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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:25:29
An Honest Conversation About Determinism
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In previous videos, you've assumed the stance that the opposite of determinism is free will, but the opposite of a determined event is a random one, not a chosen one.
To quote Sam Harris, either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.
The subjective experience of deliberation seems much more akin to a progress bar filling on a computer than anything else.
Moreover, the popular idea of free will seems to be doing a lot of harm to society, particularly in our legal systems.
What positive effects does our notion of free will have and where's the evidence for it?
That's from Joshua.
Well, hi Joshua.
How you doing?
I'm doing great, Steph.
Thanks for having me.
Well, actually you're doing Whatever the dominoes before you are making you do.
But anyway, trick question!
I am prepared to address that.
So we'll have to.
Now, you know, I don't know Sam.
I've read, I'm trying to think what Sam Harris I've read.
So his first one on religion, The End of Faith, I think it was called.
And I think one or two others.
I've not read any of his works on Determinism versus free will, but I have seen him strongly out there in the public sphere trying to change people's mind or minds.
So I, you know, I don't want to talk that much about Sam Harris because he's not here.
Apparently the atoms that compose him have not chanced upon us.
But we'll just, you know, take your approach to this if that's all right.
No, that's fine.
I mean, I kind of wanted to address How I got to where I'm at now and kind of address my take on it.
I know that I don't speak necessarily for all determinists, but I've seen a lot of your videos on the series, your various videos on determinism and various callers that have come before me that have tried to talk about the issue and I don't know how prepared they necessarily were, but I tried to bring some notes this time so that I can kind of address… Okay, how about we don't talk about being prepared and just start the conversation?
No, that's fine.
The mic check is before the concert, so let's just launch into… let me entertain you.
Okay, so give me a question in a concise way, if you could, please.
When I hear people talking about free will, people like yourself, other people who argue for its existence or for its usefulness or what have you, I guess I don't really understand where they're coming from on it.
Maybe it's just that my worldview is a little bit different.
But anytime that people start talking about having a choice to make or having a choice in some fashion, or when we're talking about a legal system and we're holding someone morally responsible, It really seems to be more a situation of ignorance in a particular situation, either ignorance about how to properly achieve their goals or ignorance, you know, maybe self-ignorance, not knowing what they want to achieve.
And then I tried to come up with a way to articulate that.
All right.
So if you find my position on free will confusing, why don't you tell me what my position is just to make sure that we're starting from... You said you watched some videos before.
So what is my position on free will and where's the confusion?
Sure.
You, from your three-part video series that you did, you actually laid out kind of a semi-formal argument on it where you gave some of the premises and then went from there.
So, that video, let's see, we had, so the first premise was truth exists, truth is independent, truth is better than error, we should prefer truth, and the capacity to change opinion is possible.
Those are the five steps in the argument that you provided.
Yeah, and this is sort of back to Aristotelian logic insofar as you can't argue against that without accepting the premises.
Right, right, self-imploding arguments, that sort of thing, right.
So, I don't as a determinist say that people don't make choices, so like when you made the argument about the boulder rolling down the hill and how arguing with nature isn't effective, I don't see the determinist worldview as saying that people are like rocks in the way that you seem to describe it.
it.
The way that I see it is the computer thing.
Joshua, in the determinist worldview that you're coming from, people can make choices.
Yes.
Okay, so aren't we just both calling the same thing by a different name?
Because I believe that people can make choices, and you believe that people can make choices.
So I'm not sure, as yet, I'm not sure where our divergence is.
Okay, so and that's part of what I wanted to explore.
Maybe I was misunderstanding something.
But when We're talking about people making choices and, um, when people make counterfactual arguments like, oh, you know, if he had, uh, you know, he had been told, you know, not to rape, let's say there was a rapist, for example, and he was told not to rape, but he did it anyway.
And people say, oh, we need to, you know, punish him because he had, you know, he had the available, uh, circumstances where he could have made the choice not to rape, but he decided to do it.
And so when we save these things, um, I mean, I can see as a mechanical process in the brain, or in unique circumstances, some combination of those factors, a choice was made and him being the person who did the actions, he has Now, who's responsible for the argument that you're making right now?
But to say that he was deeply responsible or, you know, this kind of notion that we get of like wrath or, you know, vindictive punishment on people because they at root were responsible for the things they did is the part that I don't don't really agree with, don't really get.
Now, who's responsible for the argument that you're making right now?
What do you mean exactly?
The one that I'm articulating to you at.
Yes, the argument that you're articulating, I assume it's your argument or your perspective, or at least you're communicating it.
So Josh, who is responsible for the argument that you're making to me at the moment?
It's not me, obviously, right?
It's not Mike, because he's muted.
You're one of the proximate causes, because I wouldn't be on the phone.
No, I'm not the cause of your argument.
Because you're the one who's articulating the argument and communicating it, right?
You're choosing the words, you did the preparation, you have your notes.
I'm not trying to catch you out on anything.
I'm just pointing out that you, Josh, are responsible for the argument that you're creating.
So for instance, if there was another guy next to you named Brian, and you gave me this argument, and I turned to Brian, and I said, so Brian, your argument is, what would you say to me?
If I just responded to Brian, as if Brian had said exactly what you said, and I said, OK, Brian, I'm going to respond to the argument you just made.
Right.
You would say to me, well, Steph, that Brian didn't make the argument I did, right?
Right.
So you are the one who is causally responsible for the arguments that you're putting out into the world, right?
Right now.
No, this is a yes or no.
We've got to establish some things before we go off on tangents, right?
I didn't create the argument, you know, unless we're going to go with I am the universe, we are the world, right?
So I didn't create the argument.
There's only one other person talking.
That's you, Josh.
So you created and are responsible for the presence of this argument in the digital medium we're discussing and talking through, right?
Yes.
Okay, so you have created an action which has had an effect in the world, which is me listening and the whole world listening and millions of people over time listening.
No pressure!
This is my subtle way of throwing you off.
So you have created an argument, you are responsible for it, you have created something in the world called Josh's Argument for Determinism and it's nobody else who has created it in terms of in this moment, right?
And so you are responsible for the effect of your argument in the world in that I would reply to you if we were in a room with other people rather than someone else as if that someone else would have made your argument.
Is that fair to say?
Yes.
So how is a rape any different from an argument?
I mean, I mean, sort of fundamentally, you know, I mean, obviously, morally, of course, but but how is like a rapist is Making a decision to perform an action in reality that you're responsible for.
Making an argument is making a decision to perform an action in reality that you are responsible for.
Right.
So in the kind of very narrow delineation of time and place that we're specifying here, I am kind of the nexus that causes outside of the context that we've established have converged through is I guess the way that I would put it. I am kind of the nexus that causes outside of I have no idea what that entire sentence is.
I'm so sorry.
That's totally fine.
Let me flush that out.
I'm cutting back at my coffee.
So if you can do it with him.
Oh, no, it's fine.
I'm all hopped up.
So let me try and flush that out.
So when we're saying that in the moment on this call right now I'm making an argument for determinism or I'm making whatever argument I'm making, it is correct to say that if I did not exist as a person, then it would not have happened.
So that counterfactual seems fair to make.
But if we expand the context out a little bit, We can see that there are, you know, we can trace the trail of breadcrumbs back in many different directions.
So if you hadn't made, you know, a determinism series on YouTube, or if you weren't on YouTube, for example, I would never know about you, we would never be on this call.
So your arguments in your part are a partial cause to me giving my argument.
So you partially... No, I mean, sorry, they're necessary, but not sufficient in that lots of people have listened to those arguments and have not called in.
So you found the arguments worthy and I appreciate that.
I do.
You found the arguments worthy of response and you called in or you wrote in and you waited the sorry it took so long to get you on as it is for everyone.
We're trying to fix it with an extra show on Tuesdays for our European listeners in particular.
But so it is necessary but not sufficient in terms of causality in that that you wouldn't be calling me if I hadn't made those videos or at least I hadn't made arguments about it.
But the fact that I made the arguments is not sufficient for you to do it.
Right.
And I'm not trying to say that only because you made the videos.
I'm not trying to say that that's the sole causally prior event that led to my arguments.
I feel like we're getting, you know, like if you startle a squid at the bottom of the ocean, it shoots out a whole bunch of ink or whatever the hell it is, and then it hides, right?
Because if you are responsible for the effects of your choices in the world, because it's your argument, you're making it.
My question was, how is a rape different from an argument in terms of self ownership and being responsible for the effects of your actions?
Now, I feel like we've gone on this big multi Word salad journey, but I don't know what your answer is to that question.
Because either, I mean, morally again, I'm just talking about sort of like the functionality of self-ownership and owning the effects of your actions.
How is a rape different from an argument in terms of self-ownership and creating something in the world?
So, and I think this comes a little bit back to my original question, which I think is good.
The way that we treat Those situations morally and the way that we think about them in the context of assuming free will as a given doesn't, or they're treated differently.
So if I'm, I mean, so as you said, we want to try to avoid the moral distinction.
But so for me making the argument to you For my argument.
Yes, I am responsible for it and the rapist doing the things that he does.
Yes, he is responsible for them, but I don't see because we you know, we would treat an animal attack differently than we would treat a rapist attack and we do that because we assume that humans have this extra faculty or this extra capability to, you know, inhibit violent urges or, you know, whatever, however you want to characterize it, whatever flavor of behavioral psychology you want to ascribe to.
We treat them differently between like an animal attack or a person attack.
And we do that because people are sapient and animals aren't.
And I don't see... Okay, sorry, sorry.
Let me just boil it down if I can.
So you're saying that From a philosophical standpoint there's no difference, but from a moral standpoint there is a great deal of difference, and of course I fully agree with that.
One is protected under free speech, the other is a violent sexual attack, right?
So here we're talking about the ethics of the situation rather than the choice to act in a way that affects external reality.
Not quite.
The moral case is, I feel like, the easiest illustration of where Where I see what I think is a cognitive dissonance between how we treat the situation.
I mean, another example you could look at is, you know, when we have like a parrot mimicking human speech, we can recognize that they're making the sounds of speech, but we don't say that they're speaking or that they're sentient, that they understand what they're doing.
They're just mimicking whatever they're taught because, you know, they're an animal and their brain capacity is not sufficient for sentience, what have you.
So when we talk about humans, and when we talk about them having this extra quality, and I think in the videos you talked about it being like, the idea being that it's an emergent quality of this sufficiently complex brain, where we get this ability through cognition, through volition, through reason, to deliberate, which I agree with, and then we, from that premise, say that they have this
extra characteristic that warrants retributive justice against them, because that's the only way to... that's the proper moral way to address their shortcomings.
That's the part where I... Hang on, hang on.
Sorry, but now you're talking about the philosophy of punishment, which is a very complex topic.
Right?
So there's an argument which says, we punish horse seed, we punish horse thieves, not because they're bad, but so the horses are not stolen, right?
And so if you look at compared to an animal attack, right?
Let's just say there's a coyote that kills your cat, right?
Right.
Well, we don't punish the coyote because the coyote is following its nature, right?
We may shoot the coyote without a trial, right?
You know, Stalin style.
You know, I mean, that that's like totalitarianism.
There's no trial.
You just shoot the person.
I mean, concentration camps.
So you shoot the dog, right?
Shoot the coyote.
Well, yeah.
Now, if an animal like I remember this Years and years ago, when we were pulling some all-nighter in my old company, I had this odd fight with the project manager because there was a woman in B.C.
I think she was hiking with her kids and some mountain lion had attacked them.
Okay.
And they found and shot the mountain lion.
Okay.
And she thought this was horribly unjust.
They tracked it down after the fact?
It wasn't during the attack?
I think so.
Yeah, it was after the fact.
And she thought this was horribly unjust because the people were intruding on the mountain lion's territory.
So why do you shoot the mountain lion that has attacked a human being?
Well, because the mountain lion has proven that he's not afraid of human beings and is willing to attack human beings.
And that's very dangerous for human beings.
And generally, in the scale of things, a human life is worth more than the life of a mountain lion.
Now, this is not punishment.
This is to prevent recurrence.
And it's not deterrence.
You know, they don't They don't hang the mountain lion up by its feet and set fire to it slowly while they've gathered all the other mountain lions around to watch this horrible torture so that they never ever think of attacking a hiker.
I mean this is not, it's not instructive, it's not aversive, it is simply to prevent recurrence.
And so as far as, you know, Old Testament style, you know, punish the sinner for his wrongdoing, for the most part If you look at sort of the big history of crime and taking for a moment out the hypothesis about abortion leading to lower crime rates sort of a decade and a half later, or the legalization of abortion.
If we look at the crime in New York in the 70s, it was staggeringly high.
Unbelievable, like horrendous, like Kurt Russell, Snake Plissken kind of high, horrifying violence.
And then I think it was Giuliani got in and just started locking people up, locking them up.
They may be doing terrible things in jail, but while they're in jail they're not doing terrible things outside of jail.
Sure.
And the crime rate...
Plummeted.
And as the crime rate plummeted, of course, it's situation circumstances in the neighborhoods got better.
And so there was less fear, there was less violence, children had more normalized childhood.
So it becomes sort of a virtuous cycle where if you lock up the first wave of predators, then you create a positive social environment.
And then the next wave of kids being raised is less less scared, less traumatized, fewer of their kids are getting gunned down and drive by.
So you get a positive sort of virtuous cycle.
And then of course, Democrats get in and start undoing all of this.
The crime waves that started in the 60s started because the Democrats got in and started loosening all the crime laws and loosening all the sentencing guidelines and so on.
And the last example, and then I'll turn it back to you, but the last example that comes to mind is that gun deaths in certain areas of the United States, shooting deaths of police are up 150% year over year.
Violence and murders and so on are up Chirac, right?
I mean, and that's Largely, I would argue because of what's called the Ferguson effect, which I'm sure you're very well aware of, which is that after the riots in Ferguson, and after all of the protests, anytime a black man is shot by a white policeman doesn't seem to happen when white fathers and their autistic children are shot up by black cops, but that's a topic for another time.
So after all of this, Strong media reaction to any time a black man dies at the hands of a white police officer.
This has made police officers and particularly white police officers, especially after Freddie Gray, right?
It has made them very reluctant to engage blacks who are potentially committing crimes or are under suspicion or anything like that.
And so this under policing that is occurring has caused, I think it's fairly safe to at least argue as a hypothetical, it has caused a huge Resurgence and increase in crime in the neighborhoods where the cops are kind of backing off from that, which is going to create a lot of trauma, a lot of dead people, a lot of dead kids.
And you're going to start to get this where the virtuous cycle was helping the community get better.
Now there is, of course, a descending spiral of doom that is occurring as well.
So when it gets to, you know, do we punish or do we put someone in jail?
I don't even know if the best answer is to put someone in jail.
I mean, but just looking at the current system that we have, Do we put someone in jail because we just want to punish them for being bad people?
Well, there's lots of ways to punish people.
You don't necessarily have to lock them up in jail.
Or do we do it simply because look, they're just like dangerous animals.
You know, you shoot a rabid dog, and we don't want to shoot these people.
So we lock them up so that they cannot continue to commit crimes like the way they shot that mountain lion.
It wasn't because the mountain lion was evil.
They just didn't want more people to get mauled on the hiking trails.
Or do we do it as an aversive to other people as a way of negatively conditioning people to or conditioning them to become avoidant of the kind of crimes for which they will get punished?
And I don't know what the exact answer is, but I think saying, well, we just heap this big giant truckload of moral responsibility on the evildoer and that's the only reason that we lock him up, I think is simplifying some of the complexities of how human society deals with criminals.
And the last thing I'll say as well is that if there's a sociopathic element to criminality, which certainly I would argue in the more violent crimes there is and maybe even in the more fraud-based crimes, nobody knows the cure to sociopathy.
And recidivism, or the rate at which criminals go back into prison, is extraordinarily high.
I mean, it's been a long time since I've looked at this in detail.
My vague memory is it's 80% or so.
I've looked at it some recently, that's accurate.
Is that about right?
Right.
So this is the huge challenge.
Now, again, part of this has to do with the fact that I don't think childhood's being dealt with or whatever, but nobody knows how to cure criminality of a significant degree.
And it could be that some criminals, they tend to mellow out as they get older.
You know, they just get like, like borderline personality disorders.
They apparently they just get kind of a little more mild as they go on.
So I don't know that all of the, we punish a criminal is predicated on punishing him morally merely for using his free will in a destructive or evil or violent way.
I think there's a lot more to it around keeping people safe and being aversive and all that kind of stuff.
Right.
No, I would agree.
And I think I mean, I mean, I'm condensing a lot of stuff here and trying to keep it succinct while still being effective.
So I mean, I'm probably not making the best argument here.
But I agree with what you're saying.
And I agree with your interpretation of those facts.
The point I was trying to get more around to, and this is based off one of the arguments that Harris put in his book, his titled book, Free Will, was that the way that we think about criminals, and especially if you're a victim, the way that you think about a criminal versus the way that you would think about an animal attack or a natural disaster is different.
And it's different in a way that causes undue harm to the victim after the fact.
So One of the examples, so say you're in a park, and you wake up, and there's a bear, and the bear attacks you, and you survive your ordeal, but maybe, like, you lose a hand.
After the fact, you're not- Sorry, you lose a what?
I'm sorry?
You said you lose a hand?
Yeah, so you lose, yeah, like, in fact, you lose a hand, but you survive.
The bear gets caught, they put it, like, somehow he got out of the zoo, you know, whatever.
After the fact, and as you pointed out with the mountain lion example, the victim of the bear attack is not going to feel like the bear was out to get them.
The bear was doing what a bear does when it finds a person in the park.
But with a, you know, a criminal, you know, so if a human with a hatchet comes at you while you're sleeping in the park and you lose a hand but you survive the ordeal, you may, you know, fantasize about that person's death or, you know, about getting even with that person long after, you know, the trial may be over and all this and, you know, the psychological effect and the, you know, people getting PTSD and things like that from these types of, you know, predations are
Or at least seem, and Harris argues that they're partially predicated on this idea that we treat people differently than we treat animals with regard to this extra faculty that we're calling free will.
And that's the aspect, and that was part of where I was going to be going with my original question and with the idea of free will doing harm to society within the context of the legal system, but it's more within the idea of criminality.
So that's where I see there being a problem that causes victims undue harm and extra harm on top of what they're already dealing with.
If we look at criminals as whether or not you agree that they're victims of circumstance, you know, the combination of nature or nurture, the fact that the sum of nature and nurture, to whatever degree that you ascribe to either or both theories, accounts for why they're a criminal and not a Girl Scout Or Boy Scout or what have you.
Wait, sorry, sorry.
So you're saying that criminals are produced by genetics and environment deterministically.
In other words, there's no choice involved in whether you become a criminal or not.
Right.
Okay.
And part of the... Sorry, has the argument been made with respect to genetics and also In other words, twin studies and so on.
And also, with respect to the environment that itself may be morally chosen, right?
So let's say I do know sort of based upon the bomb in the brain series, that people can go to www.bombinthebrain.com some very important information there, that children who have a particular genetic predisposition to violence if they are beaten, like if they're, I don't know, just beaten, then almost all become criminals.
But saying, well, they're not morally responsible because of genes plus environment.
Well, what about the people who beat them?
I mean, has anyone looked into that, right?
I mean, and so part of the environment that people, they say, well, environment and genetics produces this super predator or something like that, and it's amoral because it's deterministic.
Well, the environment may itself have moral choices that we could examine, right?
So simply saying, genes plus environment, well the environment includes people acting on the children who themselves may be making moral choices.
Certainly.
So, yeah, and part of why I was originally confused when I first came across your channel and I found out that you were making the arguments for the case of free will while also You know, doing all of the, you know, your recent work with the genetic differentiation with IQ within populations, and yeah, the bomb in the brain, everything with peaceful parenting and things like that.
It seems like there's a lot, you've made a lot of the cases where people's prior circumstances has quite a bit, if not everything, has quite a bit to do with how they end up later on, which is a very disturbing argument.
Well, sorry, in the absence of knowledge, I would agree with you.
Right?
So if you love smoking in the 18th century, you know, people are like, oh man, Europeans wiped out a lot of natives.
It's like they sure did and the natives gave us smoking back and that's wiped out many more Caucasians or white people than ever.
Anyway, but let's say in the 18th century you love smoking and people are saying it's perfectly fine for you, perfectly healthy, no problem, right?
Right.
And maybe you're going to die of tooth decay at 50 anyway so you don't really care about potential lung cancer at 75 or spark type emphysema later on, right?
So if you enjoy smoking, and everyone says it's fine for you, do you have the freedom to quit?
Well, why would you?
It's good for you, or at least it's not bad for you.
And you really enjoy it.
Now, maybe you'd quit because it's expensive or whatever, but you'd have no foundational, this will kill me reason to quit.
Now, of course, after the 50s, and so on, when it became really clear that smoking was linked to
to lung cancer and that was partly because people were just living a lot longer than they were before and so then you know now people like nobody can, it's right there on the cigarette you know these god-awful pictures of mutated lungs and stuff like that so nobody can say that they don't know so why do people do that well because they want people to know the consequences so that they can weigh short-term and long-term you know short-term pleasures versus long-term deadly diseases and you know you could argue that this plus maybe better child is better
This has resulted in a significant reduction in smoking over the past couple of generations so in the absence of knowledge now of course it is considered to be in many Western countries moral in fact not just okay but good morally good to hit your children and it's legal in many Western countries and it's considered morally good in fact not hitting your children is considered to be a great vice.
Now if you yourself were hit as a child and your parents said it was perfectly wonderful and fine and if your God and your holy book and your priests and your mentors and your entire culture and your family says it is absolutely morally necessary to hit your children and you've never heard counter arguments to that and you've never known anyone who wasn't hit Do you really have a choice to not hit your child?
I mean, I guess you can say theoretically, if you had a brain tumor, you might, you know, but, but it's not a practical choice in the absence of information.
Now, if you get the information about spanking and genetics and smoking is bad for you and bloody, bloody blah, then I think you could say that a choice begins to emerge because it's not a given.
Like I assume gravity.
is a given.
If somebody says to me, well, you know, say chitty chitty bang bang three times and you can float, then gravity becomes a choice where it really wasn't before.
So this is, for me, the purpose is when you give people better information, better arguments, it opens up like a little crack of potential choice, whereas before there were just absolutes that nobody really had time to question.
Maybe oxygen is really bad for me.
Yeah, I don't have time.
I've got to get on with my day.
So no, that's a very good point.
And I think this is where the conversation gets interesting.
Because, so it's definitely accurate to say that if the knowledge is not available, then you can't really say that there was a choice in the matter.
But let's say that I was given, let's just suppose for a second that there's some perfectly rational, perfect application of
Non-aggression principle and you know everything that we know about the the apex of morality And it's it's put in a book and it's given to me, but it's in Swahili now I'm a linguist, but I don't speak Swahili so if I get that information I have you know the resource available to me But I don't have the means to access it then it doesn't really do me any good And I think that's part of your argument So, now, if someone... I'm sorry, the Swahili thing is a total red herring, right?
I mean, what does that have to do with anything?
Of course, you have to be able to understand the information.
Having the material but not knowing how to use it was where I was trying to go with it.
You have to get the information.
Obviously, it has to be in a consumable format.
I mean, let's not nitpick ourselves to death as we continue with this conversation.
Let's just take it for granted that it has to be in a format that you can comprehend, okay?
It's not sign language if you're blind.
Okay, so then let's look at it this way.
So I've watched your videos and I've consumed the content and I understood it, but I'm not into philosophy.
I have the opinion or I've been taught, I've come to the conclusion that reason is just this sophist trick that smart people come up with in order to get me to do what they want.
And so anytime I see anything that looks formatted in an argument style, then I'm like, oh, that's just the sophistry.
I'm not going to listen to that.
If you don't have the receptiveness to the information either, then it's also not going to help you.
And you know, are you going to have a choice about accepting good knowledge that you can understand?
Well, no, but come on.
I mean, this is, it's all a choice, right?
I mean, so I can read that smoking is really bad for me.
And then I can say, Oh, these people are just, they're just bought off by the anti-smoking lobby.
Like I can just make up some nonsense.
To dismiss the argument, right?
But that itself is a choice.
I can say, look, clearly, I'm a smoker.
Let's say imagine I'm a smoker.
I'm a smoker.
I want to keep smoking.
And then I hear that it's really bad for you.
And it's like, nah, they're just bought off by the people who don't want your walls to turn yellow.
Whatever it is, right?
I was thinking about some friend of mine's dad who smoked forever.
And after he died, it was like, these walls are yellow.
They weren't yellow when we started.
But so All of that is choice.
So the choice to reject information is clearly a choice.
Because you could say, oh okay well this goes against my prior beliefs but you know I'm going to give it a listen.
Right now you can say, or anyone can say, I'm going to reject reason and evidence.
But that is a choice.
Okay.
Like you can You can choose not to choose, but you cannot choose to avoid the consequences of not choosing.
Right?
So if I'm lost in the woods, if I'm lost in the woods, and I say, that's it, I can't choose which way to go.
So I'm just going to sit here.
Well, I can choose to not choose which way to walk.
But I can't choose to get somewhere by staying still in the woods.
Right.
So I can choose not to choose which way I'm going to walk, but I can't choose to avoid the consequences of not choosing.
That's outside, because that's reality-based.
Right.
But those decisions don't arise out of a vacuum.
So if I'm, back to my example, if I'm going to say... That's exactly what I said!
You need to give people information.
Of course it doesn't arise out of a vacuum.
But it certainly is.
People have less choice the less information they have, the less facts, the less arguments that they have.
They have less choice.
So of course it doesn't arise out of a vacuum.
I'm trying to fill that vacuum with facts and arguments and evidence.
Right, but if that medium of exchange is not effective or is not maximally effective to them and they reject it as a result, then they didn't They don't get the omniscience of looking down on themselves externally and saying, oh, this would have been a better choice, but I'm gonna go the other way just because, you know, prejudices or prior causes or what have you.
Right.
And then what they do is by avoiding choice by avoiding information, they become another piece of information which people can consume to help them make better choices.
So the guy who says, these guys are full of crap, smoking is great for you.
I mean, it's wonderful you it makes you smell fantastic.
And it goes great with coffee and smoking is the best thing ever, right?
So he's going to reject that information, smokes and smokes and smokes and dies.
And so now what he is is a consumable piece of information for other people to say, huh, maybe rejecting facts isn't a great idea.
So even if you reject facts, you actually then become an argument as to why you shouldn't reject facts.
I'm talking to you, Europe, and hopefully to you, North America, when it comes to migrants.
Right?
So if you reject, you just become part of the information that other people can consume to make better decisions.
You know, as the old poster says, you know, I saw this poster years ago.
I loved it.
It was my background on my computer when I was in IT.
And it was a ship like just 45 degrees, you know, sinking down, you know, like in the Titanic, the guy falling down, hitting the propeller.
And underneath it says, it could be that the sole purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others.
Yeah.
Okay.
You can be part of the human experience just by saying, don't do what I did, no matter what, right?
A guy who doesn't lose weight who ends up losing his foot instead.
Well, I guess that's losing a little bit of weight and losing his eyesight, which is not really losing any weight at all.
So that's just the example.
Maybe you should eat less and exercise for other people.
Sure.
Sure.
So, and I get that.
Now, as far, sorry, sorry, go ahead.
Well, I was going to say, I understand that, you know, people can be an object lesson, And that's another way that people can take on the facts of reality and incorporate them in order to better understand what they should or shouldn't be doing to form their normative structure out of the existing data, whether it's being given to them as a lecture or as whether it's being given to them as a lecture or as an object example or just passive observation or what have
It seems like with that argument that there's this...
I don't get where we're saying that, like, they had this toggle switch in their head where, okay, this is convincing to me, but this isn't to, you know, for whatever.
Sorry, I'm not sure why it matters.
And I'll keep this brief, but I'm not sure why it matters.
So let's say that someone goes out and strangles five guys.
And either he has free will and he's using it really badly, in which case he needs to be taken out of society one way or another, right?
Or he has no free will, in which case he has to be taken out – Either way, he's either got free will, and he's using it really badly, or he doesn't have free will, in which case he's going to keep doing the same thing again and again and again.
Sure.
So from outside of him, how we would deal with him as a society doesn't change in that context.
We'd either mitigate or remove the threat.
And I get that, and I would agree with that.
You know, to wag a finger at him after you've caught him and be like, Oh, why did you do this?
You shouldn't have.
You should have been doing it else.
Why didn't you?
Why didn't you think other than you did?
You know, shame on you.
No, but we can choose that.
That's very easy to find out, like whether or not he thought he was doing the wrong thing.
That's very easy to find out.
All we have to do is figure out, did he try to hide it?
So If a guy walks into a convenience store, I don't know, what's the biggest thing you could buy in a convenience store?
A Yule log.
I'm sorry?
Physically or cost?
No, physically.
What's the biggest thing?
Maybe it's selling watermelons or, you know, maybe it's like a 19 liter of Coke for the Southern audience or whatever, right?
Or maybe it's one of those displays, you know, like Shakira selling cell phones.
I'd really like that cut out Shakira doll to take home.
Okay.
So the guy goes in and he takes a giant Shakira doll and the guy's watching him.
There are video cameras and there's a cop right there buying some gum.
Right?
And the guy says, I'm taking this and he picks it up and he walks out.
Right?
Right.
He's announcing it.
He's not trying to hide it.
He's right.
So clearly he has no particular conception that he's doing something wrong.
Right?
So Would we punish that person for being an immoral person?
No, clearly he's crazy.
Or something's wrong with him that he's in a society and has no idea that shoplifting is wrong, right?
Yeah.
So maybe that would be a process of education.
Maybe he's from, I don't know, North Africa.
I don't know, maybe he's from a culture where grabbing women on New Year's Eve is perfectly fine, right?
In which case, apparently according to some northern European countries, you just give him, you know, three hours of PowerPoints and he's totally got 2,500 years of Western developed respect for women.
That's amazing.
Okay, so if they don't know that anything's wrong, Or, you know, the other example, of course, is the person has an undiagnosed brain tumor that's making them crazy and aggressive and so on, right?
Like, I've heard the theories about O.J.
Simpson.
He had a lot of concussions in his NFL career.
Maybe that made him a little bit more aggressive, which is why he's like... One of Harris's arguments in the book talks about comparing between the criminal who acted out of character because of a brain tumor versus someone who acted without the brain tumor.
It's fairly common.
Yeah.
And the other argument is, you know, if you say to me something offensive and I I just punch you straight in the face.
Not that I ever would, but if I did, right?
Yeah.
Then clearly I've made a somewhat of a choice.
On the other hand, if you're walking next to me and I just have my first ever epileptic attack and my arm lashes out and cracks you, I'm like, I'm not, I'm more at least more responsible for one than for the other.
At least there's a differentiation there now.
So, so it's very easy to find out if the criminal had some idea of the consequences of his actions, right?
So the person just takes out the cutout Shakira.
He's like, Hi, Mr. Cop.
I'm just going to take this thing home with me.
It's like, okay.
And that actually, I'd like to take it home in the cop car.
If you did you leave the keys in there?
Here I go.
Right.
And he's announcing it.
So the question is, does he try to hide it?
Does he try to hide it?
Now, if he tries to hide it, he's fully aware of the negative consequences of his actions.
And he tried to minimize the negative consequences of his actions by hiding, you know, dissolves the body in lime, or, you know, I don't know how he goes in with a big pocket and stuffs a A giant frozen steak down his pants or whatever, right?
So if he's hiding it, then he clearly knows that it's disapproved of and he wants to avoid the negative consequences of his actions.
What that means is that he's aware of negative consequences to actions, which is why he's hiding whatever crime he's doing, trying to dispose of a body or something like that, right?
And so if he's aware of the negative consequences of his actions, then he's aware, ontologically speaking, he's aware That actions can have negative consequences and that the action he's performing has a negative consequence for him called arrest in jail or maybe execution if he's in a capital punishment environment.
Now, here we go.
Here we go.
Once the criminal has accepted that actions have negative consequences, he knows for a fact that stealing from the store has a negative consequence to the store owner.
But he doesn't care.
He's fully capable of processing negative consequences.
He just has revealed, by hiding his theft, he's revealed that he only cares about negative consequences to himself, and he has no thought whatsoever for the negative consequences for other people.
In fact, he's perfectly willing to accept the negative consequences for the store owner.
He's fine with it.
He's totally fine with it.
He just doesn't want any negative consequences to himself.
And that means that he does not have the capacity, though he has the capacity to process negative consequences, he does not have the capacity to process and act upon the negative consequences of his actions to others.
And that's what makes him so dangerous.
Now, do we say that's morally bad?
Yeah, it's pretty hypocritical.
Well, I don't want any negative consequences to accrue to me called having to work to earn this thing that I'm stealing.
I don't care that negative consequences accrue to other people.
I just don't want any negative consequences to accrue to me, so I'm going to hide it.
Okay, that's called being a hypocrite.
You don't want negative consequences for you and thus the negative consequences have to accrue to other people.
You don't care about that.
That's called being a hypocrite.
This person fundamentally either rejects or doesn't process universality, like the do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
And people who don't process universality are bad people.
They want positive consequences for themselves.
They understand there are negative consequences to others, but they just don't care.
That's called being an asshole or a criminal or whatever you want to call it.
So you can very easily find out this.
Again, if they're crazy, that's a different matter, but then they're not going to try and hide it.
I mean, couldn't it also be the case—I mean, because you could have three situations.
You could have the criminal who steals and doesn't—the one that you gave where he's just, you know, walking out, asking the cop for his keys as he goes with his goods and has no conception of the fact that stealing is wrong or that it's something he should hide.
And then you could have the sneaky criminal, the other example, where they know it's bad, but they try to do it anyway, just because, you know, they're hypocritical.
But you could also have someone who's, you know, maybe just doesn't know that they need to hide it.
Maybe they're just a simpleton.
And so they get the theft aspect of it, but not the hiding aspect of it.
What's the difference between one and three?
So with the first one, they would understand that, or they don't understand either that stealing is wrong or that it needs to be hidden.
The, in the third example, you could have someone who knows that stealing is wrong, or excuse me, that doesn't know that stealing is wrong, or knows that stealing is wrong, but doesn't know not to hide it.
So you could have someone who's like, oh, you know, I feel really bad about stealing, but you know, maybe they've never had An interaction with the police before maybe, you know, there's just some sort of illness that they don't understand the social aspect of it, how you know, they're going to be punished if they get caught stealing or something.
So I don't see how those two necessarily would coincide.
So I'm sorry, I'm just just let's try and break it down again.
You garble that for a sec there.
So let's just take another run.
Just make sure I understand.
First category, the guy's perfectly happy to inform everyone that he's stealing, right?
goes and walks out with something, and this is somebody who's got something wrong with his head, right?
Or certainly a wild incompatibility with the social values around him, right?
Right.
And so then there's the person, so he doesn't assume there are any negative consequences to what he's doing.
You know, maybe like if people leave, I don't know, a barbecue, a functional little barbecue grill, right?
Some George Foreman contraption, right?
They leave it out on their Front lawn and a sign that says, take me, right?
Yeah.
Well, somebody comes along and takes that.
They don't assume there are any negative consequences.
In fact, they may think that it's a win-win because the person get, you know, they don't have to try and find a garbage man who's going to take a George Foreman grill and the other person gets a grill.
So it's a win-win, right?
So there's no negative consequences that accrue to that.
Right.
Now, if somebody walks into a store and thinks that it's all a take me George Foreman.
Yeah, that's the title of the show.
Take me George Foreman.
If somebody walks into a store and thinks the whole thing is like a take me George Foreman grill on a front lawn on garbage day, then they just don't understand the society that they're living in.
Now, how did they get to be adult without understanding the society that they're living in?
Pretty hard, but you know, maybe they've got some mental incompetence and they've escaped or they're out of there or maybe they're demented or whatever.
For some reason they're not able to process what they're doing and therefore we don't say that they're hypocrites because they're not able to process negative consequences which is why they're suddenly taking whatever it is they're taking.
So that's the first situation.
The second one is the person who's hiding it.
So either they're hiding it or they're not hiding it.
I'm not sure what the third category is but I'm sure it's valued.
I just can't figure it out.
Right.
So I was trying to stay within our current hypothetical example, because there's another there's another one that I have in mind.
But so for the third category, you have someone who would know that stealing is wrong, but maybe doesn't recognize that they need to be hiding it.
So maybe they don't know what the police look like, or the police is undercover, you know, they think that no one's around or something like that.
Well, they don't recognize... No, sorry, but that's that's just another way of avoiding the negative consequences.
So whether they hide it, or they don't need to hide, like, If you think there's cameras around, then you'll probably wear a balaclava.
And if you don't, then you won't, right?
So there's still the commonality is they're trying to avoid negative consequences.
Well, so there's there's a real world example that illustrates the third point.
And so I was trying to stay within what we're talking about, but I'll try to lay it out succinctly.
So in the beginning, I'm really enjoying it.
I hope you are too.
Oh, absolutely.
No, this is this is what I did my degree and this is this is what I live and breathe.
So, the beginning of Sam Harris' book, he talks about two criminals, career criminals, that were planning on doing a robbery of a house.
And the family ends up being home in the house, and so they tie them up, and they're talking with each other, deciding what they want to do about it.
And all of a sudden, one of the criminals ends up just killing the whole family.
Just kills everyone, sets the house on fire, just leaves them to burn.
And he gets caught, and after the fact, he He, um, he, I'm trying to remember the exact specifics.
I will probably have to reread the book, but he, he doesn't show contrition for it.
He recognizes that he should have felt contrition, but it, I mean, I guess it's like a sociopathy thing where he didn't feel remorseful or he didn't, um, he didn't get the, the, the kickback of, I shouldn't do this.
He didn't get the inhibition that stopped him from doing it, even though he recognized that it was wrong.
And it was a little odd.
But how, sorry, how do we know?
That this was actually his lived experience versus this is just what he's saying.
Like I assume that people who can murder others and set fire to their house, I guess he did this to cover up evidence and to kill witnesses.
So I assume that that person would be capable of lying.
So you say it like it's an existential fact.
We know that he didn't experience this.
We're just going, what are the reports, right?
No, no, but you know, you were saying that he did or didn't feel like he said he didn't feel this remorse and so on.
They'd knocked over houses before and apparently they'd run into people before and they would just tie them up and leave.
So his behavior in that instance was out of character for him, according to the accomplice.
No, no, but you know, you were saying that he did or didn't feel like he said he didn't feel this remorse and so on.
But but how do we know?
Well, no, not.
OK, so not remorse.
I'm sorry, I misspoke there.
So the way that it was characterized was that he recognized in the moment while he was there and he was, you know, killing the family.
Wait, sorry, who did?
The guy who was the killer or not?
The one, yeah, the one who did the... who committed the killings.
Okay.
Was, you know, in the moment, he reckoned, you know, he doesn't normally kill people like this.
He just ties them up in leaves or, you know, does whatever he needs to do to escape safely, but he doesn't kill people.
He doesn't consider himself a murderer, but He just kind of, I don't know, Geppetto style felt, you know, just kind of went through the motions of doing it and he couldn't account for it in his subjective experience for why he did that after the fact.
And what ended up happening was he got, I think he got the death penalty, but he asked for the coroners to autopsy him after he, after his execution and to check his brain.
Cause apparently he had had some other brain problems and, or he was like feeling like headaches and other out of place behavioral stuff.
And they found a tumor on his amygdala.
And so the perception of the criminal, and the way that it's explained by Harris in the book, is the perception of the criminal before we know that he had a tumor pushing on a part of his brain that would cause sudden aggression.
So he would have a heightened amygdala, for those who don't know, and I'm certainly no expert on this, but it's a seat of the brain that to some degree perceives threat and provides the fight-or-flight response.
So he would have, I guess, with a tumor pressing on it, the idea would be that he would experience A heightened perception of danger and a concomitantly higher fight or flight response?
Right, that was the general premise of it.
And so Harris gives this example and he says that the tumor is just an easy to point to example of a situation that could potentially occur in any circumstances.
It's easy to point to a tumor pushing on the amygdala and say, You know, this is what caused him to kill someone when he wouldn't have normally otherwise.
The tumor is responsible, not him.
He's a victim of his biology.
And I would not make that case.
I would not make that case.
Okay.
For the simple reason that I'm trying to think of a Buddhist monk who had dedicated his entire life to self-management and peace of mind and you know, whatever they train for, would a brain tumor pushing on his amygdala make him into a mass murderer?
It seems unlikely.
Because if the criminal has gone through a whole lifetime of stealing, then he's not going through a whole lifetime of disciplining himself, of getting up early, of shaving, of going to work, of dealing with bosses, of dealing with difficult customers, of learning how to overcome his temper so that he doesn't get fired for screaming at people.
You know, he hasn't gone through maybe 20 or 30 years of learning how to manage his destructive emotional characteristics in order to get a paycheck.
So the fact that he has very bad self-management or non-existent self-management, self-indulgence, means that the brain tumor would have pushed him in a particular direction faster, but it was a direction he was already far down the road off.
Again, I'm not saying that's proof.
I'm saying there's one thing that you could say that his prior life as a criminal meant that an escalation of his natural state of being would result in more violence because his whole basis for existing is to prey upon and hurt other people.
So the fact that when he got a brain tumor he became more preying upon and more hurting other people is, you know, the brain tumor just put steroids into the muscles he's been working out on for 20 years.
No, and I think that's a good point to make.
But again, if we widen the context of it, the Buddhist monk, for example, he didn't just fall into a Buddhist temple.
He presumably had some exposure to Buddhism when he was young and he empathized with it or resonated with him.
And so he went down that path.
And that's not the same situation as presumably what a career criminal in America was doing.
So there's, I mean, if we expand the context and we look at the breadcrumb trail that led to him being a career criminal as opposed to being a Buddhist monk, it's not like he had both options open to him.
What, are you saying that he had no options to not steal?
Well, I mean, obviously, you know, it's a hypothetical criminal.
I don't know every aspect of what he was, you know, what was made available to him, but The comparison there, I felt, was a little maybe overselling the point.
But how is this not begging the question?
In other words, we say, well, this is where the person ended up and this is where the person had to end up.
Well, compare it to what?
What's the control group?
Right?
How is it that we We could find a way.
We can't run the life again and see if it turned out different.
There's twin studies and all that.
So what is the null hypothesis for this?
Well, this is where he ended up.
So it was all just a series of dominoes, which ended up with this person doing some particular crime.
Also, I'd also like to know, sorry, I would also like to know the proportion of criminals whose actions can be explained, at least to some degree, by brain tumors.
I gotta tell you, I don't think it's very high.
Sure.
Well, yeah, and so the point of the brain tumor story is not to say that every criminal has a brain tumor.
It's to say that brain tumors are just a special case of the same type of situation.
You could have the brain chemistry that maybe, because neuroscience and Harris being a neuroscientist, he's a little more I'm familiar with it and I am, but the science is still fairly nascent.
It's still growing.
And so we don't fully understand to what degree and in what relationships brain chemistry, brain interaction, all the neuron fun stuff maps onto people's characteristics.
But the research that has been coming out has, among other things, led to the neuroscience community to Uh, to be able to map certain things onto what people were calling their choices.
So for example, um, I think it was Benjamin Libet, uh, in 2002, he was doing experiments with fMRI machines where he was scanning the brain and then he was telling people to choose like left or right or one of two different buttons.
And then, um, by reviewing the timing of it, he was able to map the area in the brain where
People were that was activated when people made the decisions for left or for right and then using that information after he found it He was able to predict with I think it was like 75 80 percent Accuracy what someone was going to choose up to like five seconds before they felt that they were making the choice and so the science is leading to the idea that The the phenomenon that we feel subjectively as consciousness is is basically just kind of the same thing as watching a movie.
We feel like we're making the choices in the moment, but anyone with an fMRI machine scanning your brain is going to be able to predict what you do before you do it.
And so it's hard to say that you made a choice.
But this is, I mean, I'm sorry, with all due respect to the science, which I get is a great challenge.
This is, this is very old hat, as far as philosophy goes.
The idea that we have a vast reservoir of accumulated prior decisions and habits and prejudices and bigotries and irrationalities that basically choose for us.
And we think we have the illusion of choice, but without specific self knowledge, we really don't.
I mean, the number of times I've talked to people on this show.
You've heard these calls, right?
So people are, I have no idea why I was attracted to this woman.
Well, let's go through her characteristics.
Let's go through your mother's characteristics.
Oh, look, it's a perfect Oedipal horrifying fit, right?
I mean, you've heard these.
Yeah.
These are people who have a dream.
They have a dream and we break it apart and it really opens up a lot of things that they had never made those connections before.
Now, so the idea that what he's talking about is there's an unconscious which chooses and then you think you've chosen.
And that's a way, it's a very crude way of characterizing these experiments.
Right.
But okay.
But this goes all the way back to Socrates and know thyself.
It goes back to Freud.
I know Freud has had some challenges scientifically, to put it mildly.
But the idea that there's choice before choice.
Sure.
Absolutely.
There is choice before choice.
And once you have that knowledge, as we talked about, it's like knowing that smoking is bad for you.
Knowing that you have Hidden choice before superfluous choice.
Yeah.
Knowing that you are going to be susceptible without the knowledge of, I'm sorry, without knowing that you're susceptible to women like your mom, you're going to be susceptible to women like your mom.
But once you know it, you can identify it, you can see the patterns and boom, you can change So the idea that there's choice before choice, that's one of the basics of philosophy and that's what philosophy has been battling and self-knowledge and psychology and therapy and all this and that's why, you know, for
Ten years straight I've been encouraging people, many more than years before that in my private life, telling people go to therapy, study yourself, keep a journal, keep a dream journal, learn about your history, talk to your parents, find out about their dysfunctions and their strengths and their weaknesses and so on, because the more knowledge you have, the more choices you have.
So yeah, the fact that this guy is spending a huge amount of time confirming what philosophers have known for thousands of years, I guess it's nice to have it confirmed, but it's not news to those who've been pursuing self-knowledge for a while.
The way, I might have needed to clarify, the way that he did it is a little bit different.
It's not the idea of unconscious choice then arising into conscious choice.
It's unconscious machinery behind the scenes that gives you the subjective experience of choice.
I get it.
I know it.
That's exactly what I'm saying though.
If you don't know that you're going to be susceptible to a woman like your mom, you're going to think you're just choosing this woman.
Wow, she's just the best, you know, and you think you're choosing her.
But it's your unconscious patterns and imprinting that is actually choosing her and in the absence of knowing your unconscious patterns and imprinting, it'll feel like you're choosing her.
Right, you're not.
Well, so but that wouldn't necessarily so let's say that you you gain that self knowledge and you know that you have this this inclination based on you know, your your mom.
That wouldn't necessarily mean that you're going to change anything moving forward.
Maybe you're okay with that feeling.
I mean, you know, I don't know.
You just packed a whole bunch of stuff in there.
So if you have the knowledge of your susceptibility to a woman like your mom, and this doesn't mean a negative thing, if your mom is great, you know, fantastic, right?
Yeah.
So if you have this knowledge, right, when you say it doesn't necessarily mean, of course it doesn't, because there's still free will.
If it necessarily meant something, Like, oh, if you take this course of therapy or pursue this goal of self-knowledge, you will be attracted to the opposite of your mom, but that would just be another form of determinism, right?
It gives you the choice.
Now, you can still choose to ignore the knowledge that you have about your own history and your mom's functions and dysfunctions, and you can end up with someone exactly like your mom, because you're just choosing to ignore the knowledge.
The same way you can learn all about how smoking is bad for you and still keep smoking, but at least you have a choice.
And this is why people don't like more knowledge in a lot of ways, because more knowledge It gives them more responsibility.
Yeah, I remember the last call a week or two ago where you talked about that a bit with the prior caller.
I had a call – I'm sorry.
I had a call and I'm going to poke you about childhood in a sec.
But I did have a call with a determinist.
It's got to be five or six years ago.
Now – and this is not – Anything other than a minor anecdote is not proof or anything.
Sure.
But yeah, he was a determinist.
And it turns out that as he was growing up, his parents controlled his every move to the point where they would lock him in his bedroom for days and he had no choice about where to go.
He couldn't get a choice about his friends, he couldn't get a choice about going to church.
They didn't give him any choices and he grew up as a determinist.
And that's not a proof of anything.
I'm just saying that sometimes self-knowledge can help with regards to why people are attracted to the concept of determinism.
Since Sam isn't here, you might be the guinea pig for that, if that's of interest to you.
- Yep, that's fine.
So, I'll try to illustrate how I'm looking at it because I can't, I'm not fully getting the way that you're presenting the argument enough to be able to refute it, so I'll try to explain where I'm coming from and then maybe you can spot so I'll try to explain where I'm coming from and then maybe you can
So when I see the process of self-knowledge, you know, if I'm ruminating and I'm trying to, you know, account for a past action or, you know, either alone with a therapist, whatever, you know, I'm thinking about past actions and I'm trying to make the connections.
I'm getting a better understanding of myself.
The way that I look at that is kind of like learning to use a computer.
So when you first sit down a computer, you have very rudimentary understanding of how it works.
You just kind of Play with the keyboard and you learn that certain patterns give you certain responses back.
Is that how you learn how to use a computer?
I'm just curious.
Most people that sit at the computer are just randomly pushing buttons.
They usually try and get someone with spectacles and a little dating experience to help them out.
Yeah, absolutely.
Trying to make a direct correlation to sitting by myself and ruminating as opposed to sitting in the therapist's office and talking it out with them.
So if I'm just kind of doing my own thing with it, it's kind of like me just sitting at the computer teaching myself whatever, you know, about how it works.
So as I learn more and more about how the function of it works, it doesn't change how it's functioning, but it does expand my use of it.
And so I'm not... I'm going to be better able to try and achieve my goals for whatever I'm doing to achieve on the computer, and that's what I think you were talking about there.
No, but the difference is that the computer is a static entity that you're interacting with, and your interactions don't change the nature of the computer.
The more you learn about the computer, the computer doesn't change.
Your capacities to use the computer change.
Like, a Stradivarius is the best violin, right?
Apparently.
I took 10 years of violin when I was younger.
And if you gave me in my youth orchestra a Stradivarius, it wouldn't make me a better player.
It may sound a little better, but my playing would not change the Stradivarius, right?
So when you are looking at a mechanical entity outside of yourself, you can do more things with the computer as you learn more, but the computer is exactly the same as it was when you first started.
Let's assume it wasn't, it's not downloading updates and just, I don't want to nitpick and flagpole that to that degree.
Well, no, I think that's a good... Hang on, the computer doesn't change as you learn more about the computer, right?
You just can do more with it.
Well, I wouldn't necessarily agree with that.
The hardware wouldn't change, but you can, you know, as you learn more about the computer, you can start reprogramming it.
Right, but the computer, the architecture hasn't changed.
Right, well, I feel like the metaphor maps well onto people, because, like, your brain physically won't, you know, aside from whatever your diet is, won't change, but the kernel, the OS, however you want to transfer the metaphor, can be Revised, rewritten, either by yourself or in conjunction with someone else.
What would the analogy be for a human being if the kernel gets rewritten?
That would be the gaining of the self-knowledge.
Let's say that you find some inconsistency that's causing a system crash or cognitive dissonance.
So if we think of cognitive dissonance as like a system crash, and so once you go through the logs, so to speak, and you find where the error is, and then you have that self-knowledge of, you know, this is what was wrong in my brain, or this is what was wrong in the computer, you patch it, and then you rerun the system, and then it runs better.
So you've changed how the computer runs by reprogramming it, and then you change how your mind works by introspection and by gaining self-knowledge.
Right, but in this example that you're giving, though, there are two entities, the person and the computer.
Right, Josh?
Sure.
I mean, there are two entities here, but with self-knowledge, there's one entity, and that's the big difference.
The computer is programming itself in this way, and it is choosing whether to program itself.
So you can't say I am standing next to myself the same as I'm programming a computer because that's two entities when you're in fact describing human consciousness, which is one entity to the human brain.
I don't want to bring AI into it per se.
No, let's not bring AI into it at all.
I don't do sci-fi as yet.
And the last AI that Microsoft came, it took what, eight minutes for trolls to turn it into a racist hate monger.
So let's not go with AI at the moment.
You can't – when you're talking about one entity and you introduce two entities, that's kind of cheating, right?
Because the human consciousness saying, well, our own consciousness self-knowledge is like me programming a computer.
No, it's not.
Because with a computer and you, there's two people, two entities, sorry, two processors, right?
The human being that's programming the computer and the computer itself.
But with self-knowledge, there's only one and that's very significant.
I think you could have You could have an understanding that has two entities.
When you're deliberating with something, thoughts will arise as you're thinking about things that you didn't choose beforehand.
You'll have this dialogue between your conscious brain, and then all of a sudden, a counter-argument will occur to you.
And then you'll… No, I get all of that.
I'm sorry, I get all of that.
But you're physically in the same space, like you're in the same brain.
Here we have, like with the computer example, there's a human brain and there's a computer that are separated by space, not to mention biology, right?
So that's all.
You can't use as an analogy for one entity.
two entities, one of whom is conscious and one of whom is not.
You know, you can't represent one consciousness with a consciousness and a non-consciousness like a computer.
That's not fair because you're not describing the same thing.
It's like, well, to talk about this bird, I'm going to talk about a skyscraper and a bird.
It's like, why do we need the skyscraper again?
Well, no, it's not the same thing.
Yeah, I get where you're coming from now.
I feel like you can Well, I mean, because then you could just be there, you know, you could just be sitting in the computer.
I mean, I feel like the consciousness being the analog for the person, and then the unconscious being the analog for the computing side of it, fits pretty well.
I mean, you can... No, no, no, because first of all, hang on.
I mean, the unconscious is way older than the conscious mind.
In this example, the computer is created by a human, and the human is much older than the computer.
But biologically, I think we can all understand that what I've called humanity, like modern humanity.
It's the post monkey beta expansion pack and it's buggy as hell, right?
Because we've, our whole, the neurological system and the base of the brain, the medulla, the amygdala, like all of the stuff, it's all geological layers.
Like we start off single cell, fish, lizard, like it's all just built up layers.
And the neofrontal cortex, like the new, the human part of us,
is like life is four billion years old and the human part of us is like what a hundred thousand years old hundred and twenty thousand it's tiny it's so new it's ridiculous right and so the problem is that if you look at the unconscious as a computer well first of all the unconscious is not a mere receptacle a computer is a mere receptacle of what human beings do to it it doesn't really do anything to itself and as a human being is priorly programmed it to do that whereas the unconscious is
3,000 times, it's been clocked at 3,000 times in some situations faster than the conscious mind.
It's way older than the conscious mind, and it is generative, right?
I mean, it creates dreams every night.
It can write songs while you sleep.
It can create inspiration.
It can create poetry.
A lot of this stuff comes from inspiration, and the part of me that is generating even this language And you too, right, Josh?
I mean, the unconscious is not something passive and receiving only, like a computer.
And it interests me that you, as somebody who's pro-determinist, would view your unconscious in that way.
If you've not come in contact with the sort of living, majestic, titanic, terrifying, exhilarating, fantastic power of the unconscious,
I would question the degree to which you've really worked on self-knowledge, and then it could be that I could also question the degree – it's not a disproof – I would also question the degree to which, if you haven't worked very hard on self-knowledge and come into the awesome, titanic, amazing, powerful force of the unconscious and its generative, creative, and inspiring capacities, then I can see why you might be more tempted to look at the unconscious as a computer that's passive to what you do to it.
You don't come out of objectivism by chance, do you?
Actually, I do.
Ah, there we go!
So that's the Rand thing, which is your emotions are your prior philosophical arguments or your prior philosophical perceptions or your prior value statements crystallized and returned to you as feelings, right?
Right.
Yeah, and the free will aspect of Rand was the only part that I never jived with.
It was really interesting because I really enjoyed and resonated with Pretty much everything with objectivism, but then there were a couple little parts that I had issues with, and I tried to sort it out.
I've read Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology at least three or four times, and I get where it's going, but it always seemed like she hand-waved every time that she started talking about free will.
I agree, and I've read Brandon's work on free will, and I have found it to be more assertive than argumentative, which is a real shame because it is a very important issue, and I read it like somebody reads the Talmud to get the Word of God, and I'm like, no, this doesn't really work.
That's why I wanted to come on today.
I'm glad we were able to do this.
Listen, look, I fully accept, Josh, just to be clear, that me talking about the majestic power of the unconscious is not an argument.
I'm aware of that completely.
I'm just saying that that's been my experience in working with self-knowledge, that it does look that way.
I think that's one of the great tragedies of Ayn Rand.
She, as she said, she did not understand psychology at all, and she was not interested in self-knowledge in any particular way, which is, I think, why the last half of her life was a pretty sterile disaster, like after the We the Living, the Fountainhead anthem, and of course Atlas Shrugged, where she squeezed her unconscious, and I always view her like, her unconscious like Stalin with some political prisoners, you know, we're gonna get that building built now.
You know, 13 years of grinding away at her unconscious to force it to produce the work in perfect conformity with her philosophical ideals.
And I think her unconscious was like, Okay, I'm done.
Fuck you now.
And that's why she didn't write anything for like 1953.
She wrote no fiction until her death in 1980.
That's a long time to not be 37 years to not be writing.
And what was it that one of the gumshoe detective novel guys, Dashiell Hammett or whatever, wrote to her and said, when's Atlas going to shrug again?
And like, I mean, I think she controls her unconscious to the point where she was able to squeeze the books out of it.
And I think this is one of the reasons why they seem a little sterile and artificial to others.
It's not necessarily the case with science fiction.
It has to go that way.
I mean, there's lots of writers who write wonderful science fiction.
who have a great deal of liveliness and who are also, you know, libertarian, if not downright Robert Heinlein style and caps.
So I think that she was very much domineering of her own unconscious, which is why there were sort of these accusations of this top down hierarchy in what they jokingly called the collective because she was very dominant and just as she dominated Nathaniel Brandon.
So I think she dominated her own and you can see this reflected time and again, in her writings, you know, where Howard Roark is, you know, he observed his pain from a great distance and he thought, it hurts me.
So what, you know, or the one that's always struck me is Hank Reardon, sorry for the spoilers, but Hank Reardon, when he signs over Reardon Metal to the government, he's he like the idea strikes him and his emotions completely change and he signs it joyfully.
Here you go.
I'm like, no, that's not it.
You don't just get a new idea and your emotions completely rewrite themselves from scratch as if you never had any evolution or childhood or innate whatever's right.
I mean, this and this idea that a new idea will completely reshape people's emotions gave her entirely unrealistic expectations as to what her novels could achieve, which is why Leonard Peikoff said, oh yeah, a year after Atlas Shrugged is published, all the regulations will be abolished in the United States.
Because they thought, well, you know, this is new ideas and it's going to completely rewrite people's emotions.
That's not how the emotions work.
They were here a long time before you and they, you know, just ordering them around.
I mean, you can create a totalitarian aspect to your own consciousness where your consciousness orders around the emotions and You know, maybe we'll take a suggestion box once every six months but that is not a productive relationship to the unconscious and it doesn't show the unconscious the proper respect of fatherhood, right?
Because the child is the father of the man and our rational consciousness is a very new child to a very old mother and father of the unconscious and I don't know, I think it's very risky as a whole.
to be dictatorial with your own feelings.
I'm not putting you in this category, but since you brought up random objectivism, that was my big struggle, is that I thought, look, I'll change my ideas and my emotions will just line up behind them.
And it's like, no, that's not how it worked for me and not how it's worked for other people. - Yeah, I get where you're going with the unconscious aspect of it.
And I know we didn't want to talk about AI, but on the aspect of science fiction, I very much enjoy that aspect of it.
I have a much more optimistic view on Kurzweil Singularity and various... I really enjoyed Lucy and Transcendence and some of these transhumanist movies that have been coming out recently that aren't Terminator and just, you know, all the machines are coming to kill us all.
So I look at the upcoming or the looming marriage of the various AI technologies, our increasingly complex neuromapping of the brain and its functions, our better understanding of its capabilities, and then cybernetics and all this fun technology that's coming into the forefront and all of the fiction that's leading ahead of it, starting from like Vonnegut and going all the way through to like Herbert and
There's all the fun things that all the creative types are coming up with, and that's where I kind of draw the inspiration.
So when I talk about thinking of the unconscious or, you know, thinking of how humans work, how humans think, how their function works as computers, I'm not envisioning, like, you know, the two-story IBM computer at the advent of computing that's just this simple, bland, monotone machine.
I have a much more colorful outlook of it, and so that's where I come from as far as that's concerned.
Right, right.
Yeah, I think that the idea that we'll know how to make a human mind is the arrogance of the ant on top of the mountain thinking that it's the mountain, and our rational consciousness, and listen, I'm not a woo-woo, you know, like Candles and Kumbaya show.
I'm rational empiricism and all that.
I'm totally down with that, and that's really the focus of the show.
But the rational, I mean, you're, I'm sure, into evolution as much as I am, or accepted, and the evolution says that the rational consciousness is way new, and it sits on top of a brain that took four billion years to build, and we're like the pimple on the back of the humpback when it comes to, and the idea that, well, the pimple will just build a new humpback, it's like, well, you might want to take a gander at the size and depth and complexity of the wetware that powers us deep down, because it is some truly astounding Stuff.
And I think this is one of the reasons why sort of the more rationalistic philosophies have not gripped the imagination of the masses.
Perhaps I might even modestly say in the way that this show has, you know, cooking over 160 million downloads, because I'm not afraid of the passion and depth and creativity and fertility.
In fact, I know that it's essential to life.
You can be right and being right doesn't make you happy.
But what we're all after is happiness.
And that's an emotional state, not necessarily an intellectual one.
And it can't be programmed by typing ABC in the correct sequence.
It needs to be wooed and surrendered to and to some degree danced with, which is obviously kind of Nietzschean in a way, but I think there's some good empirical evidence behind it.
So for me, just to sort of sum up my position, I've argued that free will is our capacity to compare proposed behavior to ideal standards.
And so if you look at the case against spanking, right?
Spanking is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
What's the proposed action?
And what is the ideal standard?
The non-aggression principle.
And before I put the arguments out, I did not hold people massively responsible.
You know, certainly if people are hiding what they do to their kids, then yeah, okay, then we're back to that sort of, you know, I don't want negative consequences for me, but I'm more than willing to inflict negative consequences on my kids.
So comparing proposed actions to ideal standards is what we have, as far as free will goes.
Can I prove this biologically?
Well, of course not, but nobody can prove anything biologically about free will as yet because all we can do is measure the movement of electrical energy and biochemicals and so on.
We can't translate that to subjective experience of choice.
But I do know that anyone who argues against it must first compare a proposed action to an ideal standard, which is what you were doing at the beginning and what I was doing and what we've been doing all the way through is putting forward arguments to try and convince each other that our next actions, whether it's for or against the arguments of free will or the idea of free will, should conform to the ideal standards of reason and evidence.
Okay.
Yeah.
The way that you sum it up, I'm a lot more sympathetic to, and I mean, like I said before, as you presented the topic before, I've been more open to the way that you've described it than others in the field.
Yeah, and there is, of course, sorry to interrupt, but there is a challenge for atheists with regards to free will because free will is one of the foundational valuations or justifications for the religious mindset.
You know, there's a ghost in the machine that magically gives us free will.
Yeah, I would guess.
And so, yeah, it is a great challenge to defend free will from a non-spiritual side.
I love this challenge you know I mean if this diving board isn't high enough just make it higher because I'll find a way down to that postage stamp of water somehow but it is it is a great challenge and it's not too surprising to me that people who start off critical of religion end up critical of free will because I think it's this you know the fallacy of the admixture you know that because
Because religion has been so often used to justify free will through the appeal to the soul, then all appeals to free will must be irrational in nature, and I don't think that necessarily follows, although I can understand how tempting it might be.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, thanks, Joshua.
Welcome back anytime.
It was a great, great pleasure to chat, and I really appreciate the conversation.
Yeah, no, this was wonderful.
I'll have to come up with some more challenging questions for you.
By the way, nobody won, but hopefully everyone's got more information to make better decisions about free will.
The goal is to get into the Honest Conversations playlist and not the Rebuttals playlist.
Yeah, no, listen, we had a conversation and, you know, it was not exactly a debate, which is great because, you know, there's nothing particularly conclusive can come out of the biological side, but it was a really enjoyable conversation and I hope that people gain the same value out of it that I did.
Absolutely.
Thanks, man.
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