Still human logic and very western at that. The more I study Eastern philosophy, mainly pre-christ Japan, China and India, the more I see how overly analytical our philosophy is..
why does he have such a desperate need to believe humans have no say in anything, I'm pretty sure quantum physics makes his entire argument last century
Actually free will is both determined and random. Here is how it works. The mind/brain generates a massive amount of random thoughts in conjunction with sensory input and body awareness. I liken this to a roulette wheel of thoughts. All necessary even the bad ones (just try not to dwell on bad ones (danger to self and others)). From your thoughts you fashion a plan a theory (theory equals belief) by which you might attain an objective. The theory does not have to work you just calculate or estimate the probability it will work. Commission of the theory (belief) or trust in your plan (engagement) equals FAITH. Any creation of AI will have to include this formulation. Not sure but the act of doing this might give rise to consciousness or it may be part of consciousness. That is right Alex atheists can't believe in free will because free will requires faith. They also want to console themselves for their crimes and immoralities by saying "I can't help it." This side of Ayn Rand of course. I do not think Ayn ever thought about it though.
I think this is a cool idea but I don’t entirely follow. Is the premise wrong? The line of reasoning sort of makes sense, but I’m not sure if I like or agree with the premise.
If there is a creator that is all powerful and all knowing, then said creator knows everything you have done, are doing, will do ..If this is the case and you believe this, then you cannot believe in free will…In order to have free will in such a scenario, one would have to be able to go off script and choose something the creator did not foresee you doing ..You can only do what that all knowing creator has foreseen you doing…So either you believe in free will or …you believe in an all knowing creator…You can't have both…That isn't even going into why an all knowing creator would punish you for being and doing exactly what that creator created you to do and be…Do we really know ourselves??? Do we really plan what we will do or say at all times, or even at all??? If so, who is doing the planning??? Just things to think about with my free will…😮😮😮❤❤❤❤
He appeals to randomness in both of the answers he gives. Hes basically saying its random so you dont control it. We call it random because we cant logically explain it, as is the case in subjective experiences.
There's two flaws I see in this logic. First, it begins with a premise that is either a false dichotomy or a confusion of terms because the argument is that something is either determined or not determined and builds from there, but either there must exist a state of something being partially determined – we can refer to this as influenced rather than strictly determined – or determined exclusively refers to the idea of something being entirely determined by something in which case it's not true that something not being determined means it's random. For example, if I like chocolate my decision to eat chocolate ice cream for desert will be influenced by my tastes but not exclusively determined by that.
The second mistake is the assumption that free will cannot have a deterministic cause, that is to say that because initial conditions or the form of something was determined externally to itself that implies every decision is the product of of that chain of causality rather than the entity itself.
i posit another case, where both may be true, and that it is a collaborative effect (and seeing at least one in his audience, he may as well as be speaking to a cabbage! 😂)
First sentence is a wrong assumption about God. The proposition that "P must either be true/false, can't be both, can't be neither" does not apply to the God of the bible who is a God of paradoxes: the virgin can be pregnant, the innocent Jesus can pay for all sins, immortal God who is 'life' – can die etc. Because we think linearly, because we assume opposites never overlap we end up with this faulty rationale. But God is above human logic.—– which means the 'determined' and the 'un-determined' created by God does not have to be of 'opposite' quality. It was God's will that we would have free will. Use human logic and they never overlap. Use God's perspective, and they will align.
Things can be both true or not true though. It’s true BUT… only in this way. It’s true BUT only in this circumstance for example.
Free will can be limited but still exist. I think it’s all internal: biology in my view. But one can push against biology. OR one can use it as a guideline. Like the walls of a maze. Your choices are limited (as in left or right) but there is still choice. Those arguing for an external source might call the wall ‘fate’ or whatever God is supposed to have given humans.
You might argue then that is not COMPLETE free will. Sure. But it is still an amount of free will.
The way he’s just trying to factually state it doesn’t exist just doesn’t really make sense. You can’t just say what’s “inside” of you, your soul or whatever, isn’t where it’s originating from. Like how is that proof?
My current theory. Even if my reactions come from my past, I can step in, evaluate them, and redirect them—and that process is meaningfully me choosing.
I dont have a philosophical view. Mine is pragmatic. Think of your development. All that has influenced you up until this point , including your genetics, like parents parenting style, time and place of birth, culture available to you, living on Earth, being human, every world event up until your life, your cohort, socioeconomic status, wealth. etc all influence who and how you are. Where is the actual choice? Our freewill is not measurable by our current metrics or understanding. Choice is much more complex and much more limited than people assume
100% correct: He’s right that our choices don’t come out of nowhere. Every decision is influenced by your brain, your past, and your environment. Science backs this up. Your brain is already processing things before you even feel like you’ve “decided,” so full control isn’t as simple as people think.
Partially correct: He frames it as only two options, either determined or random. That sounds logical, but it’s incomplete. There’s a third angle. Your actions can be caused but still come from you, through your thinking, your values, and how you process things, not just from outside forces or randomness.
Right insight: He’s also right that saying “it’s the soul” doesn’t really solve anything. Just naming something doesn’t explain how control actually works.
Where it breaks: The argument assumes that if you don’t have total control, then you have no control at all, which isn’t true. Control works in levels. You didn’t choose your starting point, but you can still think, reflect, and change how you act over time. Also, the idea that it’s only determined or random ignores how the brain actually works. It’s a complex system that produces structured decisions, not just random outputs or forced reactions.
Bottom line: Free will probably isn’t absolute, but it’s not zero either. Your choices are shaped by many things, but they still come from you in a real and meaningful way.
Estoy pensando que algunos científicos pueden ser tan ciegos y cerrados en su cosmovisión que pueden cometer errores muy burdos. Por ejemplo, cuando escucho a los científicos decir que la ciencia es el camino, que los hallazgos permiten comprender mejor el ser humano y argumentos como los de Robert Sapolsky, como acudir a la biología para explicar todo lo que hacemos, están ignorando un elemento trascendental que es lo que nos permite tener cierta agencia de control en un sistema causal determinista, y es la razón. La razón no es caótica, es normativa, estructurada y ordenada. Cada vez está mejorando más, y si uno mira la historia, hemos avanzado y crecido muy mucho en pensamiento abstracto, y eso nos permitió hacer mejor ciencia. De hecho, cuando un físico está pensando en comprender un hecho físico o un fenómeno de la realidad y está frente a la pizarra, necesariamente tiene que usar la razón, las emociones y toda historia biológica y cultural no interesa para hacer buena ciencia, porque cuando hablamos de los buenos principios en la metodología de la ciencia no recurrimos a esas variables antes descriptas, sino a la razón. Reducir la razón a la biología o al determinismo puede ser explicar parcialmente la razón, pero la razón juega un papel muy importante en ciertos sistemas macro integrados. Ya no interesa toda la explicación determinista de la razón, es que es un patrón emergente fenómenologicamente que dominamos, y si esa razón nos permite hacer un montón de cosas, crear cosas, eliminar cosas, entender y comprender mejor la realidad, entender mejor el comportamiento humano, y a su vez es algo que podemos manipular en primera persona y no se trata solo de unos hilos en un circuito biológico dónde solo aparece allí y se manipula desde ese lugar a través de científicos, aparece el control y agencia operativa. Es que allí surge el libre albedrío, pero el libre albedrío no como la definición contrafactica de Sapolsky, sino como simplemente una agencia de control, la conciencia y la memoria juegan un papel esencial. Acudir a un libre albedrío sin límites es absurdo, estaríamos ante la nada misma, el infinito ininteligible o el caos. Por eso pensar en un control fuerte no tiene buenos pilares, la razón y el conocimiento es el control fuerte. Intentar aumentar ese control aumenta las posibilidades, no el tipo de control.
I’m thinking that some scientists can be so blind and so closed within their worldview that they may fail to see what is right in front of them. For example, when I hear scientists say that science is the way, that findings allow us to better understand the human being, and arguments like those of Robert Sapolsky—such as appealing to biology to explain everything we do—they are ignoring a transcendental element that is what allows us to have a certain agency of control within a deterministic causal system, and that is reason.
Reason is not chaotic; it is normative, structured, and ordered. It is continually improving, and if one looks at history, we have advanced and grown greatly in abstract thinking, and that has allowed us to do better science. In fact, when a physicist is trying to understand a physical fact or a phenomenon of reality and is standing in front of the board, they necessarily have to use reason; emotions and the entire biological and cultural history are not relevant for doing good science, because when we speak of good principles in scientific methodology, we do not appeal to those previously described variables, but to reason.
Reducing reason to biology or to determinism may partially explain reason, but reason plays a very important role in certain integrated macro systems. The full deterministic explanation of reason is no longer what matters; rather, it is an emergent pattern, phenomenologically, that we master. And if that reason allows us to do many things—create things, eliminate things, understand and comprehend reality better, understand human behavior better—and at the same time it is something we can manipulate in the first person, then it is not merely a set of threads in a biological circuit where it only appears and is manipulated from there by scientists; this is where control and operative agency appear.
That is where free will emerges, but not free will in Sapolsky’s counterfactual definition, but rather simply as an agency of control; consciousness and memory play an essential role. Appealing to a limitless free will is absurd—we would be facing nothingness itself, an unintelligible infinity, or chaos. That is why thinking in terms of a “strong control” without limits lacks solid foundations; reason and knowledge are the strong control. Trying to increase that control increases possibilities, not the type of control.
If you can commit a crime that benifits you, and nobody would ever know do you choose to follow the law and loose the opportunity to benifit economically Or commit the crime and reap the spoils is upto you
Free will has always existed, and you always have a choice
Speaking really fast or making up illogical premise or speaking falsely 100 times does not make a false argument true
What this argument trades on, with a certain seductive air of finality, is the idea that unless a choice is either utterly uncaused or somehow insulated from the causal fabric of the universe, it cannot count as genuinely ours. But that is not a discovery about free will; it is a stipulation dressed up as a proof. Of course randomness does not help — a roulette wheel in the skull is no friend of agency — but it hardly follows that causation is therefore the enemy. On the contrary, the only sort of freedom worth wanting is the evolved, hard-won capacity of a creature to deliberate, to anticipate consequences, to be moved by reasons, to learn, to restrain impulses, and to act in light of its considered aims. To ask, “Yes, but what caused that?” is no more a refutation of agency than asking what caused a calculator to calculate. The point is not to be an unmoved mover, a little godlet outside the universe, but to be the kind of being whose actions issue from its own rational competencies rather than from coercion, compulsion, or sheer noise. What this argument knocks down is a supernatural fantasy of free will, not the real variety that human beings actually possess and upon which moral life depends
Still human logic and very western at that. The more I study Eastern philosophy, mainly pre-christ Japan, China and India, the more I see how overly analytical our philosophy is..
At the same time, you cannot explain why I have an innate desire to do good, and yet a primal desire to do evil simultaneously
You lost Ben after about three words.
why does he have such a desperate need to believe humans have no say in anything, I'm pretty sure quantum physics makes his entire argument last century
The fact we pay taxes is crazy after watching this video!
It’s striking how much thought this guy put into this only to come up with the wrong answer.
Actually free will is both determined and random. Here is how it works. The mind/brain generates a massive amount of random thoughts in conjunction with sensory input and body awareness. I liken this to a roulette wheel of thoughts. All necessary even the bad ones (just try not to dwell on bad ones (danger to self and others)). From your thoughts you fashion a plan a theory (theory equals belief) by which you might attain an objective. The theory does not have to work you just calculate or estimate the probability it will work. Commission of the theory (belief) or trust in your plan (engagement) equals FAITH. Any creation of AI will have to include this formulation. Not sure but the act of doing this might give rise to consciousness or it may be part of consciousness. That is right Alex atheists can't believe in free will because free will requires faith. They also want to console themselves for their crimes and immoralities by saying "I can't help it." This side of Ayn Rand of course. I do not think Ayn ever thought about it though.
I think this is a cool idea but I don’t entirely follow. Is the premise wrong? The line of reasoning sort of makes sense, but I’m not sure if I like or agree with the premise.
Sounds like an argument to avoid accountability.
If there is a creator that is all powerful and all knowing, then said creator knows everything you have done, are doing, will do ..If this is the case and you believe this, then you cannot believe in free will…In order to have free will in such a scenario, one would have to be able to go off script and choose something the creator did not foresee you doing ..You can only do what that all knowing creator has foreseen you doing…So either you believe in free will or …you believe in an all knowing creator…You can't have both…That isn't even going into why an all knowing creator would punish you for being and doing exactly what that creator created you to do and be…Do we really know ourselves??? Do we really plan what we will do or say at all times, or even at all??? If so, who is doing the planning??? Just things to think about with my free will…😮😮😮❤❤❤❤
He appeals to randomness in both of the answers he gives. Hes basically saying its random so you dont control it. We call it random because we cant logically explain it, as is the case in subjective experiences.
I want to make these two snort 300 dollars worth of Cocaine and let them go !!
I swear, I could almost see smoke coming out of Shapiro's ears!
There's two flaws I see in this logic. First, it begins with a premise that is either a false dichotomy or a confusion of terms because the argument is that something is either determined or not determined and builds from there, but either there must exist a state of something being partially determined – we can refer to this as influenced rather than strictly determined – or determined exclusively refers to the idea of something being entirely determined by something in which case it's not true that something not being determined means it's random. For example, if I like chocolate my decision to eat chocolate ice cream for desert will be influenced by my tastes but not exclusively determined by that.
The second mistake is the assumption that free will cannot have a deterministic cause, that is to say that because initial conditions or the form of something was determined externally to itself that implies every decision is the product of of that chain of causality rather than the entity itself.
i posit another case, where both may be true, and that it is a collaborative effect (and seeing at least one in his audience, he may as well as be speaking to a cabbage! 😂)
It's bumper rails, doofus
First sentence is a wrong assumption about God. The proposition that "P must either be true/false, can't be both, can't be neither" does not apply to the God of the bible who is a God of paradoxes: the virgin can be pregnant, the innocent Jesus can pay for all sins, immortal God who is 'life' – can die etc. Because we think linearly, because we assume opposites never overlap we end up with this faulty rationale. But God is above human logic.—– which means the 'determined' and the 'un-determined' created by God does not have to be of 'opposite' quality. It was God's will that we would have free will. Use human logic and they never overlap. Use God's perspective, and they will align.
Things can be both true or not true though. It’s true BUT… only in this way. It’s true BUT only in this circumstance for example.
Free will can be limited but still exist. I think it’s all internal: biology in my view. But one can push against biology. OR one can use it as a guideline. Like the walls of a maze. Your choices are limited (as in left or right) but there is still choice. Those arguing for an external source might call the wall ‘fate’ or whatever God is supposed to have given humans.
You might argue then that is not COMPLETE free will. Sure. But it is still an amount of free will.
The way he’s just trying to factually state it doesn’t exist just doesn’t really make sense. You can’t just say what’s “inside” of you, your soul or whatever, isn’t where it’s originating from. Like how is that proof?
Determinism states that you are the one in fact making the decision, you choose the outcome, you just dont get to choose which one you choose
Just because something is random DOES NOT mean it's outside of my control. Try again, kid.
My current theory. Even if my reactions come from my past, I can step in, evaluate them, and redirect them—and that process is meaningfully me choosing.
Such a dim witted pseudo intellectual argument.
Gish galloping
Just because something is not deterministic doesn't mean it's random
I dont have a philosophical view. Mine is pragmatic. Think of your development. All that has influenced you up until this point , including your genetics, like parents parenting style, time and place of birth, culture available to you, living on Earth, being human, every world event up until your life, your cohort, socioeconomic status, wealth. etc all influence who and how you are. Where is the actual choice? Our freewill is not measurable by our current metrics or understanding. Choice is much more complex and much more limited than people assume
100% correct:
He’s right that our choices don’t come out of nowhere. Every decision is influenced by your brain, your past, and your environment. Science backs this up. Your brain is already processing things before you even feel like you’ve “decided,” so full control isn’t as simple as people think.
Partially correct:
He frames it as only two options, either determined or random. That sounds logical, but it’s incomplete. There’s a third angle. Your actions can be caused but still come from you, through your thinking, your values, and how you process things, not just from outside forces or randomness.
Right insight:
He’s also right that saying “it’s the soul” doesn’t really solve anything. Just naming something doesn’t explain how control actually works.
Where it breaks:
The argument assumes that if you don’t have total control, then you have no control at all, which isn’t true. Control works in levels. You didn’t choose your starting point, but you can still think, reflect, and change how you act over time. Also, the idea that it’s only determined or random ignores how the brain actually works. It’s a complex system that produces structured decisions, not just random outputs or forced reactions.
Bottom line:
Free will probably isn’t absolute, but it’s not zero either. Your choices are shaped by many things, but they still come from you in a real and meaningful way.
It is not determined. Now you're back to square one.
Estoy pensando que algunos científicos pueden ser tan ciegos y cerrados en su cosmovisión que pueden cometer errores muy burdos. Por ejemplo, cuando escucho a los científicos decir que la ciencia es el camino, que los hallazgos permiten comprender mejor el ser humano y argumentos como los de Robert Sapolsky, como acudir a la biología para explicar todo lo que hacemos, están ignorando un elemento trascendental que es lo que nos permite tener cierta agencia de control en un sistema causal determinista, y es la razón. La razón no es caótica, es normativa, estructurada y ordenada. Cada vez está mejorando más, y si uno mira la historia, hemos avanzado y crecido muy mucho en pensamiento abstracto, y eso nos permitió hacer mejor ciencia. De hecho, cuando un físico está pensando en comprender un hecho físico o un fenómeno de la realidad y está frente a la pizarra, necesariamente tiene que usar la razón, las emociones y toda historia biológica y cultural no interesa para hacer buena ciencia, porque cuando hablamos de los buenos principios en la metodología de la ciencia no recurrimos a esas variables antes descriptas, sino a la razón. Reducir la razón a la biología o al determinismo puede ser explicar parcialmente la razón, pero la razón juega un papel muy importante en ciertos sistemas macro integrados. Ya no interesa toda la explicación determinista de la razón, es que es un patrón emergente fenómenologicamente que dominamos, y si esa razón nos permite hacer un montón de cosas, crear cosas, eliminar cosas, entender y comprender mejor la realidad, entender mejor el comportamiento humano, y a su vez es algo que podemos manipular en primera persona y no se trata solo de unos hilos en un circuito biológico dónde solo aparece allí y se manipula desde ese lugar a través de científicos, aparece el control y agencia operativa. Es que allí surge el libre albedrío, pero el libre albedrío no como la definición contrafactica de Sapolsky, sino como simplemente una agencia de control, la conciencia y la memoria juegan un papel esencial. Acudir a un libre albedrío sin límites es absurdo, estaríamos ante la nada misma, el infinito ininteligible o el caos. Por eso pensar en un control fuerte no tiene buenos pilares, la razón y el conocimiento es el control fuerte. Intentar aumentar ese control aumenta las posibilidades, no el tipo de control.
I’m thinking that some scientists can be so blind and so closed within their worldview that they may fail to see what is right in front of them. For example, when I hear scientists say that science is the way, that findings allow us to better understand the human being, and arguments like those of Robert Sapolsky—such as appealing to biology to explain everything we do—they are ignoring a transcendental element that is what allows us to have a certain agency of control within a deterministic causal system, and that is reason.
Reason is not chaotic; it is normative, structured, and ordered. It is continually improving, and if one looks at history, we have advanced and grown greatly in abstract thinking, and that has allowed us to do better science. In fact, when a physicist is trying to understand a physical fact or a phenomenon of reality and is standing in front of the board, they necessarily have to use reason; emotions and the entire biological and cultural history are not relevant for doing good science, because when we speak of good principles in scientific methodology, we do not appeal to those previously described variables, but to reason.
Reducing reason to biology or to determinism may partially explain reason, but reason plays a very important role in certain integrated macro systems. The full deterministic explanation of reason is no longer what matters; rather, it is an emergent pattern, phenomenologically, that we master. And if that reason allows us to do many things—create things, eliminate things, understand and comprehend reality better, understand human behavior better—and at the same time it is something we can manipulate in the first person, then it is not merely a set of threads in a biological circuit where it only appears and is manipulated from there by scientists; this is where control and operative agency appear.
That is where free will emerges, but not free will in Sapolsky’s counterfactual definition, but rather simply as an agency of control; consciousness and memory play an essential role. Appealing to a limitless free will is absurd—we would be facing nothingness itself, an unintelligible infinity, or chaos. That is why thinking in terms of a “strong control” without limits lacks solid foundations; reason and knowledge are the strong control. Trying to increase that control increases possibilities, not the type of control.
The argument presupposes the conclusion, i.e., circular logic. Alex, you can do better.
I think truth is fractionap hence the question if weather the choice is detrmined or indertmined is illposed because its both .
Did his little hat get bigger or is his head shrinking?
Free will is choice you have,
If you can commit a crime that benifits you, and nobody would ever know
do you choose to follow the law and loose the opportunity to benifit economically Or commit the crime and reap the spoils is upto you
Free will has always existed, and you always have a choice
Speaking really fast or making up illogical premise or speaking falsely 100 times does not make a false argument true
What this argument trades on, with a certain seductive air of finality, is the idea that unless a choice is either utterly uncaused or somehow insulated from the causal fabric of the universe, it cannot count as genuinely ours. But that is not a discovery about free will; it is a stipulation dressed up as a proof. Of course randomness does not help — a roulette wheel in the skull is no friend of agency — but it hardly follows that causation is therefore the enemy. On the contrary, the only sort of freedom worth wanting is the evolved, hard-won capacity of a creature to deliberate, to anticipate consequences, to be moved by reasons, to learn, to restrain impulses, and to act in light of its considered aims. To ask, “Yes, but what caused that?” is no more a refutation of agency than asking what caused a calculator to calculate. The point is not to be an unmoved mover, a little godlet outside the universe, but to be the kind of being whose actions issue from its own rational competencies rather than from coercion, compulsion, or sheer noise. What this argument knocks down is a supernatural fantasy of free will, not the real variety that human beings actually possess and upon which moral life depends