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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:38
Free Will Part 3
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Hi, everybody. It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Now, don't be cheating, because this is part three of the Free Will series.
So, if you haven't seen the earlier two, this won't make nearly as much sense.
Well, it may not make a whole lot more sense, but at least it will make less sense if you haven't seen the earlier two.
So, if you haven't, just open up a new tab.
I can wait just to go and...
Really?
Back already?
I didn't even know YouTube had a fast forward.
Okay, so now we know that there is a history of free will versus determinism.
The idea that atoms don't have free will doesn't stop free will from being a potential effect of an aggregation.
Of cells. And we also have looked at a theory of free will that I'd sort of like to propose, which is our choice to submit our ideas to universal principles or not to submit our ideas to universal principles.
Because universal principles is what takes a desire away from mere appetite.
And puts it into a moral structure that is universal.
In the same way that a scientific methodology or a scientific way of examining the truth or false value of particular propositions takes it away from the realm of faith or prejudice or mere opinion or personal preference and makes it a universal statement.
I like ice cream is subjective and personal.
Two plus two is four, or...
A rock falls to the earth at 9.8 meters per second per second, or gases expand when heated.
Those are universal statements.
So free will really is the choice, not just to look at the long-term and the short-term effects of positives and negatives, to do a cost-benefit analysis while taking into account long-term effects.
But to compare personal justifications for action or belief with universal standards, which is an involuntary thing that human beings just seem to be drawn to do.
Nobody can act without justifying it.
And if you have little kids, you know, three or four years old, or even two or three years old, and they're having a fight, human beings are just innately...
Each kid will point at the other and say, he started it!
And if that doesn't happen, then you have an alien child and should take that child to Roswell for an examination.
So, let's look at the possibility that I am totally and completely wrong with my statement that free will is the capacity to compare opinion to objective rational standard.
Let's say that that is completely and totally incorrect.
I'm perfectly happy to take massive swings at my own ideas.
In fact, I do that quite obsessively before ending up standing here in front of you.
So let's say that I'm completely and totally incorrect as far as my formulation goes.
Well, both in terms of free will and this idea of comparing subjective opinion to objective theory, let's say it's completely wrong.
What are the consequences of that?
Well, As those of you who've studied any of the philosophy that we've put forward here, or just this is all the way back to Aristotle and the pre-Socratics, there are certain statements that self-detonate.
Certain statements that self-detonate.
For instance, if I say, I do not exist.
Clearly that is a self-contradictory statement.
If I do not exist, I cannot say, I do not exist.
I cannot say to you, all language is meaningless.
That's a self-detonating statement, because...
Obviously if I say that all language is meaningless, either you understand that, in which case Not all language is meaningless because you've understood the proposition that all language is meaningless.
Or you don't understand it, in which case, why would I be saying it?
If I truly believe that all language is meaningless, I would never use language to try and communicate that.
I would use mime or something annoying.
So there are lots of statements.
If I say nothing is true, or if I'm a nihilist, nothing is true.
Well, that's a self-detonating statement because I'm saying it's true that nothing is true.
But if nothing is true, it can't be true that nothing is true.
So there's myriads of these, and they are often overlooked when it comes to debates.
If you're debating with a statist or a minarchist or somebody who believes a government should run things, then you're debating with them, right?
So the two of you are saying that reason and evidence should be used to resolve disputes.
But at the same time, if they then say, well, we need taxation for national defense, taxation is by definition the initiation of the use of force against usually disarmed or under-armed citizens, then And therefore, if you say that the government should run national defense, or the roads, or the police, or whatever, then you're immediately saying both that we should determine this debate, resolve this debate by reason and evidence, but...
The provision of defense or police services or roads should be determined through violence, through force, through the initiation of violence in the form of taxation.
But you can't have it both ways.
You can't say human disputes among peaceful citizens should be resolved both as an ideal by reason and evidence and as an ideal by violence and imprisonment.
You can't have it both ways. You can't have opposite rules for the same situations.
You can't say one rock falls down and one rock falls up.
You can say whatever you want, but it's nonsense.
So... So, here is...
We're going to bring back Joe, big face.
So, he's got a theory.
So, he's got a theory called free will.
And this, of course, is my definition or opinion of free will.
You can go into lots of stuff about free will.
We're just trying to put a framework in here.
And then we have Joe, other guy over here, who has a theory...
Determinism. Determinism.
Fair enough. And...
If this is mere opinion, if this is all subjective...
If the belief in free will or the belief in determinism is completely a subjective state, if there's no possibility of comparing a subjective state to an external verification, as I've mentioned before, if I have a dream about an elephant and I say to you the next day, dude, I had a dream about an elephant, then there's no way, there's no conceivable way with existing technology to find out if it's true or false, whether I did or did not have a dream.
It's entirely based on self-reporting.
Things like, I like ice cream, or I'm happy, these things have some external verification.
But if I say a perfectly and epistemologically subjective statement, like I had a dream about an elephant last night, there's no way to compare that to any kind of external standard of truth.
If that is the case, free will and determinism are purely subjective states that can never be verified against any kind of Objective standard.
Then there's no possibility, there's no reasonable situation, there's no sane circumstance under which a determinist would attempt to convince someone who believes in free will that the free willer was wrong.
Let me go over that again.
It was a long sentence, I got to breathe.
If I say to you, I had a dream About an elephant last night.
Is there any conceivable situation under which you could sanely and rationally say, no, you didn't?
Assuming I slept and blah blah blah.
If I wake up and say to you, I had a dream about an elephant...
Is there any conceivable situation under which you would say, no you didn't, you had no dream, or you had a dream about a peacock?
No, it would be insane, because this is a purely subjective state, no way to verify.
So, determinists, when they argue against free will, or free willers when they argue against determinists, are automatically saying that there is an external standard of truth That our opinions must be subjected to, right? So, what happens is, there's something out here in the universe, to oversimplify it a little bit, but this is perfectly valid, right?
There's something out here in the universe that we compare this to, right?
So, if I have a belief called E equals MC squared...
Right? X equals two MC hammers.
Then, and this guy says E equals MC cubed.
See that at all?
Yeah, actually not too bad. Right?
Then, we don't argue E equals MC squared like we argue whether or not I had a dream about an elephant last night.
What we do is we measure E equals MC squared to reality.
Right? Through the scientific method.
If I have a belief which says fish can fly for hours, right?
Fish fly hours. No, fish cannot fly like hours.
We don't debate this back and forth amongst each other.
I put forward a proposition that say fish have wings with feathers and can fly for hours.
I just have to find them.
And of course, when I do, they pretty much be birds, right?
So, we have things in our mind, as we talked about in the Intro to Philosophy series, well worth having a look at if you don't know what I'm talking about.
We have things in our mind, and the way that we resolve these things is to compare them to a truth standard that is external to our consciousness, whether that is empirical reality, testing, logic, which is derived from the consistent behavior of matter and energy in the world.
So there is a subjective opinion state, and then there is an objective evaluation of that state.
So when I say 2 plus 2 is 4, we compare that to reality.
I put two rocks and two rocks and say, do I have four rocks?
Why, yes, I do. So the moment that you argue with somebody about anything...
About anything, the moment that you argue with somebody, you are immediately and implicitly and completely and irrevocably saying something that is in your head should be compared to something that is objective.
And if it does not match with what is objective, you...
Well, this guy here must abandon his position.
And this is science.
This is math. This is rationality.
This is philosophy, fundamentally.
We have stuff in our head.
We are prone to error. We validate it either through empirical reality, testing the reproducibility of experimentation, or we run it through the old logical test, which is derived from the natural behavior and stable properties of matter and energy.
So, if a determinist comes up to you and says, free will is wrong, there is no such thing as free will, the determinist is implicitly and completely setting up a whole bunch of standards, which it's important not to just leave implicit within your own mind, but to make them explicit within reality.
So, we have this comparator.
So, what are... The basic standards that are set up.
Whenever anybody says to you, you're wrong and you should be more correct.
So, when somebody...
Oh, just before I forget, Untruth, Theory, and Illusion on my website.
Fantastic book. Goodbye.
Right? So, what are the premises that people put up when they start talking about you're wrong and you should believe something better?
Truth. Truth. It's out there somewhere.
Truth exists. Truth is a relationship between thoughts and reality.
Thoughts which accurately mirror reality are called truth.
Truth exists.
Truth exists outside of consciousness.
We'll just say independent.
So truth exists independent of her mind, right?
Because if I say, well, I'm a determinist, and I think that you should stop believing in free will, because I would prefer that you don't.
Well, nobody would take that as an argument, right?
It's like saying, you should like chocolate ice cream because I like chocolate ice cream, but it's not a logical argument, right?
That's just bully or crazy talk.
Three. Truth is better than error.
Better. Truth is preferable to error.
Again, the moment that somebody says your ideas are incorrect and you should change your ideas to something that is more correct, truth exists.
Independent of the human mind, truth is better than error.
I come to you not to say, believe me because I'm me, but you should believe the truth which I am communicating.
I'm just a vessel. I'm a mere vessel of the truth and you should believe reality and logic and truth.
Not just me. It's a bully.
Truth is better than error.
Because truth is better than error, we should prefer that truth.
There's nobody who will say to you who's sane.
Nobody will sit across from you in a rational argument and say, you are completely right.
You are... I am completely wrong, but I'm not going to change my mind.
At least I've never had it.
Maybe you've had it, in which case, you know, back away slowly.
Don't make any sudden moves.
We should prefer truth.
Truth exists. In fact, if human mind is better than error, and we should prefer truth.
Right? Right? Implicit is you can change your mind.
Ooh, look at that.
It's all floating together beautifully.
Can you see that? You can change your mind.
You can change your mind.
That is implicit in any defect that you have with anybody.
This is why, if I'm standing at the bottom of a huge hill, a rocky mountainside, and some boulder comes bouncing down, you know, crashing trees and, you know, going all of the way, kicking up all this dust and birds are flying, I don't sort of sit up there and say, go left! My car is down here!
For the love of all, it's holy go left.
I mean, go left, left, left!
I wouldn't sit there with airplane flags and say, go this way and so on, right?
Why? Well, Because a rock cannot change its course.
A rock is not conscious.
A rock cannot change its course.
Similarly, if I'm in the water and there's a shark floating around that is coming at me, I don't sort of yell underwater, it's wrong to eat me, you're not hungry, don't do it!
Because I recognize that a shark doesn't have consciousness and all they're going to hear is, or something like that.
You can change your mind.
If I present you evidence and rationality, then you have the capacity to change your mind.
Because if I genuinely don't believe that you have the capacity to change your mind, then it makes no sense whatsoever to argue with you.
This is why you don't get a lot of debating societies gathering in the morgue and arguing with people three days dead.
Jesus accepted. Because they don't have the ability to change their mind, because they're pretty much dead, right?
That's the old Billy Joel thing.
Don't argue with crazy people.
So there's a number of implicit premises.
Implicit in the nature of argument are these facts.
So if we say that we have the choice to compare our thoughts to an objective standard of truth, if somebody says, we do not have the capacity to compare our thoughts to an objective standard of truth, we do not have that capacity, it's not chosen, it's not available to us, it's all automatic, we just have this illusion that we do, Then they're in this framework.
They are completely self-detonating.
They're a logical state. If I say we can never compare our internal states of mind to an external standard of truth, then I'm saying it is true that we can't do it.
It's independent of our mind.
It's an external standard.
It's better than error, so we should prefer it, but we can't prefer anything.
We should prefer truth and you can change your mind.
The moment I say we can never compare our internal states to an external standard of truth, I've immediately detonated my statement.
It is a self-contradictory statement.
It is exactly the same as saying I don't exist.
So... 2 plus 2 is 5.
It's still a logical construct that can be proven or disproven.
But I don't exist. Language has no meaning.
Your ears don't work.
If I'm using audio, then I have to assume your ears work.
You can't possibly argue That human beings cannot compare their internal states of mind to an external standard of truth.
It's completely impossible.
You're just shooting yourself in the foot with a thermonuclear device.
So, that we can absolutely pass aside as an invalid.
So, anytime anybody debates anything with you, these are, and this is just a few of them, there are many, many more, and I'm sort of working on these in my new book.
But the moment that anybody debates with you, and of course there are other things like reason is better than violence and so on.
There are all of these things which we should believe.
Now, just to touch briefly on this compatibilist version, because you'll hear this kind of thing where people will say, well, there is no free will, but we can still have morality.
Well, that's just not true. I mean, this is just one of these games that people play.
I mean, it's fundamentally not true.
Morality indicates that we have the capacity to compare what it is that we want to do and our justifications for it to an objective standard of morality.
If we can't do that, then there's no such thing as morality.
If there's no possibility of alternate action, right?
If I walk out my back door and strangle a cat, and that was carved into reality from the very beginning of time, then there's no way...
That I could be held accountable for the mere actions and reactions of matter.
If everything that I do is perfectly predictable, if everything that I do is perfectly foreordained, if I have no possibility of acting differently than it is that I'm good at, clearly, logically, you'd have to be mad to think that there was any such thing as morality.
For morality to exist, we have to have the capacity to understand moral theories, to compare our actions to them, and then be responsible for any deviation.
So if I say that stealing is good and I go out and steal stuff, but then I get mad when somebody steals from me, then clearly I'm being hypocritical.
Because I'm saying stealing is good universally, that's why I do it, but then if somebody steals from me, stealing is bad.
So stealing is both good and bad simultaneously.
It's illogical, it's manipulative, it's self-serving, it's hypocritical.
So I'm responsible for that.
So... Morality does not exist in the absence of choice.
There's no question of that.
Now, that doesn't mean that everybody has the same capacity to be moral.
If you don't know, or you grew up on some desert island, you can't be expected to invent 3,000 or 5,000 years of morality all on your own.
If you don't know the long-term causes and effects of things, if you're insane, if you're mentally deficient in some manner, if you're a child and you can't really process theories against morality, Universal standards, or even see the long-term consequences of actions.
There are limits, and there are gray areas, and we're all, you know, everybody who's over 12 mentally can live with that, right?
There's gray areas in biology, there's even some gray areas in physics, in the realm of quantum stuff.
So, we have to have the capacity to choose.
Now, what happens is, for the compatibilists, you know, there's a timeline, right?
Let's just say birth to death, right?
The hole we come out of and the hole we go into.
Now, compatibles is going to say, well, we're chugging along in our timeline.
Let's just say we're here, I'm 40.
Well, we're chugging along in our timeline, but we don't know what is coming.
So what we're like is, you see those newscasters, they've got this thing in their ear, and they're like, oh, oh, this is just in.
What happens is that everything is unfolding in a now moment to us.
We don't know what's coming.
And so, we're sort of like, if you were in a play, and the director was whispering the lines you were going to say into your ears as you spoke them, you wouldn't know what lines were coming next.
So it would feel like it was in the now, but it would still, the script is preordained, you just don't know what's coming next, right?
So they say, well, because we don't know what's coming next, there's morality and so on.
But that's all nonsense.
That's complete, total nonsense.
If you don't believe that anybody has a choice, that anybody is responsible for their actions, then of course there are things that go out the window.
Morality. Morality is an illusion, just as free will is an illusion.
Morality, spelling, is an illusion.
If free will is an illusion, then morality is an illusion.
If free will is an illusion, we should get rid of it, the same way that we get rid of the illusion of God and the virtue of governments.
Love. Preference.
Argument. Or debate, whatever, right?
Debate. Responsibility as a whole, right?
You get the whole idea, right?
Why is it that love goes away?
Well, I love my wife because she is noble and sweet and courageous and wonderful and affectionate and loyal and wonderful in every way.
Well... I have to, I mean, the only way that I can love her is if I assume that she's earned these things through making choices to act in a better manner.
So preferences as a whole, right?
I mean, to go back to the boulder coming down the hill, I can stand at the bottom of the hill, and I can scream that the boulder should go left or right, but that's irrational, because the boulder's going to go where the boulder's going to go.
Me yelling at it isn't going to make a damn bit of difference, right?
So if I am wise, I just jump out of the way of the boulder, right?
Because I know that me yelling at it isn't going to make a damn bit of difference.
So if everything is as foreordained the way that a boulder rolling down a hill is, then having preferences about anything, It's irrational.
It's insane. So, you can't debate anything.
You can't. You can't.
A sort of perfect example of a foreordained situation where you don't know what's coming is a television show, right?
So, let's say you're watching Scrubs or whatever, right?
And it's been recorded weeks or months or years ago, and you don't know what's coming next, but you do know that they're not at living on the fly, right?
So, it's been pre-recorded.
Do you have a debate with the characters on your television show?
Of course not. Right?
I mean, it's like you get these people in movies, and the girl, the woman's going down the alley, and it's almost scared by the cat, and, you know, the dark alley.
And they're like, behind you, behind you!
Well, everybody knows that's kind of funny, because the characters are, it's all prescripted, it's all mashed into celluloid, it's all doing its thing.
You can't alter it.
That, right? So yelling, look out, you know, to a character in a movie is kind of funny, but it's not, you know, it's not sensible.
It's not a rational perspective to have, right?
It's not something you would epistemologically defend.
So having any preferences whatsoever doesn't make any sense.
Argument or debate, because an argument or debate is saying what I would prefer, that you believe the truth rather than believe something false, like free will.
Responsibility of any kind.
I mean, the rock doesn't have responsibility for where it lands, right?
That the weather doesn't have responsibility for hailing even on a new car parking lot.
The world doesn't have responsibility for turning.
The sun 5 billion years from now is not going to be responsible for going supernova.
It's just following the whole causal chain.
There's no such thing as responsibility.
Conceivably, because there's no responsibility, there really is actually no such thing as an ego, an I. I is illusion.
Love is an illusion. Morality is an illusion.
Any kind of preference is an illusion.
So you have to get rid of all of these.
But the moment you get rid of preference, you get rid of debating about free will.
If you're a determinist and you're surrounded by a bunch of television sets that are all spouting off free will, free will is good, free will is great, we love free will, free will is good, you don't argue with them, right?
You sort of sit there in the middle of a television store with all these TV sets arguing about free will and say, you're wrong, you should believe in determinism and free will is wrong.
That would be the actions of a crazy person.
So the moment that somebody debates with you about free will, they're making all these assumptions about personal responsibility, choice, ethics, preferential states of mind, that the truth is objective, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
There's just no way to get around that.
That's just a basic fact.
And people will spend entire lifetimes, and people have spent generations, in fact, millennia, trying to obscure that one sort of simple basic point.
So... Determinists say, well, everything is determined, and the compatibilists are particularly true of this.
They will say, everything is determined, but, but, we must act as if we have free will.
That's really what it comes down to.
Everything is predetermined, but we must act as if we have free will.
But that is complete nonsense.
That's like me as an atheist saying, there is no such thing as God, but we must pray and go to church as if there is.
I mean, that's just freaky.
It's completely mad.
If there's no such thing as God, your behavior must change.
What's the difference between believing in God and not believing in God?
Well, not praying, not going to church, not feeling guilty about masturbation.
Thank heavens! All of these kinds of things.
Not believing people can come back from the dead.
Not believing in miracles. Not believing in old fairy tales as if they're true.
Not worrying about hell or heaven.
When you stop believing in God, there are specific consequences to those, to that change in belief or that emergence of enlightenment or rationality.
So, of course, the question I've asked for decades of determinists is, well, what changes?
So if you're going to give up the whole idea of free will, what changes?
Well, of course, they can't really go into what changes.
Well, you stop trying to change people's minds because you realize that both your actions and their actions are predetermined, that you're like two television sets.
Screaming at each other, or yelling at each other, or supposedly reasoning with each other, but neither television set is like playing an episode of Scrubs against an episode of ER and calling it a debate.
It's not. So the moment that a determinist says that your behavior should change based on determinism, one of the things that you give up is preferential behavior, because there's no possibility of anything else.
It's like praying it ain't going to rain.
It's not going to make any difference because the rain doesn't hear you or listen and has any capacity to change its behavior.
Neither does a human being in the determinist viewpoint.
So a determinist has to say that nothing changes, that you still have to act as if you're free even though you're not.
But that's mad. What's the point of having a belief that you must act in opposition to at all times?
It's like those people who say, you know, reality is purely subjective, but I'm still going to wait for the green light before crossing the street.
It's like, no! Will the trucks...
Will the trucks out of existence, right?
I mean, if reality is subjective and it's all the matrix, then walk down the street and say, trucks, stop.
I don't need to, right? In fact, why are you even walking?
Just will yourself to where you want to go.
But no, people say, well, reality is subjective.
You can't trust your senses. If you play tennis with them and they don't just sit there and say, well, I don't know if we're playing tennis.
I don't even know if I'm in shorts. Maybe I'm naked.
I don't know what's going on, right?
They'll play tennis and then they'll come back and say, well, you can't trust your senses, you see.
And the same thing is true of determinism, right?
If determinism has an effect on your belief system, Then the first effect that it has to have is that you stop debating with people.
Stop trying to convince them of determinism.
Because all of that implies all of the principles involved in free will.
Now, to sum up, and I wanted to keep this relatively short.
So, there is a lot of implicit premises in debating with anybody.
In applying rational theories or evidence or whatever it is, logic itself...
To people, which is to say that there's a preferred state called truth.
You should avoid error. You can change your mind.
You have the capacity control. And any determinist who comes in and says, well, I'm just trying to be like a billiard ball.
Who's hitting your billiard ball and bouncing off in some other direction?
Just don't debate with them, right?
They can never get mad at you for not debating with them because they're determinists.
So if you decide not to debate with a determinist, he can't conceivably get angry.
They always do. But he can't conceivably get angry because...
You deciding not to debate with him was predetermined from the beginning of time.
It's like getting angry at standing outside of the sunlight for eight hours that you got a sunburn.
Well, of course you got a sunburn.
It's not like the sun is offending you.
It's just what happens in reality.
So, it's my belief that there is, of course, an aspect of this balancing of long-term and short-term gains.
The ability to focus on the lung cancer and put down the cigarette.
The ability to focus on the consequences of hitting somebody while you're driving drunk and then not taking the next drink from Lindsay Lohan.
There's lots of things that you can do.
You can choose to focus on the long-term consequences of your actions or you can not.
It's just a matter of focus.
Long-term, short-term. Long-term, short-term.
That's a core aspect of it, but even more fundamental than that is whether we compare the ideas within our own minds to objective standards or whether we just make up objective standards that are self-justifying.
That we have a choice in.
And of course, if I did not believe that, I would not be a philosopher.
So I challenge any determinist out there to act with the same level of integrity.
Thank you! So much for watching these videos.
I look forward to see you on the Free Domain radio boards.
And, last but not least, on Truth, The Tyranny of Illusion, a fabulous book available to you for just a little bit more than the price of a movie.
I absolutely promise you it will change your life.
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