Do we have Free will? | Discussing Free will and Determinism with

Discussing free will and determinism with Wicked Surpreme. Supreme is taking the materialist determinist stance against free will and I am taking a Hermeneutic stance for free will.
A deeper dive into the heart of the empiricist model of human agency and whether it remains consistent.
Throughout this conversation I demonstrated the anti-scientific nature of empiricism and the logical jumps being made in assuming human behaviour to be caused by events external to mind.
Thanks again to supreme for being willing to go far deeper than the average KZbin discussion usually allows.
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[@telosbound]

This was a great one!

[@Razolo]

Great discussion

[@liammorris7324]

would it be possible to hear your opinion on Deleuze? I'm a philosophical incompetent and would love to hear your take.

[@paulfletcher3454]

I really enjoyed this Perspective Philosophy for your explanations and insight. I hope other people absorb the idea that they can't rely on Dr Google to debate you. :) When someone doesn't know what antecedent means but can summarise Hume regarding causation, inference and induction, I always dismiss the greater miracle...

[@jamesbarels469]

Just a suggestion, but might it be worthwhile to do a response, or review video, of the Closer to Truth documentary "Big Questions in Free Will"? And if it is worthwhile I hope it can help further your discussion with Wicked Supreme. Also, just wondering if you have watched Anil Seth's presentation at the Royal Institution, "Is Reality a Controlled Hallucination?" I think it would be really interesting to hear your thoughts on this lecture. "Anil Seth argues, using innovative combinations of theory and experiment, that our brains are prediction machines inventing our world and correcting our mistakes by the microsecond. Anil's new perspective on consciousness has shed light on the nature of the self, free will, the intimate relationship between being alive and being aware - and the possibility of conscious machines." Thanks for taking the time to put these videos out.

[@jamesbarels469]

I have a question that comes from the 1:10:00 section of the discussion. When you begin talking about something that can't be outside of our mind and getting into something that is fundamentally impossible, how does the fact that there is no largest Prime number fit into this? Are Maths outside of our mind? Is knowledge of the impossibility of there being a largest Prime Number a part of the Noumena?

[@sundayasmrpodcast]

This is probably one of my favorite discussions that you’ve had.

[@Dr-Sardonicus]

PP, I've noticed that most of your interlocutors are highly resistant to speaking about idealism, sometimes to the point of simply misunderstanding how radical a solution it is. Would you be open to a conversation with me about Hegel's response to Kant? I am not academically qualified, but genuinely open minded and interested in Idealism, and have been casually studying German idealism for the past year or so. I feel like I understand Kant fairly well, but would be keen to discuss how Hegel builds upon Kants views in a friendly discussion. Let me know

[@puppetperception7861]

I thought i would get an answer

[@bradenmcphail3740]

haha

[@PerspectivePhilosophy]

We are going to talk again on the topic soon. Next time we will have the benefit of building on this foundation

[@naitsirhc2065]

Wicked clearly had very little idea what was going on here. He half listened through the whole thing and STEM-lord misexplained each point condescendingly despite likely having never heard these ideas before. PP knew his stuff, but doesn't know how to explain these concepts to people without the same background. He'd really benefit from being able to explain these ideas using concepts considered foundational in physicalism. Sure, no one's going to disagree when you tell them color isn't an aspect of noumenal reality- but it needs to be made clear that notions such as fundamental particles are not either. Still, an interesting debate. Convinced me there may be a good basis for free will.

[@georgepantzikis7988]

I think the primary cause of misunderstanding in this conversation was that Wicked Supreme did not get Hume's actual point. It seems he thought it was basically a probabilistic thought experiment about how knowledge could never be 100% certain. This is why he kept bringing up corroborating evidence, as a way to show that, while it may technically be true that our knowledge of something is imperfect, we shouldn't dismiss the entirety of our experience. He didn't realise that the fact of his being able to have any experience at all always already includes mediation, thus creating a wedge between the mental impression and any definite extrapolation about the real world that can be made from it. Since he didn't understand Hume, he couldn't understand Kant's solution to the problems proposed by Hume.

[@geniustracks9213]

There are gaps in why and how we perceive everything, but that doesn't mean we need to REACH like the idealist does, because all you're doing is REACHING, it's almost childish...but in a more sophisticated sense. I like this guy's approach, and also liked Mr. Girl's approach as well. Idealism is an assertion. where's the 'mind' outside of the 'mind' that's making the idealist's asserted 'mind' able to conceptualize anything. kant hagel kant hagel - shrooms. It's sophomoric thinking birthed from an ego-centric unwillingness to acknowledge "not knowing" something. Hence the psycho-babble, assertion generating machine and an implied mocking of folks who don't agree.

[@eapooda]

I'd love to talk to PP about 28:00 I wonder how he'd think about my contemporary platonist position on identity.

[@PerspectivePhilosophy]

Your welcome to

[@maxywaxymus]

I feel it would be really interesting to hear you and Bernardo Kastrup chat about Idealism.

[@jonasbulota7789]

dude looks like Jesus lol

[@thegreatgodpancake9011]

Miss you 😢

[@HarryNicNicholas]

surely, if i had access to every bit of data in the universe and could comprehend it, i could predict what you will do next, which is the same as being determined, you have the ability to do any one of a bzillion things, but the fact is, you can only do the one thing. there is, until we can invent the time machine, only one past, and again you may have a bzillion choices or routes through the future, but there will only be one future. you are free to do whatever you want, but the VHS of the history of the universe is already played out, you just can't watch it or modify it.

[@dubbelkastrull]

11:05 bookmark

[@naitsirhc2065]

"Cups are a human construct and a function of language" Ok but this is literally true of "electron"

[@drewzi2044]

Is PP high. Saying philosophical slogans mashed together from Hegel to Kant to Wittgenstein does not make for a coherent discussion.

[@wintermint7]

3:37 I believe that Sam Harris actually addresses this point in his book “Free Will”. However, I would also argue that we don’t know enough about Quantum Physics and it’s interactions to be able to make such a claim.

[@rustyshackleford8022]

sam harris is a waste of time. the supernatural is required to presume free will. quantum mechanics introducing randominity doesn't matter.

[@wintermint7]

@@rustyshackleford8022 How is Sam Harris a waste of time? He offers a well-researched Determinist and Materialist framework that is the simplest explanation with the least amount of philosophical baggage (Occam’s Razor). If the scientific method can provide insights and/or answers to philosophical inquiries, why wouldn’t we use that information?

[@rustyshackleford8022]

@@wintermint7 empiricism can't answer questions that are abstract, they're separate epistemologies. he's a sophist

[@wintermint7]

@@rustyshackleford8022 How so? There have been multiple psychological experiments conducted since the 1970s that have shown that there are chemicals that “prime” the brain to perform an action before the person recognized that they had the thought to perform the action. Sam Harris also has plenty other examples that he references in “Free Will” to support the argument that free will does not exist. The results from the various studies that he references point to a lack of free will. So, how is empiricism not useful in this scenario? I would argue that any philosophy that is not grounded in material realities probably isn’t terribly useful for anything more than a thought experiment.

[@rustyshackleford8022]

@@wintermint7 yeah you pretty much describe all philosophy there, it is very much useless pragmatically, kind of like post hoc rationalization exported to a societal scale. Empiricism is about what you can detect in reality, while free will is fundamentally a claim of something that is breaking the rules of reality. So to disprove free will with empricism would require to prove a negative essentially (prove every single thing at all times). One could even argue that despite evidence for determinism that the universe's causality bends to one's supernatural free will and any detection of determinism as you described, is it working as intended (though perhaps that's almost ad absurdum)

[@wintermint7]

Question: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Answer: Yes. We can observe this to be true by setting up sensors that can pick up the sound waves and then review the data. Similarly, in response to the argument that we only experience reality as a facsimile. This is true for the exact reason as specified in the video. However, we can also set up sensors to record physical events that occur. If we can reliably recreate events (like a computer simulation) that took place using only sensor data, does this not mean that events occurred as we observed?

[@PerspectivePhilosophy]

Sound not vibrations. What a sound is requires a series of notes, its a temporal experience and even the way we configure the tech to detect this reflects our interpretation. Also its worth noting that you would be observing another experiential event separate from the original.

[@wintermint7]

@@PerspectivePhilosophy Sound is vibrations. Otherwise, how could we reliably record anything?

[@fakedoorsfordinner1677]

You would still observe it, despite it not being a direct observation. Like the information still came through your ears, eyes, tong, skin or nose. You couldn't have known it without observing it and thus can't know what would happen if you weren't obseving. Not observing leads to ignorance where you don't know what you don't know, but observing also leads to ignorance where you know what you don't know.

[@naitsirhc2065]

This means that you were there to hear it

[@rud69420]

@@wintermint7 I think PP might be saying that sound is necessarily a subjective experience, and that absent an observer, the falling tree makes no sound, only vibrations.

[@luciddreamer616]

The way I see it, the decisions we care about most are deterministic insofar as we use any sort of rational process to determine them. Mostly this debate boils down to what we mean by free will -- if you mean will divorced from causality than obviously it doesn't exist. But most people take that idea and run to some strange places with it (i.e. asserting that choices and involuntary reflexes are the same despite the fact that we seem to all experience them differently.) It seems to me that human will exists even if it is comprised of proximate causes, much in the same way that objects can exist despite being comprised of more than one part. And it also seems to me that there are degrees of freedom with respect to how we can govern our desires, or how well we can commit to actions that will bring us closer to the world we want to live in. So our will is "more free" than an earthworm but not quite as free as someone with a perfect ability to predict the future.

[@kattihatt]

Why would you have more free will if you could predict the future?

[@luciddreamer616]

@@kattihatt For the same reason that you have more freedom if you can do as you will than you would if you could only take involuntary actions.

[@luciddreamer616]

@@kattihatt Most people acknowledge a difference between voluntary and involuntary actions, and even people who take the philosophical view that this is a distinction without a difference don't live their lives as if it were so (e.g. they don't treat someone who shoves them the same way as someone who bumps into them and don't expect to be treated like an assailant for accidentally bumping into others.) But what is the difference between a reflex and a decision? The decision relies on your ability to model the world in your brain and act in such a way that you get a desirable outcome, whereas reflexes occur without any such process. Ergo, if you could predict the consequences of your actions with perfect accuracy, you could decide to act in a way that maximized your desired outcomes. I could go further and argue that someone who had the ability to alter their desires would have an even greater degree of free will than someone who couldn't. At the end of the day, you're still reacting to your environment (e.g. you can't choose what you desire, and even if you could you couldn't choose what you wanted to desire instead, and even if you could anything you chose to want to desire would be influenced by your environment.) But nobody honestly believes an earthworm has the same degree of freedom to act as a person who could edit their own mind and predict the results of their potential actions with absolute clarity.

[@kattihatt]

@@luciddreamer616 being able to predict the future, implies there being a set future. If you are changeing your actions based on this prediction with a different outcome, this means you were not able to predict the future. Maybe i misunderstood you, but this sounds like a paradox.

[@luciddreamer616]

@@kattihatt There's no paradox. If you could forecast all the ways in which any other party or parties would react to anything you might say or do -- even if you could run the tape as many times as you liked before you committed to an action -- it would make you more free than folks who couldn't. Whether the universe is deterministic or not isn't relevant. Any decision you ultimately make in the context of this thought experiment is arguably predetermined by what you learn in your forecasts.

[@drewzi2044]

His explanation of what Hume was doing is confusing and false.

[@jamesbarels469]

Metallica's limestone was eroded a long time ago.

[@zackalil2920]

PP is too big brained for wicked lol no offense but it was annoying me how wicked had no idea what PP was trying to put forth

[@TheFettuck]

Free will only exists without the laws of reality.

[@jimmyfaulkner1855]

Why on earth would you be an idealist? This seems to be anachronistic and is also fundamentally and metaphysically opposed to dialectical materialism of Marx. This undermines communism. If Idealism was true then surely this means theism is correct (what Berkeley thought)? If idealism is true and everything is mental then how can you distinguish between objective reality and your dreams? Doesn’t all of reality become subjective? Idealism appears to undermine external world realism and scientific realism. Btw are you a compatibilist or libertarian when it comes to free will?

[@wintermint7]

I would argue that there is either Determinism (no free will) or Libertarianism (free will). Once one brings up Compatibilism, they have already ceded the debate to Determinism. Based on what I’ve read, Compatibilism is just reinterpreting what free will means to try and save people’s sense of autonomy in a deterministic universe. I argue that there either is agent causation or there isn’t. It is as simple as that.

[@Itsmespiv4192]

@@wintermint7 Sorry for my incredible ignorance...but the fact you can know that it's deterministic...doesn't that give you free will ?

[@wintermint7]

@@Itsmespiv4192 Why do you think that?

[@Itsmespiv4192]

@@wintermint7 In a sense that you have autonomy (free will) but it's determined by the information you have, does that make me a determinist ?

[@drewzi2044]

@@Itsmespiv4192 What you are saying is a contradiction.

[@stewfire4916]

Not sure I see the point of this discussion. Free will vs determinism is a philosophical question, and here we have a guy asking what's the point of a philosophical argument against his side if it has "no implication to "everyday life"". To me it just looks like he has no answer nor the will to challenge these arguments. By the way, I think the weakest part of the Kantian argument is that although we don't know what percentage of reality we sense or how correct we are, for sure it's not a negligible amount. After all, we (as humans) did manage to survive and even develop intelligence, so we must have a good guess of what reality looks like. It could be the case that we are missing some important things due to our senses, but I think due to intelligence we should be able to deduce a lot more than our senses allow. Being able to use radio waves is a pretty good example of that. At the same time I think the simplest way to prove some degree of free will exists is merely the logical contradiction that we are aware that determinism exists, which is certain in case of non minds. Merely being aware of deterministic mechanisms makes it so you are not completely determined.

[@davidgalvez8741]

PP waffles so much just never gets to the point and so hard to even make sense of

[@Nana-bv1md]

It's not easy to explain complex concepts.

[@Luftgitarrenprofi]

The "ahm" and "uhm' are so frequent as well that it's hard to focus on the points he's making. No offense, but at least to me that makes it very hard to listen to. Also as a non-philosopher I feel like it's impossible to even grasp the basic idea of each concept and it's implications. Even if it's hard to explain complex concepts to laymen, this aint working for me at all. Which is kind of unfortunate, because I feel like there might be some important messages there. And I neither have the time nor expertise to read and understand all these philosophers being cited, so I guess I'm destined to stay stuck with determinism. Lol

[@wintermint7]

@@Luftgitarrenprofi One of the beautiful things of Determinism and Materialism/Physicalism is that it is consistent with scientific observations and the scientific method as a whole. Plus, because of this consistency with scientific observations, Occam’s Razor can actually be used to support the argument.

[@Untoldanimations]

@@Luftgitarrenprofi well yes the onus is on you to have the basic background reading. i don't show up to book clubs for books i haven't read and expect people to summarise the contents for me.

[@Luftgitarrenprofi]

@@Untoldanimations I didn't know this channel was the equivalent of a book club. In that analogy, wouldn't talking about philosophical issues require for every person living on the planet including workers on 60 hour weeks to also study philosophy for several years? According to most philosophy PHDs I talked to, understanding many relevant philosophical concepts is next to impossible without having the tools to understand the books you're reading first. This also goes for most scientific fields. So just reading books wouldn't really do anything. I was also specifically referring to this conversation and PP saying how understanding idealism is advanced. Not basic concepts. I took PPs approach to be inclusive of laymen. And I don't think I'm wrong, considering him talking to laymen all the time. Wouldn't make sense to be elitist about it either. Very ineffective way to reach people.

[@eapooda]

28:40 nominalist moments LOL cringe

[@PerspectivePhilosophy]

I dont think its cringe just misguided man. You can understand why people fall into this thinking because scientific thinking pre-kant was more aligned to this epistemically

[@mitscientifica1569]

Determinism* is flawed and makes a number of false assumptions, the worst being that even human behavior is predetermined. In fact, this answer will show, no one who understands its full implications really believes in it or can-and their own behavior demonstrates it. Further, the determinist has no rational basis for dismissing the volition of the human mind and the role of the self in directing one’s own thoughts. The very act of making arguments in favor of determinism shows that they assume the volition of their listeners. For, if they truly believed all things, including people’s thoughts, are completely determined by preexisting causes, then why would they ever use words to communicate ideas with people? Particularly, why would they think it necessary-or even possible-to persuade others all things are deterministic? Why would they feel people need to know (if it were true) they have no “free will”? If they indeed had no free will, what would the determinist’s “revelation” to them change? Their attempt to communicate, then, is proof positive they either don’t truly believe in determinism, or they’re stupid or insane. If determinism was true (regarding human thought and behavior), then nothing anyone could say or otherwise communicate to another person would affect that person’s thoughts or change their mind. Whatever happens or has happened in the physical universe is what would determine their thoughts and behavior. All their future thoughts would already be written upon reality. And, if the determinist’s words ever do manage to change someone’s mind, how does the determinist think that happens? Do they think the physical phenomenon of sound (if the words are spoken) or the light (if written) exerted some kind of force on the person’s body that compelled them to act against their motives and intents?

[@kattihatt]

I think the reason is that youre sort of fooled by your own mind in thinking that you have a free will. I believe in determinism, but everytime i stop thinking about it i suddenly experience having free will. So i dont think thats a good argument. If you believe in causation (which our society is built on) then i dont see how you cant believe in determinism.

[@Nana-bv1md]

@@kattihatt True (in a way but), remember quantum mechanics are mostly undetermined (not unpredictable but undetermined) aswell as Generla Relativity, so just because at big scale things look "determined" does not mean that in small scale they are , another thing would be that 1.to say the universe is deterministic one must know the whole universe ,why ? Because every new branch of physics that was created ,was created after physicists found out about new things in the universe , so to claim that the universe is deterministic one must know the whole universe ,if you don't know the whole universe , in the future we may find out about something new which may disprove determinism for good.(this argument is based on historicism (using history as an argument) And this follows 2. Since We do not know the whole universe , therefore we can not claim the universe is deterministic or a universe were everything is determined . Physicists and scientist in general are finding out about new things constantly and frequently ,aswell as philosophers are bringing new ideas , imagine it is believed the universe is 62% dark matter , but our knowledge of dark matter is scarce , so you could say we have Scare Knowledge Of 62 % Of The Universe , and we still do not have a theory for gravitation for the standard model , and we can not see beyond our local visible universe , because technology has not reached the level yet , there is still a long way to go. So we can not be making claims like determinism for the whole universe, even though this does not imply free-will because even if if the universe is indermined and our behaviors are predictable and not determined ,it does not mean we have free-will Because the brain is like a cpu it simply processes information than configurtes itself according to that information, then commands the body upon how to act, in most cases the counscious decision making is the last part of the decision making process(Liardon 1980s experiment), meaning that our behavior is not indetermined because we counsciously freely choose but because the brain is an indeterministic organ of the body itself because it's made out of quantum level particles that are inderministic in nature. I do accept that in the future this could be disproven , but currently it's the best explanation.

[@trueturp6524]

@@Nana-bv1md quantum level particles are not "indeterministic in nature" we just dont fully understand them. Even if there would be some random indeterministic thing in the universe somewhere , i dont even know how that would look like, libertarian free will still cant possible exist. We either have, 1. deterministic universe = no free will 2. not fully deterministic universe, but the nondeterministic part is fully random = no free will

[@zeltron5168]

This is the reason I hate using labels. I'm a determinist. I believe that change in thought is a result of a causal chain. As one of the people in the comments section said, a determinist would just say that your mind changing is a direct result of the better argument that essentially forced you out of your initial position. There is a causal chain in this case. The same thing could be said about nearly every single action in the world. Events in life directly reflect your behavior. However, you have no control over these events. This is essentially the same argument as "the factor of choice gives people the illusion of free will", which is 100% correct imo.

[@Nana-bv1md]

@@trueturp6524 They are indeterministic but I do accept that we do not fully understand them ,but General relating is really innderministic , but what you said is exactly what I was trying to say, we can not claim the universe is deterministic because of the arguments I showed in my previous comment, but that does not mean we are free-willed , because even if our brains are non-deterministic it's because of the indeterminism(based probably on quantum mechanics) of the brain itself , it's ability to change (neoplacility) to almost every situation(which we counciously do not realize) and it's not a chaotic system , because it's farely organized and not just one way because it doesn't always do the same in each or similar situations. But this does not mean we are free, there a lot of things that happen before reaching the pre-frontal cortex (Liardon 1980 experiment showing that ,even though it does not show when the kids person decided to perform an action .)