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July 25, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:00
345 Science And Free Will Part 1

Some criteria for framing the debate...

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Time Text
Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. Good morning to our docket determinists on the board who have responded to some posts that I put up the other day because they kept saying that there was no particularly strong arguments that had been put forward for the free will side of the debate.
So I posted 13 arguments which are helpful in Indicating that the free will position is something which can be taken with some seriousness, although I would not say that they individually, you could say perhaps collectively, but I would not say that individually they clinched the argument.
It's 8.35 on July the 23rd, I think, 2006.
And so, we're going to go through these, but the first thing I'll say is that I have been deliberately provocative to the determinists, and I very rarely post anything sharp, and I do have a temper, no question, and I've always said that I think that's a healthy thing, so I don't think I'm acting out of any kind of...
I'm not out of any kind of inconsistency here, but when people would rant at me about my free will perspective, right, those who are determinists would rant at me, I would sort of be a little bit provocative and sharper than I normally would because I was curious to see the response, right? This is a group that says that everything that happens is predetermined, and therefore it should not be the case that they get really angry at my opinions, right?
Because I'm not responsible for my opinions, so getting angry at me would be illogical.
So I've been sharper than I normally would in this debate because I'm kind of curious.
Look, I've already said that the stakes for the free will versus determinism argument are very high for me, right?
Because my whole podcasting is based on it.
And my love for Christina, my pride in what I've done with my life, my joy in a wide, wide variety of things, self-esteem, and also anger, which I enjoy as well.
When it's healthy and directed at the right target, it would mean that my past feelings of anger towards my mother would have been irrational.
And so I've certainly put forward that the stakes are very high.
I'd like to know why the stakes are so high on the determinist side, but I don't think I'm going to get any of that because they're staying...
On the intellectual side of the debate, which I understand, it just would be a little bit more, I think, human to sort of find out why on their side it's so important.
I've certainly put forward why it's so important for me.
So when people reject the free will arguments, I do perceive it to some degree as an attack upon Everything that I value and just about everything that brings me joy in my life, which doesn't have anything to do with the truth value, but it certainly does mean that I hold the right to get angry at these debates, which doesn't have anything to do with whether they're true or not, of course.
But I was deliberately provocative towards one gentleman on the board, because everyone had said to me, and you may have heard it on the...
You may have heard it on the debate on Sunday.
Everybody has said to me, no, no, no, no.
We weren't being aggressive towards you.
We weren't being condescending.
We were, you know, it's all in your head, basically.
Of course, this is whatever happens when you point out other people's bad behavior if they deny it and call you crazy, right?
That's just... You could say that's determined.
But I guess I can't really blame the determinists for it because their defensiveness is not their choice, right?
It's not their responsibility. But anyway, so I put this stuff on the board where I sort of went through just one set of posts and combed out, I don't know, half a dozen or so condescending or snarky or bitchy kinds of comments or insults towards me from determinists.
And, of course, I haven't heard anything back about that because they're very interested in facts but not in evidence.
But one gentleman got very angry and flamed me, and I sort of posted back, and I said, well, I understand that you're angry, and I have no problem with you being angry if you're into free will.
But if you're into determinism, it really undermines your whole position, right?
If you get angry at someone for having beliefs that they have no control over, then you don't really believe in determinism.
I will hold this to be a self-evident fact until the day that I die.
You simply can't do that.
It's like trying to reason with a gnat that's going to sting you.
It's sort of ridiculous.
The gnat's going to do what it's going to do.
Reasoning with it is kind of ridiculous.
Unless you say that the gnat has some capacity to change its behavior based on your reasoning, that's what I want to know.
Is this the case or not?
But this gentleman then wrote back to me with an analogy that I find to be quite interesting.
And then we'll talk a little bit more about the 13 points, which help support the free will side of things.
And again, I'm not saying that I have a proof of free will, but I think that there's some very strong evidence for it.
So this gentleman wrote back to me and he said, okay, here's an analogy, right?
And when people argue by analogy rather than syllogism, it's always a little tricky.
But anyway, let's have a look at the analogy.
He said, suppose that you're swimming off the waters off Australia, and a great white shark comes along and bites you in half.
Well, imagine that you know that the shark is just doing what it's doing, and it has no volitional control, and it's not evil, and yet you are still going to be angry at the shark.
It's just an involuntary reaction.
Now that to me is quite fascinating, because...
Talk about an argument from extremes.
I'm not biting his leg off.
I'm not biting him in half.
I'm not murdering him.
I'm not killing him.
I'm simply pointing out that there are some contradictions in the level of temper and the level of bitchiness that certain aspects of certain determinist argument bring to bear upon the table.
And then him saying, well, I would get angry at a great white shark that bit me in half, I think is a little disproportionate to what it is that I'm saying, which is that I have some logical reservations to the determinist position.
And I explained them.
Now, I do think it's kind of funny.
And I'm going to return with another analogy, just so it's a little bit more clear why I think it's funny.
This is not a proof of anything.
This is just so you can understand my perspective.
So, if I'm in the woods and I'm telling you that I am completely at peace with nature, that I understand why every living creature does what it does, And I have no problem with anything that living creatures do.
And I go on and on and on, like literally for days.
We're on a hike and I keep going on about how Zen I am.
I'm at peace with nature. I'm in touch with nature.
And then suddenly I see a mosquito on my arm that's taking some of my blood.
And I scream out the wildest curses, jump up and down.
And call it a goddamn MF, this, that, or the other.
I mean, this is not the terms that were applied to me, but just so you can...
I'm using a sort of slight argument from extreme, although not nearly as extreme as the biting in half thing.
Well, would you necessarily think that my perspective on being at one with nature was something that should be taken seriously or something that should not be taken seriously?
If I'm supposed to be such a Zen Buddhist, one with nature, peace through everything, and then the moment I get bitten by a mosquito, I jump up and down and get really angry and have a rant about how bad this mosquito is, would you at least have some questions about the degree to which I was bullshitting you about my philosophy?
Like when it came to, if you say that everything is determined, and then when you reach some opposition to this principle, which has some, I think, fairly decent arguments.
I think that I'm a fairly smart guy, and I think I have some fairly decent arguments.
And if you reach this kind of opposition and you just get angry, while at the same time claiming that everything is determined, therefore there's no reason to get angry at minor things, right?
I mean, obviously. If you just get angry at opposition, even though you claim that that opposition is not that person's fault, then if you say...
And the only way that you can do that is you can say that free will is an illusion to people.
Free will is an illusion.
And you've pierced that illusion and you now know that everybody's behavior is determined and nobody's responsible for what they do, then if you continually get angry at people who disagree with you, you're very much like the guy preaching Zen in the woods who jumps up and down and screams at the bug that stings him.
It's just hard to take it seriously.
And what you do, of course, come to as a conclusion in this kind of area is, at the very least, even if the argument is true, the person doesn't really live it.
And if the belief is not lived, but it is argued for, then that's what technically, to use a Latin phrase, we would call rank hypocrisy.
I mean, I'm not making this stuff up.
This is not just me being mean.
It's just a basic fact that if you don't live what you preach, you're a hypocrite.
And that doesn't mean that what you preach is wrong, but it does mean that you don't believe it.
Right? So, in a realm where there is no proof, i.e.
free will versus determinism, where there's simply evidence on both sides, but nothing conclusive, What I tend to do is, and this is perfectly consistent with what I've argued in the past, because what I've argued in the past is that if you want to bring people over to the side of freedom and liberty and independence and rationality and so on, And this is nothing to do with determinism.
This is simply me talking about my prior methodology for conversions, you could say.
Then you don't talk to them about ideas.
What you do is you show them that you're very happy.
You show them a superior kind of wisdom.
You show them a superior kind of joy.
You show them a superior kind of self-esteem and self-content...
Sorry, self-contentment and so on.
And from that, people will be curious about what you've got that makes your life so great.
I mean, that's sort of what I would experience.
And it's not a sales job.
You genuinely have to earn that kind of joy and peace of mind and self-esteem and so on.
But once you have it, people will be drawn to find out what you've got.
And so this is something that I would be curious about when I see other people's beliefs.
This is something I'm always curious about, which is what's their emotional experience of their life?
Do they seem to be happy?
Do they seem to have joy?
Do they seem to have great relationships?
Do they seem to be professionally successful in whatever they're turning their hand to, whatever gives them joy?
Or are they on their way to that?
And that has a lot to do with things for me.
The first thing that you want to do when you talk to a doctor who says, I can cure everything, and see this is what philosophy is all about.
Philosophy says, as far as happiness goes, I can cure everything.
I can even cure terminal illness, right?
Because I can help give you peace of mind and acceptance of inevitabilities.
So when a doctor says, I can cure everything, which is what every thinker is basically saying, and it's a very fundamental thing to understand about communicating about base ideas, especially such base ideas as determinism versus free will, that you're claiming to...
To cure everything, right?
Now, if you're claiming to cure everything, if you're going around, you're at the doctor's pavilion, I guess you could say, or the doctors all have their booths set up, and you have a doctor who says, I can make you beautiful, wealthy, healthy, and wise.
Well, the first thing that you're going to want to see is a doctor who is himself beautiful, wealthy, healthy, and wise.
I mean, that's... I know philosophy can't make you physically beautiful, but go with me to the spiritual dimension for just a moment, where free will resides.
In all defiance to causality.
And just kidding, I don't believe in free will as a spiritual element.
But that's the first thing you're going to say.
As a doctor, have you achieved the very things that you claim to be able to bestow upon others?
Because we go with the truth in the long run for happiness.
We don't go for happiness for truth.
So if people who have a certain perspective have achieved a kind of wonderful success within their own life and are happy and spiritually beautiful, wealthy and wise, then I'm like, get me some of that. I'd love some of that.
That would be great. And so, in the long run, and it's not that long a run, because we only live for 80 years or 90 years, in the long run, your beliefs have to bring you happiness and peace of mind and kindness and generosity and joy and all these kinds of things.
And I've consistently reinforced that in my podcast, that going through this stuff's a bitch.
But when you get through the other side, and it can take up to a year or two, it's fantastic.
And I'm only preaching that because I've actually done it, right?
I have broken with my family.
I don't see my family at all.
No communication with them whatsoever because they were corrupt and wouldn't change.
So I'm not preaching anything that I haven't done myself.
And when it comes to relationships, I have an absolutely glorious, wonderful, perfect, magical relationship with a glorious woman.
And we had to work to make it that great.
So when I talk about relationships, when I talk about work stuff, well, I have sort of founded a multi-million dollar company, grown it and sold it.
And so I have been a leader to whatever small degree you want to call it.
The company was like 30 people or whatever, right?
But I have traveled throughout North America, China, and Europe selling software.
And this is not an advertisement to me or anything like that.
It's just that when I do talk about authority, it's not theoretical.
I've had it. I have had significant control over other people, a significant influence, let's say.
So, you know, when I'm talking about these things, I'm not talking about them in a theoretical way.
I'm not Nietzsche sitting on a rock quivering in a room with a migraine saying you should go out and conquer the world and be brave, right?
I'm not somebody saying that you should break with your family.
Oh, I'm sorry, I've got to end this because my mom's coming, right?
I'm not saying you should break with your family unless they're a negative influence on your life, but...
So when I talk about my philosophy, I'm talking about it from an experiential standpoint, and I think, given that you can't work out all of the syllogistical reasonings for everything that I believe, and neither can I, right?
I mean, I would take forever.
That you do have to go, since our goal is not honesty or truth, our goal is happiness, the methods are honesty, truth, integrity, and so on, but the goal is happiness, then when people are talking about very fundamental things in life, like determinism and free will, the one thing that they do have to show is that they're happy, right? I don't want determinism or free will.
I want happiness. I don't want truth.
I want happiness.
Because the happiness, as Aristotle pointed out, and I've mentioned before, is the one thing that we do not pursue in order to get something else.
When we get to happy, we're there.
We're down with the happy.
We're good with the happy.
And so I'm looking for the happiness.
And I do believe that integrity...
It's a cause of happiness.
And if people who believe that my beliefs are not my fault continually get angry at me when I oppose them, then I don't, A, I don't think that makes them very happy, and B, the reason that I don't think they're very happy is there's kind of a hypocrisy, right?
Less of a problem to a determinist than a tiny little sting of a tiny little bug.
I am not physically causing them any harm.
I am not psychologically forcing them to do anything.
I'm not physically forcing them to read my posts.
It's a purely voluntary exercise.
And so I can get angry with determinists who are insulting towards me, and I can get angry with the idea of determinism insofar as it threatens, or if it were true, it would undermine all of the values that I hold dear and all of the happiness that I have.
But, I mean, the second part doesn't mean anything.
If it's true, it just means that I can be happier by believing in it.
I mean, I do believe that fidelity to reality is what makes you happy.
And so if determinism is true, then the happiness that I've got is merely an illusion.
And the happiness that's available to me on the other side of determinism is going to be even better.
And yes, I will have to go through the year or two of tricky stuff, as I have before, but I certainly got an enormous amount of happiness getting the corrupt people out of my life, and so on.
And... So I'll just have to go through it again.
So the fact that it threatens everything that I've achieved in my life, as far as I know it, right?
The happiness that I have, and I'm not sure I could take a whole lot more happiness.
I'm not a very happy person, but...
If it's true, and I do believe that fidelity to reality brings happiness, right?
Otherwise I would be just repeating be happy over and over again and sell it as some sort of new age tape.
Maybe with a few don't worries thrown in there.
But... I would not be averse to it if determinism were proven to be true, but right now it's not proven to be true, and the behaviors of the determinists, with some minor exceptions, but the behavior of the determinists is pretty universally out of keeping with their thinking.
Now, let's start with a couple of things that I have put forward.
Actually, no. Let's start with something a little bit earlier than that.
I would say when people say free will is non-causal, I'm not going to go with that.
Non-causal means spiritual or random for almost all determinants.
When you say non-causal, which means something which is not caused by something prior, like second law of thermodynamics, matter can neither be created nor destroyed, simply converted from one form to another, matter to energy and back.
Well, it would seem that, you know, some bizarre experiments in physics, and bizarre only by my uneducated head in this realm, some aspects of physics seem to be able to pop atoms into existence, but let's just leave that as a theoretical maybe at the moment.
But to a determinist, when I'm talking about free will, and they perceive it as non-causal, Then they are pretty much viewing me as somebody who, from the perspective of a physicist, is saying, you know, planets pop into being all the time.
I mean, that would be purely ridiculous.
So I prefer self-causal rather than non-causal, right?
Because non-causal would take magical thinking, and it's a straw man argument that things just pop into existence and don't.
I mean, like free will just sort of pops into existence.
Atoms just suddenly wake up and start causing their own behavior, or causing behaviors either randomly or with no cause whatsoever.
And I prefer the term self-causal, which is how I view the consciousness, that it is self-causal.
That may seem semantic, but I think it's important because otherwise we spend all this time, I spend all this time getting insulted for magical thinking, and that's not sort of where I'm coming from.
So, and I think that people should respect that.
And why? Because I'm so great?
No, not at all. Simply because I have now put up 340-odd podcasts arguing very hard for rational positions.
So when people then accuse me of magical thinking, I think that the burden of proof might just be a little bit on them, because I think I've worked quite hard to be rigorous about some very difficult topics.
Now, the thing that you always get, right, and this is another aspect which we'll talk about this morning a little bit more this afternoon, the thing that you always get when you talk about free will versus determinism is, from the free will perspective, you're always called medieval.
Again, that's almost inevitable.
So maybe it's an argument for determinism, I don't know.
But you're always caused a medieval.
So, for instance, the analogy is geocentrism.
Versus the Copernican theory.
So geocentrism, very, very briefly, obviously it's the theory that Earth is the center of the universe.
And the Copernican theory was that the Sun is the center of the universe.
I don't think he used the term in that sense, but that's sort of where he came from.
And the thing that's very important to understand about the Copernican theory and the thing that's not given perspective or not given credence, right?
Let's take this as a perfectly valid analogy, right?
And the reason that it comes up is that I think one of the central arguments for free will or one of the central supports for free will is that everybody experiences it.
Everybody experiences free will.
And even the determinists experience free will.
They just say that it's an illusion.
So the first thing that I do is start with the facts of reality and say, well, everybody experiences free will from children, babies onwards, and so on.
And they do it in a non-coerced manner.
You can say everybody believes in God, but God is a coerced relationship.
Children are taught about God and bullied for not believing in God, and so it's very important to look at the beliefs that human beings have that are non-coercive, that are innate or natural to the species.
So free will is something that toddlers understand very, very well.
So when you snatch something from them, They don't shrug, they get angry.
And this is something that's sort of important to understand.
Now, toddlers ascribe a little bit of over-causality, like they'll actually get mad at the wind for taking away their kite, but that's just something you have to rein back to help them understand that the world is not doing anything to them personally, but other people sometimes are.
So, the reason that this sort of comes up is that when you talk about free will versus determinism, and you say, well, everybody believes in free will, then people say, well, everybody used to believe that the world was flat.
And that's certainly true, that people did believe that the world was flat.
And they had every reason for believing that the world was flat, and it was a pretty valuable belief to believe that the world was flat, because it perfectly appeared flat to them.
You couldn't climb a mountain high enough to see the curvature of the Earth, and so people did believe that the world was flat.
Now, the way in which the Copernican Revolution occurred, despite the opposition of the Catholic Church at the time, was that the significant problem with the geocentric view of the universe, the Earth-centered view of the universe, is that you can't explain the retrograde motion of Mars.
So when you watch Mars in the night sky, then you end up with Mars doing a loop back on itself, because we're working within the orbit of Mars.
And so Mars loops back upon itself and then starts up again because we're swinging past it within our own orbit.
Now, the prior system that explained this was the circles within circles Ptolemaic system that I've talked about before, but it could not explain the retrograde motion of Mars without multiplying the argument to ridiculous levels of complexity.
So this is sort of where Occam's razor came in handy, where they built circles within circles, and you'd have, like, literally pages and pages of algorithms to go through to calculate where Mars should be.
The way that Copernicus...
The way that Copernicus created strong supporting argument that the Sun was the center of the universe was he said that if the Sun is the center of the universe and we're orbiting Mars, it's 93 million miles away from the Sun and Mars is, I don't know, 240 million, whatever it is.
If this is all true, then it perfectly explains the retrograde motion of Mars.
Now, the interesting thing about Copernicus is that he put forward these things as tentative proofs, as theoretical constructs, not as true.
Now, of course, this is probably heavily influenced by the genocidal, murderous nature of the Catholic Church towards any sort of science, rationality, or progress at the time, and just about any time in its history.
So we don't know what his private opinions were, whether he was like Einstein, who said, I put this forward merely as a model, and we'll have to wait for the proof, right?
The responsible scientist puts, in the absence of clinching proof, It puts things forward as a model.
And says that this is a possible way that things can work.
We're exploring it, but it's certainly not proven yet, right?
It's just a possibility. I mean, to me, that's what a responsible scientist does.
Now, when I put forward free will as an axiom, back, I don't know, podcast 60 or something like that, and I got some pretty strong responses back about that, then I modified my position.
I'd overreached, and I've done this on the board a couple of times, where I overreach a particular thesis, and I get corrections, and I correct myself.
And this, to me, is what a responsible thinker does, in my opinion, right?
So, to bring up Copernicus is interesting, because Copernicus put forward his ideas as a possible model that explains something and might be useful in other situations as well.
Now, the interesting thing is that the moment that Copernicus published his thesis, It would have been enormously irresponsible to read it and say, absent of any reproducible experiments or absent of any technical knowledge.
This is sort of an important thing.
Absent of any technical knowledge, it's ridiculous to suddenly switch your opinions.
Because it could be bullshit, right?
I mean, this is something that's fairly important.
This is why I don't follow every new environmental catastrophe that's believed to exist.
It's why I don't follow the experts, right?
In the 1970s, when they said there'll be worldwide famine by 1980.
In the 1980s, when they said, oh, we'll run out of oil and the economy will collapse by 1990.
All this kind of nonsense.
We all hear these kinds of doom predictions from all of the PhD-clad experts in the world.
And, of course, a lot of these people have ulterior motives.
A lot of these people get an enormous amount of funding for predicting disasters, and the government loves to fund them because it gains more power by frightening the population.
And I'm not putting the determinants in this camp.
It's just that, for me, every time that somebody comes along with a paper that says, ah, I've proven free will is fallacious, I'd be like, okay, well, first of all, they're not being responsible because it's certainly not a consensus yet.
Like, I think we can legitimately say that the world is round now and be pretty certain of it.
I think we can certainly say 2 plus 2 is 4 and be certain of it.
We can say that gravity exists and be certain of it.
We can say that our senses are valid, and although there are still arguments about it, I think we can be pretty certain of it.
So, there are some things which we're certain about, and there are other things which are put forward as theorems.
And the difference tends to be, for me, as a non-technical person, as a non-scientist, the consensus seems to be something like, the proof seems to be something like this.
Every single piece of evidence points towards it, and there is now no longer any debate among the experts.
That to me is fairly important.
I have to rely on the integrity of the scientific method rather than other people's opinions, rather than any individual experiment.
I have to rely on the integrity of experts because I can't do these experiments themselves.
How do I know relativity is true?
What do I have? I don't have a freaking clue.
I listen to one Queen song called 39 and I say that relativity is true.
Believe it or not, the guitarist for Queen was doing his degree in astrophysics and actually wrote a song about relativity called 39.
It's a fantastic song.
Very folky. Nice. But how do I know that relativity is true?
Well, because there seems to be every experimental evidence that I come across is something that supports it or validates it.
It also is a consensus among all experts that relativity is true.
All experts, right? I mean, if I said relativity is false, I mean, you hope you wouldn't take me seriously at all.
But that's sort of how I come across to understand that something is more than a thesis, but a conclusion.
Now, one of the reasons that I remain agnostic and in that agnosticism work with free will as something that makes me happy, because that seems to me the facts of the matter.
Yes, there are people doing experiments where people say, yeah, I made a choice, but it turns out that their impulses came beforehand.
I understand that. That's all perfectly fine, and I have no problem with that.
That stuff's interesting to follow.
But it is scarcely, it is scarcely the uniform opinion of everybody In the field that free will is simply not possible.
People are exploring it, and I think that's fantastic, and I think we should continue to explore it.
But I think to say that either position is proven is premature.
I think that even to say that the overwhelming majority of evidence is on either side is false as well.
That's why, for me, we need to go with other kinds of views.
And this is why, for me, the hypocrisy of certain aspects of determinist philosophers or determinist position holders, that hypocrisy is kind of important.
Because if somebody says that something is absolutely true when it's not, then the first thing you need to do is try and figure out their defenses.
And this is why, when I said free will was absolutely true, I think I said that.
I haven't listened to the podcast since I recorded it, but I think I just took it as an axiom.
And then people said, dude, you know, there's more to it than that.
And then I responded with, you know, you're absolutely right.
And so that, to me, would be responsible situation.
So the first thing that you do when people claim things are absolutely true, when they're not proven yet, and there's no consensus among experts, but amateurs seem to think that, of which I am one too.
I'm not a neuroscientist, of course.
The amateurs seem to think that there's this real clincher somewhere when the experts themselves are divided.
I think that's fairly important.
And so the Copernican thing is a straw man argument, because if you really understand the scientific method and the Copernican approach to proving truth, you put forward propositions, even where there's a lot of proof, as possibilities subject to a huge amount of additional research.
A huge amount of additional research.
And... The other thing that's important to understand about the Copernican model is that it had significant other proof associated with it as well.
It wasn't just Copernicus published a bunch of equations and everyone woke up one day and said, oh my god, the world is round.
The world is round experiments had been performed in the ancient world where they stuck a stick in the ground, I think in Alexandria, I've mentioned this before, and in some other place, I can't remember.
And at exactly the same time, they measured the shadow.
And from that, they got that the world's surface was curved.
And these, they'd even measured to a good degree of accuracy.
I think it was either the Babylonians or the Egyptians had measured to a good degree of accuracy the roundness of the world.
It's just that all this stuff had been blown away through the Church's repression of scientific learning through the Middle Ages, Dark Ages and the Middle Ages.
So this was not a new idea, right?
And so there was significant anterior proof, or there was significant supporting proof.
It wasn't just a bunch of equations, and everybody woke up and went, oh, the world is round, right?
And there were a number, I can't remember all of the ways in which they determine it.
Oh, that's right, there's another way that they figured out the world was round, long before Copernicus, or at least figured that there was strong evidence, which is that every now and then, the moon is between, so the Earth is between the sun and the moon.
And what they noticed was that when the world's shadow came between the sun and the moon, the world's shadow was in fact round, right?
So there's lots of things that supported Copernicus long before he published his equations.
So that's something that's very important to understand, that it's not just an isolated phenomenon.
You have to look at a long continuum.
And this continuum of free will versus determinism has been going on for thousands of years.
We're not new to the debate.
We didn't invent this thing, of course.
And nobody's been able to clinch it, which to me is sort of an indication that it's open to question, right?
So this is the first thing that I want to do in terms of looking at this Copernican analogy.
And the last thing that to me is the most important aspect, if you want to talk about Copernicus and this approach relative to understanding free will versus determinism, is that the Copernican theory was predictive.
This is very, very, very important, ladies and gentlemen.
The Copernican theory was predictive, replaced a model that was proven fallacious, and also explained things that nothing else could.
There was no way to explain the retrograde motion of Mars without putting the Sun at the center of the universe, and then Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars.
There was no way to explain any of that.
Without putting the Sun at the center of the universe.
I mean, other than just sort of making stuff up, right?
So it was...
And to believe it right away would have been ridiculous.
You have to wait for the experts to come to some kind of consensus because we all can't reproduce these experiments ourselves.
So if we take the proposition of looking at free will versus determinism from the Copernican theory, then determinism is at best a theory.
Determinism does not explain very much.
Determinism simply says that whatever human being experiences is an illusion.
And that's a fundamentally, and I know this, I'm going to get flamed for this, and please, I apologize if I'm totally wrong, but it's just my perspective, not a proof.
The problem is that that's a fundamentally religious approach.
So nobody directly experiences God, but then everyone says, well, God exists, you just, you know, the fact that you don't experience it is a false illusion, that you should experience this.
Now, everybody experiences free will, and then when the determinists come along and say, no, no, no, everything you experience is an illusion, the reality is something completely the opposite of what you experience.
So, a religious person will say that God exists, and people say, well, where is he?
What does he speak? What does he look like?
How did he come into being? I don't see any evidence whatsoever.
And people say, well, that doesn't matter. The truth is the exact opposite of what you believe.
The truth is the exact opposite of everything you experience.
The truth is the exact opposite of everything that your emotions point to.
The truth is the exact opposite fundamentally of how I live if I'm going to get upset with people or try and argue with them because I believe that everything is foreordained but I want to change it and I also believe that everything is foreordained but I get irritated when things don't go my way.
So this is, to me, a species of fantasy.
And again, this is not a disproof.
I'm just laying it on the line.
I'm putting my cards right out on the table about why I have such a problem with this.
So a communist, you say, well, classes don't exist.
People move in and out of classes all the time.
It doesn't make any sense. No, no, no.
Classes exist, you see.
And people say, well, I like having property.
I want to own things. I like having access to these kinds of things.
People say, no, no, no. Property rights don't exist.
They're wrong. Everything that you feel, everything that you are emotionally programmed to do or to acquire property, to think for yourself, to all of these kinds of things, which propaganda puts so much in harm's way to control people.
I'm not saying that the determinants are propagandists.
I'm just putting it out how I experience it at a gut level.
And, of course, the communist is going to be hypocritical because he's going to say property doesn't exist, but the first thing the communist is going to want to do is to set up a communist dictatorship where he has control of all the property.
And the same thing with Catholicism, right?
So you have a desire to, when you're a teenager, to masturbate and have sex with people, and you have a desire for independence and self-esteem, and you have a desire for thinking for yourself and so on.
And Catholicism says, no, everything that you feel, everything that you experience, everything that you naturally desire, is the exact opposite of the truth.
And what's the proof? Well, there's no proof yet, but there's a couple of indications.
Right? So, you should reverse all of your experience, you should give up all of your history, you should give up all of your innate emotional apparatus, you should fight yourself tooth and nail from now until the day you die, because you're fundamentally hardwired to believe in this illusion called free will, and you continually have to challenge that within yourself, even though whether you challenge it or not is preordained.
This is the argument from determinism.
And that to me is an essentially religious argument.
People say America exists, and of course America doesn't exist.
And nobody can see America, so you have to get all this propaganda.
And so fundamentally, if you want to take the Copernican approach, that's fine.
All I need to do is I need to understand what determinism explains that nothing else can, where the universal consensus is among all people who have expertise in this field, of which there isn't any, and determinism explains nothing that can't be explained by free will.
And taking the principle of causality as an axiom is simply begging the question.
If you say that, and we'll talk about this another time, because I really want to know from determinants what is the criteria for disproof?
What is the criteria? And I meant to ask this on Sunday, but I didn't get around to it, or I forgot about it.
But what is the criteria for disproof?
If the axiom is that everything that is is caused by everything that came before, then there's no point having a debate, because it's just an axiom.
Do you believe it or don't? We're good to go.
Like frustration and love and desire and vengeance and anger and joy and so on, because they're all unearned, then that's fine.
I mean, maybe that's the case, but the burden of proof is pretty high, and certainly determinism is nowhere close to making that leap east yet.
So we'll talk a little bit more about these 13 points.
I just wanted to talk about this particular approach up front and where I think the responsibility is in terms of thinking.
So thank you so much for listening.
I appreciate the debate. It has been very stimulating.
I am enjoying it, and I hope that other people are as well.
I know it's a very popular topic on the board, but this is sort of where I'm coming from.
When I look at the deterministic side of things, then I hope that we will continue to have this debate, but just to understand that the debate can't occur in isolation from a universal consensus of experts, as well as...
And I know there are going to be people who say, well, the universal consensus of political scientists is that there should be a state and so on.
We'll talk about that another time, but that's not exactly a situation where the scientific method is being applied.
That's all the realm of propaganda.
So thank you so much for listening.
I look forward to donations. It's been a dry couple of days.
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Thank you so much for listening.
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