I don't believe in free will. This is why.
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- čas přidán 17. 05. 2024
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Do humans have free will or to the the laws of physics imply that such a concept is not much more than a fairy tale? Do we make decisions? Did the big bang start a chain reaction of cause and effects leading to the creation of this video? That's what we'll talk about today.
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00:00 Intro
0:34 Has Physics Ruled Out Free Will?
0:52 Physics FTW!
4:14 Emergence
8:10 Free Will?
13:41 Decisions, Decisions
16:31 Why Does it Matter?
18:16 Learn More With Brilliant - Věda a technologie
Whenever i watch a Sabine video about free will, it is never by choice.
Maybe you should make the decision to watch it again because choice isn't about free will.
Choice is not about freedom but reason. And reason is not free.
I know what you mean. I watch it because first I feel like I have to, and then I just give in; and it all happens so fast too.
Lawyers charge way too much to write up a will... but still, it shouldn't be free.
😏👍🏽
I don't believe in free will, but I do believe in reasonably inexpensive will.
Yeh,.. like at least clean the house sometimes...
...show some kind of affection,
to the kids at least...?...
It costs approx .00001 cents to be a good person.
I've heard that there may be infinite universes or dimensions. Could the multiverse have existed forever? Aren't these all real infinities?
No such thing as universal basic will in this verse. You gotta earn your will, plebe😐
Well that's just your two cents.
I'm a medical doctor . I happened to like physics and I find your channel is hervorragend. Keep up the good work!
Well,I am a Physicist and Sabine is not always correct unfortunately..
@@nadirceliloglu7623 Now I'm curious to hear more ^^
@@nadirceliloglu7623 that's what makes her so entertaining to watch. If she only stated commonly known facts, it would be boring. One just has to carefully evaluate her words, she's never shy to express her opinions
@@SergejVolkov17 but some of her arguments are totally wrong. It does not matter whether she is shy or not to express her opinion.
Science does not care about opinions,but cares only about facts!
@@laura5425 Well you are curious but you are not a Physicist. Would you understand physics?
Sabine. I'm not a frequent youtube commenter, but I have to say thank you for this video. It has brought me a lot of peace. Weirdly. I don't know enough to know if you are right, but your explanation helped me a lot to leave my anxiety behind. In a very functional way, you have dramatically improved my life with this piece. Sadly, you didn't actually create free will denial, but explaining it to me turns out to have been more important. It releases me from feeling bad for the things I should have done or feeling pride in the things I have. The same goes for those around me. I don't need to feel bad or good because of what 'they' have done. Its just the universe doing its maths. Weirdly, it gives me some of the peace I can see that religion gives to others. In fact, if you decide to start a Free Will Denier religion, let me know where I can send me subscription.
Same here brother I also used to think thay why bad things happen or why some people are lucky and priveleged . Well, you put it correctly, it's the universe doing it's maths
Love and happiness from my side to you. Enjoy this life. Maybe life is a good or it can be a bad movie. But we have to enjoy it as much as possible no matter what happens❤❤❤😂😂
this was a weird comment hopefully the universe calculates no more youtube comments for you lol
The physical world is governed by physics, but the spirit world (your destination after "death") is governed by spiritual laws. You do have some control over your choices, as do we all. However limited. When in doubt, choose LOVE and you'll be fine.
@@plenarygrace That's a lot like something I said in a comment about some atheist's video. Everyone needs to stop judging the Spiritual world because it doesn't make sense in the Non-Spiritual world. It's like saying there is no such thing as apples because oranges are more nutritious.
I'm confident life is just a TEST. God didn't like it that Angels had no choice but to love Him, so He created people with free will. Instead of creating us and instantly asking us which door we want to go through, He gives us a SHORT LITTLE (on the infinity scale) TEST with Lot's of situations, like "That isn't fair," and in the end, we have walked through our door. We follow our personal master.
"To be a CZcamsr you don't need to know anything!"
CLASSIC 😂
100%
That made my day also. I had to hit pause and stop laughing.
Amusing I suppose but completely incorrect, to be a "CZcamsr" you have in fact to already know a great deal.
There is more to response. And attention than what is in the surface. You must look into all forms of information and audial matrices seemed to be quantum in this subject. Mentally quantum not physically quantum.
Let me abbreviate the organized quantum jump and how it's achieved. Using imagery the mind and audial matrix conformative agreements . As work. Amongst information flowing to constantly change what is experienced consciously in awareness.
Having this information removed upon enacting the event is what she expressed as involuntary or nonconcious quantum jumps. They can relate to physical light as matter. Seen through a beings eyes. Percievable boundaries like the connection to holomorphic light and sound and what the eyes are. Contrary to what we "know"
Sabine trolls the internet in her own dry humor way and I am constantly here for it. 😂
That's why I love her 😂
i love how she simply show all the piece we have that show the concept itself is contradictory and fundamentally meaningless from what we know of our universe
Yeah, BUT the Aliens say that we are ruining our planet. Implying that we have a choice 😮 👽 🛸 🌳 ♻️ 😂
@@fredericklehoux7160 Wait I thought there is no such thing as meaning? Oh wait that's right the new trend is to say that meaning doesn't exist therefore we choose ourselves what matters. Oh wait..we don't choose anything its all determined and meaning does exist!
Only theoretical physicists can be this stupid I swear.
Sabina's my favorite troll. None of that ad hominem stuff; just straight, hardcore Mr Spock logic combined with classic German snark. Bravo!
The notion of Free will arises from the imprecision in realizing your own thoughtprocess, in the same way the arrow of time arises from entropy due to lack of information.
I am so happy I found your channel Sabine. Thank you!
I used to worry about this, but then I realized that it feels like we do, and that's the best we can manage.
We still have consciousness, no need for free will as long as I can watch the movie
Sounds like slavery and imprisonment.
@@bobjohnson1633 there is a vast divide between metaphorical "slavery and imprisonment" and actual "slavery and imprisonment." your decision to not distinguish in this case is suspicious.
When the term was first used, it enabled us to talk about human functioning in terms that made sense to us. "Free" was meaningful because it referred to the experience of deliberating and making a choice among alternatives. But when you take the term "free" serious, it suggests that we are free to do anything we put our minds to. Some reflection shows that this ability is not real for us (despite how he might want to, a prisoner can not flap his wings and fly over the prison wall) so obviously this 'sense of freedom' 'is false. Duh. However, there is still the phenomenon, the experience, of willing something and then acting in order that it comes to pass. The meaning of "free" that most freewillers have in mind is not this radical sense, but simply the obvious sense of being able to consider alternatives in the chain of one's actable actions (physical and mental) and realize one from among those considered.
Today, freewill is better understood as just an old name (literally false by today's understandings) used to refer to purposeful, meaningful behavior (it's language, ffs). It doesn't require a violation of physics, it just requires more than one system of physico-chemical control and the means to favor one over the other. One way to do it is to have two systems processing but with them having slightly different clocks or perspectives. The freedom/determinism distinction entirely misses the point.
But can you really choose to wipe your ass or not freely ?
I'm a psychologist (albeit a junior one) and in my time I have come across people who have had some realisation (or sometimes they may say 'epiphany' ... rarely in a positive tone) that they don't have free will. It is very rare that this is based on the realisation that comes from understanding quantum mechanics or differential equations, but simply from learning over time how much of the world around them dictates their choices (or rather, limits them).
The crisis that emerges is not one to be sniffed at; how would you feel if you had the thought that nothing was in your control? That you were on a fairground ride that you had never chosen to be in and that whatever curves, splashes (or even horrors) were always going to happen regardless of how much you loved of hated being on it? You are on a fixed rail in a single direction and all you can do is hunker down or throw your hands up in the air.
Well, in my very humble opinion, I believe determinism to be the correct answer to the the question of free will, but the challenge is how to then answer the devastated people who, for them, this is hideous, terrible and stripping them of the meaning of their existence.
I am kinda fortunate that I am a research psychologist and rarely client/patient/service user/insert-correct-name-here facing but also have the task of being pointed at by people who find out what I do and being ordered to "reveal your secrets!"
Well ... from what I have seen: some people who seek out psychology due to past trauma (which is pretty much everyone) can take from this a certain comfort: if this was always going to happen to them, then they had no say and they no part and it was not their fault (which is never is), and sort of ... accept that this was 'fate'. They couldn't have done anything to stop it and absolve themselves of the self-hate and self-blame that is often par of the course for these people.
Others become extremely bitter: for them, the fact that this would have always happened to them and that no matter how strong, how resilient, how brave they were, would never have made a difference. The cold, indifferent world would have always won.
So, the absence of free-will to the individual (who is probably not a physicist/philosopher/etc.) seems to be more complex than the concept itself, because on our level it really does not matter at all if is exists, but what follows from the question of it. Outside of the noble disciplines of the physical sciences, the real world implications are way (WAY) more significant, and the idea may be thousands of years old, but the actuality of it is so new because the noble(er? 😛) disciplines of the social science are still trying to catch up.
Some people may paraphrase the Tolkien quote: "Go not to the psychologists for an answer, for they will say both 'yes' and no'." And .... they have a point.
My advice is probably going to be: go to a psychologist if you are seriously considering your existence and the doing so is having detrimental effects on your life.
My other advice would be: you have as much free-will now as you did before this video/that appointment/that realisation, and consider what you could do now ... which is almost anything you can imagine. If you want to stop reading this rambling comment: do so! If you want to dress up like a chicken and move to Norway to study pine trees and howl at the moon every night: do so!
If you have a choice (real or imagined) then that has to be worth something .... right?
I am genuinely puzzled. If the things that happen were always going to happen, then presumably we have no moral authority to punish murderers, child abusers, thieves etc. They were always going to do what they were going to do? Is that part of what you mean? And victims should just accept that this is just what was always going to happen to them? Except, they might not be able to do so as they were always going to be upset and that won't change unless it is predetermined that it will - in which case, is there really any value in psychologists, therapists and psychiatrists who claim to be want to help people with distress?
It's not worth it to me and that should be fine, I'm so angry when people say there's no reason to. People like yours want to deter me from "dressing up in a chicken suit and go to Norway" if you catch my drift, so there's literally nowhere I can go... Are we not adults here? Do we have to step on eggshells because other people might like the idea? We should have more countries like Switzerland to provide that option to citizens but noooo we're all tax paying piggies so it's in your best interest to keep us around. So to that I'll say, I will exercise the little illusion of freedom to nope the f out. See y'all in the next permutation, it's not gonna be any different but hey at least I tried!
It matters absolutely nothing whether the will is "free" or not. There is a will, a choice and a responsibility. There appear to be good choices and bad choices. The individual carefully weighs the options and makes a decision to the best of his knowledge and belief, and from then on is responsible for the outcome. The mysterious "freedom", which nobody can really explain, makes no difference whatsoever.
The scary answer is to accept the idea of god. That is, to accept as such is to realize that all, including your birth and position in life, is a part of a larger plan. After accepting that notion, cast away all concepts of determinism, and force people to live their life AS IF they had free will, yet knowing they don't.
When you have acceptance of a grander plan, you calm down a bunch. Every pain, experience, or preference you have becomes meaningful. You don't know what the outcome will be because you can't compute it. Even so, if you accept that model and keep in mind as you're living your life, you won't fret. You won't fear. You won't experience anger.
Hopefully, you can reach a point of rejoice.
Knowing that there's a grand plan in motion to raise the consciousness of all gives you something to look forward to.
Of course, it's crazy to talk about god on a science channel. Even so, I don't believe they're at odds with each other.
I don’t see free will and determinism as mutually exclusive. Just as many events are out of our control, will or no, the universe floods us with far more data and possibilities than we could ever hope to know or explore. It’s like trying to simulate a far larger computer system on a computer - it’s not possible to process. Each decision, free or not, opens up nearly infinite possibilities. Emergent structures aren’t necessary subject to the same basis of rules their constituent parts follow in much the same way many virtual particles do this physically. TLDR whether you have free will or simply find yourself in the universe/future that is entangled with perceived agency and desire is simply looking at the same complex emergent phenomenon from different viewpoints.
If someone is truly a materialist, they cannot believe in free will.
Fortunately, materialism isn’t our only reality.
@SouthernGuardian I'm a materialist that believes in free will. People seem to have this belief that when your understanding changes as to the underlying mechanism of a thing, we have to discount the thing entirely. For example, someone might argue that because we now know touch to be the sensation of electromagnetic repulsion, there is no such thing as touch. It's a pedantic line of reasoning, and it's just as pedantic to discount the concept of free will just because we now know better how it works.
this is metaphorically referred to as throwing the baby out with the bathwater. An absurd thing to even say
@@nathanwiles2719 free will denial isn't about denying the capacity for humans to make decisions, but the idea that this human in this state and context will always make the exact same decision; that is, you are physically deterministic
@@charleslegates9231 I understand that. We now understand free will to be a deterministic/physicalist/materialist (take your pick) process, but that doesn't mean that we are now required to say it doesn't exist. Again, we just understand better now how it works.
I agree with what you're saying. I was lost up until about 15:50 when it came back around to explaining choice. If Im getting this right, what you are saying is that choice is not free will and a lack of free will doesn not mean a lack of choice.
So it's completely worthless conclusion that means nothing. What a vapid contribution to the world.
I think that is not what she said. She said "Just because you don't have free will you still make decisions." You make decisions, but you have no choice about what decisions you make. There are options, but you have no control about which option you take. That has been determined by all the myriad of input to which you have been exposed.
"If you wanna become a youtuber, you don't have to know anything"
I love this woman
I had wondered, What is a "CZcamsr"? Is it just those who are presenting videos, or is it everyone who uses CZcams? I should think the quote applies to a small subset of the video producers. After all, we'll try anything to get a view. We don't have to know what we are talking a about.
@@JackPullen-Paradox a CZcamsr is someone that produces videos for CZcams (and tries to make a living off of it.)
Mmmmmmonster kill.
And since it's impossible to **KNOW** that libertarian free will does not exist according to Sabine's assumptions of naturalistic determinism, I guess Sabine is proving her point.
Consider the following argument.
1. Sabine's belief that she does not possess libertarian freedom is either (i) determined by mindless stuff, (ii) determined by deceptive beings, (iii) completely random, or (iv) because she possesses libertarian freedom.
2. Sabine's belief that she does not possess libertarian freedom is not determined by mindless stuff, determined by deceptive beings, or completely random.
3. Therefore, Sabine's belief that she does not possess libertarian freedom is because she possesses libertarian freedom.
For a defense of these premises, I recommend the paper I coauthored with J.P. Moreland entitled, “An Explanation and Defense of the Free-Thinking Argument.” This argument highlights the fact that it is ultimately self-defeating to reject the libertarian freedom to think.
Am I the only one who can't wait for the days when a photon can go left or right without being judged for its motives?
Double slit? I did that at home with a cat toy and a very fine piece of copper wire.
I was almost 60 years old and saw it done when I was a kid.
So just 4.5 volts was all it took to totally blow my mind.
The mind is actuall experiencing a " light breeze "
This is ALL about, in a sense, parallel universes (or reality more accurately ).
My toenails have no choice. Dna mixed with so called " light " frequencies dictate their path. The owner, " me " (not the body,) can choose to ignore them untill they cause disruption to the body. The choice being, " I" create comfort or pain and infection.
This principle applies to all " planes of relativity ", both physical and mental, where choice is limited to a cause and effect process, which activates the " authority " of " I ", which is where the next " plane " kicks in, being quantum mechanics. Still in the cause and effect realm, but, as with all planes, more subtle than the previous one.
As with the foundation of physics and chemistry, ALL arenas of relativity are predictable, which is why metaphysical prophesies and predictians can be recognised (by those past a certain level...NOT catagarised specifically by the intellect. This is why there is such awareness disparity amongs our " brightest ".
Ulimiately the self realized amongst us actually " contract out " of the predictable zone, and simply create. The Creator created creators.
No, lots of conservatives are tired of having their motives questioned. 😜
that day may have just come
We are all limited by our senses and our interpretation of those sense's, once reality is realized it's too late... Unless you are uninterested about the motives of direction photons are spinning, then you're a demon that needs to be excised from "the" cult..ure
It's amazing how someone so smart can lay out such a non-definition of free will then make a case for not believing in it.
The late, great Christoper Hitchens was asked this. Hitchens always found it to be a boring question. When asked if he believed in free will he answered very simply... "I have no choice." I still think it was the best answer ever given to this question. Most people don't really think about what they're asking. They just can't seem to let go of the false notion that they are in control of their decisions.
I don't see how there could be free will for a philosophical materialist. Hitchen's own thoughts would also be the inevitable consequence of material forces, not conclusions freely arrived at by a supposedly brilliant thinker. Did he really believe that or was he just not willing to face up to the question? Funny that lack of curiosity.
@@richardyates7280Understanding the absence of free will didn’t change anything for Hitchens. Hitchens enjoyed learning about the world and the thought process of figuring things out. He loved discussing it with other intelligent people. And he loved debating it with both intelligent and unintelligent people.
None of that changes after knowing our brains are a train.
you made a decision to write this dvmb comment.
We need to have the exact same starting conditions to exist as we are. I think eternal recurrence makes sense.
When you play chess against another, aren't the moves you make your choice? If there's several moves available, aren't you picking the ones you prefer rather than having them predetermined ? I think in life there are larger trends that are predetermined like your place of birth, your birth parents, your siblings, your physical structure and appearance unless you specifically go about changing it but this latter factor would indicate free will exists. Both exist concurrently.
"A man can do as he will, but not will as he will"
- Arthur Schopenhauer
That sure is a good way to sum it up.
what if you can't make your will come true?
@@wprandall2452
That's a lack of power or ability.
@@APaleDot The fact that we exist itself is proof of free will. We have to have free will to have a working mind.
@@wprandall2452
Did you choose to have a mind?
"I'm a physicist, please see a psychologist." This cracked me up! Between the content and Sabine's humour, my poor pea brain can barely take it. I love this channel.
The problem is a misunterstand of what Free Will is. David Hume has an great explanation on this. He even give the example of Man sentenced to death by beheading. He looks at the sharpness of the axe and get terrified. He than knows the executioner never gave up on an hundred previous executions and get equally terrified. The Man doesn't get an mystical Idea of the executioner having an non caused free Will that wiill make him to give up. If there was no causuality than free will would be Impossible. An vicious murderer would be no more guilty of anything than anyone else as the very act of mudering had no cause in his inner persona. We would be as free as an adrift boat that goes with the wind. Truth is our actions become our habits and these Will become our persona.
@@fernandoc4741 That great explanation of Hume looks like appeal to consequences fallacy to me (if we did not have free will, that would be bad)
@@juanausensi499 Appeal to consequence is completely rational. It was later adopted by Kant and embraced by William James pragmatism. For instance. Life does have an purpose is 100% logical. Because If It doesnt than there is no purpose believing It either does or doesnt. Even If the the chance It does was close to zero, the rarionale would still bet It does.
@@fernandoc4741 I have not studied these topics in quite a long time, so forgive my ignorance. Is it possible the reality of a situation (i.e. Whether or not we have free will) is actually irrational or illogical? Does everything need to be rational and logical?
@@Moz4rt08 Logical or Ilogical how? I guess the example gave by Hume of the Man sentenced to death was to show that the very concept of undestetministic free will makes no sense to our minds (the executioner is as terrifing as the sharp Blade). Hume also Denied that reason alone had any Power on our minds. It could only have an Power If It brings us some emoticon (ex fear of the consequence it we take an decision instead of another)
I love videos like this because regardless of whether you agree or not with the presenter, they encourage you to think and ask yourself hard questions about what you actually believe in. So much of what we consume with our eyes and ears nowadays attempts to push an agenda or manipulate rather than stimulate thought and discussion.
What all academics have in common - they occupy themselves with dealing with "intangibles". That is "brain work" - they believe. The handling of the "tangible" part they leave up to those who have to work with their hands for money - not just think. And that of course makes them "the elite".
The best example that nailed the free will concept for me is this thought experiment: Imagine you knew some twins and you knew for certain that one of them had free will and the other did not. You have access to all the resources in the universe and your mission is to find out which one is which. How can you find out? You can't, because having free will and not having free will is identical. It doesn't matter what you try to do, you can't create any experiment to tell which one is which.
You cannot prove consciousness either by such external means. Yet you personally experience direct evidence for it at every waking moment.
@@CT-pi2gl It depends on what you mean by consciousness, if you just use it as another name for free will then of course it's the same. But if you mean being aware of their surroundings and being self aware then we actually do have some ways to test for self awareness. There is this simple experiment called the mirror test. You put a noticable mark on an animal (or human) somewhere where he can't directly see it, then you put him in a front of a mirror and if he touches the mark using the mirror it means he is self aware of himself. Humans pass this test at the age of two.
To conclude, if you can't imagine how to observe something, it can't exist.
I don't think the mirror test can prove the level of consciousness or sense of personhood we are discussing. I could program a robot running software to understand the relationship between the mirror object and its own structure or "body," and use the mirror to perform inspections and maintenance of itself. All without deviating from a set if "IF... THEN" statements, or forming any sense of "Me."
@@CT-pi2gl "I don't think the mirror test can prove the level of consciousness or sense of personhood we are discussing"
Yes it can. If you could program or create an AI robot so complex that it had the ability to recognize itself and perform inspections and maintenance on itself independantly in uncontrolled circumstances, then it would be a consciousness being, it would have a state of awareness. That is exactly what it would be. I hate to tell you this but you and your brain is just a very complex and sopisticated computer and if we could create that in a computer, the computer would become a sentient being.
"I find the question stunningly uninteresting" oh how I wish I could use this line in work meetings!
Edit: 2:06 - "for simple questions like 'does free will exist?'" hahaha I love Sabine's style so much
Is there even an 'I' if freewill doesn't exist?
@@curcumin417 that depends on whether consciousness exists ;)
@@curcumin417 The only true "I" is our consciousness.
Everything else is outside of that and "other".
Free Will Smith...
Of course you can use Hossenfelderisms. There's plenty more where that one came from.
Sabine is killing it with her humorous bits, smartly added throughout the serious stuff. I want more of it please.
I want less of it, please.
Ditto on the less of it. Sometimes it's too glib. Sometimes it's trying too hard. Sometimes it just doesn't land. Sometimes it's lame....and... Sometimes it's perfect. That's 1 out of 5, leaving 4 /5 of it as an unnecessary waste of time that distracts from the point.
Given that Germanness is a hard edge to soften, at least for American ears, I wouldn't remove it entirely, just edit it down one more time.
Humor and humility go much further than fake smiles, or a false cheery attitude, or hair and makeup, and clothes. But, it doesn't need to come at a breathlessly delivered pace, like a stand-up routine.
The content IS the good stuff.
EASILY AMUSED!!!!
Yes, but her statement is ascientific. Based entirely on belief, it has no empirical evidence...😊
@@seriousmaran9414 belief in free will has no empirical evidence.
Saying free will doesn't exist is like saying there's no invisible unicorn in my room right now. That's just a null hypothesis. Someone who claims that there is a unicorn has to present evidence
The key insight of this whole video that got me screaming at the screen "Yes, yes, Yes!". Was that the brain is a calculator and we can't know the result of the calculation until it's done. That waiting for the the calculation to be completed is what people call "Free Will". That sums it all up for me. That is, your brain is making decisions and doing comparisons and calculations, but given the same input it's just like any other calculator and it's going to come up with the same answer. There was a story on NPR a few years ago about a women with short term memory loss that reset every five minutes or so. Given the same input she would answer EXACTLY the same, the same face expression, the same way she paused, everything to the point it was hard to believe it wasn't just a repeat of the recording. That was extremely insightful to me that, yes, we are just organic computers.
but a calculator that has AI running in it, not just a static calculator, and it doesn't just automatically calculate stuff, it really depends on where we put our attention at and what we decide to think about. it is not just a calculator mandating what we have to think about, its more like neural nets that can solve problems for us and give us solution, but we decide which problems to give it. that doesn't seem to defy free will to choose what we think about, just my 2 cents
@alexissvetrev exactly. Where are these inputs coming from? If there is no free will, then how can one choose to study the brain thru neuroscience and change it? You can alter your brain in different ways by making difference choices, this will alter this "organic computer" because neuroplasticity is a thing
Cool! Can you give me a link of the video depicting this woman? Thanks!!!
That's the issue though... that woman's brain was being "fixed" in that loop... so perhaps her free will was limited, responding exactly the same to the same stimuli doesn't disprove free will either it just proves that the person would choose the same actions each time.
During my late teens, a girl asked me if I "believed in fate?"
It seemed obvious to me that of course fate exists because wether we choose to travel the globe, throw ourselves under a train or devote our lives to charitable causes, then surely THAT is what was fated.
I think its only really an issue (psychologically) if you KNOW how its supposed to turn out BEFORE it happens. However, I take consolation in the fact that, try as we might, we cant know how the book ends until it's written! #Spoilers! 😄
We are like travellers on a train and must go where the rails take us, but we can enjoy the views from the window and the company of our fellow travellers.
"No one lives in the slums because they want to. It's like this train. It can only go where the tracks take it."
-Cloud Strife
That was my favorite line in Final Fantasy 7. It made me realize the whole game was an exploration into the nature of identity and free will
I don't think we *can* enjoy the views from the window. We *must* enjoy or hate the view, just like we *must* stay on the tracks. Our experience are just as much out of our control, as are our actions. At least that's how I understand it...
You could well be right, although many scientists share this view there are others who hold that we do have either some free will or at least the ability to make responsible decisions and control of our emotions .An excellent book putting the case for that position is "Who's in Charge ? " by the neuroscientist Michael S Gazzaniga .
You can always get off the train, and change to another train, or even go back to where you started, because you went the wrong way.
So, did you try kidnapping the train driver? ;)
I once told my psychotherapist that I didn't believe in free will. He was very frustrated with me at that moment. He might have had a point. Even if we do not have true free will, it might not be psychologically healthy to shape your life around that belief.
Certainly. It might also not be healthy to be an African experiencing a famine.
That's my issue with determinism. It seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy and you run the risk of a defeatist attitude - but then if we don't have free will you probably can't help yourself ;-) I think decision making is far too complex and determinism (in my view) remains a philosophical rather than a scientific viewpoint - I think a lot of findings and studies have been wildly interpreted to support this viewpoint. Scientists don't like to admit that it is hugely intermixed with philosophy and although some findings are really interesting, they are often used to draw rather far fetched conclusions. But that's just my opinion of course.
I think alot of people are uncomfortable with the lack of free will because it kind of implies someone could predict their entire life and future behaviours, kind of making them into a robot. A piano key. But the issue is, i think its impossible to calculate/predict this, because the calculation is reality itself in some sense.
Both that, and the idea that true randomness MAY be a thing.
@@smeeself yea quantum indeterminacy, chaos theory and such. Although I will say fundamental randomness still doesn't imply free will any more than determinism does.
@@WildminecraftwolfI heartily concur. 👍
Actually the algorithm decided I would watch this video
The algorithm definitely does not have free will.
It's used by people to control others freedoms , of choice in that context .
My Grandfather was something of a philosopher, he was also a coal miner, and a doughboy in WW1. He'd been a few places and seen a lot of trouble and he told me once that a man had about as much free will as a rock in an avalanche. I guess that is really true.
Or indeed, a man in an avalanche.
this is very inline with easter philosophy. i love how they go hand in hand with science. unlike the dogmas of Christianity and other biblical religions.
Powerlessness of an individual in grand scheme of geopolitics doesnt deny free will of that individual.
That sounds more like it's about being powerless.
The topic of the video got basicall nothing to do with it.
@@andrewguthrie2 why is this funny
hi!, im 16 and you're genuinely my favorite science youtuber. You always keep everything grounded while still discussing interesting topics, keep it up😁
That is some nice intention from your age perspective. In my 16 i was interested in running around while building some concept of a sublime god around running. :D
And on the other hand, you have a wart.
Keep up the good work kid, maybe you‘ll be as smart as Dr Sabine one day
You’d probably like Sean Carrol. He’s awesome.
@Conon the Binarian⚧ haha I'd love to be a scientist but I'd hate to have to teach people. I think I'll just be an engineer of some sort, but thanks for the advice 😄
I don't believe in Sabine's free will either.
I love that she’s a bit of a smart ass, but delivers it completely dry and dead serious.
Lol "I'd find it creepy if the decisions.. came from somewhere else than in my brain." Agreed! :) Enjoyed that one, Sabine. Having a science background, and in taking a philosophy class, I actually wrote a paper on the subject which I entitled, Soft Free Will, wherein I argue just about the same thing, that ultimately the constituent details determine our decisions, but the feeling that we have free will is useful to the degree that we feel in control of our own thoughts. Your elucidation of the creepy feeling it would be for something outside of us to make the decisions, is a beautiful and personal synopsis, and I thank you for the smile and the chuckle as I remember pondering this topic. I appreciate your detailed and fun-filled explanation. Thanks and keep up the fun videos! :-)
personal anecdotal argument: I don't always feel in control of my thoughts but i still think it is my brain where they are coming from.
@@gulaschnikov5335 As someone diagnosed with OCD, I definitely do not always feel in control of my thoughts, but the realization that some of those thoughts and compulsions (mainly the OCD ones) could be just the raw mechanisms of the mind without the accompanying sequence of events, goals, and over-arching narratives to make them all make sense, is really intriguing to me.
I don't know which is more unsettling:
My will could be controlled externally by an unknown puppeteer.
My true self could be external to physics, yet trapped in a link with this fragile meat sack.
I act as if I have freewill therefore I have freewill, because it is impossible to act as something without a referent.
She never really did address the question did she? I'm still left equally dumbfounded as when I did or was before watching this video. Didn't learn anything new here
I, for one, did not click on this video by my free will. I clicked on it because of who I am , because of my inclinations, tastes and interests.
And those I certainly did not choose. I learned what they are by introspection, the same way I learned what my favourite colour is, my favourite food or my sexual identity etc etc.
I didn't choose my hobbies, my favourite colour; and I can't choose - for example - a different favourite colour tomorrow, or to be religios.
I believe I clicked on this video because I always would've clicked on this video ; had I decided against it I always would've decided against it.
And so on and so forth. Keeping it short. Because I decide to. Or did I?
You always would have (or wouldn't have) clicked on the video, unless one of the random 'disturbances' happens that Sabine mentions in the video. I take this to mean that in each moment there are an infinite amount of causes/conditions which play into whether or not you would have clicked, if one (or many) of those causes/conditions randomly plays out differently, the outcome of whether you clicked can change. Do you agree?
It kind of reminds me of Electro-magnetic Interference and how one (or many) bits in a stream of data can 'randomly' flip.
Imagine criminals during trial pleading not guilty because they do not have free will?😂😅
Them committing crimes due to their upbringing, experience, information and all other factors that lead them to make the poor decision doesn't really excuse the fact they're done it.
Regardless of which side of the fence you are (whether you believe in free will or not), most wouldn't argue a computer has it, so hopefully it'll serve as an uncontroversial analogy:
If you have a computer program, and you feed it a list of numbers, and the program's meant to select whichever number is biggest, if it selects the wrong number, even though the program "didn't have free will" and made a poor choice based on its' initial code being flawed (due to which it would make the same bad choice no matter how many times you enter the same sequence of numbers), you're still going to either uninstall it and look for another software that does it properly, or try to look into the code, figure out where it's coded poorly and try to fix it.
Prison sentence for criminals is essentially them getting "uninstalled" from society for "buggy behavior", the alternative is re-education or therapy (equivalent to troubleshooting and fixing the code), which is more humane, but sadly the former is the norm. In the same way we feel it's just faster to uninstall broken software and find alternatives instead of trying to fix 'em, humans have preference to taking the easier solution of simply eliminating criminals from society, instead of trying to "fix" and reintegrate them.
I was taught that one can never prove anything only disprove
I had this realisation when I was 12 that every action was was caused by every action before it and so on, and nearly had a breakdown trying to find someone else who understood what I was talking about because none of my classmates or teachers or even older 20 year old friends on the internet at that time did. I didn't know that it was called predeterminism at the time and wasn't until a couple years later that I finally found out. Meanwhile all throughout my 12-14 year old school years, I was losing my mind arguing with both religious and non-religious teachers about how free will didn't exist because of this and it was awful because I thought I was going insane because no one else understood what I was saying.
Right, I believe this too. I had this realisation only recently at 27 now that free will is essentially determinism, as Elon Musk puts it. I think that we just constantly reap the karma of our actions from this and also previous lifetimes and that what we experience in this life is thus very little that is created from our own "free will" in this present life. Because of all this, I think some of the things we may truly want we may not experience until future lifetimes; if we are aware enough to sow the right seeds now that is.
Actually, this kind of determinism was used by Aquinas centuries ago to prove the existence of God. Just google his 5 proofs for the existence of God. It's pretty elementary, and it rests on the beliefs you're describing. One of the nice side effects is that God (in the Christian belief) confers free will on humankind from the get-go.
@@macjeffff The "proofs of god" are not scientific proofs, nor are they literal proofs, they can only be called proofs under a very lenient definition of "proof". The same way a doodle on a piece of paper can function as a proof of concept for something totally unrelated.
@@thearchitect5405 Actually, they are well-known logical proofs. Aquinas is still considered one of the finest logicians of all time. Even if you disagree, you would probably be fascinated by the work. Aquinas's proofs for the existence of God are easy to find. Check them out!
@YukiXK are you me?
As someone who suffers from indecision, I find this an absolute win.
Instant success. You just made a snap decision. Well done.
You just got an excuse to continue behaving the way you've always have...lol
@@peacemakernanathats what this is always about. Thats what leftism is, its an exscuse, a subtle whispher in the ear, a good reason to be a bad person. Theirs always some good reason: "I'm really a puppet with no free will so its ok" "Eve made me eat the apple". Nothing under the sun is new
Indecision would never exist if there were no level of will involved
Thank you for taking the time to do this
Good Lord. What a difference 2 years makes! Unlike your previous free will video, this one wasn't abrasive but instead very educational. Sometimes funny, all the time mature and not at all condescending. Thank you for your perspective. Great video.
I hope so, because the idea that I am responsible for all the stupid things I do is horrifying.
Haha, no you would still be responsible by the very definition of responsibility. Although perhaps childhood foibles can be excused to a certain extent.
The idea that you're not responsible for all the stupid things you do is somewhat horrifying too. And the horror is multiplied by a factor of 8 billion.
It's your lucky day.
In order for you to know what you're responsible for, you should start by defining what you mean by "I".
Okay, I'll be waiting here; Give me a call when you've arrived at the complete definition.
@@sisyphus_strives5463 Shaky logic. 🤔 (Highly irresponsible.)
You are not gonna like my answer:
You are only responsible for What you think, What you feel, What you say and What you do. Or Don't. 😅 Your decision. But here is a tip: when you get to a problem, you can ask yourself always: When? Where, How, Why or what/who? and determine which aspect of the problem you want to explore. It's a long term deconstruction of behavioral cul-de sacs. and a fascinating journey.
Sabine's recognition of the provisional nature of science lends huge credibility to her message. Also, I love the deadpan german humour. We need more Sabines and less dogma!
This is pure dogma. "Free Will" has nothing to do with science. Science has nothing to do with it. Sapolski wants to "Abolish the criminal justice system" because he doesn't believe in it. (Of course he doesn't offer anything to replace it with).
"provisional" is the word you can apply to every human endeavor.
I get a bit freaked out by someone with a German accent speaking about there being no free will...
@@desmondrathbone435😂
I hate to tell you - she is nowhere close to what a German is. Even her accent is most certainly not of somebody who grew up in Germany.
And no - Germans are known for their "hands-on approach". This academic person is all about intangible and talk.
Sabine, you do great transitions. I don't even realize I am watching a commercial about Brilliant until I am halfway through the ad.
that's interesting. I thought "what, ads already?" when she started the part on emergent phenomena. - and switched off my attention and then had to re-wind 🙂
Maybe free will exists, maybe not. It is not very scientific to say you are very certain about these things. We can't even connect relativity with quantum mechanics yet, so it's best to not draw conclusions.
I started watching this video, then I decided I wasn’t going to, and I ended up watching it anyway. I think it was determined that I would find out that my decisions are determined.
Pre-determined, yes.
I started watching it and thought for a person with a brain, decided to consciously make a decision to make a video about not having the ability to make a video she had no choice in the matter or among the matter. Sorry that's nonsense.
@@darinb.3273 It may depend on whether one sees conscious decisions as having causes -- for instance, you could say that the decision to create the video was "caused" by the desire to do so.
@@BardicLiving It may depend on whether one sees conscious decisions as having causes
ME: Perhaps this would mean outside control of one's own mind, the cause comes from within one's own brain.
-- for instance, you could say that the decision to create the video was "caused" by the desire to do so.
ME: Yet again that desire was a choice. The same as the decision by you or your spouse (if you are married) of what to eat for dinner, that's a free choice by one or both of you.
Free will
noun
the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion.
adjective
(especially of a donation) given readily; voluntary.
EXAMPLE; "free-will offerings"
Once we realize that "the future is determined by the past", we'll understand that this includes any and all causes of anything. That means all "choices", "feelings", "brain states", etc were all pre-determined at the point of primordial nucleosyntheses at the birth of the universe. Even the question "does it matter" is irrelevant. It simply "is what it is and will be."
You're nearing the the 1million mark. Congrats and well deserved. Very informative video as always.
Wow. I am a biologist whose dream died. I feel your pain. The 3-5 year grant period wrecks those who want to go down untrodden paths. I love your videos.
Your videos are a joy to watch, Sabine.
This may help to wrap your head around why you feel like you have free will when you actually don't: You can choose any option you want, but you can only choose the one you want. The one that is the result of the "calculation", as Wittgenstein puts it.
you also can't choose any option, you can only choose something your brain is able to imagine which we know is a gjostabulicism, the philosophical equivalent to a mathematical number set, the set of all ideas and thoughts a person has. All subsequent thoughts have to be derivatives of the person's gjostsbuli, so it can only be expanded by exposure to a different gjostsbuli.
And of course you couldn't have predicted I would refer to gjostsbulicism because I made up the word, but the idea I used it to describe is most likely as equally foreign to you as the word so it's fitting.
Free Will: The chance in a million that actually happens! Son of a Bayes!
Decisions are by definition commitments to ones desires. Of course you can only choose the choice you're making because that is what a choice is. This argument doesn't really move the debate anywhere.
You don't "choose" anything. Your brain is a complex system of neurons that makes calculations based on the data its given and comes up with answers, and that's it. The regularity in which the brain comes up with an answer is why people swear they are in control of the system in the first place. There's no free will, and nothing extra is going on but a highly complex biological information computing machine in your skull.
Free will as a [literal] concept makes no sense because it doesn't take into account the factors consistently outside our control. For example, the fact we were born humans, the parents who engaged in coitus to create our embryo, the genetic inheritance from those parents (race, height, IQ, various other predispositions), the environment, our family's socioeconomic status and so on. All of these things contribute to who we are and how we develop, thus from the very moment of our conception free will is impossible.
I think that most people don't think too deeply about it and its more a shorthand to describe decision making and thus varying levels of personal accountability. Sure, fine. But determinism accounts for that so its still a misleading term.
it's actually even worse; your neurocircuitry comes to a conclusion, and then some other neurocircuitry makes up a story about how you came to that conclusion, but you never actually know
Deeply confused explanation of the sort Dennett would give. If physics were all there is, then there would be no intensionality -- no "conclusions" to speak of, no "stories", and no "story"-makers. There would be merely matter moving in accordance with the physical laws with no awareness of anything.
@@maiku20 why not? nothing in physics discounts consciousness
@@playgroundprotagonis Nothing in physics assumes or relies on consciousness as part of its explanation. So Occam's razor removes consciousness as a thing.
@@maiku20 but physics doesn't; physics doesn't have anything to say about consciousness (currently), it doesn't say anything for or against, occam's razor doesn't enter into it.
Sounds pretty good to me. Very in line with the "be yourself is all that you can do" I believe in.
before you say "you" have a free will, you must define, wthat "you" is.
I love how Sabine can talk about complex topics in relatively simple language and still manage to throw in a few devastating jokes in a really subtle way. Where does humour come from? Is it a choice?
Choice doesn’t exist, I thought that was the point.
@@olddecimal2736 Theoretically it doesn't exist but somehow we humans seem to pull it off anyway. At least the illusion of it, and for our puny brains that's good enough.
@@olddecimal2736 I choose free will even if it is an illusion.
Humor comes from your need to please and keep the listener interested in what you are saying.
Generally, humor doesn't come from Germany that's for sure. Sabine is legit the funniest German I have ever heard speak, but humor is subjective, so it could just my perception.
The problem here is that the definition of "Free Will" is not really agreed upon, and was only lightly touched on by Sabine. I tend to the Compatibilist way of looking at it as "Are You in control of You?" Or put another way: do you have responsibility for your decisions? It's the most useful, coherent way of looking at the question. The answer is:Yes. You have to define "You". Well, I'll keep it simple; let's say the mysterious thing that really controls all your actions is your genetics, which you don't choose. Except, you *are* your genetics. There's no puppet master. If you make a decision because of your genetic predisposition, *you* made that decision. Essentially, it's the same as saying you controlled yourself. But that IS free will! If you control you, you have free will.
you are describing causation and us taking responsibility regardless of causation, which most determinists do agree that we should hold one accountable/ responsible, regardless of genetic predisposition or whatever may be. Just because responsibility is key in ensuring wellbeing of society though, doesn't change the fact that one is not in control of things like your genetics, or past experiences that shape you. Reread your comment - you admit we don't choose genetics, and then you also acknowledge the fact that genetic predisposition plays a part in decision-making. Therefore, you already admit to the fact that there is no free will. Regardless of there being a puppet master or not, we did not choose. So no, we do not 'control' ourselves - and this is *especially* clear when you look at people who are cognitively impaired in some way. So no, your argument doesn't hold up for free will.
@@joeykoo3779 He wasn't saying there should be responsibility for the sake of society, he was saying responsibility exists because we control ourselves within the situations we find ourselves in. Genetic predisposition plays a part in putting us in the situation we are in and part of the decision-making process- but who do you think is ultimately making the decision? Limitations on our existence or ability does not mean free will doesn't exist, it just means it exists in the space it is given to exist. People who are cognitively impaired control themselves 100% to the ability they have- which can be limited compared to someone not cognitively impaired.
If you are in a crashing airplane, do you suddenly not have free will because the outcome is determined? No, you will have free will until the limitations on your existence dictate that you are dead and can no longer do things.
Free will was invented philosophically as a "get out of jail" card for the Christian god.
Compatibilist agency doesn't do it.
Surveys show that people don't consider combatibilist notions "free will" at all.
Extrapolating from particle physics to psychology is an argument fallacy.
Ascribing choice to particles is called projection: anthropomorphising is an argument fallacy.
Appealing to authority is a logical fallacy.
Sabine provides no evidence of the causal relationship between particle physics and the ability to engage in decision making processes.
Arguing by analogy is also a fallacy.
Were Sabine to clearly address how free will is or is not related to consciousness, her position on determinism may have merit.
@@xx_amongus_xx6987 "who is ultimately making the decision".....making the decision is simply, an act of making the decision. Which does not imply at all there is free will. But I know there are many like you choose to think that way. That's fine.
Some people believe there is a "self". Others believe the perception of "self" arises from our anatomy - brain, body and all the works. So you asking who is ultimately making the decision is irrelevant, because that depends on whether or not you believe a "self" exist separate from what gives us consciousness - is it separate from our brain and body, or is it not? But once your brain dies, the "self" does cease to exist, so if you're going to ask me, the "self" does not exist as some separate agent that can act out free will against predisposed traits and learned behaviour/ values from past circumstances, no.
Regarding your airplane scenario - most sane people* are compelled by fear of death to act or* try to do something to survive it. But that does not imply at all you are doing it out of your own agency. Let's take the same airplane scenario and pretend you are in it - you try to will yourself to calm down and accept your fate, because the plane is crashing - but if you are any normal person, can you? You likely can't, because you are controlled by your fear of death.
I've been thinking about this my whole life and came up with exactly the same conclusion as Sabine - free will at a individual level is just the output of what the brain's algorithm churns out. I have a computer science background, and this is exactly like a function that returns an output with deterministic inputs plus some random elements in the calculation. Without the randomness, you would get the same result every time if the inputs are exactly the same. People are mistaken the randomness as free will - I am deciding what I want to eat for lunch, and thinking it's free will. But it's just some calculation based on past experiences plus randomness that gave the final result.
I actually had a rap-debate on this topic with a friend who's since passed on.
"Doesn't believe in quantum jumps"?
Does Sabine subscribe to hidden variables?
👍
Dr. Sabine, Thank you very much for reopening this Topic with a wider range of research and study!
Now, give her your money!
She didn't have a choice.
@@bornonthebayou7926 choice and Free will are 2 different things.
Not that it makes that much difference if you have free will or not. It's such a small part of the equation that ignoring it doesn't change the result.
NIL
This is all based on one assumption; that the laws we discover here, are the same throughout the universe. And, we use our mind to "discover" those laws.
We have nothing at all without thought. Yet, those rigorous and methodical scientists who swear by Reason and Logic, do not know what thoughts are, what they are made of nor where they originate and are incaopable of silencing their inner monolgue for as little as 30 seconds.
And, we see that those who could, can somehow escape those "laws" we pretend to know. Wim Hof is just one small example.
Also, those who originated (probably unwittingly)the religions were among those who had mastered this ability of freely exploring reality without that unbearable noise of their inner dialogue. They discovered what they called god, nowadays we just call it pure consciousness.Without all the ridiculous connotations the eons have stuck onto it.
Of course it is Sabine her free will to choose not to master her only tool, and throw her scientific dogma out the window at the first opportunity
(how come this reminds me of religious priests)
And as thus be part of that cult that is destroying our planet, because it has not yet discovered that behind that ongoing rattle inside her skull, is a uniting Force, that shows anyone who tried it, that when we hurt another, we literally hurt ourselves.
Also we discover that the more in tune with that Force, the less bound by those so called "laws of nature". There are layers of determinism.
Ask yourselves why those religions have not managed to destroy earth in 5000 years and the science cult does this in 150 years.
"The idea that Will is all we need has led to utopian plans ... all of which is somehow magically supposed to pop out of nowhere if we just have the will. This belief in free will puts the blame on individuals when really the problem is the way we've organized our societies."
Well said.
How can the 'problem' be how we 'organized' our societies when we had no free will to either organize anything or create anything outside of deterministic marbles bouncing around with occasional random events? We apparently had no choice in the matter, so why worry about it? If you seek to change the way our society is organized then you believe you have the free will to do so.
You can't have it both ways.
@@naturallaw4945 Sadly, we don't have the free will to choose not to care about the problems humans face as a result of how we deterministically organized ourselves. "Why worry about it?" is just another invocation that we supposedly have free will.
@@naturallaw4945 tou can change reality, but if you will do it and how you will do it will depend on causes and circumstances that came before
This video was even more interesting than most of your videos. I love existential discussions! Personally, I believe that particles do have free will on some level, but your perspective sounds much more practical than mine.
I have free will. I am free to work mathematics and physics correctly, regardless of what scientists paid by governments decide to do.
Love this video. I think it's clear most people don't even know what they mean by "free will", and they're picking the wrong aspect of it to get all angsty about it.
Indeed.
If free will does not exist, then neither does choice. If all choice is an illusion then nothing exists because then EVERYTHING is an illusion. One cannot choose to watch a video about free will if someone does not choose to make such a video. If everything is predetermined, there's no point in doing anything as all was intended from the start.
@@jordanmatthews1466 There is no interpretation of free will that negates choice. Unless you're using some other definition of free will.
Where did your source YOUR definition?
Everything is an illusion except our free will, which we use to manifest our reality. Now I just need to use my will instead of letting my clockwork body make the decisions for me.
@@smeeself there is a clear correlation between free will and choice, if we define "choosing" as the act of determining something is undetermined... you can't choose if the decision has been pre-determined, and if the decision has been pre-determined then you have no free will; therefore if you have no free will, you have no choice.
basically, if free will does not exist, it means all your decisions are pre-determined by your DNA the way computer decisions are pre-determined by algorithms, therefore you have no choice
LITERALLY keeled over at " and to be a youtuber you need to know NOTHING" classic and brilliantl humor, this my 1st time seeing you and i love u subbed and buying your book!! i love the brainy stuff!
Same here, that comment got me good. 😂
samesies!
The free will conversation has become quite interesting. In my own experience, it seems whenever there was a leap to be made in my life I literally felt pushed in a particular direction. I may have chosen otherwise but in my heart it would have been wrong to take a different path at those moments.
Almost like knowing you would not have chosen differently, right? 0 regrets for the past
Even on small decisions, choosing between two things that you're indecisive about is never random.
Agree… it always felt like a push and to fight it or go against it is to annihilate oneself.
@@tarotthoughtsinspaceis it cause of the matrix
free will would mean you could decide to believe something you don't believe..or to want something you don't
Fantastic video. As someone dealing with existential mental health issues my whole life, you learn early on in the therapeutic journey that we must see ourselves as observers of our thoughts without attaching to them. I like how you said you use your neural circuits and memories to make decisions. The past is determined so that means our new decisions are determined too. Thank you for touching on these subjects so conscientiously!
This will definently make things worse for you. I'm sorry you live in a culture that has manufactured a mental illness and you and tells you that you are a robot and a puppet with no objective worth. Sad times
I not only learn things from Sabine, I think that Sabine is hilarious. Great work. I have "decided"to keep listening regularly.
Germans are world renowned for their comedians.
i think your reward center "decided" that probably because you are smart enough to have an interest in science.
@@fredericklehoux7160
I'm beginning to think that might be the sole reason for sentience - to create an agent that will respond to a reward system. In our case, the carrot and stick approach, delivered through emotions.
@@dexterkrammer1089 Laugh: I command you!
Yeah, she is funnier than many actual comedians imo. I don't see how some of these "funny" people get so big with their jokes that give me zero emotion other than wanting to turn it off.
I do not be believe in the concept of free will.
A person makes decisions based on experience, availability; and/or other factors.
Love your candor
03/05/24
Wittgenstein died in 1951 but the graphic at 15:35 says 1939 and yes I can’t believe I noticed either
1839 is when he became a UK citizen so a little like dying
I'm so happy I discovered your chan! Your videos are always thought-provoking, thank you for that.
Yes very thought provoking indeed
So the issue isn't people making decisions, but the way our society is organised. But isn't our society organised the way it is because of people making choices? 🤔
Exactly it makes no sense
Two things can be true. General systems theory acknowledges a feedback loop.
The parts affect the greater whole.
Just as the systems affect the parts.
In my opinion the individual shifting their behavior to improve things for society is just as important as changing social systems that affect the individual
Shifting the feed back loop from both sides
But I'd also like to note some people can shift society more like the upper class, politicians, ect
Your way to explain things is not just really clear but also hilarious😄
To summarize, everything is determined, barring those random jumps. That is, from the start of things, if ever there was one, nature will follow its course till the end things, if ever there will be one, in a determined way. I get this statement, understand it as much as I can, and believe it to be true.
So, where does free will fit in, if ever? People generally think they have free will, strive for it, certainly when they are deprived of it, are forced to do things they do not want, feel unhappy because of this.
Apparently, the important issue here is, that people don’t know most about what is going to happen because of that determinism. They process the little information they have with their restricted brain, and reach to a conclusion. People think THEY reached to a conclusion, but that’s kind of an illusion: because of the available information and the state of their brain it always has been determined which conclusion would be reached, but people only discover that determined conclusion after that determined thinking process.
Like, thinking about the above paragraph gives me new information, it was determined that I would get that information. It may influence my future decision making, but that has always been determined too: if from now on I will be more fatalistic, that already was determined, only not known to me.
This determinism also applies when trying to be a good person or not, applying oneself to the best of one’s ability or not. People may think they have a choice here, they would prefer it this way, prefer that people are influenced positively by being educated about this, both hoping and expecting to work towards a better world this way. The truth is, it doesn’t matter, it all was and will be determined without people knowing about it, they are good or not, apply themselves or not, without them knowing about it until it all happens.
To me, it really doesn’t matter in my daily life whether everything I think or do is determined, it’s nice to know without consequences to me, it’s just the way it is. I go on making decisions, only my decisions because it was determined that I would make them.
I've had the definite sensation of being a passenger in my brain, that the whole free will thing was a useful illusion for day to day getting by, as long as you remember from time to time that your brain makes decisions and you then claim credit for them after the fact.
Or you bury and forget them and deny them after the fact.
Or if your brain is making the decisions that you, after the fact claim or deny you made - who is this "you" which does so?
@@KaZoomRaider exactly
@@KaZoomRaider Bingo. That's the whole misunderstanding right there. A slave to one's own brain + you are your brain => You're a slave to yourself => you're free. But people don't accept that "the brain makes a choice" is "free will" so they confuse themselves.
The question of free will is not even a question to ask. Your brain and body make decisions based on several factors, including feelings, environmental, and the past. You are simply watching the movie for the first time and seeing how it unfolds. There is nothing wrong with that, you just have to accept that is the way it is. With the temporal dimension you are forever moving towards the future and your decisions are always in the past. That is life, stop asking the question and just learn to enjoy life for what it is. :)
I think that often when people talk about free will, they're actually talking about moral responsibility, but doing so indirectly, because there's an assumption that "no free will" implies "no moral responsibility." I don't think that's the case. Even without free will, we are still morally responsible.
I agree
I think most people talking about the topic are confused in general. For example, when you think about it free will has to be deterministic, since you as a person are determining your actions. You are a physical object in reality, so where is the controversy?
@@Lilitha11 I like this viewpoint. It seems like you could consider free will as the SOURCE of determinism. Just because we identify with these determinations doesn't mean they aren't determinations. Even when you consider quantum outcomes, does it really make sense to say you could have measured a different outcome?
As I get older, I'm realizing that the way I make decisions is almost one-to-one the way my father and mother made decisions, and that they also made decisions the way their parents did. Of course, all of them did this in their own way, yet the similarity in patterns is undeniable. But I don't know whether this has anything to do with your discussion of free will, or if your discussion simply sent my thought processes off onto another tangent typical of me.
Loved the don't need to know anything thing if you're a CZcamsr. Very drole and often true but totally inapplicable in your case Sabine as one of the very best and my personal favourite.
It definitely takes a lot of pressure off if my life decisions aren't mine. Maybe I'll just stop making decisions.
or maybe you won't
that's the contradiction with thiw view, is "stop making decisions" a decision in itself?
@@briantuk3000 Yes. That will be the last decision. It was preordained 🤯
You can do that, you can even choose to try and become the most evil person who's ever existed.
It won't be your fault if you do - it was always going to happen - but what it will mean is existence is revealing that the incarnation that your consciousness is inhabiting is one that was of low or even negative value, and it's always better for everyone including yourself if this is not the case, so you still have motivation to try and do better.
@@MrGriff305 then this point of view is a contradiction, so it's invalid.
I have only recently come across your site, but definitely love it. Look forward to catching up with all your other videos. Keep up the excellent work. I bet it would be very interesting and satisfying to sit down and have a coffee with you.
"please, don't blame me of this, its bot my idea" speaks for everything.
“Let’s stick with the particles that are stable.” Good advice for every situation.
Glad to see you are getting closer to that 1mil milestone in subscription. You deserve a lot more of course
You are just awesome genuinely, the work you do and the way you bring it out!
There should be more people like you in our society.
It's too premature to decide. Any real scientist knows this.
People who break down upon realizing that free will is an improbability need a good dose of pragmatism. You can't shatter the illusion of being your own master because it's integral to how we operate as human beings, so unless you somehow did accomplish that, live goes on the same way it always has.
This is easily one of the best science channels on youtube, one of the best Pysics channels - I very much like how when you end up past physics and into philosophy not only do you recognize it you know your stuff about other philosophers!
Its is hard to understand her accent so it's hard for me to get into it, and she also speaks fast so it's hard to follow even with subtitles
interesting... i watch most videos at 2x, only slowing it down when the accent makes it hard to understand. form instance, some british accents i have to slow it down to 1.8 or 1.6. i think Sabine does enunciate very well so perhaps that is why i can undetstand her at 2x.
I love when she does these topics. You can hear her frustration about topics that aren't scientific. She says I am a scientist, I ain't got time for that.
Had me at: "the ability to change the past, just by using their thoughts " brilliant.
There's a word for that. It's called "lying".
We cannot change physical phenomena that have occurred in the past, but we can change our interpretation of physical phenomena that have occurred in the past. However, this is not science, but philosophy.
@@abc0to1 That's if the past actually IS made of physical phenomena that happened.
A photo of you as a baby is only proof of a photo, not that you actually ever were a baby.
The past not only could be completely made up, it was.
@@itsROMPERS... It is true that the past in the everyday sense seems to be only in someone's mind. But on the other hand, we can see the stars of the distant past in the night sky in the "present. In other words, my present seems to contain someone else's past.
If I understood the theory of relativity, we might have an interesting discussion about space-time.
@@FranzSdoutz It is like the fable of the blind man touching the elephant. We can't change the past of touching part of an elephant, but we can change our perception of what we were touching.
One important aspect of the lack of free will (I agree with the video, btw) is that even if you lack free will, it doesn't just mean other people can just build a machine that completely predicts your decisions 100% and take advantage of it. Think about it, if you know about such a machine, if the machine predicts you will eat a banana, you will instead eat an apple; if it thinks you want an apple, you just eat a banana. Now you have free will… right?? Not really, because that machine would not have worked to begin with.
Say we live in a deterministic universe, in theory we can build a computer that completely simulates the universe and be able to tell the future; but now the problem arises that we can use the results of that computer program to change the future, rendering its calculations incorrect. The reason why this contradiction can't exist is that this computer program will end up having to simulate itself (since the computer is part of the universe), leading to an infinite loop and never generating a result. As such, predicting the future only works if the computer lives outside the universe and cannot affect it. Along the same token, someone/some machine can only 100% predict your thoughts if their prediction have absolutely no way of affecting you, which can't be the case in the real world.
The religious folks can think of that outside-universe-computer as god, or we can just ignore it. Either way, whether you have free will or not, it's not like it *really* matters in a practical manner and it doesn't mean someone can just use that as an excuse to say "oh life has no point anymore".
👍
We are witnessing an equation solving it self. No free will
"If free will doesn't exist, it's never existed, so what difference could it possibly make for your life?" This is a *beautiful* line, and explains much more clearly an idea that I've had for a while, which I've generally tried to explain as follows, usually being met with confused looks: "It makes no sense to worry whether free will exists, because if it exists, you can stop worrying; and if it doesn't, then you can't control whether you will worry, so just don't!"
The last part, "so just don't," may seem ironic. The thing is, you may not be able to "freely" choose whether to worry over it or not, but hopefully my words will influence you not to worry. There may be no free will, but the series of events beginning with the big bang has resulted in me becoming a person who behaves in such a way that I try to prevent people from wasting resources on useless worries, hence uttering those words in an attempt to influence others to stop worrying about something which they have no control over anyway!
The fact that you mention "try to prevent" implies free will.
@@RaulMartinezRME Nope, it's just the series of events in my life up to now that make me do it. input > output ;-)
Saying someone not to worry has never worked and is one the worst piece of advice to give anyone who is actually worrying about something. It doesn't help but only sounds condescending like you are not taking their worries seriously or actually addressing and listening them.
I have so much free will that I can ALTER the will of others by IMPOSING my free will upon them! #GodEmperorAlondro2032 I AM THE UNIVERSE!!! >:D
I still think that it is extrapolation beyond the widest boundaries of our models. This happens every single time, when one branch of science has a "level of knowledge" achieved fully, giving the feeling of completeness. As natural, the conclusion is drawn that "well, we collected all that is there to know", and than wide speculations pop up stating the Ultimate Fate of the Universe or the Origin of Everything, the Final Answer, and so on.
Ancient wisdom: the universe is infinite. I am more cautious with these Universal Revelations, no matter how tempting they are.
"And that is why, if you want to become a CZcamsr, you don't need to know anything." Sabine H. As always, your videos are always great. Sometimes, you even have great lines in them. Thank you for all your videos!
She's always entertaining, and sometimes she's even right!
She is the best CZcamsr out there, but sometimes I don't learn a single thing, like today.
I agree emphatically with Sabine that free will cannot exist in a universe that has pizza.
In the end it even doesn't matter if free will exists or not. Your life is how it is and you do the stuff you do. Just have fun living and do whatever ever you think is the best, no matter if it is deterministic predefined or randomly chosen at the moment, it doesn't make a difference. The intention and the reaction counts, not how you got there.
And yes, I tell this that way because I also had my time where I realized, that free will might not exists. My guess is, that the chance free will can exist is 1/3. 1/3 eliminates the possibility because of a completely deterministic universe, which doesn't seem to be real and the other 1/3 would be in an absolutely undeterministic universe, which would have violated physics. In the last third free will would be possible but doesn't mean it has to be real. We might be just extremely complex but not completely unpredictable.
To understand why we make the choices that we do we would have to be aware of all the reasons we made our choices, which is simply maddening.
Our brain keeps us from being aware of our breathing, heart beat, all the mechanical activities our bodies automatically do to keep us sane and focused on what we are focused on…it’s an adaptation that has helped us thrive
The problem is that freewill has never been what this lady is describing. Freewill isn't the god-like ability to control space-time from the beginning to the end of our existence. Freewill is simply the ability to change direction of mind and body without any accountability to anything or anybody at any moment. Most human beings are prisoners of their mental patterns and physical habits too much to realize this. Only a truly sensitive mind would realize the true meaning of freewill. It's not about changing the game, but about playing differently. Only then do you truly realize what the game is all about. If you try to change it, you create something in opposition to what is already there, a reaction to it. Only by choosing how you play, are you able to understand what the game is actually doing.
@@chrisalex001 i think you missed the point. The way you “play the game” you are describing is dictated by the causes, which you have no control over. The illusion of choice is just a reaction to the stimulus of these said causes. Everything that has ever happened has been cause and effect/action and reaction since the beginning of everything. As the saying goes, “it is what it is”.
@@ongodddd Sounds like he understood the point just fine. He's saying that free will is a culmination of choice dictated by those causes (the game in his example). If a tragedy occurs, it won't be "oh well, it is what it is." The whole point is to equip everyone with the means to make the best decisions they can with what they have. The definition of free will is less important, not to mention highly subjective to begin with.
I am painfully aware of my irregular heartbeat.
@@carmenmccauley585
I’m sorry to hear that, must be exhausting
Thank goodness you are you not aware of your kidneys filtering your blood, or the process of the spleen fighting off germs…that would be too much to handle
Free will: all theory is against it; all experience is for it.
Not quite. We only experience free will in ourselves. Every other experience we have is not one of free will. Also, it is possible through meditation (or hallucinogens) to remove the experience of free will from yourself as well.
Very interesting presentation! Is this a valid criticism of the basic argument? I put this forward in fear and trembling, having admired your logical prowess in many other videos. I would enjoy knowing where the error in my reasoning is.
The basic assumption of the argument is that reality - absolutely, not just an aspect of nature, nature as it reveals itself to physics - is a closed, deterministic system. Not only physically, but metaphysically. What makes sense as an axiomatic assumption in physics - it yields interesting results - may or may not make sense as a metaphysical interpretation of reality as a whole. I agree that free will (in any meaningful definition) is incompatible with nature as a deterministic system - and therefore, with physics. The area of disagreement is over whether physics is not only valid as science - if I doubted that, I wouldn’t be here; I love physics - but whether science also provides us with a metaphysical interpretation of reality as such.
The assumption that reality as a whole, in an absolute sense, is a closed system is not a possible scientific proposition, though culturally very powerful at the moment. No experiment could prove it. No logical-mathematical proof could establish its soundness. The assumption that reality is not a closed system (e.g. the “strong emergence” view) is also not a scientific proposition for the same reason. It is an attempt to make sense of our experience of the world: the experience of being responsible for our actions, of being amazed over the goodness of certain people and actions, horrified over the evil that exists, of loving - find a person or a place good (‘good that you exist!), of being self-conscious (my particles change but the form of my particles show a kind of unity and I am conscious of it). I could go on. I don’t see how any conceptual space for the genuine experience of love, meaning, goodness, beauty, or freedom can exist in a closed system. Or rather, our experience of love, meaning, goodness, beauty, or freedom could reveal nothing about the world (or ourselves) if we in advance adopt a theory of determinism.
I think such things reveal a deeper level of reality than physics can, as much as I love physics. The lived experience of all these spiritual qualities is powerful evidence that at some level determinism does not apply but our inner lives emerge, like Bach’s music emerges from the physics of sound; the fugue does not violate the laws of physics but it is qualitatively different and cannot be reduced to the latter. The fugue has a reality that physics is blind to. (No I don’t think this implies a ghost in my machine; it does imply that my body is not a machine, or at least that it is more than a machine.)
Equating all of Being to the closed systems studied by natural science is a possible, logically consistent version of the world. But to adopt it, if it makes sense to you, then you will have to reinterpret much of our experiential lives. When most of us say, for example, “The earth is beautiful”, we do not mean ‘when I see a picture of the earth my brain, following algorithms, produces a certain response in my organism, and we call that beauty.’ This is subject to further reductions until we get to the right equations. No, when we say the earth is beautiful we mean the earth is beautiful, really. The deterministic world interpretation reduces our experience to other categories - equations in the end. As though we must subject all experience to doubt and radical reinterpretation to see the world right: like we correct our experience of the sun rising. Only one class of experience, science, reveals the world as it really is. I don’t really love my children, at least not in the common meaning of love; I am programmed by evolution, which reduces to particle physics, to behave and feel in certain ways about them, all things being equal. Same with the grief when a parent loses a child. I can’t refute that reductionism because to refute it we would have to get out of determinism and my common-sense worldview (“folk metaphysics”) and compare our versions of the world to the world as it is in itself, undescribed, unperceived, unconceptualized.
You quoted Wittgenstein, perhaps the most powerful critic of reductionism in metaphysics. Philosophy leaves the world as it is. The urge to reduce it, to make one practice, science, epistemologically absolute, is the problem here, as I see it.
Believing in reality as a closed system is no less an act of faith - of what makes sense - than my belief that at a certain level of complexity, determinism doesn’t apply. That all of reality conforms to one human epistemological construction, even one that gives us such power over nature, is a breathtaking leap of faith.
I agree many conceptions of free will don’t make sense. We are never absolutely free - we are conditioned by our culture, our families, and much more, no doubt. But the kind of causality and determinism that makes sense in physics doesn’t make sense in a courtroom, for example, or in a family. As a physicist trying to understand nature, I can understand how determinism makes sense. But when the physicist leaves the laboratory, I can’t imagine how it can make sense without turning the world upside down.
Well Sabine already admitted it without admitting it: we can't calculate that our body confirms to causal closure - the calculation would be to difficult. So when she says that our body confirms to a mixture of classical mechanics and quantum mechanics this is an unfalsifiable statement. And I don't mean you cant calculate qualia like music, you can not even calculate if basic movements confirm to the known physics.
Sabine, I have the feeling you'd be somehow much more fun to go for a beer with than most of our contemporaries.
“If free will doesn’t exist, then it never existed in the first place, so why does it matter?” will hold a firm grip on my perspective for a while 😆 Thanks so much for the video!! ✌️ 😁
You can try this argument in traffic court next time when they ask you to pay a fine for a moving violation. Please report to us how it went. ;-)
@@schmetterling4477🙄
@@smeeself ???
@@schmetterling4477the statement is true (most probably) but it cant be used as an argument. Going to jail in such a case would also be pre determined.
@@anonymousman1282 It is also pre-determined that most people who talk about determinism in physics are clueless about physics. ;-)
The lack of free will does not preclude the "sense of agency" (as the psychologists call it), which refers to our inner ability to make decisions.
@@michaelenquist3728 Making decision co-occurs with a subjective feeling of agency, "I am the one who decides". However it might be (and this is the point of debate), dissociated from the actual causality. Such dissociations were observed in the experimental studies with split-brain subjects.
@minimal
🐟 11. FREE-WILL Vs DETERMINISM:
Just as the autonomous beating of one’s heart is governed by one’s genes (such as the presence of a congenital heart condition), and the present-life conditioning of the heart (such as myocardial infarction as a consequence of the consumption of excessive fats and oils, or heart palpitations due to severe emotional distress), each and EVERY thought and action is governed by our genes and our environmental milieu.
This teaching is possibly the most difficult concept for humans to accept, because we refuse to believe that we are not the authors of our own thoughts and actions. From the appearance of the pseudo-ego (one’s inaccurate conception of oneself) at the age of approximately two and a half, we have been constantly conditioned by our parents, teachers, and society, to believe that we are solely responsible for our thoughts and deeds. This deeply-ingrained belief is EXCRUCIATINGLY difficult to abandon, which is possibly the main reason why there are very few humans extant who are spiritually-enlightened, or at least who are liberated from the five manifestations of mental suffering explained elsewhere in this “Final Instruction Sheet for Humanity”, since suffering (as opposed to mere pain) is predicated solely upon the erroneous belief in free-will.
Free-will is usually defined as the ability for a person to make a conscious decision to do otherwise, that is to say, CHOOSE to have performed an action other than what one has already done, if one had been given the opportunity to do so. To make it perfectly clear, if, for example, one is handed a restaurant menu with several dishes listed, one could decide that one dish is equally as desirable the next dish, and choose either option. If humans truly possessed freedom of will, then logically speaking, a person who adores cats and detests dogs, ought to be able to suddenly switch their preferences at any given point in time, or to be hair-splitting, even voluntarily pause the beating of his or her own heart!
So, in both of the above examples, there is a pre-existing preference for one particular dish or pet. Even if one liked cats and dogs “EQUALLY”, and one was literally forced to choose one over the other, that choice would not be truly independent, but based entirely upon one’s genetic sequence, plus one’s up-to-date conditioning. Actual equality is non-existent in the macro-phenomenal sphere. If one was to somehow return to the time when any particular decision was made, the exact same decision would again be made, as all the circumstances would be identical!
The most common argument against fatalism or determinism is that humans, unlike other animals, have the ability to choose what they can do, think or feel. First of all, many species of (higher) mammals also make choices. For instance, a cat can see two birds and choose which of the two birds to prey upon, or choose whether or not to play with a ball that is thrown its way, depending on its conditioning (e.g. its mood). That choices are made is indisputable, but those choices are dependent ENTIRELY upon one’s genes and one’s conditioning. There is no third factor involved on the phenomenal plane. On the noumenal level, thoughts and deeds are in accordance with the preordained “Story of Life”.
Read previous chapters of “F.I.S.H” to understand how life is merely a DREAM in the “Mind of the Divine” and that human beings are, essentially, that Divinity in the form of dream characters. Chapter 08, specifically, explains how actions performed in the present are the result of chains of causation, all the way back to the earliest-known event in our apparently-real universe (the so-called “Big Bang” singularity).
At this point, it should be noted that according to reputable geneticists, it is possible for genes to mutate during the lifetime of any particular person. However, that phenomenon would be included under the “conditioning” aspect, since the genes mutate according to whatever conditioning is imposed upon the human organism. It is simply IMPOSSIBLE for a person to use sheer force of will to change their own genetic code. Essentially, “conditioning” includes everything that acts upon a person from conception unto death, and over which there is no control.
University studies in recent years have demonstrated, by the use of hypnosis and complex experimentation, that CONSCIOUS volition is either unnecessary for a decision to be enacted upon or (in the case of hypnotic testing) that free-will choices are completely superfluous to actions. Because scientific research into free-will is a recent field of enquiry, it is recommended that the reader search online for the latest findings. I contend, however, that indeterminacy is a purely philosophical conundrum. I am highly-sceptical in relation to freedom of volition being either demonstrated or disproven by neuroscience, because even if free-will was proven by cognitive science, it would not take into account the ultimate cause of that free-will existing in the first place. The origin of that supposed freedom of volition would need to be established.
If any particular volitional act was not caused by the sum of all antecedent states of being, then the only alternative explanation would be due to true RANDOMNESS. Many quantum physicists construe that subatomic particles can arbitrarily move in space, but true randomness is problematic in any possible universe, what to speak of in a closed, deterministic universe. Just as the typical person believes that the collision of two motor vehicles was the result of pure chance (hence the term “accident”), physicists are unable to see that the seeming unpredictability of quantum events are, in fact, determined by a force hitherto undiscovered by the material sciences. It is a known fact of logic that a random number generator cannot exist, since no computational machine or software programme is able to make the “decision” to generate a number capriciously. Any number generated will be a consequence of human programming, which in turn, is the result of genetic programming, etc.
True randomness implies that there were no determinants whatsoever in the making of a conscious decision or the execution of an act of will.
Neither did we choose which deoxyribonucleic acid our biological parents bequeathed to us, nor most all the conditions to which we were exposed throughout our lives, yet we somehow believe that we are fully-autonomous beings, with the ability to feel, think and behave as we desire. The truth is, we cannot know for certain what even our next thought will be. Do we DECIDE to choose our thoughts and deeds? Not likely. Does an infant choose to learn how to walk or to begin speaking, or does it just happen automatically, according to nature? Obviously, the toddler begins to walk and to speak according to its genes (some children are far more intelligent and verbose, and more agile than others, depending on their genetic sequence) and according to all the conditions to which he or she has been exposed so far (some parents begin speaking to their kids even while they are in the womb, or expose their offspring to highly-intellectual dialogues whilst still in the cradle).
Those who believe in free-will ought to be challenged with the following experiment: at five o’clock tomorrow afternoon, for one hour, think of nothing but blue butterflies. If anyone can pass such a test, then they must be one in a billion, and even so, that does not substantiate free-will, but merely evidence that they have learnt to focus their mind on a level far beyond the average person, due solely to their genes and their conditioning. When an extraneous thought appears within that hour, as will inevitably occur, from where does that thought arise? Think about it! If we are truly the authors of our own mentation, then from where does our INITIAL thought or our first dream arise whilst we are still in the womb? If we did not consciously generate our very first thought, why do we assume that any of our proceeding thoughts are freely-produced?
Even those decisions/choices that we seem to make are entirely predicated upon our genes and our conditioning, and cannot be free in any sense of the word. To claim that one is the ULTIMATE creator of one’s thoughts and actions is tantamount to believing that one created one’s very being! If a computer program or artificially-intelligent robot considered itself to be the cause of its activity, it would seem absurd to the average person. Yet, that is precisely what virtually every person who has ever lived mistakenly believes of their own thoughts and deeds!
Cont...
Although our will is not free, but the product of all the lines of events in the universe within the local time horizon, it can hardly be controlled from outside and only to a limited extent from within. We obviously have a very idiosyncratic, unfree will.
What is the mind? I dont think it matters.
What is matter? Whatever it is, I don't mind.