What is Free Will? | Episode 210 | Closer To Truth
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 20 ก.ค. 2021
- If it seems obvious that you are perfectly free to choose and decide, then it seems perfectly clear that you underestimate the problem (and have never questioned a philosopher). Free Will is a huge problem. Featuring interviews with Peter van Inwagen, John Searle, Daniel Dennett, Christof Koch, Alan Leshner, and Susan Blackmore.
Season 2, Episode 10 - #CloserToTruth
▶Register for free at CTT.com for subscriber-only exclusives: bit.ly/2GXmFsP
Closer To Truth host Robert Lawrence Kuhn takes viewers on an intriguing global journey into cutting-edge labs, magnificent libraries, hidden gardens, and revered sanctuaries in order to discover state-of-the-art ideas and make them real and relevant.
▶Free access to Closer to Truth's library of 5,000 videos: bit.ly/376lkKN
Closer to Truth presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
In the scene where Dr. Khun is lifting weights he is still wearing his usual all black dress clothes hahaha
It was determined to happen
@James Benton Ticer He freely chose to workout in his dress clothes.
Closet probably has 50 sets of the same black outfit.
Thank goodness Christoph arrived to end the madness. Lawrence's summation that begins at 23:51 is beautiful
This video was presented to me as science. It felt like slowly pulling teeth until 90% of the way through when Dr. Koch suggested otherwise. Scientists discussing philosophy with metaphysical ideas is not science! The more people keep representing unscientific principles as science because they're supported by some scientists, the less educated our society is about the capabilities and limitations of the scientific method. This is part of why bible college PhDs are given platforms to discuss woo with people who have dedicated their lives to qualifying the observable shared experience we call the universe with intellectual honesty and sincerity. WTF Dennett! Why did you choose to introduce biology as separate from physics? Perhaps he was channeling interdimensional mover that wants to make its presence known, but I'm pretty sure we're not going to find an answer through experimentation. I'm just ranting. I'm not even saying this is a bad video and I would suggest it could be useful for many. I'm just begging that anyone who watches this or shares it will just acknowledge that it isn't a video about science.
@@brandonmarlett7370 Yeah the whole free will stuff in this series always veers towards metaphysical spirituality.
Thank you Dr. Kuhn for bringing closer to truth to us
Kuhn, thanks so much for bringing these questions to light. It reminds me of my days working with Tooley, van Inwagen, Dennett, etc.when I was studying philosophy. I personally worked under Tooley's direction. You should see his office or basement. He literally hired some third party to organize all his stuff because you had to delicately navigate around stacks of papers and books without knocking them over. Lol. Anyway, love you, brother. You ask the right questions.
Ah, the drama of thinking! Thanks for this series Lawrence.
Excellent episode Mr Kuhn.
I agree events in the physical world are determined by previous events and choices. I can't wrap myself around the suggestion that free will and consciousness is determined by previous events. To me awareness, consciousness and free will are not physical, they are free from the physical world and causual events and determinism. Peace!
I agree. There is physical world and determinism which works on physics and physical laws and there is another world of consciousness and free will that lives in this physical world of determinism and is not part of determinism. We have both of them.
But people who choose to believe that there is only matter and nothing else, no consciousness or mind, they have problem and they want to kill it and to bring it under umbrella of determinism.
Dennett: "the key to free will is understanding that free will is a biological level phenomenon it's not a physical level phenomenon. We are freer than our parts...Our parts don't have free will, but we do." " so we have to get clear about what "avoiding" is and then we can begin to see the biological dimension. Because what's happened on this planet for the last four billion years has been an explosion of avoiding. Avoiding dissolution, avoiding being eaten, avoiding starving to death. What evolution has done is designed organisms that do a little avoiding... How do you avoid something? You avoid something by anticipating it and taking corrective measures..... Free will is our capacity to see probable futures, futures that are gonna happen, in time to take steps so that something else happens instead." "We are not deluded about our sense of our own capacity..." - This is brilliant!
Excellent episode.
Realized in slightly different way than others.
The self-reflection that makes meaningful verbalization possible is a break with the instinctive reactions characteristic of the lower animals. This break is the equivalent of what we call free will.
Thought is will. Thought believes reality is deterministic, because thought itself determines.
Though may believe reality is thru-and thru deterministic, but thought may just as easily conclude “thru-and-thru” linear determinism dancing a polka with entropy. Thought is causative in myriad ways. Your will and mine do not meaningfully touch, or pass here, like ships in the night, being a prescribed outcome of some incomprehensible infinity of maybes, whose parents are puppets of determinism.
What is Dennet talking about, biology is physics essentially, but on a larger scale than the physics of particles.
Or to put it another way, biology is chemistry and chemistry is physics, so biology is still physics.
Its like he's treating biology as a set distinct to the physics set, but it's a set inside of the physics set (as a Venn diagram)
in any large system there can be emergent properties that are not present in the smaller system.
@@cosmikrelic4815 But I don't think you can have the property of non-determinableness in a determined system.
You can have the property of consciousness, but that's not breaking any rules
@@cosmikrelic4815 Exactly. A single water molecule is not wet. Many water molecules are wet. Many water molecules is a physical system. The concept of wetness is only meaningful at the level of many water molecules. Denette is talking about Free Will as a phenomenon at macroscopic level. Currently such macroscopic systems are biological. In near future we will build AI systems and neural networks in silicon that will exhibit behavior indistinguishable from free will. In fact the systems like IBMs chess playing program seems to exhibit free will like decision making. Of course we can use physics to explain, chemistry and biology. But it is not useful to talk about some concepts at physics level. For example to get a cloth wet we can move one molecule at a time from the glass to the cloth and it will eventually get wet. But it is better to pour the glass of water at once onto the cloth. There is a economy in doing that. I think Denette is talking about it in that sense. Why? The Free Will is found in live systems. Why? Because those systems are alive and have built/evolved to stay alive. In fact manipulating environment to stay alive is one of characteristics of a living system. For that they have to make decisions between future A and future B. And that is a proto free will. And then in humans it is far more complex because we are the most complex living system that we know. But yes, if we had large ability to observe one's brain it will reveal how Free Will comes about, but it is not economical. And similarly we ourselves do not try to access the microstate of each neuron to make a decision. That will be very time consuming. That is why the evolution has produced the strategy by which we seem to make decisions based on collective behavior of neurons. Otherwise we will take for ever to make decisions. And that coarse graining of neuronal activity - where there is loss of fine grain information - gives us an impression of "free" in free will.
Is experience physics?
@@Wretchedrenegade Yeah, probably
We are semi autonomous, pre programmed organisms. Semi-autonomous, because most of the stuff we do, we do "automatically" without conscious input. We have a "mind" which is a separate emergent property of the brain, which oversees our automatic actions. The mind, like a supervisor, has the ability to "overrule our automatic responses and train our automatic responses for particular tasks, so that they no longer need direct supervision. It is our mind that has "free will", and the ability to change what we would do automatically. A good example would be me typing this post. My mind is telling my fingers what to type. My fingers (part of the brain) having been already trained by my mind diligently, does as it is told. The mind supervises this task in real time, not interfering, unless it sees something it doesn't like. (thought, spelling, etc) Then it directs a correction. Last, after a final review, the mind makes the choice whether to hit the send button or not. That is freewill.
We are pre programmed to do certain things. Scientists have done tests on babies to affirm this. Fear of hights, walking, and speach, pain avoidance, eye limb coordination, are among a long list of things that are pre programmed in our bios.
Millions should just subcribe to this channel..The best on planet earth
Excelente! Cada vez que vejo um vídeo deste canal, mais dúvidas eu tenho...
kkkkkkkkkkkk é isso mesmo certeza só da morte
In this episode, free will has been killed and crushed.
Each of the appearing scientists danced on her grave.
R I P
14 ?
Dan Dennet didn't really crush it, he kind of says the freewill we talk about doesn't exist but it's irrelevant, and some other type of free will does exist. I disagree though, I can't help what my particles do, so I need not feel guilty for my bad actions.
The 60's tv show THE PRISONER is a masterpiece on the topic of Free Will. There's only one way to acquire it.
You were mislead. These are NOT true Scientists, but Philosophers. Real Scientists know Probability is inherent in physics, and not just because we don't have full information. Even at the Quantum level; an event is a Superposition of probabilistic outcomes.
Pointless robots then isn't it.
Free will is something that we can never have.
Yes you have free will. You do not believe God exists. Therefore you have free will. Without atheists like you, free will cannot exist.
Sanjosemike (no longer in CA)
Great video...kudos.
The freedom to decide without outside influence!
I think Daniel Dennett puts it very nicely and in a simple way when he says that we have to look at biology in a broad sense.
In the example of the brick, if a living being did not believe in free will, or that its actions can have an impact on its destiny, I think this being would not act and take the brick to the face. Believing we have free will is a biological mechanism to help us survive as living beings.
Enjoyable episode: Very well produced. I especially enjoyed ending summary and narration from Lawrence. As to the topic area, I think Dan Dennett got it exactly right.
Paul Hess
I agree Dan Dennett gets it exactly right factually. But his emphasise is on saving free will rather than on the fact his version is NOT the one people generally believe in.
There should be more emphasise on the free will delusion and what harm that is doing. Nobody is to blame in the way people imagine and things rightly change as a result.
15:32 (Dan Dennett - caps for emphasis): "...but what you can do is change what you THOUGHT the future was going to be into something else..." - which doesn't, in any way, negate full blown determinism of course. "Avoidance" is also (biologically) determined.
This is why so many cats are run over by cars when standing in the middle of the road, like idiots.
How would a deterministic physical reality produce feeling of free will, deliberation about what to do, choices, and other such phenomenon?
I honestly do not even know whether or not I am CHOOSING to watch this video or if its just something that is happening to me?
strange loops avoiding consequences by increasing entropy, by burning up order. i like it
Entropy could def play a role in determinism. Good point i love this content
I feel like a possible way to reconcile determinism and free will could be to regard free will as an after-the-fact experience of agency as a byproduct of constructing the brain’s reality narrative, but that the process of constructing that narrative strengthens/weakens/creates new associations between neurons. So a person’s actions/reactions in a given situation result from that person’s neuroanatomy and the way it’s been shaped by prior sensory input integration.
Let’s say someone has a habit of walking into their bathroom and brushing their teeth without turning the light on for some reason. Then one day, they get an ant infestation in their bathroom. The new associations created in their brain make it more likely that they’ll decide to turn on the light before brushing their teeth. But that could be overridden, too. Maybe sometimes the person feels they’re too tired to bother flipping the light switch and decide to live dangerously and take their chances with the ants.
Impossible to formulate with our modern framework of mind, however it’s one thing we know we have! (Feels as Intuitive as reality of external world)
I always hope my friend “Will” will be free from jail.
The jail being spacetime and “Will” being my soul.
Soul doesn't exist, so your friend is an innocent victim of authoritarianism.
@@xspotbox4400 - How do you know??
@@samuelhain2712 Because authoritarian people do that, and because the concept of soul was examined so many times, in all possible ways and circumstances, but not a single piece of evidence was ever found. It doesn't make sense in a first place, the only good that came from that waste of time is scientific approach changed what people mean by soul forever.
If free will does not exist, why do I hesitate? Hesitation is the evidence of free will.
The blonde guy at the end was serious about his conclusions. HE PICKED UP THE BRAIN MANNN!! 🥸😲😁
No one challenges a brain-squeeze.
I truly don't understand why people have a problem with determinism. Dennett's explanation of how our choices "feel" like free will (and even count as free will in some sense) because they are about avoiding the results that we can predict would follow if we didn't make them makes perfect sense to me. Seems pretty straightforward and even obvious, in my opinion.
Determinism as defined in this video is a metaphysical conjecture about how the universe works. A more reasonable idea as related to living things is reliable causation. Dead things like rocks do seem to work in the way described. They will sit there for millions of years and then react to an applied force in a mechanistic way. Living things act and respond based on intention and goals by using reliable causation in the way that only living things can. It's the same with the laws of thermodynamics. They are also completely deterministic, and yet a turtle will be found to be warmer than a rock of comparable size and reflectivity after sitting in the sun for awhile. Life harnesses thermodynamics to its own ends, just like it does with causation.
This is to me an entertainment video. Just look and listen to this video, especially the way the video ended. Science, philosophy as seasoning with a little shake and bake an some abracadabra = extravaganza.
Dennet is changing the definition.
WoW!!! 😲
I'm glad you're taking great care of yourself by doing some exercises.
We need you to be in great health, I hope you live 1,000 years
We don't need to be "free" from the laws of physics. We only need to be free from things like bricks hitting our heads and that's a much easier trick to accomplish. The laws of physics are a part of us and work through us and they enable us to do things like dodge bricks that might fly at us. What more freedom could you possibly want or need? We are living manifestations of the laws of physics and that already gives us amazing degrees of freedom. Also, "My Will" is the thing that my brain does (free to dodge bricks, not free of laws of physics), while my "consciousness" is a slower construct, a projection made afterwards for whatever purposes I (which is my physical brain) might have for it.
What people call determinism is just the laws of physics doing their thing. It would be nonsensical for us to be free of the thing that we're made of. It's like wanting to be free of atoms; nonsensical. You can think of it this way: whatever decision YOU make, the universe is obliged to already have all the particles exactly in that precice way, because YOU are made out of the laws of physics, which means reality is forced to comply with you. Pretty nice.
@@bluegirafferinos1733 I like that last little addition. People seem to be obsessed with the concept of control. I point out that there is conservation of energy and conservation of angular momentum, but there is no conservation of control. It makes just as much sense to say that "reality is forced to comply with you" as it does to say that you are forced to comply with reality because you are reality, doing what reality does. Nature has invested huge effort to give living things the ability to act and respond to the environment based on knowledge, intention, goals, future projections and all the other wonderous manifestations of the brain. It makes no sense to diminish this feat with metaphysical musings and philosophical masterbations.
There are only four fundamental forces if you include gravity. Every other law is emergent. So when you say that some action is caused you have to take care of what level of explanation, what laws, you are relying on.
That's exactly where Dennet, for instance, goes wrong. That we are ignorant of how things happen on scale Us doesn't imply that things aren't ultimately causal at scale Sub-Quantum or wherever.
Having the ability to choose between almost infinite determined potentials is free will enough for me.
Mr Frusciante
If determinism is true it's not just the potentials which are determined but also which one you select. In other words you are fated to select the option you do.
Is that free will enough for you?
Just like always: excellent episode, a big thank you to Dr. Kuhn and all interviewed scientists!
The conclusion should mark the starting point of another video: "either there is more to reality than physics, or there is no free will". I would disagree in some sense, and I'm sure that there are a bunch of physicists of high reputation that might disagree as well. Let's assume that physics is the whole reality of our universe. Let's further assume that, fundamentally, the "theory of everything" is kind of a quantum field theory. I know, that's not sure at all, but for the moment it's the best we have. Then you can go with Copenhagen-like interpretations: interaction processes will constantly make the wave-function of sub-systems (like us humans) collapse, introducing "randomness" and leading to a truely probabalistic evolution of the respective sub-system. In my opinion, that gives room to a little bit more "free will" than in a deterministic world: the "future" (meaning a state of the whole universe with higher randomness/entropy) is not determined, it is a space of myriad of more or less likely states. Having an idea of those probability distributions, based on the present state, is a lot more free than knowing that this distributions is a delta-like trajectory, right? The second important interpretation, the Everett-like one, is even more interesting: seeing the universe as a whole system, its wavefunction would never collapse, but forever evolve according to the Schrödinger equation (which is completely deterministic). Therefore, the universe as a whole would be deterministic. However, its sub-systems would permanently interact with other sub-systems, and if we assume that there is no "probabalistic collapse", we need to have branching: the reality of that sub-system branches into an amount of parallel future realities. "We", and here I mean our current perception, experience only one of those paths ... but all the other ones exist, and in those, parallel manifestations of "ourselves". Isn't that a kind of free will, experiencing one path out of all possible ones, although all those possibilities are real as well?
Would love to hear the opinion of experts on those thoughts :)
Determinism is not the same as cause and effect. Living things use reliable causation to act and respond to their environment. Imagining that the entire history of the universe, including Harry Potter and what you will have for lunch, was written in the initial conditions of the universe and waiting for the laws of physics to unfold is mysticism of the highest order, but it is what Kuhn and all the rest actually believe. It makes you wonder if there isn't some transmissible insanity that you catch at university.
@@caricue could this be just because we’re looking back with the benefit of hindsight?
Does this also mean that we can look forward into the future by looking at the trajectories of everything and determining when the next time I sneeze will be, for example?
This is a fascinating topic.
@@wastelandmungo9299 I agree with your take on this issue. People use their memory to construct chains of causation from the past to the present. This is demonstrably subjective, but so strong an effect that it could be described as an illusion.
Not only is Free Will an illusion, the Self is also an illusion.
You are correct sir!
I've often wondered whether we would ask the question of free will if we didn't have it.
Infinite consciousness will love Daniel to death.
given opportunity, options and ability, your free will varies.
A gift from you to you.
Forget dualism! Think of it as two different kinds of understanding. We understand the world outside by verifiable observations, and various methodologies. We understand ourselves and our minds through empathy, imagination, and metaphor, imagining and anticipating possible scenarios and reflecting on memories. Free will is our way of understanding how we come to make a decision. It is not our way of understanding how our brain works, which is not given to us subjectively. Freewill is incompatable with determinism because our understanding of ourselves is incompatable with our understanding of the physical world. We need both kinds of understanding.
It is my opinion that biochemical response to stimuli drives people to make certain choices. We are trained and conditioned our entire lives. Most of our thoughts happen to us rather than are thought by intent so most ideas aren't your own anyway. What ever you have the strongest chemical compulsion to do you do
What people also miss is that even if determinism is false (say, due to quantum mechanics there is always a bit of unpredictability), that only adds a bit a randomness to the outcome. It doesn't make the decision anymore "yours" than if it were pre-determined. Most people, when thinking of "free will", mean that "they" exist as a being (a spirit) outside their physical embodiment and that this spirit is who "we" really are and it controls our physical existence (some sort of remote control/transmitter receiver thing).
I don't buy it, and the structure of the brain does not suggest any sort of receiver. It suggests an information processing engine.
However, from the physicalist view, the concept of "identity" is bound up in our physical embodiment. If I snore while in deep sleep, it's still "me" that is snoring, despite my being unconscious. If my brain makes the decisions before I am consciously aware of the decision, it's still "my" decision because that unconscious processing was done by my physical instance.
So, in that sense, I support the idea that free will does indeed exist, but it's not limited to our conscious selves - it includes the entirety of ourselves.
Most people are not fat because they choose to eat less and stay fit.
BTW, have we solved the problem of defining "I"? If not, whither Free Will?
The lifting weights my experience when I saw you doing that I've thought of using the weights and this was taped so time doesn't exist I never would have thought of Mr Kuhn lifting weights when I thought of weights before I watch this it's entanglement
Dennet and 15:30 best parts
Fate comes first then free will . Simple sometimes you choose sth then you regret that thing chosen ,, we have free will in a large scale circle surround our intentions
Even though we don't really know how anything works , all the science we know of points to determinism, in that free will doesn't really exist, past, present, future is all the same in a way.
The only empirical evidence for determinism is the fact that you can do the same experiment over and over, and always get the same result. What this shows is that we live in a universe that features reliable causation. Any other idea of determinism, like that the universe can only unfold in one specific way based on initial conditions, or that everything is pre-determined, is not supported by any experiment or data, so it is metaphysics at best.
Free will and determinism are irreconcilable.
I think the illusion of free will is basically just humans confusing correlation and causation. What we want to do correlates with our actions, but it doesn't cause them, rather it's the reverse, we want to do the things that the deterministic laws of physics say that we will do. In other words, free will says that we can do what we want, but the deterministic laws of physics say that we don't choose what we want. I don’t think that there is a problem, the interesting question is why does it feel like we could have done otherwise when performing an action, but this is just part of the mind-body problem.
The question of decision, being referred to as free will, is whether there is a natural choice in physical brain, which is indirectly related to free will that measures quantum probabilities? After quantum probabilities become a measured certainty, starting deterministic chain, something in physical brain would have to create conditions for a natural choice?
All acts of what we think are free will expressions are in fact interdependent on many contingencies which nevertheless do not command our purpose of mind and intent but affect our experience and determine what beyond our control will influence the outcomes of our acts....this is how God made it
We have 2 types of physical lows, classical and quantum mechanical. One driving macro and one micro world. Based on fact that brain work on quantum mechanic foundations maybe free will is outcome of that. We know that quantum mechanic is set on probabilities and that is exactly what free will is. Set of options where we chose one. If you check wave and partial, it can be on specific set of positions but not out of that realm. Same for human, Human can decide what will do in any given moment based on where he is in his set of options as limited by wave function... but options exist therfore free will within.
Can the probabilities of quantum wave function have something to do with free will? If quantum information is random, would the probabilities be in a wave function?
Someone once explained to me the difference between a choice and a decision. That “de-cide”, similar to homicide or suicide, means to kill the alternative. As in, I’ll take this because I don’t want that. Whereas a choice is, I’ll take this because I want this.
Answer: an illusion.
The Ego and the Soul are also an illusion, a misconception
Free will is the 4D system your mind uses to naval gate and learn bits of information in real time. Functionally speaking the calls it BALSAMIC.
Oh Dennett! doesn’t biology arise out of physics?
No it doesn’t …it arises as an independent line of inquiry from science . It has its own axioms as does physics
@@domboy8080
If biology is a part of physical world, then it is a part of physics and works under the laws of physics.
I bet that it is a part of physical world.
@@jareknowak8712 my point exactly.
Yes, of course. I don't get what the guy was trying to say
@@jareknowak8712 yes but it doesn’t mean that it must follow the same axioms as physics . For example , questions in biology are often tied to consciousness, where the traditional axiom of cause and effect (in physics) breakdown when discussing free will and agency . Obviously there’s great debate concerning free will but you get my point
Dear Robert L Kuhn,
Relating to your series Closer To Truth, would you be meeting Professor Robert A Thurman?
I would be glad to watch your meeting with Prof. Thurman in case you would meet him.
Thanks and with best regards,
Is energy considered to be physical or non-physical, or something in between? If deterministic chain of events in physical reality starts with energy, then room for free will?
The question is what "I" and "You" and "Other" actually means. And what "Means" means.
Who is the fucking doer
What is anything? What what? wut wut wut wut wut wut wut wut wut wut wut wut wut wut wut wut
Without free will then we would have to let all murderers out of prison because it wasn't their fault. I can't believe that nor live in a world where there is no punishment for murder.
Since we are our brain we can not decide free of bias.
Does the deliberation to do something different than what is determined refute determinism? Why would options present themselves in a deterministic universe? Is something trying to challenge and overthrow determinism?
It seems in the view the question of identity is explored, but not given the weight it deserves in the conclusion. That is to say, the notion of what is "I" or "me" that has the free will. That is to say, many things I do are not decisions "I" make, from the my heart beat to cited table tennis reactions and related skills (like balance in walking and bike riding). And yet when it comes to choosing what I eat, there is an "I" making that choice. This differentiation is central to the conversation and glossed over in the video.
But other issues that are central to this conversation are not even touched on. There is no mention (rightly so I think) of the impact modern quantum theory on notions of determinism. Worse there is no mention (and less rightly so) of the field of chaos theory, which is built upon the premise of determinism but acknowledges the existence of complex systems (the butterfly effect being the metaphor of choice in ascribing weather the property of chaos but the human being is a chaotic system too) for which it is impossible to know the given state of all elements to predict reliably the outcome. Further that it may not be possible ever to know them to sufficient precision to know a future state. This touches upon epistemology as well, and the limits of knowing ... all of which are pertinent to free will (which as stated in the video rests upon our determining an outcome, or course of action if you prefer).
This touches too on the notion of the whole being more than the sum of the parts, and this is also a known property of the physical universe. Namely that there information (substance if you prefer) not only in the individual parts that make up a system, but the relationships between them as well. As the number of parts grows the number of relationships between them grows explosively - to with, the chaotic system modelling.
Another question not touched on in the video at all is the question of scale. The human mind likes to imagine the world as a scale free place methinks. It's easy. And evident in our fantasies about enormous giants, and shrinking down to so small we can navigate veins in a submarine etc ... challenging scale is a popular fictional theme. But the universe we know is heavily scale dependent. That is small things behave very differently to large things. This works with a consistent set of laws, primarily because they are, non-linear. For example the reason that ants and elephants are so different when they fall from a height or have a hundred of their ilk piled on top of them, is that mass scales with the cube of linear size, while apparent size scales rather more with with square of linear size (the space something occupies in our field of view) and far more importantly, neither strength and stress scale with the cube of linear size ... they wait for it, scale differently. In short the universe is not scale free.
In the human world this becomes very noticeable in that the behaviour of a groups is indeed far more predictable and far less free, than the behaviour of individuals seems. We have an entire industry predicate on the truth of this (marketing) that supplies the modern demagogic approximations we have to democracy that apply in competition, known methods of changing the behaviour of large groups of people. In fact behavioural predictability goes up with group size as a rule. And free will seems not to exist in numbers at all, much rather we see a malleable chaotic system.
The final are of thinking I see not touched on at all in this video is that of self reference. Loosely touched on with the exploration of "I" that I started with. But it is a much bigger theme. This is central Gödel's theorems of incompleteness that destroyed all efforts at proving the completeness of mathematics as a descriptive language. There isn't space in a TH-cam comment to explore the impacts of this, but Hofstädter does a prize winning job of it his toome, Gödel, Escher, Bach: And Eternal Golden Braid. He concludes that work with a fairly convincing demonstration that determinism suffices to explain the experience of free will ... and as a prize winning treatise on the matter, certainly warrants exploration in a video such as this. The central theme in all of that is self reference, and where that leads you, it's opening conversations resting on the Epimenides Paradox (All Cretans are Liars).
What is free will. When I say what it is I'm saying what the illusion is.
It's in two parts:
1) We could have done otherwise in the actual circumstances with exactly the same past.
In assuming 1) what we do is leave out that the past prior to the choice would have had to have been different to have selected a different option. And that gives us the impression that which option we select is:
2) Entirely up to us.
I became convinced that the notion of free will holds no water at all after listening to Sam Harris👌🏾
If you listen carefully to Sam Harris, he is telling you that since you can't choose "who you are" or "what you want" then you don't have free will. He never says it like this since it would be obviously silly. The purpose of free will is to "get what you want". Can you imagine a situation where you wake up a blank slate every morning and have to decide who you are going to be and what you will want that day? Evolution has gone to great trouble to set up a system where an organism can choose from the available options based on knowledge, goals and intentions. This is just the reality, even if it doesn't comport with your ideas about freedom or justice.
Too much Sam Harris then.
Try listening to Sean Carroll.
@unz: yes, me too. his exercise with the audience in getting them to thik about cities is very revealing.
@@caricue Sir if you would, I’d love a thorough explanation that reconciles the complete absence of choice or volition in terms one’s trajectory through life (as you ostensibly concede), ultimately; as well as, more fundamentally, one’s own identity, with the notion that evolution still preserves one’s true authorship of their goals and intentions. What does it even mean to intend to do something if the entire process is driven by underlying physicochemical processes over which you have no control. I feel I understand Mr Harris’ contention very well, and, though difficult to square with our personal, inner reality, is difficult to meaningfully dispute even on philosophical grounds.
Let’s talk about awakening, intention and real will. With free will and three dollars one can buy a cup of coffee.
Free Will. He didn't do anything wrong and you know it.
Cause and effect determinism is itself probably an emergent quality, emerging itself from an unknown -- but something other than deterministic -- strata starting somewhere below quantum physics up until the appearance of biological life at the classical level.
Could free will be part of the chain of causation, especially at the beginning? Would a free will that starts a chain of causation be called superdeterminism?
Wow u made a excellent point remember our whole creation is suppost grounded from free will..Alot things in life points to determinism but we are conscious beings & that separates this pardox.
No because in determinism everything is the result of a prior cause.
@@Benbjamin- free will can be a prior cause
@@jamesruscheinski8602 what would cause that cause?
@@Benbjamin- God's responsibility
What happens between quantum probabilities and determined measured certainty? If quantum probabilities precede measured certainties, would be room and place for free will to cause everything in universe?
Nobody can scape the inmediate continuous reaction, and that is all: there is not a doer because there is no time to mediate anything. Every concious experience comes from unconcious processes, from the impersonal net of events that is far from our control.
Freedom of will is the same as freedom of choice. And your freedom of choice depends on the options available for you to choose from. In some cases, you have a lot of options to choose from, but in other cases you might have only one choice, which is no choice at all. And there is never a case, where your options are unlimited. Your list of options is always finite.
So, it makes no sense to talk about free will in absolute terms, where you either have 100% free will, or you have 0% free will. Sometimes, your options might be numerous enough to approach the 100% mark. But in other cases, where you have only one choice, then you are close to the 0% mark. And most of the time in most cases, it's somewhere in between.
The past is 100% deterministic. Because there is only one possible past, and you can't change it by choosing something different. But the future isn't yet determined. That's why you can't predict it with 100% certainty. There are many possible futures. And you choosing among these possible futures is the exercise of free will. It's not absolute freedom, because the possibilities and your choices are limited. But it's not total absence of free will either. Because you can still choose among the options available for you.
People have partially free will. And some people have more free will than others. Because they have more options to choose from due to their wealth or position and status in society.
How might free will measure quantum probabilities to provide options in physical brain for natural choice to make decision?
What about luck and random events influencing/changing your choices? The output of the brain depends on its inputs.
If all input variables are known and so the model of the brain, one could absoluterly forecast brain's next move.
But in order to do that you would need to know all the variables of the universe...
So Free Will is totally depended on the infinte events and actions happening accross the comos around, which makes Free Will practially pretty random/free no?
In the brain sequence of planning and execution in pre motor (?) cortex, maybe 1 second before, free will (by measuring quantum probabilities) sends options for natural choice, then 500 milliseconds later, a natural choice is made, then a couple hundred milliseconds later the action happens?
A great segment. A topic that's difficult to avoid, but is there anything humans will not over think to the point of neurosis? Just sayin' :)
Will is included in the perceptual result. Will is perceived.
Another point to consider is that even if the future is not completely causally determined by the present (as it very well might not be, given quantum indeterminacy), both special and general relativity still seem to imply a block-universe concept of time. This is because the distinction between past, present, and future is not absolute, but rather varies according to your reference frame, which suggests that past, present, and future are all equally real, all equally "there." This in turn entails a kind of logical determinism in which the future is just as fixed as the past. So those who insist on indeterministic free will have to deny not only the causal determinism of ordinary physics, but also the logical determinism of Einsteinian spacetime as well.
When objects are at 0 distance, only than you can have 100% block universe. But when objects begin to move in all possible directions and spread apart, the notion of a predetermined future begins to dissolve in probabilities, chances and also corruption, when influenced by a conscious agent.
"Once Einstein said that the problem of the Now worried him seriously. He explained that the experience of the Now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but that this important difference does not and cannot occur within physics." "Einstein thought that these scientific descriptions cannot possibly satisfy our human needs; that there is something essential about the Now which is just outside the realm of science."
Where does consciousness fit in the block? lol
If someone broke their leg 5 years ago, the conscious pain is still there? Being felt by whom A momentary self? The momentary self is stuck feeling that pain? How? Somehow the leg breaking experience is being played over and over?
Or consciousness is outside the block, but that makes no sense either.
it seems undecideable from within the system. maybe using up entropy gives a limited form of free will to information processing entities.
Daniel Donnet's version is very covincing: we need determinism only to counteract "negative" (provided we know clearly how it could be separated "deterministically" physically from positive). Then the separation of the two is obvious: the sequence of negative events must be deterministically finite leaving the indeterministically infinite positive sequence for FREE WILL.
Is it possible the problem of "free will" vs. "determinism" cannot be "solved", because these are *malformed* concepts? Our concepts are proximal, but is not exactly what goes on in reality. The actual reality maybe shades of grey, a combination of mechanisms, operating at different levels. The video introduces the level of physics. And then it talks about the level of biology (and the brain). Daniel Dennett, and Susan Blackmore speak of the latter.
At the level of physics, the image of dominos falling, from some initial cause, as the main model for determinism, is almost certainly incorrect. One has non-linear dynamical systems, noise, and chaotic systems. And then there's quantum indeterminacy. There's "determinism", and "chance". Neither of these establishes nor kills off free will. One might say the provide the lower level components ("structure" and "chance"), for "free will", at the next layer up, the biological level.
At the biological level, going up the evolutionary scale, one has a range of organisms. Each have greater degrees of freedom to respond to their environment. Those with minds have greater "freedom". The greater range of possible responses is probably as close as we can get to the notion of "free will". This then leads into the issues of mind, brain, and consciousness. And as Susan Blackmore also explained, a notion of "self", or agent, "making a choice".
"Freedom" from what?
Could the mental stuff be energy? Would this be substance dualism, property dualism, physicalism, or something else?
I really don't get the problem of free will. It seems so straight forward to me that we have free will since we have choices...
Thabo
Ok, so the problem is when you say "we have choices" you mean we have options we can select in the actual circumstances with exactly the same past. But that isn't what choices are like at all if you pay attention to the choices you make.
The reality is we are fated to select the option we do.
I research information about colleges. I apply to 5. I get accepted to 4. I CHOOSE to go to one. How is this not free will? After graduation I research potential employers. I apply to 5. I get job offers from 4. I CHOOSE to accept one after working there for 2 years. I DECIDE to go to work for another company. How is this not free will?
5:01
In a deterministic chain of physical events, is a cause responsible for an effect? For example, gravity responsible for motion of objects, natural selection responsible for adaptation, fire responsible for burning flammable material?
Determinism doesn't imply "cause and effect", only that the present and the future are predetermined by the past.
@@ferdinandkraft857 how does determinism deal with cause and effect?
@@jamesruscheinski8602 The idea of cause and effect becomes ill-defined in a deterministic setting. Suppose we have two events, A and B, amd you claim that A caused B. How would you _prove_ that? Maybe you'd say "because if A had not happened, B wouldn't happen". The problem is that the hypothesis of A (or B) not happening violates the postulate of a deterministic setting...
Reality provides us only events. "Cause" and "Effect" are labels we give to them.
@@ferdinandkraft857 what is postulate of deterministic setting?
@@ferdinandkraft857 not sure it is enough to say that if event B not caused by event A it is determined. It may even be that time is causing events in classic reality, and that in classic reality all the events of an earlier time are part of a prior time that causes all the events of a later time
Hi, I think that free will is related to where do our thoughts come from and if our consciousness related to physical brain. If consciousness is coming from physical brain (which we do not know yet) then determinism works.
Another answer is that there could be some unknown phenomenon beyond our knowledge, because (probably) we (human) are just a newborn child of our environment. This could take time to find answers, but leaving the subject is like erasing the question.
Bests.
Not only can we restrict consciousness to the brain, we can restrict it to a certain subset of the brain, because we also have a subconscious mind stored in there.
Life is Eternal, the Life-Desire is the MOTOR of Life,
in direct extension we have the Will,
so, Will is also Eternal.
Developing-Circuit's is very basic, end of a circuit, is beginning of a new, and high'er.
In the beginning of a Developing-Circuit, the Will is at it's minimum, and in the end, at it's maximum, and Life continiue.
We might speak about degrees of Will, the balance between being in harmoni and dis-harmoni with Life.
So, Life-Desire>Will is the Motor
Hunger- and Satisfaction-Principle, is the Compass.
Did anyone else notice this guy said “do-do”?
The mystery of free will depends. Im a strong believer of free will..that it alone is rooted & connects to my convictions & morals .Determinism is a problem that is mounting on this issue i want ansers.
There’s nothing mysterious about free will it simply doesn’t exist.
Could free will be the direction of energy into motion?
It seems to me that freewill is actually the actions made by the brain, then the brain lets your consciousness know what it just did. Once that occurs "you" are now aware of what the brain's action was. It just feels like "you" made the decision to act.
It may well be that once we understand how our consciousness (or mind) arises from the brain, then what and where freewill is will become obvious.
So you are a dualist? You think your consciousness is something separate from your brain function? How does that work?
Maybe when the light (quantum) from brick entering the eye presents different probabilities, free will measurements of quantum probabilities move up the deterministic chain into the physical brain, providing a natural choice for the biological organism?
What does probability / possibility say about free will? Even though probability and possibility are indeterministic, do they contribute to sense of free will, and if so, why?
Probabilities and chances makes whole lots of sense when you add corruption to the mix.
@@xspotbox4400 is the quantum wave function corrupt?