I am reminded of a quote from the late Christopher Hitchens (directed towards right wing pundit Sean Hannity): "You strike me as a person who's never heard any of the argements against your position, ever,." Mr. Deutsch is an admitable man, but here he is fighting wind mills.
@@NicolasSchaII yes… when you’re an expert in one specific field, it usually means you’re not well educated in other fields. I wouldn’t ask him his opinion on Van Gogh’s strokes. It’s very clear from every statement he’s made that he is unaware of even the most basic arguments against free will and combatibalism. And if he is aware of them he’s doing a horrendous job explaining or defending himself… he’s just making tautological claims and stating “common sense” definitions that have little to do with the millennia long debate surrounding the nature of free will. Maybe he’s just trying to trivialise it in order to justify his religious belief in free will (and yes, he is religious)… but that’s best case scenario, worst case is he’s got a case of “thinking your expertise in one field also makes you an expert in any vaguely adjacent and related fields as well”
"We have a need for the phrase free will when discussing murder/crime" - no, we have the word "intentionality". We don't need magical words for non-magical phenomenon when we already have appropriate words available.
Free will is not magical, that is just an irrational projection of yours. It is a real emergent phenomenon that is fully compatible with the laws of physics just as interest rates, clouds, extra marital affairs and train cancellations are.
@@transcendentphilosophy Nonsense. Emergence is both compatible with fixed laws of nature and philosophically sound. It is essential for understanding complexity. Philosophers like Mill and Broad provide analytical support for emergence. Deterministic systems often produce emergent properties, such as the flocking behaviour of birds, weather patterns, or the organisation of life from biochemistry. These phenomena are fully determined by the rules governing their components but require higher-level frameworks to analyse effectively. Godel’s incompleteness theorems and Turing’s halting problem prove the limitations of formal systems (such as a mathematical description of the fundamental laws of physics), showing that not all truths can be derived or predicted from foundational rules. The Laplacean demon, if part of the universe, could not predict the future with flawless accuracy as it would need to predict its own output, thus leading to an infinite loop. These insights demonstrate that a fully reductionist account of reality is unachievable, as certain phenomena are irreducibly complex, emergent, or undecidable. Reality must be understood at multiple levels, incorporating foundational principles as well as emergent properties
Omg philosophical materialism is absolute cancer. You guys are demoniacs. To sustain your demoniac nihilistic society destroying soul destroying worldview you need to maintain that free will not only does not exist but is magical superstition. Lmao! But to make a distinction between free will and intentionality makes you look like a fool, because there is no distinction. And intentionality without free will? You may as well claim the entire universe has intentionality also, because it also does not have free will.
Comaptibilism is simply acknowledging that humans have Intent and the ability to deploy that intent. That intent changes the universe and therefore it Exists. Whether you want to call that free will or not is semantic and doesn't really matter.
yes, some free will exists. It is an expression of our inner (biological and mental) life. It is an opportunity to satisfy your needs, to create, to think, to plan and to stick to a plan. Yes, we often overestimate our freedom. However, the presence of freedom cannot be denied. Strong anomalous internal or external influences when we can no longer control the situation at all compared to being normal can only show the limits of our freedom and confirm their presence because we can compare the behaviour of a person who does not have self-control and a person who has self-control.
Will the laws of physics guarantee us the growth of knowledge? if so then einsteins equations / novelty was present at the big bang, given the starting stats and dynamics. if not, then i agree with David here, which i think I do now too, since we don't have the governing laws
@@NicolasSchaII You are a causal system. Your decisions are not free, they are dependent on causes within you, and thus dependent on causes that made you as you are. You could make random decisions, independent of causation, but then they wouldn't be your decisions, they would just be random. When people feel they have free will because their decisions come only from internal causes, they are considering only the present moment, pretending that who they are is self created.
@@robertsouth6971 Nonsense. You are confusing being causally determined with not being free. They mean very different things. Free will has got absolutely nothing to do with whether we are causally determined or not.
Free will is only possible through transcendence out of the skinnerian level of existence you identified with previously. A choice is not a choice unless you can expose your reasoning, and it is not a free choice until you can trace a second order reasoning that justified your lower level logic. Simple example, you get mad at someone. First you think autimatically it's their fault. In argument, you must consider maybe it's my fault. Go beyond fault, you see both people are stressed and hungry, nobody chose anger. But now both can choose to shut up, accept faults and remove blame accusations, and go eat a burger together
Yes, a decision is a cascade of functions across many layers of intent and expected outcomes. Explaining the full mechanistic cascade of a decision does not invalidate the decision. Humans have mechanistic intent and the ability to deploy that intent relative to the capacity of there being (physical access to the world, state of knowledge on the system etc.). Whether we are ok with defining that as "free will" or not is semantic and probably not very important.
free will is possible through our possibility to think, to plan and do with YOUR reasoning, when not another person forced, or when you are not a very special state of mind. Yes, when you get mad free will is less, but this example only shows, that what when you NOT mad you can do otherwise, you can do not automatically .
It's really simple People disagree about free will, cos they have different definitions of it. Someone claims they have free will, but their definition of it doesnt look so FREE to another person. Kierkegaard already solved it. "Life Can Only Be Understood Backwards, But It Must Be Lived Forwards" . Meaning, when you look at your past assume a 100 % deterministic mindset. Examine the reasons, the whys, the whole cause & effect, dont waste your time on explaining your actions, failures or triumphs with a simple "Cos I choosed so". When you look at your future, switch gears a go with a 100% free will mindset. You gonna see options, possibilities & oportunities, because you avoid falling into the deterministic mental trap "I did it for 10 years, so I cant change nothing". The future is set in stone cos it's cause & effect after all, but the CATCH is , you dont know with choice is inevitable, UNTIL THAT CHOICE IS DONE. So you always gonna FEEL like you can make a different choice, like you have free will... even if from a perspective of an objective all knowing observer, you are as deterministic as a Rube Goldberg machine.
Don’t follow his reasoning at all. If the will is incapable of violating the laws of Physics, to use his parlance, then distinctions such as that between his “gust of wind” and “of his of own free will” crime scenarios are morally meaningless.
Most philosophers know too little of physics, and therefore argue over abstractions that don't or cannot map to reality and could be ruled out. Once we lose reality as a baseline constraint, we lose one important source of criticism which is valuable for being able to rule out certain conjectures and therfore help advance the field. I don't really think lowly of philosphers for not having cross domain knowledge. I think this is a criticism of our institutional approach to education and domain boundaries. Hopefully that will improve.
Just because it is useful in curating social behavior for social, evolutionary purposes, doesn't mean there is an it that exists here. It's a compatibility view he's expressing, a badly construed one. Novelty does not require free will. This man is rambling.
He is saying that humans have mechanistic intent and the ability to deploy that intent relative to the capacity of their being (physical access to the world, state of knowledge on the system etc.). That intent changes the universe and therefore it Exists. Whether we are ok with defining that as "free will" or not is semantic and probably not very important.
@@beatthebagit is important. Changing the meaning of free will to “partially free partial will” is dumb. The whole point of denying free will is in saying that absolute free will doesn’t and cannot exist. No one denies that they make choices and feel as though they have some will. As Schopenhauer says, “you can do what you want, but you cannot want what you want.”
@@giuoco Every educated person has known that "absolute freewill" (defined as the ability to physically deploy a decision from processes that don't exist within this universe) isn't how animals function for centuries. So yeah if we are talking about making decisions from outside the universe somehow then that isn't a thing. But thats hardly interesting, we've known that for centuries.
Movieswewant said basically everything I would have said in reply to you but I think this recent video by KaneB called “Metaphysics and Observation” is relevant to this conversation.
@@beatthebag you have a severe lack of historical perspective. To apply the term “every educated person” to the past centuries is unbelievably daft. You can’t standardise that for the previous centuries. This is debate older than science. Secondly, it is you who’s playing a language game. By adding “intent” and “changing the world” you’re oversimplifying and obfuscating the real issue. The Isai is that intent doesn’t exist… what does intent mean? Where does intent come from? You feel like you have intent but really that’s just an illusion, you’re being dictated by either a deterministic framework or a deterministic + randomised one (if you fancy throwing quantum indeterminism in the mix). Either way, intent is almost the same thing as free will.. so it’s a circular argument. You’re essentially saying, I have free will because I feel like I have free will (intent) and I can make changes to the world… Also the changes rarely coincide with intent. The world usually comes in the way. Your own brain comes in the way. Someone may have BPD or some neurological condition or a tumour that severely affects their “intentions”. Do you think they don’t have free will? Do you think someone who is hypnotised acted with free will? These are just Semitic games to feel better about yourself and assert “free will”. The lack of engagement with philosophical and neurological ideas is startling.
I think it's very funny that most laypeople appear to believe that it's quite obvious that free will is false. Almost like believing there is no free will is pretty much common sense. Atleast that's the impression one might come to when laypeople on reddit talk about this subject. In general I think most people haven't really understood in the slightest what quantum mechanics really is and its implications, holding on to the old ways of determinism. Interesing: close to 80% of academic philosophers believe in free will, most of them in compatibalism. It appears the „I love science“-crowd didn't get the memo that Dunning Krüger is real.
Quantum indeterminacy does precisely nothing to rescue free will. It adds randomness to the universe, but randomness is not the same as control, so it cannot make us the true authors of our actions. I do agree with the bit regarding Dunning Kruger.
I also don't agree with him, but that doesn't warrant talking about him in such a manner. He spoke to the best of his knowledge, there's no need to suddenly be all high and mighty.
Doesn’t seem like that to me. Sounds like a robust defence of compatabilism which is the dominant stance in the philosophical discussions of Free Will and is also immune to the supposed experimental refutations, because it places the will and its freedom within the causal nexus
@@gorseyleas I swear the internet was a mistake. First they act like the father of quantum computing casually forgot about some of the most basic arguments against free will. Then, they go on while it's clear they don't understand compatibalism… worst place is Reddit when it comes to these kinds of stupidity.
I think he got the compatibilist position down pretty well: no mind can violate the laws of physics but that’s not what “free will” requires anyway. It’s just a manner of speaking in a world in which that is impossible.
I am reminded of a quote from the late Christopher Hitchens (directed towards right wing pundit Sean Hannity): "You strike me as a person who's never heard any of the argements against your position, ever,." Mr. Deutsch is an admitable man, but here he is fighting wind mills.
Yeah you're right, the father of quantum computing just casually forgot about the most basic argument against compatibalist free will …
@@NicolasSchaII yes… when you’re an expert in one specific field, it usually means you’re not well educated in other fields. I wouldn’t ask him his opinion on Van Gogh’s strokes. It’s very clear from every statement he’s made that he is unaware of even the most basic arguments against free will and combatibalism. And if he is aware of them he’s doing a horrendous job explaining or defending himself… he’s just making tautological claims and stating “common sense” definitions that have little to do with the millennia long debate surrounding the nature of free will. Maybe he’s just trying to trivialise it in order to justify his religious belief in free will (and yes, he is religious)… but that’s best case scenario, worst case is he’s got a case of “thinking your expertise in one field also makes you an expert in any vaguely adjacent and related fields as well”
Thanks for this! How did you get into contact with David Deutsch?
"We have a need for the phrase free will when discussing murder/crime" - no, we have the word "intentionality". We don't need magical words for non-magical phenomenon when we already have appropriate words available.
Is not the same? if you can do something intentionality, it means you haw free will to do intentionality
Free will is not magical, that is just an irrational projection of yours. It is a real emergent phenomenon that is fully compatible with the laws of physics just as interest rates, clouds, extra marital affairs and train cancellations are.
@gorseyleas There is no such thing as "emergent phenomena"...that's bad philosophy, everything is reducible.
@@transcendentphilosophy Nonsense. Emergence is both compatible with fixed laws of nature and philosophically sound. It is essential for understanding complexity. Philosophers like Mill and Broad provide analytical support for emergence. Deterministic systems often produce emergent properties, such as the flocking behaviour of birds, weather patterns, or the organisation of life from biochemistry. These phenomena are fully determined by the rules governing their components but require higher-level frameworks to analyse effectively. Godel’s incompleteness theorems and Turing’s halting problem prove the limitations of formal systems (such as a mathematical description of the fundamental laws of physics), showing that not all truths can be derived or predicted from foundational rules. The Laplacean demon, if part of the universe, could not predict the future with flawless accuracy as it would need to predict its own output, thus leading to an infinite loop. These insights demonstrate that a fully reductionist account of reality is unachievable, as certain phenomena are irreducibly complex, emergent, or undecidable. Reality must be understood at multiple levels, incorporating foundational principles as well as emergent properties
Omg philosophical materialism is absolute cancer. You guys are demoniacs. To sustain your demoniac nihilistic society destroying soul destroying worldview you need to maintain that free will not only does not exist but is magical superstition. Lmao! But to make a distinction between free will and intentionality makes you look like a fool, because there is no distinction. And intentionality without free will? You may as well claim the entire universe has intentionality also, because it also does not have free will.
Sounds like the beginnings of an interesting compatibilist theory but it's not quite there.
Comaptibilism is simply acknowledging that humans have Intent and the ability to deploy that intent. That intent changes the universe and therefore it Exists. Whether you want to call that free will or not is semantic and doesn't really matter.
yes, some free will exists. It is an expression of our inner (biological and mental) life. It is an opportunity to satisfy your needs, to create, to think, to plan and to stick to a plan. Yes, we often overestimate our freedom. However, the presence of freedom cannot be denied. Strong anomalous internal or external influences when we can no longer control the situation at all compared to being normal can only show the limits of our freedom and confirm their presence because we can compare the behaviour of a person who does not have self-control and a person who has self-control.
Exactly
Will the laws of physics guarantee us the growth of knowledge?
if so then einsteins equations / novelty was present at the big bang, given the starting stats and dynamics.
if not, then i agree with David here, which i think I do now too, since we don't have the governing laws
Free of what? If you have it then it isn't free and if it's free you don't have it.
That makes exactly 0 sense
@@NicolasSchaII You are a causal system. Your decisions are not free, they are dependent on causes within you, and thus dependent on causes that made you as you are. You could make random decisions, independent of causation, but then they wouldn't be your decisions, they would just be random. When people feel they have free will because their decisions come only from internal causes, they are considering only the present moment, pretending that who they are is self created.
@@robertsouth6971 Nonsense. You are confusing being causally determined with not being free. They mean very different things. Free will has got absolutely nothing to do with whether we are causally determined or not.
Free will is only possible through transcendence out of the skinnerian level of existence you identified with previously.
A choice is not a choice unless you can expose your reasoning, and it is not a free choice until you can trace a second order reasoning that justified your lower level logic.
Simple example, you get mad at someone. First you think autimatically it's their fault. In argument, you must consider maybe it's my fault. Go beyond fault, you see both people are stressed and hungry, nobody chose anger. But now both can choose to shut up, accept faults and remove blame accusations, and go eat a burger together
Yes, a decision is a cascade of functions across many layers of intent and expected outcomes. Explaining the full mechanistic cascade of a decision does not invalidate the decision. Humans have mechanistic intent and the ability to deploy that intent relative to the capacity of there being (physical access to the world, state of knowledge on the system etc.). Whether we are ok with defining that as "free will" or not is semantic and probably not very important.
free will is possible through our possibility to think, to plan and do with YOUR reasoning, when not another person forced, or when you are not a very special state of mind. Yes, when you get mad free will is less, but this example only shows, that what when you NOT mad you can do otherwise, you can do not automatically .
people perceive you as important if you incorporate the attitude of such, but you grow insecure and at last the truth comes out easily.
What an idiot.
It's really simple
People disagree about free will, cos they have different definitions of it. Someone claims they have free will, but their definition of it doesnt look so FREE to another person. Kierkegaard already solved it. "Life Can Only Be Understood Backwards, But It Must Be Lived Forwards" .
Meaning, when you look at your past assume a 100 % deterministic mindset. Examine the reasons, the whys, the whole cause & effect, dont waste your time on explaining your actions, failures or triumphs with a simple "Cos I choosed so".
When you look at your future, switch gears a go with a 100% free will mindset. You gonna see options, possibilities & oportunities, because you avoid falling into the deterministic mental trap "I did it for 10 years, so I cant change nothing".
The future is set in stone cos it's cause & effect after all, but the CATCH is , you dont know with choice is inevitable, UNTIL THAT CHOICE IS DONE. So you always gonna FEEL like you can make a different choice, like you have free will... even if from a perspective of an objective all knowing observer, you are as deterministic as a Rube Goldberg machine.
Don’t follow his reasoning at all. If the will is incapable of violating the laws of Physics, to use his parlance, then distinctions such as that between his “gust of wind” and “of his of own free will” crime scenarios are morally meaningless.
most physicists really shouldn't do philosophy
Most philosophers know too little of physics, and therefore argue over abstractions that don't or cannot map to reality and could be ruled out. Once we lose reality as a baseline constraint, we lose one important source of criticism which is valuable for being able to rule out certain conjectures and therfore help advance the field. I don't really think lowly of philosphers for not having cross domain knowledge. I think this is a criticism of our institutional approach to education and domain boundaries. Hopefully that will improve.
This is literally the position of 80% of academic philosophers. Reddit had an influence on your opinion much?
@@lennarthammel3075 Deutsch is both: he is a renowned philosopher of science
most philosophers shouldn't do physics - Daniel Dennett in particular.....
@@ericstarmer7779 yeah true. Point is, david deutsch is both. He's a legend
Just because it is useful in curating social behavior for social, evolutionary purposes, doesn't mean there is an it that exists here. It's a compatibility view he's expressing, a badly construed one.
Novelty does not require free will. This man is rambling.
We can tell you're much smarter than the father of quantum computing. If only he had thought more about that…
Great.
This is 7 minutes of Prof. Deutsch decreeing the existence of free will by personal fiat ie. there is free will because I said so.
He is saying that humans have mechanistic intent and the ability to deploy that intent relative to the capacity of their being (physical access to the world, state of knowledge on the system etc.). That intent changes the universe and therefore it Exists. Whether we are ok with defining that as "free will" or not is semantic and probably not very important.
@@beatthebagit is important. Changing the meaning of free will to “partially free partial will” is dumb. The whole point of denying free will is in saying that absolute free will doesn’t and cannot exist. No one denies that they make choices and feel as though they have some will. As Schopenhauer says, “you can do what you want, but you cannot want what you want.”
@@giuoco Every educated person has known that "absolute freewill" (defined as the ability to physically deploy a decision from processes that don't exist within this universe) isn't how animals function for centuries. So yeah if we are talking about making decisions from outside the universe somehow then that isn't a thing. But thats hardly interesting, we've known that for centuries.
Movieswewant said basically everything I would have said in reply to you but I think this recent video by KaneB called “Metaphysics and Observation” is relevant to this conversation.
@@beatthebag you have a severe lack of historical perspective. To apply the term “every educated person” to the past centuries is unbelievably daft. You can’t standardise that for the previous centuries. This is debate older than science.
Secondly, it is you who’s playing a language game. By adding “intent” and “changing the world” you’re oversimplifying and obfuscating the real issue. The Isai is that intent doesn’t exist… what does intent mean? Where does intent come from? You feel like you have intent but really that’s just an illusion, you’re being dictated by either a deterministic framework or a deterministic + randomised one (if you fancy throwing quantum indeterminism in the mix). Either way, intent is almost the same thing as free will.. so it’s a circular argument. You’re essentially saying, I have free will because I feel like I have free will (intent) and I can make changes to the world…
Also the changes rarely coincide with intent. The world usually comes in the way. Your own brain comes in the way. Someone may have BPD or some neurological condition or a tumour that severely affects their “intentions”. Do you think they don’t have free will? Do you think someone who is hypnotised acted with free will? These are just Semitic games to feel better about yourself and assert “free will”. The lack of engagement with philosophical and neurological ideas is startling.
I think it's very funny that most laypeople appear to believe that it's quite obvious that free will is false. Almost like believing there is no free will is pretty much common sense.
Atleast that's the impression one might come to when laypeople on reddit talk about this subject. In general I think most people haven't really understood in the slightest what quantum mechanics really is and its implications, holding on to the old ways of determinism.
Interesing: close to 80% of academic philosophers believe in free will, most of them in compatibalism. It appears the „I love science“-crowd didn't get the memo that Dunning Krüger is real.
Quantum indeterminacy does precisely nothing to rescue free will. It adds randomness to the universe, but randomness is not the same as control, so it cannot make us the true authors of our actions. I do agree with the bit regarding Dunning Kruger.
You have it backwards - most laypeople believe in free will.....
@@ericstarmer7779 doesn't matter, checkout philpapers 2009 and philpapers 2020. I don't have it backwards :)
Wishful thinking.
Education might help you out understanding this
Seems like someone is ignorant of both the experimental and philosophical arguments... a very shallow approach to this subject.
I also don't agree with him, but that doesn't warrant talking about him in such a manner. He spoke to the best of his knowledge, there's no need to suddenly be all high and mighty.
Doesn’t seem like that to me. Sounds like a robust defence of compatabilism which is the dominant stance in the philosophical discussions of Free Will and is also immune to the supposed experimental refutations, because it places the will and its freedom within the causal nexus
@@gorseyleas I swear the internet was a mistake. First they act like the father of quantum computing casually forgot about some of the most basic arguments against free will. Then, they go on while it's clear they don't understand compatibalism… worst place is Reddit when it comes to these kinds of stupidity.
I think he got the compatibilist position down pretty well: no mind can violate the laws of physics but that’s not what “free will” requires anyway. It’s just a manner of speaking in a world in which that is impossible.