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June 18, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:06:27
286 Call In Show June 18 1006 4pm Free Will Part 2
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Well, thanks so much, everybody, for coming along and coming out to, I don't know, this is the 10th or 11th, one of our Freedom Main Radio instant chats.
We don't do call-ins because, A, that's technologically difficult, and B, it's much more fun when we can all talk at once.
And so thanks so much for joining us.
This is June the 18th, just after 4 p.m., and let's have a chat.
That Francois has been offering to have with us for a while.
We couldn't get to it last week because I was on vacation.
And so, Francois, if you would like to start off and help me to understand the topic that he suggested is why Stéphane is wrong about morality, which of course is a very kind topic to bring up, because the last thing I'd want to do is to be wrong about morality.
So, Francois, I have had a look at your definitions, which I don't have any particular Well, I'm glad that you agree with my definition, Stefan.
I think the main issue revolves around the notion of values being judged and the fact that you've stated before That you thought that values were subjective and could not be judged, measured, evaluated, etc.
But in the last show you kind of went back on that.
So now I'm not sure exactly what your official position is at the moment.
Okay. Would you like me to give you two seconds on my official position and then you can tell me if it fits with what you're working with?
I'll write three seconds.
How do you seem skeptical that I can do it in two seconds?
My position on values is that there are two types of values.
The first is values which are objective, and those values are things like truth, integrity, honesty, things which can be verified.
And the other sort of values are the values which are subjective, which is like this band or that color or this TV show or something like that.
And so there are both kinds of values, and one can be thought to be objective and scientific, and I think is reasonably so, and the other is more opinion-based and pretty relevant to a lot of our life, right?
What you choose as your profession is a subjective value, which is pretty important to your life as a whole, and the ethics that you choose that are based on the argument for morality and therefore should be universal, should be rational and objective, And so there's two different criteria there.
One is more based on introspection, and one is more based on rational argument and analysis.
So that's my sort of view on values, and so do let me know what you think about that.
See, this is exactly why I don't like the words objective and subjective, because of that kind of discussion.
Because you get into pretty absurd avenues.
And I think we should really issue those terms.
Because you do agree with me that, for example, your choice of job or your choice of ice cream or whatever is based on your personality and is based on prior conditions compared to you as an individual, on your education and your experiences.
Et cetera, et cetera.
And so they're not really subjective per se.
They're based on causality, correct?
Yes, I do think that they would be based on causality to some degree for sure.
Thank you.
Thank you.
So it's not really a question of objective versus subjective.
What I would say that you're talking about is more the instantiation of a value.
Of course, we all need to eat things in one region versus another region, and we'll have different recipes of sorts of food available and so on.
And so it's more of a question of how we instantiate human values, which can be very different, but it still depends on The personality of the individual and his best experiences and the possibilities that are open to him in all this sort of factors.
Yeah, I can certainly see that.
Okay, well I don't think we disagree then on that point.
Now, one of the things that I do find useful about the objective versus subjective terminology is that most people, and I'm sorry if you can just translate that in your own head, but the problem is that most people don't really have any clue that there is a difference between what they believe and what is true, right? So people just get a whole bunch of propaganda stuffed into their heads by state schools and private schools and And churches and families and all this kind of stuff and the nation.
They get all this stuff stuffed into their head and then they just start talking about stuff like it's true, but they don't have any particular idea that it's simply just an opinion that they have.
So when somebody starts saying to me, you know, the poor have to be helped by the government, then they're just saying something that they believe just to be true.
They have no idea that it's a subjective opinion rather than an objectively proven fact.
So the first thing that I will sometimes start doing is to say to them, well, so that's a statement.
Is it something that's your opinion?
Like, I like cinnamon bread.
Or is it something that is actually true, like the world is round or two plus two equals four, and it generally startles people.
You know, they say, well, you know, the government should prevent people from owning automatic machine guns or something like that.
I say, well, okay, is that your opinion, like you're telling me you liked a certain movie, or is it an objective fact that is provable, and people just get kind of freaked out by that because it's not something that they've ever really...
I don't even know.
Go ahead.
I'd like maybe to correct that statement.
What people think they know, they think they know to be true, right?
You can't hold an opinion and think that it would be false at the same time.
And so, yeah.
I'm sorry, could you just go into that a little bit more?
You have to point out to them, you have to ask them maybe why they believe that.
What's the foundation for their beliefs?
And also, yeah, there's also the difference between opinion and aesthetic preference, right?
So, liking chocolate is an aesthetic preference, saying that people should not own guns.
Well, that could be both ways, yeah.
Yes, I certainly see what you mean, but most people, of course, when they're in the realm of ethics, don't know that they should be dealing with something that is scientific and objective.
Nobody would say, the Earth is banana-shaped and I just believe it because I believe it, because they believe, or they have an understanding, based on the general propagation of the scientific method, that just stating something that is referenceable to external reality...
It has to be backed up by some kinds of facts, but in the realm of ethics and politics and so on, we've been so conditioned to believe that everything is just based on opinion that...
They don't have any idea that statements about politics or God or ethics and these sorts of things, they don't have any idea that these things are as subjectable, in fact, more subjectable to the scientific method and to rational analysis than the general statements about science, which are much less dangerous and much less relevant to human life than things like politics and ethics.
So I think you're right.
Asking them how they know is important.
Getting them to understand that there's a difference between an opinion and a fact is important.
So I think, like, you don't have these debates in the scientific community, right?
You don't have a whole bunch of people going to scientific conferences saying, I think that we should give up on the scientific method and start praying for knowledge again.
You don't have that kind of stuff occurring.
But in the realm of ethics, we're very primitive.
Like, we're, as a species in the realm of ethics, we're extraordinarily primitive.
The Middle Ages at least had the prior experience of the Greek and Roman civilizations and to some degree the Chinese civilizations and the example of Socrates.
As far as ethics go, I would say that as a culture we're pre-Socratic at the moment.
It's extraordinarily primitive because we've even lost what the heck was going on in the Enlightenment, which was close to truth in my opinion, but not getting there in the final sense.
So I think that we have this real difficulty in getting people to understand That there's a difference between opinion and fact.
Once we've won this battle, so to speak, I don't think we'll have to deal with these subjective and subjective terms because they just won't come up any more than alchemy or mysticism comes up at scientific conferences.
But right now, I think it's such a primitive situation that we do need to just constantly reinforce in the Socratic method that there's a difference between the two so that people can begin to condition their own thinking a little bit more with rationality and external facts.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah, that's quite true.
Another thing I would like to add to this would be that we should maybe ask people, would you like it that people would not carry guns?
Or do you think that people should not carry guns?
Because there's a difference between the two statements.
Right, right. No, I think that's quite right.
And I remember, as I think I've mentioned in a podcast once or twice, when I was having lunch with one of our salespeople from New York, he was a liberal in New York.
I know it's shocking, but he was a liberal.
And of course, he was very much against guns.
And so he said, well, guns are bad, and we shouldn't have guns, and this and that and the other.
And I said, well, I think that that's great.
So we need to disarm people who have Guns, right?
And of course he was like, yes. And so I said, well, then of course we need to make sure that the police and the military don't have guns.
And it's so funny when you come up with something like that, which is just basic, it's a basic statement of facts.
You're saying it's a principle that guns are bad and no one should be allowed to own them.
Well, then no one should be allowed to own them, right?
But then you run into the paradox of who is it who enforces people and gun ownership.
Who makes sure that people don't have guns, and of course the people who do that do have to have guns, so then guns are both good and bad at the same time, and all this kind of stuff.
So people just don't really, they just mouth platitudes, stuff that they've been stuck with.
And they really have never thought about it.
They're not thinking.
I've been reading a book by Charles Murray called Losing Ground, and I sort of podcasted it on a little bit this weekend.
And what he talks about is the incredible disasters that have gone on in public education.
That's sort of one of the aspects that he talks about.
Public education is just a complete wretched mess.
And so a lot of the people that we're talking to I sort of don't know how to put it in a nice way.
A lot of the people that we're sort of debating with, and it's not because they're not intelligent, it's just that they're crippled, right?
But they're kind of half retarded, right?
I mean, they don't know how to think and they don't know that they can't think.
So that's why I sort of try and keep things gentle and sort of light and a little bit funny because You know, they're crippled, but they don't know it.
You know, they're the Special Olympics thinking that they're the highest athletes in the world, and so you have to be, I think, a little bit gentle.
It's not their fault that they've been so badly educated.
I think there's better information out there, and we may be the first people who are ever talking to them about something more rational, but they are, like, not very mentally healthy children a lot of times.
And I don't mean that with any disrespect, because it's not their fault.
But I think that it's kind of important to be gentle a little bit.
Like, you know, it's like trying to get a wild squirrel to feed out of your hand or your wife to obey you.
It's not easy. And so you do have to be gentle and work a lot with the issue of motivation and so on.
But I'm sorry. Go ahead.
To answer your original question about statements of political opinion, I don't necessarily think that they're even opinions.
I think they're mostly indoctrinated beliefs.
I think that people are very aberrated by the fact that they're living in a state of state.
And they strongly believe that the state is a permanent fixture, and that therefore they have to, you know, that the environment that they've been raised in, that's the only environment they comprehend.
So they believe that they have to fight for their values against everyone else because that's the democratic system.
That's the social warfare and democratic system.
So what I think is people who would be free would probably not choose those same positions.
So I don't think they're even opinions per se.
I think they're just beliefs, indoctrinated beliefs.
It's like your example of a monkey in a cage and you're always feeding it either a little Monkey pellets, or fruit, and you ask it, you know, what kind of food do you prefer?
And it says, you know, the fruit, whatever.
Well, I guess H.Camp taught.
And so you say, well, aha, that's the monkey's opinion, but all he's been fed all his life is just the pellets and the fruits.
You see where I'm going with this?
Right, no, I see what you mean.
I see what you mean. I think that's quite right.
It might be an insult to opinions to call them opinions.
It's knee-jerk indoctrination, and of course it is.
It's annoying to come across once you spend a good deal of time trying to get your own thoughts refined.
It's annoying to come across. But I do try and fight my irritation, at least, when it shows up with a kind of sympathy.
Like, you're dealing with, a lot of times, you know, again, this sounds a little bit extreme, but I do sort of believe that you're dealing with wounded animals.
And I think it's important that we understand that because they have, as Francois pointed out, they have less than opinions, but they think that they're absolute facts.
And not only do they think they're absolute facts, but they think that they're absolute facts associated with morality, with right and wrong, with good and evil.
And when you have propaganda that is believed to be absolute, where anybody who ever disagrees with you is evil, then you are dealing with a pretty explosive situation when you're talking about freedom with people.
And the reason that it's also so explosive is that deep down, of course, they know that it's a complete lie.
You can change... Murray Rackbar talked about this when he was talking about Soviet Russia.
You can change people's ideological beliefs.
You can swell their false self to a big bursting bag of blood with propaganda, but you can't change reality and you can't change people's fundamental natures.
So you can feed somebody junk food and tell them it's a salad, but you can't actually make them healthy if you do that.
And I think that's pretty important to understand as well.
So... Sephetus, was that you playing me back to myself, or were you about to say something?
I don't think so.
Now, Adi, you've typed into Skype, all we think we know is opinion.
Could you tell me a little bit more about what you mean by that?
It's tautological.
We don't know facts in their true form, we only have opinions.
But that's a terminology somewhat different from yours.
So what would you call this, what we think we know, what would you call it?
Would you call it opinion or something else?
Yeah, sorry. First, let me just clarify a term for those who are new to the debate.
When Adi says a definition that differs from mine, what he actually means technically is incorrect.
So that's just something which people new to the debate should be fairly clear.
Oh dear, Christina's giving me that look.
Which is usually when I say something different from her opinion, which is in fact incorrect.
But I think, Adi, if I understand it correctly, you're saying that, and this is a little bit based on the Kantian view of things that, or the Platonic view, we don't actually get to perceive things in and of themselves.
We can only perceive them as sensual evidence recreated within our own mind.
So even when I touch a table, it's not like my brain is directly perceiving that table.
What is actually happening is all the sensory evidence is being recreated within my mind, and so there's not a direct perception of physical reality.
It's all inferred through central evidence and the activity that leads into the brain.
Is that what you mean?
No, I think reality is perfectly well.
It's possible. Sure, what we know must come from reality.
And if we are to change our minds, we have to...
Appeal to reality, either to the laws of logic or to the senses themselves.
So we do perceive reality, that's not a problem.
But we perceive reality only through the senses, only through the physical body that we have.
We don't perceive this pure version of reality, this platonic thing, right?
I think we agree on the definition.
Can you tell me what it would mean or look like to have a direct perception of reality?
It would mean maybe acquiring knowledge without having to perceive external stimuli.
What comes to my mind is that that would be a sort of thing like God, right?
That God perceives reality without the idea behind a consciousness without material form, that God experiences reality or truth or knowledge without any sensual perception.
I'm not saying that that proves anything about God, but is that sort of what you mean?
Yeah, and I also mean stimuli also in the sense of introspection.
You also can't look within yourself because if you are a consequence of the environment, you have to discount that as well, so that's the idea.
Can you tell me a little bit more about what you mean by introspection and in your definition there?
It's making, for instance, thought experiments, right?
Even though they are in your mind, they are not separated from reality because you yourself are part of a reality.
That didn't clear up too much for me.
Could you try a little more?
I don't think the words are currently coming to me.
No problem. I'm saying looking within ourselves.
For instance, shutting down the external senses and simply thinking.
So, a form of revelation then?
Well, Stefan asked me to imagine how would the perfect ideas be formed and I said that you can't appeal to the senses and neither can you actually appeal to anything that is a consequence of reality.
You have to take it as is somehow.
So, this is what makes it absurd.
And I understand what you're saying.
In the language that you're using, though, and this is not your language, but I just wanted to get your opinion of it.
To me, when you come up or when somebody comes up with a concept that is anti-logical or anti-biological, calling it perfect is sort of like saying 2 plus 2 is green is perfect.
And 2 plus 2 is 4 is sort of a degraded sensual version of perfect.
But when people talk about, and I'm not saying you agree with this, but when people talk about perfect ideas being those which are not related to sensual evidence, not related to empirical verification, not related to sensual logic, Then, to me, what they're saying is it's sort of like 2 plus 2 is green or it's a square circle.
It's not perfect. It's actually just deranged.
And so I think that, and this comes from Plato, right?
That we believe, or lots of thinkers other than Plato, that we believe there's some kind of perfect world out there that doesn't have anything to do with the senses.
But if we could achieve that, that would be perfect.
But what comes through the senses is degraded.
And it has a kind of Religious connotation to it, but I don't think that it's a higher or perfect reality.
I think it's just incorrect, if that sort of makes any sense.
Yeah, there's also this perfection that does last from the ancient Greeks.
The idea, for instance, that the circle would be the perfect form, but perfect in this language actually means nothing.
It doesn't exist. Yeah, that makes sense.
Just for those who know, the mathematical definition of a circle is something which never actually exists within reality.
But what I think it says is that concepts are perfect, and the sensual evidence or material form of those concepts is imperfect.
But that, to me, seems kind of reversing the course, as I've talked about in some sequence of series of podcasts on concepts.
The reason I think that that's problematic is that we actually don't have any sense of concepts except that which is derived from the senses, right?
So everything that we see that's circular, everything we see that's flat, everything we see that's linear in the real world is what provides us with the concepts that we sort of extrapolate the essence of those things into The concepts and so to say that then concepts are somehow degraded by their manifestation in material form to me is totally backwards because we don't have concepts except For their existence in material form, which we can then synthesize.
So I've never really liked this, not that it matters what I like or anything, but I've never really liked this idea that concepts are somehow contaminated or by material form or somehow purer or cleaner and so on.
Than the material form.
I don't think that really makes too much sense.
And it's the root of a lot of things.
Like the nation is considered to be more pure than any individual that's within it.
And of course God is considered to be more pure than anything material.
And this is, in a lot of different philosophies, this also occurs in race.
that the concept is considered to be more pure or elevated than the individual and I've never found that to be valid because we wouldn't have concepts without the individual so concepts can never be superior to the individual I think that's the aspect we have to hammer out, that there is only an individual that acts, that thinks, that feels.
And this is a pretty novel concept for a lot of people.
For instance, myself and Stéphane and François and others have been going to this site assembly, assembly.com if you want to know about it.
And it's about people expressing their opinions and it's a good source of what is popular in public opinion and what is popular in knowledge because it's sometimes difficult to keep up with the popular media and the popular opinions For people in our movement, I can speak for myself specifically that it's starting to surprise me somewhat.
This level maybe of ignorance?
Do you mean level of ignorance around sort of philosophical concepts or freedom or politics or religion or what?
Yeah, all that. Especially the idea that only the individual is an active entity.
And a lot of people believe in collectives and group thinking in the collective unconscious and things like that.
And somehow the individual is an imperfect form of this collective.
Like you say, it's very good.
Well, one of our fine new listeners, Stacey Curl, has said here, and I hope you don't mind if I read this from the Skype chat, I wonder if there's some correlation between someone experiencing frustration with being unable to change reality, perhaps because of some power, and then deciding to give up on reality and start focusing on the model instead.
Yes, I think this is often what's called in philosophical circles the kryptonite principle.
Yes, it's the kryptonite principle.
And I think what happens is that when you're a kid and you're growing up, you're sort of taught something like, do as I say, not as I do.
So, in that a moral rule, like don't shout, don't hit, will get inflicted upon a child by a shouting and hitting parents right so so already right there you have a differentiation for the child between what is said and what is done and then you hear things like you have to respect your mother listen to your father your father knows best And when you ask for reasons as to why your parents say X,
Y, or Z, then what you're told is, don't ask questions.
Just have respect for whoever, your father or your mother or your school or your country or your race or whatever.
And so then what happens is you have the child then believes that the material form doesn't have much to do with the virtuous essence, right?
So you've got some drunken bum of a father, say, and the mother says, well, you should listen to your father.
And so the child then believes that the ideas or the concepts don't have anything to do with the material manifestation, but that the concepts are always superior.
To the physical manifestation, and I think it is a kind of scar tissue.
I think that you're quite right in saying that.
It is a pain that comes out of something that has been inflicted on the child, a form of moral hypocrisy, because it's a lot easier to talk virtue than to be virtuous.
And I think that the kid then gets, it's very painful for the child.
But what they have to do is believe in the virtue that is being spoken about rather than any material form that it's manifesting itself as.
And I think that's one of the things that leads people into this arid, abstract world of perfect ideals rather than dealing with basic facts.
Because if we work empirically, which is sort of what I am...
talking about in a lot of the podcasts just work empirically rather than by what people say then if your parents aren't good to you or moral or if they don't express doubt when they don't know what is going on or if they give you moral rules but then when you start to question them they They realize that maybe they don't know as much as they should and they honestly explore those rules with you together and so on.
If they don't do any of that, then you're going to end up with a rule derived from how they act, which is something like, my parents are just telling me what to do so that I'll obey, but they're claiming that it's moral so that I'll obey permanently.
And that's not a conclusion that children really want to come to about their parents.
So they start focusing on these perfect abstracts and ignore the tangible manifestations, I think, based on that relationship.
Does that make any sense?
Or did anyone hear that at all?
Hello? Can anybody hear me?
Hello? Can anybody hear me?
Yeah, we can hear you. Yeah, we can.
Sorry, I'm just calling your own text right now.
Arguing in the text chat over there.
Do you want me to synthesize that?
I've been having a look at it as I've been talking.
Do you want me to synthesize that?
Just to make sure there aren't too many S's in it.
I seem to have trouble with sibilance today.
Go for it then. Okay, so the question is, and I apologize if I'm not getting this quite right, it's been flashing by relatively quickly.
The question is, is Francois a tree or a forest?
I think that's right, isn't it?
And what I'm going to get up with the question is, when I said the nation as a concept, then the question came out, and it's a perfectly reasonable question.
I said the nation doesn't exist, and somebody said in the chat, which is perfectly reasonable if you haven't been exposed to these ideas, they said, well, the...
By golly, the nation does exist.
What are you crazy?
Of course it exists.
You said the United States.
People don't think that you're talking about a canal on Mars.
They know exactly what it is that you're talking about.
So the question then comes about does a nation exist or does a nation not exist?
And of course it's the forest and the trees argument, right?
The forest being a conceptual aggregate for groups of individual trees.
Does forest as a concept exist?
Now of course if you define forest As a conceptual label that applies to a group of individual trees, if somebody says to you that a forest doesn't exist, what they're receiving by that sort of logically is you're looking at 500 trees and someone says that forest doesn't exist.
And you say, well, it does exist.
I'm looking right over there and there are 500 trees.
So what are you saying to me that a forest doesn't exist?
So when someone says that the United States doesn't exist, people are saying, well, when I go south of the border, I don't fall into a void.
You know, sort of go into another dimension, so the United States absolutely does exist.
But the way that we try and talk about these things here, not for just reasons of semantic stuff, but for pretty important reasons of ethics and clarity, what we try and talk about in this conversation is that The concepts do not exist independently of the instances or the entities.
So the concept forest does not exist in the real world.
You can point at something called a family, which is four people sitting in a photograph or something, but you can't point at a family if there's not four people sitting in the room.
You can't point at something called a forest If there aren't 500T trees sitting in front of you, and so the concept has no material existence.
It's just a mental tag.
Right? Like, there are two rocks that exist, but the number two doesn't exist somewhere that you can go and dig it up with a shovel and say, hey, look, it's the number two.
And this is fairly important when it comes to ethics, of course, because since concepts don't exist, then the collective can never have any rational domination over the individual, because, of course, there is no such thing as collective.
So when you hear something like, well, it's for the good of the public, it's for the general good, it's for the good of mankind, well...
The general public, mankind, all of these things, they don't exist.
What does exist is individuals, and we have conceptual tags of language and all that to describe those things, but those descriptions don't exist in reality.
So you can never have, if you're talking about a forest, you can never have any definition of a forest that contradicts Any one of the individual trees.
So you can't say a forest is 500 trees and a pink elephant, right?
Because the concept forest is derived from how accurately it describes an aggregation of trees.
You can't say a forest is one tree.
You can't say a forest is a fan and a table and a door.
It all has to be a group of trees.
Can't maybe be one. Maybe five trees is a copse or something.
So the concepts are always imperfectly derived from the instances.
And that means that anything that you talk about in terms of a collective Can't ever contradict the moral nature of any single individual.
You can't create a group called a nation or a religion or a race or a gender.
You can't create those groups and then ascribe to those groups any moral characteristics that contradict the moral nature of any individual.
I always get juiced at that last part because that's really why it's so important because that's all you have to hear about in politics and in philosophy is that the rights of the group versus the rights of the individual.
Well, the group doesn't exist.
You can't have any rights ascribed to any human being or group of human beings that contradicts the moral rights of any other human being because then the concept is detached From the individual, from the instance, and then it no longer has any meaning.
Does that at least clarify this question of nation-state that's on the chat?
Well, in my opinion, it's very simple.
I can point to a forest and have a common understanding based on the density of trees in a given area compared to another, and point at it and say, look, there's a forest here, Because there's a higher density of trees in this area and there's a certain kind.
So this is all based on empirical facts.
Now if you tell me there's a nation, the nation is based on an arbitrary border, which is basically delimitating one monopoly of force from another.
One group of thugs from another group of thugs.
So they have this agreement, right?
It's just an agreement.
Based on completely arbitrary limits.
So, if I show you a satellite picture of Earth, you couldn't show me this border.
You couldn't point it out to me because it doesn't exist.
It's an arbitrary agreement.
It has nothing to do with reality.
It has nothing to do with the facts.
So, it's simply not an empirical fact.
It's not based on anything.
No, that's quite true.
And of course, the funny thing is, I cross the border between Canada and the United States quite a bit, because along with my job in Free Domain Radio, I smuggle a good deal of cigarettes.
But, okay, not really.
That makes me sound a whole lot more swashbuckling, oh God, there's another sibilant, than I actually am.
But that's an excellent point.
When you walk over the border, right, so there's this line, there's this line on the ground.
And I remember when I was a kid in Africa, I was taken to the equator.
And so I went and stood on the equator, and they said, if you face north, it's north.
If you face south, it's south. And then we would drive across particular borders.
You don't change, right?
So you stand on one side of the Canadian-US border, you step over to the other side, and your physical nature hasn't changed whatsoever, right?
So it's a purely arbitrary thing.
I think Francois' point about it's a gang of thugs, absolutely.
A nation... The citizens have the same relationship to a ruler that livestock does to a farmer.
I mean, you're kept around and educated and trained how to become economically productive to whatever degree so that you can produce taxation for the rulers.
I mean, I think that's fairly clear.
I think that the good phrase is territory.
The territory usually has three meanings that you can use in a political context.
The first is that it's a geographical locale.
It's a territory. The Northwest Territories is one of the provinces in Canada.
The second is that a territory is often used by...
In biological circles to indicate a predator's range of preying.
So lions have a certain territory and dogs have a kind of territory and it's where they claim their victims to be.
And a third, of course, is that a territory is something that is used to indicate a certain violent gangs Urban area of predation, right?
So it's like, that's this gang's territory, this is the Bloods' territory, the Crips' territory, the Hells Angels' territory.
And so that really is...
A nation is a geographical imaginary line wherein on the one side you're owned and subjected to the violence of one group of ruling thugs, and on the other line you're subject to a group of another ruling thugs.
So a nation sort of exists from that standpoint, but I don't think it's anything.
That you could ever respect.
Does that sort of clear it up for people who are talking on the board?
Yeah, I think so.
Well, if you look at this map that I pasted, you can't see any border.
Of course, you can see islands and land that is delimited by water.
But even then, the nations that are claimed, for example, Japan claims more than one area.
It claims other little islands or Australia.
So even in those cases, the construct of the nation does not correspond to the empirical evidence that we see.
Now Brad has added, for those who don't have microphones, I'm going to speak again in outrageous accents to help differentiate you.
Let's make Brad a deranged Scottish man drunk riding a horse.
So let me just clear my throat.
And get that going, just kidding.
So Brad has said, aren't there plenty of things that exist, but which you cannot show in a photograph?
Well, sure. Atoms, for instance.
Black holes, for sure.
But of course, you can infer their existence, that they do exist, right?
You just can't show them in a photograph.
But you can infer their existence from the actions of the physical things, not just in terms of belief.
You can infer that things like black holes and atoms exist by...
Looking at their effects on other matter, right?
So you know that a black hole exists because there's a gravity well and an event horizon and everything sort of swirls down and vanishes, much like dirty bathwater down a sink, down a plug.
So you can at least infer their existence based on their effects on matter.
We're independent of belief and observation, whereas saying, well, people from the south do this, and people from the north of the US do this, and Canadians are like this, and Brazilians are like that, well, that's culture, and you could certainly say that people have that, that that's an effect of a country, but I don't think that that's really the effect of any geographical location.
You could say in very broad terms that people who come from colder climates might have certain adaptive strategies, but that would be more at a biological level.
Culture certainly does exist in its effects on people, but of course my particular view of it is that culture is just a scar tissue based on things that are told to the false self by parents.
To get children to feel falsely proud and thus feel unstable and therefore be controllable and also to be falsely guilty and all that kind of stuff.
So I think that culture is an effect of a nation state but it would be very interesting to see what effect a nation state would have or a geographical location would have in the absence of things like religion and state schools and all of that kind of stuff.
That's it for me. Somebody else can talk now.
Okay, hey guys. I'm Justin.
We have to make sure that we don't become the ones who have to prove something.
Other people claim nations exist.
So let's look at one of their definitions.
Like Frank said, it's about being in control of a certain area.
And Stefan also used the example of territory of animals that they claim.
Well, if somebody claims something, he has to practice this force, which is not a constant factor.
So, that's one thing that's dynamic.
Another thing is, well, someone can claim a certain area, but lots of people can claim a certain area.
So, it's a subjective definition.
Everybody can claim an area.
So, it's dependent on what's in the minds of the people, suddenly.
Not just of the people who are in control, either at one moment or another.
So, let's say, Iraq is attacked by the US, quote-unquote.
Then the reality of this nation constantly changes and completely depends on who is doing what.
So it's really hard to attach any properties to the object Iraq.
Another thing is, suppose someone lives deep in the desert of a quote-unquote country.
Well, they might have never heard of the country.
They might have never heard of the name of the country.
And their circumstances of the bigger country can change day to day.
So you could tell them, well, you're living in Iraq.
Well, what does that mean?
They're living in a desert.
So to attach any properties to such a vague, subjective concept is really weird, especially in the way that politicians talk about it.
Well, it's weird. I agree with you, but it's incredibly effective.
Because if you can get people to believe, and I mean, I just know this because I live in Canada, so we can perpetually have this younger sibling relationship with the United States, which is really sad and pathetic.
All Canadians can talk about is how we're superior to the United States.
Which is really sad, of course, because it just indicates that you don't feel superior, right?
I mean, I don't imagine Tom Hanks rushes from party to party saying, you know, I'm a really great actor.
I'm really good at acting. I have a whole bunch of Oscars.
I'm a really great actor.
I mean, wouldn't that look kind of ridiculous, right?
If you really are good at something, you don't talk about it.
You don't compare yourself to others.
You don't do any of that sort of nonsense.
So in Canada, we constantly have this nationalism appeal to, oh, we're better than the United States because We're peacekeepers, not warmongers because we have socialized medicine and we take care of everybody and all that kind of stuff, right?
And so there's a lot of belief in the virtue of the country that you are born into.
Of course, when I was a kid in England, Football, or as it's known incorrectly, soccer, it was the big thing too.
So your neighborhood team was who you're supposed to cheer for.
And of course, in public schools, you know, I was taught that whichever country I lived in, and I lived in a bunch of different countries, whatever country you lived in was the best, right?
Of course, it's impossible, right?
I mean, it's impossible for every country that's differing from each other to be The best, not just in terms of the coolest, or the most funky, or the richest, but the most moral.
I'm sure every country believes that.
So I agree with you that it's kind of weird to talk about it as if it exists, but once people do believe that it exists, once you create these imaginary fences, Then the costs of having real fences goes way down, right?
So if you're a farmer and you can convince your cows, through putting them, say, through a public education system, you can convince your cows that they should stand around, never try and get away, that they should Die when you tell them to and wander into the slaughterhouse when you tell them to, then you need to invest a lot less in things like electrified fences and going around and so on.
So it's economically advantageous to turn the human mind into a prison so that you don't actually have to have that many real prisons in the world.
And that works for a short amount of time until people start to really rebel.
And then you have to have a lot more real prisons and then it all collapses and you get to start again maybe with a little bit more freedom.
So I agree that it's weird to talk about it, but again, our enemies really understand the argument for morality a lot better than we do, because they do talk about it continually, the virtue of the country, and that makes people into willing and happy slaves.
Does that make sense?
I would like to add something to this.
I would say that not necessarily all the limitations of territory are irrational.
For example, in a corporation that serves a certain area of land, there will be divisions made in order to say, well, we're going to have these salesmen, you know, serving this zone and this other zone and this other zone.
So you're going to have divisions of territory, but it's acknowledged that there are conventions.
There are conventions used with that company.
For the sake of usefulness.
And I think that the same is true in property.
We don't see the limitations of people's property, but we acknowledge them as a convention regarding what the other person owns.
The problem is that the nation is not supposed to be a convention.
It's supposed to be factual.
Right, I mean, that's quite true.
Innate in the concept of both your physical body and the property rights that you possess by nature of being a human being, that is territory already, right?
So, I mean, my obvious territory, first and foremost, is my own body.
If the debate turns ugly and somebody tries to knife me, well, they're kind of violating my primary territory, which is my own body.
Next weekend I get to work with my neighbor.
We're going to put a fence up because we have a new house and they have a bunch of kids and, of course, Christina wants to start the nudist therapy sessions.
So there's a lot of reason for us to put in the fence, mostly because I might participate.
Mostly in, well, I'll just be wearing scuba gear because that's sort of my thing.
So we do have territory and we do have property and so that all makes sense.
The problem is that when you have property rights associated with the collective, then it's just exploitive, right?
They say that the money is being taken by the state, but that's not true, right?
The money is being taken by specific people who are exercising property rights.
And so they can, you know, whatever you say is for the public good is nonsense, right?
It just turns into some individual's good.
So the idea that some sort of collective entity has property rights that's separate from the individual's, unless you make it some sort of contract between you, it's nothing that makes any sense from a legal standpoint to have concepts that have legal rights and so on, which I've already talked about.
In the podcast on corporations.
So I think, scuba fetish.
Oh yeah, baby.
We can talk about that another time.
Now, Stacey Curl has said, nothing's wrong with plain old labels for aggregations, areas of land jurisdiction, etc., as long as we don't pretend these have a will or need defending, etc.
Well, no, that's absolutely right.
One of the great challenges of the human mind, given that we are so scintillatingly rational, is that we have this problem where we mistake the world for ourself.
It's called anthropomorphizing.
In some circles, what it basically means is that because we can think, we think that the world can think, right?
So we create God. Because we have property, we imagine that property exists as a transferable concept to other kinds of entities.
And this is a fairly big problem, this kind of projection of our own innate nature into the world as a whole.
And so we create these concepts and then we start to anthropomorphize them.
We start to imbue them with human characteristics.
So we think that the state is virtuous or our country is the best.
And that's like saying that the number two, my number two is more blue than your number two, right?
It doesn't make any sense.
Or that my color green is more rational than your color green, or is more moral.
It doesn't really, my toe is more moral than your toe.
None of these things make any sense, but because we are so...
We have so many of these false concepts and false arguments for morality inflicted on us, we end up with all of this nonsense where we ascribe all of these human characteristics to concepts like God or nation or state or race or whatever.
And it's...
It's a real mess. This ability we have to extrapolate concepts from instances and then apply them to way too wide a concept also has problems in the psychological world, right?
So, for instance, if I had not been fairly rigorous in figuring out my own childhood, then I may have taken some of the characteristics that my mom had and erroneously and unjustly applied them to all women, which would be completely unjust and would be a problem.
It's just something that we seem to do Quite a bit.
So somebody has said all the clones had free will.
I'm not sure that I'm going to try and pick that thread up.
So I'm going to pass it over to any other topic that anybody else wants to talk to at the moment.
You don't want to talk about determinism?
Yes, absolutely. Neil, go.
You know, I just knew you were going to say that.
I'm perfectly keen to go ahead.
Okay, you've said a couple of times that you experience free will, and I'd like to get some clarification on that.
What do you mean?
Are you talking to me or Steph?
Sure, when I say that I experience free will, what I mean by that is I ask Christina.
Sorry. Let me just say that...
Should I have Christina?
Christina, how do I experience people?
When I say that I experience free will, what I mean is that I perceive that I have a number of choices, and each one of those choices have a mixture of long-term and short-term benefits.
Sometimes I'll choose short-term benefits, so if I want to stay up late to watch a movie, I will decide to do that, even though I know I'll be tired the next day because the movie's really good or something, or maybe I'll say, okay, well, I'll pause the movie because I've really got to get to bed, so I'll I'll be deciding to figure out how I'm going to balance my long-term and short-term objectives based on a variety of things.
And so I feel, I sort of experience the ability to think and to choose, to decide to do this, that, or the other.
Am I going to podcast?
Am I going to go for a bike ride?
Am I going to go to karaoke?
What is it that I'm going to do?
And so I feel that I'm constantly weighing the positives and negatives and varieties of possibilities that lay ahead of me, and that I have the capacity to choose between which one within certain limits.
Like I can't choose to know German instantaneously.
I can't choose to fly.
I can't choose my own clothes in the morning because Christina says that it's like I dress like I'm blind.
And so there are certain limits on my free will, some of which are more rational than others.
But within the context of my knowledge, my experience, and things that I have worked on, I have the choice to podcast because I've worked a lot on philosophy for 20 years.
I could podcast either way, but I have a greater return on value for podcasting because I've chosen to do things beforehand.
So it's just a variety of choices that I sort of experience as I'm trying to decide what it is to do with the limited time and energies that I have, if that makes any sense.
Okay, try to refrain using the word free will when you're explaining free will, but I'll forgive you for that one.
So, let me give back to you what I've heard from that.
So, you experience that you can consciously make decisions.
Is that correct? Yes.
Well, I have the same experience.
I also experience that I can consciously make decisions and I weigh them on a certain basis.
But is there something you want to add?
Because making choices doesn't seem very special to me.
Yeah, I mean, I guess the only thing that I would add is that I don't know if I'm making choices.
I mean, I'm certainly, I'm no innate opponent to the deterministic position, because that would be to claim a knowledge that I don't have.
So, the deterministic position could be entirely correct, right?
So, that's sort of something that I wanted to sort of be clear, that I cannot say that the determinist position is false.
I can say that I experience free will, And that I act as if free will is true, as if I'm actually making my choices based on weighing this or those factors.
But I can't say that I actually have free will.
And I can say that I experience it, but I can't claim that it's real or it exists.
It could be that the determinist position is entirely true.
But we just don't know the facts, don't know the variables and so on.
My whole life could be scripted before I'm born.
That might be perfectly valid.
But I also feel that the determinists can't actually say anything about free will either.
To me, it's a big unknown at the moment.
And so coming to conclusions doesn't mean that it's not valid sort of for either side.
That's the other thing that I would say. Well, you're still leaving the The thing that you keep bringing up in the middle, because my question would be if you make a choice and you end up making a certain choice between choices, then the choice has got to be based on something, right?
Yes. Then where does the problem come from that you all of a sudden think that the choice is not based on something?
Well, it's based on a variety of things.
The fact that new things continually get created, like choosing between, should I, like if I read a piece of information that says, well, fish is bad for you.
All fish are made of mercury and will kill you.
Well, that piece of information is going to make me less likely to eat fish.
However, if I really love fish, I might choose to go out with a bang.
I mean, there's a lot of different varieties of that.
Having struggled with a couple of habits, like I used to be an occasional smoker and stuff like that, those kinds of issues, you know, it's about just sort of saying, well, here are the consequences and so on.
So it's about the long-term, short-term consequences.
So stuff does change over life, over the course of your life from that standpoint, right?
So if I'm 90, maybe I'll take up smoking again.
Who knows? But...
The issue is that I don't know, and I genuinely don't know, why it feels different to have the ability to choose between things and to weigh in the balance and so on.
Why that occurs to me or why I feel like that, I can't tell you why.
I certainly can't tell you where it comes from.
I can't tell you how the human mind creates new things.
Like, you know, I sit down and write a poem or I write a book or I write a song or something.
I can't explain to you how something new gets generated out of the human mind that wasn't there before.
It can't be there innately.
Like, I don't think I was born in my brain with a whole bunch of novels or a whole bunch of podcasts that were just sort of, you know, sitting there like buried bombs waiting to go off.
I think that having created something new out of something which didn't exist before is this act of creation to me is a lot more to do with free will than just sort of choosing between fish and meat for dinner.
Okay, to recap, when you say you experience free will, it seems to me like that you don't know where exactly your choice comes from in a completely understood way.
So you don't know why you choose something, but you choose something, and you just added that you create something, and you don't know where it comes from.
That's not true at all, Niels.
That's not true at all.
I agree that I have free will, but I can be very well aware of where my choices come from.
Yeah, I mean, there is an X factor.
Like sometimes, I mean, I will actually change a decision based on, like I have a really powerful dream.
Like years ago, I mean, this is, I'll just keep this brief, but years ago, Christina and I were going to go and visit my mom, sorry, my dad, and Christina had a dream which caused us to not do that, right?
So her unconscious was processing something and gave us a dream which prevented us or gave us a significant factor which, when we reviewed it, we decided to not go and visit my dad.
If we'd chosen not to review it or if we'd come up with a different interpretation of Christina hadn't had the dream, then we would have chosen something different.
So I'm agreeing with you that we have stimuli that gives us information, right?
So if everyone said smoking was really good for you, then the people who liked smoking would just keep smoking, right?
But it is the balancing of long-term and short-term stimuli that, to me, is important in terms of understanding free will.
And also, this creation of things that don't exist previously, to me, also says something like that as well.
If you guys, if you don't mind, you guys, if I interrupt you for a second, I'd like to explain a couple of things related to this issue.
Can I shed some light on this?
Well, the first issue is the issue of consciousness.
We are not conscious of every single process that goes in our brain, correct?
We are in a position similar to that of a president of a country.
The president of a country gets only extremely high-level information.
But within the brain, we have dozens and dozens of different modules which process information every second and which process all kinds of information and participate in the elaboration of a choice or weighing decisions through our instincts and preferences and all that sort of thing.
So from an evolutionary standpoint, it's advantageous for us to be conscious of only a small part of these processes.
They have a higher level result and to make a decision based on that and let our brain process the great majority of the information that passes through our senses and are analyzed by the mind.
So when Neil says you're not conscious of what causes your choice.
He's correct in terms of consciousness.
In terms of consciousness, we are not aware of all the factors that enter into our preferences because they are hidden from us.
But that doesn't mean that we can't acknowledge them.
And if I think about the choices that I make, I can look and say, oh, well, it's probably due to this and that.
And when I was younger, I thought this and I knew this person.
I have this or that taste or genetic predisposition, etc.
So this is not a problem at all for me to acknowledge that, that determinism is absolutely correct.
But at the same time, it remains that I am the active agent in the choice.
And in fact, if there were no factors, then there would be no decision.
You can't have free will without determinism.
It's quite impossible.
Because if you have free will without determinism, then the decision cannot be mine.
It cannot be part of who I am.
Because that's causality.
That's cause and effect within my own self, within my own mind.
So, if there were no prior factors to my decision, then indeed it could not be a decision taken by myself.
It would be completely isolated from who I am.
From any causes emanating from myself and from my mind, from my memories, from my preferences, etc., etc.
So that's the first aspect.
And the second aspect is the block universe.
It's a very simple way to explain free will and determinism because they both must be true.
You have to understand both have to be true, absolutely.
Because for one thing, you cannot deny determinism without using it.
It's to say, if you were to present an argument against determinism, it would have to be based on causality.
First of all, our perception is based on causality.
Therefore, any argument whatsoever would have to be based on determinism in order to be understood and for other people to understand it.
And the second aspect is any argument you present against free will must use free will because you have to be able to direct your attention and to choose how to direct your attention in order to do the observations and the experimentation and to present those results.
So they are both quite undeniable.
They are completely undeniable.
Now, how can they coexist?
I gave one element of answer in the evolution of the mind.
The other element of answer is in the block universe.
Now, as you know, space and time are actually united.
They actually form a block of existence, which we call the block universe, and the basic principle of physics is paths do not move in space-time.
What does that mean? Put simply an expression of determinism, it means that if you follow a certain particle throughout its lifetime, you will see a path within the block universe, within spacetime.
And that path does not move.
It simply does not move because the block universe contains time.
So what you would see is you would have a path that would show you how that particle changed the position in nature.
There are during its lifetime.
So in the Black Universe, determinism is simply the ways in which every path changes throughout its lifetime.
The different ways that paths change in space-time.
And free will is a specific way that paths change.
For example, I'm able to go on the internet right now.
This is surely the result of volition because there is no instinct, okay, that tells us how to get on the internet.
That's quite impossible because there was no internet millions of years ago.
The internet is quite recent.
We can't possibly have evolved this capacity.
So it has to be that somehow we have learned...
Yes? You're using a definition of free will that I don't like.
Well, I think we all agree on the definition.
It's the capacity...
I don't agree. It's the capacity to direct your attention.
It's the capacity of yourself as an individual to be part of the causal chains that lead to...
Okay, hang on.
What I'm trying to do...
What I'm trying to do with Stefan is, Stefan says, I experience free will, although he doesn't really want to define it.
So what I want to do is I want to keep asking questions until we find what it is.
Because if we cannot find what it is, or if it remains in the area of we don't know, It's the capacity to choose.
Well, now you come in and you say it has to do with focusing attention and with volition, but now you have to show how focusing attention is not a choice-making process that is not supported by any other deterministic facts.
And if you don't know, then that doesn't explain anything.
I already explained to you how you cannot have free will without deterministic processes.
No, you did not. Yes, I did.
Yes, I did. You say free will is focusing attention.
Yes. Focusing attention is focusing attention.
It's a function of the mind which can be explained by a choice-making process.
Yet another one.
All I'm saying is you cannot have free will without deterministic processes.
Because if you don't have deterministic processes, then the choices and the focusing don't come from you.
They just come from thin air.
They come from somewhere else.
They are not... They are not the result of your mind.
Focusing attention is not the result of our mind?
Excuse me? No, no.
What I'm saying is...
If you have free will without deterministic processes, then it cannot exist.
Yeah, but the other one...
Free will implies that you are the one making a choice.
You are the one deciding to focus your attention.
If causality is not present, then that's quite impossible, because there would be no connection between you...
I'm not denying causality, Frank. I'm in the deterministic camp.
So, tell me what is special about focusing attention.
You said there cannot be determinism without free will.
So, explain. What?
I didn't say that. I said that you can't...
What? I didn't say that.
You invoked free will.
I said that...
I'm not sure what you're referring to.
You said you need to focus attention and you cannot have You cannot change someone's mind without them focusing their attention.
So that is what you call free will.
Yes, yes. If you talk to someone and try to convince them of something, such as you are right now, you cannot deny the existence of free will.
Because if you do so, you're denying that I can focus my attention on what you're saying and elaborate a reasoning on its basis and perhaps come to a different conclusion.
I don't understand what you're saying at all.
You are defining focusing attention as free will, and then you claim, well, you cannot deny free will.
Why do you need to define free will as focusing attention apart from the causal universe that we know?
No, no, it's not apart from the causal universe.
What I'm saying is you're talking to me right now.
You're trying to convince me of something.
Well, if you did not think that I was able to focus my attention, you would not try to convince me of anything.
Because there would be no way that I could direct my attention to what you're saying and elaborate a reasoning on its basis and perhaps change my way of thinking.
That's all I'm saying.
And this focusing attention, why would I possibly think that this is outside of causal reality?
I can never say it was outside of causal reality.
Then why do you use the term free will?
Why do you use the term if it's part of deterministic reality?
You do not need to make things more complicated.
Every single thing is part of deterministic reality.
If I follow what you're saying, then let's not use any other concepts.
What's the point of having concepts at all?
It's all part of deterministic reality.
The term free will has the word free in it.
As if focusing attention is completely independent of outside factors and your own state.
And you will have to show that that is so.
That's not what I understand by freedom at all.
What I understand by freedom is in terms of physical freedom and mental freedom.
I'm free to think.
I'm free to act on what I think.
If I want to tell you something instead of another thing, I'm free to do both.
I'm able to use my mouth, I'm able to use my brain to compose sentences, and I'm able to...
Well, what are you claiming?
Are you claiming that the things that you act are outside of causality?
No, that's ridiculous.
That's ridiculous. There isn't anything outside of causality.
That's quite impossible.
That's completely unprovable.
Okay, then I can go back to Stefan, I think.
Go ahead. Okay, have fun.
Stefan, you also mentioned focusing attention, just like Frank said.
Sorry, you didn't say it.
You said making choices.
So, do you have a problem with not knowing why you make a choice?
Like you can choose between a strawberry and something else and you pick one of the two?
Does it bother you that you do not know why?
And do you invoke uncausality from that?
Or is it maybe that you weigh a decision based on, say, long-term, short-term feelings, emotions, happenings, and that you don't know where those factors come from, which is a step further?
Yeah, I would certainly say that I don't know where all the factors come from.
Absolutely. That's why, to me, the deterministic position could be absolutely correct.
Because if I knew all of the factors, then maybe it would be perfectly possible to predict everything that I was going to do.
But I don't think that we have enough information.
I certainly don't believe that we need to have, I think, one of the two things that comes up in this realm of free will versus determinism Is either the physical universe is causal, everything causes something else, and therefore free will is an illusion, which is certainly possible, could be the case.
Or it is that the free will is like a ghost in the machine, it's not causal, it's supernatural, it comes from some magical realm outside of reality.
I don't think that those are the two possibilities, those are the only two possibilities.
I think that there's a third possibility, I can't explain it, right?
Which is that there's some property of matter, or some property of matter in its configuration within the human mind, that has the capacity for spontaneous creation and choice, which I can't explain and don't know, but it seems that's a possibility, that it is both physical and non-causal.
And that the human mind is the only thing that's really capable of that, that's a possibility.
But I certainly do accept that if I knew all the variables, it might be that free will is an illusion, but I certainly don't know all the variables that go into why it is that I make a decision, because for me the final variable is what do I choose to do?
And that's going to be based on a number of things.
Okay, you mentioned the term spontaneous creation and choice.
Let's focus on the last one first.
You said that you don't know where, sometimes you don't know where you base a choice on, and sometimes you know where the factors come from that you use in the weighing.
But what is the problem in not knowing something?
And do you agree that the deterministic position is a default position in this matter?
Because you're simply saying that I don't know something.
Absolutely, but my problem is that the determinists claim to know something which they don't know either, and can't prove.
The deterministic position is that the universe is causal, and also, with the scientific method, we understand that there are things that we don't know.
That's a scientific decision, so the theory is always, well, this is how we think it works, and it's valid until proven invalid.
But it's always up in the air.
Now, we don't invoke a semi-explanation, like uncausality, in things that we do not understand how they come about.
For instance, if the sun would explode out of nothing, we don't say it's free will.
We just say we don't know.
We don't say that we understand it, how it works, because we don't.
But we do have the principle of causality.
So that's the most fundamental understanding of everything.
So we do keep on hanging on to causality.
And determinism is simply the causality in time.
That's the only thing it says.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Sorry, that was causality in mind, you said?
In time. Causality in time?
Can you explain what you mean by that? Well, if you have causality and you have matter, then that means that things are going to happen in a set way, in the way that the matter is going to affect on each other and cause reactions.
They are inclusive.
They mean the same thing.
I see. Now, but wouldn't you say, though, and I agree with you, I mean, that causality is a pretty strong argument, but the problem is that we also have to work empirically, right?
You don't have to sort of take a principle and say, well, that principle applies to all matter, no matter what, right?
The problem is that the human mind seems to be a pretty unique configuration of matter and energy within the universe, right?
So if you look at all the universe, it's all inert, and we don't know of any other consciousness that exists.
We certainly don't know of any other rational consciousness that exists.
And so I agree with you, but we also have to work empirically, right?
So I agree with you about causality, I agree with you about the scientific method, but the scientific method also says that principles bow to what is, right?
Principles bow to what exists.
And the problem is that every human being perceives that they experience free will to whatever degree.
You would also say that you don't know all the causality for your own choices.
We also have religion, which is all around persuasion.
We have morality, which is all about persuasion.
We have the drive to live, which is all about persuasion, I mean, in the human sense.
So, we have advertising, which is all about how to change people's minds.
We have lots of people, myself included, trying to inject their ideas into the bloodstream of society, hoping to change people's minds to improve things.
So, the unfortunate thing with the argument from causality is that it's not empirical.
It's taking a physical principle that's derived from inert matter, and it's trying to fit that round box into the square hole, which is people experience free will, a huge portion of society is devoted to adjusting people's perceptions and ideas, and you then would have to prove that that is all completely incorrect.
And false, and any sort of drive or desire to change someone else's mind, assuming that you believe in determinism, whatever you do is what is inevitably going to happen, right?
So the problem is that it's just not empirical, and therefore I don't think scientific to say that the laws that apply to all matter also apply to this very unique There's a square foot of matter called the human mind, which is enormously different from any other configuration of matter that we see, if that sort of makes any sense.
Sorry, Stefan.
I really have to object to this.
You're saying persuasion, advertising, changing someone's mind is empirical evidence against determinism.
Which is nothing other than causality.
And I can't accept it.
Scientific method assumes causality as a basic principle.
So you have to understand there's a problem with proving randomness.
There's a real problem with it.
Because at some level you are just going to not know why something happens.
So for instance, something might seem random like quantum mechanics.
So if you shoot two particles together, they might shoot 70% of the time at that time to disappear and 30% time in the other cases.
But that simply means That you don't know why it happens.
You cannot say, well, this is a random effect, or this is an effect that's purely based on statistics.
Because that's only a higher level explanation, which is not actually an explanation, it's simply an observation.
So, if we go back to persuasion, I really disagree.
I use causality in communication, but also I am constantly looking for things that are already inside the mind of a person, in trying to make them focus their attention, in trying to make them change their mind.
I'm constantly looking at things that are already in their minds, like conceptual understanding, understanding of causality, values, Sorry, I just want to interrupt that for a sec, because I fully understand that. I mean, I'm a salesman.
I know fairly well how it is that you're supposed to try and prove value to someone based on their existing ideas, but I'm not sure how the fact that every human being, from pretty much the age of two onwards, or even one, you could say, is involved in negotiating and trying to get other people to change their minds for a variety of reasons, However well or badly they do it, it is a constant human activity, and it's not proof of, of course, but it's evidence for the belief, at least the wide...
People believe that they can change each other's minds, just as you're trying to change my mind, and that must have something to do with a desire to change someone's mind.
Now, if it's inevitable that someone's mind is going to be what it is or what it isn't in this regard, then people wouldn't have a desire, right?
If people are rational, they wouldn't have a desire to change other people's minds, Because it would be futile, right?
It would be like me trying to talk a volcano into being a zebra, right?
Because it's all fixed from the beginning.
So I'm not sure that we can say that the evidence that people are constantly trying to change other people's minds is not valid in a scientific method.
It's something that exists in reality as measurable and recordable, right?
No, no, there's a misunderstanding that you make.
If I'm trying to change someone's mind, I do not know what the future is going to bring.
But I know that I can change someone's mind if I can act on their current ideas they have in their mind.
You can take the same principle to innate matter.
It's no different.
If I kick a rock, Then I know, because of causality, that it will go a certain way.
I am not going to say, well, it's going to be at some point anyway, so my actions are irrelevant.
Okay. I'm sorry, I'm still not sure how, given that the vast majority of human beings are involved in trying to change Other people's minds and negotiate back and forth are acting on the assumption that free will is a possibility.
It's neither random nor causal.
That would sort of be my answer to it.
I mean, it has a certain logic of its own.
Otherwise, advertisers would just say random words and show random images, but they don't.
They do a lot of research in the way that you do to figure out what is going to be most motivating to people, and it always seems to come down to somebody in a bikini.
Sadly, never me. Otherwise, I'd have a different career.
But people do continually engage in the process of trying to change other people's minds, and that's something I think that the scientific method does need to take into account, and I think it is evidence for the possibility of something like free will, which is neither random nor supernatural, nor something which can be explained as yet by purely causal factors, but which we don't have an answer to at the moment.
Explain to me why changing someone's mind It's evidence against determinism.
I do not understand the problem.
Changing someone's mind involves a couple of things, like, for instance, focusing attention.
I don't see a problem with that.
Yeah, please explain to me.
So basically it comes down to you do not accept.
You have the need for an explanation in terms of free will, even though I don't like to use the term because I have not yet found someone who can explain it to me proving that it's something different than I don't know.
So it seems your problem is your experience needs you to believe that there is something extra.
Well, let me ask you some questions then.
Would you prefer that I change my mind about free will and swing towards the deterministic camp?
I would assume that we can empirically say that that is your preference because you're involved in spending energy to attempt to alter my way of thinking.
Okay, so you have a desire to cause me to change my mind, and you're bringing evidence and logic, and you're doing a great job, please, and I appreciate that, because of course if I am wrong, that's the last thing I want to be is wrong, or if there is a solution that I don't know about, that would be great.
So you have a desire to get me to alter my thinking, Now that desire is, if determinism is true, then that desire is irrational.
Would that be correct to say?
Because whether I change my mind or not is inevitable.
And if we have a preference for something which is predetermined, then that is irrational.
Like if I have a preference to live forever, but it's predetermined, but it's a biological entity, I'm going to die.
Then it's irrational for me to have a preference for something which is predetermined.
I don't know what your state of mind is going to be, so explain to me how my desire is irrational.
Well, because the outcome is predetermined.
Is it predetermined outside of my actions?
Well, sure, that's causality, right?
That's determinism as far as I understand it.
You understand wrong. But your actions are determined just as...
I mean, your actions are determined ahead of time as well, right?
Yes? So your actions are determined.
My responses are determined.
The whole thing has been scripted since the Big Bang, right?
So having a desire to bring about a different effect in something which is predetermined would be irrational, wouldn't it?
It would be like me throwing myself off a cliff and then expecting to fly.
Like it's predetermined I'm going to fall.
No, Stefan, you're making a basic mistake because you assume that The state of things as they are at that moment will continue to persist.
You don't know whether the determined outcome is different or not.
You're just assuming that it has to be the same, and then you say, well, that's the deterministic outcome.
It should stay this way, but you don't know that.
Well, but whether I know it or not, whether I know whether I'm going to drop myself, whether I know whether I'm going to fall if I throw myself off a cliff or not, doesn't matter.
It is still predetermined, right?
If there's no possibility of free will, if everything is predetermined, then the outcome of all the conversations about free will are predetermined, right?
So in which case, having a desire to change someone's mind about free will would be irrational, right?
I mean, it might just be blindness, but that would be logically the case, right?
No, you don't know that.
You don't know that the outcome is always against your position.
You're assuming that the deterministic outcome is always against your position.
You don't know that. You don't know if in the future you might be able to convince some people.
How do you know that? Because it's predetermined.
So what?
You don't know what the predetermination is!
Yeah, but that doesn't matter.
It's still predetermined. Whether you know it or not, it's still predetermined.
And therefore, any desire to change the outcome would be irrational.
You don't know the outcome!
Frank, hang on. Frank, stop.
Hang on. Step on.
If you are planning on going to get the groceries, you would say, in the same manner that you just argumented against us, that it would be irrational to actually get the groceries Because whether you would have them, eventually or not, would be predetermined.
Right. But you do not consider getting groceries irrational.
But if the causal explanation and determinism is correct, then whether I get the groceries or not is predetermined.
Yes, but does that change how you act on it?
Well, it sure as heck would.
I mean, if I'm working on the assumption that free will and choice and all that, and morality, ethics, and all those kinds of things that are important to me are of value, then I'm going to act in one way or not.
If everything that I do is predetermined, then I will change my behavior for sure.
Okay, it's getting better.
So, if you say that causality in innate matter is not true, This would actually mean that if you would get to the grocery store, you could be on the moon, change into a monkey, and do a hula hoop dance.
Would you still go to the groceries if reality was not causal?
I'm sorry, I don't quite follow that at all.
Because through causality, we can actually get the stuff But if reality is not causal, then reality doesn't even exist.
We cannot do anything.
We don't even exist as a being through time.
To get the groceries means to go on the street, drive your car, put up the stuff in it, Sure,
but I'm not sure that I have denied causality.
I'm just saying that we don't have an answer around free will versus determinism.
I'm not one to say that free will is absolutely true.
I experience it. It's how I live my life.
I have no idea whether it's absolutely true or not.
So I don't deny causality.
I mean, the choices are not pure determinism or complete randomness.
The choice is not between pure determinism and a ghost in the machine that comes from some other supernatural realm.
That's not the choice for me.
And so I don't deny causality at all, of course.
I mean, I try to be rational, and I'm sure that you would understand.
That since I put podcasts, I record them, I transcribe them, I put them on the net, that I don't expect people to receive my podcasts unless I perform certain actions.
So I think it's silly to say that I wouldn't accept causality at all.
but certainly if everything was fated, then my desires for anything to be different, the fact that the state exists, the fact that people have ethical responsibilities, all of that would simply, if we were all just running through a prescripted play, then ethics would mean nothing, choice would mean nothing, nobody would ever be better or worse, choice would mean nothing, nobody would ever be better or worse, or innocent or guilty, or anything like There would never be such a thing as prisons, that would be just, you would never be able to get angry at a pedophile, you would never be able to act in self-defense, you would never be able to do anything.
I mean, you could, but I mean, it wouldn't make any difference, because everything is prescripted.
And so, that's not, I mean, just at a purely aesthetic level, that's not what I experienced in my life, That's not the purpose behind my podcast, which is to try and change people's minds by appealing to a variety of situations and hoping that they will sit there and think about stuff.
The same way that if you publish that cigarettes are bad for you, you hope that some people are going to stop smoking, but you're not going to be able to guarantee that everyone, of course, is going to stop smoking.
But the idea is that if things are completely prescripted, even if I don't know what they're going to be, whatever they are going to be is prescripted and I have no choice in the matter or any choice that I do have is completely illusory.
Stefan, you are just making the exact same assumption again, that you can't, if determinism is true, you can't change anything.
How do you know that that's what the, you don't know what the pre-scripted play is, how do you know that you can't change anything?
Well, Francois, the very definition of something that's pre-scripted is you can't damn well change it.
No, how do you know that your part in the play is to not be able to do anything?
That's what you assume. You don't know what the play is.
How could you know?
But whether I know or not is completely irrelevant.
It is still pre-scripted.
You don't know what the script is.
How can you assume that you're going to be completely powerless?
If it's a script, I'm powerless by definition.
Nobody in the deterministic camp likes this.
If it's prescripted by definition, I am powerless to change it.
That is the nature of determinism.
That is the nature of physical causality.
Whether I know it or not, it doesn't matter.
It's going to happen.
It's not going to happen. It's all prescripted.
I have no responsibility in the matter.
That's just a natural fact of determinism.
You said if everything was prescripted, then you wouldn't be doing the podcast.
Why not?
What makes you believe that because there is determinism that your podcast wouldn't reach other people?
I always dislike about arguing with free will, which is that people say, well, we still have a choice.
Well, we don't know the factors, and therefore you should act as if you have a choice.
Well, the fact of the matter is that if everything is predetermined, if everything is causal, if free will does not exist, then whatever I do is...
Prescripted. I have no choice in the matter.
I have no moral responsibility, no intellectual requirement for integrity, no need to put out an effort to make the world better because the world is going to be what it is.
And the government rose, slavery came, slavery left, affirmative action came, the national debt goes up, the welfare state comes in, maybe the welfare state will go out.
But there's nothing that I can do to change any of that because it's all prescripted.
No, no, no, no. No, Niels.
Stefan, if moral responsibility cannot exist in determinism, how can you be responsible for your own actions if they're not your decisions?
Okay, what Frank is trying to get at...
No, I want him to answer this.
He said there's no moral responsibility.
I have the same question, but I want to do it more tactfully.
Stefan, Truly understand your feelings, because it seems like that if someone does something, That you could fully blame someone on that action because their choices seem to come out of nothing and they make a choice and their choices are not determined and in that way they can make a good or an evil choice.
That feels very fair.
I understand this feeling.
We have to make sure that we agree and that we acknowledge those feelings as true.
Everybody has those feelings.
But the thing that Frank just mentioned, and it's a thing that we came to realize the first time we were talking about determinism, when you first started your podcast about it, is that And if something like uncausality is true in the human mind,
that the level of moral responsibility doesn't actually not go up, but it goes down, counter-intuitively.
Because if I make a choice, if I act on something, then it is Mirroring my state of mind.
If I make a choice eventually to murder someone, then it would be on the basis of my mind, if it's determined.
So in that case, you can say, well, why can we blame somebody?
Why can we make somebody responsible?
Because the action is related to the person.
However, if actions cannot be related to the person, Then you cannot blame them or give them any responsibility because the outcome of their choices are outside of them as a person.
Okay, I sort of understand what you're talking about, but again, I'm not saying that free will is something that exists outside of the human mind or in some other...
But if I haul off tomorrow and just go, I don't know, club some homeless guy to death, is it the deterministic position that that was inevitable since the dawn of time?
Yes, but you have to understand that if you clap somebody to death, and it's based on something that is not a projection of you as a person, then we cannot take you as the responsible person, because the choice comes from, quote-unquote, external from you.
Well, the idea of responsibility is very interesting.
But it's very clear that the person we can lay the most responsibility on is the person that didn't act.
And why? Because that person makes an action that is reflected from his mind.
Do you have something to add, Frank, in a soft voice?
I'm sorry, did you just repeat that last comment?
Sorry, it's just my pen that fell down.
Sorry, can you repeat?
Oh, I just wanted to repeat that last, if you could repeat that last comment.
Be your friend. No, it was just the last comment.
I did get the argument before that, but again, I think you're putting a false dichotomy into what it is that I'm saying, because I'm not saying that free will exists outside of an individual.
It's not part of their personality.
It's not part of their physical makeup.
And I'm certainly not saying that I can explain how it occurs, but I am saying that if I go off and club a homeless guy tomorrow and kill him, if that is predetermined since the dawn of time, then anybody who gets angry at me about that or thinks that that's a bad thing It's been completely irrational.
That's not an excuse. That's not an excuse.
It still comes from you.
As long as determinism is there, we can still say that it's your decision.
You're responsible for it.
If you deny determinism, then there's no reason to put responsibility on you whatsoever because it's not your choice.
So it's been prescripted since the dawn of time that I'm going to go kill a homeless guy tomorrow, but it's my responsibility.
Of course, it comes from who you are.
It's caused by your own mind.
You decided to do it.
Yes, so you've really critically got to look at does free will, quote-unquote, make responsibility, morality, all these things, more true or less true, if you really look at them.
And Frank and I have come to the conclusion that it actually almost negates it.
So, yes, our definitions of morality and right and wrong and responsibility includes determinism.
We do not get into a problem of this if we say the human mind is determined.
Well, so if you say that I have decided to go club the homeless guy, isn't that the opposite?
Just help me to understand this, because I'm really baffled.
If you say that I'm responsible for it because I've decided to go club the homeless guy, which would be my position, isn't that sort of the opposite?
Because if it's determined since the dawn of time, then I did not decide to do it.
It simply occurred as a natural result of calamity.
It is a result of calamity.
You are part of the causal chain that led to the decision.
You're mine. You can't put yourself outside of it.
Yeah, but that's still not answering the question.
If it is determined that I'm going to go club the homeless guy, then I can't be responsible for it.
Why? I am answering the question.
You are part of the causal chain that led to the decision.
You can't escape that responsibility by invoking exterior factors.
If you had nothing to do with it, that would be something else.
But you are part of that causal chain.
You decided to interpret or assimilate these and that elements, and you took a wrong decision.
It comes from who you are.
You are responsible.
You should be put to jail or etc.
Whatever punishment.
So, what is changes in a free market society, Stefan, which is, it's very interesting, because usually...
I'm sorry, I've got to interrupt you, because, and I don't mean to interrupt you, and I don't mean to be rude, but I just, I'm still not getting this basic idea, because you're saying that I'm deciding to do it, but it's pre-like to kill the homeless guy or whatever, I'm deciding to do it, and therefore I'm responsible for it, but it's also completely determined since the dawn of time, and there's no possibility of me doing otherwise, I just can't reconcile those two positions.
Yes, exactly, because it comes from you.
Listen, it comes from you.
If there was a possibility of you doing more than one thing, then it wouldn't be a decision coming from you as a person, because as a person, There's only one decision that is optimal for your personality, for who you are, corresponding to all the experiences and preferences that you have.
Well, let me ask you this then.
If I throw a rock off a cliff, does it decide to fall or not?
No. Okay, so if we're talking about causality, you can't talk about decisions.
Yes, you can.
What are you talking about?
You're a volitional being, but a rock isn't.
But if everything is causal, then I have no more free will than the rock does.
It's just matter operating on matter, right?
A choice-making process is a property.
Just like consciousness is a property of a mechanism.
So, a train station can make a choice.
And humans can make a choice.
But it's a conceptual layer added to causality.
But reconciling, the main problem you have with reconciling determinism, making choices, responsibility, morality, etc.
Maybe you should not try to do that right now.
But what we can talk about is in a free market society.
No, first, what's the cultural thinking right now?
What happens is people do something and we punish them, like killing them or putting them in jail.
Well, this system is not based around prevention or actually doing something about it.
What we do is, well, we say that person is to blame and we punish them.
But in a free market society, punishing people is irrational.
What you want to do is you want to create a better future for everyone.
And a way to do that is not by killing someone or punishing someone.
You want to make them pay a fine, for instance, because you can put the responsibility on them.
But all this means is that you want to shape society in a certain way, that people make better choices.
Well, I certainly agree with that. Yeah, I certainly agree with that, of course.
I mean, incentives and disincentives are fundamental to, I think, any productive society, but I'm still right back at the basic level here, and I'm sure we're not going to get anywhere because, unfortunately, we're at the stage now where I keep coming up with objections, and you guys keep telling me that I'm just not getting it, and then you go on to another topic.
But, Niels, you've got to understand that from this side of the fence, right, I mean, whether you agree with it or not, you should at least understand this perception.
If you say to me that society should do this or should do that or should change to this better way of doing things, that I'm having trouble following it because what society is going to be is entirely predetermined.
So you having a preference about where things should go is like throwing a rock off a cliff and saying I would have a preference that it would fly up rather than fall down.
It just seems kind of irrational to me.
It seems that you are powerless to a certain degree.
I understand your feeling.
I really, really do.
But how I act in this case of how I want society to be is that I don't know how society is going to be.
I have certain expectations.
I have certain hopes. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to change it according to my values.
And hope that it works out in a good way.
That's the only thing I can do.
If I end up doing nothing, then I know that's one thing that I can surely know about the future, that my actions will not change it in a positive way.
But if I do try to change it, then I know that I have done the best that I could.
But your actions can't change it in any way whatsoever, can they?
I mean, whatever your actions are, are predetermined as well.
Whether I choose to act on it or not are determined, true, even though I don't know that.
What consequences of that are determined, yes, but I once again don't know them.
If I end up choosing because of determinism to not do anything, then I am being irrational because I'm saying I want society to go this way.
But I decide to do nothing about it, ensuring that I will have nothing to do with a possible better future.
But your deciding to do nothing about it is also predetermined, right?
Let me finish, let me finish.
Your decision to not do anything about it is also predetermined, is that correct?
And impossible to escape, to change?
Yes, but I don't know that.
If I say that, well, I am going to lay in my bed and do nothing, Then I cannot use the argument you are trying to use from determinism.
Well, I am going...
This was meant to be.
I do not know that.
It would be an other choice.
It would be an excuse in doing nothing.
But it would be inevitable.
It would be a false argument from determinism.
But it would be inevitable that I was going to lie in bed.
It's very simple, Stefan.
You are really tying your pants in a knot.
You're trying to catch us on trying to break the future.
But you don't know what the future is, so you're accusing us of breaking something that we don't know anyway.
I mean, if you had an envelope in it that said every single thing that we're going to do, then yes, you might have a point.
But insofar as you don't, you're in the same state of ignorance as we are, and we're all trying to act in our best interest And trying to determine the best way to do so.
Right, but there is no such thing as the best way to do it.
Yeah, but you guys, the problem, I want to stop the debate now, because we really aren't getting anywhere, and you can have the last say if you want, but you guys keep saying that there's determinism, and then you keep using concepts around free will, like try to aim for a better society, try to optimize through this, try to choose this, try to choose that. But the fact of the matter is, right down at the bottom...
No, it's a deterministic concept.
It's a deterministic concept.
You can't change things if there's no causality.
If there's no causality, there's no point in trying to change anything.
Yeah, but I'm not saying... My position is not that there's no causality.
I mean, that's not what I've been arguing for at all.
But the fact of the matter is that I've never come across a...
Well, so is mine. I've never come across a determinist who says that everything is predetermined who's comfortable with the moral results of that.
And that's the only thing that I would caution you about in terms of this...
I'm perfectly comfortable with it.
Oh, okay, sorry. Then Niels was not comfortable with it, as I understand.
It's very simple.
If your decisions are not yours, if they're not caused by who you are, then there is no moral responsibility, because we can't say that you actually did anything.
Sure, but in determinism...
We can't say that it's caused by you in any way.
But in determinism, there is no ego, right?
Because you can't choose between anything anyway, so you have no moral responsibility there either.
Sure I can. You can make a choice.
I do change. I make choices right now.
Sorry, so it's not predetermined?
Yes. So it is predetermined, but you can choose.
Choice is a conceptual observation, higher level.
So if you have a computer which outputs two things based on your input, we call that a choice, even though it is determined.
That's our description of the choice.
But I want to go back to my last example to show how determinism can be reconciled with psychology and acting.
It's the grocery example.
I can think of many of them.
You say causality is true.
So if you build a house and all the blocks are on the ground and everything is in its pre-house stage, then you just get to work and you know that there's going to be a house at the end of the year.
You're not going to sit on your ass and wait for the house to appear.
That's not how things work.
In fact, if we choose to do that, then we know that there's not going to be a house.
So we just get on building.
Very simple.
And hope for the best. If I may intervene in the discussion.
Are you saying that free will and determinism are incompatible?
They're completely opposite.
I mean, yeah, absolutely.
Of course. I mean, ethics is incompatible with determinism.
Free will is incompatible with determinism.
Personal responsibility is incompatible with determinism.
That's nonsense. No, it's not nonsense, Francois.
You guys, you're not dealing with the fundamental issues.
All you're doing is saying... Oh, Steph, it's not that complicated.
You're just not getting it, and so on.
Well, I'm not a dumb guy, and I have put some thought into these issues, and you're still not answering the fundamental questions.
You can come up with, oh, well, you see, well, we don't know this, and we don't know that, and you've still got to build a house, and this and that.
The fundamental fact is, if whatever is going to happen is predetermined, there is no such thing as moral responsibility.
And you haven't made any case, and we've had two hours on this.
I've made you twice whenever. I understand that, but you haven't made a good case.
I explained to you clearly why that's not true.
No, but you haven't made a good case.
The case is if you are not the cause of your own behavior.
I've done two hours on this.
I don't want to do any more of it, right?
Because you guys just keep repeating the same argument.
How can you not understand? Well, because it's a bad argument, Francois.
The fact that I don't understand what you're saying does not mean...
It doesn't mean that your argument is good.
If I don't agree with something that you're saying, and I keep coming up with counter-arguments, and you keep repeating your argument, it doesn't mean that I'm an idiot, and it doesn't mean that I'm not getting it.
It means that I disagree. And after two hours of going round and round in this, I don't think we're going to get any further, because, to me...
You are not... You're not explaining to us why you disagree.
Sure I am. It's very, very simple.
Could you explain...
Well, I don't really want to go over...
Could you explain exactly how you can be responsible...
Could we explain to us how you can be responsible for an action if it's not caused by you?
I would just like an answer to that.
I think we have to take a break from the discussion.
Because we've come to a point where we have some clear disagreements about certain statements.
Stefan, please understand, we are absolutely not calling you an idiot.
Far from it. I don't really have an idea why you would assume that you think.
Based on comments in the chat, yes.
Based on comments in the chat, yes.
I hope I didn't add to that.
Anyway, we both have some conclusions that are completely opposite, and it's not going to help anyone if we just keep repeating our conclusions.
So it would be interesting, I think, if, like you said, there is no morality in determinism.
I would be interested in maybe you having a small thing in the forum where you explain the position And maybe we can go from there.
I think that would be much more useful than going on right now.
Because you are right that Frank and me, we have a position about that that seems clear for us.
But if we cannot reconcile your argument with it.
So I am interested in what your argument is, why morality is inconsistent with determinism.
Well, there's nothing that I can say that I haven't already said.
If everything is predetermined, then it's like if you drop a piano on someone and they die, it's like blaming the piano for reacting to the laws of physics.
I mean, it doesn't make any sense.
If I can bring an angle onto this, you can't deny either fact, right?
And you are saying that if determinism is valid, then free will is not valid, and vice versa, right?
They are opposite concepts, right?
But you cannot deny any and actually make an argument.
You have to accept them both.
Both determinism and free will.
I disagree with that.
Yeah, you cannot accept determinism and free will together.
I mean, it's one or the other. Yeah, but they exist on different levels.
We use the scientific method and in order to, for that to be valid, we have to assume determinism about the laws we make, right?
But in the social level, we have to assume free will.
There are different levels.
That's why they are compatible, because they don't lie on the same semantic level?
Well, that may be the case, but if you're talking about determinism at an atomic level, which is my understanding of Francois and Neil's position, which I understand, if you're talking about determinism at a causal physical level, then there can't be different levels, because everything then in reality is causal and there's no possibility of responsible intervention by consciousness.
And so I don't see how you could divide it into different levels.
Well, we use different theories to explain different things on different levels.
For instance, we don't use particle physics to explain the behavior of people, right?
Or we don't use biology to explain things about chemistry.
So, I don't see what's the problem with using both determinants and free will.
And in fact, we cannot deny it.
We have to assume them as valid.
But if we assume that, if we take the materialistic position that everything that occurs in the universe is based on either matter or energy and determinism claims to be the answer for all matter and energy as being causal, then it has to be a theory that explains everything because nothing exists except matter or energy.
Well, do you agree that we can have different kinds of knowledge?
For instance, we can have knowledge on biological matters or knowledge on matters of chemistry.
Do you disagree with that?
Well, no, of course I wouldn't disagree with that.
I've talked about those disciplines at length in my podcast, but everything comes down to matter and energy, right?
So you couldn't have a theory of biology that would contradict matter and energy.
You couldn't have a theory of Geology that would contradict basic physical theories.
You couldn't say, I have this rock which has mass, but it's invisible and has no weight or something.
I mean, you couldn't have anything like that.
So the theory of physical reality down at its base, if it's causal, it subsumes all other fields of knowledge under that, and all other fields of knowledge would have to be No, I'm not saying that at all.
We can have different kinds of knowledge.
For instance, in order to explain human behavior, we have to have a theory of morality, right?
A theory of human interaction.
And it's on a different level.
Maybe if we knew everything about the universe inside and out, every single state of matter, but that would be pretty impossible because we ourselves are part of this reality.
We can't have The only perfectly accurate model of reality is reality itself.
We can duplicate it without being a part of it.
So, we can use different theories to explain different levels of knowledge.
Well, yeah, but I mean, I still don't think that that solves the problem because if determinism is the theory, Then at the atomic level it's claiming that everything is causal, and so you then can't have a theory which would contradict that.
I mean, I agree with the causality, but I think that we don't know enough about the human mind to be able to come down on the side of either Determinism or free will.
There's lots of evidence for determinism, of course, in the physical nature of reality.
And there's lots of evidence for free will based on personal experience and the nature of human society and interaction.
So my standpoint is that we can come down.
I think it's premature to come down and say there's no such thing as free will or to come down and say that free will is X, Y, or Z. I think it's premature.
And at that, after two and a half hours, I think I'll certainly close off the discussion.
Thank you so much for everyone who's participated in it.
I still would like you to clarify, just a little thing here.
When you said, with determinism you cannot be moral, are you talking about persons specifically?
Because I would quite take umbrage if I'm being told that I cannot be moral.
Well, I mean, you can be umbrage if you like, but you can take umbrage if you like, but my position is that the theory of determinism is incompatible with morality.
So, is your position that I can't be moral?
Is that what you're saying right now?
Well, no. It's just not that you can't be moral.
There's no such thing.
It's like trying to apply the concept of morality to a rock.
It's not even remotely in the realm of things that you would apply to something.
The rock is not good or evil because its nature is not open to its own choice.
Its physical properties and behavior are completely determined by natural forces, and so you would not apply the concept of morality to a rock, and neither would you, if the world is causal, would apply that to a human being either.
But my will is causal.
So you're saying that I can't be moral.
You're saying this No, I'm simply saying that if the theory of determinism is true, and that everybody's behavior is determined ahead of time, then there's no possibility of...
Well, I mean, you can talk about morality, but it's illogical and inappropriate.
- What? - It's like asking what's the heartbeat of a cloud?
It's a concept transposition that doesn't make any sense.
I think it's quite an insulting statement.
I would rather you retract it.
Well, I'm not going to retract it because it's logical.
I mean, it's like asking me to retract 2 plus 2 is 4.
If everything's predetermined, you can't have moral responsibility.
I mean, that's just a fact. You can get mad at me if you like, but I'm not the one who's bringing up the theory of determinism here.
I am mad because you are stating that with determinism you cannot have morality.
Absolutely. That's like saying all Jews are evil.
That's like saying all Jews are evil, and then if I'm a Jew and I come to ask you, are you saying I'm evil?
No, I'm just saying that in reality the genetics of it is this and that.
Well, I'm not going to start discussing this because I think it's another kind of...
I mean, if you don't like the fact that if people don't have free will and all their behavior is determined ahead of time that they're not responsible for it, then I don't really know what to say.
I mean, just to me, morality and free will are bound together.
If people have a choice, then they're responsible for their actions.
If everything is determined ahead of time.
I didn't say I don't have free will.
Yeah, but the problem and the reason why I'm cutting this debate off, Francoise, is that everybody just keeps changing their story.
You say, well, there's determinism, and then I say, well, then there's no morality, and then you say, well, there is free will.
Sorry? I'm sorry?
Yeah, as I told you before, I'm a compatibilist.
But the point is I just want you to retract your statement.
Well, I mean, it's not up to me whether I retract my statement.
I mean, I have to get a better argument.
To me, compatibilism seems to turn out to just be wanting to have your cake and eat it, too.
To have determinism and yet have moral responsibility, I don't see how the two are compatible.
I wouldn't ascribe moral responsibility to a tree.
You cannot have... A tree is not volitional.
It's a very bad comparison.
No, it's perfectly valid comparison because everything that is in material reality is predetermined and therefore there's no such thing as volition.
And so that just wouldn't make any sense, right, to talk about morality from that standpoint.
It's a brain development.
Volition is a development of the brain.
Are you denying that the brains of human beings are more complex than that of badgers?
Well, see, when we get to this level of debate, it doesn't really interest me to continue because, I mean, obviously that's just baiting, right?
I mean, that's not really going to be doing anything productive.
So, look, I mean, I certainly do appreciate everybody's feedback on this.
It's been very interesting. I certainly think that I'm going to take a break from debating with compatibilists for a while because it does seem to go round and round in circles.
And it's... But I still want you to retract your statement.
Oh, I understand that you want me to retract my statement, but I'm not going to retract my statement, because that would be dishonest of me.
I mean, certainly if I find out that I'm incorrect about this approach, then I will certainly apologize and change my position, but I'm not going to retract my statement when I believe I have logical reasons for what it is that I'm saying.
So I'm certainly not saying anything about you.
I'm simply saying something about the theory that's being put forward.
I don't know much about your moral nature, so I wouldn't hazard a guess.
I understand that you're very interested in morality.
I hugely respect that.
But we're simply talking about determinism here, not you, right?
So, I mean, that's just my particular position there.
So I'm not saying anything about you in particular.
I am a determined being.
I'm a material being.
You are talking about me indirectly.
Well, then the great thing about this, and where I'll end up here, Francois, is that the great thing about determinism is that whether or not I'm going to retract my statement has been determined since the dawn of time, so there's no need to ask for me to do it.
So thanks so much for everyone.
You don't know what's going to happen.
Well, I'll tell you what's going to happen right now.
If I'm going to end the conversation, we can talk about it another time, because my dinner is ready.
So thank you so much for everyone listening.
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