TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Introduction 0:52 - Theories of Free Will 5:59 - Free Will & Moral Responsibility 14:56 - Linguistics & Historical Perspectives 28:31 - Language & Mental Health/Illness 42:00 - Medicalisation of the Human Experience 50:45 - Manufacturing consent (effects on Free Will) 1:01:13 - Mechanical Philosophy, Newton, Einstein, Leibniz 1:09:23 - Teleology, Purpose & Meaning of Life 1:10:44 - Noam's Mount Rushmore of Philosophy/Science 1:15:22 - Solving the Mind-Body Problem 1:19:20 - Why is Philosophy important 1;20:50 - Conclusion THANKS FOR WATCHING! If you enjoyed the content, please like this video, subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications for future updates. :)
I love this man. Not only because of his intelligence, his ecuanimity, his sensibility and his critical thinking, but also because he's a noble, sensitive and agreeable person.
Except during covid he completely lost his mind: he said that everyone who refuses the covid vaccine should be isolated (arrested). And when asked how he thinks they would be able to support themselves, he responded: "That's their problem". To this day he has not apologised for that. And BTW, the right to refuse any medication has been established in the Nuremberg Nazi trial in 1945. He should have known that. How the mighty has fallen.
@@julir3754 The most charitable explanation I have is perhaps his old age is taking its toll. It was very shocking to see because of his past track record. I remember Glenn Greenwald and Chris Hedges commenting briefly on it but they only said something about disagreeing but really very meekly, probably because of the respect for the man.
We are free to cooperate or not cooperate with Reality, that is our free will, that is the religious perspective. Reality is the Good. NC beating about the bush gets nowhere as he does not take this into account.
@@garysantos7053 Thought is special experience,because it’s experience which can speak about non -existent experience.Thought says that there is a thinker of thoughts,but there is zero experience of that .
OMG, Noam Chomsky's first point about free will is literally the same argument that I make to people when they say there is no free will!... very interesting. Exactly, science can't prove free will exists. We just "know" or don't know that we are alive. And if you are alive and conscious, then you either know or don't know whether or not you control your actions. It's very simple yet undeniably impossible to prove.
Chomsky's point is that we behave 100% of the time as if we have free will. This seems to be as close to a scientific proof as we can find. If it is not the truth, that we have free will, the other option is that we are entirely deluded all of the time. Which is possible regarding anything else in the universe: time, gravity, someone else's existence: everything may simply be some total delusion.
@@david80johnson While I can't say people behave this way 100% of the time, I can say that people have choices and options... they can choose 1 option over another option for various reasons. We call the ability to choose "free-will". I think a consciously aware being would also know whether or not the choices they make are there own or not.
@@marcfruchtman9473 yes I agree with that. And in regard to the question of whether of not we can "prove" that we have free will, the fact that we behave as if we have free will and assume other people with whom we interact have free will seems like proof enough. The other option is that it's all a massive delusion. Which is possible for anything else: beyond, I suppose, that I exist.
Found your channel by coincidence. Love your current collection of interviews. Diverse and from different sides of the conversation in the human sciences. Subscribed.
So glad you picked up where it got cut off… thank you so much. Have you interviewed Richard Schwartz? His IFR theory feels intuitively correct (or at least valuable). I would love to know how it could relate to “dissociated alters?״ In “spirituality RUclips” terms one might say, “as above so below,” but that’s not very deep… Great job, to you and all the smart viewers, for great questions♥️
@@drtevinnaidu His theory is Internal Family System. I mentioned it because of your comment that you’re interested in mental health. I’m sure we, the viewers, will get a lot of you conducting the interview. You do a fantastic job focusing either on your guest or on the audience getting the most out of it 🙏
"What we know so little about matter that matter may be alive" of course same is now applied to consciousness. But the real problem is how little we know about the brain and neurons. Or for that matter what we know about thought itself. Materialism, idealism, dualism, monism, Pansychism etc are just positions which reflect our deficits of knowledge..
About half way realised I was smiling - wondered if it owing to a lifetime-of-blind-reading-saved-by- context sort of feeling - couldn't stop smiling to the end.
Chomsky says that science tells nothing about freedom of will. Maybe science doesn't, but scientists do. Wittgenstein talks about the illusion of free will and the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder says that the idea of free will is incompatible with the laws of physics that we know. However, we experience that we have a free will, but that doesn't mean it exists. Chomsky seems to base his argument on our experience, but that's not enough.
"Sabine Hossenfelder says that the idea of free will is incompatible with the laws of physics." Which laws of physics specifically, I'd really like to know? Organic life is not governed by the laws of classical physics exclusively; especially our central nervous system which runs on the quantum mechanical phenomena. The laws of quantum mechanics are indeterministic. So there is free will in our heads, right? I think the whole argument about the "free will" is so scholastic, like trying to figure out how many angels fit on the head of a needle. Just sheer nonsense. And no one can even define "free will."
NO! Nowhere does Wittgenstein talk of the illusion of free will. From Tractatus See 5.135 and what follows. E.g. 5.1361 We cannot infer the events of the future from those of the present. Belief in the causal nexus is superstition. 5.1362 The freedom of the will consists in the impossibility of knowing actions that still lie in the future. We could know them only if causality were an inner necessity like that of logical necessity. - - Wittgenstein continues to treat of the will in Philosophical Investigations years later. E.g. Para 618 One can say “I will, but my body does not obey me” - but not “My will does not obey me” (Augustine). Para 619 And one might say “I can always will inasmuch as I can never try to will.” Para 620… “I do . . .” seems to have a definite sense , separate from all experience. Para 629 When people talk about the possibility of foreknowledge, they always forget the fact of the prediction of one’s own voluntary movements. Returning to Tractatus think hard about 6.52 We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. No wonder Wittgenstein broke with Russell.And of course one of his closest younger colleagues was Elizabeth Anscombe, an analytic philosopher who was also a devout Roam Catholic. In Culture and Value, Wittgenstein wrote “It is a great temptation to try to make the spirit explicit.” There is no doubt, that rather like 43:39 Socrates, Wittgenstein considered moral questions and what it is to lead a decent life the most important issues of all. But he regarded imperatives of personal conduct almost impossible to talk about. It is a denial reminiscent of Cordelia’s silence when confronted by the debasing of language in the mouths of her sisters as they falsely express their love of their father in order to secure their inheritances. In a wicked world actions are what count, not fine words.
Maybe so but I think he’s saying that in the end that s all we have because we will never be able to prove definitively that we have free will or not , much like we’ll never prove or disprove the existence of God.
He says that because science is an epistemological enterprise rather than a metaphysical one. This means that it explains what we know about the world, but not what the world is, or how it can or cannot exist.
I think sound of all our senses is the most important vibration for understanding the mind^body connection. Each sound that we hear can I believe transport us anywhere we desire. Kind of a way to escape the time/space shackles. Physicist Richard Feynman was supremely interested in vibrational energy.
Repeating this from Twitter: Great interview. Would you happen to know what the quantum physics journal is that Noam was referring to at around 1:16:15? I'd be very keen to read it
Hi Vinny. This was recorded a couple months ago, so relatively new. So glad that, at 94, Noam is still keen on having these informative discussions - there's more to come too! Hope you enjoyed it.
Chomsky said something in a video I watched earlier today about words having meaning independent of other words is something peculiar to English. I only speak English so I have nothing to base any kind of assessment of that statement on. In this video, the prybar in my brain got a little extra purchase from that earlier video with the concept of "free agency." Formerly, I would have defined "agency" as necessarily a collaborative effort that establishes someone's identity. Now I realize that similarities between people's independent agencies are just coincidental. Like I like to say about not thinking there is a god, appreciating life as the extremely coincidental circumstance that it is is far more reverential than attributing to some feeble human construct. Anyway, there's that notion about words as well as people having independent agency(ies.)
این که گویی این کنم یا آن کنم خود دلیل اختیار است ای صنم مولانا When you say Should i do this Or that instead That's a sign of Your free will My friend Rumi
14:56 - Linguistics & Historical Perspectives : It seems that Dr. Chomsky is much interested in the problem/mystery of relevance realization, our ability to select between an infinite number of possibilities, thoughts, courses of action.
" This is not a personal problem, it is a philosophical question. Our lives are both predestined and they are not. Both yes and no. And both answers are true for all questions about life. In a way, everything is predetermined. Whatever is physical in you, material, whatever is mental, is predetermined. But something in you constantly remains undetermined, unpredictable. That something is your consciousness. If you are identified with your body and your material existence, in the same proportion you are determined by cause and effect. Then you are a machine. But if you are not identified with your material existence, with either body or mind - if you can feel yourself as something separate, different, above and transcendent to body-mind - then that transcending consciousness is not predetermined. It is spontaneous, free. Consciousness means freedom; matter means slavery. So it depends on how you define yourself. If you say, ”I am only the body,” then everything about you is completely determined. A person who says that man is only the body cannot say that man is not predetermined. Ordinarily, persons who do not believe in such a thing as consciousness also do not believe in predetermination. Persons who are religious and believe in consciousness ordinarily believe in predetermination. So what I am saying may look very contradictory. But still, it is the case. A person who has known consciousness has known freedom. So only a spiritual person can say there is no determination at all. That realization comes only when you are completely unidentified with the body. If you feel that you are just a material existence, then no freedom is possible. With matter, no freedom is possible. Matter means that which cannot be free. It must flow in the chain of cause and effect. Once someone has achieved consciousness, enlightenment, he is completely out of the realm of cause and effect. He becomes absolutely unpredictable. You cannot say anything about him. He begins to live each moment; his existence becomes atomic. Your existence is a river-like chain in which every step is determined by the past. Your future is not really future; it is just a by-product of the past. It is only the past determining, shaping, formulating and conditioning your future. That is why your future is predictable. Skinner says that man is as predictable as anything else. The only difficulty is that we have not yet devised the means to know his total past. The moment we can know his past, we can predict everything about him. Based upon the people he has worked with, Skinner is right, because they are all ultimately predictable. He has experimented with hundreds of people and he has found that they are all mechanical beings, that nothing exists within them that can be called freedom. But his study is limited. No Buddha has come to his laboratory to be experimented upon. If even one person is free, if even one person is not mechanical, not predictable, Skinner’s whole theory falls. If one person in the whole history of mankind is free and unpredictable, then man is potentially free and unpredictable. The whole possibility of freedom depends on whether you emphasize your body or your consciousness. If you are just an outward flow of life, then everything is determined. Or are you something inner also? Do not give any preformulated answer. Do not say, ”I am the soul.” If you feel there is nothing inside you, then be honest about it. This honesty will be the first step toward the inner freedom of consciousness. If you go deeply inside, you will feel that everything is just part of the outside. Your body has come from without, your thoughts have come from without, even your self has been given to you by others. That is why you are so fearful of the opinion of others - because they are completely in control of your self. They can change their opinion of you at any moment. Your self, your body, your thoughts are given to you by others, so what is inside? You are layers and layers of outside accumulation. If you are identified with this personality of yours that comes from others, then everything is determined. Become aware of everything that comes from the outside and become non-identified with it. Then a moment will come when the outside falls completely. You will be in a vacuum. This vacuum is the passage between the outside and the inside, the door. We are so afraid of the vacuum, so afraid of being empty that we cling to the outside accumulation. One has to be courageous enough to disidentify with the accumulation and to remain in the vacuum. If you are not courageous enough, you will go out and cling to something, and be filled with it. But this moment of being in the vacuum is meditation. If you are courageous enough, if you can remain in this moment, soon your whole being will automatically turn inward. When there is nothing to be attached to from the outside, your being turns inward. Then you know for the first time that you are something that transcends everything you have been thinking yourself to be. Now you are something different from becoming; you are being. This being is free; nothing can determine it. It is absolute freedom. No chain of cause and effect is possible. Your actions are related to past actions. A created a situation for B to become possible; B creates a situation in which C flowers. Your acts are connected to past acts and this goes back to the beginningless beginning and on to the endless end. Not only do your own acts determine you, but your father’s and mother’s acts also have a continuity with yours. Your society, your history, all that has happened before, is somehow related to your present act. The whole history has come to flower in you. Everything that has ever happened is connected with your act, so your act is obviously determined. It is such a minute part of the whole picture. History is such a vital living force and your individual act is such a small part of it. Marx said, ”It is not consciousness that determines the conditions of society. It is society and its conditions that determines consciousness. It is not that great men create great societies. It is great societies that create great men.” And he is right in a way, because you are not the originator of your actions. The whole history has determined them. You are just carrying them out. The whole evolutionary process has gone into the making of your biological cells. These cells in you can then become part of another person. You may think that you are the father, but you have just been a stage on which the whole biological evolution has acted and has forced you to act. The act of procreation is so forceful because it is beyond you; it is the whole evolutionary process working through you. This is one way in which acts happen in relation to other past acts. But when a person becomes enlightened, a new phenomenon begins to happen. Acts are no longer connected with past acts. Any act, now, is connected only with his consciousness. It comes from his consciousness not from the past. That is why an enlightened person cannot be predicted. Skinner says that we can determine what you will do if your past acts are known. He says that the old proverb, ”You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink,” is wrong. You can force him to. You can create an atmosphere so that the horse will have to drink. The horse can be forced, and you also can be forced, because your actions are created by situations, by circumstances. But even though you can bring a buddha to the river, you cannot force him to drink. The more you force him, the more impossible it will be. No heat will make him do it. Even if a thousand suns shine on him it will not help. A Buddha has a different origin of action. It is not concerned with other acts; it is connected with consciousness. That is why I emphasize that you act consciously. Then, every moment you act, it is not a question of a continuation of other acts. You are free. Now you begin to act, and no one can say how you will act. Habits are mechanical; they repeat themselves. The more you repeat something, the more efficient you become. Efficiency means that now consciousness is no longer needed. If a person is an efficient typist it means that no effort is needed; typing can be done unconsciously. Even if he is thinking about something else the typing continues. The body is typing; the man is not needed. Efficiency means that the thing is so certain that no effort is possible. With freedom, effort is always possible. A machine cannot make errors. To err, one has to be conscious. So your acts have a chain relationship with your previous acts. They are determined. Your childhood determines your youth; your youth determines your old age. Your birth determines your death; everything is determined. Buddha used to say, ”Provide the cause, and the effect will be there.” This is the world of cause and effect in which everything is determined. If you act with total consciousness, an altogether different situation exists. Then everything is moment to moment. Consciousness is a flow; it is not static. It is life itself, so it changes. It is alive. It goes on expanding; it goes on becoming new, fresh, young. Then, your acts will be spontaneous."
21:00 for the question of how the mechanics of though connect to their execution in action, I tend to turn toward Vervaeke et al's propositions on relevance realization. I tackle this issue as well on my own channel, though it is incredibly complex. Investigating the question of when it's useful to consider oneself to not have free will in the frame of morality is what I'm focused on now. thanks for this excellent interview, you're both brilliant.
Thank you for the kind words! I'm looking forward to chatting to Vervaeke to dissect his views on the topic. It should be a treat and I hope you enjoy that conversation too!
@user-jo1gy3kx3j is this all your original theory? This is pretty good, reminds me a bit of spinozian dual-aspect monist philosophy. I also write about how determined and causal our reality is, and am actively trying to find how to integrate this knowledge into everyday life through various life frameworks and philosophies on my Wordpress as well as my channel. It's quite a challenge, eh?
Science has a lot to say about free will through having a lot to say about determinism. Behaving as if we have free will does not mean that we have free will and is readily explicable even if we have no free will. Any belief that we have free will is understandably intuitive but is not borne out by objective evidence. The language of choice and accountability is the same but has different interpretations depending on the belief in free will.
Life is Eternal, Will is Eternal, the Circuit-Principle is Eternal, end of a Developing-Circuit, is beginning of a new and Higher Developing-Circuit, in beginning of a Circuit, the Will is at it's minimum-performance, in the end, it is at it's maximum-performance.. The Life-Desire, is Motor of Life, in direct extension We have Will. Hunger-Principle and Satisfaction-Principle, is the Compass.
We can do what my parents did when the child wants something destructive: Say you'll talk about it later and hope the kid forgets. If not then say no. If it wasn't food we didn't get it.
So rewarding learning (as in: original thinker's texts. Or as here: their direct voice, etc.) from man and woman's history, --- which often, the quick-knowing young of all ages think for a time they can outrun, leave off from, and plain ignore; all is new in their world, but is it? (this one's experience thus far speaks!); --- that has the history of possible answers corrugated, sewn into. Then with age M. Keats! one comes to one's responsibilities, less wild and flailing for the heck of it, as to the future and the tradition, mayhap. What is intelligence, and what does life owe life? Does it take a lifetime's endeavour to sort? And even then Age's Disappointments! what of your dis-allusions? - More than likely! says History staring, burn-eyes on we here now, You will in fact do better when all are doing better, as much as with your individual help, true help, no selfish -intruded, you individually might allow! With this Human Mr. Prof. Noam Chomsky, I tarry, for mind! And again Thank him his tries to assist our survivals, so much painted as: oh, you worry too much! that can't happen! go ahead and buy that unnecessary item, in the dangerous-kind of plastics wrapped!! blind entreaties, you owe yourself! I think men and women owe each other far more courtesies than we presently, worldwide allow! Hey Humanity! Come Together! Save Yourself! JMD!
to me it seems there is just what is appearing to happen. But I do not see a division in this experience. In other words, I do not see a separate chooser from the experiencing. If I could, I would tell that person to choose. happy thoughts all the time. choices seem to happen but no one does it. It’s just what is appearing not unlike the weather if you ask me. I mean where in the whole universe or reality or whatever you wanna call seems to exist, where is anything separate from anything else. There are no relationships truly. There is no true cause and effect. not really.
Well, what he got into was political economy. The correct lense through which to understand anything social, from the so called hard sciences, to the reasons why we have all experienced/participated in the bureaucratic apparatus of state capitalism.
The argument against free will deniers is -- a very strong pragmatic argument. Free will deniers shouldn't even TRY to argue for this view! that they behave in all respects like they have free will, shows how detached their actions are from what they say they believe! Pragmatism is not a common view today though -- this argument is not relevant to a rationalist! Back to "matter is inconceivable". Noam argues that a) we have a "mechanistic" model of matter that we are evolutionarily pre-loaded to think in terms of. and b) Newton refuted this model when he showed that causation does not operate solely by pushing contact between solids. He did not specify his assumed point c) "and we are not able to conceive of anything other than a mechanistic model for matter, therefore matter is inconceivable". He did not specify c), nor argue for it, and without c), his conclusion is not supported. So, is c) plausibly true? I think not. We are INCLINED to think mechanistically, but children do not come with a mechanistic model in their heads, They develop it, from interacting with the world. AND, there isn't just one mechanistic model. Aristotle's physics was different from the less complete physics of, say, Homer. They both might have been mechanistic models, but they were DIFFERENT models, and we humans could conceive of both. This shows how conceivability is LEARNED. Just as a toddler learns to conceive of a mechanistic model by working with it, and Aristotle developed his more complex mechanistic model thru playing with and using it, so can physicists develop and conceive of NON-mechanistic models by using and getting familiar with them. Most physicists today, and certainly every fluids engineer, can conceive of waves, and wave behavior such as reflectance, phase, superposition, etc. NOAM may be unable to think in terms other than mechanistic, but this is not a feature that is universal.
Had to stop at the 13:00, i really love your podcast but Chomskys argument are weak in my pov. Starting with the free will debate and his whole argument being that 100% act as if they had free will… sorry but how the hell can you conclude out of that, that it’s obvious that something is missing. This is simple straw man, he completely discredited the other position. Because everyone acts if they had free will? Of course?! And doesn’t it actually point out that we are not able to disable the acing on free will, hence we have no choice, acting and believing in free will is default. You can not turn of your heart, its just as obvious that you can not turn of free will. Also he does not even differentiate between phenomenological free will and lets call it causal free will. This differentiation has to be made even in the abstract thought experiments in my pov. Topping that of with „we are organisms“ at the 13 min mark. Sorry but even my biologics teacher understood that we are not a organism, but some, depending on your beliefs, kind of emerging metaphysical phenomenon… i don’t understand peoples obsession about Chomsky
Whilst science hasn't proved beyond doubt the absence of free will, on the other hand it has closed out all gaps where free will could exist and no evidence has been found that opens even a smidgin of doubt. It's very similar to the "there is no God" position - in fact it is religious folk who are the defenders of the idea of free will. Based on scientific knowledge we can safely rule out both a "God" and "free will". I think Robert Sapolsky has nailed the lid on the "free will" coffin.
No, science tells us what we know about the human brain, but it doesn't really explain metaphysical concepts such as causality, or universals. I mean, you seem to be confusing epistemology with metaphysics, as the former explains knowledge, the latter explains objects and existence. That is what Chomsky is getting at in the first 3 minutes.
TL;DR: Free will exists when things aren't being deterministic. Objects in the universe don't inherently possess the ability to act independently or with intent in the absence of outside forces acting against them. Humans and other lifeforms do, this is the basis of free will. Free will exists in a kind of superposition with determinism, it forms a paradoxical circuit that can only be broken by ceasing to act under the assumption of free will. Choice is the vehicle of free will, should free will exist, that tethers the object of free will to it. Like a man with a loop tied to his foot that is connected by a long rope through two overhead pulleys to a weight, which in this case represents free will, in front of him so that every time he tries to reach the weight it disappears overhead, leaving only the impression of the weight, which in this case is determinism. Because of the all encompassing nature of free will, to attempt to access it via choice results in a predetermined response. Which also means accepting the presence of determinism only suggests that free will has been suspended by the act of choice. This work of free will is unprecedented in the universe as far as we can tell and so it must be assumed that the length of the tether between the object of free will and the length of the tether attached to the weight of free will is equal distance, so that any attempt to perceive free will is of it leaving behind determinism. Which, and this could get a little far out, because of the lack of will in the post-big bang physics driven universe, this unprecedented nature of free will is also subject to causality, shortening or lengthening the rope dependent on the universe's global work capacity for free will, our action-to-determinism response time may be influenced by extra terrestrials and their ability to engage with this free will work paradox. Because there is a global capacity for "Free will" dependent on the lifecycle of the universe and its available work energy. Post-Big Bang, the universe entered a period of "free will" things were being decided about the ensuing epochs that would not change shape again for the lifetime of this universe. What we are living in now is the "deterministic" universe and the causality of the big bang, physics is acting on celestial bodies in a way that we can calculate the trajectory of all the way until the end of existence on a macro scale. We possess a fraction of this colossal power at the most minute scale that is feasible within this universe, which is on the surface of rotational bodies orbiting a star, but it must be diminishing like the tether of the big band on the cosmos, perhaps not before solidifying first however. Additionally, because of the mostly "willless" universe, any slight changes to our environment due to choice is sure to have cosmic repercussions. None of this was written with AI, it's my own thoughts on free will and the nature of the universe.
The bank pays more people and you "save time", and you pay *higher prices* for that time saved. Balancing economics is the best way to balance every other aspect of human life, although human is still rife with suffering. Don't pretend the system is a problem as if a better system could physically exist.
I love that I share this guy's thoughts. I remember taking a PSYCH101 class in community college (just down the road from MIT as it turns out) and there was this "professor" called Koch (pronounced "cook")... Let me tell you ALL he did for the entire semester was stifle student's thought with his dogmatic bullshit. I remember telling him common sense was simply "what everyone thinks" and that everyone acts as if free will is a reality. Holy God did he have warped and convoluted explanations to deny those obvious basic facts of everyday life. I have (obviously) never forgotten how insanely incorrect that guy was about everything. Hi view of humanity was so sad and broken that I wondered how badly he must have been treated as a child and that his professional life was dedicated to taking revenge by bullying community college students who dared to think we could lead decent lives that potentially have a positive impact on the world Edit: btw, I also happen to think - and I realize this is totally unqualified (and the host anticipated this when he asks Chomsky about DSM) - that the asshole community college Psych professor contributes to what we now call "ADHD" by curtailing and truncating the range of views into his hateful little box. I only wish I had the confidence then to say these things to his face.
There must be something wrong with me; I don't need all this uncertainty. All creatures start life with different physical capabilities and develop models to react to the world. No-one is EVER morally guilty of anything. Morals are relative, subjective concepts, nothing more. Maybe humans or AI could develop guidelines to live in relative harmony. Maybe consequences for actions could empirically and continually improve these guidelines Classic "morals" won't help. We are still savage and morals may pretend good intentions but have generally been used to repress and abuse as much as for anything. No-one deserves what he has ( or has not). The more capability one has, the more responsibility he carries
As a physicist, mathematician and first degree was medical science and a B.S. in Chemistry and clinical pathology and a lot of laboratory work in Health and Human Serivces for hospitals like Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center glad I had a personal doctor in the 50s and was trained cognitively when, I did graduate high school. 1968 and was intellectually. trained so I could think creatively. Left CUNY before my Ph.D. in theoretical physics because my thesis was on the Unified Field Theory and my advisor argued that this was off limits Aristotle Plato is it true and is it useful read Marcus Aurelius' Professor of Physics and Mathematics and Musician
It would be interesting to know on what basis he believes all people who believe they don't have free will base their actions on the assumption that they do have free will.
He means that, even though you say you dont believe in free will, you behave exactly as if you believe you do have it, you just argue about it during discussions, but after you go home, you take the train, you are thinking and behaving as if you are choosing everything you usually do. Do you blame people for doing wrong things? Well you shouldnt if you really dont believe in free will. You should not attribute responsability to anyone.
@GustavoOliveira-gp6nr Thank you. I know that's what he means, however I wanted him to go into more depth, because all that point implies is that your thoughts might imply that you behave as if you have free will. Not everyone behaves as if they think they have free will, which is why people question it. And, the point of view that they believe they behave as if they did doesn't actually mean that they do. The point about responsibility is a philosophical question that is being investigated more now that there is growing scientific evidence refuting free will.
first of all, you could probably spend the most of your remaining life defining just what you mean by the word, FREE. That a great deal of what is done is through WILLING is undeniable, however, FREE? this is an adda matta poetic word, a feel good word, and very little else. FREE WILL is an absurdity.
There is no free will because there is no one to have it. One would have their work cut out for them to first prove the substantial existence of a stable agency that could possess free will before proving they have it.
@@chrisbennett6260 yes, actually, everyone is. It’s only a useful-fiction to act ‘as if’ we are our own agencies for purpose of social fluidity in a society. Truly, all bodies are myopic localizations of the same larger whole. You may think you’re one organism, while forgetting that the body is comprised of trillions of smaller organisms. But none of those smaller organisms are truly separate agencies themselves. The boundaries of self that appear to be solid are in fact permeable and are the same space that everything else arises within.
The "purpose of life"? There is no "purpose" of life other than life. The "purpose of life" is life, to live ... Life is its own purpose. In metaphysical terms: "Being is Being". ’ehye ’ăšer ’ehye (Exodus 3:14).
The purpose of Life is to express itself. Without requiring any definition or universal "meaning". For me, Life's "purpose" is being, and staying happy. All the greatest teachers from the beginning expressed continuous happiness. The basic art of being happy is continuously choosing happiness thoughts. All of us are at all times in charge of our own thoughts. Viktor Frankle, "Mans Search For Meaning" learned that people who survived concentration camps during WW2 all did it by the same means, as did he in surviving 3 camps intending to kill him that all failed utterly.
THE QUESTION OF FREE-WILL: As concisely explained in the previous chapter, humans do not possess individual free-will. However, that does not necessarily imply that there is no optimal way of living. There is, in fact, an ideal way for humans to behave in every situation, even if it was ordained that we each behave according to destiny, and therefore, imperfectly. Morality is indeed OBJECTIVE, that is to say, independent of the subjective opinions or whims of any particular person. The reason why many claim morality to be SUBJECTIVE, is because they have noticed that there is a component of judgement required upon the moral position of any particular human action, and that different persons judge each action rather differently. Therefore, even though freedom of volition for any living creature, whether microbe, plant, fungus, animal, or alien, is utterly non-existent, from a purely pragmatic viewpoint, criminal behaviour should be punished in order to prevent civilization from degeneration and destruction. So, the purpose of this chapter (and the entire book) is not so much to convince miscreants to repent of their evil ways, but to provide an objective synopsis of what is dharma. Regrettably, those who are destined to live wicked lives will do so, but for those who are destined to seek happiness via righteous living, this treatise will provide the definitive underpinning for their moral ideology. In other words, this book, too, was destined to have been written, and it has the potential to change one’s conditioning, which of course, was also destined to transpire. From the very beginning of our universe, this book was destined to have been composed in precisely the manner in which it was composed, and the fact that you are now reading these words was also predetermined from all eternity. How you respond to the wisdom contained herein depends entirely on your unique genetic sequence and your unique lifelong conditioning. Unfortunately, only an EXTREMELY minute percentage of humanity will come to read the entire treatise, and an even smaller proportion will take heed of its wisdom and practice it. Of course, that also was predetermined, so this subsection ought not be seen as some kind of attempt to thwart what is destined to transpire.
@@drtevinnaidu, you found my comment insightful but apparently not sufficiently insightful to question the name of the book from which it was extracted. The philosopher you mentioned in this video (Prof. Strawson) gave the book ("A Final Instruction Sheet for Humanity") a favourable review - at least the chapter on "consciousness" that I emailed him last year - so if you would like to read my book, you are welcome to email me for a free copy.
I disagree with your logical conclusion... if humans have no free-will then all existence is pre-programmed and the ultimate outcome is predetermined. There is NOT an "optimal way of living" because if have no free-will then we can never change direction to "enjoy" such a state of existence. based on your logic, everything we do is predetermined... You have no choices without free-will. Claiming you need laws to prevent degeneration of society is preposterous in a universe without free-will. You either choose to follow the laws of society, or you choose not to. You can't make a logical argument for those laws without acknowledging that those laws change how a person acts.
So if morality is objective, where is morality coming from? And what is the point of laws and punishments for those who break laws, if everything is predetermined? Nothing can prevent society from degenrating if everything is predetermined and that degeneration is the society's inevitable destiny. Society, according to what you've posted, CAN only degenerate if that is its destiny. On the other hand, a society that is not destined to degenerate, has no need for laws either, because there is no need for repression anyways: the vast majority of people is not going to go against that objective morality and those who do have been doomed to do so from before their ancestors were born anyways, with no law or anything human-made being capable of preventing that fate. I see so many contradictions in these two paragraphs and I suspect that you are not going to address criticism. In fact, I'm afraid you're just dropping this here and are going to refrain from discussion, which would make your entire quote (where is it from btw?) only, ironically enough, an advertisement for a dogmatic conception of the world an humankind's place in it. Not very fitting under this video, where people are eager to discuss such ideas. I hope I am mistaken and a response will follow, in which case I'll apologise for presuming.
@Phoenix Uhm... I hope you forgive me for not going into esoterics, I will only tackle your point about free will, because you seem to misunderstand the idea. You ironically enough say that "the illusion of free will is responsible for most crimes" and that sentence completely contradicts the idea of determinism. In fact, you have argued that free will IS NOT an illusion, because you basically say that people commit crimes because they CHOOSE to commit them. If a human being can make a choice, they have free will. Without free will, there is no choice. For there to be a choice, I must be presented with options to choose from and I must be able to make that choice myself, with nothing and nobody forcing me to opt for one options over the other options presented to me. So if you say that the reason humans do bad things is the "illusion of free will", you are saying that people can take decisions. If people are free to decide whether they commit a crime or not, then they don't have an illusion of free will, they have actual free will. If there is NO free will, then illusion of free will only means that we THINK we can take decisions but the actions we take were never really up to us: they were predetermined and there was no choice involved. I will try to explain what I said above about the collapse of a society: If there is no free will, then determinism is the only explanation for all human behaviour (and not just human behaviour, but everything that ever happens: every earthquake, every war, every child that dies in its mother's arms could not be prevented, because it was predetermined to happen exactly at the moment it did happen). If determinism is the true explanation behind how things happen, then a society can only collapse if it was also predetermined to collapse. If it was predetermined to not collapse, then that is not due to human beings choosing to behave in a way that is conducive to the healthy functioning of their society but simply due to the fact that human beings were determined to behave that way. The opposite then holds true as well: if a society was doomed to collapse, then there is nothing anyone could have done about it. Here is my opinion: there are many things we do without thinking about them and we tend to form habits that allow others to reliably predict our behaviour. (e.g. you could reliably predict that I am going to eat a bowl of cerial for breakfast tomorrow, because I always eat cereal for breakfast) On the other hand, I also think there are many situations where we casually make decisions: which T-shirt should I wear today? What song do I want to listen to on my way to my friend? Those are not very important decisions, but you do not take them without thinking; you actually stop for a second and consciously ponder what you want to do. Of course you are quickly forgetting about that choice again, because it wasn't very important. And finally, I think there are a few moments every once in a while, where we really take some time to think carefully about what we are going to do. These are the moments where I think free will is most prominent: maybe your mother asks you to go for a walk with her, but you have important work to do and you now have to choose whether you will spend your day working on that important thing but make your mother sad, or you spend time with your mother but risk not getting done with your work in time and get into trouble for it. This is still a fairly weak example, but I think you see what I mean: sometimes we think about our options and then think about the likely consequences of our actions before we act. You can still make a good case against free will in my examples, but you cannot say that I did not have free will and then say that if I make a mistake, that mistake happened because of my "illusion of free will". Saying that simply means that I have free will when I mess up but when I do something that turns out well, then I merely acted according to some cosmic plan, objective morality or natural order of things. I actually dislike that notion: it only gives us humans credit for things we do wrong, but it takes away all credit for our positive actions. It denies praise and only gives blame. I find that a very pessimsitic and depressing notion of human action and that way of thinking makes thanking people meaningless: why should you thank me for helping you fix your bike, if all good things are predetermined? You can only be mad at me when I am the one who breaks your bike, but you cannot be grateful if I help you.
The higher one’s perspect in one’s own self image, the lower the degree of common sense! The world around us benefits from such levels if awareness, and the parallels between common sense and intellect. Cluck “Like”, always on such things as this. Raise these pieces of “something we should all be aware of” on the algorithmic ladder. (Take lughtly, I’m no scientist!).
Noam Chomsky is a genius but he has to believe in free will. Much of his life has been fighting "evil". He is strongly against the "right wing" (not disagreeing) for example the CIA that killed priests in South America who were acting too socialist, he uses that example. He despised the torture tactics of right wing dictators, etc. It would be hard, after all those decades of political activism, to say "it was all just random neurons. It might also be difficult, even though he seems humble, to take no credit for being a famous scientist and political thinker. He would have to admit the "he" was not so great, the Noam Chomsky phenomena just happened.
HAHA! I'd forgotten about this. Oh Lord. Foucault had Chomsky's number decades ago. lol E.g., on point #1 ("Common Sense"): No, Noam. I feel like I have free will, while you (apparent external agents) seem to act as if you seem to believe in free will. THAT is the empirical formulation. Derp. I just can't take his contemptuous venom. I've done my time in front of this vile man. You'll forgive me if I skip this one.
Foucault? Lmao. I don't understand why exactly you hate Chomsky so much, but what are you even talking about here? Foucault, despite his brilliance, was somebody who was no match for chomsky's philosophical lucidity and analytical clarity. Most students of Althusser, including Foucault, were terribly misled philosophically and they could not even realize the silly philosophical errors they were making. The lack of consistency and analytical depth was of course concealed by their obscurantism and theatricality in presentations. It's sad that most people let their intellectual curiosity be stifled by finding comfort in silly forms of irrealism.
Chomsky is philosopher of mind so he knows what he's talking about. For example, when he says science can't tell us a thing about free will, he means that science is an enterprise of the field of epistemology, that it can only tell us what we know about the physical world. However, science cannot explain metaphysical concepts such as free will. I.e., it cannot explain whether free will exists or how it can exist, and what it is. Meanwhile, the conversation of science would be concerned with how can we know free will exists, yet that isn't the purpose of science according to Mikhail Bakunin as that would be making science a god in that it has a monopoly on knowledge, which it does not. Also, Sam Harris is total hack, as he never cites arguments from the likes of Robert Hilary Kane or Mark Beleguior, Galen Strawson, or the late Harry Frankfurt. He only cites the late Dan Dennett, of who he claims is a determinist (which is a complete lie), but is a compatibalist.
@@CosmoShidan where is the “self” that either has or does not have free will ? Sam Harris is arguing from direct experience,seeing through the illusion of self.
@@robertjsmith Are you talking about personal identity? Because that's a much bigger category for me to cover in a single comment. For me to go into self, I would then have to discuss other elements, such as consciousness, self-reflection, self-awareness, volition, memory, and autonomy for one. And to answer your question, I ask in return, whose experience? Experience is not something we can directly explain, since everyone has different experience. For example, we could describe a blind person's experice with a bat's lack of sight in the dark as an allegory that Thomas Nagel uses in his essay, What's it like to be a Bat?. Then again we could also describe the experience of a colorblind person, by using a dog's vision of colorblindness as another allegory. Now with that this falls into another question, whose sense of self? If you get where I'm coming from, Sam Harris' own work falls short insofar as he does not take into consideration of subjective experience, and tries and fails to categorize self and experience Objectively. Hence, this has me questioning further if he even read Nagel. Once again, science can't actually explain if free will exists or not. Rather, it can inform our premises about the existence of free will, by knowledge of the human brain, rather than to directly arrive at our conclusions.
@@CosmoShidan look at your here and now experience,is there a YOU to be found thinking a thought ? Is there a YOU to be found smelling a smell ? Is there a YOU to be found seeing a sight ? Is there a YOU to be found sensing a sensation ? YOU TBF hearing a sound ? YOU TBF tasting a taste ? Is there a YOU to be found experiencing an experience?
@@robertjsmith But then my experience is my SUBJECTIVE experience. How exactly am I to explain YOUR experience? I do I go about explaining what your experience(s) in the physical world are? If I am not in your shoes, then exactly how can I describe what you are experiencing? Now for more epistemic question, how do I know what your experience(s) are, and how can I know what you have experienced in life, if I not met you in real time? Let alone, how can I know your experience(s) if I'm not occupying your person, or have lived your life?
@@AAA9549-w7w I'm going to need an epistemically informed argument, rather than a making your exit excuse bucko. So either answer my question or step aside.
If this is his first or only incarnation…God is very unfair, when it comes to handing out brains 🧠 An authentic Mahatma or bodhisattva…if there ever was one…I know that he would vehemently disagree with me…❤
![BLACK BAG - Official Trailer [HD] - Only in Theaters March 14](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Du0Xp8WX_7I/mqdefault.jpg)
TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 - Introduction
0:52 - Theories of Free Will
5:59 - Free Will & Moral Responsibility
14:56 - Linguistics & Historical Perspectives
28:31 - Language & Mental Health/Illness
42:00 - Medicalisation of the Human Experience
50:45 - Manufacturing consent (effects on Free Will)
1:01:13 - Mechanical Philosophy, Newton, Einstein, Leibniz
1:09:23 - Teleology, Purpose & Meaning of Life
1:10:44 - Noam's Mount Rushmore of Philosophy/Science
1:15:22 - Solving the Mind-Body Problem
1:19:20 - Why is Philosophy important
1;20:50 - Conclusion
THANKS FOR WATCHING!
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I love this man. Not only because of his intelligence, his ecuanimity, his sensibility and his critical thinking, but also because he's a noble, sensitive and agreeable person.
Agreed!
Saintly soldier for the truth, the truth, and nothing but the truth....without which justice will never be possible...
Except during covid he completely lost his mind: he said that everyone who refuses the covid vaccine should be isolated (arrested). And when asked how he thinks they would be able to support themselves, he responded: "That's their problem". To this day he has not apologised for that. And BTW, the right to refuse any medication has been established in the Nuremberg Nazi trial in 1945. He should have known that. How the mighty has fallen.
@@JanPBtest I don't know that, I didn't listen to current programs at that time.
I'll have to check, but I admit I don't agree if that's the case.
@@julir3754 The most charitable explanation I have is perhaps his old age is taking its toll. It was very shocking to see because of his past track record. I remember Glenn Greenwald and Chris Hedges commenting briefly on it but they only said something about disagreeing but really very meekly, probably because of the respect for the man.
"Words Matter"
The words you use speak of you and reveal your perception of reality.
So nicely expressed. Well done👏
We are free to cooperate or not cooperate with Reality, that is our free will, that is the religious perspective. Reality is the Good. NC beating about the bush gets nowhere as he does not take this into account.
@@garysantos7053 Thought is special experience,because it’s experience which can speak about non -existent experience.Thought says that there is a thinker of thoughts,but there is zero experience of that .
Uncle Noam never disappoints! Long life for him!🥳
🙌🏽👌🏽
Perhaps he can dialogue with Sapolsky.
I just came to know about Professor Noam Chomsky 6 months ago and from that moment I keep on listening to him.
The Man, The Myth, The Legend.
I keep listening to this interview again and again. What a beautiful mind.
Glad you're enjoying it!
OMG, Noam Chomsky's first point about free will is literally the same argument that I make to people when they say there is no free will!... very interesting. Exactly, science can't prove free will exists. We just "know" or don't know that we are alive. And if you are alive and conscious, then you either know or don't know whether or not you control your actions. It's very simple yet undeniably impossible to prove.
Thanks so much for engaging! Really glad you enjoyed the content.🙂
@Phoenix I guess I will disagree. There is free will.
Chomsky's point is that we behave 100% of the time as if we have free will. This seems to be as close to a scientific proof as we can find. If it is not the truth, that we have free will, the other option is that we are entirely deluded all of the time. Which is possible regarding anything else in the universe: time, gravity, someone else's existence: everything may simply be some total delusion.
@@david80johnson While I can't say people behave this way 100% of the time, I can say that people have choices and options... they can choose 1 option over another option for various reasons. We call the ability to choose "free-will". I think a consciously aware being would also know whether or not the choices they make are there own or not.
@@marcfruchtman9473 yes I agree with that. And in regard to the question of whether of not we can "prove" that we have free will, the fact that we behave as if we have free will and assume other people with whom we interact have free will seems like proof enough. The other option is that it's all a massive delusion. Which is possible for anything else: beyond, I suppose, that I exist.
Found your channel by coincidence. Love your current collection of interviews. Diverse and from different sides of the conversation in the human sciences. Subscribed.
Welcome aboard!💙
Free will is a corollary of true intelligence.
So glad you picked up where it got cut off… thank you so much.
Have you interviewed Richard Schwartz? His IFR theory feels intuitively correct (or at least valuable). I would love to know how it could relate to “dissociated alters?״
In “spirituality RUclips” terms one might say, “as above so below,” but that’s not very deep…
Great job, to you and all the smart viewers, for great questions♥️
Thank you so much. I'll look into Richard Schwartz and definitely try make that happen! 🙏🏽 Keep an eye out.
@@drtevinnaidu His theory is Internal Family System. I mentioned it because of your comment that you’re interested in mental health.
I’m sure we, the viewers, will get a lot of you conducting the interview. You do a fantastic job focusing either on your guest or on the audience getting the most out of it
🙏
Thanks for that. Means a lot! I do my best to find that balance (not always successful - but we learn and grow!)😁🙏🏽
@@drtevinnaidu ♥️
"What we know so little about matter that matter may be alive" of course same is now applied to consciousness.
But the real problem is how little we know about the brain and neurons. Or for that matter what we know about thought itself.
Materialism, idealism, dualism, monism, Pansychism etc are just positions which reflect our deficits of knowledge..
About half way realised I was smiling - wondered if it owing to a lifetime-of-blind-reading-saved-by- context sort of feeling - couldn't stop smiling to the end.
😊
Chomsky says that science tells nothing about freedom of will. Maybe science doesn't, but scientists do. Wittgenstein talks about the illusion of free will and the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder says that the idea of free will is incompatible with the laws of physics that we know. However, we experience that we have a free will, but that doesn't mean it exists. Chomsky seems to base his argument on our experience, but that's not enough.
"Sabine Hossenfelder says that the idea of free will is incompatible with the laws of physics." Which laws of physics specifically, I'd really like to know? Organic life is not governed by the laws of classical physics exclusively; especially our central nervous system which runs on the quantum mechanical phenomena. The laws of quantum mechanics are indeterministic. So there is free will in our heads, right? I think the whole argument about the "free will" is so scholastic, like trying to figure out how many angels fit on the head of a needle. Just sheer nonsense. And no one can even define "free will."
NO!
Nowhere does Wittgenstein talk of the illusion of free will. From Tractatus See 5.135 and what follows. E.g. 5.1361 We cannot infer the events of the future from those of the present. Belief in the causal nexus is superstition. 5.1362 The freedom of the will consists in the impossibility of knowing actions that still lie in the future. We could know them only if causality were an inner necessity like that of logical necessity. - - Wittgenstein continues to treat of the will in Philosophical Investigations years later.
E.g. Para 618 One can say “I will, but my body does not obey me” - but not “My will does not obey me” (Augustine). Para 619 And one might say “I can always will inasmuch as I can never try to will.” Para 620… “I do . . .” seems to have a definite sense , separate from all experience. Para 629 When people talk about the possibility of foreknowledge, they always forget the fact of the prediction of one’s own voluntary movements.
Returning to Tractatus think hard about 6.52 We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.
No wonder Wittgenstein broke with Russell.And of course one of his closest younger colleagues was Elizabeth Anscombe, an analytic philosopher who was also a devout Roam Catholic.
In Culture and Value, Wittgenstein wrote “It is a great temptation to try to make the spirit explicit.” There is no doubt, that rather like 43:39 Socrates, Wittgenstein considered moral questions and what it is to lead a decent life the most important issues of all. But he regarded imperatives of personal conduct almost impossible to talk about. It is a denial reminiscent of Cordelia’s silence when confronted by the debasing of language in the mouths of her sisters as they falsely express their love of their father in order to secure their inheritances. In a wicked world actions are what count, not fine words.
Maybe so but I think he’s saying that in the end that s all we have because we will never be able to prove definitively that we have free will or not , much like we’ll never prove or disprove the existence of God.
He says that because science is an epistemological enterprise rather than a metaphysical one. This means that it explains what we know about the world, but not what the world is, or how it can or cannot exist.
I think sound of all our senses is the most important vibration for understanding the mind^body connection. Each sound that we hear can I believe transport us anywhere we desire. Kind of a way to escape the time/space shackles. Physicist Richard Feynman was supremely interested in vibrational energy.
Repeating this from Twitter: Great interview. Would you happen to know what the quantum physics journal is that Noam was referring to at around 1:16:15? I'd be very keen to read it
wow noam chomsky! thanks for making this available. when was it recorded?
Hi Vinny. This was recorded a couple months ago, so relatively new. So glad that, at 94, Noam is still keen on having these informative discussions - there's more to come too! Hope you enjoyed it.
Wonder why the one tradition that actually addressed this question directly and most coherently is not represented here?
Chomsky said something in a video I watched earlier today about words having meaning independent of other words is something peculiar to English. I only speak English so I have nothing to base any kind of assessment of that statement on. In this video, the prybar in my brain got a little extra purchase from that earlier video with the concept of "free agency." Formerly, I would have defined "agency" as necessarily a collaborative effort that establishes someone's identity. Now I realize that similarities between people's independent agencies are just coincidental. Like I like to say about not thinking there is a god, appreciating life as the extremely coincidental circumstance that it is is far more reverential than attributing to some feeble human construct.
Anyway, there's that notion about words as well as people having independent agency(ies.)
if thats what you think fine
این که گویی این کنم یا آن کنم
خود دلیل اختیار است ای صنم
مولانا
When you say
Should i do this
Or that instead
That's a sign of
Your free will
My friend
Rumi
WHAT IS A TEACHER?
THANX NOAM ONE OF MY GREATEST TEACHERS.
Loved this and really liked the selection of questions too!
Thanks so much!
14:56 - Linguistics & Historical Perspectives : It seems that Dr. Chomsky is much interested in the problem/mystery of relevance realization, our ability to select between an infinite number of possibilities, thoughts, courses of action.
Read Kipling’s poem “IF” it perfectly describes people like Noam Chomsky…😍
Thanks for this video.
🙏🏽🙏🏽
" This is not a personal problem, it is a philosophical question. Our lives are both predestined and they are not. Both yes and no. And both answers are true for all questions about life. In a way, everything is predetermined. Whatever is physical in you, material, whatever is mental, is predetermined. But something in you constantly remains undetermined, unpredictable. That something is your consciousness.
If you are identified with your body and your material existence, in the same proportion you are determined by cause and effect. Then you are a machine. But if you are not identified with your material existence, with either body or mind - if you can feel yourself as something separate, different, above and transcendent to body-mind - then that transcending consciousness is not predetermined. It is spontaneous, free.
Consciousness means freedom; matter means slavery. So it depends on how you define yourself. If you say, ”I am only the body,” then everything about you is completely determined. A person who says that man is only the body cannot say that man is not predetermined. Ordinarily, persons who do not believe in such a thing as consciousness also do not believe in predetermination.
Persons who are religious and believe in consciousness ordinarily believe in predetermination. So what I am saying may look very contradictory. But still, it is the case. A person who has known consciousness has known freedom. So only a spiritual person can say there is no determination at all. That realization comes only when you are completely unidentified with the body. If you feel that you are just a material existence, then no freedom is possible.
With matter, no freedom is possible. Matter means that which cannot be free. It must flow in the chain of cause and effect. Once someone has achieved consciousness, enlightenment, he is completely out of the realm of cause and effect. He becomes absolutely unpredictable. You cannot say anything about him. He begins to live each moment; his existence becomes atomic.
Your existence is a river-like chain in which every step is determined by the past. Your future is not really future; it is just a by-product of the past. It is only the past determining, shaping, formulating and conditioning your future. That is why your future is predictable.
Skinner says that man is as predictable as anything else. The only difficulty is that we have not yet devised the means to know his total past. The moment we can know his past, we can predict everything about him. Based upon the people he has worked with, Skinner is right, because they are all ultimately predictable. He has experimented with hundreds of people and he has found that they are all mechanical beings, that nothing exists within them that can be called freedom.
But his study is limited. No Buddha has come to his laboratory to be experimented upon. If even one person is free, if even one person is not mechanical, not predictable, Skinner’s whole theory falls. If one person in the whole history of mankind is free and unpredictable, then man is potentially free and unpredictable. The whole possibility of freedom depends on whether you emphasize your body or your consciousness.
If you are just an outward flow of life, then everything is determined. Or are you something inner also? Do not give any preformulated answer. Do not say, ”I am the soul.” If you feel
there is nothing inside you, then be honest about it. This honesty will be the first step toward the inner freedom of consciousness. If you go deeply inside, you will feel that everything is just part of the outside. Your body has come from without, your thoughts have come from without, even your self has been given to you by others.
That is why you are so fearful of the opinion of others - because they are completely in control of your self. They can change their opinion of you at any moment. Your self, your body, your thoughts are given to you by others, so what is inside? You are layers and layers of outside accumulation. If you are identified with this personality of yours that comes from others, then everything is determined.
Become aware of everything that comes from the outside and become non-identified with it. Then a moment will come when the outside falls completely. You will be in a vacuum. This vacuum is the passage between the outside and the inside, the door. We are so afraid of the vacuum, so afraid of being empty that we cling to the outside accumulation. One has to be courageous enough to disidentify with the accumulation and to remain in the vacuum. If you are not courageous enough, you will go out and cling to something, and be filled with it.
But this moment of being in the vacuum is meditation. If you are courageous enough, if you can remain in this moment, soon your whole being will automatically turn inward. When there is nothing to be attached to from the outside, your being turns inward.
Then you know for the first time that you are something that transcends everything you have been thinking yourself to be. Now you are something different from becoming; you are being. This being is free; nothing can determine it. It is absolute freedom. No chain of cause and effect is possible.
Your actions are related to past actions. A created a situation for B to become possible; B creates a situation in which C flowers. Your acts are connected to past acts and this goes back to the beginningless beginning and on to the endless end. Not only do your own acts determine you, but your father’s and mother’s acts also have a continuity with yours. Your society, your history, all that has happened before, is somehow related to your present act. The whole history has come to flower in you.
Everything that has ever happened is connected with your act, so your act is obviously determined. It is such a minute part of the whole picture. History is such a vital living force and your individual act is such a small part of it. Marx said, ”It is not consciousness that determines the conditions of society. It is society and its conditions that determines consciousness. It is not that great men create great societies.
It is great societies that create great men.” And he is right in a way, because you are not the originator of your actions. The whole history has determined them. You are just carrying them out. The whole evolutionary process has gone into the making of your biological cells. These cells in you can then become part of another person. You may think that you are the father, but you have just been a stage on which the whole biological evolution has acted and has forced you to act. The act of procreation is so forceful because it is beyond you; it is the whole evolutionary process working through you.
This is one way in which acts happen in relation to other past acts. But when a person becomes enlightened, a new phenomenon begins to happen. Acts are no longer connected with past acts. Any act, now, is connected only with his consciousness. It comes from his consciousness not from the past. That is why an enlightened person cannot be predicted.
Skinner says that we can determine what you will do if your past acts are known. He says that the old proverb, ”You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink,” is wrong. You can force him to. You can create an atmosphere so that the horse will have to drink. The horse can be forced, and you also can be forced, because your actions are created by situations, by circumstances. But even though you can bring a buddha to the river, you cannot force him to drink. The more you force him, the more impossible it will be.
No heat will make him do it. Even if a thousand suns shine on him it will not help. A Buddha has a different origin of action. It is not concerned with other acts; it is connected with consciousness. That is why I emphasize that you act consciously. Then, every moment you act, it is not a question of a continuation of other acts. You are free. Now you begin to act, and no one can say how you will act.
Habits are mechanical; they repeat themselves. The more you repeat something, the more efficient you become. Efficiency means that now consciousness is no longer needed. If a person is an efficient typist it means that no effort is needed; typing can be done unconsciously. Even if he is thinking about something else the typing continues. The body is typing; the man is not needed. Efficiency means that the thing is so certain that no effort is possible.
With freedom, effort is always possible. A machine cannot make errors. To err, one has to be conscious. So your acts have a chain relationship with your previous acts. They are determined. Your childhood determines your youth; your youth determines your old age. Your birth determines your death; everything is determined. Buddha used to say, ”Provide the cause, and the effect will be there.” This is the world of cause and effect in which everything is determined.
If you act with total consciousness, an altogether different situation exists. Then everything is moment to moment. Consciousness is a flow; it is not static. It is life itself, so it changes. It is alive. It goes on expanding; it goes on becoming new, fresh, young. Then, your acts will be spontaneous."
brilliant
🙏🏽
Never lets us down. Thanks.
🙏🏽
Fascinating discussion Thanks 😊
Our pleasure! :)
I Adore his,Humanity and Person,of very rare Intelligence
21:00 for the question of how the mechanics of though connect to their execution in action, I tend to turn toward Vervaeke et al's propositions on relevance realization. I tackle this issue as well on my own channel, though it is incredibly complex. Investigating the question of when it's useful to consider oneself to not have free will in the frame of morality is what I'm focused on now. thanks for this excellent interview, you're both brilliant.
Thank you for the kind words! I'm looking forward to chatting to Vervaeke to dissect his views on the topic. It should be a treat and I hope you enjoy that conversation too!
@user-jo1gy3kx3j is this all your original theory? This is pretty good, reminds me a bit of spinozian dual-aspect monist philosophy.
I also write about how determined and causal our reality is, and am actively trying to find how to integrate this knowledge into everyday life through various life frameworks and philosophies on my Wordpress as well as my channel. It's quite a challenge, eh?
Science has a lot to say about free will through having a lot to say about determinism.
Behaving as if we have free will does not mean that we have free will and is readily explicable even if we have no free will. Any belief that we have free will is understandably intuitive but is not borne out by objective evidence.
The language of choice and accountability is the same but has different interpretations depending on the belief in free will.
Life is Eternal,
Will is Eternal,
the Circuit-Principle is Eternal,
end of a Developing-Circuit,
is beginning of a new and Higher Developing-Circuit,
in beginning of a Circuit, the Will is at it's minimum-performance,
in the end, it is at it's maximum-performance..
The Life-Desire, is Motor of Life,
in direct extension We have Will.
Hunger-Principle and Satisfaction-Principle,
is the Compass.
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on free will ,brilliant now overr to you, Brian green ,jhon searle,,sabine Hossenfelder ,Daniel dennett
Guest to-do-list.🙌🏽
@@drtevinnaidu you must get bruce h Lipton, Rupert Sheldrake,bernado Kastrup ,Raymond talis,michael Egnor
We can do what my parents did when the child wants something destructive: Say you'll talk about it later and hope the kid forgets. If not then say no. If it wasn't food we didn't get it.
So rewarding learning (as in: original thinker's texts. Or as here: their direct voice, etc.) from man and woman's history, --- which often, the quick-knowing young of all ages think for a time they can outrun, leave off from, and plain ignore; all is new in their world, but is it? (this one's experience thus far speaks!); --- that has the history of possible answers corrugated, sewn into. Then with age M. Keats! one comes to one's responsibilities, less wild and flailing for the heck of it, as to the future and the tradition, mayhap.
What is intelligence, and what does life owe life? Does it take a lifetime's endeavour to sort? And even then Age's Disappointments! what of your dis-allusions? - More than likely! says History staring, burn-eyes on we here now, You will in fact do better when all are doing better, as much as with your individual help, true help, no selfish -intruded, you individually might allow! With this Human Mr. Prof. Noam Chomsky, I tarry, for mind! And again Thank him his tries to assist our survivals,
so much painted as: oh, you worry too much! that can't happen! go ahead and buy that unnecessary item, in the dangerous-kind of plastics wrapped!! blind entreaties, you owe yourself! I think men and women owe each other far more courtesies
than we presently, worldwide allow! Hey Humanity! Come Together! Save Yourself! JMD!
to me it seems there is just what is appearing to happen. But I do not see a division in this experience. In other words, I do not see a separate chooser from the experiencing. If I could, I would tell that person to choose. happy thoughts all the time. choices seem to happen but no one does it. It’s just what is appearing not unlike the weather if you ask me. I mean where in the whole universe or reality or whatever you wanna call seems to exist, where is anything separate from anything else. There are no relationships truly. There is no true cause and effect. not really.
Beautiful minds and very valuable person in this erra... love him
💙
Tevin, dude: cool interview.
Thanks so much!
Well, what he got into was political economy. The correct lense through which to understand anything social, from the so called hard sciences, to the reasons why we have all experienced/participated in the bureaucratic apparatus of state capitalism.
The argument against free will deniers is -- a very strong pragmatic argument. Free will deniers shouldn't even TRY to argue for this view! that they behave in all respects like they have free will, shows how detached their actions are from what they say they believe! Pragmatism is not a common view today though -- this argument is not relevant to a rationalist!
Back to "matter is inconceivable". Noam argues that a) we have a "mechanistic" model of matter that we are evolutionarily pre-loaded to think in terms of. and b) Newton refuted this model when he showed that causation does not operate solely by pushing contact between solids. He did not specify his assumed point c) "and we are not able to conceive of anything other than a mechanistic model for matter, therefore matter is inconceivable". He did not specify c), nor argue for it, and without c), his conclusion is not supported.
So, is c) plausibly true? I think not. We are INCLINED to think mechanistically, but children do not come with a mechanistic model in their heads, They develop it, from interacting with the world. AND, there isn't just one mechanistic model. Aristotle's physics was different from the less complete physics of, say, Homer. They both might have been mechanistic models, but they were DIFFERENT models, and we humans could conceive of both. This shows how conceivability is LEARNED. Just as a toddler learns to conceive of a mechanistic model by working with it, and Aristotle developed his more complex mechanistic model thru playing with and using it, so can physicists develop and conceive of NON-mechanistic models by using and getting familiar with them. Most physicists today, and certainly every fluids engineer, can conceive of waves, and wave behavior such as reflectance, phase, superposition, etc. NOAM may be unable to think in terms other than mechanistic, but this is not a feature that is universal.
I've got some interesting chats with other free will experts coming soon. I think you're going to enjoy them!
@@drtevinnaidu where are they ?
You wrote a lot of empty nothing.
@@goldenbrettfx90 Commenting on details of what Chomsky said is hardly "nothing". Try again, and post something that isn't blatantly untrue.
great interview
Thanks!
Zeer goed
1:26 free to disagree is never encouraged
Fabulous again😍
Thank you again!
it was tv for two year olds - tellytubbies - that was the pitch. it will be computer games for two year olds or is it already?
Had to stop at the 13:00, i really love your podcast but Chomskys argument are weak in my pov. Starting with the free will debate and his whole argument being that 100% act as if they had free will… sorry but how the hell can you conclude out of that, that it’s obvious that something is missing. This is simple straw man, he completely discredited the other position. Because everyone acts if they had free will? Of course?! And doesn’t it actually point out that we are not able to disable the acing on free will, hence we have no choice, acting and believing in free will is default. You can not turn of your heart, its just as obvious that you can not turn of free will. Also he does not even differentiate between phenomenological free will and lets call it causal free will. This differentiation has to be made even in the abstract thought experiments in my pov. Topping that of with „we are organisms“ at the 13 min mark. Sorry but even my biologics teacher understood that we are not a organism, but some, depending on your beliefs, kind of emerging metaphysical phenomenon… i don’t understand peoples obsession about Chomsky
Thank you! 💙
Maybe instead of free will, we just have "free wont"
Whilst science hasn't proved beyond doubt the absence of free will, on the other hand it has closed out all gaps where free will could exist and no evidence has been found that opens even a smidgin of doubt.
It's very similar to the "there is no God" position - in fact it is religious folk who are the defenders of the idea of free will.
Based on scientific knowledge we can safely rule out both a "God" and "free will".
I think Robert Sapolsky has nailed the lid on the "free will" coffin.
No, science tells us what we know about the human brain, but it doesn't really explain metaphysical concepts such as causality, or universals. I mean, you seem to be confusing epistemology with metaphysics, as the former explains knowledge, the latter explains objects and existence. That is what Chomsky is getting at in the first 3 minutes.
TL;DR: Free will exists when things aren't being deterministic.
Objects in the universe don't inherently possess the ability to act independently or with intent in the absence of outside forces acting against them. Humans and other lifeforms do,
this is the basis of free will.
Free will exists in a kind of superposition with determinism, it forms a paradoxical circuit that can only be broken by ceasing to act under the assumption of free will. Choice is the vehicle of free will, should free will exist, that tethers the object of free will to it. Like a man with a loop tied to his foot that is connected by a long rope through two overhead pulleys to a weight, which in this case represents free will, in front of him so that every time he tries to reach the weight it disappears overhead, leaving only the impression of the weight, which in this case is determinism.
Because of the all encompassing nature of free will, to attempt to access it via choice results in a predetermined response.
Which also means accepting the presence of determinism only suggests that free will has been suspended by the act of choice.
This work of free will is unprecedented in the universe as far as we can tell and so it must be assumed that the length of the tether between the object of free will and the length of the tether attached to the weight of free will is equal distance, so that any attempt to perceive free will is of it leaving behind determinism.
Which, and this could get a little far out, because of the lack of will in the post-big bang physics driven universe, this unprecedented nature of free will is also subject to causality, shortening or lengthening the rope dependent on the universe's global work capacity for free will, our action-to-determinism response time may be influenced by extra terrestrials and their ability to engage with this free will work paradox.
Because there is a global capacity for "Free will" dependent on the lifecycle of the universe and its available work energy.
Post-Big Bang, the universe entered a period of "free will" things were being decided about the ensuing epochs that would not change shape again for the lifetime of this universe. What we are living in now is the "deterministic" universe and the causality of the big bang, physics is acting on celestial bodies in a way that we can calculate the trajectory of all the way until the end of existence on a macro scale.
We possess a fraction of this colossal power at the most minute scale that is feasible within this universe, which is on the surface of rotational bodies orbiting a star, but it must be diminishing like the tether of the big band on the cosmos, perhaps not before solidifying first however.
Additionally, because of the mostly "willless" universe, any slight changes to our environment due to choice is sure to have cosmic repercussions.
None of this was written with AI, it's my own thoughts on free will and the nature of the universe.
The bank pays more people and you "save time", and you pay *higher prices* for that time saved. Balancing economics is the best way to balance every other aspect of human life, although human is still rife with suffering. Don't pretend the system is a problem as if a better system could physically exist.
I love that I share this guy's thoughts. I remember taking a PSYCH101 class in community college (just down the road from MIT as it turns out) and there was this "professor" called Koch (pronounced "cook")...
Let me tell you ALL he did for the entire semester was stifle student's thought with his dogmatic bullshit. I remember telling him common sense was simply "what everyone thinks" and that everyone acts as if free will is a reality. Holy God did he have warped and convoluted explanations to deny those obvious basic facts of everyday life. I have (obviously) never forgotten how insanely incorrect that guy was about everything. Hi view of humanity was so sad and broken that I wondered how badly he must have been treated as a child and that his professional life was dedicated to taking revenge by bullying community college students who dared to think we could lead decent lives that potentially have a positive impact on the world
Edit: btw, I also happen to think - and I realize this is totally unqualified (and the host anticipated this when he asks Chomsky about DSM) - that the asshole community college Psych professor contributes to what we now call "ADHD" by curtailing and truncating the range of views into his hateful little box. I only wish I had the confidence then to say these things to his face.
if entangled ... change in many changes everything ... limited 0.000000...1 of freedom
There must be something wrong with me; I don't need all this uncertainty. All creatures start life with different physical capabilities and develop models to react to the world. No-one is EVER morally guilty of anything. Morals are relative, subjective concepts, nothing more. Maybe humans or AI could develop guidelines to live in relative harmony. Maybe consequences for actions could empirically and continually improve these guidelines Classic "morals" won't help. We are still savage and morals may pretend good intentions but have generally been used to repress and abuse as much as for anything.
No-one deserves what he has ( or has not). The more capability one has, the more responsibility he carries
Thank you for asking my question. Chomsky is misunderstood by most linguists just as he is misunderstood by most economists and political scientists.
Always a pleasure!😁
LOL Economists and Political Scientists who actually know what they are talking about simply know better than to take Chomsky seriously! 😀
@mck1972 lots of economists and political scientists take Chomsky seriously.
@@gentlefierceness ,
Please give examples?
0:27
One of the few intellectuals who has the courage to admit the reality of Freewill and the absurdity of AI sentience.
As a physicist, mathematician and first degree was medical science and a B.S. in Chemistry and clinical pathology and a lot of laboratory work in Health and Human Serivces for hospitals like Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center glad I had a personal doctor in the 50s and was trained cognitively when, I did graduate high school. 1968 and was intellectually. trained so I could think creatively. Left CUNY before my Ph.D. in theoretical physics because my thesis was on the Unified Field Theory and my advisor argued that this was off limits Aristotle Plato is it true and is it useful read Marcus Aurelius' Professor of Physics and Mathematics and Musician
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Can math be proven?
obvious ChatGPT right there, LMFAO that that nonsense just got 2 real replies 😅
@@scowlsmcjowls2626 Read Gödel! :)
Noam never seemed to make much sense on the program Firing line with William F Buckley
It would be interesting to know on what basis he believes all people who believe they don't have free will base their actions on the assumption that they do have free will.
It’s obvious from context.
@@louiscarlet3479 Please explain how...
He means that, even though you say you dont believe in free will, you behave exactly as if you believe you do have it, you just argue about it during discussions, but after you go home, you take the train, you are thinking and behaving as if you are choosing everything you usually do.
Do you blame people for doing wrong things? Well you shouldnt if you really dont believe in free will. You should not attribute responsability to anyone.
@@CJ0101 get real
@GustavoOliveira-gp6nr Thank you. I know that's what he means, however I wanted him to go into more depth, because all that point implies is that your thoughts might imply that you behave as if you have free will.
Not everyone behaves as if they think they have free will, which is why people question it. And, the point of view that they believe they behave as if they did doesn't actually mean that they do.
The point about responsibility is a philosophical question that is being investigated more now that there is growing scientific evidence refuting free will.
first of all, you could probably spend the most of your remaining life defining just what you mean by the word, FREE. That a great deal of what is done is through WILLING is undeniable, however, FREE? this is an adda matta poetic word, a feel good word, and very little else. FREE WILL is an absurdity.
nonsense
your opinion an absurdity
@@chrisbennett6260my opinion maybe, but what I wrote about free will is not an opinion.
There is no free will because there is no one to have it. One would have their work cut out for them to first prove the substantial existence of a stable agency that could possess free will before proving they have it.
nonsense
so your a no one then what nonsense
@@chrisbennett6260 yes, actually, everyone is. It’s only a useful-fiction to act ‘as if’ we are our own agencies for purpose of social fluidity in a society. Truly, all bodies are myopic localizations of the same larger whole. You may think you’re one organism, while forgetting that the body is comprised of trillions of smaller organisms. But none of those smaller organisms are truly separate agencies themselves. The boundaries of self that appear to be solid are in fact permeable and are the same space that everything else arises within.
@@the-absolute-light i dont agree but your entitled to your own view okay
Where is the “self” that either has or doesn’t have free will
The "purpose of life"?
There is no "purpose" of life other than life.
The "purpose of life" is life, to live ...
Life is its own purpose.
In metaphysical terms: "Being is Being".
’ehye ’ăšer ’ehye (Exodus 3:14).
yes
The purpose of Life is to express itself. Without requiring any definition or universal "meaning". For me, Life's "purpose" is being, and staying happy. All the greatest teachers from the beginning expressed continuous happiness. The basic art of being happy is continuously choosing happiness thoughts. All of us are at all times in charge of our own thoughts. Viktor Frankle, "Mans Search For Meaning" learned that people who survived concentration camps during WW2 all did it by the same means, as did he in surviving 3 camps intending to kill him that all failed utterly.
THE QUESTION OF FREE-WILL:
As concisely explained in the previous chapter, humans do not possess individual free-will. However, that does not necessarily imply that there is no optimal way of living. There is, in fact, an ideal way for humans to behave in every situation, even if it was ordained that we each behave according to destiny, and therefore, imperfectly. Morality is indeed OBJECTIVE, that is to say, independent of the subjective opinions or whims of any particular person. The reason why many claim morality to be SUBJECTIVE, is because they have noticed that there is a component of judgement required upon the moral position of any particular human action, and that different persons judge each action rather differently.
Therefore, even though freedom of volition for any living creature, whether microbe, plant, fungus, animal, or alien, is utterly non-existent, from a purely pragmatic viewpoint, criminal behaviour should be punished in order to prevent civilization from degeneration and destruction.
So, the purpose of this chapter (and the entire book) is not so much to convince miscreants to repent of their evil ways, but to provide an objective synopsis of what is dharma. Regrettably, those who are destined to live wicked lives will do so, but for those who are destined to seek happiness via righteous living, this treatise will provide the definitive underpinning for their moral ideology. In other words, this book, too, was destined to have been written, and it has the potential to change one’s conditioning, which of course, was also destined to transpire.
From the very beginning of our universe, this book was destined to have been composed in precisely the manner in which it was composed, and the fact that you are now reading these words was also predetermined from all eternity. How you respond to the wisdom contained herein depends entirely on your unique genetic sequence and your unique lifelong conditioning. Unfortunately, only an EXTREMELY minute percentage of humanity will come to read the entire treatise, and an even smaller proportion will take heed of its wisdom and practice it. Of course, that also was predetermined, so this subsection ought not be seen as some kind of attempt to thwart what is destined to transpire.
Thanks for this insightful comment, really looking forward to what other viewers/listeners have to say in response to it. I'll be watching!
@@drtevinnaidu, you found my comment insightful but apparently not sufficiently insightful to question the name of the book from which it was extracted.
The philosopher you mentioned in this video (Prof. Strawson) gave the book ("A Final Instruction Sheet for Humanity") a favourable review - at least the chapter on "consciousness" that I emailed him last year - so if you would like to read my book, you are welcome to email me for a free copy.
I disagree with your logical conclusion... if humans have no free-will then all existence is pre-programmed and the ultimate outcome is predetermined. There is NOT an "optimal way of living" because if have no free-will then we can never change direction to "enjoy" such a state of existence. based on your logic, everything we do is predetermined... You have no choices without free-will. Claiming you need laws to prevent degeneration of society is preposterous in a universe without free-will. You either choose to follow the laws of society, or you choose not to. You can't make a logical argument for those laws without acknowledging that those laws change how a person acts.
So if morality is objective, where is morality coming from?
And what is the point of laws and punishments for those who break laws, if everything is predetermined?
Nothing can prevent society from degenrating if everything is predetermined and that degeneration is the society's inevitable destiny. Society, according to what you've posted, CAN only degenerate if that is its destiny. On the other hand, a society that is not destined to degenerate, has no need for laws either, because there is no need for repression anyways: the vast majority of people is not going to go against that objective morality and those who do have been doomed to do so from before their ancestors were born anyways, with no law or anything human-made being capable of preventing that fate.
I see so many contradictions in these two paragraphs and I suspect that you are not going to address criticism.
In fact, I'm afraid you're just dropping this here and are going to refrain from discussion, which would make your entire quote (where is it from btw?) only, ironically enough, an advertisement for a dogmatic conception of the world an humankind's place in it.
Not very fitting under this video, where people are eager to discuss such ideas. I hope I am mistaken and a response will follow, in which case I'll apologise for presuming.
@Phoenix Uhm... I hope you forgive me for not going into esoterics, I will only tackle your point about free will, because you seem to misunderstand the idea.
You ironically enough say that "the illusion of free will is responsible for most crimes" and that sentence completely contradicts the idea of determinism. In fact, you have argued that free will IS NOT an illusion, because you basically say that people commit crimes because they CHOOSE to commit them. If a human being can make a choice, they have free will. Without free will, there is no choice. For there to be a choice, I must be presented with options to choose from and I must be able to make that choice myself, with nothing and nobody forcing me to opt for one options over the other options presented to me.
So if you say that the reason humans do bad things is the "illusion of free will", you are saying that people can take decisions. If people are free to decide whether they commit a crime or not, then they don't have an illusion of free will, they have actual free will.
If there is NO free will, then illusion of free will only means that we THINK we can take decisions but the actions we take were never really up to us: they were predetermined and there was no choice involved.
I will try to explain what I said above about the collapse of a society:
If there is no free will, then determinism is the only explanation for all human behaviour (and not just human behaviour, but everything that ever happens: every earthquake, every war, every child that dies in its mother's arms could not be prevented, because it was predetermined to happen exactly at the moment it did happen).
If determinism is the true explanation behind how things happen, then a society can only collapse if it was also predetermined to collapse. If it was predetermined to not collapse, then that is not due to human beings choosing to behave in a way that is conducive to the healthy functioning of their society but simply due to the fact that human beings were determined to behave that way.
The opposite then holds true as well: if a society was doomed to collapse, then there is nothing anyone could have done about it.
Here is my opinion: there are many things we do without thinking about them and we tend to form habits that allow others to reliably predict our behaviour. (e.g. you could reliably predict that I am going to eat a bowl of cerial for breakfast tomorrow, because I always eat cereal for breakfast) On the other hand, I also think there are many situations where we casually make decisions: which T-shirt should I wear today? What song do I want to listen to on my way to my friend? Those are not very important decisions, but you do not take them without thinking; you actually stop for a second and consciously ponder what you want to do. Of course you are quickly forgetting about that choice again, because it wasn't very important.
And finally, I think there are a few moments every once in a while, where we really take some time to think carefully about what we are going to do.
These are the moments where I think free will is most prominent: maybe your mother asks you to go for a walk with her, but you have important work to do and you now have to choose whether you will spend your day working on that important thing but make your mother sad, or you spend time with your mother but risk not getting done with your work in time and get into trouble for it. This is still a fairly weak example, but I think you see what I mean: sometimes we think about our options and then think about the likely consequences of our actions before we act.
You can still make a good case against free will in my examples, but you cannot say that I did not have free will and then say that if I make a mistake, that mistake happened because of my "illusion of free will". Saying that simply means that I have free will when I mess up but when I do something that turns out well, then I merely acted according to some cosmic plan, objective morality or natural order of things.
I actually dislike that notion: it only gives us humans credit for things we do wrong, but it takes away all credit for our positive actions. It denies praise and only gives blame.
I find that a very pessimsitic and depressing notion of human action and that way of thinking makes thanking people meaningless: why should you thank me for helping you fix your bike, if all good things are predetermined? You can only be mad at me when I am the one who breaks your bike, but you cannot be grateful if I help you.
SA represent
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We all act as if Euclidean geometry is real
Science has nothing to say about free will?
Yes, can you tell me what it does say?
The higher one’s perspect in one’s own self image, the lower the degree of common sense!
The world around us benefits from such levels if awareness, and the parallels between common sense and intellect.
Cluck “Like”, always on such things as this. Raise these pieces of “something we should all be aware of” on the algorithmic ladder. (Take lughtly, I’m no scientist!).
Noam Chomsky is a genius but he has to believe in free will. Much of his life has been fighting "evil". He is strongly against the "right wing" (not disagreeing) for example the CIA that killed priests in South America who were acting too socialist, he uses that example. He despised the torture tactics of right wing dictators, etc. It would be hard, after all those decades of political activism, to say "it was all just random neurons.
It might also be difficult, even though he seems humble, to take no credit for being a famous scientist and political thinker. He would have to admit the "he" was not so great, the Noam Chomsky phenomena just happened.
0:43 more like free media time
What is thought?
The answer will surprise you
All Google search and chat GPT searches ... will give you the wrong answers.😊
How did that old joke go? "Why did the philosophers have a problem with their chariot? Because they put Descartes before the horse .(???)
Now I really want a talking dog. Four hundred dollars seems reasonable.
Sapolski disagrees
I don't think neurologist can predict 100% of human behavior. Maybe 50% or less.
HAHA! I'd forgotten about this. Oh Lord. Foucault had Chomsky's number decades ago. lol
E.g., on point #1 ("Common Sense"): No, Noam. I feel like I have free will, while you (apparent external agents) seem to act as if you seem to believe in free will. THAT is the empirical formulation. Derp.
I just can't take his contemptuous venom. I've done my time in front of this vile man. You'll forgive me if I skip this one.
Foucault? Lmao.
I don't understand why exactly you hate Chomsky so much, but what are you even talking about here? Foucault, despite his brilliance, was somebody who was no match for chomsky's philosophical lucidity and analytical clarity. Most students of Althusser, including Foucault, were terribly misled philosophically and they could not even realize the silly philosophical errors they were making. The lack of consistency and analytical depth was of course concealed by their obscurantism and theatricality in presentations. It's sad that most people let their intellectual curiosity be stifled by finding comfort in silly forms of irrealism.
@@lokayatavishwam9594 : 🙄
Chomsky is awesome on politics but he's no philosopher - sorry to say.
Yes he is, he's a philosopher of mind and a political philosopher.
Ask SAM HARRIS ABOUT FREE WILL not someone that knows nothing about it
Chomsky is philosopher of mind so he knows what he's talking about. For example, when he says science can't tell us a thing about free will, he means that science is an enterprise of the field of epistemology, that it can only tell us what we know about the physical world. However, science cannot explain metaphysical concepts such as free will. I.e., it cannot explain whether free will exists or how it can exist, and what it is. Meanwhile, the conversation of science would be concerned with how can we know free will exists, yet that isn't the purpose of science according to Mikhail Bakunin as that would be making science a god in that it has a monopoly on knowledge, which it does not.
Also, Sam Harris is total hack, as he never cites arguments from the likes of Robert Hilary Kane or Mark Beleguior, Galen Strawson, or the late Harry Frankfurt. He only cites the late Dan Dennett, of who he claims is a determinist (which is a complete lie), but is a compatibalist.
@@CosmoShidan where is the “self” that either has or does not have free will ? Sam Harris is arguing from direct experience,seeing through the illusion of self.
@@robertjsmith Are you talking about personal identity? Because that's a much bigger category for me to cover in a single comment. For me to go into self, I would then have to discuss other elements, such as consciousness, self-reflection, self-awareness, volition, memory, and autonomy for one.
And to answer your question, I ask in return, whose experience? Experience is not something we can directly explain, since everyone has different experience.
For example, we could describe a blind person's experice with a bat's lack of sight in the dark as an allegory that Thomas Nagel uses in his essay, What's it like to be a Bat?.
Then again we could also describe the experience of a colorblind person, by using a dog's vision of colorblindness as another allegory.
Now with that this falls into another question, whose sense of self?
If you get where I'm coming from, Sam Harris' own work falls short insofar as he does not take into consideration of subjective experience, and tries and fails to categorize self and experience Objectively. Hence, this has me questioning further if he even read Nagel.
Once again, science can't actually explain if free will exists or not. Rather, it can inform our premises about the existence of free will, by knowledge of the human brain, rather than to directly arrive at our conclusions.
@@CosmoShidan look at your here and now experience,is there a YOU to be found thinking a thought ?
Is there a YOU to be found smelling a smell ?
Is there a YOU to be found seeing a sight ?
Is there a YOU to be found sensing a sensation ?
YOU TBF hearing a sound ?
YOU TBF tasting a taste ?
Is there a YOU to be found experiencing an experience?
@@robertjsmith But then my experience is my SUBJECTIVE experience. How exactly am I to explain YOUR experience? I do I go about explaining what your experience(s) in the physical world are? If I am not in your shoes, then exactly how can I describe what you are experiencing?
Now for more epistemic question, how do I know what your experience(s) are, and how can I know what you have experienced in life, if I not met you in real time? Let alone, how can I know your experience(s) if I'm not occupying your person, or have lived your life?
As a metaphysician. And, as of today there is no free will. ©
What do you mean by free will, and how can or cannot it exist then?
@@CosmoShidan Invite me to a show or a seminar, thus i will say to be establish on my name. Metaphysician and fine art painter
@@AAA9549-w7w I'm going to need an epistemically informed argument, rather than a making your exit excuse bucko. So either answer my question or step aside.
@@CosmoShidan It is good that I did not, You are. already aside to hell. Metaphysician
@CosmoShidan It is good that I did not, You are. already aside to hell. Metaphysician
Chomsky has just "destroyed" the name and the whole concept of this podcast...🤭.
What a legend.😂😂😂
If this is his first or only incarnation…God is very unfair, when it comes to handing out brains 🧠
An authentic Mahatma or bodhisattva…if there ever was one…I know that he would vehemently disagree with me…❤
Don’t bring on Chomsky and say “I don’t want to talk about politics” 😬
Fair enough!😂
I think it was Bruno Latour who "every act is a political act"
Yeah, okay. Prevent Jonah's son Jonah to make use of his dad's dough, so that his dad comes back... How's that for Logic?
Goodbye Noam
Is that a mobile phone ringing😂
He's not studied in this topic and doesn't know anything about it.
He's a philosopher of mind.
41:22 Chomsky shits himself after hearing that comment
😂
BBB.
1:08