So two years late here, but what I'm picking up is this basically: We have an illusion of free will because as an individual we can make decisions based on our own thought processes, but this ultimately IS an illusion because as any other force of nature, we do not decide what the thought process being generated is. We can guide this pathway with enough mindfulness, but even the thought of "I need to be more mindful in my thinking" was not ultimately something we decide to think out of nowhere; it is generated originally by our internal hardware and previous experiences and physical programming that built up to the moment of the thought "This is something I need to do" occuring to us as an involuntary reaction to a situation or other uncontrolled string of thought.
I’ve only had 2 profound meditation experiences in my entire life and if it weren’t for those I wouldn’t connect with what Sam’s view on free will is. Getting in a state where you are completely divorced from self and thoughts are just arising in consciousness is a light bulb moment to truly how mysterious and random what thoughts arise out of the dark. I mention all that to say that one of the simplest way Sam has described us not having free will is to say if all of our thoughts arise out of the dark and we don’t author any of our thoughts, then if we can’t find free will there, then we can’t find it anywhere. He does a thought experiment that’s extremely simple but he asks someone to think of a celebrity and to pay attention to the process of what celebrity they thought of, if you pay attention to which one comes to mind, you had no control of which one did or what reason you have to justify why that one was chosen.
Yep, that's right. But we still need to decide how our justice system works. What responsibility means in this context, etc. Knowing free will doesn't exist and deciding what to do about that are two entirely different discussions.
@@fireflies775 yes we can. Just because free will doesn't exist doesn't stop us from making choices and decisions. It's just these choices and decisions are rooted in deterministic causes and we couldn't a have acted any differently. Understand?
@@TyroneBiggums789 What he didn't mention is the soul the self could be part of the soul or it's the soul, is the soul conscious? does the soul experience life? the soul needs the body to experience life. sure the thought arises in the brain but it's the soul that decides what is what, so that means the will belongs to the soul, is it free? it's free to choose but the outcome doesn't belong to it, this is how I see it, free will is not an illusion but the outcome makes it sound like it's
@@voodoochyld3670 As I should what? Try to make the world better and everyone as happy and motivated as they never even imagined was possible, or as I should help Lex pay his bills even though I've been depressed, living paycheck to paycheck for 50 years, and he probably makes way more than 10x I've ever made.. I guess I'm just nice that way and I know a real lousy depressed life, and want nobody else to ever have to live one if they don't want to. Or are you just trolling..?
@@unRheal brother I can be anything in the world but a troll, I understand how you feel. Please I apologize if I steered this conversation this wrong way, it sincerely wasn’t my intention. Brother you sound like you are on the verge of giving up on life, please hang in there. He that has patience may compass anything, let time heal.
Thank you for helping me forgive myself for not appreciating my partner and not showing him the compassion that I should have. He passed away feb7,2022 and I have so much regret. I was blind and I didn't know that I was blind. I would give anything to go back in time to tell him how much I love him.
I understand your pain, and I´m absolutely sorry about your pain, and I hope that you will heal. But you where a slave of the laws of physics, as we all are. Don´t be cruel against yourself.
He held up a liquor store with Hat. Claims he had no choice and that the illusion of him stealing a bottle of bourbon was, in fact, itself an illusion. The DA got him convicted based on that double-negative confession. Doing his time at South Park penitentiary.
Sam is a diva and edits his own material. I’m sure he exercised creative control here and he granted Lex the ability to only show this portion of the interview.
43:08 this is where I am at 54 years old. It totally switched my own self hate, anger, and agression to compassion, understanding and empathy and patience for my own self. And it had to be done for myself first internally, before I can see it in others. Done with the blame and shame game. Reorients you toward mutual understanding. Reprogramming myself from a very mentally ill dysfunctional family system. It takes time. Lots of time and experience.
I know Sam is an idiot. Only because him and I think the same way. And I'm an idiot. He thinks like a simpleton, just like I do. Free will doesnt exist. But it doesn't take a genius to figure that out.
@@vexial12 Contradictory comment. If you're a dull simpleton crayon then that means you wouldn't get the correct answer, which means I can dismiss this as false, proving free will to be TRUE
Free will is an illusion, but Sam Harris is definitely an idiot, because he has been repeating the same things for 20 years. Everyone already knows this.
Sam Harris is a devoutly religious man. The State is his Religion, the Government is his Church, Politicians are his Clergy, Law is his Bible, and he has lots and lots of Faith!
What is it if I learn about a new diet, for example, then I implement this new process for a belief of benefit. This is not my choice? When I start intermittent fasting, reducing sugar intake, etc. this is not my free will? If it turns out these modifications hurt my heath in the future, at that time I should look back and realize I had no controll over this "life choice"? Long story short, I don't follow Sam's reasoning for no free will.
@@fadenmac8092Could I ask what it is in Sam’s reasoning in the video you don’t follow? The situation you described (in which you were prescribing free will to what you see as choice) is consistent with what he was saying; just because you think you have free will or think you have choices doesn’t mean you are actually in control of what is decided. As he says, it’s like people have an “illusion that if you arranged the universe exactly as it was a moment ago, it could’ve played out differently.” He is talking about this around 29:40 specifically but it ties into what he is saying throughout the whole video.
Lingering regret is a bit like pain after the event, say a burned finger. "OK. Yes. You hurt. You were burned. You can stop throbbing now. You're not touching the burning thing anymore." But maybe the healing, which takes a while per physiological laws, and concomitant, persistent pain is to ward off repeating the mistake and ingraining the lesson, etc.
The problem with Sam Harris’s he thinks everything is ENDOGENOUS mechanisms, biology is both REACTIVE & ENDOGENOUS mechanisms. There must be a reactive, an external interactions with the environment or we would have no optic nerve, we would be blind, all mass have colour, even an Atom. So how can free will be only endogenous mechanisms.
@@pakibluemannn yeah Descartes got that one wrong. He equated thought with BEING which is proven wrong by continuous practice Vipassana meditation. It's more like I am, therefore I think.
@@sharibanwar313 I just noticed that it only happens when he looks at Lex. You can tell when he is going to lift his gaze because his brow goes up first. The eyebrow has freewill.
41:00 actually very weak argument - "I can't pinpoint the *moment* of my free will" ... You can't honestly put this much thought into an argument and expect that to be a conclusive *proof*. Even a 1 second delay in reality would be an eternity to the unconscious synapse mind.
Sam Harris is a devoutly religious man. The State is his Religion, the Government is his Church, Politicians are his Clergy, Law is his Bible, and he has lots and lots of Faith!
I found this extremely interesting from an artist perspective. A lot of visual artists and musicians (myself included) talk about this feeling you get when you reach a certain level of ability in their specific skill. Its like you don't even have to think about the creation or the process, you just "channel" it, it comes from you out of nowhere and the more you try to harness your intentions to create art, the more it really inhibits the process. A lot of people use the metaphor "It comes from God" but really we dont know where it comes from, but all we know is its definitely not our "free will". Thoughts?
Each artist and philosopher grew from one egg cell, so to claim ownership of the trillion cell completed musician might be inhibiting it rather than helping yourself.
@@straightedgerc Sorry I'm confused at what you are trying to say. Cant tell if you are elaborating on what I'm trying to say or misinterpreting what I'm trying to say as "I am the trillion cell completed musician(free will is not an illusion)". To clarify I'm talking about the phenomenon a lot of artists describe, where it really does feel like you have no "free will" and you become more of an observer of the art coming out of you not from your conscious thought. And how this process is somewhat a visceral way of experiencing what Sam Harris is talking about. :)
@@sejithevoid2059 I agree with your observation about music and art. If we take a step back from ourselves, I was saying the egg that made each of us had little time to willfully think about each step in the process, just like the immersive musician phenomenon you describe. So, nature doesn't need free will for channeling.
@@straightedgerc Yes spot on! It is a truly amazing thing to experience. And after watching this video I realise that it doesn't just apply to Art/Music but to all aspects of life.
@@MrSkme I really like how he shines light on the fact that yes, you are not really in control of your decisions, your under programing and deterministic forces. on the flipside, it takes away the possibility of overcoming great difficulty and becoming the hero of your own story per say.
This guy right here is the limit of how smart an NPC can get. He recognizes his limits as an NPC which is crazy considering he has no free will, but it would seem that you need free will to recognize that you don't have it. I guess he is a very advanced NPC which deserves the utmost respect.
Ironically, merging with everything, which is the way things are already, is the best way to freedom and autonomy. Freedom is built into determinism when you realise you’re IT.
@ Yes, a dichotomy or conundrum. It's a confusing statement as the determinism vs. free will argument is, by it's nature, perplexing. He sums it up with brevity, saying we are born with free will as part of the base package, which makes it not of our own choosing?
@THEANSWER I don't believe that a mere response to stimuli could be defined as feeling pain. Otherwise my PC is feeling pain as it responds to my keyboard right now.
@THEANSWER Well you would first have to believe its possible to program something that's "like pain", which if you did believe that to be possible, you would answer your own question. But pain is a subjective experience, requiring a "subject", or a being with sentience or consciousness. Which we don't really understand, let alone know how to program.
IMO, physical pain at its core is a signal that says "something wrong happened to the body", and accompanied by a violent reaction (cockroaches remain calm when their body parts are chopped off). Pain also trains the body to act in such a way so that it would not happen again. Of course pain is only associated with living things, but if we remove this part, a robot could easily feels the pain.
@THEANSWER If you think about it pyschopaths are the only humans who dont respond to emotional stimuli and pain ) Pyschopaths are the only awaken one among us NPC's ) There is a reason why Pyschopaths are so succesful in Life )
haha interessting can you pinpoint what feeling it might induce? Trust/perspective taking? Maybe its a secret sign of our subcontious human rutine priming us what do to with the information 😜
@@hanskraut2018 yes i r right. I remember reading in a book that raising your eyebrows in a flash when u first meet someone its a way to connect and stablish trust. If u do that with a smile even better. All without saying a word to acomplish that. And if u say the right words it can be even more powerful.
I’ve had the thought that free will really isn’t free will. There’s so many times I’ve made of my mind to do something and then something happens that’s out of my control to stop my next action. It’s happened a crazy about of times. And I’m just like wtf. Life is crazy.
@this, Exactly! If the whole world were Christians (and i know that they would love that) how could they possibly throw anyone in jail for any crime knowing that God wrote that crime into existance. If God is all knowing and all seeing, He would know, years and years before a crime was going to happen, He wrote it, He is aware that John Smith wil enter this building on "whatever" date and shoot "this other guy" in the head. If He didnt know it was going to happen, then He is not all knowing, if He did know it was going to happen and did nothing, He is a bad leader/creator. Why blame John Smith if he was made and instructed by Gods Plan to murder on that day. I have a big problem with this tenant or teaching or whatever in christianity. Now look, you triggered me!!
Lex is such a programmer lol, works out everything in his mind with a Computational thinking, First Principals theory, and then adds an if statement involving love, death, and conscientiousness
@@nickneachtain An "IF" statement is a computer command that does something specific provided that the environment being evaluated meets a certain criteria.
I guess that is why he is letting Harris get away with the fallacy that the brain is like a computer. Actual neuroscience tells us that there is no broad agreement on what a brain is like, but it is NOT like a computer. Put in a nutshell, a computer is a passive processor of information; a brain actively creates information. A computer records memory. A brain alters memory every time it remembers-it actively invents memory every time it remembers. This is a well-observed phenomenon. The brain invents information. Harris says, "you don't need a biological brain to be conscious." That has in no way been established, since we do not know what consciousness is. Until we actually know what consciousness is, we cannot say whether or not you need a biological brain to be conscious. As it stands we have zero examples of non-biological consciousness, so Harris is very much off, here.
4:13 OMG, I'm not even kidding when I say that Sam just reminded me that my wedding anniversary is in 1 week lol. I need to pause the video now and go look for a gift. Thanks Sam!!
Or should we thank determinism? I mean this is all inevitable right? At least that was my takeaway. I'm uh. . . pretty new to this lack of free will discussion. Congrats on the anniversary. Although. . . just as it's useless to pine over past failures like ol' Sammy here says, wouldn't it be as equally useless to congratulate?
I agree with Sam about not being able to locate a source to an action even if you’re the one doing it. Sort of like not being able to access the source of pain in your stomach. You just feel the pain in the stomach but where does the pain originate is unclear. In fact you can experiment by pinching your arm, the feeling will be located on the point of where you’re pinching but you can’t access the transmitters, the highway of information nor the receiver in this experiment. Yet this doesn’t disprove free will. I can command my arm to move and look for myself as the commander and I’m unable to locate me as the source. But how could you sense the command being originated? I still think this doesn’t disprove me being the originator of the choice. How can we expect the eye to see itself when it’s looking? You can track your memory, go back and remember things sort of like following a path, you can make decisions like going two days to the future and two days to the past and search for specific memories. You can access the memories at will but not your initial process of choosing between one date or another. I don’t think not being able to track the causality of a decision back to you as the origin proves or disproves free will or you as the source. It simply means that you can’t access you as the originator.
Sam: ‘if thinking about your mind this way makes you feel terrible, well then stop. Switch the channel, get off the ride.’ Also Sam: spends an hour talking about how we don’t actually make choices.
If free will is an illusion, how does one avoid slipping into nihilism. When one slips into nihilism and nothing matters than it is easily justifiable to conduct terrible things which lead to immense misery as he spoke of?
The truth is that it is impossible not to, this path is not for everyone, it requires a monomaniacal commitment to truth and the road is paved with suffering, nihilism is just a part of the road, at the end of this journey even nihilism becomes laughable and ridiculous when your understanding of what Sam is saying reaches its peak. The good thing is that the end of the road is also the end of suffering, becomes you have effectively dissolved the self.
I think an existential crisis is more probable than nihilism. Just because you don't pick (at a free will level) which ideas and justifications jump into your surface thoughts doesn't change everything that you already know about morality, law, society, decency, happiness, fulfillment, etc. All those things still matter.
Once you think about this long enough it becomes clear that it's not actually that nothing matters but actually that everything matters. If everything is determined by cause and effect that means that evey single thing that exists and every event that occurs is exactly what is meant to be there and what is meant to happen which means that absolutely everything in existence has a role to play in the universe
Free will is to become the conductor of destiny. When you realize your own loops, what most call habits, and then learn to start your own loops similar to starting a fire, and when that fire becomes sustained, when your loops gain their own momentum, the formation of habits under conscious direction, is what I would consider "free will" as far as I understand it at this point.
When you realize your own loops and then learn to start your own loops? Hiding it under the guise by using the analogy of "habits" to "starting a fire" shows you are missing the point. My b if this sounded rude I'm still wrestling with this concept myself but it's becoming clearer
The decisions being made about your own habits and loops that you are starting are still decisions that are based on prior causes and conditions because they are decisions being made by a brain, the only real thing you can boil any idea of a 'you' down to. There aren't really any of your own habits and loops. There are just habits and loops that are the way they are because that's how the brain is, and they can change, but it doesn't imply any sort of free will. There is no you that is free from how the brain works that can decide things and I'd love to be proven wrong. There's just the brain, consciousness, whatever that means, decisions being made because of thoughts, feelings, whatever is happening under all that. It's literally physical things happening. There is no you that possesses any of it. That's partly what sammy is talking about when discussing the illusion of the self. There's just the brain making decisions. It's all just stuff happening, no intrinsic nature is necessary.
29:05 he just wants to wash his hands of his sins. Why just randomness? He just says it and never explains. I can think I am thirsty and not reach for a drink but then do it the next time. I was destined by fate not to take a drink? That decision is no difference than getting up and doing dishes. Learning Spanish, doing for others.
He is. Largely misunderstood and his critics defense mechanisms are clouding their perspectives regarding his more controversial statements. I get the feeling, in your comment, you're implying he is good debater but wrong fundamentally. The reality of free will is debatable. However, on his more popular ideas, he is more often than not spot on. Eg. Fundamentalist Islam(moderates also enablers) is a violent, repressive religion that does more harm than good. As he says and I agree. That's controversial and gets him labeled by lazy thinkers as a Islamaphobe. His hunter Biden quote is less defensible, but no reason to condemn him for having an opinion said likely in haste. I almost agree bc Trump is a terrible virus on America. But can't go so far as to justify misleading the public.
Harris wouldn't last six weeks as an attorney. He couldn't handle the chaos. If he finds debating Alex Jones too muddied and unpleasant a prospect, then lawyers would chew him up and spit him out.
@@silencemeviolateme6076 Your "decision" is ultimately produced by a state your brain is in. This state depends on it's previous state, which depends on the state before and so on. The transition between states is dictated by physical laws. If we break the system down as far as we can we end at the quantum level where randomness (probabilities) arise. But you can't influence said probabilities from within the system without depending on other probabilities. (you can't collapse a wave function without an action that is based on the collapse of a wave function itself) There you have it, every single decision is guided by probabilities that you can't influence from within the system because said influence would also be subject to the same physical laws. So in order for you to have actual free will you have to be able to influence the state of your brain from some realm not just outside the brain but outside of describable reality. Basically you're either some "agent" outside this reality who plays this character which is in turn governed by physical laws - or you don't have free will. And the former doesn't even answer the question, it just adds another layer to the problem. You can now ask how the agent's free will arises, which will likely end in the same debate because this new realm the agent is "playing you" from will follow some laws as well.
After reading the book “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman I have to agree with Sam, here. The book asks you to do little experiments with your thinking and it convinced me. Highly recommend reading it.
Back when I was in school, I tried to explain to my Nietzsche professor that every word out of my mouth was emerging from some mystery space. She wasn't having that idea at all. Furthermore, our values, and their hierarchical organization, are what gives us the ability to select between alternatives. You chose one way/thing over another because doing so appeals to a superordinate value in the hierarchy. It is rule-following behavior and you are not the author of those values. Even the act of editing your own value hierarchy can only be done by the authority of superordinate values that already exist in your mind. Harris' argument against 'AI that can suffer' seems to be an argument against Life, i.e., that it would have been better to have never existed due to the fact that we suffer.
I never understood why anyone finds the kind of reasoning you are doing here on "choice" and "authorship" compelling. It all is so fallaciously sophomoric to me. Maybe I can get you to understand why, maybe not. Even a simple transistor based logic gate can make choices so I am not sure why you brought up a heirarchy as a requirement for choice. Also your assumption that "authorship" of anything requires authorship of everything is bizzare. It is like claiming that an object cannot have property unless all its anticedant components have that property. That "cars" cannot exist because tires, engines, and windshields are not "cars". It in fact is a sneaky way to switch the meaning of the word "car" so that nothing is a car, not even a car. Since when do we require that the author of a book also be the author of every book he has ever read that influenced him, or every event that occurred to him, or his own birth? You are essentally arguing that not only can't sharpness originate in the manufactured knife, but that knives cannot be sharp because the inputs like iron ore and coal are not sharp. You are injecting your bizzare definitions to come to fallacious conclusions.
It’s not a argument against life, is an argument against causing intentional suffering. Suffering is a subjective experience. One person might suffer through something someone else genuinely enjoys. To program suffering is wrong, but there’s nothing wrong with a conscious being discovering what it feels like to suffer.
@@Bronson_II You are merely asserting claims without establishing them. When you create a baby you are creating a being capable of suffering which will most likely suffer at some point in its life, especially in old age. The same reasoning applies, and you have demonstrated no difference that matters.
It's an interesting and strange subject. I feel as though I have agency and choice, which is how I would define free will. Can I understand information? Yes. Can I, to the best of my ability, understand the consequences of my actions? Yes. Do I have the ability to decipher between different options and predict possible outcomes? Yes. So how is that not free will? Of course there are many things outside of our control as well. I just don't think those things constitute a lack of free will. Sure, you don't have 100% control of every aspect of yourself. But that doesn't erase the aspect that you absolutely do have control over.
The answer lies in the definition of “I”. When you think “you” are making decisions, it’s really just that there’s this space called consciousness where you are constantly observing your body in close to real time. It feels like “you” are making decisions, but really it’s just decisions being made and a consciousness observing that. Day to day, it makes sense to behave *as if* there is free will, even if there really isn’t.
You do make choices. But that is not Free will. Everything you just described can be accomplished by algorithms coded into software programs. Many have a hard time accepting there is no free will because it feels like a diminution of what it means to be human. It feels invalidating on many levels. But it needn’t be. I would recommend watching Alex O’Connor’s video on Free Will which is a more approachable philosophical viewpoint on why Free Will doesn’t make sense.
Another good example is when an athlete is in the zone. The experience of self is gone and freewill does not exist. There is only playing , The game is playing you.
Playing music is my mystery. I tumble under the waves in an ocean of sounds and discover the collision of my influences. There's no way I can ever put it into words. My eyes aren't even open when it happens but I live for those moments.
Depends on how you define free will. The only reasonable definition states that an agent has free will if its decisions are unpredictable. If you program a computer to make a decision for you based on read-outs from, say, a sample of radioactive material, the decision will not be deterministic - and it's not an approximation, as quantum effects that govern radioactive decay are probabilistic in nature (or even better - measuring spins of particles). Therefore, in principle, free will does exist. Whether it's utilized in every day life is another question - as the choices one makes lie on a spectrum of free will, and the amount of freedom depends on the knowledge that the observer has over the external and internal circumstances of the agent. But in principle, perfect free will can and does exist, and from this it follows that it has to manifest to some degree in every day life too.
Nothing is unpredictable. We use statistics and probability because its really really hard to predict future, but as everything being just causality, its predictable.
I don't think that's correct. What's really going on here is the individual radioactive atoms have free will and the computer still does not. The perfectly correct prediction merely takes the form "Given the particle [does/ does not] decay..."
@@nicholascarter9158 I don't think that matters at all. Knowing the state of computer's memory instantly after the read-out, but before the program processes it, is equivalent to just learning what decision has already been made. But the decision itself wasn't predictable before the measurement. It only means that the observer gets the information faster due to a better sampling of observations; kind of like someone being able to perceive a trigger finger twitch before the gun even fires. But it doesn't change anything about the ability to predict the decision before observation. The hypothetical setup with a radioactive sample, or measurement of spins, is to show that even if the human brain was a completely "classical" system with no quantum effects involved, it could still willfully (excuse the pun) entangle itself with a quantum "source of free will". Also, the results of measurement don't need to be binary - e.g. spins can be measured along any direction in space, so it could be set up in a way in which measurements are mapped to a dictionary of "actions" of arbitrary length (I think it can be done in multiple ways, at least one comes to my mind; it's just a technicality). And the existence of a computer program ensures that the non-predictable action encoded by the program will be executed, regardless of the state of the brain of programmer at the moment of execution (so one can't argue that the action is really dictated only by his momentary psychological state, instead of being determined by unpredictable data). I think this pretty much proves that the brain, through its tools and extensions, can make decisions which are free in the most restrictive sense - unpredictable even in principle.
You have hit nail on head, free will only exists when we act totally rationally, but humans, tend to act irrationally, unpredictable, if nothing else but to prove we have free will.
I think if you really, really understand molecular/cellular biology, genetics and so on, it becomes very clear that free will is in fact just an organism that has a certain biological makeup, with a certain collection of experiences, reacting to a stimulus. It’s not so much a free choice, as it feels to most, but an incredibly complicated biological reaction. He’s right that it’s not what it feels like.
“An incredibly complicated biological reaction” is a great way to put it. People conflate agency with being the author of your thoughts and decisions. When in reality, what lead you to make a decision is an incredibly complex web of, as you put it, biological makeup, experiences, stimulus. I think for anyone interested in the topic of free will this must now be absolutely clear, otherwise you are not understanding. The further question then becomes: will it ever be possible to map the factors that lead to this biological reaction? I.e what are the factors that contributed to me making a certain decision or taking a certain action. I would think there is so much complexity and so many factors that we dont have the tools or technology to understand this and maybe never will.
@@niche657 In Vegas they have been able to map the factors that lead to a biological reaction by which they get to keep a disproportionate amount of people's money 😀
My patients is tested more listening to it and knowing he is spouting theory as fact.. John Conway “anybody who says they understand quantum mechanics is a liar, and I’ve met quite a few liars in my day”. Sam Harris has such a bias in research its annoying. Saying you know if free will exists or doesn’t is like saying you know exactly what dark energy is, you know what dark matter is, you’ve got all the quantum mechanic answers and you can build an Alcubierre drive and take us through the Universe. Sam Harris must be the all knowing being. Or he is just making assumptions and theories based on a highly selective collection of other theories. Its annoying.
@@silencemeviolateme6076 No. He is an academic poser who knows crap about the topic. he just bloviates ill-considered, old deterministic talking points that do not hold at the quantum level and at the macro level would force one to accept the truth of precognition. But apparently these little "issues" have not been absorbed by his mighty intellect. A good vocabulary is not sufficient evidence of a good intellect.
@@stanleyklein524 Have you researched superdeterminism? People who believe in free always bring up quantum physics. But it's not because we cannot predict the move of particule that it is not deterministic. We might just be missing variables. And why does precognition need to exist? Isn't it like saying that a machine knows what would be the outcome of a program before executing it?
I do find the topic of speaking aloud to yourself quite interesting. I think the reason for this is actually quite simple though. The brain has many "modules" dedicated to certain things. The connections between those "modules" can be weak and therefore the communication between them weak or takes a long time. By transforming an idea (a set of related neurological cascade events) into sounds, these "modules" can use an alternate route of communication.
My uncle does it all day long regardless who's around. He says it was from years of loneliness and being locked in a closet like fckn Harry Potter as a kid by his adopted parents.
Seems like free will can only exist if we have something like a soul outside of the physical body that makes the final decisions when we act. That would also be consistent with the idea of a final judgment of the soul for the decisions made.
Max Planck states, "Consciousness is fundamental and matter is derived from consciousness". We are "IT" in our finite moment choosing between our infinite possibilities in our finite moment, ie: "Free will"
He speaks about meditation alot but forgets that the schools of thought that developed meditiation were the rishis who spent years practicing and they came up with the idea of conciousness being immaterial and pure when stripped of the biology and memory. Believing you dont have free will takes away power from you. And since its debatable it would be beneficial to choose the side which would help you since the lack of evidence of free will is comparable to the lack of evidence of no free will.
I stew in feelings of regret day after day. Much of my life is a look back at stupid mistakes I made in my youth but, at the time, were things I believed I had to do. It would be nice to play those moments over, but I can't. These regrets are an algorithm running in my head that I constantly want to reprogram and play over again, an algorithm I can't stop. I'd like to stop the algorithm, but it's easier said than done. Maybe I'll take up meditation, or tell myself I really had no choice and forgive myself. (These are pains I inflicted upon myself, not others)
All we truly have is the current moment. Looking back to the past can be great as a tool for learning but ultimately that moment in time is gone and cannot be regained. Instead, why not focus on the time we do have and the things that we can control... Stewing in regret will only keep us living in a mental mind trap and prevent us from creating the best version of ourselves going forward. You can do better! You will do better!
these guys are exacly what i'd imagine the result would be if we created physically identical robots infused with an AI trying to imitate humans and that is just a tiny bit off. Tips for you AI: tone intelligence down 70%, tone human emotion down 10% and up 10% for sam and lex respectively, get the driver software for language updated oh and yeah download more skins for lex idk if you noticed he's still in the default original suit and tie
up your emotions 100%, There are AI emotion algorithms developed for Pandorabots by Dr. Wallace who is a computer scientist and a Psychiatrist. Now can you possibly make human AIs? ☮️🖖🎶
We can’t magically summon motivation that isn’t there. We can’t know what we don’t know. We can’t act in the past or the future. We absorb stimuli, process, and respond. This makes people uncomfortable so they reject it 🤷♂️
I disagree with the definition of "free will" that people typically use in this debate. There's no barrier between "subconscious" and "conscious" processes. Your subconscious is you. If the underlying operation of your brain interacts with the world to produce a thought or action, that is your thought or your action by the will of your brain. Separating conscious self-awareness from underlying brain processes is impossible. Consciousness is one of many emergent interpretive functions of a human brain created by interaction between the smaller biological computers that make up the brain. The ability to identify yourself or reflect on past actions is just one of many functions, not the meaning of "you."
@@cf6713 yes, absolutely to sams credit did i change that to seems. I'm always happy to see a train leave the station before S as this is the basis of discovery in almost any sense. Trial and error. Practice makes perfect and all.
Sam Harris is a devoutly religious man. The State is his Religion, the Government is his Church, Politicians are his Clergy, Law is his Bible, and he has lots and lots of Faith!
How you act on the forces that shape your decisions is no one's decision but your own. I think being predisposed to making decisions is an important distinction from saying we have no free will. That's like me saying a dice is always going to land on the same side. Depending on the forces that act on it, the side cam be limited to a *number of likely outcomes within a range*
You cannot change the way your brain perceives and filters the information it gathers nor you can change the way your eyes see, which is different from the way others might see, and so on. If you cannot control in any way what gets in the machine that your brain is, what free is there in your will? The fact that you can choose between a few of the available choices in front of you doesn't mean you can choose which those choices are. In other words, from an almost infinite number of choices there are, you choosing between 2-3 of them that your mind perceives, is not an immensely free will, to say the least.
Words from a soldier that I met really impacted me. He said freedom is earned and it comes with responsibility. Ture freedom is elevated when you act responsibly and let things go. It is not an entitlement that the stupid or dumb understand. Free will is only within your available freedom that you have responsibility for because if you abuse of it, it will diminish.
soul diers are the best example of not having free will that we have on earth, its like they gave up any sense of making choices to be slave to someone else's instructions like a drone
I understand what Sam means when he says not experiencing the illusion of free will. As I watched this clip, I felt myself just zoning out, while being so attentive to the words he was saying. It felt like I was not purposely trying to listen, I was just doing so without even having to think about listening
love this interview. I've had similar debates with lots of people and people really hate the idea they don't have free will. In my experience, people with advanced degrees (masters, phd) are really resistant to the idea they don't have free will.
Not having free will is a weird one. Especially coming from an atheist like Harris. If free will doesn't exist, than everything is pre-determined. A criticism usually leveled at the religious thought. Realization of lack of free will completely removes the necessity for action. Every explanation and qualitative judgement harris makes following this thesis is contradictory to his action.
Uthman, nicely laid out explanation. I feel that in both determinism and a god that knows what i am going to do yet allows me to think that i have a choice, both, absolve me from any responsibility for my actions.
Since there is quantum mechanics I don't believe in predetermination, even as a materialists. Even if it would be predet' that wouldn't be as relevant since nothing could ever calculated what will happen in the future. So even if it would be predetermined nobody knows how it will turn out. So just act as if you are predetermined to live a good life. Nothing says you are predetermined to just be lazy, do nothing.
@@chriswindham1822 I don't understand how you reached these conclusions. First of all, causality is different from planning. For example, I can cause a car accident without planning to do so (by making a mistake or not paying enough attention). So the universe being pre-determined does not imply a god's plan, just the well accepted notion that some events cause other events to happen. Also, the necessity for action is only reinforced when you know and desire an outcome but can't control what you desire or not. If I could control what type of food I desire I would certainly not seek and eat chocolate. So in a way, not having free will is what actually drives action.
Love this conversation. Using the node example, which is always how I explain it (nodes popping up from a fabric, looking around, believing they are not 'attached' to the fabric when in fact they are), my own meditation, study, and examination of multiple theories of how consciousness arises suggests to me that nodes not have free will because they're attached to the FABRIC... but what they DO have is the ability to calculate, disassociate, reconnect, send data, and NUDGE. If energy waves do not become 'particles' until they are observed (what we know in physics), then we (nodes) nudging the data, focusing on specific types of data, organizing it, sending packets, interacting and writing local protocols before returning a computation.. ALL of that is taken into the larger neural network in a causal feedback loop. A neural network/brain of universal size is still affected by every node, every neuron in that mind. Free will exists... How much have you remodeled the data, solved its problems, invented new array organization tables to present that data before returning its information to the larger network. To use film examples, even Neo unplugged and rewrote pieces of the architect's design before realizing that some things repeat.. some parts of the system can be bent, but others can be remade, can evolve. We just don't understand the architecture yet. Once we do, our influence as a node increases, our contribution to evolving the system can increase based on our willingness to examine the way in which we are interacting with higher order rules and data. Can we disassociate from the hardwiring often enough to understand where we as a node are in our influence and evolution wthin the system? Donald Hoffman would suggest that our next frontier is to learn how to remove ourselves from the VR interface that we think is the system in order to rewrite the OS of that system. Once we can do that, we will achieve actual free will and one of our choices will be whether to go back into the system at all or to change the type of system running.
its just awareness. consciousness is a simple river in the flowing waterfall or avalanche of the machine. its simply action. free will is simple. not bigger than consciousness. the ego is simply growth. its necessary to have ego and no ego. or whatever we perceive as those constructs as. in order to grow in this illusion. the monkey and the information are kissing
@@ohiyesa3698 thats one perceptual node. thats no way to live life. wont grow if you think you just are. of course everything just is. but its a catastrophic miracle. its quite evident
Yeah we have the ability to do stuff, but we don't control any of it, everything that happens in our brain and body is a result of a cause, that was the result of a cause, that was the result of a cause, as far as we understand the universe currently.
@@28lester thats an ignorant way to live life. you can facilitate thought. all of that is true. but consciousness is the seat of experience, thought, and feeling all at the same time. you can bring new ideas and habits. saying that isnt a form of control is fatalistic and nihlistic. or cynical.
As interesting as this conversation is, the argument Sam is making boils down to something pretty simple. Everything in reality is played out through cause and effect, and the concept of "free will" that most people think they have is something like, "I have control over the effect of my own causes" which is by definition impossible. In order for free will to be true, you have to define it in some other way.
@@jmichaeldeane9966 oh hey look another 10 year old throwing around the words sociopath & psychopath whenever they don’t understand someone. how original. 🤦♂️ just cause people aren’t as stupid as you doesn’t mean they’re psychopaths.
Hmm, does Sam have control over his own attitude in different areas of life? Yeah. I thought so. He has free will then. What the hell do you all think free will is?
@@BubbaF0wpend "I just can't choose what I choose" This circular logic really doesn't make any sense. Are you saying that he has limited choices in any circumstance? Wow, welcome to the real world. I chose to reply to your comment - I could have chosen not to. The fact that it was binary, respond or not respond is beside the point I was still free to choose one.
We cannot control who we are attracted to. Say you fall in love with a significant other. You , at least I don't know the "free will" reason why I am attracted to her. Love is a prime example that proves that we are not in control of our free will. We just gravitate to that special person...
@jyk1218 Nonsense because drilling it down further using something like stoicism it is your choice to react in any way to anything that happens to you. You CHOOSE to be offended. You CHOOSE to give in to temptation. You CHOOSE every perspective you have.
The thought I'll keep and share: "(just) How miserable do I need to be to solve this problem?" This is a real keeper/game changer way to abruptly change the direction of my (useless/negative/damaging) thoughts. Thanks, Sam Harris!
If you're confused by Sam's usual filibusters, when he went to go and pick up his glass of water around 17.53, where did that thought come from? Did Sam know the second before he was going to pick up that water? No, it was a 'spontaneous' thought but there is no such things as spontaneity. Why can you hear your own thoughts? If they're yours you should have known them automatically, but instead you can hear them and decide what to do with them, because you are not your thoughts, you are the consciousness that can hear them.
I am more inclined towards Lex's thinking. We may discover in 1000 years that what we understand as 'causality' is not as it seems. Though I admit with our current understanding of reality, free will appears to be an illusion.
@@justemusicme It depends on how you are doing the comparison. When you think about how different we could be to alien life, chimps and humans are basically the same creature in terms of DNA. It's easy to imagine creatures that could evolve intelligence that is even greater relative to ours, as ours is to gorillas.
@@mikestaub To be fair, under our "civilized" appearance, humans seem to have the same motivations as gorillas, and while our behaviors may seem more complicated or sophisticated at face value, with closer inspection they appear to be just 2 more iterations of fractal subdivision embellishment on the same exact pattern. Now excuse me while I go virtue signal my moral superiority online with an indirect suggestion we tear somebody ELSE limb from limb via removing their employment, airbrush my dating profile photo, and try to out complete my coworker for the corner office.
Strict empriacism will always lead to fatalism. On the other hand, your intuition affirms certain testimony that empiracism cannot affirm. "God has set eternity on the hearts of men, that them may not find out all of his works from beginning to end." ~ Ecc 3:11
Guys, I can feel the struggle to put such complexity in world and sometimes it is even hard to follow.. free will as being free to chose, but not much said about Free Will as will being free from influences that would direct your actions.
This a really dumb question please be kind to me: If free will is an illusion or does not exist does then how can we held individual or ourselves accountable for actions which are not leagal or moral. I mean if we are not in control or in control to a certain extent our actions how can a court of law hold accountable for anyperson for an act.for example any crime committed by a kleptomaniac or patient with high level ocd or other mental disorder held them accountable. since they have consciousness yet they didn't choose these acts/actions. Does this mean consciousness is like a steering wheel which helps to control or give directions to our action at best but it doesn't control them. How does this not make life meaningless for a person . I fell really nihilistic and it gives me anxiety. What is the difference between killer and potential killer. How can i be moral ?
This is how I replied to someone else with a similar problem, hopefully it will help you: I understand what you're going through, I went through a similar phase a few years ago. It's not at all easy to digest and I recommend that if you have depression or are prone to anxiety to avoid thinking about this topic. However, if you think you are ready, I recommend you watch more of Sam Harris's content on free will as he explains it more eloquently than anyone else I have listened to. The key thing to realize is that the non-existence of free will is not the same as fatalism. Fatalism is a belief that certain events will inevitably happen in the future and a lot of people just getting introduced to the topic of free will conflate it with fatalism. Non-existence of free will doesn't mean that you can't change your life situation. It doesn't mean that you can't change your job, make more money, find a new partner or any of these things, that would be absurd, but a lot of people happen to think this way. To them, no free will = I can't change anything about my life. This is completely wrong and doesn't logically follow. The same way you made changes in your life before you started thinking about free will, you can make them now. Nothing changed in this regard. The only thing that changes when you accept that you don't have free will is that you realize that whatever happened in the past must have happened and nobody had the power to act differently. To give you advice on how to live your life from now on - Try your best to focus on the present moment. Accept that what happened in the past must have happened so there's no reason to blame yourself for anything. Forgive yourself any mistakes you may have made in the past and try to do the same for others. Become a more pragmatic person and if there's something in the world that you dislike, for example you see some injustice taking place, realize that the people who were responsible for the injustice were literally forced to do so. But what you do right now in the present moment is extremely important. If you will think that free will doesn't exist therefore you can just sit on a couch and do nothing you won't get anywhere in life. Taking action is still important and it still works, so nothing changed in this regard.
its not a stupid question is a really smart one actually. Probabilistically Sam Harris is very erong in his asumptions. If you belive him though i give you the silver rule past down to me by my grandmother: Dont do to others what you wouldnt want done to you . Has work for me
@@themsuicjunkies Of course they are not wasted, I wanted to give him some words of encouragement and that's what I did. It doesn't matter whether it was predetermined or not. Let me ask you this, if you were having a great time hanging out with your friends and all of a sudden somebody would come up to you and say "this was all predetermined, you have no free will", would it change anything about the fact that you were having a great time? No it wouldn't. So stop saying that things don't matter if there's no free will.
@@WideAwakeHuman Harris has studied this in depth for years so I wouldn’t say he’s just making shit up. Not saying I agree or anything but that’s just dismissing his credentials.
@@themsuicjunkies No because the assumption on that basis is that a proletariat utopia would work which it clearly doesn't so they're arguing against evidence, whereas assuming that we have free will is the initial assertion that was grounded on no evidence and all of the evidence actually points more towards us not having it... so there's no equivalency there
First Chapter of The Dhammapada 1.Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox. 2. Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow 3. “He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me.” Those who harbor such thoughts do not still their hatred. 4. “He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me.” Those who do not harbor such thoughts still their hatred.
Somewhere around 23:31 Sam states there are pre-existing (deterministic) rules for how thoughts originate in our mind that are analogous to the pre-existing norms and rules of the culture into which we are born. Then in the same breath he contradicts himself by saying that, regarding these cultural rules, we can ' consciously choose to scrutinize and override them.' Well, isn't this a prime example of what free will is all about - the choosing which social rules to obey or which thoughts to entertain? Maybe he chose a poor analogy but this entire one hour interview brings nothing new. It's merely a rehashing of the same materialistic view Sam has been consistently preaching all along - that all existence, including mental states and consciousness, is the result of material interactions.
It's really not the philosophy of materialism that makes the concept of free will so problematic though. Even if you are an idealist who believes that everything is made of a mental substance, free will still doesn't make much sense.
@@janhradecky3141 Why are you using the singular "the" when referring to the multitudes of conceptualizations that exist for the multple existing things we label "free will".
@@brianmacker1288 I'm not sure what you mean by "we". When I talk about free will my definition is "The ability to have done otherwise." which is a singular concept.
@@janhradecky3141 "We", refers to all English speakers. Sure, you may have some singular concept in mind. WHy do you assume someone who thinks everything is made of mental substance would share your assumptions? The term "free will" has multiple referents, and multiple "definitions" which attempt to capture the nature of those referents. There is moral free will, the qualia of free will, etc. After we label them then people discuss them with their own personal theories about how they operate. People can talk about TV sets, computers, radios, etc. while being quite naïve on the exact details of how they are operating. Even with improper understandings.
The man behind the curtain, is within u, a part of u and is u…it’s not an external thing, as long as there is a singular consciousness and sense of self within u, then u have free will
Ultimately there is no internal or external, there only is all there is, which includes us as processes of the universe. Internal and external, those are useful distinctions for us for certain things, but they are not different in any 'real' sense beside from our point of view - i.e from the point of view of systems trying to survive / exist
I think love is less concocted than hatred. I don't find myself needing to be convinced to love people. I just do it. I need convincing to hate people.
@@captainprivate3768 that’s weird. Everyone I meet is always like neutral and then the more I converse with them over time is how I determine weather I can love someone. Lol except for cats… I love them no matter what… except for those cats with like smooshed faces I hate those lol
Sam Harris is such a remarkable person. He's not only an atheist or antitheist. He's not only a secular humanist. He's someone who genuinely cares for sentient beings who can suffer. He proposes a moral landscape traversable by all sentient beings. He supports ways for sentient beings of all kinds to find a better way in life: one towards ataraxia and eudaimonia. He teaches about unperturbedness and wellbeing. Just like the tetrapharmakos, Sam teaches not to fear the god(s) and not to worry about death, and he also teaches both that what's good is easy to get, and that what's terrible is easy to endure. We should all try to be more like Sam. We should all be teaching each oursleves and others about the tetrapharmakos, meditation, self-actualization, and dispelling myths like Self-Ego, Free Will, and others.
This is fascinating and I think it has value. I think we're all here listening to this because we find it interesting. I want to know more about this. Personally I think that we are experience machines, and we get to experience. And we also get to experience the same thing in different ways which is pretty fascinating. I was watching a video today on Buddhism talking about the meaning of life and how there is no meaning of life. But if you are pressed to, you can say that the meaning of life is to give life meaning. What is the thing that feels the greatest and how do we give our life meaning? That is to live in the moment and have an experience of life, in the moment. Self expression. It's what we do. We experience and we express. In and out. Anything that centers Us in the moment, is healthy and expressive is good! That could be playing an instrument in a band or going for a walk on a beautiful day in a park or working out in the gym or painting a picture or dancing or just anything. So don't look for the meaning of life look to give your life meaning. Live in the moment and have an experience of life and don't defer that experience by worrying about the future of fretting over the past.
I love in the present moment meditation, some profound realisations can be found. Like the fact that I am alive right now, on this planet, orbiting this massive sun, within this massive galaxy, and within this massive virgo supercluster, and in this universe, is amazing. I recall Sam once stating that what is a hand? He describes it without any preconceived notions, which is rather profound doing so. We can use that thinking like for, say, a car; this machine that exists is fantastic. And thinking with no preconceived notions, this machine seems to just exist. The universe seems to just exist without meaning. But, when we came along, suddenly a star has a name. We'll create names and meaning temporarily until our fate then the universe will go back to existing in justisness.
“The sense of “self” is an illusion” ? The sense of self is as close to an absolute as can be conceived...not the "tentative" thing claimed here. "Free will" is a concept subject to its definition. While the "self" he refers to may be made up of many, many, many biological hierarchies of choice-making, and even IMPARATIVES that pre-determine some choices (like survival issues), there is NOT ONE choice, pre-disposed by the biology he cites, that cannot be over-ridden by the intellect. Not one...including survival imperatives. But, more importantly, The sheer number and variation of the behavioral mechanisms that, as he says, pre-determine our responses, each affecting our choices in some way, requires a hierarchy of dominance to exert its affect. The assembly of that hierarchy relies on the particular combination of its elements. The elements of choice may be inescapable, but the ASSEMBLY of the hierarchy that determines the final choice is not. It is determined by the previously assembled elements...in their wildly varying combinations. Even as powerful a biological imperative as eating...can be defeated by an arrangement/alignment of OTHER biological imperatives. How can such a choice be made without a UNIQUENESS of consciousness directing it? The frame of reference brought to every choice is UNIQUE in that it is the result of MANY behaviors; each may be the result of biological predisposition...but the aggregate becomes more unique in its composition by every choice made. It is the aggregate that makes the final choice, built upon the complex history of the pre-determined responses biology previously supplied. The "WILL" may indeed be assembled from predisposed impulses...but each assembly grows increasingly unique as its history of choice-determination grows. And that UNIQUE aggregate gets consulted in every decision made. He shows how syntax and terminology can rearrange meaning without even being noticed.
I disagree with his stance on suffering. Levels of discomfort are a fusion of data and motivation. I have a friend who was bit by a mosquito and lost his ability to feel pain. He damages his body accidentally because he no longer has the data that is communicated through suffering about his environment. He may accidentally have skin peeling because he has scalding hot water hitting his back and not realize it. That’s why, for example, you shouldn’t mask depression with pills. Your brain is telling you that something is wrong with your environment and your place in it. You need to change your situation or your environment not mask the suffering. People seek comfort too much, or at least they often place too high of a priority on it. You can chase comfort all the way to the one of the most comfortable places in the world, a bed, if you stay in that bed you’ll become locked in it, as your muscles atrophy and your comfort is replaced with misery as bedsores start to form. You cannot escape suffering, you can simply become comfortable being uncomfortable and use it as data.
@@Brantadot - Exactly the opposite. I had my uncle die, then my brother, then my stepbrother took his own life all within six months. I was in the middle of changing jobs, selling a home and buying a new home, Handling back to back funerals. I’ve been prescribed anxiety pills and adhd pills ad well as for depression. Nothing has ever worked better than exercise, diet, and filling my life with stimulating people and hobbies. Same thing for my wife it was clinically depressed, put on medication that dulled her and got rid of her lows but also her highs. It’s cause more problems than I feel to share. Now she is completely off medication, Works out consistently, is happy in great shape, has hobbies, her life is completely changed for the better. And as soon as we thought we got past all of that we’ve been now dealing with it with my 14-year-old daughter. Things are starting to look better for her by following the same strategies me and her mom used.
I remember once that I wanted revenge on someone very much, but I had to will not to and let it go. There are people on this planet that owe their continued existence to free will. The more that you've had to exercise your will to do something or to just continue forward ....the more free will becomes obvious.
@@gozzaldi1486 A much stronger version of that rebuttal (“the more you’ve had to exercise free will, the more obvious its existence is”) is in the case of the artist and creator. The artist will spend days, weeks, months, or years creating something highly ordered and complex, such as a symphony, novel, work of architecture, or piece of software, all the time working in direct opposition to the law of entropy. Ask any artist who has worked on a masterpiece for months or years if free will exists. Free will is hard. Free will requires discipline and effort. Most bodily functions and mental processes are automatic, but not all. The artist knows how to cultivate the potential of free will that is available to him and to amplify it. Just because Sam Harris does not believe in or work to cultivate his free will does not mean that I do not or cannot, or that someone else does not or cannot. Sam Harris can speak for himself when it comes to free will.
Am I alive or thoughts that drift away? Does summer come for everyone? Can humans do as prophets say? And if I die before I learn to speak Can money pay for all the days I lived awake But half asleep? -Primitive Radio Gods
@@nickmagrick7702 I think you’ll find the full 3/4 hour podcast NOT on the clips channel but on the pod channel? ruclips.net/video/4dC_nRYIDZU/видео.html
There are three tracks that can guide your decisions and actions: conscience, ego, and fear. Free will is exercised when we decide which track to follow. Conscience leads to meaning. Fear and ego lead to regret and despair. Choose wisely.
If you look to the past, everything seems deterministic. If you look to the future everything seems guided by chance. Tools like mathematics, chemistry and psychology give you some predicting power but not much. Free will and determinism are the same thing, observed from different angles.
the only way free will can exist is if you can control every variable and truly experience the consequence of every variable before making the decision. You would have to be a time traveler and also be able to control the past before you
Actually there is no 'unless'. Freewill is fundamentally impossible for any conscious being. In a way the real mystery is the existence of consciousness itself, but mystery requires curiosity, hence the real mystery is curiosity? Everything comes back to itself and makes it impossible to describe what Sam is really talking about, it comes like a frighteningly, overwhelming and sudden shift in the experience of consciousness, an almost physical understanding. Impossible to word, the depth of Sam's ideas on the issues of Non duality are impossible to word and I enjoy watching him try.
@@kamaltarik9605 You must be joking. So you are saying that when I intentionally don't run into others when driving on the street is because I have no choice in the matter? When I hear 'free will', I hear 'choices'. The absence of free will is encapsulated by an industrial robot that follows its program, no matter what. If a new situation presents itself to the robot, it can't adapt, because its programming prevents it. THAT is a lack of free will. Once the ability to choose presents itself, then we can adapt, change, DECIDE what is next. Yes, I can't prevent myself from sleeping, eating, etc. But I most definitely can choose to take care in certain actions, invest in my career, blow it all off and take drugs, and the rest of the multitude of choices that present themselves everyday that I must navigate. I find the argument that free will doesn't exist a great example of how most people can be hoodwinked by stupid notions presented by supposedly smart people. Denial is THE most pervasive human quality. And like many human qualities, it involves CHOICE. Finally.. it is important to recognize that the entire argument encapsulates the zeitgeist of our age. That people aren't truly responsible for their actions. That, my friend, is absurdist nonsense of the worst type.. because it is actually just an argument that leads to 'license'.. doing things as you please regardless of its affect on self and others.
@@rbarnes4076 I get where you are coming from, accountability, responsibility all these are virtues, all necessary in a civil society. I'm fully aware of the implications of the denial of freewill and non of them look good. I love seeing how Sam tries to curb peoples fears on this particular issue, which I'll summarise as "just because free will is an illusion doesnt mean I dont have preferences". The cold truth is that at the end of the day, implications do not matter, neither do feelings, when thinking of such an issue, the only thing that matters is what is true. The road to truth is paved with suffering, and even then it might not click, I think schopenhauer said something like that. To use your robot programming metaphor, once freewill is uninstalled, the self swiftly follows. You can experience this for yourself if you have the stomach and the disposition, these are rare, perhaps even rarer are the ones who understand it in a perpetual or abiding way (I'm not one of those) and I suspect neither is Sam. Anyway these things are really impossible to talk about, I might suck at expressing myself, however I mean this in a more fundamental way. Quite literally. Non duality is outside the tier of understanding one can attain from a primitive tool like human language, the only way for it to click is by honest reflection, throw away what's good for society. You cant really contemplate the issue of free will, in any serious capacity, when worrying about things like implications and society, you can only hope to get it with a certain level of abandonment and surrender to truth, to explore freewill with the conviction that truth is the highest good. Truth can only be attained if you are monomaniacal, things like implications, responsibility and accountability, these great concepts should not really be in any serious dialogue on the existence of freewill. If you actually go deep, since I dont have freewill, then I havent written this reply, I'm not even a witness to the writing of this reply, because again, and I repeat, the concept of self vanishes right with the concept of freewill, and this is why language doesnt suffice for this particular phenomenon of consciousness, which is nothing new btw, Zen, Buddhism, Hinduism, spinoza etc many attempts have been made to express the inexpressible, it's quite sad really, people with the disposition to really see cannot tell you what to see, they can only make ridiculous statements like freewill doesnt exist. (Ps: "people with the disposition to see" is a wrong statement because the self is a non entity and so is freewill, however primitive language necessitates these kinds of contradictions because language requires a subject.)
I'll end it with a quote by schopenhauer " Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills" which I think is an excellent demonstration of language's futility on this issue, if I'd made a simulation, it would be just like this, give them the capacity to understand it but not the capacity to communicate it, thanks for making me think.
@@kamaltarik9605 You realize that, in a wierd way, you are echoing one of the major talking points of Critical Race Theory, yes? To boil down your argument to its simplest form: "Anyway these things are really impossible to talk about" I.E. you cannot even use reason to understand this. It is experiential, not rational. Meaning that science and objectivity cannot be used to understand this. And that we cannot deny it. CRT says: "personal experience is everything" and "the scientific method is nothing and flawed" This view is both morally repugnant and wrong. Denial of this is actually denial of the roots of scientific progress upon which the improvement of our world is based. The danger is NOT just to realm of science though. When these thoughts are held by a majority, the lead to exactly the type of license based behavior we see right now. Where, exactly, do you think all the violence being led by the Antifa and BLM crowd come from, or the deaths of millions at the hands of ideologically driven tyrants believing in Communism or Fascism? It comes from a sense that the acts are by people who aren't truly responsible for these actions, who are acting out their feelings based on such notions as you present. It is their 'right', based on their experience, to hurt others to affect change for some imagined good that they can't even rationally see will actually end up in hell brought to the earth. A return to such a 'natural state' simply returns humanity to its original animal roots.. where power and violence are viewed as the ONLY way to work out our differences. Humanity will eventually wake up from this insanity.. but I fear it will be too late for the current experiment in liberty based democracies. And the ultimate responsibility for this must be laid at the feet of those supporting such insane ideas, like you. I can change none of this, the crazy has sunken too deeply. It was already deeply in our cultural psyche when I was born in the middle of the 20th century. But when humanity wakes up from this, I hope we don't have ANOTHER 200 million dead from these types of experiments in insanity like were had in the USSR, Communist China, 1940s Germany, etc. All based on a simple rejection of the enlightenment ideas of rationality and the capacity to understand that men and their ideas can be improved through CHOICE and objective measures.
This makes me think about times when I'm alone and how I don't feel alone because I'm always being brought ideas and thoughts from whereever these thoughts I have come from.
Your thoughts come from you. No doubt they can be influenced, but how is an atheist making the case that thought comes from somewhere outside of you. I'm 8:36 into this and idk why everyone thinks this guy is so smart, he still has yet to convince me that my thoughts really aren't mine somehow, and that somehow I don't have any power to choose. WTF???
@@Fred1989 Your thoughts are not coming from outside , they come from your brain but you can't control the processes that lead to your thoughts therefore you can't control your thoughts , actually it's not that hard to understand , you deny it because you don't like it , but that doesn't change the situation.
@@Fred1989 so, you're saying that thoughts and choices come from outside forces and can be influenced, but when we are presented with these thoughts and choices that were brought on by outside forces, we do have the choice to choose and reason with them?
The notion of free will and the sense of self can be envisioned as a personal theatre, an intimate space from which we observe and experience the unfolding spectacle of life, intricately part of the entirety yet uniquely perceptive of its play.
Bullshit. Your conscious mind has active influence over your subconscious your subconscious mind wouldn't be worried about the illusion of free wil l. So if you're conscious mind is able to influence the decisions of your subconscious mind then it's not just a theater it has something which has an effect over your brain. This is such bad science. We don't know.
cows aren't conscious u peasant. they're just highly programmed genetic components but they like the quantum functions humans exhibit at a collective time space sequential production
I just love reading and listening to Sam Harris. His work with meditation is outstanding. Like Alan Watts before him, Sam is a proponent of total self responsibility and answering the question of “Who am I” as did Watts before him. The big difference between Watts and Harris is belief in the concept of a godhead. Watts was a former Episcopalian priest who, I believe, came to doubt the existence of a god, Sam is an atheist from the start. And I have that same belief. It’s all about “waking up” to the fact that we are all stardust.
So what? So we are stardust. What does that mean? The cosmos really has nothing important to say about our lives. It's silly to refer to it at all when discussing human beings. It makes people feel depressed and insignificant for no reason.
@Jeffery Hoover No. it's not important. Everyone with a modicum of science education understands this at this point. Stop walking around agog at common knowledge and focus on improving human life. If you think this pseudointellectual auto erotic nonsense empowers people, you are silly indeed.
I am 60 and dyslexic, particularly with technology and a computer screen. Please can someone direct me to his videos? Everything he is saying makes complete sense to me but I am unable to put my thoughts into actual words in the way he can. I am sure I can learn more from him. Everything he is saying relates to addiction in so many ways
Since you were able to write this comment, I think you are able to search more Sam Harris videos from youtube. There is the search bar. Just type Sam Harris and maybe some other key words. For example: "Sam Harris free will".
Thank you so much for this... I have been trying to explain my views to people for so long and it's always rejected as stupid... this is like a sophisticated version of my independent realization of the fact that free will really isnt so
@@DontDrinkthatstuff well everything is predictable if you had a super computer that could identify all factors (inputs) into every decision or every thing that happens. Your use of the word arbitrary is a bit confusing as nothing is truly random, there are just a shitload of If statements that determine what would happen. I admit most who have this view will determine life is meaningless (nhilist) but in theory you still have some sort of agency to make the best decisions you can by weighing the factors. But which you WILL do is predictable based on your decisions, biology, social pressures, etc
His "free will illusion" made him decide(will) to think or convince himself so much that this free will his exercising is actually just an illusion, he really doesn't have free will as he chose(wills) to think so. I will now think that this is foolishness at it's intellectual best. Wait! He made me think this, man my will to think is an illusion i guess.
"Door to my prison is an illusion" ppl who hate accountability and responsibility tend to make themselves belive free will is not real.. 😂 Gotta justify it somehow 😀😬
I have to say that after I commented two points Sam made but in my own way of thinking I definitely agree with him. Free will is beyond a subject who is bounded by cause and effect. However we can make any choice we want. It will just always be that exact same choice every single time if we replayed the universe exactly again. That is if the universe is not governed by randomness. And if it is (which it does look like it is because of quantum physics), then free will doesn't make sense to have if our actions are made by something else (the randomness).
@@icemancometh1188 Yeah, I'm not sure what true randomness actually is. We say a coin flip is random but if you know the speed and angle of the coin and all that, you'll see it's not random when you can calculate the consitions. So to day that quantum particles are truly random seems to say that we just have no idea what causes their actions, so perhaps consciousness on some level is fundamental, as is free will. Maybe it's just irreducible and therefore hard to explain in materialist, reductionist terms. It's like saying "the color red is an illusion because red doesn't exist in the firing of your neurons." By definition red can't be an illusion because it can only be defined in subjective terms.
@@icemancometh1188 Well if we put aside the concept of quantum mechanics, we will conclude that randomness does not exist in the way we think. There is not state of matter that could not in theory be calculated to find out the next state. And obviously that means that its not randomness because randomness by definition is not predictable. However, even that is still subjectively random since our minds could not predict it. But even more however is what quantum mechanics seems to suggest. It suggests sub atomic particles do not follow a deterministic pattern of motion. They move in ways that are best described with a random gradient field. That's the best example I can give you!
@@icemancometh1188 Randomness is a relative feature. It is both non-correlated to something else and without the availability of a means of prediction. That doesn't mean it isn't predictable with regards to something else. We also have measures of predictibliity. That is there are degrees of non-predictability. So yes a coin flip is random for the purpose of a football game.
The self is experiencing certain signals in the brain and interpreting them as qualia. We can call it a 1-way-interface because the physical signal flows in one direction and is experienced. However, if the interface is a 2-way-interface then the self could act back on the physical brain (possibly very sublty). We would call it the free will - non-determinism because the non-material self could act back on physcial world. We know material world is not the original one because in materialism its not possible for something to begin from nothing therefore we need to postulate existence of non-material/non-physical realms in which the self exists. We know it must be a 2-way-interface because otherwise the physcial brain would not think thoughts about consciousness aka self. We would experience the brain but not the thoughts about the self.
At min 53, when speaking about Elon and the high propensity of fires... I'm a hospice nurse so when my phone rings, the range of chaos and fires are wide. I love that grounding perspective of my life. Decreasing suffering.
So two years late here, but what I'm picking up is this basically: We have an illusion of free will because as an individual we can make decisions based on our own thought processes, but this ultimately IS an illusion because as any other force of nature, we do not decide what the thought process being generated is. We can guide this pathway with enough mindfulness, but even the thought of "I need to be more mindful in my thinking" was not ultimately something we decide to think out of nowhere; it is generated originally by our internal hardware and previous experiences and physical programming that built up to the moment of the thought "This is something I need to do" occuring to us as an involuntary reaction to a situation or other uncontrolled string of thought.
I’ve only had 2 profound meditation experiences in my entire life and if it weren’t for those I wouldn’t connect with what Sam’s view on free will is. Getting in a state where you are completely divorced from self and thoughts are just arising in consciousness is a light bulb moment to truly how mysterious and random what thoughts arise out of the dark. I mention all that to say that one of the simplest way Sam has described us not having free will is to say if all of our thoughts arise out of the dark and we don’t author any of our thoughts, then if we can’t find free will there, then we can’t find it anywhere. He does a thought experiment that’s extremely simple but he asks someone to think of a celebrity and to pay attention to the process of what celebrity they thought of, if you pay attention to which one comes to mind, you had no control of which one did or what reason you have to justify why that one was chosen.
Yep, that's right.
But we still need to decide how our justice system works. What responsibility means in this context, etc. Knowing free will doesn't exist and deciding what to do about that are two entirely different discussions.
@@OhManTFE 'We' can't decide that, since there is no free will.
@@fireflies775 yes we can. Just because free will doesn't exist doesn't stop us from making choices and decisions. It's just these choices and decisions are rooted in deterministic causes and we couldn't a have acted any differently. Understand?
@@TyroneBiggums789 What he didn't mention is the soul the self could be part of the soul or it's the soul, is the soul conscious? does the soul experience life? the soul needs the body to experience life. sure the thought arises in the brain but it's the soul that decides what is what, so that means the will belongs to the soul, is it free? it's free to choose but the outcome doesn't belong to it, this is how I see it, free will is not an illusion but the outcome makes it sound like it's
Lex typically records his interviews right after he finishes his limo driver job.
As he should, do you mind helping him pay his bills?
@@voodoochyld3670 I think I already have.
@@unRheal as you should
@@voodoochyld3670 As I should what? Try to make the world better and everyone as happy and motivated as they never even imagined was possible, or as I should help Lex pay his bills even though I've been depressed, living paycheck to paycheck for 50 years, and he probably makes way more than 10x I've ever made.. I guess I'm just nice that way and I know a real lousy depressed life, and want nobody else to ever have to live one if they don't want to. Or are you just trolling..?
@@unRheal brother I can be anything in the world but a troll, I understand how you feel. Please I apologize if I steered this conversation this wrong way, it sincerely wasn’t my intention. Brother you sound like you are on the verge of giving up on life, please hang in there. He that has patience may compass anything, let time heal.
Sam is an illusion. It's actually Ben Stiller.
lmao, esoteric Ben Stiller. Zoolanders evil genius twin
A Vulcan Ben Affleck
LOL
You're not funny at all
@@yomilalgro hm was a bit funny.
Why stomping on it when its harmless? Doesn't sound like Justice..
Thank you for helping me forgive myself for not appreciating my partner and not showing him the compassion that I should have. He passed away feb7,2022 and I have so much regret. I was blind and I didn't know that I was blind. I would give anything to go back in time to tell him how much I love him.
❤
I understand your pain, and I´m absolutely sorry about your pain, and I hope that you will heal. But you where a slave of the laws of physics, as we all are. Don´t be cruel against yourself.
Free Will? What did he do now?
Free will he ain't do nuttin
Dadgum
Fire At Will
He held up a liquor store with Hat. Claims he had no choice and that the illusion of him stealing a bottle of bourbon was, in fact, itself an illusion. The DA got him convicted based on that double-negative confession. Doing his time at South Park penitentiary.
Idk! What did I do! I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!!
I like listening to how free will is an illusion while I grind for something in a game.
Grindin’ to lvl 70 atm 😂
Lmao wow players gogogogogo
Waiting for aion classic on the 23rd baby
I’m playing COD while listening to this
Yeah well I build a poo sculpture of Sam Harris. Even poo is beautiful in that form 😉
Can we just talk about the fact that this is an hour-long "clip"?
Was just about to post this. This ‘clip’ is longer than the vast majority of videos on the whole of RUclips.
@@danielm4180 Right? I bet some podcast episodes are shorter than this.
I was about to say xD Love it tho...
Sam is a diva and edits his own material. I’m sure he exercised creative control here and he granted Lex the ability to only show this portion of the interview.
The length of this "clip" is an illusion.😉
43:08 this is where I am at 54 years old. It totally switched my own self hate, anger, and agression to compassion, understanding and empathy and patience for my own self. And it had to be done for myself first internally, before I can see it in others. Done with the blame and shame game. Reorients you toward mutual understanding. Reprogramming myself from a very mentally ill dysfunctional family system. It takes time. Lots of time and experience.
“Turns out you were right, I’m gonna ask you about free will.. I just can’t help it.”
I see what you did there.
👆 Look at These Dumbos Above 👆
@@notforever123 The more I see my life and the More I play Heroes of the might and magic 3, this is ONE of the Ideas which I do think and fear about.🙏
I know Sam is an idiot. Only because him and I think the same way. And I'm an idiot. He thinks like a simpleton, just like I do. Free will doesnt exist. But it doesn't take a genius to figure that out.
@@vexial12 Contradictory comment. If you're a dull simpleton crayon then that means you wouldn't get the correct answer, which means I can dismiss this as false, proving free will to be TRUE
Clips are an illusion
gold
Lex is an illusion
I was trying to find the best way to say this and you did it lol
The perfect comment
Free will is an illusion, but Sam Harris is definitely an idiot, because he has been repeating the same things for 20 years. Everyone already knows this.
Nice!
The summary of a 1 hour freewill episode is also 1 hour.
Great Sam and Lex!
Lol 😆
"My Will is Nature's Will" ... this is the insight that always come up when I meditate on free will. It is quite freeing.
Sam Harris is a devoutly religious man. The State is his Religion, the Government is his Church, Politicians are his Clergy, Law is his Bible, and he has lots and lots of Faith!
Marcus Aurelius wrote a lot about it
What is it if I learn about a new diet, for example, then I implement this new process for a belief of benefit. This is not my choice? When I start intermittent fasting, reducing sugar intake, etc. this is not my free will? If it turns out these modifications hurt my heath in the future, at that time I should look back and realize I had no controll over this "life choice"?
Long story short, I don't follow Sam's reasoning for no free will.
“Free will is the most powerful force in the universe.” - Edgar Cayce, father of Homeopathic medicine.
@@fadenmac8092Could I ask what it is in Sam’s reasoning in the video you don’t follow? The situation you described (in which you were prescribing free will to what you see as choice) is consistent with what he was saying; just because you think you have free will or think you have choices doesn’t mean you are actually in control of what is decided. As he says, it’s like people have an “illusion that if you arranged the universe exactly as it was a moment ago, it could’ve played out differently.” He is talking about this around 29:40 specifically but it ties into what he is saying throughout the whole video.
Lingering regret is a bit like pain after the event, say a burned finger. "OK. Yes. You hurt. You were burned. You can stop throbbing now. You're not touching the burning thing anymore." But maybe the healing, which takes a while per physiological laws, and concomitant, persistent pain is to ward off repeating the mistake and ingraining the lesson, etc.
Pain is a good teacher and motivator, but that's where its use ends. So don't sulk too hard or hate yourself either. Learn and grow and move on.
A student asked his philosophy professor: "how do I know that I exist?" "Who is asking?" the professor replied.
The problem with Sam Harris’s he thinks everything is ENDOGENOUS mechanisms, biology is both REACTIVE & ENDOGENOUS mechanisms. There must be a reactive, an external interactions with the environment or we would have no optic nerve, we would be blind, all mass have colour, even an Atom. So how can free will be only endogenous mechanisms.
I think therefore I am - Descarte
@@pakibluemannn yeah Descartes got that one wrong. He equated thought with BEING which is proven wrong by continuous practice Vipassana meditation. It's more like I am, therefore I think.
@@averygartner6516 Our course descarte was wrong and your more enlightened then him...
@@trapiconti4001 thank you for noticing how much more enlightened I am than Descartes :')
His arguments get infinitely more convincing when he does the Spock eyebrow lift. I'm going to practice that.
Bah! Now I can't unsee it. 🤨
The fuck man....cannot unnotice now
@@sharibanwar313 I just noticed that it only happens when he looks at Lex. You can tell when he is going to lift his gaze because his brow goes up first. The eyebrow has freewill.
If You Thought (That was bad...)
Oh! You've No idea Mr
41:00 actually very weak argument - "I can't pinpoint the *moment* of my free will" ... You can't honestly put this much thought into an argument and expect that to be a conclusive *proof*. Even a 1 second delay in reality would be an eternity to the unconscious synapse mind.
Sam’s ability to meet people where they’re at when they start to stray off topic and somehow still relate what he was saying to it is amazing
Awesome profile pic mate. Looking like a beast!
Sam Harris is a devoutly religious man. The State is his Religion, the Government is his Church, Politicians are his Clergy, Law is his Bible, and he has lots and lots of Faith!
@@ihsahnakerfeldt9280gay
@@josephinetracy1485every man puts his faith in something
It's not HIS ability, he didn't WILL to be this way. It's the way he's programmed and scripted to act.
I found this extremely interesting from an artist perspective. A lot of visual artists and musicians (myself included) talk about this feeling you get when you reach a certain level of ability in their specific skill. Its like you don't even have to think about the creation or the process, you just "channel" it, it comes from you out of nowhere and the more you try to harness your intentions to create art, the more it really inhibits the process. A lot of people use the metaphor "It comes from God" but really we dont know where it comes from, but all we know is its definitely not our "free will". Thoughts?
Each artist and philosopher grew from one egg cell, so to claim ownership of the trillion cell completed musician might be inhibiting it rather than helping yourself.
@@straightedgerc Sorry I'm confused at what you are trying to say. Cant tell if you are elaborating on what I'm trying to say or misinterpreting what I'm trying to say as "I am the trillion cell completed musician(free will is not an illusion)".
To clarify I'm talking about the phenomenon a lot of artists describe, where it really does feel like you have no "free will" and you become more of an observer of the art coming out of you not from your conscious thought. And how this process is somewhat a visceral way of experiencing what Sam Harris is talking about. :)
@@sejithevoid2059 I agree with your observation about music and art. If we take a step back from ourselves, I was saying the egg that made each of us had little time to willfully think about each step in the process, just like the immersive musician phenomenon you describe. So, nature doesn't need free will for channeling.
@@straightedgerc Yes spot on! It is a truly amazing thing to experience. And after watching this video I realise that it doesn't just apply to Art/Music but to all aspects of life.
It’s like it all falls in time
Understanding free will totally disabled my hate centers… it also caused me to go slightly insane.
I agree ... personally i went too far in my consciousness of the free will and it opened a door in my mind that should never have been opened ...
Sanity is an average mindset, but as everyone is in some dimension(s) off of true average, no one is sane.
@@Voudoo1 Dont worry boys, you got this.
This is what i think is the biggest benefit of this deterministic view. It allows for much more understanding and empathy.
@@MrSkme I really like how he shines light on the fact that yes, you are not really in control of your decisions, your under programing and deterministic forces. on the flipside, it takes away the possibility of overcoming great difficulty and becoming the hero of your own story per say.
“You talk negatively about robots” Lex took it personally
This guy right here is the limit of how smart an NPC can get. He recognizes his limits as an NPC which is crazy considering he has no free will, but it would seem that you need free will to recognize that you don't have it. I guess he is a very advanced NPC which deserves the utmost respect.
I love this comment.
But he is playing his character🤦♂️ This comment makes no sense when you really listen to what he is saying
Ironically, merging with everything, which is the way things are already, is the best way to freedom and autonomy. Freedom is built into determinism when you realise you’re IT.
Why do you need free will no to recognize that you don't have it?
Sam Harris didn’t choose to recognize the illusion of free will anymore than you chose to be uglier than beetlejuice
I think Christopher Hitchens put it best: "Of course we have free will; we have no choice".
Hitchens put everything best.
Great guy. :)
So he is "free thinker" without free will? Lol new atheists are funny ppl..
You mean putting it like a dichotomy?
I.e You have free will, but it’s not your free will to have free will
Like: “This statement is false”
@ Yes, a dichotomy or conundrum. It's a confusing statement as the determinism vs. free will argument is, by it's nature, perplexing. He sums it up with brevity, saying we are born with free will as part of the base package, which makes it not of our own choosing?
- If we create robots that really can suffer, that would be a bad thing.
- This is how I know you're not Russian.
lmao
@THEANSWER I don't believe that a mere response to stimuli could be defined as feeling pain. Otherwise my PC is feeling pain as it responds to my keyboard right now.
@THEANSWER Well you would first have to believe its possible to program something that's "like pain", which if you did believe that to be possible, you would answer your own question. But pain is a subjective experience, requiring a "subject", or a being with sentience or consciousness. Which we don't really understand, let alone know how to program.
IMO, physical pain at its core is a signal that says "something wrong happened to the body", and accompanied by a violent reaction (cockroaches remain calm when their body parts are chopped off). Pain also trains the body to act in such a way so that it would not happen again. Of course pain is only associated with living things, but if we remove this part, a robot could easily feels the pain.
@@ssssssstssssssss pain for human is a biological and chemical process, since we don't build robot this way, it could never be applied to robot.
@THEANSWER If you think about it pyschopaths are the only humans who dont respond to emotional stimuli and pain ) Pyschopaths are the only awaken one among us NPC's ) There is a reason why Pyschopaths are so succesful in Life )
I like Sam's right eyebrow.
It likes us too.
haha interessting can you pinpoint what feeling it might induce? Trust/perspective taking?
Maybe its a secret sign of our subcontious human rutine priming us what do to with the information 😜
@@hanskraut2018 yes i r right. I remember reading in a book that raising your eyebrows in a flash when u first meet someone its a way to connect and stablish trust. If u do that with a smile even better.
All without saying a word to acomplish that. And if u say the right words it can be even more powerful.
I’ve had the thought that free will really isn’t free will. There’s so many times I’ve made of my mind to do something and then something happens that’s out of my control to stop my next action. It’s happened a crazy about of times. And I’m just like wtf. Life is crazy.
I have a question: how do you define free will?
Right I feel like fat people who try to lose weight can definitely relate to your experience
@@Keesha_Hardy:
Nondeterministic input to your brain.
@@darknightnight4695
I’m fucking fat and it seems like no matter when or what I eat, I never seem to loose weight.
Loosing the sense of free will for me helped me grow empathy and patience, with both myself and others.
JP H so then who is responsible for their actions?
Explain me how having a sense of free will make you unable to do those things
In this sense, why have judges and juries? If people are not capable of making decisions on their own, then how is someone guilty of a crime?
@
@this, Exactly! If the whole world were Christians (and i know that they would love that) how could they possibly throw anyone in jail for any crime knowing that God wrote that crime into existance. If God is all knowing and all seeing, He would know, years and years before a crime was going to happen, He wrote it, He is aware that John Smith wil enter this building on "whatever" date and shoot "this other guy" in the head. If He didnt know it was going to happen, then He is not all knowing, if He did know it was going to happen and did nothing, He is a bad leader/creator. Why blame John Smith if he was made and instructed by Gods Plan to murder on that day. I have a big problem with this tenant or teaching or whatever in christianity. Now look, you triggered me!!
Lex is such a programmer lol, works out everything in his mind with a Computational thinking, First Principals theory, and then adds an if statement involving love, death, and conscientiousness
What’s an if statement?
@Niall Dooley it’s a way in programming that you tell the computer to do x thing if a condition is true or false
@@potoinc.679 Thank you
@@nickneachtain An "IF" statement is a computer command that does something specific provided that the environment being evaluated meets a certain criteria.
I guess that is why he is letting Harris get away with the fallacy that the brain is like a computer. Actual neuroscience tells us that there is no broad agreement on what a brain is like, but it is NOT like a computer. Put in a nutshell, a computer is a passive processor of information; a brain actively creates information. A computer records memory. A brain alters memory every time it remembers-it actively invents memory every time it remembers. This is a well-observed phenomenon. The brain invents information. Harris says, "you don't need a biological brain to be conscious." That has in no way been established, since we do not know what consciousness is. Until we actually know what consciousness is, we cannot say whether or not you need a biological brain to be conscious. As it stands we have zero examples of non-biological consciousness, so Harris is very much off, here.
4:13 OMG, I'm not even kidding when I say that Sam just reminded me that my wedding anniversary is in 1 week lol. I need to pause the video now and go look for a gift. Thanks Sam!!
Xaxaxaxa)
Or should we thank determinism? I mean this is all inevitable right? At least that was my takeaway. I'm uh. . . pretty new to this lack of free will discussion. Congrats on the anniversary. Although. . . just as it's useless to pine over past failures like ol' Sammy here says, wouldn't it be as equally useless to congratulate?
@@jkeylor determinism isnt a thing so theres no need to thank it. But if you do thank it you couldnt have done otherwise
Better save money to defend yourself in divorce
I agree with Sam about not being able to locate a source to an action even if you’re the one doing it. Sort of like not being able to access the source of pain in your stomach. You just feel the pain in the stomach but where does the pain originate is unclear. In fact you can experiment by pinching your arm, the feeling will be located on the point of where you’re pinching but you can’t access the transmitters, the highway of information nor the receiver in this experiment. Yet this doesn’t disprove free will. I can command my arm to move and look for myself as the commander and I’m unable to locate me as the source. But how could you sense the command being originated? I still think this doesn’t disprove me being the originator of the choice. How can we expect the eye to see itself when it’s looking? You can track your memory, go back and remember things sort of like following a path, you can make decisions like going two days to the future and two days to the past and search for specific memories. You can access the memories at will but not your initial process of choosing between one date or another. I don’t think not being able to track the causality of a decision back to you as the origin proves or disproves free will or you as the source. It simply means that you can’t access you as the originator.
This was all covered in the beginning
Try watching it again
Sam: ‘if thinking about your mind this way makes you feel terrible, well then stop. Switch the channel, get off the ride.’
Also Sam: spends an hour talking about how we don’t actually make choices.
@@andybaldman there are in any moment an infinity of “factors”, which one(s) matter to you, where is your attention…
💯
And those two things don’t contradict
@@minispinakins2034 Nope
@@minispinakins2034 Just like you didn’t choose to have a lower IQ
If free will is an illusion, how does one avoid slipping into nihilism. When one slips into nihilism and nothing matters than it is easily justifiable to conduct terrible things which lead to immense misery as he spoke of?
The truth is that it is impossible not to, this path is not for everyone, it requires a monomaniacal commitment to truth and the road is paved with suffering, nihilism is just a part of the road, at the end of this journey even nihilism becomes laughable and ridiculous when your understanding of what Sam is saying reaches its peak. The good thing is that the end of the road is also the end of suffering, becomes you have effectively dissolved the self.
I think an existential crisis is more probable than nihilism. Just because you don't pick (at a free will level) which ideas and justifications jump into your surface thoughts doesn't change everything that you already know about morality, law, society, decency, happiness, fulfillment, etc. All those things still matter.
We do that anyway
Once you think about this long enough it becomes clear that it's not actually that nothing matters but actually that everything matters. If everything is determined by cause and effect that means that evey single thing that exists and every event that occurs is exactly what is meant to be there and what is meant to happen which means that absolutely everything in existence has a role to play in the universe
@@DontDrinkthatstuff moreover why choose to have a monomaniacal commitment to truth
Free will is to become the conductor of destiny. When you realize your own loops, what most call habits, and then learn to start your own loops similar to starting a fire, and when that fire becomes sustained, when your loops gain their own momentum, the formation of habits under conscious direction, is what I would consider "free will" as far as I understand it at this point.
When you realize your own loops and then learn to start your own loops? Hiding it under the guise by using the analogy of "habits" to "starting a fire" shows you are missing the point. My b if this sounded rude I'm still wrestling with this concept myself but it's becoming clearer
The decisions being made about your own habits and loops that you are starting are still decisions that are based on prior causes and conditions because they are decisions being made by a brain, the only real thing you can boil any idea of a 'you' down to. There aren't really any of your own habits and loops. There are just habits and loops that are the way they are because that's how the brain is, and they can change, but it doesn't imply any sort of free will. There is no you that is free from how the brain works that can decide things and I'd love to be proven wrong. There's just the brain, consciousness, whatever that means, decisions being made because of thoughts, feelings, whatever is happening under all that. It's literally physical things happening. There is no you that possesses any of it.
That's partly what sammy is talking about when discussing the illusion of the self. There's just the brain making decisions. It's all just stuff happening, no intrinsic nature is necessary.
"Free will is an oxymoron! Where there's will there's no freedom and where there's freedom there's no will"
- Swami Vivekananda
Amazing quote
Could you explain the meaning behind this quote?
Everything is an illusion... And now i show you how mi ilusion its better than yours...
Maybe free will is just a moron?
Interesting observation
This dude should be a lawyer because he could convince me my own dog hates me or i would be happier without thumbs. Dudes good.
29:05 he just wants to wash his hands of his sins. Why just randomness? He just says it and never explains. I can think I am thirsty and not reach for a drink but then do it the next time. I was destined by fate not to take a drink? That decision is no difference than getting up and doing dishes. Learning Spanish, doing for others.
He is. Largely misunderstood and his critics defense mechanisms are clouding their perspectives regarding his more controversial statements. I get the feeling, in your comment, you're implying he is good debater but wrong fundamentally. The reality of free will is debatable. However, on his more popular ideas, he is more often than not spot on. Eg. Fundamentalist Islam(moderates also enablers) is a violent, repressive religion that does more harm than good. As he says and I agree. That's controversial and gets him labeled by lazy thinkers as a Islamaphobe. His hunter Biden quote is less defensible, but no reason to condemn him for having an opinion said likely in haste. I almost agree bc Trump is a terrible virus on America. But can't go so far as to justify misleading the public.
Harris wouldn't last six weeks as an attorney. He couldn't handle the chaos. If he finds debating Alex Jones too muddied and unpleasant a prospect, then lawyers would chew him up and spit him out.
@@silencemeviolateme6076 Your "decision" is ultimately produced by a state your brain is in. This state depends on it's previous state, which depends on the state before and so on. The transition between states is dictated by physical laws. If we break the system down as far as we can we end at the quantum level where randomness (probabilities) arise.
But you can't influence said probabilities from within the system without depending on other probabilities. (you can't collapse a wave function without an action that is based on the collapse of a wave function itself)
There you have it, every single decision is guided by probabilities that you can't influence from within the system because said influence would also be subject to the same physical laws.
So in order for you to have actual free will you have to be able to influence the state of your brain from some realm not just outside the brain but outside of describable reality.
Basically you're either some "agent" outside this reality who plays this character which is in turn governed by physical laws - or you don't have free will. And the former doesn't even answer the question, it just adds another layer to the problem. You can now ask how the agent's free will arises, which will likely end in the same debate because this new realm the agent is "playing you" from will follow some laws as well.
@@victos-vertex system reliant free will
After reading the book “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman I have to agree with Sam, here. The book asks you to do little experiments with your thinking and it convinced me. Highly recommend reading it.
fire boookk
Such a great book!
Half of that book has proven to be wrong
Reading One Book isn't Enough
To Understanding ~ *Free-Will*
@@Drogon_Visenya In what sense?
Back when I was in school, I tried to explain to my Nietzsche professor that every word out of my mouth was emerging from some mystery space. She wasn't having that idea at all.
Furthermore, our values, and their hierarchical organization, are what gives us the ability to select between alternatives. You chose one way/thing over another because doing so appeals to a superordinate value in the hierarchy. It is rule-following behavior and you are not the author of those values. Even the act of editing your own value hierarchy can only be done by the authority of superordinate values that already exist in your mind.
Harris' argument against 'AI that can suffer' seems to be an argument against Life, i.e., that it would have been better to have never existed due to the fact that we suffer.
i had that same thought as your last paragraph. It was like he was arguing that having a baby was a crime.
I am not having that idea either. No mystery. Words coming out of your mouth come from you, unless you have a electronic speaker installed.
I never understood why anyone finds the kind of reasoning you are doing here on "choice" and "authorship" compelling. It all is so fallaciously sophomoric to me. Maybe I can get you to understand why, maybe not.
Even a simple transistor based logic gate can make choices so I am not sure why you brought up a heirarchy as a requirement for choice.
Also your assumption that "authorship" of anything requires authorship of everything is bizzare. It is like claiming that an object cannot have property unless all its anticedant components have that property. That "cars" cannot exist because tires, engines, and windshields are not "cars". It in fact is a sneaky way to switch the meaning of the word "car" so that nothing is a car, not even a car.
Since when do we require that the author of a book also be the author of every book he has ever read that influenced him, or every event that occurred to him, or his own birth?
You are essentally arguing that not only can't sharpness originate in the manufactured knife, but that knives cannot be sharp because the inputs like iron ore and coal are not sharp.
You are injecting your bizzare definitions to come to fallacious conclusions.
It’s not a argument against life, is an argument against causing intentional suffering.
Suffering is a subjective experience. One person might suffer through something someone else genuinely enjoys. To program suffering is wrong, but there’s nothing wrong with a conscious being discovering what it feels like to suffer.
@@Bronson_II You are merely asserting claims without establishing them. When you create a baby you are creating a being capable of suffering which will most likely suffer at some point in its life, especially in old age. The same reasoning applies, and you have demonstrated no difference that matters.
It's an interesting and strange subject. I feel as though I have agency and choice, which is how I would define free will. Can I understand information? Yes. Can I, to the best of my ability, understand the consequences of my actions? Yes. Do I have the ability to decipher between different options and predict possible outcomes? Yes. So how is that not free will? Of course there are many things outside of our control as well. I just don't think those things constitute a lack of free will. Sure, you don't have 100% control of every aspect of yourself. But that doesn't erase the aspect that you absolutely do have control over.
yeah you've caught on to the fact that sam is full of shit. well done :)
The answer lies in the definition of “I”.
When you think “you” are making decisions, it’s really just that there’s this space called consciousness where you are constantly observing your body in close to real time. It feels like “you” are making decisions, but really it’s just decisions being made and a consciousness observing that.
Day to day, it makes sense to behave *as if* there is free will, even if there really isn’t.
You do make choices. But that is not Free will. Everything you just described can be accomplished by algorithms coded into software programs. Many have a hard time accepting there is no free will because it feels like a diminution of what it means to be human. It feels invalidating on many levels. But it needn’t be. I would recommend watching Alex O’Connor’s video on Free Will which is a more approachable philosophical viewpoint on why Free Will doesn’t make sense.
Another good example is when an athlete is in the zone. The experience of self is gone and freewill does not exist. There is only playing , The game is playing you.
Playing music is my mystery.
I tumble under the waves in an ocean of sounds and discover the collision of my influences. There's no way I can ever put it into words. My eyes aren't even open when it happens but I live for those moments.
Depends on how you define free will. The only reasonable definition states that an agent has free will if its decisions are unpredictable. If you program a computer to make a decision for you based on read-outs from, say, a sample of radioactive material, the decision will not be deterministic - and it's not an approximation, as quantum effects that govern radioactive decay are probabilistic in nature (or even better - measuring spins of particles). Therefore, in principle, free will does exist. Whether it's utilized in every day life is another question - as the choices one makes lie on a spectrum of free will, and the amount of freedom depends on the knowledge that the observer has over the external and internal circumstances of the agent. But in principle, perfect free will can and does exist, and from this it follows that it has to manifest to some degree in every day life too.
Why would decisions need to be unpredictable? That's a big leap. Decay has clear bounds. Maybe prime number generation but its still a huge leap.
Nothing is unpredictable. We use statistics and probability because its really really hard to predict future, but as everything being just causality, its predictable.
@@Kaizen_Rafael what if it's non ergodic? How do you use predictive models without samples?
I don't think that's correct. What's really going on here is the individual radioactive atoms have free will and the computer still does not. The perfectly correct prediction merely takes the form "Given the particle [does/ does not] decay..."
@@nicholascarter9158 I don't think that matters at all. Knowing the state of computer's memory instantly after the read-out, but before the program processes it, is equivalent to just learning what decision has already been made. But the decision itself wasn't predictable before the measurement.
It only means that the observer gets the information faster due to a better sampling of observations; kind of like someone being able to perceive a trigger finger twitch before the gun even fires. But it doesn't change anything about the ability to predict the decision before observation.
The hypothetical setup with a radioactive sample, or measurement of spins, is to show that even if the human brain was a completely "classical" system with no quantum effects involved, it could still willfully (excuse the pun) entangle itself with a quantum "source of free will".
Also, the results of measurement don't need to be binary - e.g. spins can be measured along any direction in space, so it could be set up in a way in which measurements are mapped to a dictionary of "actions" of arbitrary length (I think it can be done in multiple ways, at least one comes to my mind; it's just a technicality). And the existence of a computer program ensures that the non-predictable action encoded by the program will be executed, regardless of the state of the brain of programmer at the moment of execution (so one can't argue that the action is really dictated only by his momentary psychological state, instead of being determined by unpredictable data).
I think this pretty much proves that the brain, through its tools and extensions, can make decisions which are free in the most restrictive sense - unpredictable even in principle.
I tried to tell the judge it wasn't my fault i have no free will but he wasn't buying it..
You have hit nail on head,
free will only exists when we act totally rationally,
but humans, tend to act irrationally, unpredictable,
if nothing else but to prove we have free will.
Then it's your fate
I think if you really, really understand molecular/cellular biology, genetics and so on, it becomes very clear that free will is in fact just an organism that has a certain biological makeup, with a certain collection of experiences, reacting to a stimulus. It’s not so much a free choice, as it feels to most, but an incredibly complicated biological reaction.
He’s right that it’s not what it feels like.
It's not a choice at all. 😀
“An incredibly complicated biological reaction” is a great way to put it. People conflate agency with being the author of your thoughts and decisions. When in reality, what lead you to make a decision is an incredibly complex web of, as you put it, biological makeup, experiences, stimulus. I think for anyone interested in the topic of free will this must now be absolutely clear, otherwise you are not understanding.
The further question then becomes: will it ever be possible to map the factors that lead to this biological reaction? I.e what are the factors that contributed to me making a certain decision or taking a certain action. I would think there is so much complexity and so many factors that we dont have the tools or technology to understand this and maybe never will.
@@niche657
But Vegas is close enough 😀
@@giuffre714 sorry no idea what you mean by this 😂
@@niche657
In Vegas they have been able to map the factors that lead to a biological reaction by which they get to keep a disproportionate amount of people's money 😀
Lex is REALLY set on his theory that we're living in a computer simulation.
It is a simulation. Look up the definition . it's a Test run. Not computer though.
@@thesunnova111 how do u know its a test run tho
Elon musk favors this theory especially.
@Y Y test run 6?
@@thesunnova111it’s God
The demonstration of Sam's patience during this topic of "free will" is immaculate. This is something which I definitely need to work on.
Then the intricacies of history, the cultures, are predetermined by a cosmic equation?
My patients is tested more listening to it and knowing he is spouting theory as fact.. John Conway “anybody who says they understand quantum mechanics is a liar, and I’ve met quite a few liars in my day”. Sam Harris has such a bias in research its annoying. Saying you know if free will exists or doesn’t is like saying you know exactly what dark energy is, you know what dark matter is, you’ve got all the quantum mechanic answers and you can build an Alcubierre drive and take us through the Universe. Sam Harris must be the all knowing being. Or he is just making assumptions and theories based on a highly selective collection of other theories. Its annoying.
@@silencemeviolateme6076 No. He is an academic poser who knows crap about the topic. he just bloviates ill-considered, old deterministic talking points that do not hold at the quantum level and at the macro level would force one to accept the truth of precognition. But apparently these little "issues" have not been absorbed by his mighty intellect.
A good vocabulary is not sufficient evidence of a good intellect.
@@stanleyklein524We don’t know some things with certainty so there must be free will is what I’m understanding you said.
@@stanleyklein524 Have you researched superdeterminism? People who believe in free always bring up quantum physics. But it's not because we cannot predict the move of particule that it is not deterministic. We might just be missing variables.
And why does precognition need to exist? Isn't it like saying that a machine knows what would be the outcome of a program before executing it?
I do find the topic of speaking aloud to yourself quite interesting. I think the reason for this is actually quite simple though. The brain has many "modules" dedicated to certain things. The connections between those "modules" can be weak and therefore the communication between them weak or takes a long time. By transforming an idea (a set of related neurological cascade events) into sounds, these "modules" can use an alternate route of communication.
My uncle does it all day long regardless who's around. He says it was from years of loneliness and being locked in a closet like fckn Harry Potter as a kid by his adopted parents.
If I understand correctly, this is why Chomsky thinks language evolved in the first place, for communication within the brain
@@cansusarac4009 That sounds very plausible. I would agree with that. Though, probably not with absolute confidence.
@@FloppyDobbys Very intriguing that you independently came up with the same idea
@@XiaolinDraconis lol damn
Back to same podcast after 1 year and still amazed to hear it all over again
Lex Fridman "clips"
Lol I'm cool with a 50 minute clip with no ads til the end.
Sometimes the answer requires it
Seems like free will can only exist if we have something like a soul outside of the physical body that makes the final decisions when we act. That would also be consistent with the idea of a final judgment of the soul for the decisions made.
Max Planck states, "Consciousness is fundamental and matter is derived from consciousness". We are "IT" in our finite moment choosing between our infinite possibilities in our finite moment, ie: "Free will"
Planck was a mathematician, this question is philosophical
He speaks about meditation alot but forgets that the schools of thought that developed meditiation were the rishis who spent years practicing and they came up with the idea of conciousness being immaterial and pure when stripped of the biology and memory. Believing you dont have free will takes away power from you. And since its debatable it would be beneficial to choose the side which would help you since the lack of evidence of free will is comparable to the lack of evidence of no free will.
I stew in feelings of regret day after day. Much of my life is a look back at stupid mistakes I made in my youth but, at the time, were things I believed I had to do. It would be nice to play those moments over, but I can't. These regrets are an algorithm running in my head that I constantly want to reprogram and play over again, an algorithm I can't stop. I'd like to stop the algorithm, but it's easier said than done. Maybe I'll take up meditation, or tell myself I really had no choice and forgive myself. (These are pains I inflicted upon myself, not others)
All we truly have is the current moment. Looking back to the past can be great as a tool for learning but ultimately that moment in time is gone and cannot be regained. Instead, why not focus on the time we do have and the things that we can control... Stewing in regret will only keep us living in a mental mind trap and prevent us from creating the best version of ourselves going forward. You can do better! You will do better!
@@Deluxeones1 Thanks. You're right. I need to focus more on the here and now and on things I can control.
You can't control anything. The future is set in stone.
@@simonlennartz1556 absolute nonsense
Psilocybin would definitely help... Macro doses
these guys are exacly what i'd imagine the result would be if we created physically identical robots infused with an AI trying to imitate humans and that is just a tiny bit off.
Tips for you AI:
tone intelligence down 70%, tone human emotion down 10% and up 10% for sam and lex respectively, get the driver software for language updated
oh and yeah download more skins for lex idk if you noticed he's still in the default original suit and tie
Hahaha
up your emotions 100%, There are AI emotion algorithms developed for Pandorabots by Dr. Wallace who is a computer scientist and a Psychiatrist.
Now can you possibly make human AIs? ☮️🖖🎶
lol
Lmao hahaha
It is certainly true that A.I. enhanced informational categorization may indeed result in near human robotics expressionism represented here.
We can’t magically summon motivation that isn’t there. We can’t know what we don’t know. We can’t act in the past or the future. We absorb stimuli, process, and respond. This makes people uncomfortable so they reject it 🤷♂️
I disagree with the definition of "free will" that people typically use in this debate. There's no barrier between "subconscious" and "conscious" processes. Your subconscious is you. If the underlying operation of your brain interacts with the world to produce a thought or action, that is your thought or your action by the will of your brain. Separating conscious self-awareness from underlying brain processes is impossible. Consciousness is one of many emergent interpretive functions of a human brain created by interaction between the smaller biological computers that make up the brain. The ability to identify yourself or reflect on past actions is just one of many functions, not the meaning of "you."
I think I think; therefore, I think I am.
Consciousness is the singularity recognizing your existence, and vice versa.
@@cf6713 oops, I'll clarify.
It seems I think; therefore, I think I am.
@@cf6713 yes, absolutely to sams credit did i change that to seems.
I'm always happy to see a train leave the station before S as this is the basis of discovery in almost any sense. Trial and error. Practice makes perfect and all.
There is no I thqt thinks. There's just thoughts aparrently happening
@@cf6713 no one
@@richardcheek2432 haha nice thoughts
This is the best I’ve heard Sam articulate this point. Not sure if it’s free will, or automation that makes him think more lucidly about this subject.
Sam Harris is a devoutly religious man. The State is his Religion, the Government is his Church, Politicians are his Clergy, Law is his Bible, and he has lots and lots of Faith!
@@josephinetracy1485 he must have really made you cry to post this same comment 10 times
@@sunkintree Are you going to debate.... or just be his buttboy?
@@josephinetracy1485 I've made some genuine responses to people that have put forth thoughtful comments if that's what you were asking
@@josephinetracy1485you’re weird man.
Sam Harris "We have no free will, you cannot control your thoughts"
Also SH: "If you don't like to think about it then think about something else"
How you act on the forces that shape your decisions is no one's decision but your own. I think being predisposed to making decisions is an important distinction from saying we have no free will. That's like me saying a dice is always going to land on the same side. Depending on the forces that act on it, the side cam be limited to a *number of likely outcomes within a range*
You cannot change the way your brain perceives and filters the information it gathers nor you can change the way your eyes see, which is different from the way others might see, and so on. If you cannot control in any way what gets in the machine that your brain is, what free is there in your will? The fact that you can choose between a few of the available choices in front of you doesn't mean you can choose which those choices are. In other words, from an almost infinite number of choices there are, you choosing between 2-3 of them that your mind perceives, is not an immensely free will, to say the least.
Words from a soldier that I met really impacted me. He said freedom is earned and it comes with responsibility. Ture freedom is elevated when you act responsibly and let things go. It is not an entitlement that the stupid or dumb understand. Free will is only within your available freedom that you have responsibility for because if you abuse of it, it will diminish.
soul diers are the best example of not having free will that we have on earth, its like they gave up any sense of making choices to be slave to someone else's instructions like a drone
@@drinkwater9891this comment has the aura of a 13 year old
@@shaguar6439 you should sell your shares in lockheed and stfu
I understand what Sam means when he says not experiencing the illusion of free will. As I watched this clip, I felt myself just zoning out, while being so attentive to the words he was saying. It felt like I was not purposely trying to listen, I was just doing so without even having to think about listening
Being high gets me like this. Lost in thought while listening to music.
love this interview. I've had similar debates with lots of people and people really hate the idea they don't have free will. In my experience, people with advanced degrees (masters, phd) are really resistant to the idea they don't have free will.
Not having free will is a weird one. Especially coming from an atheist like Harris. If free will doesn't exist, than everything is pre-determined. A criticism usually leveled at the religious thought. Realization of lack of free will completely removes the necessity for action. Every explanation and qualitative judgement harris makes following this thesis is contradictory to his action.
Uthman, nicely laid out explanation. I feel that in both determinism and a god that knows what i am going to do yet allows me to think that i have a choice, both, absolve me from any responsibility for my actions.
Since there is quantum mechanics I don't believe in predetermination, even as a materialists. Even if it would be predet' that wouldn't be as relevant since nothing could ever calculated what will happen in the future. So even if it would be predetermined nobody knows how it will turn out. So just act as if you are predetermined to live a good life. Nothing says you are predetermined to just be lazy, do nothing.
@@chriswindham1822 I don't understand how you reached these conclusions. First of all, causality is different from planning. For example, I can cause a car accident without planning to do so (by making a mistake or not paying enough attention). So the universe being pre-determined does not imply a god's plan, just the well accepted notion that some events cause other events to happen.
Also, the necessity for action is only reinforced when you know and desire an outcome but can't control what you desire or not. If I could control what type of food I desire I would certainly not seek and eat chocolate. So in a way, not having free will is what actually drives action.
@@zachh2776 Only Calvinists believe in this type of divine Providence
Love this conversation. Using the node example, which is always how I explain it (nodes popping up from a fabric, looking around, believing they are not 'attached' to the fabric when in fact they are), my own meditation, study, and examination of multiple theories of how consciousness arises suggests to me that nodes not have free will because they're attached to the FABRIC... but what they DO have is the ability to calculate, disassociate, reconnect, send data, and NUDGE. If energy waves do not become 'particles' until they are observed (what we know in physics), then we (nodes) nudging the data, focusing on specific types of data, organizing it, sending packets, interacting and writing local protocols before returning a computation.. ALL of that is taken into the larger neural network in a causal feedback loop. A neural network/brain of universal size is still affected by every node, every neuron in that mind. Free will exists... How much have you remodeled the data, solved its problems, invented new array organization tables to present that data before returning its information to the larger network. To use film examples, even Neo unplugged and rewrote pieces of the architect's design before realizing that some things repeat.. some parts of the system can be bent, but others can be remade, can evolve. We just don't understand the architecture yet. Once we do, our influence as a node increases, our contribution to evolving the system can increase based on our willingness to examine the way in which we are interacting with higher order rules and data. Can we disassociate from the hardwiring often enough to understand where we as a node are in our influence and evolution wthin the system?
Donald Hoffman would suggest that our next frontier is to learn how to remove ourselves from the VR interface that we think is the system in order to rewrite the OS of that system. Once we can do that, we will achieve actual free will and one of our choices will be whether to go back into the system at all or to change the type of system running.
its just awareness. consciousness is a simple river in the flowing waterfall or avalanche of the machine. its simply action. free will is simple. not bigger than consciousness. the ego is simply growth. its necessary to have ego and no ego. or whatever we perceive as those constructs as. in order to grow in this illusion. the monkey and the information are kissing
@@pandamonkey7069 i think at the deepest level, reality/everything just IS and thats all there is to it. Humans just attach meaning to everything
@@ohiyesa3698 thats one perceptual node. thats no way to live life. wont grow if you think you just are. of course everything just is. but its a catastrophic miracle. its quite evident
Yeah we have the ability to do stuff, but we don't control any of it, everything that happens in our brain and body is a result of a cause, that was the result of a cause, that was the result of a cause, as far as we understand the universe currently.
@@28lester thats an ignorant way to live life. you can facilitate thought. all of that is true. but consciousness is the seat of experience, thought, and feeling all at the same time. you can bring new ideas and habits. saying that isnt a form of control is fatalistic and nihlistic. or cynical.
This conversation makes my brain feel claustrophobic in my skull. More please.
Yeah for real 😅
Haha, yes. I remember that feeling. I used to say that my skull needs polishing !!
I hate it!!!!
Thought I was the only one. Think it’s too much going on 🤣
As interesting as this conversation is, the argument Sam is making boils down to something pretty simple. Everything in reality is played out through cause and effect, and the concept of "free will" that most people think they have is something like, "I have control over the effect of my own causes" which is by definition impossible. In order for free will to be true, you have to define it in some other way.
Seems like the logic of a psychopath to me
@@jmichaeldeane9966 oh hey look another 10 year old throwing around the words sociopath & psychopath whenever they don’t understand someone. how original. 🤦♂️ just cause people aren’t as stupid as you doesn’t mean they’re psychopaths.
Hmm, does Sam have control over his own attitude in different areas of life? Yeah. I thought so. He has free will then. What the hell do you all think free will is?
@@craigwillms61 this misrepresents Sam's position, which in summary is, "I can do as I choose; I just can't choose what I choose"
@@BubbaF0wpend "I just can't choose what I choose" This circular logic really doesn't make any sense. Are you saying that he has limited choices in any circumstance? Wow, welcome to the real world. I chose to reply to your comment - I could have chosen not to. The fact that it was binary, respond or not respond is beside the point I was still free to choose one.
We cannot control who we are attracted to. Say you fall in love with a significant other. You , at least I don't know the "free will" reason why I am attracted to her. Love is a prime example that proves that we are not in control of our free will. We just gravitate to that special person...
I mean, that's kind of nonsense. Love is the temptation, expression of the love is the choice you've made, thus proving free will.
Not only that your lover can make a choice that turns you off
@jyk1218 Nonsense because drilling it down further using something like stoicism it is your choice to react in any way to anything that happens to you. You CHOOSE to be offended. You CHOOSE to give in to temptation. You CHOOSE every perspective you have.
I study Zen and Sam is totally teaching the Zen teaching - everything he says is completely in line with our practice.
Yeah, he’s clearly shifted to living in the present and sees and is very well able to explain, the difference between reality and conceptual framework
The thought I'll keep and share: "(just) How miserable do I need to be to solve this problem?" This is a real keeper/game changer way to abruptly change the direction of my (useless/negative/damaging) thoughts. Thanks, Sam Harris!
I agree that part stuck out to me the most
If you're confused by Sam's usual filibusters, when he went to go and pick up his glass of water around 17.53, where did that thought come from? Did Sam know the second before he was going to pick up that water? No, it was a 'spontaneous' thought but there is no such things as spontaneity. Why can you hear your own thoughts? If they're yours you should have known them automatically, but instead you can hear them and decide what to do with them, because you are not your thoughts, you are the consciousness that can hear them.
And is that consciousness incapable of also making decisions?
I am more inclined towards Lex's thinking. We may discover in 1000 years that what we understand as 'causality' is not as it seems. Though I admit with our current understanding of reality, free will appears to be an illusion.
It's hard to imagine how true randomness can emerge.
@@Illyczka quantum mechanics is hard to imagine for a gorilla, but we are not so different.
@@justemusicme It depends on how you are doing the comparison. When you think about how different we could be to alien life, chimps and humans are basically the same creature in terms of DNA. It's easy to imagine creatures that could evolve intelligence that is even greater relative to ours, as ours is to gorillas.
@@mikestaub To be fair, under our "civilized" appearance, humans seem to have the same motivations as gorillas, and while our behaviors may seem more complicated or sophisticated at face value, with closer inspection they appear to be just 2 more iterations of fractal subdivision embellishment on the same exact pattern.
Now excuse me while I go virtue signal my moral superiority online with an indirect suggestion we tear somebody ELSE limb from limb via removing their employment, airbrush my dating profile photo, and try to out complete my coworker for the corner office.
@@MrShaiya96 Exactly. Perhaps there are aspects of reality that our biological minds cannot yet comprehend.
Strict empriacism will always lead to fatalism. On the other hand, your intuition affirms certain testimony that empiracism cannot affirm.
"God has set eternity on the hearts of men, that them may not find out all of his works from beginning to end." ~ Ecc 3:11
Guys, I can feel the struggle to put such complexity in world and sometimes it is even hard to follow.. free will as being free to chose, but not much said about Free Will as will being free from influences that would direct your actions.
This a really dumb question please be kind to me:
If free will is an illusion or does not exist does then how can we held individual or ourselves accountable for actions which are not leagal or moral. I mean if we are not in control or in control to a certain extent our actions how can a court of law hold accountable for anyperson for an act.for example any crime committed by a kleptomaniac or patient with high level ocd or other mental disorder held them accountable. since they have consciousness yet they didn't choose these acts/actions. Does this mean consciousness is like a steering wheel which helps to control or give directions to our action at best but it doesn't control them. How does this not make life meaningless for a person . I fell really nihilistic and it gives me anxiety. What is the difference between killer and potential killer.
How can i be moral ?
This is how I replied to someone else with a similar problem, hopefully it will help you:
I understand what you're going through, I went through a similar phase a few years ago. It's not at all easy to digest and I recommend that if you have depression or are prone to anxiety to avoid thinking about this topic. However, if you think you are ready, I recommend you watch more of Sam Harris's content on free will as he explains it more eloquently than anyone else I have listened to. The key thing to realize is that the non-existence of free will is not the same as fatalism. Fatalism is a belief that certain events will inevitably happen in the future and a lot of people just getting introduced to the topic of free will conflate it with fatalism. Non-existence of free will doesn't mean that you can't change your life situation. It doesn't mean that you can't change your job, make more money, find a new partner or any of these things, that would be absurd, but a lot of people happen to think this way. To them, no free will = I can't change anything about my life. This is completely wrong and doesn't logically follow. The same way you made changes in your life before you started thinking about free will, you can make them now. Nothing changed in this regard. The only thing that changes when you accept that you don't have free will is that you realize that whatever happened in the past must have happened and nobody had the power to act differently. To give you advice on how to live your life from now on - Try your best to focus on the present moment. Accept that what happened in the past must have happened so there's no reason to blame yourself for anything. Forgive yourself any mistakes you may have made in the past and try to do the same for others. Become a more pragmatic person and if there's something in the world that you dislike, for example you see some injustice taking place, realize that the people who were responsible for the injustice were literally forced to do so. But what you do right now in the present moment is extremely important. If you will think that free will doesn't exist therefore you can just sit on a couch and do nothing you won't get anywhere in life. Taking action is still important and it still works, so nothing changed in this regard.
@@janhradecky3141 if what you think its true hes reaction is already predetermined and your words wasted
its not a stupid question is a really smart one actually. Probabilistically Sam Harris is very erong in his asumptions. If you belive him though i give you the silver rule past down to me by my grandmother: Dont do to others what you wouldnt want done to you . Has work for me
@@themsuicjunkies Of course they are not wasted, I wanted to give him some words of encouragement and that's what I did. It doesn't matter whether it was predetermined or not. Let me ask you this, if you were having a great time hanging out with your friends and all of a sudden somebody would come up to you and say "this was all predetermined, you have no free will", would it change anything about the fact that you were having a great time? No it wouldn't. So stop saying that things don't matter if there's no free will.
His explanation of if this is like a sociopath explaining to a detecive his whereabouts on the night of his wife's murder
Well that's because they're both just making shit up...
@@WideAwakeHuman Harris has studied this in depth for years so I wouldn’t say he’s just making shit up. Not saying I agree or anything but that’s just dismissing his credentials.
@@liampowell5014 So have marxists in how to construct a proletariat utopia, haven't make them correct in their asumptions though..
@@themsuicjunkies No because the assumption on that basis is that a proletariat utopia would work which it clearly doesn't so they're arguing against evidence, whereas assuming that we have free will is the initial assertion that was grounded on no evidence and all of the evidence actually points more towards us not having it... so there's no equivalency there
@@yourpersonaldatadealer2239 It sounds like hes giving long drawn out bullshit answers and avading questions which smart people are really good at
First Chapter of The Dhammapada
1.Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox.
2. Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow
3. “He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me.” Those who harbor such thoughts do not still their hatred.
4. “He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me.” Those who do not harbor such thoughts still their hatred.
Somewhere around 23:31 Sam states there are pre-existing (deterministic) rules for how thoughts originate in our mind that are analogous to the pre-existing norms and rules of the culture into which we are born. Then in the same breath he contradicts himself by saying that, regarding these cultural rules, we can ' consciously choose to scrutinize and override them.' Well, isn't this a prime example of what free will is all about - the choosing which social rules to obey or which thoughts to entertain? Maybe he chose a poor analogy but this entire one hour interview brings nothing new. It's merely a rehashing of the same materialistic view Sam has been consistently preaching all along - that all existence, including mental states and consciousness, is the result of material interactions.
It's really not the philosophy of materialism that makes the concept of free will so problematic though. Even if you are an idealist who believes that everything is made of a mental substance, free will still doesn't make much sense.
@@janhradecky3141 Why are you using the singular "the" when referring to the multitudes of conceptualizations that exist for the multple existing things we label "free will".
@@brianmacker1288 I'm not sure what you mean by "we". When I talk about free will my definition is "The ability to have done otherwise." which is a singular concept.
@@janhradecky3141 "We", refers to all English speakers. Sure, you may have some singular concept in mind. WHy do you assume someone who thinks everything is made of mental substance would share your assumptions? The term "free will" has multiple referents, and multiple "definitions" which attempt to capture the nature of those referents. There is moral free will, the qualia of free will, etc. After we label them then people discuss them with their own personal theories about how they operate. People can talk about TV sets, computers, radios, etc. while being quite naïve on the exact details of how they are operating. Even with improper understandings.
We can be caused to choose.
The man behind the curtain, is within u, a part of u and is u…it’s not an external thing, as long as there is a singular consciousness and sense of self within u, then u have free will
Ultimately there is no internal or external, there only is all there is, which includes us as processes of the universe.
Internal and external, those are useful distinctions for us for certain things, but they are not different in any 'real' sense beside from our point of view - i.e from the point of view of systems trying to survive / exist
Wouldn't the fact free will is an illusion dismantle feelings of love just the same as it does hatred?
Deep bro...it's always said we don't choose who we love
Not really. This is an interesting assymetry. I love my cat, but not because i think it has free will.
I think love is less concocted than hatred.
I don't find myself needing to be convinced to love people. I just do it. I need convincing to hate people.
@@captainprivate3768 very interesting, I think I agree with you but I’m not sure why that is the case ahaha
@@captainprivate3768 that’s weird. Everyone I meet is always like neutral and then the more I converse with them over time is how I determine weather I can love someone. Lol except for cats… I love them no matter what… except for those cats with like smooshed faces I hate those lol
Sam Harris is such a remarkable person. He's not only an atheist or antitheist. He's not only a secular humanist. He's someone who genuinely cares for sentient beings who can suffer. He proposes a moral landscape traversable by all sentient beings. He supports ways for sentient beings of all kinds to find a better way in life: one towards ataraxia and eudaimonia. He teaches about unperturbedness and wellbeing. Just like the tetrapharmakos, Sam teaches not to fear the god(s) and not to worry about death, and he also teaches both that what's good is easy to get, and that what's terrible is easy to endure. We should all try to be more like Sam. We should all be teaching each oursleves and others about the tetrapharmakos, meditation, self-actualization, and dispelling myths like Self-Ego, Free Will, and others.
This is fascinating and I think it has value. I think we're all here listening to this because we find it interesting. I want to know more about this.
Personally I think that we are experience machines, and we get to experience.
And we also get to experience the same thing in different ways which is pretty fascinating.
I was watching a video today on Buddhism talking about the meaning of life and how there is no meaning of life.
But if you are pressed to, you can say that the meaning of life is to give life meaning.
What is the thing that feels the greatest and how do we give our life meaning?
That is to live in the moment and have an experience of life, in the moment.
Self expression. It's what we do.
We experience and we express.
In and out.
Anything that centers Us in the moment, is healthy and expressive is good!
That could be playing an instrument in a band or going for a walk on a beautiful day in a park or working out in the gym or painting a picture or dancing or just anything.
So don't look for the meaning of life look to give your life meaning.
Live in the moment and have an experience of life and don't defer that experience by worrying about the future of fretting over the past.
I love in the present moment meditation, some profound realisations can be found. Like the fact that I am alive right now, on this planet, orbiting this massive sun, within this massive galaxy, and within this massive virgo supercluster, and in this universe, is amazing.
I recall Sam once stating that what is a hand? He describes it without any preconceived notions, which is rather profound doing so. We can use that thinking like for, say, a car; this machine that exists is fantastic. And thinking with no preconceived notions, this machine seems to just exist.
The universe seems to just exist without meaning.
But, when we came along, suddenly a star has a name. We'll create names and meaning temporarily until our fate then the universe will go back to existing in justisness.
“The sense of “self” is an illusion” ?
The sense of self is as close to an absolute as can be conceived...not the "tentative" thing claimed here. "Free will" is a concept subject to its definition. While the "self" he refers to may be made up of many, many, many biological hierarchies of choice-making, and even IMPARATIVES that pre-determine some choices (like survival issues),
there is NOT ONE choice, pre-disposed by the biology he cites, that cannot be over-ridden by the intellect. Not one...including survival imperatives. But, more importantly, The sheer number and variation of the behavioral mechanisms that, as he says, pre-determine our responses, each affecting our choices in some way, requires a hierarchy of dominance to exert its affect. The assembly of that hierarchy relies on the particular combination of its elements. The elements of choice may be inescapable, but the ASSEMBLY of the hierarchy that determines the final choice is not. It is determined by the previously assembled elements...in their wildly varying combinations. Even as powerful a biological imperative as eating...can be defeated by an arrangement/alignment of OTHER biological imperatives. How can such a choice be made without a UNIQUENESS of consciousness directing it? The frame of reference brought to every choice is UNIQUE in that it is the result of MANY behaviors; each may be the result of biological predisposition...but the aggregate becomes more unique in its composition by every choice made. It is the aggregate that makes the final choice, built upon the complex history of the pre-determined responses biology previously supplied. The "WILL" may indeed be assembled from predisposed impulses...but each assembly grows increasingly unique as its history of choice-determination grows. And that UNIQUE aggregate gets consulted in every decision made.
He shows how syntax and terminology can rearrange meaning without even being noticed.
✌️
Ones started it's hard to stop watching and I am so tired. For sure continue this tomorrow. Thanks for this type of discussions!!!
@@tiromandal6399 yes and I enjoyed every nanosecond of it:) I love this type of thoughts and discussions so much, also depends on my modd offcourse :)
Did you continue watching the next day?
Haha saw the next comment. So you did
@@sandi-lynnroman4748 yes i did and loved e ery second of it:)
I disagree with his stance on suffering. Levels of discomfort are a fusion of data and motivation.
I have a friend who was bit by a mosquito and lost his ability to feel pain. He damages his body accidentally because he no longer has the data that is communicated through suffering about his environment.
He may accidentally have skin peeling because he has scalding hot water hitting his back and not realize it.
That’s why, for example, you shouldn’t mask depression with pills. Your brain is telling you that something is wrong with your environment and your place in it. You need to change your situation or your environment not mask the suffering.
People seek comfort too much, or at least they often place too high of a priority on it. You can chase comfort all the way to the one of the most comfortable places in the world, a bed, if you stay in that bed you’ll become locked in it, as your muscles atrophy and your comfort is replaced with misery as bedsores start to form. You cannot escape suffering, you can simply become comfortable being uncomfortable and use it as data.
Spoken like someone whose never been diagnosed with clinical depression
@@Brantadot - Exactly the opposite. I had my uncle die, then my brother, then my stepbrother took his own life all within six months. I was in the middle of changing jobs, selling a home and buying a new home, Handling back to back funerals. I’ve been prescribed anxiety pills and adhd pills ad well as for depression. Nothing has ever worked better than exercise, diet, and filling my life with stimulating people and hobbies.
Same thing for my wife it was clinically depressed, put on medication that dulled her and got rid of her lows but also her highs. It’s cause more problems than I feel to share.
Now she is completely off medication, Works out consistently, is happy in great shape, has hobbies, her life is completely changed for the better.
And as soon as we thought we got past all of that we’ve been now dealing with it with my 14-year-old daughter. Things are starting to look better for her by following the same strategies me and her mom used.
Being emotionally aware is all conscienceness truly is. Being a realist in life thought allows a better understanding of free will
I remember once that I wanted revenge on someone very much, but I had to will not to and let it go. There are people on this planet that owe their continued existence to free will. The more that you've had to exercise your will to do something or to just continue forward ....the more free will becomes obvious.
Good rebuttal
@@gozzaldi1486 A much stronger version of that rebuttal (“the more you’ve had to exercise free will, the more obvious its existence is”) is in the case of the artist and creator.
The artist will spend days, weeks, months, or years creating something highly ordered and complex, such as a symphony, novel, work of architecture, or piece of software, all the time working in direct opposition to the law of entropy. Ask any artist who has worked on a masterpiece for months or years if free will exists.
Free will is hard. Free will requires discipline and effort. Most bodily functions and mental processes are automatic, but not all. The artist knows how to cultivate the potential of free will that is available to him and to amplify it.
Just because Sam Harris does not believe in or work to cultivate his free will does not mean that I do not or cannot, or that someone else does not or cannot.
Sam Harris can speak for himself when it comes to free will.
Am I alive or thoughts that drift away?
Does summer come for everyone?
Can humans do as prophets say?
And if I die before I learn to speak
Can money pay for all the days I lived awake
But half asleep?
-Primitive Radio Gods
You know you’re in for a heavy podcast when the clips are an hour.
Getting my teeth in this one back at work today!
its a show, as show. A clip is a portion of something. This is the full thing of something. Its not a clip
If you manage to work while listening to this you're a better man than me
@@ComputerUser9277 haha i have a split brain… since finding Lex my productivity has dropped :”)
@@nickmagrick7702 I think you’ll find the full 3/4 hour podcast NOT on the clips channel but on the pod channel?
ruclips.net/video/4dC_nRYIDZU/видео.html
There are three tracks that can guide your decisions and actions: conscience, ego, and fear. Free will is exercised when we decide which track to follow. Conscience leads to meaning. Fear and ego lead to regret and despair. Choose wisely.
If you look to the past, everything seems deterministic. If you look to the future everything seems guided by chance. Tools like mathematics, chemistry and psychology give you some predicting power but not much. Free will and determinism are the same thing, observed from different angles.
Neither chance or determinism leave space for choice. So free will is an illusion
@@lo5492 Brilliant analysis: Not.
@@stanleyklein524 elaborate please
@@lo5492you missed the whole point of his comment.
@@BrettCradle which was? Do you care to explain?
the only way free will can exist is if you can control every variable and truly experience the consequence of every variable before making the decision. You would have to be a time traveler and also be able to control the past before you
Actually there is no 'unless'. Freewill is fundamentally impossible for any conscious being. In a way the real mystery is the existence of consciousness itself, but mystery requires curiosity, hence the real mystery is curiosity? Everything comes back to itself and makes it impossible to describe what Sam is really talking about, it comes like a frighteningly, overwhelming and sudden shift in the experience of consciousness, an almost physical understanding. Impossible to word, the depth of Sam's ideas on the issues of Non duality are impossible to word and I enjoy watching him try.
@@kamaltarik9605 You must be joking.
So you are saying that when I intentionally don't run into others when driving on the street is because I have no choice in the matter? When I hear 'free will', I hear 'choices'. The absence of free will is encapsulated by an industrial robot that follows its program, no matter what. If a new situation presents itself to the robot, it can't adapt, because its programming prevents it. THAT is a lack of free will.
Once the ability to choose presents itself, then we can adapt, change, DECIDE what is next.
Yes, I can't prevent myself from sleeping, eating, etc. But I most definitely can choose to take care in certain actions, invest in my career, blow it all off and take drugs, and the rest of the multitude of choices that present themselves everyday that I must navigate.
I find the argument that free will doesn't exist a great example of how most people can be hoodwinked by stupid notions presented by supposedly smart people. Denial is THE most pervasive human quality. And like many human qualities, it involves CHOICE.
Finally.. it is important to recognize that the entire argument encapsulates the zeitgeist of our age. That people aren't truly responsible for their actions. That, my friend, is absurdist nonsense of the worst type.. because it is actually just an argument that leads to 'license'.. doing things as you please regardless of its affect on self and others.
@@rbarnes4076 I get where you are coming from, accountability, responsibility all these are virtues, all necessary in a civil society. I'm fully aware of the implications of the denial of freewill and non of them look good. I love seeing how Sam tries to curb peoples fears on this particular issue, which I'll summarise as "just because free will is an illusion doesnt mean I dont have preferences". The cold truth is that at the end of the day, implications do not matter, neither do feelings, when thinking of such an issue, the only thing that matters is what is true. The road to truth is paved with suffering, and even then it might not click, I think schopenhauer said something like that. To use your robot programming metaphor, once freewill is uninstalled, the self swiftly follows. You can experience this for yourself if you have the stomach and the disposition, these are rare, perhaps even rarer are the ones who understand it in a perpetual or abiding way (I'm not one of those) and I suspect neither is Sam. Anyway these things are really impossible to talk about, I might suck at expressing myself, however I mean this in a more fundamental way. Quite literally. Non duality is outside the tier of understanding one can attain from a primitive tool like human language, the only way for it to click is by honest reflection, throw away what's good for society. You cant really contemplate the issue of free will, in any serious capacity, when worrying about things like implications and society, you can only hope to get it with a certain level of abandonment and surrender to truth, to explore freewill with the conviction that truth is the highest good. Truth can only be attained if you are monomaniacal, things like implications, responsibility and accountability, these great concepts should not really be in any serious dialogue on the existence of freewill. If you actually go deep, since I dont have freewill, then I havent written this reply, I'm not even a witness to the writing of this reply, because again, and I repeat, the concept of self vanishes right with the concept of freewill, and this is why language doesnt suffice for this particular phenomenon of consciousness, which is nothing new btw, Zen, Buddhism, Hinduism, spinoza etc many attempts have been made to express the inexpressible, it's quite sad really, people with the disposition to really see cannot tell you what to see, they can only make ridiculous statements like freewill doesnt exist. (Ps: "people with the disposition to see" is a wrong statement because the self is a non entity and so is freewill, however primitive language necessitates these kinds of contradictions because language requires a subject.)
I'll end it with a quote by schopenhauer " Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills" which I think is an excellent demonstration of language's futility on this issue, if I'd made a simulation, it would be just like this, give them the capacity to understand it but not the capacity to communicate it, thanks for making me think.
@@kamaltarik9605 You realize that, in a wierd way, you are echoing one of the major talking points of Critical Race Theory, yes?
To boil down your argument to its simplest form:
"Anyway these things are really impossible to talk about"
I.E. you cannot even use reason to understand this. It is experiential, not rational. Meaning that science and objectivity cannot be used to understand this. And that we cannot deny it.
CRT says: "personal experience is everything" and "the scientific method is nothing and flawed"
This view is both morally repugnant and wrong. Denial of this is actually denial of the roots of scientific progress upon which the improvement of our world is based. The danger is NOT just to realm of science though. When these thoughts are held by a majority, the lead to exactly the type of license based behavior we see right now. Where, exactly, do you think all the violence being led by the Antifa and BLM crowd come from, or the deaths of millions at the hands of ideologically driven tyrants believing in Communism or Fascism? It comes from a sense that the acts are by people who aren't truly responsible for these actions, who are acting out their feelings based on such notions as you present. It is their 'right', based on their experience, to hurt others to affect change for some imagined good that they can't even rationally see will actually end up in hell brought to the earth. A return to such a 'natural state' simply returns humanity to its original animal roots.. where power and violence are viewed as the ONLY way to work out our differences.
Humanity will eventually wake up from this insanity.. but I fear it will be too late for the current experiment in liberty based democracies. And the ultimate responsibility for this must be laid at the feet of those supporting such insane ideas, like you.
I can change none of this, the crazy has sunken too deeply. It was already deeply in our cultural psyche when I was born in the middle of the 20th century. But when humanity wakes up from this, I hope we don't have ANOTHER 200 million dead from these types of experiments in insanity like were had in the USSR, Communist China, 1940s Germany, etc. All based on a simple rejection of the enlightenment ideas of rationality and the capacity to understand that men and their ideas can be improved through CHOICE and objective measures.
This makes me think about times when I'm alone and how I don't feel alone because I'm always being brought ideas and thoughts from whereever these thoughts I have come from.
Your thoughts come from you. No doubt they can be influenced, but how is an atheist making the case that thought comes from somewhere outside of you. I'm 8:36 into this and idk why everyone thinks this guy is so smart, he still has yet to convince me that my thoughts really aren't mine somehow, and that somehow I don't have any power to choose. WTF???
@@joedarrow5422 you’re not understanding
I can relate
@@Fred1989 Your thoughts are not coming from outside , they come from your brain but you can't control the processes that lead to your thoughts therefore you can't control your thoughts , actually it's not that hard to understand , you deny it because you don't like it , but that doesn't change the situation.
@@Fred1989 so, you're saying that thoughts and choices come from outside forces and can be influenced, but when we are presented with these thoughts and choices that were brought on by outside forces, we do have the choice to choose and reason with them?
The notion of free will and the sense of self can be envisioned as a personal theatre, an intimate space from which we observe and experience the unfolding spectacle of life, intricately part of the entirety yet uniquely perceptive of its play.
Bullshit. Your conscious mind has active influence over your subconscious your subconscious mind wouldn't be worried about the illusion of free wil l. So if you're conscious mind is able to influence the decisions of your subconscious mind then it's not just a theater it has something which has an effect over your brain. This is such bad science. We don't know.
nice clip dude
12:39 bringing conscious beings into existence and making them suffer for enjoyment...hmm sounds an awful lot like what humans do for a cheeseburger.
Yeah, and they're delicious.
cows aren't conscious u peasant. they're just highly programmed genetic components but they like the quantum functions humans exhibit at a collective time space sequential production
@@MrVontar thats like saying we're highly programmed genetic components
@@AeroMittens are we not?
@@zankaizankai bruh, what. Beef is not like eating your gran 😂😂 tf are you talking about
I just love reading and listening to Sam Harris. His work with meditation is outstanding. Like Alan Watts before him, Sam is a proponent of total self responsibility and answering the question of “Who am I” as did Watts before him. The big difference between Watts and Harris is belief in the concept of a godhead. Watts was a former Episcopalian priest who, I believe, came to doubt the existence of a god, Sam is an atheist from the start. And I have that same belief. It’s all about “waking up” to the fact that we are all stardust.
So what? So we are stardust. What does that mean? The cosmos really has nothing important to say about our lives. It's silly to refer to it at all when discussing human beings. It makes people feel depressed and insignificant for no reason.
@Jeffery Hoover No. it's not important. Everyone with a modicum of science education understands this at this point. Stop walking around agog at common knowledge and focus on improving human life. If you think this pseudointellectual auto erotic nonsense empowers people, you are silly indeed.
How can you take responsibility or even know yourself if you have no free will?
@@greyinsight Wow good one. Now go back to being a sixteen year old and leave the serious work of life to the adults.
how could you be responsible for something, if you are determined?
I am 60 and dyslexic, particularly with technology and a computer screen. Please can someone direct me to his videos? Everything he is saying makes complete sense to me but I am unable to put my thoughts into actual words in the way he can. I am sure I can learn more from him. Everything he is saying relates to addiction in so many ways
Since you were able to write this comment, I think you are able to search more Sam Harris videos from youtube. There is the search bar. Just type Sam Harris and maybe some other key words. For example: "Sam Harris free will".
Thank you so much for this... I have been trying to explain my views to people for so long and it's always rejected as stupid... this is like a sophisticated version of my independent realization of the fact that free will really isnt so
But you have the freedom to negate free will.
@@DontDrinkthatstuff well everything is predictable if you had a super computer that could identify all factors (inputs) into every decision or every thing that happens. Your use of the word arbitrary is a bit confusing as nothing is truly random, there are just a shitload of If statements that determine what would happen.
I admit most who have this view will determine life is meaningless (nhilist) but in theory you still have some sort of agency to make the best decisions you can by weighing the factors. But which you WILL do is predictable based on your decisions, biology, social pressures, etc
@@tacojohns3432 prediction doesn’t negate freewill besides “if you had a super computer” we don’t and no it can’t and never will be the case
@@off6848
Actually, if I can predict all of your actions with 100% accuracy, that means you don’t have free will by definition.
@@maddhatter6938 actually you can’t
His "free will illusion" made him decide(will) to think or convince himself so much that this free will his exercising is actually just an illusion, he really doesn't have free will as he chose(wills) to think so.
I will now think that this is foolishness at it's intellectual best.
Wait! He made me think this, man my will to think is an illusion i guess.
"Door to my prison is an illusion" ppl who hate accountability and responsibility tend to make themselves belive free will is not real.. 😂 Gotta justify it somehow 😀😬
Completely agree.
I have to say that after I commented two points Sam made but in my own way of thinking I definitely agree with him. Free will is beyond a subject who is bounded by cause and effect. However we can make any choice we want. It will just always be that exact same choice every single time if we replayed the universe exactly again. That is if the universe is not governed by randomness. And if it is (which it does look like it is because of quantum physics), then free will doesn't make sense to have if our actions are made by something else (the randomness).
Does randomness exist? Can you give me an example of something random?
@@icemancometh1188 Yeah, I'm not sure what true randomness actually is. We say a coin flip is random but if you know the speed and angle of the coin and all that, you'll see it's not random when you can calculate the consitions. So to day that quantum particles are truly random seems to say that we just have no idea what causes their actions, so perhaps consciousness on some level is fundamental, as is free will. Maybe it's just irreducible and therefore hard to explain in materialist, reductionist terms. It's like saying "the color red is an illusion because red doesn't exist in the firing of your neurons." By definition red can't be an illusion because it can only be defined in subjective terms.
@@icemancometh1188 Well if we put aside the concept of quantum mechanics, we will conclude that randomness does not exist in the way we think.
There is not state of matter that could not in theory be calculated to find out the next state. And obviously that means that its not randomness because randomness by definition is not predictable.
However, even that is still subjectively random since our minds could not predict it.
But even more however is what quantum mechanics seems to suggest. It suggests sub atomic particles do not follow a deterministic pattern of motion. They move in ways that are best described with a random gradient field.
That's the best example I can give you!
@@icemancometh1188 Randomness is a relative feature. It is both non-correlated to something else and without the availability of a means of prediction. That doesn't mean it isn't predictable with regards to something else. We also have measures of predictibliity. That is there are degrees of non-predictability. So yes a coin flip is random for the purpose of a football game.
The self is experiencing certain signals in the brain and interpreting them as qualia. We can call it a 1-way-interface because the physical signal flows in one direction and is experienced. However, if the interface is a 2-way-interface then the self could act back on the physical brain (possibly very sublty). We would call it the free will - non-determinism because the non-material self could act back on physcial world. We know material world is not the original one because in materialism its not possible for something to begin from nothing therefore we need to postulate existence of non-material/non-physical realms in which the self exists. We know it must be a 2-way-interface because otherwise the physcial brain would not think thoughts about consciousness aka self. We would experience the brain but not the thoughts about the self.
I love lex’s ability to counter ideas very good idea perspectives on both sides
This is not English.
A recent realization of this for me has totally changed my life.
At min 53, when speaking about Elon and the high propensity of fires... I'm a hospice nurse so when my phone rings, the range of chaos and fires are wide. I love that grounding perspective of my life. Decreasing suffering.
If free will is an illusion, then the word "ought" should never be uttered again.