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July 5, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
37:56
314 Fudging Free Will

The logical consequences of determinism - like it or not!

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Good morning, everybody.
It's Steph. I hope you're doing well. Dang, I forgot to check the date.
Well, it's Wednesday, and it's July the 6th, 2006?
Let me like that. Anyway, so I'm going to rant today.
This is going to be a genuine, unadulterated rant, so if you don't like the rants, this may not be the one for you, which is fine.
Of course, everyone has their own particular tastes, and this was not a topic that I was going to deal with, because heaven sent to Betsy, we know that it's been dealt with a number of times before, but it's really, really sticking in my craw, and what that does is it makes me suspicious about myself.
I mean, this is a topic that has really angered and frustrated me.
And what that means for myself is that I am invested in it emotionally.
And that doesn't mean anything good or bad.
It's an important thing to be aware of.
And the first thing that I did want to check with myself is, was I taking a religious approach?
to this particular problem.
And what I mean by that is that if I have a particular belief set which I've invested a lot of emotional energy into, like people do with faith, And then I start to come up against evidence against it.
Do I simply say, well, that's all well and good, but I find this is very important to my life, this is very important to my happiness, this is very important to everything that I can conceive of as pertaining to value and meaning and so on, and therefore I am simply going to reject the argument because the argument threatens...
My sense of happiness and value.
That is what I've really been examining myself in.
And so what I decided to do was I decided to do a little thought experiment.
And I'm certainly open to the possibility that I am being old-fashioned, cantankerous, reactive, and emotional, and not logical.
There's nothing wrong with all those other things as long as you're logical.
But what I tried to do, and of course the debate is around free will.
I'm sure that's no shock to me.
This is an absolutely massively popular topic on the board, and there are some very able logicians and people with a great degree of knowledge and more knowledge than I had about the deterministic side of things who are making excellent cases and so on.
And so I tried a little thought experiment with them.
And this is not manipulative because this is genuinely how I approach intellectual topics.
But what I wanted to do, and this is a very interesting thing for you to try yourself, If you find yourself being irritated in a debate, it can be a very good thing to simply try this approach of being very, very humble.
Absolutely humble. So, with this debate in free will that's going on, I've never been able to get any satisfactory answers to a bunch of questions, which I'll get into in a little bit.
And what I wanted to do when talking about free will was I wanted to find out the degree of intellectual humility on the other side of the debate.
And so what I did was I said, look, I'm really trying to get it.
I'm having a great deal of problems with it.
I'm not understanding it, blah, blah, blah.
And... What I wanted to find out was whether people would say, well, sure, that makes sense because it's not a topic which has been proven on either side.
And that to me is an important thing.
If you're arguing with someone, if you feel like you're dealing with people who aren't respecting your intellect, I don't really generally like to debate with people who don't respect my intellect because I generally respect the intellect of other people quite a bit.
I think that people are very smart.
And I don't just mean people with degrees and all that kind of stuff.
I think just about everyone is very smart.
And so I generally don't like to get involved in that, because it very quickly becomes not about the topics, but about self-aggrandizement in a false self and petty kind of way.
And I'm not accusing all these people of doing this, the people who are debating the determinist position.
But I was curious the degree to which, if I simply said, I'm striving to understand this, I'm having a great deal of difficulty, perhaps you can explain...
These simple things to me.
These simple things to me about the determinist position.
And I wanted to find out if they would say, well, there are no answers to these simple things.
Then I would really respect that.
There are no answers to these simple things.
Or there are certainly no simple answers to these simple things.
And, of course, that's not what I got back, right?
So I'd say, I'm really, really having trouble.
Can you explain to me this simple thing?
And what I got back was, well, you know, maybe you're overcomplicating it.
I'm going to try another metaphor to see if it helps you understand it, that kind of stuff.
So I really did get back quite a bit of stuff around...
And you can see this trace on the board.
I think it's free will in a deterministic teacup.
That's right, free will in a deterministic teacup.
And this free will versus deterministic debate has been going on for thousands and thousands of years.
So it's going to be hard to add anything new to the debate.
And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that.
It's going to be hard to add anything new to the debate.
Certainly science has not clinched the matter, right?
I mean, scientists have not clinched the matter in terms of proving that everything that happens to a human being is dependent upon something that happens before, and that it's just a very complicated thing.
So, I'll run over some of the thoughts that I've had.
And the irritations that I have with the people who are arguing the determinist position.
And I think the irritations are helpful myself.
I think it's important to understand when you feel irritated.
It doesn't mean that you're right, but it's an important clue as to what's happening when you're debating someone.
Now, I've sort of asked for a couple of basic things about free will versus determinism.
The first thing that I've asked for is, tell me what changes.
Tell me what changes when you become somebody who believes in determinism versus free will.
How do your actions change?
That's sort of an important thing.
If I am a religious person, and I go to church, and I praise God, and I say grace, and so on, and then I become an atheist, well, some of my behaviors are going to change, right?
Some of my behaviors are going to change.
And what I've never understood, and what is constantly...
I constantly get fogged upon me whenever I ask for clear definitions of this from the determinists, which makes me a little suspicious, whether it's an intellectual exercise or a living and breathing philosophy, actually makes me a little bit more suspicious, I guess you could say, is the following.
Okay, what changes when I become a determinist?
Because, logically, there's things that would change.
If I become a determinist.
Obviously, there can be no such thing as moral judgment, because everything is prescripted.
Moral judgment is something that you would have to stop.
So I would stop having moral judgments, or I would fight moral judgments the same way that I would fight The impulse to believe in a god or I would fight going to church or I would fight getting on my knees to pray or saying grace.
I would fight those impulses if I became an atheist from a religious standpoint.
I would fight those impulses as impulses towards error.
Or if I was a person who had a real problem with his temper, then I would fight anger or irrational irascibility.
I would fight all of that as an error.
And if I was an alcoholic, then I would fight the desire to drink like crazy, right?
I would stay away from temptation.
So if I became a determinist, then moral judgments would be false.
They would be something you would have to fight as an error within your own personality, within your own nature.
Pride would be something you would have to fight, and love would have to be something that you would have to fight, because love would be a preference for one person over another based on their actions, but they would not be responsible for their actions.
Personal responsibility would be something that you would have to fight.
Responsibility that you would project onto others for their actions would be something you would have to fight.
So these are all, now I know, and I, you know, please try and fight this impulse if you're a determinist.
I've gone through these arguments pretty solidly.
I've read quite a bit about free will and determinism over the past 20 years.
This has been a debate that's been going on for thousands of years.
No single determinist has ever come up with an argument that is valid.
That says, oh yeah, everything's determined, but we're still responsible, right?
I mean, we are puppets, but if one puppet knocks another puppet over the head, we don't send the first puppet to jail, right?
Because it's just moving the strings, right?
So, you simply, you can't get around it.
And it makes me very suspicious, and I'll sort of get to that in a little bit, when the determinists don't accept the natural and logical results of their own position.
So, what would change?
And so I've asked people, what is going to change If you become a determinist.
And I get back a little bit like, well, I've become a little bit more forgiving.
I've become a little bit more accepting.
And it's like, well, that's great.
I mean, there's nothing wrong with that, except forgiveness sometimes, I think, is not a virtue, but instead a vice.
But I think I've mentioned that a couple of times before.
If you're really curious, I'll talk about it again.
But I haven't actually found out what has changed In someone's life.
And so somebody could easily say to me, well, what changed when you became an anarchist?
Well, I'll tell you.
I stopped watching the media.
I started writing like a crazed mad demon over an article a week for the past year, year and a half.
I started getting published on lewrockwell.com.
I started doing these podcasts because it all came together for me.
And that changed. If somebody said, well, what changed when you went through therapy?
I was like, well, I went in as a girl guide and I came out as a man.
And, you know, that's quite a...
I had to get new outfits. There's no merit badge for cross-gender stuff, so I had to drop out of that.
But what came out of therapy?
Well, I broke up with my girlfriend of seven years and fiancé.
I stopped seeing my mother.
I stopped seeing my brother.
I left my career.
I took almost two years off.
Yes, things changed quite a bit.
And so it was externally measurable what changed.
But the problem with determinism is every time I point out the logical consequences of no moral judgments, no pride, no love, no virtue, no vice, no prisons, no evil, no good, none of that kind of stuff, then people say, they sort of back down from that, and we'll get to that in a minute or two, but they say, well, but you have to live as if you have free will.
See, it's like there's this play that's scripted, but somebody's whispering the lines into your ear as you go, so you don't know what's coming next.
And so, basically, the whole point of certain aspects of the deterministic debate seem to be this.
Well, I think it's kind of funny.
I have a guess as to why people take on a deterministic position, but I'm not going to talk about it just yet, because I'm still working on it, and I don't want to cloud this particular aspect of the debate by talking about yo mama.
I'm just talking about interpersonal aspects, which I'm still working on.
But if somebody can't tell me how things are going to change, then it seems hard for me to understand why you would bother debating it.
It seems completely at odds with the point of how we spend our time in our short sojourn in the material world.
I just can't figure it out.
Life is very short.
Debate time is very, very short.
And so if people don't like the consequences of determinism, who are actually arguing for determinism, Then I find the whole thing rather pointless.
And people say to me, well, determinism is true, but we lack all the knowledge, so you have to act as if you have free will anyway.
It's like, well, why can't I use Occam's razor and just believe in free will?
And I know that people are going to say, well, you have to prove the existence of free will.
And I understand that. And my position is on this.
I've mentioned this before, so I'll keep it brief.
My position is basically this.
I don't know how the brain does what it does.
Nobody does. Nobody has, and I'm guessing nobody will for quite some time.
The brain is the most magnificent organ in the universe.
It is completely unique within all of material objects.
It is matter and energy.
There's nothing supernatural about the brain that I know of or that has been proven, and I would be shocked if there were some other dimensional ghost in the machine, but it's a purely material object.
It is absolutely unique in the universe.
There is no other, and I know that the argument from evolution comes up, and we'll get to that in a sec.
There's no other piece of matter that does what the brain does, that writes symphonies and writes plays and writes songs and understands black holes and measures the speed of receding galaxies 100 billion light years away and dreams every night and has aspirations and drives cars and podcasts and has incredible language skills and math skills and reasoning skills and I mean,
and can figure out somebody's personality within three or four seconds and provides guides in terms of emotions that even contradict the base logical principles the conscious mind holds.
There is absolutely no other thing in the universe that is as glorious and magnificent and beautiful and wonderful and treasurous as the human mind.
So the problem is when people say, well, you see, it's like weather.
No, it's not like weather.
It's really not like weather, and you need to work for this empirically.
If you claim to be scientific and you claim to be logical, you need to work empirically.
And the first thing that you need to work from when it comes to understanding the human mind is it ain't like anything else.
There's nothing else like it.
Nothing, nothing, nothing.
Yes, the weather is very complex, but the weather doesn't write a symphony.
And so somebody gave a metaphor and said, okay, well, if you want to understand how we process cause and effect, if you program a jeep to cross a desert, you put a program in the jeep that moves the steering wheel to cross a desert, you're going to say, well, program it to go for the gullies between the dunes, and it doesn't have a map of the desert, it's just working on sensual evidence.
And so it's constantly adjusting itself based on that program to cross the desert.
And therefore... It seems to be choosing between different paths.
It's constantly adjusting itself as it drives across the desert, but it's completely causal.
There's no free will in it.
Of course, I absolutely agree with it, but this is the whole problem with the arguments for determinism.
There is, if you program a beetle to cross a desert, which is a very large view of what, sorry, a jeep, it's what a beetle does, right?
A beetle can cross a number of obstacles and get over them.
But a beetle is not the human mind.
The beetle can't write a symphony, right?
The beetle can't design a helicopter.
A beetle can't learn another language.
And so the problem is that whenever people reduce the human mind to something which everything else does, and says, well, you see, that's acausal, well, of course, I totally understand that.
But that's not what the human mind is.
At all. There's no other system in the universe which takes an enormous amount of variables and comes out with a symphony, and comes out with language, and comes out with dreams, and comes out with abstract reasoning, comes out with all of the stuff that the human brain regularly does on a daily basis, continually.
There is no other system in the world, and you can say, well, yes, evolution, and evolution takes simple things and makes them complex, and so and so and so.
I understand that. I fully understand that.
Everything in evolution is a step up from what came before, but the human mind creates a...
Mozart is five years old, writing a symphony in two days.
Evolution doesn't sort of pop up a species, twirl it around, see if it fits, get rid of it, pop up another one, turn it around, see if it fits, all within the space of a day or two.
It doesn't do that.
The human mind does that.
And again, I'm not saying the human mind is a product of evolution.
But it's a freaky-ass product of evolution that has no particular precedence from what came before it.
Yes, everything else has a consciousness and a mind and a brain of some kind, and you can see a progression.
But there is a quantum leap with the human mind, and we don't know what the hell has caused that quantum leap.
We really, really don't.
And I, for one, am willing to admit this.
And this is why this argument irritates me.
Because I don't like when people claim a knowledge that they don't have.
So when someone says to me, and says, well, determinism is true, they come across to me exactly as a religious person would in the Middle Ages.
Because the first thing that you have to admit, if you want to be a rigorous and honest philosopher, is that you don't know what you don't know.
Right? I don't disbelieve in God because I've had some evidence or some experiment.
I disbelieve in God because the idea is innately contradictory.
It is consciousness without matter, it's omniscience and omnipotence altogether, it is being without form, and even if God did exist, he or she wouldn't be moral, and so there's all of these, and this is podcast, I don't know, 13 I think it is, but I disbelieve in God because the whole idea is contradictory.
Now, I don't disbelieve in determinism because the idea itself is not contradictory.
I mean, so it's definitely a step up from religion in that standpoint.
But what I'm saying is that if you're in the Middle Ages and you're debating about whether the sun goes around the earth or the earth goes around the sun, and you're debating it on a board without going to measure the shadows of two sticks in different places and the curvature of the earth, which you can figure out by sailing and all of these things, which you can work out, if you are debating these things in an abstract, dry, scholastic kind of way, you're really not going to get very far.
You're going to feel like you're getting somewhere, but you're absolutely not.
Because you're claiming a knowledge that you just don't have.
Without any measurements, without any experiments, and I know that there are experiments with determinism, this and that, but they're certainly not conclusive at all.
Because the final experiment for determinism is to predict human behavior, and that has never been achieved.
And they say, well, there's too many variables, and that's fine, but that's the same as saying you don't know.
Yes, everything else in the universe is determined.
Everything else in the universe is causal.
But the human mind does things which nothing else in the universe does which indicate a causality.
And I don't know what that means, and I don't know where it comes from, so don't hound me with those questions.
But I'm willing to admit that this incredibly glorious product of natural selection, this incredible quantum leap of consciousness, artistic, scientific power, language power, I don't know what makes it tick.
I don't know whether it has free will or not.
It sure feels like we have free will, and when you look around the world at advertisers and propagandists and educators and parents and governments, they all seem to indicate that human beings have free will.
The entire emotional structure of human beings is predicated on the idea of free will.
But maybe that's all false.
I have no problem with that.
Everyone, well, not everyone, but a lot of people used to believe in God and they were wrong, so maybe it's all false.
Maybe our entire emotional apparatus, the entire structure of society, any kind of moral system, any kind of punishment system or behavior redirect system based on wanting someone to do something different than what they do, right, which is Anti-deterministic, right? The moment you wanted someone to do something that they're not already doing, then you're anti-deterministic because you want them to change their behavior, but whether they do or don't change their behavior is completely foreordained.
And then people say, well, but you don't want to confuse determinism with fatalism.
Which to me is just a linguistic game.
If things are determined, then they're faded.
And I'm not saying faded in some external manner, but this is a 2,000-year-old debate or a 3,000-year-old debate.
It's been worked over.
If something is predetermined, if everything is causal...
Then everything is fated.
Everything that happens is fated.
So then people say, well, you don't want to, and then I say, well, why would you go to a doctor?
It's like, well, but you don't know, and that's just passivity, that's just fatalism, and whatever's going to happen is going to happen, and you don't try and act.
It's like, yeah, but you only try and act because you want to change the outcome.
And if the outcome is predetermined, then you can't change it.
Anyway, I mean, this is all just...
And I don't mind the determinist position.
I just want some consistency.
That's all I'm asking for.
I want to know what changes when you become a determinist.
Now, if someone comes to me and says, I believe in determinism, and I say, well, what has changed since you became a determinist?
And they say, well, I'll tell you what I've done.
I've started a blog wherein I say the Holocaust was not evil.
Wherein I say pedophilia is not evil.
Wherein I say child beating is not evil.
Wherein I say the Armenian Genocide was not evil.
Hitler was not evil.
The war in Iraq is not a problem.
Now, if somebody starts a blog with that and starts submitting articles and starts really taking that argument to its logical conclusion, determinism to its logical conclusion, wherein somebody says, I no longer try to have any pride or love or feelings of desire or anything like that, because all of that is just emotional trickery.
It's all a sham. And I put my ideas out there simply because that's just what I like to do.
I don't really engage in debates with people because the outcome of that debate is preordained.
And so it's like two television sets trying to talk to each other.
It really doesn't make any sense because the opinions that someone comes out with from that debate are preordained.
And I know, I know, and this is what makes me irritated is that everyone's going to say who's a determinist.
No, no, no, it's not that way at all.
You're trying to put new input into their system, and you're trying to change this, and you're trying to say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Don't say determinism and then say you can change people's minds, right?
That's just nonsense. Don't just say, well, you're just another variable, right?
So somebody gave me an example on the boards of saying, well, your boss wants to give you a raise, and that's their action.
And then someone comes in and says to them, well, Steph has been stealing from the company.
And then he says, okay, well, I'm not going to give him a raise.
I'm going to fire him. And so they're saying, well, this guy's like a carbon atom and then a hydrogen atom hits them, which is this new information, so then he goes off in a new direction.
So he's had a new input and therefore his behavior changed, and I fully understand that.
But it's not new input.
There really can be no new input.
There can be no input because the person who's decided to tell my boss that I'm stealing from the company is not willing that either.
They're not choosing that either. That's just their behavior.
It's absolutely like atoms moving around.
We wouldn't say there's any new input in an air full of oxygen where the atoms are bouncing around, or a room full of oxygen or air where the atoms are bouncing.
We wouldn't say there's some new input there.
No, there has to be a new input that comes from outside.
And if everything is causal, then there can be no input that comes from outside of causality.
So, the problem that I have is that I really, I mean, I would really respect people if they accepted the natural conclusions of determinism and said, yeah, of course there are no ethics.
Of course there's no reason to try and change people's minds.
Of course I shouldn't discipline my children.
Everything is determined.
I can do it or not do it.
There's no reason to do it or not do it.
So one guy was saying, well, if I attempt to correct the behavior of my child because my child is doing something that I don't want him or her to do, then I apply these sanctions and then the behavior of the child changes and so on.
It's like, yeah, but it would be completely irrational to say my child is doing something that I don't want my child to do.
Because what your child is doing and what your child is going to do next is entirely causal.
And if you then say, well, but I want my child to change his behavior to fully conform or conform with my values so I provide new arguments, new input, well, then we're perfectly on the same page.
And we got there, right?
And we did get there where somebody who was arguing the deterministic position said, yes, but I want to provide a new input to change my child's behavior to have that child behave in a way that's more in conformity with my values and so on.
Then I said, okay, well, we're using the same word for different things.
You call it determinism, I call it free will, because that's what I'm trying to do.
If you can do that, if you can apply new arguments or insights to people or give them that in an attempt to change their way of thinking and consequently their behavior, fantastic.
Then the podcast makes sense, the whole Free Domain Radio Board makes sense.
My wife is not a charlatan, right?
So my wife is a psychologist, and therefore she is attempting to change people's behavior through an appeal to a more rational approach to life.
And so she is appealing to their capacity to change and evaluate new information.
And, of course, if determinism is true, then her profession is a...
She's a charlatan, right?
She's a thief, right?
Because she's then attempting to change people's minds, and they can't change their minds because they're programmed to simply respond to stimuli.
And so she might be going through the motions of trying to change their mind, but it's all foreordained, and therefore her profession is a lie.
And then I know people are going to say, no, it's not that way at all.
And it's like, no, no, no, no, no.
It is that way. It is that way.
You might not like the consequences of determinism, but that means to me that you just don't believe in it.
So, if somebody is going to do all of these things and go on public record and say very openly that pedophilia is not evil, that all jails, all punishment, all sanctions, all moral judgments, all criteria, most if not all of human emotions are absolutely false and should be fought tooth and nail as illusions, right? It's the same way that we fight the illusion that the state is moral or that slavery is good or that...
I don't know. Women should be beaten.
I mean, these are all illusions that we fight or corruptions that we fight.
And if somebody is willing to go on record with the logical consequences of determinism, I would be really impressed.
I would be really impressed if somebody were openly to say, yeah, well, you can't judge the Holocaust as evil.
You can't judge genocide as evil.
You can't judge punching children as evil because it's simply causal.
Something happened to cause it.
Any more than if somebody punches you in their sleep, then that's not their choice.
They think they're fighting some devil in their dream and they punch you.
You may say, hey, but you're not going to say I'm going to press charges against you because obviously this would be a no-free-will situation.
And so that would be all of life, right?
Whatever violence occurs is people punching each other in their sleep because we are all determined.
All of our behavior is foreordained from the Big Bang onwards.
And so all I'm asking for is for people to be consistent with that and to stop screwing around with all of this bullshit, frankly.
About, well, okay, it's determined, but you still feel, it feels like you have choice, and there's inputs, and you want to alter people's inputs, and you're reprogramming the jeep, and so on.
It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
No, no, no, no, no.
That's not how it is.
That's, I mean, this is, you just go read all the debates.
There's been no good answer to this, and it's logically impossible to blame people if they don't have a choice.
As I said before, blaming somebody for the evil they commit, if there's such a thing as determinism, is like blaming a piano that falls off a building for killing a guy.
You don't put the piano on trial, right?
Because it's just gravity.
It's all causal. So if you don't feel comfortable with giving up all moral judgments and saying that there is no such thing as evil, then you have a problem with your own philosophy, and therefore not only is it illogical, but I'm not really going to respect your position.
And if you can't answer basic, simple questions, right?
I put myself out there.
I put myself out there on record from now until the day I die, and for many years beyond, if anyone cares about that standard of reputation, I put myself out there.
And I say, yeah, the military is evil.
Yes, people who go and kill each other for money are evil.
Yes, the state is evil.
Yes, your parents are very likely corrupt.
Yes, you need to get rid of your family of origin if it is corrupt and you can't help people to fix it or sort it out.
I put myself out there in terms of my beliefs in a way that is challenging and I think, you know, verges on bravery from time to time.
So my particular preference would be, hey, put yourself out there.
Put yourself on record. You know, write it down.
Podcast it. Write articles.
Put yourself on record about your particular beliefs on determinism and the lack of moral judgment that's possible, or lack of validity of moral judgment.
Just put yourself on record.
Put some skin in the game.
Stop making it so abstract.
So the fundamental paradox that I have, and I'll sort of put out an offer to the determinists at the end of this because I don't want to monopolize the conversation.
So the fundamental problem that I have is this really, really, really irritating seesaw that I see going on with free will versus determinism.
So, when people say, oh yeah, well, determinism, blah blah blah, everything is caused, and so on, then I say, oh, okay, well then these would be the logical consequences of that.
And they say, no, no, no, no, no.
You can still make moral judgments, you can still discipline your child, you can still do this, you can still do that.
Oh, okay, so then it's exactly the same as believing in free will.
No, no, no, no, because it's deterministic.
Oh, okay, so if it's deterministic, then we have to, you know, stop doing this, we have to start opposing this, we can't have pride, we can't have love.
No, no, no, no, you can still have all of those.
Oh, so then it's exactly the same as free will.
No, no, no, no, no, it's determinism.
Determinism being what again?
Everything is causal.
It's caused by what came before.
Okay, so if that's the case, then there's no such thing as personal responsibility because everything is caused by what came before and therefore nobody can be responsible for what comes next.
It is simply a chain of causality.
So there's no such thing as personal responsibility or the responsibility of other people.
No, no, no, no, no. You still have personal responsibility, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, well, Jesus Christ, can you make your mind up?
If it's like, well, you see, there's this thing called determinism, which in practice looks exactly the same as free will.
Everything is caused, but all of the logical consequences of everything being caused is completely rejected.
So, everything is determined, but you shouldn't believe in fatalism, you can still have moral judgments, you can still have punishment, you can still discipline your children, you can still try and argue with people, you can still try and change people's minds, you can still do this, you can still do that.
It's like, well, goddammit, isn't that just the same as free will?
I mean, my god, what a complete waste of time!
Everything is determined, but you have to act as if you have free will.
Well, what the hell was the point of all of that?
And what the hell is the point of something called determinism if it turns out that you have to act as if you have free will anyway?
So, anyway, listen, I don't want to monopolize the debate.
I'll certainly put this out there to the determinists who listen to this and to the determinists on the board.
I've talked with one of them, so I'm pretty sure I know where that person's coming from, and I'll sort of open it up to a single or any group of other determinists who would like to debate this topic, and maybe if I'm making all of these catastrophic errors, help to put me straight.
I would really appreciate that, but this sort of gives you a framework of where I'm coming from.
I need to know what's different about determinism.
I need to know that if determinism turns out to be exactly the same as free will, but called determinism, then to me the debate is just sort of pointless.
And also, I have a fair amount of intellectual humility in this area, simply because...
I openly admit that I don't know whether it's free will or determinism.
It could well turn out to be determinism when they finally do the experiment a thousand years from now.
Of course, you can never say never in the scientific realm.
It could completely and totally turn out to be determinism, but there's no way to know that just now.
And I'm not willing, sort of fundamentally, I don't think it's logical, To extrapolate all of the properties of matter to the human mind.
I know that everything is causal prior to, but the human mind is unique.
The first thing you have to do is recognize that something very, very unusual relative to all of the rest of matter is going on in the human mind.
And so, I just don't think that you can say that everything is causal when you have something which appears.
Absolutely on the surface it feels like it's absolutely a-causal.
I think just saying, well, it's causal, is jumping the gun.
And I think we need to examine more of the properties of the mind to figure out if there's some possibility of self-generating intellectual activity, self-generating electrical activity, Maybe there's something down at the quark level.
Maybe there's some quantum variability that allows this electrical and biochemical energy to reflect and choose.
Maybe. Maybe this will be proven at some point, and I think that we'd get some pretty cool computers out of that.
But right now, we don't have enough knowledge, and it's not valid because...
I mean, just using the scientific method, it's not valid to...
It would be exactly the same as saying, well, nothing is alive, and here we have a living organism, so we're going to take all the principles of nothing that's alive and apply it to all the principles of something that is alive, and say that...
This thing that is moving is moving exactly the same way that the wave on a sea moves, and there's no goal direction, there's no choice, I mean, at the very basic cellular level, that they pursue things that they like and that they avoid things that they don't like.
So it would not be valid to take the principles of inanimate matter and project them onto animate matter, which is why we divide science into physics, the inanimate matter, and biology, which is the animate matter.
When it has different rules, right?
So I think that there's everything else, and then there's the human mind, which is unique, and we need to sort of figure out what the rules are, and maybe they are completely determined, and maybe it's just a matter of figuring out all the variables, but then the conclusions will still be the same, that you can't blame anyone for anything, and there's no such thing as personal responsibility.
And so that's sort of my position that I just don't know, and I absolutely dislike The idea that we can claim knowledge which we don't have in advance of us having it, and we can come to conclusions.
To me, that's exactly the same as saying, well, the volcano is belching forth fire because the fire god is angry, and you think you have some sort of answer, but it's just a kind of superstition, and to me that's what determinism is.
And, of course, to me it's very much the same as the Christians who say we have free will and things aren't determined because we have the soul.
The soul is non-material and therefore it can break out of the causality of material objects.
That, to me, is a kind of superstition.
And people who say...
Well, we are determined, and I know that because I'm taking all of the principles of non-mind matter and applying them to mind matter, and that to me is exactly the same.
It's an exactly the same kind of non-answer that I think does not do a lot of good in terms of helping advance human knowledge.
Anyway, I'll put that out there.
Send me an email. I would be more than happy to debate one or a group or as many as you like with the free will versus determinism thing.
Or I guess you could say with the I know versus I don't know.
I'm definitely coming from the I don't know camp when it comes to the human mind.
And I would be more than happy to debate that.
And so just send me an email.
Let's have it out because I'm finding this debate really going in circles and it's very frustrating.
Because I just feel like people say, well, this is determinism, and when you dig into the conclusions, it turns out that they're exactly the same as free will.
So I think that something else is going on there, and I'll sort of talk about that perhaps another time psychologically, but I think that I would be more than happy to debate this if people are interested, and if they want to get into the debate, let's do it live rather than on the boards, which is kind of laborious and is giving us all carpal tunnel.
So thanks so much for listening, as always.
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