be exactly the same, AND we don't know all the inputs either. What hard determinists are doing is saying that we don't need to know the inputs or even run any tests, determinism is true so volition is impossible.
Advocates for volition cannot claim to scientifically know that volition is true either - through test data. But, perhaps if we dig into our conceptual definitions of reasoning and truth, we can see that the whole process of science and reason are built upon a foundation in philosophy. As far as I can see, this foundation requires us to be able to choose at some level, to reach a fork and self-generate a choice of one path over another. We could call this the choice to focus on reality or not. We cannot take paths that are not in front of us, but perhaps we can pick a path to follow when a fork confronts us.
The process of executing one's free will and the process of being determined by laws of physics are the same. It's like arguing over whether an apple drops down because of its mass or because of gravity. It's a false dichotomy.
I am happy with the mundane version of free will. If you give me a choice between eating a cockroach or a snickers bar I will choose the snickers bar. I have the decision making capacity to do that. Whether you can give some infinite causal explanation as to how I ultimately chose the snickers bar is besides the point. I still have the freedom to choose the snickers bar. If you said eat a cockroach or i'll shoot you then I would not have the freedom to choose and would have to eat the cockroach (something I would not otherwise choose given the freedom to choose). It's not clear probing the topic beyond that is worth much.
But free will is in the fact that different people faced with the same information can and will make completely different decisions. It doesn't have to be life or death, it can be as simple as choosing what to have in a restaurant. That's free will.
@@robertpirsig5011 Yes, it’s just like apples with different masses will fall to the ground with different levels of momentum pulled by gravity. I think we are in agreement here. I don’t know why you started your comment with “But”.
@@danielm5161 Maybe you don't have the freedom to choose even in the first case. if you know for sure due to prior knowledge that eating a cockroach is a bad idea, you will never choose the cockroach and that implies you are forced(in a more mental way) to eat the bar every time
By equating "The process of executing one's free will" and "the process of being determined by laws of physics", you are essentially saying there is no free will and siding with Sam's argument. The counter position is that free is NOT pre-determined just by laws of physics and there is some other factor involved(consciousness perhaps whatever that is)
Don't we need to establish what constitutes having a "will" before we determine when it is "free" or constrained?
What evidence is there for having "will?"
Read Schopenhauer
@@iwannabethekid34xc Why?
Comments such as yours are both assuming and non-specific and thus amount to little.
Try replying to my questions.
What constitutes a will is a person makin an idea in his or her mind first then through thought action and perseverance that idea comes into physical reality !
Whether it is free will or not depends on the constraints of the persons mind surroundings nd ability to make an idea come from the mind into reality
"Schopenhauer put the puzzle of free will and moral responsibility in these terms: Everyone believes himself a priori to be perfectly free, even in his individual actions, and thinks that at every moment he can commence another manner of life ... But a posteriori, through experience, he finds to his astonishment that he is not free, but subjected to necessity, that in spite of all his resolutions and reflections he does not change his conduct, and that from the beginning of his life to the end of it, he must carry out the very character which he himself condemns.."
What Schopenhauer does not tell us is how "will" is biologically constructed in the brain.
Will is good enough. Leave Freedom alone!
"free will"? Simply put, we have no choice but to choose.
This one was new to me. Low key mind blowing.
Its rewarding to see a youtube comments thread with so many people recapitulating Sam ideas on Free Will and the first person non-experience of it. I remember a time on the internet where comments disagreeing with Sam were 9 out of 10, and slowly, overtime its reversed. And that feels nice, for some reason. Maybe it just feels like we are collectively ‘getting it,’ i dunno.
What I find stranger is that I'm finding more wisdom in UA-cam comments than from a professional philosopher.
@@felipec I find the same on Twitter in places
What I find more surprising is the number of people who think the arguments Harris deploys are original or in anyway specifically attributable to him.
@@MarksMindBox Name one person who has made the exact same argument as Harris before him.
@@felipec The book is pretty much a survey of the standard analytic literature on illusionism that every philosophy undergraduate in the west learns in their second year and it's for that reason that you won't find it as a selected text on any course bibliography anywhere.
I don't agree with Sam but I don't think either Lex or his guest really understand Sam's argument. Sam is basically saying that free will requires a metaphysical reality (which Sam doesn't believe in) and does not seem even possible based on standard understanding of physics. Every action has a cause.
I have a theory that allows for both determinism, of a kind, and free will, of a kind, to coexist (which seems counterintuitive on the surface) but that requires a higher dimensional structure of reality. The point that Sam makes is that the cause and effect that occurs at such small levels (that we don't notice) are no different to the cause and effect that we can and do notice. For example, we assume free will when a human acts on impulses that are triggered by various stimuli, with neurons firing and chemicals reacting, but there's no reason to think (within the paradigm of our understanding of standard physics) that this phenomena is fundamentally any different than a leaf moving because the wind blow it. Outside of our consciousness, which we also don't really understand and is only evidenced by our own experience as a conscious being, there is no part of physical reality, as most people understand it, that points to true to the core free will and Sam is correct to say that within the paradigm of our standard model of physics it seems virtually impossible to argue for free will over determinism.
However, the undeniable fact remains that our understanding of reality is flawed, incomplete and likely wrong even in places where we think we "know" we are right. So the possibility of true to the core free will can be argued for but such arguments need to invoke beyond our standard understanding of time and space.
I think your understanding of Sam's argument is solid. I can think of no reason why the two phenomena must be intrinsically different (although I am open to the idea that they might be).
Could you explain your theory and/or how you believe it allows for both determinism and free will?
@@seftondepledge3658 Certainly.
Like I say, it does require a higher dimensional structure for reality of at least 5 dimensions. So is a little out there in that sense and involves an alternate theory on reality itself.
I'm going to assume you are familiar with the double slit and the delayed choice experiment that appear to show that particles exist/behave as waves when not directly observed or interacted with but "collapse" into particles when they are observed with the Delayed Choice experiment appearing to dispel concerns about the possible fallibility of the double slit experiment, and concerns over "observing" particles without altering them. It also appeared to reveal a time travelling effect where the wave or particle behavior is effected by future observations. Also the "spooky action at a distance" of entangled particles is revealed in these experiments.
If you are not familiar with these concepts and experiments then let me know, but I will assume you are in this response.
The reality we experience is 4 dimensional. 3 dimensions of space and 1 dimension of time. But if this was just a 4 dimensional slice of a 5 dimensional superstructure where the 5th dimension was essentially all the alternate 4 dimensional realities, then the phenomena of waves collapsing into particles could be the result of us simply observing a lower dimensional slice of a higher dimensional structure. We know it exists as a wave in superposition, but we can only observe or interact with a particle, which is just a lower dimensional slice of a higher dimensional structure.
So the phenomena of particles existing as waves when we don't observe or interact with them could be a result of those particles (like everything in the universe) existing as part of this 5 dimensional superstructure. The wave is part of the 5 dimensional superstructure that we cannot observe or interact with. We can only observe a 4 dimensional slice. So in the 5 dimensional reality, the "particle" that we observe in one place at one time is actually part of this wave of higher dimensional reality that we are part of but cannot directly observe within our lower dimensional experience.
Something else worth being familiar with is the concept of flat land and Carl Sagan's explanation of higher dimensions, as this has some similarities to the concepts explored there.
If you were a 2 dimensional being living on flat land and a 3 dimensional being came into your reality, it would only be able to put a 2 dimensional slice of itself into your reality because it is 3 dimensional. So cannot put its full 3 dimensional form into your 2 dimensional universe. And we, as 2 dimensional beings would only see this lower dimensional slice of it.
Similar to this, the 3 dimensional particles that make up our reality are actually just lower dimensional slices of a higher dimensional superstructure. So when they interact with our 4 dimensional reality we can only get that 4 dimensional slice, which we observe as particles that are in one place at one time.
So if all of these realities exist as part of a 5 dimensional superstructure, that superstructure would be deterministic but our journey through it MAY not be.
I emphasize the word "may" because it could also be 100% deterministic even within the paradigm of this superstructure. But it could also be the case that we are able to surf this wave with some level of higher dimensional agency that allows us to have some control over precisely which slice of each moment in time we want to move from.
So we can say that in this 4 dimensional reality you can turn left or right but not do both at the same time. But we can say that both realities (where you turn left and where you turn right) exist in this superposition that is part of this superstructure/reality.
It's like imagine the universe was a story book, but instead of one book telling one story, it is all the books telling all the stories. All of these stories exist as predetermined stories but which one you choose to read is not predetermined. Or maybe it is predetermined. Like I say, even this theory doesn't demand free will as part of it, but it does allow it.
Now this does kick the can down the road a little, so to speak, or perhaps more accurately, kick the can up a dimension, because this theory demands that our consciousness has a higher dimensional source with some higher dimensional agency over our lower dimensional experience and even if we accept that theory, it still begs the same question for the higher dimensional being. If our higher dimensional self is able to exercise some agency or influence over which predetermined lower dimensional reality we experience then the same could true going up to the higher level. But that's when my brain hurts and I realize that I cannot extrapolate to a higher dimension that is both theoretical and impossible to understand from a lower dimensional perspective.
Anyway, I hope that all makes sense. It's difficult to communicate these ideas in only the written word. Some of the things that don't seem to make sense (like quantum mechanics) may not make sense to us because we are trying to apply our lower dimensional understanding of our lower dimensional reality to a higher dimensional reality.
So, maybe the slice we experience is predetermined all the way. Or maybe we have some influence over where we go and what predetermined slice we choose to experience with our free will.
The books have all been written (determinism) but we can choose which one to read (free will).
@@matthewsands1572 It did make sense, you explained it well. I’ll have to think about it a bit more. It seems to agree with some of Dirac’s theories that the collapse of the wave function isn’t perhaps as real a process as it appears to be and that in fact particles don’t really exist.
It also seems similar to the Ruliad that Stephen Wolfram mentioned in Lex’s podcast recently. This collection of all possible rules being ran in all possible ways at all times and we exist (this universe) in just a particular place in that Ruliad space. Just as our galaxy exists within this universe in a positional space.
I don’t know much about how realistic the possibilities of more than 4 dimensions. I remember though that I heard it mentioned in another of Lex’s podcast about how they have formulated experiments that should be able to test the presence of higher dimensions and that they hadn’t found anything. I shall have to rewatch and have read some physics papers I think.
Free will seems like a non-starter given that the agent that is acting freely 'the self' does not exist, certainly not in a completely integrated sense. So the theories that it exists are equivocation and some kind of compatibilism. There really is not a big difference between Sam's view and compatibilism, they both agree that acting freely without coercion is an important concept, just disagree on the nomenclature. Sam is basically saying free will is not what most people think it is and he is correct.
No, even with a metaphysical reality free will is a nonsensical concept. Not just in deterministic universe, but in *any* universe.
A higher dimensional structure of reality doesn't change anything.
A nonsensical concept is nonsensical in any reality. A square with three sides is nonsense in this reality, and it's nonsense in any reality.
Shifts the discussion to a safe and irrelevant topic, in a very deliberate and measured manner, a purposeful accentuated manner
This seems like another issue of semantics when discussing “free will”. Phil is referring to the contemplations and choice aspect of “free will”. Sam largely focuses on the idea that most of the “free will” we experience is outside of our control and the ethics of knowing that within our society. I made a choice to watch this video and comment, but I didn’t choose the influences of my youth that lead me to eventually caring about Lex’s podcast.
He's not thinking deep enough about it.
@@jackd6129 Bingo. I find it always kind of frustrating to watch people argue against free will. I think it's a subject where intelligence of the more average kind is helpful. The free will argument is a brick wall and he's using his mighty head as a hammer. The wall ain't gonna break though.
Explain?
I think Sam Harris is basically saying that consciousness and free will aren't required to explain our existence. I agree. In fact I think the Free Will/Consciousness narrative is yet another layer of religious influence which we are now slowly peeling back.
Good point. We haven’t yet cracked the code of our brains. A lot needs to be study and researched.
@@Rancho12345 I think you're right. Tl;dr below - Cracking our biology is just the start. We could obtain a kind of free will, eventually. But we have a long way to go to obtain that level of control.
To expand, a lot, on that...
I think cracking the brain and our biology is just the first step in becoming truely conscious and in possession of a kind of free will.
For now, every single thing about us is original and unchanged. "Nature" decides everything for us. Try to avoid going to the bathroom or eating and you'll see what I'm saying.
The depth of our control only extends to things like curing cancer or fixing vision with a laser. Or curing an infection. Still, that's substantial progress. Shows you how much control can improve things for us.
Once we can directly modify our own risk reward centers, or modify our overall mental and physical capacities, I think then we can start to talk about free will.
I think that kind of biological modification is likely within 50 years. Our bodies are not getting any more complex yet the tools we use are. Very rapidly as well.
Though I think free will is a far larger responsibility than we think it is. Being strongly free of natural influence would probably drive some of us insane. Though, that's true with many things today.
I don't see why you can't just take a pragmatic science-based approach to these big questions. When you do, to me it seems as though the line of what we can see and what we can not becomes a bit clearer. That free will is something we can explain, while figuring out what the universe is, is still a way off.
There have always been things we can kind of see (known science) and things we are still having a hard time seeing. I think free will, the human brain, life and biology are within our reach now, in terms of quantifying enough to feel we see something with confidence.
So, again, why do we need to currently be conscious and in possession of free will? If the evidence even slightly shows that we do not have those things, shouldn't we be trying our best to obtain those things?
I think that's exactly what we are doing through science. Using what little control we do have to gain more control, to eventually gain some kind of strong control we could call conscious.
We have a long way to go. Yes, to many what I say here is boringly obvious. But not to all. Engagement is key.
Tl;dr? Scroll to the top of this comment.
Name an intellectual that ever said they were? Sam thinks we do not have free will base largely off of one experiment. When in fact all that experiment truly demonstrated was that many of our elementary decisioning is unconscious. He is making assumptions that this is the way all decisions are done. That the result is already there before we are conscious. I personally think this is insufficient to rule out free will.
@@robertpirsig5011 As this is UA-cam we have to assume the audience is a mix and not pure academics. Thus what is obvious to an academic may not be so obvious here. Keep that in mind.
How can you make a decision in isolation from the universe? If you're in contact with the universe in any way, you will be influenced by it and thus not truly free to decide.
Free will in an absolute kind of way is obviously impossible. You don't need to test for it just as you don't need to test that we humans must breath to survive. It's obvious.
But, influence is vastly harder to prove/disprove. If you're talking about control in the minor (to the extreme), then I think there is a case to be made.
How much does the universe influence your experience? How much can it? I think many smart people could spend their entire lives debating these questions. And in fact, that's exactly what Philosophers have been doing for a long time.
That's the "hard problem". Absolutes are obviously NOT what we are talking about, but it is what many uneducated people (UA-cams audience) will refer to when speaking of free will.
I'm assuming you removed the absolute from your mind before responding. Well, put it back in because that's the 1st year Uni subject we're discussing here. Or, at least I am.
@@lostinbravado You're the academic here, right??
You certainly are "lost in bravado." To claim some boundary of intellectual prowess so to set yourself apart within a debate is the most "tell-tale" sign of ineptitude.
Newsflash: we've already obtained a type of free will and its called Self Awareness. To Be Aware of Yourself. To Be Aware of Your Being in relationship to other beings and in relationship to the universe at large. We are ALWAYS in a perpetual circumstantial relationship to universal mechanisms however the fact that we can acknowledge ourselves and veritably think "I Am" is a type of separation despite the fact that we can never be separated from the universe. The universe IS creative and seeks to create; therefore the universe acknowledges YOU as its creation and YOU as a willful creative being. IF YOU did not come to recognize YOURSELF, YOU could not be creative. The universe demands that YOU WILL creation into existence.
I was hoping for more, you want a strong argument against free will, Robert Sapolsky, it's impossible to hear his argument and somewhat gerimander a counter argument against, all arguments in favour of free will have fallen short after I heard Robert.
I love Sapolsky. Very charismatic speaker, great teacher. I bring him up whenever people spout off with "You just believe free will doesn't exist to justify being a loser". Sapolsky is a very accomplished man, very intelligent, by no means in any definition of the word a 'loser', and he doesn't believe in free will.
The Sapolsky argument that I heard against free will was terrible. It was the typical ultra-reductionist billiard-balls-in-the-brain appeal to the determinism-is true argument. No concession to the possibility of emergence in the hugely complex electrochemical chaos that is the brain. The main thrust of his argument was neuron A causes neuron B to fire causes this which causes that, therefore no free will. He also makes the not necessarily related point that quantum effects can't operate in the brain because they are orders of magnitude smaller that the size of a neuron. False, as a recent research described in the current issue of Scientific American explains how quantum effects in the visual system of birds allows the to migrate with pinpoint accuracy using the earth's magnetic field. Maybe you have a link to a different Sapolsky's argument. I would love to have it.
0:55-1:02 Uncaused will isn't libertarian free will by at least two meanings of "uncaused". Whether there is literally no cause (which doesn't seem to jive with current empirical findings) or if a single quantum mechanical event (which one might call a cause) can stochastically produce multiple effects.
I find it really difficult to find sense in the argument that "quantum particles are random, therefore free will". It doesn't follow. Let's say the quantum universe is random. Well if its random effects directly correlate to events on the atomic level, which continue out onto a macro scale, then that is still a deterministic process. Quantum event->Event in the universe->Event in our lives. That's deterministic. It's determined on the actions of those quantum particles. You can trace what happens in our lives to that quantum event. And on top of that, randomness isn't freedom any more than determinism is.
Hitchens was once asked if he believed in free will... "of course free will exists. There is no other choice." 😁
I'm confused at why he says it's not obvious that free will is an illusion. I've become more agnostic in my assumptions on free will (which are more or less Sam's assumptions) given my coming around to the reality of parapsychology, as well as Wolfram's computational irreducibility theory, but what I can't shake is the lack of first person experience I have of being in control of the content of the "neural static" so to speak that Sam illuminates (which he usually does by asking you to observer the free will you have about the first city that pops into your head when randomly asked to think of one).
He really shouldn't worry about uncaused causes since there are no caused causes either. Humans use their prodigious memory and imagination to look back in time and create chains of causation. While this intuitive understanding of causation is super useful and survival enhancing, it is nothing but an artifact of mind. The most you can say is that everything causes everything, which clearly shows the futility of subjectively applying the term "cause" to whatever catches your eye first.
Exactly right. Among other things, cause and effect occur simultaneously. The cue ball causes the other billiard ball to move at the instant of impact, not a moment before. The billiard player striking the cue ball is an influence, not a cause. He could as well have missed entirely.
This is a man of science well versed in philosophy of science speaking. That’s the difference between the big boys and the amateurs.
Do you not experience your own thoughts even if you have no way of choosing them? A computer experiences its own computations yet has no control over them. Does this make a computer untrustworthy? Does this make the computer useless (as its output can always be known from its inputs)?
Not only do I believe that there may be no free will (note that I think we do not have enough knowledge to be able to tell at this current time in science) but I think the existence of free will is completely meaningless.
I get that we don't pick which thoughts pop into head at any given moment, but isn't our response to these thoughts what gives rise to the idea of free will? I know the response to that will be that our reaction is a thought itself but that does't seem obvious to me given the highly abstract nature of "thoughts", and I believe there is fundamentally a difference between the mental stimuli that is bombarding us at every moment and how we choose to respond to the stimuli. I'm not a neuroscientist or a philosopher so if you can provide any insight on this please enlighten me.
@@TejanoTigre The problem is the confusing of the word "you". When "you" stumble walking on the street we would rarely blame you for that, it's more like an accident that happened to "you", rather than something "you" did. When "you" forget the name of an actor something very similar is happening, but some people would put the blame on "you", even though again, it's something that happened to "you", rather than something "you" did.
We humans tend to assign blame where there is none. A person dances to make it rain one night, and the next morning it rains, he thinks he did it, but that's just an illusion.
If somebody asks you to name an actor, and you are unable to, it isn't you the one unable to, it's your brain. You are not your brain. You live in your brain.
Most people can't accept the truth that they are nothing more than a consciousness observing events. Some of those events happen to your body, some to your brain, but you did not cause any of those.
Your brain comes up with responses to the thoughts popping in your head, but you (a consciousness) did not cause them in any way. All you are doing is experiencing them.
Like the person wrongly attributing the rain to him, you can attribute your brain's responses to you, but you would be wrong.
@@felipec I appreciate the response. Yes, that is Sam's argument, we are the one riding the horse of consciousness rather than the horse as he puts it. But my question was how we are sure that our response to the thoughts popping into our head are beyond our control and your answer was just that they are. Is it possible to prove this through experimentation? Maybe by putting someone with severe memory loss in the exact same situation twice and see if they respond identically?
@@TejanoTigre You are not riding the horse of consciousness. You are the consciousness.
There is no need for empirical experimentation because by thinking it for two seconds you can see it easily.
Say a thought pops in your head "I want tacos", now, in response to that thought "you" start to deliberate if you are actually going to have tacos or not, and them "you" decide to have tacos.
When did "you" decide that?
Certainly it was before you had the second thought "I will eat tacos". But in order to decide to have that thought, you need a thought prior to that. "I will decide to eat tacos", but that thought requires a prior decision on it's own "I will decide that I will decide to eat tacos".
This is an *infinite* regression. You cannot decide to have a thought before you have it, because that's also a thought that requires a prior decision.
It's logically impossible.
@@TejanoTigre It seems to me that you answered your own query. Stimulus = thought 1. Response = thought 2, and so ad infinitum
I personally think free will could very well exist... but I also think one of Sam Harris' points against free will is an extremely compelling point, that I haven't heard anyone address. His point is something like "think of a movie..." then you think of a movie, say terminator, then he points out "where in conjuring up that movie, was your free will?". It's very true at the experiential level - when you're really paying attention. Even the words im thinking and typing, seem to be coming up out of nowhere. I argue however, that the free will exists, but BEHIND our lens of consciousness. Our consciousness is the lens through which our true selves act. And lastly, to really drive my point home, the reason I think we may have free will, is very much tied into the huge question "IS THE FUTURE DETERMINED". If it is NOT... then there are processes that can alter the outcome of events. Perhaps - these locations are inside each and every living being.
It doesn't matter if the future is determined or not, the point is *what* determines it.
If it's randomness... it isn't you.
If it's souls, demons, or gods... it isn't you.
It doesn't matter what determines the future, because it cannot be you. You are just a consciousness experiencing events as they happen.
luck does not give you free will - and you are spot on with the movie analogy - thoughs come from nowhere and you do not control the decisions that you make - you just watch them happen
Surely, for your will to be free it must be conscious. By definition, you cannot choose that which is subconscious. And YES the future is determined, unless you can disprove determinism.
@@felipec Nono, you miss my point, it does matter if the future is undetermined (which is possible as far as we know). My point is that I am more than my concious self. If you only identify with the conscious part of you, then your missing the idea that you are much more than that. For instance, when you are asleep and have dreams, you live in a theatre of your own mind - and this theatre seems to have a will of its own. You are both the thing creating it, and the thing experiencing it. Now what I am saying, is that if the future is not FIXED, then somewhere between smallest possible particles and the largest macro universe, there exists phenomena which are creating the future. And, I am going out on a limb here, but if our conscious selves are products of the universe, and we feel that we have some agency in the outcome of things... then perhaps we do. Im not relying on randomness, or souls. What I'm saying is we are more than our conscious self.
@@SurrealMcCoy Maybe, but I think this topic is way too complicated to make these claims with certainty. How do you know the future is already determined? How can we be certain that every particle in the universe has been on a fixed trajectory since the beginning of time, and will continue to do so for the rest of eternity? Personally, I'm inclined to believe present and past events are causally determined - but that does not exclude the possibility that the future is at some level undetermined. So ya, how are you so certain that the future is determined?
I don't think free will is something that can have proof one way or the other. Therefore, you have to determine your belief in free will off of pragmatics. I disagree with Sam that it would be better to treat people (including oneself) as if there is no free will. For example, I think treating people as if they have free will is instrumental to things like mental health and encouraging legitimate change. Even if the world is deterministic and there isn't actually free will, treating people as if they do yields better results.
Aside from unnecessarily torturing people it doesn't make a difference.
It doesn't even matter how much we know about the brain, it is obvious to anyone paying attention that thoughts arise on their own. You cannot think your thoughts before you think them, they just emerge in consciousness. There is no free will, the brain just creates a thinker that seems to be separate from thoughts.
You are articulating one of Sam Harris's favorites, but it presumes that somehow consciousness itself doesn't just "arise" on its own. So couldn't you say that you can't be conscious before you are conscious since it just emerges? Your consciousness is generated by the same brain that generates your thoughts, so the distinction is meaningless. Your brain has free will, and you are your brain.
@@caricue I don't have a clue what you're saying sorry. Consciousness does arise on its own. I don't know what distinction you're referring to. There's no free will.
@@illiniry One might conclude that you were just trolling when you ask what distinction I am referring to. In your original post you said, "the brain just creates a thinker that seems to be separate from thoughts." That's a hell of a distinction bro.
It's also kind of troll-y to keep saying "there's no free will" as if just stating it makes it so. It is possible that you are such a generic cretin that you really don't have much in the way of free will, but you could also just have limited communication ability. I don't want to judge.
@@caricue
No, you aren't your brain. Your brain does a myriad of things you aren't aware of. Do you blame people with tourettes for their ticks?
The "you" that is the target of hate, pride and shame isn't an organ.
You are perfectly allowed to have your beliefs but you shouldn't present them as facts. We don't understand how thoughts are summoned/appear. That is all you can say.
For an intelligent guy it is disappointing for him to not even understand Sam Harris's Free Will position. He butchered his description of Sam's position. All of this talk of reasoning and weighing reasons to take a decision is immaterial. Sam's position is that everything that leads up to all that pondering and weighing of evidence comes from nowhere. It is inexplicable to the person where these thoughts arise from . We don't create the the thoughts that pop into our mind and we don't create the decision that gets taken once the brain has decided. We are biological robots and free will is not even an illusion that you can have.
It's not inexplicably were our thoughts come from. They come from reacting to the environment around us. That's why people meditate in quiet spaces to not have their minds interact with a noisey environment which will bring more and more thoughts. The human mind is very complex that we do not fully understand how it works. Saying either way at this point is to make assumptions on things we don't know.
We are just our brains, me and my brain are not separate entities.. so this argument kind of confuses me.
@@gorbachevdhali4952
Bullshit. You don't know 99.9% of what your brain does. Do you sleep? If you are your brain, you shouldn't vanish in the night and reappear the next day or in a dream.
If you are your brain why do tourettes patients experience discomfort?
The intuition here for me is elegant and simple. If we have a system with 8 Billion Nodes (Humans) in a material space (Known Universe) that those nodes were "born" into... what level of agency would those nodes have over that space? And if those nodes are interacting with each other -- how much commonality do they need to transact agency with each other?
Also -- how much deviation does the nodal system tolerate? Killing a node -- our system doesn't like that at all. So there's a lot of limits to agency in any given system we have as humans. There's an inherent resistance to unhinged agency and will. I wonder what the mathematical model is for that? (Is that game theory?)
Both event causation and agent causation forms of non-determinist freedom have detrimental grounding problems.
Goff’s argument that we “don’t know enough about the brain, therefore = free will” is a god in the gaps argument. Good luck trying to argue how the missing knowledge of a thing is what gives him understanding of the same thing.
I agree. The scientific method is to accept the current theories we have based on current data as the current "truth" even though they might be disproved later. So if we come to the conclusion that there is no free will based on our current understanding of the brain, then that is the "truth" for now.
@@joegibbskins yup, neuroscience is still infantile, but it hasn’t found anything that isn’t congruent with all other physical sciences. Making a physical argument for a metaphysical concept is paradoxical and dishonest, despite how enlightening it feels. Humans have always hated to admit “I don’t know” and tend to avoid the distress by filling in the missing pieces with concepts that steer away from objectivity.
@@joegibbskins physical determinism isn’t metaphysical, it literally has “physical” in the name. While it’s far from complete, it is well supported physical science. It is frighteningly well supported by the physical sciences as the only explanation of the phenomena of freedom. I don’t “want” (lol) to believe it either.
It's more like he wants to believe in free will but does not want to give up on determinism, so the only middle ground is agnosticism. In later comments though, Goff does hit on some great points about the really bad experimental design that Sam Harris always trots out under the guise that they prove something.
In truth, conscious prior cause is not the same as physical deterministic prior cause. Conscious prior cause is highly speculative in nature, we speculate that our choices are fully determined by upbringing, temperament, etc, but we have no proof of this, it is just a number of thought experiments. Another prior cause that would be reduced by Harris is the will to live, I am sure Harris would say this is just a computer program. But the will to live provides a goal for the action: without a goal, any action is completely senseless, purposeless, and meaningless. Freedom to do something meaningless is not really freedom, or at least not the type of freedom most commonly used when we think of free will, the kind that imbues responsibility. Common freedom is the freedom to pursue life in whatever manner you freely choose to. This then leads to the meaning of good and evil, in that one may choose to pursue life in a manner that permits peaceful and prosperous coexistence with others, or in a manner that is at the expense of others in various ways. But without that initial goal of pursuing life, good and evil have no meaning. For example, if someone were to harm another person and that harm were to provide no reward or gratification of any kind, we would likely assume mental disability, rather than evil, but if there is a clear gratification or reward, we call that evil. It means the person is not disabled, but is enabled with faculty to pursue self interest in complex ways, but that those complex ways happen to be knowingly harmful to others.
We punish people who have committed terrible crimes of their own free will not because we believe there was no prior cause, but because we are appalled by the present condition. Such a person's present condition is likely one that maintains certain disdain and malevolent beliefs about the society they live in, to commit such a crime. Those beliefs are like a mind virus that can spread from person to person, so we view the one infected with those beliefs as particularly dangerous. We also abhor those beliefs ourselves. The indignation we express through our justice system is not about the potential to do differently, it is about releasing society from the obligation of compassion, so that someone dangerous can be treated with severity.
@@peterrhoads9317
Sam does not do that. Instead he points out that you can know that free will is bullshit a priori through reasoning about either causality or phenomenology.
Free will & destiny/fate are not mutually exclusive. Both exist. Like a horse tied to a pole with a rope. The horse is free to move in the inner circle or sit etc, but only till the limit of the rope. We all live in 2 concentric circles - the inner circle of free will & and an outer circle of pre determined attributes (country, family, parents, socio economic status, genetic predisposition etc). Karma would have no meaning if there was no free will. What we do in our inner circle, of free will, determines our next outer circle. Absence of free will will make karma & liability for your actions, redundant. It would also mean that we could just all sit at home, watch UA-cam all day, and if fate wanted us to be a billionaire, that would just happen om it's own
Your ability to respond to reason is deterministic. If, then, etc... to weigh, is deterministic: which is more valuable to me? Do the math... No freedom involved, but rather indecision, ignorance, impatience, and so on.
We have Determined Wills, not Free Wills.
Goff is not doing a good job here. The actual answer is that you are not your thoughts. Your brain generates thoughts. You exist as awareness and will. Not thoughts. You still exist even when you're not thinking. Free will is not tied to thoughts.
It was very painful to listen to Goff speak about his rationale. Very nebulous and unsure about his points. I have listened to hours of Sam postulating his ideas about it and they seem cogent. Just my read... Perhaps it is how he delivers his message or maybe I should watch the entire episode.
I don’t think anyone understands Sam argument or position. It’s not even that hard.
Try forget your own name and tell me you have any free will.
For one thing it wasn't Sam Harris's argument in the first place. He just popularised an experiment that tried to investigate elementary decision-making process.
Good example
@@rd5854 Ty
An algorithm can also be said to be responsive to reasons, no?
No, a computer does not "know" anything, so it cannot respond to reasons. It is a mechanism that will give a desired output if properly programmed.
@@caricue How is a human anything but a mechanism that will give the desired output properly programmed by evolution and its past experiences?
@@seftondepledge3658 If you manage to create a "mechanism" that actually knows anything, or understands anything, then you will go down in history. And if you really don't know the difference between a mechanism and an organism, then you probably won't get too far with the project.
@@caricue I would like for you to explain what you mean by the terms 'know' and 'understand'. Not because I am trying to win a discussion through pedantry but because I think it is hard for us to debate with one another if we do not have a common basis from which we can both reason.
@@seftondepledge3658 Congratulations, you have asked the "right" question. If you've ever tried one of those Chatbots online, then you know immediately that the thing doesn't know anything. Even that computer that won Jeopardy doesn't "know" what a game show is, or what a computer is. It doesn't really know anything. The fact that you can have this discussion and ask the right questions means that you do "know" and "understand", but other than that, it is impossible to define. Sometimes, even when talking to other people, you suddenly realize that "there is no one home." I am being honest, and this does open me up to pretty much any counter-argument, but the fact remains that you can easily tell when you are dealing with a robot.
Sam's argument on this topic has a major flaw. And that is his arrogance masked as certainty.
At the end of the day, his argument looks like "There is no free will because no idea is truly your own. Every idea you've had can be traced back towards an environmental exposure. If there was a machine that could see life as inputs and outputs, then you would act exactly as you would now. Don't even trip about not having free will, continue acting the same. Oh by the way, I am right. And have sympathy for prisoners btw lol hehe MRI SCANS 7 SECONDS!"
He speaks with certainty on an abstract topic. There is no scientifically measurable "free will." It's not a physical law - like gravity.
Due to the abstract nature of this idea, which can never be truly proven, since the validity of the idea relies on postulation and with majority consensus, should not be taken as gospel - because there can't be.
This position doesn't really add anything to any discussion though. We believe free will exists as a concept, we operate as if it does, it effects peoples lives in negative ways. There is utility in discussion about it.
It's not abstract and it's obviously absurd when you even try to make sense of it physically for a second. It's also absurd experientially.
Was it the Roman poet Avid that said "I prefer not to speak with those who do not have free will since they did not formulate there own opinions".
Avid just belonged to the deluded majority of people who believe in the reality of free will. Notwithstanding this, it is entirely possible for opinions to be modified as a result of a conversation. This does not require free will.
@@SurrealMcCoy While the statement is a joke to be appreciated by both camps it is funny to see your intolerance in the answer. Too many unknowns for such confidence in the matter; no deluded majority required!
I agree with Sam that free will is not even an illusion. I recognized that on my own when I was still a child. But it is not a tragic loss. Why would you actually want a will that doesn't follow from the conditions of the past? That is what allows you to create a future that you desire.
And yet some learn from their past and others don't. I'm not sure one can say by learning from the past they have no free will. I would argue learning from your past and changing your behavior is a direct result of free will.
Either way Sam's arguments are super interesting.
@@maxamos7 Well, it isn't free from causality and physics, but would you really want to be free from those things? You're never going to run into a situation where you can't will what you want to will. So I say will is *free enough*. Yes, Sam is interesting. He doesn't try to dazzle. It is just very direct and earnest logic with him.
@@theotormon will is "free enough"... I like that.
Determinism vs free will ... Would you like your death by another human act to be investigated?
What is will?
I agree with Sam Harris on this
It's hilarious how many Sam Harris fan boys just say. "Sam is right" and take that as an argument. Really some of his fans are completely irrational.
@@robertpirsig5011
The arguments are made a hundred fold in the comments.
Lex looks really pale in this stop fasting so much bro coffee ain't food 😅
The certainty and hubris among Sam Harris fans in this comments section is astounding. Harris can be entertaining but he’s not a serious mind. His work is dreadfully imprecise and lazy.
that's just disappointing
Even weighing up for reasons isn’t going to cut the mustard because the influences of those reasons you didn’t choose yourself. Why do you lean this way more than that? Mostly an accident of birth.
I'm a little surprised at how lazy his position is on free will. Maybe I'm just missing something.
Care to elaborate?
@@robertpirsig5011 not really
@@davidhoggan5376 I guess you are missing something then.
Who is the puppet master? Who is pulling the strings?
I think if you really understand Sam's argument, people having free will doesn't even make sense. It isn't even about scientifically "proving" that free will doesn't exist.
"Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills."
So you're saying that Sam Harris sees people exercising free will, concocts a concept of free will, proves this concept wrong, and then says that the original free will that he based his concept on doesn't make sense. What could go wrong?
@@caricue What is your definition of free will? Sam and many others claim that since there is an illusion of the self (= a thought that there of a conductor/driver/permanent entity/experiencer inside this skinbag which is separate from experience and that controls most of the body's actions), libertarian free will doesn't really make sense since there isn't anything that could make it "free" from physics, biology.
@@Leksi20 Thanks for the interesting response. If I see a natural phenomenon, I give it a name and a description. If I want to think about it further, I may create a concept of the thing. In order for a concept to be useful, it must have a good definition. At no point does it make sense to use the concept to negate the very thing on which it is based.
It is easy to come to strange conclusions when you introspect. If you look at yourself from the outside, you will see a unified organism that has various behaviors. One of those behaviors is the ability to choose from the available options based on whatever is going on. This is free will.
That arguments stands up to every element on the periodic table. To me it is insufficient for a complexity that we could only hope to truly understand one day.
How much free will do you need? Seems like literally 1 bit of free will potential is sufficient. Everything else can fall like deterministic dominos in your brain, but the the entire cause and effect hinged on one Yes or No choice. Besides, how does freewill scale? I doubt a million bits of free will potential means free will is a million times freer. All the low level freewill in the world doesn't count for much when for example some CEO says Yay or Nay and the whole will of a corporation aligns to a 1 bit dictate. Of course it can't be deterministic. Therefore is likely is something quantum mechanical about it. They say quantum effects can't persist in the brain to be of use computationally. But you only need in some sense 1 qubit to manifest some high level free will decision making like a CEO. To think 100 trillion synapses couldn't cunningly integrate 1 qubit across neurological time and space from all the countless quantum events in the brain in a way that bypasses our intuitions is pretty myopic. I mean nature has had a billion+ years doing 10^20 experiments, so stumbling onto that incomprehensibly useful 1 qubit of freedom doesn't seem that outlandish to me......
yet you do not even have that
@@dmshunt lol, that's not what you confided in our mutual lucid dream...
Drivel
Despite what anyone thinks, your subconscious is still you.
No. I have hair, but I'm not my hair. I have a hand, but I'm not my hand. I have poop inside my intestines, but I'm not my poop.
I have a body, but I'm not my body. I have a brain, but I'm not my brain.
And yes, I have a subconscious, but I'm not my subconscious.
I'm a consciousness, my subconscious isn't me.
I have about the same idea of what's happening in my subconscious as I have of what's happening inside your brain: *zero* .
@@felipecWhat makes you think it's ok for you to insult or be rude to me? I'm really interested to know because as far as I can tell you had no reason to.
@@alterecho8261 I have not insulted *anyone* .
People are such snowflakes nowadays.
@@felipec Right, so the very last sentence in your first reply was not a negative characterization designed to minimize my own reply and at the same time instigate some type of disagreement whereby I start defending myself against it. and here again you're doing the same thing. And you'll say oh that wasn't towards you it was towards other people but you'd be wrong because the implication is that you're talking about me, again rude for no reason.
@@alterecho8261 I don't care what you think. Attacking ideas is not an insult. *Period* .
You can extend your will with relationships if other people are willing to bend to your will.
It's not that you're not free it's that you don't have full control over your environment.
Rationality and weighing up decision does not make it more free than random decisions. The closer you get to pure rationality the more the decision is entirely determined by the circumstances. Either way you don't get to determine the weights that go into making decisions and even if you could, the reasons expressed for making decisions are often post-facto rationalizations.
This does not in any way address the Sam's arguments against free will, is it just simply poorly articulated or extremely sloppy thinking?
What's pure rationality got to do with choosing a color to paint your room? Ask two people, more often than not you get different answers. Nothing to do with what you call being more rational. Many discisions have nothing to do with being objective. Many questions boil down to individual taste which can't be accounted for.
Also people do determine weights for decision all the time. It's called accountancy.
they give each other titles and prizes too ! huge imagination ! it is their paradise !
I’m proud to say Sam Harris has prepared me to refute this guys argument on reason being evidence that free will must exist
As soon as he made his claim, I paused the video and pretended to be across from him and gave such an eloquent answer.
Thanks Sam.
Freewill is the spouse of destiny.. the brain is not a factor .. as it is the domain of the soul
brillant!!! - a great summing up of the problem and how it may be resolved- of course I can fall in love with alicia vikander anytime soon:)
To fully say either “free will doesn’t exist” or “determinism isn’t implicative” is pretty arrogant. I like Philip’s take on incorporating Edward Lowes philosophy of taking an agnostic approach to defining ‘free will’
Well put
Yes, distance yourself from any uncomfortable conclusion. And do that while covering everything in well made intellectual arguments. Typical cowardly intellectuals.
What's wrong with having no free will? What's wrong with not being conscious? Aren't these two narratives simply more elements of Christianity and other faiths?
Do we really need such concepts as free will and consciousness? Are we not yet mature enough to move just a little past our own mortality? I think we can, and are.
@@lostinbravado and so the name calling begins.
@@KyBrancaccio It's not name calling. It's an inconvenient truth. We're all afraid, and so we should be. But to allow our fear to control us only holds us back.
We don't need stuffed animal like concepts such as free will. It's just childishness.
@@lostinbravado “allow our fear” as if we have a choice?
If you don’t believe in free will you were forced into whatever belief you have, so how can you be trusted?
Is suicide not free will?
How would suicide be free will?
@@voidoflife7058 the person doing it is choosing to do it, or are they not? Ps how would suicide not be free will?
@@mickwelch4041 You seem to think that since suicide is such a severe action that one must choose to do it, because of its severity. In reality, neither suicide nor something as inconsequential as scratching an itch is chosen by the person who does it. The severity of a particular action is irrelevant.
@@mickwelch4041 Choosing to commit is still a cognitive choice like any other choice the brain makes. Why do you think it's any different just because the example you used is extreme?
I really appreciate Philip's acknowlegment of doubt at the begining. Gives him way more credibility. Thats what grates my nerves with Sam, is that he claims with near certainty his position - and I think that limits the conversation.
Sam Harris can be as certain as he likes. It's up to others to refute his reasoning. I'm sure he would welcome a cogent refutation.
@@SurrealMcCoy Yes Im sure he would. I wish I could chat with him. Perhaps explore alternative hypotheses.
The case against free will literally couldn't be any stronger. Both from phenomenology and physics, it's utter nonsense.
When you are aware of a decision, you cannot have caused it. Simple as. At some point there is a first thought and you haven't created it.
We have a calendar that tracks consciousness. The 20 day cycle, is the beginning of the path to exploring free will and consciousness. Until physics can detect what causation is behind it, we are stuck in an eddy. The question is, where do ideas come from ? The people who are most often asked this, are artists and scientists. Those two groups need to start working together and it will be messy. The first 20 hexagrams of the I-Ching are the same descriptors in the same sequence as the 20 days. The 20 amino acids are the same functions in the same sequence as the 20 days. The primordial elements Tin-Ytterbium are the same sequence and function as the 20 days. So we have tangible and intangible examples. If we do not own our ideas and they are pre-existing, we need to change the values. We are opportunistic receivers,..gathering ideas from pre-existing consciousness. Then , the next step is exploring independent entities tampering with the either the schedule or the receiver. That is where most shaman/elders are working.
There's absolutely 0 room for "free will" either in physics or in personal experience. It's just plain nonsense, no matter how much you try to steelman the idea.
This is not true at all. You clearly know nothing about philosophy or neuroscience
Even if free will is an illusion, it is certainly a useful illusion. Just like the desktop on your computer.
The desktop isn't an illusion and free will isn't an illusion either.
The desktop us a real terminal doing what it seems to be doing. Free will is nowhere to be found.
@@MrCmon113 Look up user illusion, or better yet - interface.
@@analoguedragon7438
The desktop does exactly what you expect it to do. An illusion is when something doesn't jive. You never have direct perception of base reality. You have appearances in consciousness and when they are coherent then your perception isn't an illusion.
At the same time there is no illusion of free will. If you actually pay attention you never feel like you are choosing anything. Free will is a delusion without any illusion component to it. People just don't check.
I personally believe in god but I love this conversation. Lex love ya!
Anyone that has changed their mind once ,twice and then three times, (as I expect most humans have done) would find it hard to believe that they did not have free will. Perhaps those that make such arguments are victims of their own impulsiveness. Incredible confidence in the science of measuring something that we are only just beginning to understand takes a huge amount of arrogance in my opinion.
Changing your mind does not require or prove free will.
Changing your mind is still a process in your brain that you had no control over , because you still don't know where those thoughts came from , you didn't create them , it seems like you did but that is why the illusion of free will is so convincing , you can't think of something before you think of something , so you can't create your thoughts.
@@laza6141 Thank you for your feedback. I appreciate the enormous confidence that you have in your unproven conclusion; I do mean that sincerely. I believe that my thoughts came from an amalgamation of my whole life experience, my whole life's accumulated knowledge and too many numerous other things that I believe that we are heretofore unable to understand or fathom. My unproven conclusion still stands. In contrast, all of my prior thoughts and experiences (distinct biology and a plethora of other unknown things included) are part of me thinking something before I think something. In deed there is some conditioning in there as well depending on one's training. Please educate me more as I appreciate opposing views. Thank you in advance.
@@laza6141 If YOU can't create your thoughts, exactly who does create your thoughts? Is there someone else in there with you Laza?
@@KyBrancaccio " all of my prior thoughts and experiences (distinct biology and a plethora of other unknown things included) are part of me thinking something before I think something. "
But you don't have control over those things either and you certainly don't have control over your genetics or your upbringing , you didn't choose to have a normal brain or a brain of a psychopath , you had absolutely no control over those things and in the same way you don't control your brain , your brain controls you.
Sam Harris is too confident in matters humans are yet to completely comprehend.
But not free will, because that's easy: free will is a nonsensical concept.
You can be completely confident in rejecting self-refuting nonsense.
I don't have to govto Pluto to see whether there are any married bachelors.
I write this often, but Sam’s argument against free will isn’t even an argument. It is a dismissal of a phenomenon because it threatens his model. It doesn’t fit in the model so it must not exist because the model must be upheld. But explaining to people identified with their intellect that the world won’t conform to their ideas is Sisyphean.
@@jackd6129 his statement is that there is no way to ground choice in what is known about physics and so he dismisses choice.
That is it. That's what he says. He mistakes the map for the territory.
There is no phenomenon. There is the assertion of the existence of some cryptid and upon reading the description of the cryptid it becomes apparent, that it is absurd.
There is no reason to look for something that cannot exist.
@@andrewcain6518
Of course choices exist.
But no matter what level of randomness is involved in them, they don't resemble "free will".
Awareness of a choice comes always after the choice.
@@MrCmon113 so there are choices, but not free will.
That isn't even wrong.
I didn't say anything about randomness. So I don't know why you missed the mark, but I would guess you are positing some argument about randomness introducing freedom. I didn't say any such thing. Nor would I.
Sam's argument begs the question.
Full stop.
Sam Harris is insufferable now. His TDS really broke him.
It doesn't change the fact that he is correct about free will.
@@laza6141 I appreciate the back and forth today. You had the last word here but I think asserting his position as a fact is a bridge too far. I prefer not to assert the unknowable as FACT. JMHO in that confirmation bias is hard enough to overcome without believing something to be objective fact.
That's true. But he is right about free will.
@@KyBrancaccio
That absurd things don't exist is very knowable.