#241 — Final Thoughts on Free Will
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Summary
Most people believe that they have a self which enjoys something called freedom of will. But is there any truth behind this notion of "free will"? And if there isn't, then why does it matter so much to most people? Is there any reason to believe that we actually have a sense of free will at all? In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, I discuss why I believe that the illusion of "Free Will" is itself an illusion, and why losing one's belief in free will can actually have very positive consequences for one's morality, morality, law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, and feelings of guilt. In fact, losing one s belief in freedom of choice can actually remove a rational basis for hating people, and we'll explore that later on in the episode. In order to access full episodes of the making sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe to the podcast, where you'll get access to all of the podcast's premium features, including the most popular sub-podcast, Making Sense. If you're not a fan of the show, then you'll want to become a member of the mailing list, where all future episodes will be available 24/7. The mailing list is open to all interested in making sense. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to makingsense.org/sponsorships. We don't run ads on the podcast and you get 100% of the best deals on the show's premium edition of Making Sense, which includes ad-free versions of the entire year-wide, including "Making Sense" and "The Making Sense" stickers, shirts, hoodies and hoodies, plus limited edition hoodies available for purchase, and much more! Thank you for listening to this podcast and subscribe to Making Sense! You'll get a discount code: MINDING MESENSE! The Making Sense is making sense! to get 10% off the entire show, plus an ad discount when you sign up for the VIP membership only, and get 20% off your first month, and 5% of your ad discount, plus a free shipping discount, and a 20% discount, when you become a patron gets 7 days early, you get 7 months of the VIP promo code, VIP access, and 6 months of VIP access to the show gets a maximum discount, only $50, and 7 other places get a maximum chance to review the show starts in 7 months, and they get 7 days of the course gets a discount of $75, and I'll get $5,000 PROMOTION!
Transcript
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welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing
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i have said and written a lot about free will over the years and i wanted to get all of my thoughts or
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my most effective thoughts all in one place many of you find my argument against free will to be
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very provocative and even off-putting and many of you mistake it for a philosophical argument that
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doesn't make contact directly with experience so i want to see if i can do this all in one pass
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and actually bring some of you along with me into the end zone here so here's the starting point
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most people believe that they have a self which enjoys something called freedom of will
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and in fact this feeling of self and the feeling that we have free will are really two sides of the
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same coin but here i'm going to focus on free will because in many ways it's easier to deconstruct
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now i found in my surprise that this is a very sensitive topic and so here i want to offer the usual
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disclaimer if it makes you uncomfortable to think about these things you need to be the judge of whether
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this discomfort is healthy and worth pressing into or whether it's actually bad for you and in the
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latter case just skip this journey with me and it's probably not an accident that many people find
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the prospect that free will might be an illusion to be provocative because the idea of free will
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seems to touch nearly everything people care about morality law politics religion public policy
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intimate relationships feelings of guilt and personal accomplishment most of what is distinctly human
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about us seems to depend on our viewing one another as agents who are capable of free choice
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and i say seems to because i don't think it does really but it can take a little while to see this
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now most people believe that the challenge is to reconcile a subjective fact the fact that we experience
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free will with objective reality the way physical causes and events arise in the universe but i want you
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to examine this what i hope to impress upon you is that the illusion of free will is itself an illusion
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there is no illusion of free will and there are no subjective facts about it to reconcile with the
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truths of physics and neurophysiology in fact our conscious experience is perfectly compatible with a
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scientific picture of reality that does not stop or change character at the boundary of our skin
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many people worry that the consequences of dispensing with free will must be negative now obviously this
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wouldn't suggest that free will actually exists but generally speaking this claim about negative outcomes
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isn't true either losing one's belief in free will can actually have very positive consequences
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for one it removes any rational basis for hating people and we'll explore that later on
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let's begin at the beginning the popular conception of free will rests on two assumptions
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the first that each of us was free to think and act differently than we did in the past we chose a but
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we could have chosen b you became an accountant but you could have decided to be a firefighter
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you had chocolate ice cream last night but you could have picked vanilla
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it certainly seems to most of us that this is the world we're living in the second assumption
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is that we are the conscious source of many of our thoughts and actions in the present
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your sense of deciding what to do in each moment seems to be the actual origin of your subsequent
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behavior you feel you want to reach and pick up an object and then you do the conscious part of you
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that wants and intends and perceives seems to be in control of at least some of your thoughts and actions
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however there is every reason to believe that both of these assumptions are false
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of course there's very little disagreement over the fact that events have causes
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everything that arises seems to be born into existence by some previous state of the universe
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now maybe there's some place to stand where all of this proves to be an illusion
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maybe there's some way to view the cosmos as a whole or reality itself and to say that nothing has ever actually happened
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right that change itself the process of cause and effect itself is an illusion
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but let's leave that possibility aside for the moment most of the time things certainly seem to happen
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lightning strikes a tree and a fire starts a few lines of computer code cause your phone to ring
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people are born they grow old and then they die
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everywhere we look we see patterns of events and all these events have prior causes which is to say
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they depend materially and functionally and logically on other events that preceded them in time
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and most relevantly for our purposes all of our conscious experiences our thoughts intentions desires
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and the actions and choices that result from them are caused by events of which we are not conscious
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and which we did not bring into being you didn't pick your parents you didn't pick your genes
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therefore and you didn't pick the environment into which you were born
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and yet the totality of these facts determines who you are in each moment and what you do in the next
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and even if you think that you have an immaterial soul that somehow animates this machinery
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you didn't pick your soul the next thing you think and do
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can only emerge from this totality of prior causes and it can only emerge in one of two ways
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lawfully that is deterministically like one domino just getting knocked over by another or randomly
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now randomness is a very interesting concept and it's not clear how pervasive it might be
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there are arguments against determinism especially in quantum mechanics that suggest that subatomic particles
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themselves make quote free choices which is to say there's nothing in the prior history of the universe
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that tells them what to do next and if what a particle does next doesn't depend on the past
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well then there's no theory that can predict what it will do next i'm not taking a position against this
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at the level of particles but i am claiming that this kind of independence from prior causes
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would not give people the psychological freedom they think they have for two reasons the first is that
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there's every indication that larger systems like human brains behave more deterministically but
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more important randomness of any sort would not give people freedom of will there is no will
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in randomness if you ever did something that was truly random that had no relationship to prior states of
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your brain if it literally came out of nowhere that wouldn't be what you or anyone means by free will
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you would think what the hell did i just do right and why did i do it such an action would be precisely the
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sort of thing we would deem out of character because it would be by definition out of character to be in
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character is to be discernibly in line with prior tendencies right it follows a pattern something truly
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random would be unanalyzable right there would literally be no answer to the question of why you did it
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with true randomness there is no why that's not what we mean by will much less a free one right that
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is not psychological continuity through time the problem is that neither determinism nor randomness
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nor any combination of the two justifies the feeling that most people have that goes by the name
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of free will the feeling that they're free to think and do more or less whatever they want in the
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present in a way that allows them to be something other than a mere concatenation of causes or mysterious
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influences to be something other than a natural phenomenon people don't want to believe that they are
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in any sense like a wave breaking on the shore but this is how causes propagate or seem to propagate
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many scientists and philosophers have acknowledged the problem here but most appear to think that we must
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live with the illusion of free will or euphemize about it and i'm arguing that this is a mistake
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so what do most people mean by free will well there's controversy over this among philosophers and scientists
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but i think the central false intuition is pretty clear and it results from how our subjectivity is structured
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or appears to be structured again the feeling of having free will is directly connected to the
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feeling of being a self with respect to free will that amounts to this most people feel that the
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conscious part of their minds the one that is experiencing their experience thinking their thoughts feeling
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their feelings is in control of their mental life and behavior in some real way they feel that they are the
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source of their intentions and actions not merely that these mental and physical states are arising
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in their bodies somehow but that they are initiated by their conscious minds in some way the fact that
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something's happening in a person's body isn't really the point right people do not feel free to beat their
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hearts or to stop beating them they don't feel that they're causing their cells to divide or to metabolize energy
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they don't feel they're in control of their livers right but they do feel that they're the source of their
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thoughts and voluntary actions and at any given moment they feel that they are free to think and do something
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else now perhaps you feel this perhaps you feel that if you could rewind the movie of your life
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and return the universe to the precise state it was in a moment ago you could think and behave differently
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i think there's little question that most people presume this about themselves and about other
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people not philosophically but implicitly as a felt sense of how they exist in the world
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this seems to be the very essence of what it means to hold ourselves and others morally responsible for
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our actions if someone does something to harm you intentionally you feel they shouldn't have done
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it right they could and should have done otherwise and you have a grievance against them that is very
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different from how you feel about a malfunctioning piece of machinery or a gust of wind that might produce
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the same harm all right so the reason why discussions about free will are so fraught is that declaring free
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will to be an illusion strikes at the very heart of what people feel is true about their own subjectivity
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in each moment and it seems to have implications for a wide variety of moral norms as we'll see the
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implications are not what many people think i'll argue that our morality actually improves once we
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recognize that free will doesn't make any sense but again the consequences of believing in free will
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or not are quite separable from any claim about what is true one simply can't argue for the reality
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of free will based on the imagined good effects of believing in it and with respect to what's true
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the problem is there's absolutely no reason to believe that free will exists there's no objective
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reason and there's no subjective reason either in the end a belief in free will is analogous to
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believing that if you rewound this piece of audio i might finish this sentence some other way
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as i said traditionally this has been viewed as a philosophical impasse we know we have free will
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because we experience it directly but we just can't see how to make sense of it in terms of physical
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causation but as i hope to show you there is no impasse because there's no experiential reason to believe in
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free will either the experiential you the conscious witness of your inner life the one who's hearing
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these words right now you aren't the author of your thoughts intentions and actions rather thoughts
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intentions and subsequent actions simply arise and are noticed but this doesn't mean there's no difference
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between voluntary and involuntary behavior there is let's take a closer look at this reach for
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something and pick it up now and pay attention to what the experience is like now whether you're aware
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of it or not voluntary behavior is structured by intention and expectation your brain produces a forward-looking
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model of what's about to happen and if the model is violated you'll notice you know what it's like
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to reach for something and to accidentally knock it over for instance the successful manipulation of an
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object feels different than just banging into it and produces different results and voluntary actions
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can be consciously interrupted which is to say we can experience an impulse to stop them and this impulse is
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effective and of course they can be deterred by other people and by legal penalties an involuntary action
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such as a muscle spasm or a reflex or a seizure or tripping and falling can't be deterred so there are many
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differences here okay what someone does voluntarily says more about him about what he wants for instance and
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about what he's likely to do in the future than an involuntary action does doing something on purpose
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reveals something about one's purpose in life we don't need a concept of free will to notice these
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differences and as i'll make clear later on most of our ethical judgments remain unchanged when we give
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up the illusion of free will but not everything remains unchanged and a few things that do change are
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actually quite important again i want to flag what is novel about my argument here most philosophers and
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scientists believe we have an experience of free will that is undeniable and the challenge is to make
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sense of it in terms of a picture of causality that seems not to allow for it whether that's deterministic
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or random i'm claiming that we don't have the experience we think we have there is no experience
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of free will so let's look more closely at our experience consider how your thoughts arise because
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they're the basis for most of your complex behavior certainly your most deliberate behavior if you pay
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attention to the process of thinking you'll see that your thoughts simply appear in consciousness very
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much like my words in fact you can observe that you no more decide the next thing you think then you
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decide the next thing i say what are you going to think next you don't know yet your thoughts determine
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what you want and intend and do next your thoughts determine your goals and whether or not you believe
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you've met them they determine what you say to other people and what you don't say in fact thoughts
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determine almost everything that makes you human now most people feel that they are the thinker of their
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thoughts and therefore their author and this is one way of describing the feeling of self subjectively
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speaking as a matter of experience there's no thinker to be found in the mind apart from thoughts
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themselves there's no subject in the middle of experience everything including thoughts and
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intentions and counter thoughts and counter intentions is arising all on its own and the feeling that
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there's a thinker in addition to the flow of thought is what it feels like to be thinking without
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knowing that you're thinking it's the feeling of being identified with the train of thought that's
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passing through consciousness in this moment but if you pay attention to how thoughts arise you'll see
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that they simply appear quite literally out of nowhere and you're not free to choose them before
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they appear that would require that you think them before you think them so here's the question if
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you can't control your next thought if you can't decide what it will be before it arises and if you can't
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prevent it from arising where is your freedom of will at this moment you might be thinking what the hell
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is he talking about here is what i'm talking about you didn't choose that thought either if you're confused
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by what i'm saying you didn't produce your confusion you didn't decide to be confused conversely if you
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understand what i'm saying and you find it interesting you didn't create that state of mind either
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and if your mind is just wandering to thoughts of lunch and you missed half of what i just said
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you didn't choose to be distracted everything is just happening including your thoughts and intentions
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and desires and most deliberate actions you are part of the universe and there is no place for you to
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stand outside of its causal structure and as we'll see there's no one to stand there either right you're
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not a self in the end you're certainly not a subject in the middle of experience or on the edge of it you're
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not on the riverbank watching the stream of consciousness because as a matter of experience there is only the
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stream and you are identical to it this is not a metaphysical statement i'm not talking about how
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consciousness relates to the physical universe i'm talking about your actual experience in this moment
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as a matter of experience you are not having an experience from some place outside of experience
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there is only experience you're not on the edge of your life looking in you're not sitting in the
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theater of your mind watching a life movie and the feeling that you are the feeling that you can stand
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apart from everything that's happening and this feeling of being free to choose the next thing you do
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or the next thing you notice the next thing you pay attention to this feeling is itself part of the movie
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yet more appearances in consciousness there's just consciousness and its contents in this moment
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again this isn't just a philosophical point most people think that free will really exists
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and it's just hard to map onto the physics of things or it doesn't exist and we just have to admit
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that we're living in the grip of a powerful illusion but that's not what i'm saying i'm saying free will
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doesn't exist and in fact it's such an incoherent concept that it's impossible to say what would have
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to be true of the world for it to exist there really is no way for causes to arise that would make sense
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of this notion of free will but i'm making a much more fundamental claim about the nature of conscious
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experience i'm saying there is no illusion of free will if you pay attention you can see that your
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experience is totally compatible with the truth of determinism or determinism plus randomness
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let's run a little experiment just close your eyes and take a few deep breaths
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and now think of a movie it can be one you've seen or just one you know the name of right doesn't
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have to be good it can be bad whatever comes to mind doesn't matter and pay attention to what this
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experience is like a few films have probably come to mind just pick one and pay attention to what the
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now the first thing to notice is that this is as free a choice as you are ever going to make in your
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life right you are completely free you have all the films in the world to choose from and you can pick
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anyone you want and you can pause this audio and take as long as you want now let's do that again
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all right i want you to become sensitive to this process so forget the first film and choose another
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and again pay attention to what you actually experience here what is it like to choose
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what is it like to make this completely free choice you got a new film okay do it one more time
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all right just clean the slate think of a few more films and choose one
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did you see any evidence for free will here because if it's not here it's not anywhere
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right so we better be able to find it here so let's look for it well first let's set aside all
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the films you've never seen or heard about and whose names and imagery are unknown to you right
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needless to say you couldn't pick one of those and there's no freedom in that obviously because you
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couldn't have picked one of those if your life depended on it but then there are many other films whose
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names are well known to you right many of which you've seen but which didn't occur to you to pick
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for instance you absolutely know that the wizard of oz is a film but you just didn't think of it
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and if you thought of the wizard of oz apologies right but you get my point you can swap in the seventh
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seal or mission impossible or the deer hunter there and if you're hearing this for the first time and you
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thought of all those films well then we really are living in a simulation and it's all about you
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apparently so consider the few films that came to mind right in light of all the films that might
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have come to mind but didn't and ask yourself were you free to choose that which did not occur to you
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to choose as a matter of neurophysiology your wizard of oz circuits were not in play a few moments ago
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for reasons that you can't possibly know and could not control based on the state of your brain the
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wizard of oz was not an option even though you absolutely know about this film and if we could
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return your brain to the state it was in a moment ago and account for all the noise in the system
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adding back any contributions of randomness whatever they were you would fail to think of the wizard of oz
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again and again and again until the end of time where is the freedom in that
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it's important to see that whether the universe is fully determined or it admits of randomness the
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picture is the same okay determinism gives you no freedom obviously it would just be mere biochemical
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clockwork but randomness gives you no freedom either if you knew that your next choice of a film
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would be the result of a random process some quantum roll of the dice that would be the antithesis of
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what most people mean by free will there's no will in that and if that same random influence appeared a
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trillion times in a row just by chance you would think of the same film a trillion times in a row just by
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chance i mean no matter how we think about causation whether things are determined or random or some
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combination of the two there's no place for you as the conscious subject to stand that isn't downstream
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of causes that you can't inspect or anticipate everything is just appearing in consciousness
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again focus on the experience here you can forget about the metaphysics free will is an enduring
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problem for philosophy and science for one reason people think they experience it they feel they have it
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do you experience it again if it's not here it's not anywhere right the only constraint you've been
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given is to think of a film and you can pick anyone you want and you can take as long as you want
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it is likely that every other choice you have made in your life has been more constrained than this one
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what job to take who to marry whether to have kids who to vote for most choices in life are much more
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obviously constrained by other variables than this one so if you're not free to simply pick a film
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right now i don't know where you're going to find free will anywhere in your life so really pay
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attention to the experience do it one more time pick a film any film
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okay so we can use my films here to describe the experience i thought of chinatown and once upon a
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time in hollywood and alien and let's say i thought i'm going to go with chinatown right but then at the
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last second i thought nope i'm going to go with alien this is the sort of decision that motivates
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the idea of free will you go back and forth between two or more options and then you settle on one
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without suffering any obvious coercion or pressure from the outside world it's just you and your
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thoughts right and you appear to be doing everything so i pick alien over chinatown i appeared entirely free
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to make that choice but when i look closely i can see that i'm in no position to know why these films
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occurred to me in the first place or why i chose alien over chinatown i mean i might have some
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additional story to tell about my choice i might now think well everyone says chinatown's a great
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film but it's actually a little boring so i picked alien which is not boring but of course we know from
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a vast psychological literature that these sorts of explanations are often pure fiction and when people
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are manipulated in a lab they seem to always have a story about why they did what they did
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and it often bears no relationship to what actually influenced them it's simply a fact that our
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judgments about the causes of our own behavior are often unreliable generally this comes courtesy
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of the left hemisphere of the brain but even if i'm right in this instance about why i picked alien
00:29:34.200
over chinatown i'm in no position to know why my memory of chinatown being boring had the effect
00:29:40.840
that it did why didn't it have the opposite effect why didn't i think i'm going to go with a classic
00:29:47.560
whether it's boring or not the thing to notice is that you as the conscious witness of your inner life
00:29:55.160
are not making decisions all you can do is witness decisions once they're made no matter how many times
00:30:01.720
you go back and forth between two options no matter how many other thoughts arise to give color
00:30:07.160
to this process giving way to one option or the other the process itself is irreducibly mysterious
00:30:15.000
from your point of view and whether these mental events are fully determined or in part random the
00:30:21.320
experience is the same everything is just happening on its own may i say pick a film and there's this
00:30:29.000
moment before anything has changed for you and then the names of films begin percolating at the margins
00:30:36.280
of consciousness and you have no control over which appear none and really none can you feel that
00:30:48.440
you can't pick them before they pick themselves someone else might as well be whispering the names of
00:30:55.160
films in your ear for all that you did to summon them and the same can be said for the process of
00:31:01.320
choosing among the candidates that do appear even if you go back and forth between two choices for an
00:31:07.560
hour eeny meeny miny mo you can't know why you stop on the one that you finally choose if you pay
00:31:15.800
attention to how your thoughts arise and how decisions actually get made you'll see that there's no evidence
00:31:22.920
for free will not only no evidence it's impossible to make sense of the claim that free will might
00:31:30.840
exist what could it refer to forget about the physics of things what in your experience could it refer to
00:31:41.160
everything is simply springing out of the darkness what will you think or intend or want or ignore or
00:31:51.400
forget and then suddenly remember next our experience of being and acting in the world is totally compatible
00:32:02.280
with the truth of determinism or determinism plus randomness and this has implications not only for
00:32:08.360
our sense of self but for our ethics and our view of other people and this insight can be extraordinarily
00:32:16.200
freeing psychologically it can lead to much greater compassion both for other people and for ourselves
00:32:22.680
and far from causing us to become passive an insight into the illusoriness of free will can allow us to
00:32:28.440
behave much more intelligently in life as we will see i've been arguing that there's no such thing as free
00:32:36.680
as free will so what is there well there's luck both good and bad and there's what we make of it actually
00:32:47.800
that's not quite true what you make of your luck is also just more luck once again you didn't choose your
00:32:55.400
parents you didn't choose the society into which you were born there's not a cell in your body or brain
00:33:02.120
brain that you the conscious subject created nor is there a single influence coming from the outside
00:33:08.920
world that you brought into being and yet everything you think and do arises from this ocean of prior
00:33:17.080
causes so what you do with your luck and the very tools with which you do it including the level of
00:33:24.600
effort and discipline you manage to summon in each moment is more in the way of luck i mean how do you
00:33:32.920
explain your capacity for effort how do you explain when you're lazy how do you explain when you're lazy but
00:33:40.920
then you suddenly get inspired and make great effort you can't the you that experiences sudden
00:33:49.400
inspiration or a doubling of effort or a failure of nerve the you that rises to the occasion or chokes
00:33:59.160
isn't in the driver's seat in each moment there's a mystery at your back and it's producing everything
00:34:05.480
that you can notice your thoughts intentions desires inhibitions and all of the behaviors and course
00:34:13.000
corrections that follow from them this is an objective truth about your subjective experience you can't
00:34:21.080
inspect your causes now most people resist this idea seemingly at any intellectual cost and yet this
00:34:30.920
single insight is the antidote to arrogance and hatred and provides a profound basis for compassion
00:34:38.600
both for other people and for oneself it's the basis for real forgiveness again for other people and
00:34:46.040
for oneself it is literally the path to redemption and it's the only view of human nature that cuts
00:34:53.400
through the logic of retribution this notion of punishment as justified vengeance and it allows us to
00:35:00.120
simply consider what actually works in changing people's behavior for the better so that we can achieve
00:35:05.480
outcomes in the world that we actually want but before we get into the ethics we need to clear away
00:35:11.480
some more confusion at this point many people begin to wonder about the importance of choice and decision
00:35:18.280
making if there's no free will how do we do anything and why do anything why not just wait around to see what happens
00:35:27.320
there is no free will but choices matter and this isn't a paradox your desires intentions and decisions arise
00:35:39.160
out of the present state of the universe which includes your brain and your soul if such a thing exists along
00:35:46.040
with all of their influences your mental states are part of a causal framework so your choices matter whether or not
00:35:54.040
they're products of a brain or a soul because they're often the proximate cause of your actions
00:36:00.360
imagine that i want to learn to speak mandarin okay how is that going to happen it's not going to happen
00:36:07.320
by accident i'll need to attend classes or hire a native speaking tutor or travel to china i'll need to study
00:36:16.360
and practice and practice and this will entail a lot of effort i'll get frustrated and embarrassed by my
00:36:23.000
failures and i'll have to overcome my frustration and embarrassment and keep learning my decision to
00:36:30.200
learn mandarin and all of the efforts that follow if they persist long enough will be the cause of my
00:36:37.640
speaking mandarin at some point in the future badly i'm sure it's not that i was destined to speak
00:36:44.840
mandarin regardless of my thoughts and actions determinism isn't fatalism choices reasoning discipline
00:36:54.520
all of these things play obvious roles in our lives despite the fact that they're determined by prior
00:36:59.960
causes and again adding randomness to this machinery doesn't change anything but the reality is is that i show
00:37:08.120
no signs of making an effort to learn mandarin it simply isn't a priority for me am i free to make
00:37:15.640
it a priority well in some ways yes but not in the crucial way that the common notion of free will
00:37:22.600
requires i can't account for why i don't want to speak mandarin more than i do i can't decide to make
00:37:28.760
learning this language my top priority when it simply isn't my top priority and if it suddenly became
00:37:35.880
the most important thing in my life i wouldn't have created this change in myself i would be a mere
00:37:41.480
witness to this change it would come over me like a virus if i read an article tomorrow that convinces
00:37:49.080
me that the best use of the next few years of my life is to become competent in mandarin i will not be
00:37:55.480
able to account for why this article had the effect that it did i've already read articles like that and
00:38:01.480
they haven't moved me if the next one does where is the freedom in that it would be like being pushed
00:38:09.240
off a cliff and then claiming that i'm free to fall the fact that i might enjoy the feeling of the wind
00:38:15.320
in my hair doesn't change this situation and so it is with any other influence a conversation with
00:38:22.360
another person or indeed a conversation with oneself simply has the effect that it has and not some other
00:38:29.160
effect i mean you are free to do an almost infinite number of things today free in the sense that no
00:38:35.800
one will try to stop you from doing these things or put you in prison if you do them but you're not
00:38:41.880
free to want what you don't in fact want or to want what you want more than you want it you're not free to
00:38:50.200
notice what you won't notice or to remember what you've truly forgotten again consider your experience in
00:38:57.560
this moment are you going to spend the rest of the day and tomorrow and the day after that and onward
00:39:04.840
for days uncountable struggling to master a skill that you don't happen to care about are you going to
00:39:11.240
learn mandarin or the violin or fencing are you going to take up rock collecting why aren't you more
00:39:18.680
interested in rocks there are people who are all in for rocks why aren't you one of these people
00:39:26.440
if you suddenly became one of these people and began spending all of your free time looking for
00:39:31.720
interesting rocks freely doing what you most want to do you're now rock collecting to your heart's
00:39:37.720
content where is the freedom in that and if your interest suddenly dissipates such that you no longer
00:39:44.840
care about rocks where is the freedom in that you are being played by the universe but choices still
00:39:54.200
matter because causes matter change matters and a capacity to make change matters biological evolution
00:40:04.120
and cultural progress have increased our ability to get what we want out of life and to avoid what we
00:40:09.880
don't want a person who can reason effectively and plan for the future and choose his words carefully
00:40:17.560
and regulate his negative emotions and play fair with strangers and participate in various cultural
00:40:24.040
institutions is very different from a person who can do none of those things but these abilities do not
00:40:31.640
lend credence to the traditional notion of free will people sometimes ask well if there's no free will
00:40:38.920
then why are you trying to convince anyone of anything people are just going to believe whatever they
00:40:44.120
believe your very effort to convince them that they don't have free will is proof that you think they have
00:40:50.680
it again this is confusion between determinism and fatalism reasoning is possible not because you're free
00:41:00.600
to think however you want but because you are not free reason makes slaves of us all to be convinced
00:41:08.840
convinced by an argument is to be subjugated by it it's to be forced to believe it regardless of your
00:41:16.920
preferences think about what it's like not to know something and then to know it to learn something
00:41:25.400
despite your prior ignorance or presuppositions to the contrary to be placed in the grip of an argument
00:41:33.480
that is valid and true to be led step by step over foreign ground without spotting an error without
00:41:43.000
seeing any place to put a foot or a hand to arrest your progress to then be delivered to the necessary
00:41:49.320
conclusion is the antithesis of freedom you're about as free as any prisoner who was ever led to the
00:41:56.600
gallows it's the lack of freedom that makes reasoning possible that's why i know an argument that worked
00:42:05.160
on me should also work on you and if it shouldn't work on you it shouldn't have worked on me either
00:42:13.240
reasoning is all about constraints two plus two equals four where is the freedom in that
00:42:22.040
it matters that two plus two equals four and it matters that we each can be made to understand that
00:42:29.640
by being forced to think under the same logical constraints are you free not to understand that
00:42:36.040
two plus two equals four not if you do in fact understand it are you free to understand it if you
00:42:43.560
don't understand it again no right not until the understanding itself dawns in your mind so whether
00:42:52.360
you understand something or not isn't under your control but the difference matters absolutely
00:42:59.560
and knowledge on all fronts matters absolutely it's every bit as important as we imagine it to be
00:43:06.200
in fact it's probably more important than most people imagine it to be
00:43:09.880
the physicist david geutsch has argued that knowledge can produce any change in the universe
00:43:20.760
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