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Feb. 4, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:54
1274 A Theory of Free Will Part 2
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We continue, my friends, down the road towards, hopefully, a workable framework for free will.
So I'm going to put forward a definition of free will that I think could at least help answer some of the questions that people have In regards to what it is and so on.
I'm not going to put this forward as a biological proof, because obviously there isn't any.
The brain is an incredibly complex organ, the most dazzling and astounding organ that the universe has ever produced, so that's as far as we know.
So, I'm going to put forward some ways of working with the concept of free will, and then what we'll do in the last section is look at the implications of the rejection of this concept and look at what it means to have integrity in this realm, because this is the problem.
The major problem I have with determinists is one that they want to have the cake and eat it, too.
They want all of the certainty and tidiness that comes from an atomic deterministic kind of Dominoes falling produces the illusion of free will kind of viewpoint, but at the same time, they want to rescue virtue and choice and responsibility.
And so, for me, if you're a determinist, then that's fine.
Then you shouldn't debate the issue, because then it's like yelling at this rock bouncing down a mountainside saying, go left, go right!
Ah, what are you doing? It would be madness, right?
So, we'll get into the consequences of that either in part three.
But for part two here, I'd like to put forward a framework which we can use to determine free will and elevate it above determinism, elevate it above randomness, and also elevate it above mere appetite, right?
So, a shark swims, and then when it notices an attractive and nude swimmer, The shark rises up and eats good chunks of her.
Why? Well, because the shark is stimulated by appetite and the desire, and a shark obviously has a desire to eat when it's hungry, as we all do.
And the Hobbesian view, of course, is that it is appetite which drives us, and the appetite is a stimulation, internal stimulation, that arises from our stomach and the chemical processes that work to produce hunger and thirstiness.
And so it is the satisfaction of that desire that is the supposed choice.
But since we don't have, fundamentally, choices over our desires, we have choices, we could say, in how we react to them, but if I feel hungry, I can choose to eat or not, let's say, but I can't choose whether or not I feel hungry, because that is a biochemical process.
I can choose to jump off a cliff, but I can't choose to jump off a cliff and fly.
So, if mere desire is the foundational aspect of human motivation, then free will doesn't really exist, because all we're doing is responding to appetite.
And maybe we could train our appetite to do different things, we could desire more, sort of, quote, virtue, but we are fundamentally indistinguishable from a shark.
Now, what I want to do, sort of the challenges that come up with the free will question, particularly as it relates to morality, is it can't just be a continuum, right?
So, free will can't work, I mean, I'm fully with the determinists on this one, right?
Let's just say free will can't work if we go with, you know, single cell to man.
And say, well, a single cell has appetites and a single cell goes to eat things and reproduces and obviously fits the criteria of life, these single-celled organisms.
And, you know, somewhere in here, you know, we have a shark, and then we have, you know, I don't know, a dolphin, and then an ape, and then there's a continuum, right?
So the appetites, the complexity of the appetites, the complexity of the organism goes up, you know, like this.
And even if we say that man is, you know, 50 times more complex than his nearest relative, it's still just a matter of degree.
It's just a larger degree.
But that's not how morality works in the traditional sense, right?
So, if we say that a man has a responsibility, sorry, a man has a complexity of 100 and a shark has a complexity of 10, we don't say that a man who steps another man in the water is 100% responsible, but a shark that eats a man is only 10% responsible, because that's not really how free will works.
Free will has a cutoff.
That, as far as we understand it, or as it's commonly talked about, free will has a cutoff below human beings, so we don't really ascribe free will even to chimpanzees and dolphins and other intelligent species.
So, there's some things which free will cannot It can't be defined by complexity.
It can't be defined by biology alone.
It can't be defined by things like rational consciousness, because certainly monkeys will pile crates up to get some bananas that are hanging above them and will also go and encircle the baboons that they're trying to eat and so on.
It can't be the use of language, because...
I mean, even bees do a dance that say where the honey is, and obviously there's some certain possible attributes of rudimentary language in dolphins and so on.
So you can't just sort of say, well, human beings have this attribute, and that attribute is free will, language or rational consciousness, because that's just a difference of degree, not of kind.
And fundamentally, just working empirically, human beings do stuff that That nothing else can do.
It's not that chimpanzees write rudimentary symphonies and human beings write complex symphonies.
It's not that dolphins are bad at karaoke, but human beings are very good at karaoke.
Actually, most people aren't. It's not just we do more of.
There's something fundamentally different in the realm of free will.
Which, again, I'm just talking from the traditional perspective, right?
And I go with Aristotle that if you come up with a theory of ethics that says that murder and rape are good, that you've made a mistake somewhere and you've got to kind of go back.
Because there's generally acceptable norms that we have to kind of work with as philosophers.
And if you say, the bridge that I want to build stands perfectly well, On paper.
But when I build it, it falls down.
Clearly I've made a mistake somewhere, just as if my scientific or mathematical theory is great on paper but doesn't pan out in the lab.
Well, clearly I've made a mistake.
So, I'm not saying that this, because, you know, traditionally lots of people believe in God, and so the fact that people believe in this immaterial entity called God doesn't make that immaterial entity valid.
And so neither does the fact that people believe in an immaterial, quote, entity called free will doesn't make that valid either.
But if we can, If we come up with a theory that conforms with, sort of, quote, common sense or universal standards of morality, that's better than if we come up with something that completely opposes them, like determinism.
So, I'm going to sort of put a start of the definition out, and then we'll have a look in more detail, right?
So, there's a timeline of cause and effect, let's say.
I mean, not let's say, there is, right?
So, there's immediate gratification, and then there's long-term gratification, right?
So, there's right now and long-term.
So, clearly, if we look at something like smoking, we can look at this like, to have ye olde cigarette is real nice in the short-term.
I mean, I have to assume that, because there are lots of smokers in the world.
So, immediately, you get a short-term benefit, right?
Now, a single-celled organism, or even goldfish, which will eat until they die, don't have the capacity empirically to defer short-term gratification for the sake of longer-term gratification, right?
So, if goldfish could smoke, they would just be smoking, right?
Now, the fact is, of course, that human beings, and we'll talk in more detail about other animals in a sec, human beings have the capacity They don't always exercise it.
They have the capacity to say, well, in the immediate, a cigarette is damn fine, damn tasty, so round, so firm, so fully packed.
So there's this immediate benefit.
Unfortunately, you know, there's the long-term benefit of being dead, right?
Sorry, the long-term consequences that you get lung cancer and you die a horrible, painful death.
So, if human beings did not have the capacity to weigh short-term benefits with long-term benefits and to choose whether or not they could focus on the long-term or the short-term benefits, then there would be no such thing as responsibility, clearly.
I mean, if all that we had was the immediate, what's going to happen in the next 30 seconds, we'd be sort of going forward in a blur of now, and there would be nothing to weigh against.
So we can think of this in terms of dieting as well, right?
So let's get rid of the cigarette and let's replace it with a cupcake of some kind, right?
So we've got this cupcake, which is, you know, damn tasty and so on.
And immediately it tastes good, right?
But you know, as they say, once on the lips, forever on the hips.
Then we have this long-term benefit called, you know, obesity and, you know, death, let's say.
Heart attacks and, you know, pulling that Ella Fitzgerald, losing your legs to diabetes kind of thing.
So there's the short-term and then there's the long-term.
And human beings do have the capacity, and we know this just because there are long-term contracts and all this kind of stuff.
Human beings do have the capacity To either look at immediate benefits or to look at long-term benefits.
That, for sure, we have the capacity to do either.
Now, the determinists would say which one we do is completely predetermined.
And let's just leave that aside for now and say that there's the immediate benefit and then there's the longer-term benefit.
And the cost-benefit analysis that occurs is important, right?
So, if a guy wins a million dollars and goes and blows it in Vegas, He obviously had the choice, or he had the capacity to not do that.
Even if you say deterministically he was going to, as a human being, in the abstract, he had the capacity to put it in the bank, invest it sensibly, and so on, right?
If he goes and throws it all on one hand to poker or something, then, you know, so then you've got immediate and long-term.
Now, somebody has pointed out on the Freedom Aid radio boards, and, you know, validly, too, that a coyote who gets his arm, his paw, caught in a trap.
We'll, after a certain reasonable point of waiting, chew that leg off in order to become free of the trap.
Now, clearly, the short term there is, like, ow, right?
You have a sore tooth, you go to the dentist, right?
And the short term is going to be painful, but the long term is better in that you're alive.
And, of course, human beings will do that, too, if you've ever seen the Saw movies.
I haven't, but... I've sort of got the general idea that human beings will, you know, hack off their own limbs to get free.
You know, imagine if you were a scuba diver and you'd sort of sit there and one of those giant clam things clamps onto your leg.
Well, you may have to cut off your own leg after you run out of air if you can't reach in and cut the muscle.
So, even animals do have the capacity in situations of extremity to act in a short-term negative manner in order to gain a longer-term benefit, right?
Now, The Randian definition of sort of free will is the capacity to think or not to think.
And I think that's fine. I just think it's a bit general in a way, and I don't think it's precise enough or detailed enough to answer objections.
So, clearly, human beings do have the capacity to focus on the short term or to focus on the long term.
Now, I would argue that this is not inbuilt and the same for everyone, right?
So, Let's go back to the smoking example for just a moment.
So Walter Rowley brought smoking over from the Indians.
I think it was their vengeance for the whole smallpox thing, the blankets.
So here we have the old cigarette and we have death by lung cancer.
There's a number of different things that can occur.
So in the 17th century or 16th century when this all first came up, people's average life expectancy was like 30 or 25.
So you didn't live long enough.
You'd die of something else.
You didn't live long enough to get lung cancer, which is unusual to happen before, you know, 50 or 60, even for a heavy smoker.
So in that sense, this long-term benefit was not really particularly relevant, right?
I mean, If somebody said, well, if you never eat red meat again, you might get 30 seconds added to your life, probably wouldn't be a real benefit to you, right?
So, this stuff changes, right?
Also, there has to be knowledge of this, right?
So, it was only in the 1950s that the scientific evidence began to pile up about the causal relationship between smoking and lung cancer.
So, if you don't know this, If you don't know about the mortality aspect or if you're dying of something else anyway, then why not in a sense?
So this kind of stuff can change.
There's a guy, the old guy on Desperate Housewives.
My wife likes it.
He said that he was eating something and he's dying of cancer, right?
And the guy says, is that really good for you?
And he says, I got less than a year to live.
I'm not exactly worried about my waistline.
And that, of course, is quite important, right?
So, these kinds of things have, they change over life, right?
So, the odds of starting to smoke, sorry, the benefits of quitting smoking when you're 16 are a whole lot different than when you're 90, right?
These kinds of things change over time.
You have to know the long-term effects.
If you don't know that eating too much sugar or whatever can cause diabetes, then eating more sugar, forget the obesity thing just for the moment, just looking at these two things, it's going to have a different effect on you.
This capacity requires knowledge.
It requires an understanding of cause and effect.
And so on, right?
I mean, if you don't know that your premiums are going to rise for health insurance if you go over a certain weight, you're going to have less incentive to not do that.
So this requires a certain kind of knowledge.
I also think that this is, you know, like all good habits or bad habits in a sense, it can be trained, right?
So I don't think that free will is just some innate edifice that is fundamental or foundational to all human beings and everybody has the same capacity.
Free will is kind of like health.
If you continually make bad decisions with regards to eating and exercise and so on, self-care, then you don't have the choice to be healthy.
You're just going to be unhealthy. And at some point, it's going to get so bad that you can't be healthy again, right?
I've used this example before, like Jerry Garcia, the singer for The Grateful Dead.
When he died, I think he was in his late 50s, you know, after a lifetime of smoking and cheeseburgers and no exercise, Everything just shut down at once.
A year before that, it didn't matter if he switched to salads and yoga and stopped smoking, he was still going to die.
So there are things that you do reach that point of no return.
I think the same thing happens in terms of free will.
So if you decide not to deal with your past, because this is a therapeutic situation as well.
This is foundational to the question of philosophy and psychological self-awareness.
The Socratic dictum of know thyself.
Because When you start going into emotional pain, it's very similar to physiotherapy.
If you break your leg badly, a twist break or something, and then you go into physiotherapy, it's really painful.
I've never broken a bone, but a friend of mine did, a judo guy, and it's really, really painful.
So, why do you do it? Well, because in the long run, you're going to end up healthier than if you don't do it.
You're going to end up hobbling around for the rest of your life.
So, you submit to that short-term pain in order to gain longer-term strength and health, which is dieting, going to the gym when you don't feel like it, and so on.
But, of course, this is also the case with psychological help.
And the book, did I mention the book?
I can't remember if I did.
The Tyranny of Illusion, available at freedomainradio.com.
When you start to learn about yourself and deal with your history and so on, it's very painful.
But, of course, you gain freedom and flexibility, strength, power, and virtue in the long run, but you have to go through a period which can sometimes be a long time.
I spent over a year and a half in pretty intensive therapy to deal with these issues, to gain sort of happiness and strength on the other side of that.
This sort of capacity that human beings have to compare short-term and long-term gains certainly does seem to be pretty innate to our species.
The capacity! It doesn't mean that everyone will always do it, right?
But it is something that human beings can do.
And it is something that human beings have the choice.
I would argue that human beings have the choice to do it.
So when you're looking at gains and losses, you have the choice either just to focus on the short-term gains, or you have the chance to focus on the long-term gains.
And the fact that these two can be in complete opposition, and the fact that it requires conceptual intelligence to project the consequences of actions further out, You can't teach a monkey about too much sugar equals potential for diabetes or something like that.
You can't even teach a monkey that too much sugar will equal obesity.
It could happen. A monkey will eat too much, get fat, get sluggish, and then stop eating because, you know, whatever.
But that's experiential. That's always ex post facto reasoning.
I am fat, therefore I don't want to eat anymore, rather than I should not eat more because I don't want to get fat, right?
Human beings do seem to have an ability here, but this ability is shared to some degree by other creatures, so I don't think that that's the absolute Sinh Kuan Na definition of free will.
So what I'll do is...
Yeah, let's do this very briefly.
I think it can be relatively brief.
I'm going to put forward a new way of looking at free will.
I mean, it may not be new. It's new to me.
A new way of looking at the question of free will so that we can really center it around human capacity.
Because, you know, frankly, people who argue about the free will is like, Steph just raised his hand.
Why did he raise his hand? I don't care about that stuff, because free will is really foundationally about ethics.
And I really don't care about the free will of a goldfish.
I'm never going to take a goldfish to court or anything like that.
So I'm going to put forward a framework or a way of Working with free will as a concept that is absolutely core and solely within the realm of human thought and human capacities.
Alright, so let's look at a capacity that only human beings have.
And we'll start with it in the realm of something we're all more familiar with, which is the scientific method.
And then we will expand it to include other things.
Alright, so here is...
A human head. We'll put the eyes up here and the mouth down here, just so we remember.
Can we see that? Yeah, pretty much.
So we can remember what it is.
This is the human head, right?
This is the brain, the mind, or whatever, right?
And out here, we have reality, right?
We have reality.
Things sort of as they are, right?
So, again, I apologize for my crappy art skills.
Let's just say that is not a mushroom cloud or a toadstool or a mushroom, but a tree, right?
So a human being and a tree.
Now, obviously the eyes are going to see the tree and flip it in our brain and all that.
We're going to end up with a picture of a tree in our mind, right?
That's not a nose, the tree.
So we're going to end up with a picture of a tree in our mind.
Let me flip colors for a moment here.
Let's go with exciting red, right?
So we've got this tree in our mind.
Now, every animal that has sensory organs can do this to one degree or another.
Every creature, even down to the single-celled organisms that feel their way and know the difference between food and non-food and so on.
They can all do this, right?
Human beings can do it in a pretty sophisticated way, but we still can't smell as well as the arrangements of rods and cones in the eyes.
We still can't smell as well as dogs or see as well as sharks underwater and so on, right?
But every creature can do this to some degree.
Human beings have a different capacity, which I believe, and I've never seen evidence of the contrary, you certainly let me know if there is, that I believe is only a human capacity.
And that is to create an abstract and logical conceptual definition.
An abstract, and not just a perceptual one, like, that's a tree, I've learned there's a tree, I recognize that those are trees, and so on, but that we can come up with a rational, consistent, objective, conceptual definition of what a tree is,
and compare not just the sense evidence of the tree to other sense evidences of trees, but rather To compare the sense evidence of a tree, what comes in through our eyes, to a conceptual definition of a tree.
So, you've all seen those, I mean, if you've spent any time sort of looking at biology or national or geographic, They will show some creature, and nothing's particularly popping to my mind.
They will show some creature, and they'll say, this is in fact a mammal, or this is in fact a frog, or this freaky thing is in fact a tree, even though it doesn't look like a tree.
It looks completely different, but based on the definition, it is a tree.
So we can come up with a definition of a tree, we can come up with a definition of life, of virtue even, and so on.
We can come up with conceptual definitions.
And this really is the scientific method.
So, all animals with sense organs and hands and so on know that a rock is going to fall.
A squirrel can catch a nut.
A dog can catch a frisbee.
They can work with those physics.
So, they can process sensual reality, come up with cause and effect, the dog can jump and, you know, grab the Frisbee out of the middle of the air.
But what a dog and a squirrel cannot do is come up with a theory of physics and mathematically Come up with the equations that predict the movement of matter.
So, a dog can compare perceptual evidence to the future and go and catch the frisbee, but a dog cannot come up with a conceptual understanding, an abstract scientific understanding of reality.
So, again, let's go back to the human guy here.
So, we have, let's just put...
A famous equation there.
Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.
That is something which we have in our brains, right?
Now, this does not come from perceptual reality.
This is something that we have in our minds that is a relationship between matter and energy that Einstein came up with in the early 20th century that is derived from reality.
So we have the capacity to compare what it is we're going to do to a theory, a specific, abstract, generalized, precise theory.
The scientific method is really the whole process of comparing perceptual or sensual reality, what we see, touch, taste, feel, and so on, or even if we translate it into some other medium, like a spectrograph or whatever.
It's comparing that evidence of the senses to conceptual theories.
And that really is a capacity that only human beings have, and that is something I'm not even going to imagine to claim how that works.
But we know that it does work, because that, of course, is science.
And language is one of those things as well.
So, what I'd like to propose is that free will has to be something that is just for human beings.
Because, again, we're not going to stop putting goldfish or sharks in jail for eating worms or people or whatever.
The only capacity that human beings have that is relevant to free will is our capacity to compare specific actions, properties, behaviors, or whatever, to generalized theories.
Because we're the only creatures that we know of that can come up with these generalized theories.
Now, fundamentally, fundamentally, Free will matters in terms of ethics, and we'll get to that in the third of this, I think, three-part series.
We can talk about raising hands and doing cartwheels and so on another time, but really, foundationally, as I'll talk about, it comes down to ethics, which I'll talk about in the next video.
And... So, the most important thing is for us to understand that human beings have the capacity to compare actions to generalized theories of ethics, right?
So, we've got one guy holds a gun to another guy, right?
And he, uh, give me your wallet or whatever, right?
Well, that's an action, right?
And, of course, we can see that this person is weighing the short-term advantages of getting somebody else's wallet versus the longer-term disadvantages of potential jail, of being on the run, of guilt, or remorse, or whatever.
But, of course, animals do that, too, right?
Animals steal from each other, and they risk getting caught, and the zebras cross the river, even though there are alligator or crocodiles in the river, and so on.
They'll take risks, short-term gains, long-term benefits, and so on.
But the freedom here, I think, right, the choice that fundamentally free will comes down to is to compare this situation against a universal theory.
In this case, a particular universal theory of ethics.
And I argue, in the book, again, not to like do much, but in the book on truth to and evolution, We argue that human beings are inevitably drawn to justify.
We are inevitably drawn to justify our actions according to theories.
Even this guy is saying, hey, if you're strong enough, do it.
If you can, get away with it.
If you don't, you're too chicken.
He's going to reframe this in terms of a kind of predatory virtue, that he's stronger, he's better, and the might makes right, and so on.
He's going to be unable to do this.
Without comparing his actions to a universal framework of morality that he is just acting as a part of.
Nobody ever says, it's good because I do it.
I mean, if you ask people ten questions, or even five, or even two, about their justifications, always with reference to a universal theory of values.
So the question is, the fundamental freedom that we have, because we innately are going to compare our actions to a universal standard of value, Do we take the time to figure out whether that universal standard of value, virtue, or what I call universally preferable behavior, do we take the time to figure out whether our theory is correct or not?
That, to me, is something that is fundamentally human beings, because we're the only species that we know of that can create these universal theories of value, whether they're scientific, whether they're mathematical, whether they're biology, whether they're theories of ethics or right behavior.
We are the only creatures in the known universe that either have the capacity or almost the inevitable desire to compare our actions to a generalized theory.
So, to put it back into a scientific context, because I know this is a little tough to process, to put it back into a scientific context, if I come up with a theory as to gravity or electromagnetism or strong or weak forces or whatever, if I come up with a theory Then, I have the capacity to just say, well, that theory is true because I believe in it, which is sort of the religious or patriotic approach.
My country, right or wrong, God exists because God exists, because it's right to believe that God exists, and it's virtuous, and so on.
Or, I have the capacity to subject my theory to a rational analysis.
So, in science this would be peer review, this would be a rigorous analytical testing of the logic, this would be empirical evidence, research into empirical evidence.
I have that choice.
Am I just going to believe in the theory that justifies whatever it is that I do because I want to, or am I going to submit my theories about virtue, which inevitably are going to condition my actions, to exterior standards of rational analysis?
So, am I going to submit my theory to the scientific method, to rational philosophical analysis, and so on?
This doesn't mean that everybody has to be a philosopher.
Of course not. But no more than anybody has to be a scientist.
But I don't have to be a scientist to recognize the value of this kind of thing and to reject.
I don't have to be a scientist to reject religion.
I just have to understand some basic stuff around science, which I think I do.
So, this question of free will, that it's not just the balancing of short-term and long-term gains, which other creatures can do, which we do not assign free will to a coyote, but it's the comparing of our justifications for action to a more universal standard, and whether we choose or not To subject that external standard to a rational analysis, that fundamentally has to do with free will.
And this may seem rather abstract and obtuse, but we'll get to why that is so important in just a moment and how I think it clears up a lot of problems with the free will position and doesn't help the problems that I think will show up in the determinist position.
So thank you so much for hanging on through this conversation, and we'll tidy it up in the next round.
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