Both determinism and free will are WRONG.

been struggling to find motivation and a
reason to live in a world where free will doesn't exist before we get into the rational and philosophical side of this conflict between two irreconcilable worldviews let's all acknowledge that there's a really important emotional side to the dispute that in large part when we talk about determinism we are not talking about something that people know but something that they feel something that they care about and they may not have questioned themselves why it is they care about this what it means to them or what the ethical and moral implications are for their own life in this way i would compare the philosophy of determinism to the buddhist belief in karma and reincarnation there are many many buddhists who will admit to you they have no evidence to prove that reincarnation is real many determinists will admit that there isn't evidence for the philosophy or theory of determinism but buddhists will tell you they choose to believe in karma they choose to believe in reincarnation because of the emotional impact this has in their lives and it's very easy to imagine if you were certain that you would be reincarnated and have another life as another person you might be much more willing to engage in suicidal acts of heroism to throw yourself into battle to throw yourself into life to take risks and specifically the delusion within buddhism is that as long as you're getting good karma as long as you're doing something morally positive your next reincarnation is going to be going to be even better so not leading to a reckless life of self-indulgence but sure a reckless life of heroism it's very easy to see the uh the effect that could have on someone's life people do say that believing in determinism changes the way they feel changes the way they regard their life some feel that it's liberating and uplifting i've had people who believe in determinism tell me that it was only when they understood determinism that they really let go of their sense of hostility towards drug addicts pedophiles and other serious criminals that they accepted this world view that nobody really makes their own decisions that nobody has control of their own actions that even if you can choose what you do you don't choose what you desire you don't choose what you want this fundamentally passive worldview suddenly even the worst criminal such as a drug addict or a pedophile rapist instead of being a perpetrator they also are somehow a passive victim in this universe where all of our actions are determined by someone other than ourselves and other people who believe in determinism i have heard it said that they find it very demotivating and demoralizing now that they've lost this sense of choice and originality because they've subscribed so this is a philosophy this is something people choose to believe in in part because of how it makes them feel in struggling to find motivation and a reason to live in a world where free will doesn't exist i'm sure when you discovered that free will is an illusion you must have had a similar experience so how do you deal with that well this is quite a popular question right i get asked this quite a lot and it's quite a serious one if it's really troubling you to the extent that you're struggling to find meaning in life it's not in a shallow or catty sense that i say this is similar to mythology people choose to believe in karma they choose to believe in buddhism without evidence and not because it has problem-solving value right but because of how it makes them feel because of some kind of ethical impact on their lives around the world whether they experience that as uplifting or depressing uh liberating or constraining whatever it may be you know i just want to add not everything in the sciences involves things we can empirically observe things we can verify empirically however both in the sciences and in philosophy we have to keep in mind this criterion of problem solving right what is the problem that determinism is supposed to solve there is a theory right now that our solar system has an extra planet some people call it the dark planet that there's a planet so far from the sun that we can't see it at all with telescopes we can't we can't detect its existence now why does this theory exist when people do complex mathematical computations to measure what are now the stable regular orbits of each of the planets around the sun and i think also they include some of the asteroids and other large objects right when they calculate the motion of our the planets around the sun and our solar system the gravity of each planet acts on the others like the precise course and shape of the orbit of a huge planet like jupiter it influences and is influenced by the other planets and looking at these equations there seems to be an irregularity or an imperfection and the math would look better the equations would be improved it would all become more consistent if we added another planet that we can't see that's compensating for some of those motions that evens out some of those some of those numbers so this is starting with a problem and then it's proposing a theory for the purposes of problem solving and now as you can imagine there are people who want to send out a probe to test the theory of whether or not there is another planet that we can't see now admittedly it will affect life on earth very little if we discover this planet the planet is not going to be inhabited by intelligent beings it probably the planet is not going to contain valuable minerals that will want to go and mine or anything like this i mean probably will just be an interesting footnote in history that there was this other planet that nobody could see and then we sent a probe and it's good that's that's one possibility right but why does the discussion matter why why do we philosophize about this though why do we theorize about it why do we speculate about it why is this in the realm of science right because there are other possibilities right another possibility is that there is no extra planet there is no undiscovered world that instead there's a problem with how we do the math now right and we'd also be interested in discovering that we would also have a sincere interest in having a better understanding of what we may be doing wrong in writing out the equations in the first place that lead us to this hypothesis that there could be another planet influencing the orbits maybe there's something we don't understand about gravity maybe there's something we don't understand about the theory on the chalkboard and we're actually open to that and interested in that this type of problem-solving mentality is completely absent from the discourse about determinism the way determinism is presented the way determinism is believed in and the sense of smug intellectual superiority that believers have over non-believers strikingly strikingly this is similar to the role of mythology in religion one of the most interesting things about the psychology of free will to me is that it's impossible to not kind of live with that illusion that you do have free will i mean i can fully rationalize the idea that free will is ultimately an illusion but it still feels like i have it interestingly i think that if you ask someone who believes in free will probably needs to be an atheist for this to be reliably the case but if you ask them what they think brings the meaning life you know what is it that infuses their life with meaning they'll probably say something like well i like pursuing pleasures you know the pursuit of happiness is one of the things detailed in the declaration of independence for a reason because it's seen as one of the most important ways in which a human being can find meaning and purpose in life and the anti-free will argument doesn't remove that it further entrenches it what determinists will do again and again and again is present you with irrelevant preconditions as if they are causes that determine human behavior human thoughts human emotions uh etc human imagination now we can all accept there are very rarely very occasionally in life determining causes for our actions that override our own mind our own nervous system you could be shocked with electricity and that causes your hand to seize up and in theory someone holding a gun who gets electrocuted might be able to really say in court look they didn't choose like they didn't decide to pull the trigger they were shocked with electricity and then their nervous system seized up there are very real court cases talking about the extent to where someone may or may not be responsible for the decision they made because the effects of a drug drug that causes them to hallucinate or changes their behavior or causes mania or what have you um we all acknowledge there are some very limited situations in life where we are talking about human behavior human thoughts human decisions being determined by something or someone other than that that person themselves in establishing something as a necessary precondition we have not established it as a cause there are exceptions to the rule i'm explaining to you here and i think those exceptions only draw attention to just how absurd the determinist philosophy really is a man who is standing in the middle of a field holding a rifle may be able to say sincerely that he was struck by lightning and the lightning was the cause of his pulling the trigger the electricity flowed through his body his muscles suddenly seized up he pulled the trigger not of his own volition not of his own choosing not with his own will mentation imagination intention no there was an external cause there was a cause and effect relationship between that lightning strike him and what he did next what's so absurd about the determinist worldview is that they want us to believe that all of our actions are in this way caused by the external world and they will indicate preconditions again and again and again as if they were causes it is true that to become a drug addict you must live in a society where those drugs are available for sale it would be impossible for you to become a cocaine addict if you happen to be living on a remote island where cocaine just didn't exist it wasn't grown there it wasn't exported there this is true if you were living in a society where there were no opiates you could not become an opiate addict but it's a tremendous fallacious and ultimately immoral step to taking your reasoning to then insist that you are no more responsible for the decisions that made you into a drug addict then the man standing in a rainy field is responsible for pulling the trigger on the gun when he was struck by lightning whether you think of this in terms of sociological conditions that made you become a drug addict being raised in poverty in a neighborhood where drugs are commonly bought and sold or if you think about this in terms of psychological preconditions oh you were a victim of childhood trauma and this quote unquote caused you to become a jordan no we can never take this step from precondition to cause and effect mechanistic relationship the human mind never operates the way salt forming into salt crystals operates simply in response to external conditions and the implicit laws of physics unfolding for us unless and except we're dealing with these extreme exceptions to the rule if you have ever been electrocuted you might know what it feels like to have your hand clench up due to an electric shock and you feel you know the difference between choosing to open or close your own hand and when that happens without your will contrary to will because it is in this sense determined that is the philosophy that is the fetish of determinism is that in this surreal sense all of us secretly are marionettes with no evidence to support it and plenty of evidence to the contrary the whole discourse about determinism is vitiated by fallacious reasoning these fallacies are so deep and so profound that i can say i reject both determinism and free will free will and as much as it's an argument created and counter posed to determinism what is randomness how do we perceive it empirically the judgment that something is random or not random is entirely a judgment having to do with our own perception and our own feeling it isn't the observation of an actually existing law of physics in the universe so determinist will accept this first step of the argument if you say that rolling the dice is random the outcome of rolling a set of dice is random what you are really saying is we cannot know or we do not know or we do not care about the incredibly minut causes and effects that actually control which side of the dice will turn up when we roll the dice this is a judgment about no ability right it's an epistemological judgment it's a judgment about what we know or even what we care to know we say this is random this is arbitrary this is meaningless right our concept of randomness is reciprocal with our judgment that something is meaningless really this is just a judgment that we either don't know or we don't even care to know like if it could be ascertained precisely what caused one dice to come up as a six and the other to come as a three we wouldn't want to figure it out anyway so we discard this from the realm of possible human knowledge by reviling it as random what if i told you my grandmother died in a random car accident what does that mean what does that mean does it does it really mean that the causes of the car accident are unknown or unknowable does it mean that the scientific research you'd have to do is on this kind of minute scale of measuring the factors that control which side of the dice rolls up no no it's really all i'm telling you is my own attitude now let's say somebody comes forward and talks to me who knew my grandmother and they say look you know they know the reason why that car accident happened and there was ice on the road and my grandmother was ripped off by a uh a corrupt garage that there were workmen in a garage who said they were going to change her tires for this other pair of better tires but they ripped her off and they gave her really bad snow tires and that's why she died right that it wasn't random that there were these factors that i should not regard as random now you could you could still regard this as random you could say well the weather the climate it's random some days there's ice on the road sometimes there isn't i regard this as random i don't care it's just a judgment of whether or not well you know some people who work in automotive repair shops are corrupt and some aren't randomly she went to buy new snow tires to pay someone to rotate her tires replace her tires and she happened to get a bad pair of tires or she happened to get a bad mechanic who dishonest gifted i could still regard that as random and it's really just an emotional commitment if i say no this matters i care i if i get motivated i have to get to the bottom of this i have to sue this guy i have to charge him with a crime or take him to court and say hey you are responsible or partly responsible for my grandmother dying in this car accident it wasn't at random i'm assigning responsibility do you see the problem the distinction between what's random and not random it's not the perception of some kind of verifiably real law of physics in the universe like gravity it's a judgment about me it's a judgment about how i perceive the universe it's a judgment even about my moral and ethical values what if your grandmother died in a car accident and you had been told all your life since childhood that it was at random that it was meaningless that just randomly she happened to be killed in a car accident and then someone comes forward to you and presents you with a dossier from moscow and they say hey you know what the russians disclose this information because 50 years had elapsed since the car accident it was declassified and in fact your grandmother was intentionally killed by a kgb agent by a russian spy that there was a spy on a mission and let's say the spy was sent to kill someone on a particular highway driving a particular kind of car and they got the wrong person so in a sense it was random your grandmother was killed at random in the sense that it was just an accident that this spy killed the wrong person it just just happened to be that your grandmother was driving the same type of car and let's say the same color of car as the person the russian agent was actually supposed to target and assassinate right so it's it's still kind of random but now maybe how you feel about it has changed you no longer regard this as random in the same sense as happening to meet a drunk driver on the highway is that random is it not random as happening to drive down a highway where someone spilled oil on the road causing the accident as as happening to have an accident that you and i would judge to be random it's our judgment we're talking about we're not perceiving something in the outside world in an objectively real falsifiable scientific sense as either random or non-random when we make judgments about randomness we're making judgments about the limits of human knowledge and even an emotional and ethical judgment about the extent to which we care if you invest this with meaning if you say wow this is terrible now i'm motivated now i'm going to go and do the research i'm going to go to moscow and read the files and i'm going to try to figure out what really happened what was really going on with my grandmother being assassinated you can do that and this does not in any way make her death more or less random our sense of randomness is in the shadow of our sense of meaning and meaninglessness and the meaning of life is something you create it's something you invest in you project onto these arbitrary circumstances the determinist worldview is created from this strange yearning of people to want to believe that the decision you made when you chose what book to read next and the decision you made when in your own mind's eye you decided whether or not this was a good book whether or not it was meaningful whether or not it was convincing whether or not you should change your whole life in response to what this book has been telling you or teaching you that all of that happens in the same simplistic mechanistic sense as salt forming into salt crystals and they want you to believe this with absolutely no empirical evidence to support it and a great deal of empirical evidence in the real world to the contrary the question i'm asking you is why and i think the answer is what i said at the beginning of this video people choose to believe this unbelievable thing for the same reason that they embrace various kinds of religious mythology because it has a certain sort of ethical and moral impact on them it changes how they feel about their own lives to close the video i just want to say i've had a determinist or two say to me that believing in determinism let them forgive other human beings because they regarded those human beings as not truly responsible for their own actions not responsible for their own desires for their own evils what if christianity had that same effect on you what if buddhism the belief in karma what if hinduism the belief in fate and hindu what if some other religion or some other myth had this supposedly positive affecting you is that all it takes is that all it takes for you to be willing to believe a lie and now to sit here and insist to me that it's science