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Aug. 6, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
48:38
358 Stef's Wager

Take a gamble on freedom!

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Well, look at hisaphronia, have you got a dollar on you in the state of California?
If it's alright to know, I want a little girl to be all mine in the wintertime.
Boy, you've got to listen to that song, Sophronia B. I don't know who wrote it originally, but it's the most delightful piece of nonsense around.
Colin James did a recording of it.
In the little big band, Volume 2, called Saffronia B. S-A-F-R-O-N-I-A slash B. Great deal of fun.
It's a fun song. Two minutes of pure froth.
Alright, so we're in the land of something we are going to call chore casting.
I cleaned the bathrooms.
And I have found that time has been a little tight for podcasting recently, so we are going to try chorecasting, which is the...
Well, I'm sure you can break down the word and figure it out yourself, so...
Because there have been a number of things that I've wanted to talk about in a variety of ways or in a variety of means.
And I haven't really had a chance because I haven't had the dedicated time to do it.
Or when I do have the dedicated time, I am using it for other things like flopping in the sun or playing badminton.
So I thought if I could combine...
I mean, driving to work is a chore and we're able to podcast in that realm.
So I thought maybe it would be the case to be able to do it here.
Now, sadly, well, I guess maybe not so sadly, perhaps you could say, almost inevitably, the free will versus determinism debate has sort of petered out, which I can certainly understand the reasons why, on the Free Domain Radio Board, and it's been really great, and I certainly do appreciate those who've put the time and energy Thank you.
Thank you.
appreciate those who've spent the time opening up my mind to a way of thinking that I didn't even really know existed, but which has some very fascinating aspects to it, and of course some great logic.
And so I guess, you know, these are sort of my final comments, and this is not to have the last word, it's just that these are sort of my final comments on the whole free will versus determinism thing, and I would like to sort of end with my version of Pascal's and I would like to sort of end with my version of We can call this Steph's wager, if you like, which is a way of approaching it from a probabilistic cost-benefit standpoint, which maybe you'll find interesting, and maybe you won't.
Now, what I've kind of gotten from the whole free will versus determinism thing, and again, thanks to all of the determinists for posting on this topic, what I've kind of gotten is that from my perspective...
I sort of felt that free will was a requirement for things like personal responsibility and ethics and so on.
And so that sort of, of course, I value those things highly.
It's sort of the basis of what I'm trying to do with my life.
So, of course, I'm not going to give it up without a fight.
And, of course, I wouldn't want anybody I was debating with to give up something that they greatly treasured and valued, which they felt was...
Central to the happiness of their life, right?
Purpose of philosophy is not truth but happiness.
It's just that it generally tends to coincide.
In fact, it pretty much always seems to coincide.
But I kind of thought that...
Determinism eradicated something like personal responsibility and so on.
And the determinists don't believe that this is the case.
Of course, it would be a rather challenging paradox to say that determinism means that there can be no such thing as personal responsibility because that would eliminate things like logical argument, right? You can't logically argue.
If everything is determined, then you can't...
And this is sort of my perspective.
I know this is not what determinants believe, or at least not what a lot of them believe.
But of course, if everything is not foreordained, but inevitable based on the causal chain from the Big Bang, then things like debating would all be rather pointless, right?
So... I think I've sort of understood, and I think I've finally grasped, and I do apologize, of course, for how long it's taken me, but I think I've finally grasped sort of where the determinists are coming from and why those on the free will side look rather deranged and fundamentalist and religious in the fundamental approach.
And it seems to me to go something like this.
The universe is causal, and matter is not random, and randomness would not constitute free will anyway.
If decisions were random, in other words, if it was some sort of quantum flux that produced free will, or sort of quote free will, then it wouldn't really be free at all, because I certainly don't believe that randomness would equate to free will, because it wouldn't be sort of conscious choosing, it would just be bouncing around in a sort of randomized fashion.
And that, to me, would not constitute free will.
And there seems to be a fairly good agreement about that principle on the board.
So, good, good, good.
We're happy with that. So, given that the universe is causal, it certainly makes sense from a logical standpoint to say that there is a significant logical problem with the argument for free will.
And I fully understand that.
As I've said, it's You know, freaky.
As you may guess, I'm no neuroscientist.
But I certainly do understand that from the perspective of those who take the determinist approach, it does look very bizarre to hang on to this idea of free will if you can get everything that is provided by free will but in a nice, tidy determinist package.
So... If the determinists can say that you get personal responsibility, you get the capacity for a logical argument or illogical argument, if that's your pleasure, you get morality and you get all of the things that normally are associated with the free will position.
You get all of those things and you don't end up With the logical problem of a-causality or self-causality or whatever, however you want to term free will.
So, if the determinist position, and I think I sort of do understand it by now, if the determinist position is that you can have personal responsibility in a completely inevitable and determined universe, if you can have logical argument, personal responsibility, ethics, and all these good things...
With determinism, and determinism bypasses the problem of a-causality, then what sane individual would not want to be a determinist?
The only way that you would ever not want to be a determinist is if you're sort of pathologically addicted to the...
If you get some sort of titillation out of them, then, of course, that would make perfect sense.
If you can get ethics, personal responsibility, logical argument, love, pride, and all these kinds of things from the determinist position...
Then, of course, to argue for free will would be ridiculous, because then you don't gain anything by arguing for free will, because of course you get all of the free will goodies, the personal responsibility and ethics and so on, you get all of those, but...
You also, by taking the determinist position, you avoid the problem of self-causality, which is certainly counterintuitive relative to physics and sort of reality and so on, where every action is caused by a previous action, or all reactions are caused by previous actions, and so on.
So I think I finally got it.
And what I've got is that the determinist position is that why would you ever want free will?
Because you get everything with determinism that you get with free will, but you also get to avoid the problem of causality, of self-causality.
And good heavens, who could but agree with that?
And there, of course, are significant religious aspects to this.
For those of us who've spent a number of years debating religious people, the people on the determinist side are in sort of our shoes from that standpoint, right?
Because people who are religious, Christians and so on, they will generally say, well, without...
There is no such thing as morality, right?
So we're saying that with determinism, there is no such thing as morality.
And of course, as atheists, we say...
No, there is no such thing as morality with God.
And there is only a possibility for morality, or at least a rational morality, not just sort of prejudicial stuff from old books.
There is only a possibility for morality in the absence of God.
If you get rid of God, then you can start to have a rational sense of morality.
All perfectly sensible and all the disputes that I've certainly had many, many hundreds of times over the course of my disputational career, you could say.
And so the people on the determinist side are looking at us on the free will side, or at least those on the free will side, and saying, look, you guys are fundamentally religious in your epistemology, that you're just clinging to a subjective experience called free will in the absence of scientific evidence and against all scientific methodologies, of which self-causality is not one of them.
And so it is a very bizarre thing.
And you say, well, you can't have morality if there's such a thing as determinism.
And the determinists, of course, are saying, well, if determinism is true, then you can only have morality by understanding determinism.
because certainly we do need to understand the facts of reality and use the scientific method if we are going to create a rational sense of morality around how human beings should behave, because, of course, you don't want to just be pulling moral opinions you don't want to just be pulling moral opinions out of your ass, right?
You sort of want to have some basis of facts and observational experience and logic and so on.
So, of course, if determinism is true, according to the determinists, you can't have any kind of rational ethics if you sit there and say, well, free will is a fact even though I can't describe it and I can't prove it and it's just a subjective experience and so on.
Well, they would say, well, you can't have.
So not only can you get all of the goodies that free will claims to offer, but you can also get goodies that free will can't offer if the free will position is false and Because you're then basing your morality on something called free will, which has a very high likelihood of not existing or not being true at all.
I think I sort of get where they're coming from and how insane people who, and I don't mean this, they're not calling us insane, but I can certainly understand how, from the determinist position, people who believe in free will or say that free will is how I'm going to live my life and so on, are epistemologically exactly identical or pretty much exactly identical to To people who say, well, I believe in God because without God there are no ethics.
And if there's no judgment, no external judgment or punishment to human beings for good or evil, then we become this sort of Nietzschean universe of satisfying base wants.
And there's no need or requirement to defer gratification.
There's no value to empathy.
These things are all counter-social Darwinism and so on.
So, I mean, I really do understand the perspective.
So, my only sort of response to that is to say something like this.
I still don't understand how you can have inevitability combined with personal responsibility, and I've gone over the debates of the free will people, and I have not had any luck understanding it.
And people will always sort of talk about Well, when you debate with people, you want to create new inputs into their behavior, sort of give them ideas that they haven't had before and attempt to modify their behavior and so on.
But to me, that's sort of begging the question.
If I'm a determinist and I argue with you because I want to create new inputs for you to change your behavior, to reprogram you, the same way that you would train a dog by swatting it with a newspaper or providing some sort of positive incentive not to chew your rug,
Well, the problem with that is that in that combination of events or that argument, what's happened is that one person is then considered to have free will and the other person isn't.
So if I, as a determinist, argue that you should not kill because it's bad and I show you all these pictures of dead people attempting to rouse your empathy and I give you all of these logical arguments as to why you should not kill, well, of course I'm argue that you should not kill because it's bad and I show you all these pictures of dead people attempting to rouse your empathy and I give you all of these logical arguments as to why But the fact that I'm doing that is also pre-ordained, right?
Or not pre-ordained like somebody's telling you, but pre-ordained like an inevitability of cause and effect from the Big Bang onwards.
So I don't think, at least for me, that it logically works or makes much sense to say that we can debate, even if we're determinists, because we want to provide new inputs.
Because, of course, in the deterministic universe, there are no new inputs.
There are new inputs to me...
But they're not new inputs in reality.
So if I've never been to Thailand and somebody kidnaps me and puts me on a plane and I end up in Thailand, then I have never seen Thailand before, so it's new to me.
But nobody's going to say, of course, that Thailand is created for my convenience.
That, of course, would be Singapore.
But... New inputs to somebody else are not new inputs in reality because, of course, in the deterministic universe, everything is caused by what came before, and therefore nothing can be new.
And so if I say to you, I don't want you to kill people, and here's pictures of dead people, and here's all the moral arguments as to why you shouldn't kill people...
Well, it may be new inputs to you, but it's inevitable that I am going to be making that argument, so it's not really a new thing in the universe.
You're still kind of going through the motions.
And also, I don't see how ignorance of the future creates moral responsibility if the future is foreordained.
And these are not new arguments and so on, and I don't really want to open that up.
But I do want to say, at least, that I perfectly well understand why people who are pro-free will feel that...
look kind of religious and kind of creative.
Because if it is the case that determinism can offer everything that free will does, in terms of personal responsibility, ethics, argument, and so on, and pride and emotion and so on, but it also solves the problem of causality, then what?
Why wouldn't you take it?
As I posted on the board, it's like somebody coming up to you and saying, here's a leprechaun and $50,000.
And you're saying, forget about the $50,000, just give me the leprechaun.
So you're taking the irrational, not the beneficial.
When you could have both and toss out the irrational, keep the $50,000, right?
So for the determinist, the choice is between a leprechaun, i.e.
free will, and $50,000.
And they're not saying, well, you know what?
I don't care about the leprechaun because it doesn't exist.
You're just going to mime handing me over something.
But I will take the $50,000, right?
That's all the benefits that are traditionally associated with the free will position.
Because that's of real value to me.
Well... I can certainly understand why the free will position looks deranged then, right?
Why it looks like we're inventing a ghost in the machine for the sake of a misunderstanding of ethics and causality.
But, nonetheless, the position still remains and it's not a new position and we're not going to solve it, in my opinion, until the science advances to the point where we can understand it.
So, that to me has been particularly fascinating.
Now, what I'd like to do It's not the kind of wager that you can cash in, except in the most Fundamental, epistemological sense.
But I would like to sort of offer a wager or a possibility for people who are looking at this particular approach.
And the compatibilists, who I can't really figure out the position to make, the sense of the position for the life of me, would say that this is their position and that they have both determinism and free will hand in hand.
Or, again, they say we have all the benefits of free will, but we avoid the problem of self-causality And I would like to sort of offer a wager.
Now this is sort of based on Pascal's wager, which was in a religious context and sort of went along the lines of the following.
So Pascal said, let's say that you have a choice to believe in the Christian God or to not believe in the Christian God.
This could be any God. We're going to talk about the Christian God for now.
So you can believe in God, and you cannot believe in God.
Those are perfectly possible opinions.
Now, let's look at the pluses and minuses.
And I've touched on this before, so I'll be very brief.
If you believe in God, and there is a God, then you get to go to heaven.
You don't have to burn in a lake of hellfire forevermore.
And that would be pretty much a negative outcome, right?
So you roll the dice, you say, well, there could be a God, a Christian God, whatever, right?
And you say that there is a God, and if there is a God, you go to heaven.
Now, if you say that there is no God, when there is a God, then you go to hell, right?
So that's a bad outcome.
And if you look at the costs and benefits of both, what are the costs of believing in the Christian God?
Well, you've got to give up some money as a tithe.
This is sort of in the... 18th century, I think, Pascal lived.
And you have to go to church on Sundays, and you have to baptize your kids, and a bunch of rituals that you have to go and perform in order to fulfill your obligations to the Christian faith.
This is the stuff that God wants you to do.
Give some money to the poor, give money to the priest, and hand over your firstborn as an altar boy, and so on.
So you go ahead and you do these things, and the cost is relatively minor.
It's going to cost you some income, you're going to lose some sleep on Sunday morning, and so on, right?
You have to pay for a lot of therapy after the priests get a hold of your kid, but overall the cost is not ridiculously high.
Nobody's saying you have to cut your arm off to be a Christian.
So, Pascal's wager is basically this.
Given that the downside of going to hell for eternity is pretty much the worst punishment and worst conceivable outcome in the world, then you should, even if you don't believe from a faith-based standpoint, you should sort of hedge your bets and be a Christian because the costs of being a Christian relative to the costs of not being a Christian are not very high.
Now, of course, there's about a bazillion logical problems with this, and I'm not going to say that mine solves all these problems, but I would at least like to sort of put it out there as a possibility.
The problems, of course, that Pascal's wager faces is that I don't think God, if he's really a Christian God and really into all of this kind of stuff, I don't really believe that God is going to say, oh, you believed in me as part of a calculated way of getting out of heaven.
That's really great virtuous faith and you're just the best Christian in the world.
So, I couldn't be more pleased, and that's genuine faith, right?
I mean, I would say that God would probably say, well, you didn't really believe in me for the right reasons, so I can't really see my way clear to giving you the get into heaven free card, so off you go to hell because you were a sort of a statistician and a gambler and not really into the virtue of our Lord Jesus Christ and so on.
So, I don't think that that would really work as far as virtue went.
And of course, the problem as well is that...
This approach to weighing the costs and benefits work with all religions, which have some sort of supernatural punishment at the end of not believing.
And so, whatever works for Christianity will also work for all other religions, and thus, since you can't simultaneously obey all other religions, and of course you can't simultaneously obey even Christianity in any coherent fashion because it's so full of contradictory rules, But,
if you say, well, anytime anybody threatens me with eternal punishment, I should believe whatever they say, because nothing could be worse than that, well, you have a problem, of course, when the imam or the rabbi come to town and say, well, not the rabbi so much, but the imam comes to town and says, well, if you don't believe in my God, then...
You are going to be faced with eternal hellfire and punishment and so on.
Because it works with all religions, it actually works with no religion.
So there's sort of that logical problem.
And of course, the other issue is that...
It really works with anybody in any context who promises you hellfire for eternity for not obeying particular edicts, right?
So if I run around saying, well, if you don't donate to Free Domain Radio, then you are going to go to hell for eternity, then Pascal's wager would equally apply to donating to Free Domain Radio, right?
Equally as it would to believing in Christian religion, having Christian beliefs or whatever.
So it doesn't really work in any significant way.
So there's lots of problems with Pascal's wager.
Nonetheless, with all of those problems sort of put up front, and there's lots more, I would still like to base a possible...
A possible wager of the same kind regarding free will versus determinism.
Now, this wager is not going to work if you believe that free will and determinism have absolutely zero differences in terms of how, you know, whether ethics exist, whether debate is worthwhile, and so on.
If you believe that the free will position offers no benefits in terms of moral responsibility and personal ethics and pride and love and so on, If you believe that the two positions are the same, then what I'm about to talk about won't mean anything to you.
I mean, you can certainly listen to it, but don't bother emailing me and telling me that there's no need for this false dichotomy and blah, blah, blah, blah, because a 2,000-year-old problem regarding ethics versus free will, in the absence of conclusive scientific proof, which we don't have for either position, is not going to be resolved in an email, right? So don't... I mean, you can, but I'm not going to read it.
So if you believe that you can get all of the goodies...
A free will from determinism, then what I'm about to say isn't going to mean anything to you.
But let's just say that you do believe that, as most thinkers throughout history believe, that there are some significant problems with regards to ethics and personal responsibility if everything in the universe is causal and a chain of causality goes from sort of one to the next.
In a straight line and there's no possibility really of deviation, right?
Everything is caused by what came before.
Everything is a pinball bouncing around in predictable though hyper-complex ways.
If you believe that This does produce some problems in terms of personal responsibility.
In other words, if we don't have a choice about our thoughts and actions, then it's really not a logical thing to say that we are responsible for our thoughts and actions any more than a rain cloud is responsible for when it starts to release rain to the ground below.
It's all just a matter of causal.
We can't predict it. We don't know when exactly it's going to happen, but we do know that it's not the result of free will.
The cloud doesn't choose when it's going to release its rain on the unsuspecting inhabitants of the planet below.
And they don't know either, but that doesn't mean that it's free will.
So if you do believe that there are some significant problems with personal responsibility, And ethics and debate and so on in the world of free will, in the world of determinism, then this wager is going to mean something to you.
It certainly does to me.
And it's a way of, I mean, I don't care.
I don't know if anyone cares about my particular way of solving this problem, but it's sort of how I approach it.
So, in the absence of knowledge, we should obviously, and this is the part of Pascal that is relevant, in the absence of knowledge, we should obviously work to do that which is the least harmful.
So, if you don't know how to cure a disease, then you should continue to explore and keep trying and so on, but you should certainly always go with the premise of do the least harm possible in the absence of knowledge.
So, the way that I would approach it is this.
Let's just say that there are significant problems with personal responsibility in the deterministic universe.
Well, the question is then, and we don't know whether determinism or free will is the ultimate truth.
Then, I would sort of put it to you this way.
You can either believe in the possibility of free will, the possibility of rationally weighing and choosing...
Long-term and short-term objectives.
All the stuff that I've talked about before is working definitions for free will, which gives you personal responsibility and ethics, which you don't have in any other context, right?
So if you believe in free will, and free will is true, right?
Science proves that consciousness can choose its own, can weigh factors and make choices based on the focusing or lack of focusing on particular pieces of information and so on.
If you believe in free will, and free will turns out to be true, then you've made a really great decision.
I mean, that's a really good decision, to believe in something which then turns out to be true.
Now, if you believe in free will, and free will does not turn out to be true, then there are other consequences, which we will get into a little bit later.
Now, if you believe in determinism, and determinism turns out to be true, then there are specific consequences to that.
And if you believe in determinism and accept that there are consequences to believing in determinism versus not believing in determinism, because of course if there aren't any consequences then who cares, right?
If the free will people say that there is personal responsibility and ethics and so on and the determinists say, well, we believe there is too, then it doesn't really matter what you believe, right?
If the conclusions are the same, not just in terms of form but in terms of content, then...
It doesn't really matter and the debate becomes sort of pointless.
So if you believe in determinism, and determinism turns out to be true, that's one thing.
If you believe in determinism and that has specific consequences to your ethics and your sense of personal responsibility and your judgment and your capacity to debate in a rational way and so on, right?
If you believe in determinism and it has a strong effect on you and then it turns out that free will is true, then there are specific consequences to that.
So let's just go briefly over the consequences and then I'll talk about the wager that in the absence of information, I would sort of say, and I'm just trying to point out how I make the decision.
This is not to say anything about how you should make the decision.
These are the parameters that I work with, and maybe you'll find them helpful as well.
So, if free will is true, If you believe free will is true, and free will turns out to be true, obviously, good decision, no problems, right?
Now, if free will, if you believe in free will, and free will turns out to be false, in other words, everything is causal, and you've never had any capacity to choose, then you've lost absolutely nothing.
You've lost absolutely nothing.
And this is the part of this death's wager that I think is very important.
So, if you believe in free will and free will is true, you've made a good decision far better than if you'd believed that determinism was true.
But if you believe that free will is true, and free will turns out to be false, then you've lost nothing.
Why? Because it was inevitable that you were going to believe that free will was true.
And it was inevitable that you were going to incorrectly believe that free will was true.
Right? So... If you believe in free will, and determinism turns out to be the real state of the universe, then you've lost nothing.
Because it was inevitable that you were going to sort of, quote, choose that.
You never had any real capacity to choose.
And so you've lost absolutely nothing.
Now, if you believe in determinism, and determinism turns out to be true, then you've gained nothing, right?
Because if determinism turns out to be true, then it is absolutely the case that That you were destined, so to speak, fated, to use a word that determines hate, and I understand why, and I don't mean to indicate that there's any external agent that's causing this, but you were destined to believe that determinism was true, so you've sort of gained or lost nothing, because there was no possibility of an alternate state, right?
So, if you believe in determinism, now this is the last one, and this is where the doozy is, so watch this one closely, If you believe in determinism, and this has specific consequences to your ethics and so on, and free will turns out to be true, then you have made a very significant error.
And that error has very strong, not only logical, but moral consequences as well.
And this is a very, very important aspect So if it has no effect on your assignation of personal responsibility, morality, the capacity to debate, and so on, right?
Personal ethics.
If the free will versus determinism debate has no effect on these things, then of course you don't bother getting into a debate, right?
So if you do believe that there are significant differences...
In something relative to free will versus determinism, then if you then live your life according to determinism and you teach your children according to determinism that their behaviors are always caused by what came before and so on,
then you're going to have some specific and I think highly, highly different set of moral propositions and moral axioms Than if you believed in free will and therefore were able to make a stronger case for personal responsibility and so on.
So you teach your children, this is how you live your life, and if you run a business, this is how you run your business, and you're making some significant, significant decisions in your life based on the existence of determinism and the non-existence of free will and so on, or the validity of determinism.
Now, of course, if it turns out that Free will does exist.
Free will is a capacity of the human mind.
In whatever freakazoid manner it exists, then you have made, obviously, a significant, significant error.
And you, of course, since free will is the case, then your decision to choose determinism over free will was not inevitable.
It was your choice. So it's a mistake, and you're personally totally and completely responsible for it, and you have then founded your ethics and taught your children on...
Foundations of thought that are completely incorrect, and in a pretty significant way.
This is to be the fundamental question of ethics, is one of personal responsibility.
Assigning a personal responsibility to somebody whose behavior is determined...
To me, it's equivalent to assigning moral responsibility to a rock slide.
It doesn't sort of make any sense.
It would actually be rather deranged.
So that's just my perspective, and of course you can email me all you want and tell me that's not the case, but we're just doing a thought experiment here.
Of course, if there is no difference, then who cares about the debate at all?
We care about the debate because there is a difference, right?
I mean, people don't fight for...
You know, one color over another.
They don't sort of get angry and rageful and call each other names over insignificant things.
We fight about this because it is a very significant thing.
So, in the balance, right, in the general balance, this is not a conclusive argument or anything like that.
I'm just arguing for the do-least-harm principle.
In the balance, then, right, we have these four positions.
You believe free will is true and free will is true.
You believe free will is true and free will is not true.
You believe determinism is true and determinism is true and you believe determinism is true and determinism is false.
Of these four positions, by far the least harm is done by believing that free will is true.
Right? Because, and again, this is assuming that there's these differences in ethics and so on, but by far the least harm is done by believing that free will is true.
And this, of course, is my perspective.
Now, you could say, of course, and you're more than welcome to say, that this is just Steph justifying himself, and that's exactly the case, without a doubt.
I am justifying myself.
I don't think that I'm doing it in a completely illogical manner.
I think that because people are sort of people have posted on the boards and said, well, you're agnostic when it comes to free will versus determinism.
So that might mean that your entire life is a waste, right?
Since you define what you do as predicated on the existence of free will.
Yeah, sure.
Absolutely. It may be the case that I'm completely fooled about my own capacity to choose, that my brain is paying enormous and immense tricks on me and letting me believe that I have all of this free will and capacity for choice that I don't in fact have, and that I'm making massive mistakes in terms of my fundamental psychology and philosophy around ethics, personal responsibility, debate.
And choice, absolutely.
But the beautiful thing is, if it turns out to be the case that determinism is true, then I'm not responsible for my mistakes, right?
Because my thoughts are causal based on what has happened before.
So that's how I live with it, frankly, is that if it turns out to be the case that determinism is true, which would be very interesting.
I mean, no problem with it sort of fundamentally.
It would be a fascinating thing to find out that it was true.
But... I live with it just with this sort of basic fact that if determinism does turn out to be true, then of course my focus on free will and my belief in the capacity for choice and so on and the effects of that on ethics was all causal, was all just caused by my genes and my environment and all of the myriad and near infinitely complex factors that go up into making my determinism.
My sort of being and my sort of quote decisions and choices and so on.
It's just, it's causal.
So it's not like I did anything wrong by believing in free will if free will is false, right?
Because it's just caused by what came before.
So I don't lose anything by advocating a belief or believing in free will.
Either it's true, in which case it's pretty significant to believe in what is true, or it's false, in which case What I believe is inevitable anyway, so I haven't really lost anything.
And if I raise my kids as I planned to, telling them about free will, choice, personal responsibility, and so on, and I turned out to have completely misled them because determinism is true, well, I was determined that I was going to teach them that, and determined that they were going to believe that, and so on, right? I haven't done anything wrong, right?
Because it was just acting out the prior history and prior inputs of the determined and mechanistic universe, right?
So I don't really lose anything from that standpoint.
But of course, if I teach my children that determinism is true and it has significant effects on their moral development or their belief in ethics and so on, let's just say.
I mean, if it doesn't, then who cares?
But if it does have significant effects...
on their life from that standpoint, and it turns out to be false, then I've done, you know, a really bad thing, because I could have chosen to believe and communicate about free will and the consequences thereof, and I chose not to, and I'm perfectly responsible for that choice, right? So, that to me is the basic framework that I'm operating in.
I'm not saying that this is a proof for free will, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's a disproof or proof for determinism or anything like that, But when people ask me, well, how can you base your decisions or how can you base your approaches to life on the existence of free will, and at the same time admit that it might not be the case, which of course I do admit, right?
People asking me, right, I'm a historian, a philosopher, and a software entrepreneur, asking me to prove the existence of free will is sort of nuts, right?
It's like asking Galileo to prove relativity, right?
I mean, not that I'm as smart as Galileo, but...
The knowledge gap is that significant, and of course I'm not a neuroscientist, and I don't believe that the people who are defending determinism at the moment are neuroscientists.
We're all just sort of working with the available material.
So I am agnostic around the...
I certainly can't...
I would not logically be able to live with myself if I claimed for the absolute proof for something whose existence was not provable, at least yet.
And so I certainly do recognize that there are significant challenges, let's say, to the free will position, but I would say that the way that I live with this sort of, quote, agnosticism is to say that given the available knowledge,
To believe in determinism and to act as if determinism is true is the best way to promote the least harm principle for me, which is that I would rather take the risk of finding out that determinism was true, which would mean that I had not been in error for believing that it was not true because that belief in me was determined from the Big Bang onwards.
I would rather take that approach, where no harm or error was really possible, versus not believing in free will, communicating all of the logical and moral consequences of that, and then finding out that free will was in fact true, and that I had made an enormous error in both my logical thinking and my moral thinking and communication.
And, of course, when children are involved, that may be irrecoverable.
It may not be able for them to recover from that kind of falsehood or that kind of incorrect approach to things.
So that's just my general approach to the problem of free will versus determinism and in terms of how I live my life.
And I'm not willing to give up the things that I believe inherently associated with the free will position.
And I'm not willing to debate with people who say that those things aren't associated with the free will position because then we're just calling the same thing two different words and it's not really much of a debate.
And I'm also not willing to debate, and I think that the determinists feel the same way, which I can totally understand and sympathize with, I'm not willing to debate with people whose axiom is everything is causal and therefore there's no such thing as free will.
Because I find that the human mind to be such a unique and incredible collection of atoms and energy that I'm not willing to come to final conclusions about its capacities and possibilities.
And so people who simply say, as an axiom, there's no such thing as free will, then it's really not a debate, right?
It's not a debate anymore.
Then somebody whose basic axiom is God exists, you can't debate with them, right?
If they say God exists because of X, Y, and Z, then you can debate with them, right?
But if they basically come back to everything is causal, right?
That's their fundamental thing.
Everything is causal and we have to fit the human mind into that box, then it's not really a debate, right?
Because nobody is going to say that the human mind, or at least nobody can logically say that the human mind is not composed of atoms and energy or has some other thing associated with it, right?
At least you can logically say that, then you just become a kind of spiritualist and you're back into the realm of religion and leprechauns and gods and goblins and so on, so nobody's going to take that approach.
So if the axiom is everything that is material is causal, then of course free will is eliminated, but it's not really a debate, right?
So I would sort of say, yes, everything in nature is causal, but there is one gray area that we know of, or at least we can observe, as a possibility of non-causality or self-causality or whatever you want to, however you want to call it, whatever we call free will.
Which, I mean, I'm not going to go into a long definition here.
I've posted a couple on the board, so you can find them there if you want, with the one exception of the human mind, which seems to exist in the kind of gray area.
Maybe you can slam the door on that and say, well, that's causal too, right?
In the absence of conclusive proof, I don't feel comfortable doing that, so I'm going to live my life.
In this way, right, trying to do the least harm based on this Steph's wager, or maybe somebody else has come up with this wager before.
I'm sure that that's a real possibility.
But that's sort of my approach to it.
And I would sort of invite you to look at this quadrant of, you know, belief in free will, free will is true, belief in free will, free will is false, and determinism is true, and the opposite for determinism, and just sort of find out and say to yourself, well, if there's no difference, then it doesn't matter.
If there is a difference, what is going to do the least harm based on the possibilities that exist on the table?
That's my approach to that.
Let me just sort of end up with reading two short posts that I put together on determinism and free will, which I think might be sort of humorous or interesting for you.
So the first is I did a post a little while back, which is sort of a typical exchange between myself and determinists.
So the determinist says, no one has any control over his or her behavior.
Free will is an illusion.
And then I say, well, if that is true, there would be significant moral and emotional consequences.
Yes, says the determinist.
Quoth I. What are they?
You become sort of nicer and more forgiving.
Ah, and what have you changed in your life specifically as a consequence of believing in determinism?
Nothing really. Really.
Because it seems that there would be enormous changes.
No, you misunderstand determinism.
Nothing really changes.
Oh, okay.
Then if we have no proof on either side, and nothing really changes, why bother debating the issue?
Well, because it's an essential question.
All right. So what changes in my life if I accept determinism?
Nothing. So then, it is unimportant.
No, it is crucially important.
Okay, so what effect does it have?
It has no effect.
This goes on for a while, then the determinist usually gets angry, at which point I say, Why are you angry?
According to you, I am not to blame for my actions.
That's right, I am angry at you as if you were a mosquito, since you don't have free will.
Okay, so you would spend days getting this angry at a mosquito?
No, because you are rational, and a mosquito is not.
But you just said I was like a mosquito.
No, you are a rational being with the capacity to change your mind based on new evidence.
So I can change my mind?
Yes. But you just said I am like a mosquito with no free will.
Don't be a jerk and screw up the metaphor.
You know what I meant. No, I don't.
It was your metaphor. You are willfully misunderstanding me.
Don't be stupid. All right, all right.
But I can change my mind based on rational evidence, right?
Yes. Then we are of the same opinion.
We are just calling it two different names.
No, we have opposite opinions.
But I believe that we can change our minds based on rational evidence.
No, you do not have the capacity to change your mind because of determinism.
And round and round and round we go.
And I'm glad that we're getting off the merry-go-round, and we'll wait for science to give us something definitive.
And I don't sort of say this.
I'm mocking a little bit, and I do apologize for that, but I just thought it was a funny exchange.
And then one last post that I put up today, which sort of, as we're closing off the debate, was something like this.
I said, my basic position is that sometimes a combination of atoms and energy can give rise to a phenomenon larger than their component parts.
This is not magic, this is science and observation.
Prior to the rise of life, objects never moved themselves and wondered about a landscape or reproduced or fought or ate or died.
These concepts would have been laughed at by any independent scientific observer as ridiculous.
But when life arose, these actions and interactions became common.
No individual atom in a mouse is, quote, alive, yet in combination they give rise to something called life, which gives rise to a whole new set of nouns and verbs.
Well, mostly verbs.
The human brain is a collection of atoms, but like a mouse...
Sorry, just like a mouse. No atom has consciousness, yet in combination they produce consciousness.
Just as life is radically different from inanimate matter, it propels itself and reproduces and so on...
The human mind is radically different from most life.
It creates new thoughts and makes decisions and so on.
In other words, the human mind is to life as life is to inanimate matter, a radical departure greater than the sum of its parts in ways we do not understand as yet.
And that's sort of my basic position.
So I would say that we can have a new language regarding the mind, just as a new language had to be invented regarding self-propelling matter that fought and reproduced and died and so on.
And so for me, you know, we're just at the forefront of this kind of stuff.
I think it's a fascinating debate.
I do thank those people who fought passionately for their ideas and very well.
And I'm not going to say that it's conclusive on either side, but I just sort of wanted to sort of point out my thinking or my approach to these things just so it made a little bit more sense to people.
Thank you so much for listening, as always.
I look forward to thank you for the couple of more people who've signed up for $17 a month of repetitive donations to Free Domain Radio.
The more you do this, of course, the closer that I will be in relatively short order to being able to work on this stuff full-time, which, just think about it.
It's not like the quality of the research will get any better, but there'll just be a whole lot more unfounded opinions.
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