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Hands down one of my favorite channels for this genre of content that I don't really have a name for. You really are the cream of TH-camrs for me. Never stop!
@@bobbymcbobmcbilly322 yeah but we have video essays for movies and stuff as well. Btw you would love Adam Something. The guy recently blew up. I would recommend you start with his "Elon Musk loop is bizarrely stupid" video
I'm semi determinism: -if i make good choice, thanks to myself -if i make bad choice, blame chemical in my brain . Philosopher really have so much time, lol
Yet some quite influential moral intuitions are based on the belief in free will, and they are quite damaging intuitions. The common notion of free will is incoherent, and it is upon this common notion that these intuitions are based.
I also feel like the pain most people feel when they think they don't have free will comes from them finding out that they aren't what they thought they were. Most people go day to day believing they have a soul or that their conscious experience is outside of the realm of physics. When you really narrow it down all we really are is our genetic makeup and our past experiences. If you believe this to be who you are then no problem arises sense theres no alteration in identity. You act the way you act because this is who you are. On the other hand if you perceive yourself to be something else then all of a sudden nothing has meaning anymore for some reason.
overall my take is that free will is completely irrelevant. Thought experiment: You decide to write a novel and name your protagonist. Either that name is completely deterministically determined from all your memories, associations of names and persons you know, linguistic preferences, current mood, current fascinations and topics on your mind and so on, OR you actually had the choice and picked among the options you could come up with using free will In both cases you end up with a name in your novel. In both cases you had to think about it and make a decision. In both cases you can change that decision later or decide to keep it, and so on. People assume that not having free will means that someone else is making the decisions, but no, its you, in both cases. in no case is there a plan for you, don't think of the lack free will as train tracks, think of it like the splashes left after the cola-mentos experiment. If you vary the angle of the mentos even slightly, you will have vastly different splash patterns. Some things always happen though, like the reaction going off ... or you deciding to eat or you falling asleep, or dieing one day. The rest is up to you and you still have to make the decisions, looking ahead in time as to what decision you will make is impossible unless you find a way to gather complete information about literally everything (a stranger coughing in a movietheater 10 years ago, the facial experession of your best friend when you told them something about yourself...) AND simulate everything interacting with you faster than it runs in real time. There are WAAAAY more "chunky" bits of free will you lose with advertisments, tribalism, brand loyalty and so on
The fact this conversation is even being had shows that it cannot be relevant, it is at least relevant to millenia of discussions. In fact, that take of yours is one of the few provably wrong ones.
I think free will is largely irrelevant when it comes to personal matters (although it may help/hurt your decision making if you believe in it or don't), but I do think that if our culture at a wide scale did not believe in free will, or at least did not believe in it to nearly the radical extreme that we often do (speaking from a US perspective here), that we would be better equipped to deal with societal problems. If you accept absolute free will, then no policy implementations really matter. Let's take crime for example. If absolute free will exists, then people will just decide to commit crimes when they feel like it, when they make that decision, and that decision can hardly be influenced. But if we assume instead that people are deterministic in nature, we CAN prevent future crimes by changing the starting conditions that would lead up to it. For example, people tend to commit far fewer crimes, especially violent crimes, if they have easy access to healthcare, including mental healthcare, and have some form of financial security. We can use that to influence our policy making and influence people in the direction we want society to go. It isn't perfect, like the example in the video about the magnetic field making only 80% of people raise their left hand, but it's at the very least better. And I would argue that the remaining 20% (like the remaining people who commit crimes) simply had a different, unpredictable environment, sort of like you mentioned with the angle of the mentos. But even in these cases, approaching it from a deterministic PoV leads to better results, in my opinion. For example, let's say a man kills his mother in a rage. He gets arrested, shows great remorse for killing his mother, goes to prison, and when one day he gets some medical treatment and gets an MRI, it's revealed that a tumour is growing in his brain where the impulse control of the brain is, leading him to be more violent and impulsive. If that tumour gets removed and he no longer has any violent impulses, no outbursts, nothing that would lead him to commit a crime like that again, what reason is there to keep him locked up? Revenge, I suppose, for his action but it was an action that he had little control over in the first place. Almost as though he killed her while sleep walking.
I will now prove that free will can exist. step 1: present a rat two pieces of identical cheese. step 2: the rat picks one of the cheeses. step 3: repeat until you feel like stopping. step 4: deal with the rat population. step 5: eat the rats.
However, I have objection to libertarianism: quantum mechanics IS deterministic, but its output is probabilistic. Our consciousness doesn't have power over quantum processes, uncertainty doesn't mean free will. Upd.: Chaotic systems are also deterministic, just hard to predict with Turing machines.
@@carlosandleon I have no explanation as to why I should comment this in reply to you or why I had the urge to comment this in the first place but I would like to say "YES"
Great video with a perfect ending. A few quibbles are that the three-body problem is deterministic and in principle predicable (the most salient example of macroscopic indeterminacy is the hardware random number generator), that seizures are by definition physiological (medical conditions characterized by changes in affect include mood disorders and injuries to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex), and that a spoon can be microwaved without ill effect (forks however experience arcing between their tines). The ship and crew analogy could be good for showing how to view the universe from a systems-theoretical perspective, but I don't find it useful for free will since it's just a homunculus argument. The first criterion for conscious volition runs into a problem of the same making: as far as we know, everything is forced by "external" factors. The closest thing to a causally independent decision I can conceive is a decision that determines itself through retrocausality, though predestination is hardly how we imagine free will.
Yeah, the chaotic systems were severely misrepresented. The most random event I can think of is the collapse of the wave function. The idea of parallel worlds implies that we could have made any number if decisions in our lifetime, but even there is still a point to be made that the only thing that matters when we make choices is the randomness in our universe, which is certainly not a conventional way to describe free will.
@@baggelissonic The indeterminate output of hardware random number generators indeed arises from wave function collapse. Please note that the many worlds interpretation is a fringe view, with the Copenhagen interpretation being a more popular competing view. Further, it seems unlikely that indeterminate phenomena determine our cognition. Every neurological experiment has shown brain behaviour to be classicly mechanical.
A 'homunculus argument' could only be called a fallacy if one has already decided upon the pretense that a conscious, singular agent (However that agent may arise), whose choices are influenced but not determined by neurological, physiological, and any other factors 'external' to it, cannot exist, and thus the agent being posited (The 'homunculus') must itself be another 'body'. It hold about as much weight as a Hitchens 'Super-God' argument. The same goes for the statement that "As far as we know, everything is forced by "external" factors". It shows a train of argument where the premise and the conclusion are identical, and the premise present is what's being rejected in the first place. That seizures (Or any other degenerative or harmful neurological illness or event) affect the conscious agent is something, of course, obvious, but it means little. One easily asserts that these things, like almost any other factor which belongs to either experience of the 'outside world' or state of the 'body' (Including the brain), can, in some instances, influence choice, but do not determine it; They do not rob the agent of agency. You are partially correct about chaos theory: It is concerned with systems supposed to be determistic. However, chaos theory is concerned with deterministic systems that are supposed to be practically unpredictable past their early stages, despite being posited as deterministic. The statement that "Every neurological experiment has shown brain behaviour to be classically mechanical" is untrue, even if taken with the fewest presumptions. Most experiments of that sort not only are unable to show anything regarding quantum or classical mechanics in neurological function, they do not desire to do so, not to mention the fact of modern neuroscience being so often among the most tenuous fields of its kind, even given my distaste for others. As far as it is addressed, such relations are hotly contested even among 'mainstream' science, like essentially everything about quantum mechanics and theory. And if we do take the statement as carrying the presumption of 'brain behaviour' being synonymous with the conscious agent, we encounter the same error of the conclusion and the identical premise (The one which is being rejected in the first place) which I addressed before. I should say that I am steady in my belief in the singular human soul, created by God, despite this likely meaning irreconcilability, as well as an opening of myself to ridicule or dismissal.
I have always thought the thrid option made the most sense, even if I didn't know it had a name. Even if your actions are predetermiend you're still the one chosing you decisions- you just dont get to chose that you chose it. If you catch my drift.
I think it is already known by God but you are the one choosing it. But I will bet that we chose to choose in a sort of a pre life scenario. It isn't possible that we are the only creatures who are conscious like that there must be a reason
12:30 there was this guy that randomly started killing people one day, murdered his wife and children in cold blood and then became a serial killer. In his trial it was actually found out that he had a brain tumor causing that and after it was removed, they didn't know what to do with him.
@@zoogl I think that's just brain tumors causing a type of frontal lobe damage. Certain types of brain damage can cause emotional sensitivity of some sort, and it some rare cases it can cause psychosis and enable violent behavior.
@@zoogl Isn't it mostly correlative? Even if we supposed that the brain tumor impacted his mental state contributing to his later action, it doesn't suggest that cause him to make the decision to murder his family and other. There is a difference between urges and decision.
8:22 the 3 body system may not be predictable, it is still fully deterministic. The path that the three bodies will follow is always the same for the same initial values. Computing these paths and accuratly determining these initial values are the hard things. I will only accept this as and argument against free will if you talked about measurements of the initial values.
Yes but because perfection don't exist in the real world, the same initial values will never be same and so it is not predictable, with the same values it's like rewatching the same tape over and over again but we can't reverse time in our world (im bad at explaining so i hope u understood)
This reminds me of a scifi story I once read. A person becomes desynced from his brain and his choices now lag a second behind his actions. Horrified, he stops making decisions and realises he's just a prisoner inside an automated body. He only thought he was making decisions, but in fact his consciousness was merely following the body. And now he's stuck inside a body that continues life as normal, but he no longer influences it and can't communicate to anyone.
@@letzte_maahsname Yeah, it was written like a horror story. When his thoughts were synced, his actions felt like his own. But when he started lagging, his brain kept going as if nothing was different, except he was now trapped in a body that went on to live his life without any input from him. He couldn't communicate with anyone, his body just talked with people like always without him being involved. It gave me anxiety when I read it as a teen. Wish I could remember what it was called.
8:25 I have a nitpick here! the three body problem is commonly used to demonstrate how deterministic processes do not need to be predictable a three body system will behave in exactly the same way given exactly the same input, however since tiny pertubations can affect the output a lot, the fastest way to predict a 3 body system is to actually simulate it. meaning in that sense even if your decisions are deterministic, the fastest way to predict you would be to just see what you end up doing.
The really creepy thing is that if there is a consciousness, there's actually *two* of them. the middle connector in-between the two hemispheres of the brain can be severed, this used to be a treatment for schizophrenia and seizures, and if you ask both hemispheres different questions and show them different stimuli, you will get different answers, often contradicting each other. this can either mean there are two different things arguing on what to do at any given moment, or you can split that thing in half and create two separate beings. freaky.
@@serraramayfield9230 Isn't it the case that people that had that procedure done may somewhat lose control over left or right side of the body. Example: They move their left/right hand without wanting to do it. Assumed to be because the other brain half is doing it and the main decision center cannot properly control the action / veto in this video's case? Note: Los of control =/= random actions, proper minor action but without wanting to do it.
reminds me of Alien X in ben 10. Alien X is omnipotent, but the 2 beings inside it need to agree first before they can do something. What if we are alien x and the 2 consciousness inside us just never agree lol
As long as you don't know your future from your perspective you will always have free will so for me, it's fine. Like watching a show with and without spoilers Without spoilers everything seems possible, but with spoilers you know that every decision is leading to that specific end
I've always thought the Libet experiment is pretty useless for answering the question of whether we have free will. All it tells us is that the brain makes decisions before we're consciously aware of them - it could still be that there's a lag between 'the will' and its conscious expression. I'm a determinist and I don't think this is actually the case, but I'd never use this experiment to support my position.
There's definitely a lag between the will and conscious expression,the electrical signals at the decision making centers have to travel to the neocortex.
@@adamdinar376 well no, reaction time is the time between deciding to do something, and doing it. Whether there's a lag between deciding to do something and the conscious awareness that the decision has been made is a different matter. That's the only point I'm making - it could be that we have free will, and there's a lag between 'the will' and our conscious awareness of it. I don't believe that, because I don't believe we have some special 'free will' module in our brains that somehow non-deterministically makes independent decisions. So the lag being measured is, it seems to me, the lag between the decision-making mechanisms and the conscious awareness of the outcome of those mechanisms. I'm just saying that either way, the existence of lag is not evidence for or against free will, in itself.
This is the point of The Matrix: You already "made the decision", it is predictable, you are here to understand _why_ you made the decision. Cake or death? The validity of my prediction you will pick cake doesn't remove your free will to choose death. Predictability and free will are not mutually exclusive.
I once had this kind of thought as a kid, but I decided that regardless of if free will exists or not, I can still feel joy and happiness, so life is still worth living.
This is actually such a simple yet brilliant conclusion! Despite all of this discourse, the "true" truth doesn't actually make any difference. You, your free will and your mind still exist to _yourself_ and that's all that really matters. Whilst deep philosophical debate is definitely helpful, it's sometimes good to just take a step back and appreciate the simpler, more concrete things. No matter what the science says, from your own perspective you are here, you feel things, you think and you do. And even if your future is predetermined then so what! It doesn't change the fact that you yourself have no idea what will happen to you next week or next year. The Universe may have it all figured out, but life's still a mystery to us and maybe that's for the better. At the end of the day, the only thing we truly know is that we can never truly know anything at all. And the joy in not knowing is getting to find out and think of an answer for yourself. The world is what you make of it, there isn't _a_ universe, just _your_ universe.
"My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will" - that's a lot like how I came out of depression. It's that most unscientific of things, faith: a belief that is justified not because one is aware of evidence that it is true, but on the consequences of one's believing in it. As an amateur philosopher, I feel like lay society has, over the past 50 years or so, gradually gone from voluntarism to determinism, & the result has been the personal existential crisis becoming a popular culture trope.
I love how this guy basically went: “VSauce isn’t gonna upload anything again? Fine, I’ll do it myself! What was his show about again? The mind? Alright!”
To be honest, the seizure argument is kinda odd to me, you don't stick a hard drive in a microwave and expect the pictures you had on it to change into different pictures, the files just get corrupted or the hard drive breaks, so why expect a seizure to change someone's opinions?
Also, there is a difference between, for example, having a memory and moving your hand. Moving your hand is a sudden action caused by an electrical impulse, so it makes sense that a seizure could cause it to happen. Memories and habits are more permanent. They are stored chemically in and in the way neurons have connected to each other over a long time. I doubt random electric activity could affect them.
Also, there is anecdotal “evidence” (I know that’s not actual evidence but humor me for a moment) of people that received physical damage to the head or brain and changed their personality. Also, also, it is known that certain diseases will affect the brain and will also affect people’s behavior (syphilis and rabies are famous examples)
@@gebys4559 That's assuming only the values defining the actual image get scrambled, but I'm willing to bet filling a hard drive with random 1s and 0s and plugging it into a computer wouldn't give you an image.
Great vid, one small problem. The n body-problem is competely decidable, and it will always be the same, with the same inputs. It's just that we can't calculate it using algebra, like with 2 bodies. This would be more of chaos theory than true randomness.
You can't calculate the two body problem using algebra or even in terms of standard functions(exp, log, trigonometric functions). The reason why is that you need to find an inverse function to something expressible in terms of trig, which isn't expressible in terms of trig, exp and log. You can calculate it approximately very well tho.
@@xfom4008 This is very true. I have recently had the pleasure to make a small simulation of planetary motion and numeric simulation can always approximate it (at the limit even perfectly). However, my point was that the problem is ultimately still deterministic. Just because an algebraic solution doesn't exist, doesn't mean that the problem is random. In the video, BritMonkey compares U-238 decay (something truly random) to a 3 body system (which is deterministic, but cannot be calculated). I was just pointing out that these two things are not equivalent
@@palanix3145 3 body system can be calculated to arbitrary precision. Like you can just use numerical integration techniques for it and get an answer that is arbitrarily precise. In special cases the 3 body problem is even completely solvable. The difference is that the 3 body problem has paths diverge to arbitrary distance in phase space when you propagate them over time and you don't have what is called integrability in Hamiltonian mechanics. 2 body is integrable, 3 body isn't.
There are some things that you don’t really have a choice on. Emotional moments aren’t your choice, you don’t really choice to cry, but you can resist the urge. I think the ship analogy is really good
I feel like he would have, but it would break the whole vsauce parody that this video was going for (all the music in this video has been used in vsauce videos). He has used Libet's Delay in other videos, though.
most spoons in microwaves amazingly enough seem fine, not enough rigged edges on them to cause the problem it seems. I knew a guy that swore up and down it was fine, i told him i had a hard time believing it, so to prove the point every time he used the microwave he'd point out that the spoon was inside the whole time, every time. At this point i guess i have to believe spoons are mostly okay to do that with? I'm still not doing it myself tho, i would be to spooked.
Good video overall, though I believe there is much, much more depth to the matter. Seizure argument is very weird. Seizures involve neurons firing indiscrimnately at same time, while "will" (a most unprecise term) is a high order function that probably requires precise timely cascades of neurons firing at exctly the right time in multiple parts of the brain. Seizures involving multiple parts of the brain lead to loss of consciousness. So how would you observe a seizure altering "will" in real time? More importantly, there are hundreds of documented cases of tumours, brain trauma and brain degenrative disease altering the "will" of people, completely changing their life. 8:30 false. The system is chaotic and it would require impossible amounts of computational power to calculate, however it still follows determnistic rules ; it's literally the definition of a chaotic system, something that follows strict deterministic laws but requires vast (and sometimes infinite) amounts of computation to be simulated. To our current human knowledge, we have yet to discover any kind of non-quantic structure to behave in a non deterministic way (calling quantum mecanics non determninstic is also imprecise, but whatever, I guess your point was to highligh a system that doesn't behave as our usual intuitive macroscopic world, and that is very much true, qantum mechanics is weird). 16:06 makes no sense. Our knowledge of how the brain works is extremely limited, we basically know nothing about it. We put a giant magnet over the brain and manage to create such a gigantic shift in decisions, what exactly makes you think 100% of left hand lifting isn't reachable using more invasive methods (which would be unethical*) and/or using more advanced techniques when we advance our knowledge in neuroscience? Invasive brain manipulations would be unethical in humans, but on mice it's already been done : pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22441246/ (quite technical) www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/meet-two-scientists-who-implanted-false-memory-mouse-180953045/ (correctly vulgarized)
Individual events at the quantum scale are truly random, in that knowing the outcome is fundamentally impossible (according to current quantum mechanical theory) and they individual events cannot be coerced to fall with certainty a certain way. Only over time can more predictable patterns of probabilities emerge. A single 50-50 quantum event is truly truly random and non-deterministic in the truest sense. Experiments have shown too that these outcomes can't possibly be decided by some hidden underlying or unknowable parameter either. They're random, plain and simple.
@@geoffdavids7647 only according to the Copenhagen interpretation. Which is the main interpretation, but still. That's why I said it was imprecise to call quantum mech non-deterministic, not incorrect.
Didn't Turing prove that something like the 3 body problem isn't necessarily deterministic because math itself isn't deterministic. Doesn't mean all starting conditions don't have determined outcomes but that not all can be pre-determined. Seems more like a problem with math then whether or not the underlying principle is deterministic
@@geoffdavids7647 no. It's completely random _to us._ Which is why we treat them as completely random phenomena, but we don't know what's happening "under the hood". The fact that we can link particles that _always,_ 100% of the time, behave in the same way even if seemingly completely unlinked and separated, makes us think that there's something deterministic that we don't yet know, and maybe never will. (And yes, I study this stuff, I'm not coming up with it based on random stuff I find on the internet.)
@@FAB1150 @Nuovo Well granted I don't study this stuff officially - but there was one incredible video that seemed to really disprove the idea of a hidden variable under the hood determining what the outcome would be. It seemed to say that quantum outcomes are really truly random th-cam.com/video/zcqZHYo7ONs/w-d-xo.html
I came up with compatibilism on my own, and came to that conclusion. Sort of like the "simulation" hypotheses of the universe; I simply believe it does not matter. Whether we have free will or not is irrelevant. The choice I make, whether deterministic or my own, is a choice I made. There is obviously a more eloquent way to describe this, but I find it very simple. It is a completely superfluous question. Free will is something espoused by religion (aside from the few deterministic sects), that you have 'free will to accept or deny God, and that is a gift he has given you'. Does it matter if my choice is a result of my neurons? Is it a product of my environment and my genetics? Is it something else, something ephemeral? Who gives a shit. One thing I believe supports determinism is our sexual drive. It's something we cannot control, and is more or less an instinctual drive to procreate. We do not have a choice in whether we desire this; it is either there or not there (in the case of true asexuals), but we do have a choice to act on it or to deny it. Even denying it, the drive is still there. Is the ability to deny it free will? Or simply a factor of our environment, our upbringing, perhaps abuse or bad experiences? I'm not a fan, and yet, that feeling is still there. It is inescapable. Our body has so many instinctual needs that make us identical to animals (as we are animals), who seem to not have 'free will'. Our consciousness is just being aware of our lack of free will.
I'm in no way a philosopher of neuroscientist, but If I simply choose to never do a single action again, surely that proof that free will exists in some way
Been binge watching your vids since I discovered you couple days ago, you deserve much more subs. You are going places buddy, your vids are both fun and informative, hope you grow a lot!
Is it just me or non-determinists stances sound a bit like conspiracy theorists? "Yeah like, MAYBE there is something umeasurable! And also physics aren't ALWAYS consistant, it's not magic I swear!"
The final point is completely nonsensical. All brains are different, there's a near infinite scale of variability due to human being being a species of living creatures. Imagine you had 100 different sets of dominoes, but each set has a slightly different weight for its dominoes, and a different height, and a different width, and maybe each end of a domino could have more or less mass than the other, making them lopsided. No one model of domino physics could accurately predict how these dominoes would fall, the speed, velocity, the decibles of the sound they make when colliding, but by virtue of them all being dominoes, certain elements would remain true, thus any attempted "universal" model would have 80% accuracy. But if you were to take one single set of these dominoes, and make a model specifically for it, then you would be able to predict the outcome perfectly 100% of the time. It's not about humans having free will, it's about it being impossible to create an accurate model of something when each and every measurable example is a variation of each other, with no two being identical, it's like an experiment with no control group.
The problem isn't just across different people, if that were the case, you could prove against this by showing that the same person manipulated in the same way would show either 100% or 0% response. The problem also exists across the same person at different times.
I am witnessing the birth of a mainstream sized channel. I will have bragging rights of watching before it was cool. Also opinion on determinism in nature. People study Newtonian physics in public education and hit the first peak of confidence in the dunning kruger curve thinking everything can be explained with action and mathematically predictable reaction. More hardcore physicists are aware of the uranium example used in the video, but also literally 95% of the micro world. Electrons in the atomic model represent a spot of highest probability of the location of the electron. In thermodynamics you are told heat goes from cold to hot, which is wrong. Heat can go either way, but its statistical probability makes the overall process flow in one direction. A much more relevant science to evaluate free will is the science of data manipulation, communications, transfer and so on. There the first thing you are taught is any system has a noise that is unpredictable (definition of noise). Analog signals develop unpredictable deviations from their original value and digital ones develop errors and bitflips on random bits. Noise in a datastream can by definition never be predicted, so even if physics are deterministic, nothing can predict the outcome of a series of events until its over. You can only make probability estimates. If you dive deep into the engineering of analog vs digital filters you will learn to see basic analog devices as a hardware replacement of something that can be duplicated in function in software. This will give you the lens of seeing the universe not as a victim of deterministic physics, but an infinite computational process running on the hardware of the universe, the kernel of physics and the OS of the big bang. I consider individual free will a program running on this system with certain, yet unpredictable outcome.
I personally think the following thought experiment really does a lot of damage to compatibilism and any notion of freedom of the will within individuals. I’ve shortened it down a bit. Ask yourself if you can think a thought before it is thought. If I ask you to think of a movie and you do so, at which point did you *think of choosing* that movie? When did you choose to choose that movie? I think if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll say that it just popped into your head, seemingly ex nihilo. You never *chose* for the popping into being of the thought to happen at all. This seems in line with Schurger. You can produce reasons for your choice, but where did those reasons come from? Not the content, but the actual *happening* of the rationale itself? I would contend that you cannot think a thought before it is thought. If you could think a thought before it is thought, that means that you would have retroactive access to the thinking of thoughts by way of the act of the thinking of thoughts. In other words, you would be stuck in an infinite regress or a vicious loop. The problem goes something like this: I think thought X only because I first thought the meta-thought X^-1, which I only thought because I first thought meta-thought (X^-1)^-1, which I only thought because I first thought meta-thought ((X^-1)^-1)^-1, then (((X^-1)^-1)^-1)^-1 and so on, out to infinity. To think a thought before it is thought is a temporal and logical absurdity because you would have to think each thought, and each meta-thought about each thought, and each meta-thought about each meta-thought before ever thinking a thought. But this simply cannot happen--it’s a Zeno’s paradox of the mind. In fact, the electrical stimulus of the brain takes time to traverse decision-making neural pathways, which means that every choice would have to be a retroactive response represented to consciousness while the brain is busy taking in new information, already moving beyond the thought *you* think you are volitionally thinking. But if you can’t choose to think a thought, if it is a logical and temporal absurdity, at what point does free will come into the picture? I would say that it simply cannot come into play. Positing a soul doesn’t help at all, because that soul must have this incoming stimulus in order to make a decision for the brain. But then it seems to act mechanistically as well, in accord with past, present, and future conditions and behaviors. If it didn’t, it would probably look a lot like the most extreme cases of schizophrenia, or low latent inhibition or something like that (not a psychologist here). But that clearly isn’t freedom at all-quite the opposite.
The notion that any sufficiently stochastic or chaotic process has free will is really beautiful. The wind and the weather could have free will. A game of poker could have free will. A lava lamp could have free will.
8:20-8:28 You can use Newton's law of universal gravitation and add up the vectors for one body of mass, attracted to the other two, do this to all three bodies of mass, move them according to the vectors, and repeat! You can actually predict what will happen to the colliding objects (if you had the time!)
Now try combining the concept of free will with the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics or the concept of fixed spacetime to get some real existential dread. Some nice questions are: - How do we know that my "now" is your "now", are you maybe 10 years in front of me? -Why do we only experience one outcome of random quantum mechanical events? Is there a hyper consciousness aware of all possible decisions and we are just a small slice of it? -If things are deterministic, why do we even experience time? There is nothing in physics making a "now" necessary.
SSRIs and ADHD medications really made me believe that my mind and my brain are separate entities. Kind of like my mind is the RAM/cache, and my brain is the ROM. The RAM/cache builds up over the lifetime based on your experiences and if your hardware crashes you lose your RAM (I'm talking about comas). Meds have had a lot of effect on how I feel, how happy or sad or lathargic or productive I am, but I've always been able to separate me from what my brain/body allows me to do.
Because the information is incomplete and wrong. 80% success rate with crude tools clearly demonstrate the lack of free will. Imagine what a finished tool will do.
I know people say things like that all the time, but I was a compatabilists before I found out it's a thing from this video. Glad to know there's a name for that.
Keep what you're doing, just discovered your channel today and I really love your narration, your subjects and your ideas, thanks for the amazing content !
12:15 we have something like that. there have been bad people who stopped being bad after a tumor was removed. in other words, they stopped having the will do do very particular morally wrong things.
It is known that radiation could cause computers to flip a bit in their memory. And such radiation could come from a variety of sources seemingly randomly, from the computer itself, from the immediate surrounding, or even from outside the galaxy. Sometimes the flipped bit causes the computer to crash, sometimes the computer notices the flipped bit and corrects it, or sometimes the computer will produce a slightly different result. This is why there are usually multiple identical computers that run identical programs in applications that involve radiation to produce more consistent results. Is it possible that brains work the same way? Even though it is theoretically deterministic, it behaves in an in-deterministic way in practice. Perhaps there are many identical brain modules that run through the same decision making process to provide a more consistent but not fully consistent result. So our decisions are largely deterministic but can still act randomly as if there is free will. Just a random 3 AM thoughts.
Epileptic patients tend to have behavioral changes and mood derangement related to the seizures... also patients with syndenhams chorea (post streptococcal infection) have behavioral changes
I find it so pretentious of us humans, to think we are ready to understand such things. It helped me to understand that I may never know, and that's OK. I'm here now, and let's see what comes
The clock experiment doesn’t really work because 1. the participants likely got the arm ready to flick it and then decided to say it out loud and 2. maybe the brain made the decision to flick their wrist and tried to say it and do it at the same time but because talking requires more conscious effort then moving your wrist the actions weren’t made at the exact same time
Flipping awesome video mate. Love this topic. I think free will and consciousness can be talked about in close conjunction with complex systems. The flawed human perception of the universe is what makes things seem complex. We understand the universe in a beautifully backwards way; because we don't understand it. I think you can get over this fact by asking why anything happens. Just asking "why?" continuously and you will get to a point where we do not know the answer. It is beyond our understanding, and that is okay, because as far as we idiots know we get to live our own life in a way that we choose to. Just gotta do our best. Compatibilism ftw
I wanna add something for the seizure morality bit, because yeah, a seizure has never changed someone's opinion, but there was once a man, who had a railroad spike pass through his brain, and after it was removed, he start to act more angry than before, altough something could've happened to him in his personnal life which changed his attitude.
In addition to being a great video about free will, this is a wonderful homage to Vsauce. You incorporated his style into yours so seamlessly. I smiled or laughed out loud several times because the way you turned a phrase, or presented a point, sounded so much like him it was uncanny.
I read your "top comment" and all i have to say it is laughable. Quantum mechanics is determenistic with indeterminenistic output... Ok .... But free will is neither determenistic or random. I know what category it is but you don't deserve to know. Also, a passive observer.. what an energy inefficient evolutionary update! Truely, loosing time and energy to have comsciousness to just be cosmetic... Very rational.. And for sure... When someone is aware of something he is doing its the same when he isn't... Of course humans are mere automatons.. Pathetic confused determinists, doing everything to eliminate moral responsibility, and live like embryos!
The Universe works on a math equation That never even really ends in the end Infinity spirals out of creation We're on the tip of its tongue, and it's saying "Well, we aren't sure where you stand You ain't machines and you ain't land" And the animals and the plants, they're all linked And the animals and plants, they eat each other
I still think consciousness is made of blocks. Our brain tries to cut resources whenever it can. So it would makes sense that it simply generates things on the fly based on past experiences. That's why illusions work, and that's why you loose focus so often. You're a weird machine that most of the time isn't even aware it exist. Most of the time you're not here, you're just executing tasks like walking down the street, eating something. It's like your brain recognizes patterns and groups them together to play them back later again. The other stuff is thrown away cause it's not important, that's why your memory is shit in remembering the tedious stuff you tried to learn, and that's why you must like and engage to learn effectively.
By blocks I mean like packages of information grouped together, many past sensory information can come together to help predict the future. Like when you know something will fall and bounce not shattering cause you saw that thing doing that before. You'll know the sound, the feel or the taste beforehand, you'll remember something or someplace important.. Consciousness seems to come in packages to try predicting a future event or sometimes just cause it's convenient your brain gives strange or false information simply cause it's there grouped in your subconscious.
5:01 this can literally be explained by the fact it takes time for your brain to register what you see. Of course the recorded time and decision time are going to be different. After you make the decision, you still have to look at the clock and register what you saw. even if you were staring at the clock the entire time there is a gap between consciously realizing what time it is
14:55 isn't this phrasing kinda weird? Both Forced and coerced imply that if external factors don't play a role in the decision making then there's free will but if you wanted to stay by yourself in a room for an indefinite amount of time and be handled by the system as a prisoner then could you say that the existence of rooms, the system, the concept of prision and prisoners had a direct effect, a moving effect, a force, in the decision making, aswell as everything that exist bc everything has tiny vectors that make you be you, then you could say "if rooms didn't exist they would go to a cave or whatever but the intent of the "decision" would still be there and that's entirely on the person" and to that I'd say that if your mind takes some of the vectors that are affecting you and assings values to different vectors which makes humans take different courses of action but what is it that determines the values? Knowledge, mood, tiredness, culture, urges, etc. most of them external factors and the ones that are or have an internal components that can be reduced down to a lack/over production of chemicals that you don't have control over and yes, there's still the randomness but if it's random you can't affect it either Ultimately I don't care if there's free will or not, because although is annoying not to know there's still a very real feeling of free will and I act according to that because I can't just get rid of it and I can't ignore it because that'd be unhealthy
I used to think the world wasn't deterministic because of quantum randomness. I came across an argument which was "If the universe were to revert back to a point in time where everything down to the subatomic level is identical, would we end up exactly where we are today?" and I just can't believe otherwise now. We know the universe is chaotic but at least for me I feel its deterministic. Perhaps the math and science just isn't there to prove or disprove it yet.
The problem with conciousness is it effects everything around us, not the other way around. I'm no expert but there's a lot about the world around us that we dont understand, even at the highest levels of physics. A study done on millions of people who had died for up to two hours and were revived. At least 10% of people had a vivid memory of everything going on around them while they were dead, and were able to confirm this. Sure we can see light, hear vibrations, feel matter etc. But how many other sources of "information" are out there that we simply cannot quantify with our standard methods or from standard congition. Free will is also an interesting subject. And its a trade off between our conscious and unconscious minds. Most actions we do throughout the day, especially things we are comfortable with are done autonomously by our unconcious minds. Even picking up a glass of water and taking a drink, you dont really have to put any mental effort into these actions no matter how complex they are. But things like learning new skills, making decisions and taking risks, or anything that takes you out of your daily routines. I think most people dont want to be conscious. Most people want to let their subconscious take over and live comfortably. But theres nothing exciting about that. Adventure is full of conscious decisions and experiences. Thats why we love them so much. The brain does not create consciousness. The brain is a sort of reducing valve for consciousness. It allows us to experience the world through various stimuli. Our bodies and minds dwell within all dimensional levels but really we can only see 2 dimensions and we think of the world in 3 dimensions within our minds. If we could experience higher dimensions, I'm sure it would completely change how we view our reality.
We once had a discussion about freewill in our school. One student said that if he found out that freewill doesn't exist then he would get depressed and probably kill himself. The only problem I see with that is "what difference does it make?". What difference does it make that you have or have not a free will. In the end you still need to make descisions and also you still need to decide whether what you decided on was right or wrong. Noone can truely use "determinism" as a shield to protect themselfs from having to do moral choices! You put the book down and go outside. You have options to do and as you said even if the imput is the same the output is not predictable there can only be a probability.
8:26 It's chaotic, which means that a tiny change in the starting position leads to a huge change after some time. It doesn't mean that it isn't deterministic, it just means that as long as we don't have 100% perfect knowledge of the initial state, our predictions won't hold very long
The main argument for libertarianism is that qualia exist as a real quality and quantity of the universe, therefore things exist outside the physical dichotomy of determinism and randomness, therefore these same qualia and whatever unnamed factor is responsible for free will could have the same origin. This is very much not related to dualism. If anything, it's in the vein of monism (whatever variant, beside the most naive kind of materialism).
14:00 he is objectively a freeman if the door is unlocked. And he is objectively confined if the door is locked. He is simply choosing not care and choosing to remain there regardless.
What does it matter if free will does not exist? We will still live our lives, feel emotion, feel happiness, experience things and experience the human experience. So what if we don't have free will? I will still live my life as I normally do and enjoy it as much as I can. it does not matter if the choices I make are predetermined because I ultimately made those choices and I will experience the outcome. What if everything's just a chemical response? Why would that matter? Why should we care about it? I feel as if we shouldn't. Saying that everything is predetermined is limiting and won't get us anywhere so we should make the best out of what we've got.
“Free will” is somewhat paradoxical in nature in my opinion. To have a will is to determine and impose something in existence, whether that’s yourself or the environment or somebody else in the surrounding. It’s an action and a reaction, which makes it opposite of free. As you impose on someone or something that will be reaction that you experience that you have no control off.
This parody is actually so good it isn't even a parody, i would totally believe this was an legit vsauce video if it was dubbed by him
Nah, nowhere near enough tangents
Nah needs more stuff in it maybe more what if
Main point is that the ending does not match the original point
It's better in quality than Michaels videos.
How is it a parody? It may be inspired by Vsauce, but it's not satire?
@@IIIlIl parody and satire are not the same thing. There’s some overlap, mostly on satire’s end, but they aren’t the same.
I love how philosophers will have complete mental breakdowns over this topic while the neuroscientist just want to play with the brain some more
mmm brain juice so mysterious
@@muza-pe1183 waht the fuck
what
@@muza-pe1183 mysterious and yummy for my tummy
What if the philosopher and the neuroscientist are the same person 😳
Hands down one of my favorite channels for this genre of content that I don't really have a name for. You really are the cream of TH-camrs for me. Never stop!
I think that the genre is "video essay". Many prominent ones include EmpLemon and Turkey Tom, I think.
@@bobbymcbobmcbilly322 yeah but we have video essays for movies and stuff as well. Btw you would love Adam Something. The guy recently blew up. I would recommend you start with his "Elon Musk loop is bizarrely stupid" video
I like the name "variety channel" you get a variety of content. One video might be about buster keaton, next about zeppelins another about new labour.
@@vozil7829 yeah, been thinking of the name 'social-commentary' as well.
I think these are Educational Philosomeme videos 🤔
I'm semi determinism:
-if i make good choice, thanks to myself
-if i make bad choice, blame chemical in my brain
.
Philosopher really have so much time, lol
We found it. The best compromise
Well it's their job and their whole thing lol
compatibilism?
@@shzarmai I thought that said cannibalism for I minute idk why but It made me laugh
man you read my mind lol
If Vsauce refuses to make Vsauce videos, I fully support your carrying on.
my take: "free will" isnt even well defined enough to ask wether it exists or not.
Do we exist?😂
@@jessica49arrow yes and no I guess
Yet some quite influential moral intuitions are based on the belief in free will, and they are quite damaging intuitions. The common notion of free will is incoherent, and it is upon this common notion that these intuitions are based.
@@MrNikeNicke agreed
I also feel like the pain most people feel when they think they don't have free will comes from them finding out that they aren't what they thought they were. Most people go day to day believing they have a soul or that their conscious experience is outside of the realm of physics. When you really narrow it down all we really are is our genetic makeup and our past experiences. If you believe this to be who you are then no problem arises sense theres no alteration in identity. You act the way you act because this is who you are. On the other hand if you perceive yourself to be something else then all of a sudden nothing has meaning anymore for some reason.
It is mind-boggling (no pun intended) how this channel doesn’t have at least 100k subs.
it obv will soon. If this channel was a stock I'd buy it on leverage.
@@DimAngelProductions 5x leverage to the roof and yolo it in option?
@@DimAngelProductions i dont know what that means, but this is 100% a channel that will blow up, it's just a matter of a random algorithm blip
@@Phianhcr123 125x
@@DimAngelProductions this is the way
overall my take is that free will is completely irrelevant.
Thought experiment: You decide to write a novel and name your protagonist.
Either that name is completely deterministically determined from all your memories, associations of names and persons you know, linguistic preferences, current mood, current fascinations and topics on your mind and so on,
OR you actually had the choice and picked among the options you could come up with using free will
In both cases you end up with a name in your novel. In both cases you had to think about it and make a decision. In both cases you can change that decision later or decide to keep it, and so on.
People assume that not having free will means that someone else is making the decisions, but no, its you, in both cases. in no case is there a plan for you, don't think of the lack free will as train tracks, think of it like the splashes left after the cola-mentos experiment. If you vary the angle of the mentos even slightly, you will have vastly different splash patterns. Some things always happen though, like the reaction going off ... or you deciding to eat or you falling asleep, or dieing one day. The rest is up to you and you still have to make the decisions, looking ahead in time as to what decision you will make is impossible unless you find a way to gather complete information about literally everything (a stranger coughing in a movietheater 10 years ago, the facial experession of your best friend when you told them something about yourself...) AND simulate everything interacting with you faster than it runs in real time.
There are WAAAAY more "chunky" bits of free will you lose with advertisments, tribalism, brand loyalty and so on
The fact this conversation is even being had shows that it cannot be relevant, it is at least relevant to millenia of discussions.
In fact, that take of yours is one of the few provably wrong ones.
Well put
I think free will is largely irrelevant when it comes to personal matters (although it may help/hurt your decision making if you believe in it or don't), but I do think that if our culture at a wide scale did not believe in free will, or at least did not believe in it to nearly the radical extreme that we often do (speaking from a US perspective here), that we would be better equipped to deal with societal problems. If you accept absolute free will, then no policy implementations really matter. Let's take crime for example. If absolute free will exists, then people will just decide to commit crimes when they feel like it, when they make that decision, and that decision can hardly be influenced. But if we assume instead that people are deterministic in nature, we CAN prevent future crimes by changing the starting conditions that would lead up to it. For example, people tend to commit far fewer crimes, especially violent crimes, if they have easy access to healthcare, including mental healthcare, and have some form of financial security. We can use that to influence our policy making and influence people in the direction we want society to go.
It isn't perfect, like the example in the video about the magnetic field making only 80% of people raise their left hand, but it's at the very least better. And I would argue that the remaining 20% (like the remaining people who commit crimes) simply had a different, unpredictable environment, sort of like you mentioned with the angle of the mentos. But even in these cases, approaching it from a deterministic PoV leads to better results, in my opinion. For example, let's say a man kills his mother in a rage. He gets arrested, shows great remorse for killing his mother, goes to prison, and when one day he gets some medical treatment and gets an MRI, it's revealed that a tumour is growing in his brain where the impulse control of the brain is, leading him to be more violent and impulsive. If that tumour gets removed and he no longer has any violent impulses, no outbursts, nothing that would lead him to commit a crime like that again, what reason is there to keep him locked up? Revenge, I suppose, for his action but it was an action that he had little control over in the first place. Almost as though he killed her while sleep walking.
I will now prove that free will can exist.
step 1: present a rat two pieces of identical cheese.
step 2: the rat picks one of the cheeses.
step 3: repeat until you feel like stopping.
step 4: deal with the rat population.
step 5: eat the rats.
sound logic
@@binguscat2514 Logic good sound
@@faisal3398 sounds good, logic
Good logic sound
@@robertortiz-wilson1588 logic? Sounds good
However, I have objection to libertarianism: quantum mechanics IS deterministic, but its output is probabilistic. Our consciousness doesn't have power over quantum processes, uncertainty doesn't mean free will.
Upd.: Chaotic systems are also deterministic, just hard to predict with Turing machines.
at that point it doesn't even matter anymore
@@carlosandleon I have no explanation as to why I should comment this in reply to you or why I had the urge to comment this in the first place but I would like to say "YES"
@@Survivalist_Redo Fair enough brah
80% of libertarians are anarchists in denial anyways. This sounds fine.
I just wanna know, how is quantum mechanics deterministic if its output is probabilistic
Great video with a perfect ending. A few quibbles are that the three-body problem is deterministic and in principle predicable (the most salient example of macroscopic indeterminacy is the hardware random number generator), that seizures are by definition physiological (medical conditions characterized by changes in affect include mood disorders and injuries to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex), and that a spoon can be microwaved without ill effect (forks however experience arcing between their tines).
The ship and crew analogy could be good for showing how to view the universe from a systems-theoretical perspective, but I don't find it useful for free will since it's just a homunculus argument. The first criterion for conscious volition runs into a problem of the same making: as far as we know, everything is forced by "external" factors. The closest thing to a causally independent decision I can conceive is a decision that determines itself through retrocausality, though predestination is hardly how we imagine free will.
Fukin nerd
Yeah, the chaotic systems were severely misrepresented.
The most random event I can think of is the collapse of the wave function.
The idea of parallel worlds implies that we could have made any number if decisions in our lifetime, but even there is still a point to be made that the only thing that matters when we make choices is the randomness in our universe, which is certainly not a conventional way to describe free will.
@@baggelissonic The indeterminate output of hardware random number generators indeed arises from wave function collapse. Please note that the many worlds interpretation is a fringe view, with the Copenhagen interpretation being a more popular competing view. Further, it seems unlikely that indeterminate phenomena determine our cognition. Every neurological experiment has shown brain behaviour to be classicly mechanical.
A 'homunculus argument' could only be called a fallacy if one has already decided upon the pretense that a conscious, singular agent (However that agent may arise), whose choices are influenced but not determined by neurological, physiological, and any other factors 'external' to it, cannot exist, and thus the agent being posited (The 'homunculus') must itself be another 'body'. It hold about as much weight as a Hitchens 'Super-God' argument.
The same goes for the statement that "As far as we know, everything is forced by "external" factors". It shows a train of argument where the premise and the conclusion are identical, and the premise present is what's being rejected in the first place.
That seizures (Or any other degenerative or harmful neurological illness or event) affect the conscious agent is something, of course, obvious, but it means little. One easily asserts that these things, like almost any other factor which belongs to either experience of the 'outside world' or state of the 'body' (Including the brain), can, in some instances, influence choice, but do not determine it; They do not rob the agent of agency.
You are partially correct about chaos theory: It is concerned with systems supposed to be determistic. However, chaos theory is concerned with deterministic systems that are supposed to be practically unpredictable past their early stages, despite being posited as deterministic.
The statement that "Every neurological experiment has shown brain behaviour to be classically mechanical" is untrue, even if taken with the fewest presumptions. Most experiments of that sort not only are unable to show anything regarding quantum or classical mechanics in neurological function, they do not desire to do so, not to mention the fact of modern neuroscience being so often among the most tenuous fields of its kind, even given my distaste for others. As far as it is addressed, such relations are hotly contested even among 'mainstream' science, like essentially everything about quantum mechanics and theory. And if we do take the statement as carrying the presumption of 'brain behaviour' being synonymous with the conscious agent, we encounter the same error of the conclusion and the identical premise (The one which is being rejected in the first place) which I addressed before.
I should say that I am steady in my belief in the singular human soul, created by God, despite this likely meaning irreconcilability, as well as an opening of myself to ridicule or dismissal.
yeah the only thing that is technically free in that scheme is a closed system. Humans are not closed systems.
I have always thought the thrid option made the most sense, even if I didn't know it had a name. Even if your actions are predetermiend you're still the one chosing you decisions- you just dont get to chose that you chose it. If you catch my drift.
I think it is already known by God but you are the one choosing it. But I will bet that we chose to choose in a sort of a pre life scenario. It isn't possible that we are the only creatures who are conscious like that there must be a reason
I don't catch your drift.
12:30 there was this guy that randomly started killing people one day, murdered his wife and children in cold blood and then became a serial killer. In his trial it was actually found out that he had a brain tumor causing that and after it was removed, they didn't know what to do with him.
seems to be more evidence for compatibilism
@@zoogl I think that's just brain tumors causing a type of frontal lobe damage.
Certain types of brain damage can cause emotional sensitivity of some sort, and it some rare cases it can cause psychosis and enable violent behavior.
How did they know the tumor cause it?
@@blugaledoh2669 once removed the guy wasn't crazy
@@zoogl Isn't it mostly correlative? Even if we supposed that the brain tumor impacted his mental state contributing to his later action, it doesn't suggest that cause him to make the decision to murder his family and other. There is a difference between urges and decision.
8:22 the 3 body system may not be predictable, it is still fully deterministic. The path that the three bodies will follow is always the same for the same initial values. Computing these paths and accuratly determining these initial values are the hard things.
I will only accept this as and argument against free will if you talked about measurements of the initial values.
Yes but because perfection don't exist in the real world, the same initial values will never be same and so it is not predictable, with the same values it's like rewatching the same tape over and over again but we can't reverse time in our world (im bad at explaining so i hope u understood)
SEU's in electronics, or radioactive decay are not deterministic. But at the same time, neither nucleons, nor electrons have free will.
This reminds me of a scifi story I once read. A person becomes desynced from his brain and his choices now lag a second behind his actions.
Horrified, he stops making decisions and realises he's just a prisoner inside an automated body. He only thought he was making decisions, but in fact his consciousness was merely following the body. And now he's stuck inside a body that continues life as normal, but he no longer influences it and can't communicate to anyone.
Sounds (and feels) like schizophrenia.
@@letzte_maahsname Yeah, it was written like a horror story. When his thoughts were synced, his actions felt like his own. But when he started lagging, his brain kept going as if nothing was different, except he was now trapped in a body that went on to live his life without any input from him.
He couldn't communicate with anyone, his body just talked with people like always without him being involved. It gave me anxiety when I read it as a teen. Wish I could remember what it was called.
8:25 I have a nitpick here!
the three body problem is commonly used to demonstrate how deterministic processes do not need to be predictable
a three body system will behave in exactly the same way given exactly the same input, however since tiny pertubations can affect the output a lot, the fastest way to predict a 3 body system is to actually simulate it.
meaning in that sense even if your decisions are deterministic, the fastest way to predict you would be to just see what you end up doing.
When Shona started playing at the Uranium part, you better believe I got hyped. Excellent taste.
this is the best vsauce parody i’ve ever seen it’s not even a parody it’s just doing a video for him
Spiritual successor™
The really creepy thing is that if there is a consciousness, there's actually *two* of them.
the middle connector in-between the two hemispheres of the brain can be severed, this used to be a treatment for schizophrenia and seizures, and if you ask both hemispheres different questions and show them different stimuli, you will get different answers, often contradicting each other.
this can either mean there are two different things arguing on what to do at any given moment, or you can split that thing in half and create two separate beings. freaky.
no, because the halves can still communicate, since the brainstem still exists along with those below the corpus callosum.
@@serraramayfield9230 then why don’t they cut the brain stem as well?
@@serraramayfield9230 Isn't it the case that people that had that procedure done may somewhat lose control over left or right side of the body.
Example: They move their left/right hand without wanting to do it. Assumed to be because the other brain half is doing it and the main decision center cannot properly control the action / veto in this video's case?
Note: Los of control =/= random actions, proper minor action but without wanting to do it.
@@h4xorzist i don't think so, though strokes can do it
reminds me of Alien X in ben 10. Alien X is omnipotent, but the 2 beings inside it need to agree first before they can do something. What if we are alien x and the 2 consciousness inside us just never agree lol
As long as you don't know your future from your perspective you will always have free will so for me, it's fine. Like watching a show with and without spoilers
Without spoilers everything seems possible, but with spoilers you know that every decision is leading to that specific end
I've always thought the Libet experiment is pretty useless for answering the question of whether we have free will. All it tells us is that the brain makes decisions before we're consciously aware of them - it could still be that there's a lag between 'the will' and its conscious expression. I'm a determinist and I don't think this is actually the case, but I'd never use this experiment to support my position.
Yeah I agree this is a weird experiment to bring up while debating free will
There's definitely a lag between the will and conscious expression,the electrical signals at the decision making centers have to travel to the neocortex.
dude, it should be hard to be a deterministic haha.
Of course there is lag, it’s called reaction time
@@adamdinar376 well no, reaction time is the time between deciding to do something, and doing it. Whether there's a lag between deciding to do something and the conscious awareness that the decision has been made is a different matter. That's the only point I'm making - it could be that we have free will, and there's a lag between 'the will' and our conscious awareness of it.
I don't believe that, because I don't believe we have some special 'free will' module in our brains that somehow non-deterministically makes independent decisions. So the lag being measured is, it seems to me, the lag between the decision-making mechanisms and the conscious awareness of the outcome of those mechanisms. I'm just saying that either way, the existence of lag is not evidence for or against free will, in itself.
0:55 the map is the city of detroit
I'm not watching because I want to, I'm watching because the universe wanted me to.
This is the point of The Matrix: You already "made the decision", it is predictable, you are here to understand _why_ you made the decision.
Cake or death? The validity of my prediction you will pick cake doesn't remove your free will to choose death. Predictability and free will are not mutually exclusive.
I'm reminded that this channel doesn't have 600k subs. Now I'm sad.
I once had this kind of thought as a kid, but I decided that regardless of if free will exists or not, I can still feel joy and happiness, so life is still worth living.
This is actually such a simple yet brilliant conclusion! Despite all of this discourse, the "true" truth doesn't actually make any difference. You, your free will and your mind still exist to _yourself_ and that's all that really matters. Whilst deep philosophical debate is definitely helpful, it's sometimes good to just take a step back and appreciate the simpler, more concrete things. No matter what the science says, from your own perspective you are here, you feel things, you think and you do. And even if your future is predetermined then so what! It doesn't change the fact that you yourself have no idea what will happen to you next week or next year. The Universe may have it all figured out, but life's still a mystery to us and maybe that's for the better. At the end of the day, the only thing we truly know is that we can never truly know anything at all. And the joy in not knowing is getting to find out and think of an answer for yourself. The world is what you make of it, there isn't _a_ universe, just _your_ universe.
@@Scien_Tific Nice one mate. Simple is best.
“But America’s a free country 🤠”
"My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will" - that's a lot like how I came out of depression.
It's that most unscientific of things, faith: a belief that is justified not because one is aware of evidence that it is true, but on the consequences of one's believing in it. As an amateur philosopher, I feel like lay society has, over the past 50 years or so, gradually gone from voluntarism to determinism, & the result has been the personal existential crisis becoming a popular culture trope.
Lmao the "look honey, they made the Twitter logo into a real thing" had me.
I love how this guy basically went:
“VSauce isn’t gonna upload anything again? Fine, I’ll do it myself! What was his show about again? The mind? Alright!”
To be honest, the seizure argument is kinda odd to me, you don't stick a hard drive in a microwave and expect the pictures you had on it to change into different pictures, the files just get corrupted or the hard drive breaks, so why expect a seizure to change someone's opinions?
Also, there is a difference between, for example, having a memory and moving your hand. Moving your hand is a sudden action caused by an electrical impulse, so it makes sense that a seizure could cause it to happen. Memories and habits are more permanent. They are stored chemically in and in the way neurons have connected to each other over a long time. I doubt random electric activity could affect them.
Also, there is anecdotal “evidence” (I know that’s not actual evidence but humor me for a moment) of people that received physical damage to the head or brain and changed their personality. Also, also, it is known that certain diseases will affect the brain and will also affect people’s behavior (syphilis and rabies are famous examples)
Corrupted picture, is a different picture. There will always be gates to read binary values from.
@@gebys4559 That's assuming only the values defining the actual image get scrambled, but I'm willing to bet filling a hard drive with random 1s and 0s and plugging it into a computer wouldn't give you an image.
@@Haibing22 Personality changes due to head trauma are extremely common.
Great vid, one small problem. The n body-problem is competely decidable, and it will always be the same, with the same inputs. It's just that we can't calculate it using algebra, like with 2 bodies. This would be more of chaos theory than true randomness.
You can't calculate the two body problem using algebra or even in terms of standard functions(exp, log, trigonometric functions). The reason why is that you need to find an inverse function to something expressible in terms of trig, which isn't expressible in terms of trig, exp and log. You can calculate it approximately very well tho.
@@xfom4008 This is very true. I have recently had the pleasure to make a small simulation of planetary motion and numeric simulation can always approximate it (at the limit even perfectly).
However, my point was that the problem is ultimately still deterministic. Just because an algebraic solution doesn't exist, doesn't mean that the problem is random. In the video, BritMonkey compares U-238 decay (something truly random) to a 3 body system (which is deterministic, but cannot be calculated). I was just pointing out that these two things are not equivalent
@@palanix3145 3 body system can be calculated to arbitrary precision. Like you can just use numerical integration techniques for it and get an answer that is arbitrarily precise. In special cases the 3 body problem is even completely solvable.
The difference is that the 3 body problem has paths diverge to arbitrary distance in phase space when you propagate them over time and you don't have what is called integrability in Hamiltonian mechanics. 2 body is integrable, 3 body isn't.
everytime i finish watching a new video i get mad about how underrated this channel is
I’ll third that
Because of the incomplete info??? 80% success rate with crude tools clearly demonstrate the lack of free will.
There are some things that you don’t really have a choice on. Emotional moments aren’t your choice, you don’t really choice to cry, but you can resist the urge. I think the ship analogy is really good
5:15 the fact you didn't play “libet’s delay” here has ruined my day
Otherwise, really good video
I feel like he would have, but it would break the whole vsauce parody that this video was going for (all the music in this video has been used in vsauce videos).
He has used Libet's Delay in other videos, though.
most spoons in microwaves amazingly enough seem fine, not enough rigged edges on them to cause the problem it seems. I knew a guy that swore up and down it was fine, i told him i had a hard time believing it, so to prove the point every time he used the microwave he'd point out that the spoon was inside the whole time, every time.
At this point i guess i have to believe spoons are mostly okay to do that with?
I'm still not doing it myself tho, i would be to spooked.
Good video overall, though I believe there is much, much more depth to the matter.
Seizure argument is very weird. Seizures involve neurons firing indiscrimnately at same time, while "will" (a most unprecise term) is a high order function that probably requires precise timely cascades of neurons firing at exctly the right time in multiple parts of the brain. Seizures involving multiple parts of the brain lead to loss of consciousness. So how would you observe a seizure altering "will" in real time?
More importantly, there are hundreds of documented cases of tumours, brain trauma and brain degenrative disease altering the "will" of people, completely changing their life.
8:30 false. The system is chaotic and it would require impossible amounts of computational power to calculate, however it still follows determnistic rules ; it's literally the definition of a chaotic system, something that follows strict deterministic laws but requires vast (and sometimes infinite) amounts of computation to be simulated. To our current human knowledge, we have yet to discover any kind of non-quantic structure to behave in a non deterministic way (calling quantum mecanics non determninstic is also imprecise, but whatever, I guess your point was to highligh a system that doesn't behave as our usual intuitive macroscopic world, and that is very much true, qantum mechanics is weird).
16:06 makes no sense. Our knowledge of how the brain works is extremely limited, we basically know nothing about it. We put a giant magnet over the brain and manage to create such a gigantic shift in decisions, what exactly makes you think 100% of left hand lifting isn't reachable using more invasive methods (which would be unethical*) and/or using more advanced techniques when we advance our knowledge in neuroscience?
Invasive brain manipulations would be unethical in humans, but on mice it's already been done :
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22441246/ (quite technical)
www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/meet-two-scientists-who-implanted-false-memory-mouse-180953045/ (correctly vulgarized)
Individual events at the quantum scale are truly random, in that knowing the outcome is fundamentally impossible (according to current quantum mechanical theory) and they individual events cannot be coerced to fall with certainty a certain way. Only over time can more predictable patterns of probabilities emerge. A single 50-50 quantum event is truly truly random and non-deterministic in the truest sense. Experiments have shown too that these outcomes can't possibly be decided by some hidden underlying or unknowable parameter either. They're random, plain and simple.
@@geoffdavids7647 only according to the Copenhagen interpretation. Which is the main interpretation, but still. That's why I said it was imprecise to call quantum mech non-deterministic, not incorrect.
Didn't Turing prove that something like the 3 body problem isn't necessarily deterministic because math itself isn't deterministic. Doesn't mean all starting conditions don't have determined outcomes but that not all can be pre-determined. Seems more like a problem with math then whether or not the underlying principle is deterministic
@@geoffdavids7647 no. It's completely random _to us._
Which is why we treat them as completely random phenomena, but we don't know what's happening "under the hood".
The fact that we can link particles that _always,_ 100% of the time, behave in the same way even if seemingly completely unlinked and separated, makes us think that there's something deterministic that we don't yet know, and maybe never will.
(And yes, I study this stuff, I'm not coming up with it based on random stuff I find on the internet.)
@@FAB1150 @Nuovo Well granted I don't study this stuff officially - but there was one incredible video that seemed to really disprove the idea of a hidden variable under the hood determining what the outcome would be. It seemed to say that quantum outcomes are really truly random th-cam.com/video/zcqZHYo7ONs/w-d-xo.html
8:20 whilst the stystem is chaotic, it is still determenistic. If you recreate the initial conditions exactly, the outcome will be the same
I came up with compatibilism on my own, and came to that conclusion. Sort of like the "simulation" hypotheses of the universe; I simply believe it does not matter. Whether we have free will or not is irrelevant. The choice I make, whether deterministic or my own, is a choice I made.
There is obviously a more eloquent way to describe this, but I find it very simple. It is a completely superfluous question. Free will is something espoused by religion (aside from the few deterministic sects), that you have 'free will to accept or deny God, and that is a gift he has given you'. Does it matter if my choice is a result of my neurons? Is it a product of my environment and my genetics? Is it something else, something ephemeral? Who gives a shit.
One thing I believe supports determinism is our sexual drive. It's something we cannot control, and is more or less an instinctual drive to procreate. We do not have a choice in whether we desire this; it is either there or not there (in the case of true asexuals), but we do have a choice to act on it or to deny it. Even denying it, the drive is still there. Is the ability to deny it free will? Or simply a factor of our environment, our upbringing, perhaps abuse or bad experiences? I'm not a fan, and yet, that feeling is still there. It is inescapable.
Our body has so many instinctual needs that make us identical to animals (as we are animals), who seem to not have 'free will'. Our consciousness is just being aware of our lack of free will.
I'm in no way a philosopher of neuroscientist, but If I simply choose to never do a single action again, surely that proof that free will exists in some way
Been binge watching your vids since I discovered you couple days ago, you deserve much more subs. You are going places buddy, your vids are both fun and informative, hope you grow a lot!
Is it just me or non-determinists stances sound a bit like conspiracy theorists?
"Yeah like, MAYBE there is something umeasurable! And also physics aren't ALWAYS consistant, it's not magic I swear!"
Occam's Razor
The final point is completely nonsensical.
All brains are different, there's a near infinite scale of variability due to human being being a species of living creatures.
Imagine you had 100 different sets of dominoes, but each set has a slightly different weight for its dominoes, and a different height, and a different width, and maybe each end of a domino could have more or less mass than the other, making them lopsided.
No one model of domino physics could accurately predict how these dominoes would fall, the speed, velocity, the decibles of the sound they make when colliding, but by virtue of them all being dominoes, certain elements would remain true, thus any attempted "universal" model would have 80% accuracy.
But if you were to take one single set of these dominoes, and make a model specifically for it, then you would be able to predict the outcome perfectly 100% of the time.
It's not about humans having free will, it's about it being impossible to create an accurate model of something when each and every measurable example is a variation of each other, with no two being identical, it's like an experiment with no control group.
The problem isn't just across different people, if that were the case, you could prove against this by showing that the same person manipulated in the same way would show either 100% or 0% response. The problem also exists across the same person at different times.
8:43 *You can't hide, Italy.*
I am witnessing the birth of a mainstream sized channel. I will have bragging rights of watching before it was cool.
Also opinion on determinism in nature.
People study Newtonian physics in public education and hit the first peak of confidence in the dunning kruger curve thinking everything can be explained with action and mathematically predictable reaction.
More hardcore physicists are aware of the uranium example used in the video, but also literally 95% of the micro world.
Electrons in the atomic model represent a spot of highest probability of the location of the electron.
In thermodynamics you are told heat goes from cold to hot, which is wrong. Heat can go either way, but its statistical probability makes the overall process flow in one direction.
A much more relevant science to evaluate free will is the science of data manipulation, communications, transfer and so on. There the first thing you are taught is any system has a noise that is unpredictable (definition of noise). Analog signals develop unpredictable deviations from their original value and digital ones develop errors and bitflips on random bits.
Noise in a datastream can by definition never be predicted, so even if physics are deterministic, nothing can predict the outcome of a series of events until its over. You can only make probability estimates.
If you dive deep into the engineering of analog vs digital filters you will learn to see basic analog devices as a hardware replacement of something that can be duplicated in function in software. This will give you the lens of seeing the universe not as a victim of deterministic physics, but an infinite computational process running on the hardware of the universe, the kernel of physics and the OS of the big bang.
I consider individual free will a program running on this system with certain, yet unpredictable outcome.
My only unprofessional response to this is "if there are gaps in knowledge and understanding, it looks like magic".
EXACTLY!!!!!!!!
The legend has returned....
Keep it up mate.
I personally think the following thought experiment really does a lot of damage to compatibilism and any notion of freedom of the will within individuals. I’ve shortened it down a bit.
Ask yourself if you can think a thought before it is thought. If I ask you to think of a movie and you do so, at which point did you *think of choosing* that movie? When did you choose to choose that movie? I think if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll say that it just popped into your head, seemingly ex nihilo. You never *chose* for the popping into being of the thought to happen at all. This seems in line with Schurger. You can produce reasons for your choice, but where did those reasons come from? Not the content, but the actual *happening* of the rationale itself?
I would contend that you cannot think a thought before it is thought. If you could think a thought before it is thought, that means that you would have retroactive access to the thinking of thoughts by way of the act of the thinking of thoughts. In other words, you would be stuck in an infinite regress or a vicious loop.
The problem goes something like this: I think thought X only because I first thought the meta-thought X^-1, which I only thought because I first thought meta-thought (X^-1)^-1, which I only thought because I first thought meta-thought ((X^-1)^-1)^-1, then (((X^-1)^-1)^-1)^-1 and so on, out to infinity. To think a thought before it is thought is a temporal and logical absurdity because you would have to think each thought, and each meta-thought about each thought, and each meta-thought about each meta-thought before ever thinking a thought. But this simply cannot happen--it’s a Zeno’s paradox of the mind.
In fact, the electrical stimulus of the brain takes time to traverse decision-making neural pathways, which means that every choice would have to be a retroactive response represented to consciousness while the brain is busy taking in new information, already moving beyond the thought *you* think you are volitionally thinking.
But if you can’t choose to think a thought, if it is a logical and temporal absurdity, at what point does free will come into the picture? I would say that it simply cannot come into play. Positing a soul doesn’t help at all, because that soul must have this incoming stimulus in order to make a decision for the brain. But then it seems to act mechanistically as well, in accord with past, present, and future conditions and behaviors. If it didn’t, it would probably look a lot like the most extreme cases of schizophrenia, or low latent inhibition or something like that (not a psychologist here). But that clearly isn’t freedom at all-quite the opposite.
>He still thinks the mind is bound by physical laws like the brain
This video gave me an existential crisis and I'm thanking it for that. Good job, Vsauce, Britmonkey here
The notion that any sufficiently stochastic or chaotic process has free will is really beautiful. The wind and the weather could have free will. A game of poker could have free will. A lava lamp could have free will.
You see, the way I ignore existential crises about free will is to call it nerd shit and move on.
3:05 “we can be creative and autistic” is what I heard and I think that’s a better way of putting it /sarc
8:20-8:28 You can use Newton's law of universal gravitation and add up the vectors for one body of mass, attracted to the other two, do this to all three bodies of mass, move them according to the vectors, and repeat! You can actually predict what will happen to the colliding objects (if you had the time!)
Now try combining the concept of free will with the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics or the concept of fixed spacetime to get some real existential dread. Some nice questions are:
- How do we know that my "now" is your "now", are you maybe 10 years in front of me?
-Why do we only experience one outcome of random quantum mechanical events? Is there a hyper consciousness aware of all possible decisions and we are just a small slice of it?
-If things are deterministic, why do we even experience time? There is nothing in physics making a "now" necessary.
Finally a new video from my favourite TH-camr. I’ve been waiting for this for ages.
SSRIs and ADHD medications really made me believe that my mind and my brain are separate entities. Kind of like my mind is the RAM/cache, and my brain is the ROM. The RAM/cache builds up over the lifetime based on your experiences and if your hardware crashes you lose your RAM (I'm talking about comas). Meds have had a lot of effect on how I feel, how happy or sad or lathargic or productive I am, but I've always been able to separate me from what my brain/body allows me to do.
Really glad I found this channel. Honestly don’t know why you don’t have 100x more subscribers; the quality of the videos warrants it!
Because the information is incomplete and wrong. 80% success rate with crude tools clearly demonstrate the lack of free will. Imagine what a finished tool will do.
I know people say things like that all the time, but I was a compatabilists before I found out it's a thing from this video. Glad to know there's a name for that.
Keep what you're doing, just discovered your channel today and I really love your narration, your subjects and your ideas, thanks for the amazing content !
12:15 we have something like that. there have been bad people who stopped being bad after a tumor was removed. in other words, they stopped having the will do do very particular morally wrong things.
It is known that radiation could cause computers to flip a bit in their memory. And such radiation could come from a variety of sources seemingly randomly, from the computer itself, from the immediate surrounding, or even from outside the galaxy. Sometimes the flipped bit causes the computer to crash, sometimes the computer notices the flipped bit and corrects it, or sometimes the computer will produce a slightly different result. This is why there are usually multiple identical computers that run identical programs in applications that involve radiation to produce more consistent results.
Is it possible that brains work the same way? Even though it is theoretically deterministic, it behaves in an in-deterministic way in practice. Perhaps there are many identical brain modules that run through the same decision making process to provide a more consistent but not fully consistent result. So our decisions are largely deterministic but can still act randomly as if there is free will.
Just a random 3 AM thoughts.
I think because of quantum physics, whether or not free will has something to do with it, our choices and actions are not deterministic.
For that beginning alone, It was worth to suscribe to this channel.
Epileptic patients tend to have behavioral changes and mood derangement related to the seizures... also patients with syndenhams chorea (post streptococcal infection) have behavioral changes
I find it so pretentious of us humans, to think we are ready to understand such things.
It helped me to understand that I may never know, and that's OK. I'm here now, and let's see what comes
The clock experiment doesn’t really work because 1. the participants likely got the arm ready to flick it and then decided to say it out loud and 2. maybe the brain made the decision to flick their wrist and tried to say it and do it at the same time but because talking requires more conscious effort then moving your wrist the actions weren’t made at the exact same time
Where’s there’s a willn’t, there’s a wayn’t
i initially thought this was gonna be about "willn't" being an archaic synonym for "won't"
Flipping awesome video mate. Love this topic.
I think free will and consciousness can be talked about in close conjunction with complex systems. The flawed human perception of the universe is what makes things seem complex. We understand the universe in a beautifully backwards way; because we don't understand it. I think you can get over this fact by asking why anything happens. Just asking "why?" continuously and you will get to a point where we do not know the answer. It is beyond our understanding, and that is okay, because as far as we idiots know we get to live our own life in a way that we choose to. Just gotta do our best. Compatibilism ftw
I think that philosophers making everyone consistently angry just speaks to how maybe they're onto something lol
This takes me back to the old vsauce videos, with less mathematics. Also Jake Chudnows music goes great with any educational video.
I wanna add something for the seizure morality bit, because yeah, a seizure has never changed someone's opinion, but there was once a man, who had a railroad spike pass through his brain, and after it was removed, he start to act more angry than before, altough something could've happened to him in his personnal life which changed his attitude.
BritMonkey: “Human beings can pause and think about their actions”
My ADHD: “no, I don’t think so”
In addition to being a great video about free will, this is a wonderful homage to Vsauce. You incorporated his style into yours so seamlessly. I smiled or laughed out loud several times because the way you turned a phrase, or presented a point, sounded so much like him it was uncanny.
"Oh thanks Sam and Sabrine! Now that I know that I have no free will, I will use that knowledge to make better choices in the future."
Conciousness is just electrons.
My opinion on this: consciousness is merely an observer.
I read your "top comment" and all i have to say it is laughable. Quantum mechanics is determenistic with indeterminenistic output... Ok
.... But free will is neither determenistic or random. I know what category it is but you don't deserve to know. Also, a passive observer.. what an energy inefficient evolutionary update! Truely, loosing time and energy to have comsciousness to just be cosmetic... Very rational.. And for sure... When someone is aware of something he is doing its the same when he isn't... Of course humans are mere automatons.. Pathetic confused determinists, doing everything to eliminate moral responsibility, and live like embryos!
The Universe works on a math equation
That never even really ends in the end
Infinity spirals out of creation
We're on the tip of its tongue, and it's saying
"Well, we aren't sure where you stand
You ain't machines and you ain't land"
And the animals and the plants, they're all linked
And the animals and plants, they eat each other
Your content is just too good to stay undiscovered, i know your channel is gonna have a million subs like a year from now
0:52 (on computer)
Yeah nobody gonna do that. The computer s worth everything
Awesome video! One of the few that made me laugh in a long while. Love it
I still think consciousness is made of blocks. Our brain tries to cut resources whenever it can. So it would makes sense that it simply generates things on the fly based on past experiences. That's why illusions work, and that's why you loose focus so often. You're a weird machine that most of the time isn't even aware it exist. Most of the time you're not here, you're just executing tasks like walking down the street, eating something. It's like your brain recognizes patterns and groups them together to play them back later again. The other stuff is thrown away cause it's not important, that's why your memory is shit in remembering the tedious stuff you tried to learn, and that's why you must like and engage to learn effectively.
By blocks I mean like packages of information grouped together, many past sensory information can come together to help predict the future. Like when you know something will fall and bounce not shattering cause you saw that thing doing that before. You'll know the sound, the feel or the taste beforehand, you'll remember something or someplace important.. Consciousness seems to come in packages to try predicting a future event or sometimes just cause it's convenient your brain gives strange or false information simply cause it's there grouped in your subconscious.
The Oracle in the Matrix: _"You didn't come here to make the choice, you've already made it. You're here to try to understand _*_why_*_ you made it."_
5:01 this can literally be explained by the fact it takes time for your brain to register what you see. Of course the recorded time and decision time are going to be different. After you make the decision, you still have to look at the clock and register what you saw. even if you were staring at the clock the entire time there is a gap between consciously realizing what time it is
is this vsauce4
14:55 isn't this phrasing kinda weird? Both Forced and coerced imply that if external factors don't play a role in the decision making then there's free will but if you wanted to stay by yourself in a room for an indefinite amount of time and be handled by the system as a prisoner then could you say that the existence of rooms, the system, the concept of prision and prisoners had a direct effect, a moving effect, a force, in the decision making, aswell as everything that exist bc everything has tiny vectors that make you be you, then you could say "if rooms didn't exist they would go to a cave or whatever but the intent of the "decision" would still be there and that's entirely on the person" and to that I'd say that if your mind takes some of the vectors that are affecting you and assings values to different vectors which makes humans take different courses of action but what is it that determines the values? Knowledge, mood, tiredness, culture, urges, etc. most of them external factors and the ones that are or have an internal components that can be reduced down to a lack/over production of chemicals that you don't have control over and yes, there's still the randomness but if it's random you can't affect it either
Ultimately I don't care if there's free will or not, because although is annoying not to know there's still a very real feeling of free will and I act according to that because I can't just get rid of it and I can't ignore it because that'd be unhealthy
I used to think the world wasn't deterministic because of quantum randomness. I came across an argument which was "If the universe were to revert back to a point in time where everything down to the subatomic level is identical, would we end up exactly where we are today?" and I just can't believe otherwise now. We know the universe is chaotic but at least for me I feel its deterministic. Perhaps the math and science just isn't there to prove or disprove it yet.
Emergence, incompleteness and contingency - answers all of the discrepancies in mind/body, subject/object, or intrinsic/extrinsic distinction.
We sort of have to assume free will exists in order for ethics to work.
The problem with conciousness is it effects everything around us, not the other way around. I'm no expert but there's a lot about the world around us that we dont understand, even at the highest levels of physics. A study done on millions of people who had died for up to two hours and were revived. At least 10% of people had a vivid memory of everything going on around them while they were dead, and were able to confirm this.
Sure we can see light, hear vibrations, feel matter etc. But how many other sources of "information" are out there that we simply cannot quantify with our standard methods or from standard congition.
Free will is also an interesting subject. And its a trade off between our conscious and unconscious minds. Most actions we do throughout the day, especially things we are comfortable with are done autonomously by our unconcious minds. Even picking up a glass of water and taking a drink, you dont really have to put any mental effort into these actions no matter how complex they are. But things like learning new skills, making decisions and taking risks, or anything that takes you out of your daily routines.
I think most people dont want to be conscious. Most people want to let their subconscious take over and live comfortably. But theres nothing exciting about that. Adventure is full of conscious decisions and experiences. Thats why we love them so much.
The brain does not create consciousness. The brain is a sort of reducing valve for consciousness. It allows us to experience the world through various stimuli.
Our bodies and minds dwell within all dimensional levels but really we can only see 2 dimensions and we think of the world in 3 dimensions within our minds. If we could experience higher dimensions, I'm sure it would completely change how we view our reality.
"dude its magic trust me"
We once had a discussion about freewill in our school. One student said that if he found out that freewill doesn't exist then he would get depressed and probably kill himself. The only problem I see with that is "what difference does it make?". What difference does it make that you have or have not a free will. In the end you still need to make descisions and also you still need to decide whether what you decided on was right or wrong.
Noone can truely use "determinism" as a shield to protect themselfs from having to do moral choices!
You put the book down and go outside. You have options to do and as you said even if the imput is the same the output is not predictable there can only be a probability.
At the end of the day, the breakfast I had was pretty good so I'm not complaining.
Cheers for the “Not built by dolfins” gag
8:26
It's chaotic, which means that a tiny change in the starting position leads to a huge change after some time. It doesn't mean that it isn't deterministic, it just means that as long as we don't have 100% perfect knowledge of the initial state, our predictions won't hold very long
The main argument for libertarianism is that qualia exist as a real quality and quantity of the universe, therefore things exist outside the physical dichotomy of determinism and randomness, therefore these same qualia and whatever unnamed factor is responsible for free will could have the same origin. This is very much not related to dualism. If anything, it's in the vein of monism (whatever variant, beside the most naive kind of materialism).
14:00 he is objectively a freeman if the door is unlocked. And he is objectively confined if the door is locked. He is simply choosing not care and choosing to remain there regardless.
We read about this exact topic in philosophy class last week, perfect timing.
Determinist evidence: Let's do some convincing neural science
Libertarian evidence: URANIUM-238
What does it matter if free will does not exist?
We will still live our lives, feel emotion, feel happiness, experience things and experience the human experience. So what if we don't have free will? I will still live my life as I normally do and enjoy it as much as I can. it does not matter if the choices I make are predetermined because I ultimately made those choices and I will experience the outcome. What if everything's just a chemical response? Why would that matter? Why should we care about it? I feel as if we shouldn't. Saying that everything is predetermined is limiting and won't get us anywhere so we should make the best out of what we've got.
“Free will” is somewhat paradoxical in nature in my opinion. To have a will is to determine and impose something in existence, whether that’s yourself or the environment or somebody else in the surrounding. It’s an action and a reaction, which makes it opposite of free. As you impose on someone or something that will be reaction that you experience that you have no control off.