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Jan. 14, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:20
56 Emails of the week - and free will!

Excellent responses to the question of determinism

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Time Text
Good evening, everybody.
It's Steph.
It's 8 o'clock on...
Saturday, January the 14th, 2006.
I'm sitting here with Christina on the couch and she's going to do a Sudoku and I'm going to do a podcast because we've been painting my study all day and we don't really feel like doing anything particularly outside.
So what I'm going to do is emails of the week.
I got some great emails this week.
I did a podcast on Buddhism and of course a number of other things.
So I did receive a podcast back from a gentleman regarding my thoughts on Buddhism, or at least on a text of Buddhism that somebody had asked me to have a look at.
So, let's have a chat about what he didn't like about what I had said.
So, he says here, you open your podcast with the Buddhist view on free inquiry.
This comes from the Kalama Sutta, and nowhere in this Sutta does it say anything about conducive for the good and benefit of one and all.
So, of course, I've asked him to send me the original text, so I won't reply to that part as yet.
But where he and I really parted ways was the rest of the podcast, he said, had to do with the wrong view that in Buddhism there is no free will.
This is contrary to the Buddhist teaching.
Of course there is free will.
If there were no free will, why bother with religion at all?
It would be pointless.
So Steph, your entire 50-minute podcast was based on nonsense.
Throughout your podcast you rambled, made points based on nothing, and with a little hocus pocus you closed it up with the statement, the individual definitely exists.
Where the hell did that come from?
You sound like a Christian trying to prove the existence of God by making a bunch of lame assertions to confuse the issue, and at the end of the day say, and therefore God exists.
If the, quote, individual truly exists, then you should be able to prove it scientifically and with objective reasoning, that there lies an inherent entity that is independent of the individual's component parts.
Prove it.
It does not, and your whole line of reasoning relies on it, and must crumble in the light of day.
Well, certainly I understand his frustration, and if I were to be just sort of making blind assertions, and then, you know, just saying, well, and therefore something is true, then I can understand his frustration, because that certainly frustrates me in other people's.
So maybe I can be a little bit more clear about what it is that I was talking about.
The question of free will is, of course, one of the central questions in philosophy, and I'm not sure exactly why it's such a big question, because it just seems to me self-evident.
But, you know, there's a lot of hangover from religious teachings and from other kinds of teachings wherein we do have this problem of resolving how The material world can produce something like consciousness, which is not subject to the same physical laws as anything else.
So I do understand his frustration, but his question about The individual definitely exists, which is one of the things that, for sure, Buddhism does not support.
You know, they say that the individual self is an illusion, that we're all sort of part of one collective, or part of the natural world and so on, and that the ego is an illusion.
And the problem, I think, that I have with this gentleman's question is that he says that I have to prove with scientific and objective reasoning that there is an inherent entity that is independent of the individual's component parts.
And, you know, we are... I mean, there's sort of two issues I have with that.
One is that I think that it is somewhat provable, because we know for certain that the self, or the identity, or what we call consciousness, is dependent on biochemical and electrical energy, which is an effective matter within the brain.
We know this because there's nobody who experiences consciousness who does not have this electrical energy or this biochemical energy charging around through their brain cells.
So, you know, we are composed of matter and energy.
Matter and energy, obviously, are somewhat interchangeable, but the matter, which is our brain cells, is one aspect of our identity as living organisms and of human beings.
Our consciousness is the electrical energy, that is, the effective electrical energy, biochemical energy, within the brain.
So, you know, an inherent entity that is independent of the individual's component parts, of course, you know, a Christian would call this a soul, I would simply call it electrical energy or biochemical energy, and that is what we know as personality.
Is that scientifically provable?
Well, sure, right?
Because if a person were to live without that electrical energy and have consciousness, then we would suspect it would be something else.
If there was such a thing as a soul, Then we would expect that there would be, upon death, you know, if the soul was supposed to be leaving the body, that the body would change in some fundamental manner, right?
I mean, if I cut off a toe of somebody, and then that's their soul, and I take it away, then the body is sort of lighter one soul.
I know that this thing called 21 grams is supposed to be the weight of a soul.
I think that's all just nonsense.
You know, if something were to leave the body, then we would have some awareness of it.
You'd see an electrical energy or a magnetic energy or some sort of energy, heat energy perhaps, that would leave the body upon death, and that would be an indicative of the soul or consciousness leaving.
However, all that happens when somebody dies is that the energy that forms that consciousness leaves, right?
So if I have a television sitting on my table... No, let's make it a radio.
If I have a radio sitting on my table, Then I hear voices and, you know, there's all this electrical energy going through it.
And then when the battery runs down or the battery runs out and the voices stop, then the radio has not changed its fundamental nature, right?
It's still capable of all that.
It's just that the energy has run out.
that runs the radio, so the voices have stopped, the electrical energy has stopped.
And, you know, that is what we see when you, you know, when somebody dies and the electrical energy ceases.
And, you know, their body remains fundamentally the same, but it's the electrical energy that has ended.
So, an inherent entity that is independent of the individual's component parts, since matter and energy are a continuum, then that would say that the energy is an effect of matter, And then the energy ceases or dissipates, and the matter remains, but the energy is gone, just as a radio is when its battery is dead.
And that is, you know, both sort of scientifically provable, when you look upon the brain activity or heart activity and so on, when the energy ends, it's not like the heart vanishes, it just no longer is powered.
And, you know, so I think scientifically and with objective reasoning, that it is true to say that there is such a thing as consciousness, that it's an energy effect of matter.
And it's entirely dependent on matter, right?
There's no such thing as consciousness without a brain.
You don't just sort of see free-floating energy that you could sort of put a ghost into an MRI and see the electrical activity of the brain.
So, for sure, it is an effect of matter, this energy, and so it is dependent upon the individual's component parts.
And, you know, the individual component parts don't change on death, just the energy ends.
So, I think that is sort of one way that I would approach how to deal with the individual ego or identity, that there is ways of tracking its existence through energy recordings and so on.
You know, however, there's sort of an... Oh, and the last thing I'll say about that is also that, you know, the individual exists because, you know, we see individual people and we talk to them and, you know, we don't know what it is that they're going to say.
Like when I meet someone, I talk to someone on a bus, I don't know what their story is going to be, I don't know what the history is going to be.
So I know for sure That they're different from me, right?
They obviously have similarities in that they have a head and a mouth and they can talk and they're a human being.
So I recognize them as a separate entity than myself, but I also recognize that I don't know their history or what it is that they're going to say.
I don't even know their accent.
I don't even know if they can speak English.
So, you know, it seems to me pretty self-evident that, you know, I exist as an individual and that that person exists as an individual, because if we existed in some sort of collective manner, then I should be able to sort of, you know, mind-meld with them or figure out something about their decisions or histories or whatever, but, you know, I'm completely ignorant of it, so they're a completely separate entity.
And there's space or air between us, so, you know, we're physically separate.
So, I mean, these things are kind of basic to me.
Maybe they're, you know, not so clear to other people, and that might be because I'm missing something important, but that's sort of how I would approach the proof of individual and, you know, that there is such thing as an ego or consciousness that is dependent on, in an individual's body, but not entirely united with it, right?
Because the energy is not always going to be present within the body as in after death.
But the second thing that I would say about that is that I don't really think that the onus is on me to prove anything.
And don't get me wrong, I enjoy proving things.
I mean, it's my geeky meat and butter, meat and bread.
But I think that generally What is a sort of practical approach to truth is that the person who is making the non-sensual claim, the claim that does not derive from the senses and everyday experience, the onus is upon that person to prove his or her case.
So, for instance, I don't really need to disprove God.
You know, I enjoy doing it because it's sort of an intellectual exercise that, you know, is aerobics for the brain.
But I'm not required to disprove the existence of God.
Because, you know, if you and I are both sitting there staring at a lamp on a table, Then I don't need to prove to you that the lamp exists.
I just sort of say, well, you know, touch the lamp.
It's pretty simple, right?
And, you know, if you don't believe that China exists, right, I mean, it's sort of not up to me to prove to you that China exists.
You know, if you disbelieve, you know, you've got photographs and movies and, you know, there's a whole language and you... I mean, there's people who've been there who've said, you know, that yes, it exists, and so on.
So with all of this evidence, then it's certainly not incumbent upon someone to prove to you.
If you don't believe that China exists, despite all this evidence, then it's not incumbent upon somebody else to prove to you that China exists.
Like, it's kind of up to you to prove that China doesn't exist, because you're the one who's making the claim that is, you know, pretty counterintuitive and counter, you know, it goes against the evidence of the census and of logic.
I mean, there's no way that China could not exist because there's, you know, supposed to be a billion people out there and I don't think anybody would have just forged it all just to fool you and made up a whole language and history and culture and, you know, art and movies, you know, just to fool you.
It would be sort of non... I mean, it could be possible, right?
For you, not for me.
I've been to China.
I mean, unless I was on some hallucinogenic drug trip at an isolation chamber or something.
But if you're going to claim something that's non-intuitive and non-sensual and non-logical, then it's really up to you to state your case.
I mean, this doesn't mean that you're wrong.
I mean, if I say to you, You know, in the 15th century, that the world is going around the sun, and the moon and the sun are different sizes, and so on.
If I say that to you, that's pretty counterintuitive, because it sure looks like the sun goes around the earth, and it sure looks like the sun and the moon are the same size.
So I have to prove to you what is non-intuitive and non-sensually based in terms of evidence, because I'm the one who's making a claim that's counterintuitive.
For this gentleman who wrote me in, I'm certainly happy to have taken a swing.
I mean, not necessarily the best of swings, but certainly I think a fairly decent go at proving that, you know, we have individual consciousness and that we are individual entities.
But I don't have to work too hard at it, because if somebody says to me that my ego does not exist, my free will does not exist, or God does exist, or, you know, the government exists as an entity separate from the people who just call themselves the government, and so on, if people try to prove to me that concepts exist, or collectives exist,
then they are the ones who face the burden of proof, you know, and I'm completely within my rights as a rational human being to say, you know, it's your job to prove it and if you don't prove it, you know, too bad for you because, you know, you're claiming something that doesn't make any sense and has no central evidence to back it up.
Now, the second email that I got, very interesting of course, I'll spend a little bit more time on this, This is from a kind gentleman who's emailed me a few times before.
I'm actually currently having a discussion with him about 9-11, which I've done a little bit more research into and I'm going to have a little chat about later.
Probably not later tonight, but I would like to talk to him about or review his email about Buddhism.
So he quotes some part of my podcast, which I certainly appreciate, and so he starts off with a quote from my podcast where I say, we are entirely part of reality and yet we have free will.
And then he says, well, that depends on what you call free will.
You talk a lot about making choices, responding to incentives, the million dollar proposal, and all of this is obviously true.
But then you say this, how consciousness escapes the inevitability of material forces, but it certainly does.
I find that quite a remarkable statement.
How could the material mind possibly escape material forces?
And that is an excellent, excellent question, and I probably didn't explain it very well.
But what I mean by that is that the material forces in the world pretty much operate with inevitability, right?
If you throw a rock off a cliff, it doesn't get to make up its mind which way it goes.
It just falls with complete inevitability.
And what I mean by consciousness is that we don't operate with complete inevitability because, you know, human behavior can't be predicted.
People can Wake up one morning, you know, having been married for 30 years and say, that's it, I want to leave or whatever.
And so human behavior is very difficult to predict.
It's impossible to predict, in fact.
And if you think otherwise, I suggest you play the stock market and see how much luck you have.
And if you do have luck, just let me know.
I'll change my mind and we'll make a fortune.
So when I say the material mind escapes material forces, I just mean that the inevitability of physics Which applies to just about every piece of matter within the universe except for the human mind.
We do escape material forces in that sense.
I don't mean non-material, but I do mean that we have a consciousness which is outside of sort of blind inevitable physics.
So that's sort of the first question that he had.
He then says, I would say that everything in fact is ordained because of causality and materialism.
I wouldn't even know what uncausal would mean.
Also, I don't think it's possible to prove randomness.
However, determinism doesn't mean there is any way to know what will happen.
In fact, it probably only means that there is no way to know what will happen.
Because analyzing reality to find out what will happen changes what will happen, so that leaves an endless loop of unpredictability.
And determinism isn't an excuse one can use to oneself while doing bad things, since reality can't be predicted, and so one still has to make choices.
Nothing is a given about one's actions from the personal perspective.
And in looking back, people couldn't have done different things, but this doesn't mean responsibility doesn't exist.
It does define the depth of the concept of responsibility, however.
When someone in your environment does something bad to you, it's perfectly logical to start avoiding this person, to be angry, to force someone by non-aggressive means to fix it, as a collective like DROs, that's My Dispute Resolution Organizations, because people respond to incentives.
This forcing of retribution means the person that acted badly is appointed responsibility, and that's completely fair, because that person was the one who has the minimum and maximum kinds of responsibility we can define.
Also, it's of little importance as to what degree the mind can be objective or self-triggering, whatever that means.
For one thing, there's no way to tell the difference as an individual experience, I mean, even in the case of non-determinism.
Now, he's given me a technical term, which I'm going to look up about what this all means, so some of it I'm not following too well.
But in this question of determinism, I sort of want to say something that to me is fairly important.
I haven't mentioned it before, but maybe this will sort of clarify things.
You know, if you're sort of a physicist, and you're just sort of starting out, and you don't have access to anybody else's physics books or whatever, and you sort of notice, you know, everything falls down.
Everything falls down, everything is sort of attracted to the center of the Earth, and so you start developing physical theories around that particular example, right?
And then you kind of notice, well, you know, some things kind of don't, right?
Smoke goes up, clouds stay in the sky, and then you see a child let go of a helium balloon and, you know, it floats up into the sky.
Well, I don't think that you can say You can, but I don't think it would be very rational to say that most things fall down, but there are these sort of inexplicable exceptions.
Some stuff just falls up, but most stuff falls down.
You can't exactly predict which one it's going to be, but don't worry, the vast majority of stuff falls down.
What you would do as a responsible scientist is you would sort of say, That, you know, some stuff falls up, and therefore there's no rule which says everything falls down.
There must be some other rule, and so you'd start investigating, you know, the weight of air, what's lighter than air, and, you know, how things can escape a gravity well through their particular material properties.
And so you'd end up having a much greater understanding of reality, of material reality in particular.
You would have a much greater understanding of it by recognizing that the exception is not an exception, but simply the manifestation of a different kind of rule.
That you have made a premature assumption called everything falls down, but you have to investigate the exceptions and try to understand them so that you can have a much greater or deeper understanding of the material universe, which is sort of the goal of being a physicist.
And when you put this sort of analogy together with Occam's Razor, then you sort of end up with two things, in my humble opinion.
One is that we really don't know why consciousness is so different from everything else.
But, you know, the fact that we don't know is very important, and to establish the fact that we don't know is very important.
You know, we can't just sort of try and take human consciousness and put it into the category either of, you know, immaterial, abstract, soul, or god-like forces, because there's no evidence for any of that.
We also can't use the criteria of determinism or Everything is fated, or everything is caused by something else, because there's no evidence of that either.
In fact, I would say that anybody who introspects and looks at their own life will find out that they have made choices in their life, even if that choice has been to, you know, avoid unpleasant things, even if it's as simple as that.
So given that We have to accept the fact that consciousness is just a different effect of matter than anything else in the universe that we know of.
We have to accept the fact that it is material and it is energetic, but it is fundamentally different from anything else that we know.
But that difference can't be categorized either as non-material, because it obviously is material, but it also can't be categorized as deterministic.
Because we don't know enough about it to say whether it is deterministic or not.
I certainly experience every day my capacity to make choices and you know there are times in my life where I have made choices that are You know, counter to what a natural living organism would normally do, right?
So to deal with emotional pain, you have to sort of say, OK, well, I'm going to put myself through this difficult or challenging environment in order to emerge a better or healthier person, right?
I mean, to submit to, I don't know, dental surgery, which is painful.
You know, when you don't even feel bad, right?
I mean, I've never had my wisdom teeth out, but I guess that's what they do, right?
They say, get your wisdom teeth taken out, even though you feel fine, because there's going to be a problem down the road.
Well, that's a pretty counterintuitive thing to do, right?
You can't get a dog to do that, for instance, right?
You know, Christina's patients are constantly doing this, right?
You know, she makes them feel really bad and gets paid a lot of money for it.
I'm just kidding.
She's just giving me that look.
But I mean, to some degree, it's true, right?
She says, look, it's going to feel worse before it gets better, which is sort of like a physiotherapist is going to tell you that if you're rehabilitating an injury, right?
So we can make choices that are counter-intuitive or counter-biological in a sort of pain and pleasure sense.
And we do that because we're able to focus on a larger goal, right?
I mean, we get up and go to work even when we feel sleepy because it's nice to have a bed to sleep in.
So, you know, consciousness is different than anything else in the universe that we know of.
And we don't know why.
We don't know what it is.
We can't say that it's causal or non-causal.
We can't say that it's immaterial.
We can't say that it's determined.
We can't say anything about it, because we simply don't know enough.
And, you know, the concern that I always have with this kind of stuff, the reason that I'm, I guess, pushing this analysis fairly far, is that it's so important to know what you don't know.
We, you know, I know for a fact that we don't know enough about consciousness to come to any conclusions about how it might conceivably operate.
You know, the complexity of everything that consciousness does, from emotion, to intuition, to rationality, to producing dreams, to processing the evidence of the senses, to, you know, annoyingly reminding you of an appointment ten minutes after it's supposed to have occurred, like, everything that goes, all the memories, you know, every sort of thing, every frame of memory in your life You can go back to it and sort of replay and relive.
You know, every time you see a silly sitcom on television, it's lodged in your brain for eternity.
Where does it go?
How does it get stored?
I mean, we just don't know!
Our brains are so fantastically complex that we simply don't know what causes them to operate in the way that they do and why they are so fundamentally different from everything else in the universe.
How is it that we get to act in a counterintuitive manner?
And nothing else in the universe gets to.
How is it that we are able to disprove or doubt the evidence of our senses and so gain greater truth thereby, like the fact that the world is round and not flat?
We don't know.
We absolutely don't know.
So the problem I have is people who tell me any kind of conclusions about consciousness, I think it's a little specious.
I think it's a little bit premature.
In fact, I think it's quite a lot premature.
I think that we absolutely have to, if we want to be rational, we have to accept the fact that we just don't know what's going on with consciousness.
And we know that it exists because we experience it every day.
We know that we make choices.
We have absolutely no evidence that anything is foreordained, because if there were any kind of foreordainment, then, you know, we would have some kind of evidence or some ability to predict things, even in a general kind of way.
So that's sort of the reason that I'm pushing back quite hard on some of these conclusions that people have been sending me to about things like free will and determinism and so on.
You know, I think we just have to accept that we don't know.
However, that having been said, the one problem with determinism, or things being foreordained, is that people have the problem of explaining why nothing can be predicted.
If everything is foreordained, then something should be predictable.
That would be the test, right?
But nothing is predictable in human behavior.
I mean, there are some very sort of general predictabilities that you can make, like, you know, you're not going to get a free market when everything is compelled by the government.
I mean, there's some basic things that you can say, but that has nothing to do with individuals.
That's just sort of an organic definition of the species, right?
Like, if you put frogs in hot water, they die.
It doesn't say anything about individual frogs.
Well, not much anyway, and not much of importance.
But, so since nothing can be foreordained, sorry, since nothing can be predicted, that's a blow against the idea that things are foreordained, and a blow for, or sorry, a support for the idea that there's a free will, which is a living conscious thing which can make choices and weigh the evidence and determine based on short-term and long-term goals and so on.
So, you know, Occam's Razor would then say that the simplest explanation is that there's some as yet unknown property of the human mind which produces consciousness and free will, and we don't know anything about it.
And that Occam's Razor would say that there's nothing foreordained because there's no proof for it and we have no understanding of how it might happen.
And there's no testability to it.
You know, that's sort of one of the issues I have with this concept of things being foreordained.
Because people will say, in response to the criticism that things can't be predicted, they'll say, well, you know, that things are so complex and, you know, we don't know that there's so many variables and we don't know what the root of them is.
And so, you know, in my general way of thinking, if there's no difference between a theory being present and a theory being false, why do you need it at all?
I mean, that's a fairly important criteria, right?
If somebody says to me, everything that you do is fated, and I say, okay, well then tell me what comes next.
And they say, well that's impossible because there's too many variables.
Then I sort of have to ask them, what's the point of the theory?
In other words, how would my life be different if I believed this theory or I did not believe this theory?
Right, so let's say that I say everything is foreordained, but Because of the complexity of what is foreordained, I have no idea what's coming next.
Or, I say, I have no idea what's coming next, because there's free will.
You know, there's no material difference and no provable or disprovable hypothesis except that one of them involves this whole other thing called, you know, everything is foreordained.
Since there's no material difference between the two theories, but one is much more complex than the other, and unprovable, and doesn't answer anything, then I would just say, well, why bother?
Why bother with this preordained theory?
And just say, well, that's just free will.
I mean, with all due respect to those who believe this, and I know there's a lot of materialists and atheists who believe this, but with all due respect, I would say that it's the same problem I have with people who say God created the universe.
It doesn't add anything to the theory of why the universe exists, because you just say some incomprehensible being has created the universe in some unknowable manner for some unfathomable purpose through a methodology we could never understand.
You haven't really added anything to our understanding of the universe to layer in a huge and incomprehensible complexity to it.
And I would similarly say that it doesn't add anything to our understanding of human consciousness to say that everything is foreordained, but we can never predict what that's going to be because it's all too complex.
What you want to do, I think, is just go with the simplest explanation, unless there's a compelling reason or a testable hypothesis for going in some other direction.
And so, you know, with all due respect, and not to call atheists by using nasty labels like religious epistemology, I think there's a similarity here.
And I think it's more than an accidental similarity, right?
I mean, we always have to be careful that, you know, our thoughts aren't like a sort of balloon, in that we push one side in to get to the truth, but it just bulges out the other side, right?
And so I don't think that we want to get rid of an over-complex and non-provable theory like a deity, and then come up with a overly complex and non-provable theory like foreordainment or, you know, everything is the result of a cause.
Because we simply can—I certainly experience within my life and can certainly have lots of, you know, countless examples within my own life and through my Interaction with others, that everybody does seem to have choices.
I mean, I work in sales to a large degree as part of my position as a Director of Technology or as a Chief Information Officer.
And in sales, you are attempting to influence people's self-interest by providing them with a benefit that outweighs what it is that they're spending, right?
And, you know, they're certainly not going to buy your software based on a phone call.
They're certainly not going to buy your software unless you've identified the benefit that it's going to provide to them.
And, you know, you certainly have to tell them or get them to understand the level of risk involved and how it's worthwhile, and you have to give them references.
And so you're really attempting to influence their thinking.
And if somebody were to say to me, that's all foreordained, whether they're going to buy or not, and I'd say, well, how do you know?
Well, we just know.
Well, how can you prove it?
Well, we can't prove it because it's too complex.
I'd just say, well, what does that mean?
Right?
I mean, how is that actually going to materially affect my life in any way, shape, or form?
You know, I mean, to some degree I would sort of view an astronomer who was going completely nuts trying to calculate, based on some arcane methodology, whether or not, like, whether there was a medium-sized crater, like of, I don't know, a couple hundred yards in diameter on the dark side of the moon or not, and was spending his life pursuing this topic.
You know, part of me would to some degree say, well, why?
Why would you do that?
What's the point, right?
What material effect is it going to have on anything?
Whether you prove the existence of this crater on the dark side of the moon or not.
And, you know, I know we've got photos of the moon and all that, and maybe before then.
So, I think that's very important.
We don't want to get involved in these scholastic kinds of debates, you know, like they used to have these fierce debates in the Middle Ages around topics like, you know, did Adam have a belly button?
No, that's a very serious question for medieval scholastics, because God obviously does not have a belly button, because God was never born of woman, and no umbilical cord, so God doesn't have a belly button.
However, man is made in the image of God, and we are born of Adam, and so if Adam has a belly button and God does not have a belly button, what does it mean to say that we are born in the image of God?
These are all serious questions, but of course, if you don't believe in religion, it all just looks like a bunch of make-work projects for people in between courting choirboys.
So, I would sort of say that this question of determinism versus free will is to some degree similar.
I think it's worth examining in detail because I think it can free up a lot of mental energy.
to not focus on things that are unprovable and, you know, make no difference to how one actually executes one's life either way.
And, you know, I know that there's a lot of sophistry that's put into this question of what is the level of moral responsibility that one accumulates if everything is preordained.
And you can say, well, the person doesn't know and therefore they can make choices and, you know, but the fact of the matter is that if everything is preordained, You know, let's just cut to the chase, right?
Let's just get to the root of it.
If everything is preordained, then there's no such thing as morality.
I mean, there's just no way around it.
I mean, you can sort of layer on all of the syllables that you want, and, you know, I've been sent some terms, some technical terms in this area, which I'll be happy to look up, and I may post something tomorrow saying, ignore everything I said yesterday, but I sort of doubt it.
I'm certainly happy to look into it, though.
But, you know, if everything is preordained, there's no such thing as moral responsibility.
Because even if the person doesn't know why they're doing what they're doing, they're still fated to do it.
And therefore you can't blame them for the choices that they make.
Because, you know, it's foreordained, therefore they're not choices.
It's like blaming somebody for an inherited disease, right?
That is foreordained based on the genetics.
And if, you know, there's another kind of lack of free will that is based on the genetics or environment or, you know, some X factor, then it's as absolutely as... it would be wrong then to ascribe any kind of choice to people and any kind of moral consequences for those choices.
And, you know, then you're going to face... I mean, there's sort of another way of looking at this problem is, you know, one of the ways that you would prove causality is to eliminate the factor of culture.
So, for instance, in an environment where it's considered good to spit into the air, as the Greeks do, to sort of ward off the evil eye, then you would, if this was causal and based on matter, right?
Culture doesn't exist in matter, right?
Culture is just a concept within the mind.
then you would expect that it would be common throughout the world, right?
Because all human beings are material, and so on.
But, you know, people's behavior is very dependent on the culture they grew up in, which can't be considered a force of matter, and therefore that would sort of be an example that human beings like to conform to what it is that they're told, and so on.
And you would also have to explain, if everything was ordained, why people spend, you know, tens or hundreds of billions of dollars a year in aggregate on advertising, which is the effect of trying to change someone's mind about the products that they like.
You would also have to explain why, if everything is foreordained, women like to do their hair up and look pretty on a date, and guys like to have their car cleaned and, you know, to put your best foot forward and so on.
Everything is foreordained.
Why would you wear a suit to an interview?
Because everything is foreordained.
Why would you?
I mean, you could go on and on, right?
But, I mean, you sort of would have to explain a way why everybody acts as if their choices have an influence on the outcome when your assertion is that everything is foreordained, right?
Again, this is one of these things where the onus is on you, if this is your particular approach to free will, since it is so non-intuitive and it is so counter-sensual.
We see this, we experience it, there's evidence all over the world, a huge amount.
Enormous amounts of human resources are poured into this, right?
I mean, the amount of energy that religious people put into training their children on religion is certainly not because they believe that one's religious beliefs are foreordained, but because they know if they don't get the kids young, they're not going to get them at all.
So, you know, the amount of energy that people pour into Changing other people's minds or influencing their decisions is just so staggering that nobody acts as if things are foreordained, except for a minority of people who do and so on.
But in general, human activity is really predicated around free will and the influence of other people's behavior.
So, if you're going to come up with something that says things are foreordained, then you really do have to prove it, otherwise it's definitely not going to be considered true, I think, in any sort of scientific or rational manner.
Which is not to say that it's not true, right?
It's just that you can't claim for something to be true unless you have some evidence, or some logic, or some way of proving the difference, or proving the plus and minus of your theory.
It has to be disprovable, in other words.
And I've never come across a theory of determinism which has ever being provable or disprovable, right?
I mean, it would be one of the greatest prizes in physics.
In fact, it would be probably the greatest prize in physics to prove that there were material factors affecting consciousness that predetermined the outcomes of, you know, what we perceive as free will.
So, given that everybody acts as if they're free will, and everybody makes decisions as if they're free will, and everybody chooses to influence other people's decision-making based on, you know, sharing information, putting your best foot forward, or whatever, then if you are not behind this idea, you know, you have to prove why.
Because otherwise Occam's Razor just cuts the idea of determinism down and just puts right back in the throne of human existence.
free will and the sovereign consciousness, which, you know, as I said at the beginning, we don't know anything about.
So to say it's, you know, free will seems to be the obvious answer.
If it's not, if it turns out to be something else, it will be because we have recognized that we don't know and we've kept looking.
And that is what, you know, I think we need to do as responsible rationalists, is to recognize what we don't know so that we can keep the road to inquiry open.
So that's my chat for Saturday night.
Thank you again for everybody who sent me emails.
I certainly enjoy reading them, and feel free to let me know where I'm going wrong, and to help me to further clarify my thinking, and then hopefully through the people who listen to this to further help clarify their thinking.
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