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Dec. 17, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:27
1234 Free Will, Determinism And Self Knowledge - Part 2
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Hi everybody, it's Steph. Just a little bit more, a few more thoughts on this whole determinism question and some thoughts that I had after I did the last podcast on that 12.33, I think it was.
And the first thing that I wanted to talk about in terms of thoughts that struck me afterwards Is that people who are very much into determinism, I mean, as I said before a couple of times, the thing that bothers me most about determinists is the have your cake and eat it too.
It's the intellectual laziness and the moral laziness of the argument.
You know how people say, how are we going to solve these problems in society?
And what they come up with is, they call it the state.
How do we solve the problems of justice?
Well, we have a government. How do we solve the problems of pollution?
Well, we pass a law.
How do we solve the problems of...
Poverty? How do we solve the problem of education?
It's lazy.
Really, it's completely magical thinking.
The idea that the state will solve the problem of poverty is intellectually identical to the idea that God created the universe.
And morally equivalent to the idea that bad people go to hell and good people go to heaven.
It's just a kind of laziness.
And to me it's the same problem that determinists have.
Like it's kind of like a joke.
I mean really it does like nihilism and statism and religion.
I mean it feels like a joke.
It feels like people couldn't possibly be serious.
About this position, saying that the few square inches of brain between a human's ears is identical to all other matter in the universe, and then treating that few square inches of brain as completely different, as completely the opposite of every other piece of matter in the universe.
It feels like a joke, right?
Or when you say to a determinist, well, you can't correct people because there's no such thing as a better position, because there's no possibility of a different position.
And then they say, no, no, no, you can keep that.
And you say, oh, really? Well, how?
We go long-winded, convoluted crap, explanations about all of this.
And then they say, well, this is wrong, morally wrong.
Oh, you can't have ethics if there's determinism.
Oh, no, you can, because we've got this mythical creature called compatibilism.
Therefore, you get to keep ethics, right?
And you say, well, you can't have debate because you're debating with a rain cloud, right?
You're debating with the weather.
No, no, no. You can still have debate, right?
You see? It's like it's a joke.
It's not a real position.
It's like a game.
It's like a silly trap.
It's like a... I don't even know what it's like.
It's not like anything serious.
You can't take this stuff seriously.
It's ridiculous.
It's an embarrassing position to see.
Because, you know, when...
And, of course, this has been going on for a while.
And you get to determinists and you say, well...
So, okay, if you can keep debating and you can keep ethics and you can keep choice and you can keep preferred behavior, right?
Right? And you can keep moral responsibility or any kind of responsibility.
If that's what comes out of determinism, then how is determinism different from free will?
Well, they say, but it doesn't have this magic called Free will.
There's magic pixie dust called free will.
But it's worse than free will because I agree.
Choice, free will, it's magic pixie dust.
Absolutely. And so is life.
Right? The tiny, tiny, tiny, infinitesimally small percentage of atoms that we know get up, walk around, consume, mate, reproduce, suckle, and so on.
Well, it's tiny.
And it's magic.
And you would never predict it in general, looking at almost all of the universe.
But there it is, something we have to figure out.
But when people say the determinism, you get everything the same as free will.
You just call it determinism and with that magic word, what you do see is you wave away the problem of consciousness, Which is a Freaky ass problem no question. I don't have the answer.
I don't think anyone has the answer.
We may not have the answer for a thousand years, but nonetheless.
There it is.
It's a fact of reality.
And so it's kind of like a joke position, right?
I mean, it's exactly the same as me saying, I'm an atheist, right?
And a religious person gets upset, right?
And says, well, but then you don't believe that Jesus is the Son of God.
And I say, yes, I do.
Of course I do. Well, you don't pray to God.
And I say, no, no, no, of course I pray to God.
Well, you don't believe every word that's in the Bible.
I say, no, no, of course I believe every word that's in the Bible.
You don't believe in the Virgin Mary.
You don't believe in the saints.
You don't believe in seraphim and cherubim and devils.
No, no, no, I believe in all of those things.
But then you're religious. No, no, no, no.
I'm an atheist. Come on, listen to me.
I'm an atheist. But you believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and you believe that prayer works, and you believe that...
No, but I'm an atheist.
I mean, it's like a joke position, right?
It's like a dare.
It's like...
To me, it's like, pull the other one.
Come on, pull the other one. What are you doing, right?
It makes no sense. And so why would people believe this?
I don't believe that people are dumb.
I don't believe that they're just vain.
I believe in evil, without a doubt.
I believe in maliciousness, and I believe in all of that, which I think is essential.
If you're a philosopher or a moralist or a thinker and you don't believe in evil, then you're like a doctor who doesn't believe in sickness.
There's really no point getting out of bed or calling yourself a doctor.
But why would someone Take this crazy position and defend it so vociferously, and often times, of course, so aggressively.
Why? Why would somebody do that?
And they will always sell you the story that it's science and, you know, they're materialists, they're secularists, they're atheists.
You define free will then.
What is this magic? They'll always take the approach that they're rational.
Someone else will chime in with quantum mechanics and possibilities of choice and all this kind of stuff.
But that's the story that people will sell to you, right?
that it's a rational position and that free will is a religion.
And why would they take this silly position where they end up with all of these conundrums?
Well, blatant contradictions.
It's like nihilism, like agnosticism.
Well, again, I don't have any proof.
I have some evidence. I don't have any proof.
I don't know proof. Proof is probably not something that you would layer into this particular slice of the sponge cake called reality.
It's not the icing you can apply to this.
But there is some evidence.
And the evidence is the absence of evidence.
Ooh, doesn't that sound like one hand clapping?
Well, let's see if we can make any sense of it.
The one thing that we have noticed, right?
We who have now been in this conversation for several years and have seen a lot of people come and go and stay and go through this conversation.
The one thing that I hope, I hope, I hope you're getting good at is figuring out when someone is traumatized, right?
I've really, really been thinking a lot about Socrates lately, and I'll do a full show on this, right?
But this problem that Socrates has, and in my own tiny way, I have the problem as well.
Which is that when you've been around this, when you become authentic, when you really are yourself, you gain a kind of set of superpowers, right, that look prejudicial to people who haven't achieved that.
And, you know, you say that you don't achieve it, like you get it, like you buy an iPod or something.
So it's levels, right?
It's layers, and you have to maintain it.
And so on, it's like being an athlete in tip-top condition, right?
I mean, you get there, and if you stop working at it, you quickly are no longer there, right?
But for those of us who've gotten some way along this road, when you get the wisdom of the whole self, the true self, the ecosystem, you get a kind of set of superpowers, right?
So... Someone, a woman came and posted on the board recently, and I won't get into the details, but she was saying, oh yeah, my dad was abusive, and I separated from him for like 10 years, and then I was so lonely, and I missed him, and so we got back together, and now it's wonderful.
And you read that, and it's not like...
He went to therapy, I went to therapy, we dealt with stuff, you know, we tentatively rebuilt, and here's the value that we get out of it.
It was just like, you know, I was lonely, I was desperate, and so I got back in touch.
And it was all, it's creepy, it's creepy.
And... When you have access to who you really are, your true self, you know this right up front.
You just know when someone's coming in.
Oh, and at the end she says, you know, basically grow up and deal with your shit.
Life's too fucking short, right?
And that's not the statement that comes out of people who have achieved some genuine wisdom and compassion and curiosity and so on, and who know that they are Approaching a very delicate subject.
You don't set off the depth charges, right?
By the way, child abuse for me is not a very delicate subject.
It's okay to do a tracheotomy when someone's choking, right?
But it's not the same as nutrition for the long haul.
But you read the stuff and you just know.
You know that it's just all kinds of creepy.
You know when someone's coming in and it's being manipulative.
You just know it. You feel it.
You get it. You get it.
But the game is, right, the trick that these people play is they come in and say all this crazy stuff, right?
And then you say, hey, this is crazy stuff.
And then they just go off on you, right?
I mean, that's the trap, right?
So when Socrates goes and examines the sophists or the politicians or the teachers or the, quote, wise men, and Socrates says, well, you must be...
And he always does the same thing, right?
And I've fallen into this myself sometimes as well.
And you say, wow, you must be amazingly wise to have learned so much about, you know, justice or truth or Or wisdom or virtue or honor or courage, whatever it is, nobility.
You must be awfully learned because I find these things very hard to understand, so perhaps you would like to instruct me on them, right?
And this is a kind of game, right?
And I'm aware when I'm playing it, and I'm less comfortable playing it now.
Obviously, Socrates is not a bad person to imitate most of the time, and if the world imitated Socrates, we'd be a hell of a lot better off.
But I'm less comfortable with it now.
And the reason is that...
Well, I've had more exposure, more understanding of how all this works.
But it's, and I have more credibility, I think, as well.
But the reason I'm more concerned about it now is because, or more hesitant, more reticent about it now, is that Socrates, and I think this is why they kind of killed him in many ways, is that Socrates knew that these people were full of shit, right?
Right. Some guy is up there pompously gasbagging about truth and virtue and things and all that and so on.
And Socrates says, wow, you must be so smart.
I don't get it. I mean, I have a real tough time with these things, but if you've got the answers, I would love to examine how you got there.
Now, Socrates knows, I believe, knows that these guys are full of shit, right?
And yet, he approaches them, you know, like, hey, instruct me, right?
And again, I've taken a page from this book, and I've played around with that approach, and I've done that approach, and it's certainly not the worst approach in the world.
It's certainly a lot better than many other approaches, but there's something fundamentally not true about it.
There's a non-assertiveness, right?
And it's not RTR, right?
Because the RTR is, you know, this just feels all kind of creepy.
And here's why, I think, right?
And if someone's just being a jerk, right?
The RTR is, you know, once you've gone through it a whole bunch of times, you know, the first time you have an epileptic attack, you say, what the hell was that, right? Right? The 50th time or the 100th time you say, hey, I just had an epileptic attack, right?
So RTR is not permanent.
It's until you, as I've said before, until you have gone through it a number of times, right?
And it's like the first time you do the surgery, you have someone talk you through it, right?
But after you do your 200th appendectomy, you pretty much can do it blindfolded, right?
So as you get practice, you get better and so on.
But, you know, the truth is, Don't come in and bullshit me.
Get lost. If this is the seriousness that you take these matters, to come in and spout off a whole bunch of crap, and you clearly have no idea what you're talking about, then you're just a manipulative little shit, and I don't want to have anything to do with you.
Get lost, right? Ban. I mean, this is something you know.
I mean, you know. After a certain amount of time, after a certain number of years of dealing with this, you just know when someone's coming in, bullshitting and splitting and projecting and manipulating.
I mean, you just know. You feel it in their very first post.
And I mean, if you take the time or bother, you can figure out exactly what has been put into this kind of stuff, right?
I did an analysis of a troll post a little while back.
I mean, you can parse it out, but you get it, right?
And... But Socrates wouldn't be honest about that.
Oh, instruct us, instruct us, right?
And he's a little bit more assertive, a lot more assertive in the trial than you normally hear when he's talking about Meletus and the others.
But that's kind of not a true approach.
And what happens, of course, is that if you say, you know, sorry, you know, with all due respect, you're just full of crap and you ban the person, right?
If this is how you start, I don't want a second post from you, right?
Okay. Because then what happens is they change names, they come back, they IP spoof, they say this place is censorious, this is a dictatorship, it's fascistic, I just had an innocent post, you banned for no reason, it was not offensive, I was not abusive, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And then everyone gets all shitstormed, right?
So that's the game, right?
That's the game that's being played, right?
And then they say, well, I'm aggressive now, but you provoked my aggression, right?
That's the story, right?
Well, sure, I'm angry now, but that's because you banned me and I wasn't angry at the beginning and you caused this kind of stuff, right?
So, I mean, obviously Socrates was dealing with some pretty powerful political forces and he had to be a lot more gentle and a lot more, you know, well, you are so wise, instruct me when he knows people are full of crap, right?
But that kind of approach just doesn't work for me as well anymore.
It just doesn't. And I think that, you know, those of us who've been around for a while, we kind of get in the hang of this, right?
So with determinists...
I can't even remember why I went on that tangent now.
Oh, it'll come to me later. But so determinists, why are they determinists, right?
Well, choice, of course, is identity, right?
I mean, choice is virtue.
Choice is identity. Choice is pride.
Choice is that which can be loved.
Choice is who you are.
If you don't make any choices, you're in a coma, right?
So choice is identity, right?
So when we see a lot of people who come in to...
To the call-in show to some degree, but to the chat room, at least when we had guests to a large degree, and then to the board more commonly, what happens is we see a common pattern, right? And that common pattern is...
You know, why would someone come in who's screwed up about sex in one way or another?
Well, usually because something terrifically untoward happened to them in that realm, right?
And, you know, so if somebody's obese, often, this is not my conclusion, if they're obese, it's often sexual abuse.
Behind that or that kind of quasi-incestuous thing that goes on between kids and opposite-sex parents sometimes, you know, the boyfriend to mom or whatever, the girlfriend to daddy.
So that's why they would have this kind of stuff, right?
And so why is it that someone who would come in would be screwed up about choice?
Well, because, the theory would go, the standard theory would go, because that person has faced a lot of punishment for making choices, right?
You start early, you start deep, right?
Why would somebody be very hostile towards the concept of choice, of free will, of responsibility?
No one's really that hostile to the concept of responsibility except, well...
I shouldn't say no one, except very bad people, right?
Bad people who don't want to take responsibility for their actions, right?
But why is it that somebody would be so...
Screwed up about this basic question of choice.
Well, it's like asking, why would somebody be screwed up about religion?
Because they've been raised in a crazy religious household, right?
Why would somebody be screwed up about sex?
Because sexual inappropriateness or romantic, quasi-sexual inappropriateness of one kind or another was inflicted upon them as children.
Why would somebody be angry?
Because they were abused by angry parents as children.
This is where you start, right?
It's not... Definitive, and it's not the final answer, and it's not a closed case, but this way you start, right?
Why would somebody bring such irrationality to a particular topic?
Well, because of his or her history, childhood history, early history, right?
Irrationalities and defenses and projections and avoidances that go this deep and are this impenetrable just come from early childhood.
They just do. And so why would somebody be so hostile to the idea of choice?
Well, I mean, one of the things that we've seen quite consistently among people who have honestly and with maturity and courage talked about abuse as children, one of the things that we've seen quite consistently is that there is a great pressure to internalize The parents' thoughts and wishes,
right? If you were abused by your dad, say, and you want to take a break, your dad doesn't want you to take a break because that makes his conscience feel bad and he acts out in other ways, right?
So then people say, well, I'm ambivalent, and it means that they want something and, you know, follow the benefit, right?
They want something and their father wants something quite the opposite, and so you follow the benefit to see what's going on, right?
And we've also seen many times what happens with really narcissistic parents is that any genuine, spontaneous in particular, and authentic expression of identity in the child is attacked as bad, right? As evil, as wrong, as willfulness, as stubbornness, as backtalk, you know, whatever it is, right, that is going on.
And so, abusive parents hate choice.
Narcissistic parents hate identity, and identity is choice, is free will, is the ethics of choice.
So, and of course, the Abusive parents treat children as objects, as objects for their own consumption, their own cannibalism, their own poison containers, their own sadistic pleasures at times.
They treat children as things without...
And they view any kind of individuation and any kind of selfhood on the part of the child as a great evil, as an inconvenience, as something that pricks the pleasures of their narcissism, right? So we have determinists who You know, hate.
There's very strong feelings, right, that determinants have about free will.
And it's very condescending.
I'll tell you that. There's no...
I mean, nihilists, number one.
Agnostics, number two. But they're tied with determinants as far as condescension goes, right?
I mean, it's like, well, don't you people realize that free will is a myth and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
It's a religion.
You can't prove it. You can't identify it.
And so on. And so what I feel is lectured to by somebody who's very impatient and somebody who's very volatile.
That's what always occurs for me when I'm talking with a determinist and that I feel like I'm getting sucked into a kind of kaleidoscope, you know, like up is down, black is white, words change meanings, everything shifts, right?
And that's narcissism in my experience.
So why would somebody be so screwed up about choice?
About the simple axiom that to debate with somebody you have to accept responsibility and free will.
And preferred states and our ability to choose them and identify them.
You have to, otherwise it's all a game, a silly game, right?
Well, it's because they were attacked for expressing Choice, free will, identity, personhood, preference as children.
I mean, weren't we, those of us who went through those kinds of childhoods, weren't they all that way?
Weren't we all attacked for expressing preferences?
Haven't you seen how nervous people are to simply express simple preferences in their adult life?
And that happens to me as well at times.
Well, it's because they were attacked, right?
I mean, why is someone fearful of the opposite sex?
Because they were attacked and mocked for expressing romantic or sexual interest, or whatever sex you're attracted to, right?
Why is someone afraid of being assertive?
Because every time she was assertive as a kid, her mom or her dad would belittle or attack or hit or whatever, right?
Why are people screwed up about a particular topic?
Because they got punished for that when they would show me.
That's where you start. That's where any sensible person starts.
It's not a closed case. It's not the final resting place.
It may be completely incorrect, but surely that's where you would start.
Right? And so we have the determinists who basically say, well, but people are just meat, right?
Same as everything. Well, children are just that, to parents, right?
The choice is an illusion.
Choice is a fantasy.
Well, that's someone who's given up, right?
Who had a strong capacity, was inhabited by strong preference and choice when they were children.
Got that beaten out of them or mocked out of them or teased out of them or ridiculed out of them or whatever, right?
Your choice means nothing.
And so, as adults, they say, you know, choice is just a bullshit illusion, right?
But that's Fundamentally, it's a cosmic case of sour grapes, right?
Choice got beaten out of me, and so I'm going to view all choice as an illusion, right?
Because that's the only possibility, that they've been so inhabited by the preferences and ugly pleasures of their abusers that they've just taken on that position, right?
Only deluded fools believe in identity.
Only deluded fools believe in choice, in freedom, in responsibility, in ethics, in preferred states.
I mean that's so bottomlessly cynical and empty and shattered.
shattered, not broken, but shattered to atoms.
Identity is an illusion You know, like if we were secularists and we believed that identity existed in the soul, there was no such thing as the personality without the soul, then we met a religious person who said, my identity is in my soul, and we said both your identity and your soul are a complete illusion, and you are exactly the same as everyone else, just a robot machine, like a protozoa, right?
Feeding, excreting, and reproducing.
That would be the same as, why would we have that feeling, this hostility?
So I think that's important to understand, that when people are screwed up about a topic as an adult, it's because they got punished for whatever that was, and probably a lot more too, but they got punished for whatever that was when they were kids.
And, I mean, why I think I'm not freaked out about choices, free will, is because I was a wolf kid for much of my childhood and was sort of left to raise myself.
And, you know, I was obviously punished for expressing preferences, but it was never claustrophobic.
I mean, my brother a little more, but my mom not so much.
It was never claustrophobic that way.
So I think that's important.
Now, of course, if you're an abusive parent, and we don't know, right?
It could be the number of people who've come in who really dislike free will have come in and they dislike free will because they're really bad people, right?
They've done bad things, right?
And when their conscience begins to arise up in them, then they...
Beat it back down by saying, well, there's no choice.
It's all determined.
That's the sort of heavy club they use to beat their conscience back into the unconscious.
But I think that's an important thing to understand as well, right?
That people who have done some really bad things in their life and who aren't willing or able to, I say willing to make atonement, to make restitution, well, they're going to hate the idea of choice and moral responsibility because that doesn't serve them well, right?
Their conscience rises up and they say, oh, it was inevitable, it's predetermined, there's no such thing as ethics.
You might as well be a hallucination of Jesus whispering in my ear and I'm an atheist, I don't care, right?
I'm not going to listen to you.
It's all predetermined, right?
And that's something that I think is important to remember.
Because that's the only thing that explains why people simply won't talk to me about what happened to them that may have given them a predilection for determinism.
Because the true self is essentially gone, only exists as a tortured reaction to all of the other nonsense.
But that's the only reason why nobody...
Like, why it's just such nonsense, why it's such a nonsense position, why people find it just so impossible to see these really completely obvious things, obvious problems about determinism, why they'll never talk about their childhoods, and why...
They are so irritable, right?
So putting this all together, it just seems to me that if you're attacked for expressing any kind of free will, any kind of choice, any kind of preference, and viciously attacked and repeatedly attacked, and I think in a kind of obsessive and claustrophobic kind of way, Then choice is going to be something, free will is going to be something that you have this completely borderline love-hate relationship with, right?
You've yearned for it, and yet at the same time you view it as a sign of cynicism, you know, like an ex-Catholic or whatever, somebody who's given up but still vaguely wrestles with the problems.
So I hope that helps.
I hope it's not too rambly, but I kind of wanted to get those thoughts down.
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