Yeah, this is where the argument that "there is no free will" becomes problematic. It's a made up concept that's practically designed to destroy the idea of accountability despite the fact that there are clearly actions that we want people to not do, regardless of the causal chain.
Your client has the type of brain that would steal gallons of maple syrup so we need to issue some sort of behavioral training to make it less likely this brain will try to do this again.
Now take it to the extreme, and how do we now justify the Nuremberg Trials? If the Nazis had no free will, then they couldn't choose to not genocide the Jews, so now what? Denying free will leads to all kinds of extremely dark places...
Don't be slave, free will does exist. For a detailed explanation, please watch this 37 min video: "The Latest Scientific Evidence of God - Fr Robert Spitzer at the Napa Institute Summer Conference."
My mother has expressed regret over marrying my father. In response to that I told her that she wouldn't have any of her children as we are. Her response is always that we'd still be us, just a different version of us. Since I am genetically a product of my father and mother, I wouldn't be me if she had married and had children with some other man. I would never have existed. Sorry, this is a tangent to your statement that we are who we are because of who are parents are, who their parents are, who the parents of their parents are, and so on. I was reminded of this conversation with my mother because of your statement.
@@the-weirdist Not Quite the way I see it. If there 'was' a world where your mother married a different man or otherwise had or did not have children, they would not be you, because you are unique and uniquely yourself. But if there were no 'other' worlds and this world was defined by predetermination, then there also would not be a you, because there is no 'self' in this world, there is no conciousness in this world. The only way you exist is if you and all concious life have free will. And I'm so glad that you do.
@@the-weirdist : Yes, those too; I only mentioned specifically genes because you had. But this applies to any change. If there's anything that your mother has ever done that she regrets, or your father for that matter, or their parents, or a teacher that affected them, or really anyone ever (because everything affects everything else a little bit); if this person had done things differently, then you would have had different experiences and so be a different person. In fact, if there's anything that you've ever done that you regret, if you'd done it differently, then you would be a different person now. I know that there are things that I've done that I regret; if I'd done them differently, then I would be a different person now. (In one way a better person, who didn't make that mistake; but in another way a worse person, who didn't learn from that mistake.) But when I think about something that someone (me or someone else) regrets, it doesn't bother me that if things have gone differently then I wouldn't exist. If the different people who would exist would be better off, then I share the regret.
17:32 In all fairness, dude spent 35,000 hours over 13 years living amongst Grizzly Bears. He was able to gain rapport, walk up to them, and straight up pet some of them. And the bear that attacked them was a new bear to the area that he admitted he was unsettled by. Absolutely deserves a rewatch.
Sounds like a similar case to Steve Irwin. You can spend your whole life around dangerous animals, learn how to get close without provoking them, have the training to know when to get out when things get dicey...but all it takes is one stroke of really bad luck and it's curtains.
@@AceSpadeThePikachuDingo Dinkleman just a few months ago. Literally regarded as the biggest expert on Mamba conservation and handling, has owned dozens of them over his years of adulthood...and then he gets called to move a WILD mamba, who he doesn't know, and even if he is the best....the best still can make a single wrong move... Arguably much sadder than steve irwin to me, because you could argue going near the stingray was unnecessary when theres stock footage available already. But a wild mamba in an occupied area simply MUST be moved. If not by him than by someone else. They are SO dangerous, they are fast, agressive, and very good at climbing into rafters or places you will not notice until its biting you. Actually, the species that got him, green mambas, are famous for killing cocoa harvesters. They coil up in the trees, the harvesters cant see them even though they constantly look, and then boom. Too fast to avoid, no warning. Some go numb before they can even finish climbing down the ladder and fall. Just sucks that we cant talk to animals, seriously. Like if i could just explain to my dog "dont eat nylon straps you could get a blockage and will be in pain and need to stay at the vet and its a huge thing" then maybe shed stop eating, well, literally everything
Sir I have ADHD, I am aware I am barely in charge of ANY decision that happens in this body, I am not the driver, I'm a passenger that is half outside the vehicle trying their best to hang on as we speed down the highway, my man
As a neurotypical who hasn't believed in free will for many years, I think you've described all humans. The only difference is you've accepted it and aren't deluding yourself (consciously or otherwise) into thinking you're in control. That is to say, I think you're more in touch with reality than most people, lol.
I sadly know all too well what you mean. Checking if the door is locked... then try to open it, after that lean against it to be sure.. then check the key again.. open or close the window at a certain speed, then lock that, and make sure 7 times, exactly 7, that the handle is fully closed, so that the window can not be opened. Turn off the lamp in a certain way.. for me my OCD is very reliant on numbers of successions being perfect. Example: I have one 50 watt lamp in my room, and the ceiling lights (which I never use). When shutting off that lamp, and going to bed, I always press 3 times.. I also have a small light on my nightstand (but I broke the switch due to excessive fumbling with it). When both lights were on, I pressed 1 time in the on position for the bigger lamps light switch, then 4 times in the off position, making sure my fingers glide off the plastic material in a certain way. Then, having the number 4 in my head, I would lay in my bed, and continue there.. press the switch in the "on direction" while the lamp is still on, then off.. still having the number 4 in my head, I would then go 4..5..6 and finally.. 7. For me it's all related to numbers.. 3, 5, 7, 13 and 16 are "okay" amount of times (interestingly, 4 out of 5 of those numbers are primes, and uneven numbers tend to be more "acceptable" than even ones) to switch something off, or rather, to make sure it's really off (even though the lamp is obviously off already since it's not emitting any light). It made me very sad to write this.. I am literally wasting away my life doing literally useless things.. therapy did not help (except for one method I wrote about below), medications did not help. The best thing I have found yet is to just not listen to your mind, which ironically, is considered therapy, exposure therapy to be exact. When I ignore the triggers of my OCD, then the next day, I wouldn't worry nearly as much.. if done for a longer period, I sometimes feel much better and the OCD is almost gone but as soon as the baseline anxiety level goes through the roof for whatever reason, the cycle repeats. Maybe try that? I hope you find the peace that you deserve eventually.
@@williamkaneDoesn't sound like a pleasant experience. I too have OCD,but of the contamination type. I have had it maybe two or three years before puberty,and I'm 42 as now. My OCD started to get quite worse around early 2020. Along with my worsening came erotomania and intrusive thoughts. I would keep having to do the same things over again to try and get the unwanted thoughts and feelings of uncleanliness to go away long enough to get ready to go to work. I know it's not the exact same as your experience, but the anxiety and panic certainly are. It has me at rock bottom. I dont know if meds and/or therapy will truly work. I wouldn't wish OCD and everything that comes with it on anyone,it has made me almost useless. Good luck to you! And will definitely check out the methods in your comment.
I too have had OCD for a good while.It's of the contamination type. I have had it maybe since I was 12,and I'm 42 now. It hasn't been too bad of an issue until 2020. For some reason I started to have erotomania and intrusive thoughts,which in a way,are opposed to my OCD and the need to feel clean. So anxiety, panic,rituals,second guessing,and feelings of hopelessness are almost a daily thing. I feel your sentiment of never feeling free,or that I have any semblance of control. I wouldn't wish it on anyone for any reason. I will paraphrase Howie Mandel: "It has ruined my life." For me,its rock bottom. I hope for the best for you and the other person in this thread. 👍🏽
@@johngavin1175 Thank you for sharing your story, John. I will reply in detail tomorrow because it is very late where I live and I need to get some sleep. Until then, I wish you nothing but the best.
Before we can answer "do we have free will?", we have to define "what is free will?". If we define it in some specific ways, we have it, and we define it differently, we don't.
one thing thats undeniable is that we have some kind of will that we act with, but whether or not its "free" and what that means exactly is the difficult part, and also the less important part
Right, we aren't free to choose our desires, thoughts or likes, but we are free to chose our actions. If we weren't free to chose our actions then we would never struggle to decide, and we would never be able to change our mind.
Yeah. It's thorny. Kyle kept saying free will meant decisions made with our *conscious* mind, which is...a little slippery, maybe. Because there's a lot of our minds that are not conscious, and yes...decisions often come from there, and their origins are therefore hazy or even inaccessible to our consciousness. That doesn't necessarily mean it's not 'free.' I also take some small issue with his implicit assertion that 'choosing from a limited set of options' is the same as being 'unfree.' You may not control what options you have, but if you're still choosing between the available options, that does represent a degree of freedom. It's an interesting thought experiment though, and I think people probably do overestimate how much freedom they have in making decisions. But I don't know that I agree that there's *no* such thing as free will.
As far as I understand it Kyle is arguing that a "Free Will" that puts "you" outside of pure physics and biology does not exist. We can make choices sure, but they were either predestined in a classical determinism sense, or randomly produced due to quantum mechanics. There is no room for a "you" agent that sits outside of physics and biology, so perhaps we should be a bit more compassionate to people just like we are to certain animals or people with brain tumors.
The common idea of free will is that "I could have done otherwise". There is no way to make coherent sense of this idea. It's just a psychological illusion like deja vu.
I think people with ADHD can probably relate when I say, I have never in my life felt like I was in control of my actions. When you have ADHD and are not being treated for it, the rift between what you consciously want to do and what you actually do is an absurd grand canyon of torment that just spirals up to self-hatred very quickly. I hear sometimes people with autism also feel this way. So, I think people like us have an innate understanding that free will is really not something you can ever rely on. This video perfectly describes why.
This has been my experience too. I have never been able to make a decision and stick to it. Either I'm a shitty person that doesn't care enough to do what I am wanting or supposed to be doing, or I just am not in control of myself. I feel like I care a lot so to me only the second option makes sense to me.
Brennen Lee Mulligan said something that was hardcore in his D&D show about this (paraphrasing) “you think you make choices, you drive down the highway and decide to take this exit or the next, but you didn’t make the road. The big decisions were made for you long ago”
cool quote, but i dont think it really works out, same for most of the videos points. The logic is based on the idea that to have any choice you have to have had a choice about everything, which is not and can not be anything more than an opinion, not a fact. Yes there will always be things influencing or restricting your choices but that does NOT prove there is no choice, you not building the road does mean you cant safely just get off wherever you want, but it does NOT mean there is no choice between exits. You can still choose what to do with the hand your dealt and that is still a choice regardless of if you got to pick the cards or not.
Behind your skull is a cloud made of meat. Within that cloud is a thunderstorm. That thunderstorm is you. Thanks, Kyle. I have never felt more like a billion dice rolls before
if you realize its dice rolls. u can chose not to receive the number if you pay attention close enough u can not act, that is where most 'free will' is expressed and its always contrary to what you felt like doing
You mean those same dice rolls that are completely determined by the shapes of the dices, the friction forces that act upon them, the strength with which they were thrown, etc., etcetera... ?
Objection! Irrelevant. The court will either find the defendant guilty or not guilty by due process like any other chemical reaction standing in this room with us today.
You can not fool me with determinism. I choose twice to watch this video, first when I subscribed and the second when I clicked on it. Edit: Hint. It's maybe, perhaps, possibly and very probably a joke. But on serious note I don't think about determinism and free will as absolute terms.
@@bayfish_9156 As happens far too often to be unique, Kyle said Honda Accord exactly as I read your reply If Google could monetize that they'd have more money than... idk, a ghost-woman offering free Hondas and goat-horses to the undead
@@myscreen2urs actually it is free. you just have to know how not to fuck it up and thats why all of us pay turbotax $50 to not fuck it up..... thats also why turbotax lobbies the government to keep it difficult
That depends on your income level. If you're to low, it's not really worth the cost of going after you, if you're to high you can make it to costly to go after you. Gotta be right in that juicy middle where you can't afford the tax lawyers to fight back. 😉
the idea that free will isn't real has never really bothered me as much as it seems to bother other people. Knowing that I don't technically have a choice or a decision in anything doesn't change anything about my life, I'm still "choosing" to do things, and I can still "choose" to do the right thing, even if it might as well be random
No it is not random, your choices simply have an input that you cannot identify. Just like a computer does calculations, you simply are not aware of all the calculations going on inside your brain (which is a good thing, or you would not be able to sleep). If you choose a chicken sandwich over salmon, it means your brain did calculations, based on sensory input from your cells: what substances does the body need more right this moment (salt, fat, sugar, etc.).
This is such a profound discussion! If we follow this logic to it's conclusion, justice is meaningless. Every single act is bound to happen, so, nobody is guilty. Of course this is nonsense. My view is that we must apply the notion of free will, or Chaos will ensue. Another point I like to mention is that we are so complex that every single interaction on our neurons can very well be deterministic, but the overall result is only computable if you have all variables at your disposal. The only place these variables are available is your brain, so it might as well be your choice.
i see it like watching a very immersive movie. what will i do next? pay attention to the story to find out! participation in a movie is about watching it happen, thinking and reflecting on it, and identifying with the themes and characters. my own life is simply my own personal movie with full surround sound and even emotions
Lol, "Why didn't you think of a city like Christchurch? A place you've always wanted to visit?" As a person who lives in Christchurch, a) it was the city I chose, and b) why the hell would you want to visit here? There's about zero tourist attractions, fuck all night life, unwalkable and barely driveable roads plus roadworks and construction everywhere, plus Queenstown/bungee jumping/hot pools/etc is all hours away.
Unwalkable? Sounds like a terrible place,as I love walking. I chose Oslo for no reason. I haven't ever traveled the world. I'm stuck here in Florida. Which isn't pleasant either.
@johngavin1175 well, barely walkable. There're some spots like Hagley Park that are fine, but you can't get anywhere unless you're in a car, and a bus will turn a 15 minute trip into an hour. If you want anything outside your suburb it's practically unwalkable. Better for bikes than walking. Still, hardly a tourist place
I don’t get why people genuinely think that if science proves free will doesn’t exist than that means they would instantly lose their free will. If science proves free will to be an illusion you don’t change one bit and can continue to live a life you see fulfilling just as you used to.
I mean, you make the choices you have, the choice is just really really low. Because you will generally choose the best choice for you. And the physical you, your meat sack, is made to do this.
Not really, my life has significantly improved since realization that free will is not real. I lost mental burdan of overthinking "what if" scenarios. Now I'm at peace with myself, instead of constantly chasing trends and dreams of others.
@@Enclave_Engineer Sounds like stoicism. Right, this is just a philosophical distinction. Free will being an illusion is completely irrelevant to how anyone lies life, except maybe in the example above where it can give someone a different philosophical perspective. I feel like the "we do have free will" people think that there is some sort of change in behavior associated with not having free will, when it's actually nothing more than a routine observation. The fact that it's not real is just kind of meta, and not everyone sees the need to acknowledge it. To me it's essential to understanding reality and ourselves, but I don't feel that my disbelief in free will has any actual impact on the choices I make.
@@johnshite4656 You are technically correct, obviously not everybody will have the same reaction to this realization. My brain and psyche was always focused on abstract concepts. The thing is, if we teach this to young people their behaviour may be significantly impacted in the future. It would serve as core to build more understanding and open view of the world.
@@Enclave_Engineer Listen man, I was raised religious. I would be far less concerned about children being taught "everything is probably predetermined but it doesn't matter" as opposed to "there's this particular human sacrifice, that if you believe in it you don't have to burn in a hell forever, you can instead die and go to fairy land where everyone is always happy and lounges around on clouds made of cotton candy forever more" -- the former is an enormous improvement over the latter, if we're concerned about what children are being taught...... IF ONLY children were taught Philosophy in schools..... IF ONLY!
After witnessing and caring for people with Parkinson's and Dementia I learned this first hand. It also made me question and realize how truly fragile personalities are and the things that people consider to make them, themself.
Exactly, most of us isn’t actually us. Why am I someone (self proclaimed atleast) that isn’t a bad person? Well clearly my environment and my parents. My psychology had predispositions to be out of control and to not listen to authority (ODD among others) So, say I was born into an abusive household in poverty, surrounded by crime and violence. I do not doubt for a second that I would have then fallen under the “bad person” label if that were the case. So my ego makes me think I personally am the reason for being a “good” person, but really it’s completely happenstance and outside factors
@@ZxZNebula wth is the point of life then, just so exist to watch a "movie" basically since everything is determined but also feel the pain,and pleasures.
I too have worked in memory care units. I see no evidence that any disease proves free will doesnt exist. The body is hardware. A radio. If your radio is broken it cant translate the signal into music very well. But the signal is still there, and is not altered by a broken radio. The problem is when we identify as the hardware. Your body is you but you are not your body.
@@ZxZNebulaI thought most people would agree that your upbringing shapes your personality? That also extends out to you being a "good" or "bad" person assuming you know what you're doing is good or bad. This video seems much ado about nothing
Now I have to reconcile myself to the fact that the people making the ads that interrupted this video didn't choose to be liars, scammers, or grifters.
A lack of free will doesn't mean a lack of choices, it's means being bound by causality. No matter how many choices we have, we can't choose anything outside our preexisting capabilities or circumstances.
@@suruxstrawde8322we have a range of choice within our experience, genetics, etc, much how I have a range of motion. I can put my hand anywhere I can reach. We may be screwed when it comes to snap decisions, but long term planning offers some range of choice. I usually have scrambled eggs and sausage for breakfast, but it's early enough today that I could pre plan to get a bagel. But also, ragging on the scammers that advertise on UA-cam is evergreen.
You might be surprised most of them are not even aware of their choices, just copying and pasting behaviours that they were told to do by others, either directly or online in articles, unaware they can change.
@@suruxstrawde8322it’s like most ppl aren’t understanding what this means lol, like they just watched a video and haven’t thought deeply about it or something. Like mental health therapy like cbt literally tries and changes the neurological pathways and patterns of that person. So like getting angry and learning to calm yourself down, it’s a practiced skill. I can’t just choose to calm down if I don’t have those skills previously, I am bounded by the laws of physics and the universe. And “bad” people doing bad things is a great example of the illusion of free will, it tells us how they don’t truly have the same level of choice as we do, as it’s relative, and unique to each person’s biology. This also shows us how purely punishment doesn’t change or make some learn to be better, but a more empathetic and compassionate approach has much better chances of reaching that person and get them to attempt to change
Honestly, this video helped me calm down. It helped me realize that I am a product of my environment and experiences. Thank you Kyle, I feel better about myself.
That's the intent behind these ideas, which I disagree with fundamentally. The bio-chemistry and meta-physical has not been unified in this hypothesis. Yet it can cause legitimate harm to people who might disregard sound decisions for poor ones, under the assumption 'I can't do anything about it" or "it was predetermined"
The debate about free will obscures the real matter: the illusion of the self. We tend to think of ourselves as distinct from the universe, but we’re absolutely not. We are manifestations of the world in every way: from the nutrients we’re constructed from, to the air we breathe, to the information we respirate. When even just partially cut off-sensory deprivation or “just” solitary confinement-our mental health gradually descends into insanity. You are no more distinct from the universe than a tornado is distinct from the atmosphere. We are, as they say, the universe attempting to know itself. The debate over free will can only matter in the context of that illusory self, but when we view ourselves as dependent manifestations of the universe, we inherit the entire causal chain which brought us into being. Both of these things are true: we are a puppet, and we are the prime mover.
Absolutely this. Whether we can assert with 100% certainty that all our actions are physically predetermined is irrelevant because we're still talking in the context of a 'self' making the decisions and having the thoughts. A 'self' or a 'consciousness' makes zero sense in the context of physics, which only predicts the behaviour of elementary particles and does not predict that a random bunch of these particles assembled in a particular way can suddenly gain self awareness. Neither does it describe what conciousness or an experience is - it simply can't, it's an abstraction, so this whole talk about 'erm, actually, we are just a bunch of atoms in a deterministic system' is completely pointless and has nothing to do with our actual human experience.
The "free will" question has always seemed rather straightforward to me. Can I choose to become genuinely convinced that the moon is made of cheese? If not, then it would seem that I have no conscious control over my brain's decision-making. I have yet to succeed in choosing to become genuinely convinced that the moon is made of cheese.
You already previously chose to accept the rational belief that the moon is made of dust, rock, etc. and previously chose to accept the science and experience of NASA that formed and reinforced that fact. I don’t think the inability to choose to believe in the falsehood of something that is factually true proves a lack of free will, it just proves that you are rational. You can be rational and choose to believe in things that are not set in stone, like religion or whether a person on trial is guilty or innocent, or choose an action from a set of possible actions because there is no known outcome yet.
@@tridoc99The problem here is that I never chose to accept that the moon is composed of rock. I was presented with evidence and became convinced that the proposition was true. Just as I can not choose to become convinced of a false proposition, I can not choose to be unconvinced of a proposition for which my subconscious concludes there exists sufficient evidence. I don’t believe rationality to be of relevance here. That is simply a label which I would assign to my brain’s decision-making process.
@@WeebLabs I agree with you I think the fallacy is, some how the use of logic and rational thinking isn’t a biological process in the brain. When it obviously is. Nothing about being a biological organism is not biological. Which of the brain is subject to a slew of factors “good” and “bad.”
@@WeebLabs you and I are agreeing on the point that it is hard to consciously choose to accept or deny something that is obviously true, it is virtually automatic. I was trying to point out that this is not a great way to defend the free will illusion argument. Choice comes in when facts aren’t clear or when choosing something that isn’t based on facts, but on preference or morality.
"Pick a random city." Chicago. "You have no idea why you picked it." I've been re-reading the Dresden Files. Can we control our thoughts? Not the first ones. But every time we think "no, that's wrong", our ability to think is turning against our instinctual or learned reactions. Every time we have an intrusive thought, that's our neural chemistry trying to make us think things. And every time I spend five minutes mentally kicking that intrusive thought in its metaphorical junk, I'm rewiring my brain to think like that a little less. If we can change our instinctive thought patterns, we have control over ourselves.
The point of the video, I think, is that we can't control where those instinctive thoughts come from. We can't choose not to have those thoughts. We can choose to act on them, or express them, but we can't choose them.
This is half thought out philosophy. Essentially saying “because the human mind is imperfect and is not omniscient, free will does not exist.” No. Free Will does exist. It’s just not as special as people make it out to be. Just because an individual reaches a conclusion that was the ending of perceptions, conditions, and settings outside their control does not mean a decision wasn’t made. You could decide to have baked chicken for dinner. If you thought back to why you came to that conclusion, you could find you saw a person with a chicken sandwich for lunch. Or you saw a picture of a parent and the memory of their chicken dishes ticked in your mind. Or you are having a minor, mostly benign genetic vitamin deficiency passed down through your family line that chicken makes up for. But none of this matters. Because YOU still made the decision. People think free will is some magic, soul affirming thing. It’s not. It’s just the conclusions we can come to given our situation and perspective. It’s the same sort of misunderstanding people have about Power. People hear Power and think physical, political, or magical strength. But that’s not what Power is. At its core, Power is Choice. The more choices you have in a situation, the more Power you have. That’s it. You could shoot lightning from your fingers, yet be just as powerful as the crackhead next door. Because that ability doesn’t grant you any new choices. No new opportunities. Back to Free Will, let me ask you something. Let’s say you go on a road trip to Alaska. You plan a route, pack supplies, and book a hotel upon arrival. Is any of that process less free will just because you can track the history and progress of every step of the prep and journey? No. It just is what it is. We all are not singular individuals. We are influenced by external and internal forces at every moment of our lives. However, how we react to those influences IS up to us. THAT is free will. Free will is the ability to choose left or right at an intersection. Free will is not lost just because we didn’t map out and pave the road ourselves, or that we can’t fly straight up. Directed or limited choices are still choices.
You never actually choose left or right at an intersection. While it's true that we have *a* will, it is not free; we can do what we want, but we can't choose what we want. The thunderstorm does not choose to strike one location over another, that's not a choice - that's just the predestined path that occurred. *You* don't choose the path, your nature & your environment does.
@@jdizzle3740 This is a misunderstanding of how destiny & fate works. Nature & nurture aren't some external separate force outside of destiny; they are the thing through which it manifests. They are the hands of fate that does the determining.
Which means they are victims of their bilogy. Bears that were raised by humans from infacy will kill their caretakers if hungry. Humans who are in survival risk will kill other humans to get food/resources. Example: Soviet canibal island (google it). Starving people acually cut off muscles from living woman and ate them just to feed themselves. How is that any different from the bear?
I really shouldn't engage, but yanno what, why not. I'm feeling chatty, catty, and always in the mood for academic discussion. @SolaireIntensifies Even if what you're saying is true, which you're not in fairly certain he has an engineering degree and is Very well studied in nuclear sciences and engineering, I say... and? I take everything everyone says with a pound of salt anyway, the internet is a cesspool of lies and misinformation. There's a reason they tell you not to believe everything you read on here. Besides, I fact check his claims myself if I feel something is too wild and I find he usually comes up correct on the foundations of his arguments, not to mention the streams he (may or may not still) does where he holds open forum and carries himself very well. Also last I checked, you don't need a degree to think. Am I personally wanting to get deeper into epistemology and philosophy myself? Absolutely that's why I'll find dedicated channels and sources for it, but he's an internet funny man who i feel carries a good amount of well intentions and sources to back his claims, regardless of if they're right or not. It's my own job not to fall down pitfalls of fallacy. I don't engage with him too much to really care about this as UA-cam isn't really a place in source a lot of the information I want to share Anyway, but believe me when I say there's Far worse out there to quote. Not naming any, as I'm not looking to start anything, but there's Definitely some things that come to mind. Except VSauce, VSauce is based as hell and I adore that man.
I read a theory that people who do awful things do them because of all of their life experiences up until the action, that they somehow were less culpable for their abhorrent behavior, as if their choice is entirely guided by those experience. This is BS. Of course we are influenced heavily by what has happened to us and what we'vew experienced, but we still do have choices. What a cop-out.
I respectfully disagree. Most of the time we operate on autopilot/instict, because it is fast. From an evolution perspective, free will would disrupt survivability by giving us choice paralysis. However explaining everything with a butterfly effect/great chain is in my mind too reductionist. It's like the brain version of Last Thursdayism, by it's own definition it is uprovable and even if it is true, nothing changes. How is this different from religion? If you believe this, why not god? If bad behaviour should not be punished (cruelly), should good behaviour not be rewarded? I have an idea - Let's test this on one of your other videos - Roko's Basilisk. Does the AI consider non-existence of free will? Is the AI sufficiently "outside" to make a decision if we have free will and following your example, would it decide not to torture people? Sorry for spamming questions like that, the whole argument just feels to me like an excuse for abandoning personal responsibility. Which I'd guess does not exist in this argument, which brings me back to the religion comparison. It's too vague, too wide, too shallow, to actually do anything with it.
You are correct with the first part about autopilot. God or religion are tools for people without knowledge to explain things they cannot. Some realize humans may lack ability to understand, some don't care and some resort to fictional explanations such as god to avoid uncertainty. This argument against free will is scientifically proven in many different ways, even in the video. (Tumor example, mental illness causing uncontrollable behaviors, brain scans) What about the personal responsibility? Look at the state of world today, a world that is largely ignorant to the fact free will is just an illusion. We have genocidal wars, mad dictators looking for more land, systematic corruption, exploitation of millions for profit of few. These terrible actions are driven by primitive needs of people who fail to realize they are governed by them. Where is personal responsibility here?
He's using a determinist's definition of free will, (which is, as you mentioned, used as an excuse for bad behavior) not what the actual definition is. Free will is simply the ability to chose to act in opposition to your own instinct.
I somewhat agree. It's an interesting (and frightening) debate, but somewhat pointless, nonetheless, and to fully accept the application of no free will is to become nothing but another object in the universe, which I don't agree with. Perhaps it is not what we call "free will" that makes us unique, but something else. I could be wrong, though, but I'm willing to hold out.
Something I saw here that I found interesting... There are people with autism and ADHD in the comments saying how they feel like they don't have free will. As someone with ADHD, I agree to an extent. The fact that these (and other) mental conditions appear to remove (or limit) one's free will is, to me, good evidence of it's existence.
But that only proves the existence of the feeling of free will, not free will itself. Which Kyle argued for in the form of the fact that believing you have free will is beneficial to us as social creatures. Also idk, if people who don't have ADHD or autism still get stuff like cravings, moods, addictions (and not just to drugs, which have any chemical impact on the addiction, but also to unhealthy activities), and inexplicable depression, then free will seems like just as much of an illusion to you lot as it does to us with ADHD, cause having such a condition is basically the same type of out-of-your-control sensation as those things.
I’ve always subscribed to the compatiblist philosophy of conditional free will. Meaning our brains and neurochemistry are deterministic in the ways Kyle described in the video, but we do have some kind of agency in our ability to pick from the variety of predetermined options provided by our brain! Consciousness is so cool, great video as usual Kyle :)
But, the part of our brain responsible for choosing between the presented options is still subject to the “chain” analogy prestented at the beginning. I want to agree that there must be some conditional, marginal free will. I don’t think that want is necessarily motivated by reason, though 😅
When you said "think of a major city" I immediately thought of Djibouti, which I've never been to, never want to go to, didn't know where it was, and, as it turns out, isn't even a city, it's a nation, so suck it mister "there is no free will"
@@orlandomoreno6168 rather than trying to feel smart by disparaging strangers on the Internet, you should look up the meaning of 'critical thinking' instead, and if you still think you used it correctly, there's no hope for you.
@RudCh01 It's a process used to criticise information. You check for mistakes. I also though of country names on the process but obviously those are not options. And stop projecting. Why is it always about status for you normies?
Putting the subconscious equal to not having choice is a bit of a stretch I think. Trying to make sense of a mechanism we don’t fully understand _is_ still just philosophical/religious thoughts, no matter if all the biology _around_ it can be explained
Any assertion of free will necessitate an assertion of some form of dualism, which is what's unscientific. If you want to assert that your choices are actually yours rather than simply a culmination of everything that came before, you need to point to something that is unaffected by deterministic Newtonian mechanics or random quantum mechanics.
@@CaptainScarfish Not all scientist empiricists believe in determinism. There are some defences of free will that comes from psychology and neuroscience. And also according to a study from 2007, 79% of evolutionary biologists said that they believe in free will. Free will =/= unsientific
@kennytvn 4 hours ago (edited) Putting the subconscious equal to not having choice is a bit of a stretch I think. Trying to make sense of a mechanism we don’t fully understand is still just philosophical/religious thoughts, no matter if all the biology around it can be explained .its better then claiming all humans have sin when there baby and dont know right from wrong its because Right Wrong depend on humans choise we learn from mistakes.
@@skepticalzostrianos9875 The burden is on believers to prove that free will exists. I have seen no cogent argument that doesn't invoke the supernatural or argument from intuition.
Coming at this from a software perspective, and specifically a User-Experience perspective: In software circles, we've had a fairly recent reckoning with the fact that there are different definitions of "Free", and the fact that people keep talking passed one-another because of this. For software, there's "Free" as in speech, and there's "Free" as in lunch. The former means software uninhibited by any external influences, the latter means you get _something_ for free but there may be strings attached. I think there's a similar definition issue at play with this discussion. There's "Free" as in context, and "Free" as in choice. We well understand the influence context, biology, and the differing forms of memory play on our decision making (Related: Celia Hodent's "The Gamer's Brain") - humans are not context-free, as you point out. The definition of free I would argue is more widely colloquially intended is free to rationalize, reinforce, and modify our actions - which of course is beholden to our circumstances, but given minimally beneficial circumstances there's room for arbitrary (albeit context-influenced) choice. Understanding, though, that there are large swaths of people with circumstances that predetermined their outcomes would be a boon to society. It's a degree of empathy that's sorely needed, and highlights how addressing root causes of these circumstances can prevent these outcomes. (Mental health care, poverty, etc)
You ended your idea on a terrible note. Nobody's outcomes are predetermined by their circumstances. Circumstances can increase the likelihood of an outcome but nothing more as there are far too many variables, the most chaotic being the human mind. Throw a million people into the same circumstances and their outcomes will differ in a variety of ways.
@@josephfigueroa3527 you simply outlined biodiversity which is riddled with predisposition. I.e of course there will be, variation, because there is near infinite biological variation, but that variation itself is deterministic. I.e it’s comes from what came before.
“Most people are convinced that as long as they are not overtly forced to do something by an outside power, their decisions are theirs, and that if they want something, it is they who want it. But this is one of the great illusions we have about ourselves. A great number of our decisions are not really our own but are suggested to us from the outside; we have succeeded in persuading ourselves that it is we who have made the decision, whereas we have actually conformed with expectations of others, driven by the fear of isolation and by more direct threats to our life, freedom, and comfort.” ― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
Why can't free will be an emergent property of a complex system? Emergent properties are real, and are not found in the components of their systems, like how one transistor can't do computation
That's an unsubstantiated hypothesis and before you give evidence for it it must be treated as equally likely as all other claims that are, for now, unproven. Since t he number of things that are true is very small and the number of unproven claims you can make is enormous the odds of this being true becomes number of things that are true/number of things that can be claimed. This would be a vanishingly small probability so you'd have to find evidence first to move that probability into 'worthy of attention' territory.
I could easily see all this making someone less compassionate, at least less compassionate to criminals. "So you're saying that we shouldn't hate them because free will doesn't exist? Well then you shouldn't hate me either for what I'm about to do to them".
You, as an organism, still make “decisions” even though those “decisions” are decided by external factors. I’ve never had the belief that my “will” is independent from my surroundings… I don’t understand why so many people bring forth the concept that we don’t have “free will”, nobody else is deciding things for you but your decisions can be tracked back to the beginning of the universe. This changes nothing.
"even though those “decisions” are decided by external factors" But they aren't, really. The state of your brain is *you*. If I sit down and spend 10 minutes deciding something in my life, that's not the outside world deciding. Deciding to jump off the bridge is *me*. We don't say we decided to fall after stepping off the bridge, because *that* is the external world.
@boldCactuslad Yes, I have done bad things before realizing that free will is an illusion. I was selfish, racist and hateful to people with different lifestyles. Now I'm a complete opposite, more emphatetic and understanding to struggles of other people. Before I called them idiots and dismissed them, now I try to understand and help.
But his ending was all about how this could change our lived experience, how it can help us find empathy and understanding in the most uncomfortable of moral situations, right?
@@sepiar7682I find there is no difference in my mind between sentience and "free will". If you can be aware of the results of your actions, you have a choice to follow through to those results, or to change your course of action. The fact we even debate what choice is the "correct" one is a pretty good indication of will. I don't find value in viewing things from a deterministic standpoint. All it does to me is muddy what should be clear waters.
@@sepiar7682Yes and he is correct. After independently realizing this over span of decade, I went from close minded, hateful, selfish person to somebody who does their best to help others and decrease their suffering.
I always think of something I heard genetically modified skeptic say. It was something along the lines of "what does it look like to live as if there is no free will?"
Exactly. I guess the closest would be the stereotypical mystic-type who maintains that everything is predestined, that everything they seemingly chose was already destined to happen.
i think that, most of the time, most of us are purely reactionary - acting without free will. but, as someone who's had problems and stopped and thought about it and decided to get help and acted on that help, i think that, yes, i did have the free will to change how i thought. i am sure, had i just continued reacting to things, i could have ended up much worse and probably one of those people you might want to separate from society. it's very hard work, but i believe you can assert free will from time to time and save yourself
"The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives." William James
But that’s the thing, you didn’t have free will to choose between continuing to react or seek help. Somewhere between those two different choices, your brain chemistry changed in such a way that made you want to choose to seek help. Maybe someone told you your previous path was wrong, or you saw the bad consequences of your inaction. Either way, there’s no "homunculus" separate from the chain of causality that made you change behaviors. You were just lucky to be able to break through the bad behavior.
@@TriteHexagon if you are right, then i have no choice but to believe that i have a choice; which sounds rather stupid. i contend that anyone who's overcome personal difficulties by not just going along with their body's reactions will also believe they had free will. also, if there really is no free will then dear world, stfu about jail for people who have no choice (ie: no responsibility) for their actions, quit talking to me about poor life choices when i don't have a choice. of course, you would argue, people have no choice but to be so judgemental about other people
The reason you give for being more compassionate due to determinism is vacuous. One could also argue "well, I didn't choose to draw enjoyment out of other's suffering, and they are just electrons anyways, so...". If anything, you can justify anything with determinism.
Being “just electrons” doesn’t make anyone less valuable. In fact everything you’ve ever known and loved has been “just electrons”. Idiot creationist spotted.
To be fair to the determinists, if determinism is justify anything, then it can justify nothing, since it isn't a standard or a commandment. It's still the narcissist's prayer's final form, tho.
@@nobodyinteresting5311no it isn’t lol, it’s literally just an observation on science and life. We do things because we chemically are made to do it or to move towards it. Ur passions are only ur passions because ur brain gets a positive chemical reaction that it likes and wants to continue receiving. This isn’t philosophical
@@ZxZNebula in itself it isn't but it's perhaps a bit dismissive to imply that it isn't also a philosophical concept. Remember, philosophy has been dabbling in these ideas - in some form or another - long before the possibility of this type of research was ever conceived. Additionally, this view of consciousness can certainly be interpreted philosophically even with these findings behind them. It stands in contradiction to most religions, after all.
The funniest part about brains with ego modules is that the modules tend to think they are the sole tenants in their buildings. "You" are the entire building and everything in it. Just because no one in apartment 2B answers the door when you knock, it doesn't mean that it's vacant. It's a blessing, really. That part of "you" does the heavy lifting and "you" get to just smile and say "Dublin" or "Vanilla, please."
Exactly. Your brain is not in your skull as you perceive it. Your brain is containing the room you’re currently in from all sides. What You are experiencing is a projection, a model being created by Brain hardware as it synthesizes abstract sensory signals.
When I was a young kid, my dad was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. According to my mom, his personality was permanently changed after that. Growing up with that disease in my family made me well aware that we can't always choose what our brains decide.
As someone who deals with intrusive thoughts, I find it a lot harder to lose the feeling of free will. If my brain can present thoughts that I have to consciously reject, it feels more like there's a decision vs just the neurons firing with differing strengths and speeds. I'm curious how one would explain intrusive thoughts and the reactions to them with greater clarity or detail in a deterministic paradigm.
Can you decide which thoughts you consciously reject? I would argue no, because there is no free will. And if you can reject, can you consciously reject to consciously reject?, and so on. The argument is, that there i no entity which can influence its own thoughts without having to think about it itself. This proves no free will.
I appreciate this video as I do all your videos. This topic specifically makes me feel very uneasy. As a survivor of SA it is very hard for me to grasp the idea that the perpetrators of crimes aren't making the choice to harm others. I can't believe that it's just my environment and random chance that I choose not to take advantage of others when given the opportunity.
Yeah, as a philosophical discussion, it's a really interesting topic, but this logic can't be applied to serious stuff where the concept of personal responsibility is important.
This!! Even if we take criminal actions to be a result of a lack of free will, why should we forgo accountability of said actions? Yes, sure let’s assume there’s no free will in a criminal’s actions, but how does that diminish the severity of the crime they committed? They committed a crime because of nature, nurture and other bullcrap sure, but they still committed a crime, a serious one, so who should be held responsible if not them? If no one’s accountable or responsible for heinous acts then aren’t we essentially saying people are ‘free’ to do whatever they want and contradicting ourselves? Not to mention, mediating a collapse of society… @slimedrive My heart goes out to you that you had to go through something so terrible, I hope you’ve found the peace and the justice that you deserve and if not I hope you do very soon…
I would say the reason you don’t take advantage of others is because you are a good person, and someone who would take advantage of others is a bad person. Even if they weren’t responsible for being a bad person that doesn’t make them good, that doesn’t make them deserving of having all the rights and freedoms of a good person, and that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be punished in hopes that they change. And if they don’t change, punishment will at least stop them from doing it again, discourage others from doing the same, and maybe give the victims a feeling of revenge that they deserve for having to go through what they did.
"Yet we don't want people stealing from others in our society, so we're gonna remove you from it and try to help you do better or find treatment if it's pathological"
@tempestive1 "however, doing that would be very unprofitable for our private prison, so instead we will exploit your labor for as long as possible-even manufacturing reasons to keep you in prison longer-while minimizing goods and services provided to you during this period of time."
@@torstenkruger7372to contest your intuition is dissociation, maybe the red Ferrari attacked his neurons with red photons causing a collapse in the wave function
Everyone puts too much emphasis on the "free" part of Free Will. Nobody ever puts any emphasis on the "will" part of Free Will. We make choices, and those choices matter. We are free to choose, and what events led to those choices are the reason we choose what we do, but at the end, those choices are our own. And that's fine. It's our will, and our will is free.
Aren't you just trying to say that we do have free will in a long winded way? Obviously if our will is free we have free will.. But the argument states that we cannot choose our will, hence it is not free.
Questioning “what is in control of my thoughts” makes it hard to believe I am in control. Questioning “what is in control of my attention” is what makes me believe free will exists. I have significantly less control over my brain than I do over my attention.
Are you sure you have as much control over your attention as you think you do? Try focusing your attention on doing absolutely nothing and you will notice that eventually your attention will waver on trying to do nothing because insert x, y, z rationalization and this will occur on anything that you ever do.
@ I’ve briefly tried putting my attention on “nothing” but I couldn’t. I’m not sure if it’s impossible to put my attention on “nothing” or if I just don’t understand the concept. In case you weren’t specifically talking about putting attention on “nothing”; I do practice putting my attention on things like sounds or the sensation of air entering and exiting my lungs. My attention does waver but I just bring it back. Like how each pushup makes you stronger, each time I regrab my attention I get better at controlling it. Also like pushups, it is a slow and very gradual improvement.
@@direstorm7324 Better yet choose to put your attention on something that you have zero interest in. By attention I mean, choose to have interest in it, unequivocally.
@@experimentalcyborg I agree I think the people in charge are well well aware of there being no “free will.” But they also have no “free will” in being what they are. So it is truly paradoxical. That’s why I think for there to be any significant change, the general population also has to accept this. It will take the “power” they have. The point is there’s no choice in accepting it or not. So it’s fundamentally a generational issue, luckily there are some scholars teaching at least the concept of there being no “free will.”
I came here expecting to get an existential crisis, but instead I got a new perspective on things. As oxymoronic as it sounds, I find this concept of having no free will (a concept I’ve subscribed to for a number of years now) extremely freeing. Thank you, Kyle. You’re a beautiful human.
@@pillarmenn1936 a relative chose for you to be born. And that is a relative correlation that you can relate to. If some chooses to unrelate you from reality, it was also not your choice but was freely willed by Free Willy.
Just because you can't account for the origin of every thought, the timing of every decision, or the source of every influence, doesn't mean you have no control over your thoughts or free will. Our thoughts are not simply "flashes of lightning", we also have the ability to hold onto an idea and work with it, to consider it beyond the immediate impulse, and while many thoughts may be effectively pre-determined, there are also many decisions that I cannot reasonably set aside as not being free. Your reasoning seems to be "We don't understand it therefore it can't be free will", and I think you're freely choosing to fool yourself. And your expectation seems to be that free will should allow you to have full conscious control over every thought, with full knowledge of every second of the history of the universe leading up to that thought. I hope you see how ridiculous that is, so if not that then how would you define free will, and more importantly what would it take to reasonably prove it exists?
I agree. This is a massive stretch from him, and the subsequent arguments and supposition stemming from his viewpoint are ridiculous. This seems like a logical fallacy.
@@timothymonk1356 I agree that Kyle's argument here isn't great. I'll propose one that's a bit more ironclad: If you want to argue that you have free will in a way that isn't bound by the laws of physics you must first demonstrate that your brain (or whatever is "piloting" your brain) can violate causality.
@@CaptainScarfish I'll give you another argument. I want to watch the video to see what Kyle says, I'm just so shocked he would make it and the first 30 seconds turned me off a bit. If you want to argue that you have free will in a way that isn't bound by the laws of physics you must first demonstrate we have a complete or really good understanding of physics and reality. I'm always put off when people make claims about things we can't possibly know at this moment. The video should have just said I don't know and then ended. It might be possible to know in the future when humanity has a better understanding of things and has more ability to freely explore. I think an analogy would be like "is the weather on TRAPPIST-1b more cloudy on Friday than Monday" I don't know if this makes any sense. I hope you have a wonderful day
Agreed also. Personally, I’m hoping that the NEXT video he puts out is a direct contradiction to this one, arguing the other side. “We can’t define consciousness or how the brain works in the first place, so assuming things are outside of our control is wildly premature. …what, I said differently before? But that was way back in 2024.”
Free will isn't in the individual decisions but in the construction of your mind. As someone who doesn't have a an internal monologue or a video playing or really any thoughts other than ones that just pop up fully ready to go I realize I don't make individual decisions. My sense of free will comes from what I direct my overall self to do. I choose objectives not the individual decisions. I am the CEO building the individual. I choose what environment I continue in and what people I continue to interact with. Do I choose what I eat? The question never even arises to my mind. What things I spend my consciousness on is what are my goals for the week, what is distracting me, what is helping me, who do I have obligations to ECT. It is environmental questions, all the little stuff falls into place when they need to. Sometimes I override the autopilot, example was that I wasn't sleeping well and got a medication to help me sleep from my doctor. This medicine caused me to hallucinate and I saw my wife and young daughter as vampires that were trying to kill me. My mind was hundred percent convinced, I saw the fangs, the hungry looks, the rooms lighting turned blood red my adrenaline was through the roof. Everything screamed fight for your life. Me I shut that shit down, I told everything to stop and not to believe what I felt or saw and to ignore every instinct. We are capable of overriding the random thoughts and electric activity of our brains and we are capable of choice. We are also a product of our environment and the friends we keep. The choices we control are the environments we choose to remain in and the friends we choose to keep by our side. Those choices shape the smaller choices of everyday life that might as well by just chemical processes of the brain.
I've been working on a Simulated Mind Hypothesis. Where concioiusness is like a virtual machine running on a pc. You get a bit of emergence and a self referencing recursive loop that we call "Free Will". That being said consciousness is scalar. So, it is deterministic up until the brain gets complex enough to get the feedback loop. One way you can think of it is a PC that is running a Virtual Machine that is running Minecraft that is running a Redstone Computer that is watching the whole system.
@@DrewTrox the awareness of that “feedback loop” is simply a “program” itself. Read about the PFC, what makes it not “free”, is its subject to a magnitude of factors both “bad” and “good.” Example of “good.” Stable, environment, in human construct, i.e financial stability. Will cause efficient function of the PFC. also depends on it being capable, i.e. damage, tumors, and most importantly, adverse development and genetic disposition. Example of the “bad.” Even acute mild uncontrollable persistent stress can cause a rapid decline in PFC cognitive abilities. Uncontrollable adverse stress causes physical changes in the PFC. If the “awareness program,” get a “virus” of sorts - is it on - that program?
Yes, but understanding that not everybody does things because they just want to makes you more emphatetic toward them, just like Kyle argued. That's the most important take away from the video.
The postulate that anything less than unlimited, unconstrained free will is not really free will is laughable outside the realm of thought experimentation.
I was the thinking the same thing. He makes poor arguments all throughout and doesn’t even bother to define what free will is in the first place. Can’t have a discussion on a topic when people don’t agree on definitions because then you’re just arguing over the definition instead of the actual topic.
@@saleplains Where does gravity reside? Where does hunger, or love, or life-force? Not everything that exists exists within the dimensions we perceive.
I'm a firm believer in the causal chain. I have been ever since I first watched Gargoyles in the mid 90s and its approach to time travel where nothing can change because it all already happened. It is only the limitations of individual perspective that makes what is the past to me, the future to someone else who lived before me, and vice versa. There are no branching paths, just a single unbroken chain which occasionally loops back on itself. None of this however made me feel any less "free". The way I see it, the choice I've made, regardless of the reasons I made them, are whet defines me as me. Anyone else who would have, under the exact same circumstances, made different choices would by definition be a different person. Maybe a very similar person to myself, if alternate timelines actually existed, but not the exact same person. All that considered, it may be better to say that free will being only an illusion just can't bother me, because what I believe in instead is self-determinism. Who I am is the sum total of everything I have experiences and the choices those experiences led me to make.
Just because we're not in full control of absolutely everything, I believe has little grasp on making choices at all. I think this argument is very pedantic in nature. There is no such thing as complete control, yes there are a lot of circumstantial things in life, but you always have a choice to keep walking your path or at anytime you could choose another but have to deal with the difficult process of change which I feel many people dislike and do not have the will to do until they are forced. Either way, there will always be challenges and things you cannot control, you must simply choose how to respond. I believe the universe is chaotic, unforgiving, and uncontrollable, and that's okay. I don't need to be in control of everything to be free. I'm free within the circumstances that my little light of consciousnesses has popped into. I may not be able to change or control everything, but to want that or be foolish enough to think that is possible is insanity I believe. Live life with accountability and responsibility.
The argument is pedantic in nature because the only people who care about how determinism affects moral responsibility are people who believe in an omnipotent omniscient judgemental deity.
What part of you is free from the deterministic Newtonian mechanics or random quantum mechanics that would allow you to make a decision not predetermined by physics?
@@CaptainScarfish Why do you think that your decisions are the result of physics somehow makes them not your decisions? Your decision isn't "predetermined." It's instead impossible to predict.
What do you think about people who lost their personality after brain injury/procedure? Do people with brain tumor chose to kill their family and themselves? Do lobotomy victims chose to do... nothing at all after their brain is irriversably damaged?
The problem that I have with the argument "it's your neurotransmitters that decide" is it fails to acknowledge that the neurotransmitters are the process by which free will is facilitated. We also don't know what consciousness is, and due to the uncertainty principle, we can't and will never see the full atomic or quantum field structure of the brain. I believe choice is a physical process that is self-interacting and self-determining, so it is not determined by any causal event, only influenced. The only evidence we have that supposedly supports the idea that free will is an illusion is the idea of determinism, which we know is fundamentally incorrect, as well as experiments which I'll get to. So the first argument is that the universe is determined through a chain of cause and effect. Quantum physics proves that randomness is real, but the way we talk about randomness is incorrect. We say random because we assign a probability to it, and we do this, as scientists will say, because of a lack of information. Physicists like Sean Carroll who I respect immensely will say that everything evolves according to, meaning deterministically, the Schrodinger equation. This is fundamentally false and I'll tell you why. We can never see the whole system, and this is important and I will continue to come back to it. The implication of this fact of the universe is that whatever description we invent to define physical phenomena and the relationships between them will inherently and quite literally always, for eternity, lack some information that keeps us from describing it in full. To get around this lack of information, individuals like Carroll will then invoke LaPlace's Demon, an entity with a different perspective on our universe that allows it to see every position and measure every particle's momentum simultaneously and it is because we lack this perspective that we can't see all the information. I take issue with this thought experiment because it seems to prove something about the universe while denying the universe's arguably most fundamental and important feature that defines how it works; the uncertainty principle. This, as far as I'm concerned, invalidates such a thought experiment as being useful to infer any valid information about the nature of the universe. The reason I say this is because there is no position in which this information could be viewed, and what I propose is this: the information simply - does not exist, because everything physically in a state of superposition even as it relates to the universe itself. The uncertainty principle states that all the information about a quantum system cannot be simultaneously measured. Measurement, whether we want to admit it or not, means literally everything. It is not just a conscious being that takes a measurement. When rocks smash into each other, transfer energy and momentum and change direction, that is a measurement. To go even further, when a mass is embedded in and moving through spacetime, spacetime itself is measuring it based on the warp that that mass imposes onto the fabric of spacetime. Let's imagine the following: When a large object is located within spacetime and moving through it, as is inevitable of all objects within it, that object warps space as a result of its mass. It's also moving though, and mass and energy are equivalent. When you take a mass and add energy to it by say, moving it faster, it gains mass. However, we aren't adding more particles to it, we are simply vibrating the particles it already has faster. This means that mass and velocity can have interchangeable values that can in possibly an infinite number of combinations, result in the same warping of space. You could have rest mass A and velocity B that results in overall interpreted mass C that warps spacetime a certain way. Let's say that mass A is a small mass and velocity B is super fast. Then we have another object, rest mass Z and velocity Y. Rest mass Z is a large mass, but velocity Y is a slow velocity. Both of these will result in exactly the same warp on spacetime. The universe itself does not even know which it is, because it fundamentally, physically, isn't either. The information defining its position and momentum in absolute terms literally does not exist, because it is in a physical state of super position. It is always in a physical state of super position. The reason we as the types of entities we are don't see things that way, is because the universe has to maintain continuity with regards to its laws, so we see everything in a sort of collapsed state. Choice is the physical process the universe and its laws impart on beings like us, in order to maintain the continuity of its laws, and maintain eternal superposition. I am sitting, but I am also standing. The universe however only lets me see one, and the way it lets me see one is by bestowing upon me the physical process whereby I choose what happens to me next. Super position isn't just about the state of the system right now, it's about the possibility of all future states. If I was standing and then decided to sit, it eliminates the future where I decide to originally stand, but it manifests a possible path where I decide to sit but then choose later to stand back up. I believe whatever the physical process of choice is, it has to do with the information about us as quantum systems that does not exist in the universe. The process that collapses the wave function is a process that is self-interacting and self-determining. It is one that is influenced by outside processes that are and can be measured, but not determined by them. In essence, choice is determined by the act of choosing itself, as it is self-interacting and self-determining. Now as for the experiments, we have two, the hungry judge experiment and the choice experiment. The hungry judge experiment just posits and illustrates that you are more likely to get a harsher sentence if your judge didn't have lunch. This however is not in comparison to judges that did have lunches however, this is only a comparison within the hungry judges between how many times they issued a harsher sentence and how many times they issued a lenient sentence. This is similar to how drug companies convey the effectiveness of their drugs. They say it's 65% effective in patients. They don't however say that a not insignificant number of patients who got a placebo also improved, which actually brings down the effectiveness of things like Tylenol to 10-15% compared to a placebo. So the hungry judge experiment doesn't actually take into account the amount of harsh sentences from judges who have actually had lunch, rendering the results mediocre at best and completely invalid at worst. Then there's the basic experiments where neuroscientists ask participating individuals to make a choice between two things, and to verbally signal when they have decided. They see that there is a neurological signal in the teat before the participant voices that they have decided and they concluded, without reasonable evidence I might add, that this signal is absolute proof that the process of "choice" happens unconsciously and before choice begins and thus we have no free will. As far as I'm concerned these experiments are literal dog shit, they conclude absolutely nothing tangible or substantiative about the nature of choice. Any reasonable, professional scientist should actually conclude that this signal is barely part of the picture. Remember when I said that not all the information can be seen because it doesn't actually exist? Perhaps this signal is part of the process, but a part nonetheless. The moment something is chosen is determined by the act of choosing itself, which makes free will actually *free* *will* . Lastly, here is an example about our eternal lack of comprehension, why both free will or no free will are just as likely, and thus we should act like it exists. I like pie more than I like cake. I like pumpkin pie more than I like any other pie. On my birthday I will probably choose pumpkin pie every time. However, even if I choose it every time for all of eternity, there is fundamentally no experiment that can be engaged that can prove I didn't choose it every single time. The only thing any experiment can say about the taste, the texture, about my past experiences with pumpkin pie, about my feelings about pumpkin pie compared to other pies or compared to cake, about my experiences with other pies and with cake, about those taste, and the texture of those - the only thing any experiment will ever be able to say about those things is that they influenced my choice, not determined it. Influence is not determination and the only thing we can prove and will ever be able to prove about choice is influence.
I've always found this argument so strained. I haven't even watched the video yet, but it usually amounts to... "You did not get to choose the background of your parents which shaped who you are. Therefore you have no free will at all and it's all predetermined." What's worse than that nonsense is that this usually is followed by some form of... "Therefore let us make decisions for you."
More like: you can't roll a die and get "elephant". Evolutionarily, an intelligent species would not thrive if certain filters and perceptions weren't implemented. It would be like saying that because we are watching a movie on two different models of screen; that the film is somehow different and can be changed. The illusion of agency is stubborn because it has to be. It is effective at helping navigate way too much stimuli in any given stage of the natural world. The prey didn't choose running over getting eaten. No prey would ever be eaten again if that could be true (running doesn't help sometimes) These things are almost impossible to break down without involving emotion or anecdotal influence. So the cycle continues with avid believers of agency vs materialistic pattern driven chaos😂
This has honestly been one of the most eye opening and mind boggling videos you have ever made. You just single handedly changed my view on the death penalty and severe criminals overall.
Every time I hear an argument against free will, the more convinced I am that humans do in fact possess free will. There are endless rebuttals to each of these arguments.
If you lend credence/legitimacy to many of those rebuttals; they tend to dissolve into a base data/frequency/anecdotal mess. Once emotion and purpose are reduced to data points, the argument for "no free will" seems to solidify itself even further; while avid believers in "agency" tend to dig in and dispute more vehemently. It is such a fascinating dance of conflicting poles
I chose to stop watching this at 4:16 seconds because this feels depressing and now I want chicken nuggets. I continue beliving were just moneys on a space rock with baseball caps and automatic weapons.
the chicken nuggets were super tastsy now im gonna liten to this as I fall asleep because a bunch of you gave this comment a like and had other ideas... since you are anwsering to my comment I need to listen to the whole thing to u.ndterstand your point of view. you cunts made me to finish this video, otherwise i could have let it go... but you refrence things i dont understand because I havent finished watching it. long story short im gonna get some food and finish it. does this make sense? sorry english isnt my first languege
I'm a huge fan of the term 'post hoc rationalization' I use it almost all the time because.. well, it's applicable all the time. This is wild. Help. wait. don't do anything, it doesn't matter. oh wait. do whatever you want it doesn't matter. wait. it just doesn't matter. nevermind.
Ridiculous - the whole point of the free will concept is that it is NOT causally connected to anything in the material world. That is what makes it "free" in the first place. Your premise is wrong so that means the conclusion is wrong - straw man argument.
It's a little like how you can trace generosity back to the selfish desire for a hit of dopamine, it makes you feel good, then you'll do that so you feel good. I loved playing this angle on my highschool writing assignments, "we are forged of our experiences" It's a very fun rabbit hole to chase down sometimes
I dont help people for the good feeling or dopamine. I help people to improve their life and alleviate and their experience. For altruism, not for feel goods.
@tonypalmetto6114 by why do you act altruistically? Is it for personal benefit for the afterlife, is it because you believe it is good? And in the end can you not root that down to securing your afterlife or for the benefit of feeling you yourself are a good person, is it because it makes you feel important to others? So yes, it's good of you to do, but you can still reduce it to self serving reasons. That's not to say stop performing good and kind acts in the world, but by reducing you can find an underlying motivator. It's like how an object at rest stays at rest unless acted upon by another force, you were acted upon by some underlying motivator making your altruism fundamentally what you would do due to an underlying motivator. It can be a scary thought to reduce things that fundamentally, but its also digging at the nature of motivation. We are who we are by the collection of all our experiences in life which are an amalgam of the collective experiences of all those other lives we interact with, it's the mass blanket of life with us each but a thread in the grand design, the curves and corners and path of that thread effecting all the threads it touches, which in turn then effect the threads those touch too. But as your thread effects other threads so do other threads effect yours. Naturally a living thing acts in self interest and self furthermore in some way or another, making everything deterministic. But this then gets into the 3 body problem of there being too many variables in the starting state as it is that we could not predict, making life a beautiful chaotic predetermined tapestry expanding forever out. Each act effecting the whole but wholly predetermined by everything that has acted upon the person up to the point of that choice.
@@tonypalmetto6114 it still makes you feel good. And no matter what yo uthink, that will influence your decision to continue helping. And we evolved this so we kept helping others that need help to survive. It doesn't for me. I'm a psychopath. But I still go against that nature.
Keep in mind dopamine isn't what makes you feel good exactly it just makes things more strongly likely in your brain in a similar vein to testosterone for social recognition. The pleasure facet is indirect, mainly from survival factors and scarcity. You get a hit with salt and sugar which are pleasurable because they are naturally rare so when you rat stuff with them you get a rise in dopamine making it more likely.
So if I benefit from the circumstances that led to my success then I attribute it to my "free will" and pat myself on the back and denigrate others for their poor "choices". However, if I don't benefit, then I blame others and circumstances outside of my perceived "control". Makes sense.
I appreciate Kyle's effort to present academic and scientific themes to lay audience but this video is just an example why doing this is not so easy. Kyle did not presented common definitions of free will according to the literature, nor did he engaged with the main objections and arguments in favour or against free will. In fact, Kyle promptly dismisses with bare effort what Dennett had said on the subject matter. But one must surely agree with something Kyle states right through the end of the video: the talk about free will does require more than some fancy philosophy. But so does its negation
But what are the reasons you chose the option you did. And why did you think of those reasons instead of other reasons that would have made you pick a different option. And did you have any control over the cause of those reasons that made you pick what you did.
As someone who lived with a significant hormone inbalance for over a decade and who is now having it treated via HRT, I can say yes, the brain is extremely fragile and who you are can be changed at the drop of a hat. It's wild.
I think Kyle's argument is not conclusive, like at all. First of all, his definition of free will is ill posed. He basically says it is your ability to make choices without being affected by the physics of the world. Well, the issue there is then what is the "you" in the "your" part of this statement. He alludes to a soul, but that is speaking in hypotheticals, which we cannot argue about because there's no way to argue about something that cannot be interacted with by the physical world, but can supposedly interact with it. It might as well be god. It's a dead end in the argument. Since Kyle cannot define the "you" here, his answer is to a fundamentally ill posed question. Kyle can't actually make a distinction between the people he talked about and the universe in general. He's purposely stripped the word "you" of all colloquial meaning in order to get the result he wants. It's like how I can redefine the plus operation in 2+2 to be anything I want to get any result I want. The spirit of the problem of free will is how your will is your own, external factors be damned. Reducing the human to be just an extension of the universe allows the "non will" of the universe to bleed into the "you will". That is not in the spirit of the problem and is a reduction to redefining the word "you" beyond anything meaningful to the colloquial meaning of it and it's use in the definition of free will. However, if we take "you" as being the entirety of your biological being that forms a homeostatic system... well then free will clearly exists. The question and the answer are well posed. Your neurons forming and destroying connections to adjust to the data coming in to the world IS your will. Actually, all decisions and actions performed internal to your system are your free will and the outcome of the free will is clearly the influence that causes on the world outside of your system. Think of this is being the opposite of Descartes' argument of cutting away all of you until you are just something experiencing signals - the adding of parts of you until you really can't argue that something can count as you anymore. The free will exists as the interface between your internal machinations and the external world. And clearly, you can decide to do all sorts of things that impart your will on the world, via your own rumination and guiding of your thoughts towards a goal.
Congratulations, you've discovered the difference between conscious and subconscious thought. Choice isn't about intrusive thoughts and urges, it's what you do with them. Like Nature vs Nurture, its not an all or nothing game. I do have to wonder how badly you have to have screwed up to be so gung ho on abandoning personal responsibility. Also, I would love to meet a determinist who actually walks the walk. Having no responsibility means you get no credit for your successes, either. Not that I'd agree with them, but it'd be interesting to see one.
You are correct on the subconscious and conscious thought. But guess what, what we call (me) is just an observer to that processes (just like Kyle argued). And you just met a determinist who does not take personal credit for their success. That's why I make a good deeds for sake of helping others, not because I want a reward. That's also why I release all my creative work for free and allow anybody to use it however they want.
@@lachlanhenry486 Nothing is simply the word we use to describe the lack of something, not the presence of a "nothing" non-entity. Using the grammar present in the language it is possible for existence to have the lack of something, thereby it is possible for nothing to exist, if only in language.
everything is bound by cause and effect, that's it. If you think that means people can't be held accountable for their actions, then people also can't be held accountable for how they respond either and neither can the people who step in to restrain the latter and suddenly...nothing changes about the world :o we just stop pretending its anything more than causality
I can guarantee you that this video of yours will be one you return to years later to explain how this pseudoscientific slop of an argument was wrong. Eventually. Once people realize it is in the same vein as phrenology and treat it as such. There is free will. There are also things I'm not free to choose, but that doesn't negate free will in the least. I cannot choose which blood cell is in my pinky toe at any given second, but that doesn't mean anything to my freedom to choose and it's ridiculous for people to argue as much. Some of our meat-mech is automated, some of it is manual. Sometimes we can make the automated parts manual by choice, and sometimes our choice is taken away by automation. But the whole system is still you.
> gets presented scientifically proven facts > calls it pseudoscience What is your opinion about lobotomy victims? Their prefrontal cortex responsible for conscious decisions is removed and they lose their personality and ability to act on their own without specific instructions. Brain chemistry is responsible for all decisions, remove parts of the brain and person loses the ability.
@@cameron7374it is. It's your brain. You are every part of you, not some abstract external component that directs the meat puppet you call yourself, which is really the only definition free will wouldn't exist under, because every reaction in your brain and your nerves and every other cell in your body is part of your natural process of being you. Your actions are influenced by things, they do have causes, but those causes, even the subconscious ones, still only influence the decisions you make in most cases - and most are just as much part of you as the molecules used to make energy in a cell.
speaking as someone who has experienced the deepest depths of the mental abyss, the worth of a soul is in the ability to overcome the urges. Those that slip are not to be pitied.
even if they've got a brain tumor? you only have your own brain as a reference, someone elses mental abyss might be accompanied by impulse control issues also outside of their control. like a manic episode or a psychotic break.
*mentions science experiments that "prove" free will is an illusion *doesn't show them, give reference, talk about them in detail and even says they're pointless
Because they are pointless. What if they prove that a decision was made by the person? Of course it was. How did that person make the decision tho? By neurons firing in his/her brain. And you can't decide which neuron to fire
@@nvrndingsmmr nope. it's not something i believe in and don't care enough to look up the research myself. if someone's going to attempt to change my belief and they vaguely mention research has been done, they should be providing it and citing sources. but again, he said it didn't matter, so why should i even care? his video, his onus.
I have been a disbeliever of free will for many years now. I would have a hard time trying to explain my reasoning to anyone, but now I can just direct people to watch this instead of trying myself. Thank you for your great work in all the videos you make, Kyle.
@@antoineswine2029 direct them in the direction of Robert Sapolsky. He’s a neuroscientist that gets into the grit of exactly why we don’t have “free will.”
I once read 'you are free to do what you want, but you are not free to want what you want'.
Yessss
oh yeah this came to my mind too
Its a quote by Arthur Schopenhauer-
"A man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills."
That is so profound.👍🏻
Yet acting on your impulses makes you no better than the animal that evolution pushed you to transcend.
"And that, your honor, is why my client should not be punished for stealing 500 gallons of Maple Syrup."
Yeah, this is where the argument that "there is no free will" becomes problematic. It's a made up concept that's practically designed to destroy the idea of accountability despite the fact that there are clearly actions that we want people to not do, regardless of the causal chain.
Fr thou, you honor. You wasn't even there, how tf would you know he stole it?
Your client has the type of brain that would steal gallons of maple syrup so we need to issue some sort of behavioral training to make it less likely this brain will try to do this again.
Tabernac!
Now take it to the extreme, and how do we now justify the Nuremberg Trials? If the Nazis had no free will, then they couldn't choose to not genocide the Jews, so now what? Denying free will leads to all kinds of extremely dark places...
“You feel like you chose to watch this video.“ Bro I’m just a slave to the algorithm at this point.
Hi my name is Questerer and I’m an addict.
Don't be slave, free will does exist. For a detailed explanation, please watch this 37 min video:
"The Latest Scientific Evidence of God - Fr Robert Spitzer at the Napa Institute Summer Conference."
I don't usually choose what I eat either. Is it edible? Am I allergic to it? Let's stuff the gullet.
I mean, you joke but that's actually exactly the point of the video
I did choose to watch the video but also read the comments for quality entertainment.
My mother has expressed regret over marrying my father. In response to that I told her that she wouldn't have any of her children as we are. Her response is always that we'd still be us, just a different version of us. Since I am genetically a product of my father and mother, I wouldn't be me if she had married and had children with some other man. I would never have existed.
Sorry, this is a tangent to your statement that we are who we are because of who are parents are, who their parents are, who the parents of their parents are, and so on. I was reminded of this conversation with my mother because of your statement.
You'd still be you, just a version with different genes.
@@tobybartels8426 I don't see how. Aside from different genes, there would be different circumstances and life experiences.
@@the-weirdist Not Quite the way I see it. If there 'was' a world where your mother married a different man or otherwise had or did not have children, they would not be you, because you are unique and uniquely yourself. But if there were no 'other' worlds and this world was defined by predetermination, then there also would not be a you, because there is no 'self' in this world, there is no conciousness in this world.
The only way you exist is if you and all concious life have free will. And I'm so glad that you do.
@@the-weirdist : Yes, those too; I only mentioned specifically genes because you had.
But this applies to any change. If there's anything that your mother has ever done that she regrets, or your father for that matter, or their parents, or a teacher that affected them, or really anyone ever (because everything affects everything else a little bit); if this person had done things differently, then you would have had different experiences and so be a different person.
In fact, if there's anything that you've ever done that you regret, if you'd done it differently, then you would be a different person now. I know that there are things that I've done that I regret; if I'd done them differently, then I would be a different person now. (In one way a better person, who didn't make that mistake; but in another way a worse person, who didn't learn from that mistake.)
But when I think about something that someone (me or someone else) regrets, it doesn't bother me that if things have gone differently then I wouldn't exist. If the different people who would exist would be better off, then I share the regret.
So, if by her logic, there will be two of you in alternate timeline, given that both your mother and father had children but with different partner.
Kyle woke up and chose to set the comment section on fire
Did he really choose?
@@SCP.343 hehe
Don't Read Myy name
Ch
@@SCP.343he was all mk ultra'd up on Rock and Roll.
"Red pill or blue pill?"
"Both, and keep em coming"
Crush, mix, snort. --xkcd
I choose the black pill
Bro the pills are like the infinity stones, you take red, blue, white and black and you reach a state of nirvana
That's why I crank the Purpl Drank, lmao
🎶🎵But nothing compares to these blue and yellow, purple pills🎵🎶
17:32 In all fairness, dude spent 35,000 hours over 13 years living amongst Grizzly Bears. He was able to gain rapport, walk up to them, and straight up pet some of them. And the bear that attacked them was a new bear to the area that he admitted he was unsettled by. Absolutely deserves a rewatch.
thank you.
Sounds like a similar case to Steve Irwin. You can spend your whole life around dangerous animals, learn how to get close without provoking them, have the training to know when to get out when things get dicey...but all it takes is one stroke of really bad luck and it's curtains.
@@AceSpadeThePikachuDingo Dinkleman just a few months ago. Literally regarded as the biggest expert on Mamba conservation and handling, has owned dozens of them over his years of adulthood...and then he gets called to move a WILD mamba, who he doesn't know, and even if he is the best....the best still can make a single wrong move...
Arguably much sadder than steve irwin to me, because you could argue going near the stingray was unnecessary when theres stock footage available already. But a wild mamba in an occupied area simply MUST be moved. If not by him than by someone else. They are SO dangerous, they are fast, agressive, and very good at climbing into rafters or places you will not notice until its biting you.
Actually, the species that got him, green mambas, are famous for killing cocoa harvesters. They coil up in the trees, the harvesters cant see them even though they constantly look, and then boom. Too fast to avoid, no warning. Some go numb before they can even finish climbing down the ladder and fall.
Just sucks that we cant talk to animals, seriously. Like if i could just explain to my dog "dont eat nylon straps you could get a blockage and will be in pain and need to stay at the vet and its a huge thing" then maybe shed stop eating, well, literally everything
Sir I have ADHD, I am aware I am barely in charge of ANY decision that happens in this body, I am not the driver, I'm a passenger that is half outside the vehicle trying their best to hang on as we speed down the highway, my man
God that’s accurate isn’t it 😆😭
As a neurotypical who hasn't believed in free will for many years, I think you've described all humans. The only difference is you've accepted it and aren't deluding yourself (consciously or otherwise) into thinking you're in control.
That is to say, I think you're more in touch with reality than most people, lol.
yup
I also have ADHD, and with discipline/effort, I can compensate without meds. I don't like it, but it can be done.
As someone who's spent nearly four decades with OCD, I've basically never felt like I truly had free will.
I sadly know all too well what you mean.
Checking if the door is locked... then try to open it, after that lean against it to be sure.. then check the key again.. open or close the window at a certain speed, then lock that, and make sure 7 times, exactly 7, that the handle is fully closed, so that the window can not be opened. Turn off the lamp in a certain way.. for me my OCD is very reliant on numbers of successions being perfect.
Example: I have one 50 watt lamp in my room, and the ceiling lights (which I never use). When shutting off that lamp, and going to bed, I always press 3 times.. I also have a small light on my nightstand (but I broke the switch due to excessive fumbling with it). When both lights were on, I pressed 1 time in the on position for the bigger lamps light switch, then 4 times in the off position, making sure my fingers glide off the plastic material in a certain way. Then, having the number 4 in my head, I would lay in my bed, and continue there.. press the switch in the "on direction" while the lamp is still on, then off.. still having the number 4 in my head, I would then go 4..5..6 and finally.. 7.
For me it's all related to numbers.. 3, 5, 7, 13 and 16 are "okay" amount of times (interestingly, 4 out of 5 of those numbers are primes, and uneven numbers tend to be more "acceptable" than even ones) to switch something off, or rather, to make sure it's really off (even though the lamp is obviously off already since it's not emitting any light).
It made me very sad to write this.. I am literally wasting away my life doing literally useless things.. therapy did not help (except for one method I wrote about below), medications did not help.
The best thing I have found yet is to just not listen to your mind, which ironically, is considered therapy, exposure therapy to be exact.
When I ignore the triggers of my OCD, then the next day, I wouldn't worry nearly as much.. if done for a longer period, I sometimes feel much better and the OCD is almost gone but as soon as the baseline anxiety level goes through the roof for whatever reason, the cycle repeats. Maybe try that?
I hope you find the peace that you deserve eventually.
@@williamkaneDoesn't sound like a pleasant experience. I too have OCD,but of the contamination type. I have had it maybe two or three years before puberty,and I'm 42 as now. My OCD started to get quite worse around early 2020. Along with my worsening came erotomania and intrusive thoughts. I would keep having to do the same things over again to try and get the unwanted thoughts and feelings of uncleanliness to go away long enough to get ready to go to work. I know it's not the exact same as your experience, but the anxiety and panic certainly are. It has me at rock bottom. I dont know if meds and/or therapy will truly work. I wouldn't wish OCD and everything that comes with it on anyone,it has made me almost useless. Good luck to you! And will definitely check out the methods in your comment.
I too have had OCD for a good while.It's of the contamination type. I have had it maybe since I was 12,and I'm 42 now. It hasn't been too bad of an issue until 2020. For some reason I started to have erotomania and intrusive thoughts,which in a way,are opposed to my OCD and the need to feel clean. So anxiety, panic,rituals,second guessing,and feelings of hopelessness are almost a daily thing. I feel your sentiment of never feeling free,or that I have any semblance of control. I wouldn't wish it on anyone for any reason. I will paraphrase Howie Mandel: "It has ruined my life." For me,its rock bottom.
I hope for the best for you and the other person in this thread. 👍🏽
@@johngavin1175 Thank you for sharing your story, John.
I will reply in detail tomorrow because it is very late where I live and I need to get some sleep.
Until then, I wish you nothing but the best.
@@williamkane Alright,the same to you! Good night,and take care.
Before we can answer "do we have free will?", we have to define "what is free will?". If we define it in some specific ways, we have it, and we define it differently, we don't.
one thing thats undeniable is that we have some kind of will that we act with, but whether or not its "free" and what that means exactly is the difficult part, and also the less important part
Right, we aren't free to choose our desires, thoughts or likes, but we are free to chose our actions. If we weren't free to chose our actions then we would never struggle to decide, and we would never be able to change our mind.
Yeah. It's thorny. Kyle kept saying free will meant decisions made with our *conscious* mind, which is...a little slippery, maybe. Because there's a lot of our minds that are not conscious, and yes...decisions often come from there, and their origins are therefore hazy or even inaccessible to our consciousness. That doesn't necessarily mean it's not 'free.' I also take some small issue with his implicit assertion that 'choosing from a limited set of options' is the same as being 'unfree.' You may not control what options you have, but if you're still choosing between the available options, that does represent a degree of freedom.
It's an interesting thought experiment though, and I think people probably do overestimate how much freedom they have in making decisions. But I don't know that I agree that there's *no* such thing as free will.
As far as I understand it Kyle is arguing that a "Free Will" that puts "you" outside of pure physics and biology does not exist. We can make choices sure, but they were either predestined in a classical determinism sense, or randomly produced due to quantum mechanics. There is no room for a "you" agent that sits outside of physics and biology, so perhaps we should be a bit more compassionate to people just like we are to certain animals or people with brain tumors.
The common idea of free will is that "I could have done otherwise". There is no way to make coherent sense of this idea. It's just a psychological illusion like deja vu.
I think people with ADHD can probably relate when I say, I have never in my life felt like I was in control of my actions. When you have ADHD and are not being treated for it, the rift between what you consciously want to do and what you actually do is an absurd grand canyon of torment that just spirals up to self-hatred very quickly. I hear sometimes people with autism also feel this way. So, I think people like us have an innate understanding that free will is really not something you can ever rely on. This video perfectly describes why.
@@averyhaferman3474they're right, though.
@SolaceCafe youre even worse. That pfp is horrendous and you probably got groomed by fnaf community
@@averyhaferman3474 The only one who should be pitied here is you, brother.
This has been my experience too. I have never been able to make a decision and stick to it. Either I'm a shitty person that doesn't care enough to do what I am wanting or supposed to be doing, or I just am not in control of myself. I feel like I care a lot so to me only the second option makes sense to me.
@@averyhaferman3474 My god, you're a sad person.
Brennen Lee Mulligan said something that was hardcore in his D&D show about this (paraphrasing) “you think you make choices, you drive down the highway and decide to take this exit or the next, but you didn’t make the road. The big decisions were made for you long ago”
Oooooh I love this
cool quote, but i dont think it really works out, same for most of the videos points. The logic is based on the idea that to have any choice you have to have had a choice about everything, which is not and can not be anything more than an opinion, not a fact. Yes there will always be things influencing or restricting your choices but that does NOT prove there is no choice, you not building the road does mean you cant safely just get off wherever you want, but it does NOT mean there is no choice between exits. You can still choose what to do with the hand your dealt and that is still a choice regardless of if you got to pick the cards or not.
Behind your skull is a cloud made of meat. Within that cloud is a thunderstorm. That thunderstorm is you.
Thanks, Kyle. I have never felt more like a billion dice rolls before
meatcloud piloting meatsuit full of porous stones and rubber bands go brrr.
Not really a thunderstorm though as neuronal communication by electrical arcing is something that only really happens in animals like jellyfish.
if you realize its dice rolls. u can chose not to receive the number if you pay attention close enough u can not act, that is where most 'free will' is expressed and its always contrary to what you felt like doing
You mean those same dice rolls that are completely determined by the shapes of the dices, the friction forces that act upon them, the strength with which they were thrown, etc., etcetera... ?
I AM THE STORM THAT IS APPROACHING!
“Your honor, the forces acted upon the defendants atoms at the start of the universe led to him driving drunk that night”
Im not entirely sure you understand what's being spoken about my man.
Objection! Irrelevant.
The court will either find the defendant guilty or not guilty by due process like any other chemical reaction standing in this room with us today.
The Big Bang made me do it!
If only you could even pretend to submit that argument in court lol
It's because free will is an illusion, we must have laws and consequences.
You can not fool me with determinism. I choose twice to watch this video, first when I subscribed and the second when I clicked on it.
Edit: Hint. It's maybe, perhaps, possibly and very probably a joke. But on serious note I don't think about determinism and free will as absolute terms.
Don't Read Myy name
@@DontReadMyyPictureeeok I won’t.
Yeah but like sorry this was kinda predetermined by the universe :/
This video uploaded 1 hour ago. You wrote this comment 55 minutes ago. It's a 28 minute video.
That is physically impossible
@@C-mz1blit's both possible to play the video at 2x speed and to form a conclusion before the video ends
I literally scratched my nose with my left hand when Kyle asked me why I chose to do that
I didn't pick Burundi because that's a country...
This
Get an upgrade
oh thats a red flag....
Well spotted, it's capital is Bujumbura. Only heard of it thanks to George Of The Jungle.
@@matt_acton-varian Good shout! I think it's now a dual capital country though? They are trying to make Gitega happen, I think?
"Hi, V-sauce. Kyle, here."
Dude, I wanted to say the same thing! Love the video Kyle! ^_^
I genuinely thought he was gonna say it at the start
i would expect a better argument from V-sauce... This one was a real dud for me.
"-Or is it?"
Missing that one 🎶 music, after couple minutes in?😂 Moon Men
Whoever came into this video thinking about the number 47,203 is gonna be STUNNED
43,892 so it was universally close lol
And there I am thinking about 7 like a true pleb lol
Or a Honda accord or their brother, just less so.
@@emreyurtseven23 ......you and me.
@@bayfish_9156 As happens far too often to be unique, Kyle said Honda Accord exactly as I read your reply
If Google could monetize that they'd have more money than... idk, a ghost-woman offering free Hondas and goat-horses to the undead
“Yes I have free will; I have no choice but to have it.”
-Christopher Hitchens
"Free to do your taxes" The IRS would like to challenge that thought.
It's a Matrix movie reference. Morpheus, who Hill here is himself referencing, says the line in the movie.
Of course you're free to do your taxes. You're just not free to not do you're taxes🙃
@@myscreen2urs actually it is free. you just have to know how not to fuck it up and thats why all of us pay turbotax $50 to not fuck it up..... thats also why turbotax lobbies the government to keep it difficult
You're also free to go to jail 😂
That depends on your income level. If you're to low, it's not really worth the cost of going after you, if you're to high you can make it to costly to go after you. Gotta be right in that juicy middle where you can't afford the tax lawyers to fight back. 😉
the idea that free will isn't real has never really bothered me as much as it seems to bother other people. Knowing that I don't technically have a choice or a decision in anything doesn't change anything about my life, I'm still "choosing" to do things, and I can still "choose" to do the right thing, even if it might as well be random
The “technically don’t have a choice” is a lie. You do. You can literally prove it to yourself.
No it is not random, your choices simply have an input that you cannot identify. Just like a computer does calculations, you simply are not aware of all the calculations going on inside your brain (which is a good thing, or you would not be able to sleep). If you choose a chicken sandwich over salmon, it means your brain did calculations, based on sensory input from your cells: what substances does the body need more right this moment (salt, fat, sugar, etc.).
This is such a profound discussion! If we follow this logic to it's conclusion, justice is meaningless. Every single act is bound to happen, so, nobody is guilty. Of course this is nonsense. My view is that we must apply the notion of free will, or Chaos will ensue. Another point I like to mention is that we are so complex that every single interaction on our neurons can very well be deterministic, but the overall result is only computable if you have all variables at your disposal. The only place these variables are available is your brain, so it might as well be your choice.
i see it like watching a very immersive movie. what will i do next? pay attention to the story to find out! participation in a movie is about watching it happen, thinking and reflecting on it, and identifying with the themes and characters. my own life is simply my own personal movie with full surround sound and even emotions
You're only experiencing the illusion of choice you're just lucky that you're predestined to not be bothered by it
“… and that is why Luigi is innocent, your honor!”
mama mia
@@broodlingg Here I go again
Lmao me outside the courthouse raising a giant boombox over my head playing this video on full volume
Your honor, it actually was-a-me, Mario!
Toadette disagrees
Lol, "Why didn't you think of a city like Christchurch? A place you've always wanted to visit?"
As a person who lives in Christchurch, a) it was the city I chose, and b) why the hell would you want to visit here? There's about zero tourist attractions, fuck all night life, unwalkable and barely driveable roads plus roadworks and construction everywhere, plus Queenstown/bungee jumping/hot pools/etc is all hours away.
Unwalkable? Sounds like a terrible place,as I love walking. I chose Oslo for no reason. I haven't ever traveled the world. I'm stuck here in Florida. Which isn't pleasant either.
@johngavin1175 well, barely walkable. There're some spots like Hagley Park that are fine, but you can't get anywhere unless you're in a car, and a bus will turn a 15 minute trip into an hour. If you want anything outside your suburb it's practically unwalkable. Better for bikes than walking. Still, hardly a tourist place
As someone living in Auckland, can relate since Auckland is basically this as well XD (tbf we do have the Sky Tower but that's about it)
I don’t get why people genuinely think that if science proves free will doesn’t exist than that means they would instantly lose their free will. If science proves free will to be an illusion you don’t change one bit and can continue to live a life you see fulfilling just as you used to.
I mean, you make the choices you have, the choice is just really really low. Because you will generally choose the best choice for you. And the physical you, your meat sack, is made to do this.
Not really, my life has significantly improved since realization that free will is not real. I lost mental burdan of overthinking "what if" scenarios. Now I'm at peace with myself, instead of constantly chasing trends and dreams of others.
@@Enclave_Engineer Sounds like stoicism.
Right, this is just a philosophical distinction. Free will being an illusion is completely irrelevant to how anyone lies life, except maybe in the example above where it can give someone a different philosophical perspective. I feel like the "we do have free will" people think that there is some sort of change in behavior associated with not having free will, when it's actually nothing more than a routine observation. The fact that it's not real is just kind of meta, and not everyone sees the need to acknowledge it. To me it's essential to understanding reality and ourselves, but I don't feel that my disbelief in free will has any actual impact on the choices I make.
@@johnshite4656 You are technically correct, obviously not everybody will have the same reaction to this realization. My brain and psyche was always focused on abstract concepts.
The thing is, if we teach this to young people their behaviour may be significantly impacted in the future. It would serve as core to build more understanding and open view of the world.
@@Enclave_Engineer Listen man, I was raised religious. I would be far less concerned about children being taught "everything is probably predetermined but it doesn't matter" as opposed to "there's this particular human sacrifice, that if you believe in it you don't have to burn in a hell forever, you can instead die and go to fairy land where everyone is always happy and lounges around on clouds made of cotton candy forever more" -- the former is an enormous improvement over the latter, if we're concerned about what children are being taught......
IF ONLY children were taught Philosophy in schools..... IF ONLY!
After witnessing and caring for people with Parkinson's and Dementia I learned this first hand. It also made me question and realize how truly fragile personalities are and the things that people consider to make them, themself.
Forgive my french, but no shit sherlock. Your brain is you, damage the brain, you damage your sense of self. That's why it's terrifying.
Exactly, most of us isn’t actually us.
Why am I someone (self proclaimed atleast) that isn’t a bad person? Well clearly my environment and my parents. My psychology had predispositions to be out of control and to not listen to authority (ODD among others)
So, say I was born into an abusive household in poverty, surrounded by crime and violence. I do not doubt for a second that I would have then fallen under the “bad person” label if that were the case.
So my ego makes me think I personally am the reason for being a “good” person, but really it’s completely happenstance and outside factors
@@ZxZNebula wth is the point of life then, just so exist to watch a "movie" basically since everything is determined but also feel the pain,and pleasures.
I too have worked in memory care units. I see no evidence that any disease proves free will doesnt exist. The body is hardware. A radio. If your radio is broken it cant translate the signal into music very well. But the signal is still there, and is not altered by a broken radio. The problem is when we identify as the hardware. Your body is you but you are not your body.
@@ZxZNebulaI thought most people would agree that your upbringing shapes your personality? That also extends out to you being a "good" or "bad" person assuming you know what you're doing is good or bad.
This video seems much ado about nothing
Now I have to reconcile myself to the fact that the people making the ads that interrupted this video didn't choose to be liars, scammers, or grifters.
A lack of free will doesn't mean a lack of choices, it's means being bound by causality. No matter how many choices we have, we can't choose anything outside our preexisting capabilities or circumstances.
I reconcile this by saying I didn't choose to hate them 😅
@@suruxstrawde8322we have a range of choice within our experience, genetics, etc, much how I have a range of motion. I can put my hand anywhere I can reach. We may be screwed when it comes to snap decisions, but long term planning offers some range of choice. I usually have scrambled eggs and sausage for breakfast, but it's early enough today that I could pre plan to get a bagel.
But also, ragging on the scammers that advertise on UA-cam is evergreen.
You might be surprised most of them are not even aware of their choices, just copying and pasting behaviours that they were told to do by others, either directly or online in articles, unaware they can change.
@@suruxstrawde8322it’s like most ppl aren’t understanding what this means lol, like they just watched a video and haven’t thought deeply about it or something.
Like mental health therapy like cbt literally tries and changes the neurological pathways and patterns of that person. So like getting angry and learning to calm yourself down, it’s a practiced skill. I can’t just choose to calm down if I don’t have those skills previously, I am bounded by the laws of physics and the universe.
And “bad” people doing bad things is a great example of the illusion of free will, it tells us how they don’t truly have the same level of choice as we do, as it’s relative, and unique to each person’s biology. This also shows us how purely punishment doesn’t change or make some learn to be better, but a more empathetic and compassionate approach has much better chances of reaching that person and get them to attempt to change
Honestly, this video helped me calm down. It helped me realize that I am a product of my environment and experiences. Thank you Kyle, I feel better about myself.
This just instills more "fuck it we ball" inside me.
Don't Read Myy name
That's the intent behind these ideas, which I disagree with fundamentally. The bio-chemistry and meta-physical has not been unified in this hypothesis.
Yet it can cause legitimate harm to people who might disregard sound decisions for poor ones, under the assumption 'I can't do anything about it" or "it was predetermined"
@@FoolShortOGright on! People find enough excuses to do terrible things already. We need to see more videos about SELF CONTROL.
we ball indeed
Ironically, that's a preprogrammed nature as well.
The debate about free will obscures the real matter: the illusion of the self. We tend to think of ourselves as distinct from the universe, but we’re absolutely not. We are manifestations of the world in every way: from the nutrients we’re constructed from, to the air we breathe, to the information we respirate. When even just partially cut off-sensory deprivation or “just” solitary confinement-our mental health gradually descends into insanity. You are no more distinct from the universe than a tornado is distinct from the atmosphere. We are, as they say, the universe attempting to know itself. The debate over free will can only matter in the context of that illusory self, but when we view ourselves as dependent manifestations of the universe, we inherit the entire causal chain which brought us into being. Both of these things are true: we are a puppet, and we are the prime mover.
Absolutely this. Whether we can assert with 100% certainty that all our actions are physically predetermined is irrelevant because we're still talking in the context of a 'self' making the decisions and having the thoughts. A 'self' or a 'consciousness' makes zero sense in the context of physics, which only predicts the behaviour of elementary particles and does not predict that a random bunch of these particles assembled in a particular way can suddenly gain self awareness. Neither does it describe what conciousness or an experience is - it simply can't, it's an abstraction, so this whole talk about 'erm, actually, we are just a bunch of atoms in a deterministic system' is completely pointless and has nothing to do with our actual human experience.
@@nw42 brilliantly put 👏
The "free will" question has always seemed rather straightforward to me. Can I choose to become genuinely convinced that the moon is made of cheese? If not, then it would seem that I have no conscious control over my brain's decision-making. I have yet to succeed in choosing to become genuinely convinced that the moon is made of cheese.
You already previously chose to accept the rational belief that the moon is made of dust, rock, etc. and previously chose to accept the science and experience of NASA that formed and reinforced that fact. I don’t think the inability to choose to believe in the falsehood of something that is factually true proves a lack of free will, it just proves that you are rational. You can be rational and choose to believe in things that are not set in stone, like religion or whether a person on trial is guilty or innocent, or choose an action from a set of possible actions because there is no known outcome yet.
@@tridoc99The problem here is that I never chose to accept that the moon is composed of rock. I was presented with evidence and became convinced that the proposition was true.
Just as I can not choose to become convinced of a false proposition, I can not choose to be unconvinced of a proposition for which my subconscious concludes there exists sufficient evidence.
I don’t believe rationality to be of relevance here. That is simply a label which I would assign to my brain’s decision-making process.
@@WeebLabs I agree with you I think the fallacy is, some how the use of logic and rational thinking isn’t a biological process in the brain. When it obviously is. Nothing about being a biological organism is not biological.
Which of the brain is subject to a slew of factors “good” and “bad.”
@@WeebLabs you and I are agreeing on the point that it is hard to consciously choose to accept or deny something that is obviously true, it is virtually automatic. I was trying to point out that this is not a great way to defend the free will illusion argument. Choice comes in when facts aren’t clear or when choosing something that isn’t based on facts, but on preference or morality.
"Pick a random city."
Chicago.
"You have no idea why you picked it."
I've been re-reading the Dresden Files.
Can we control our thoughts? Not the first ones.
But every time we think "no, that's wrong", our ability to think is turning against our instinctual or learned reactions.
Every time we have an intrusive thought, that's our neural chemistry trying to make us think things. And every time I spend five minutes mentally kicking that intrusive thought in its metaphorical junk, I'm rewiring my brain to think like that a little less.
If we can change our instinctive thought patterns, we have control over ourselves.
The point of the video, I think, is that we can't control where those instinctive thoughts come from. We can't choose not to have those thoughts. We can choose to act on them, or express them, but we can't choose them.
This is half thought out philosophy. Essentially saying “because the human mind is imperfect and is not omniscient, free will does not exist.”
No. Free Will does exist. It’s just not as special as people make it out to be. Just because an individual reaches a conclusion that was the ending of perceptions, conditions, and settings outside their control does not mean a decision wasn’t made. You could decide to have baked chicken for dinner. If you thought back to why you came to that conclusion, you could find you saw a person with a chicken sandwich for lunch. Or you saw a picture of a parent and the memory of their chicken dishes ticked in your mind. Or you are having a minor, mostly benign genetic vitamin deficiency passed down through your family line that chicken makes up for. But none of this matters. Because YOU still made the decision.
People think free will is some magic, soul affirming thing. It’s not. It’s just the conclusions we can come to given our situation and perspective. It’s the same sort of misunderstanding people have about Power. People hear Power and think physical, political, or magical strength. But that’s not what Power is. At its core, Power is Choice. The more choices you have in a situation, the more Power you have. That’s it. You could shoot lightning from your fingers, yet be just as powerful as the crackhead next door. Because that ability doesn’t grant you any new choices. No new opportunities.
Back to Free Will, let me ask you something. Let’s say you go on a road trip to Alaska. You plan a route, pack supplies, and book a hotel upon arrival. Is any of that process less free will just because you can track the history and progress of every step of the prep and journey? No. It just is what it is. We all are not singular individuals. We are influenced by external and internal forces at every moment of our lives. However, how we react to those influences IS up to us. THAT is free will.
Free will is the ability to choose left or right at an intersection. Free will is not lost just because we didn’t map out and pave the road ourselves, or that we can’t fly straight up. Directed or limited choices are still choices.
You never actually choose left or right at an intersection. While it's true that we have *a* will, it is not free; we can do what we want, but we can't choose what we want. The thunderstorm does not choose to strike one location over another, that's not a choice - that's just the predestined path that occurred. *You* don't choose the path, your nature & your environment does.
@@doomakarn if it's predestined, wouldn't nature/nurture be irrelevant and it would happen regardless of upbringing/ environment or inherent nature?
@@jdizzle3740 It's predestined BECAUSE nature/nurture are the *only* relevant factors.
@ if it’s truly predestined they play absolutely no role and exert zero influence.
@@jdizzle3740 This is a misunderstanding of how destiny & fate works. Nature & nurture aren't some external separate force outside of destiny; they are the thing through which it manifests. They are the hands of fate that does the determining.
Bears aren't victims of their biology, they don't think that people are not food 18:07
Which means they are victims of their bilogy.
Bears that were raised by humans from infacy will kill their caretakers if hungry.
Humans who are in survival risk will kill other humans to get food/resources.
Example: Soviet canibal island (google it). Starving people acually cut off muscles from living woman and ate them just to feed themselves. How is that any different from the bear?
Ah! Oh boy time for my daily dose of existential horror from one of my favorite science and philosophy people!
Don't Read Myy name
It's pretty subtle but the background music is definitely contributing to the existential dread
Kyle doesn't even have a degree in science or philosophy. He's a youtuber who does some googling.
@@SolaireIntensifies Only of you dont consider engineering science.
I really shouldn't engage, but yanno what, why not. I'm feeling chatty, catty, and always in the mood for academic discussion.
@SolaireIntensifies Even if what you're saying is true, which you're not in fairly certain he has an engineering degree and is Very well studied in nuclear sciences and engineering, I say... and? I take everything everyone says with a pound of salt anyway, the internet is a cesspool of lies and misinformation. There's a reason they tell you not to believe everything you read on here. Besides, I fact check his claims myself if I feel something is too wild and I find he usually comes up correct on the foundations of his arguments, not to mention the streams he (may or may not still) does where he holds open forum and carries himself very well.
Also last I checked, you don't need a degree to think. Am I personally wanting to get deeper into epistemology and philosophy myself? Absolutely that's why I'll find dedicated channels and sources for it, but he's an internet funny man who i feel carries a good amount of well intentions and sources to back his claims, regardless of if they're right or not. It's my own job not to fall down pitfalls of fallacy.
I don't engage with him too much to really care about this as UA-cam isn't really a place in source a lot of the information I want to share Anyway, but believe me when I say there's Far worse out there to quote. Not naming any, as I'm not looking to start anything, but there's Definitely some things that come to mind. Except VSauce, VSauce is based as hell and I adore that man.
I read a theory that people who do awful things do them because of all of their life experiences up until the action, that they somehow were less culpable for their abhorrent behavior, as if their choice is entirely guided by those experience. This is BS. Of course we are influenced heavily by what has happened to us and what we'vew experienced, but we still do have choices. What a cop-out.
I respectfully disagree. Most of the time we operate on autopilot/instict, because it is fast. From an evolution perspective, free will would disrupt survivability by giving us choice paralysis. However explaining everything with a butterfly effect/great chain is in my mind too reductionist. It's like the brain version of Last Thursdayism, by it's own definition it is uprovable and even if it is true, nothing changes.
How is this different from religion? If you believe this, why not god?
If bad behaviour should not be punished (cruelly), should good behaviour not be rewarded?
I have an idea - Let's test this on one of your other videos - Roko's Basilisk. Does the AI consider non-existence of free will? Is the AI sufficiently "outside" to make a decision if we have free will and following your example, would it decide not to torture people?
Sorry for spamming questions like that, the whole argument just feels to me like an excuse for abandoning personal responsibility. Which I'd guess does not exist in this argument, which brings me back to the religion comparison. It's too vague, too wide, too shallow, to actually do anything with it.
Really good thoughts.
That's my issue with this. I feel like everything is being waaaaaaaayyyyyy too oversimplified to be able to make this argument.
You are correct with the first part about autopilot.
God or religion are tools for people without knowledge to explain things they cannot. Some realize humans may lack ability to understand, some don't care and some resort to fictional explanations such as god to avoid uncertainty.
This argument against free will is scientifically proven in many different ways, even in the video. (Tumor example, mental illness causing uncontrollable behaviors, brain scans)
What about the personal responsibility? Look at the state of world today, a world that is largely ignorant to the fact free will is just an illusion.
We have genocidal wars, mad dictators looking for more land, systematic corruption, exploitation of millions for profit of few. These terrible actions are driven by primitive needs of people who fail to realize they are governed by them. Where is personal responsibility here?
He's using a determinist's definition of free will, (which is, as you mentioned, used as an excuse for bad behavior) not what the actual definition is. Free will is simply the ability to chose to act in opposition to your own instinct.
I somewhat agree. It's an interesting (and frightening) debate, but somewhat pointless, nonetheless, and to fully accept the application of no free will is to become nothing but another object in the universe, which I don't agree with. Perhaps it is not what we call "free will" that makes us unique, but something else. I could be wrong, though, but I'm willing to hold out.
Something I saw here that I found interesting...
There are people with autism and ADHD in the comments saying how they feel like they don't have free will. As someone with ADHD, I agree to an extent.
The fact that these (and other) mental conditions appear to remove (or limit) one's free will is, to me, good evidence of it's existence.
But that only proves the existence of the feeling of free will, not free will itself. Which Kyle argued for in the form of the fact that believing you have free will is beneficial to us as social creatures.
Also idk, if people who don't have ADHD or autism still get stuff like cravings, moods, addictions (and not just to drugs, which have any chemical impact on the addiction, but also to unhealthy activities), and inexplicable depression, then free will seems like just as much of an illusion to you lot as it does to us with ADHD, cause having such a condition is basically the same type of out-of-your-control sensation as those things.
I’ve always subscribed to the compatiblist philosophy of conditional free will. Meaning our brains and neurochemistry are deterministic in the ways Kyle described in the video, but we do have some kind of agency in our ability to pick from the variety of predetermined options provided by our brain! Consciousness is so cool, great video as usual Kyle :)
But, the part of our brain responsible for choosing between the presented options is still subject to the “chain” analogy prestented at the beginning. I want to agree that there must be some conditional, marginal free will. I don’t think that want is necessarily motivated by reason, though 😅
When you said "think of a major city" I immediately thought of Djibouti, which I've never been to, never want to go to, didn't know where it was, and, as it turns out, isn't even a city, it's a nation, so suck it mister "there is no free will"
@@RudCh01 you just lacked enough critical thinking to stick to correct answers
@@orlandomoreno6168 rather than trying to feel smart by disparaging strangers on the Internet, you should look up the meaning of 'critical thinking' instead, and if you still think you used it correctly, there's no hope for you.
@RudCh01 It's a process used to criticise information. You check for mistakes. I also though of country names on the process but obviously those are not options. And stop projecting. Why is it always about status for you normies?
To quote the classic: "We're not here because we're free; we're here because we're not free."
@DEADPOOLUTTP What the F**k.
Don't Read Myy name
@DEADPOOLUTTP What the hell
"It's the smell... if there is such a thing"
@DEADPOOLUTTP Translate.
ถ้าอ่านข้อความนี้ ตื่นได้แล้ว แม่พยายามจะปลุกลูกมาสิบหกปีแล้ว ขอร้องเถอะ แม่อยากเห็นหน้าลูกอีกครั้ง
Putting the subconscious equal to not having choice is a bit of a stretch I think. Trying to make sense of a mechanism we don’t fully understand _is_ still just philosophical/religious thoughts, no matter if all the biology _around_ it can be explained
Any assertion of free will necessitate an assertion of some form of dualism, which is what's unscientific.
If you want to assert that your choices are actually yours rather than simply a culmination of everything that came before, you need to point to something that is unaffected by deterministic Newtonian mechanics or random quantum mechanics.
@@CaptainScarfish Not all scientist empiricists believe in determinism. There are some defences of free will that comes from psychology and neuroscience.
And also according to a study from 2007, 79% of evolutionary biologists said that they believe in free will.
Free will =/= unsientific
It's not saying you don't have choices, it's saying you don't have choices in what choices you do or can have.
@kennytvn
4 hours ago (edited)
Putting the subconscious equal to not having choice is a bit of a stretch I think. Trying to make sense of a mechanism we don’t fully understand is still just philosophical/religious thoughts, no matter if all the biology around it can be explained .its better then claiming all humans have sin when there baby and dont know right from wrong its because Right Wrong depend on humans choise we learn from mistakes.
@@skepticalzostrianos9875
The burden is on believers to prove that free will exists. I have seen no cogent argument that doesn't invoke the supernatural or argument from intuition.
Coming at this from a software perspective, and specifically a User-Experience perspective:
In software circles, we've had a fairly recent reckoning with the fact that there are different definitions of "Free", and the fact that people keep talking passed one-another because of this.
For software, there's "Free" as in speech, and there's "Free" as in lunch. The former means software uninhibited by any external influences, the latter means you get _something_ for free but there may be strings attached.
I think there's a similar definition issue at play with this discussion. There's "Free" as in context, and "Free" as in choice. We well understand the influence context, biology, and the differing forms of memory play on our decision making (Related: Celia Hodent's "The Gamer's Brain") - humans are not context-free, as you point out. The definition of free I would argue is more widely colloquially intended is free to rationalize, reinforce, and modify our actions - which of course is beholden to our circumstances, but given minimally beneficial circumstances there's room for arbitrary (albeit context-influenced) choice.
Understanding, though, that there are large swaths of people with circumstances that predetermined their outcomes would be a boon to society. It's a degree of empathy that's sorely needed, and highlights how addressing root causes of these circumstances can prevent these outcomes. (Mental health care, poverty, etc)
You ended your idea on a terrible note. Nobody's outcomes are predetermined by their circumstances. Circumstances can increase the likelihood of an outcome but nothing more as there are far too many variables, the most chaotic being the human mind. Throw a million people into the same circumstances and their outcomes will differ in a variety of ways.
@@josephfigueroa3527 you simply outlined biodiversity which is riddled with predisposition. I.e of course there will be, variation, because there is near infinite biological variation, but that variation itself is deterministic. I.e it’s comes from what came before.
“Most people are convinced that as long as they are not overtly forced to do something by an outside power, their decisions are theirs, and that if they want something, it is they who want it. But this is one of the great illusions we have about ourselves. A great number of our decisions are not really our own but are suggested to us from the outside; we have succeeded in persuading ourselves that it is we who have made the decision, whereas we have actually conformed with expectations of others, driven by the fear of isolation and by more direct threats to our life, freedom, and comfort.”
― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
Why can't free will be an emergent property of a complex system? Emergent properties are real, and are not found in the components of their systems, like how one transistor can't do computation
That's an unsubstantiated hypothesis and before you give evidence for it it must be treated as equally likely as all other claims that are, for now, unproven.
Since t he number of things that are true is very small and the number of unproven claims you can make is enormous the odds of this being true becomes number of things that are true/number of things that can be claimed.
This would be a vanishingly small probability so you'd have to find evidence first to move that probability into 'worthy of attention' territory.
I could easily see all this making someone less compassionate, at least less compassionate to criminals.
"So you're saying that we shouldn't hate them because free will doesn't exist? Well then you shouldn't hate me either for what I'm about to do to them".
i mean sure it's not their fault that they perceive conversations about the nature of reality to be a personally attack on their characters.
You, as an organism, still make “decisions” even though those “decisions” are decided by external factors. I’ve never had the belief that my “will” is independent from my surroundings… I don’t understand why so many people bring forth the concept that we don’t have “free will”, nobody else is deciding things for you but your decisions can be tracked back to the beginning of the universe. This changes nothing.
"even though those “decisions” are decided by external factors" But they aren't, really. The state of your brain is *you*. If I sit down and spend 10 minutes deciding something in my life, that's not the outside world deciding. Deciding to jump off the bridge is *me*. We don't say we decided to fall after stepping off the bridge, because *that* is the external world.
You are correct, but Kyle didn't really argue we have no decisions. Just that those decisions are dictated by certain internal and external forces.
without exception the people who want to "debunk" free will have done bad things.
True, but the external factors or environment also affect your decisions.
@boldCactuslad Yes, I have done bad things before realizing that free will is an illusion. I was selfish, racist and hateful to people with different lifestyles.
Now I'm a complete opposite, more emphatetic and understanding to struggles of other people. Before I called them idiots and dismissed them, now I try to understand and help.
Seeing as how every atom in my body has been replaced, it makes sense that I have no free will. I literally am 100% different than who i used to be.
Happy New Year Kyle! We ❤ you!
Jesus, that is really nice of you
Interesting choice. Or was it? 😂
Much like the simulation theory: so what? No matter which side the 'truth' falls on, it doesn't change the lived experience.
But his ending was all about how this could change our lived experience, how it can help us find empathy and understanding in the most uncomfortable of moral situations, right?
@@sepiar7682I find there is no difference in my mind between sentience and "free will". If you can be aware of the results of your actions, you have a choice to follow through to those results, or to change your course of action. The fact we even debate what choice is the "correct" one is a pretty good indication of will. I don't find value in viewing things from a deterministic standpoint. All it does to me is muddy what should be clear waters.
If it feels real, it might as well be.
@@sepiar7682Yes and he is correct. After independently realizing this over span of decade, I went from close minded, hateful, selfish person to somebody who does their best to help others and decrease their suffering.
@@sepiar7682 but that only matters if we have free will, if we don't it's all been determined already and we're all just npc's running our routines
I always think of something I heard genetically modified skeptic say. It was something along the lines of "what does it look like to live as if there is no free will?"
Exactly. I guess the closest would be the stereotypical mystic-type who maintains that everything is predestined, that everything they seemingly chose was already destined to happen.
Probably how it is now. What happened, happened. And it will continue to
It looks like a night at Diddys house.
Very simple a program that repeats
GMS always brings up some good points. Have you watched his latest vid on Richard Dawkins?
I'm in Dublin, had my eyes closed, thinking of Dublin and that's the first one he said. I was very surprised!
For the human brain to contemplate the inexistence of its own perceived feeling of free will is still an amazing reality right there.
Im glad Kyle is getting push back on this. Normally the viewers of these types of channels tend to agree with everything the so called educator says.
I'm glad as well. Though there is a disturbing trend of some comments disappearing. Hopefully that's youtube and not Kyle's team.
i think that, most of the time, most of us are purely reactionary - acting without free will. but, as someone who's had problems and stopped and thought about it and decided to get help and acted on that help, i think that, yes, i did have the free will to change how i thought. i am sure, had i just continued reacting to things, i could have ended up much worse and probably one of those people you might want to separate from society. it's very hard work, but i believe you can assert free will from time to time and save yourself
"The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives."
William James
But that’s the thing, you didn’t have free will to choose between continuing to react or seek help. Somewhere between those two different choices, your brain chemistry changed in such a way that made you want to choose to seek help. Maybe someone told you your previous path was wrong, or you saw the bad consequences of your inaction. Either way, there’s no "homunculus" separate from the chain of causality that made you change behaviors. You were just lucky to be able to break through the bad behavior.
@@TriteHexagon if you are right, then i have no choice but to believe that i have a choice; which sounds rather stupid. i contend that anyone who's overcome personal difficulties by not just going along with their body's reactions will also believe they had free will. also, if there really is no free will then dear world, stfu about jail for people who have no choice (ie: no responsibility) for their actions, quit talking to me about poor life choices when i don't have a choice. of course, you would argue, people have no choice but to be so judgemental about other people
The reason you give for being more compassionate due to determinism is vacuous. One could also argue "well, I didn't choose to draw enjoyment out of other's suffering, and they are just electrons anyways, so...". If anything, you can justify anything with determinism.
Being “just electrons” doesn’t make anyone less valuable. In fact everything you’ve ever known and loved has been “just electrons”.
Idiot creationist spotted.
To be fair to the determinists, if determinism is justify anything, then it can justify nothing, since it isn't a standard or a commandment. It's still the narcissist's prayer's final form, tho.
4:17 "Close your eyes". I can't, im driving 🤣
Hope you didn't write this when you were driving.
Sure you could, but I'm glad you didn't!
@@josiahpaez4601 but it would have been a lot cooler if he did XD
Keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel
do it, blame it on the lack of free will
‘The reason is simple and doesn’t involve philosophy’. Immediately describes a philosophical argument about causality :).
Also: “You are the processes of your mind” is a philosophical position called functionalism
Bah humbug
@@nobodyinteresting5311no it isn’t lol, it’s literally just an observation on science and life.
We do things because we chemically are made to do it or to move towards it.
Ur passions are only ur passions because ur brain gets a positive chemical reaction that it likes and wants to continue receiving.
This isn’t philosophical
It’s literally not a philosophical argument lmao, we have loads of scientific evidence to suggest we don’t actually have free will lmao
@@ZxZNebula in itself it isn't but it's perhaps a bit dismissive to imply that it isn't also a philosophical concept. Remember, philosophy has been dabbling in these ideas - in some form or another - long before the possibility of this type of research was ever conceived.
Additionally, this view of consciousness can certainly be interpreted philosophically even with these findings behind them. It stands in contradiction to most religions, after all.
The funniest part about brains with ego modules is that the modules tend to think they are the sole tenants in their buildings. "You" are the entire building and everything in it. Just because no one in apartment 2B answers the door when you knock, it doesn't mean that it's vacant. It's a blessing, really. That part of "you" does the heavy lifting and "you" get to just smile and say "Dublin" or "Vanilla, please."
Yes, it’s basically the PFC that talks, what about all the other parts though.
Exactly. Your brain is not in your skull as you perceive it. Your brain is containing the room you’re currently in from all sides. What You are experiencing is a projection, a model being created by Brain hardware as it synthesizes abstract sensory signals.
When I was a young kid, my dad was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. According to my mom, his personality was permanently changed after that. Growing up with that disease in my family made me well aware that we can't always choose what our brains decide.
As someone who deals with intrusive thoughts, I find it a lot harder to lose the feeling of free will. If my brain can present thoughts that I have to consciously reject, it feels more like there's a decision vs just the neurons firing with differing strengths and speeds. I'm curious how one would explain intrusive thoughts and the reactions to them with greater clarity or detail in a deterministic paradigm.
Can you decide which thoughts you consciously reject? I would argue no, because there is no free will.
And if you can reject, can you consciously reject to consciously reject?, and so on.
The argument is, that there i no entity which can influence its own thoughts without having to think about it itself.
This proves no free will.
I appreciate this video as I do all your videos. This topic specifically makes me feel very uneasy. As a survivor of SA it is very hard for me to grasp the idea that the perpetrators of crimes aren't making the choice to harm others. I can't believe that it's just my environment and random chance that I choose not to take advantage of others when given the opportunity.
+
Yeah, as a philosophical discussion, it's a really interesting topic, but this logic can't be applied to serious stuff where the concept of personal responsibility is important.
This!!
Even if we take criminal actions to be a result of a lack of free will, why should we forgo accountability of said actions? Yes, sure let’s assume there’s no free will in a criminal’s actions, but how does that diminish the severity of the crime they committed? They committed a crime because of nature, nurture and other bullcrap sure, but they still committed a crime, a serious one, so who should be held responsible if not them? If no one’s accountable or responsible for heinous acts then aren’t we essentially saying people are ‘free’ to do whatever they want and contradicting ourselves? Not to mention, mediating a collapse of society…
@slimedrive My heart goes out to you that you had to go through something so terrible, I hope you’ve found the peace and the justice that you deserve and if not I hope you do very soon…
I'm an SA survivor and my abuser was also a child, this is sadly the reality for some enduring generational trauma and mental illness.
I would say the reason you don’t take advantage of others is because you are a good person, and someone who would take advantage of others is a bad person. Even if they weren’t responsible for being a bad person that doesn’t make them good, that doesn’t make them deserving of having all the rights and freedoms of a good person, and that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be punished in hopes that they change. And if they don’t change, punishment will at least stop them from doing it again, discourage others from doing the same, and maybe give the victims a feeling of revenge that they deserve for having to go through what they did.
0:18 no, you're an illusion!
😂
I didn't choose to watch this video. I merely saw that Kyle Hill had uploaded, and was compelled.
“I didn’t choose to steal that Ferari your honor”
"Yet we don't want people stealing from others in our society, so we're gonna remove you from it and try to help you do better or find treatment if it's pathological"
the illusion of free will is the truth, accountability is a socially necessary tool. Ethics is a bit more complicated
@tempestive1 "however, doing that would be very unprofitable for our private prison, so instead we will exploit your labor for as long as possible-even manufacturing reasons to keep you in prison longer-while minimizing goods and services provided to you during this period of time."
@@torstenkruger7372to contest your intuition is dissociation, maybe the red Ferrari attacked his neurons with red photons causing a collapse in the wave function
Everyone puts too much emphasis on the "free" part of Free Will. Nobody ever puts any emphasis on the "will" part of Free Will. We make choices, and those choices matter. We are free to choose, and what events led to those choices are the reason we choose what we do, but at the end, those choices are our own. And that's fine. It's our will, and our will is free.
Aren't you just trying to say that we do have free will in a long winded way? Obviously if our will is free we have free will.. But the argument states that we cannot choose our will, hence it is not free.
Right there when you say "we are free to choose"
I ask of you
Prove it
Questioning “what is in control of my thoughts” makes it hard to believe I am in control. Questioning “what is in control of my attention” is what makes me believe free will exists. I have significantly less control over my brain than I do over my attention.
Are you sure you have as much control over your attention as you think you do? Try focusing your attention on doing absolutely nothing and you will notice that eventually your attention will waver on trying to do nothing because insert x, y, z rationalization and this will occur on anything that you ever do.
@ I’ve briefly tried putting my attention on “nothing” but I couldn’t. I’m not sure if it’s impossible to put my attention on “nothing” or if I just don’t understand the concept.
In case you weren’t specifically talking about putting attention on “nothing”; I do practice putting my attention on things like sounds or the sensation of air entering and exiting my lungs. My attention does waver but I just bring it back. Like how each pushup makes you stronger, each time I regrab my attention I get better at controlling it. Also like pushups, it is a slow and very gradual improvement.
If people had control over their attention, marketing wouldn't be the multi trillion dollar industry that it is.
@@direstorm7324 Better yet choose to put your attention on something that you have zero interest in. By attention I mean, choose to have interest in it, unequivocally.
@@experimentalcyborg I agree I think the people in charge are well well aware of there being no “free will.” But they also have no “free will” in being what they are. So it is truly paradoxical. That’s why I think for there to be any significant change, the general population also has to accept this. It will take the “power” they have. The point is there’s no choice in accepting it or not. So it’s fundamentally a generational issue, luckily there are some scholars teaching at least the concept of there being no “free will.”
I came here expecting to get an existential crisis, but instead I got a new perspective on things. As oxymoronic as it sounds, I find this concept of having no free will (a concept I’ve subscribed to for a number of years now) extremely freeing. Thank you, Kyle. You’re a beautiful human.
Free will is relative just like time. Your point of observation determines how you observe it.
I highly doubt we can call it relative when we can't even choose to be born or not.
@@pillarmenn1936 a relative chose for you to be born. And that is a relative correlation that you can relate to. If some chooses to unrelate you from reality, it was also not your choice but was freely willed by Free Willy.
its kind of the underlying problem of "we have never found proof of where consciousness is in the brain"
Just because you can't account for the origin of every thought, the timing of every decision, or the source of every influence, doesn't mean you have no control over your thoughts or free will. Our thoughts are not simply "flashes of lightning", we also have the ability to hold onto an idea and work with it, to consider it beyond the immediate impulse, and while many thoughts may be effectively pre-determined, there are also many decisions that I cannot reasonably set aside as not being free.
Your reasoning seems to be "We don't understand it therefore it can't be free will", and I think you're freely choosing to fool yourself.
And your expectation seems to be that free will should allow you to have full conscious control over every thought, with full knowledge of every second of the history of the universe leading up to that thought. I hope you see how ridiculous that is, so if not that then how would you define free will, and more importantly what would it take to reasonably prove it exists?
I agree. This is a massive stretch from him, and the subsequent arguments and supposition stemming from his viewpoint are ridiculous. This seems like a logical fallacy.
@@timothymonk1356
I agree that Kyle's argument here isn't great. I'll propose one that's a bit more ironclad:
If you want to argue that you have free will in a way that isn't bound by the laws of physics you must first demonstrate that your brain (or whatever is "piloting" your brain) can violate causality.
@@CaptainScarfish I'll give you another argument. I want to watch the video to see what Kyle says, I'm just so shocked he would make it and the first 30 seconds turned me off a bit.
If you want to argue that you have free will in a way that isn't bound by the laws of physics you must first demonstrate we have a complete or really good understanding of physics and reality.
I'm always put off when people make claims about things we can't possibly know at this moment. The video should have just said I don't know and then ended. It might be possible to know in the future when humanity has a better understanding of things and has more ability to freely explore. I think an analogy would be like "is the weather on TRAPPIST-1b more cloudy on Friday than Monday" I don't know if this makes any sense. I hope you have a wonderful day
Yeah ... this is truly a wtf video.
Agreed also. Personally, I’m hoping that the NEXT video he puts out is a direct contradiction to this one, arguing the other side.
“We can’t define consciousness or how the brain works in the first place, so assuming things are outside of our control is wildly premature. …what, I said differently before? But that was way back in 2024.”
Free will isn't in the individual decisions but in the construction of your mind. As someone who doesn't have a an internal monologue or a video playing or really any thoughts other than ones that just pop up fully ready to go I realize I don't make individual decisions. My sense of free will comes from what I direct my overall self to do. I choose objectives not the individual decisions. I am the CEO building the individual. I choose what environment I continue in and what people I continue to interact with. Do I choose what I eat? The question never even arises to my mind. What things I spend my consciousness on is what are my goals for the week, what is distracting me, what is helping me, who do I have obligations to ECT. It is environmental questions, all the little stuff falls into place when they need to. Sometimes I override the autopilot, example was that I wasn't sleeping well and got a medication to help me sleep from my doctor. This medicine caused me to hallucinate and I saw my wife and young daughter as vampires that were trying to kill me. My mind was hundred percent convinced, I saw the fangs, the hungry looks, the rooms lighting turned blood red my adrenaline was through the roof. Everything screamed fight for your life. Me I shut that shit down, I told everything to stop and not to believe what I felt or saw and to ignore every instinct. We are capable of overriding the random thoughts and electric activity of our brains and we are capable of choice. We are also a product of our environment and the friends we keep. The choices we control are the environments we choose to remain in and the friends we choose to keep by our side. Those choices shape the smaller choices of everyday life that might as well by just chemical processes of the brain.
I've been working on a Simulated Mind Hypothesis. Where concioiusness is like a virtual machine running on a pc. You get a bit of emergence and a self referencing recursive loop that we call "Free Will". That being said consciousness is scalar. So, it is deterministic up until the brain gets complex enough to get the feedback loop. One way you can think of it is a PC that is running a Virtual Machine that is running Minecraft that is running a Redstone Computer that is watching the whole system.
@@DrewTrox the awareness of that “feedback loop” is simply a “program” itself. Read about the PFC, what makes it not “free”, is its subject to a magnitude of factors both “bad” and “good.”
Example of “good.” Stable, environment, in human construct, i.e financial stability. Will cause efficient function of the PFC. also depends on it being capable, i.e. damage, tumors, and most importantly, adverse development and genetic disposition.
Example of the “bad.” Even acute mild uncontrollable persistent stress can cause a rapid decline in PFC cognitive abilities. Uncontrollable adverse stress causes physical changes in the PFC.
If the “awareness program,” get a “virus” of sorts - is it on - that program?
I am a big pile of atoms following the laws of physics. So what? It doesn't matter what me is, I am me and will act accordingly
Yes, but understanding that not everybody does things because they just want to makes you more emphatetic toward them, just like Kyle argued. That's the most important take away from the video.
The postulate that anything less than unlimited, unconstrained free will is not really free will is laughable outside the realm of thought experimentation.
how is a choice made? how is it anything other than the meat computer in your skull running a calculation? if free will exists where does it reside?
I was the thinking the same thing. He makes poor arguments all throughout and doesn’t even bother to define what free will is in the first place. Can’t have a discussion on a topic when people don’t agree on definitions because then you’re just arguing over the definition instead of the actual topic.
@@saleplains Where does gravity reside? Where does hunger, or love, or life-force?
Not everything that exists exists within the dimensions we perceive.
I'm a firm believer in the causal chain. I have been ever since I first watched Gargoyles in the mid 90s and its approach to time travel where nothing can change because it all already happened. It is only the limitations of individual perspective that makes what is the past to me, the future to someone else who lived before me, and vice versa. There are no branching paths, just a single unbroken chain which occasionally loops back on itself. None of this however made me feel any less "free".
The way I see it, the choice I've made, regardless of the reasons I made them, are whet defines me as me. Anyone else who would have, under the exact same circumstances, made different choices would by definition be a different person. Maybe a very similar person to myself, if alternate timelines actually existed, but not the exact same person.
All that considered, it may be better to say that free will being only an illusion just can't bother me, because what I believe in instead is self-determinism. Who I am is the sum total of everything I have experiences and the choices those experiences led me to make.
Just because we're not in full control of absolutely everything, I believe has little grasp on making choices at all. I think this argument is very pedantic in nature. There is no such thing as complete control, yes there are a lot of circumstantial things in life, but you always have a choice to keep walking your path or at anytime you could choose another but have to deal with the difficult process of change which I feel many people dislike and do not have the will to do until they are forced. Either way, there will always be challenges and things you cannot control, you must simply choose how to respond.
I believe the universe is chaotic, unforgiving, and uncontrollable, and that's okay. I don't need to be in control of everything to be free. I'm free within the circumstances that my little light of consciousnesses has popped into. I may not be able to change or control everything, but to want that or be foolish enough to think that is possible is insanity I believe.
Live life with accountability and responsibility.
The argument is pedantic in nature because the only people who care about how determinism affects moral responsibility are people who believe in an omnipotent omniscient judgemental deity.
What part of you is free from the deterministic Newtonian mechanics or random quantum mechanics that would allow you to make a decision not predetermined by physics?
@@darrennew8211 Everyone seeks a comfort to make them content in the absurdity that is existence, certainly.
@@CaptainScarfish Why do you think that your decisions are the result of physics somehow makes them not your decisions? Your decision isn't "predetermined." It's instead impossible to predict.
What do you think about people who lost their personality after brain injury/procedure?
Do people with brain tumor chose to kill their family and themselves? Do lobotomy victims chose to do... nothing at all after their brain is irriversably damaged?
The problem that I have with the argument "it's your neurotransmitters that decide" is it fails to acknowledge that the neurotransmitters are the process by which free will is facilitated. We also don't know what consciousness is, and due to the uncertainty principle, we can't and will never see the full atomic or quantum field structure of the brain. I believe choice is a physical process that is self-interacting and self-determining, so it is not determined by any causal event, only influenced.
The only evidence we have that supposedly supports the idea that free will is an illusion is the idea of determinism, which we know is fundamentally incorrect, as well as experiments which I'll get to. So the first argument is that the universe is determined through a chain of cause and effect. Quantum physics proves that randomness is real, but the way we talk about randomness is incorrect. We say random because we assign a probability to it, and we do this, as scientists will say, because of a lack of information. Physicists like Sean Carroll who I respect immensely will say that everything evolves according to, meaning deterministically, the Schrodinger equation. This is fundamentally false and I'll tell you why. We can never see the whole system, and this is important and I will continue to come back to it. The implication of this fact of the universe is that whatever description we invent to define physical phenomena and the relationships between them will inherently and quite literally always, for eternity, lack some information that keeps us from describing it in full. To get around this lack of information, individuals like Carroll will then invoke LaPlace's Demon, an entity with a different perspective on our universe that allows it to see every position and measure every particle's momentum simultaneously and it is because we lack this perspective that we can't see all the information.
I take issue with this thought experiment because it seems to prove something about the universe while denying the universe's arguably most fundamental and important feature that defines how it works; the uncertainty principle. This, as far as I'm concerned, invalidates such a thought experiment as being useful to infer any valid information about the nature of the universe. The reason I say this is because there is no position in which this information could be viewed, and what I propose is this: the information simply - does not exist, because everything physically in a state of superposition even as it relates to the universe itself. The uncertainty principle states that all the information about a quantum system cannot be simultaneously measured. Measurement, whether we want to admit it or not, means literally everything. It is not just a conscious being that takes a measurement. When rocks smash into each other, transfer energy and momentum and change direction, that is a measurement. To go even further, when a mass is embedded in and moving through spacetime, spacetime itself is measuring it based on the warp that that mass imposes onto the fabric of spacetime.
Let's imagine the following: When a large object is located within spacetime and moving through it, as is inevitable of all objects within it, that object warps space as a result of its mass. It's also moving though, and mass and energy are equivalent. When you take a mass and add energy to it by say, moving it faster, it gains mass. However, we aren't adding more particles to it, we are simply vibrating the particles it already has faster. This means that mass and velocity can have interchangeable values that can in possibly an infinite number of combinations, result in the same warping of space. You could have rest mass A and velocity B that results in overall interpreted mass C that warps spacetime a certain way. Let's say that mass A is a small mass and velocity B is super fast. Then we have another object, rest mass Z and velocity Y. Rest mass Z is a large mass, but velocity Y is a slow velocity. Both of these will result in exactly the same warp on spacetime. The universe itself does not even know which it is, because it fundamentally, physically, isn't either. The information defining its position and momentum in absolute terms literally does not exist, because it is in a physical state of super position. It is always in a physical state of super position. The reason we as the types of entities we are don't see things that way, is because the universe has to maintain continuity with regards to its laws, so we see everything in a sort of collapsed state.
Choice is the physical process the universe and its laws impart on beings like us, in order to maintain the continuity of its laws, and maintain eternal superposition. I am sitting, but I am also standing. The universe however only lets me see one, and the way it lets me see one is by bestowing upon me the physical process whereby I choose what happens to me next. Super position isn't just about the state of the system right now, it's about the possibility of all future states. If I was standing and then decided to sit, it eliminates the future where I decide to originally stand, but it manifests a possible path where I decide to sit but then choose later to stand back up.
I believe whatever the physical process of choice is, it has to do with the information about us as quantum systems that does not exist in the universe. The process that collapses the wave function is a process that is self-interacting and self-determining. It is one that is influenced by outside processes that are and can be measured, but not determined by them. In essence, choice is determined by the act of choosing itself, as it is self-interacting and self-determining. Now as for the experiments, we have two, the hungry judge experiment and the choice experiment.
The hungry judge experiment just posits and illustrates that you are more likely to get a harsher sentence if your judge didn't have lunch. This however is not in comparison to judges that did have lunches however, this is only a comparison within the hungry judges between how many times they issued a harsher sentence and how many times they issued a lenient sentence. This is similar to how drug companies convey the effectiveness of their drugs. They say it's 65% effective in patients. They don't however say that a not insignificant number of patients who got a placebo also improved, which actually brings down the effectiveness of things like Tylenol to 10-15% compared to a placebo. So the hungry judge experiment doesn't actually take into account the amount of harsh sentences from judges who have actually had lunch, rendering the results mediocre at best and completely invalid at worst.
Then there's the basic experiments where neuroscientists ask participating individuals to make a choice between two things, and to verbally signal when they have decided. They see that there is a neurological signal in the teat before the participant voices that they have decided and they concluded, without reasonable evidence I might add, that this signal is absolute proof that the process of "choice" happens unconsciously and before choice begins and thus we have no free will. As far as I'm concerned these experiments are literal dog shit, they conclude absolutely nothing tangible or substantiative about the nature of choice. Any reasonable, professional scientist should actually conclude that this signal is barely part of the picture. Remember when I said that not all the information can be seen because it doesn't actually exist? Perhaps this signal is part of the process, but a part nonetheless. The moment something is chosen is determined by the act of choosing itself, which makes free will actually *free* *will* . Lastly, here is an example about our eternal lack of comprehension, why both free will or no free will are just as likely, and thus we should act like it exists.
I like pie more than I like cake. I like pumpkin pie more than I like any other pie. On my birthday I will probably choose pumpkin pie every time. However, even if I choose it every time for all of eternity, there is fundamentally no experiment that can be engaged that can prove I didn't choose it every single time. The only thing any experiment can say about the taste, the texture, about my past experiences with pumpkin pie, about my feelings about pumpkin pie compared to other pies or compared to cake, about my experiences with other pies and with cake, about those taste, and the texture of those - the only thing any experiment will ever be able to say about those things is that they influenced my choice, not determined it.
Influence is not determination and the only thing we can prove and will ever be able to prove about choice is influence.
I've always found this argument so strained. I haven't even watched the video yet, but it usually amounts to...
"You did not get to choose the background of your parents which shaped who you are. Therefore you have no free will at all and it's all predetermined."
What's worse than that nonsense is that this usually is followed by some form of...
"Therefore let us make decisions for you."
Yeah. There's that.
More like: you can't roll a die and get "elephant".
Evolutionarily, an intelligent species would not thrive if certain filters and perceptions weren't implemented.
It would be like saying that because we are watching a movie on two different models of screen; that the film is somehow different and can be changed.
The illusion of agency is stubborn because it has to be. It is effective at helping navigate way too much stimuli in any given stage of the natural world.
The prey didn't choose running over getting eaten. No prey would ever be eaten again if that could be true (running doesn't help sometimes)
These things are almost impossible to break down without involving emotion or anecdotal influence.
So the cycle continues with avid believers of agency vs materialistic pattern driven chaos😂
This has honestly been one of the most eye opening and mind boggling videos you have ever made. You just single handedly changed my view on the death penalty and severe criminals overall.
Every time I hear an argument against free will, the more convinced I am that humans do in fact possess free will. There are endless rebuttals to each of these arguments.
Agreed
If you lend credence/legitimacy to many of those rebuttals; they tend to dissolve into a base data/frequency/anecdotal mess.
Once emotion and purpose are reduced to data points, the argument for "no free will" seems to solidify itself even further; while avid believers in "agency" tend to dig in and dispute more vehemently.
It is such a fascinating dance of conflicting poles
@@tylersmith2792 Thanks for sharing your opinion, but I disagree
I chose to stop watching this at 4:16 seconds because this feels depressing and now I want chicken nuggets. I continue beliving were just moneys on a space rock with baseball caps and automatic weapons.
4:19
based
the chicken nuggets were super tastsy now im gonna liten to this as I fall asleep because a bunch of you gave this comment a like and had other ideas... since you are anwsering to my comment I need to listen to the whole thing to u.ndterstand your point of view.
you cunts made me to finish this video, otherwise i could have let it go...
but you refrence things i dont understand because I havent finished watching it.
long story short im gonna get some food and finish it.
does this make sense? sorry english isnt my first languege
....we also have autotune,nukes,viruses,and at least one human being doing a real stand up impression of a leaking colostomy bag.
I'm a huge fan of the term 'post hoc rationalization' I use it almost all the time because.. well, it's applicable all the time. This is wild. Help. wait. don't do anything, it doesn't matter. oh wait. do whatever you want it doesn't matter. wait. it just doesn't matter. nevermind.
dont remember subbing to this channel, it must have been the great chain
Ridiculous - the whole point of the free will concept is that it is NOT causally connected to anything in the material world. That is what makes it "free" in the first place. Your premise is wrong so that means the conclusion is wrong - straw man argument.
It's a little like how you can trace generosity back to the selfish desire for a hit of dopamine, it makes you feel good, then you'll do that so you feel good. I loved playing this angle on my highschool writing assignments, "we are forged of our experiences" It's a very fun rabbit hole to chase down sometimes
I dont help people for the good feeling or dopamine. I help people to improve their life and alleviate and their experience. For altruism, not for feel goods.
@@tonypalmetto6114
And doing so probably doesn't make you feel miserable, right?
@tonypalmetto6114 by why do you act altruistically? Is it for personal benefit for the afterlife, is it because you believe it is good? And in the end can you not root that down to securing your afterlife or for the benefit of feeling you yourself are a good person, is it because it makes you feel important to others? So yes, it's good of you to do, but you can still reduce it to self serving reasons. That's not to say stop performing good and kind acts in the world, but by reducing you can find an underlying motivator. It's like how an object at rest stays at rest unless acted upon by another force, you were acted upon by some underlying motivator making your altruism fundamentally what you would do due to an underlying motivator. It can be a scary thought to reduce things that fundamentally, but its also digging at the nature of motivation. We are who we are by the collection of all our experiences in life which are an amalgam of the collective experiences of all those other lives we interact with, it's the mass blanket of life with us each but a thread in the grand design, the curves and corners and path of that thread effecting all the threads it touches, which in turn then effect the threads those touch too. But as your thread effects other threads so do other threads effect yours. Naturally a living thing acts in self interest and self furthermore in some way or another, making everything deterministic. But this then gets into the 3 body problem of there being too many variables in the starting state as it is that we could not predict, making life a beautiful chaotic predetermined tapestry expanding forever out. Each act effecting the whole but wholly predetermined by everything that has acted upon the person up to the point of that choice.
@@tonypalmetto6114 it still makes you feel good. And no matter what yo uthink, that will influence your decision to continue helping. And we evolved this so we kept helping others that need help to survive.
It doesn't for me. I'm a psychopath. But I still go against that nature.
Keep in mind dopamine isn't what makes you feel good exactly it just makes things more strongly likely in your brain in a similar vein to testosterone for social recognition. The pleasure facet is indirect, mainly from survival factors and scarcity. You get a hit with salt and sugar which are pleasurable because they are naturally rare so when you rat stuff with them you get a rise in dopamine making it more likely.
So if I benefit from the circumstances that led to my success then I attribute it to my "free will" and pat myself on the back and denigrate others for their poor "choices". However, if I don't benefit, then I blame others and circumstances outside of my perceived "control". Makes sense.
I appreciate Kyle's effort to present academic and scientific themes to lay audience but this video is just an example why doing this is not so easy. Kyle did not presented common definitions of free will according to the literature, nor did he engaged with the main objections and arguments in favour or against free will. In fact, Kyle promptly dismisses with bare effort what Dennett had said on the subject matter. But one must surely agree with something Kyle states right through the end of the video: the talk about free will does require more than some fancy philosophy. But so does its negation
1:35 this video influenced what I'm eating tonight. It will be chicken dumplings.
Any askers?
Good choice! I had Texas Roadhouse 😂
A limitation on the number of options one can choose 9:32 does not cancel out free will
But what are the reasons you chose the option you did. And why did you think of those reasons instead of other reasons that would have made you pick a different option. And did you have any control over the cause of those reasons that made you pick what you did.
As someone who lived with a significant hormone inbalance for over a decade and who is now having it treated via HRT, I can say yes, the brain is extremely fragile and who you are can be changed at the drop of a hat. It's wild.
You are not a woman
Nope, you just chose it, never forget it, be me, be them, be better.
This is Sarcasm just in case.
@@Laotzu.Goldbug I don't think that's what hormonal imbalance means man
I think Kyle's argument is not conclusive, like at all. First of all, his definition of free will is ill posed. He basically says it is your ability to make choices without being affected by the physics of the world. Well, the issue there is then what is the "you" in the "your" part of this statement. He alludes to a soul, but that is speaking in hypotheticals, which we cannot argue about because there's no way to argue about something that cannot be interacted with by the physical world, but can supposedly interact with it. It might as well be god. It's a dead end in the argument.
Since Kyle cannot define the "you" here, his answer is to a fundamentally ill posed question. Kyle can't actually make a distinction between the people he talked about and the universe in general. He's purposely stripped the word "you" of all colloquial meaning in order to get the result he wants. It's like how I can redefine the plus operation in 2+2 to be anything I want to get any result I want. The spirit of the problem of free will is how your will is your own, external factors be damned. Reducing the human to be just an extension of the universe allows the "non will" of the universe to bleed into the "you will". That is not in the spirit of the problem and is a reduction to redefining the word "you" beyond anything meaningful to the colloquial meaning of it and it's use in the definition of free will.
However, if we take "you" as being the entirety of your biological being that forms a homeostatic system... well then free will clearly exists. The question and the answer are well posed. Your neurons forming and destroying connections to adjust to the data coming in to the world IS your will. Actually, all decisions and actions performed internal to your system are your free will and the outcome of the free will is clearly the influence that causes on the world outside of your system. Think of this is being the opposite of Descartes' argument of cutting away all of you until you are just something experiencing signals - the adding of parts of you until you really can't argue that something can count as you anymore. The free will exists as the interface between your internal machinations and the external world. And clearly, you can decide to do all sorts of things that impart your will on the world, via your own rumination and guiding of your thoughts towards a goal.
Congratulations, you've discovered the difference between conscious and subconscious thought. Choice isn't about intrusive thoughts and urges, it's what you do with them. Like Nature vs Nurture, its not an all or nothing game. I do have to wonder how badly you have to have screwed up to be so gung ho on abandoning personal responsibility. Also, I would love to meet a determinist who actually walks the walk. Having no responsibility means you get no credit for your successes, either. Not that I'd agree with them, but it'd be interesting to see one.
I think you just said "ego".
I also don't believe in good/evil, right/wrong, win/lose. False dichotomies exist. I do believe in is, but not isn't. Nothing cannot exist.
You are correct on the subconscious and conscious thought. But guess what, what we call (me) is just an observer to that processes (just like Kyle argued).
And you just met a determinist who does not take personal credit for their success. That's why I make a good deeds for sake of helping others, not because I want a reward.
That's also why I release all my creative work for free and allow anybody to use it however they want.
@@lachlanhenry486 Nothing is simply the word we use to describe the lack of something, not the presence of a "nothing" non-entity. Using the grammar present in the language it is possible for existence to have the lack of something, thereby it is possible for nothing to exist, if only in language.
everything is bound by cause and effect, that's it. If you think that means people can't be held accountable for their actions, then people also can't be held accountable for how they respond either and neither can the people who step in to restrain the latter and suddenly...nothing changes about the world :o we just stop pretending its anything more than causality
I can guarantee you that this video of yours will be one you return to years later to explain how this pseudoscientific slop of an argument was wrong. Eventually. Once people realize it is in the same vein as phrenology and treat it as such.
There is free will. There are also things I'm not free to choose, but that doesn't negate free will in the least. I cannot choose which blood cell is in my pinky toe at any given second, but that doesn't mean anything to my freedom to choose and it's ridiculous for people to argue as much. Some of our meat-mech is automated, some of it is manual. Sometimes we can make the automated parts manual by choice, and sometimes our choice is taken away by automation. But the whole system is still you.
> gets presented scientifically proven facts
> calls it pseudoscience
What is your opinion about lobotomy victims? Their prefrontal cortex responsible for conscious decisions is removed and they lose their personality and ability to act on their own without specific instructions.
Brain chemistry is responsible for all decisions, remove parts of the brain and person loses the ability.
But isn't the manualness just a different part of the meat mech being in control?
@cameron7374 That's proving my point.
@@cameron7374it is. It's your brain. You are every part of you, not some abstract external component that directs the meat puppet you call yourself, which is really the only definition free will wouldn't exist under, because every reaction in your brain and your nerves and every other cell in your body is part of your natural process of being you.
Your actions are influenced by things, they do have causes, but those causes, even the subconscious ones, still only influence the decisions you make in most cases - and most are just as much part of you as the molecules used to make energy in a cell.
speaking as someone who has experienced the deepest depths of the mental abyss, the worth of a soul is in the ability to overcome the urges. Those that slip are not to be pitied.
even if they've got a brain tumor? you only have your own brain as a reference, someone elses mental abyss might be accompanied by impulse control issues also outside of their control. like a manic episode or a psychotic break.
@TweedleDeem have had those. They are able to be overcome. As far as tumors go, we put down rabid animals don't we?
Without free will, there's no difference between submission and rebellion.
*mentions science experiments that "prove" free will is an illusion
*doesn't show them, give reference, talk about them in detail and even says they're pointless
Because they are pointless. What if they prove that a decision was made by the person? Of course it was. How did that person make the decision tho? By neurons firing in his/her brain. And you can't decide which neuron to fire
Google is your friend
@@nvrndingsmmr nope. it's not something i believe in and don't care enough to look up the research myself.
if someone's going to attempt to change my belief and they vaguely mention research has been done, they should be providing it and citing sources.
but again, he said it didn't matter, so why should i even care?
his video, his onus.
@DragoNate "I have a question that has answers from reputable sources." "Ok, well just read those answers." "No."
Lmao.
@@nvrndingsmmr where's my question?
my only question is: what are the sources?
try paying attention?
Don't blame me, I'm just doing what my brain tells me
Well if what your brain tells you to do pisses off my brain, then I'm gonna do what my brain tells me.
oh shit, i didn't know you where chill like that
@@Natalie-ls8rb just have your brain call my brain and let those two figure it out on their own
I have been a disbeliever of free will for many years now. I would have a hard time trying to explain my reasoning to anyone, but now I can just direct people to watch this instead of trying myself. Thank you for your great work in all the videos you make, Kyle.
@@antoineswine2029 direct them in the direction of Robert Sapolsky. He’s a neuroscientist that gets into the grit of exactly why we don’t have “free will.”
As someone with a genetic incurable chronic illness that is slowly destroying me, I fully agree.