Apparently TH-cam doesn't always notify subscribers when people upload anymore. Please click the little bell to make sure you see when I do, or follow me on social media (@cosmicskeptic). Let me know what you think of all this.
Ok I mentioned this before in my other response, but I'll lay down another video to explain in full how free will is discussed and how it is necessary for you to have free will to do things like knowing truth, or knowing if what you say is true. I actually foudn it a bit cheeky you glossed over the problem that it introduces of not have interllectual liberty my dude, nice try but I know very well the issue you have there. Anyway I expect ya to address my points when I make the video. Overall, your points were good but the logic did not follow to it's conclusion, and there's a underlying self defeating idea in your entire argument.
The problem with your idea of free will is that you're starting with the ending. Deliberation exists before the desire that leads to the action. The longer the time In deliberation, the less certain the outcome. In addition, you haven't discussed the absence of desire as an alternative.
I was in a Subway's once and the girl asked my friend 'Do you want extra cheese?' to which he replied, 'I don't know' and for a brief moment the entire structure of the universe just stopped.
Kind of like how it takes time to process anything, even hand movement, the brain probably got a slow / unreachable receptor or something. Or maybe the brain decided "let them choose for me, as I trust their decision to be the best" + had an added fear of being wrong.
scott mcadam you can't just assume all women are shit at making decisions... What does your comment have to do with anything... They were talking about their friend at Subway. The friend was a HE.
“Want” doesn’t seem like a real word anymore. edit: guys i was making a joke about how many times Alex said “want”. Not trying to have a deep philosophical conversation about it.
I think it's even more simple, yet deeper than that. Any action is preceded by a thought. If you want to choose between vanilla and chocolate, you think the decision before you physically make it. So, free will would then require that you choose your thoughts, which is paradoxical. How can you choose to think something, without already thinking about it?
@@moss_yass My hypothesis is that that voice is indeed not "you". I'd say that "you" are merely the passive experience of having those thoughts. I think the thought "where does that voice in my head come from" is proof of that. Clearly, you see the voice already as something that you "have", instead of something that you "are". So, what are you? I feel bad that my comment made you feel distrustful though. I sincerely hope that you can approach the dilemma with positive curiosity, instead of with distrust. In everyday life, that voice feels like it's "you", and that works totally fine.
I think before thinking that you want vanilla rather than chocolate you think and evaluate you options, and during this process you make your choice wich then becomes your desire, no?
A fly flew into my eye and I blinked without thinking. I always prefer chocolate to vanilla so when offered a choice I automatically choose chocolate without thinking about it. When faced with a variety of foods I consider what I prefer and choose accordingly. What I like caused my preference but did not determine me to make that choice--next time I might choose vanilla, say, to win a bet or out of boredom. Every effect has a case, but doesn't necessarily destine us.
>imagine believing freewill is an illusion based on retarded antiquated physics and darwinian evolution which has basically been mathematically disproven.
? A higher conciousness wants nothing though.. You are not your thoughts.. Why is it that no one is talking about levels of consciousness? This comment does not apply to all of the population.
devzkii I would not say that it is using want like choose. We want what we want. I want chocolate rather than vanilla. But did I choose to want vanilla? No. I just want vanilla, i can’t help wanting what I want. It just arises as such. And I can then have the vanilla, as I want. But I didn’t actually choose to want it.
surrender & survive I can relate to not wanting anything, what you call higher consciousness. There are moments of such utter peace and fulfillment that there is no wanting. If you’re sitting in bliss and don’t eventually want to eat you’ll die, however. We and the other animals have want built into our DNA. if we didn’t it would be the end of life. It seems evolutionary drive in life to want: to find warmth when you’re freezing, shade when you’re hot, food when hungry, and then there are those damn hormones that make us want to mate. All of it designed to sustain and perpetuate life.
What do you mean by this, if you don't mind me asking? (No, I am not asking you to clarify OCD, I'm asking you to elaborate on what you mean by it making you realize you don't have free will.)
@@shinmoda I’m pretty sure they meant it as a joke, but Obsessive Compulsive disorder is based on the experience of compulsions, basically like your brain acting like an annoying younger siblings like “do it. You have to” to the extreme
@@p11_studios Again, I wasn't asking then to tell me what OCD was, I was asking them to clarify how they mean it taught them they didn't have free will, but I guess based on the compulsions it's like your own brain forcing you rather than others. I found, though, that as time gets going and it's been longer since my original diagnosis, I tend to fend off the sudden episodes with rational thought; but originally, I always felt like if I didn't do when I felt I needed to do them, then something will happen (negative). Or the flip side, sometimes I felt that if I do something then something will happen (positive). I still respond to these thoughts due to it making me feel satisfied but it's not as bad as it once was. It got tough when, being someone interested in spirituality, this realm of thought crossed into that realm. That's when stuff got tough. Thank you! :)
I would actually say that the reasons we do anything is actually singular - it is because we want to. Even if we are forced to do something at gunpoint, we still do it because we want something - that something is to survive and continue living.
I wouldn’t agree with that premise. Imagine you were very sick or broke your legs or had a mental illness and you were bound to your bed temporarily. You would want to get up and be productive more than you wanted to be in bed but you physically couldn’t get out of bed no matter how bad you wanted to because you are forced to be there.
He's a perfect definition of a narcissist. When he said "we've already concluded.." blah blah blah, no, "we" haven't concluded anything. We are in control of our lives, period.
@@tyemaddog but we actually are not because what ever is going to happen or what ever ever happened...happened and there's no changing that ever....everything is technically predestined wether you believe it or not.
@@tyemaddog Point me to a single logical mistake in this video, please. Because as it stands, it just seems like you are stubbornly refusing to listen to what was said, not because you actually have any argument to make against the stance (which is, just by the way, utterly impossible, as the logic is completely obviously clear and sound).
It appears many individuals are misunderstanding the message. Changing your mind on something isn't changing what you want, but simply following a greater want that moves in a different direction. We are endlessly following wants and what we want changes based on the environment and past experiences.
But i'm changing what ME AS A PERSON want, choosing between your "greater want" and a "smaller want".. *note* I thoroughly believe I can make myself want something I despice, given enough time and thought.. In other words, choosing to want what i hate
ugseth2 but isn't changing that want, even if it's to something you hate, is satisfying your want to change ? no matter what you do, you want to do it, it's all a choice of wants evolves through time based on your experiences. :)
@@Siegfried5846 Yea, because then you wouldn’t be accountable for anything you’ve done right or wrong, though that isn’t how societies live. They live as if we are all accountable for our actions and that’s why there are ethics. And why do we tell people you shouldn’t have done that or that wasn’t right when the person had no free will to do so? And why do we correct someone by saying, “No, this is how you do this.” If we believe there is no free will and want to be consistent, we cannot complain when someone violates our human rights.
@@satellitecannon9463 I most certainly can be consistent because right and wrong are objective according to God’s character and not my opinion or yours or anyone else’s. I just follow what He says whether I agree or not. He made the universe, so I’m not going to tell Him I know better
@@trustthetruth2779 that isn't how it works. You were predetermined to see this video and make the comment you made, because of all the things that happened to you before, and all that you ate and consumed, all that you were taught. You couldn't help but make the choices you've made, but you still feel the suprise when someone appreciates your work, or you still feel the pain of bad choices. You are the agent of change, but you had no other choice in the end as you look back on things that have happened. Theists have this loophole that they pull out when the pain of bad decisions starts to haunt them, and they often just claim it was God's plan or God's Will, so you can forgive yourself and move on. We live in a deterministic universe with an endless chain of causality, and there is a liberating freedom from excessive guilt, to some extent, but if someone murders another person in cold blood and they feel nothing, that isn't a normal person, and they go to prison no matter how they became broken. We are still held accountable for actions, but even you have to admit you have an out, in regards to these problems of choice. All normal people react to good and bad things and they make changes to remedy the situation, but sometimes it takes time and more input from the chain of causality, like friends telling someone they messed up. I simply don't believe in a God that is supernatural and outside of the Universe, making things happen and intervening when he wants and letting you have your will, and then a little bit of his will, and then a bit more of your will, and a whopping amount of his will. An omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent God can't give you Freewill and also be all of those things.
I have crippling depression and have killed myself after that challenge I am now a dead rabbit who cant do nothing but think and I have wifi somehow I think this is hell
I just finished watching hentai. This video told me I didn't watch it with free will. I will now go back to watching hentai so that I can test this hypothesis. For science.
@Jo-Ash Scott Official You have will- your free will was based on the question regarding free will, which was freely chose to respond- if he didn't respond, you could just as well have asked, did you have free will to not write that comment.
James Walker I think you are missing the irony and true point of the quote. By saying we have free will and we have no choice but to have it is purposely contradictory.
From a psychoanalytic point of view you are not free about your decisions, desires, etc., but that doesn't mean psychoanalysis didn't believe in freedom. From a Hegel, Marx and Freud point of view the more you are aware of the forces (external and internal) you are attached to the more free you become.
This is pretty close to how I felt leaving Christianity. My family kept talking about my "choice" to stop believing in their God, but I never made any choice regarding that. It simply didn't make sense to me so I didn't believe it. The only "choice" I made was to stop suppressing my own doubtful thoughts which really were becoming extremely overwhelming and upsetting to keep down.
I feel the same, but the opposite way. I believe in god. I don’t know why, I can’t explain it. I just do. Was never bought up religiously or anything either.
@@celtictarotreadings333 You're the kind of religious person I like. I personally find myself wanting there to be a god who suits my preference for what I want god to be but I don't want to believe something without knowing it to be true. Since evidence is a matter of demonstrating something through immutable natural laws which produce the same result of the same causes under the same circumstances every time those causes are applied under the same circumstances and since the supernatural as a concept does not rely on immutable natural laws, I can only hope and can't believe since my belief of anything depends on knowing. Thus, I can't help not believing in a god and can't help hoping for a god I would like. I suppose a god could exist who I wouldn't like but I can't hope for that and I can't believe it either. This is why I can't hope for or believe in a god who would punish anyone for not believing in a god as believed by the kind of religious person I don't like... well, that might not be the best way to put it, I should call them the kind of religious person who's beliefs I don't like since their beliefs themselves cause them fear which forces them to believe the beliefs which cause the fear. Anyway, I'm always happy to come across someone like you who just believes in a god because they want to believe.
When free will is defined as "ability to have acted differently", then this is true. The reason most of us feel we have free will is because we subconsciously define free will as "ability to do what you want/desire". Most people are not that concerned that they don't have the ability to choose what they want, or your wants are beyond your control. As long as we can act on those wants we feel that we have free will.
Then I would say that the term is wrong and it's implications still equivocated. If your will is determined by your "wants" which you aren't in control of, then it's not free, why bother with reusing the term to say something completely different? Specially if we don't redefine it's implications, like moral responsability. If we aren't in control of the desires that motivate our actions, how can we hold people accountable? It would radically change the framework in which we base or social systems, which people seem not so eager to do, which I think is what makes them clinge so hard to using the same term.
what gives us a taste in music, did the universe choose my favorite color, if the universe can choose my favorite color than god can create a soul and if god can't create a soul than the universe can not choose my favorite color and im liberty to do as i wish to do constant battle with the universe
This sounds to be very true so although we don't have complete free will the will is still in our character/traits to (choose the things we want) So i think in a given moment we definitely have will/free will (based on our character traits) I mean I didn't have to comment here though i did so based on an inner impulse to do so Ohh yeah when I say choose the things we want I didn't mean we choose our wants but I meant we have the choice or decision to act on it
@@sensibleone3268 Before you had the impulse to write a comment,that was already set in motion.Then you had the thought I will write a comment.In reality the comment had to happen,you just claim authorship for doing so.There simply is no doer.
lol this is something i struggled with when i was 15 and i didn’t get why no one else cared about this!! the lack of choice to want something is so important and figuring this out has made me a much less judgemental and empathetic person tbh
That’s really interesting to know. Cause it has happened to me also. I’d say that the exact same effect it was caused on you was really caused on me as well. It has made me reflect a lot more than usual about life in general after I started gravitating towards this possibility.
@@jes8253 yeah i'd say i used to feel scared about it but now i think it's quite a freeing mindset. i study sociology now which has helped me explore how unhelpful this belief in free will really is to almost everyone - means we think we can judge other people even when we can't relate to their situation at all because we think 'well I would never do that' without having any context. empathy is a great skill and i think we need to remember what it actually means to put yourself in someone else's shoes - it doesn't mean put yourself in their particular situation, it means put yourself in their particular situation within the whole context of their life. rugged individualism has meant we think that's not important somehow and i think without a radical shift in perspective in the very near future the world is going to be totally irreperably fucked soon
@@Jemmainadilemma I couldn’t agree more with your words. It’s really fulfilling to get to know there’s still people in the world that has this sort of insight to reflect upon it the way you do. It’s quite funny cause I couldn’t ever imagine I would definitely bump into someone right here on TH-cam who shares the same concept as I do and also as accurate as my concept is about this idea. It’s really gratifying! I do think the same, moreover, I still sense that the world unfortunately is more likely to be fucked up as soon as we can’t expect because of individualism.
@@Jemmainadilemma What isn't it a free choice that "I want to prove a point by regaining my free will"? Didn't I freely choose to want one over the other?
@@CuriosityGuy well you want to do something to prove a point, but you don't choose to want that, you just want that. The source of the want is the point here - you can't choose to want something. you could explore why you want that but i don't think that would affect what you want
Well.. that’s genius. You definitely convinced me. I always asked people what the definition of “free will” ment to them. Now after watching this video and actually understand what you mean, i have a whole different perspective on it. Thankyou so much for this beautiful video ❤
I feel like the dangerous implication here is that, if there is no free will, criminals are innately evil, because they could have never chosen the right thing. Logically that creates a category of good people who are righteous and self-improving and evil people that are beyond help.
@@skeleton1765but that also brings into question whether or not we should hold criminals morally responsible to begin with. If they had no ability to do otherwise, why should we punish them for something out of their control? Of course the obvious question is what would we do instead and to be frank, I have no idea. It’s something I’ve been trying to grapple with
@@MoonlightMaggie Exactly, I do good because I want to do good, than I am part of the righteous class. If I can’t help but be evil, or don’t want to do good, or prefer to do the evil thing than they are part of the deplorables. This is almost leading to a justification for genocide. If it looks like free will, feels like free will, society and morals collapse without the assumption of free will, than why would it not be free will? How many senses/mechanisms have to positively support free will before we assume it’s true. Is it like a Schrödinger’s mechanic where we can observe what choice a person makes but only if we look at the decision matrix in their brain at a certain instance, or even after the decision has been made. Even if all the ‘decisions’ you made leading up to that one MAKE you ‘choose’ a certain outcome, does that disprove free will? This seems like another instance of an atheist (I’m probably part of that category/agnostic) being infinitely and annoyingly reductive. If got so annoyed with myself doing this I had to stop. Clearly I have a low tolerance for this thing and was always destined to choose that choice as well. 🙄
@@MoonlightMaggie Yes but ask yourself, why does your reasoning stop there anyway? It's wrong to stop there and call it a day. "Holding them accountable" or not doing so would be a "choice" i.e something you'd want (to want to..(etc recursively)) to do in itself, which in itself is already uninfluenceable, that line of reasoning goes on infinitely. It's not about "what would we do instead", it's that anything else we do instead, then that too, wasn't chosen or free will. It's not about thinking of things in that macro/limited scale of people/society/the justice system etc, we're discussing the general concept of "free will" at its bare-bones, philosophical/logical root. What I mean is, in your example about crime etc, it's not about just holding anyone accountable in that sense, it's about that if you do hold them accountable, then you were already always going to, same of the opposite. It's not "should" we or "can" we hold them accountable, because there is no choice there either, "choosing" to hold them accountable or not was inevitable. Same with: If you jumped then you were already always going to jump, whether you "chose" to or not, if you were born then you were already always going to be born, etc etc etc, get what I mean? It doesn't even apply just to our experience of free will, but to causality itself. The takeaway is pretty much that everything that happened so far was inevitable (and I don't mean in the woo-woo way "everything happens for a reason" because "God chose it"), and that "consequences"/the future/causality is as inevitable as the flow of time itself, you are stuck in your unique experience or "illusion" of the present, some will find great solace in that, some will find terrible distress. 😛 (Both are also inevitable, like everything else - and the illusion of a consequence/event being avoided arises from the fact that its avoidance was also inevitable, etc.) So within the confines of this illusion you can "choose" to recognize that since this truth is inevitable, then there is no point worrying or thinking about it too much, because it doesn't change anything for you or your experience, whether it was "predetermined" or not. It's just that if you do worry/not believe it,/do anything at all, then that too, was inevitable in its very nature 😅.. but just "choose" not to care, and for all practical purposes, live life the way you would have either way, even while knowing you didn't really choose. I know it feels like a paradox but they aren't mutually exclusive, because one of them is an illusion that arises from the other. The illusion of free will/choice arises from the fact itself there is no free will/choice, which personally doesn't bother me, it's just a logical fact, and a conclusion that you come to when you really think about it enough. I find this beautiful and awe-inspiring on its own. So yes, continue to hold criminals accountable etc. not because they are "innately evil" (which is a conclusion you arrived to because you decided to stop there) etc., but because you don't justify "choosing" do something BECAUSE there is free will or not, it's just that it HAPPENS / HAPPENED / WILL HAPPEN *because* there is no free will, that doesn't mean you shouldn't still continue "choosing" just because it's an illusion when you look deep enough... for us it might as well not be an illusion because it's all we will ever experience, there is no need to "adjust" just because you learned this (it's just that if you did adjust, you didn't truly choose that either lol), it is logically and by nature impossible to truly choose, as it breaks all logic and the concept of time and causality itself. It doesn't mean there is no beauty in that. To me there IS beauty in that this illusion of choice itself can be born from the fact that there is no choice, almost as an extension of it, and within it we can experience everything as if we all truly chose it, almost going full circle. There is no need to think of it as fake when it is a direct consequence of that initial truth.
“I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.” ~Stephen Hawking
@@choco1199 they are contradicting themselfes. if they look before they cross the road they have basically reduced their chances of getting hit by a car to 0% meaning they chose their own destiny
@@robertjusic9097 or it's just survival instict doing it's work. It's just like animals that try to avoid pain/danger. It has nothing to do with choice.
Peter Griffin I’m not being facetious I promise, I’m just curious about the topic. But what about a suicidal person who has those same instincts to avoid pain but walk out in front of a truck. It was there choice no?
@@carsonmcmanus9410 No. This completely ignores the fact that their "want" to walk in front of the truck overrides their "want" to do otherwise. Do you think a suicidal person would choose to want to be suicidal? This is actually a compelling case AGAINST free will.
I think you can actually combine "want to or have to" even further into just "want to" Even if you have a gun to your head or you have a boss threatening to fire you, the pressure only works if you want to be alive or have whatever luxuries the job affords you more than you want to do whatever they're demanding. Put someone suicidal or someone who has been on the fence about taking a vow of poverty into those situations and it's pretty obvious how those change the scales. In effect "being forced to" is just adding one weight to one end of your scales deciding what to do, often an inordinately heavy one, but isn't necessarily a sole determinant.
@@actualwafflesenjoyer in judicial situations the distinction is never that clear-cut. E.g. self-defense and 'acting under duress' have to be proportionate in order to be legitimate. E.g. agreeing to kill a third party because someone threatens with releasing your naked baby pics hardly seems proportionate. It's up to a judge/jury to decide. But as long as questions of moral responsibility (which only exist on a societal-artificial level) are out of the way, both 'have to' and 'want to' seem to describe deliberate action under desires and constraints
@@ashleystrout6651 I agree with Ashley, and I think the distinction is important for this reason. You did not "want to" be pushed off the stage (presumably), but you were. You did not "want to" shoot the man while you were sleeping, but someone moved your finger to the trigger of a gun they put in your hand.
I had to write an essay in high school about free will in the form of destiny. And my answer was basically "we can act like we have free will because we can't know the future so it doesn't matter."
Here's a brain twist. The decision after learning about free will not existing, and then deciding to make an expository video about it, is actually in itself an act of free will.
"you either want to, or your forced to"...but I could say "you either choose to, or you are forced to." Alex conflates want with choice. if we define EVERYTHING according to desire and impulse, including Magnus Carlsen playing a game of chess including calculating his first instinctive move before choosing to making it, including someone who desires to not act according to desire, we have effectively stripped deliberating, calculation, and reason of their meaning by tying them to impulse and desire. Alex's argument is basically "Why free desire doesn't exist." It's a weak argument with low explanatory power because impulse and desire have actual opposites. . Further, this leaves out the concept of doing something begrudgingly. third, it defines freewill as taking action, which is incomplete, freewill is simply defined as "undetermined thoughts." Freewill incorporates THINKING not just bodily actions. The body just obeys the mind. A person in conscious sleep paralysis has freewill even though they cannot actually do anything.
This reminds me of Eastern religious philosophy, specifically the concept of being enslaved by one's desires(wants) and the idea that true freedom comes from not having desires(wants). The Mahabharata depicts many ascetics living lifestyles free from desire. The desire to not desire is a desire itself. It is extremely difficult to achieve a desireless state of existence.
@@dionysusnow This is likely why religions like Jainism have elaborate death rituals connected directly to shedding yourself of your connections to the material (and social) world.
Doesn't that simply mean that those ascetics are simply ruled by their desire to not want desires? Or maybe that's the ultimate state, where they've eliminated so much of their worldly desire, that the only desire left is to maintain the desire to not want any other desires.
Sorry you have that compulsion! 😂 When I see a video about free will, I have full range of choice. I watched about 4 minutes of this one, and then I quite watching! I'd heard enough of his nonsense! 🤣
@@rexlion4510 So your “want” wasn’t strong enough and you’ve made a choice based on you not wanting to continue - clearly proving the point of the video here! ^_^
@@NousTrapper It might be the case the your reason for doing so is because determinism causes you discomfort, and so you act accordingly to minimise discomfort since we seem to be exclusively motivated to minimise suffering/maximise pleasure. Even seeking pain is pretty much always done to minimise it or seek a future pleasure, such as in the experiment of people choose to shock themselves to relieve boredom (choosing a lesser pain to relieve a greater/worse pain) Even seeking a meaningful life filled with meaningful experiences is only done to relieve the suffering of meaninglessness.
@@NousTrapper “Nature has placed mankind under two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure, it is for them alone to point out what we ought to do and well as determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong and on the other the chain of cause and effect are fastened to their throne. They govern us in everything we do, everything we think, everything we say. Every attempt we make to throw off our subjection will serve but to *demonstrate and confirm* it.” - My boy Jeremy Bentham spitting straight facts
Why are you terrified? It is out of your control. You can either accept or reject it, but neither stance will affect the outcome in any predictable way. So why worry? if it's going to happen, it's going to happen. This is also the same argument that renders faith pointless. Faith is belief without evidence, yet the only reason belief can be validated is if there is evidence. Thus, faith is a waste of time since without evidence, then it is equally likely that something will happen as it is that something will not happen. This is the problem of non-falsifiable claims. Either it _will_ or it will _not_. Belief nor faith can change this.
Dylan Wight Well that's completely off topic, but I agree. But just because something is true doesn't make it comforting. Just because something is out of my control doesn't stop me from finding it unsettling, no matter how much I would like to pretend it does
Actually, the only reason you'll do anything is because you want to. Being forced to do something has a want of survival or the avoidance of punishment behind it, unless your hand is being moved by someone else physically.
But do you really "want" to in the sense that it's something you choose truly on your own behalf? For example, if you buy a soda or something at a store "because you want to", it could realistically be for a variety of factors. For one thing, you could be thirsty while also holding a disposition towards sweeter drinks. That would naturally cause you to gravitate towards the sugary drink. If you weren't thirsty, then it was probably a craving - something you don't necessarily choose to have that holds a significant amount of power over deciding what you buy. If you had a craving and instead got water since it was healthier, there were prior decisions already dictating that choice as well. Free will is essentially impossible to prove, in reality, since if you go back far enough and with enough detail, every single one of your actions could likely be telegraphed. Even without this consideration, the concept of free will in and of itself is so nebulous that it's genuinely hard for our brains to conceptualize. That's just my thought on it anyway
I was just thinking of this. You can’t be forced to do something unless whatever is forcing you has a consequence for you not doing it in which you do it because you want to avoid the consequence. I didn’t think of your hand being physically moved by something else though. Interesting point.
That's why I think there will be anarchy in a lawless society. Most people don't break the law simply because they don't want to be punished, not because they are well-intentioned and well-behaved citizens. Humans are not superior, civilised moral beings. We're worse than animals.
That's a really good one! And speaks a lot of truth as well. To the best of my knowledge I could say that the belief in free will or not is predetermined. Gazzaniga I believe his name is backs this up, as well as other Neurosciency people.
@@benj766 Sure, you have a choice, but it's always determined in the past. A choice is never made of anything but thoughts you already had. Any thoughts you think that are brand new, any responses you can imagine, and all reactions to everything are always old once they happen like the choices they help to make. We live in time like the crest of a wave you cannot ever pin down even if you snap a picture of it because it required time to take making it a wave from the light traveling in the past to build up enough photons collapsing from the quantum light wavelength to capture in the camera. Your brainwaves must behave by quantum physics too.
That's a very good point, despite the joke, because you didn't yourself decide what you like. Your genes and experiences did. You only decided to express that feeling of liking. And why am I writing this? The point is that we are incredibly advanced "machines", and whatever we think we decide is always within the framework of our genetic programming. Thus, free will only exists within certain limits. Another argument against free will is that people understanding the consequences make stupid or "wrong" choices that severely harm them. If they truly had complete free will, that wouldn't happen. One example is me writing this, despite being better off in health and freshness tomorrow if I were sleeping now.
Only stones and rocks and inanimate matter have no choice. You had the choice to not like this video but you have already been convinced that whatever Alex says is intelligent so let me like this video blindly without using your 10 brain cells to contemplate on what he says.
William Esping: Absolutely William; we have no choice in possessing free will as a created member of the human race; the choice that we have is whether and when we will use it or not. God bless you.
When I hear you say something along the lines of "you are completely controlled by your wants", it doesn't make sense to me. It seems to imply that "I" am somehow a separate entity from my desires, when in fact my desires are actually a large part of what I would define as "myself". What is a person if not a set of changing desires motivated by memories? I don't feel like a slave to my desires because I literally am my desires.
Yes, agreed, scrolled down to say this. If we confine the definition of self and the definition of free will to just the conscious component, as was discussed in the video, then the video is logically correct. However, that definition is a bit narrow. It may make more sense to redefine the argument presented above as "you don't have fully conscious free will." Part of us - our desires - are subconscious and driven by various environmental, historical, and genetic factors. That does not mean that those factors exclusively define what we are - and vice-versa, we cannot separate our conscious decisions from those factors. We are the sum of our consciousness and the above-mentioned factors. To put it another way, CS could have two competing desires - the desire for chocolate or vanilla. Which one he selects is up to his conscious mind, based on various factors, including other desires, memory, knowledge, etc. If he went back in time and told himself that chocolate ice cream is bad, he could and likely would select vanilla, based on the updated knowledge.
I use this same argument against freewill. The only difference is i use the word impulse instead of want. There will always be an impulse to do one thing over another and those impulses simply arise.
You have made an astute observation. Perhaps freewill is our mind simply "managing impulses" to prioritize which to act on. I'd love to hear your answer if you have a few minutes, but if you choose to ignore me, that's ok too. ;-)
@@paultomori I think there’s a deeper issue with the idea that freewill is simply about managing impulses. If our decisions are just a matter of prioritizing impulses, then we're not actually choosing freely, we're just responding to the strongest urge at a given moment. But it goes even further: the impulses themselves are beyond our control. They’re shaped by past experiences, genetics, and external influences, all of which we didn’t choose. If our impulses arise from factors outside our control and all we're doing is selecting among them, where's the freedom in that? It seems like we're just following a predetermined path laid out by our past and biology, rather than exercising any real autonomy. If freewill is about making genuine choices, shouldn't it involve more than just reacting to whatever impulse happens to be most compelling? Your idea implies that our decisions are essentially pre-programmed, which seems to strip freewill of any meaningful substance. How can we claim to have freewill if we can't even control the impulses that supposedly drive our choices?
Free will is in the realm of quantum mechanics so the Cosmic Skeptic is wrong. Since if you had no free will and were just an observer in your head and had no control of the rest of your brain, your brain is then like a computer doing things. And it is like you are just watching a movie play out. Your brain apparently gives you notification on how to feel, like when you want something. So why is this computer asking about free will ? It has no consciousness so would not ask this question. Therefore there must be free will and you and your brain are connected and you are conscious. A mechanical computer would not ask questions about free will and consciousness. So since we are really very complicated mechanical computers and we are asking about free will and consciousness, must mean these things are real. Somehow in quantum physics this happens. There are fields, electron, proton, light, everything has a field , even human beings.
Not necessarily since as he mentioned it is indeed possible for you to make different choices, but ultimately what lead to those choices isn't really in your control
I thank my attention deficit disorder for helping me to enunciate my lack of free will when I threw that rock hitting my bullying physical education teacher square between the eyes for teasing me about not being eligible to try out to be a baseball pitcher on that fateful day of 1990. The principal didn't buy it, but I remembered ever after the truth that I have no free will, nor do any other of my fellow humans.
More precisely, free will is about the ability to interrupt from COMPULSIVE action. if you are aware, you can do it, free will goes together with awareness.
@@rl7012We don't have any control to what we want because there's a reason behind why we want this why we want that as long as reason exists we can't have absolute true free will free from everything.
This reminds me of a weird thought that's popped into my head a couple times... "It couldn't have turned out any differently, because if it could've it would've."
I'm no expert but I think it has nothing to do with free will but you're speaking of possibility of different outcomes (my expression, not a real term). Let's take the ideas that pop up in your head be called made up ideas, as in comparison to reading that water is liquid and thinking of water as liquid (constructed, extracted by communication E.C., non-genuine) ideas. I THINK we're speaking of EC ideas, the ones we, allegedly, consciously construct, not the made up ones, which I have no explanation for.
It really could’ve though. Due to the randomness of particles’ behavior, if the universe was rewinded to the beginning to play again, we’d get a vastly different result. Though there are likely some structures that are inevitable.
@@TheNightWatcher1385 I think, not authorized tho, 1- deep in the most minute scale, if there is a randomness in the process then the possibility of a different outcome than what we have now is definitely present. What I mean includes if particles popping behaviour in and out of nowhere is literally random, then that could very well indicate a random outcomes if the uni were to rewind again. 2- if the laws and contants (gravity, forces, electro, maybe even matter if there were other particles similar to electrons and protons) have behaved differently then we would have different outcomes. Otherwise, I think, had the uni been rewinded and if the laws have been identical and the randomness is non-existent (which is something hard to prove by experimenting on every place, planet and black hole to test the validity of matter/space/fiber-stuff determinism and predicting every single instance with the properties of space, time and mass -excuse the metaphor- of the presence of matter there) until then, wait I might sound religious there but objectively speaking, we couldn't yet prove the non-existence of consciousness, everything we know is based on the likely possibility of dependence on neural networks. Such inductive argument might not be true as, as far as I know, we know nothing about consciousness. All we know is brain activity. I'm not saying there is a soul because consciouness is so mysterious that we can't explain yet. All I'm saying is we have no idea and we could base assumptions on this possibility. I don't say I believe in free will certainly, what I'm saying is the arguments of free will non-existence are still not 100% conclusive. I'm not sure if there is a part of us (allegedly that we are a distinct part of the world) that is not dependent entirely on the material interactions. I mean there is no reason for us to do good to each other and yet we do! We could be killing eachother over territories yet we feel the deep urge of loving each other. I wanna hug every other person. I don't want to think of them as junk space-time-matter that magically surfs the space-time continuum. I wanna shake hands with aliens. I wanna see the last bit of conscious being enjoying his/her/whatever gender "they" call themselves to the last moment they live it. I wanna preach the morality of no-suffering to every conflicting conscious being. Because the other possibility of only material world (speaking of conscious beings, not dieties) is utterly terrifying. A sadistic authority could rise one day and have a grip over the whole humanity and in his thinking, there is no difference between life and death at all!
Reda Ali Personally, I believe the brain and the mind (consciousness) are related, but distinct things. I believe the brain is largely automated and runs our day to day lives on auto pilot, but the mind is the “quality control” of a decision, if that makes sense. So the brain is like an automated assembly line. It does its thing when left to do so, but a line manager (the mind) can stop the process momentarily to check for quality and give their stamp of approval. I think consciousness is present in the brain, but that it doesn’t rely on the brain to actually exist, I feel there’s more to it than that. To me, consciousness is more likely to be a quantum event and not necessarily a physical one (unless you consider quantum events to be physical phenomena). We forget that our brain isn’t our entire nervous system. It runs around our whole body. It’s curious that sometimes when someone receives an organ donation, that recipient begins to show personality traits that were present in the donor, such as food preferences or general personality.
@@TheNightWatcher1385 you're right. I share your opinion of modes of operation of 'mind' as auto-pilot and active decision making. I heard many arguments about controlling someone's arbitrary decision like moving a hand or pressing a button. While scientests have done some experiments of predicting when someone would do such arbitrary action, and also the presence of consciousness on actions, aka hypnosis, while still having the same brain activity, and the similar subconscious acts are very variant like preferring a food or flavor over the other. While genetics could, and very likely do, play a huge rule in dictating how sensitive I am towards anxiety and what category of games I enjoy, (which are once again subconscious; I don't choose to like a food. I have been pre-programmed to like this taste and would be, I expect, very difficult to change the physical part of me that changes my taste. I want to remind you of the 'subconscious' part of our actions that we are all aware of) that still doesn't explain how I find the urge (automatic response) of wanting to laugh when I hear a joke that I understand while still holding myself (2 wants. Which one do you prefer more?). Like I find the two wants, forces, speaking in Greek style, are present both at the same time, albeit that whichever weighed more to you, you would choose. And let me be clear about this: a conscious being could either have a reason to do so or not, and in either case it's a lost case due to 'you want to'. The part where daily life free will means when you allegedly intentionally attempt to strike a pedestrian with your car instead of applying the brakes. Let's ignore the moral part while holding into the social aspect of it. Assume you have 2 wants: to kill the pedestrian, and to steal him. And you have 2 wants-not: social demeaning, and law prosecution. Assume also you have no moral restrictions as killing him is of no psychological downsides, only social ones. Coincidentally, the wants on one side and the wants-not are on another; there could be option A with 2 wants and one want-not, option B with 3 wants ..., but atill the wants-not are inherently want by definition (want not to). So, where my alleged free will comes into the picture is when I *evaluate* the options, in this case, only two options, run him over, or apply brakes. There could be a situation where I could talk with someone and have A) talk gently, B) use some offensive language, C) agitate a friend with a statement to catch their support into my argument, D) punch him in the face... So it's not like only black and white choice that I "could" choose. These options have the high likelihood of resulting the mentioned outcomes (2 wants for A and 2 wants-not for B). But remember that these outcomes are in many cases exclusive: you are unlikely to kill him, steal him while still escaping the police and social demeaning unless you're that Dostoevsky's novel character to get it all. So you are highly unlikely, let's assume the impossibility hence, of gathering different options' outcomes, aka options' outcomes' exclusivity. The situation at hand is you could either choose A, B, C, ... or N. What do you do then? You simply *evaluate* the outcomes' (both benefits and downsides. And for simplicity let's assume the certainty of these outcomes benefits and downsides to eliminate the probablistic aspect of uncertainty). The question now becomes: do you value X and Y more than P and Q? These are your wants, true, but it comes down to what values weigh to you more than others. Money, knowledge, morality, social class, civil prosperity? I think here it could need some compromises regarding your wants against public good where we should draw the line between the want and freedom to take a decision. You could sacrifice you wants and leave them for something else, like future reward. Even though you don't want to leave this choice, you did have the capability to choose or not choose it (you could value the outcomes more than your wants and sacrifice your wants for unwanted outcomes). It could reach to a moral or public good standard where someone would only sacrifice their wants for others' benefits. The difference here is in the future case, the benefit would still reach you afterall; while in public good it would highly unlikely benefit you, at least in the short term, to leave your parking lot for someone else that needs to park closer. I'm not speaking about morality in specific, rather how we would sacrifice our benefits for others even when we know that the odds of benefitting are not on our favor. True, generally, we are acting for a better life of us all, stemming from a beneficiary prospective, but still based on basis of what you want more than the other. And if the better good requires sacrificing one for the whole then so be it. Evolutionarily or not, that gives my life its meaning. Is it free will? Yes because there are other wants. Unless someone considers any want to be decisive to one's decision then even choosing not to follow it stems from that. It's a lost cause anyway! I can almost remember no argument regarding the 'conscious' (carefully using the non-scientific term of conscious as I 'm still not sure of my opinion) part but many arguments on the auto-pilot part. An aspect that is highly exploited by psychological biases and subsoncious manipulation in advertisements and giving people the imoression that "I feel I'm winning in the casino just because everything is suggesting that even tho I rationally know the odds are totally not in my favor and it's totally randomly-base rather than skill-based. Don't get me wrong, we don't need to embrace some facts as certainty of death or the possibility of my partner cheating on me but these tendancies should be given and informed to the agent rather than exploiting them against him/her.
Using the icecream scenario since that's what the video had - What if one were to chose between two bowls of vanilla ice cream that had the exact same amount of icecream in it, in the exact same bowls, kept side by side. Would that constitute free will since there isnt a 'want' of either one of it in particular?
But there is. For example, if you’re right-handed, that might make you more likely to grab the bowl on the right. This is an example of a puppet not seeing its strings and falsely concluding that the strings don’t exist.
@@Rio-zh2wb Wrong, these are assumptions (being right hand, etc). There is no proof against or for free will. We dont know. This was chewed since millenia. We dont even know how the brain works, or consciousness.
He is wrong , I have written the explanations elsewhere in the comments. If you analyze any word to death , it loses meaning and we live in a quantum world. He is stuck in the classical world. Quantum physics has observers and measurement and quantum states that are completely unknowable and uncontrollable.
Dear Alex, Free will is an overcomplicated concept because of all the religious and societal baggage that word got saddled with. The problem at its core is the ability to decide between, say, two choices A or B, and whether the choice made is predictable or not. Let’s look at all constituents of that situation. 1. Input data. 2. A brain, that makes the decision. 3. Output choice: A or B. Let’s start with the brain first. Our brains are probability calculating engines. The Brain is programmed from the very beginning of the formation of the first neural cell, until the brain’s death. The brain also comes with preprogrammed models to drive various functions and emotions, obtained through evolution and environment. The brain contains a model of the world that is influenced by every input it receives through its various sensors. This model is shaped and reshaped throughout its life as the input data is received by the brain. Input data could take many forms - From touch, vision, sound, taste, smell, etc. - To chemicals such as hormones, whether from your own body, or your mother’s body during pregnancy, or environment, etc. - There are also meta Input Data that could influence the model such as language, emotions, the experience of others, past experience, observations, learning, etc. - Input Also could take the form of societal norms, rules and/or regulations, shame, love, hate, etc. Let us assume that we have a system of Input data and a brain model such as: - We can provide a very precise and perfectly known input data set. - Also, we can provide a very precise and perfectly known brain and brain model starting point. - Let’s also assume that system, if provided a choice between A or B, that A would have a higher probability to be selected by that system, hence that system will choose A. Now, the people who would say that we have free will, argue that even though the system is predisposed to choosing A, that system could choose B instead. People who would say that we don’t have free will, argue that the system will choose A no matter what. And we don’t have a choice. For that system to choose B instead of A, would mean that there is an input data condition that we did not account for, hence the input data set is not perfect or complete, which violate the assumption. Hence, we don’t have free will. In my opinion, the reason people get confused about this illusion of free will is that the probability calculating engine (our brains) is constantly and recursively being updated by the experiences we have on a second by second basis. Also, the set of input data into the brain is large and complex, not to mention the combinatorial factor of how all that data is processed in our brains. This is, as referred to it by Data Science as an AI-complete problem. The decision tree is vast, but not infinite. If we have a big enough computer (let’s go crazy, the size of the sun) with “perfect” input data set and “perfect” model of that brain at that point, we can predict the outcome and choice. So, if that is the case, then anyone who will commit a crime, could claim that she has no choice and it was predestined, yes? No! one of the inputs in the input data set is societal norms, rules, regulation, etc. this is another variable that could shape our world model in the brain. So, if this probability calculating engine decided on B instead of A (where B happened to be illegal) they will suffer the consequences. But more importantly for this discussion, there is an input condition in this brain’s life that made it set low priority or low weight to the legal and societal rules, and for that, it needs to be corrected. Having rule enforcement in our society ought to help shape the model for these probability calculating engines, toward the betterment of society. The other aspect of this, is if the brain itself was deficient or broken in some way to allow it to choose B instead of A, No matter what the input data set is (training, or rules, regulation, or experience) then you can say this person is not responsible for their crime (choosing B) and should be treated differently (send to a mental institute, instead of jail). I wish the atheist community stop using the “free will” terminology because it is awash with imprecision and theological baggage that misses representing reality. Whenever we try to explain it, we always get wrapped around the axel. The model above is derived directly from Neural Science and AI research. Thank you for all your great work.
I don't disagree with your comment, but you are ironically part of the problem why concept of free will (its nonexistence) is harder to grasp than it needs to be. You make it way too complicated. The fundamental mistake I think is to argue (firstly) from the point of brain science to debunk free will, when we have the logical killshot under our noses. Choice is either: 1. predetermined 2. random You could even have full reign over the universe and laws that govern it, but you wouldn't be able to make it as such, where you would escape choice being random or predetermined.
@@25hvghfgetr6 which is exactly why we are also in a simulation, acting out our roles. No universe can escape predictability, so reality means absolutely nothing anywhere.
Actually when your “forced to do something” you aren’t. Even if severe punishment will follow not doing something you still “want” to not deal with punishment rather than doing the task. Only exception being prison where no matter what u will be physically forced in there
Agree. Other exceptions: blinking, breathing, and anything that you do automatically and unconsciously. You are "forced" to do this by your brain, then...
@@soybean3423 I would contest those. You blink because your eyes get dry, and you implicitly "want" to make it stop. It may be automatic, but there is still a choice to continue.
I was looking for an example of being forced to do something. It seems to me that all of those would still come down to a want. I'm not sure that even your example of being forced in prison works. You could fight the correctional officers & they might have to kill you. If they succeeded in transporting you to prison without killing you, I'm still not sure that it works. Once in prison, you could refuse to do whatever they told you, no matter what the consequences were. You still wouldn't be forced to do anything, at least not that I can think of. Being forced into a location seems different than doing something.
@@SpikeShroom @soybean blinking, breathing, those are involuntary actions. If you want to argue that you could not blink until you go blind, or hold your breath til death, consider your heartbeat, you cant choose for it to stop right now. These are involuntary processes. Alex carefully chose his free will definition because we do have voluntary choices, it's just that once they're made, they never would have been different.
The issue with the initial premise is that it’s not necessary for free will. You don’t have to be in control of all the factors influencing your decisions to act differently. You just need to be aware of them, and not even all of them. Even a general degree of self-awareness of your personal psychology (not even a single factor) would be enough to reasonably conclude that one could have acted differently.
How can one act differently? We can never repeat the _identical_ situation, and if we could, we should expect either with or without freewill, unless the universe is random at the fundamental level, the same outcome. Repeating an experiment overtime is _not_ the identical situation. A person is older, the previous attempts are part of their memory, the angle of sunlight has changed. We all only act once in each moment, and it could not be any other way than the way it was, it doesn't physically make sense to suggest otherwise.
@@Rogstin Why doesn’t it physically make sense? We have a degree of self awareness, which can inform us on why we make the decisions we make, and I have no idea why that doesn’t suggest we can choose differently. It seems to contradict our inner experience. Determinism hasn’t been able to explain 100% of our actions, so it’s absolutely an assumption that it would.
Rationalizing decisions does not equate to making them. The argument encapsulates your "awareness" of your inner workings. _Any_ conscious rationalization is based on your being. On nature and nurture. You don't _choose_ to "be aware" of your inner workings. You claim to be - and that contributes to the decisionmaking process. See, the awareness you claim to have _does not change anything._ it is merely your expression of one of the influences you feel your decisions are based on.
@@thomasw153 Your claim only works if we bisect awareness from being. All you’re actually saying is that there are mechanisms within our being driving our decisions that are inaccessible to consciousness. But that doesn’t mean it’s not *us* making the choices, it just means they’re made in a way that’s not immediately accessible to our conscious selves. There’s also the fact that your argument doesn’t explain how or why human beings are able to reflect and deliberate on choices they haven’t yet made. We can consciously think through decisions, imagine alternatives, and make choices based on reasoning. This subjective experience undermines strict determinism, and requires scientific explanation, not elimination.
@@mottebailley4122 _This subjective experience undermines strict determinism_ How? The fundamental problem is, _how_ is a choice made. Where can it be made? Voltage thresholds and chemical transmitters. It's all obeying the laws of physics. Free will as a perception, that exists, but as a reality, it doesn't make sense. _and I have no idea why that doesn’t suggest we can choose differently._ How could you choose differently? You cannot replay the moment again. Every moment is new, and no experiment I can think of could distinguish between free will and determinism. So we have to ask about what free will even means. Yes, I feel like I make choices, I just understand that's the result of an incredibly complex system of interactions. _and make choices based on reasoning._ This is why free will fails even at a high level. There is always a reason, even if it isn't something we are aware of consciously. A chain of _Why? Because!_ until we can't explain it. Where is the choice? Not just the feeling of it when we discover what the outcome is, but the moment we pick _without_ external impetus. Free will doesn't make sense.
Everstruggling You are right that Buddhists don’t believe a human can fully rid themselves of any desire. They do however believe you can curb and temper those desires (The Middle Way). Therefore, a Buddhist would agree that our desires/wants have strong influence over our minds and our decisions and that there is no way to totally eradicate them. However, they would disagree (with the guy in this video) that it is impossible to want something and then decide not to want it. The more you practice not wanting something the more you don’t want it, and therefore, you choose what you want. It’s a long process that takes a crazy amount of willpower and focus, but it can be done. Once you curb one desire, another may pop up as you go through life and circumstances change, and you’ll have to start the process all over again. There’s really no difference from this belief and behavioral psychology. If you believe you can retrain your brain and change habits, then you should believe that we have control over our wants. They go hand in hand. But I can understand peoples’ confusion because westernized culture teaches us to do the opposite and blindly satisfy our desires from the time we’re born. One could argue, following this video's logic, that the desire to curb your desire is in itself a want, and therefore, that desire must have been stronger (due to pre-determined circumstances) than the desire not to change one's behavior. But anyone that has suffered from any kind of addiction can tell you that they can be so chemically dependent on their object of desire that they seem to crave it with every fiber of their being. And yet, one will at some point face that inevitable and pivotal choice: whether to give in to their desire for temporary pleasure or fight back against it in order to reclaim their freedom. To me, this is evidence of another aspect of our brain that moves past our simple wants/desires. It's some kind of willpower/force science and classic logic fails to explain. Some may call this one's spirit or soul. And this goes back to the age old debate over whether man's mind is distinct from one's soul and vice versa. So, I guess you could say this video is only true if you don't believe in the existence of the soul. And neuroscience just hasn't gone far enough yet to be able to rule it out. And therefore, how can we say every choice is a product of our desire if we are yet to fully understand where that desire stems from? As of yet, I'm not convinced one way or another that free will exists or doesn't exist. But if it doesn't exist, I don't think it's because of the reasons in this video. If anything, I find it more likely that our lives are already laid out before us due to forces beyond our comprehension. Whether that means we're just pawns in a simulation and our choices are a complete illusion; or our understanding of time is skewed and everything that will happen has already happened and will always be; or both; or something else entirely. Either way, humans always gravitate toward black and white answers. But the truth is rarely simple. My personal belief is that it's a little of both (a combination of fate/free will): that we are destined for some experiences and have choices over others. And this goes back to the Buddhist idea of the soul and reincarnation and the choice to either take the opportunity to temper our desires and free our spirit or let it pass us by and be born again...
Everstruggling You don’t need to want to become a monk to want to be a better person. I’m sorry if that is a difficult concept for you to grasp. And i find it funny you think I helped prove your point, because I feel like you helped prove mine with your question. I’ve never met one person that doesn’t want to be successful or grow as a person in some way, unless they have some kind of psychosis. The main thing that differentiates people who want to get better with those who choose complacency, is that the former takes responsibility for their actions. Really think about why the idea of there being no free will comforts you so much. It’s appealing for a reason. Also, people these days are always angry if you use “too many words.” God forbid they put effort and brainpower into understanding anything more complex than what can be depicted in a meme. And psychology is a lot more complicated than a simple saying. I’ve read countless books and taken courses and gone to psychologists myself, so I know plenty. Anyway, knowledge and what’s written in the textbooks isn’t everything. People can memorize every fact in the world and still know nothing. Just like everything else, the field of psychology relies a lot on one’s intuition since there is actually very little proven about the human brain. Until we understand more, I don’t see it as appropriate for some TH-camr (credentials unknown) to make blanket claims - in the name of “philosophizing” about free will and our desires - with no real evidence to support it. We don’t yet understand where our wants stem from, and therefore, I don’t see how anyone could make a statement like that with absolute certainty.
@@optionsstrategies7511 yes... Think we want? When we think we want something we actually want that thing..but.we cant control what we want...we cant control our choice of want.
Sam's Studio Certainly there are things in your life that you have wanted and no longer want. Or there are things you thought you wanted, but then decided you did not want. What is the force controlling this desire and these changes?
You express things well Alex, and it is great that you have chosen this path to discuss so many philosophical ideas. I hope, and indeed, believe, that most of your videas will prompt serious thought and great discussions. I don't think you succeed in what you attempt on this one, but it was for sure a very big ask!
Free will and gods punishment was something I always struggled to believe too. What convinced me was imagining that I was a scientist who had the ability to create life and who could also see into the future. I can create a being and hardwire every single desire and thought process of this being. Not only that, but based on precisely where I raised this being and the exact people this being grew up around, I would know exactly their desires, beliefs, and life path. Now, this is even less than what god can do. My thought was, how can a god, who made me with the specific desires and thought processes that I have, and put me specifically in a home and surrounded by people where he knew exactly how they would affect me (i.e. god is in control of both nature and nurture), how could a god like this fault me for any of the decisions I 'choose' to make?
Well Christians will say God only created the first two humans. Other humans came through reproduction. Still God should not held us responsible. He knew it will happen and should have stop it. Then again if someone thought a wrong thought, that doesn’t excuse them to commit it.
@@polandball999 Right. That doesn’t mean he cause it, but allowing it is just as bad. Before you say God created us. He didn’t. Only the first two people who were said to be prefect until they are the fruit. Besides having a bad thought doesn’t mean you should act on it. Unless you was raise wrongly, you could have rebuke those thoughts.
@@Bunni504 but god made me uncapable of not getting the proof, he changes environmental facts, and hardwire my thought process, he knew i would do that, i can choose to not do it, but that is just an illusion since god created me knowing i wouldnt get the apple
this reminds me of what I used to think in the childhood. when ever an ant was passing, I'd think that if I kill the ant right now, that's the death the god has decided for the ant and if I don't do that but kill it after five minutes then that's also decided and if I don't do anything of them and just let it go then that is also decided by the god. I used to be very confused because of that.
THIS IS THE END TIMES🔥🔥🔥.ENOUGH WITH ATHEISM FOOLISHNESS. YOU ARE ALL STUCK IN PLATO'S CAVE AND SATAN 'S MATRIX OF LIES. THE SPIRITUAL REALM IS REAL. REPENT OF YOUR SINS AND TRUST THE GOSPEL OF JESUS CHRIST. YOU WILL BE SAVED FROM HELL 🔥 th-cam.com/video/bVlfo0KHlVc/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/myaroler0wM/w-d-xo.html Your soul is on the line. Jesus is coming soooon. Jesus loves you❤
@@loocypher150🤣😅.But it's not certain yet. Heaven and Hell is like a quantum phenomenon in which 0 and 1 can coexist at the same time but your consciousness gets to decide/observe. We live in a quantum reality. Example the double slit experiment. The electrons are estimated to be moving in on the two paths simultaneously until the final observation is made. That's what heaven and Hell is like. If you are saved by Jesus, heaven is a certainty. But if you are not yet saved it's not yet certain where you are going. Until you finally take that jump. And since you are not allowed to see the end Until you reach the end. God sees your end. But it's you who is accountably walking towards that end. Have you watched TeNeT? "What has happened happened" but until you see the end you will never know. But For us who are saved we certainly know. The offer of forgiveness from God is offered to you NOW. 2 Corinthians 6:2 ..Today is the day of salvation Albert Einstein proved that time is a relative illusion in his theory of general relativity. The only time that truly exists is the NOW. You can use it with your God given free will to reject or accept God's forgiveness. To reject or accept God's love. Heaven or Hell. The choice is ultimately your's..
I think there may be a fine distinction between 'free will' as in: the ability to choose, and autonomy as in: the ability to choose free of influence. BTW I love your videos, your ability to think critically and logically is incredible and something I strive to achieve as well.
We are the sum of our senses, the society we live in, our culture, and the people around us. It is impossible to have free will (free of influence). Just take a look at how hormones control what we think and do.
Are you saying you are aware of, and exert conscious control of the cascade of electrical and chemical reactions that happen in your brain continuously? Unique.
@@TesterAnimal1 I am not saying that, we are not in control of the chemical reactions in our brain. I'm basically saying that the chemicals and hormones in our brain control us.
I would argue, that to a certain degree we can control the degrees or intensity to which we desire what we “want” across multiple dimensions because we organize those “wants” into a hierarchy and inter connect them with one another. As we change different areas in our lives, we rearrange the hierarchy, and shift multiple items based on the initial change. For instance, the decision to go to the gym is not only a shift in want, it is a shift in value structure, and therefore you’ll shift multiple other “wants” within your hierarchy of wants in order to align yourself with the new value. I do agree that changes like this are rare and take conscious effort, but we are most definitely capable of shifting our wants. I think a better argument for free will would be that the future is already predetermined, and therefore we will always fall prey to the future.
I agree that you can change your "wants" by changing your cognitive value structure. But you will change this structure because you want to do it. And then you will try very hard and think about it and question it, because you want to do so. In the end you have changed your "wants" by using your wants or being forced to by a therapist or someone/something else. In no point you are free of your "wants". At least according to Alex ;)
This is what I am currently doing: diving deep into this topic and changing my wants and desires. My desire to sit on the couch or be on the computer is stronger than my desire to go to the gym. As soon as the thought of going to the gym arises in my mind, I ask myself why my desire to work out and improve my appearance and well-being is less compelling. Clearly, one option involves more effort but offers long-term benefits, while the other requires less effort and provides immediate gratification. Without delving too deeply into our reward system, I aim to make my desire to work out stronger than my inclination to sit idle. The desire to desire something is potent, whether we believe in free will or not. This shift in priorities is the most powerful step I've taken to accomplish more.
When I was a little kid, I didn't have the illusion of free will. It seemed kind of unfair that my parents would punish me for something, when I didn't feel I had any control over whether I did it or not. It was when I was about 6 or 7 that I started to think I had control over my choices.
It would seem that punishments/consequences for your childhood actions were designed to create a want strong enough to act against your current wants. Building up your Id, ego and superego in the design of your parents.
What is free will: The ability to have acted differently 1. You can't control your wants: - Try to think about so thing you want - now try not wanting it. - Try to think of something you don't want - now try to want it. - This is not possible. 2. You will only do anything because you either want to or because you're forced to. Everything is controlled by your wants. 3. Everybody feels like they have free will / control over their actions 4. Consceptional vs. Personal free will. "Yes, you can do anything you want but you can't, you just can't choose WHAT you want - and where's the freedom in that?" Free will is based on your wants, which you can't control. Acknowledge this and you will be more calm with your choices.
Really? Did you want to write that comment and were not able to not write that comment? No choice made on your part? Free will is based on our choices, which we can control. Acknowledge this and you will be more responsible with your choices.
@@jpt7955 if they chose not to write the comment it would still be based on a want the have whether it be they don't want people to respond or they want to spend their energy on something else etc
Your not forced to do anything. For instance. People with drug addictions who are trying to detox from alcohol or heroin may want to drink alcohol or do heroin but they have the decision (chose) to deny thereselves and say NO! I WILL NOT SHOOT UP HEROIN! No Matter how bad you might want something you can (free willingly) Choose what you want to do. Free will exist
Free will doesn't imply the supernatural ability to transcend your identity and instantiate a different set of desires than the ones you come hard wired with. Free will implies the mental capacity to exercise conscious choice within an available context. It is a psychological phenomenon, not a metaphysical power. By consciously choosing to reject free will, you are inescapably exercising it (in the psychological sense - the only sense in which free will can meaningfully apply).
Is exercising a conscious choice meaningful if you don't control the reasons behind that choice? I would argue that even if you think it is, the choice we make is still deterministic in nature. If we were to make an exact copy of you, with the exact same brain state and put you both into an identical room then all of your choices would be the exact same. You would both say the exact same things at the same time etc.
Libertarian Realist Right, that's a different definition, one that basically boils down to "we have free will because we feel like we have free will" which Alex mentioned. Can an entity have no consciousness but still have free will? Can an entity have no free will but still be conscious? How would that work? If not, what's the difference between free will and consciousness? If there's no difference, free will is a redundant term.
michaelmath Puffy would agree with you..... :3 This whole "free will vs. determinism" thing is ridiculous by default..... :3 Can't Fight The Systemagic..... :3
By invoking the concept "you," you are presupposing the existence of a being with a particular identity. Yes, an exact copy of me would make the same choices given exactly the same circumstances. That doesn't mean the choices aren't real as mental processes. Would only the choices of a boundless, unlimited consciousness capable of transcending the law of identity count as "free"? I don't think that's the basis of the concept of free will or what proponents of it believe.
the fact that we are beings capable of producing an infinite number of desires and that we can consciously pick one desire over another, is enough evidence of free will for me.
The whole premise of the video of we can’t control what we want is just untrue. To a large degree, we can start choosing differently by focusing on the positives of the things we want to choose. It is so common we call it rationalization. The video maker seems smart enough, I wonder how did he miss the point … or did he just went straight to absolutism to be able to make a video.
@@scoobydoo9579I don't share your opinion, if you rationalize, it is because you want to, and you didn't chose to want it, for everything you do, or think, there was something which motivated you to do so, otherwise you wouldn't do it
@@gregvanb Interesting. In your view, when we are "motivated" to do something -- what do you call that motivation if it is not rationalization? Or are you suggesting human should operate purely on impulse -- the same way a sea cucumber would?
@@scoobydoo9579 what I'm saying is that if you rationalize, it is because you have the ability to do so (which you have no control on), and the will to do it the moment you do it. For example if you're in a moment when you are too emotional, you won't be able to rationalize immediately but then you'll do it once you realize that to just follow your emotions might not be the best way to deal with your actual situation (so there is one or many reasons that leads to rationalize, but you don't choose to do so from nowhere, if you do something you have reason(s) to do it, otherwise you wouldn't do it). So every decision, thoughts, change of opinion, action etc. you make is actually the consequence of a lot of different things that happened before you make it. An idea doesn't come from nowhere, your brain doesn't generate ideas from nowhere, and if it did it would mean that we all are gods at our own level
@@gregvanb You lost me there. Is your view that our every decision is the "natural" results of trillions of factors we can't control, and therefore we don't have free will? And why must we be "gods" just because we can create an idea out of nothing -- can't God create us to be able to create an idea out of nothing -- especially if that's what giving us "free will" means?
Akryloth yes it will . If anything it will make your more unlikely to have kids, when you realise humans are just slaves of conscious and unconscious desires. There is no point to life. And pain and suffering is inevitable
@@lepetitchat123 This kind of realisation don't change anything about our lives we just keep living the way we always did because that's how humans are
Actually you don't know whether the (non) existence of free will changes anything or a lot about daily life. Predetermined or not, you don't know the future. The fact that it seems not to have had much of an impact in the past, makes you think that way but it does not allow you to say anything about changes in the future and even about changes about the past that could had been.
I came to this conclusion many years ago but could not express it as well as you have here. Whenever I have this conversation I usually resort to asking the person to give me one example of a 'choice' they believe they made and unravel it with them to demonstrate that their 'choice' will have ALWAYS come from a 'reason' and that the 'reason' never originates with them or something they 'chose'!
The ability to rationalize through choices and decide which one isn’t always a result of desire. This video would also disprove things we know exist like consciousness, rationality, intelligence, etc. The literal definition of consciousness is the ability to parse through desires and pick one independent of emotion. You may really really want something, but also know it’s bad for you. What decides what you do? You do. If both desires are equal, how is it that anything happens? The answer is that your ability to rationalize and make a decision INDEPENDENT of both desires is what makes the decision.
@@aidanm.655 None of those change anything. For example you state "but also Know its bad for you". How did you arrive at the knowledge that it's bad for you? Also Consciousness, Rationality and Intelligence are capacities you were born with. In other words things you were given but didn't 'chose'. So does somebody born with a lesser intelligence, as per your example, have fewer 'choices'? "The literal definition of consciousness is the ability to parse through desires and pick one independent of emotion" - all you are describing here is the lived experience of the 'program' running (what we call our consciousness) that, from our perspective makes is 'seem' like we are making a choice. Being 'aware' of the program running does not effect the output. " If both desires are equal, how is it that anything happens?" -what you are describing here is like what happens to humans when faced with too many apparent 'options'. Many do find it impossible to 'chose' in such instances and the Operating System becomes distressed. For those that do there will ALWAYS be a reason why they 'chose' one above any of the others. The closest it will 'feel' you can get to 'breaking' determinism is the use of a randomizer. i.e. Flipping a coin. Since you will have then removed 'yourself' from the decision making part. But I will leave you to consider "Whose 'Free Will' is being implemented here?"; "Is it Free Will" and "Does this really disprove determinism?" It really does help when considering this subject to think of ourselves like a computer program that is so complex that it does not only take direct inputs from its immediate environment (via the senses) but also uses 'data' gathered during its runtime (lived experiences). We are only doing what we were 'programmed' to do from birth.
@@aidanm.655 The greatest desire wins. That's all it ever is. When are you ever making a choice that isn't of desire? "You may really really want something, but also know it’s bad for you. " Your desire for being healthy was greater than your desire to want to do that thing.
The debate dissolves when you take an honest perspective of your opponents position (I have Free Will). This video will mean nothing to them, because of reasons you eluded to early. It's a problem of Symantecs. When you say you don't have the ability to pre-determine your wants. They say I don't need to. I know what I want and why. I could choose otherwise but I don't want to; hence I am exercising my free will by wanting this want rather than that. They are unable to see the fallacious nature of this logic. It's circlular reasoning with a dash of ad absurdum. Couple your arguments against free will with some critical thinking lessons for a complete demolishion of their delusion. :) Great vid btw I always at the end of this debate give an uplifting. "Don't worry too much over what you never had, you got this far without it ;)
Makeshift Altruist Agreed, mostly. There are simply some tragic horrors that befall us due to some of these kinds of delusions. I don't know how to present the information to people in a way that convinces them of the need to stop retributive responses, to have more forgiveness and compassion. It's true, we got this far with no free will while thinking it was coherent, that we had it. But it seems to me we could do far better facing the facts - no matter how bleak they might seem - in the long run. The false positives have a way of coming back around and biting us.
While true free will is nonexsistant due to physical, legal, or other limitations l like my little illusion of being able to make choices about personal expression.
Indeed, our brains evolved "fooling" themselves so as to make us convinced that we have free will. This is because (becasue) for a highly intelligent species the idea of free will not existing would be quite hard to swallow and therefore would prove to be PROBLEMATIC both socially as well as for individuals, hindering the ability to survive and reproduce, so this position of blissful ignorance is 100% logical.
you can like the illusion while being completely aware of it though. or are you telling me that since you got convinced about the lack of free will you don't feel like you make decisions anymore? ever?
I absolutely understand, for all practical reasons we have free will, randomness exists, there may as well be a god, etc. What is true and what is practical are two different things.
I would also argue, from a sociological perspective, that we don’t have free will because we are inevitably influenced by external factors since birth. These factors influence our wants, and how we act and our ‘free will’. Great video
Well I guess it's impossible for us not to be influenced by external factors since day one of our life outside our mothers. It's a good question from you but think about it - animals, bears let's say, how could they possibly survive if their parents gave them free choice to eat or not to eat and what to eat. Do you think them being infants could possibly have the "free will", I mean "free will" to do EVERYTHING on even such basic level of existence? They'd die after few days. Few hours maybe? Parents provide house, provide food, warmth and make sure their offspring don't drown in their own excrements. If a one day old being was suppose to decide about himself from the day one, he would have to have any base of experience anyway. If you know what I mean. Cheers :P
It's actually simpler - you cannot have free will because there is no 'you' to have it. I - is another complex abstraction/illusion on which we base most of our misconceptions.
No, you're not. Sam Harris is an even more dramatic example of someone who tells people what they SHOULD think and believe while telling them they can't choose.
@@KingoftheJuice18 To be fair he's just making his case, not telling you that you should agree with him, you can disagree and think or believe something else.
@@alguno1010101 You're completely right that we can disagree and believe differently, but Sam himself argues for what he thinks is true for everyone. Sam certainly does not feel it's all a matter of personal opinion. That would be so unSam-like!
@Forever Forward Nah, just because I have no free will doesn't mean I listen to everybody or believe anything someone tells me. I actually feel better knowing free will is bs. Also your arguments are useless, whatever will happen will happen, its not that it can be controlled at all. lol
Well, he has no other choice than to make that recommendation, so that doesn't contradict that there is no free will. Anybody interested might chekc the book out, anybody that isn't won't. Whatevs
Well you have no choice but to have what you have so what is hitchens trying to say? That you should be able to not have free will? Then you wouldn't have free will in that case yet would have freely chosen to not have free will which is self contradictory. Hitchens' point is total nonsense but it sounds funny
thebullybuffalo you would have free will until the moment you choose not to. How can your free will that you had in the previous moment disappear? This is a strong statement and was primeraly said by hitchens, it was said by hume.
7:36.... Now I'm curious how this relates to relationships. My 31yr old ex fiancé left for a 17yr old, leaving me homeless and having to take him to court to get my car back, and still he defended himself with, he's just trying to be happy. I just wanted my car to sleep in and get over what happened. After 7 years with him, I knew he'd grown and changed over time, but couldn't see how he'd done it. I somewhat understand now how his insecurities about his age and sense of impending death had effected his wants over time. I couldn't change what he wanted and I have to accept that if I want to move forward. Sorry, this may be unrelated but I'm glad this video got me thinking.
This is a very rational and mature reaction, one that you no doubt did not feel at first, as we are dominated by our emotions, but understanding that we lack free will really ought to increase our empathy for others, even others who seem to have done us wrong. As you say, there are so many reasons behind what happened between you two, and it is impossible to work them all out, and even if you did it would not do anything to change it. He just did the sort of things that the type of person he is was going to do. You too. Men are cursed in some sense by our sexual attractions to younger women. We are biologically programmed (most of us, anyway, there are lots of exceptions) to want to spread our self as far as possible, and to go after what our programming tells us are the most healthy specimens. It's very cold and clinical, but it really does explian a lot of male behaviour. The veneer of civilisation and marriage and monogamy and all that cannot tamp this drive down. The sexual drive is the most powerful in animals. My own story is somewhat similar, me being the bad guy. I never did it because I wanted to hurt anyone, in fact quite the opposite. Knowing I had hurt the mother of my daughter was very painful, but I was not in love with her any longer, and was in love with someone else (who ended up leaving me for someone younger, how's that for poetic justice!). Here I am, all philosophically minded and I still am reeling from this loss almost 4 years later. Knowing that we don't have free will does help with our empathy, but we still are deeply governed by irrational emotions.
But we must reduce things, for this it what science is supposed to do. We must be honest of what the science shows, otherwise we are constructing falsehoods to avoid the obvious uncomfortable facts. You are suggesting constructing some kind of religion, of made up ideas, over science to make things fit an old, religious world of "morals" and "ethics"
Morals and ethics have no scientific evidence proving they exist; they are as made up as religion, just stories to exert power and constrain freedom...
Even if you can’t control what you want, the precise outcome of your actions in doing what you want are not known to you. Also, a chain of wants that leads to the final want gives the feeling of free will, as you have no memory on a conscious level of every experience that led you to that point. It’s more of a feeling.
But why do you want your outcome to be doing what you want? If your outcome makes someone happy, then that is what you wanted. Whether you successfully made them happy or not doesn't matter, what matters is, that is what you wanted to achieve. So the outcome doesn't really matter. What matters is what made you chose the option that you did. Your want for something made you choose that option. Even if you don't remember all experiences, it doesn't mean they don't influence your decisions. You don't have to remember precisely the time when you were 3 years old and you put your hand on hot plate and burn it to know that this will happen if you do it now. You experienced it and your brain remembers it, it remembers what it needs to remember for you to not make such a mistake again.
This makes no sense at all. What are you trying to argue? The more confident you are that you have free does absolutely nothing. You concede you can't control your wants, and the only driving force behind your actions are your wants. Self delusion does not grant you free will all of a sudden
@@The_Jumpman I think they are answering the question why do we feel we have free will, they are not arguing/disagreeing with anything they are adding to what Alex is discussing.
Crown Kira - and what makes you think that I am not someone who thinks and ponders a lot? I have been doing there for over 60 years - thank you for your advice!
I've been thinking about the illusion of free will every day for the last 2 years or so to the point were I couldn't even listen in class and had an existential crisis. Thinking about prisons, and the validity of the judiciary and stuff like that. And in all that time, I've never thought about the question of wanting and not wanting like you did in this video. Thank you for this, it's very helpful.
Prisons are not entirely unjustified tho. They influence your wants in a direction compatible with society ie. you have an incentive not to want to hurt people.
You still have to lock dangerous people away (so they stop hurting others), but the judicary system would still change into something that focuses more on rehabilitation rather than punishment if the vast majority actually understood that free will is an illusion. Punishment doesn't do very much when people are aware they're not ultimately responsible for their actions. Of course people still wouldn't want to go to prison, but the effect would still differ.
The way I’ve thought about it is how the universe seems to be wholly mathematical. Our brains are calculators with bodies to execute commands. We intake inputs and output responses based solely on those inputs. So if you made a choice, and were sent back in time to where you were, with no changes and no awareness of the future in which you made the choice to come back, you would again make that choice everytime without fail. This applies to everyone and everything, everywhere. Because this applies to everything always, every decision that has ever or will ever be made is already decided based on the formula. Of course there’s no way to see this, and it’s purely philosophical and unprovable, yet to me completely understandable.
Yes this cosmic person unwittingly is deterministic in the way reformed theology teaches. I wonder if he is familiar with infralapsarianism, sublapsarianism, and supralapsarianism. I don't think so however. He reads Richard Dawkins books.
Calvanists might be right about free will, but they are pretty wrong about everything else... especially what it implies. Free will (or not) isn't a problem unless you posit the existence of a being which can actually predict everything. For us mortals, free will is just a very practical illusion. There's no more use worrying/arguing about free will than there is in trying to prove the statement "This is not a sentence." is true or false.
Calvinism doesn't teach free will doesn't exist. Hypercalvinism does. Mainly, the Calvinist would say free will is overpowered for soteriological purposes.
Oh I know I do...his definitions are terrible and I don't agree with them XD It's the cult problem all over again where depending on your definition the impact of it loses all meaning.
We are not able to 'control our wants' (choose what we want) at any given moment in time, but realising that we (don't) want one thing (and not another) is an essential first step in evaluating and eventually re-programming (neuroplasticity) those 'wants' (or reactions of rejection, for that matter). Humans are basically empirically-learning (through imitation, initially) automates (relying largely on our (program routine) subconscious) with the added ability of (re-)programming themselves (critical thought)... but granted that much of the human population does not use this function, and are indeed 'stuck in their ways'. This is not an argument 'for' free will, by the way: critical thought (self-analysis and re-programming) just makes our role in the universe's 'action-reaction' chain of events more complex, that's all... because even our re-programming abilities, choices, etc. are determined by past experiences, tastes, etc.. Sorry for all the brackets: trying to say a lot in a few words, here.
@J.M. Schomburg - I really appreciate your comments and ideas (how could I not?) as it was something I was wanting to explore further and I think you're on to something. It would still deterministic that someone (person A), being able to evaluate and reprogram their wants, does while person B (someone without the function of reprogramming for any myriad of reasons), does not (and hence are stuck in their ways). Correct? Again, thanks for the thoughts!
Thank you for posting this. I've thought about this for as long as I can remember but since almost everyone in my life is religious or at least spiritual, the idea of not having free will is terrifying to them. I don't understand how to believe in free will. I see it this way, every choice or mistake you make is based on your past experiences and your environment (edit: and your innate instinct). You aren't able to think outside the box, well you can, but only to the extent of what you have subconsciously or consciously observed in your life. There is only one path in your life that you will take, not many different roads ahead of you. Because everything you will decide today has already been decided by what you have learnt. Woah this is heavy stuff to think about.
Cognitive dissonance can be hard to get through. Skeptics are really just intellectual masochists. We've grown fond of hurting ourselves in the pursuit of truth. But it's not like you can help it. Once your brain has stopped resisting by forwarding confirmation bias, you'll most likely keep coming back until it has found a satisfactory solution.
There's a "mathematical" argument that is much more difficult to refute. It goes like this: 1. The behavior of all systems is either deterministic or random. 2. A person is a system. 3. Therefore, a person's behavior is either deterministic or random. 4. Deterministic behavior means we don't have free will because our actions are determined even before we were born. 5. Random behavior doesn't allow for free will because random behavior is, well... random. Nothing influences it. 6. Therefore, free will must be an illusion.
The dichotomy of "deterministic or random" excludes the possibility of conscious free choice having any place in the universe, meaning it's arguably a false dichotomy.
All of you are forgetting the fact that "random" does not have to mean equal probabilities for all outcomes like flip of a coin, outcome can have 80:20 difference and still be random, or even 99.9999999 vs 0. however much
@@BennyOcean nobody can ever explain what this spooky third option means. Invoking the phrase “free will” like a magic spell does nothing. Everything is either determined or undetermined, law of the excluded middle. Undetermined IS random. Nothing determined it, whether it’s a will or a soul or a body.
This is something I've been thinking about given some of my psychonautical experiences with dissociatives and psychedelics. When under the effects of LSD and nitrous oxide I've repeatedly had the strong sense that I wasn't in control of my actions. It literally felt like my body was just moving without me willing it to. At first I was terrified and convinced myself that I was being mind controlled by aliens or something (give me a break, I was tripping), but as I experienced in multiple times after that I sort of came to expect it. Those experiences have brought me to hypthesize that free will is an illusion, and when under the effects of certain mind-altering hallucinogens it breaks that illusion as your consciousness dissociates from your mind. That's essentially what I was experiencing.
Or the mind-alrering substances literally temporarily altered the way your mind was working, and now you're just trying to rationalize the experience that is literally impossible to rationalize because your reality simulation organ wasn't working properly for that short time. Meaning maybe there was no grand revelation or purpose behind your experience. Maybe it was just you having an incoherent nonsensical experience because your brain was temporarily out of whack.
@@liarwithagun the op said that perhaps hallucinogenics disassociate your consciousness from your body, which basically is exactly what your saying. So what is your argument.
I think "forced to" and "want to" are the same thing in this context. Being forced to do something is still a WANT. You WANT to continue living (if you're forced at a gun point for example). Or if your parents give you and ultimatum to do something or they'll kick you out of the house, you're just WANTING to preserve your well being by doing that thing seemingly forcefully. If you WANT to NOT do the thing you're being forced to more than the consequences (known to you) that will follow, then you'll just not do it and vice versa.
Oh... now I get what you mean by forced, literally and physically. But then if you're pushed off the stage you're just a physical object being influenced by another one(another person) no thought involved. This video is perfect.
You made a great video here explaining how people cannot control their 'wants'. I wrote an essay on the Free Will v Determinism debate when I was an undergrad. I came to a conclusion which you may find interesting. You see I wasn't happy for the religious lobby to go off and still claim just for themselves the slogan of "Freedom". Leave aside that my experience of organised religion didn't give me the impression that religious people were keen on me being free, but freedom is such an attractive concept to 99% of people. We all want to be free to walk down the street, free to choose the videos we watch etc. The conclusion I came to was that the juxtaposition between freedom and determinism is completely false. The answer to whether I have free will when I choose vanilla over chocolate is, yes. And the answer to whether my choice was determined is also, yes. Like you may say, at the moment it seems I prefer or WANT vanilla over chocolate. The point is that the 'determinant' factors are within me. They are part of what makes me at the current moment. You could say that I determined my choice of vanilla. To express this in the general case, the causal links in any chain of events that result in someone taking an action are/are within/are part of that person. So to suggest that the scientifically identifiable causes for someone's choices means those people lack free will is completely wrong. As you say, we really experience feelings of freedom when we are not constrained by external factors. There is simply no greater freedom available ... least of all from religious 'authorities' who try to dictate on our thoughts and actions. Keep up the great work 👍💪
About 30 years ago, I had a chat with my friend, where he claimed that everybody were being selfish all the time. Every action everyone did, was a selfish action. I countered by saying you could be forced or threatened to do it. He said if you were forced or threatened to do it, you still made the choice of doing it, rather than facing the consequences of not doing it. Now, Matt used the example of someone jumping off the stage, or being pushed off the stage. I would say that if you are pushed off the stage, you're not performing an action. So you can't say that you're forced to do it. But when talking about someone who either jumps off the stage by their own "free will", or are threatened with physical violence and jumps off the stage because of the threat, then they are still choosing to jump off the stage. So if you use Matt's example of force, then it's not an action they are doing, and so it doesn't count. And if you are using my example, then they choose to do it, rather than facing the consequences of not doing it. So when you say that there are only two reasons why you can ever do something, either because you want to, or because you're forced to, then I would say that's wrong. There is only ONE reason why you ever do anything. And that's because you want to. True, some times you don't want to want to do it, but with the limited options you have available, you will want the option that seems best to you at the time, and so you will choose that one.
Sir, I totally agreed with you. That explain why a lot of smart and successful people out there will tell you try not to blame others on anything. You can't always choose what's gonna happen, but you can always choose how to react.
@@SP-ig3vs I have'nt heard of everyone is you "pushed out",before.Do you have a source.?.It is my understanding ,what is perceived as the external world is in fact ones internal world.In that respect everyone is you and the you I am referring to is the consciousness that prevades all things. The witness is the witnessed,witnessing itself in relationship,through apparent movement .Everything is appearing "happening "over which no one has control over anything.In ultimate reality nothing is actually happening though thought creates the illusion there is movement.
You simply repeated what he said. The argument about force was canceled in his argument and yours as well. Whether you think it's not a choice or not an action, it's still null. So we go to the other argument, again, about wants. Why do we want to want to do something. It's out of your control. You haven't tackeled the main argument/argued free will.
Brilliant video. Got me scared as shit when you said "You can do what you want, but not control what you want" bec that rings true (we do say "ugly truth" or "sad but true"). I always tell people "Our preferences will be as they are, they don't have make sense to other people just make sense to us. But even if they don't make sense to us they will still be our choice, our bias, our inexplicable preference." Thanks for the video.
Not only can I stop wanting something (by always pushing away the thoughts about it and by thinking of something better instead), I can also choose to not act upon my wants. Both are acts of free will.
@Rexlion You not acting on your wants is a thing you are doing not out of your own free will. You are only not doing what you want, because you want to
Apparently TH-cam doesn't always notify subscribers when people upload anymore. Please click the little bell to make sure you see when I do, or follow me on social media (@cosmicskeptic). Let me know what you think of all this.
CosmicSkeptic Love you 😘
I see CosmicSkeptic, I click. Freewill, notwithstanding.
Ok I mentioned this before in my other response, but I'll lay down another video to explain in full how free will is discussed and how it is necessary for you to have free will to do things like knowing truth, or knowing if what you say is true.
I actually foudn it a bit cheeky you glossed over the problem that it introduces of not have interllectual liberty my dude, nice try but I know very well the issue you have there.
Anyway I expect ya to address my points when I make the video. Overall, your points were good but the logic did not follow to it's conclusion, and there's a underlying self defeating idea in your entire argument.
I got notified without the bell. I will click it anyway.
The problem with your idea of free will is that you're starting with the ending. Deliberation exists before the desire that leads to the action. The longer the time In deliberation, the less certain the outcome. In addition, you haven't discussed the absence of desire as an alternative.
Imagine those books are actually on the floor, and they're just really, really big.
That’s so weird
Husky McFluff
I can’t unsee that now
I can't unsee it
Up
Knowing him...Those books probably are that big lol
I was in a Subway's once and the girl asked my friend 'Do you want extra cheese?' to which he replied, 'I don't know' and for a brief moment the entire structure of the universe just stopped.
Kind of like how it takes time to process anything, even hand movement, the brain probably got a slow / unreachable receptor or something. Or maybe the brain decided "let them choose for me, as I trust their decision to be the best" + had an added fear of being wrong.
@@scottmcadam4509 I will make them our angels again.
Let's find out if I'm telling the truth. Won't we?
Take crack cocaine and meth much ? What has your comment got to do with anything ?
scott mcadam you can't just assume all women are shit at making decisions... What does your comment have to do with anything... They were talking about their friend at Subway. The friend was a HE.
Darwin replace Subway with "Dealers house " and Cheese with "Crack cocaine" then story makes perfect sense .
“Want” doesn’t seem like a real word anymore.
edit: guys i was making a joke about how many times Alex said “want”. Not trying to have a deep philosophical conversation about it.
Well maybe you should want for it to seem like a real word.
That would probably be due to semantic satiation.
Want seems like a desire. You still have desires without free will 🤷🏻♀️
@@rbst-dg8ji
Yes, but you can resist the desire therefore establishing a freedom of will over it.
@@JohnDoe-bt4ps why would you 'want' to resist desires?
I think it's even more simple, yet deeper than that. Any action is preceded by a thought. If you want to choose between vanilla and chocolate, you think the decision before you physically make it. So, free will would then require that you choose your thoughts, which is paradoxical. How can you choose to think something, without already thinking about it?
This comment makes me suddenly very distrustful of the voice in my head. Where does it really come from if I can’t control it? Is it really me?
@@moss_yass My hypothesis is that that voice is indeed not "you". I'd say that "you" are merely the passive experience of having those thoughts. I think the thought "where does that voice in my head come from" is proof of that. Clearly, you see the voice already as something that you "have", instead of something that you "are". So, what are you?
I feel bad that my comment made you feel distrustful though. I sincerely hope that you can approach the dilemma with positive curiosity, instead of with distrust. In everyday life, that voice feels like it's "you", and that works totally fine.
I think before thinking that you want vanilla rather than chocolate you think and evaluate you options, and during this process you make your choice wich then becomes your desire, no?
@@mallvalim That process of evaluation is done with a heirarchy of relative 'wants' though.
A fly flew into my eye and I blinked without thinking. I always prefer chocolate to vanilla so when offered a choice I automatically choose chocolate without thinking about it. When faced with a variety of foods I consider what I prefer and choose accordingly. What I like caused my preference but did not determine me to make that choice--next time I might choose vanilla, say, to win a bet or out of boredom. Every effect has a case, but doesn't necessarily destine us.
"Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills."
Schopenhauer
It makes sense now
Thank you for sharing that phrasing, Cap'n. Seems rather more clear to me now.
I reckon compatibilists believe in free will simply because "Man can do what he wills'" regardless of the fact that "he cannot will what he wills."
>imagine believing freewill is an illusion based on retarded antiquated physics and darwinian evolution which has basically been mathematically disproven.
In a nutshell: “A man can do what he wants, but he cannot want what he wants.” Schopenhauer
Thanks for saving me time.
Is this using want like choose?
? A higher conciousness wants nothing though.. You are not your thoughts.. Why is it that no one is talking about levels of consciousness? This comment does not apply to all of the population.
devzkii I would not say that it is using want like choose. We want what we want. I want chocolate rather than vanilla. But did I choose to want vanilla? No. I just want vanilla, i can’t help wanting what I want. It just arises as such. And I can then have the vanilla, as I want. But I didn’t actually choose to want it.
surrender & survive I can relate to not wanting anything, what you call higher consciousness. There are moments of such utter peace and fulfillment that there is no wanting. If you’re sitting in bliss and don’t eventually want to eat you’ll die, however. We and the other animals have want built into our DNA. if we didn’t it would be the end of life. It seems evolutionary drive in life to want: to find warmth when you’re freezing, shade when you’re hot, food when hungry, and then there are those damn hormones that make us want to mate. All of it designed to sustain and perpetuate life.
My OCD already taught me long ago that I don't have free will
What do you mean by this, if you don't mind me asking? (No, I am not asking you to clarify OCD, I'm asking you to elaborate on what you mean by it making you realize you don't have free will.)
@@shinmoda I’m pretty sure they meant it as a joke, but Obsessive Compulsive disorder is based on the experience of compulsions, basically like your brain acting like an annoying younger siblings like “do it. You have to” to the extreme
@@p11_studios Again, I wasn't asking then to tell me what OCD was, I was asking them to clarify how they mean it taught them they didn't have free will, but I guess based on the compulsions it's like your own brain forcing you rather than others. I found, though, that as time gets going and it's been longer since my original diagnosis, I tend to fend off the sudden episodes with rational thought; but originally, I always felt like if I didn't do when I felt I needed to do them, then something will happen (negative). Or the flip side, sometimes I felt that if I do something then something will happen (positive). I still respond to these thoughts due to it making me feel satisfied but it's not as bad as it once was. It got tough when, being someone interested in spirituality, this realm of thought crossed into that realm. That's when stuff got tough.
Thank you! :)
true but you can also get help for it.
I have this voice I my head that sometimes tells me to do things that I may not want to and if I do not bad things happen is this normal?
I would actually say that the reasons we do anything is actually singular - it is because we want to. Even if we are forced to do something at gunpoint, we still do it because we want something - that something is to survive and continue living.
I wouldn’t agree with that premise. Imagine you were very sick or broke your legs or had a mental illness and you were bound to your bed temporarily. You would want to get up and be productive more than you wanted to be in bed but you physically couldn’t get out of bed no matter how bad you wanted to because you are forced to be there.
@@corndude4172 You want to stay in bed because you didn't want to mess up your injury or make yourself feel worse.
no, youre physically restrained meaning that youre being forced to not get up
why don't you teleport to the other side of the world? you might want to, but you physically can't.
That's what I thought
I've never been so confused by understanding something in my entire life
Cus we don’t want to understand ☠️😂I’m just as confused 😮💨 but I want to understand
He's a perfect definition of a narcissist. When he said "we've already concluded.." blah blah blah, no, "we" haven't concluded anything. We are in control of our lives, period.
@@tyemaddog Do you know what the word narcissist means?
@@tyemaddog but we actually are not because what ever is going to happen or what ever ever happened...happened and there's no changing that ever....everything is technically predestined wether you believe it or not.
@@tyemaddog Point me to a single logical mistake in this video, please. Because as it stands, it just seems like you are stubbornly refusing to listen to what was said, not because you actually have any argument to make against the stance (which is, just by the way, utterly impossible, as the logic is completely obviously clear and sound).
It appears many individuals are misunderstanding the message. Changing your mind on something isn't changing what you want, but simply following a greater want that moves in a different direction. We are endlessly following wants and what we want changes based on the environment and past experiences.
Precisely
following a ''greater want that moves in a different direction'' is changing what you want ;-;
+Mr. King Kong I can't believe all these months later you're still this stupid.
But i'm changing what ME AS A PERSON want, choosing between your "greater want" and a "smaller want"..
*note*
I thoroughly believe I can make myself want something I despice, given enough time and thought..
In other words, choosing to want what i hate
ugseth2 but isn't changing that want, even if it's to something you hate, is satisfying your want to change ? no matter what you do, you want to do it, it's all a choice of wants evolves through time based on your experiences. :)
Ironically, when I think about how I really have no free will, it makes me feel free.
It explains all my failures in life
@@Siegfried5846 Yea, because then you wouldn’t be accountable for anything you’ve done right or wrong, though that isn’t how societies live. They live as if we are all accountable for our actions and that’s why there are ethics. And why do we tell people you shouldn’t have done that or that wasn’t right when the person had no free will to do so? And why do we correct someone by saying, “No, this is how you do this.”
If we believe there is no free will and want to be consistent, we cannot complain when someone violates our human rights.
@@trustthetruth2779no.
@@satellitecannon9463 I most certainly can be consistent because right and wrong are objective according to God’s character and not my opinion or yours or anyone else’s. I just follow what He says whether I agree or not. He made the universe, so I’m not going to tell Him I know better
@@trustthetruth2779 that isn't how it works.
You were predetermined to see this video and make the comment you made, because of all the things that happened to you before, and all that you ate and consumed, all that you were taught.
You couldn't help but make the choices you've made, but you still feel the suprise when someone appreciates your work, or you still feel the pain of bad choices.
You are the agent of change, but you had no other choice in the end as you look back on things that have happened.
Theists have this loophole that they pull out when the pain of bad decisions starts to haunt them, and they often just claim it was God's plan or God's Will, so you can forgive yourself and move on.
We live in a deterministic universe with an endless chain of causality, and there is a liberating freedom from excessive guilt, to some extent, but if someone murders another person in cold blood and they feel nothing, that isn't a normal person, and they go to prison no matter how they became broken.
We are still held accountable for actions, but even you have to admit you have an out, in regards to these problems of choice.
All normal people react to good and bad things and they make changes to remedy the situation, but sometimes it takes time and more input from the chain of causality, like friends telling someone they messed up.
I simply don't believe in a God that is supernatural and outside of the Universe, making things happen and intervening when he wants and letting you have your will, and then a little bit of his will, and then a bit more of your will, and a whopping amount of his will.
An omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent God can't give you Freewill and also be all of those things.
I love how you speak Alex, yours so calm and easy to follow ❤
Take a shot every time he says “want”
Anika Martinez I'd get alchohol poisoning. And i dont want that.
Im dead now thanks
Fuck
I have crippling depression and have killed myself after that challenge I am now a dead rabbit who cant do nothing but think and I have wifi somehow I think this is hell
Gabriel Marbordo Kosta well then
I just finished watching hentai. This video told me I didn't watch it with free will.
I will now go back to watching hentai so that I can test this hypothesis.
For science.
And the people that illustrated that hentai did not do it of free will, either.
And you can...Out of NOT free will..share links so we can validate your research
I second this
This person deserves to go in the history books for this comment.
lloydagola I won't give you the link, but I can tell you I was watching Koi Maguwai.
"Of course we have free will, we have no other choice but to have it" C. Hitchens
Brilliant ~Lord Hitchens
Of course the exact opposite could be said, “Of course we don’t have free will. We have no choice but not to have it”
Jo-Ash Scott Official I had will. I’m not convinced it was “free”
@Jo-Ash Scott Official You have will- your free will was based on the question regarding free will, which was freely chose to respond- if he didn't respond, you could just as well have asked, did you have free will to not write that comment.
James Walker I think you are missing the irony and true point of the quote. By saying we have free will and we have no choice but to have it is purposely contradictory.
From a psychoanalytic point of view you are not free about your decisions, desires, etc., but that doesn't mean psychoanalysis didn't believe in freedom. From a Hegel, Marx and Freud point of view the more you are aware of the forces (external and internal) you are attached to the more free you become.
This is pretty close to how I felt leaving Christianity.
My family kept talking about my "choice" to stop believing in their God, but I never made any choice regarding that. It simply didn't make sense to me so I didn't believe it. The only "choice" I made was to stop suppressing my own doubtful thoughts which really were becoming extremely overwhelming and upsetting to keep down.
Same here. Very similar and I got to the point where my whole “faith” felt fake.
I feel the same, but the opposite way. I believe in god. I don’t know why, I can’t explain it. I just do. Was never bought up religiously or anything either.
You can't choose to believe something you don't actually believe.
@@celtictarotreadings333 You're the kind of religious person I like. I personally find myself wanting there to be a god who suits my preference for what I want god to be but I don't want to believe something without knowing it to be true. Since evidence is a matter of demonstrating something through immutable natural laws which produce the same result of the same causes under the same circumstances every time those causes are applied under the same circumstances and since the supernatural as a concept does not rely on immutable natural laws, I can only hope and can't believe since my belief of anything depends on knowing. Thus, I can't help not believing in a god and can't help hoping for a god I would like. I suppose a god could exist who I wouldn't like but I can't hope for that and I can't believe it either. This is why I can't hope for or believe in a god who would punish anyone for not believing in a god as believed by the kind of religious person I don't like... well, that might not be the best way to put it, I should call them the kind of religious person who's beliefs I don't like since their beliefs themselves cause them fear which forces them to believe the beliefs which cause the fear. Anyway, I'm always happy to come across someone like you who just believes in a god because they want to believe.
Ditto.
When free will is defined as "ability to have acted differently", then this is true. The reason most of us feel we have free will is because we subconsciously define free will as "ability to do what you want/desire". Most people are not that concerned that they don't have the ability to choose what they want, or your wants are beyond your control. As long as we can act on those wants we feel that we have free will.
Then I would say that the term is wrong and it's implications still equivocated. If your will is determined by your "wants" which you aren't in control of, then it's not free, why bother with reusing the term to say something completely different? Specially if we don't redefine it's implications, like moral responsability. If we aren't in control of the desires that motivate our actions, how can we hold people accountable? It would radically change the framework in which we base or social systems, which people seem not so eager to do, which I think is what makes them clinge so hard to using the same term.
What you're describing sounds like "will", not "free will".
what gives us a taste in music, did the universe choose my favorite color, if the universe can choose my favorite color than god can create a soul and if god can't create a soul than the universe can not choose my favorite color and im liberty to do as i wish to do constant battle with the universe
This sounds to be very true so although we don't have complete free will the will is still in our character/traits to (choose the things we want)
So i think in a given moment we definitely have will/free will (based on our character traits) I mean I didn't have to comment here though i did so based on an inner impulse to do so
Ohh yeah when I say choose the things we want I didn't mean we choose our wants but I meant we have the choice or decision to act on it
@@sensibleone3268 Before you had the impulse to write a comment,that was already set in motion.Then you had the thought I will write a comment.In reality the comment had to happen,you just claim authorship for doing so.There simply is no doer.
lol this is something i struggled with when i was 15 and i didn’t get why no one else cared about this!! the lack of choice to want something is so important and figuring this out has made me a much less judgemental and empathetic person tbh
That’s really interesting to know. Cause it has happened to me also. I’d say that the exact same effect it was caused on you was really caused on me as well. It has made me reflect a lot more than usual about life in general after I started gravitating towards this possibility.
@@jes8253 yeah i'd say i used to feel scared about it but now i think it's quite a freeing mindset. i study sociology now which has helped me explore how unhelpful this belief in free will really is to almost everyone - means we think we can judge other people even when we can't relate to their situation at all because we think 'well I would never do that' without having any context. empathy is a great skill and i think we need to remember what it actually means to put yourself in someone else's shoes - it doesn't mean put yourself in their particular situation, it means put yourself in their particular situation within the whole context of their life. rugged individualism has meant we think that's not important somehow and i think without a radical shift in perspective in the very near future the world is going to be totally irreperably fucked soon
@@Jemmainadilemma I couldn’t agree more with your words. It’s really fulfilling to get to know there’s still people in the world that has this sort of insight to reflect upon it the way you do. It’s quite funny cause I couldn’t ever imagine I would definitely bump into someone right here on TH-cam who shares the same concept as I do and also as accurate as my concept is about this idea. It’s really gratifying! I do think the same, moreover, I still sense that the world unfortunately is more likely to be fucked up as soon as we can’t expect because of individualism.
@@Jemmainadilemma What isn't it a free choice that "I want to prove a point by regaining my free will"? Didn't I freely choose to want one over the other?
@@CuriosityGuy well you want to do something to prove a point, but you don't choose to want that, you just want that. The source of the want is the point here - you can't choose to want something. you could explore why you want that but i don't think that would affect what you want
Well.. that’s genius. You definitely convinced me. I always asked people what the definition of “free will” ment to them. Now after watching this video and actually understand what you mean, i have a whole different perspective on it. Thankyou so much for this beautiful video ❤
Whats ur instagram
I feel like the dangerous implication here is that, if there is no free will, criminals are innately evil, because they could have never chosen the right thing. Logically that creates a category of good people who are righteous and self-improving and evil people that are beyond help.
@@skeleton1765but that also brings into question whether or not we should hold criminals morally responsible to begin with. If they had no ability to do otherwise, why should we punish them for something out of their control? Of course the obvious question is what would we do instead and to be frank, I have no idea. It’s something I’ve been trying to grapple with
@@MoonlightMaggie Exactly, I do good because I want to do good, than I am part of the righteous class.
If I can’t help but be evil, or don’t want to do good, or prefer to do the evil thing than they are part of the deplorables. This is almost leading to a justification for genocide.
If it looks like free will, feels like free will, society and morals collapse without the assumption of free will, than why would it not be free will? How many senses/mechanisms have to positively support free will before we assume it’s true. Is it like a Schrödinger’s mechanic where we can observe what choice a person makes but only if we look at the decision matrix in their brain at a certain instance, or even after the decision has been made. Even if all the ‘decisions’ you made leading up to that one MAKE you ‘choose’ a certain outcome, does that disprove free will?
This seems like another instance of an atheist (I’m probably part of that category/agnostic) being infinitely and annoyingly reductive. If got so annoyed with myself doing this I had to stop. Clearly I have a low tolerance for this thing and was always destined to choose that choice as well. 🙄
@@MoonlightMaggie Yes but ask yourself, why does your reasoning stop there anyway? It's wrong to stop there and call it a day.
"Holding them accountable" or not doing so would be a "choice" i.e something you'd want (to want to..(etc recursively)) to do in itself, which in itself is already uninfluenceable, that line of reasoning goes on infinitely. It's not about "what would we do instead", it's that anything else we do instead, then that too, wasn't chosen or free will.
It's not about thinking of things in that macro/limited scale of people/society/the justice system etc, we're discussing the general concept of "free will" at its bare-bones, philosophical/logical root.
What I mean is, in your example about crime etc, it's not about just holding anyone accountable in that sense, it's about that if you do hold them accountable, then you were already always going to, same of the opposite. It's not "should" we or "can" we hold them accountable, because there is no choice there either, "choosing" to hold them accountable or not was inevitable.
Same with: If you jumped then you were already always going to jump, whether you "chose" to or not, if you were born then you were already always going to be born, etc etc etc, get what I mean? It doesn't even apply just to our experience of free will, but to causality itself.
The takeaway is pretty much that everything that happened so far was inevitable (and I don't mean in the woo-woo way "everything happens for a reason" because "God chose it"), and that "consequences"/the future/causality is as inevitable as the flow of time itself, you are stuck in your unique experience or "illusion" of the present, some will find great solace in that, some will find terrible distress. 😛 (Both are also inevitable, like everything else - and the illusion of a consequence/event being avoided arises from the fact that its avoidance was also inevitable, etc.)
So within the confines of this illusion you can "choose" to recognize that since this truth is inevitable, then there is no point worrying or thinking about it too much, because it doesn't change anything for you or your experience, whether it was "predetermined" or not.
It's just that if you do worry/not believe it,/do anything at all, then that too, was inevitable in its very nature 😅.. but just "choose" not to care, and for all practical purposes, live life the way you would have either way, even while knowing you didn't really choose. I know it feels like a paradox but they aren't mutually exclusive, because one of them is an illusion that arises from the other. The illusion of free will/choice arises from the fact itself there is no free will/choice, which personally doesn't bother me, it's just a logical fact, and a conclusion that you come to when you really think about it enough. I find this beautiful and awe-inspiring on its own.
So yes, continue to hold criminals accountable etc. not because they are "innately evil" (which is a conclusion you arrived to because you decided to stop there) etc.,
but because you don't justify "choosing" do something BECAUSE there is free will or not, it's just that it HAPPENS / HAPPENED / WILL HAPPEN *because* there is no free will, that doesn't mean you shouldn't still continue "choosing" just because it's an illusion when you look deep enough... for us it might as well not be an illusion because it's all we will ever experience, there is no need to "adjust" just because you learned this (it's just that if you did adjust, you didn't truly choose that either lol), it is logically and by nature impossible to truly choose, as it breaks all logic and the concept of time and causality itself.
It doesn't mean there is no beauty in that. To me there IS beauty in that this illusion of choice itself can be born from the fact that there is no choice, almost as an extension of it, and within it we can experience everything as if we all truly chose it, almost going full circle. There is no need to think of it as fake when it is a direct consequence of that initial truth.
“I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.”
~Stephen Hawking
Wait, does that mean they don’t actually believe it is pre-Destin?
@@choco1199 they are contradicting themselfes. if they look before they cross the road they have basically reduced their chances of getting hit by a car to 0% meaning they chose their own destiny
@@robertjusic9097 or it's just survival instict doing it's work. It's just like animals that try to avoid pain/danger. It has nothing to do with choice.
Peter Griffin I’m not being facetious I promise, I’m just curious about the topic. But what about a suicidal person who has those same instincts to avoid pain but walk out in front of a truck. It was there choice no?
@@carsonmcmanus9410 No. This completely ignores the fact that their "want" to walk in front of the truck overrides their "want" to do otherwise. Do you think a suicidal person would choose to want to be suicidal? This is actually a compelling case AGAINST free will.
I think you can actually combine "want to or have to" even further into just "want to"
Even if you have a gun to your head or you have a boss threatening to fire you, the pressure only works if you want to be alive or have whatever luxuries the job affords you more than you want to do whatever they're demanding.
Put someone suicidal or someone who has been on the fence about taking a vow of poverty into those situations and it's pretty obvious how those change the scales.
In effect "being forced to" is just adding one weight to one end of your scales deciding what to do, often an inordinately heavy one, but isn't necessarily a sole determinant.
This is fully correct, as far as I can tell
But In a physical matter, no.
@@actualwafflesenjoyer in judicial situations the distinction is never that clear-cut. E.g. self-defense and 'acting under duress' have to be proportionate in order to be legitimate. E.g. agreeing to kill a third party because someone threatens with releasing your naked baby pics hardly seems proportionate. It's up to a judge/jury to decide. But as long as questions of moral responsibility (which only exist on a societal-artificial level) are out of the way, both 'have to' and 'want to' seem to describe deliberate action under desires and constraints
I think "being forced to" would be more akin to someone physically forcing you, e.g. being pushed off a stage.
@@ashleystrout6651 I agree with Ashley, and I think the distinction is important for this reason. You did not "want to" be pushed off the stage (presumably), but you were. You did not "want to" shoot the man while you were sleeping, but someone moved your finger to the trigger of a gun they put in your hand.
I had to write an essay in high school about free will in the form of destiny. And my answer was basically "we can act like we have free will because we can't know the future so it doesn't matter."
Here's a brain twist. The decision after learning about free will not existing, and then deciding to make an expository video about it, is actually in itself an act of free will.
@@davidt8087 no because he wanted to. He doesn’t control his wants.
@@celtictarotreadings333you are your want so you always do what you want if we remove aĺl the wants are you still here?
It does tho, had you made the choices to set yourself up for success later. That’s free will
@@celtictarotreadings333 that’s free will lol. Because he wanted to, he could have chose not to even if wanting to
"you either want to, or your forced to"...but I could say "you either choose to, or you are forced to." Alex conflates want with choice. if we define EVERYTHING according to desire and impulse, including Magnus Carlsen playing a game of chess including calculating his first instinctive move before choosing to making it, including someone who desires to not act according to desire, we have effectively stripped deliberating, calculation, and reason of their meaning by tying them to impulse and desire. Alex's argument is basically "Why free desire doesn't exist." It's a weak argument with low explanatory power because impulse and desire have actual opposites. . Further, this leaves out the concept of doing something begrudgingly. third, it defines freewill as taking action, which is incomplete, freewill is simply defined as "undetermined thoughts." Freewill incorporates THINKING not just bodily actions. The body just obeys the mind. A person in conscious sleep paralysis has freewill even though they cannot actually do anything.
This reminds me of Eastern religious philosophy, specifically the concept of being enslaved by one's desires(wants) and the idea that true freedom comes from not having desires(wants). The Mahabharata depicts many ascetics living lifestyles free from desire. The desire to not desire is a desire itself. It is extremely difficult to achieve a desireless state of existence.
It's not difficult to achieve a desire-less state , it's called death.
@@dionysusnow based
@@dionysusnow This is likely why religions like Jainism have elaborate death rituals connected directly to shedding yourself of your connections to the material (and social) world.
Doesn't that simply mean that those ascetics are simply ruled by their desire to not want desires? Or maybe that's the ultimate state, where they've eliminated so much of their worldly desire, that the only desire left is to maintain the desire to not want any other desires.
Also Schopenhauer talks about this.
Whenever I see a video about free will, I have no choice but to watch it
Sorry you have that compulsion! 😂 When I see a video about free will, I have full range of choice. I watched about 4 minutes of this one, and then I quite watching! I'd heard enough of his nonsense! 🤣
@@rexlion4510
So your “want” wasn’t strong enough and you’ve made a choice based on you not wanting to continue - clearly proving the point of the video here! ^_^
I had no choice but to vote this comment up (and also make this reply.)
@@NousTrapper It might be the case the your reason for doing so is because determinism causes you discomfort, and so you act accordingly to minimise discomfort since we seem to be exclusively motivated to minimise suffering/maximise pleasure.
Even seeking pain is pretty much always done to minimise it or seek a future pleasure, such as in the experiment of people choose to shock themselves to relieve boredom (choosing a lesser pain to relieve a greater/worse pain)
Even seeking a meaningful life filled with meaningful experiences is only done to relieve the suffering of meaninglessness.
@@NousTrapper “Nature has placed mankind under two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure, it is for them alone to point out what we ought to do and well as determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong and on the other the chain of cause and effect are fastened to their throne. They govern us in everything we do, everything we think, everything we say. Every attempt we make to throw off our subjection will serve but to *demonstrate and confirm* it.”
- My boy Jeremy Bentham spitting straight facts
Well I'm terrified now, thank you Alex.
AlmostCanadian
It gets better with time
Lol
That fear only lasts for awhile. Once you get used to it, the bad occurances in life become quite alot easier to bear.
Why are you terrified? It is out of your control. You can either accept or reject it, but neither stance will affect the outcome in any predictable way. So why worry? if it's going to happen, it's going to happen.
This is also the same argument that renders faith pointless. Faith is belief without evidence, yet the only reason belief can be validated is if there is evidence. Thus, faith is a waste of time since without evidence, then it is equally likely that something will happen as it is that something will not happen. This is the problem of non-falsifiable claims. Either it _will_ or it will _not_. Belief nor faith can change this.
Dylan Wight Well that's completely off topic, but I agree. But just because something is true doesn't make it comforting. Just because something is out of my control doesn't stop me from finding it unsettling, no matter how much I would like to pretend it does
I thought about exercising my free will by subscribing but then I remembered I don’t want to and so I didn’t.
Perhaps you’re right.
Actually, the only reason you'll do anything is because you want to. Being forced to do something has a want of survival or the avoidance of punishment behind it, unless your hand is being moved by someone else physically.
But do you really "want" to in the sense that it's something you choose truly on your own behalf? For example, if you buy a soda or something at a store "because you want to", it could realistically be for a variety of factors. For one thing, you could be thirsty while also holding a disposition towards sweeter drinks. That would naturally cause you to gravitate towards the sugary drink. If you weren't thirsty, then it was probably a craving - something you don't necessarily choose to have that holds a significant amount of power over deciding what you buy. If you had a craving and instead got water since it was healthier, there were prior decisions already dictating that choice as well. Free will is essentially impossible to prove, in reality, since if you go back far enough and with enough detail, every single one of your actions could likely be telegraphed. Even without this consideration, the concept of free will in and of itself is so nebulous that it's genuinely hard for our brains to conceptualize. That's just my thought on it anyway
I was just thinking of this. You can’t be forced to do something unless whatever is forcing you has a consequence for you not doing it in which you do it because you want to avoid the consequence. I didn’t think of your hand being physically moved by something else though. Interesting point.
That's why I think there will be anarchy in a lawless society. Most people don't break the law simply because they don't want to be punished, not because they are well-intentioned and well-behaved citizens. Humans are not superior, civilised moral beings. We're worse than animals.
@@lepetitchat123 Would you murder someone if you couls?
@@Broctis If I could get away with it, yes. But perhaps I couldn't do it myself, I am too chicken. I will hire someone else to do it lol
It's simple really, i believe in free will because i don't have a choice.
That's a really good one! And speaks a lot of truth as well. To the best of my knowledge I could say that the belief in free will or not is predetermined. Gazzaniga I believe his name is backs this up, as well as other Neurosciency people.
Oxymoronic, though.
That's a contradiction, you are not freely believing in free will if you don't have a choice. But the thing is you do have a choice
@@benj766 Sure, you have a choice, but it's always determined in the past. A choice is never made of anything but thoughts you already had. Any thoughts you think that are brand new, any responses you can imagine, and all reactions to everything are always old once they happen like the choices they help to make. We live in time like the crest of a wave you cannot ever pin down even if you snap a picture of it because it required time to take making it a wave from the light traveling in the past to build up enough photons collapsing from the quantum light wavelength to capture in the camera. Your brainwaves must behave by quantum physics too.
@@benj766 Some will argue that stating that there is a point where it supposed to be is pointless.
*I had no choice but to like this video :)*
same
That's a very good point, despite the joke, because you didn't yourself decide what you like. Your genes and experiences did. You only decided to express that feeling of liking. And why am I writing this? The point is that we are incredibly advanced "machines", and whatever we think we decide is always within the framework of our genetic programming. Thus, free will only exists within certain limits. Another argument against free will is that people understanding the consequences make stupid or "wrong" choices that severely harm them. If they truly had complete free will, that wouldn't happen. One example is me writing this, despite being better off in health and freshness tomorrow if I were sleeping now.
Only stones and rocks and inanimate matter have no choice. You had the choice to not like this video but you have already been convinced that whatever Alex says is intelligent so let me like this video blindly without using your 10 brain cells to contemplate on what he says.
babbisp1 o h s h it
babbisp: Or, you chose to like it :) God bless you.
A really good example of what I have been feeling about free-will for a long time
After this video “want” doesn’t sound like a word anymore
sans I have the same issue with the verbs „believe“ and „hope“. Completely unnecessary in my world.🤗
Wϖt
jamais vu
Haha
My confusion is with Faith
Of course we have free will. We’ve no choice on the matter
No freewill. You don't choose your wants. It's that simple.
Alan Lloyd I was quoting hitchens. Don’t think he believed in it, but he did make a very apt way of debunking it.
I see what you unwilligly did there
William Esping: Absolutely William; we have no choice in possessing free will as a created member of the human race; the choice that we have is whether and when we will use it or not. God bless you.
Mario DiBlasio 🤣
When I hear you say something along the lines of "you are completely controlled by your wants", it doesn't make sense to me. It seems to imply that "I" am somehow a separate entity from my desires, when in fact my desires are actually a large part of what I would define as "myself". What is a person if not a set of changing desires motivated by memories? I don't feel like a slave to my desires because I literally am my desires.
Yes, agreed, scrolled down to say this. If we confine the definition of self and the definition of free will to just the conscious component, as was discussed in the video, then the video is logically correct. However, that definition is a bit narrow. It may make more sense to redefine the argument presented above as "you don't have fully conscious free will." Part of us - our desires - are subconscious and driven by various environmental, historical, and genetic factors. That does not mean that those factors exclusively define what we are - and vice-versa, we cannot separate our conscious decisions from those factors. We are the sum of our consciousness and the above-mentioned factors.
To put it another way, CS could have two competing desires - the desire for chocolate or vanilla. Which one he selects is up to his conscious mind, based on various factors, including other desires, memory, knowledge, etc. If he went back in time and told himself that chocolate ice cream is bad, he could and likely would select vanilla, based on the updated knowledge.
@@elimgarak1617 I do stuff all of the time without even thinking about it at a conscious level. I'm pretty sure everyone does.
Exactly
Without desires we will be same as a dead thing than alive
We will be fucking stones without it
I use this same argument against freewill. The only difference is i use the word impulse instead of want. There will always be an impulse to do one thing over another and those impulses simply arise.
You have made an astute observation. Perhaps freewill is our mind simply "managing impulses" to prioritize which to act on. I'd love to hear your answer if you have a few minutes, but if you choose to ignore me, that's ok too. ;-)
@@paultomori
I think there’s a deeper issue with the idea that freewill is simply about managing impulses. If our decisions are just a matter of prioritizing impulses, then we're not actually choosing freely, we're just responding to the strongest urge at a given moment. But it goes even further: the impulses themselves are beyond our control. They’re shaped by past experiences, genetics, and external influences, all of which we didn’t choose.
If our impulses arise from factors outside our control and all we're doing is selecting among them, where's the freedom in that? It seems like we're just following a predetermined path laid out by our past and biology, rather than exercising any real autonomy. If freewill is about making genuine choices, shouldn't it involve more than just reacting to whatever impulse happens to be most compelling? Your idea implies that our decisions are essentially pre-programmed, which seems to strip freewill of any meaningful substance. How can we claim to have freewill if we can't even control the impulses that supposedly drive our choices?
Sir, this is a Wendys
Nice one, this cracked me up a little. Here, have a cookie 🍪
😂
Indeed, I laughed.. have this pizza 🍕 nigga
Lmao. Here's a baby 👶. Bon apetite.
@@brahimilyes681 Bro....
I was talking to my friends about we not having free will, i was immediatly in the 'evil person' category haha.
He was thinking freely to say what he said I just disprove and freewill still stands no way out of it
It’s not evil to be easily confused
Your friends do not believe their god is omnipotent.
Looks like inherent optimism bias and terror management theory always helps regardless of ideologies such as antinatalism based on consent.
Free will is in the realm of quantum mechanics so the Cosmic Skeptic is wrong. Since if you had no free will and were just an observer in your head and had no control of the rest of your brain, your brain is then like a computer doing things. And it is like you are just watching a movie play out. Your brain apparently gives you notification on how to feel, like when you want something. So why is this computer asking about free will ? It has no consciousness so would not ask this question. Therefore there must be free will and you and your brain are connected and you are conscious. A mechanical computer would not ask questions about free will and consciousness. So since we are really very complicated mechanical computers and we are asking about free will and consciousness, must mean these things are real. Somehow in quantum physics this happens. There are fields, electron, proton, light, everything has a field , even human beings.
So 'Free Will' should really be termed 'Linear Choice', then?
Not necessarily since as he mentioned it is indeed possible for you to make different choices, but ultimately what lead to those choices isn't really in your control
So what would be a more appropriate term then?
@@brandonbaza1639 Maybe "influenced (by known and unknown factors) choice"
Veggies for Thought not really choice either. More like “Influenced Doing/Happening”
I agree that humans have labeled what IS happening with an insufficient term.
I have always believed that free will wasnt real but i was never able to verbalize why and this really helped me so thank you.
I always thought of free will as the ability to interrupt myself from impulsive action
Because you wanted to interrupt impulsive actions. And there are reasons why you wanted to. Character traits I guess.
I thank my attention deficit disorder for helping me to enunciate my lack of free will when I threw that rock hitting my bullying physical education teacher square between the eyes for teasing me about not being eligible to try out to be a baseball pitcher on that fateful day of 1990.
The principal didn't buy it, but I remembered ever after the truth that I have no free will, nor do any other of my fellow humans.
More precisely, free will is about the ability to interrupt from COMPULSIVE action. if you are aware, you can do it, free will goes together with awareness.
That definition of free will is literally the reason for living, even if its not truly free.
“You can only do what you want” is oddly empowering
Not really when he also adds that you have no control over what you want.
@@rl7012 but why would you control what you want? Why would you decide to want to jump onto a train track?
@@rl7012We don't have any control to what we want because there's a reason behind why we want this why we want that as long as reason exists we can't have absolute true free will free from everything.
@@antoniofarina716 You can't control what you want, you can only control what you do about it.
@@betamass3803 Without reason how could life and the universe exist?
This reminds me of a weird thought that's popped into my head a couple times...
"It couldn't have turned out any differently, because if it could've it would've."
I'm no expert but I think it has nothing to do with free will but you're speaking of possibility of different outcomes (my expression, not a real term).
Let's take the ideas that pop up in your head be called made up ideas, as in comparison to reading that water is liquid and thinking of water as liquid (constructed, extracted by communication E.C., non-genuine) ideas.
I THINK we're speaking of EC ideas, the ones we, allegedly, consciously construct, not the made up ones, which I have no explanation for.
It really could’ve though. Due to the randomness of particles’ behavior, if the universe was rewinded to the beginning to play again, we’d get a vastly different result. Though there are likely some structures that are inevitable.
@@TheNightWatcher1385 I think, not authorized tho,
1- deep in the most minute scale, if there is a randomness in the process then the possibility of a different outcome than what we have now is definitely present. What I mean includes if particles popping behaviour in and out of nowhere is literally random, then that could very well indicate a random outcomes if the uni were to rewind again.
2- if the laws and contants (gravity, forces, electro, maybe even matter if there were other particles similar to electrons and protons) have behaved differently then we would have different outcomes.
Otherwise, I think, had the uni been rewinded and if the laws have been identical and the randomness is non-existent (which is something hard to prove by experimenting on every place, planet and black hole to test the validity of matter/space/fiber-stuff determinism and predicting every single instance with the properties of space, time and mass -excuse the metaphor- of the presence of matter there) until then, wait
I might sound religious there but objectively speaking, we couldn't yet prove the non-existence of consciousness, everything we know is based on the likely possibility of dependence on neural networks. Such inductive argument might not be true as, as far as I know, we know nothing about consciousness. All we know is brain activity.
I'm not saying there is a soul because consciouness is so mysterious that we can't explain yet. All I'm saying is we have no idea and we could base assumptions on this possibility.
I don't say I believe in free will certainly, what I'm saying is the arguments of free will non-existence are still not 100% conclusive.
I'm not sure if there is a part of us (allegedly that we are a distinct part of the world) that is not dependent entirely on the material interactions. I mean there is no reason for us to do good to each other and yet we do! We could be killing eachother over territories yet we feel the deep urge of loving each other.
I wanna hug every other person. I don't want to think of them as junk space-time-matter that magically surfs the space-time continuum. I wanna shake hands with aliens. I wanna see the last bit of conscious being enjoying his/her/whatever gender "they" call themselves to the last moment they live it. I wanna preach the morality of no-suffering to every conflicting conscious being. Because the other possibility of only material world (speaking of conscious beings, not dieties) is utterly terrifying. A sadistic authority could rise one day and have a grip over the whole humanity and in his thinking, there is no difference between life and death at all!
Reda Ali Personally, I believe the brain and the mind (consciousness) are related, but distinct things. I believe the brain is largely automated and runs our day to day lives on auto pilot, but the mind is the “quality control” of a decision, if that makes sense.
So the brain is like an automated assembly line. It does its thing when left to do so, but a line manager (the mind) can stop the process momentarily to check for quality and give their stamp of approval.
I think consciousness is present in the brain, but that it doesn’t rely on the brain to actually exist, I feel there’s more to it than that. To me, consciousness is more likely to be a quantum event and not necessarily a physical one (unless you consider quantum events to be physical phenomena).
We forget that our brain isn’t our entire nervous system. It runs around our whole body. It’s curious that sometimes when someone receives an organ donation, that recipient begins to show personality traits that were present in the donor, such as food preferences or general personality.
@@TheNightWatcher1385 you're right.
I share your opinion of modes of operation of 'mind' as auto-pilot and active decision making. I heard many arguments about controlling someone's arbitrary decision like moving a hand or pressing a button. While scientests have done some experiments of predicting when someone would do such arbitrary action, and also the presence of consciousness on actions, aka hypnosis, while still having the same brain activity, and the similar subconscious acts are very variant like preferring a food or flavor over the other. While genetics could, and very likely do, play a huge rule in dictating how sensitive I am towards anxiety and what category of games I enjoy, (which are once again subconscious; I don't choose to like a food. I have been pre-programmed to like this taste and would be, I expect, very difficult to change the physical part of me that changes my taste. I want to remind you of the 'subconscious' part of our actions that we are all aware of) that still doesn't explain how I find the urge (automatic response) of wanting to laugh when I hear a joke that I understand while still holding myself (2 wants. Which one do you prefer more?). Like I find the two wants, forces, speaking in Greek style, are present both at the same time, albeit that whichever weighed more to you, you would choose. And let me be clear about this: a conscious being could either have a reason to do so or not, and in either case it's a lost case due to 'you want to'.
The part where daily life free will means when you allegedly intentionally attempt to strike a pedestrian with your car instead of applying the brakes. Let's ignore the moral part while holding into the social aspect of it.
Assume you have 2 wants: to kill the pedestrian, and to steal him.
And you have 2 wants-not: social demeaning, and law prosecution. Assume also you have no moral restrictions as killing him is of no psychological downsides, only social ones.
Coincidentally, the wants on one side and the wants-not are on another; there could be option A with 2 wants and one want-not, option B with 3 wants ..., but atill the wants-not are inherently want by definition (want not to).
So, where my alleged free will comes into the picture is when I *evaluate* the options, in this case, only two options, run him over, or apply brakes. There could be a situation where I could talk with someone and have A) talk gently, B) use some offensive language, C) agitate a friend with a statement to catch their support into my argument, D) punch him in the face... So it's not like only black and white choice that I "could" choose. These options have the high likelihood of resulting the mentioned outcomes (2 wants for A and 2 wants-not for B). But remember that these outcomes are in many cases exclusive: you are unlikely to kill him, steal him while still escaping the police and social demeaning unless you're that Dostoevsky's novel character to get it all. So you are highly unlikely, let's assume the impossibility hence, of gathering different options' outcomes, aka options' outcomes' exclusivity.
The situation at hand is you could either choose A, B, C, ... or N. What do you do then? You simply *evaluate* the outcomes' (both benefits and downsides. And for simplicity let's assume the certainty of these outcomes benefits and downsides to eliminate the probablistic aspect of uncertainty). The question now becomes: do you value X and Y more than P and Q? These are your wants, true, but it comes down to what values weigh to you more than others. Money, knowledge, morality, social class, civil prosperity? I think here it could need some compromises regarding your wants against public good where we should draw the line between the want and freedom to take a decision. You could sacrifice you wants and leave them for something else, like future reward. Even though you don't want to leave this choice, you did have the capability to choose or not choose it (you could value the outcomes more than your wants and sacrifice your wants for unwanted outcomes). It could reach to a moral or public good standard where someone would only sacrifice their wants for others' benefits. The difference here is in the future case, the benefit would still reach you afterall; while in public good it would highly unlikely benefit you, at least in the short term, to leave your parking lot for someone else that needs to park closer. I'm not speaking about morality in specific, rather how we would sacrifice our benefits for others even when we know that the odds of benefitting are not on our favor. True, generally, we are acting for a better life of us all, stemming from a beneficiary prospective, but still based on basis of what you want more than the other. And if the better good requires sacrificing one for the whole then so be it. Evolutionarily or not, that gives my life its meaning. Is it free will? Yes because there are other wants. Unless someone considers any want to be decisive to one's decision then even choosing not to follow it stems from that. It's a lost cause anyway!
I can almost remember no argument regarding the 'conscious' (carefully using the non-scientific term of conscious as I 'm still not sure of my opinion) part but many arguments on the auto-pilot part. An aspect that is highly exploited by psychological biases and subsoncious manipulation in advertisements and giving people the imoression that "I feel I'm winning in the casino just because everything is suggesting that even tho I rationally know the odds are totally not in my favor and it's totally randomly-base rather than skill-based. Don't get me wrong, we don't need to embrace some facts as certainty of death or the possibility of my partner cheating on me but these tendancies should be given and informed to the agent rather than exploiting them against him/her.
Using the icecream scenario since that's what the video had -
What if one were to chose between two bowls of vanilla ice cream that had the exact same amount of icecream in it, in the exact same bowls, kept side by side.
Would that constitute free will since there isnt a 'want' of either one of it in particular?
But there is. For example, if you’re right-handed, that might make you more likely to grab the bowl on the right. This is an example of a puppet not seeing its strings and falsely concluding that the strings don’t exist.
Might not want ice cream.
@@Rio-zh2wb Wrong, these are assumptions (being right hand, etc). There is no proof against or for free will. We dont know. This was chewed since millenia. We dont even know how the brain works, or consciousness.
This video made “want” stop sounding like a word.
Then you should try saying ''ought'' after watching his video on objective morality. ;-p
He is wrong , I have written the explanations elsewhere in the comments. If you analyze any word to death , it loses meaning and we live in a quantum world. He is stuck in the classical world. Quantum physics has observers and measurement and quantum states that are completely unknowable and uncontrollable.
@@jeffbguarino expand please
Dear Alex, Free will is an overcomplicated concept because of all the religious and societal baggage that word got saddled with. The problem at its core is the ability to decide between, say, two choices A or B, and whether the choice made is predictable or not.
Let’s look at all constituents of that situation.
1. Input data.
2. A brain, that makes the decision.
3. Output choice: A or B.
Let’s start with the brain first. Our brains are probability calculating engines. The Brain is programmed from the very beginning of the formation of the first neural cell, until the brain’s death. The brain also comes with preprogrammed models to drive various functions and emotions, obtained through evolution and environment.
The brain contains a model of the world that is influenced by every input it receives through its various sensors. This model is shaped and reshaped throughout its life as the input data is received by the brain. Input data could take many forms
- From touch, vision, sound, taste, smell, etc.
- To chemicals such as hormones, whether from your own body, or your mother’s body during pregnancy, or environment, etc.
- There are also meta Input Data that could influence the model such as language, emotions, the experience of others, past experience, observations, learning, etc.
- Input Also could take the form of societal norms, rules and/or regulations, shame, love, hate, etc.
Let us assume that we have a system of Input data and a brain model such as:
- We can provide a very precise and perfectly known input data set.
- Also, we can provide a very precise and perfectly known brain and brain model starting point.
- Let’s also assume that system, if provided a choice between A or B, that A would have a higher probability to be selected by that system, hence that system will choose A.
Now, the people who would say that we have free will, argue that even though the system is predisposed to choosing A, that system could choose B instead.
People who would say that we don’t have free will, argue that the system will choose A no matter what. And we don’t have a choice.
For that system to choose B instead of A, would mean that there is an input data condition that we did not account for, hence the input data set is not perfect or complete, which violate the assumption. Hence, we don’t have free will.
In my opinion, the reason people get confused about this illusion of free will is that the probability calculating engine (our brains) is constantly and recursively being updated by the experiences we have on a second by second basis. Also, the set of input data into the brain is large and complex, not to mention the combinatorial factor of how all that data is processed in our brains. This is, as referred to it by Data Science as an AI-complete problem.
The decision tree is vast, but not infinite. If we have a big enough computer (let’s go crazy, the size of the sun) with “perfect” input data set and “perfect” model of that brain at that point, we can predict the outcome and choice.
So, if that is the case, then anyone who will commit a crime, could claim that she has no choice and it was predestined, yes?
No! one of the inputs in the input data set is societal norms, rules, regulation, etc. this is another variable that could shape our world model in the brain. So, if this probability calculating engine decided on B instead of A (where B happened to be illegal) they will suffer the consequences.
But more importantly for this discussion, there is an input condition in this brain’s life that made it set low priority or low weight to the legal and societal rules, and for that, it needs to be corrected. Having rule enforcement in our society ought to help shape the model for these probability calculating engines, toward the betterment of society.
The other aspect of this, is if the brain itself was deficient or broken in some way to allow it to choose B instead of A, No matter what the input data set is (training, or rules, regulation, or experience) then you can say this person is not responsible for their crime (choosing B) and should be treated differently (send to a mental institute, instead of jail).
I wish the atheist community stop using the “free will” terminology because it is awash with imprecision and theological baggage that misses representing reality. Whenever we try to explain it, we always get wrapped around the axel. The model above is derived directly from Neural Science and AI research.
Thank you for all your great work.
dude this comment was epic
......amazing
Solid mate but dont ever get it confused no matter what you are never truly responsible for your action, only held accountable.
I don't disagree with your comment, but you are ironically part of the problem why concept of free will (its nonexistence) is harder to grasp than it needs to be. You make it way too complicated. The fundamental mistake I think is to argue (firstly) from the point of brain science to debunk free will, when we have the logical killshot under our noses.
Choice is either:
1. predetermined
2. random
You could even have full reign over the universe and laws that govern it, but you wouldn't be able to make it as such, where you would escape choice being random or predetermined.
@@25hvghfgetr6 which is exactly why we are also in a simulation, acting out our roles. No universe can escape predictability, so reality means absolutely nothing anywhere.
Actually when your “forced to do something” you aren’t. Even if severe punishment will follow not doing something you still “want” to not deal with punishment rather than doing the task. Only exception being prison where no matter what u will be physically forced in there
Agree. Other exceptions: blinking, breathing, and anything that you do automatically and unconsciously. You are "forced" to do this by your brain, then...
Was about to comment this. Very true. Now there truly is only 1 reason you ever do anything.
@@soybean3423 I would contest those. You blink because your eyes get dry, and you implicitly "want" to make it stop. It may be automatic, but there is still a choice to continue.
I was looking for an example of being forced to do something. It seems to me that all of those would still come down to a want. I'm not sure that even your example of being forced in prison works. You could fight the correctional officers & they might have to kill you. If they succeeded in transporting you to prison without killing you, I'm still not sure that it works. Once in prison, you could refuse to do whatever they told you, no matter what the consequences were. You still wouldn't be forced to do anything, at least not that I can think of. Being forced into a location seems different than doing something.
@@SpikeShroom @soybean blinking, breathing, those are involuntary actions. If you want to argue that you could not blink until you go blind, or hold your breath til death, consider your heartbeat, you cant choose for it to stop right now. These are involuntary processes. Alex carefully chose his free will definition because we do have voluntary choices, it's just that once they're made, they never would have been different.
The issue with the initial premise is that it’s not necessary for free will. You don’t have to be in control of all the factors influencing your decisions to act differently. You just need to be aware of them, and not even all of them. Even a general degree of self-awareness of your personal psychology (not even a single factor) would be enough to reasonably conclude that one could have acted differently.
How can one act differently? We can never repeat the _identical_ situation, and if we could, we should expect either with or without freewill, unless the universe is random at the fundamental level, the same outcome. Repeating an experiment overtime is _not_ the identical situation. A person is older, the previous attempts are part of their memory, the angle of sunlight has changed. We all only act once in each moment, and it could not be any other way than the way it was, it doesn't physically make sense to suggest otherwise.
@@Rogstin Why doesn’t it physically make sense? We have a degree of self awareness, which can inform us on why we make the decisions we make, and I have no idea why that doesn’t suggest we can choose differently. It seems to contradict our inner experience.
Determinism hasn’t been able to explain 100% of our actions, so it’s absolutely an assumption that it would.
Rationalizing decisions does not equate to making them. The argument encapsulates your "awareness" of your inner workings. _Any_ conscious rationalization is based on your being. On nature and nurture. You don't _choose_ to "be aware" of your inner workings. You claim to be - and that contributes to the decisionmaking process. See, the awareness you claim to have _does not change anything._ it is merely your expression of one of the influences you feel your decisions are based on.
@@thomasw153 Your claim only works if we bisect awareness from being. All you’re actually saying is that there are mechanisms within our being driving our decisions that are inaccessible to consciousness. But that doesn’t mean it’s not *us* making the choices, it just means they’re made in a way that’s not immediately accessible to our conscious selves.
There’s also the fact that your argument doesn’t explain how or why human beings are able to reflect and deliberate on choices they haven’t yet made. We can consciously think through decisions, imagine alternatives, and make choices based on reasoning. This subjective experience undermines strict determinism, and requires scientific explanation, not elimination.
@@mottebailley4122 _This subjective experience undermines strict determinism_ How?
The fundamental problem is, _how_ is a choice made. Where can it be made? Voltage thresholds and chemical transmitters. It's all obeying the laws of physics. Free will as a perception, that exists, but as a reality, it doesn't make sense.
_and I have no idea why that doesn’t suggest we can choose differently._
How could you choose differently? You cannot replay the moment again. Every moment is new, and no experiment I can think of could distinguish between free will and determinism. So we have to ask about what free will even means.
Yes, I feel like I make choices, I just understand that's the result of an incredibly complex system of interactions.
_and make choices based on reasoning._ This is why free will fails even at a high level. There is always a reason, even if it isn't something we are aware of consciously. A chain of _Why? Because!_ until we can't explain it. Where is the choice? Not just the feeling of it when we discover what the outcome is, but the moment we pick _without_ external impetus. Free will doesn't make sense.
"You can't control the strengths or objects of your desire"
Buddhists: ARE YOU SURE ABOUT THAT?!
@Everstruggling If we give buddhists the merit of the doubt, they claim to be able to completely eradicate any form of desiring from the mind.
@@wezzuh2482 Why would they do that? Because they want to.
Everstruggling You are right that Buddhists don’t believe a human can fully rid themselves of any desire. They do however believe you can curb and temper those desires (The Middle Way). Therefore, a Buddhist would agree that our desires/wants have strong influence over our minds and our decisions and that there is no way to totally eradicate them. However, they would disagree (with the guy in this video) that it is impossible to want something and then decide not to want it. The more you practice not wanting something the more you don’t want it, and therefore, you choose what you want. It’s a long process that takes a crazy amount of willpower and focus, but it can be done. Once you curb one desire, another may pop up as you go through life and circumstances change, and you’ll have to start the process all over again. There’s really no difference from this belief and behavioral psychology. If you believe you can retrain your brain and change habits, then you should believe that we have control over our wants. They go hand in hand. But I can understand peoples’ confusion because westernized culture teaches us to do the opposite and blindly satisfy our desires from the time we’re born.
One could argue, following this video's logic, that the desire to curb your desire is in itself a want, and therefore, that desire must have been stronger (due to pre-determined circumstances) than the desire not to change one's behavior. But anyone that has suffered from any kind of addiction can tell you that they can be so chemically dependent on their object of desire that they seem to crave it with every fiber of their being. And yet, one will at some point face that inevitable and pivotal choice: whether to give in to their desire for temporary pleasure or fight back against it in order to reclaim their freedom. To me, this is evidence of another aspect of our brain that moves past our simple wants/desires. It's some kind of willpower/force science and classic logic fails to explain. Some may call this one's spirit or soul. And this goes back to the age old debate over whether man's mind is distinct from one's soul and vice versa. So, I guess you could say this video is only true if you don't believe in the existence of the soul. And neuroscience just hasn't gone far enough yet to be able to rule it out. And therefore, how can we say every choice is a product of our desire if we are yet to fully understand where that desire stems from?
As of yet, I'm not convinced one way or another that free will exists or doesn't exist. But if it doesn't exist, I don't think it's because of the reasons in this video. If anything, I find it more likely that our lives are already laid out before us due to forces beyond our comprehension. Whether that means we're just pawns in a simulation and our choices are a complete illusion; or our understanding of time is skewed and everything that will happen has already happened and will always be; or both; or something else entirely. Either way, humans always gravitate toward black and white answers. But the truth is rarely simple. My personal belief is that it's a little of both (a combination of fate/free will): that we are destined for some experiences and have choices over others. And this goes back to the Buddhist idea of the soul and reincarnation and the choice to either take the opportunity to temper our desires and free our spirit or let it pass us by and be born again...
@@greasergirrl People will gravitate towards black & white because it's comforting to feel they've resolved one of life's many questions.
Everstruggling You don’t need to want to become a monk to want to be a better person. I’m sorry if that is a difficult concept for you to grasp. And i find it funny you think I helped prove your point, because I feel like you helped prove mine with your question. I’ve never met one person that doesn’t want to be successful or grow as a person in some way, unless they have some kind of psychosis. The main thing that differentiates people who want to get better with those who choose complacency, is that the former takes responsibility for their actions. Really think about why the idea of there being no free will comforts you so much. It’s appealing for a reason. Also, people these days are always angry if you use “too many words.” God forbid they put effort and brainpower into understanding anything more complex than what can be depicted in a meme. And psychology is a lot more complicated than a simple saying. I’ve read countless books and taken courses and gone to psychologists myself, so I know plenty. Anyway, knowledge and what’s written in the textbooks isn’t everything. People can memorize every fact in the world and still know nothing. Just like everything else, the field of psychology relies a lot on one’s intuition since there is actually very little proven about the human brain. Until we understand more, I don’t see it as appropriate for some TH-camr (credentials unknown) to make blanket claims - in the name of “philosophizing” about free will and our desires - with no real evidence to support it. We don’t yet understand where our wants stem from, and therefore, I don’t see how anyone could make a statement like that with absolute certainty.
I think the best statement would be " we Dont control what we want, "
Sam's Studio But there are ways to control what we want(think we want).
@@optionsstrategies7511 yes... Think we want? When we think we want something we actually want that thing..but.we cant control what we want...we cant control our choice of want.
Sam's Studio Certainly there are things in your life that you have wanted and no longer want. Or there are things you thought you wanted, but then decided you did not want. What is the force controlling this desire and these changes?
@@optionsstrategies7511 my thinking,my circumstances, my upbringing,and my genetics.
Sam's Studio So all of these factors are out of your control, but they control what you want?
Good luck on your exams! Amazing video like always!
You express things well Alex, and it is great that you have chosen this path to discuss so many philosophical ideas. I hope, and indeed, believe, that most of your videas will prompt serious thought and great discussions. I don't think you succeed in what you attempt on this one, but it was for sure a very big ask!
He might not have had the choice to make this video or not. Free will is in itself a choice.
did you watch the vid?
Free will and gods punishment was something I always struggled to believe too. What convinced me was imagining that I was a scientist who had the ability to create life and who could also see into the future. I can create a being and hardwire every single desire and thought process of this being. Not only that, but based on precisely where I raised this being and the exact people this being grew up around, I would know exactly their desires, beliefs, and life path. Now, this is even less than what god can do. My thought was, how can a god, who made me with the specific desires and thought processes that I have, and put me specifically in a home and surrounded by people where he knew exactly how they would affect me (i.e. god is in control of both nature and nurture), how could a god like this fault me for any of the decisions I 'choose' to make?
My thought is this:
if god is all knowing, he knows what i'm going to do before i do it
Well Christians will say God only created the first two humans. Other humans came through reproduction. Still God should not held us responsible. He knew it will happen and should have stop it. Then again if someone thought a wrong thought, that doesn’t excuse them to commit it.
@@polandball999
Right. That doesn’t mean he cause it, but allowing it is just as bad. Before you say God created us. He didn’t. Only the first two people who were said to be prefect until they are the fruit. Besides having a bad thought doesn’t mean you should act on it. Unless you was raise wrongly, you could have rebuke those thoughts.
@@Bunni504 but god made me uncapable of not getting the proof, he changes environmental facts, and hardwire my thought process, he knew i would do that, i can choose to not do it, but that is just an illusion since god created me knowing i wouldnt get the apple
this reminds me of what I used to think in the childhood. when ever an ant was passing, I'd think that if I kill the ant right now, that's the death the god has decided for the ant and if I don't do that but kill it after five minutes then that's also decided and if I don't do anything of them and just let it go then that is also decided by the god. I used to be very confused because of that.
I sat there staring at the bonfire trying to imagine how differently it would've behaved if I had lit it from the opposite side.
@Gods Servant That means nothing. The initial choice was not dependent on the outcome. Temporally, it couldn't be.
Is this a line of your own creation? I find it profoundly beautiful
Want doesn't even sound like a word anymore
You are free to do what you want, but not free to choose what you want.
Schopenhauer
Oh my God, I've been thinking about this for almost my entire life and he summed up how I feel in a video!
THIS IS THE END TIMES🔥🔥🔥.ENOUGH WITH ATHEISM FOOLISHNESS. YOU ARE ALL STUCK IN PLATO'S CAVE AND SATAN 'S MATRIX OF LIES. THE SPIRITUAL REALM IS REAL. REPENT OF YOUR SINS AND TRUST THE GOSPEL OF JESUS CHRIST. YOU WILL BE SAVED FROM HELL 🔥
th-cam.com/video/bVlfo0KHlVc/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/myaroler0wM/w-d-xo.html
Your soul is on the line. Jesus is coming soooon. Jesus loves you❤
Your free will and god's free will are awaiting clarification.
@@loocypher150 ooh! Burnnn. 🤣🤣🤣.
@@loocypher150🤣😅.But it's not certain yet. Heaven and Hell is like a quantum phenomenon in which 0 and 1 can coexist at the same time but your consciousness gets to decide/observe. We live in a quantum reality. Example the double slit experiment. The electrons are estimated to be moving in on the two paths simultaneously until the final observation is made. That's what heaven and Hell is like. If you are saved by Jesus, heaven is a certainty. But if you are not yet saved it's not yet certain where you are going. Until you finally take that jump. And since you are not allowed to see the end Until you reach the end. God sees your end. But it's you who is accountably walking towards that end.
Have you watched TeNeT? "What has happened happened" but until you see the end you will never know. But For us who are saved we certainly know.
The offer of forgiveness from God is offered to you NOW.
2 Corinthians 6:2
..Today is the day of salvation
Albert Einstein proved that time is a relative illusion in his theory of general relativity. The only time that truly exists is the NOW.
You can use it with your God given free will to reject or accept God's forgiveness. To reject or accept God's love. Heaven or Hell. The choice is ultimately your's..
@@keyboardevangelist you can’t just put quantum in front of a word to sound smart when it doesn’t make any sense
Drinking game: Take a shot every time he says 'want'.
I don't want to.
Whatdoyoo meaaan i turned out fiine! Nahtdruunk
Sounds more like a pass out party. 😏
You copy pasted a popular comment
You’re funny lol, I like you.
I think there may be a fine distinction between 'free will' as in: the ability to choose, and autonomy as in: the ability to choose free of influence.
BTW I love your videos, your ability to think critically and logically is incredible and something I strive to achieve as well.
ALL actions are influenced by something though, so I can’t even grant your definition of autonomy as something that actually exists.
We are the sum of our senses, the society we live in, our culture, and the people around us. It is impossible to have free will (free of influence). Just take a look at how hormones control what we think and do.
Free will would require that decisions are made consciously. But decisions are made at a subconscious level, well before we are even aware of them.
Are you saying you are aware of, and exert conscious control of the cascade of electrical and chemical reactions that happen in your brain continuously?
Unique.
@@TesterAnimal1 I am not saying that, we are not in control of the chemical reactions in our brain. I'm basically saying that the chemicals and hormones in our brain control us.
I would argue, that to a certain degree we can control the degrees or intensity to which we desire what we “want” across multiple dimensions because we organize those “wants” into a hierarchy and inter connect them with one another. As we change different areas in our lives, we rearrange the hierarchy, and shift multiple items based on the initial change. For instance, the decision to go to the gym is not only a shift in want, it is a shift in value structure, and therefore you’ll shift multiple other “wants” within your hierarchy of wants in order to align yourself with the new value. I do agree that changes like this are rare and take conscious effort, but we are most definitely capable of shifting our wants. I think a better argument for free will would be that the future is already predetermined, and therefore we will always fall prey to the future.
I agree that you can change your "wants" by changing your cognitive value structure. But you will change this structure because you want to do it. And then you will try very hard and think about it and question it, because you want to do so. In the end you have changed your "wants" by using your wants or being forced to by a therapist or someone/something else. In no point you are free of your "wants". At least according to Alex ;)
This is what I am currently doing: diving deep into this topic and changing my wants and desires. My desire to sit on the couch or be on the computer is stronger than my desire to go to the gym. As soon as the thought of going to the gym arises in my mind, I ask myself why my desire to work out and improve my appearance and well-being is less compelling. Clearly, one option involves more effort but offers long-term benefits, while the other requires less effort and provides immediate gratification.
Without delving too deeply into our reward system, I aim to make my desire to work out stronger than my inclination to sit idle. The desire to desire something is potent, whether we believe in free will or not. This shift in priorities is the most powerful step I've taken to accomplish more.
When I was a little kid, I didn't have the illusion of free will. It seemed kind of unfair that my parents would punish me for something, when I didn't feel I had any control over whether I did it or not. It was when I was about 6 or 7 that I started to think I had control over my choices.
Well after all there's a distinction between 'free will' and 'free action'
Free will isn’t an illusion lol. You always have a choice to do things you don’t want to do
@@kennypowers1945 that's free action, not free will
It would seem that punishments/consequences for your childhood actions were designed to create a want strong enough to act against your current wants. Building up your Id, ego and superego in the design of your parents.
Why would you know it’s unfair if you don’t have free will😂
What is free will:
The ability to have acted differently
1. You can't control your wants:
- Try to think about so thing you want - now try not wanting it.
- Try to think of something you don't want - now try to want it.
- This is not possible.
2. You will only do anything because you either want to or because you're forced to.
Everything is controlled by your wants.
3. Everybody feels like they have free will / control over their actions
4. Consceptional vs. Personal free will.
"Yes, you can do anything you want but you can't, you just can't choose WHAT you want - and where's the freedom in that?"
Free will is based on your wants, which you can't control. Acknowledge this and you will be more calm with your choices.
Really? Did you want to write that comment and were not able to not write that comment? No choice made on your part?
Free will is based on our choices, which we can control. Acknowledge this and you will be more responsible with your choices.
@@jpt7955 if they chose not to write the comment it would still be based on a want the have whether it be they don't want people to respond or they want to spend their energy on something else etc
Well not exactly because you can still do the things that you don't want to do
Your not forced to do anything. For instance. People with drug addictions who are trying to detox from alcohol or heroin may want to drink alcohol or do heroin but they have the decision (chose) to deny thereselves and say NO! I WILL NOT SHOOT UP HEROIN! No Matter how bad you might want something you can (free willingly) Choose what you want to do. Free will exist
And secondly your wrong. I thought about wanting a pancake. Now I decided I don't want a pancake. So no it's not impossible
Free will doesn't imply the supernatural ability to transcend your identity and instantiate a different set of desires than the ones you come hard wired with. Free will implies the mental capacity to exercise conscious choice within an available context. It is a psychological phenomenon, not a metaphysical power. By consciously choosing to reject free will, you are inescapably exercising it (in the psychological sense - the only sense in which free will can meaningfully apply).
Is exercising a conscious choice meaningful if you don't control the reasons behind that choice? I would argue that even if you think it is, the choice we make is still deterministic in nature. If we were to make an exact copy of you, with the exact same brain state and put you both into an identical room then all of your choices would be the exact same. You would both say the exact same things at the same time etc.
Libertarian Realist Right, that's a different definition, one that basically boils down to "we have free will because we feel like we have free will" which Alex mentioned.
Can an entity have no consciousness but still have free will? Can an entity have no free will but still be conscious? How would that work? If not, what's the difference between free will and consciousness? If there's no difference, free will is a redundant term.
michaelmath Puffy would agree with you..... :3 This whole "free will vs. determinism" thing is ridiculous by default..... :3 Can't Fight The Systemagic..... :3
Rational people do NOT choose what they believe.
By invoking the concept "you," you are presupposing the existence of a being with a particular identity. Yes, an exact copy of me would make the same choices given exactly the same circumstances. That doesn't mean the choices aren't real as mental processes. Would only the choices of a boundless, unlimited consciousness capable of transcending the law of identity count as "free"? I don't think that's the basis of the concept of free will or what proponents of it believe.
the fact that we are beings capable of producing an infinite number of desires and that we can consciously pick one desire over another, is enough evidence of free will for me.
The whole premise of the video of we can’t control what we want is just untrue. To a large degree, we can start choosing differently by focusing on the positives of the things we want to choose. It is so common we call it rationalization. The video maker seems smart enough, I wonder how did he miss the point … or did he just went straight to absolutism to be able to make a video.
@@scoobydoo9579I don't share your opinion, if you rationalize, it is because you want to, and you didn't chose to want it, for everything you do, or think, there was something which motivated you to do so, otherwise you wouldn't do it
@@gregvanb Interesting. In your view, when we are "motivated" to do something -- what do you call that motivation if it is not rationalization? Or are you suggesting human should operate purely on impulse -- the same way a sea cucumber would?
@@scoobydoo9579 what I'm saying is that if you rationalize, it is because you have the ability to do so (which you have no control on), and the will to do it the moment you do it. For example if you're in a moment when you are too emotional, you won't be able to rationalize immediately but then you'll do it once you realize that to just follow your emotions might not be the best way to deal with your actual situation (so there is one or many reasons that leads to rationalize, but you don't choose to do so from nowhere, if you do something you have reason(s) to do it, otherwise you wouldn't do it). So every decision, thoughts, change of opinion, action etc. you make is actually the consequence of a lot of different things that happened before you make it. An idea doesn't come from nowhere, your brain doesn't generate ideas from nowhere, and if it did it would mean that we all are gods at our own level
@@gregvanb You lost me there. Is your view that our every decision is the "natural" results of trillions of factors we can't control, and therefore we don't have free will? And why must we be "gods" just because we can create an idea out of nothing -- can't God create us to be able to create an idea out of nothing -- especially if that's what giving us "free will" means?
But.. what does it mean to, "want" to do something?
*vsauce music plays*
DADANNNN
truely humorous... um i think it goes "ha. ha."
Hey, Vsauce! Michael here.
Love this
You think you are the doer.
the real question is "who is this you?" that has free will. "Or what is this you?"
exactly, the ego is the real illusion here
''Free will'' is such a semantic black hole that I have refrained from touching it again. Also it won't change anything about daily life.
Akryloth yes it will . If anything it will make your more unlikely to have kids, when you realise humans are just slaves of conscious and unconscious desires. There is no point to life. And pain and suffering is inevitable
@@lepetitchat123 This kind of realisation don't change anything about our lives we just keep living the way we always did because that's how humans are
jaf not really wanna change anything, but I would prefer a world where less people spew bullshit like life is what you make it
Akryloth: OR, it will change everything about YOUR daily life and may be, also, the people you love; it's up to you. God bless you.
Actually you don't know whether the (non) existence of free will changes anything or a lot about daily life. Predetermined or not, you don't know the future. The fact that it seems not to have had much of an impact in the past, makes you think that way but it does not allow you to say anything about changes in the future and even about changes about the past that could had been.
I came to this conclusion many years ago but could not express it as well as you have here. Whenever I have this conversation I usually resort to asking the person to give me one example of a 'choice' they believe they made and unravel it with them to demonstrate that their 'choice' will have ALWAYS come from a 'reason' and that the 'reason' never originates with them or something they 'chose'!
The ability to rationalize through choices and decide which one isn’t always a result of desire. This video would also disprove things we know exist like consciousness, rationality, intelligence, etc.
The literal definition of consciousness is the ability to parse through desires and pick one independent of emotion. You may really really want something, but also know it’s bad for you. What decides what you do? You do. If both desires are equal, how is it that anything happens? The answer is that your ability to rationalize and make a decision INDEPENDENT of both desires is what makes the decision.
@@aidanm.655 None of those change anything. For example you state "but also Know its bad for you". How did you arrive at the knowledge that it's bad for you? Also Consciousness, Rationality and Intelligence are capacities you were born with. In other words things you were given but didn't 'chose'. So does somebody born with a lesser intelligence, as per your example, have fewer 'choices'?
"The literal definition of consciousness is the ability to parse through desires and pick one independent of emotion" - all you are describing here is the lived experience of the 'program' running (what we call our consciousness) that, from our perspective makes is 'seem' like we are making a choice. Being 'aware' of the program running does not effect the output.
" If both desires are equal, how is it that anything happens?" -what you are describing here is like what happens to humans when faced with too many apparent 'options'. Many do find it impossible to 'chose' in such instances and the Operating System becomes distressed. For those that do there will ALWAYS be a reason why they 'chose' one above any of the others.
The closest it will 'feel' you can get to 'breaking' determinism is the use of a randomizer. i.e. Flipping a coin. Since you will have then removed 'yourself' from the decision making part. But I will leave you to consider "Whose 'Free Will' is being implemented here?"; "Is it Free Will" and "Does this really disprove determinism?" It really does help when considering this subject to think of ourselves like a computer program that is so complex that it does not only take direct inputs from its immediate environment (via the senses) but also uses 'data' gathered during its runtime (lived experiences). We are only doing what we were 'programmed' to do from birth.
Good explanation@@BlackWolf-uk2yb
@@aidanm.655 The greatest desire wins. That's all it ever is. When are you ever making a choice that isn't of desire?
"You may really really want something, but also know it’s bad for you. " Your desire for being healthy was greater than your desire to want to do that thing.
The debate dissolves when you take an honest perspective of your opponents position (I have Free Will). This video will mean nothing to them, because of reasons you eluded to early. It's a problem of Symantecs. When you say you don't have the ability to pre-determine your wants. They say I don't need to. I know what I want and why. I could choose otherwise but I don't want to; hence I am exercising my free will by wanting this want rather than that.
They are unable to see the fallacious nature of this logic. It's circlular reasoning with a dash of ad absurdum. Couple your arguments against free will with some critical thinking lessons for a complete demolishion of their delusion. :) Great vid btw
I always at the end of this debate give an uplifting. "Don't worry too much over what you never had, you got this far without it ;)
Makeshift Altruist
Agreed, mostly.
There are simply some tragic horrors that befall us due to some of these kinds of delusions.
I don't know how to present the information to people in a way that convinces them of the need to stop retributive responses, to have more forgiveness and compassion.
It's true, we got this far with no free will while thinking it was coherent, that we had it. But it seems to me we could do far better facing the facts - no matter how bleak they might seem - in the long run. The false positives have a way of coming back around and biting us.
While true free will is nonexsistant due to physical, legal, or other limitations l like my little illusion of being able to make choices about personal expression.
So... ignorance?
Indeed, our brains evolved "fooling" themselves so as to make us convinced that we have free will. This is because (becasue) for a highly intelligent species the idea of free will not existing would be quite hard to swallow and therefore would prove to be PROBLEMATIC both socially as well as for individuals, hindering the ability to survive and reproduce, so this position of blissful ignorance is 100% logical.
you can like the illusion while being completely aware of it though. or are you telling me that since you got convinced about the lack of free will you don't feel like you make decisions anymore? ever?
well... no it also has interllectual and skeptical implication.
I absolutely understand, for all practical reasons we have free will, randomness exists, there may as well be a god, etc. What is true and what is practical are two different things.
I would also argue, from a sociological perspective, that we don’t have free will because we are inevitably influenced by external factors since birth. These factors influence our wants, and how we act and our ‘free will’. Great video
Well I guess it's impossible for us not to be influenced by external factors since day one of our life outside our mothers. It's a good question from you but think about it - animals, bears let's say, how could they possibly survive if their parents gave them free choice to eat or not to eat and what to eat. Do you think them being infants could possibly have the "free will", I mean "free will" to do EVERYTHING on even such basic level of existence? They'd die after few days. Few hours maybe? Parents provide house, provide food, warmth and make sure their offspring don't drown in their own excrements. If a one day old being was suppose to decide about himself from the day one, he would have to have any base of experience anyway. If you know what I mean. Cheers :P
It's actually simpler - you cannot have free will because there is no 'you' to have it. I - is another complex abstraction/illusion on which we base most of our misconceptions.
Based.
Am I the only one that sees the irony of someone make a book recommendation, in a video explaining why we dont have free will?
No, you're not. Sam Harris is an even more dramatic example of someone who tells people what they SHOULD think and believe while telling them they can't choose.
@@KingoftheJuice18 To be fair he's just making his case, not telling you that you should agree with him, you can disagree and think or believe something else.
@@alguno1010101 You're completely right that we can disagree and believe differently, but Sam himself argues for what he thinks is true for everyone. Sam certainly does not feel it's all a matter of personal opinion. That would be so unSam-like!
@Forever Forward Nah, just because I have no free will doesn't mean I listen to everybody or believe anything someone tells me. I actually feel better knowing free will is bs. Also your arguments are useless, whatever will happen will happen, its not that it can be controlled at all. lol
Well, he has no other choice than to make that recommendation, so that doesn't contradict that there is no free will.
Anybody interested might chekc the book out, anybody that isn't won't. Whatevs
I have freewill because i have no choice but to have it.
Christoper Hitchens
Well you have no choice but to have what you have so what is hitchens trying to say? That you should be able to not have free will? Then you wouldn't have free will in that case yet would have freely chosen to not have free will which is self contradictory. Hitchens' point is total nonsense but it sounds funny
@Mainari Yeah I agree, I wasn't responding to you if you thought I was
Hitchens was not making a serious point. He was also pointing out the arguement / nonsensical. Peace.
thebullybuffalo you would have free will until the moment you choose not to. How can your free will that you had in the previous moment disappear?
This is a strong statement and was primeraly said by hitchens, it was said by hume.
Taua Dawson Ah poindexter humour at maximum cringe
7:36.... Now I'm curious how this relates to relationships. My 31yr old ex fiancé left for a 17yr old, leaving me homeless and having to take him to court to get my car back, and still he defended himself with, he's just trying to be happy. I just wanted my car to sleep in and get over what happened.
After 7 years with him, I knew he'd grown and changed over time, but couldn't see how he'd done it. I somewhat understand now how his insecurities about his age and sense of impending death had effected his wants over time.
I couldn't change what he wanted and I have to accept that if I want to move forward.
Sorry, this may be unrelated but I'm glad this video got me thinking.
This is a very rational and mature reaction, one that you no doubt did not feel at first, as we are dominated by our emotions, but understanding that we lack free will really ought to increase our empathy for others, even others who seem to have done us wrong. As you say, there are so many reasons behind what happened between you two, and it is impossible to work them all out, and even if you did it would not do anything to change it. He just did the sort of things that the type of person he is was going to do. You too. Men are cursed in some sense by our sexual attractions to younger women. We are biologically programmed (most of us, anyway, there are lots of exceptions) to want to spread our self as far as possible, and to go after what our programming tells us are the most healthy specimens. It's very cold and clinical, but it really does explian a lot of male behaviour. The veneer of civilisation and marriage and monogamy and all that cannot tamp this drive down. The sexual drive is the most powerful in animals.
My own story is somewhat similar, me being the bad guy. I never did it because I wanted to hurt anyone, in fact quite the opposite. Knowing I had hurt the mother of my daughter was very painful, but I was not in love with her any longer, and was in love with someone else (who ended up leaving me for someone younger, how's that for poetic justice!). Here I am, all philosophically minded and I still am reeling from this loss almost 4 years later. Knowing that we don't have free will does help with our empathy, but we still are deeply governed by irrational emotions.
people don't make choices, "choice" implies "free will"
Your atoms lead to you writing that....as my atoms lead me to type this...
But we must reduce things, for this it what science is supposed to do. We must be honest of what the science shows, otherwise we are constructing falsehoods to avoid the obvious uncomfortable facts. You are suggesting constructing some kind of religion, of made up ideas, over science to make things fit an old, religious world of "morals" and "ethics"
Morals and ethics have no scientific evidence proving they exist; they are as made up as religion, just stories to exert power and constrain freedom...
Because the ancient book clearly says worship me or i will punish you forever after your dead. Not freewill but forced will
Even if you can’t control what you want, the precise outcome of your actions in doing what you want are not known to you. Also, a chain of wants that leads to the final want gives the feeling of free will, as you have no memory on a conscious level of every experience that led you to that point. It’s more of a feeling.
These is kinda good and deserves discussion
But why do you want your outcome to be doing what you want? If your outcome makes someone happy, then that is what you wanted. Whether you successfully made them happy or not doesn't matter, what matters is, that is what you wanted to achieve. So the outcome doesn't really matter. What matters is what made you chose the option that you did. Your want for something made you choose that option.
Even if you don't remember all experiences, it doesn't mean they don't influence your decisions. You don't have to remember precisely the time when you were 3 years old and you put your hand on hot plate and burn it to know that this will happen if you do it now. You experienced it and your brain remembers it, it remembers what it needs to remember for you to not make such a mistake again.
This makes no sense at all. What are you trying to argue? The more confident you are that you have free does absolutely nothing. You concede you can't control your wants, and the only driving force behind your actions are your wants. Self delusion does not grant you free will all of a sudden
That's getting pretty deep there! Wanna know what God told me free will is?
@@The_Jumpman I think they are answering the question why do we feel we have free will, they are not arguing/disagreeing with anything they are adding to what Alex is discussing.
I actually love this video. No one I ever speak to understands this concept!
Okak H2o - oh, only the chosen ones do? Like yourself?
@@kbeetles you wouldn't understand if you haven't actually sat down and thought about it.
Crown Kira - and what makes you think that I am not someone who thinks and ponders a lot? I have been doing there for over 60 years - thank you for your advice!
Let's be honest, no one truly understands this concept.
Ignore the bullshit guys, this video makes perfect, by human standards of logic, sense.
I've been thinking about the illusion of free will every day for the last 2 years or so to the point were I couldn't even listen in class and had an existential crisis. Thinking about prisons, and the validity of the judiciary and stuff like that. And in all that time, I've never thought about the question of wanting and not wanting like you did in this video. Thank you for this, it's very helpful.
Prisons are not entirely unjustified tho. They influence your wants in a direction compatible with society ie. you have an incentive not to want to hurt people.
You still have to lock dangerous people away (so they stop hurting others), but the judicary system would still change into something that focuses more on rehabilitation rather than punishment if the vast majority actually understood that free will is an illusion.
Punishment doesn't do very much when people are aware they're not ultimately responsible for their actions. Of course people still wouldn't want to go to prison, but the effect would still differ.
Maybe you should consider the alternative then. I do believe that free will exists and I think it's somewhat absurd to suggest the contrary.
+Luciano Latouche Did you even watch the video ?
@@Usulcardo Alex's definition of free will is totally stupid.
The way I’ve thought about it is how the universe seems to be wholly mathematical. Our brains are calculators with bodies to execute commands. We intake inputs and output responses based solely on those inputs. So if you made a choice, and were sent back in time to where you were, with no changes and no awareness of the future in which you made the choice to come back, you would again make that choice everytime without fail. This applies to everyone and everything, everywhere. Because this applies to everything always, every decision that has ever or will ever be made is already decided based on the formula. Of course there’s no way to see this, and it’s purely philosophical and unprovable, yet to me completely understandable.
you are assuming that our universe is deterministic, which it isnt
@@hypnogri5457, it is
I'm gonna have lots of sleepless nights now thinking about this. Thanks bro
Don't worry, a completely different person will wake up tomorrow with your memories.
Looks like the Calvinists were right all along.
Yes this cosmic person unwittingly is deterministic in the way reformed theology teaches. I wonder if he is familiar with infralapsarianism, sublapsarianism, and supralapsarianism. I don't think so however. He reads Richard Dawkins books.
So ironic that determinist atheists and Calvinists make a great team.
Calvanists might be right about free will, but they are pretty wrong about everything else... especially what it implies.
Free will (or not) isn't a problem unless you posit the existence of a being which can actually predict everything. For us mortals, free will is just a very practical illusion. There's no more use worrying/arguing about free will than there is in trying to prove the statement "This is not a sentence." is true or false.
Calvinism doesn't teach free will doesn't exist. Hypercalvinism does. Mainly, the Calvinist would say free will is overpowered for soteriological purposes.
Yeshua = Truth, ofc we have free will. There are people who willingly choose evil, because they love the energy it produces
I think the comments are struggling with defintion problems XD
Spelling too apparently.
Oh I know I do...his definitions are terrible and I don't agree with them XD It's the cult problem all over again where depending on your definition the impact of it loses all meaning.
Strongest argument for free will, is it's definition. Will contains the concept of "want" "desire" - will.
We are not able to 'control our wants' (choose what we want) at any given moment in time, but realising that we (don't) want one thing (and not another) is an essential first step in evaluating and eventually re-programming (neuroplasticity) those 'wants' (or reactions of rejection, for that matter).
Humans are basically empirically-learning (through imitation, initially) automates (relying largely on our (program routine) subconscious) with the added ability of (re-)programming themselves (critical thought)... but granted that much of the human population does not use this function, and are indeed 'stuck in their ways'.
This is not an argument 'for' free will, by the way: critical thought (self-analysis and re-programming) just makes our role in the universe's 'action-reaction' chain of events more complex, that's all... because even our re-programming abilities, choices, etc. are determined by past experiences, tastes, etc..
Sorry for all the brackets: trying to say a lot in a few words, here.
@J.M. Schomburg - I really appreciate your comments and ideas (how could I not?) as it was something I was wanting to explore further and I think you're on to something.
It would still deterministic that someone (person A), being able to evaluate and reprogram their wants, does while person B (someone without the function of reprogramming for any myriad of reasons), does not (and hence are stuck in their ways). Correct?
Again, thanks for the thoughts!
Thank you for posting this. I've thought about this for as long as I can remember but since almost everyone in my life is religious or at least spiritual, the idea of not having free will is terrifying to them. I don't understand how to believe in free will. I see it this way, every choice or mistake you make is based on your past experiences and your environment (edit: and your innate instinct). You aren't able to think outside the box, well you can, but only to the extent of what you have subconsciously or consciously observed in your life. There is only one path in your life that you will take, not many different roads ahead of you. Because everything you will decide today has already been decided by what you have learnt. Woah this is heavy stuff to think about.
I need to stop watching this kind of video giving me headaches
Yeah thinking is hard
🤦♂️
Cognitive dissonance can be hard to get through. Skeptics are really just intellectual masochists. We've grown fond of hurting ourselves in the pursuit of truth.
But it's not like you can help it. Once your brain has stopped resisting by forwarding confirmation bias, you'll most likely keep coming back until it has found a satisfactory solution.
Pure nonsense will do that to you
Not sure why it has no bearing on very at all really. Just stating the obvious really.
There's a "mathematical" argument that is much more difficult to refute. It goes like this:
1. The behavior of all systems is either deterministic or random.
2. A person is a system.
3. Therefore, a person's behavior is either deterministic or random.
4. Deterministic behavior means we don't have free will because our actions are determined even before we were born.
5. Random behavior doesn't allow for free will because random behavior is, well... random. Nothing influences it.
6. Therefore, free will must be an illusion.
The dichotomy of "deterministic or random" excludes the possibility of conscious free choice having any place in the universe, meaning it's arguably a false dichotomy.
A choice by design is not random and if it is predetermined it isn't a choice therefore a choice could be of free will.
All of you are forgetting the fact that "random" does not have to mean equal probabilities for all outcomes like flip of a coin, outcome can have 80:20 difference and still be random, or even 99.9999999 vs 0. however much
@@BennyOcean nobody can ever explain what this spooky third option means. Invoking the phrase “free will” like a magic spell does nothing. Everything is either determined or undetermined, law of the excluded middle. Undetermined IS random. Nothing determined it, whether it’s a will or a soul or a body.
@@bedro_0 yeah, random pretty much always means within some bounds.
I think the most disturbing implication of determinism is that we are not actually alive.
Yeah you are. Life is just a definition of a particular arrangement of atoms.
Seth Bowden Is a clock alive?
My ex girlfriend said "I want" to go to her friends wedding and spend money on a gift. She says I have free will to do whatever I want... lol.
its lonely out there lol
This is something I've been thinking about given some of my psychonautical experiences with dissociatives and psychedelics. When under the effects of LSD and nitrous oxide I've repeatedly had the strong sense that I wasn't in control of my actions. It literally felt like my body was just moving without me willing it to. At first I was terrified and convinced myself that I was being mind controlled by aliens or something (give me a break, I was tripping), but as I experienced in multiple times after that I sort of came to expect it. Those experiences have brought me to hypthesize that free will is an illusion, and when under the effects of certain mind-altering hallucinogens it breaks that illusion as your consciousness dissociates from your mind. That's essentially what I was experiencing.
It's spychosis
that’s sounds like depersonalization
Or the mind-alrering substances literally temporarily altered the way your mind was working, and now you're just trying to rationalize the experience that is literally impossible to rationalize because your reality simulation organ wasn't working properly for that short time.
Meaning maybe there was no grand revelation or purpose behind your experience. Maybe it was just you having an incoherent nonsensical experience because your brain was temporarily out of whack.
@@liarwithagun the op said that perhaps hallucinogenics disassociate your consciousness from your body, which basically is exactly what your saying. So what is your argument.
Exactly! the job of consciousness is to tell a story about shit that happens.
This is unquestionably the clearest example of why we don't have free will that I have ever heard.
Did anyone noticed, that the number of views and subscribers are more or less same at this particular time
This is getting creepy, there's a part of me that almost expects Agent Smith to walk around the corner.
We're not here because we're free. We're here because we're not free.
Hello Mr Anderson
This comment just made my day. I want to watch them Matrixes all over again for the 10th time now. Cheers mate.
I think "forced to" and "want to" are the same thing in this context.
Being forced to do something is still a WANT. You WANT to continue living (if you're forced at a gun point for example).
Or if your parents give you and ultimatum to do something or they'll kick you out of the house, you're just WANTING to preserve your well being by doing that thing seemingly forcefully.
If you WANT to NOT do the thing you're being forced to more than the consequences (known to you) that will follow, then you'll just not do it and vice versa.
Oh... now I get what you mean by forced, literally and physically. But then if you're pushed off the stage you're just a physical object being influenced by another one(another person) no thought involved. This video is perfect.
Yeah, to force can either mean to change a circumstance so that a person wants to do something, or to make someone do something unconsciously.
Nicht von dieser Welt what he means is that if X tells Y to do Z, or be shot, Y technically wants to do Z at that point, in value of Y's life.
I think you are arguing semantics right now, not JDS_96
You made a great video here explaining how people cannot control their 'wants'.
I wrote an essay on the Free Will v Determinism debate when I was an undergrad. I came to a conclusion which you may find interesting.
You see I wasn't happy for the religious lobby to go off and still claim just for themselves the slogan of "Freedom".
Leave aside that my experience of organised religion didn't give me the impression that religious people were keen on me being free, but freedom is such an attractive concept to 99% of people.
We all want to be free to walk down the street, free to choose the videos we watch etc.
The conclusion I came to was that the juxtaposition between freedom and determinism is completely false.
The answer to whether I have free will when I choose vanilla over chocolate is, yes. And the answer to whether my choice was determined is also, yes.
Like you may say, at the moment it seems I prefer or WANT vanilla over chocolate.
The point is that the 'determinant' factors are within me. They are part of what makes me at the current moment.
You could say that I determined my choice of vanilla.
To express this in the general case, the causal links in any chain of events that result in someone taking an action are/are within/are part of that person.
So to suggest that the scientifically identifiable causes for someone's choices means those people lack free will is completely wrong.
As you say, we really experience feelings of freedom when we are not constrained by external factors.
There is simply no greater freedom available ... least of all from religious 'authorities' who try to dictate on our thoughts and actions.
Keep up the great work 👍💪
About 30 years ago, I had a chat with my friend, where he claimed that everybody were being selfish all the time. Every action everyone did, was a selfish action.
I countered by saying you could be forced or threatened to do it.
He said if you were forced or threatened to do it, you still made the choice of doing it, rather than facing the consequences of not doing it.
Now, Matt used the example of someone jumping off the stage, or being pushed off the stage. I would say that if you are pushed off the stage, you're not performing an action. So you can't say that you're forced to do it. But when talking about someone who either jumps off the stage by their own "free will", or are threatened with physical violence and jumps off the stage because of the threat, then they are still choosing to jump off the stage.
So if you use Matt's example of force, then it's not an action they are doing, and so it doesn't count.
And if you are using my example, then they choose to do it, rather than facing the consequences of not doing it.
So when you say that there are only two reasons why you can ever do something, either because you want to, or because you're forced to, then I would say that's wrong. There is only ONE reason why you ever do anything. And that's because you want to. True, some times you don't want to want to do it, but with the limited options you have available, you will want the option that seems best to you at the time, and so you will choose that one.
Wants are not in your control.They derive from genetics and environment that you did not choose.
Sir, I totally agreed with you. That explain why a lot of smart and successful people out there will tell you try not to blame others on anything. You can't always choose what's gonna happen, but you can always choose how to react.
@@daviddeida how do you feel about the “everyone is you pushed out” concept in relation to this and your environment?
@@SP-ig3vs I have'nt heard of everyone is you "pushed out",before.Do you have a source.?.It is my understanding ,what is perceived as the external world is in fact ones internal world.In that respect everyone is you and the you I am referring to is the consciousness that prevades all things. The witness is the witnessed,witnessing itself in relationship,through apparent movement .Everything is appearing "happening "over which no one has control over anything.In ultimate reality nothing is actually happening though thought creates the illusion there is movement.
You simply repeated what he said. The argument about force was canceled in his argument and yours as well. Whether you think it's not a choice or not an action, it's still null. So we go to the other argument, again, about wants. Why do we want to want to do something. It's out of your control. You haven't tackeled the main argument/argued free will.
I thought it was kinda funny to see US bills displayed like it's a rarity, but then I save every foreign coin I come across lol.
inhalefarts Man... just in 3 wks.
This didn’t age well :(
Brilliant video. Got me scared as shit when you said "You can do what you want, but not control what you want" bec that rings true (we do say "ugly truth" or "sad but true"). I always tell people "Our preferences will be as they are, they don't have make sense to other people just make sense to us. But even if they don't make sense to us they will still be our choice, our bias, our inexplicable preference." Thanks for the video.
Not only can I stop wanting something (by always pushing away the thoughts about it and by thinking of something better instead), I can also choose to not act upon my wants. Both are acts of free will.
@Rexlion You not acting on your wants is a thing you are doing not out of your own free will. You are only not doing what you want, because you want to