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Aug. 16, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:01:51
1724 Determinism - The Family Backstory
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So this is a conversation about free will versus determinism and one that I think is actually a lot more useful than the ones I've had over the past 25 years and particularly over the past five years of Free Domain Radio.
For many years I've been curious about what motivates determinists.
Is there any history that they've had as children or as young adults that may have had some influence on their receptivity towards Determinism, because I find that when we're stuck in frustrating merry-go-round arguments that never resolve, never progress, and where definitions are consistently shifting, that it's most likely that you're dealing with the bomb in the brain thing.
So I had this conversation with a very emotionally generous and open determinist, who I really do appreciate to this fellow taking the time to do this.
I lost a minute or two at the beginning, but basically I'm just starting off with a history of my experience with Free will, about what I thought it was and why I thought it was important and why I thought it was valid philosophically.
And of course I looked at and worked on the self-detonating arguments about that, which I'm sure you're familiar with by now.
And then that sort of continued.
Then I just sort of said, look, I'm not going to...
It was consuming about 90% of the board's resources, which is sort of what's happening now.
And zero progress was being made.
And I lost respect for the determinist position over that time period for a variety of reasons, which we don't really have to get into here.
And so I just said, this board is not going to do that topic anymore because of the lack of progress and just general mental exhaustion.
It was just something we just had to agree to disagree, if that makes any sense, because it was turning the order to a less pleasant place, an uglier place, and there was no particular progress being made, and I couldn't for the life of me see what the difference was between the determinist and the free will position, right?
Because I would say to determinists, well, the consequence of your belief would be X, and they'd say, well, no, I still have morality.
And I still have love.
And I still get to correct people.
I still get to debate. And I still get to believe in truth.
So basically I ended up saying, okay, well I'm a determinist then too.
Because those are all things that are the essence of philosophy to me.
So I'm perfectly happy and comfortable to be called a determinist because there's no functional difference between that and free will in any way that I could think or conceive of.
And so I guess it came back up as a topic and exactly the same thing seems to be happening.
And I would rather not end up having to say, let's stop using this topic.
I would rather there be something productive But I have a feeling, or I have a theory, which comes out of many years of conflict resolution in my marriage as an entrepreneur on this show.
I have a theory that determinism is psychologically driven, and that doesn't mean that the position is false, but it does mean that when I get involved in intractable debates with people, If you go to a marriage counselor and you say, we're always having fights about who uses the car, these fights have been going on for 20 years, any competent marriage counselor will say, it's not about the car.
You don't debate the form.
You have to look at the deeper. What is the deeper emotional driver behind the confidence?
And so I put a call out to determinists saying, listen, I would really like to find out what the emotional drivers are behind determinism.
I know what my emotional drivers are for free will, and I've talked about those quite considerably.
But I wanted to know what the emotional drivers were for determinists.
I put that call out a couple of years ago and no determinist ended up taking me up on it and I was sort of hoping that maybe you could indulge me in that.
I would certainly be happy to try to do that as best as I can analyze myself and maybe you can help by asking some leading questions or pointed questions.
Can I just say first really quickly, I sort of broke web community rules 101 by sort of delving right in without being a lurker long enough first.
So I apologize. I didn't know that this was You know, a particularly fraught subject on Free Domain Radio before I launched that.
No, that's fine.
I mean, I would have mentioned it if it had been a real problem, so it's fine.
But that's no problem.
Right. And the other thing that I just want to say really quickly before you launch in is that my experience, I guess, as somebody on the other side of the fence, is exactly the same as yours.
Just my experience of it is, you know, that I've spent years, whenever I found some, because it interests me, whenever I found somebody who seemed like an intelligent, rational person, I discussed free will of them from a determinist point of view and felt the same wall that you feel that you're getting from determinists.
And it just, it seemed like A few people have said on the board that there's a bomb in the brain of somebody on some side.
Or I guess both. Yeah, it could be both, for sure.
It could be both, but definitely one, for sure.
Because any intractable dispute is emotionally driven.
It's not driven by the reason or evidence.
It's driven by emotions.
And I think something that we may have in common at this point My main interest at this point, I think, is less about the free will deter this thing than that potential bomb in the brain.
Who has it? Why do they have it if they have it?
You know, and so on. Why is this particular subject so inflammatory even amongst, you know, rationalists and so on?
So, yeah, anyway, sorry. That's my introductory remark.
Well, I guess that the first question I would ask, and I hope you don't mind if I just ask a bunch of questions, this is not designed to...
Anything you want.
And I just want to be clear, this is not a rhetorical trick.
This is not designed to prove or disprove either of our positions.
This is just a way of finding out if there's an emotional issue for both of us that may be interfering with the debate.
This is not a conclusive one position is right.
Absolutely. So can you tell me a little bit about when you first became interested in determinism, what your path to it was and why you feel that it became of such great interest?
Right. One thing that I have to say about that is I feel like I started really calling myself a determinist on the board in this thread because it just seemed like the simplest way to label myself.
But I'm probably like a soft determinist or something.
Determinism seems to make sense to me, but it's not like my world would be shattered and turned upside down and I'd be in the twilight zone if it turned out not to be true.
I feel like what my position feels like to me more is as a free will skeptic.
And determinism is one of the things that makes me feel that way.
That perhaps free will doesn't exist, but if free will was eliminated, I wouldn't go, oh, well, then, or sorry, if determinism was eliminated, I wouldn't instantly go, oh, well, then, of course, free will exists.
So I feel like it needs more than toppling determinism, but it's just because everybody calls this the free will versus determinism debate, and I didn't want to constantly get into that.
I just went ahead and Except for that label.
So I just don't want to mislead you or anybody else.
Yeah, and I think it's fair to say, sorry to interrupt, but I think it's fair to say that it's a binary proposition.
I think everyone can understand that we don't have 100% free will, but a determinist will say we don't have any free will.
The most ardent free will person will not say, I have the choice to fly unaided or walk through walls or live forever.
And if you're dealing with someone like that, you just might need to adjust their It's a binary.
It's a zero versus something other than zero in terms of choice.
Is that fair to say? Yes, I think it's very fair to say, and I mean, you've certainly studied philosophy for years longer than I have, so I'm sure you're obviously very aware, whether you agree with it or not, of the arguments that say that, well, if determinism doesn't exist, then the opposite would be randomness, and you don't get free will from that either.
Yeah, no, and I agree that that is certainly not my definition of free will.
Okay, okay, I just wanted to, and so my only point is that That we can call me a determinist, but I'm really, I guess, more of a free will skeptic than a determinist.
I'm very much into, as I'm sure you are too, empirical observation and the scientific method is a big deal for me.
And randomness simply is not how human beings do not operate in a random manner any more than life evolves in a random manner.
And so I think randomness is something that we can throw out of the window even if we discount philosophical arguments and simply look at human beings respond to incentives.
There would be no such thing as...
Economics, if people acted randomly, and economics is a fairly valid discipline.
So I think we can toss randomness out, and with that, there's either a tiny smidgen to a medium smidgen of choice, or everything is predetermined in a sort of dominoes, causal way from the beginning of the universe.
So I think the reason that we have to say determinist versus free will is that at its essence, it is a binary proposition, I think.
Right. Alright, so I'm going to try to answer your Question about when I became interested in this.
It's a little hard for me.
I don't really remember, you know, I don't remember a light bulb moment.
But I think, and I think you're going to like this part, Steph, but I think where I connect most with the free domain community is not this or libertarianism, which is something I'm interested in, but I'm not all that knowledgeable about it yet.
But it's really education.
I haven't contributed anything on the education board because everybody said pretty much everything that I would ever say about the U.S. educational system, but I went to a terrible, terrible, terrible public school, as I'm sure you did and a lot of people did for over a decade of my life.
I was a very intellectually free child thanks to some good things my parents did.
And I remember confronting a lot of these questions because I naively thought that school was supposed to be an intellectual playground as opposed to sort of indoctrination arena.
And I would continually...
I mean, I really thought that's why I was in school.
So it was in school that I started...
Asking all these really fundamental questions, you know, does God exist?
What is God? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
All these sort of, you know, what is morality?
And found continual resistance from my teachers.
Sure. You should really, sorry to interrupt, just a slight pitch, you should really check out my book, On Truth, The Tyranny of Illusion.
It talks about this process, at least from my perspective, but anyway, go on.
Right, right, right.
So, I mean, I think the interesting thing, perhaps, to explore if we want to get into my psychology, and the thing that I'm not self-aware about is, for some reason, that process, getting rebuffed in that way by so many adults, It seemed to affect me much more strongly than my peers.
So I think the frustration was that free will was one of these subjects, and in fact the sort of uber subject, that when I would bring it up to adults when I was, you know, 12 or whatever, I would get incredibly strong resistance.
Sure. And I have a very hard time letting go of anything like that that's about a Sort of a fundamental intellectual topic, and I don't know why that is true about me, but the more somebody says, look, I just don't want to talk about this, I find it easy to do that about emotional topics.
If somebody says, look, I just don't want to talk about why you don't want to be your friend, that's actually a little bit easier for me than I don't want to talk about this intellectual topic anymore because I have this kind of Utopian view that intellectual topics should just be these sort of pleasurable, neutral things that we can all discuss.
All right, now let me just make sure that we actually get to the emotional content, because like a classic intellectual, you are very good at describing intellectual journeys, but not so good at talking about the feelings that accompany them.
So where do you think it came from that when you met emotional resistance, you increased your desire to penetrate that resistance?
Where do you think that came from?
The best I can do, and I have a feeling this is really shy of the mark because it's still not all about an emotional answer, is that I was raised in an environment outside of school that was where you could say anything.
And it never occurred to me that all of a sudden I would be in an environment where There are all kinds of things you couldn't say and couldn't talk about.
So, sorry, let me make sure I understand that.
So you're saying that with your parents you could say anything?
Right, right. Sorry, interrupt.
But then you said that you were surprised that you ran into resistance.
I mean, your parents must have talked about resistance that you would likely meet outside the home, right?
No, they didn't. And I think this is actually something that they did wrong as parents.
And they and I have talked about this since then.
My parents are intellectuals, and I'm sure there were hot-button topics for them, but one way or another, I didn't hit them, or if I did, I'm blocking it.
I don't remember it or whatever.
But I went into school very sort of wide-eyed and naive and was never told.
I mean, in fact, I was encouraged.
I was encouraged by my parents to say, hey, if you have something interesting to talk about, I'll talk to your teachers.
That's what they're for. Well, did you talk to your parents about the problems you had in school?
I did, and okay, here's where we might get to the interesting part.
I did, and that's where my parents had resistance.
Yeah, I mean, there had to be something.
Right, right, yeah. Yeah, it was their promotion of school as a positive thing, and if there was...
If I was having a problem with school, the problem was most likely on my end.
And would you say that they're socialists?
I'm sorry, say that again?
Would you say that they were socialists?
My father was...
My father's British and very left-winging, and I don't know whether he'd call himself socialist, but when he lived in England, he always voted Labour Party and so on and so on.
And that was in the 50s.
That was before the Labour Party was, you know, just sort of a centrist thing.
Yeah, that's pretty socialist as far as the spectrum goes.
Yeah, and my mother was sort of a hippie sort of woman.
So, yeah, I think that's a fair way to describe him.
Alright, so they believed in the virtues of public education and when you found that these virtues did not exist, your parents responded defensively, is that right?
Yeah, and the other day the point about that is they both came from working class families and were the first in both their cases to get a college education.
So for them this was a really big deal.
And both my brother, I have a brother who's 11 years younger than I, and both of us wound up dropping out of college.
I went back years later, but it was years later.
It was one of those things where I had to completely get something out of my system and rage about it, and then finally was able to come back to it and go, okay, I can just do this to get the piece of paper.
Okay, sorry, we're heading off on the intellectual journey again.
I just want to make sure I stay back.
Okay, sorry about that. Oh no, no problem.
So what exactly happened when you would come home and say, I hate school, or I don't like what is going on at school?
What specifically would happen?
It was actually more extreme than that.
In elementary school, I was getting ill every morning from anxiety about going to school.
And I was actually, I didn't understand what this was at the time that I was put on a tranquilizer.
To me, it was just the green stuff that I had to drink every morning.
Okay, so, sorry, let me just make sure I understand this.
How old were you at that time? Right.
That was elementary school.
So that was, I think, around third grade.
How old are you in third grade?
Eight? Nine, eight or nine, yeah, yeah.
Okay, so you were put on tranquilizers.
Were you aware of this? I was told that it was the green medicine that would make me feel better.
Do you know why you were put on tranquilizers?
Yeah, because I couldn't keep my breakfast down before going to school.
Oh boy. So you had such stress and anxiety that you were vomiting before school, and the solution was to drug you.
Right, right, yep, yep.
And what do you think about that, or how do you feel about that?
Oh, I think it's absolutely vile.
Yeah, I think it's absolutely vile.
I don't think I am where you are, or probably where you would want me to be, having listened to a lot of your stuff in terms of being furious at my parents about this.
You know, I have kind of a relationship with them now that's fine, although a little bit distant.
But in my mind, when I get angry, it's anger at teachers.
Right. Now, let me just back up a little bit, and I really appreciate you talking about this stuff.
I know it's not useful stuff in the world to talk about, and I really do appreciate that.
It's very helpful to me.
It's actually more interesting than free will to me.
Well, and if it helps solve the problem, the impasse, so much the better.
So, in this situation, your choice was crushed.
I mean, biochemically almost, right?
I have to say I have absolutely no memory of the medicine having any effect on me one way or another.
It truly may have. I feel like my choice was crushed by being forced to go to school.
Well, yes, and then drugged.
I mean, regardless of whether the medicine had any effect, you were still being drugged.
Right. Yes, absolutely.
Now, were there any other circumstances in which your choice, in a sense, your preferences did not matter?
You mean at home with my parents?
Yes. Sure.
Sure, but I can't think of anything that I would call unusual.
I was actually given much more freedom as a child than most of my friends were.
Well, what you're saying about your childhood is not exactly what you're describing about your childhood.
I just want to point this out because self-knowledge is so important in every other area.
At first you said at home I could say anything and then you said that you hated school so much you were throwing up and then you were drugged and sent anyway.
So I just want to point out that there's a disparity between your description and the actual events.
I do understand that.
Back when I said I could say anything, I was talking more about abstract intellectual topics.
And that's why I want to try and avoid the intellectual journey description.
And I would guess, I'm no psychologist trying to read this guy on the web, but I would guess that if your parents' response to your resistance to school was to overwhelm you with making you go to school and drugging you, that that was not the only place that that showed up.
Right. No, I'm sure it wasn't.
I'm sort of drawing a blank on this right now.
I mean, I can tell you mundane things.
You know, if I... You know, if I wanted to stay out until 3 o'clock in the morning, I wasn't allowed to do that.
Most of my memory as a child, you know, sometimes I wanted to use things in the home, use equipment that my father had that was really delicate that I wasn't allowed to use.
But I can't say, I don't know if that's the sort of thing that you want to hear.
And that seems like pretty mundane everyday childhood restrictions.
Yeah, no, I'm talking about more stuff that...
I don't remember, right. Yeah.
And my father was a man who had, I think he was, he's still alive.
He is a man who had, had, used to have, he sort of mellowed out, but a very explosive temper.
But the main things that I would remember fights about Were either safety issues, which were a big deal for him.
He saw me crossing a road without looking both ways.
He would go ballistic over that.
And school issues, if I wasn't doing my homework or I got a poor grade.
But those are the things I remember from a child.
How would your father's temper manifest itself?
A huge amount of yelling and screaming and arguing and guilt trips and never punishments.
I don't think I was ever grounded and I was certainly never spanked, but there could be tirades like lectures that would go on for an hour and a half.
Now, do you mean sort of screaming lectures?
Yeah, screaming lectures.
And also just very sort of, you know, prison camp, you know, pointed, domineering.
You know, it doesn't have to be screaming to get to that kind of scary.
Well, emotionally that must have been just terrifying.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was very scary.
And where was your mom during these times?
She would stay out of those fights and then sometimes do some mopping up afterwards, either sort of taking care of me if I would be quivering in a corner or taking care of my dad if he got angry to the point of You know, he was of incoherence or something, but more often she would come to me.
And if she did, she would usually sort of back up what my father said, but in a gentler way.
I'm sorry, what did you mean by taking care of your father?
She would...
You know, sometimes my father would get so upset, he would go sort of storming off upstairs to his room or whatever.
And she would... If he seemed like he was more upset than I was, she would follow him upstairs, and I didn't know what they would do, but presumably either she was comforting him or she was saying, you know, calm down, talk to your son when you're more rational.
I didn't know what they were doing.
Has your father ever...
I mean, to me this is verbal abuse and it's pretty catastrophic and really destructive.
Has your father admitted fault in any way about the violence of his temper?
Well, yes and no.
I think he's admitted it in a way that still puts the onus on other people.
I'm sorry that you all made me so angry.
Yeah, yeah. Or he will say things like, I'm sorry I'm such a terrible father, which is kind of the same thing.
You know what I mean? You know, I'm sorry that...
That you believe that I'm such a bad father and so on, right?
Right, right, right, yeah.
And has your mother accepted any responsibility for failing to intervene during these abusive episodes?
No, she hasn't. I don't think that...
I don't think we've discussed that.
I think you'd remember if you did.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, I don't think she ever has.
I would say categorically she hasn't.
Would it be fair to say that your father did not exercise The choice to restrain himself, or did not work to alter his own behavior, but just continue to act out.
I mean, I know this is a leading question, and again, this is not to prove it.
I just want to sort of try and get some parameters about your experience.
Right. I think it is probably a good question, because whether I'm a determinist or not, I will certainly agree that my experience, from my experience point of view, and particularly when I was a kid, once a while I was a determinist, I believed that people could choose to do So no, he certainly didn't.
Not only did he not exercise self-control, but I learned to exercise self-control in the sense that I at some point decided, whether this is smart or not, that my best bet when he was yelling at me was to not yell back at him.
Oh, I agree. I'm sure that was a very smart thing to hear.
Right, right. I was aware that it was possible to exercise self-control because I did it.
Right. And the terrible thing is that if you can do it as a child, but he can't do it as an adult, then he's expecting higher standards of behavior from a child than from an adult, which is pretty wretched morally, in my opinion.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And of course, he expected discipline from you with school, but he did not exercise self-discipline to restrain his abusive tendencies, right?
Right. You know what, if I can just interrupt...
I've got some flashes of something.
If you want to...
I feel like I'm going to betray my...
But if you want a...
Kind of a psychological insight, I think, into why emotionally someone might become a determinist.
As we were talking about that, as you were asking about whether I felt my father could make certain choices, I realized that it was important to me to have a model of him where he couldn't, where it was out of his control.
Yeah, I can get that.
Does that make sense? If I was able to think of him as he can't help getting this angry at me, then he wasn't a bad person.
Well, first of all, I completely admire that insight.
I think that's very honest. It doesn't explain everything, but it's an important thing to think about.
Because it's very important for me not to say, aha, and therefore, right?
But I think it is important to recognize that I think a perfectly healthy and valid defense mechanism would be to say, my father is a dangerous robot, but we don't get mad at the robot.
We just say, oh dear, the robot is malfunctioning.
Right, right. And that's a way of retaining some sense of affection for your father, so to speak.
Right, right. Okay, and I'll go to the next level.
I would say that I, based on my relationship with my father and learning that by me controlling myself, I could have a certain amount of control over him if I thought of him as a machine.
And he's the anger machine.
And the way to control the anger machine is to just kind of agree with it and stay calm.
When I realized that, I think I was a teenager, and I stopped getting upset back, and the fights would end a lot sooner.
I started doing that more with other people.
I started psychoanalyzing, I guess, other people a little bit more than engaging.
With them and thinking of them as, okay, I can see what is going on with you right now, and it's sort of out of your control, so I will wait until it blows over.
Right, right. Now, I would also, I think that's a very powerful thing to realize.
I would also suggest, Marcus, that it's possible that, it seems to me that your father was also treating you like a machine.
Like, oh, we have a machine that throws up before it goes to school, so we need to oil it with, like, we need to fix it like a machine, not listen to its problems.
Yes. Yeah, that makes sense.
Or if we have a machine that's not doing well in school, we need to bang it, so to speak, on the side of the head until it does better in school.
Yeah, that makes complete sense.
Anyway, sorry, go on with any other thoughts that may be coming out of this, because you're coming up with much better things to say than I am.
You may want to ask another question because kind of where I want to go with this.
My next thought is about adults other than my parents and I think that's where you were trying to steer me away from and I can understand why.
Well, I think you've got good stuff about your parents and I think there's a lot to mull over there.
If other things are popping up for you about other than your parents, I'm very happy to hear.
Well, it's not anything that I really haven't already said or anything that will surprise you.
I was going to say it was not like there were a lot of adults who, you know, when my parents were forcing me to go to school even when I was throwing up, it's not like there were a lot of other adults who were saying, oh, maybe you shouldn't do that to them.
Were there any? There were none.
They were backed up by everybody, in fact.
When I was years later after that, I think the medicine, the tranquilizer, whatever that was, only lasted for about a year.
I don't know why I was taken off it.
That's a long time! Only a year when you're eight or nine.
I don't mean only in that sense, but I mean it wasn't throughout my entire schooling.
But I went through another extremely rough period in junior high school and There was a doctor visit involved.
My mother took me to the doctor and I don't know whether it was because I don't think I was having, I wasn't having any kind of, you know, huge explosive bodily issues by that point.
I gained other strategies.
So I think it may have been just a regular checkup, but I mentioned to the doctor or my mother mentioned to the doctor that, you know, Marcus still doesn't like school.
He's still very anxious about school.
And the doctor's immediate response was, that's abnormal and he should be in therapy.
And it's probably great, and I've had good therapy to some extent since, but I'm sure that therapy would not have been good.
Luckily, my parents didn't make me go to therapy, but had I gone, I'm positive that it would have been another adult saying, let's look at what's wrong with you that makes you dislike school.
Right. And that's, of course, what I heard from teachers and other people.
I also kept hearing this Yeah, yeah.
Right.
Do you remember... It felt like a...
Sorry. No, no, go ahead.
So it had the feeling to me of a conspiracy.
Like a con, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess the one good thing, and I think the reason that I, if I came out of that unscathed at all, it was that I never completely bought it.
I never thought it fell into what I was being told to the point that it just became true.
To me, I always had a sense that this is bullshit.
Right. Do you remember an example of anyone when you were a child who was a curious listener, who had good empathy, who was respectful towards children and wanted to find out what you tick or anything like that?
Not in terms of any of the things we're talking about now.
I mean, certainly if I wanted to discuss, you know, gong problems or, you know, something like that or whatever, there'd be plenty of adults.
I mean, parents would have been great for that.
So there are plenty of adults who...
But if I wanted to say something like, I think school is terrible and I think my teachers are all terrible, no, there wasn't anybody that I could think of that I could even start that conversation with.
Have you had that experience since your childhood as an adult?
Yes, I've had it in the sense that I've been teaching for on and off.
I'm not doing full-time now, but for about 20 years, which is interesting in itself that I would choose to do that.
And I have very small feelings about education, largely based on my childhood, and I hear them.
And I get huge resistance.
Right. So, yes, this is an argument that has continued well into adulthood.
No, sorry, what I mean is, have you experienced, as an adult, the kind of opposite of what you experienced as a kid, where you have a problem or a complaint, and people are sort of curious and open and want to find out what's making you tick and so on?
Oh yes, absolutely.
I have some very good friends.
I have friends who have a similar background that I did and who I can talk to about all this stuff.
I have a very good marriage.
I feel no lack of people.
I feel like there's somebody, at least in my life, at all times, that I can talk to about anything.
Right, right, okay.
Alright. And I think you had mentioned that it was when you were a teenager that you became very interested in determinism, and this was, I think, around the same time, if I'm right and tell me if I'm wrong, around the same time that you were beginning to find a way of managing your father through non-resistance, so to speak. I think you're right.
I would caution you, I guess, before you sort of bake that into a really strong thing.
Yeah, please. Absolutely. Right.
I mean, the only thing I would caution you is I say that because I don't remember, I don't have any strong memories of thinking about it before then.
But I don't, I just don't have a real sharp aha that it was, you know, when I was a junior in high school, I just can't remember.
It's sort of been so many years I've been thinking about this on and off that I don't really remember a starting point.
If somebody told me, no, it wasn't when you were a teenager, it was when you were eight, that wouldn't surprise me particularly.
But it may be. It may be a teenager.
And the two are probably not entirely unrelated, even if they're not directly causal, these two perspectives of determinism and management.
It also may not have been when I was a teenager that I first started that strategy with my father.
I mean, again, I don't remember the day.
That could have come a little bit earlier, or maybe I slid into it and And I will give you just my two cents of perspective on this, and I'll keep this brief, because I still want to keep talking about your experiences.
The Socratic argument is that in the absence of self-knowledge, we are machines.
In the absence of insights into our own behavior, in the absence of knowing really what makes us tick, then we are defensive, we are reactive, we simply, like a pinball, we bounce off various stimuli.
Like your father would get angry at something which would blow up.
He wouldn't stop and say, why am I really angry?
What is really going on?
And so, in a sense, determinism is psychologically true if you have no self-knowledge.
Right. And then the question is, is somebody responsible for not having self-knowledge?
And that, because certainly later in life, it seems, I've never seen an example where somebody who does not have self-knowledge gains it later in life.
I mean, maybe it's possible, but it seems to be extremely rare.
And so to me, it's sort of like drinking, right?
So somebody is not responsible for what he does when he's drunk, but he's responsible for getting drunk, getting in a car and driving or something like that.
And so, to me, what somebody does in the absence of self-knowledge, they're not morally responsible directly, but they are morally responsible for avoiding or rejecting the necessity for self-knowledge, if that makes sense.
So, I agree with you that determinism seems really true for people who lack self-knowledge, because their behavior is very predictable.
Right? You go up to some tea party or guy and you say, I think Obama is a great president, and it's like pushing a button, right?
I mean, it's boing! You know, the steam out of their ears and their teeth rotate and, you know, whatever, right?
Or you go up to some left-wing person and you say, I think George Bush is going to go down in history as one of the greatest presidents, and weee!
You know, it's the same thing. It's like pushing a button, right?
Right, right, right. I just wanted to sort of agree with you about determinism has, to me, a very valid approach, that that's the prison you live in without self-knowledge.
Right. Right.
Now, if I can kind of steer this in just a slightly different direction, and you're welcome to steer it back if you think it's getting off track, the one thing that I want to come back to again is that, I mean, a lot of this sounds...
Very psychologically plausible to me, that my love affair with determinism started as a way of dealing with abuse from my father.
The only thing about this is, again, if I really think about it for a second, I realize that as much as you feel that it's binary, it wasn't until fairly recently in adulthood, maybe 25 or something, that I even encountered the idea of determinism.
What happened much earlier than that was a feeling of free will.
How can that be possible?
It was a feeling of free will cannot be possible unless I can locate it somewhere.
Right.
Right. Right.
Right. And we either ran it or it's predetermined or there's some other factor.
So if you had experiences that made you particularly receptive to the idea of determinism, in other words, you had to manage your father like a dangerous machine, and your mother was an ineffective, you know, salvation machine.
Then it's going to be a determinism.
You hear the idea, and it fits like a key into a lock.
And that doesn't mean that it's wrong.
I mean, we're not talking about the rightness or wrongness.
We're talking about... No, no, no. I completely...
I understand that we're not talking about it.
I actually find this conversation a lot more interesting than that.
We both know that that conversation, whether it's interesting or not, does not have a good chance of going anywhere.
Well, I tell you, I mean, if, let's say, I'm into free will because of my childhood shit, and let's say that you're into determinism because of your childhood shit, then we're actually talking about our childhood shit, but we're pretending it's about free will versus determinism, and the end result of that, we make no progress, right?
Right. And that's why I've always been curious about that.
Right. I'll tell you something that I think is really fascinating.
I think that you and I are very similar, having listened to a lot of your podcasts.
Obviously, you have a huge interest in psychology.
You've been through therapy.
I have a huge interest in psychology.
I've been through therapy.
About 50% of my reading is somehow based in psychology.
I'm sorry, about 50% of your what?
About 50% of my reading.
I mean, it's going to be either psychology, neurology, or whatever.
I eat that stuff up.
And it sounds like you do, too.
What I find really fascinating is that you...
Well, I'll take it on me first.
Whenever I read that kind of stuff that is essentially about what makes people tick emotionally or psychologically, it strikes me as, aha, yet another nail on the coffin for free will.
Here's another mechanistic, another way of looking at people, the mechanism.
Clearly, you're reading the same stuff and reacting to it very differently.
No, no, I react to it the same way that you do.
No, no, what I do when I read that kind of stuff, like so for instance here, when you're talking about the things that may have influenced you to have a kinder reaction to determinism, I don't view that as your programming.
What I view is that in the absence of knowing that, it's almost impossible to be objective about determinism.
Because you have a susceptibility to it.
It's almost impossible to be objective about it.
So like the way that I think about it in my own head is that let's say that someone is speaking Mandarin to my left and I don't speak Mandarin and someone is speaking English to my right.
Who am I going to listen to more?
Well, I'm going to listen to the guy who speaks English because that's the language I'm familiar with.
And so for you, if you speak determinism and not free will, and then free will information comes up, you're going to be like, well, I don't speak that language.
But if you speak determinism, you'll just listen to that because that's the language you speak.
Now, if you know that, you can say, okay, well, I'm going to try and learn free will, and then I'll listen to that.
I agree with you that it's programming if we don't know that it's there.
So that, to me, spurs self-knowledge, which I think gives you some additional choices, but in the absence of that self-knowledge, then yeah, you're just a broken record and I'm just a broken record.
And that's why I was so keen to talk to a determinist about possible influences.
Because, of course, as I mentioned, if we're talking about childhood stuff, or if, and it's just a theory, who knows, right?
But if when free will comes up, it pushes you right up against some early terrorists that you had with your father, but you don't know that, then you're going to avoid the topic and think that you're having a debate.
Just as I would do the same thing in the absence of that knowledge as well.
Right, right. Well, I think that what you're onto is something really important that I almost never see acknowledged.
Obviously, this particularly doesn't go acknowledged in intellectual forms, is that if there is a debate about anything, and there are two sides to that debate, what that means is it's possible for a person to be on either side It's not like it's impossible for someone to be a determinist or it's impossible for someone to believe in free will.
It's obviously possible to have those.
And I think what most people tend to do is say, well, the reason I believe in determinism is because I'm right.
Right. Well, that's all the evidence then, whatever, right?
Right. I'm right.
Here's all the evidence, but clearly it's for some reason Okay, but why did you happen to fall on that side?
Clearly, there are other smart people who are on the other side, so there's got to be something going on that's at least more profound on an emotional level.
Without the self-knowledge of confirmation bias, it's almost impossible to be objective, right?
Right, right, yeah. So libertarians, some people, they hear Ron Paul, and the whole being, for whatever reason, goes, yeah!
And they start reading everything to do with libertarianism, and they stop consuming any other media, and then they just live in a sort of biodome of self-perpetuating and self-referencing information without ever figuring out why they said yes to begin with, and that's not really any way to be objective in that environment.
Yeah, yeah. Right, yeah.
And just to flip over to the other side, to say my sort of prejudiced view of the other side for a second, the majority of arguments in favor of free will that I've heard throughout my entire life have started from the point of view of, we want free will to exist.
I'm not saying that this is yours, but the ones that I've heard, and even a lot of the ones that I've read, read in kind of legitimate philosophical books are essentially, we want free will to exist.
So what can we do to sort of make it exist?
What arguments can we come up with?
And I just thought, wait a minute, how can we start from we want it to exist?
Well, and I think it was you or somebody else in that thread who pointed out entirely rightly that that's fundamentally a religious argument.
I like God, and therefore I'm going to figure out how he could exist.
Right. Yeah, and I agree.
But I do think that what you're saying is if we don't have self-knowledge, There's a risk that that's what we're doing, whether we're doing it consciously or not.
Maybe I like is not the right word, but I have a need for determinism, and I haven't explored that.
I haven't explored the emotional factors, so maybe I'm just sitting, you know, I'm listening to that voice and not listening to the other voice.
I'm possibly a determinist.
Sorry, go ahead. I would go a little deeper than that, again, just as a possibility.
I don't go and debate on religious forums.
I don't. Because I have achieved as much closure as humanly possible.
With the idea of a deity.
I have closure. I know why I was skeptical.
I know why I disliked emotionally the idea of God.
I have the intellectual arguments.
I talked about it in therapy.
I've journaled about it. I've written a book about it.
I got it.
I have that closure, so I don't have any desire to re-engage.
The question that is always important for me is to say, it could be important for you, is to say, well, why are you re-engaging in this debate?
Why did I start that thread?
Yeah, and it's not a criticism of starting the thread, but if you don't know why you're doing it, I would suggest as a possibility, Marcus, that the reason that you started the thread in this particular forum, which you know is psych-heavy, right, is because you were trying to get to the self-knowledge Of why this was such an important issue for you, and I would suggest that you've been having this debate to try and get back to the possible source.
And again, that does not mean that your arguments are invalid, but the most important thing is to process the emotions that make us fertile to particular arguments, because if you process those, then I think you will lose the drive to figure this stuff out, or to have these debates, if that makes any sense.
Right, right. Well, I think even my behavior in the thread backs up what you're saying in that pretty much everybody else got to a point where they were saying this is going nowhere, so I'm done.
And what I did at that point is said, well, I agree it's going nowhere, but can we talk about why we're having this debate?
Which, of course, we includes me.
So why am I doing this?
Right. And this is one of, I think, if not the only, certainly one of the very few places on the internet where the level of debate can reach that depth, right?
Where you can actually talk about this stuff without flame wars and enemies and determinants suck and free willers or, you know, they believe it goes to the machine and all that sort of shit, right?
Yeah, yeah. Yes, absolutely.
No, I think it's an incredibly valuable community.
I think so. I hope so.
I certainly think so. Right.
I don't want to go into all of my history with free will, but the basic thing for me, because you've talked a lot about your history, the basic thing for me was that I grew up with parents who had and have the level of self-knowledge that your average sea anemone possesses.
Kind of horrifying for me to see what happens in the long run of a life that is lived without self-knowledge.
Because a life that is lived without self-knowledge, as a kid I saw this, it's just terrifying.
And the weird thing is, it's a tortoise and a hare thing.
Because if you pursue self-knowledge, you start off much more slowly out of the gate.
Whereas the people who reject self-knowledge, they go flying out of the gate.
But it really changes later on in life.
And I was very concerned, if not downright terrified, about what might happen to me if I just reacted to things as I saw everyone around me doing.
If I did not stop and think about what the hell I was doing and what the consequences would be in the long run.
I mean, if your father had really thought about What are the consequences in the long run going to be between my son and myself if I let myself out in this kind of way?
He wouldn't have done it if he'd thought about the long-term consequences.
He didn't.
And that was a terrifying thing for me.
You say your father and yourself are not that close, which I think is very sad, but I also think it's kind of inevitable given A, his behavior in the past and B, his lack of responsibility in the present.
For me, I can't just magically will it to happen, but I hope that I can achieve better choices if I try to figure out why I feel the way that I do, why I have the impulses that I have, why I have the preferences that I have.
I really hoped that that was going to give me the capacity to make different choices.
I did not at all want to be programmed by my environment.
And so I, you know, sort of set on sail on this with the hope that now, I subjectively, I can't prove this objectively, of course, but I subjectively believe that it has achieved what I wanted it to achieve, which is not to say that determinism is false.
I can't say that determinism is false, because that fundamentally is going to be a scientific question, not a philosophical question.
But my experience has been that self-knowledge does appear to me to give choices in terms of different behavior than people without self-knowledge.
And I say that with some pretty strong empirical evidence, that the people who've rejected self-knowledge don't seem to be able to live different lives than what they inherited, but the people who embrace it do seem to.
That doesn't prove it, but there's evidence for.
Yes, yes, yes.
I agree with that.
Do you think it would be...
It would make sense to say that this particular topic, free will and determinism, is going to be deeply connected to some very core experiences that almost everybody experienced in childhood.
I mean, it's connected to freedom.
Obviously, it's got the word free in it.
And it's connected to issues of control, self-control, and also control of other people.
It seems like it's something that would be very hard for anybody to come to in a very neutral way.
I completely agree with you, and I think that there are three major topics, all of which are subsumed under the monster topic.
The three major topics that I think most connect with people's childhoods are free will and determinism, the state versus voluntarism, religion, The state, of course, is the parent is the government and controls your behavior and blah, blah, blah.
If the government isn't controlling your behavior, you're going to go run in the street and get creamed by a truck.
So there's that fundamental thing that goes on with people.
Religion about the father is very obvious, but free will and determinism is a more subtle one, which is to what degree are you allowed to choose Things as a child.
To what degree do you see self-knowledge and choice demonstrated in your environment?
And so on. And that's a very important one.
These all fall under, to me, the vast umbrella called morality, which is the most fundamental thing that occurs within families that people get messed up about because parents will so often claim that they know what goodness is and will instruct you on virtue.
But when you actually ask them what it is, it's like chasing ghosts around a whirlwind, right?
So I think you're right.
I think that That these topics become so heated and so powerful because they hook into such deep and powerful childhood experiences that it is so hard, so hard to be objective about them.
And this is why so much stuff on the internet gets so volatile and so problematic because people aren't fighting about surface stuff.
They're fighting to retain particular positions that are inflicted on them as children that is very painful to re-examine.
Right. But I think what is...
What's fascinating to me is that as explosive as religion and the state, you can fairly easily find communities, and there's one of them exists thanks to you, where you can discuss those things in a relatively non-explosive way.
On both sides.
I mean, I have a good friend who's a devout Christian, and he certainly has communities where he can discuss that without people yelling at him.
I can go onto Free Domain and a number of other sites and discuss atheism, or say I'm an atheist, or without fear that people are going to start screaming at me.
But free will seems to be a really special topic.
Well, but here's the question, though, is that your friend, the Christian, does he go to Christian sites to talk about things, or does he go to sites where he can actually come to an objective resolution about the existence of God, right?
Because the echo chamber is not progress in terms of philosophy.
Now, the great thing about having non-mainstream views is that you're constantly exposed to the opposing arguments every time you look at a newspaper, every time you turn on the television, all the time.
Whereas people who have mainstream views can stay within those mainstream areas and they do not get exposed to the same crosswinds that people who have different views get exposed to.
I think if certainly we've had religious people and there still are religious people on the free domain radio boards, but it doesn't come to any resolution in exactly the same way that the free will and determinism thing doesn't come to any resolution.
In the same way, the statism thing doesn't come to any resolution Because I really believe that people are just shuffling around the chess boards of their histories rather than dealing with facts and arguments.
Right, right. Just to drive this one more time, it's sort of been my observation that, yes, you're right, it's not as if my friend is going to websites where they're debating whether or not God exists.
But even from the point of view, I feel completely safe amongst most of my friends saying that I'm an atheist.
And obviously I've bit friends who are okay with that.
I know that my Christian friend has friends where he can say, I believe in God and this and that and no one's going to mock him or tell him he's stupid for believing that.
I do feel like the free will thing, it's kind of a thing you don't bring up in polite company.
Well, but I would suggest, sorry to interrupt, but let me just make a suggestion.
If you say, if you say, I'm an atheist, that is a statement of conclusion, not a process of thought, right?
So you are an atheist because God does not exist.
Right now, if you say, God does not exist, therefore I'm an atheist, I accept that there is no such thing as a God, that is a very different thing from saying, I'm an atheist.
Right. And if you say to a religious person, there is no such thing as God, that is not the statement of a conclusion, but rather, I guess, an argument or a premise.
And that's going to be a lot more, it can create more friction than simply the statement of a conclusion.
Right, right. Whereas with determinism and free will, people don't say, I believe in determinism.
And now you are much more nuanced, and kudos to you for that.
I thought that was very interesting. I desperately don't want to believe in it, but I can't avoid it.
But most people will say, free will is an illusion.
Not, I believe in determinism, but free will is interesting.
But they will say, free will is an illusion, it does not exist, it is not valid, it violates scientific principles, and so on.
And that's exactly the same as going into a religious area and saying, God is an illusion, he does not exist, and blah, blah, blah.
That is going to create more contention, which is good, as long as people are dealing with objective facts and not, again, pushing the pawns out of it around.
Right, right. No, absolutely.
Well, I guess what I would love to hear, and I don't know how this can happen, but I would love to hear at some point in my life the flip of what we did here.
And I know you just kind of did it yourself.
Very briefly. Yeah, but I would like to hear a free willer...
To put on the couch, so to speak.
I think that would be really interesting.
We could set this up for another time, but I would certainly be happy to...
I try not to dish out any medicine I can't take, right?
So I would be perfectly happy, if you would like to question me about my history with it, I would be happy to talk about it.
Right, right, right. Yeah, I think what I would have to think about is whether I'm the best person to do that, or so on and so forth.
It's definitely something I would love to hear.
If you don't feel up to doing it, we can put the call out to anybody who wants to.
I'm certainly happy to have the light shone in my eyeballs.
I think we should definitely do it sometime.
I think it would be really, really interesting.
I agree. I would certainly give it a shot.
Let me get back to shepherding my child around.
And I really do appreciate the time for the combo.
Thank you. Actually, it was a very enlightening and exciting phone call, so thank you very much.
All right, take care. All the best.
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