Dennett talks about his view on free will and why it doesn't necessarily rules out a determenistic universe. Ok, it's not about atheism but it's still a very interesting topic.
Introducing unpredictable randomness doesn't change the discussion about the viability of 'free will' in any interesting way, is what Dennet is arguing at the end, so you may as well contain the discussion to a deterministic universe. Free will can't mean complete freedom from predictability either; that's just randomness. "All the varieties of free will that are worth wanting you can have in a deterministic world." That's the key. The biggest problem in the discussion if so-called free will is the very mushy definitions people bring to the table. Once you're clear about what you mean when you say 'free will' it's not that complicated to show that it does or doesn't exist.
What he says is very simple. Free will exists not as an ontological entity, but rather as a linguistic form. Free will is our way of explaining to ourselves how we behave under given circumstances.
For me personally it's like this. I genuinely don't believe in free will and I do not take credit for any of my actions. Not even when it's convenient and I do something awesome. I really see myself as a spectator experiencing my life. Even though it feels like I'm directly involved with it, oh and I am, but I do not have control over it. When something great happens and I accomplish something, I just think, "Wow, that's really awesome that I was able to do that." That is my kind of peace.
Doug Syler I've been thinking the same thing. If you knew everything in a certain moment, you'd "predict" the future and change it. And that itself would've'been predetermined. Although I feel like there's a flaw in this reasoning.
+babbisp1 No, it's correct in fact. But you have to realize that even if you succeed somehow to uncover the hard-determined future (before it arrives), then THAT future scenario that you learn will have to contain every and each one of your attempts to avoid it and how it shaped your path to arriving to it. The determined future might even say something like "At this day and this hour you have successfully avoided xyz." And from some reasons that will be exactly what you're going to do. Maybe that the recognition of the hard determined future will always just yield very useless information since it will always contain the possibility of you having avoided anything bad that might come to you. But it won't ever tell you that something bad is going to happen for sure if there is even a slightest possibility that you can avoid it and succeed. Or it will tell you that something bad is going to happen, but it will reliably "predict" that you have no way to avoid it or to get all the information on the misfortune that's going to happen. (if that ever will be the case!) Dennett just, as he says himself, doesn't understand what do people mean by the inevitable future and he thinks it's the scenarios we are able to predict by the power of our reasoning or observation and therefore avoid them: but that clearly isn't the inevitable future. The inevitable will and must contain all your attempts to avoid other possible future scenarios that you want to avoid. Dennett from some reason, didn't come to this in his reasoning or chose to ignore it.
yes, this guy Dennet thinks he has solved the problem Descartes was unable to solve, and Newton, and Hume, and Chomsky, they are all wrong, and he is right because he discovered that "inevitable" means "unavoidable" and he is so happy...well...it is funny how stupid people think they are smart, so so so simplistic and superficial
Part 2.. I personally think it's ironically "liberating" to understand these things. It gives us new insight on what we actually are. The reason it seems unpleasant is because we've been brought up to believe the opposite and unless you've lost respect for those values it's difficult to adopt or understand new things. If more people understood that free will doesn't exist, our ways of solving problems would change drastically. I'd encourage you to check out "Paradise or Oblivion" on youtube.
It's so easy to say in hindsight that "you could have only done this" but genuinely I think you'll find that in this very moment you have the ability to choose...or at least, a very convincing illusion that you do. But here's where I employ Occam's razor. It's simpler to assume we do have free will rather than the illusion of it.
There are three things that most people seem to miss when they discuss this matter, and Dennett is no exception: 1) Knowing all the truths in the realm of Physics (every particle, field, etc in the initial conditions of the Universe + all their determined behaviors) doesn't give a predictive picture of how the world will be because it's only one level of explanation. You can't even see cells and their behavior at the phyics level; you need to invoke chemistry and biology. And it gets more and more removed as you move up "levels". Imagine that, at a given moment, a huge cluster of atoms stop going in the direction they had been going and quickly fly in the opposite direction. Why did they do that? No answer on the physics level. No answer even at the chemical level. They did it because they are the constituent atoms of a gazelle who just saw a tiger and is running for its life. Explanation has levels, and what is meaningful at one level is not exhaustively visible at a lower level. And so, embodied agents interacting with a world and in a community of minds can make decisions because that's the kind of entities they are, and physics is the wrong level at which to address that. 2) Libet-style experiments are irrelevant to the real question of free will. Neuroscience has focused on these kinds of experiments, but the lifting of a finger or pressing of a button is actually just a small piece of a much larger activity: *participating in Libet's experiment*! And this involved all sorts of planning, choosing, committing, etc, and it involves REASONS why you went through all that effort (perhaps thinking that advances in neuroscience will help people or whatever). Moreover, the Libet-style experimenter has to rely on the subject to tell them at what time they chose to lift their finger. But that means you have to trust the subject to respond truthfully and as accurately as they can. But why should you trust that unless you consider the subject to be an agent who has the desire to help you with your experiment, etc etc? 3) Finally, having discovered that particles are NOT actually tiny billiard balls behaving in predictable ways, why should we imagine that large assemblages of them who certainly seem to have non-deterministic wills and abilities to choose are just bigger billiard balls?? Indeed, we almost can't help but think that we are choosing freely, even when it comes to freely choosing not to believe in free will! It's a basic belief; as basic to our epistemological framework as the belief in the external world and it's comprehensibility which underlies all scientific endeavor. In other words: We have certain basic beliefs that are fundamental to our cognition, and science is based on several of these... so it is a perilous idea indeed to try to use science to uproot equally basic beliefs (like free will), ESPECIALLY when we're counting on those beliefs in each experiment we do (see point #2 about the reports of the subject in the Libet experiment). I think it's really pitiful what a zeitgeist like metaphysical naturalism can do to our thinking when we're wrapped up in it like Dennett clearly is. Otherwise brilliant people end up making the silliest mistakes.
There would be a physical explanation to the change of direction of the atoms if one was to study the intricate relationship between that system and the entirety of the universe. Physics is not the wrong level to study this, it may be the most impractical one in a short term, but it is certainly not wrong to approach a biological problem through Physics. One day, if we get good enough at using computational models, we may be able to predict the behaviour of a full blown animal, maybe even an animal in a small environment. Particles do behave in a deterministic fashion, quantum mechanics states that there is an apparent randomness, there could very well be hidden non local variables that explain that apparent behaviour of particles. And even if we said this "randomness" is really embedded into the laws of the universe, there is no room for free will, as randomness does not imply making a decision, you dont choose where the electron is, it just exists there. Besides, what if the belief in free will is present in so many things we do? 2000 years ago people thought the fucking earth was the center of the universe, and that the planets moved around the earth in perfect circles and around another center in an epicycle. Millons of women were murdered for being "witches", people are stoned to death in certain arab countries and it has been happening over a really long time, does this mean that doing so is right? Of course not.
Mardlamock N You've missed the point. An "animal" does not exist at all at the level of physics. As such, it isn't about getting better computational models of subatomic particles. No such model will ever address the "animal itself" since no such entity exists at that level. I wasn't saying that the indeterminacy of QM is the explanation of free will. I agree completely that randomness doesn't help the free will argument at all. And I also personally favor the hidden variables, Bohm-deBroglie type of model of QM such that there is no *ontological* indeterminacy; merely epistemological. But that is completely beside the point. I only pointed to the "none-billiard-ball" nature of the subatomic world to give an example of where our "mechanistic" idea of how the world works is clearly flawed. Subatomic particles are most likely behaving as interacting *fields*, not balls bouncing off each other in mechanistic fashion. As such, the very idea of "physical determinism" is not what it once seemed to be. Finally, I wasn't saying that the ubiquity of our belief in free will guaranteed its truth. I was saying that the *proper BASICALITY* of that belief indicated that we are more rational to dismiss a worldview which tells us we have no free will than we are to dismiss free will in favor of a worldview. The belief in free choice is *properly basic* to our experience; it is even present in the very attempt to get rid of it! If I say "I choose not to believe in free will, since I am convinced by such-and-such argument" I am implicitly saying that I can freely choose which beliefs to accept! Moreover, a belief as basic and central to our experience as free will obviously is ought not to be abandoned any more easily than we ought to abandon the belief in the external world or the belief in other minds.
An animal does exist at a physical level, because if it didint it wouldnt exist, we havent been able to find a mathematical description of an animal, but i am more than sure that with the use of computational models we could be able to find one. If a person who doesnt believe in free will says the word choose, then that person is contradicting itself and fails to communicate their beliefs, that person hasnt understood the objectiveness with which one must communicate such idea.This is one of the biggest problems with determinists, the difficulty in expressing one s ideas without using words that imply choice. If you listen to any free will supporters, they will use the same argument as you are, but that does not adress the very nature of the problem, only the way of expressing it. IMO trying to take down determinism by the way it is expressed is cheap and dishonest.
1) I never said animals did not exist at "the physical level". I said they don't exist at the level of Physics. I meant the level of subatomic particles/waves/fields which is the fundamental realm of Physics. There are no "animals" at that level; just collections of fundamental particles. It is the wrong level to address things like predation. The movement of the atoms would look no different if the gazelle was running for some other reason (or for no reason at all). 2) I wasn't referring to the *word* "choose", I was referring to the *concept*. The determinist genuinely believes that they have been convinced by reasons to accept determinism. However, if determinism were true, then the determinist would believe it the same way a tree grows a branch; an inevitable result of objects bumping into each other. 3) What's cheap and dishonest is how you completely ignored my main argument and misconstrued my secondary one! My main argument is to do with the proper basicality of belief in free will and how it is on a par with belief in the external world. As such, since science presupposes the latter, it is untenable that it should disprove the former.
1- There are no such things as animals in a small level, animals are just the effect of the interactions between atoms. It is not the wrong level to adress things like predation, it is simply the most impractical, one day we will get a mathematical definition of an animal (it will be very complicated imo), everything approachable from Physics, because physics tries to understand the whole universe, it may be trying to solve what happens on a small or gigantic scale, but once we find those rules we can figure out all that goes inbetween ie: animals, social interactions, psychology. 2- And i dont see why being convinced should represent a problem to a deterministic view of the universe, there is this causality. I believe in determinism because I was convinced of it there is a causality( i saw something on a computer screen, which introduced that thought into my mind, which then stayed there and made me do some more research, bla bla bla). And you are still not adressing the main point of determinism, just the way people express their belief in it and the certain contradicitons it may seem to pose in a person that believes in free will. 3- Science can and will prove free will wrong, one day, maybe not too long from now.
The free-will problem is easy. Objectively, of course there can not be any free will in a materialized world, but subjectively, we are hard-wired to feel that we are free to choose. You are determined to feel free! You cannot equate subjective experience with objective experience, just like you cannot equate your experience of color to the wave length. There is no contradiction at all.
To me, colour doesn't really exist, its just something we perceive from different wavelengths of light. Analogously, free will doesn't exist, its just something we perceive from being conscious.. If you take that deeper, you could say different levels of reality have their own truths, but I suspect that's not right, the "truths" in the higher level are probably just illusions.
Amazing.This guy wrote a book and gained recognition without understanding the topic of which he speaks.Whether you'll avoid something is determined by your ability to foresee the results of your actions.Whether you have that ability is determined by your intelligence,experience,current level of tiredness,genes,and many,many other things.But its just the normal stream of cause and effect.If you made a choice,then time rewinded,you would make the same decision again,all factors would be the same.
In ten minutes of nigh-uninterrupted speech, Dennett said precious little about what he believes and his rationale for believing it. I've watched this video a few times now, and can't help but wish more and more that he'd give Sam Harris the dialogue he's asked for.
+Neil Mcintosh This is because Dennett is confused and hopeless. There is no evidence that we do not have free will, none at all. We are the agents. We may be fooled, we may make mistakes, we may be misled but all these simply confirm that we in fact have free will. That is the end of the matter. Simple. Don't let fake philosophers like Dennett pull wool over your eyes.
According to Sam Harris and the other incompatiblists, you're just a collection of cells, and there's no "you" in there at all. If that makes more sense to "you" (the scare quotes being necessary in that case), then fine.
***** But the decision to move your hands is predicated on signals from your brain. Where do the signals originate? In brain cells, and from their chemical processes. If you don't believe that, then consider people whose motor systems in the brain do not work. They can't move their hands up and down. Do the handicapped have LESS free will than you? (BTW, I think we do have free will, but I like making this problem hard because to me it really is tricky.)
If there is only the material world, as Dennett beleives, it's obvious that there is no free will. It's impossible to say rationally that we can compatibilize free will and materialism. Laplace understood this very well. It's surprising that Dennett, a philosopher, seems unable to understand something so obvious. Excuse my English, I'm a Brazilian.
+Graham Shimell Free will arguments are always arguments about language. Heck, most arguments come down to people using incompatible or poorly defined terms. The observation that most metaphysical arguments come down to definitions of terms has been known since the ancient Greeks.
Did you watch the video? The point Dennett is trying to make is that any sort of "free will" worth wanting doesn't depend on any thesis on determinism or indeterminism, much less any thesis about quantum uncertainty.
"but in no way free." It's free by the definition Dennett provides. In the same sense someone who're not in jail is freer than someone who is, someone who is in a situation where many choices are available is freer than someone who isn't. This is all that matters to the connection between the term free will and morality, which is why compatibilism has value.
Watched 7 mins and I have no clue what he is talking about. If you watch sam harris talking on this subject, he is very clear and makes strong points with concise examples. I'm not sure exactly what determinism is, but I think if time was reversed by say 1 hour, then things would play out slightly differently the second time due to the randomness seen at the quantum level. With or without any randomness, its irrelevant to free will. My point here is that determinism might not be the opposite of free will, cause it could be a random-determinism like I mentioned above. If he does mean something different when he says freewill, he should clarify it to stop confusing people.
Exactly right. Life is not about having control, but about experiencing it. The “Amness“ is the capacity to experience, nothing more (Peter Russell). In a hard deterministic worldview, things like anger, envy or pride, are irrational. It is much easier to deal with struggle, discomfort or injustice. It is easier to forgive and to bring your mind at peace. It does not free one from moral responsibility, and it doesn´t take away fascination because you don´t know what´s going to happen next.
I Agree with Daniel Dennet, that free will is an illusion regardless of universe being deterministic or undeterministic. Free will is an ilussion not because of determinism, it is an illusion because we equate it with thought processes, the meaning of whic we can not or do not understand and therefore proclaim it as a metaphysical concept independant from the rest of our thoughts, that we do not consider as a part of our free will.
@@lenn939 He's defending an idea that he was predetermined to believe. He can't know if it's true or not since every thought that comes to his head was simply determined to be there.
I think RUclips user Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨Ʒ nailed it with this comment (posted on this video ruclips.net/video/joCOWaaTj4A/видео.html ): "You run models in your mind of what the world will look like if you do different things, you evaluate the consequences, and you make the choice which has the consequences that are best. You were always going to make that choice, but you had to run a model where you didn't. That's what gives us the feeling that we could have made the other choice."
I don't understand goalkeeper action you refer to. I can't avoid avoiding a brick at my head. Perhaps if I had a helmet on and I knew I would not be harmed by the things flying at my head, the reflex would not trigger.
He talks about "agents", but neglects to take apart the word like he did "inevitable". If the universe is deterministic, true agency doesn't exist in the first place. It's rethorical sleight-of-hand.
What do you mean by 'true' agency? In a deterministic universe their can be action/reaction, their can be complexity, chaos, unpredictability.. and systems like us that get input, calculate probabilities, weigh optional outcomes and act on these result... that is agency.. Why does the 'true' stand for? What does it add (that we can demonstrate exists)? Addendum: most of our actions are taking by us, but not with this 'free will' at hand. Our biology does most of the work, we have reflexes, instincts (which are basicly shortcuts to useless calculation of option in familiar circumstances..), .. The sort of free will we seem to have is a slow working system, prosponing fast reaction and taking the time to recalculate different scenarios.. (not whilst spears are approaching) But between all these different systems, that induce action, i suspect is a lot of greyscale.. they flow one in the other..
P.G. Burgess Our biology doesn't do most of the work, it does ALL of the work, because unless you want to invoke some sort of soul, our biology is all we are, and thus the only thing that CAN do the work. Thus, the only difference between instinct and so-called free will is subjective experience. Objectively, all actions and "choices" we make are but the ticking of a biochemical clock - a program running on a neuro-computer. And like any other computer, given the same input, programming and initial state, we will always make the same choice. So what room does that leave for agency?
Ann O. Nymus I'll agree that 'free will' , 'making of choices' or 'agency' are rather subjective experiences. I'd say these terms explictly refer to the experience this 'neurocomputer has'. I do understand your point, but what 'objective' viewpoint is there from which the unfolding of time is predictable? You say 'Given the same input', but the same as what or when? What initial set state was there? Even the 'programming' of the brain is a dynamic system.. The place of 'agency' is that of -what seems to be the only- existing viewpoint in which actions are 'calculated'. But i think one might even go further.. we interact with a complex and unpredictable universe; it is filled with fundamental uncertainties and interferences... in which the smallest detail can make huge differences. You do not even need to go into the blury field of quantumtheories to find chaos; this even can arise in simple deterministic systems. (for reference, check out lorenz-equations; non-liniair dynamics...)
layperson here, does my brain create an underlying, evolving, constant memory that is who "I" am and what my mind is? do we use our brain to make choices? does our brain use us to make choices? do we "think" our mind is separate from body, brain, and self? if “I use” my brain to make choices, then who am “I”? I do really find it interesting that I don't have as much free will to make choices about what my brain is actually charged with controlling: blood flow, body temp, body growth, injury repair, metabolism, that annoying uncontrollable twitch you get once in a while, etc. If I cant honestly choose to, for example, quit sending blood to my index finger or maybe just quit blinking till my eyes hurt then how do I believe that I have more control over other less intimate things. if free will is the ability to choose, then what is choosing? so I googled choice, then got "decision" in the definition, so I looked it up and got conclusion, then reasoning, then thought, then thinking, mind, intellect, consciousness, and so on. it appears that it is much more complex to define what "choice” is than I expected. "making" a choice must be exponentially more difficult. just for arguments sake take this next sentence. “you” “think” “you” have a “choice” to read this or not and “conclude” if its “intelligent”. I find all the words in quotes very had to define. the calculations (or whatever thought is) of reasoning are so freakishly complex the more i think i am thinking about it, the less i feel i understand. from a different perspective, in a truly "free will" scenario how extreme can one go to simply "not choose" anything, ever? it seems that we believe in free will and yet many choices we make, we MUST make, and we don't have the free will to not choose even if indecision didnt immediately mean certain death. I dunno, like I said... layperson here maybe I should "keep mouth closed so foot cannot enter" lol
The delusion of the Dennet is to believe that intelligent agents have the ability to choose to AVOID the determinist nature of their behaviour, when the reasoning itself that the agent has to go through to "choose to avoid it" is underlied by deterministic processes and as such it's IMPOSSIBLE to do so! The example of the brick and a lighting stroke is pure bull. "You can't avoid a lighting stroke, but you can choose to avoid a brick thrown at you". No you can't. The decision of avoiding that brick (or not) was predetermined to happen.
Prior conditioning does not obviate the capacity to make a broad range of choices and take actions in the present. What Dennett is saying is that your insistence on there being something more to free will than that is simply a bugaboo. In other words, it's not a black-and-white thing. In your sense, right, there is no absolute and total free will. But that's not something we should expect or care about when we discuss whether or not a person can make their own navigational decisions. We clearly can, and whether or not that is wholly conditioned and deterministic doesn't matter to the concept of independent agency.
The undeniable "explosion of evitability", which I do not deny, does not change the basic constellation, that we ALWAYS act "in style". "Acting in style", which enables clever observers to predict in most cases, what we are likely going to do, INCLUDES acting AGAINST our true inclination, e.g. fear, sexual desires, laziness etc. etc. Wolfgang RUTTKOWSKI / Kyoto, Japan
It isn't determinism that gives us the illusion of free will, but rather emotion and indeterminism that does. The fact that we can't anticipate the next moment makes it seem like we are choosing the next step, but we aren't. In reality we are all only drawn towards certian choices and deterred from others (through learned behavior). Emotion simply seals the deal by making us feel good and powerful for making a choice to in essence reward the illusion of "free will".
His error is in missing that natural selection was determined in a materialistic universe, down to the position of every molecule which was part of evolution, so that evolution itself could not have occurred in any other way, and the 'avoiders' so formed could have formed in no other way, including each minuscule step of avoidance and the subsequent consequences of that, right down to the current illusion of free will in humans. Every thought is a chemical reaction formed by previous states and without escape. In other words, even the avoiders were determined to avoid down to the last molecule. This is a freight train sized hole in his reasoning, and one can only assume it is because he so wants there to be some actual freedom of action rather than mere existence watching internal and external forces in his own mind drag him along.
+De Bunking You only say that because you can't help but respond that way... ;-) But seriously, it's not a response to just say 'you don't understand' and not give specifics. Tell me in what way I don't understand free will and explain how it really works in opposition to what I said. Otherwise, you are just proving you don't really have any ideas, just complaints you can't defend. Show us what mechanism can free any matter in the universe from either inescapable cause and effect from initial conditions, or from the relentless randomness of quantum uncertainty, both of which deny actual free choice and only allow an illusion of choice. Explain the mechanism.
+De Bunking - I agree hard determinism is bs. But it is also logically inescapable for atheistic worldviews, because there is no mechanism possible to free our thought from cause and effect (or random quantum fluctuation, neither of which allows for libertarian free will.) I do believe in free will, and because I believe in a transcendent super-natural God, it is a rationally defensible position. Congrats on beating your addiction and ptsd. I think that's really terrific, and a great hope for others to know it can be done.
+jasonthesage Isn't your decision to wear your red shirt and have corn flakes for breakfast a result of combinations of causes? It seems like people just call the victorious decision from that molecular battle between neurons 'free will' no matter what it is. None of this will change anyone's life one iota other than adding more experiences to be considered in future decisions (maybe you'll buy corn flakes tomorrow now). In fact I could pretty much change 'incompatible' to 'compatible' and use it for my argument. As he said, determinism is pretty much inevitable for an atheistic worldview. Are synapses affected by 'free will' or the other way around? If you see this comment and decide between replying or ignoring it, what element other than the material parts of the decision (1. your brain and its components and 2. the words its receiving from me) are involved? If none, isn't that pure determinism on its face? Why call the result 'free will', especially if you obviously can't control what synapses/neurons do and you can't control what my words are? (and if neurons are controlled, what is controlling them and how can I worship it?)
***** How is the fluff (not to mention 'yourself' and 'your mind' distinct from your neural chemistry? Something indescribable - can it be demonstrated to exist?
***** I would define subjectivity as just differences between brain chemistry, between either people or between yourself at different times. What else is it? Why attribute it to something unobservable?
Hahahaha Dennet stumped :) at ca. 9 minute mark. The interviewer pins him down and all he can do is bluster and insult. Notice he offers no response in the form of a rational argument. Anyway he has so changed his tune in the last 5 years hahaha.
@0ctopusRex I understand determinism perfectly fine, but I never mentioned omniscience. Point is how can I know something I can prevent? Is it even logically possible for me to know what I'll eat next week if the universe is deterministic?
If "evitability" has evolved, so that we can exercise free will, in what sense does this retain the principle of determinism? This is what compatibilists have been doing for centuries, invoking some feature of human or animal psychology that allows us to really choose between real options, but if that's true, it's no longer a deterministic system. If Dennett is convinced of the evitable, he has _two_ options - the one he chooses, which is to deny the traditional argument that determinism rules out free will, and another, which he doesn't seem to recognise (and I've never heard him explain why he avoids it): that determinism does not obtain. The traditional argument seems as sound as the fact that a non-random computer program always returns the same output given the same inputs. Furthermore, it is perfectly possible to retain determinism faithfully and conceive of all these evolved dodges as inevitable ones we must take, since we are biological machines computing inputs, according to the laws of physics. There's no deterministic escape from determinism. Clockwork doesn't find a way to wind itself up. There may be elimination of determinism, even if the evolution of evitability were true. Compatibilism is cognitive dissonance.
If everything was random, everything would be inevitable, because you'd have no chance to avoid things that are out of your control. Determinism helps free will, because agents get more reliable information about things to avoid. When less is up to random chance, more freedom is on the agent.
420xHustlerxB0SS you don't seem to understand either lol.. what you know about outside threats is determined, and so is your "choice" to avoid those threats
That's why he's a compatabalist! Oddly enough a recent survey suggested that 80% of philosophers beleive in the 'compatabalist' view on freewill! To me it's all word play and confusion on defining what freewill is, a straw man argument if you like which gets us nowhere.
@SaraCufer I posed a question. Einstein saw time as a dimension of time-space. For Einstein the present and the past exist simultaneously. Hence the term the block universe where all the slices of time exist together. Now the question in quantum mech. is do we have multiple parallel universes for each observer or is there a single universe with all its time slices already layed out? Does that atom have to decay at a particular point in time-space. If so the future is set - no degree of freedom.
I am quite surprised that Dennett, whom I have generally found to be extremely bright and eloquent, would make such a fundamental error. He somehow fails to see that when a brick is thrown and someone ducks to avoid it, this was a complex process of action and reaction, and there was no way that the person was ever going to be hit by the brick. They may think they almost got hit, and other people may think so; but the fact is that it was just not in the cards, if the universe is deterministic (and Dennett takes as a given that it is deterministic). You may as well say that the spokes on a bicycle wheel are good at avoiding collisions, as they never touch each other, despite one spoke moving very quickly toward where the other spoke had been just a millisecond earlier.
I think a part of his point on this is that it is non-sense to talk of 'what the future might have been'. In retrospect the future could -in a direct way - not have been different. (only in manner of speaking.. 'under almost the exact circumstances') But as far as the actual future is concerned, that may - even in a deterministic universe- still be unpredictableto us in a fundamental way.. leaving our determenistic mind up to the task of making probabiltiy-calculations that may 'alter the future..'
Alan Thomas people who believe the universe is deterministic are not aware of the implications of Quantum Physics it seems to me. Surely you have to be a Newtonian in terms of your level of scientific understanding to even entertain the idea that the universe *is* deterministic? Of course there is some hope for determinists that behind apparent quantum chaos there is an underlying order but the current understanding is against determinism, and that is the state of scientific evidence at this time. Right?
Justin Holme The word believe is interesting. It is just belief. No more no less. One is free to believe anything one likes. Dennett sets out his belief. You can have yours. That is about it. He begins to look like a fool when he pretends this is science.
I think as a philosopher you need to be very clear if you are putting forward a personal belief or a philosophical position. The later should be based on the best evidence available, generally scientific. People are interested in Dennet as a philosopher, very few care at all about his personal life surely.
Justin Holme You are right. But I think his personal belief is also his philosophical position. Could you explain why philosophical issues should be based on scientific evidence? Do you mean a philosophical position can always be settled by scientific evidence ?
i can't believe this guy is a respected intellectual. "some agent can avoid a brick, therefor determinism doesn't preclude free will" - that's just stupid. obv the important thing is that it was predetermined that said "agent" (not really an agent) would avoid the brick. determinism and free will are incompatible, amirite?
correction, he said determinism doesn't imply inevitability. same thing really, it's inevitable that the agent avoids the brick if everything is predetermined
Long time gone! Well actually I was arguing against determinism, just because it's depressing/disempowering, not because it's unlikely. I say, if the history of the universe is just a series of physical reactions, the future is set and none of my actions or thoughts matter. Or I should sayy actions and thoughts are inevitable, so my effort doesn't matter. I prefer to believe in free will and trust my sense that the universe and my life exist for a reason.
+Bill Willow Well if you succeed in something you should be happy by the fact no mattter if you were determined to succeed or not. Unless you have the information, there is no reason not to be happy or disempowered. The absence of free will just has totally nothing to say how we should behave in most situation (there are exceptions like taking vengeance etc.) UNLESS we know the determined future. And we might never will.. the amount of computing power would have to be astronomical. That is: unless we know, we have no reason not to behave and understand the universe as if we had the free will, no reason at all.
Well I was more so talking about just standing in the road with a bus heading in your direction and you must either move or not move. Therefore you would indeed be able to make a thought out decision. Not just a reaction but motives taken into consideration..
Toolman85 1) sam harris doesn't say "goofy things". 2) "Don't get out of bed and starve to death starting tomorrow, and tell me you don't have free will" What the fuck are you talking about? I have the desire to get out of bed, but I'm not responsible for having it or even following it. 3) "sam harris doesn't want to "blame others". in fact, he states clearly that blaming doesnt make any sense, because free will doesn't exist. I'm confident that the notion of free will is nonsensical no matter how you put it. Here's the thing. If physical determinism is true, we are "slaves to chemical processes", like you said correctly. However, if indeterminism is true (the universe would still be partially deterministic, btw) we still don't have free will. Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them. Imagine this. Imagine if all of your experience was caused by someone at a computer, determining what you feel, do, say and want. That's clearly not a circumstance of free will. Now imagine if that person was determining all of that, but 10% of the time threw some dice or introduced some other mode of randomness into the process. That doesn't open up a space for free will. We know as a matter of scientific fact that everything you're consciously intending to do is preceded by neural events of which you're not conscious, and of which you have no control over whatsoever. Lastly, my argument against free will does not depend upon philosophical materialism, the idea that reality is at bottom physical. Now, there are very good reasons to believe that the mind is at bottom physical, but even if we had souls, nothing about my argument would change. The unconscious operations of a soul grant you no more freedom than the unconscious neurophysiology of your brain does. If you don't know what your soul is gonna do next, you're not in control of your soul. And you didn't pick your soul to begin with. In other words, the whole notion of free will can be debunked by one sentence. You can't think a thought before you think it. So you can brag all you want about how Sam Harris is wrong or goofy or whatever, but it means less than shit if you don't provide evidence for your claims.
wow, like im gonna read all that... I'm not going to debate with you. I think that determinism is silly, think what you want! your acting like your going to eventually find "proof" that determinism is true... "In other words, the whole notion of free will can be debunked by one sentence. You can't think a thought before you think it." This statement is just plain silly
Toolman85 You weren't bored to read it. You chickened out. By the way, I only mentioned determinism once. I simply argued why free will can't be mapped unto *ANY* conceivable reality (regardless of determinism). And don't ask me "what do you mean" or "explain yourself". Not until you've read the paragraph.
I don't understand why people frame compatibilism as (if it is) a rival stance of determinism. Most determinists, I'm assuming, would agree that what compatibilists like to call free will (that is the feeling/illusion of agency, or that fact that "your brain is making decisions" which you can by narrowing the scope pf cause and effect) is very true. But they also acknowledge that feeling like you're free (which I don't realy anymore) doesn't make you a self causing agent, which some of them, including myself, think (as a part of subjective preference) is the requirement for you to call someone "responsible" for their actions, or for being who they are; indeed this doesn't mean we don't need to prevent crime, by imprinsoning or rehabilitating the 'criminal' or something else. And, I don't see comaptibilism making claims about the metaphysical reality any different from determinism. So, given this, there should really be no compatibilism, at least as a metaphysical position, as a counter to determinism. And it seems to me that, many compatibilists, just want to make determinists call the thing they call free will "free will";when, in my opinion, as long as you both have mutual understanding of what you are talking about, how you call a thing is metaphysically completely irrelevant.
Right,lol. You know what I mean. Ringo's songs were shit and that's not up for debate. If there were one member of the beatles that could have been replaced without totally ruining the band it was Ringo!
But the set of electrons rushing through my brain causing me to type these letters were once set in motion by the big bang and these anonymous particles have been pushed around in a long line of causal events, eventually to end up where they are right now. When did this un-causal thing called free will all of a sudden intervene? How would that work?
@rjbullock You might be joking, but it made me think about something: I wouldn't say that since you're incapable of doing something you're not free. It's a matter of free will not even being a part of the equation. You can be willing to do something, and yet be unable to. Am I correct in this?
The free will question does not ask whether we can make decisions in isolation from physical law, nor does it ask whether the future is predestined. It asks ONLY whether it is sensible to to hold people accountable for their actions. To which the answer is YES. Even those who argue against free will admit that holding people another accountable 'makes sense', or is 'unavoidable'. Dennett's position makes sense of accountability in a deterministic world without magic.
@view1210 & @fmocastro So either the universe will keep me from knowing my own future (which might as well be an indeterministic standpoint) or the universe will render me incapable of changing it which sounds counter-intuitive (do I turn in a mindless puppet unable to change my choices or will the universe suddenly do things to prevent an alternate outcome?)
I`m a Huge fan of Dennett, but on free will i think he is wrong. It might feel like we have free will in our every day life, but as Sam Harris points out: we have no controll over the forming of our thoughts and can only accept or reject the thoughts that surfaces. I have no real reason for why i chose the blue shirt instead of the grey one. And i certainly can`t take the credit for where i was born, when i was born or who my mother is and that i was not born with downs syndrome or only one arm.
surely people have control over choosing their shirts. Just compare these people who choose their shirts every morning with mentally disabled people who cannot choose their shirts. Claiming that there is no distinction is plain wrong. That doesn't meen you have a magically free will, floating over your head, which is not part of the determined world, but thats just a silly idea. For the distincition made above, you do not need such magic.
Dennett's answer is "yes", in many instances we could have done otherwise but being able to do otherwise is not incompatible with determinism. There is nothing problematic about saying that we are determined to be able to do otherwise. An odd way of putting it is to say we are just such beings that do not have the choice to be able not to do otherwise. We are determined to have choices, to have certain decisions up to us, unlike the moon or a stone, for example.
In any case, the compatibilists have solved all the issues related to morality and determinism ages ago and have a technical vocabulary related to that, which includes the definition of freedom that Dennett talks about here. If you don't like it, tough, but it actually works very well, because there aren't huge changes in meaning and any sensible person should be able to grasp it right off the bat unless they have ideological commitments to contraditions.
That's interesting. Perhaps what I am thinking of as free will is not free will at all...I'm still trying to figure it all out, but it's pretty hard to call free will free if it isn't completely free. And it obviously isn't completely free now, is it?
Other than the statement about consciousness and free will (because neither terms are well defined anywhere), I agree with whatever you say and I believe in the same. But my question to you was: how can one go on living normally? Are you proud of your accomplishments? Are you ashamed of your mistakes/failures? Like you said, you are not responsible for your actions/thoughts/behavior. So how can you be in peace with this?
I think Dennett is quite right. When people talk about free will, the important thing about it is not that it's magic, but moral responsibility and the feeling of control. If a person is identical with the properties of a brain, and the brain is in control of the body, the person is in control. Whether your identity is "caused" is irrelevant; if no one constrains you strongly, your actions are your own. Even computers can surprise their programmers; one day they may be considered "free" too.
Just another of the mysteries with which we must content ourselves, I am with William James who says, 'the first act of my freedom is to affirm that I am free.' It is an affirmation that by the logic of the case cannot be compelled not event rationally or logically. It must be chosen, assumed, believed in.
Bell's Theorem only rules out LOCAL hidden variables. It still leaves room for the possibility of non-local hidden variables. So this basically means that a particle might be able to affect another particle instantaneously from a distance. This would effectively mean that "information" can travel at faster than light speed (under certain interactions).
One of the significant changes that results from accepting determinism, or that we don't have free will in the libertarian sense, is that it shifts us from a retributivist conception of justice to a consequentialist conception of justice. I will give you a clear example of how these two conceptions of justice come apart. - cont.
@wholethinker It is certainly frustrating that we can only peel back the layers without knowing what any layers below may reveal. Always an an approximation. But it's not clear what your point is as you contradict yourself: is there "out of nothing energy" or not? Does it violate the conservation law or not? The supply of energy to the brain isn't the issue anyway.
@theocean1973 Also, check 3:55 - 4:12. The word 'inevitable' gets it's meaning from the agent point of view, in other words it's use is pragmatic. Therefore, the argument that free will is impossible because in a deterministic material universe every event is inevitable, in exactly the way it happened, can be dismissed.That's just not how we use the word 'inevitable'. So ironic enough, the standard argument for non-compatibalism is actually juggling with words and Dennett's argument is not!
That's also something I have thought about - if the brain is like a 'prism' for consciousness and the more advanced the brain, the more it is able to manifest. So in effect we are evolving towards a greater 'knowing' of the universe. Who knows?
@TheWALOS good point, free will is essentially saying that we have the ability to make a decision other than the decision we made, it is expecting something different to happen if you replayed time (ignoring quantum physics which has no bearing on free will, as our will is still determined by physical laws outside our control even if they are probabiliistic). what i should of said is 'it doesnt make sense to talk about free will, as it doesnt make sense to talk about an undeterminded universe.'
I can see that you are trying but you have said it clearly.. "our behavior is determined". To state that we can override our basic emotions to some degree is to contradict the statement you made prior. I ask you; with what mechanism do we "override" our basic emotions and is that separate from causation and non-randomness. If it is separate then I would like to know how it even manifest itself within the realm of reality. In any case free-will still remains elusive to logical explaination.
Nah, Dennett explains what we're actually referring to when we use the expression free will, and his explanation is perfectly straight forward and true. The only reason to reject it is if one believes we need to reserve the expression "free will" for something magical and contradictory that obviously can not exist. The latter seems foolish given the role freedom(In Dennett's sense) plays in assignment of responsibility etc.
Avoiding a flying brick is different from avoiding a predestined event such as avoiding a flying brick. If determinism is true, you can avoid a lot, but you can't aviod what is already bound to happen.
Exactly,.. in that context it was predetermined. I would also not say that I have proven that free-will doesn't exist but the more you discuss it seriously you begin to see more evidence for the contrary. For free-will to exist it must be separate from the world of causation and non-random. One question that you can ask is: where does your desire come from? or where does it originate? If you tend to link it back to some causal chain then it is not free. And randomness takes away accountability.
You are correct that it's not totally random rather probabilistic, but that still means it's somewhat random. It sounds to me like you are describing the idea of "local hidden variables". That is the idea that quantum mechanics is only "fuzzy" because there is some underlying complexity that we don't yet understand that would make it completely deterministic. If you google "Bell's Theorem", you will find that that idea is actually incompatible with what has been observed through experiment.
I must say, its as unexpected as it is refreshing to stumble upon a voice of such reason and clarity in the RUclips comments section. Mo' power to you.
Isn't the definition of free will that when i make a decision it has been decided by ME? and when i say ME i mean my body and my brain etc. i think that if im trying to figure it wether or not i was the one making the decision, i should check if processes in my brain caused the outcome, and if thats the case then i was responsible.so that should mean that there CAN be free will in a deterministic universe. could you please explain because i think i am wrong lol, sorry for my english by the way
@PurpleGhost Oh sorry. QM=Quantum Mechanics. This goes to your point of "range of possibilities" but without the Dennett avoidance mechanism. The mechanism in this case is scientific uncertainty. Are you familiar with it? "Uncertainty" is fundamental to QM. Theres alot of arguing (for and against) its importance in "free will" as well. I think it allows for indeterminism which gives us "the range." From there its a mystery for now.
Why is everyone hating on Dennett here? To posses the capacity of avoiding requires: 1. to be conscious of goals and life-plans stretching far into the future 2. To be able to evaluate situations and elements in your environment as being useful as means for those goals and life-plans, or detrimental to their fullfilment 3, to be able to react intelligently and autonomously to those situations, thus avoiding the things that you can perceive to be bad for the realization of your goals and lifeplans. You can have all of this in a deterministic world!
I don't know if its similar, but the concept of the aesop's fable where an eagle catches a bird who tries to persuade her to let it go because it (the bird) is so small and she could catch something bigger but the eagle doesn't (moral: bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush) - i think this type of learning where intelligent beings create laws to evaluate the chaoic world. But if the universe is deterministic, could clarvoyance evolve? Or phrophesying be possible?
"Choice" and "decision making" is just the part of determinism where the prefer-ability of outcomes is ascertained. Action is the result of a personal calculation. It is governed by our ignorance and preference. People ALWAYS "choose" the most valuable/preferable action. If going "against" the strongest preference, that is the persons actual strongest preference. Thus there is no choice, only unique preference and the ignorance of the moment.
Free will is a social construct we apply to make sense of this world. I agree with Dan Bennett in the sense that we could come up with a definition of free will that makes sense and fits within a deterministic perspective, however one could argue there's nothing free about it at all since it wouldn't free us from being slaves of our brain chemistry and events happening around us.
@SaraCufer "our universe hasn't been deterministic for about 80 years" Consider a single uranium atom. Due to quantum theory we don't know when that atom will decay. Suppose we have two observers who exist simultaneously according to Relativity. However for one of those observers the uranium atom has already decayed but for the other it has not. Does the fact that one observer has observed the atom decay, collapse the wave function for the other observer?
Dennett's view is that every variety of free will 'worth wanting' is compatible with determinism. The problem is that a significant kind - the kind needed to make us truly deserving of blame and praise for our deeds - is absent. Of course, it is probably absent if indeterminism is true too, and may actually be incoherent. But that doesn't alter the fact that compatibilist free will just 'aint up to making us responsible.
What bugs me about Dennett is that when he talks about the mind body problem he says a difference that makes no difference is irrelevant and those who argue for a separation of mind and body use incoherent, ill-defined terms that make no difference at all to the practicality of consciousness. But then whenever he talks about free will he uses a lot of incoherent terms like "evitability" that makes no difference at all to what the situation would be if there were no free will.
"You can do what you will, but in any given moment of your life you can will only one definite thing and absolutely nothing other than that one thing."
This is how the two different conceptions of justice come apart: If you have a consequentialist conception of justice, all you care about is that the effects of punishment are good for society, so you would want to have a lower recidivism rate. Most people have a retributivist conception of justice though, they are willing to allow more crime if it means that prisoners are forced to suffer, because they believe they deserve to suffer and this is based on their belief in free will.
If determinism is true, it's theoretically possible to predict future events as they are already determined. Like what I'm going to eat for dinner next week. But knowing that, I can choose not to eat what was predicted. Which makes the prediction false. If any avertable future event can't be predicted with certainty, does that lead to indeterminism or simply me being unable to ever know my future actions? Or will the universe "force" me to comply with the determined outcome?
I don't think anyone is arguing against that. I think everyone agrees that we are bound to a limited number of decisions at any one time. But what I'm saying is that we DO have decisions...even if they are limited.
I dont really understand his argument. Agents will only avoid certain things. Agent might or might not avoid something, but ultimately they will only make the choice they make at any given point in time. I cannot change what i did yesterday, and today and tomorrow will be the same story. No matter what the probability is for any event, only one outcome will occur.
+Angloth Yeah, I think that the Dennett's obvious hole in his argument is that what he describes as unavoidable futures that we learn to avoid is just possible scenarios but none of them, given that we are and will avoid them, is the actual determined future. "They are just strawman-futures." The avoiding is then just a part of the process how to arrive at the determined future. And even if we are so fortunate as to know for sure what the determined future is, then we'll arrive at it, no matter what we do. And then the 'recognized' determined future should reflect all our tries to avoid it and how it shaped our way of arriving to it. I think the key part to this video is what Dennett said right at the beginning: "I don't know what they mean by inevitable future" and I agree. he doesn't really understand what do scientists mean when they speak about it (even though I'm a great sympathizer of his work): the inevitable future just has nothing to do with the possible futures that we can avoid.
A nice way of putting it! I also sympathize with most of what i have seen him talk about. I wonder why he "clings" to such a position. Maybe he argues that the impression we have of avoiding certain futures is a usefull skill, and that this impression IS in some way free will (in the eye of the beholder) A while since i saw this interview now, but i seem to recall that he actually admits that the future of the universe is determined by its very "timeline", that what happens tomorrow is dependent on today and so forth. I loose him when he says that this is different for humans, because we have cognitive functions that let us evaluate situations based on what outcomes we percieve. I think he simply argues that because we, in some sense, have atleast an illusion, or a percieved sense of free will and action in everyday life, we indeed HAVE free will, or as much free will as "we need" or something like that. It just becomes confusing semantics to me at that point, but im not that well educated on his position, ill admit.
Angloth Can't agree more. Of course, as I think you pointed out, the free will illusion: I think this is another thing some anti-hard-determinism people (not saying Dennett really) try to point out that then there is no responsibility and blah blah blah. I think it is then much more important for us to explain what the free will illusion entails: lack of information about the hard-determined future doesn't and cannot ever exonerate us from responsibility and that while we're never responsible in respect to the whole universe, we are always responsible to our social units (our society, our planet...) due to the collective ignorance of what is determined. But I digressed: I just wanted to express my discontent at what is sometimes said by people who just don't bother to grasp that the free will illusion actually means that nothing changes for us as individuals in our daily conduct (maybe with one exception: we should think twice about pursuing a revenge / or about how exactly we want punish criminals and so forth). Yeah, I think that as you say, Dennett is not really sure in this point what he himself wants to argue for. On one side he tries to assure us that he doesn't speak against what most of physics says (that probably not even quantum 'random' events can really prevent determinism since the quantum theory is perfectly probabilistic and the equations work great there) = that there is nothing to really speak against hard-determinism, but he's just somehow trying to find his way out of it... by changing the meanings of the words.. Well, I'm just repeating what you said :.) Anyway, thanks for the discussion! (And greetings from the Czech Republic :P)
The issue is much more complex than that. Without determinism our actions lack reason and become irrational. So you can either believe that determinism is false yet there is some loophole that allows us rational thought. Or believe determinism true yet there is a some loophole that allows us freedom.
We DO 'hold machines accountable'. When a machine malfunctions, we either shut it down (i.e., execute it) or repair it (rehabilitate). We don't ignore it, we don't pretend its malfunction isn't evidence that it will malfunction again, and we don't turn our attention to the innocent machine next to it. I have no idea why you ask whether a comet is 'immoral'. Morality is not the question, accountability is. It is NOT intuitively or logically clear that there's anything 'special' about humans.
If I decide to "avoid" a bus that is heading in my direction it was INEVITABLE that I would! Do to: my desire to live, the fact that i want to go home and play xbox, the possibility of eating pizza later that night...etc etc. whatever your reason it was unavoidable that you would or would not avoid. If you decided not to avoid the bus then that as well was determined by your lack of desire to live, your lack of desire to play xbox later that night etc. whether we avoid or don't is already set
Dennett is wrong. Inevitable does not mean just unavoidable, it means fully implicit in the current state and laws of physics. I can avoid a situation simply by its not being realized. That does not put me into the causal chain in the way free will does. Free will means that I am the radical source of a line of events, where radical means that the line was not implicit in the state of affairs prior to my decision. Peace, DP
It's true, there may be something that we haven't found yet that would change how we understand quantum physics, but this is very unlikely, because the evidence is pretty overwhelming. The calculations and predictions of quantum mechanics that tell us that it's all probabilistic, are the best predictions and calculations we have in all of science. Richard Feynman said that it is like calculating the width of North America with the accuracy of the width of a human hair.
mathematically, everything that is currently happening in the universe when i hit "post" WILL determine everything until the end of time. free will is simply the definition we give to what is determined by the inputs and outputs of our brain. since the nature of electrical impulses in our brains vary from person to person, we get the illusion of free will. i encourage a response to this.
Right on the money! When I wrote my reply I thought of putting "and enhanced" in brackets. The proper way of putting things is to acknowledge that nature and its laws simultaneously enhance and constrain our freedom of the will.
It's not a contradiction to say that on a whim you will do one thing, but in thought you will do another. We override our basic emotions through thought and reason...we can see the implications of our actions. Animals just seem to act, without thought.
Introducing unpredictable randomness doesn't change the discussion about the viability of 'free will' in any interesting way, is what Dennet is arguing at the end, so you may as well contain the discussion to a deterministic universe. Free will can't mean complete freedom from predictability either; that's just randomness.
"All the varieties of free will that are worth wanting you can have in a deterministic world." That's the key.
The biggest problem in the discussion if so-called free will is the very mushy definitions people bring to the table. Once you're clear about what you mean when you say 'free will' it's not that complicated to show that it does or doesn't exist.
You’ve got it. The eras-old debate is a semantic one.
What he says is very simple. Free will exists not as an ontological entity, but rather as a linguistic form. Free will is our way of explaining to ourselves how we behave under given circumstances.
For me personally it's like this. I genuinely don't believe in free will and I do not take credit for any of my actions. Not even when it's convenient and I do something awesome. I really see myself as a spectator experiencing my life. Even though it feels like I'm directly involved with it, oh and I am, but I do not have control over it. When something great happens and I accomplish something, I just think, "Wow, that's really awesome that I was able to do that." That is my kind of peace.
Rest as awareness.. just as some zen Buddhist might say 😀
If determinism does not allow free-will, the avoider is just doing the "evitable" when he predicts a future event and avoids it.
Doug Syler I've been thinking the same thing. If you knew everything in a certain moment, you'd "predict" the future and change it. And that itself would've'been predetermined. Although I feel like there's a flaw in this reasoning.
+babbisp1 No, it's correct in fact. But you have to realize that even if you succeed somehow to uncover the hard-determined future (before it arrives), then THAT future scenario that you learn will have to contain every and each one of your attempts to avoid it and how it shaped your path to arriving to it. The determined future might even say something like "At this day and this hour you have successfully avoided xyz." And from some reasons that will be exactly what you're going to do. Maybe that the recognition of the hard determined future will always just yield very useless information since it will always contain the possibility of you having avoided anything bad that might come to you. But it won't ever tell you that something bad is going to happen for sure if there is even a slightest possibility that you can avoid it and succeed. Or it will tell you that something bad is going to happen, but it will reliably "predict" that you have no way to avoid it or to get all the information on the misfortune that's going to happen. (if that ever will be the case!)
Dennett just, as he says himself, doesn't understand what do people mean by the inevitable future and he thinks it's the scenarios we are able to predict by the power of our reasoning or observation and therefore avoid them: but that clearly isn't the inevitable future. The inevitable will and must contain all your attempts to avoid other possible future scenarios that you want to avoid. Dennett from some reason, didn't come to this in his reasoning or chose to ignore it.
yes, exactly, thats what we believe
yes, this guy Dennet thinks he has solved the problem Descartes was unable to solve, and Newton, and Hume, and Chomsky, they are all wrong, and he is right because he discovered that "inevitable" means "unavoidable" and he is so happy...well...it is funny how stupid people think they are smart, so so so simplistic and superficial
@@nunya7616 An avoider ducks when a brick is thrown at me.
Part 2.. I personally think it's ironically "liberating" to understand these things. It gives us new insight on what we actually are. The reason it seems unpleasant is because we've been brought up to believe the opposite and unless you've lost respect for those values it's difficult to adopt or understand new things. If more people understood that free will doesn't exist, our ways of solving problems would change drastically. I'd encourage you to check out "Paradise or Oblivion" on youtube.
It's so easy to say in hindsight that "you could have only done this" but genuinely I think you'll find that in this very moment you have the ability to choose...or at least, a very convincing illusion that you do. But here's where I employ Occam's razor. It's simpler to assume we do have free will rather than the illusion of it.
There are three things that most people seem to miss when they discuss this matter, and Dennett is no exception:
1) Knowing all the truths in the realm of Physics (every particle, field, etc in the initial conditions of the Universe + all their determined behaviors) doesn't give a predictive picture of how the world will be because it's only one level of explanation. You can't even see cells and their behavior at the phyics level; you need to invoke chemistry and biology. And it gets more and more removed as you move up "levels". Imagine that, at a given moment, a huge cluster of atoms stop going in the direction they had been going and quickly fly in the opposite direction. Why did they do that? No answer on the physics level. No answer even at the chemical level. They did it because they are the constituent atoms of a gazelle who just saw a tiger and is running for its life. Explanation has levels, and what is meaningful at one level is not exhaustively visible at a lower level. And so, embodied agents interacting with a world and in a community of minds can make decisions because that's the kind of entities they are, and physics is the wrong level at which to address that.
2) Libet-style experiments are irrelevant to the real question of free will. Neuroscience has focused on these kinds of experiments, but the lifting of a finger or pressing of a button is actually just a small piece of a much larger activity: *participating in Libet's experiment*! And this involved all sorts of planning, choosing, committing, etc, and it involves REASONS why you went through all that effort (perhaps thinking that advances in neuroscience will help people or whatever). Moreover, the Libet-style experimenter has to rely on the subject to tell them at what time they chose to lift their finger. But that means you have to trust the subject to respond truthfully and as accurately as they can. But why should you trust that unless you consider the subject to be an agent who has the desire to help you with your experiment, etc etc?
3) Finally, having discovered that particles are NOT actually tiny billiard balls behaving in predictable ways, why should we imagine that large assemblages of them who certainly seem to have non-deterministic wills and abilities to choose are just bigger billiard balls?? Indeed, we almost can't help but think that we are choosing freely, even when it comes to freely choosing not to believe in free will! It's a basic belief; as basic to our epistemological framework as the belief in the external world and it's comprehensibility which underlies all scientific endeavor. In other words: We have certain basic beliefs that are fundamental to our cognition, and science is based on several of these... so it is a perilous idea indeed to try to use science to uproot equally basic beliefs (like free will), ESPECIALLY when we're counting on those beliefs in each experiment we do (see point #2 about the reports of the subject in the Libet experiment).
I think it's really pitiful what a zeitgeist like metaphysical naturalism can do to our thinking when we're wrapped up in it like Dennett clearly is. Otherwise brilliant people end up making the silliest mistakes.
There would be a physical explanation to the change of direction of the atoms if one was to study the intricate relationship between that system and the entirety of the universe. Physics is not the wrong level to study this, it may be the most impractical one in a short term, but it is certainly not wrong to approach a biological problem through Physics. One day, if we get good enough at using computational models, we may be able to predict the behaviour of a full blown animal, maybe even an animal in a small environment.
Particles do behave in a deterministic fashion, quantum mechanics states that there is an apparent randomness, there could very well be hidden non local variables that explain that apparent behaviour of particles. And even if we said this "randomness" is really embedded into the laws of the universe, there is no room for free will, as randomness does not imply making a decision, you dont choose where the electron is, it just exists there.
Besides, what if the belief in free will is present in so many things we do? 2000 years ago people thought the fucking earth was the center of the universe, and that the planets moved around the earth in perfect circles and around another center in an epicycle. Millons of women were murdered for being "witches", people are stoned to death in certain arab countries and it has been happening over a really long time, does this mean that doing so is right? Of course not.
Mardlamock N
You've missed the point. An "animal" does not exist at all at the level of physics. As such, it isn't about getting better computational models of subatomic particles. No such model will ever address the "animal itself" since no such entity exists at that level.
I wasn't saying that the indeterminacy of QM is the explanation of free will. I agree completely that randomness doesn't help the free will argument at all. And I also personally favor the hidden variables, Bohm-deBroglie type of model of QM such that there is no *ontological* indeterminacy; merely epistemological. But that is completely beside the point. I only pointed to the "none-billiard-ball" nature of the subatomic world to give an example of where our "mechanistic" idea of how the world works is clearly flawed. Subatomic particles are most likely behaving as interacting *fields*, not balls bouncing off each other in mechanistic fashion. As such, the very idea of "physical determinism" is not what it once seemed to be.
Finally, I wasn't saying that the ubiquity of our belief in free will guaranteed its truth. I was saying that the *proper BASICALITY* of that belief indicated that we are more rational to dismiss a worldview which tells us we have no free will than we are to dismiss free will in favor of a worldview. The belief in free choice is *properly basic* to our experience; it is even present in the very attempt to get rid of it! If I say "I choose not to believe in free will, since I am convinced by such-and-such argument" I am implicitly saying that I can freely choose which beliefs to accept! Moreover, a belief as basic and central to our experience as free will obviously is ought not to be abandoned any more easily than we ought to abandon the belief in the external world or the belief in other minds.
An animal does exist at a physical level, because if it didint it wouldnt exist, we havent been able to find a mathematical description of an animal, but i am more than sure that with the use of computational models we could be able to find one. If a person who doesnt believe in free will says the word choose, then that person is contradicting itself and fails to communicate their beliefs, that person hasnt understood the objectiveness with which one must communicate such idea.This is one of the biggest problems with determinists, the difficulty in expressing one s ideas without using words that imply choice. If you listen to any free will supporters, they will use the same argument as you are, but that does not adress the very nature of the problem, only the way of expressing it. IMO trying to take down determinism by the way it is expressed is cheap and dishonest.
1) I never said animals did not exist at "the physical level". I said they don't exist at the level of Physics. I meant the level of subatomic particles/waves/fields which is the fundamental realm of Physics. There are no "animals" at that level; just collections of fundamental particles. It is the wrong level to address things like predation. The movement of the atoms would look no different if the gazelle was running for some other reason (or for no reason at all).
2) I wasn't referring to the *word* "choose", I was referring to the *concept*. The determinist genuinely believes that they have been convinced by reasons to accept determinism. However, if determinism were true, then the determinist would believe it the same way a tree grows a branch; an inevitable result of objects bumping into each other.
3) What's cheap and dishonest is how you completely ignored my main argument and misconstrued my secondary one! My main argument is to do with the proper basicality of belief in free will and how it is on a par with belief in the external world. As such, since science presupposes the latter, it is untenable that it should disprove the former.
1- There are no such things as animals in a small level, animals are just the effect of the interactions between atoms. It is not the wrong level to adress things like predation, it is simply the most impractical, one day we will get a mathematical definition of an animal (it will be very complicated imo), everything approachable from Physics, because physics tries to understand the whole universe, it may be trying to solve what happens on a small or gigantic scale, but once we find those rules we can figure out all that goes inbetween ie: animals, social interactions, psychology.
2- And i dont see why being convinced should represent a problem to a deterministic view of the universe, there is this causality. I believe in determinism because I was convinced of it there is a causality( i saw something on a computer screen, which introduced that thought into my mind, which then stayed there and made me do some more research, bla bla bla). And you are still not adressing the main point of determinism, just the way people express their belief in it and the certain contradicitons it may seem to pose in a person that believes in free will.
3- Science can and will prove free will wrong, one day, maybe not too long from now.
The free-will problem is easy. Objectively, of course there can not be any free will in a materialized world, but subjectively, we are hard-wired to feel that we are free to choose. You are determined to feel free! You cannot equate subjective experience with objective experience, just like you cannot equate your experience of color to the wave length. There is no contradiction at all.
To me, colour doesn't really exist, its just something we perceive from different wavelengths of light.
Analogously, free will doesn't exist, its just something we perceive from being conscious..
If you take that deeper, you could say different levels of reality have their own truths, but I suspect that's not right, the "truths" in the higher level are probably just illusions.
Dennett is brilliant and expresses himself with extreme clarity as usual.
Thanks for posting the video.
Amazing.This guy wrote a book and gained recognition without understanding the topic of which he speaks.Whether you'll avoid something is determined by your ability to foresee the results of your actions.Whether you have that ability is determined by your intelligence,experience,current level of tiredness,genes,and many,many other things.But its just the normal stream of cause and effect.If you made a choice,then time rewinded,you would make the same decision again,all factors would be the same.
I just learned the word gratuitous from this video and will use it liberally from now on. Thank you Daniel Dennett!
In ten minutes of nigh-uninterrupted speech, Dennett said precious little about what he believes and his rationale for believing it. I've watched this video a few times now, and can't help but wish more and more that he'd give Sam Harris the dialogue he's asked for.
Neil Mcintosh there is no position to make sense of :)
+Neil Mcintosh
This is because Dennett is confused and hopeless. There is no evidence that we do not have free will, none at all. We are the agents. We may be fooled, we may make mistakes, we may be misled but all these simply confirm that we in fact have free will. That is the end of the matter. Simple.
Don't let fake philosophers like Dennett pull wool over your eyes.
@@dubunking2473 There is no evidence that we have free will.
According to Bennett Google's self driving car has free will because it can avoid collisions. That's what he's saying.
cause he's an idiot.
But is the car reasoning? Or simply reacting?
+Christopher Soria It doesn't make a difference because ultimately, reasoning is simply reacting too..
According to Sam Harris and the other incompatiblists, you're just a collection of cells, and there's no "you" in there at all. If that makes more sense to "you" (the scare quotes being necessary in that case), then fine.
***** But the decision to move your hands is predicated on signals from your brain. Where do the signals originate? In brain cells, and from their chemical processes. If you don't believe that, then consider people whose motor systems in the brain do not work. They can't move their hands up and down. Do the handicapped have LESS free will than you? (BTW, I think we do have free will, but I like making this problem hard because to me it really is tricky.)
If there is only the material world, as Dennett beleives, it's obvious that there is no free will. It's impossible to say rationally that we can compatibilize free will and materialism. Laplace understood this very well. It's surprising that Dennett, a philosopher, seems unable to understand something so obvious. Excuse my English, I'm a Brazilian.
This is an argument about language.
+Graham Shimell Free will arguments are always arguments about language. Heck, most arguments come down to people using incompatible or poorly defined terms. The observation that most metaphysical arguments come down to definitions of terms has been known since the ancient Greeks.
Word is a cool breeze
of a sudden wind blowing into the expanse;
it might refresh you, but
it won't help you get anywhere.
Wittgenstein argued that all of philosophy is an argument over semantics.
This doesn't negate the meaningfulness of the aforementioned debate!
that is what philosophy is about - understanding the language.
Just like every other argument
Did you watch the video? The point Dennett is trying to make is that any sort of "free will" worth wanting doesn't depend on any thesis on determinism or indeterminism, much less any thesis about quantum uncertainty.
The other guy's name is Robert Wright, BTW
"but in no way free."
It's free by the definition Dennett provides. In the same sense someone who're not in jail is freer than someone who is, someone who is in a situation where many choices are available is freer than someone who isn't.
This is all that matters to the connection between the term free will and morality, which is why compatibilism has value.
He's a compatibilist? I thought he was a hard determinest.
Really? Compatibilism has been Dennett’s schtick for decades. He’s written three books on it, given lectures, did a Philosophy Bites episode, etc.
Watched 7 mins and I have no clue what he is talking about.
If you watch sam harris talking on this subject, he is very clear and makes strong points with concise examples.
I'm not sure exactly what determinism is, but I think if time was reversed by say 1 hour, then things would play out slightly differently the second time due to the randomness seen at the quantum level.
With or without any randomness, its irrelevant to free will.
My point here is that determinism might not be the opposite of free will, cause it could be a random-determinism like I mentioned above.
If he does mean something different when he says freewill, he should clarify it to stop confusing people.
He lost me right when he started to dissect words. Inevitability is what has happened ...thus you can predict. Sorry Dennet, you're wrong.
Exactly right. Life is not about having control, but about experiencing it. The “Amness“ is the capacity to experience, nothing more (Peter Russell). In a hard deterministic worldview, things like anger, envy or pride, are irrational. It is much easier to deal with struggle, discomfort or injustice. It is easier to forgive and to bring your mind at peace.
It does not free one from moral responsibility, and it doesn´t take away fascination because you don´t know what´s going to happen next.
I Agree with Daniel Dennet, that free will is an illusion regardless of universe being deterministic or undeterministic. Free will is an ilussion not because of determinism, it is an illusion because we equate it with thought processes, the meaning of whic we can not or do not understand and therefore proclaim it as a metaphysical concept independant from the rest of our thoughts, that we do not consider as a part of our free will.
exactly becuz there is no true delimited object in the world that obey a different law from the rest of universe. Were all mass of matters.
That’s not at all what he thinks. Free will is NOT an illusion. We have all the freedom that matters.
Which book by Daniel Dent is the interview talking about?
Dennett's brain defending a belief it was determined to hold. Oh...the irony ;)
Are you a libertarian or determinist?
What irony? Dennett’s view is compatible with determinism.
@@lenn939 Dennett was simply predetermined to hold those views.
@leonard u But what’s ironic about that?
@@lenn939 He's defending an idea that he was predetermined to believe. He can't know if it's true or not since every thought that comes to his head was simply determined to be there.
I think RUclips user Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨Ʒ nailed it with this comment (posted on this video ruclips.net/video/joCOWaaTj4A/видео.html ): "You run models in your mind of what the world will look like if you do different things, you evaluate the consequences, and you make the choice which has the consequences that are best. You were always going to make that choice, but you had to run a model where you didn't. That's what gives us the feeling that we could have made the other choice."
Im a Christian, which obviously means I disagree with Daniel Dennett on certain things. But I strongly agree with what he says about compatibilism
I don't understand goalkeeper action you refer to. I can't avoid avoiding a brick at my head. Perhaps if I had a helmet on and I knew I would not be harmed by the things flying at my head, the reflex would not trigger.
He talks about "agents", but neglects to take apart the word like he did "inevitable". If the universe is deterministic, true agency doesn't exist in the first place. It's rethorical sleight-of-hand.
addendum: You can avoid a spear. But can you avoid avoiding the spear?
What do you mean by 'true' agency? In a deterministic universe their can be action/reaction, their can be complexity, chaos, unpredictability.. and systems like us that get input, calculate probabilities, weigh optional outcomes and act on these result... that is agency..
Why does the 'true' stand for? What does it add (that we can demonstrate exists)?
Addendum: most of our actions are taking by us, but not with this 'free will' at hand. Our biology does most of the work, we have reflexes, instincts (which are basicly shortcuts to useless calculation of option in familiar circumstances..), ..
The sort of free will we seem to have is a slow working system, prosponing fast reaction and taking the time to recalculate different scenarios.. (not whilst spears are approaching)
But between all these different systems, that induce action, i suspect is a lot of greyscale.. they flow one in the other..
P.G. Burgess Our biology doesn't do most of the work, it does ALL of the work, because unless you want to invoke some sort of soul, our biology is all we are, and thus the only thing that CAN do the work.
Thus, the only difference between instinct and so-called free will is subjective experience. Objectively, all actions and "choices" we make are but the ticking of a biochemical clock - a program running on a neuro-computer.
And like any other computer, given the same input, programming and initial state, we will always make the same choice. So what room does that leave for agency?
Ann O. Nymus
I'll agree that 'free will' , 'making of choices' or 'agency' are rather subjective experiences. I'd say these terms explictly refer to the experience this 'neurocomputer has'.
I do understand your point, but what 'objective' viewpoint is there from which the unfolding of time is predictable?
You say 'Given the same input', but the same as what or when? What initial set state was there? Even the 'programming' of the brain is a dynamic system..
The place of 'agency' is that of -what seems to be the only- existing viewpoint in which actions are 'calculated'.
But i think one might even go further.. we interact with a complex and unpredictable universe; it is filled with fundamental uncertainties and interferences... in which the smallest detail can make huge differences. You do not even need to go into the blury field of quantumtheories to find chaos; this even can arise in simple deterministic systems. (for reference, check out lorenz-equations; non-liniair dynamics...)
layperson here, does my brain create an underlying, evolving, constant memory that is who "I" am and what my mind is? do we use our brain to make choices? does our brain use us to make choices? do we "think" our mind is separate from body, brain, and self? if “I use” my brain to make choices, then who am “I”?
I do really find it interesting that I don't have as much free will to make choices about what my brain is actually charged with controlling: blood flow, body temp, body growth, injury repair, metabolism, that annoying uncontrollable twitch you get once in a while, etc. If I cant honestly choose to, for example, quit sending blood to my index finger or maybe just quit blinking till my eyes hurt then how do I believe that I have more control over other less intimate things.
if free will is the ability to choose, then what is choosing? so I googled choice, then got "decision" in the definition, so I looked it up and got conclusion, then reasoning, then thought, then thinking, mind, intellect, consciousness, and so on. it appears that it is much more complex to define what "choice” is than I expected. "making" a choice must be exponentially more difficult.
just for arguments sake take this next sentence. “you” “think” “you” have a “choice” to read this or not and “conclude” if its “intelligent”. I find all the words in quotes very had to define. the calculations (or whatever thought is) of reasoning are so freakishly complex the more i think i am thinking about it, the less i feel i understand.
from a different perspective, in a truly "free will" scenario how extreme can one go to simply "not choose" anything, ever? it seems that we believe in free will and yet many choices we make, we MUST make, and we don't have the free will to not choose even if indecision didnt immediately mean certain death.
I dunno, like I said... layperson here maybe I should "keep mouth closed so foot cannot enter" lol
The delusion of the Dennet is to believe that intelligent agents have the ability to choose to AVOID the determinist nature of their behaviour, when the reasoning itself that the agent has to go through to "choose to avoid it" is underlied by deterministic processes and as such it's IMPOSSIBLE to do so!
The example of the brick and a lighting stroke is pure bull. "You can't avoid a lighting stroke, but you can choose to avoid a brick thrown at you". No you can't. The decision of avoiding that brick (or not) was predetermined to happen.
Prior conditioning does not obviate the capacity to make a broad range of choices and take actions in the present. What Dennett is saying is that your insistence on there being something more to free will than that is simply a bugaboo. In other words, it's not a black-and-white thing. In your sense, right, there is no absolute and total free will. But that's not something we should expect or care about when we discuss whether or not a person can make their own navigational decisions. We clearly can, and whether or not that is wholly conditioned and deterministic doesn't matter to the concept of independent agency.
The undeniable "explosion of evitability", which I do not deny, does not change the basic constellation, that we ALWAYS act "in style". "Acting in style", which enables clever observers to predict in most cases, what we are likely going to do, INCLUDES acting AGAINST our true inclination, e.g. fear, sexual desires, laziness etc. etc. Wolfgang RUTTKOWSKI / Kyoto, Japan
Inevitable/unavoidable! Dennett likes to use unnecessary and confusing word play!
It isn't determinism that gives us the illusion of free will, but rather emotion and indeterminism that does. The fact that we can't anticipate the next moment makes it seem like we are choosing the next step, but we aren't. In reality we are all only drawn towards certian choices and deterred from others (through learned behavior). Emotion simply seals the deal by making us feel good and powerful for making a choice to in essence reward the illusion of "free will".
His error is in missing that natural selection was determined in a materialistic universe, down to the position of every molecule which was part of evolution, so that evolution itself could not have occurred in any other way, and the 'avoiders' so formed could have formed in no other way, including each minuscule step of avoidance and the subsequent consequences of that, right down to the current illusion of free will in humans. Every thought is a chemical reaction formed by previous states and without escape. In other words, even the avoiders were determined to avoid down to the last molecule.
This is a freight train sized hole in his reasoning, and one can only assume it is because he so wants there to be some actual freedom of action rather than mere existence watching internal and external forces in his own mind drag him along.
+De Bunking You only say that because you can't help but respond that way... ;-)
But seriously, it's not a response to just say 'you don't understand' and not give specifics. Tell me in what way I don't understand free will and explain how it really works in opposition to what I said. Otherwise, you are just proving you don't really have any ideas, just complaints you can't defend.
Show us what mechanism can free any matter in the universe from either inescapable cause and effect from initial conditions, or from the relentless randomness of quantum uncertainty, both of which deny actual free choice and only allow an illusion of choice. Explain the mechanism.
+De Bunking - I agree hard determinism is bs. But it is also logically inescapable for atheistic worldviews, because there is no mechanism possible to free our thought from cause and effect (or random quantum fluctuation, neither of which allows for libertarian free will.)
I do believe in free will, and because I believe in a transcendent super-natural God, it is a rationally defensible position.
Congrats on beating your addiction and ptsd. I think that's really terrific, and a great hope for others to know it can be done.
+jasonthesage Isn't your decision to wear your red shirt and have corn flakes for breakfast a result of combinations of causes? It seems like people just call the victorious decision from that molecular battle between neurons 'free will' no matter what it is.
None of this will change anyone's life one iota other than adding more experiences to be considered in future decisions (maybe you'll buy corn flakes tomorrow now). In fact I could pretty much change 'incompatible' to 'compatible' and use it for my argument.
As he said, determinism is pretty much inevitable for an atheistic worldview. Are synapses affected by 'free will' or the other way around? If you see this comment and decide between replying or ignoring it, what element other than the material parts of the decision (1. your brain and its components and 2. the words its receiving from me) are involved? If none, isn't that pure determinism on its face? Why call the result 'free will', especially if you obviously can't control what synapses/neurons do and you can't control what my words are? (and if neurons are controlled, what is controlling them and how can I worship it?)
***** How is the fluff (not to mention 'yourself' and 'your mind' distinct from your neural chemistry? Something indescribable - can it be demonstrated to exist?
***** I would define subjectivity as just differences between brain chemistry, between either people or between yourself at different times. What else is it? Why attribute it to something unobservable?
Redefining terms and proposing you support something that means something while proposing that doesn't exist isn't really arguing for anything.
Hahahaha Dennet stumped :) at ca. 9 minute mark. The interviewer pins him down and all he can do is bluster and insult. Notice he offers no response in the form of a rational argument. Anyway he has so changed his tune in the last 5 years hahaha.
@0ctopusRex I understand determinism perfectly fine, but I never mentioned omniscience. Point is how can I know something I can prevent? Is it even logically possible for me to know what I'll eat next week if the universe is deterministic?
Trying to get good things = seeking behavior
If "evitability" has evolved, so that we can exercise free will, in what sense does this retain the principle of determinism? This is what compatibilists have been doing for centuries, invoking some feature of human or animal psychology that allows us to really choose between real options, but if that's true, it's no longer a deterministic system. If Dennett is convinced of the evitable, he has _two_ options - the one he chooses, which is to deny the traditional argument that determinism rules out free will, and another, which he doesn't seem to recognise (and I've never heard him explain why he avoids it): that determinism does not obtain. The traditional argument seems as sound as the fact that a non-random computer program always returns the same output given the same inputs. Furthermore, it is perfectly possible to retain determinism faithfully and conceive of all these evolved dodges as inevitable ones we must take, since we are biological machines computing inputs, according to the laws of physics. There's no deterministic escape from determinism. Clockwork doesn't find a way to wind itself up. There may be elimination of determinism, even if the evolution of evitability were true. Compatibilism is cognitive dissonance.
Dennet doesn't understand choices are included in determinism too lol..
If everything was random, everything would be inevitable, because you'd have no chance to avoid things that are out of your control. Determinism helps free will, because agents get more reliable information about things to avoid. When less is up to random chance, more freedom is on the agent.
420xHustlerxB0SS you don't seem to understand either lol.. what you know about outside threats is determined, and so is your "choice" to avoid those threats
That's why he's a compatabalist! Oddly enough a recent survey suggested that 80% of philosophers beleive in the 'compatabalist' view on freewill! To me it's all word play and confusion on defining what freewill is, a straw man argument if you like which gets us nowhere.
You are totally right,it seems incredible but he doesn't get it
sure he understands that. Dennett does not argue against determinism. He argues for compatibility of free will and determinism.
@SaraCufer I posed a question. Einstein saw time as a dimension of time-space. For Einstein the present and the past exist simultaneously. Hence the term the block universe where all the slices of time exist together.
Now the question in quantum mech. is do we have multiple parallel universes for each observer or is there a single universe with all its time slices already layed out? Does that atom have to decay at a particular point in time-space. If so the future is set - no degree of freedom.
I am quite surprised that Dennett, whom I have generally found to be extremely bright and eloquent, would make such a fundamental error. He somehow fails to see that when a brick is thrown and someone ducks to avoid it, this was a complex process of action and reaction, and there was no way that the person was ever going to be hit by the brick. They may think they almost got hit, and other people may think so; but the fact is that it was just not in the cards, if the universe is deterministic (and Dennett takes as a given that it is deterministic). You may as well say that the spokes on a bicycle wheel are good at avoiding collisions, as they never touch each other, despite one spoke moving very quickly toward where the other spoke had been just a millisecond earlier.
I think a part of his point on this is that it is non-sense to talk of 'what the future might have been'.
In retrospect the future could -in a direct way - not have been different. (only in manner of speaking.. 'under almost the exact circumstances')
But as far as the actual future is concerned, that may - even in a deterministic universe- still be unpredictableto us in a fundamental way.. leaving our determenistic mind up to the task of making probabiltiy-calculations that may 'alter the future..'
Alan Thomas people who believe the universe is deterministic are not aware of the implications of Quantum Physics it seems to me. Surely you have to be a Newtonian in terms of your level of scientific understanding to even entertain the idea that the universe *is* deterministic? Of course there is some hope for determinists that behind apparent quantum chaos there is an underlying order but the current understanding is against determinism, and that is the state of scientific evidence at this time. Right?
Justin Holme The word believe is interesting. It is just belief. No more no less. One is free to believe anything one likes. Dennett sets out his belief. You can have yours. That is about it. He begins to look like a fool when he pretends this is science.
I think as a philosopher you need to be very clear if you are putting forward a personal belief or a philosophical position. The later should be based on the best evidence available, generally scientific. People are interested in Dennet as a philosopher, very few care at all about his personal life surely.
Justin Holme You are right. But I think his personal belief is also his philosophical position.
Could you explain why philosophical issues should be based on scientific evidence? Do you mean a philosophical position can always be settled by scientific evidence ?
This is just about the hardest conversation to follow ever.
The whole subject makes my brain itch. Same thing happens when I try to wrap my head around special relativity
i can't believe this guy is a respected intellectual. "some agent can avoid a brick, therefor determinism doesn't preclude free will" - that's just stupid. obv the important thing is that it was predetermined that said "agent" (not really an agent) would avoid the brick. determinism and free will are incompatible, amirite?
correction, he said determinism doesn't imply inevitability. same thing really, it's inevitable that the agent avoids the brick if everything is predetermined
Long time gone! Well actually I was arguing against determinism, just because it's depressing/disempowering, not because it's unlikely. I say, if the history of the universe is just a series of physical reactions, the future is set and none of my actions or thoughts matter. Or I should sayy actions and thoughts are inevitable, so my effort doesn't matter. I prefer to believe in free will and trust my sense that the universe and my life exist for a reason.
+Bill Willow Well if you succeed in something you should be happy by the fact no mattter if you were determined to succeed or not. Unless you have the information, there is no reason not to be happy or disempowered. The absence of free will just has totally nothing to say how we should behave in most situation (there are exceptions like taking vengeance etc.) UNLESS we know the determined future. And we might never will.. the amount of computing power would have to be astronomical. That is: unless we know, we have no reason not to behave and understand the universe as if we had the free will, no reason at all.
Well I was more so talking about just standing in the road with a bus heading in your direction and you must either move or not move. Therefore you would indeed be able to make a thought out decision. Not just a reaction but motives taken into consideration..
Absolutely not worth watching.
Toolman85 I agree with Sam Harris. His speech was 100% true and enjoyable. Do you agree with harris that free will doesnt exist?
Toolman85 1) sam harris doesn't say "goofy things".
2) "Don't get out of bed and starve to death starting tomorrow, and tell me you don't have free will" What the fuck are you talking about? I have the desire to get out of bed, but I'm not responsible for having it or even following it.
3) "sam harris doesn't want to "blame others". in fact, he states clearly that blaming doesnt make any sense, because free will doesn't exist.
I'm confident that the notion of free will is nonsensical no matter how you put it. Here's the thing. If physical determinism is true, we are "slaves to chemical processes", like you said correctly. However, if indeterminism is true (the universe would still be partially deterministic, btw) we still don't have free will. Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them. Imagine this. Imagine if all of your experience was caused by someone at a computer, determining what you feel, do, say and want. That's clearly not a circumstance of free will. Now imagine if that person was determining all of that, but 10% of the time threw some dice or introduced some other mode of randomness into the process. That doesn't open up a space for free will. We know as a matter of scientific fact that everything you're consciously intending to do is preceded by neural events of which you're not conscious, and of which you have no control over whatsoever. Lastly, my argument against free will does not depend upon philosophical materialism, the idea that reality is at bottom physical. Now, there are very good reasons to believe that the mind is at bottom physical, but even if we had souls, nothing about my argument would change. The unconscious operations of a soul grant you no more freedom than the unconscious neurophysiology of your brain does. If you don't know what your soul is gonna do next, you're not in control of your soul. And you didn't pick your soul to begin with.
In other words, the whole notion of free will can be debunked by one sentence. You can't think a thought before you think it.
So you can brag all you want about how Sam Harris is wrong or goofy or whatever, but it means less than shit if you don't provide evidence for your claims.
wow, like im gonna read all that... I'm not going to debate with you. I think that determinism is silly, think what you want! your acting like your going to eventually find "proof" that determinism is true...
"In other words, the whole notion of free will can be debunked by one sentence. You can't think a thought before you think it."
This statement is just plain silly
Toolman85 You weren't bored to read it. You chickened out. By the way, I only mentioned determinism once. I simply argued why free will can't be mapped unto *ANY* conceivable reality (regardless of determinism). And don't ask me "what do you mean" or "explain yourself". Not until you've read the paragraph.
Not so silly really. But a better way to phrase it would be that a man can do what he wills, but he can not will what he wills.
I don't understand why people frame compatibilism as (if it is) a rival stance of determinism. Most determinists, I'm assuming, would agree that what compatibilists like to call free will (that is the feeling/illusion of agency, or that fact that "your brain is making decisions" which you can by narrowing the scope pf cause and effect) is very true. But they also acknowledge that feeling like you're free (which I don't realy anymore) doesn't make you a self causing agent, which some of them, including myself, think (as a part of subjective preference) is the requirement for you to call someone "responsible" for their actions, or for being who they are; indeed this doesn't mean we don't need to prevent crime, by imprinsoning or rehabilitating the 'criminal' or something else. And, I don't see comaptibilism making claims about the metaphysical reality any different from determinism. So, given this, there should really be no compatibilism, at least as a metaphysical position, as a counter to determinism. And it seems to me that, many compatibilists, just want to make determinists call the thing they call free will "free will";when, in my opinion, as long as you both have mutual understanding of what you are talking about, how you call a thing is metaphysically completely irrelevant.
This is embarrassing. Dennet is the Ringo Starr of the four horseman....
Right,lol. You know what I mean. Ringo's songs were shit and that's not up for debate. If there were one member of the beatles that could have been replaced without totally ruining the band it was Ringo!
+J LaReaux What Goes On, Don't Pass Me By, and With A Little Help From My Friends were good Ringo songs
Neal Kelly yeah yeah yeah, i knew i never should have made that comment,lol
J LaReaux But you were right about Dennett not making any sense in this video
Neal Kelly thanks...that was the point I was trying to make...nothing personal about Ringo,lol
But the set of electrons rushing through my brain causing me to type these letters were once set in motion by the big bang and these anonymous particles have been pushed around in a long line of causal events, eventually to end up where they are right now. When did this un-causal thing called free will all of a sudden intervene? How would that work?
@rjbullock
You might be joking, but it made me think about something: I wouldn't say that since you're incapable of doing something you're not free. It's a matter of free will not even being a part of the equation. You can be willing to do something, and yet be unable to.
Am I correct in this?
The free will question does not ask whether we can make decisions in isolation from physical law, nor does it ask whether the future is predestined.
It asks ONLY whether it is sensible to to hold people accountable for their actions. To which the answer is YES. Even those who argue against free will admit that holding people another accountable 'makes sense', or is 'unavoidable'.
Dennett's position makes sense of accountability in a deterministic world without magic.
@view1210 & @fmocastro So either the universe will keep me from knowing my own future (which might as well be an indeterministic standpoint) or the universe will render me incapable of changing it which sounds counter-intuitive (do I turn in a mindless puppet unable to change my choices or will the universe suddenly do things to prevent an alternate outcome?)
I`m a Huge fan of Dennett, but on free will i think he is wrong.
It might feel like we have free will in our every day life, but as Sam Harris points out: we have no controll over the forming of our thoughts and can only accept or reject the thoughts that surfaces. I have no real reason for why i chose the blue shirt instead of the grey one. And i certainly can`t take the credit for where i was born, when i was born or who my mother is and that i was not born with downs syndrome or only one arm.
surely people have control over choosing their shirts. Just compare these people who choose their shirts every morning with mentally disabled people who cannot choose their shirts. Claiming that there is no distinction is plain wrong. That doesn't meen you have a magically free will, floating over your head, which is not part of the determined world, but thats just a silly idea. For the distincition made above, you do not need such magic.
I'd like to hear him flesh this out more. Anyone know a book or video where he does?
Dennett's answer is "yes", in many instances we could have done otherwise but being able to do otherwise is not incompatible with determinism. There is nothing problematic about saying that we are determined to be able to do otherwise. An odd way of putting it is to say we are just such beings that do not have the choice to be able not to do otherwise. We are determined to have choices, to have certain decisions up to us, unlike the moon or a stone, for example.
In any case, the compatibilists have solved all the issues related to morality and determinism ages ago and have a technical vocabulary related to that, which includes the definition of freedom that Dennett talks about here. If you don't like it, tough, but it actually works very well, because there aren't huge changes in meaning and any sensible person should be able to grasp it right off the bat unless they have ideological commitments to contraditions.
That's interesting. Perhaps what I am thinking of as free will is not free will at all...I'm still trying to figure it all out, but it's pretty hard to call free will free if it isn't completely free. And it obviously isn't completely free now, is it?
Other than the statement about consciousness and free will (because neither terms are well defined anywhere), I agree with whatever you say and I believe in the same.
But my question to you was: how can one go on living normally? Are you proud of your accomplishments? Are you ashamed of your mistakes/failures? Like you said, you are not responsible for your actions/thoughts/behavior. So how can you be in peace with this?
I think Dennett is quite right. When people talk about free will, the important thing about it is not that it's magic, but moral responsibility and the feeling of control. If a person is identical with the properties of a brain, and the brain is in control of the body, the person is in control. Whether your identity is "caused" is irrelevant; if no one constrains you strongly, your actions are your own. Even computers can surprise their programmers; one day they may be considered "free" too.
Just another of the mysteries with which we must content ourselves, I am with William James who says, 'the first act of my freedom is to affirm that I am free.' It is an affirmation that by the logic of the case cannot be compelled not event rationally or logically. It must be chosen, assumed, believed in.
Bell's Theorem only rules out LOCAL hidden variables. It still leaves room for the possibility of non-local hidden variables. So this basically means that a particle might be able to affect another particle instantaneously from a distance. This would effectively mean that "information" can travel at faster than light speed (under certain interactions).
One of the significant changes that results from accepting determinism, or that we don't have free will in the libertarian sense, is that it shifts us from a retributivist conception of justice to a consequentialist conception of justice. I will give you a clear example of how these two conceptions of justice come apart. - cont.
@wholethinker It is certainly frustrating that we can only peel back the layers without knowing what any layers below may reveal. Always an an approximation.
But it's not clear what your point is as you contradict yourself: is there "out of nothing energy" or not? Does it violate the conservation law or not? The supply of energy to the brain isn't the issue anyway.
@theocean1973
Also, check 3:55 - 4:12. The word 'inevitable' gets it's meaning from the agent point of view, in other words it's use is pragmatic. Therefore, the argument that free will is impossible because in a deterministic material universe every event is inevitable, in exactly the way it happened, can be dismissed.That's just not how we use the word 'inevitable'. So ironic enough, the standard argument for non-compatibalism is actually juggling with words and Dennett's argument is not!
A discussion with Dennett and Wilford Brimley would be downright hilarious.
That's also something I have thought about - if the brain is like a 'prism' for consciousness and the more advanced the brain, the more it is able to manifest. So in effect we are evolving towards a greater 'knowing' of the universe. Who knows?
@AEFic
Yes, his ability to fill 10 minutes with a solid stream of words and yet in the end, say absolutely nothing never ceases to amaze me.
@TheWALOS good point, free will is essentially saying that we have the ability to make a decision other than the decision we made, it is expecting something different to happen if you replayed time (ignoring quantum physics which has no bearing on free will, as our will is still determined by physical laws outside our control even if they are probabiliistic). what i should of said is 'it doesnt make sense to talk about free will, as it doesnt make sense to talk about an undeterminded universe.'
I can see that you are trying but you have said it clearly.. "our behavior is determined". To state that we can override our basic emotions to some degree is to contradict the statement you made prior. I ask you; with what mechanism do we "override" our basic emotions and is that separate from causation and non-randomness. If it is separate then I would like to know how it even manifest itself within the realm of reality. In any case free-will still remains elusive to logical explaination.
Nah, Dennett explains what we're actually referring to when we use the expression free will, and his explanation is perfectly straight forward and true. The only reason to reject it is if one believes we need to reserve the expression "free will" for something magical and contradictory that obviously can not exist. The latter seems foolish given the role freedom(In Dennett's sense) plays in assignment of responsibility etc.
Avoiding a flying brick is different from avoiding a predestined event such as avoiding a flying brick. If determinism is true, you can avoid a lot, but you can't aviod what is already bound to happen.
Exactly,.. in that context it was predetermined. I would also not say that I have proven that free-will doesn't exist but the more you discuss it seriously you begin to see more evidence for the contrary. For free-will to exist it must be separate from the world of causation and non-random. One question that you can ask is: where does your desire come from? or where does it originate? If you tend to link it back to some causal chain then it is not free. And randomness takes away accountability.
You are correct that it's not totally random rather probabilistic, but that still means it's somewhat random. It sounds to me like you are describing the idea of "local hidden variables". That is the idea that quantum mechanics is only "fuzzy" because there is some underlying complexity that we don't yet understand that would make it completely deterministic. If you google "Bell's Theorem", you will find that that idea is actually incompatible with what has been observed through experiment.
I must say, its as unexpected as it is refreshing to stumble upon a voice of such reason and clarity in the RUclips comments section. Mo' power to you.
Isn't the definition of free will that when i make a decision it has been decided by ME? and when i say ME i mean my body and my brain etc. i think that if im trying to figure it wether or not i was the one making the decision, i should check if processes in my brain caused the outcome, and if thats the case then i was responsible.so that should mean that there CAN be free will in a deterministic universe. could you please explain because i think i am wrong lol, sorry for my english by the way
@PurpleGhost Oh sorry. QM=Quantum Mechanics. This goes to your point of "range of possibilities" but without the Dennett avoidance mechanism. The mechanism in this case is scientific uncertainty. Are you familiar with it? "Uncertainty" is fundamental to QM. Theres alot of arguing (for and against) its importance in "free will" as well. I think it allows for indeterminism which gives us "the range." From there its a mystery for now.
Why is everyone hating on Dennett here? To posses the capacity of avoiding requires:
1. to be conscious of goals and life-plans stretching far into the future
2. To be able to evaluate situations and elements in your environment as being useful as means for those goals and life-plans, or detrimental to their fullfilment
3, to be able to react intelligently and autonomously to those situations, thus avoiding the things that you can perceive to be bad for the realization of your goals and lifeplans.
You can have all of this in a deterministic world!
What is a Laplacian Being or Laplacian Determinism? I am having a hard time find it on Google.
I don't know if its similar, but the concept of the aesop's fable where an eagle catches a bird who tries to persuade her to let it go because it (the bird) is so small and she could catch something bigger but the eagle doesn't (moral: bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush) - i think this type of learning where intelligent beings create laws to evaluate the chaoic world. But if the universe is deterministic, could clarvoyance evolve? Or phrophesying be possible?
"Choice" and "decision making" is just the part of determinism where the prefer-ability of outcomes is ascertained. Action is the result of a personal calculation. It is governed by our ignorance and preference. People ALWAYS "choose" the most valuable/preferable action. If going "against" the strongest preference, that is the persons actual strongest preference. Thus there is no choice, only unique preference and the ignorance of the moment.
What's the name of the interviewer? I've seen him in other videos and on the news before, but I never seem to catch his name.
Free will is a social construct we apply to make sense of this world. I agree with Dan Bennett in the sense that we could come up with a definition of free will that makes sense and fits within a deterministic perspective, however one could argue there's nothing free about it at all since it wouldn't free us from being slaves of our brain chemistry and events happening around us.
@SaraCufer "our universe hasn't been deterministic for about 80 years"
Consider a single uranium atom. Due to quantum theory we don't know when that atom will decay. Suppose we have two observers who exist simultaneously according to Relativity. However for one of those observers the uranium atom has already decayed but for the other it has not. Does the fact that one observer has observed the atom decay, collapse the wave function for the other observer?
Dennett's view is that every variety of free will 'worth wanting' is compatible with determinism. The problem is that a significant kind - the kind needed to make us truly deserving of blame and praise for our deeds - is absent. Of course, it is probably absent if indeterminism is true too, and may actually be incoherent. But that doesn't alter the fact that compatibilist free will just 'aint up to making us responsible.
What bugs me about Dennett is that when he talks about the mind body problem he says a difference that makes no difference is irrelevant and those who argue for a separation of mind and body use incoherent, ill-defined terms that make no difference at all to the practicality of consciousness. But then whenever he talks about free will he uses a lot of incoherent terms like "evitability" that makes no difference at all to what the situation would be if there were no free will.
"You can do what you will, but in any given moment of your life you can will only one definite thing and absolutely nothing other than that one thing."
This is how the two different conceptions of justice come apart: If you have a consequentialist conception of justice, all you care about is that the effects of punishment are good for society, so you would want to have a lower recidivism rate. Most people have a retributivist conception of justice though, they are willing to allow more crime if it means that prisoners are forced to suffer, because they believe they deserve to suffer and this is based on their belief in free will.
If determinism is true, it's theoretically possible to predict future events as they are already determined. Like what I'm going to eat for dinner next week. But knowing that, I can choose not to eat what was predicted. Which makes the prediction false.
If any avertable future event can't be predicted with certainty, does that lead to indeterminism or simply me being unable to ever know my future actions? Or will the universe "force" me to comply with the determined outcome?
I don't think anyone is arguing against that. I think everyone agrees that we are bound to a limited number of decisions at any one time. But what I'm saying is that we DO have decisions...even if they are limited.
I dont really understand his argument. Agents will only avoid certain things. Agent might or might not avoid something, but ultimately they will only make the choice they make at any given point in time. I cannot change what i did yesterday, and today and tomorrow will be the same story. No matter what the probability is for any event, only one outcome will occur.
+Angloth Yeah, I think that the Dennett's obvious hole in his argument is that what he describes as unavoidable futures that we learn to avoid is just possible scenarios but none of them, given that we are and will avoid them, is the actual determined future. "They are just strawman-futures." The avoiding is then just a part of the process how to arrive at the determined future. And even if we are so fortunate as to know for sure what the determined future is, then we'll arrive at it, no matter what we do. And then the 'recognized' determined future should reflect all our tries to avoid it and how it shaped our way of arriving to it.
I think the key part to this video is what Dennett said right at the beginning: "I don't know what they mean by inevitable future" and I agree. he doesn't really understand what do scientists mean when they speak about it (even though I'm a great sympathizer of his work): the inevitable future just has nothing to do with the possible futures that we can avoid.
A nice way of putting it! I also sympathize with most of what i have seen him talk about.
I wonder why he "clings" to such a position.
Maybe he argues that the impression we have of avoiding certain futures is a usefull skill, and that this impression IS in some way free will (in the eye of the beholder)
A while since i saw this interview now, but i seem to recall that he actually admits that the future of the universe is determined by its very "timeline", that what happens tomorrow is dependent on today and so forth.
I loose him when he says that this is different for humans, because we have cognitive functions that let us evaluate situations based on what outcomes we percieve.
I think he simply argues that because we, in some sense, have atleast an illusion, or a percieved sense of free will and action in everyday life, we indeed HAVE free will, or as much free will as "we need" or something like that.
It just becomes confusing semantics to me at that point, but im not that well educated on his position, ill admit.
Angloth Can't agree more. Of course, as I think you pointed out, the free will illusion: I think this is another thing some anti-hard-determinism people (not saying Dennett really) try to point out that then there is no responsibility and blah blah blah. I think it is then much more important for us to explain what the free will illusion entails: lack of information about the hard-determined future doesn't and cannot ever exonerate us from responsibility and that while we're never responsible in respect to the whole universe, we are always responsible to our social units (our society, our planet...) due to the collective ignorance of what is determined.
But I digressed: I just wanted to express my discontent at what is sometimes said by people who just don't bother to grasp that the free will illusion actually means that nothing changes for us as individuals in our daily conduct (maybe with one exception: we should think twice about pursuing a revenge / or about how exactly we want punish criminals and so forth).
Yeah, I think that as you say, Dennett is not really sure in this point what he himself wants to argue for. On one side he tries to assure us that he doesn't speak against what most of physics says (that probably not even quantum 'random' events can really prevent determinism since the quantum theory is perfectly probabilistic and the equations work great there) = that there is nothing to really speak against hard-determinism, but he's just somehow trying to find his way out of it... by changing the meanings of the words..
Well, I'm just repeating what you said :.) Anyway, thanks for the discussion! (And greetings from the Czech Republic :P)
I agree wholeheartedly! Thank you aswell, dude! :) Greetings from Norway!
Thanks! :)
The issue is much more complex than that. Without determinism our actions lack reason and become irrational. So you can either believe that determinism is false yet there is some loophole that allows us rational thought. Or believe determinism true yet there is a some loophole that allows us freedom.
We DO 'hold machines accountable'. When a machine malfunctions, we either shut it down (i.e., execute it) or repair it (rehabilitate). We don't ignore it, we don't pretend its malfunction isn't evidence that it will malfunction again, and we don't turn our attention to the innocent machine next to it.
I have no idea why you ask whether a comet is 'immoral'. Morality is not the question, accountability is.
It is NOT intuitively or logically clear that there's anything 'special' about humans.
If I decide to "avoid" a bus that is heading in my direction it was INEVITABLE that I would! Do to: my desire to live, the fact that i want to go home and play xbox, the possibility of eating pizza later that night...etc etc. whatever your reason it was unavoidable that you would or would not avoid. If you decided not to avoid the bus then that as well was determined by your lack of desire to live, your lack of desire to play xbox later that night etc. whether we avoid or don't is already set
Dennett is wrong. Inevitable does not mean just unavoidable, it means fully implicit in the current state and laws of physics. I can avoid a situation simply by its not being realized. That does not put me into the causal chain in the way free will does. Free will means that I am the radical source of a line of events, where radical means that the line was not implicit in the state of affairs prior to my decision. Peace, DP
It's true, there may be something that we haven't found yet that would change how we understand quantum physics, but this is very unlikely, because the evidence is pretty overwhelming. The calculations and predictions of quantum mechanics that tell us that it's all probabilistic, are the best predictions and calculations we have in all of science. Richard Feynman said that it is like calculating the width of North America with the accuracy of the width of a human hair.
mathematically, everything that is currently happening in the universe when i hit "post" WILL determine everything until the end of time. free will is simply the definition we give to what is determined by the inputs and outputs of our brain. since the nature of electrical impulses in our brains vary from person to person, we get the illusion of free will. i encourage a response to this.
@JustMereArt But wouldn't there be determining factors to why you wanted to do something?
Right on the money! When I wrote my reply I thought of putting "and enhanced" in brackets. The proper way of putting things is to acknowledge that nature and its laws simultaneously enhance and constrain our freedom of the will.
It's not a contradiction to say that on a whim you will do one thing, but in thought you will do another. We override our basic emotions through thought and reason...we can see the implications of our actions. Animals just seem to act, without thought.