After all these years, you’re still putting out quality videos without receiving a cent from yt. You’ve touched my life in a very special way, and have my undying thanks.

Thanks Wes. Your thumbnail for this video is spot on. Listening to Robert Sapolsky on free will or Roger Penrose's take on consciousness and collapse of the wave function make this even more complex.

One reason 'free will' matters is that our judicial systems are predicated on citizens being able to exert self-control and choice. Ideas like "justice" or "just deserts" become incoherent if you neglect agents actually being able to make choices. Nobody "deserves" anything they were not free to not choose. You can rebut that "Free will or no, locking up criminals that are repeat offenders is a necessary thing to do for the health of society." and I would agree. But >95% of people do not think this way. They deem it necessary that criminals are punished because "they chose to act wrongly" or that "committing crimes makes you deserve punishment". If you were to tell them that these concepts (likely) make no sense then they would have to come up with new excuses and/or reform the judicial system. If this also seems unimportant to you then I have nothing left to say other than I liked hearing you talk on the topic.

I would like to thank you for taking the time to record and post these. I have learned so much from your videos. These days to have a nuanced take on a difficult topic is quite rare. Please keep these up, it is the olny thing that i still watch on KZread. Regards from Poland.

The implication is that there is some measure of "free will" and man isn't completely deterministic. If that's true, no matter how small, from where does that "free will" originate?

I mean, the good news is, just the barest, scantest, slightest glance at just how complex our universe is in practice -- if free will didn't exist in the slightest, we'd never even notice. And if it does, it would be indistinguishable from it not. The other good news is, you can kill the idea of free will with a single thought experiment: Do something you do not know how to do. Solve something you do not know how to solve. Become aware of the solution to a problem in absence of any understanding. Phase through a wall. Fly into the sky. Skip to the end of the book and understand what was on every page. You can't know what you don't know, functionally, and you can't then, in absence of understanding, make informed decisions that are intentional and predictable. Yet your heart still beats, your digestions still does peristalsis, you still learn, you still grow, you still live. You don't know how it works, let alone how you're doing it, and yet it moves. Free will doesn't exist, but the good news is, it doesn't have to. We still find a way.

@roberth9814

7 ай бұрын

"The other good news is, you can kill the idea of free will with a single thought experiment:" - The entire lecture was about moving away from preconceptions and manufactured debates, do you think that Wes simply never came across an argument such as this one and failed to consider it before posting a video in which he refuses to take a side on the debate?

@Ignirium

7 ай бұрын

I suppose if free will does exist then so do prophecies; they're not true after the fact, they can be true before they even happen yet

@francescaerreia8859

7 ай бұрын

This thought experiment made no sense whatsoever to me lol wtf are you talking about

I think that the idea of determinism means that essentially at the core if you work in a logical didactic manner, you will find that all of your decisions which seem like free will weren't yours to have. They are all dependent on things you seemingly hadn't been afforded choice to. Whom your parents are pretty much decides 99% of your future decisions. Which original option were afforded to you etc... I'm a so to speak practicing Jew. And this concept is a huge question in Judaism. I actually think this question is hugely important because it speaks exactly to the idea of agency self competence etc

Thank you so much for this

Doesn’t the Will undo freedom? I cannot choose my Will, but it then determines my choices.

Every time I turn to one of your videos, I find gems of thought and points that put my own thoughts into perspective. Thanks, incidentally, for putting a problem I have had with Kant into proper perspective too. There’s such a deep irony embedded in ole’ Immanuel in this regard…😂

Thanks for Sharing!!

But all the STEM PhDs with KZread channels and podcasts said it was a settled debate!

@steliosmitr8245

7 ай бұрын

the world has been plagued by the religion of scientism

@christopherhamilton3621

3 ай бұрын

While Scientism is wrong headed & silly, it’s NOT a damned religion! Just stop…

Love ya Mr. Cecil. So grateful for all your wonderful lectures and your mind in general.

Happy to have you doing content like this again as opposed to your last series.

I am in the free will camp. But as always you have raised points to ponder 🤔 You ask why it matters. One point it would open up would be if every thing is determined then would it be ethical to put anyone in prison? Love your videos. Many thanks.

I've always thought that a version of compatibilism made the most sense for thinking about free will. Sometimes a good explanation for one thing will contradict a good explanation for another thing, and in those cases you don't discard either explanation out of hand, you just keep chipping away at the science and the philosophy and trust that eventually things will become clear. Scientists get this when they talk about the contradiction between general relativity and quantum mechanics. We know they don't reconcile right now, so one or both must be false in whole or in part, but they're still good explanations right now, so we can keep using them. Likewise there is a contradiction between our theories of free will, such that they are, and the theories of modern science. Nevertheless, free will remains a good explanation (critical, in fact) for human affairs. Knowledge is messy, it does not come to us in a way that is already reconciled. There is no getting to the capital T Truth, only getting to ever more useful explanations for things. We shouldn't be so surprised when two explanations both seem to work but are incompatible, knowledge will always and forever continue to have this property.

It’s a topic that baffles me, I can just about grasp the concept but struggle nonetheless. Living without a god doesn’t trouble me, but living without even an minuscule amount of free will does. 😅

@bretta7057

7 ай бұрын

I’ve come to strongly believe that our general common idea of free will is an illusion a long time ago, but it’s always a puzzling thing to truly grasp. That being said, I make sure to sort of meditate it on it daily. I don’t think it needs to be as terrifying as our egos try to insist that it is😉 I think, on a day to day basis, it has more to do with how we treat and think about others than on living our own lives. I think it’s essentially impossible to live without the pressing assumption that it exists. But it’s made me able to let go of anger, resentment, etc (while still having boundaries, because Pragmatism is still a thing). I highly recommend Sapolsky’s new book!

I agree. The debate regarding the existence of God is pointless.

I am a philosophy teacher for the german Highschool (Abitur) and as a staunch proponent of determinism, I feel like the idea of determinism was not precisely represented in this video. I would like to talk to you in person via zoom or something to further discuss the idea and maybe clear up some misunderstandings (also about things you said that I may have gotten wrong)

I agree with the problem being mostly semantics. I disagree with almost everything else you've said. There are two main definitions of free will people use. The first one defines it as the ability to make choices based on what one wills. The second one requires the will itself to be freely alterable ("to will what one wills"), which may or may not be a nonsense concept. According to the established science, our world is based on determinism + random chance. That's just a fact, like evolution or magnetism. To most people, random chance does not imply or facilitate free will. If you accept this fact and follow the first definition of free will, you end up with compatibilism. The second definition gets you to metaphysical determinism. Of course, you can also reject the current state of science and accept full indeterminism. Philosophy is utterly useless, and I say that in a loving way.

@bladdnun3016

7 ай бұрын

Also hard disagree on the question of free will being irrelevant. It has major implications for ethics, at the very least.

@eladpeleg745

3 ай бұрын

Yep. That's why philosophy is a joke subject. All questions can be addressed within their discipline via science and the questions that can't are unfalsifiable and therefore have no answer.

@christopherhamilton3621

3 ай бұрын

LOL! Such strong opinions…

I think you missed a term professor. I think the meaning of versus can be debated sufficiently to be included in the words that lack constant, agreed upon, understood definitions. 25:20 the apple va pomegranate debate is another good example of a false dichotomy. Even more, it's based on false premises even within the confines of religious discussion. First off, even if we're confining ourselves to real fruits, there's no reason it couldn't be a date instead, or even a lemon or an orange. Second, there's no reason whatsoever to assume it's a real fruit at all. It's the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, so if it's a real fruit, that raises some very complicated questions about the nature of apple or pomegranate trees.

@christopherhamilton3621

3 ай бұрын

It’s not even a false dichotomy. It’s just a non-sensical non-sequitur.

Wes Cecil, the gadfly of super serious philosophasters

@Ignirium

7 ай бұрын

Way to miss the point And why did it annoy you?

@bladdnun3016

7 ай бұрын

@@Ignirium Way to miss the point indeed. They meant it as a compliment. "Super serious philosophasters" is mocking (wannabe) philosophers who take themselves too seriously. Like me :D

@Ignirium

7 ай бұрын

@@bladdnun3016 Well when i looked up what a "gadfly" meant it wasn't a compliment, and "philosophasters" isn't a word either so it didn't make sense.

@bladdnun3016

7 ай бұрын

@@Ignirium It can be quite hard to correctly decipher sarcasm and other forms of humor. I often struggle with it myself.

This is my main gripe with philosophy. It's just chock full of false dichotomies. Freedom exists on a spectrum its not are you free or are you not it's to what degree are you free. They apply digital thinking to analog problems and then wonder how they ended up in a paradox and argue that paradox for centuries. It's crazy lol. It's like Xeno's paradox of achiles and the tortoise and how he thinks it means movement is impossible. But it's simply just a categorical mistake . He is using an exponential function on a linear problem and that's why it becomes paradoxical.

@Recontramojado

7 ай бұрын

One of the points of this lecture is that those false dichotomies are not PHILOSOPHICAL Thinking, but rather simplified and vulgarized pseudo-philosophical debates that ignore the basis of logic and methodological thinking and turn into rhetorical debates, usually incredibly shallow.

@christopherhamilton3621

3 ай бұрын

@@RecontramojadoWell said.