Refuting Determinism: a "How To" for Atheists & Skeptics.

the fundamental question of contrasting
determinism to so-called free will is of whether or not a person is making a decision at all more broadly do we live in a universe where people and sentient animals are making decisions all the time or do we live in a universe where nobody and nothing is making a decision ever where all of the decisions they seem to make are predetermined have been determined in fact since the creation of the universe by the laws of physics and the whole process of decision making imagining even innovation even dreaming even reverie all of these psychological processes are just as automated as the formation of salt crystals in a cave now it's a beautiful image isn't it you're seeing on screen right now mind-blowing formations of salt crystals in a cave i think you could put yourself in the shoes of an ancient or medieval person who walks into a miraculous cave of this kind and who thinks this must be created by some architect some god some divine intelligence must have made these crystals but today even the most devoutly religious among us except that no wonders of the world like this develop without anyone making a decision without a plan without imagination or innovation right this is just the mindless automated unfolding of the laws of physics chemistry so on and so forth and the beautiful and enticing vision of the world that the determinists invite you to believe in is that everything in your life despite what you may agonize over about the decisions you made in your life is just like the salt crystals in this cave so when i reflect back on the loves i have lost when i reflect back on women i chose not to have sex with i can regard that deeply personal peculiar decision i made at that time the emotional and ethical conflicted feelings i had at that time as something that has the same geometric simplicity as the formation of these salt crystals in the cave whether i fell in love with one woman or another whether i slept with one woman or another that was in this same sense determined wow what an inspirational world view unfortunately the nature of that world view is religious not scientific so is a person making a decision well no despite all the evidence that you really are making a decision this is in fact an illusion so let's emphasize they recognize that there's empirical evidence that we are making decisions right they're discounting or discarding that evidence by claiming it's an illusion this is common to many religions ancient and modern it's a common line of thought in both hinduism and buddhism although not the most orthodox form of ancient teravata buddhism and it was reproduced in christian garb by what is called christian science christian science is basically a cult group nothing really scientific about it but they interestingly they regard their own thesis that the world as you perceive it is just an illusion as a scientific fact or scientific discovery of course it's a scientific discovery they prove by quoting the gospels but that's another story well you know this illusion we can prove that it is such because we're all just made out of particles like a tornado if the tornado were sentient it would perceive itself as making decisions even though it's just an effect of external causes this type of imagery i think was uh innovated by the philosopher arthur schopenhauer if he wasn't the first to say this sort of thing he certainly was someone who said it an impressively long time ago if in ancient times or medieval times your house were destroyed by a tornado and there's another house next door that is not impacted by the tornado in any way this still happens to this day it still happens on video camera you can see it it's part of the strange wonder of life on planet earth the way tornadoes whirl around and leave some buildings untouched others utterly devastated it would be easy to convince yourself that the tornado is making decisions or that it is guided by some kind of god or demon that has a plan and has definite intentions that that some entity made the intelligent decision that one house should be destroyed and another left untouched so there's a sense in which this type of determinist analysis can be meaningfully applied to salt crystals and tornadoes the question is how or why would anyone arrive at the conclusion that everything in life everything intellectual artistic emotional all decisions are in the same way comparable to assault crystal or um the action of a tornado so step one is this philosophy of illusionism the proponents of this view claim that everything you can observe and experience in human and animal behavior is an illusion so we are discounting a mountain of empirical evidence in order to instead focus our attention on a molehill number two they make cosmological claims they claim that all decision making all imagination all creativity etc only happened and only could have happened at the moment of the creation of the universe if this isn't a religious idea what is so returning to my first slide here for one second i asked the question is a person making a decision yes or no another way to phrase this would be are human beings capable of innovation of imagination of arbitrary and original creativity creativity and decision making are overlapping domains we have the explicit claim here from the determinists that nobody invents anything nobody imagines anything nobody innovates anything all of that creativity is reserved for this one magical moment at the creation of the universe and you merely have the illusion that you're thinking of something new creating something new innovating to you in the same way that you have the illusion that you're making decisions now if that is not a religious idea what is so you may think that you are an architect you came up with something new that changed the world but you're not you are just a passive passenger you are just an observer of the unfolding of the grand transcendental design that was all set in place at the beginning of the universe let me just digress to talk about the physical reality of what we call imagination dreaming and thus by extension also things like decision making that only exists in the form of a wet human brain what we call digestion only exists in the form of a wet and squishy long intestine small intestine stomach etc how could you possibly convince me that the only true digestion happened at the moment of the creation of the universe it doesn't actually occur in your stomach in your long intestine here and now how could you convince me that all of the dreaming all of the imagination all of the creativity and all the decision making took place at the moment the creation universe and that it isn't happening now merely in our squishy brains merely as a biological process a process that is really no more mysterious than the type of imagination innovation decision making that we can observe animals engaged in right we have a whole science of looking at the behavior of animals right that's quite a weak argument but again people believe in it because it is inspirational because that is religious quality finally there's the issue of decision making itself a great deal of circular reasoning is employed when they have to speak on decision making specifically so i notice when the other side is presenting their case this is minimized the process of decision making is described in terms of their cosmology their view of the world as an illusion but they will not use palpable examples contrasting a decision to a non-decision they won't show us the criteria whereby we establish something to be determined as opposed to being decided by ourselves or animals what i have seen emerge just in the last 10 years is the reliance on this materialistic assertion that no decisions could possibly be made that human beings couldn't possibly have something like imagination innovation dreams or reverie of their own accord because we're all just made of atoms the claim that everything is made of atoms would only be significant in this debate if we believed one that being made of atoms is incompatible with decision making or that it's incompatible with imagination etc or two that atoms differentiate determined from non-determined phenomena this whole line of argument is profoundly irrelevant to what we're supposedly debating here the fact that they perceive it as relevant is very strange indeed it could only be because you're negating a view that decisions are made by a transcendental soul by something that's made of a magical substance that is not comprised of atoms if that were the view you were refuting then obviously this would this would have some sailings to debate but if you're talking to someone like me and i represent the vast majority of people in 21st century someone who takes the pragmatic attitude that digestion is something that happens in a stomach and the long intestines in the small intestines and there is no such thing as digestion in the absence of those organs and we look at human intelligence and animal intelligence also as something that takes place in a brain or a bunch of uh ganglia of neurons and axons however you know precisely you want to put it under a microscope sure we look at you know this concatenation of complex physical factors what do you mean of course we know that's made out of atoms we were never in any doubt that just as digestion exists in your stomach on this material basis intelligence thinking imagination decision making that exists in your mushy wet brain and doesn't rely on some external transcendental or divine cause uh to explain its function this isn't the 14th century anymore what can i tell you the greatest concession i can give to the other side is that this line of reasoning makes some sense if we're talking about tornadoes to make the claim that tornadoes are just made up of so many particles so many atoms and you know a certain amount of motion provided by the temperature and the wind cloud formations you can analyze piece by piece what comprises a tornado in order to refute the view that a tornado is sentient intelligent or making decisions but why is it that the other side is incapable of admitting that within the sciences without even reaching as far as philosophy this same line of reasoning would not establish that the human mind behaves like a tornado nor that dog intelligence or raven intelligence or even ant intelligence can be in this way mechanistically reduced to a number of particles caught up in a vortex but to be clear this line of reasoning is only meaningful when it is negating the opposite opposed position only if you actually knew someone who believed that a tornado had intelligence or a spirit or a soul or was guided by some kind of divine demiurge only in that context could this possibly be meaningful it's also noteworthy the extent to which these people rely on circular reasoning something they should be sensitive to given their background in the sciences so this woman claims that you perceive yourself as making decisions because the process of making decisions is a type of calculation during the calculation she says you do not know the outcome of the decision because if you did know it there would be no reason to do the calculation the first place oh i'm sorry weren't we answering the question of whether or not a person is making a decision at all this is profoundly irrelevant precisely because of circular reasoning she is in fact referring to the process of making a decision as a foregone conclusion as something already proven and established and indeed we all experience it empirically we can even empirically observe it in the behavior of animals she's accepting that people do make decisions in problematizing how they perceive and experience those decisions but as such she is in fact taking an anti-determinist position in the process of defending determinism now naturally of all the imbeciles to engage in this type of fallacious reasoning sam harris is the most ridiculous of all after giving us a uh i don't know chilling description of some rapists and murderers he then says whether criminals like these can be trusted honestly report their feelings and intentions is not the point whatever their conscious motives these men cannot know why they are as they are nor can we account for why we are not like them as sickening as i find their behavior i have to admit that if i were to trade places with one of these men adam for adam i would be him there is no extra part of me that could decide to see the world differently or resist the impulse to victimize other people to murder and rape other people so his claim is that if he were adam for adam identical to these rapists and murderers he would himself be a rapist and what what possible meaning could that have except for unless you're negating a counter-opposed view from medieval christianity that what human intelligence or morality or decision-making consists in is some kind of magical soul unless you believe there is a spirit floating above your head that actually makes those decisions and therefore this atom by adam reasoning is shocking and disruptive to the assumptions you've grown up with this is just totally utterly irrelevant to the question of decision making oh so g sam you're saying that if you were the same guy you would have made the same decision do you not see that that's a begging the question fallacy that's a pitiful principia fallacy because the question we were asking was who makes the decision who decides if you're accepting he decides you decide if you were him you would make the same decision you are still accepting the premise that you decide and therefore you are not a determinist therefore you are abandoning the view that the whole universe just exists on the same basis as the formation of salt crystals in a cave in order to defend that position now in coming back briefly to this question i've asked if this isn't a religion what is let me just mention my earlier video on the secure wharf hypothesis there are examples and examples in the modern world here and now where ideas that originated in religion even ideas that originated in fringe cult groups came to be regarded as science some of you may think i'm being insincere or over the top when i put forward this warning that religious ideas can infest the sciences and that scientific ideas can be fundamentally insane in the same way as the religious mentality the example of the superior warf hypothesis is also very instructive indeed so is a person making a decision yes or no if your answer is no you either believe that something else is compelling the decision or that nothing at all compels it like the formation of salt crystals without any intelligence or decision making guiding that pattern we live in a world of wonders we live in a world of awesome inspiring phenomena like tornadoes and these soul crystals that you see in this cave right now but the role of the sciences in our lives fundamentally is one of problem solving the sciences do not exist to provide us with uplifting motivating myths the sciences certainly do not exist to guide us in ethical and political questions and that is precisely what the proponents of determinism have been doing they present ethical arguments they present political and legal arguments they even argue for how this will help you live a more meaningful and more rewarding life on the basis of this claim that everything all your most private thoughts decisions ambitions are not things that you decide for yourself are not things that you imagine or innovate for yourself but are things that you passively observe unfolding that were established and decided for you at the moment of the creation of the universe if that is not a religious worldview what is