Nihilism vs. Determinism ("Free Will" Debates)

hey guys uh it's difficult I do not want
to start any more videos than hey guys that's how unnatural vegan starts her videos [ __ ] that I've got a band to sing oh yeah Oh God so what are we supposed to say what what is up isn't that what's peerage okay best best wishes to you and yours as you join me for this YouTube video all right we'll come up with sighing get the get the marketing committee to work on a new green or what church is open with abolish yell No [Music] I'm Emma's yen alright okay I remember what's hurt an interview with a guy was part of 50 cent screw the rapper 50 cent when they came up with his background Diddy Jude ug you hit that they actually had a brainstorming session where they sat around try to cope with that alright enough of the aggression from an aggression guys this video is both something that means an awful lot to I think a small number of people but it's very difficult for me to say how many or how few people this matters to over the internet over the last five years I have several times spoken to people who deeply passionately believe that there is no such thing as free will that there was no such thing as human beings making arbitrary choices or creative choices that all choices human beings make are determined so these are hard determinists and from my perspective for them it really is a religion now why do I consider this a religious view well for one thing it is very directly parallel to religious determinism so a simple Christian form of determinism would be the view of the world that although you may imagine you make decisions although you may imagine you make choices although you may sometimes regret looking back at your life that you made the wrong choice secretly and unknown to you as the myth goes all of those decisions were part of a mysterious plan the Christian God's plan in fact those decisions were in a sense not of your free choice not of your election not of your of your free will now scientific or scientistic determinism sees the world in this same way but it has replaced the role of the Christian God with a variety of demons and fairies some of them put emphasis on genetics on DNA some of them put emphasis on psychology brain States and brain scans and brain activity some put emphasis on a very metaphysical reading of a chain of causes and events that extend around the whole world around us like the butterfly flapping its way wins the idea that some trivial cause can indirectly have a cascading set of knock-on effects some of which we may be aware of and some of them not but nevertheless each of us is ultimately like a tornado that perceives itself as making decisions but really does not exist as an entity that makes decisions at all but is merely the product of unthinking a circumstance swirling around it and at some point we come to see that swirling within ourselves as if it were our very selves now the religious form of pious god-fearing determinism is also psychologically similar to scientistic determinism in that it allows them to have a very pious view of sinners if you really believe this is a Christian then you feel nothing but pity for the rapist or murderer because you see them ultimately as a kind of victim of circumstances or even as a victim of a divine joke of God's plan that in some very real sense they didn't have a choice or it was not their choice or it was not their fault although of course in another sense there is nobody else to blame now in this same way I've just now been engaged in a debate with people who very piously and passionately believe in this view of determinism and they really do argue they have really passionately said to me that they do not regard rapists as being guilty of rape and they do not regard murderers as being guilty of murder not in the same way I do because they absolutely insist that each and every one of those criminals was behaving under duress in effect they were making those decisions as if they were compelled to by outside forces that determine everything so again these outside forces whether there are genetic evolutionary socio-economic myriad whether they are tiny and trivial like a butterfly flapping its wings or something abstract and transcendental and inevitable they add up to a worldview that is magical and tantamount to monotheism its equivalent in its outcomes the faith it demands of the believer now what I pointed out to these people repeatedly in the debate was that um how great somehow that tiny bump destroyed hmm I pointed out to them that what it is they believe in here has no empirical basis whatsoever and would not pass Karl poppers test for falsifiability so I'm not gonna degress into a long lecture here about Karl Popper in the philosophy of science and what falsifiability means but the idea is to challenge a view about that like this by saying okay what elements of your view can be observed empirically in real life and of course with many with many theories of this including psychological theories even it's purely psychological not metaphysical in any way if it's just a claim made about people's mental states intentions and emotions and decisions ultimately um I'm gonna ask you I'm gonna challenge you to explain to me something you could empirically observe something hypothetically you could observe where if it were true if it happened you would then accept that your explanation of reality is wrong so the textbook example Karl Popper gives of this is the belief that light always travels in a straight line and there was a counter theory proposed I believe by Albert Einstein himself that actually at a certain stage of the Moon obscuring the light of the Sun you should be able to measure that the moon does actually the gravity the gravity force of the moon actually does intercept and slightly bend off course the rays of light that pass right next to the moon very close to the moon and this was tested in low behold it proved to be true so the point is the theory was originally one theory was light always travels in a straight line and the other theory was if there is a sufficiently heavy object not just you know some object that's sitting on this table here next to me but something with enough gravity force would actually result in light bending in its course and it turns out that was right but we have to be willing to state our theories you know where we will we can admit of an empirical challenge on the discussion I just had ultimately what they retreated to was a position that their explanation in the world has no empirical basis that it has no pragmatic value because I said to them also well if your theory is true what problems does it solve whether a theory is philosophical or mathematical or one of physics even in the social sciences a theory has to have a problem-solving value it has to elucidate something rather than merely obfuscate something what is the problem this this solves um great so I lose my train of thought the way it's not you it was the cooker going off for whatever reason oh I'm a little bit run down a little bit sick but it had a great workout of the gym though okay it has to have problem solving value it has to elucidate something and it has to be falsifiable right and in their case they were treated to a position of saying no their view of the world was purely a sort of qualitative description of how cognition works that there's nothing empirical about it there's nothing falsifiable about it there's nothing that can be tested there's nothing that could that could either prove or disprove it so I said to the multiple look from my perspective your view of the world is magical when you walk through the forest you see fairies everywhere everywhere that there's darkness and shadow you can imagine that these magical forces you will you believe in are active in the same way a monotheists who believes in theological determinism walks around the world and everywhere sees God's plan if someone who believes in God's plan wishes it would rain and then instead of raining there's a terrible flood or there's a tsunami they'll believe it's God's plan either way if there's a drought they say the drought was God's plan if all their crops are destroyed because there's no rain at all they say that was God's plan instead there's too much rain well it turns out that was goes when they will rationalize and reinterpret whatever happens to affirm their deterministic worldview and these scientistic non monotheistic believers in determinism they're just as religious they are believers still but they believe in a plurality of fairies some of them putting more emphasis on DNA some of them more on on other factors and as they walk through the world they see those spooks everywhere they see those fairies and demons they feel their own hypothesis being affirmed again and again now how did the conversation there was a debate several people participated I was the only person on my side of the debate um how did this conclude so very interestingly my final opponent because I talked to several people who exhausted themselves um the last fellow at bat the last fella on the microphone he used an example that you might think I had cornered him into but he volunteered it he spoke at some length about how he regards a rapist as ultimately not responsible for their commission of rape because from his perspective criminal like that never had an alternative they never had an alternate course of action that you can reproach them for failing to take as okay so that's your perspective that's your magical religious view of what happened my view is instead compatible with basically the legal tradition and political tradition of every culture I've heard of on planet earth for the last 2,500 years three 3,000 years I simply do think that yes people who commit crimes choose to commit crimes and so on okay so give me an example what's problematic from my perspective is that you can't really elucidate what's happening when a human being sits down at a blank canvas and tries to paint a painting this is very different from a criminal act there are a series of creative and arbitrary decisions being made but the painter here and when he's done the painting maybe his teacher tells him you know what this is a really lousy painting and maybe the teacher discusses with him in what ways it's a lousy painting and why it's lousy painting which techniques he had neglected to practice or which decisions he made which creative choices he made oh you chose to paint the sky blue and it would be better if the sky were red because you need this cut these are the types of decisions you makin in painting slang and in talking through those decisions and talking through what skills he has and what skills he lacks and so on the painter may be filled with a sense of regret and remorse and indeed he regrets painting a bad painting because he feels he feels that he could have painted a better painting and what do you know the next time he sits down at a blank canvas he makes different choices and he tries to make a better painting again from my perspective there's no mystery to be explained here there's no metaphysical problem or a priori conflict to be resolved there's nothing difficult for philosophy exchange but from their perspective the painter is wrong to regret having painted a bad painting because he had no choice there was absolutely no alternative all along the only painting he could have possibly painted was this terrible painting and that may be a very pious and very reassuring and very kind and very nice thing to say and from my perspective it's complete nonsense I can't imagine what motivates it it is absolutely no pragmatic value as a philosophy or as a political philosophy it's not gonna help you solve any problems or improve society so fundamentally I do not know why they bother um the only other thing I mentioned this video wrapping it up is there was a real contrast in the selection of examples that the two sides used my examples are very directly and simply drawn from reality like painting a painting who makes the creative decisions where's that come from how does that proceed why would this deterministic worldview help you with this I mean do you really believe it is God's plan or the plan of some plurality of demons and fairies that this painting has to turn out one way and one way only as opposed to being something each of us has control over arbitrary control creative control ex nihilo control but ultimately a kind of meaningless control also control that I mean it doesn't reflect your genetics or you know any other great transcendental paranormal abstraction you know you're just gonna sit down and try to come up with an idea and do the best you can so my examples were we're very close to real life experience we can all relate to and they're examples relied on huge leaps of inference that I found laughable one fellow was insisting again and again that a human being is no different from a computer playing chess it was striking to me that he insisted again and again that computer playing chess that's the product ultimately of human beings programming instructions etc is literally he used the word literally again and again the same as a human mind thinking now I do have a little bit of experience with computer programming I studied it in school when I was a child basically and I tried to talk him through to what extent these two things are really profoundly dissimilar and they're dissimilar in ways that matter for the argument that he's making a human mind is very very different from a computer code running off of a hard drive it's very different even from the particular type of programming he's describing or you have a quote-unquote evolutionary process producing the chess-playing computer but the word evolution is being used here in a sense that has nothing to do with natural selection with wild animals competing for who gets to mate that the nature of the human brain is really not comparable to a set of instructions written in a computer programming language like C++ or assembly code or what have you that in fact the the allegory he's using in many ways dams his own philosophical case it requires really a religious level of faith and very creative leaps of inference to possibly believe that a computer playing chess following a code is anyway similar to the decisions we make when we sit down at a blank canvas decide what it is we're gonna draw and then how it is that we're gonna draw it so there you go guys this is a philosophy that seems to be popular amongst vegan intellectuals who spend a lot of time on the Internet in 2018 I don't know if this will become a really kind of trivial footnote in modern Western history or if this is going to go on to be the next big thing like blue jeans I could see it going either way because you know I do think that these people have an understandable motive I think that they want to have a view of the world that is fundamentally compassionate and that looks at people who are raised in poverty mired in bad circumstances and making bad decisions as not being culpable for those decisions and I'm sure that their heart is in the right place and I'm sure that just as religious people who believe in God's plan draw a sense of faith and moral courage and positive motivation from seeing the world that way I think they probably do get a kind of warm and fuzzy compassionate glow in believing if not quite like Spinoza's concept if not quite believing that they live in the best of all possible worlds that they live in a world where no matter how terrible it was the only possible world and that any given person is 100% a product of their circumstances and their genetics and these mysterious forces that surround them that are beyond their control that in fact nothing is under your control that nothing is ultimately your fault what a liberating delusion that must be a virus yen