June 28, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:29
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| All right. | |
| Explain. | |
| Oh, sorry. | |
| If free will doesn't exist, should we somehow, so it should, sorry, should we nonetheless act as though it does? | |
| Well, a free will, I mean, the word exists is, right? | |
| My phone exists, my hat exists, my shirt exists. | |
| They exist independent of my consciousness. | |
| And we can check that through the consistent behavior of matter and, you know, sense evidence testing. | |
| Logically consistent and sense evidence testing is how we know something exists. | |
| A free will is an effect of consciousness, right? | |
| Does gravity exist or is gravity an effect of mass? | |
| Well, gravity doesn't exist independent of mass. | |
| And like where there is no mass around, there is no gravity other than very, very faint, blah, blah, blah. | |
| So a concept doesn't exist in the same way as that which it describes does exist, right? | |
| There's a concept called a crowd, but a crowd is just an aggregation of individual people. | |
| There's no such thing as a crowd. | |
| When the people disperse, there's no such thing as the crowd left as a remnant, right? | |
| So free will is a concept or a description of human consciousness, and the description is, free will is our ability to compare proposed actions to ideal standards, which is morality or efficiency or so on, right? | |
| Or it could be something like business goals and so on. | |
| Our proposed actions, we have the ability to compare proposed actions to ideal standards. | |
| Now, does that ability exist? | |
| No, it doesn't exist. | |
| Consciousness is an effect of the brain. | |
| It's a description of the biochemical and material effects of neurons in the brain. | |
| A forest, as a concept, does not exist independent of the trees. | |
| It is a description of the trees. | |
| So free will does not exist independent of human consciousness. | |
| It does not exist as a material entity in its own right. | |
| But free will is a valid concept. | |
| So if you have two bananas, you add two more bananas, you now have four bananas. | |
| But the number two, the number two, and the number four are not somehow attached to the bananas. | |
| They don't exist in an independent state. | |
| They are conceptual descriptions of what is occurring in the world. | |
| So conceptual descriptions are valid or invalid. | |
| They do not exist independent of our minds. | |
| So is free will a valid concept? | |
| Sure, yeah. | |
| Do we have the ability to compare proposed actions to ideal standards? | |
| Absolutely. | |
| We certainly have the ability to create ideal standards. | |
| Something like tell the truth or do not aggress or be courageous and so on. | |
| So we have the ability to propose ideal standards or to have ideal standards. | |
| Can we compare our proposed actions to ideal standards? | |
| Sure, we do it all the time. | |
| Should I, shouldn't I? | |
| Should I have this piece of cheesecake? | |
| Should I go exercise? | |
| Should I tell the truth? | |
| Should I, whatever? | |
| Should I be mean? | |
| Should I succumb to temptation? | |
| So we have ideal standards and we can compare our proposed actions to ideal standards all the time. | |
| This catches the determinist who says you should be a determinist. | |
| In other words, you should compare your proposed actions called continuing to believe in free will or act as if you have free will. | |
| You should compare your proposed actions to an ideal standard called determinism. | |
| So this formulation of free will, which is valid, rejects determinism as a self-contradictory argument. |
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