Based Camp - Based Camp： Can Determinists Believe in Free Will？

00:00:00.000 So a person may say, well, because the future isn't exactly determined, because there is

00:00:06.480 variability added by, for example, quantum events or by timeline branching, right, that

00:00:15.100 means that we don't live in a deterministic universe, and thus the problems created by

00:00:20.440 a deterministic universe as it relates to free will don't exist within our reality.

00:00:25.680 Whereas the problem that is created by a deterministic universe for free will is that

00:00:29.500 regardless of your free will, the future will always only end in one way.

00:00:32.780 This is what people who are against, you know, who think these two things are incompatible

00:00:35.840 believe.

00:00:36.480 The problem is that it doesn't actually fix the problem, because the only way that free

00:00:41.980 will, like, meaningfully exists, like, the problem, the incompatibility with free will

00:00:47.200 and determinism, the reason it comes into play is because your free will isn't shaping

00:00:51.800 the future.

00:00:53.140 If the future is shaped by random quantum events that have nothing to do with your free will,

00:00:57.620 but are probabilistic occurrences in the fabric of reality, then your free will has all of

00:01:04.380 the same problems it has in a completely deterministic universe without quantum events.

00:01:10.100 What needs to happen for free will in the way that people who believe that free will is

00:01:14.860 incompatible with determinism want free will to work, the way it has to work is free will,

00:01:21.380 the events of sort of your consciousness or your sentience have to be able to change the course

00:01:29.320 of the universe.

00:01:30.700 They have to be able to essentially break the laws of physics.

00:01:35.560 And I personally don't understand why this would be a comforting thought.

00:01:41.580 So from our perspective, the things I am thinking are completely determined by the things that

00:01:49.500 have happened to me before and who I am, sort of my existing state.

00:01:54.460 To want free will to matter within this context, either who I am needs to not matter, or the things

00:02:01.600 that have happened to me before need to not matter.

00:02:04.000 Basically, you need sort of a random number generator within every person's consciousness in a way that

00:02:09.900 actually removes autonomy from it.

00:02:13.140 Yeah, because then it's not you.

00:02:14.460 If it's not, if it's neither your nature nor your nurture that causes your actions,

00:02:19.480 what kind of free will is that?

00:02:22.060 Would you like to know more?

00:02:24.120 Hello, Malcolm.

00:02:25.300 Hello, Simone. 0.69

00:02:26.700 What are we talking about today?

00:02:29.300 Our mechanistic universe.

00:02:31.980 Our deterministic worldview.

00:02:33.860 Yes.

00:02:34.620 So we had mentioned this in a previous podcast as something that's really important.

00:02:39.900 to how we see the world, different cultures can sometimes see things in different ways.

00:02:44.940 And sometimes those ways they see things can continue even after the culture secularizes.

00:02:50.000 This is one thing with us.

00:02:51.380 We both come from Calvinist backgrounds.

00:02:54.200 And one of the most famous things about the Calvinist tradition is that it has a deterministic

00:02:58.480 view of the universe, that it believes the future is already written.

00:03:02.880 And we, as secular individuals, still believe this.

00:03:07.340 Now, let me explain what I mean here.

00:03:09.660 This doesn't mean that we don't live in a universe with splitting timelines.

00:03:13.500 We might live in a universe with splitting timelines.

00:03:17.640 However, those timelines don't split based on any aspect of our free will.

00:03:23.680 They split based on quantum events.

00:03:26.880 Our free will is an emergent property of reality, but it also interacts with reality.

00:03:31.580 And this is a really interesting thing about determinism that I think a lot of people miss

00:03:34.700 is they think that a belief in determinism is antagonistic to a belief in free will when

00:03:40.700 I think it really isn't.

00:03:42.540 So I'll explain what I mean by this, starting from a religious perspective.

00:03:45.720 So when I look at the decisions that I made yesterday, from where I stand today on the timeline,

00:03:54.800 all of those decisions are set.

00:03:57.880 They only could have happened in one way.

00:04:01.960 However, yesterday when I made those decisions, I had free will in every one of those decisions

00:04:08.900 I was making.

00:04:09.540 Yet, God exists outside of the timeline.

00:04:16.080 He is looking at the timeline as a third party observer, able to see the whole timeline at

00:04:21.800 once.

00:04:22.160 His perspective of any point in time is the same as my perspective of any point that happened

00:04:29.140 in the past.

00:04:31.200 And as such, he does not interfere with free will, even though the timeline might be preset.

00:04:39.540 And this is where the splitting universes becomes relevant to a deterministic perspective.

00:04:45.980 So what we mean by determinism from a secular perspective is that our free will is an emergent

00:04:53.080 property of the mechanistic nature of reality.

00:04:56.500 What we mean by determinism is that fundamentally, matter and reality is basically a mathematical

00:05:03.400 equation.

00:05:04.300 So there is a mathematical equation that governs how the universe interacts.

00:05:08.380 And it may not be exactly an equation.

00:05:09.720 It may be a set of rules, but it determines how every individual molecule will move based

00:05:15.620 on where that molecule was before.

00:05:18.620 Our free will is an emergent property of the movements of these fundamental forces of reality.

00:05:25.700 And yet, that emergent property can interact with the future, but not in a way that breaks these

00:05:35.100 physical laws.

00:05:37.900 So, while we may live in a branching timeline, our free will has nothing to do with how that

00:05:44.940 timeline branches.

00:05:45.900 That timeline is branching based on, if not random, physically structured and mathematically

00:05:52.600 predetermined quantum events.

00:05:55.340 As such, we have free will.

00:05:57.540 My free will does determine the actions I take in the future.

00:06:03.460 However, that free will also completely exists within the mathematical construct of our reality.

00:06:11.440 So what this means is that if someone had the capacity mentally or with some kind of crazy

00:06:17.480 supercomputer, one could technically probably predict every small action that would take

00:06:25.500 place in a universe.

00:06:27.360 Of course, there would be like quantum branching, and I don't really know how that would play

00:06:30.140 out.

00:06:30.340 But you could still technically know everything that will happen because things will fall in

00:06:34.420 place like clockwork, right?

00:06:35.540 But where quantum branching added variability to potential future events, free will played no

00:06:43.260 role in that variability.

00:06:44.920 Right.

00:06:45.960 And thus, it is not relevant to the question of whether you can have free will in a deterministic

00:06:52.320 universe.

00:06:53.120 Hmm.

00:06:54.740 Do you understand what I mean when I say that?

00:06:56.460 Can you maybe word that in a different way?

00:06:58.060 I do not understand what you're saying.

00:06:59.600 I do not understand what I mean when I say that.

00:07:00.600 Okay.

00:07:00.720 Okay.

00:07:01.920 So a person may say, well, because the future isn't exactly determined, because there is

00:07:08.780 variability added by, for example, quantum events or by timeline branching, right, that

00:07:17.400 means that we don't live in a deterministic universe, and thus the problems created by a deterministic

00:07:23.480 universe as it relates to free will don't exist within our reality.

00:07:27.520 Whereas the problem that is created by a deterministic universe for free will is that regardless of

00:07:32.400 your free will, the future will always only end in one way.

00:07:35.080 This is what people who are against, you know, who think these two things are incompatible

00:07:38.140 believe.

00:07:38.760 The problem is, is it doesn't actually fix the problem.

00:07:41.840 Because the only way that free will, like, meaningfully exist, like, the problem, the

00:07:48.260 incompatibility with free will and determinism, the reason it comes into play is because your

00:07:52.720 free will isn't shaping the future.

00:07:54.560 If the future is shaped by random quantum events that have nothing to do with your free

00:07:59.620 will, but are probabilistic occurrences in the fabric of reality, then your free will

00:08:06.120 has all of the same problems it has in a completely deterministic universe without quantum events.

00:08:12.400 What needs to happen for free will in the way that people who believe that free will is

00:08:17.160 incompatible with determinism want free will to work.

00:08:20.040 The way it has to work is free will, the events of sort of your consciousness or your sentience

00:08:27.880 have to be able to change the course of the universe.

00:08:32.920 They have to be able to essentially break the laws of physics.

00:08:36.860 And I personally don't understand why this would be a comforting thought.

00:08:43.880 So from our perspective, the things I am thinking are completely determined by the things that

00:08:51.800 have happened to me before and who I am, sort of my existing state.

00:08:57.120 To want free will to matter within this context, either who I am needs to not matter or the things

00:09:03.900 that have happened to me before need to not matter.

00:09:05.900 Basically, you need sort of a random number generator within every person's consciousness

00:09:11.020 in a way that actually removes autonomy from it.

00:09:15.440 Yeah, because then it's not you.

00:09:16.760 If it's neither your nature nor your nurture that causes your actions, what kind of free

00:09:22.820 will is that?

00:09:24.260 Yeah, it's a meaningless free will.

00:09:26.260 To us, a world in which a person has this sort of random number generator free will, I guess

00:09:32.120 I'd call it, is a world in which you have less meaningful free will.

00:09:36.740 So from our cultural perspective, you have more meaningful free will in a deterministic

00:09:44.460 universe than you have in a non-deterministic universe.

00:09:49.040 And again, we have to group deterministic universes into two categories.

00:09:53.580 A deterministic universe in which you can totally predict the future or a deterministic universe

00:09:58.040 in which there is some level of probability, but that probability isn't influenced by free

00:10:02.920 wills.

00:10:08.180 Now, what are your thoughts on this, Simone?

00:10:09.880 How does this affect how you see the world?

00:10:13.140 One thing that I encountered the first time I heard this kind of argument was that it would

00:10:19.260 be dangerous for people to spread this information because it would give people the impression that

00:10:25.040 they weren't responsible for every action they took.

00:10:29.840 And at first, I just accepted that at face value. 0.99

00:10:32.520 And now I think it's a fairly ridiculous assertion because it's really dumb. 0.92

00:10:37.280 Per this worldview, you know, every every single action that you take is 100 percent 0.95

00:10:43.660 your responsibility.

00:10:44.320 It is a product of your nature and your nurture.

00:10:46.600 And it also 100 percent affects how the world works.

00:10:51.200 You know, it's like if you're looking at a giant Rube Goldberg machine and you see like

00:10:55.540 there's this this portion at which a ball bounces off of something bouncy, maybe you're

00:11:01.320 that bouncy thing in this universe.

00:11:03.200 But that's still something that affects how the universe works.

00:11:06.060 It's still something that matters.

00:11:07.840 And so I think that's that's important.

00:11:10.000 And of course, every experience you have, every belief you hold is going to affect these

00:11:15.340 outcomes.

00:11:15.680 That is the the the the nurture element of what causes you to do what you do.

00:11:21.560 So these things, your beliefs, your viewpoints really, really matter.

00:11:25.160 And I think what's interesting about our mechanistic view of the universe and how it also dovetails

00:11:31.340 with Calvinism and other like sort of more theistic mechanistic views of the universe is that it really,

00:11:39.600 to me, has kind of the opposite effect.

00:11:41.900 Instead of making me think, oh, none of my choices matter.

00:11:46.600 I'm not responsible for anything I ever do.

00:11:49.780 I have this feeling like, oh, my gosh, I could really matter.

00:11:54.240 I'm really extra super responsible for what I do because everything that I believe will affect how I act.

00:11:59.820 And so my beliefs really, really matter.

00:12:01.360 And you see a lot in Calvinist tradition or history, you know, you see the like early colonial pilgrims writing like, oh, gosh, like, am I saved?

00:12:10.520 Am I a really important person or no?

00:12:13.060 No, I'm like, I'm wretched. 0.51

00:12:14.260 I'm horrible. 0.98

00:12:14.880 I'm damned. 1.00

00:12:15.620 I'm a terrible person. 0.98

00:12:17.140 And they're really thinking a lot about their position in the mechanistic universe.

00:12:21.880 Am I going to be something that matters?

00:12:23.380 Am I not going to be something that matters?

00:12:25.180 And I think they're also acutely aware of how their beliefs affect these things.

00:12:29.820 If you have the hubris to believe that you are redeemed, you are saved, maybe that means that you're depraved and that you're not saved.

00:12:38.560 Because what kind of holy person would believe that they're superior and actually good, right?

00:12:44.360 But then once you believe that you're damned and you're super dedicated to try to redeem yourself, then you start to see, you know, there's this weird oscillation between.

00:12:53.280 This is something which I think is really important in terms of radical self-responsibility is when you see the world this way, it means you're responsible even for your own thoughts.

00:13:03.880 Yes.

00:13:04.140 You know, if you have a thought, and this is something you saw in colonial Calvinists and stuff like that, which would make you a bad person, then you had to think, oh my God, this thought may mean that I actually am one of the people who is predestined to go to hell.

00:13:19.600 That I actually was created as like this joke, this foil to the saved.

00:13:23.920 And so you are responsible for everything that goes through your head, everything that's a component of who you are.

00:13:32.600 Yeah, it's like hyper-agency.

00:13:34.300 It's super hyper-agency.

00:13:36.080 And this is, when we talk about hyper-agency, you know, I think a way to explain this to somebody who might have trouble, you know, gonking, I guess is the word they use these days, what you're saying.

00:13:46.320 Oh, gronking? 0.99

00:13:47.640 Gronking, gronking. 0.99

00:13:48.620 That's what the kids say, right?

00:13:50.200 Gonking.

00:13:50.940 Fancy new words.

00:13:51.700 So, suppose you have a murderer, right?

00:13:54.640 And this murderer says, oh, I'm not really fully responsible for murdering these people because I was abused as a kid, right?

00:14:03.620 That is a level of not taking responsibility that is possible even in a universe where people believe in free will, because they still believe that some things influence an individual.

00:14:13.560 When you take full ownership over the fact that, yes, you are a creation of the things that happen to you in life, and you get to, to some extent, choose, and you are destined to either choose or not choose, to overcome those things and take total self-ownership.

00:14:31.220 You don't get to ever say, I don't have responsibility for this decision, or I don't have responsibility for this emotion I'm allowing myself to feel, because it's who I am as a human, or because my parents did X, Y, or Z.

00:14:44.960 No, everything you have is part of who you are.

00:14:49.060 And so, what you're searching for constantly within yourself and you're trying to prevent is that you're the type of pre-programmed person who does evil things, who succumbs to the flow of society, rather than trying to determine what's good and what's bad and going down the good path, no matter what you have to face going down that path.

00:15:09.980 And I love that level of radical self-determinism, that you never can say it's not my fault because something that happened to me before, because I was abused, because of something in society, because of, because all of us are complete constructs of the things that have happened to us in the past.

00:15:29.240 And the way we judge ourselves is whether or not all of those things created somebody who tries to overcome that and take responsibility for themselves or not.

00:15:39.980 And I really love the way you put that, sort of, what is it, radical agency.

00:15:45.380 Yeah, I'm trying to think about how, because I don't think either of us held this mechanistic view of the universe when even we first met.

00:15:53.900 I'm trying to think.

00:15:54.400 A little bit, but not as strongly as I do now, because it was always sort of a weird outlier thing I thought before.

00:16:00.080 And then I started talking with Simone about it and it became part of our like regular daily conversation, part of the way we held ourselves to account for everything.

00:16:08.740 You know, there's, there's never an excuse.

00:16:11.960 There's never an excuse.

00:16:13.740 You either made the decision that was optimal given your moral framework or you didn't.

00:16:19.160 And you either developed a moral framework as dissociated from the influences of society as possible.

00:16:25.300 And they tried to go to a first principles approach as much as possible while still being true to sort of your traditional view of the world.

00:16:31.940 You know, understanding that you are a product of those traditions, but trying to optimize them or you don't.

00:16:37.040 And I, I think what it was is I held this view before, but I didn't live by it.

00:16:43.760 When I met you, you really lived by it in a way that sort of almost shamed the portion of my brain that said, no one can really handle this level of responsibility.

00:16:56.100 And through that shining example, you proved to me who I could be.

00:17:03.560 And I started moving along that path.

00:17:05.220 And I think a way that sort of created a feedback loop between us.

00:17:08.480 Hmm. Yeah.

00:17:10.280 A very, a very useful feedback loop.

00:17:13.760 Now I'm just trying to model or understand the key differences in worldview between a universe in which everything that will happen has happened.

00:17:24.200 And time is an illusion that we're experiencing based on sort of our biology and some weird glitch of our consciousness.

00:17:33.340 That, that view versus a view in which, I guess, what would we call this a procedural world, a procedurally generated world?

00:17:41.480 What, what is the opposite to this?

00:17:43.240 And what are the implications of the world would still always have the same outcomes dependent on its previous states.

00:17:49.240 That's true.

00:17:49.680 I guess I call it a random number generator consciousnesses.

00:17:53.340 That's the way I see it.

00:17:54.480 I think to have the other perspective, you need to believe that the physical world doesn't really exist in a meaningful sense.

00:18:00.960 And that the thing that exists in a meaningful sense is people's consciousnesses and people's sentiences.

00:18:05.500 And that they are manifesting the physical world to some extent.

00:18:08.880 I think that's really the opposite perspective.

00:18:11.000 Well, yeah, because I'm genuinely struggling to understand how you could not believe that the world is.

00:18:18.080 Well, and again, I think this is a cultural thing.

00:18:20.920 So it's one of the things we talk about in our book is people hugely underestimate how quickly humans evolve and how quickly humans can co-evolve with a belief system.

00:18:30.240 And that if, you know, if we both have come from Calvinist traditions, that the individuals who didn't naturally just see the world this way left the tradition and that individuals in their community, you know, regardless of their ethnic background or where they came from, who did see the world this way drifted into the community at a much higher rate.

00:18:48.140 This is what we mean when we say the sociological aspects of an individual are determined at the genetic level or much less determined by things like ethnicity, which takes hundreds of thousands of years to change.

00:18:59.860 And more things like opt-in community, such as religious traditions or where an individual chose to live ancestry, like where they moved.

00:19:08.060 Like Silicon Valley is a good example of this, you know, in the gold rush, people who moved to Silicon Valley disproportionately were taking really high payout, low probability of success bets.

00:19:19.100 And then is it any surprise that like the Silicon Valley ecosystem arose there for a completely different set of reasons?

00:19:25.580 And it wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't based on like one ethnic group or anything like that.

00:19:29.760 It was basically a beacon from everyone from everywhere in the world who was like, okay, I have a mindset that is predispositioned to low probability, high reward payouts.

00:19:42.940 And this is how you can get people who like us, who see things in a culturally biased way and are just incapable of seeing it outside of that cultural bias.

00:19:53.620 And this is something that I think we should try to correct for if we have some sort of biological bias towards seeing the world in an incredibly deterministic fashion.

00:20:02.800 However, I don't really know, like, if you look at like our wider philosophy, this is why we believe in cultural pluralism.

00:20:09.380 I actually think that there are some benefits to having specialized ways of seeing the world within some subpopulation groups.

00:20:15.760 And that, you know, like, there's some aspects of Judaism that I like try to engage with and I just can't get like the snake oven story. 0.86

00:20:24.560 I can do that as a cultural outsider and it just feels wrong to me.

00:20:29.600 You should probably explain this story for context.

00:20:33.120 Three rabbis are having a disagreement around whether a, an oven is kosher or not.

00:20:40.000 I can't remember.

00:20:40.920 One of them was like, it's either kosher or not kosher.

00:20:42.440 Anyway, he says, it's definitely not.

00:20:44.720 God talks to me.

00:20:46.780 He's, I have a personal relationship with him.

00:20:49.120 And he has told me it's not kosher or it is kosher.

00:20:52.600 I don't remember what he was arguing.

00:20:53.560 And the other two said, no, you've got to look at our traditions.

00:20:56.860 And it clearly, you know, taking the other side of the argument here.

00:21:01.340 And he's like, no, no, no, no, no, no.

00:21:02.580 Here, watch.

00:21:03.320 Like, he's like, I understand.

00:21:04.580 Like, I agree with you that based on our traditions or whatever the Torah says, like, you guys are right.

00:21:08.040 But God has told me that that's not true.

00:21:11.200 And I can prove it.

00:21:12.220 Look, if it's not true, then the rain will fly upwards.

00:21:15.420 That river will move backwards.

00:21:17.300 That building over there I just pointed to will randomly explode.

00:21:20.080 Like, I don't remember all the things he did, but he just did a number of, like, impossible miracles on command saying, God, if you believe this, do this miraculous thing in the universe.

00:21:27.640 And he was the villain.

00:21:31.620 He was wrong.

00:21:32.740 And he was supposed to be wrong.

00:21:33.940 He was supposed to know better.

00:21:34.840 And the other rabbis, they go to God, and they're like, look, God, I'm sorry. 0.64

00:21:39.220 Like, you disagree with us, but this is basically outside your jurisdiction.

00:21:44.540 And then God laughs.

00:21:48.680 Like, he takes this humorously, and he's like, well, I guess, what is it?

00:21:51.040 It is not in heaven or something like that.

00:21:52.660 And the point being is that sort of the legalistic interpretation of things, the cultural interpretations of things matters more than the objective truth of those things from, like, a fun – because I'm assuming that God has more access to, like, objective truth than humans.

00:22:08.220 I mean, there's different ways you can read this, but, like, from a different cultural perspective, I just – it seems so obviously wrong.

00:22:20.560 And I think the same way that many people can look at our deterministic view of reality, and it just seems obviously wrong, but I believe we live in a better world where certain humans are programmed to see the world one way, and certain humans are programmed to see the world another way, and that I can talk to those humans congenially and gain access to this different perspective of reality they have.

00:22:44.500 And this is why it is so important to us to maintain this cultural pluralism.

00:22:49.520 People wonder why we're so, like, fervently and fanatically worried where they're like, well, you believe that you and your descendants will be okay in the face of population collapse.

00:22:59.860 Why are you worried about saving other people?

00:23:01.500 It's because other people are different from us.

00:23:03.760 That's the advantage.

00:23:05.140 And this is where it gets so crazy when people are like, you guys are racist, or you only want people like you to exist in the future.

00:23:09.560 It's like, no, no, no, no, no.

00:23:10.560 Like, we've got us covered.

00:23:11.700 What we're terrified about is the people who see things in a way that we can't begin to understand, that's what we're afraid is going to disappear, because they have some perspective of reality that our brains aren't built to model.

00:23:25.920 Yeah.

00:23:26.280 Like, I see it as a genuine moral failing on my part that I'm having difficulty modeling or understanding a non-mechanistic view of the universe.

00:23:34.940 And imagine a world in which I couldn't go on to, like, Reddit or some other place online, YouTube, and, like, find someone's, multiple people's explanations of this.

00:23:45.160 Imagine a world in which I can't course correct for that.

00:23:48.620 That is not a very good world.

00:23:51.000 Yeah, but, I mean, that's also part of a Calvinist perspective, your intrinsic wretchedness.

00:23:54.820 Well, no, but this is also something that we really believe about ourselves, is that humans, at any specific point in time, are a failed race.

00:24:03.760 We are wretched and horrible, and we will constantly fail.

00:24:08.320 That doesn't absolve us from responsibility to try to overcome our limitations.

00:24:13.020 And so, we can accept that we have these intrinsic limitations.

00:24:17.840 They may even be biological limitations to the way our brains process reality.

00:24:22.020 But the fact that we are wretched and limited does not free us from the responsibility of trying to overcome that.

00:24:29.980 Yeah, totally.

00:24:32.240 And to that extent, I love that you take that responsibility on.

00:24:35.220 And I am just so honored that you really forced me to live with my values, Simone, because that wasn't something I was doing before we got into a relationship.

00:24:45.160 And I really appreciate that.

00:24:48.980 I am glad that you are deluded into thinking that somehow I'm making you a better person.

00:24:57.080 But, yeah, I mean, this is all very interesting stuff.

00:25:00.480 And I love having these conversations with you, because I can just kind of dumbly muse about something, and you'll make it a thing.

00:25:08.080 And then suddenly, our lives are different, because we're committing to some kind of new worldview or set of values that, like, really changes our views and makes us better people, more effective.

00:25:19.040 So, I think the one final thing I'd like to talk about within this subject is the concept of, in Minority Report, there are the precogs, right?

00:25:29.540 There are these psychic people who are able to tell when you are about to commit a crime, and they will arrest you before you commit your crime so that you don't commit it.

00:25:40.280 And then there's this sort of moral question of, well, but if you haven't committed the crime yet, can you really be arrested?

00:25:46.940 Like, that's not fair.

00:25:48.160 And we're entering an age in which now there are polygenic risk scores for all sorts of things.

00:25:53.660 You know, right now they're for things like gum disease and brain fog and certain types of cancer, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's.

00:26:01.280 But I'm sure in the future there will be polygenic risk scores for, like, murdering people and stealing things and violence, assault, risks of all sorts of bad behaviors, embezzlement.

00:26:14.360 And, you know, there could probably be polygenic risk scores for all sorts of behaviors.

00:26:18.700 Maybe not something that specific.

00:26:20.400 Well, I mean, the answer to this is obvious.

00:26:22.260 A genetic propensity from a Calvinist perspective is not predestination.

00:26:29.160 Yeah, everything is nature and nurture.

00:26:30.940 You have responsibility for mastering yourself, and therefore you cannot punish someone for it.

00:26:36.240 Mm-hmm.

00:26:37.380 Until they do it.

00:26:38.060 We don't believe we live in a minority report universe because no one has access to this total information except for a god, right?

00:26:46.480 And, you know, we do believe in a god.

00:26:49.280 Other people don't.

00:26:50.280 But what I would say is that god is already punishing or rewarding us based on the decisions we're going to make from a Calvinist cultural perspective.

00:27:00.060 So, we already live in a minority report, okay?

00:27:05.380 So, it's irrelevant as a question to pontificate upon.

00:27:10.460 It is the height of human immorality to think they can pass these judgments on other humans.

00:27:15.580 In fact, passing these judgments on other humans means that you probably deserve to be punished.

00:27:21.320 You're one of the bad guys.

00:27:22.440 You know, that's the classic Calvinist perspective, which is to say, if you think that you are in the saved group, you almost certainly are not.

00:27:31.800 There's Schrodinger, you know, the, I love you because you're beautiful.

00:27:35.800 No, it's you're beautiful because you don't know you're beautiful, which, of course, creates the recursive loop, which is as soon as she realizes that someone could be beautiful because they don't know they're beautiful, then she knows she's beautiful.

00:27:48.280 But through knowing she's beautiful, she's not beautiful.

00:27:50.600 It's the same thing with being a good person from a Calvinist or secular Calvinist perspective.

00:27:56.780 Well, what would you say about also the recent, I would say, surging meme that people, I guess, shouldn't be arrested or punished if they have gotten a bad roll of the dice in our mechanistic universe?

00:28:12.340 Like, oh, well, you were born to an abusive family, you've lived a tragic life, and now you're assaulting people on the streets, you shouldn't be jailed, it's not fair.

00:28:23.460 Some things that you inherited, everything you are is a result of the reality that existed before you.

00:28:29.760 Therefore, you are always 100% responsible for who you are.

00:28:33.780 I mean, that's unfortunate, but it is who you are.

00:28:37.160 It is the painting that was painted by reality.

00:28:40.420 The problem with that mindset is they want the world to be fair.

00:28:44.920 And this is one of the many ways that fairness causes evil because it removes moral responsibility from the individual.

00:28:52.360 So the response that our worldview has to that view is essentially, the world is not fair, rise above.

00:29:02.060 Yeah, and these people are not any more or less responsible for their actions than anyone else in the world.

00:29:09.400 Everyone is completely a product of their environment, their genes, and their past experiences.

00:29:14.620 The fact that that's the case does not absolve you from responsibility.

00:29:19.000 Those things may have made that person a bad person deserving of punishment, but it made that person a bad person deserving of punishment.

00:29:27.580 It created that evil.

00:29:30.900 And when you absolve a person of that, you lead to much higher rates of negative actions across society.

00:29:37.080 When a person thinks they're not responsible for their own actions.

00:29:40.500 Actually, this brings me to a point that you see historically.

00:29:45.840 And it's something that, you know, one of the things we ask in the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion is why, you know, suppose the Calvinists and the Quakers were anti-slavery.

00:29:54.720 Yet, if you look at Calvinist slave ownership rates, they were like 0.5%.

00:29:58.420 You look at Quaker slave ownership rates, which you can see from wills, go through the books for citations on this, don't just take it from me. 0.95

00:30:04.540 They were like 40 to 70%.

00:30:06.120 They were really high.

00:30:07.980 And the question is, wait, what?

00:30:09.700 I thought that they were anti-slavery.

00:30:11.200 And they were anti-slavery.

00:30:12.980 Like morally, they thought slavery was bad, but they just did it anyway.

00:30:16.800 And so the question is, what was happening there, right?

00:30:20.400 And I think here you have the two extremes on these ideas of free will.

00:30:24.720 From the perspective of a Calvinist, if they even thought about owning a slave, if they even considered the idea,

00:30:30.600 they were proving to themselves that they were a bad person and that they were always going to go to hell no matter what.

00:30:39.700 Through having those threats, through allowing yourself to become a bad person, through allowing yourself to even be the type of person who might do that,

00:30:48.380 you prove your inevitable fate at the end of the timeline.

00:30:51.260 Whereas to the Quaker, well, you know, in the moment, they were really doing it for good need.

00:30:59.240 They could treat the slave well.

00:31:01.800 They could, over the course of time, oh, do more good deeds in the future than they'd done in the past.

00:31:09.540 You know, they really have free will and they can course correct around this in the future.

00:31:15.200 And sort of this other belief in free will, this belief that they're a product of the things that have happened before them,

00:31:22.020 that they're a product of the things that led them to the slave auction, and that absolves them of responsibility in some way.

00:31:28.120 And that these things can be course corrected in the future because their free will can always change who they are.

00:31:33.060 That absolves them from responsibility and leads to more immoral actions.

00:31:37.380 So I genuinely believe, and I know everybody believes their own culture is superior to other cultures. 0.99

00:31:42.180 Isn't that just the way humans are?

00:31:43.720 There's a difference between saying, I like my culture more than other cultures for me and my family,

00:31:48.120 and then saying that that means that other cultures shouldn't exist.

00:31:51.020 And I even believe that we have something we can learn from Quakers. 1.00

00:31:53.960 I'm just glad that, you know, I guess I take more pride in the way that my ancestors handled that moral challenge

00:32:02.060 than the way their ancestors handled that moral challenge.

00:32:04.860 But ain't that just the way things are, right?

00:32:08.520 We, you wouldn't hold your traditions if you didn't take any pride in them.

00:32:12.780 And there are many things to take pride in within the Quaker tradition that aren't, that are different from,

00:32:18.800 that they held lots of slaves and they claim to be against slave holding.

00:32:24.480 Okay.

00:32:25.840 Nice try.

00:32:26.920 Malcolm.

00:32:27.940 What can I say?

00:32:29.560 It was an evil thing to do.

00:32:31.520 Your attempts at diplomacy are.

00:32:33.900 I'm not as good diplomacy as you because Simone has the ability to like genuinely think kindly of other people in a way that I just,

00:32:42.540 oh, you've heard this on the other podcast.

00:32:44.780 She can genuinely get in other people's mental spaces and defend them.

00:32:49.240 Oh, oh, our listeners know.

00:32:51.300 And this is why I rely on her guidance to be a good person and why I, and this is one of the great things.

00:32:59.680 Even if I had all of my environmental conditions, you know how we talk about two people can become a single entity when they get married?

00:33:05.600 Well, I went into marriage knowing all of my flaws, all of the things that were etched into my identity that made me a bad person.

00:33:14.800 And through combining my identity with Simone's, I was able to partially overcome those things through to an extent having her as a voice in my ear for the rest of my life.

00:33:30.320 I am able to be a better entity.

00:33:33.120 And so even though we are predetermined, and even though me choosing to marry her was to an extent predetermined,

00:33:38.980 it was one of those high variability predetermined things where I really got to, through who I was as a predetermined entity,

00:33:47.860 shape the future through choosing her.

00:33:50.680 And I'm really glad.

00:33:52.140 If you have our mindset, that statement will make perfect sense.

00:33:55.120 If you don't have our mindset, it'll seem completely contradictory, and it's very hard to communicate.

00:34:00.580 Maybe we can do another video where we explain this better, or maybe you can just read The Pragmatist Guide to Life,

00:34:04.700 which explains the concept in a lot more detail.

00:34:07.100 Always, if you're like, I wish you had citations on this, or I wish you explained this more concisely or better, read our books.

00:34:12.700 That's where we, like, went over every paragraph 50 or 80 times, where we cite, like, every third paragraph.

00:34:19.460 Like, if you want all of those things, be reading a book, not listening to a podcast.

00:34:23.580 You're listening to a podcast because you're lazy, and you want to have a parasocial relationship with us or something.

00:34:29.460 But we really appreciate your listening.

00:34:31.160 We really appreciate you listening.

00:34:33.420 That you subscribe if you are not already subscribed.

00:34:35.960 Oh, yeah, that would be nice if you subscribe.

00:34:37.760 I take way more self-worth out of that than I probably should.

00:34:41.520 He does.

00:34:43.260 I literally update that page multiple times, like, every two to three hours.

00:34:49.980 Yeah, that's always something you're watching.

00:34:51.720 It's either that, or book reviews, or people who've responded with criticism to our books,

00:34:57.600 and you go and update them right away with more information.

00:35:01.000 No, I'm like, oh, okay.

00:35:02.960 But we always try to respond to criticism.

00:35:05.320 And again, this is something we mentioned in other things.

00:35:07.300 People, they don't understand how receptive we are to criticism if it's based on reality and facts.

00:35:13.120 It's so often we get criticism, and then we chase down whatever the criticism was, and it's just wrong, or the person, like, didn't know about something, and they didn't.

00:35:22.740 Yeah, it's really a shame.

00:35:24.380 Because, yeah, I'm very open to changing my mind, and so are you, where we are capable of changing our minds.

00:35:29.720 Well, because we feel that we're extremely responsible, which, again, I think feels very counterintuitive to people.

00:35:37.360 If there's a person with a mechanistic view of the universe, I don't think that people simultaneously expect that they're going to be extremely neurotic about course correction and changing their views and changing and, like, controlling their behavior.

00:35:51.140 But Calvinists have always been neurotic about that.

00:35:53.400 Yeah, so it's a fun thing to think about.

00:35:55.540 It is conditional to a deterministic universe view, because every wrong thing you do proves who you are.

00:36:01.700 Yeah.

00:36:02.120 Speaking of immense responsibility for things, it's time for us to pick up the kids and do dinner.

00:36:06.920 So I will see you in the kitchen.

00:36:08.820 I am very excited for dinner tonight.

00:36:11.640 I am very excited to give you some big hugs today and to see the kids again.

00:36:16.020 Can't wait.

00:36:16.780 See you soon.

00:36:17.340 I love you.

Based Camp - June 02, 2023

Based Camp： Can Determinists Believe in Free Will？

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