Compatibilism does not actually say that free will and determinism can simultaneously be true, it just redefines "free will" as being the illusion of itself - it calls the perception that the deterministic events happening in your brain are the result of conscious will "free will", but still acknowledges that they're deterministic. Schachter here essentially states that because our societies require us to act as if humans have free will, free will must exist, but that just leads to searching for something real that can be called free will. Fortunately, compatibilism is unnecessary, because even when you accept determinism, it's still true that rewarding and punishing people as if they made choices changes how often those actions happen - a brain is less likely to commit a crime if it fears legal consequences.
Thank you for sharing such a thoughtful and thorough analysis! I love hearing different perspectives on these complex topics. Would love your thoughts on the other ideas such as "consent" and "gender identities".
@@camedwardbenton Yeah I was also interested in what my thoughts on Schachter's take on "consent" was, because I couldn't initially figure out what they were. What Schachter describes as "consent" here is something I would call "interoception", which is basically your sense of your own internal state and the physical symptoms of brain activity - for example, the way that panic attacks can manifest as intense chest pain. I think it's very important that the definition of "consent" is not conflated with that, because interoception is not something everyone is able to do - autistic people often struggle with it - and if that was a necessary part of consent, then it would be defining consent as something that some people who are otherwise well-informed and rational are unable to give, which could result in infantilising policies such as requiring parental consent for an adult autistic person to get a medical procedure. Schachter also seems to be using this experience of interoception and introspection as essentially evidence for the existence of "something like God". I'm not entirely clear on the point being made because it was kind of tangential, but the two sentiments "consent is interoception" and "I don't know many artists or trans people who don't believe in something like God" were definitely being presented as if related, then followed by the words "It's about being a channel, a conduit". Unless Schachter also has different definitions of those words, that's pretty explicitly describing four separate concepts as being closely related: a) the word "consent", b) the act of figuring out what's going on inside your body, c) self-expression and d) divine will acting through your body. Which is interesting, because point d there would make this activity deterministic even if humans did have free will, because channelling is behaving in direct accordance with the will of another entity, which means that self-expression and consent are also deterministic - in other words, if Schachter's position is logically consistent and I understand it correctly, Schachter must believe that humans do not choose to give consent or to express themselves - and potentially that humans don't even express themselves at all, but just express a portion of some divine material. On the topic of Schachter's perception of God, I think there would be benefit to studying the philosophy of the ancient Greeks, particularly Plato. They detected the same transcentental property, but did not call it God - possibly because the concept of a "god" to them as a polytheistic culture was very different. Plato and I would call that transcendental property "beauty"; Plato believed it to be a fundamental property of the universe, something he called an "Idea", I prefer to approach it in evolutionary terms. In that sense, I would agree with Schachter that all artists must tap into that "beauty", but "channeling" has not been my experience of doing so - for me it's a very instinctive, very animalistic "you know it when you see it" reaction to external stimuli. There's no "opening up a doorway and letting beauty flow through it" or anything, it's much more of an experimentation process that will at some point click into place and feel correct - which given the prevalence of the lightbulb or eureka moment in pop culture I'd guess is probably the more common experience. As for gender - my position on the matter is that "identity" as a whole breaks down the further into the details you get, and people should, as much as possible, refer to each other in terms of what they do rather than which labels they wear. A label has no meaning except to imply a preclusivity for certain behaviours, which makes all labels inherently stereotypes. When labels have been important beyond behavioural implications, it has always been as a tool of prejudice; a way to basically think of another type of person as being less complex and potentially less virtuous than yourself. When people apply labels to themselves, it results in them simplifying themselves in the same way, which is why there's such a huge diversity of labels within queer culture - people keep noticing that their own behaviour doesn't really match up with the stereotype of the existing labels that they try on. Here's a rather gruesome thought experiment that illustrates the limitations of identity - imagine a space colony where humans are grown in vats and immediately upon birth, the brain is removed and placed into a white cube that has a propulsion system, a sensor array, arms, and an interface that allows signals to be sent to and from the brain. The brain is then allowed to mature normally, to interact with other cubes, to learn things etc. However, it has absolutely no concept of what a human body is. It doesn't have one itself, it has never seen one, it has never heard anything about one, nor been told such a thing exists - as far as it's concerned, "human body" refers to the white cube that is identical for all brains. In that society, what do you think the chances are of gender existing, or for that matter, of cubes primarily finding monoamorous partnerships that, without their knowledge, are between one male-sourced brain and one female-sourced brain? If gender did exist, It could only exist as a result of gender roles being in some way hard-coded in the brain - for the sake of a facetious example, this might result in half the cubes choosing to paint themselves pink and the other half choosing to paint themselves blue, if female brains were wired to associate long wavelengths of light with themselves and male brains were wired to associate short wavelengths of light with themselves. I don't think that would be very likely though. We rely on facets of biological sex to come up with our ideas of gender - we notice that humans come in two basic models and ascribe societal meaning to those shapes and the people who have them, based on what aptitudes those shapes tend to have. If you had to divide cube-people into two groups based solely on their personality traits (which would be the only evidence of female or male since all other biology is removed), I think the odds are one in a million you'd end up with exactly the same two categories we have today. So as far as I'm concerned, there are no female cubes or male cubes, only cubes that like pink and cubes that like blue.
I really love the cube analogy! I think it’s a great way to perceive “through” the myriad of complexities that we are born into (I.e. the stories we are raised with) vs “how things actually are.” If you’ve ever will. We dive more into this kind of topic on my previous episode with Daniel DiPiazza if you want to check it out. We dive into topics mor like “what is experience” and “what is reality?” for instance. Regarding the topic of consent that you mentioned. I actually think this fits into Mia’s ideas around compatablism. I know you disagree with their definition of it, but I think it’s one that works for me as well, in that both are true. I know you mentioned earlier that the issue is that we have to figure out then what/where free-will is. But I’m not sure that we do. And I think this is where some eastern thought is useful as well. In that I think that “free will” lives in the same place as do thoughts, emotions and experience. To get a better sense of that I’d recommend checking out an episode of Impact Theory where Tom interviews Dr. K of the Healthy Gamer. I believe that the things we experience are a priori. And I think that one of the flaws with a lot of western philosophy in particular (especially in our current scientific form) is that if we can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist. But simply because I can’t measure love doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. In the same way this is related to Mia’s experience of God and of consent as atunement and full body listening. But this is something that must be experienced and trained and developed it’s not something that can be simply learned about through reading. They actually work with a lot of autistic people (and have even described themselves as probably being autistic) and help them to develop that skillset. Which I think is something that’s currently underdeveloped/atrophied in many of us who aren’t autistic just due to the overall impact of technology and us not working those muscles. Let me know your thoughts! I really appreciate the conversation and engagement in this kind of content. This is the kind of community I’m wanting to build 😊 So thank you for your participation!
@@camedwardbenton Western philosophy does have a problem of only being able to confidently say that something exists when we can figure out how to measure it, but so far no other philosophy has presented a better way of knowing that things exist. The experiential model, ie "I experience it therefore it exists" is incapable of distinguishing between reality and convincing illusion, or in other words, it says that strongly believing in something makes that thing exist, which makes it useless. It's also very arrogant, it puts humans at the center of a universe that all evidence suggests is not interested in us. The other major problem with that experiential model is that we have reasonable evidence that not all humans actually experience consciousness in the same way. There's an interesting couple of videos by Simon Roper on the topic of Qualia, which is basically the theory that when we sense something, we determine what it is by comparing it to a set of innate truths about experience - eg that there is a true "redness" beyond just a band of light wavelengths. Roper begins in the position that qualia are so self-evident that they need not be proven, and that anyone who doesn't think they exist must just be mistaken, but later comes to the conclusion that it might be the case that people who do not believe qualia exist may not use qualia in their own experience of the world, and thus feel that qualia self-evidently don't exist and are just as confused about how anyone could claim they do as Roper is that anyone could claim they don't.
So I agree with you. However, all of those measurements you’re talking about exist within an individual’s experience. Or reading about them in this case exists within yours. But can you prove those things actually took place? What evidence do you have outside your experience that they actually took place? This might initially seem as a silly and useless argument because then everything in fact can be argued to be illusion. Which in fact I’d say actually is true. But in turn that make me realize that nearly everything is something I don’t “know”, but is something I believe. The only thing I do “know” is that I am experiencing such a thing. But I don’t “know” you exist, for example. You could be a bot, an ai, or an illusion. What I do “know” is that I’m experiencing you. And because I am experiencing you I can form beliefs, but those beliefs are just that, beliefs. Which, for me, I find freedom in. Because if I understand that the vast majority of life is shaped simply by beliefs and beliefs can shift than so too can my experiential reality.
I really like my corporate "hamster wheel" job haha. I get to teach & mentor my co-workers, learn from them in turn, and make the codebase (and hopefully banking) a little bit better every day.
That’s great! Yeah I don’t think there’s anything wrong working in corporate it has more to do with living in line with your values which it sounds like you are!
I feel like it's a little bit of a disappointment when someone describes a connection to something greater, something spiritual, transcendent, connected, artistic and beautiful, and then ascribes that to God or something outside themselves. How much better is it to realize what you're connecting with is -- yourself! Or the light of other humans. We are incredible. The subconscious is an unexplored ocean. There's no reason to bring the supernatural into it. We are enough!
I think this might me more of a semantic difference personally. Like for me I don’t see “god” as “outside myself” That word is in some ways just describing the infallible the bigger identity beyond my small identity.
Compatibilism does not actually say that free will and determinism can simultaneously be true, it just redefines "free will" as being the illusion of itself - it calls the perception that the deterministic events happening in your brain are the result of conscious will "free will", but still acknowledges that they're deterministic. Schachter here essentially states that because our societies require us to act as if humans have free will, free will must exist, but that just leads to searching for something real that can be called free will.
Fortunately, compatibilism is unnecessary, because even when you accept determinism, it's still true that rewarding and punishing people as if they made choices changes how often those actions happen - a brain is less likely to commit a crime if it fears legal consequences.
Thank you for sharing such a thoughtful and thorough analysis! I love hearing different perspectives on these complex topics. Would love your thoughts on the other ideas such as "consent" and "gender identities".
@@camedwardbenton Yeah I was also interested in what my thoughts on Schachter's take on "consent" was, because I couldn't initially figure out what they were.
What Schachter describes as "consent" here is something I would call "interoception", which is basically your sense of your own internal state and the physical symptoms of brain activity - for example, the way that panic attacks can manifest as intense chest pain. I think it's very important that the definition of "consent" is not conflated with that, because interoception is not something everyone is able to do - autistic people often struggle with it - and if that was a necessary part of consent, then it would be defining consent as something that some people who are otherwise well-informed and rational are unable to give, which could result in infantilising policies such as requiring parental consent for an adult autistic person to get a medical procedure.
Schachter also seems to be using this experience of interoception and introspection as essentially evidence for the existence of "something like God". I'm not entirely clear on the point being made because it was kind of tangential, but the two sentiments "consent is interoception" and "I don't know many artists or trans people who don't believe in something like God" were definitely being presented as if related, then followed by the words "It's about being a channel, a conduit". Unless Schachter also has different definitions of those words, that's pretty explicitly describing four separate concepts as being closely related: a) the word "consent", b) the act of figuring out what's going on inside your body, c) self-expression and d) divine will acting through your body. Which is interesting, because point d there would make this activity deterministic even if humans did have free will, because channelling is behaving in direct accordance with the will of another entity, which means that self-expression and consent are also deterministic - in other words, if Schachter's position is logically consistent and I understand it correctly, Schachter must believe that humans do not choose to give consent or to express themselves - and potentially that humans don't even express themselves at all, but just express a portion of some divine material.
On the topic of Schachter's perception of God, I think there would be benefit to studying the philosophy of the ancient Greeks, particularly Plato. They detected the same transcentental property, but did not call it God - possibly because the concept of a "god" to them as a polytheistic culture was very different. Plato and I would call that transcendental property "beauty"; Plato believed it to be a fundamental property of the universe, something he called an "Idea", I prefer to approach it in evolutionary terms. In that sense, I would agree with Schachter that all artists must tap into that "beauty", but "channeling" has not been my experience of doing so - for me it's a very instinctive, very animalistic "you know it when you see it" reaction to external stimuli. There's no "opening up a doorway and letting beauty flow through it" or anything, it's much more of an experimentation process that will at some point click into place and feel correct - which given the prevalence of the lightbulb or eureka moment in pop culture I'd guess is probably the more common experience.
As for gender - my position on the matter is that "identity" as a whole breaks down the further into the details you get, and people should, as much as possible, refer to each other in terms of what they do rather than which labels they wear. A label has no meaning except to imply a preclusivity for certain behaviours, which makes all labels inherently stereotypes. When labels have been important beyond behavioural implications, it has always been as a tool of prejudice; a way to basically think of another type of person as being less complex and potentially less virtuous than yourself. When people apply labels to themselves, it results in them simplifying themselves in the same way, which is why there's such a huge diversity of labels within queer culture - people keep noticing that their own behaviour doesn't really match up with the stereotype of the existing labels that they try on.
Here's a rather gruesome thought experiment that illustrates the limitations of identity - imagine a space colony where humans are grown in vats and immediately upon birth, the brain is removed and placed into a white cube that has a propulsion system, a sensor array, arms, and an interface that allows signals to be sent to and from the brain. The brain is then allowed to mature normally, to interact with other cubes, to learn things etc. However, it has absolutely no concept of what a human body is. It doesn't have one itself, it has never seen one, it has never heard anything about one, nor been told such a thing exists - as far as it's concerned, "human body" refers to the white cube that is identical for all brains. In that society, what do you think the chances are of gender existing, or for that matter, of cubes primarily finding monoamorous partnerships that, without their knowledge, are between one male-sourced brain and one female-sourced brain? If gender did exist, It could only exist as a result of gender roles being in some way hard-coded in the brain - for the sake of a facetious example, this might result in half the cubes choosing to paint themselves pink and the other half choosing to paint themselves blue, if female brains were wired to associate long wavelengths of light with themselves and male brains were wired to associate short wavelengths of light with themselves. I don't think that would be very likely though. We rely on facets of biological sex to come up with our ideas of gender - we notice that humans come in two basic models and ascribe societal meaning to those shapes and the people who have them, based on what aptitudes those shapes tend to have. If you had to divide cube-people into two groups based solely on their personality traits (which would be the only evidence of female or male since all other biology is removed), I think the odds are one in a million you'd end up with exactly the same two categories we have today.
So as far as I'm concerned, there are no female cubes or male cubes, only cubes that like pink and cubes that like blue.
I really love the cube analogy! I think it’s a great way to perceive “through” the myriad of complexities that we are born into (I.e. the stories we are raised with) vs “how things actually are.” If you’ve ever will.
We dive more into this kind of topic on my previous episode with Daniel DiPiazza if you want to check it out. We dive into topics mor like “what is experience” and “what is reality?” for instance.
Regarding the topic of consent that you mentioned. I actually think this fits into Mia’s ideas around compatablism. I know you disagree with their definition of it, but I think it’s one that works for me as well, in that both are true.
I know you mentioned earlier that the issue is that we have to figure out then what/where free-will is. But I’m not sure that we do. And I think this is where some eastern thought is useful as well.
In that I think that “free will” lives in the same place as do thoughts, emotions and experience.
To get a better sense of that I’d recommend checking out an episode of Impact Theory where Tom interviews Dr. K of the Healthy Gamer.
I believe that the things we experience are a priori.
And I think that one of the flaws with a lot of western philosophy in particular (especially in our current scientific form) is that if we can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist.
But simply because I can’t measure love doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
In the same way this is related to Mia’s experience of God and of consent as atunement and full body listening. But this is something that must be experienced and trained and developed it’s not something that can be simply learned about through reading.
They actually work with a lot of autistic people (and have even described themselves as probably being autistic) and help them to develop that skillset. Which I think is something that’s currently underdeveloped/atrophied in many of us who aren’t autistic just due to the overall impact of technology and us not working those muscles.
Let me know your thoughts! I really appreciate the conversation and engagement in this kind of content. This is the kind of community I’m wanting to build 😊 So thank you for your participation!
@@camedwardbenton Western philosophy does have a problem of only being able to confidently say that something exists when we can figure out how to measure it, but so far no other philosophy has presented a better way of knowing that things exist. The experiential model, ie "I experience it therefore it exists" is incapable of distinguishing between reality and convincing illusion, or in other words, it says that strongly believing in something makes that thing exist, which makes it useless. It's also very arrogant, it puts humans at the center of a universe that all evidence suggests is not interested in us.
The other major problem with that experiential model is that we have reasonable evidence that not all humans actually experience consciousness in the same way. There's an interesting couple of videos by Simon Roper on the topic of Qualia, which is basically the theory that when we sense something, we determine what it is by comparing it to a set of innate truths about experience - eg that there is a true "redness" beyond just a band of light wavelengths. Roper begins in the position that qualia are so self-evident that they need not be proven, and that anyone who doesn't think they exist must just be mistaken, but later comes to the conclusion that it might be the case that people who do not believe qualia exist may not use qualia in their own experience of the world, and thus feel that qualia self-evidently don't exist and are just as confused about how anyone could claim they do as Roper is that anyone could claim they don't.
So I agree with you.
However, all of those measurements you’re talking about exist within an individual’s experience.
Or reading about them in this case exists within yours. But can you prove those things actually took place?
What evidence do you have outside your experience that they actually took place?
This might initially seem as a silly and useless argument because then everything in fact can be argued to be illusion. Which in fact I’d say actually is true.
But in turn that make me realize that nearly everything is something I don’t “know”, but is something I believe.
The only thing I do “know” is that I am experiencing such a thing.
But I don’t “know” you exist, for example. You could be a bot, an ai, or an illusion. What I do “know” is that I’m experiencing you. And because I am experiencing you I can form beliefs, but those beliefs are just that, beliefs.
Which, for me, I find freedom in. Because if I understand that the vast majority of life is shaped simply by beliefs and beliefs can shift than so too can my experiential reality.
I really like my corporate "hamster wheel" job haha. I get to teach & mentor my co-workers, learn from them in turn, and make the codebase (and hopefully banking) a little bit better every day.
That’s great!
Yeah I don’t think there’s anything wrong working in corporate it has more to do with living in line with your values which it sounds like you are!
I feel like it's a little bit of a disappointment when someone describes a connection to something greater, something spiritual, transcendent, connected, artistic and beautiful, and then ascribes that to God or something outside themselves. How much better is it to realize what you're connecting with is -- yourself! Or the light of other humans. We are incredible. The subconscious is an unexplored ocean. There's no reason to bring the supernatural into it. We are enough!
I think this might me more of a semantic difference personally. Like for me I don’t see “god” as “outside myself”
That word is in some ways just describing the infallible the bigger identity beyond my small identity.