Sam Harris: Free Will is an Illusion
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- čas přidán 15. 05. 2024
- Lex Fridman Podcast full episode: • Sam Harris: Consciousn...
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GUEST BIO:
Sam Harris is an author, podcaster, and philosopher.
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Lex typically records his interviews right after he finishes his limo driver job.
As he should, do you mind helping him pay his bills?
@@voodoochyld3670 I think I already have.
@@unRheal as you should
@@voodoochyld3670 As I should what? Try to make the world better and everyone as happy and motivated as they never even imagined was possible, or as I should help Lex pay his bills even though I've been depressed, living paycheck to paycheck for 50 years, and he probably makes way more than 10x I've ever made.. I guess I'm just nice that way and I know a real lousy depressed life, and want nobody else to ever have to live one if they don't want to. Or are you just trolling..?
@@unRheal brother I can be anything in the world but a troll, I understand how you feel. Please I apologize if I steered this conversation this wrong way, it sincerely wasn’t my intention. Brother you sound like you are on the verge of giving up on life, please hang in there. He that has patience may compass anything, let time heal.
So two years late here, but what I'm picking up is this basically: We have an illusion of free will because as an individual we can make decisions based on our own thought processes, but this ultimately IS an illusion because as any other force of nature, we do not decide what the thought process being generated is. We can guide this pathway with enough mindfulness, but even the thought of "I need to be more mindful in my thinking" was not ultimately something we decide to think out of nowhere; it is generated originally by our internal hardware and previous experiences and physical programming that built up to the moment of the thought "This is something I need to do" occuring to us as an involuntary reaction to a situation or other uncontrolled string of thought.
I’ve only had 2 profound meditation experiences in my entire life and if it weren’t for those I wouldn’t connect with what Sam’s view on free will is. Getting in a state where you are completely divorced from self and thoughts are just arising in consciousness is a light bulb moment to truly how mysterious and random what thoughts arise out of the dark. I mention all that to say that one of the simplest way Sam has described us not having free will is to say if all of our thoughts arise out of the dark and we don’t author any of our thoughts, then if we can’t find free will there, then we can’t find it anywhere. He does a thought experiment that’s extremely simple but he asks someone to think of a celebrity and to pay attention to the process of what celebrity they thought of, if you pay attention to which one comes to mind, you had no control of which one did or what reason you have to justify why that one was chosen.
Yep, that's right.
But we still need to decide how our justice system works. What responsibility means in this context, etc. Knowing free will doesn't exist and deciding what to do about that are two entirely different discussions.
@@OhManTFE 'We' can't decide that, since there is no free will.
@@fireflies775 yes we can. Just because free will doesn't exist doesn't stop us from making choices and decisions. It's just these choices and decisions are rooted in deterministic causes and we couldn't a have acted any differently. Understand?
@@TyroneBiggums789 What he didn't mention is the soul the self could be part of the soul or it's the soul, is the soul conscious? does the soul experience life? the soul needs the body to experience life. sure the thought arises in the brain but it's the soul that decides what is what, so that means the will belongs to the soul, is it free? it's free to choose but the outcome doesn't belong to it, this is how I see it, free will is not an illusion but the outcome makes it sound like it's
Thank you for helping me forgive myself for not appreciating my partner and not showing him the compassion that I should have. He passed away feb7,2022 and I have so much regret. I was blind and I didn't know that I was blind. I would give anything to go back in time to tell him how much I love him.
❤
I understand your pain, and I´m absolutely sorry about your pain, and I hope that you will heal. But you where a slave of the laws of physics, as we all are. Don´t be cruel against yourself.
"Free will is an oxymoron! Where there's will there's no freedom and where there's freedom there's no will"
- Swami Vivekananda
Amazing quote
Could you explain the meaning behind this quote?
Everything is an illusion... And now i show you how mi ilusion its better than yours...
A student asked his philosophy professor: "how do I know that I exist?" "Who is asking?" the professor replied.
The problem with Sam Harris’s he thinks everything is ENDOGENOUS mechanisms, biology is both REACTIVE & ENDOGENOUS mechanisms. There must be a reactive, an external interactions with the environment or we would have no optic nerve, we would be blind, all mass have colour, even an Atom. So how can free will be only endogenous mechanisms.
I think therefore I am - Descarte
@@pakibluemannn yeah Descartes got that one wrong. He equated thought with BEING which is proven wrong by continuous practice Vipassana meditation. It's more like I am, therefore I think.
@@averygartner6516 Our course descarte was wrong and your more enlightened then him...
@@trapiconti4001 thank you for noticing how much more enlightened I am than Descartes :')
“Turns out you were right, I’m gonna ask you about free will.. I just can’t help it.”
I see what you did there.
👆 Look at These Dumbos Above 👆
@@notforever123 The more I see my life and the More I play Heroes of the might and magic 3, this is ONE of the Ideas which I do think and fear about.🙏
I know Sam is an idiot. Only because him and I think the same way. And I'm an idiot. He thinks like a simpleton, just like I do. Free will doesnt exist. But it doesn't take a genius to figure that out.
@@vexial97 Contradictory comment. If you're a dull simpleton crayon then that means you wouldn't get the correct answer, which means I can dismiss this as false, proving free will to be TRUE
"My Will is Nature's Will" ... this is the insight that always come up when I meditate on free will. It is quite freeing.
Sam Harris is a devoutly religious man. The State is his Religion, the Government is his Church, Politicians are his Clergy, Law is his Bible, and he has lots and lots of Faith!
Marcus Aurelius wrote a lot about it
What is it if I learn about a new diet, for example, then I implement this new process for a belief of benefit. This is not my choice? When I start intermittent fasting, reducing sugar intake, etc. this is not my free will? If it turns out these modifications hurt my heath in the future, at that time I should look back and realize I had no controll over this "life choice"?
Long story short, I don't follow Sam's reasoning for no free will.
“Free will is the most powerful force in the universe.” - Edgar Cayce, father of Homeopathic medicine.
@@fadenmac8092Could I ask what it is in Sam’s reasoning in the video you don’t follow? The situation you described (in which you were prescribing free will to what you see as choice) is consistent with what he was saying; just because you think you have free will or think you have choices doesn’t mean you are actually in control of what is decided. As he says, it’s like people have an “illusion that if you arranged the universe exactly as it was a moment ago, it could’ve played out differently.” He is talking about this around 29:40 specifically but it ties into what he is saying throughout the whole video.
43:08 this is where I am at 54 years old. It totally switched my own self hate, anger, and agression to compassion, understanding and empathy and patience for my own self. And it had to be done for myself first internally, before I can see it in others. Done with the blame and shame game. Reorients you toward mutual understanding. Reprogramming myself from a very mentally ill dysfunctional family system. It takes time. Lots of time and experience.
I like listening to how free will is an illusion while I grind for something in a game.
Grindin’ to lvl 70 atm 😂
Lmao wow players gogogogogo
Waiting for aion classic on the 23rd baby
I’m playing COD while listening to this
Yeah well I build a poo sculpture of Sam Harris. Even poo is beautiful in that form 😉
Can we just talk about the fact that this is an hour-long "clip"?
Was just about to post this. This ‘clip’ is longer than the vast majority of videos on the whole of CZcams.
@@danielm4180 Right? I bet some podcast episodes are shorter than this.
I was about to say xD Love it tho...
Sam is a diva and edits his own material. I’m sure he exercised creative control here and he granted Lex the ability to only show this portion of the interview.
The length of this "clip" is an illusion.😉
I agree with Sam about not being able to locate a source to an action even if you’re the one doing it. Sort of like not being able to access the source of pain in your stomach. You just feel the pain in the stomach but where does the pain originate is unclear. In fact you can experiment by pinching your arm, the feeling will be located on the point of where you’re pinching but you can’t access the transmitters, the highway of information nor the receiver in this experiment. Yet this doesn’t disprove free will. I can command my arm to move and look for myself as the commander and I’m unable to locate me as the source. But how could you sense the command being originated? I still think this doesn’t disprove me being the originator of the choice. How can we expect the eye to see itself when it’s looking? You can track your memory, go back and remember things sort of like following a path, you can make decisions like going two days to the future and two days to the past and search for specific memories. You can access the memories at will but not your initial process of choosing between one date or another. I don’t think not being able to track the causality of a decision back to you as the origin proves or disproves free will or you as the source. It simply means that you can’t access you as the originator.
This was all covered in the beginning
Try watching it again
Love this conversation. Using the node example, which is always how I explain it (nodes popping up from a fabric, looking around, believing they are not 'attached' to the fabric when in fact they are), my own meditation, study, and examination of multiple theories of how consciousness arises suggests to me that nodes not have free will because they're attached to the FABRIC... but what they DO have is the ability to calculate, disassociate, reconnect, send data, and NUDGE. If energy waves do not become 'particles' until they are observed (what we know in physics), then we (nodes) nudging the data, focusing on specific types of data, organizing it, sending packets, interacting and writing local protocols before returning a computation.. ALL of that is taken into the larger neural network in a causal feedback loop. A neural network/brain of universal size is still affected by every node, every neuron in that mind. Free will exists... How much have you remodeled the data, solved its problems, invented new array organization tables to present that data before returning its information to the larger network. To use film examples, even Neo unplugged and rewrote pieces of the architect's design before realizing that some things repeat.. some parts of the system can be bent, but others can be remade, can evolve. We just don't understand the architecture yet. Once we do, our influence as a node increases, our contribution to evolving the system can increase based on our willingness to examine the way in which we are interacting with higher order rules and data. Can we disassociate from the hardwiring often enough to understand where we as a node are in our influence and evolution wthin the system?
Donald Hoffman would suggest that our next frontier is to learn how to remove ourselves from the VR interface that we think is the system in order to rewrite the OS of that system. Once we can do that, we will achieve actual free will and one of our choices will be whether to go back into the system at all or to change the type of system running.
its just awareness. consciousness is a simple river in the flowing waterfall or avalanche of the machine. its simply action. free will is simple. not bigger than consciousness. the ego is simply growth. its necessary to have ego and no ego. or whatever we perceive as those constructs as. in order to grow in this illusion. the monkey and the information are kissing
@@pandamonkey7069 i think at the deepest level, reality/everything just IS and thats all there is to it. Humans just attach meaning to everything
@@ohiyesa3698 thats one perceptual node. thats no way to live life. wont grow if you think you just are. of course everything just is. but its a catastrophic miracle. its quite evident
Yeah we have the ability to do stuff, but we don't control any of it, everything that happens in our brain and body is a result of a cause, that was the result of a cause, that was the result of a cause, as far as we understand the universe currently.
@@28lester thats an ignorant way to live life. you can facilitate thought. all of that is true. but consciousness is the seat of experience, thought, and feeling all at the same time. you can bring new ideas and habits. saying that isnt a form of control is fatalistic and nihlistic. or cynical.
Sam is an illusion. It's actually Ben Stiller.
lmao, esoteric Ben Stiller. Zoolanders evil genius twin
A Vulcan Ben Affleck
LOL
You're not funny at all
@@yomilalgro hm was a bit funny.
Why stomping on it when its harmless? Doesn't sound like Justice..
Nice!
The summary of a 1 hour freewill episode is also 1 hour.
Great Sam and Lex!
Lol 😆
Back to same podcast after 1 year and still amazed to hear it all over again
Max Planck states, "Consciousness is fundamental and matter is derived from consciousness". We are "IT" in our finite moment choosing between our infinite possibilities in our finite moment, ie: "Free will"
Free Will? What did he do now?
Free will he ain't do nuttin
Dadgum
Fire At Will
He held up a liquor store with Hat. Claims he had no choice and that the illusion of him stealing a bottle of bourbon was, in fact, itself an illusion. The DA got him convicted based on that double-negative confession. Doing his time at South Park penitentiary.
Idk! What did I do! I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!!
“You talk negatively about robots” Lex took it personally
Sam’s ability to meet people where they’re at when they start to stray off topic and somehow still relate what he was saying to it is amazing
Awesome profile pic mate. Looking like a beast!
Sam Harris is a devoutly religious man. The State is his Religion, the Government is his Church, Politicians are his Clergy, Law is his Bible, and he has lots and lots of Faith!
@@ihsahnakerfeldt9280gay
@@josephinetracy1485every man puts his faith in something
It's not HIS ability, he didn't WILL to be this way. It's the way he's programmed and scripted to act.
@42:00: So, I have to choose between Miami and Austin, before I finish going through my mental checklist on each I've already made up my mind, or, do I have to process some of the data first then the choice is made? How far in advance is the choice determined? That is an intriguing concept, and if true has to imply that your consciousness is constantly updating every input, cataloging, and revising those decisions along the way, on every topic...
Lingering regret is a bit like pain after the event, say a burned finger. "OK. Yes. You hurt. You were burned. You can stop throbbing now. You're not touching the burning thing anymore." But maybe the healing, which takes a while per physiological laws, and concomitant, persistent pain is to ward off repeating the mistake and ingraining the lesson, etc.
Pain is a good teacher and motivator, but that's where its use ends. So don't sulk too hard or hate yourself either. Learn and grow and move on.
4:13 OMG, I'm not even kidding when I say that Sam just reminded me that my wedding anniversary is in 1 week lol. I need to pause the video now and go look for a gift. Thanks Sam!!
Xaxaxaxa)
Or should we thank determinism? I mean this is all inevitable right? At least that was my takeaway. I'm uh. . . pretty new to this lack of free will discussion. Congrats on the anniversary. Although. . . just as it's useless to pine over past failures like ol' Sammy here says, wouldn't it be as equally useless to congratulate?
@@jkeylor determinism isnt a thing so theres no need to thank it. But if you do thank it you couldnt have done otherwise
Better save money to defend yourself in divorce
This guy right here is the limit of how smart an NPC can get. He recognizes his limits as an NPC which is crazy considering he has no free will, but it would seem that you need free will to recognize that you don't have it. I guess he is a very advanced NPC which deserves the utmost respect.
I love this comment.
But he is playing his character🤦♂️ This comment makes no sense when you really listen to what he is saying
Ironically, merging with everything, which is the way things are already, is the best way to freedom and autonomy. Freedom is built into determinism when you realise you’re IT.
Why do you need free will no to recognize that you don't have it?
Sam Harris didn’t choose to recognize the illusion of free will anymore than you chose to be uglier than beetlejuice
I’ve had the thought that free will really isn’t free will. There’s so many times I’ve made of my mind to do something and then something happens that’s out of my control to stop my next action. It’s happened a crazy about of times. And I’m just like wtf. Life is crazy.
I have a question: how do you define free will?
Right I feel like fat people who try to lose weight can definitely relate to your experience
@@Keesha_Hardy:
Nondeterministic input to your brain.
- If we create robots that really can suffer, that would be a bad thing.
- This is how I know you're not Russian.
lmao
@THEANSWER I don't believe that a mere response to stimuli could be defined as feeling pain. Otherwise my PC is feeling pain as it responds to my keyboard right now.
@THEANSWER Well you would first have to believe its possible to program something that's "like pain", which if you did believe that to be possible, you would answer your own question. But pain is a subjective experience, requiring a "subject", or a being with sentience or consciousness. Which we don't really understand, let alone know how to program.
IMO, physical pain at its core is a signal that says "something wrong happened to the body", and accompanied by a violent reaction (cockroaches remain calm when their body parts are chopped off). Pain also trains the body to act in such a way so that it would not happen again. Of course pain is only associated with living things, but if we remove this part, a robot could easily feels the pain.
@@ssssssstssssssss pain for human is a biological and chemical process, since we don't build robot this way, it could never be applied to robot.
@THEANSWER If you think about it pyschopaths are the only humans who dont respond to emotional stimuli and pain ) Pyschopaths are the only awaken one among us NPC's ) There is a reason why Pyschopaths are so succesful in Life )
Clips are an illusion
gold
Lex is an illusion
I was trying to find the best way to say this and you did it lol
The perfect comment
Free will is an illusion, but Sam Harris is definitely an idiot, because he has been repeating the same things for 20 years. Everyone already knows this.
The demonstration of Sam's patience during this topic of "free will" is immaculate. This is something which I definitely need to work on.
Then the intricacies of history, the cultures, are predetermined by a cosmic equation?
My patients is tested more listening to it and knowing he is spouting theory as fact.. John Conway “anybody who says they understand quantum mechanics is a liar, and I’ve met quite a few liars in my day”. Sam Harris has such a bias in research its annoying. Saying you know if free will exists or doesn’t is like saying you know exactly what dark energy is, you know what dark matter is, you’ve got all the quantum mechanic answers and you can build an Alcubierre drive and take us through the Universe. Sam Harris must be the all knowing being. Or he is just making assumptions and theories based on a highly selective collection of other theories. Its annoying.
@@silencemeviolateme6076 No. He is an academic poser who knows crap about the topic. he just bloviates ill-considered, old deterministic talking points that do not hold at the quantum level and at the macro level would force one to accept the truth of precognition. But apparently these little "issues" have not been absorbed by his mighty intellect.
A good vocabulary is not sufficient evidence of a good intellect.
@@stanleyklein524We don’t know some things with certainty so there must be free will is what I’m understanding you said.
@@stanleyklein524 Have you researched superdeterminism? People who believe in free always bring up quantum physics. But it's not because we cannot predict the move of particule that it is not deterministic. We might just be missing variables.
And why does precognition need to exist? Isn't it like saying that a machine knows what would be the outcome of a program before executing it?
Maybe I don’t completely understand this. And I started listening to Robert Sapolsky’s book Determined and had to stop. It was mind blowing and so dense and it required an immense amount of concentration to follow. Def not a book to listen to in the car. I tend to agree with determination and no real free will but I am so unclear how this intersects with some kind of divinity and meditation and Sam doesn’t make it clear either….at least to me. So if there is no free will, and we then decide to have more compassion for humanity isn’t that in itself a level of agency in life? Choosing a different perspective…it alludes to free will on some level. There are things like prayer, meditation, helping others etc that make my life experience very enjoyable, but am I even choosing that path or am I just along for the ride?
I found this extremely interesting from an artist perspective. A lot of visual artists and musicians (myself included) talk about this feeling you get when you reach a certain level of ability in their specific skill. Its like you don't even have to think about the creation or the process, you just "channel" it, it comes from you out of nowhere and the more you try to harness your intentions to create art, the more it really inhibits the process. A lot of people use the metaphor "It comes from God" but really we dont know where it comes from, but all we know is its definitely not our "free will". Thoughts?
Each artist and philosopher grew from one egg cell, so to claim ownership of the trillion cell completed musician might be inhibiting it rather than helping yourself.
@@straightedgerc Sorry I'm confused at what you are trying to say. Cant tell if you are elaborating on what I'm trying to say or misinterpreting what I'm trying to say as "I am the trillion cell completed musician(free will is not an illusion)".
To clarify I'm talking about the phenomenon a lot of artists describe, where it really does feel like you have no "free will" and you become more of an observer of the art coming out of you not from your conscious thought. And how this process is somewhat a visceral way of experiencing what Sam Harris is talking about. :)
@@sejithevoid2059 I agree with your observation about music and art. If we take a step back from ourselves, I was saying the egg that made each of us had little time to willfully think about each step in the process, just like the immersive musician phenomenon you describe. So, nature doesn't need free will for channeling.
@@straightedgerc Yes spot on! It is a truly amazing thing to experience. And after watching this video I realise that it doesn't just apply to Art/Music but to all aspects of life.
It’s like it all falls in time
His arguments get infinitely more convincing when he does the Spock eyebrow lift. I'm going to practice that.
Bah! Now I can't unsee it. 🤨
The fuck man....cannot unnotice now
@@sharibanwar313 I just noticed that it only happens when he looks at Lex. You can tell when he is going to lift his gaze because his brow goes up first. The eyebrow has freewill.
If You Thought (That was bad...)
Oh! You've No idea Mr
41:00 actually very weak argument - "I can't pinpoint the *moment* of my free will" ... You can't honestly put this much thought into an argument and expect that to be a conclusive *proof*. Even a 1 second delay in reality would be an eternity to the unconscious synapse mind.
It's an interesting and strange subject. I feel as though I have agency and choice, which is how I would define free will. Can I understand information? Yes. Can I, to the best of my ability, understand the consequences of my actions? Yes. Do I have the ability to decipher between different options and predict possible outcomes? Yes. So how is that not free will? Of course there are many things outside of our control as well. I just don't think those things constitute a lack of free will. Sure, you don't have 100% control of every aspect of yourself. But that doesn't erase the aspect that you absolutely do have control over.
For the record, this is actually a perfect example of how people will often forget WHY self-evident things are true when they go unchallenged for so long. After all, that's what it means for something to be "self-evident". People don't need to how to argue in favor of things that are obviously true, so after a while, nobody remembers why it's true. Hell, it's only when a civilizatiom becomes so fat and overly-privileged that academics even have the time to seriously (or unseriously) question the most fundamental aspects of reality. Nobody has time for this nonsense when their firmly rooted to the ground by the adversity of every day life. But we've gone to such incresible lengths to temporarily quell that adversity that people like Sam Harris can essentially let their mind float around like an untethered kite in the wind. Unfortunately, for academics like Sam, there's ALWAYS a tornado looming on the horizon.
Understanding free will totally disabled my hate centers… it also caused me to go slightly insane.
I agree ... personally i went too far in my consciousness of the free will and it opened a door in my mind that should never have been opened ...
Sanity is an average mindset, but as everyone is in some dimension(s) off of true average, no one is sane.
@@Voudoo1 Dont worry boys, you got this.
This is what i think is the biggest benefit of this deterministic view. It allows for much more understanding and empathy.
@@MrSkme I really like how he shines light on the fact that yes, you are not really in control of your decisions, your under programing and deterministic forces. on the flipside, it takes away the possibility of overcoming great difficulty and becoming the hero of your own story per say.
I think Christopher Hitchens put it best: "Of course we have free will; we have no choice".
Hitchens put everything best.
Great guy. :)
So he is "free thinker" without free will? Lol new atheists are funny ppl..
You mean putting it like a dichotomy?
I.e You have free will, but it’s not your free will to have free will
Like: “This statement is false”
@ Yes, a dichotomy or conundrum. It's a confusing statement as the determinism vs. free will argument is, by it's nature, perplexing. He sums it up with brevity, saying we are born with free will as part of the base package, which makes it not of our own choosing?
I study Zen and Sam is totally teaching the Zen teaching - everything he says is completely in line with our practice.
Yeah, he’s clearly shifted to living in the present and sees and is very well able to explain, the difference between reality and conceptual framework
There are three tracks that can guide your decisions and actions: conscience, ego, and fear. Free will is exercised when we decide which track to follow. Conscience leads to meaning. Fear and ego lead to regret and despair. Choose wisely.
Sam: ‘if thinking about your mind this way makes you feel terrible, well then stop. Switch the channel, get off the ride.’
Also Sam: spends an hour talking about how we don’t actually make choices.
@@andybaldman there are in any moment an infinity of “factors”, which one(s) matter to you, where is your attention…
💯
And those two things don’t contradict
@@epicbehavior Maybe in Sam's mind but it is just BS. Sam is a robot and that is his problem.
@@minispinakins2034 Nope
Free Will can be an 'illusion' yes, but you'll have to unpack it in more layers than what is currently being offered; in other words, the illusion aspect is deeper than the basic understanding of why it is or may be so. Its basic phenomenon (to the degree that the illusion idea itself must manifest itself in more than two stages in any given form) starts somewhere, is subjected to a number of things related mostly to MEST, and only then brings about the end-possibility, which then makes (the argument for) the interrogation of the REALITY aspect (thereof) highly possible.
The notion of free will and the sense of self can be envisioned as a personal theatre, an intimate space from which we observe and experience the unfolding spectacle of life, intricately part of the entirety yet uniquely perceptive of its play.
One thing I have believed for most of my life is that there are many unknown reasons for everything that happens. I usually give the example that if I left the house, but forgot my keys, I may very well have been in a fatal accident had I not forgotten my keys, and it saved my life, as well as many other things that did not happen, simply because of that one little thing. And I will live on to be part of the never ending script that is being written at a fundamental level in which the universe plays out without any one's consent. Another thing I live by is that even though it may seem like people are acting a certain way on purpose, even though to you it is wrong or detrimental, I don't believe they really understand what it is they are really doing, or they wouldn't do it. We are all guilty of doing things and later regretting it only because we didn't know at the time that we would regret it. Knowledge is powerful and without it we arre reckless and our lives can be very meaningless, Life is like a long rollercoaster ride. We didn't build the rollercoaster, and we didn't decide to be afraid or not, but yet we will be on it, constantly reacting, in order to get to the end of the ride with all the experience of having taken the ride. I supose that is similar to what Sam Harris is trying to say here, in so many words. Just me and how I think...
A certain amount of randomness and unpredictability seems to be the point, otherwise, we'd all be living in a recording, just going through the motions. Objective reality has to be mostly mysterious and unseen in order for us, as conscious, intelligent humans to be fooled into living authentic lives on Earth. If we all possessed objective reality, could easily perceive all the fundamental forces of nature, could easily see the illusion of stuff, then it would be impossible to live an authentic life on planet Earth as a human being. The purpose of the stuff is to create authentic experience for the conscious.
@@kenjoneslee…wtf are you talking about?
Utter nonsense.
Lex is REALLY set on his theory that we're living in a computer simulation.
It is a simulation. Look up the definition . it's a Test run. Not computer though.
@@thesunnova111 how do u know its a test run tho
Elon musk favors this theory especially.
@Y Y test run 6?
@@thesunnova111it’s God
Another good example is when an athlete is in the zone. The experience of self is gone and freewill does not exist. There is only playing , The game is playing you.
Playing music is my mystery.
I tumble under the waves in an ocean of sounds and discover the collision of my influences. There's no way I can ever put it into words. My eyes aren't even open when it happens but I live for those moments.
If free will is an illusion, then the word "ought" should never be uttered again.
Wow excellent deep dive. ty Lex for posting this "clip" ... look at the length hahhaaa... but best part were your final words.... such poetry! Loved by a nerd like me!!!❤❤❤
Lex is such a programmer lol, works out everything in his mind with a Computational thinking, First Principals theory, and then adds an if statement involving love, death, and conscientiousness
What’s an if statement?
@Niall Dooley it’s a way in programming that you tell the computer to do x thing if a condition is true or false
@@potoinc.679 Thank you
@@nickneachtain An "IF" statement is a computer command that does something specific provided that the environment being evaluated meets a certain criteria.
I guess that is why he is letting Harris get away with the fallacy that the brain is like a computer. Actual neuroscience tells us that there is no broad agreement on what a brain is like, but it is NOT like a computer. Put in a nutshell, a computer is a passive processor of information; a brain actively creates information. A computer records memory. A brain alters memory every time it remembers-it actively invents memory every time it remembers. This is a well-observed phenomenon. The brain invents information. Harris says, "you don't need a biological brain to be conscious." That has in no way been established, since we do not know what consciousness is. Until we actually know what consciousness is, we cannot say whether or not you need a biological brain to be conscious. As it stands we have zero examples of non-biological consciousness, so Harris is very much off, here.
Seems like free will can only exist if we have something like a soul outside of the physical body that makes the final decisions when we act. That would also be consistent with the idea of a final judgment of the soul for the decisions made.
Dr. Harris it would be interesting to share thoughts. Sometimes we are confused but cannot explain it but we can argue it away to make it disappear so confusion no longer lingers in our mind.
Sam Harris is such a remarkable person. He's not only an atheist or antitheist. He's not only a secular humanist. He's someone who genuinely cares for sentient beings who can suffer. He proposes a moral landscape traversable by all sentient beings. He supports ways for sentient beings of all kinds to find a better way in life: one towards ataraxia and eudaimonia. He teaches about unperturbedness and wellbeing. Just like the tetrapharmakos, Sam teaches not to fear the god(s) and not to worry about death, and he also teaches both that what's good is easy to get, and that what's terrible is easy to endure. We should all try to be more like Sam. We should all be teaching each oursleves and others about the tetrapharmakos, meditation, self-actualization, and dispelling myths like Self-Ego, Free Will, and others.
I do find the topic of speaking aloud to yourself quite interesting. I think the reason for this is actually quite simple though. The brain has many "modules" dedicated to certain things. The connections between those "modules" can be weak and therefore the communication between them weak or takes a long time. By transforming an idea (a set of related neurological cascade events) into sounds, these "modules" can use an alternate route of communication.
My uncle does it all day long regardless who's around. He says it was from years of loneliness and being locked in a closet like fckn Harry Potter as a kid by his adopted parents.
If I understand correctly, this is why Chomsky thinks language evolved in the first place, for communication within the brain
@@cansusarac4009 That sounds very plausible. I would agree with that. Though, probably not with absolute confidence.
@@FloppyDobbys Very intriguing that you independently came up with the same idea
Back when I was in school, I tried to explain to my Nietzsche professor that every word out of my mouth was emerging from some mystery space. She wasn't having that idea at all.
Furthermore, our values, and their hierarchical organization, are what gives us the ability to select between alternatives. You chose one way/thing over another because doing so appeals to a superordinate value in the hierarchy. It is rule-following behavior and you are not the author of those values. Even the act of editing your own value hierarchy can only be done by the authority of superordinate values that already exist in your mind.
Harris' argument against 'AI that can suffer' seems to be an argument against Life, i.e., that it would have been better to have never existed due to the fact that we suffer.
i had that same thought as your last paragraph. It was like he was arguing that having a baby was a crime.
I am not having that idea either. No mystery. Words coming out of your mouth come from you, unless you have a electronic speaker installed.
I never understood why anyone finds the kind of reasoning you are doing here on "choice" and "authorship" compelling. It all is so fallaciously sophomoric to me. Maybe I can get you to understand why, maybe not.
Even a simple transistor based logic gate can make choices so I am not sure why you brought up a heirarchy as a requirement for choice.
Also your assumption that "authorship" of anything requires authorship of everything is bizzare. It is like claiming that an object cannot have property unless all its anticedant components have that property. That "cars" cannot exist because tires, engines, and windshields are not "cars". It in fact is a sneaky way to switch the meaning of the word "car" so that nothing is a car, not even a car.
Since when do we require that the author of a book also be the author of every book he has ever read that influenced him, or every event that occurred to him, or his own birth?
You are essentally arguing that not only can't sharpness originate in the manufactured knife, but that knives cannot be sharp because the inputs like iron ore and coal are not sharp.
You are injecting your bizzare definitions to come to fallacious conclusions.
It’s not a argument against life, is an argument against causing intentional suffering.
Suffering is a subjective experience. One person might suffer through something someone else genuinely enjoys. To program suffering is wrong, but there’s nothing wrong with a conscious being discovering what it feels like to suffer.
@@bronsonii5036 You are merely asserting claims without establishing them. When you create a baby you are creating a being capable of suffering which will most likely suffer at some point in its life, especially in old age. The same reasoning applies, and you have demonstrated no difference that matters.
Being emotionally aware is all conscienceness truly is. Being a realist in life thought allows a better understanding of free will
I think if you really, really understand molecular/cellular biology, genetics and so on, it becomes very clear that free will is in fact just an organism that has a certain biological makeup, with a certain collection of experiences, reacting to a stimulus. It’s not so much a free choice, as it feels to most, but an incredibly complicated biological reaction.
He’s right that it’s not what it feels like.
It's not a choice at all. 😀
“An incredibly complicated biological reaction” is a great way to put it. People conflate agency with being the author of your thoughts and decisions. When in reality, what lead you to make a decision is an incredibly complex web of, as you put it, biological makeup, experiences, stimulus. I think for anyone interested in the topic of free will this must now be absolutely clear, otherwise you are not understanding.
The further question then becomes: will it ever be possible to map the factors that lead to this biological reaction? I.e what are the factors that contributed to me making a certain decision or taking a certain action. I would think there is so much complexity and so many factors that we dont have the tools or technology to understand this and maybe never will.
@@niche657
But Vegas is close enough 😀
@@giuffre714 sorry no idea what you mean by this 😂
@@niche657
In Vegas they have been able to map the factors that lead to a biological reaction by which they get to keep a disproportionate amount of people's money 😀
Loosing the sense of free will for me helped me grow empathy and patience, with both myself and others.
JP H so then who is responsible for their actions?
Explain me how having a sense of free will make you unable to do those things
In this sense, why have judges and juries? If people are not capable of making decisions on their own, then how is someone guilty of a crime?
@
@this, Exactly! If the whole world were Christians (and i know that they would love that) how could they possibly throw anyone in jail for any crime knowing that God wrote that crime into existance. If God is all knowing and all seeing, He would know, years and years before a crime was going to happen, He wrote it, He is aware that John Smith wil enter this building on "whatever" date and shoot "this other guy" in the head. If He didnt know it was going to happen, then He is not all knowing, if He did know it was going to happen and did nothing, He is a bad leader/creator. Why blame John Smith if he was made and instructed by Gods Plan to murder on that day. I have a big problem with this tenant or teaching or whatever in christianity. Now look, you triggered me!!
I like Sam's right eyebrow.
It likes us too.
haha interessting can you pinpoint what feeling it might induce? Trust/perspective taking?
Maybe its a secret sign of our subcontious human rutine priming us what do to with the information 😜
@@hanskraut2018 yes i r right. I remember reading in a book that raising your eyebrows in a flash when u first meet someone its a way to connect and stablish trust. If u do that with a smile even better.
All without saying a word to acomplish that. And if u say the right words it can be even more powerful.
what is a circle once you zoom in close enough?
How about this, although unpractical freewill exist. To me, having choices is the vehicle in which freewill exist, simply because if we have more than one choice we are free to make different choices on our own, but we may make the wrong one come to find out. For example, if I knew then what I know now I'd have made another choice, but I didn't and can't know then what I know now, so while I'm free and was free to make some choice, it wasn't practical for me to make the correct choice because of my lack of knowledge. Something like that:)
Lex Fridman "clips"
Lol I'm cool with a 50 minute clip with no ads til the end.
Sometimes the answer requires it
I tried to tell the judge it wasn't my fault i have no free will but he wasn't buying it..
You have hit nail on head,
free will only exists when we act totally rationally,
but humans, tend to act irrationally, unpredictable,
if nothing else but to prove we have free will.
Then it's your fate
Words from a soldier that I met really impacted me. He said freedom is earned and it comes with responsibility. Ture freedom is elevated when you act responsibly and let things go. It is not an entitlement that the stupid or dumb understand. Free will is only within your available freedom that you have responsibility for because if you abuse of it, it will diminish.
soul diers are the best example of not having free will that we have on earth, its like they gave up any sense of making choices to be slave to someone else's instructions like a drone
I think the double slit experiment explains this. Once observed you can say that’s the only way it could be but in reality it’s a cloud of possibilities and only after observing it can you say how it worked out. If you set up the universe exactly the same the double slit could be different and so could we on our decisions
Free will is to become the conductor of destiny. When you realize your own loops, what most call habits, and then learn to start your own loops similar to starting a fire, and when that fire becomes sustained, when your loops gain their own momentum, the formation of habits under conscious direction, is what I would consider "free will" as far as I understand it at this point.
"when you realise" - you do realise it isn't your choice to come to realisation, right? How many people in life go through the same loops in life and then still don't find awareness?
When you realize your own loops and then learn to start your own loops? Hiding it under the guise by using the analogy of "habits" to "starting a fire" shows you are missing the point. My b if this sounded rude I'm still wrestling with this concept myself but it's becoming clearer
The decisions being made about your own habits and loops that you are starting are still decisions that are based on prior causes and conditions because they are decisions being made by a brain, the only real thing you can boil any idea of a 'you' down to. There aren't really any of your own habits and loops. There are just habits and loops that are the way they are because that's how the brain is, and they can change, but it doesn't imply any sort of free will. There is no you that is free from how the brain works that can decide things and I'd love to be proven wrong. There's just the brain, consciousness, whatever that means, decisions being made because of thoughts, feelings, whatever is happening under all that. It's literally physical things happening. There is no you that possesses any of it.
That's partly what sammy is talking about when discussing the illusion of the self. There's just the brain making decisions. It's all just stuff happening, no intrinsic nature is necessary.
If free will is an illusion, how does one avoid slipping into nihilism. When one slips into nihilism and nothing matters than it is easily justifiable to conduct terrible things which lead to immense misery as he spoke of?
The truth is that it is impossible not to, this path is not for everyone, it requires a monomaniacal commitment to truth and the road is paved with suffering, nihilism is just a part of the road, at the end of this journey even nihilism becomes laughable and ridiculous when your understanding of what Sam is saying reaches its peak. The good thing is that the end of the road is also the end of suffering, becomes you have effectively dissolved the self.
I think an existential crisis is more probable than nihilism. Just because you don't pick (at a free will level) which ideas and justifications jump into your surface thoughts doesn't change everything that you already know about morality, law, society, decency, happiness, fulfillment, etc. All those things still matter.
We do that anyway
Once you think about this long enough it becomes clear that it's not actually that nothing matters but actually that everything matters. If everything is determined by cause and effect that means that evey single thing that exists and every event that occurs is exactly what is meant to be there and what is meant to happen which means that absolutely everything in existence has a role to play in the universe
@@TruthDissident moreover why choose to have a monomaniacal commitment to truth
@ 7.10 he is referring to CHuang Tze for example about the difference between nature's way and human way. @ 9.00 yes about no self, then no mind, no reward, nothingness etc, Yes I happen to record and post about 8-10 videos related to those today in my channel in which most of them are shorts. Then, after posting, I found this video (and another one by Fridman and Lee Cronin. So, it is definitely an interesting subject - especially related to the awakened state. (I have to go to sleep now. Will check from here tomorrow...good night)
Now, I listened to 20min. It seems speaker is thinking of him speaking and constructing logic to verify something... In Zen this is called as adding head on top of head. So how about this Zen saying: The bamboo shadow moves but dust on the floor does not. I see if no pure awareness is experienced, it's like Hakuin saying: you are in the water looking for water to quench your thirst. (I may listen more later.. will see)
At 30min. The answer is not in mind but accepting what is which is beyond your free will - kind of thought. IN other words, it looks like you are not aware of who you are and playing in the mind as if that is the only thing you can do which is a bounded condition you are and nothing to do with an idea - free will you are playing with in your mind. The door is open but you are hesitant to go out because you are concerned about you and you cannot let your thought to be --- free - ie no mind.
How you act on the forces that shape your decisions is no one's decision but your own. I think being predisposed to making decisions is an important distinction from saying we have no free will. That's like me saying a dice is always going to land on the same side. Depending on the forces that act on it, the side cam be limited to a *number of likely outcomes within a range*
You cannot change the way your brain perceives and filters the information it gathers nor you can change the way your eyes see, which is different from the way others might see, and so on. If you cannot control in any way what gets in the machine that your brain is, what free is there in your will? The fact that you can choose between a few of the available choices in front of you doesn't mean you can choose which those choices are. In other words, from an almost infinite number of choices there are, you choosing between 2-3 of them that your mind perceives, is not an immensely free will, to say the least.
I stew in feelings of regret day after day. Much of my life is a look back at stupid mistakes I made in my youth but, at the time, were things I believed I had to do. It would be nice to play those moments over, but I can't. These regrets are an algorithm running in my head that I constantly want to reprogram and play over again, an algorithm I can't stop. I'd like to stop the algorithm, but it's easier said than done. Maybe I'll take up meditation, or tell myself I really had no choice and forgive myself. (These are pains I inflicted upon myself, not others)
All we truly have is the current moment. Looking back to the past can be great as a tool for learning but ultimately that moment in time is gone and cannot be regained. Instead, why not focus on the time we do have and the things that we can control... Stewing in regret will only keep us living in a mental mind trap and prevent us from creating the best version of ourselves going forward. You can do better! You will do better!
@@Deluxeones1 Thanks. You're right. I need to focus more on the here and now and on things I can control.
You can't control anything. The future is set in stone.
@@simonlennartz1556 absolute nonsense
Psilocybin would definitely help... Macro doses
Depends on how you define free will. The only reasonable definition states that an agent has free will if its decisions are unpredictable. If you program a computer to make a decision for you based on read-outs from, say, a sample of radioactive material, the decision will not be deterministic - and it's not an approximation, as quantum effects that govern radioactive decay are probabilistic in nature (or even better - measuring spins of particles). Therefore, in principle, free will does exist. Whether it's utilized in every day life is another question - as the choices one makes lie on a spectrum of free will, and the amount of freedom depends on the knowledge that the observer has over the external and internal circumstances of the agent. But in principle, perfect free will can and does exist, and from this it follows that it has to manifest to some degree in every day life too.
Why would decisions need to be unpredictable? That's a big leap. Decay has clear bounds. Maybe prime number generation but its still a huge leap.
Nothing is unpredictable. We use statistics and probability because its really really hard to predict future, but as everything being just causality, its predictable.
@@Mister.Palitotk what if it's non ergodic? How do you use predictive models without samples?
I don't think that's correct. What's really going on here is the individual radioactive atoms have free will and the computer still does not. The perfectly correct prediction merely takes the form "Given the particle [does/ does not] decay..."
@@nicholascarter9158 I don't think that matters at all. Knowing the state of computer's memory instantly after the read-out, but before the program processes it, is equivalent to just learning what decision has already been made. But the decision itself wasn't predictable before the measurement.
It only means that the observer gets the information faster due to a better sampling of observations; kind of like someone being able to perceive a trigger finger twitch before the gun even fires. But it doesn't change anything about the ability to predict the decision before observation.
The hypothetical setup with a radioactive sample, or measurement of spins, is to show that even if the human brain was a completely "classical" system with no quantum effects involved, it could still willfully (excuse the pun) entangle itself with a quantum "source of free will".
Also, the results of measurement don't need to be binary - e.g. spins can be measured along any direction in space, so it could be set up in a way in which measurements are mapped to a dictionary of "actions" of arbitrary length (I think it can be done in multiple ways, at least one comes to my mind; it's just a technicality). And the existence of a computer program ensures that the non-predictable action encoded by the program will be executed, regardless of the state of the brain of programmer at the moment of execution (so one can't argue that the action is really dictated only by his momentary psychological state, instead of being determined by unpredictable data).
I think this pretty much proves that the brain, through its tools and extensions, can make decisions which are free in the most restrictive sense - unpredictable even in principle.
He speaks about meditation alot but forgets that the schools of thought that developed meditiation were the rishis who spent years practicing and they came up with the idea of conciousness being immaterial and pure when stripped of the biology and memory. Believing you dont have free will takes away power from you. And since its debatable it would be beneficial to choose the side which would help you since the lack of evidence of free will is comparable to the lack of evidence of no free will.
The question you have to ask is "free from what?". If the answer is "free from physics and causality", then you have to ask yourself if the question “do we have free will“ is a good one.
This is a topic that I am also interested in exploring. People like Mooji and Ramana Maharshi talk about it. We could have no free will as many people understand it, but maybe the will is free in the sense that there's no restrictions in possibilities that exist for the will, whatever causes it.
After reading the book “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman I have to agree with Sam, here. The book asks you to do little experiments with your thinking and it convinced me. Highly recommend reading it.
fire boookk
Such a great book!
Half of that book has proven to be wrong
Reading One Book isn't Enough
To Understanding ~ *Free-Will*
@@DURRAKUKSI In what sense?
It also involves the direction of time and why it’s set in one direction under our physical laws but that’s it’s behavior only in our specific circumstances and is relative… but Ive said enough I could explain it further but the amount of energy to transfer this amount of information is extreme and im not physically capable at this time in on sitting
Sam isn't wrong. But like Brian Greene said (I think it was him), Sam's way of describing the lack of free will isn't useful. Sam's example of the difference between the involuntary experience of a tremor and the voluntary experience of picking up a cup of water is exactly what most people mean when they say they have free will. But by Sam getting more granular about it, he doesn't introduce new, actionable information of much use, other than perhaps some meditation based benefit. But if it provides such a benefit, it would also tend to paralyze the sort of action that leads to progress and improvement--to whatever degree a person can experience themselves making progress and improvements--and if there is such a thing as good moral behavior in a non free will world, impeding the experience of progress and improvement is certainly not morally good. So I don't know why he promotes his ideas about this.
We can’t magically summon motivation that isn’t there. We can’t know what we don’t know. We can’t act in the past or the future. We absorb stimuli, process, and respond. This makes people uncomfortable so they reject it 🤷♂️
Interesting that he says if thinking about it this way makes you feel bad “stop” and don’t go down that road. Doesn’t that imply that he thinks the listener has the free will to choose the path of how to think about this?
🎯
You make an interesting point and I might be inclined to agree until I realize there is no way I will remember to do this the very 1st instant of the very 1st time a negative thought comes to my mind and starts to run off with feeling bad. Even if I carry around a piece of paper with a note to remind me not to let it, or write a reminder on my hand, there will still be a delay before, at some time, and for some unknown reason, it will suddenly emerge into my consciousness to begin right then and there to look into my thoughts, and change their direction by applying these principles of awareness.
Him saying that is the environmental trigger for a mind that needs to maintain the comfort of the illusion of the illusion of free will to respond and stop viewing. Tldr if you hear that and stop you are the brain that would.
No. A choice that’s unavoidable instantly disproves so-called free will’s accessibility.
If you wish to examine the act of choice within the prison of the set of ‘options’ before you, you’ll find the burden of one’s previous experiences, hormonal inspirations, and mental errors, you’ll see that again you’ve already decided before realisation.
@@mstandenberg1421you still have free will aka choices. I have the power of perspective. I can choose how i react to situations. Free will is not an illusion
The self is experiencing certain signals in the brain and interpreting them as qualia. We can call it a 1-way-interface because the physical signal flows in one direction and is experienced. However, if the interface is a 2-way-interface then the self could act back on the physical brain (possibly very sublty). We would call it the free will - non-determinism because the non-material self could act back on physcial world. We know material world is not the original one because in materialism its not possible for something to begin from nothing therefore we need to postulate existence of non-material/non-physical realms in which the self exists. We know it must be a 2-way-interface because otherwise the physcial brain would not think thoughts about consciousness aka self. We would experience the brain but not the thoughts about the self.
Im still listening but would meditation and controlling the mind be a means to work towards free will?
This dude should be a lawyer because he could convince me my own dog hates me or i would be happier without thumbs. Dudes good.
29:05 he just wants to wash his hands of his sins. Why just randomness? He just says it and never explains. I can think I am thirsty and not reach for a drink but then do it the next time. I was destined by fate not to take a drink? That decision is no difference than getting up and doing dishes. Learning Spanish, doing for others.
He is. Largely misunderstood and his critics defense mechanisms are clouding their perspectives regarding his more controversial statements. I get the feeling, in your comment, you're implying he is good debater but wrong fundamentally. The reality of free will is debatable. However, on his more popular ideas, he is more often than not spot on. Eg. Fundamentalist Islam(moderates also enablers) is a violent, repressive religion that does more harm than good. As he says and I agree. That's controversial and gets him labeled by lazy thinkers as a Islamaphobe. His hunter Biden quote is less defensible, but no reason to condemn him for having an opinion said likely in haste. I almost agree bc Trump is a terrible virus on America. But can't go so far as to justify misleading the public.
Harris wouldn't last six weeks as an attorney. He couldn't handle the chaos. If he finds debating Alex Jones too muddied and unpleasant a prospect, then lawyers would chew him up and spit him out.
@@silencemeviolateme6076 Your "decision" is ultimately produced by a state your brain is in. This state depends on it's previous state, which depends on the state before and so on. The transition between states is dictated by physical laws. If we break the system down as far as we can we end at the quantum level where randomness (probabilities) arise.
But you can't influence said probabilities from within the system without depending on other probabilities. (you can't collapse a wave function without an action that is based on the collapse of a wave function itself)
There you have it, every single decision is guided by probabilities that you can't influence from within the system because said influence would also be subject to the same physical laws.
So in order for you to have actual free will you have to be able to influence the state of your brain from some realm not just outside the brain but outside of describable reality.
Basically you're either some "agent" outside this reality who plays this character which is in turn governed by physical laws - or you don't have free will. And the former doesn't even answer the question, it just adds another layer to the problem. You can now ask how the agent's free will arises, which will likely end in the same debate because this new realm the agent is "playing you" from will follow some laws as well.
@@victos-vertex system reliant free will
Guys, I can feel the struggle to put such complexity in world and sometimes it is even hard to follow.. free will as being free to chose, but not much said about Free Will as will being free from influences that would direct your actions.
I've been fascinated by determinism 15 years or more. Free will has never made sense to me since hearing about it..
I also don't have any illusion of free will when I pay attention. It's very freeing for me too
If free will did not exist then every choice is predetermined or at least determined by something outside of our volition?? What factor if factors then would determine our choices?? If you line up ten identical circles and ask one to choose a circle, and you ask him a hundred times or so, at the end whatever factor determined his choice of circles would form a definitive pattern assuming that the factor is definitively there?? If you take the hundred choices of circles then and if you find randomness in the choices then whatever factor determining his choices was at least partly random?? You could even do the hundred tries of a hundred choices say ten times, and look for randomness, if the randomness is statistically significant in the total result then you could infer that at least some choices were not pre-determined and were free choices????!!!!
We cannot control who we are attracted to. Say you fall in love with a significant other. You , at least I don't know the "free will" reason why I am attracted to her. Love is a prime example that proves that we are not in control of our free will. We just gravitate to that special person...
I mean, that's kind of nonsense. Love is the temptation, expression of the love is the choice you've made, thus proving free will.
Not only that your lover can make a choice that turns you off
@@tobyn123 What you are saying is there's a choice, not free will. Say you are married, and you are tempted by this "love". Your next choice will be based on 1) your personal values (hedonistic, utilitarian, deontology, etc) which you have formed through your summation of life experiences , 2) the intensity of your feelings and the ability to override them in order to gauge the risks and consequences, and probably some other factors involved. When you break it down into detail, anyone can see that your choice is entirely based on a LACK of free will, because you don't choose the life experiences and predisposed traits that determine your moral outlook in life. You and anybody who thinks otherwise massively lack an ability to* think outside of your own life experience.
@@jyk1218 Nonsense because drilling it down further using something like stoicism it is your choice to react in any way to anything that happens to you. You CHOOSE to be offended. You CHOOSE to give in to temptation. You CHOOSE every perspective you have.
I understand what Sam means when he says not experiencing the illusion of free will. As I watched this clip, I felt myself just zoning out, while being so attentive to the words he was saying. It felt like I was not purposely trying to listen, I was just doing so without even having to think about listening
Being high gets me like this. Lost in thought while listening to music.
I am 60 and dyslexic, particularly with technology and a computer screen. Please can someone direct me to his videos? Everything he is saying makes complete sense to me but I am unable to put my thoughts into actual words in the way he can. I am sure I can learn more from him. Everything he is saying relates to addiction in so many ways
Since you were able to write this comment, I think you are able to search more Sam Harris videos from youtube. There is the search bar. Just type Sam Harris and maybe some other key words. For example: "Sam Harris free will".
Reminds me of that bit in Ayn Rand refuting the mechanistic materialists-they use mind to deny mind.
Sam is the kind of guy who can't wait to tell his kids there is no Santa
Do you believe in santa, the tooth fairy or the easter bunny? People eventually tell their kids that they don't exist. Belief in religion has done way more harm to humans than any other beliefs. Please tell me which god is the real one 🙏
He actively said if this is something that troubles you when you think of it then by all means stop. It's not his fault that the truth is there is essentially no meaning to life, it's shit and it sucks but unfortunately it's the way it is and all we can do is make our way through life as best we can
@@joesikic6531the God that created the universe and has necessary existence due to his maximal greatness exists. That’s the right one
And he'd be right.
Santa, Tooth Fairy are great lessons to learn that even the people you trust the most will deceive you for their own amusement.
At min 53, when speaking about Elon and the high propensity of fires... I'm a hospice nurse so when my phone rings, the range of chaos and fires are wide. I love that grounding perspective of my life. Decreasing suffering.
The more conscious one becomes of what unconciously motivates one the more you become in charge or the more you free up your will.
What exactly do you mean when you say « free up your will »
@@MaryamPirzada free from unconscious directives.
Free will is confined to our physical makeup for survival, and interacting with other people and our environment.
Technical progress reduces our scope of free will… our lives are based on a risk and reward system. Rationality predetermines your choices.
This a really dumb question please be kind to me:
If free will is an illusion or does not exist does then how can we held individual or ourselves accountable for actions which are not leagal or moral. I mean if we are not in control or in control to a certain extent our actions how can a court of law hold accountable for anyperson for an act.for example any crime committed by a kleptomaniac or patient with high level ocd or other mental disorder held them accountable. since they have consciousness yet they didn't choose these acts/actions. Does this mean consciousness is like a steering wheel which helps to control or give directions to our action at best but it doesn't control them. How does this not make life meaningless for a person . I fell really nihilistic and it gives me anxiety. What is the difference between killer and potential killer.
How can i be moral ?
This is how I replied to someone else with a similar problem, hopefully it will help you:
I understand what you're going through, I went through a similar phase a few years ago. It's not at all easy to digest and I recommend that if you have depression or are prone to anxiety to avoid thinking about this topic. However, if you think you are ready, I recommend you watch more of Sam Harris's content on free will as he explains it more eloquently than anyone else I have listened to. The key thing to realize is that the non-existence of free will is not the same as fatalism. Fatalism is a belief that certain events will inevitably happen in the future and a lot of people just getting introduced to the topic of free will conflate it with fatalism. Non-existence of free will doesn't mean that you can't change your life situation. It doesn't mean that you can't change your job, make more money, find a new partner or any of these things, that would be absurd, but a lot of people happen to think this way. To them, no free will = I can't change anything about my life. This is completely wrong and doesn't logically follow. The same way you made changes in your life before you started thinking about free will, you can make them now. Nothing changed in this regard. The only thing that changes when you accept that you don't have free will is that you realize that whatever happened in the past must have happened and nobody had the power to act differently. To give you advice on how to live your life from now on - Try your best to focus on the present moment. Accept that what happened in the past must have happened so there's no reason to blame yourself for anything. Forgive yourself any mistakes you may have made in the past and try to do the same for others. Become a more pragmatic person and if there's something in the world that you dislike, for example you see some injustice taking place, realize that the people who were responsible for the injustice were literally forced to do so. But what you do right now in the present moment is extremely important. If you will think that free will doesn't exist therefore you can just sit on a couch and do nothing you won't get anywhere in life. Taking action is still important and it still works, so nothing changed in this regard.
@@janhradecky3141 if what you think its true hes reaction is already predetermined and your words wasted
its not a stupid question is a really smart one actually. Probabilistically Sam Harris is very erong in his asumptions. If you belive him though i give you the silver rule past down to me by my grandmother: Dont do to others what you wouldnt want done to you . Has work for me
@@themsuicjunkies Of course they are not wasted, I wanted to give him some words of encouragement and that's what I did. It doesn't matter whether it was predetermined or not. Let me ask you this, if you were having a great time hanging out with your friends and all of a sudden somebody would come up to you and say "this was all predetermined, you have no free will", would it change anything about the fact that you were having a great time? No it wouldn't. So stop saying that things don't matter if there's no free will.
9:55 is synonymous with Descartes’ “(I doubt therefore) I think therefore I am”
Exactly what I was thinking, I think Descartes came to the same conclusion about consciousness from his malicious demon thought experiment.
@@DeoVolente444 Except Descartes was completely wrong, and is one of the reasons why western consciousness has such a twisted psyche today lol 😆
Sir, Descartes' thought-experiment is a schizophrenic nightmare.
'What if the world is created by a demon who is decieving me about everything?' is not a healthy way to establish certainty about one's existence. Plus, its quite obvious that existence is not dependent on thought. This 'ergo' leads to solipsism and narcissism. A corpse rotting on the ground does not exist because it thinks.
Spinoza runs circles around Descartes.
Descartes split the western psyche in two. Along with Machiavelli (ruler/ruled) and Bacon (humanity/nature), and Smith/Marx (capital/labor) he is partly responsible for the dualisms that causes all 'mental illness' and extreme inequalities the world.
Ideas have material consequences that take centuries to unfold.
Have a fine evening.
@Luke Hall Thanks, haven't heard of that guy. Yep Descartes fucked everyone up, lol oh well..
@@rowanjakeman2243 Spinoza was Albert Einstein's favorite philosopher. Rather than thinking about mind/body as two different realms/worlds (which is an almost religous, heaven/hell view of things), Spinoza saw mind and body as two different modal expressions of the same underlying reality or 'substance' to use the technical term (substance in the Aristotelian sense, not the chemical sense, which basically means 'single thing'.) Spinoza calls this substance DEUS SIVE NATURA, a Latin term meaning 'God or Nature'.
The best philosophers of that era were Leibniz and Spinoza. Kant was alright, but Nietzsche was dead-on when hr called him 'a spider.' Descartes spent his time being a celeb and tutoring princesses.
All that being said, my view is that none of these philosophers even come close to Aristotle.
Regret isn't thinking you could've acted differently, it's knowing you would have if you could go back.
Believing free will doesn't exist is as silly as believing it does, so long as it's a belief, it will not truly change your experience. It will likely just thwart you.
Not feeling a sense of free will is as much proof for it not existing, as feeling a sense of free will is for it existing.
Free will doesn't exist. That's not a "belief", but an objective scientific fact.
Time machine. The invention to settle the debate between free will and determinism is a time machine. Put one person back in time but have their memory of the future wiped out, then see if they keeps making the same choices or actions. If on the n-th repetition they made a different choice, that's an indication of free will (or broken memory wiping machine).
You know you’re in for a heavy podcast when the clips are an hour.
Getting my teeth in this one back at work today!
its a show, as show. A clip is a portion of something. This is the full thing of something. Its not a clip
If you manage to work while listening to this you're a better man than me
@@thedangus9277 haha i have a split brain… since finding Lex my productivity has dropped :”)
@@nickmagrick7702 I think you’ll find the full 3/4 hour podcast NOT on the clips channel but on the pod channel?
czcams.com/video/4dC_nRYIDZU/video.html
The thought I'll keep and share: "(just) How miserable do I need to be to solve this problem?" This is a real keeper/game changer way to abruptly change the direction of my (useless/negative/damaging) thoughts. Thanks, Sam Harris!
I agree that part stuck out to me the most
Aren’t we free to be consciously aware? Yes certain circumstances are out of our control like the next thought that arise, but we are capable to witness these thoughts and be consciously aware.
I am of the oppinion that our brain body relationship ultimately determined what channels get opened in our brain which allow for our various states of consciousness. The ability to think better after working out, having better oxygen flow, or whatever chemical/hormone is the topic of discussion, shows that our mind is intrinsically linked to our body and our body needs to be in a particular state for the mind to work efficiently toward some arbitrary task. Therefor it's not so much that we don't have free will, but that our free will is limited in it's ability to act by the ways in which our body controls our brain and therefor the way our neural network operates. Too much chaos or dependency and your brain will prevent your will from being realized. It's all too much really to place the blame on a single person because we are constantly bombarded by influences.
This conversation makes my brain feel claustrophobic in my skull. More please.
Yeah for real 😅
Haha, yes. I remember that feeling. I used to say that my skull needs polishing !!
I hate it!!!!
Ones started it's hard to stop watching and I am so tired. For sure continue this tomorrow. Thanks for this type of discussions!!!
@@tiromandal6399 yes and I enjoyed every nanosecond of it:) I love this type of thoughts and discussions so much, also depends on my modd offcourse :)
Did you continue watching the next day?
Haha saw the next comment. So you did
@@sandi-lynnroman4748 yes i did and loved e ery second of it:)
This conversation articulates perfectly a practical scientifically backed perspective that makes the Christian ideal of forgiveness far easier to exercise. I had this same awakening 10 years or so ago and my life became so much less burdened with resentment. Who knows what mystery brought me to this perspective.
Alan Watts said something similar, rather concisely… We go back-and-forth in labor over what we’re going to do for hours or days, and then, at the last moment, we just make a snap decision and go with it.