Exactly. I mean we are talking EEG here in this particular experiment, not even fMRI. Those signals mean basically nothing, or in other words could mean pretty much anything. It just shows an increase of electrical activity in the brain prior to consciously choosing to move your hand. And also the idea that decisions we make “subconsciously” are not decisions “we” make “freely” is itself one I would debate. The relationship between controlled and automatic processing (conscious and subconscious thinking) is very interrelated, they both affect each other and shape each other and both of them are a part of who we are. It’s not like our subconscious brain is removed from us or represents something arbitrary and random about us. For example, by consciously learning to drive and deciding to be a good driver, we will eventually develop automatic responses consistent with that. On a more complex level, the decisions we consciously take about the kind of person we want to be will become a part of that structure and framework which makes up our automatic processing, and a lot of our impulses will be generated from there. Sure there are other (instinctual, biological, etc) influences that will arise from our subconscious brain but like Trent mentions here, we still have quite a bit of power to respond to those thoughts one way or another, to a greater or lesser extent depending on the situation. As Catholics we believe that our thoughts can come from three sources: ourselves (including our subconscious selves), the enemy, and our guardian angels or the Holy Spirit etc. The fact that not all thoughts that arise in our heads are thoughts we consciously choose to think of is absolutely consistent with Catholic thought.
A couple things, If i am only matter, how can I observe myself existing? How is there a "location" to my consciousness? Also, if everything is material then one day (in theory) we could predict everything that is going to happen. If that's the case, we could predict what we (ourselves) would do in the future. Once we know what we will do, could we not WILL to do the opposite of what the equation gives us?
Hi, I'm a fan on the Counsel of Trent and an atheist, materialist, and hater of free will. I'm kidding about hating free will but I do find myself falling more on the side of determinism and compatibilism (beings with rational brains have "will", but perhaps not "libertarian free will"). At the beginning of your conversation with Cy, Trent, you mentioned that atheists tend to deny free will AND they are naturalists. I'm interested, do you hold the belief that, if naturalism is true, then free will *necessarily* cannot exist? Further, do you hold that, if free will exists, then naturalism is *necessarily* false? Also, at about 10:30 into the video, did you mention that you are an incompatabilist (sp?) in terms of free will existing alongside determinism? (Nevermind, at 15:00 you do say that you're an incompatabilist) I find myself a compatibilist, because I'm not sure how the fact that events are determined is tied to the belief that free will cannot exist? That belief seems like a non-sequitur. How do incompatabilists determine that "will" cannot exist if events are determined? Or, why is the fact "I couldn't have done otherwise" incompatible with "I did what I willed to do". Those two statements don't strike me as conflicting. And then lastly, you ended your show with the following: "I believe that free will exists because (1) its intuitive and (2) moral facts exist". You just explained how intuition is not a reliable pathway to truth, with the flat earth example, and there wasn't enough time to discuss moral facts in any detail. Earlier, you sounded like "Moral facts exist because its intuitive that they exist". I'm sure that you have more sophisticated reasons then that (30 minutes isn't long enough to really dig in), but given this, it seems far more honest to be agnostic about the existence of free will? Anyway, big fan, just wanted to engage a little in the comments, thanks!
I agree. I think Trent's argument from intuition is poor. The obviousness of moral responsibility in the way we view it now is due to being surrounded by a culture that assumes morality is about arbitrary rights and wrongs. Historically, this wasn't the case. And if we used the moral intuition of imperfect humans to attempt to describe a perfect morality, we'd be dumb. There is a long line of "compatibilist" Catholic philosophers. Of course, they wouldn't have referred to themselves this way, as this dilemma only became an issue in the 17 century and later. But their conception of "free will" is so highly different than our modern one that it removes the problem entirely. Anselm's "On Free Will" is a good example of a Catholic thinker who would be classified as a compatibilist today. It's a pretty easy read if you would care to get an idea of a more rigorous Catholic view of free will. It's also really cool your an atheist who watches Trent. I always appreciate people who enjoy listening to those from the other side. I personally enjoy Alex O'Connor myself.
@@josephmoya5098 Regarding the first paragraph, yeah. I know plenty of people who say that its "written on their hearts" that gay relationships are immoral, and these people grew up in religious areas. I also know lots of people who would say that its intuitive that gay relationships aren't immoral, since these people grew up in secular areas. There appears to be nothing intuitive about the immorality or lack thereof in gay relationships. Second paragraph: I haven't read any Anselm or any other Catholic compatibilists, thanks for the recommendation. Trent made it sound like Catholics must be imcompatibilists though? Third: Yeah, and even "atheist" is a funny word. I am not one who insists that no gods exist, I'm just not convinced that any Gods do exist. So, some people would probably label me Agnostic, and I am totally happy with that label too. I don't get hung up on labels, I just like to explore ideas. I think its cool that you like exploring ideas too
I don't know if you are interested in delving deeper into it, but I feel like there's actually a lot of evidence supporting the existence and reality of God, the Bible, and Jesus Christ. For example, there's the scientifically unexplainable Eucharistic miracles (TH-cam search “Inspired By Carlo Acutis - Scientific Evidence of Eucharistic Miracles”), the confirmed apparitions and related miracles of Mother Mary throughout history (Our Lady of Fatima, Lourdes, Guadalupe, Akita, and Kibeho for example), the incorrupt bodies of the Saints and medical miracles performed by the Saints for generations, the scientifically-unexplainable Tilma from Our Lady of Guadalupe, The Miracle of the Sun at Fatima (approx. 70k people, both atheist and religious, saw it and Mother Mary predicted the end of WWI and the beginning of WWII during the apparition), The Our Lady of Kibeho apparition in which Mother Mary predicted the Rwandan Genocide, the near-death experiences in which people are pronounced dead on the operating table, float above their bodies, and can hear/see everything the doctors are saying/doing before entering a new realm in Heaven and meeting Jesus....The list goes on and on. But I saw that you were atheist, so I was just curious if you've ever delved into these examples before. Just wanted to share in case you haven't heard of them! Best.
@@kevinoconnor3859 Regarding the first paragraph, it goes deeper than intuitions of single rights and wrongs. The entire concept of morality used to be viewed as the process of making a person complete, (somewhat analogous to the concept of self-actualization today). Only after the 14th century do you begin to see a move to seeing morality primarily as questions of what is right in a given circumstance, shifting morality from a quality of a person to the quality of a single act. Second paragraph: I think Trent's view is a common mistake. A certain philosophical school became very popular after the 14th century. It pushed an idea that morality was primarily arbitrary rules pushed on us by God, instead of something innate in God's nature. Morality was then a choice between God's will and your own. This is why Catholics today can't conceive of moral culpability unless you are free to choose without determination. If God's will is arbitrary, and morality is about a single act, then you can't be "punished" unless it's completely your fault. Historically, Catholics viewed it more as self-harm. Being immoral was corrupting yourself. The corruption was its own punishment. Catholics will still say things connected to this idea, like "God doesn't send you to hell, you do," but they largely lack a moral grounding for this. Many serious modern Catholic moral philosophers and theologians reject this view of morality and freedom. It just hasn't caught on with the average person yet. Also if you read Anslem, he is writing in a genre popular at the time, akin to how Plato wrote the republic. It is a discourse between characters, which is easy to read, but strange to a modern reader. And remember his concern isn't directly this question of determinism vs. libertarianism, because no one has posed it at the time. He is also discussing angels and God, so forgive him that as well. The important thing is it is clear that one of the most influential philosophers in Catholic history didn't believe freedom was the choice of good vs. bad.
@@a.r.4093 Hi James, I'm actually ex-Catholic, so I am familiar with everything you mentioned. I used to be an FSSP Catholic, I was an MC at High Masses, I went to an FSSP school where I took apologetics classes, religion classes, Latin, the works. You mentioned a bunch of miracle claims. I've examined them and I am not convinced by any of them that the supernatural does indeed exist. We can pick any examples you would like to do a deep dive on, but I'll pick two in particular: The Tilma of Guadeloupe - the Catholic Church has never been examined using the full range of tools available today to historians. That alone is suspicious. Secondly, multiple studies, from 1979, 1982 and 2002, all suggest that the image on the tilma is made by pigments and that it has been retouched since the original painting was made. There is nothing supernatural about the Tilma. The Miracle of the Sun at Fatima - we do not have even close to 70,000 individual accounts from people who claim to have seen the sun dance. Catholic newspapers printed that the whole crowd saw the sun dance, but that is evidently not the case. There were Catholic priests there who claim to have witnessed nothing at all. Further, the crowd included tons of people with cameras, yet not a single picture of the sun doing anything out of the ordinary was captured. By occam's razor, I will reject the greater miracle in both cases. Again, if you'd like to deep dive on any, I am most certainly interested in talking more.
Big issue with harris light bolt argument is we wouldn't lock up lightning and earthquakes we'd give them the death penalty specifically because they are not free agents and are destructive.
I thought this was going to be a video on mental health and trying to figure out the difference between illness and sin, so I was a bit disappointed that I was wrong, but it's still a great video
On the readiness-potential: even if it comes from the subconscious, it is still me. And so much of our motion is subconscious or has subconscious mechanisms. The next thing is: The subconscious is an integral part of us - where do thoughts and ideas come from? Also something that would be interesting to me: If we can't even understand and account for consciousness in a materialistic framework, why do we think that the subconscious works materialistically, if we even understand it less?
I watched the original airing of this CA episode on May 11 and made my own video in response to it: th-cam.com/video/kTE1fYL7PvA/w-d-xo.html I am a fellow Catholic who just so happens to have an education in physiological psychology, which is rooted in neuroscience. And though I am certainly not the final authority on this subject, I hope my response adds value to the debate. And the bottom line is, YES, we have *freewill* :-)
Hi Trent, if not for the findings of quantum physics (e.g. entanglement, superposition), it would be possible to take determinism seriously in the realm of the ('dead') matter governed by the entropy, but not the (biological) life with its structure and development, at least partly resist entropy, and its very core feature is to 'will' - to procure what is needed / missing. But it goes even deeper: Veritasium has a new episode "This is Math's Fatal Flaw " that shows a little-known consensus among theoretical mathematicians that the math is incomplete, undecidable and, perhaps, inconsistent. On the philosophical side: can any will be non-free? Or, in other words, isn't the phrase "free will" redundant? Because if it's not free / imposed, how can it be "will" in principle? I know it sounds silly, but any will is "free". The critics seem to speak about a completely random, irrational or unpredictable choices. If that is the case, then the good news is that the universe is full of those.
TLDR: The modern debate over "free will" stems from an anti-scientific and anti-rational philosophy foreign to early Christianity. This philosophy is argued against by saints, namely Anselm. Free will is not the ability to choose something in a undetermined way, but the ability to act as you desire and accomplish what you act for. The modern issu of free will is really the issue of a Nominalistic understanding of free will versus a classical understanding. Anslem addresses this in his treatise on Free Will. The conceptual nominalism of Ockham, which has become the norm, was created specifically because Ockham disliked the discussions surrounding God's nature occuring in the scholastic schools at the time. In his view, it limited God's absolute freedom to do as he pleases. He directly wanted to attack so called "Greek Determinsim" which had, in his view, infected Christianity. For Ockham, God's free will must be undertermined, and therefore, our free will must be undetermined. For him, God's will preceded everything, had no cause, including God's own nature. Nominalists took this so far as to say that if God's free will commanded you to hate Him, it would be good to do so. From this idea, we get most of our modern concept of morality. Everything is based on doing what God says, and has nothing to do with what you are or who God is. In my mind, however, if "free will" is the ability to not be determined by what you are, then free will does not exist. Remember that for Ockham, God's free will is not determined by God's nature. But if God's nature is existence, as is traditionally claimed, then God's free will, an existant thing, does not come prior to His nature. Or take a simpler example, can God choose to do evil? I, and I think most honest people, would say no. This is a limit on God's freedom. He cannot choose to do evil because he is, by nature, good. His nature determines his will. (Ockham realized this and actually said God could choose evil.) If God's will is determined, then I cannot some how be less determined than that which is without cause. So I also have a determined will. So a reply to an Atheist regarding free will is to simply say, that conception of free will as being perfectly undetermined doesn't exist either for him or I. A different meaning to "free will" is necessary. The classical view, which can be associated with Catholic thinkers like Aquinas, Anselm, Augustine, Basil, Gregory Theologos and non Catholic thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, and their respective schools, is that will is an aspect of our nature, cause by our nature. For them, will the is term given for that which is internal to us which causes us to act. It is "free" in as much as it can fully accomplish it's act as it desires to do so. (I may want to fly, I may will to fly, but I am not free to fly.) In this way, God is the most free being, always fully accomplishing what he wills. Humans are most free when we act virtuously, because only virtuous acts accomplish the real desire of the will, happiness and unity with God. But the will is determined by previous factors outside oneself and within oneself. In this class of determining factors would be things like "original sin." It influences what we want, what we will, but is not an internal cause. It is therfore, not a free cause, a cause internal to myself, internal to my system. This fixes a lot of issues, including what it means to be most free in God. It is only in God that I can actually accomplish all that I desire in a truely beautiful way. So without unity with God in some degree, there is no freedom. Sorry for the super long reply, just thought it would be useful.
@@realcosmicmystic Good question. Morality overall takes a very different form. The way we typically frame moral responsibility falls apart. This is because morality ceases to be punitive. From a classical view, it is about the intactness of your own human nature. From the Christian view, it is about the intactness of the image of God. There is no longer a question of whether it is fair for you to be punished for an action, which is really what we mean when we say someone is morally responsible. Instead, every action you take affects your overall morality, your active intactness, or, as Aristotle would say, your virtuosity or viscousness. Moral actions build moral people. Immoral actions tear down the moral person. In this way, you are morally responsible for all your actions, even those which you perform without knowledge, because they all harm you naturally. This is because every action you take, every thought you have, affects your person. Of course, actions taken with deliberation and intent affect you much more than indeliberate actions do, but indeliberate actions still affect you. This is still seen today in the Christian East, where you routinely ask forgiveness of sins "committed knowingly or unknowingly." It is also the basis of the Christian West's concept of venial and mortal sins. I used to teach my youth group that the way to envision moral responsibility was to see sin not as breaking God's rules, but as self-harm. If you cut off your hand unintentionally, you still lose a hand. You still suffer, whether you wanted to or not. In the same way, if you hate someone, for even a second, without really fully realizing it, you still tear down your love for them and, therefore, your love for yourself and your love for God. In reality, it is not your individual sins you need worry about, but your overall brokenness which these sins contribute to. This is why John says "Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin (singular - hamartian in the greek) of the world." For it is not an action God came to take away, nor a set of actions, but the entire brokenness of the world. And so you are not responsible for anything, in the sense that it is somehow fair to punish you. If that were true, everyone would be doomed. But you are responsible in the sense of causal responsibility for the destruction of yourself, even more so than with a punitive sense of responsibility. For this reason, Christ answers Peter's despairing question of who can enter the kingdom by saying, "For man it is impossible." But he concludes his answer with God's eternal justice, as our Lord reveals by saying, "yet with God, all things are possible." And that is the truly important thing. God Bless. Sorry for the super long reply again.
@@josephmoya5098 thanks for this, Joseph. So I suppose we should dispense with the idea of Hell then? Perhaps a purgatory that removes agent guilt is sufficient. What do you think?
“The determinist does not believe in appealing to the will, but he does believe in changing the environment. He must not say to the sinner, "Go and sin no more," because the sinner cannot help it. But he can put him in boiling oil; for boiling oil is an environment. Considered as a figure, therefore, the materialist has the fantastic outline of the figure of the madman. Both take up a position at once unanswerable and intolerable.” -GK Chesterton
Everything makes sense once you understand the difference between the Logos of Heraclitus and the Logos ofJohn. Both are within us, but only the latter is independent of the violent sacred at the anthropological origins of humanity and human cognition.
"If we don't have free will, it doesn't matter if they find out, and you can't stop it anyway, you have no choice." This is a misunderstanding, Cy. The argument is that a person's behavior is determined by forces outside of their control, not that a person's behavior has no impact on the world. If people find out that they don't have free will, that's a force outside their control that influences their behavior. What they do after they find out they don't have free will STILL has impact on the world. And Trent just gave you empirical examples of that, where people treat each other more cynically after they hear expressions of doubt about free will. If your intuition was right, that "it doesn't matter if they find out," then scientists wouldn't have been able to obtain these results. So of course it matters if people find out. If they went on blissfully unaware of the supposed nonexistence of free will, they would behave differently than they would if they found out. The question is not whether it matters if they find out, nor is it whether you can choose to hide it or not hide it. This question of whether belief in free will is useful to humans is completely independent of the question of whether free will really exists in our universe. For example, the belief in free will could be important for human flourishing, and still be an illusion. And conversely, the belief in free will could be irrelevant or even incoherent and incomprehensible as Sam Harris believes, yet still exist in some physically paradoxical but logically necessary way. We seem to behave as if free will exists, even though we can't find it with any scientific apparatus. Free will may be necessary for human consciousness, and yet simultaneously be impossible for an impartial, rational, intelligent human to believe in. Of course, according to non-libertarians, the idea is that there is one canonical history of the universe, and we are not free to change it. Either we're going to hide the absence of free will from the people, or we're not. The "choice" has already been made for us by the initial conditions of the universe and the laws of physics. But we still have to play our part in unfolding that history. We're not agents in this framework at all, so we couldn't choose to abdicate our roles in that history. The choice has been made for us in the sense that we're going to do what we're going to do, based on a chain of prior causes. Becoming aware that we only _observe_ our choices, we don't actually _make_ them, doesn't mean that we all just stop thinking and acting. The fact that our thoughts and actions are ordered by forces outside our control does not mean that we stop performing them, nor does it mean that they have no effect on reality. In this view, Adolf Hitler was destined to kill millions of people. That doesn't mean he could have just frozen up and never got out of bed for the rest of his life, and he still would have wound up killing millions of people. If Hitler had decided to stay in bed for the rest of his life, that would have meant he was not destined to kill millions of people after all. Likewise, in the scenario where we try to hide the absence of free will from people, we are destined to have this conversation, destined to come to a conclusion about it, and destined to go through the motions of trying to hide the absence of free will from people. Therefore, our having hid the absence of free will from the public is causally responsible for what those people end up doing. So in a very real sense we still _caused_ people to behave morally, even though we could not have chosen otherwise. One of the reasons it took me so long to come to Christ is because so many theists completely miss the point on this issue. It's like they just can't wrap their mind around the difference between choice and cause. I get that it's a very difficult and highbrow question, but it is THE most consequential question we can answer with respect to religion. Obviously there are more important questions, like whether God exists, but this is a question we can empirically or at least rationally come to a very solid conclusion on, and if Sam Harris were correct about it, it would totally disprove an absolutely essential, orthodox doctrine of Christianity. So we can't just throw up our hands and make arguments like "if free will doesn't exist then why are you arguing against free will?" That's not only a non sequitur, but it makes atheists even more hostile to the theist position. It sounds like you're trying to dodge the question. Reminds me of Bill O'Reilly's "Tide goes in, tide goes out. You can't explain that" remark. I used to be totally convinced of Sam Harris' position on free will. Not because I chose to believe it, not because I wanted to believe it, but because I literally could not fathom how a free choice could be made. Everything that happens in my brain obeys the laws of physics. Therefore, for every conceivable choice I could make, either classical physics determines a single possible outcome, or the uncertainty of quantum physics determines a probabilistic outcome. Either way you slice it, my ego, my perception, my "observer mind" is cut off from my actions. I walked myself into a logic well that I couldn't lift myself out of. Similar to how some people can't grasp the distinction between cause and choice, I couldn't grasp that such a thing as "choice" was even a coherent concept in a universe that appears to obey laws modeled by mathematics. So it was really my failure of imagination that led me to that conclusion. It was almost a self-fulfilling prophesy in a way, because when people tried to convince me of free will, I _wanted_ to be convinced but I couldn't. I accepted my inability to _choose_ to believe as just further evidence of my lack of free will. I felt incapable of choosing to believe in free will, or choosing to believe in God, similar to how I'm incapable of choosing to believe that 2 + 2 = 5. I took this as proof that I am not free to defy reason. I can only believe something as a consequence of reason and evidence. That is, I believed that the very concept of _faith_ was a fantasy. That is, what we call belief is equivalent to what we call knowledge. It's just an opinion you hold based on observations and logic occurring in your brain. I was definitely wrong about that, there is a distinction between faith, belief, knowledge, and opinion. But from my materialistic point of view, I pretty much conflated all of them as merely states of the brain that represent abstract ideas. We have varying degrees of certainty about how closely those ideas correspond to reality, but those levels of certainty are outside of our control in exactly the same way as the ideas themselves. If someone tells me about an idea for the first time, my thinking about it is involuntary. So why wouldn't my belief in it be involuntary? If I'm presented with enough evidence and reasoning for it, then my brain develops a degree of confidence in the idea, independent of my choice. So, I had a pretty coherent view about those 4 things. For me, faith was just an idea that I have confidence in, but the confidence is only justified by non-empirical evidence or bad reasoning. Opinion and belief were basically equivalent, just slightly more rational and empirical. The main difference just being the "genre" of the idea. We often call religious opinions "beliefs," but with respect to secular ideas the words are interchangeable. As for knowledge, it just represents a high degree of confidence in an idea. This view makes a lot of sense to atheists and it's very difficult to pull someone out of it. I think I only stopped accepting this view after I was already convinced that God exists. I first had to come to Christ through historical evidence, then accept God as a logical implication. I investigated the philosophical arguments mainly to prove to myself that God is not impossible. So if God is implied by Jesus and God is not logically or empirically demonstrated to be impossible, then it's reasonable to believe in God, even if philosophy doesn't definitively prove God's existence. And if God exists, and if even a fraction of what the Bible claims is true, then free will must exist, irrespective of how incomprehensible it is to us.
If you didn’t have free will and locked people up for society sake....why would you imprison and not just kill that person? Seems like spending money on incarceration would also be bad for society. Free will is a thing for sure because we are moral beings...
is an addict free to not be addicted? Everyone knows someone who wants to quit an addiction. Yet cannot resist the temptation. I think drugs shed a lot of light on the free will debate.
By praying 4 Rosaries a day every day for months, God and Mother Mary helped me overcome a past addiction. All things are possible with God. Obviously everyone's situation is different. But at the end of the day, I genuinely believe that God fills the void and brings peace and healing. I highly recommend that people struggling with any addiction genuinely seek Him and make a genuine effort to fortify a relationship with Him. Saying 4 Rosaries a day is life-changing, and I am living proof of that.
People seem to mistakenly equate "free" with "easy". Just because it may be difficult to do what is right doesn't mean one can't nevertheless freely choose to do it.
Lol. Trent often brings up true cosmology, Geocentrism, I E flat earth. The freemasonic heliocentric model is only one way to explain what we see and experience. Geocentric cosmology works just as well. The model you were taught in government school doesn’t better explain what we see and experience. It’s what you’ve been taught so you believe it. But it’s not true. And it’s never been proven. Our scriptural evidence about what the earth looks like is not faulty, it is true. What our ancient Jewish brothers and sisters believed was true. What all people through all time until atheistic freemasons pushed this model on us - is true. The only thing NASA ever provides you with as “evidence” is CGI videos - and you buy it all. Hook line and sinker. Check out the free documentary LEVEL. Ps. There are tons of trolls online, disinformation specialist. Like the “flat Earth Society,“ for example. Those people don’t actually believe in flat earth cosmology. They are a sigh up to make people look stupid. That’s why government officials always mention it.
Very interesting debate. Thanks for sharing. This is a time where philosophical and theological clarity is much needed.
I learned something here- 'doing something is not same as noticing I'm doing something'
“imagine if you have to think of everything you do, ud go insane” Explains a lot for me.
Excellent subject! Very pertinent to contemporary culture for the personal benefit of lost souls.
It also assumes they have properly attributed the signals they are detecting
Exactly. I mean we are talking EEG here in this particular experiment, not even fMRI. Those signals mean basically nothing, or in other words could mean pretty much anything. It just shows an increase of electrical activity in the brain prior to consciously choosing to move your hand. And also the idea that decisions we make “subconsciously” are not decisions “we” make “freely” is itself one I would debate. The relationship between controlled and automatic processing (conscious and subconscious thinking) is very interrelated, they both affect each other and shape each other and both of them are a part of who we are. It’s not like our subconscious brain is removed from us or represents something arbitrary and random about us. For example, by consciously learning to drive and deciding to be a good driver, we will eventually develop automatic responses consistent with that. On a more complex level, the decisions we consciously take about the kind of person we want to be will become a part of that structure and framework which makes up our automatic processing, and a lot of our impulses will be generated from there. Sure there are other (instinctual, biological, etc) influences that will arise from our subconscious brain but like Trent mentions here, we still have quite a bit of power to respond to those thoughts one way or another, to a greater or lesser extent depending on the situation. As Catholics we believe that our thoughts can come from three sources: ourselves (including our subconscious selves), the enemy, and our guardian angels or the Holy Spirit etc. The fact that not all thoughts that arise in our heads are thoughts we consciously choose to think of is absolutely consistent with Catholic thought.
Quote of the episode goes to Cy Kellet: “Cuz it’s chunky!”
LOL’d 23:36
This is very helpful
I never thought of those experiments that way
A couple things, If i am only matter, how can I observe myself existing? How is there a "location" to my consciousness? Also, if everything is material then one day (in theory) we could predict everything that is going to happen. If that's the case, we could predict what we (ourselves) would do in the future. Once we know what we will do, could we not WILL to do the opposite of what the equation gives us?
instead of using location, I think a better term might be "oneness"
Mostly this made my brain fog over.. was that my free will or evil clouding me from understanding? 🤔😆
Hi, I'm a fan on the Counsel of Trent and an atheist, materialist, and hater of free will. I'm kidding about hating free will but I do find myself falling more on the side of determinism and compatibilism (beings with rational brains have "will", but perhaps not "libertarian free will"). At the beginning of your conversation with Cy, Trent, you mentioned that atheists tend to deny free will AND they are naturalists. I'm interested, do you hold the belief that, if naturalism is true, then free will *necessarily* cannot exist? Further, do you hold that, if free will exists, then naturalism is *necessarily* false?
Also, at about 10:30 into the video, did you mention that you are an incompatabilist (sp?) in terms of free will existing alongside determinism? (Nevermind, at 15:00 you do say that you're an incompatabilist) I find myself a compatibilist, because I'm not sure how the fact that events are determined is tied to the belief that free will cannot exist? That belief seems like a non-sequitur. How do incompatabilists determine that "will" cannot exist if events are determined? Or, why is the fact "I couldn't have done otherwise" incompatible with "I did what I willed to do". Those two statements don't strike me as conflicting.
And then lastly, you ended your show with the following: "I believe that free will exists because (1) its intuitive and (2) moral facts exist". You just explained how intuition is not a reliable pathway to truth, with the flat earth example, and there wasn't enough time to discuss moral facts in any detail. Earlier, you sounded like "Moral facts exist because its intuitive that they exist". I'm sure that you have more sophisticated reasons then that (30 minutes isn't long enough to really dig in), but given this, it seems far more honest to be agnostic about the existence of free will?
Anyway, big fan, just wanted to engage a little in the comments, thanks!
I agree. I think Trent's argument from intuition is poor. The obviousness of moral responsibility in the way we view it now is due to being surrounded by a culture that assumes morality is about arbitrary rights and wrongs. Historically, this wasn't the case. And if we used the moral intuition of imperfect humans to attempt to describe a perfect morality, we'd be dumb.
There is a long line of "compatibilist" Catholic philosophers. Of course, they wouldn't have referred to themselves this way, as this dilemma only became an issue in the 17 century and later. But their conception of "free will" is so highly different than our modern one that it removes the problem entirely. Anselm's "On Free Will" is a good example of a Catholic thinker who would be classified as a compatibilist today. It's a pretty easy read if you would care to get an idea of a more rigorous Catholic view of free will.
It's also really cool your an atheist who watches Trent. I always appreciate people who enjoy listening to those from the other side. I personally enjoy Alex O'Connor myself.
@@josephmoya5098 Regarding the first paragraph, yeah. I know plenty of people who say that its "written on their hearts" that gay relationships are immoral, and these people grew up in religious areas. I also know lots of people who would say that its intuitive that gay relationships aren't immoral, since these people grew up in secular areas. There appears to be nothing intuitive about the immorality or lack thereof in gay relationships.
Second paragraph: I haven't read any Anselm or any other Catholic compatibilists, thanks for the recommendation. Trent made it sound like Catholics must be imcompatibilists though?
Third: Yeah, and even "atheist" is a funny word. I am not one who insists that no gods exist, I'm just not convinced that any Gods do exist. So, some people would probably label me Agnostic, and I am totally happy with that label too. I don't get hung up on labels, I just like to explore ideas. I think its cool that you like exploring ideas too
I don't know if you are interested in delving deeper into it, but I feel like there's actually a lot of evidence supporting the existence and reality of God, the Bible, and Jesus Christ. For example, there's the scientifically unexplainable Eucharistic miracles (TH-cam search “Inspired By Carlo Acutis - Scientific Evidence of Eucharistic Miracles”), the confirmed apparitions and related miracles of Mother Mary throughout history (Our Lady of Fatima, Lourdes, Guadalupe, Akita, and Kibeho for example), the incorrupt bodies of the Saints and medical miracles performed by the Saints for generations, the scientifically-unexplainable Tilma from Our Lady of Guadalupe, The Miracle of the Sun at Fatima (approx. 70k people, both atheist and religious, saw it and Mother Mary predicted the end of WWI and the beginning of WWII during the apparition), The Our Lady of Kibeho apparition in which Mother Mary predicted the Rwandan Genocide, the near-death experiences in which people are pronounced dead on the operating table, float above their bodies, and can hear/see everything the doctors are saying/doing before entering a new realm in Heaven and meeting Jesus....The list goes on and on. But I saw that you were atheist, so I was just curious if you've ever delved into these examples before. Just wanted to share in case you haven't heard of them! Best.
@@kevinoconnor3859 Regarding the first paragraph, it goes deeper than intuitions of single rights and wrongs. The entire concept of morality used to be viewed as the process of making a person complete, (somewhat analogous to the concept of self-actualization today). Only after the 14th century do you begin to see a move to seeing morality primarily as questions of what is right in a given circumstance, shifting morality from a quality of a person to the quality of a single act.
Second paragraph: I think Trent's view is a common mistake. A certain philosophical school became very popular after the 14th century. It pushed an idea that morality was primarily arbitrary rules pushed on us by God, instead of something innate in God's nature. Morality was then a choice between God's will and your own. This is why Catholics today can't conceive of moral culpability unless you are free to choose without determination. If God's will is arbitrary, and morality is about a single act, then you can't be "punished" unless it's completely your fault. Historically, Catholics viewed it more as self-harm. Being immoral was corrupting yourself. The corruption was its own punishment. Catholics will still say things connected to this idea, like "God doesn't send you to hell, you do," but they largely lack a moral grounding for this. Many serious modern Catholic moral philosophers and theologians reject this view of morality and freedom. It just hasn't caught on with the average person yet.
Also if you read Anslem, he is writing in a genre popular at the time, akin to how Plato wrote the republic. It is a discourse between characters, which is easy to read, but strange to a modern reader. And remember his concern isn't directly this question of determinism vs. libertarianism, because no one has posed it at the time.
He is also discussing angels and God, so forgive him that as well. The important thing is it is clear that one of the most influential philosophers in Catholic history didn't believe freedom was the choice of good vs. bad.
@@a.r.4093 Hi James, I'm actually ex-Catholic, so I am familiar with everything you mentioned. I used to be an FSSP Catholic, I was an MC at High Masses, I went to an FSSP school where I took apologetics classes, religion classes, Latin, the works.
You mentioned a bunch of miracle claims. I've examined them and I am not convinced by any of them that the supernatural does indeed exist. We can pick any examples you would like to do a deep dive on, but I'll pick two in particular:
The Tilma of Guadeloupe - the Catholic Church has never been examined using the full range of tools available today to historians. That alone is suspicious. Secondly, multiple studies, from 1979, 1982 and 2002, all suggest that the image on the tilma is made by pigments and that it has been retouched since the original painting was made. There is nothing supernatural about the Tilma.
The Miracle of the Sun at Fatima - we do not have even close to 70,000 individual accounts from people who claim to have seen the sun dance. Catholic newspapers printed that the whole crowd saw the sun dance, but that is evidently not the case. There were Catholic priests there who claim to have witnessed nothing at all. Further, the crowd included tons of people with cameras, yet not a single picture of the sun doing anything out of the ordinary was captured.
By occam's razor, I will reject the greater miracle in both cases.
Again, if you'd like to deep dive on any, I am most certainly interested in talking more.
They can't stop debunking and debunking anything,this self righteous attitude towards finding the ultimate truth.
Big issue with harris light bolt argument is we wouldn't lock up lightning and earthquakes we'd give them the death penalty specifically because they are not free agents and are destructive.
I thought this was going to be a video on mental health and trying to figure out the difference between illness and sin, so I was a bit disappointed that I was wrong, but it's still a great video
According to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle you can determine whether you have Free Will or Free Won't but you can't know both at the same time.
On the readiness-potential: even if it comes from the subconscious, it is still me. And so much of our motion is subconscious or has subconscious mechanisms. The next thing is: The subconscious is an integral part of us - where do thoughts and ideas come from?
Also something that would be interesting to me: If we can't even understand and account for consciousness in a materialistic framework, why do we think that the subconscious works materialistically, if we even understand it less?
100%
because it is closer to the metal perhaps. A reflex.
I watched the original airing of this CA episode on May 11 and made my own video in response to it: th-cam.com/video/kTE1fYL7PvA/w-d-xo.html I am a fellow Catholic who just so happens to have an education in physiological psychology, which is rooted in neuroscience. And though I am certainly not the final authority on this subject, I hope my response adds value to the debate. And the bottom line is, YES, we have *freewill* :-)
Hi Trent, if not for the findings of quantum physics (e.g. entanglement, superposition), it would be possible to take determinism seriously in the realm of the ('dead') matter governed by the entropy, but not the (biological) life with its structure and development, at least partly resist entropy, and its very core feature is to 'will' - to procure what is needed / missing. But it goes even deeper: Veritasium has a new episode "This is Math's Fatal Flaw
" that shows a little-known consensus among theoretical mathematicians that the math is incomplete, undecidable and, perhaps, inconsistent.
On the philosophical side: can any will be non-free? Or, in other words, isn't the phrase "free will" redundant? Because if it's not free / imposed, how can it be "will" in principle? I know it sounds silly, but any will is "free". The critics seem to speak about a completely random, irrational or unpredictable choices. If that is the case, then the good news is that the universe is full of those.
'St John Bosco and Confidence in Our Lady' on TH-cam
TLDR: The modern debate over "free will" stems from an anti-scientific and anti-rational philosophy foreign to early Christianity. This philosophy is argued against by saints, namely Anselm. Free will is not the ability to choose something in a undetermined way, but the ability to act as you desire and accomplish what you act for.
The modern issu of free will is really the issue of a Nominalistic understanding of free will versus a classical understanding. Anslem addresses this in his treatise on Free Will. The conceptual nominalism of Ockham, which has become the norm, was created specifically because Ockham disliked the discussions surrounding God's nature occuring in the scholastic schools at the time. In his view, it limited God's absolute freedom to do as he pleases. He directly wanted to attack so called "Greek Determinsim" which had, in his view, infected Christianity. For Ockham, God's free will must be undertermined, and therefore, our free will must be undetermined. For him, God's will preceded everything, had no cause, including God's own nature. Nominalists took this so far as to say that if God's free will commanded you to hate Him, it would be good to do so. From this idea, we get most of our modern concept of morality. Everything is based on doing what God says, and has nothing to do with what you are or who God is.
In my mind, however, if "free will" is the ability to not be determined by what you are, then free will does not exist. Remember that for Ockham, God's free will is not determined by God's nature. But if God's nature is existence, as is traditionally claimed, then God's free will, an existant thing, does not come prior to His nature.
Or take a simpler example, can God choose to do evil? I, and I think most honest people, would say no. This is a limit on God's freedom. He cannot choose to do evil because he is, by nature, good. His nature determines his will. (Ockham realized this and actually said God could choose evil.) If God's will is determined, then I cannot some how be less determined than that which is without cause. So I also have a determined will. So a reply to an Atheist regarding free will is to simply say, that conception of free will as being perfectly undetermined doesn't exist either for him or I. A different meaning to "free will" is necessary.
The classical view, which can be associated with Catholic thinkers like Aquinas, Anselm, Augustine, Basil, Gregory Theologos and non Catholic thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, and their respective schools, is that will is an aspect of our nature, cause by our nature. For them, will the is term given for that which is internal to us which causes us to act. It is "free" in as much as it can fully accomplish it's act as it desires to do so. (I may want to fly, I may will to fly, but I am not free to fly.) In this way, God is the most free being, always fully accomplishing what he wills. Humans are most free when we act virtuously, because only virtuous acts accomplish the real desire of the will, happiness and unity with God. But the will is determined by previous factors outside oneself and within oneself. In this class of determining factors would be things like "original sin." It influences what we want, what we will, but is not an internal cause. It is therfore, not a free cause, a cause internal to myself, internal to my system. This fixes a lot of issues, including what it means to be most free in God. It is only in God that I can actually accomplish all that I desire in a truely beautiful way. So without unity with God in some degree, there is no freedom.
Sorry for the super long reply, just thought it would be useful.
Thanks for this. How'd you maintain moral responsibility within this view of free will?
@@realcosmicmystic Good question. Morality overall takes a very different form. The way we typically frame moral responsibility falls apart. This is because morality ceases to be punitive. From a classical view, it is about the intactness of your own human nature. From the Christian view, it is about the intactness of the image of God. There is no longer a question of whether it is fair for you to be punished for an action, which is really what we mean when we say someone is morally responsible.
Instead, every action you take affects your overall morality, your active intactness, or, as Aristotle would say, your virtuosity or viscousness. Moral actions build moral people. Immoral actions tear down the moral person. In this way, you are morally responsible for all your actions, even those which you perform without knowledge, because they all harm you naturally. This is because every action you take, every thought you have, affects your person. Of course, actions taken with deliberation and intent affect you much more than indeliberate actions do, but indeliberate actions still affect you. This is still seen today in the Christian East, where you routinely ask forgiveness of sins "committed knowingly or unknowingly." It is also the basis of the Christian West's concept of venial and mortal sins.
I used to teach my youth group that the way to envision moral responsibility was to see sin not as breaking God's rules, but as self-harm. If you cut off your hand unintentionally, you still lose a hand. You still suffer, whether you wanted to or not. In the same way, if you hate someone, for even a second, without really fully realizing it, you still tear down your love for them and, therefore, your love for yourself and your love for God. In reality, it is not your individual sins you need worry about, but your overall brokenness which these sins contribute to. This is why John says "Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin (singular - hamartian in the greek) of the world." For it is not an action God came to take away, nor a set of actions, but the entire brokenness of the world.
And so you are not responsible for anything, in the sense that it is somehow fair to punish you. If that were true, everyone would be doomed. But you are responsible in the sense of causal responsibility for the destruction of yourself, even more so than with a punitive sense of responsibility. For this reason, Christ answers Peter's despairing question of who can enter the kingdom by saying, "For man it is impossible." But he concludes his answer with God's eternal justice, as our Lord reveals by saying, "yet with God, all things are possible." And that is the truly important thing.
God Bless. Sorry for the super long reply again.
@@josephmoya5098 thanks for this, Joseph. So I suppose we should dispense with the idea of Hell then? Perhaps a purgatory that removes agent guilt is sufficient. What do you think?
Last chapter of free will is pretty clever.
Can you debate Dr. James White on this subject, please? 🙂
“The determinist does not believe in appealing to the will, but he does believe in changing the environment. He must not say to the sinner, "Go and sin no more," because the sinner cannot help it. But he can put him in boiling oil; for boiling oil is an environment. Considered as a figure, therefore, the materialist has the fantastic outline of the figure of the madman. Both take up a position at once unanswerable and intolerable.” -GK Chesterton
Everything makes sense once you understand the difference between the Logos of Heraclitus and the Logos ofJohn. Both are within us, but only the latter is independent of the violent sacred at the anthropological origins of humanity and human cognition.
Good point…taken from Girard?
@@thomasreiter2367 Indeed it is
Trent, I like your shirt in this episode
"If we don't have free will, it doesn't matter if they find out, and you can't stop it anyway, you have no choice." This is a misunderstanding, Cy. The argument is that a person's behavior is determined by forces outside of their control, not that a person's behavior has no impact on the world. If people find out that they don't have free will, that's a force outside their control that influences their behavior. What they do after they find out they don't have free will STILL has impact on the world. And Trent just gave you empirical examples of that, where people treat each other more cynically after they hear expressions of doubt about free will. If your intuition was right, that "it doesn't matter if they find out," then scientists wouldn't have been able to obtain these results.
So of course it matters if people find out. If they went on blissfully unaware of the supposed nonexistence of free will, they would behave differently than they would if they found out. The question is not whether it matters if they find out, nor is it whether you can choose to hide it or not hide it. This question of whether belief in free will is useful to humans is completely independent of the question of whether free will really exists in our universe.
For example, the belief in free will could be important for human flourishing, and still be an illusion. And conversely, the belief in free will could be irrelevant or even incoherent and incomprehensible as Sam Harris believes, yet still exist in some physically paradoxical but logically necessary way. We seem to behave as if free will exists, even though we can't find it with any scientific apparatus. Free will may be necessary for human consciousness, and yet simultaneously be impossible for an impartial, rational, intelligent human to believe in.
Of course, according to non-libertarians, the idea is that there is one canonical history of the universe, and we are not free to change it. Either we're going to hide the absence of free will from the people, or we're not. The "choice" has already been made for us by the initial conditions of the universe and the laws of physics. But we still have to play our part in unfolding that history. We're not agents in this framework at all, so we couldn't choose to abdicate our roles in that history. The choice has been made for us in the sense that we're going to do what we're going to do, based on a chain of prior causes.
Becoming aware that we only _observe_ our choices, we don't actually _make_ them, doesn't mean that we all just stop thinking and acting. The fact that our thoughts and actions are ordered by forces outside our control does not mean that we stop performing them, nor does it mean that they have no effect on reality. In this view, Adolf Hitler was destined to kill millions of people. That doesn't mean he could have just frozen up and never got out of bed for the rest of his life, and he still would have wound up killing millions of people. If Hitler had decided to stay in bed for the rest of his life, that would have meant he was not destined to kill millions of people after all.
Likewise, in the scenario where we try to hide the absence of free will from people, we are destined to have this conversation, destined to come to a conclusion about it, and destined to go through the motions of trying to hide the absence of free will from people. Therefore, our having hid the absence of free will from the public is causally responsible for what those people end up doing. So in a very real sense we still _caused_ people to behave morally, even though we could not have chosen otherwise.
One of the reasons it took me so long to come to Christ is because so many theists completely miss the point on this issue. It's like they just can't wrap their mind around the difference between choice and cause. I get that it's a very difficult and highbrow question, but it is THE most consequential question we can answer with respect to religion.
Obviously there are more important questions, like whether God exists, but this is a question we can empirically or at least rationally come to a very solid conclusion on, and if Sam Harris were correct about it, it would totally disprove an absolutely essential, orthodox doctrine of Christianity. So we can't just throw up our hands and make arguments like "if free will doesn't exist then why are you arguing against free will?" That's not only a non sequitur, but it makes atheists even more hostile to the theist position. It sounds like you're trying to dodge the question. Reminds me of Bill O'Reilly's "Tide goes in, tide goes out. You can't explain that" remark.
I used to be totally convinced of Sam Harris' position on free will. Not because I chose to believe it, not because I wanted to believe it, but because I literally could not fathom how a free choice could be made. Everything that happens in my brain obeys the laws of physics. Therefore, for every conceivable choice I could make, either classical physics determines a single possible outcome, or the uncertainty of quantum physics determines a probabilistic outcome. Either way you slice it, my ego, my perception, my "observer mind" is cut off from my actions.
I walked myself into a logic well that I couldn't lift myself out of. Similar to how some people can't grasp the distinction between cause and choice, I couldn't grasp that such a thing as "choice" was even a coherent concept in a universe that appears to obey laws modeled by mathematics. So it was really my failure of imagination that led me to that conclusion. It was almost a self-fulfilling prophesy in a way, because when people tried to convince me of free will, I _wanted_ to be convinced but I couldn't. I accepted my inability to _choose_ to believe as just further evidence of my lack of free will.
I felt incapable of choosing to believe in free will, or choosing to believe in God, similar to how I'm incapable of choosing to believe that 2 + 2 = 5. I took this as proof that I am not free to defy reason. I can only believe something as a consequence of reason and evidence. That is, I believed that the very concept of _faith_ was a fantasy. That is, what we call belief is equivalent to what we call knowledge. It's just an opinion you hold based on observations and logic occurring in your brain.
I was definitely wrong about that, there is a distinction between faith, belief, knowledge, and opinion. But from my materialistic point of view, I pretty much conflated all of them as merely states of the brain that represent abstract ideas. We have varying degrees of certainty about how closely those ideas correspond to reality, but those levels of certainty are outside of our control in exactly the same way as the ideas themselves. If someone tells me about an idea for the first time, my thinking about it is involuntary. So why wouldn't my belief in it be involuntary? If I'm presented with enough evidence and reasoning for it, then my brain develops a degree of confidence in the idea, independent of my choice.
So, I had a pretty coherent view about those 4 things. For me, faith was just an idea that I have confidence in, but the confidence is only justified by non-empirical evidence or bad reasoning. Opinion and belief were basically equivalent, just slightly more rational and empirical. The main difference just being the "genre" of the idea. We often call religious opinions "beliefs," but with respect to secular ideas the words are interchangeable. As for knowledge, it just represents a high degree of confidence in an idea.
This view makes a lot of sense to atheists and it's very difficult to pull someone out of it. I think I only stopped accepting this view after I was already convinced that God exists. I first had to come to Christ through historical evidence, then accept God as a logical implication. I investigated the philosophical arguments mainly to prove to myself that God is not impossible. So if God is implied by Jesus and God is not logically or empirically demonstrated to be impossible, then it's reasonable to believe in God, even if philosophy doesn't definitively prove God's existence. And if God exists, and if even a fraction of what the Bible claims is true, then free will must exist, irrespective of how incomprehensible it is to us.
😇
St. James said we are drawn away by our own lusts. I JUST made a video about it.....like 10 minutes ago....lol
Therefore ....is BELIEVE in atheism purely circumstantial, just a coincidence without free will being a factor?
It's a paradox. I have Free Will even though I don't will it. Sam Harris does not have Free Will but that's his choice.
If you didn’t have free will and locked people up for society sake....why would you imprison and not just kill that person? Seems like spending money on incarceration would also be bad for society. Free will is a thing for sure because we are moral beings...
Because free will, protecting society say. nothing as to the value of human life.
is an addict free to not be addicted?
Everyone knows someone who wants to quit an addiction.
Yet cannot resist the temptation.
I think drugs shed a lot of light on the free will debate.
There are people who have quit their addictions.
People CAN resist the temptation. Its just very difficult
By praying 4 Rosaries a day every day for months, God and Mother Mary helped me overcome a past addiction. All things are possible with God. Obviously everyone's situation is different. But at the end of the day, I genuinely believe that God fills the void and brings peace and healing. I highly recommend that people struggling with any addiction genuinely seek Him and make a genuine effort to fortify a relationship with Him. Saying 4 Rosaries a day is life-changing, and I am living proof of that.
People seem to mistakenly equate "free" with "easy". Just because it may be difficult to do what is right doesn't mean one can't nevertheless freely choose to do it.
Atheists, just admit that the human brain is limited!
Dennett and Harris are both good.
Idk if free will exists or not.
It certainly seems murky.
Catholic answers' apologist? You're not Catholic apologist?
a Catholic apologist who works for Catholic Answers.com
Lol. Trent often brings up true cosmology, Geocentrism, I E flat earth.
The freemasonic heliocentric model is only one way to explain what we see and experience. Geocentric cosmology works just as well. The model you were taught in government school doesn’t better explain what we see and experience. It’s what you’ve been taught so you believe it. But it’s not true. And it’s never been proven.
Our scriptural evidence about what the earth looks like is not faulty, it is true. What our ancient Jewish brothers and sisters believed was true. What all people through all time until atheistic freemasons pushed this model on us - is true.
The only thing NASA ever provides you with as “evidence” is CGI videos - and you buy it all. Hook line and sinker.
Check out the free documentary LEVEL.
Ps. There are tons of trolls online, disinformation specialist. Like the “flat Earth Society,“ for example. Those people don’t actually believe in flat earth cosmology. They are a sigh up to make people look stupid. That’s why government officials always mention it.
LOL.