Determinism: A False Religion. A Sequel on "Free Will".

I'm recording this after 2 a.m. so I
start with my usual caveat if I look exhausted it's because I am exhausted probably some of the best and some of the worst videos on this channel were recorded when I was having difficulty falling asleep decided to record a video rather than trying to force myself to study Chinese or something in my sleep-deprived state so hopefully you guys get something out of this I definitely wouldn't record a video on this topic under other circumstances the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer set down a dictum we might say he sat down a warning that an abstraction always by definition contains less information than the things it is abstracted from now it's almost ironic that I'm opening this video but quoting Arthur Schopenhauer because Schopenhauer was an avid proponent of the pseudo philosophical view called determinism and in this video I'm refuting or opposing determinism there are many strange ironies that arise from this conversation because I do regard the deterministic view as a religious worldview as a belief in something supernatural of insisting on adding something unseen unscientific and that cannot be tested or verified to our empirical experience even though it is in many ways contradicted by empirical experience so let's become quickly to the core question of what determinism is what it must mean in order to be a meaningful concept because a great deal of moving of the goalposts a great deal of fallacious reasoning is used by the other side by the pro determinists where they want to keep subtracting and subtracting from the definition of determinism until it means practically nothing at all until it simply becomes a description of reality that's interchangeable with any reality and anyone else's view of reality this is somewhat similar to a Christian who may be willing to accept any definition of the soul as long as you accept that there is such a thing as the soul that exists so that ultimately if we simply define the soul as the beating heart or the spleen or some other organ in the body they'll say yes yes that's the soul now you have to believe that there is such a thing as a soul that exists in order to refute this we have to set down what are the in electable aspects of the soul that make it a soul rather than merely a description of oneself one's body or a particular body part like the heart of a spleen does the soul denote something that contains your personal identity prior to your birth and that continues to survive your body after death definitely in a religion or religion like Christianity there's the very clear notion that the soul is a container for your identity or is the very substance of your identity that endures after your body has died so obviously this is not true of the heart or the spleen so we have to reject this idea that the concept of soul is merely a description of a living being or of the person's essence or personality or character in that context of a philosophical debate meanwhile of course in a great deal of poetry and literature including poetry within the Bible very often the word soul is used simply as a description of a person of their spirit or character so this is the way in which these concepts become slippery and we have to avoid whether or not cynically moving the goalposts we have to avoid allowing a fallacy of moving the goalposts as these things progress if you believe in determinism then you believe there is no difference between the dilation of the eye and any other action of my mind or body the dilation of the I being the involuntary adjustment of the eye to bright light or to darkness so if I walk into a room that's dark but most you'll know this already there's an adjustment in the eye that allows me to see better in the dark and then if I step from that dark room it takes a few seconds of course to transpire if I step from that dark room into a very brightly lit room let's say I step out from the darkness into the brilliant sunshine in the middle of the day then I'll be dazed I'll be temporarily blinded there'll be too much light for my eye and for several seconds and won't be able to see clearly until my eye adjusts so in English this is called the dilation of the eye narrowing and expanding how much light is led into the eye why is it not possible for me to stand inside the dark room and decide Oh in a future in the next few minutes in the next few seconds I'm going to step out into the bright light therefore in advance in preparation I'm now going to adjust my eye I'm going to dilate my eye so that I can step out from the darkness into the bright light without being dazed without being blinded without being momentarily in painting or inconvenience why is that impossible but more fundamentally why is there an empirically obvious contrast that I'm aware of between what I can and cannot decide now the selection of examples that determine us use to try to flatter their case does not contain any contrast such as this they like to speak in terms of cause and effect and they like to speak about this abstraction the abstract idea of cause and effect as if it is more real than anything empirically given and it's not it's an ideal it's an abstraction it's a ghost made up in your own head in your own minds i in your own imagination and it is simply pathetic for me to hear or determine us tell me that I'm the one who believes in something magical and supernatural no no no determinists believe in the will of God they've simply removed the figure of God and still believe in his will determining what happens in the universe if you don't believe in some kind of super supernal supernatural agency what is it that you believe distinguishes the empirically obvious experience of the dilation of my eye from my own so to speak freewill in thinking about what I'm going to do tomorrow and I can insert several other contrasts between different modes of consciousness that we all experience empirically and none of which can be neatly explained in terms of cause and effect so is the contrast between the dilation of my eye something I can't controls and that's involuntary and the range of all the decisions I empirically experience that are or voluntary there is also the difference between decisions I make in the present moment and options I consider when thinking in an abstract way about what I might do in the future and then there's a contrast between the mind when I'm awake and the mind when I'm asleep and dreaming or when I'm passing from being awake to being asleep when I'm an intermediate State memory operates differently when I'm awake and when I'm asleep thinking about possibilities for the future operates differently when I'm awake I'm being asleep and this form of reference to past and future is also somewhat different in how I operate my hand as opposed to how I operate the dilation of my so all of that is completely empirically obvious and the dilation of the I dreaming etc they're interesting examples where we can talk about something hypothetically which is nevertheless completely empirical it's completely based in reality as you can perceive it for yourself these abstract concepts like cause and effect are not truly empirical they're abstractions which as Schopenhauer warns us means that they contain less information than the reality that they're abstracted from now when I last debated this with people who really believed in determinism what they insisted was that there was no difference between a human being and a computer playing chess this would be very similar to someone insisting to you there was no difference between a person and a painting of a person it's true that if you look at a painting from a certain angle in a certain light a painting may have a remarkable resemblance to a real human being but if we just turn the painting sideways if we look at it from its edge we'll be very quickly revealed to us that there is no real meaningful resemblance between a piece of canvas with a very thin layer of colored paint on it and the biological mechanical and psychological reality of a human being likewise a computer can perform certain functions like playing the game of chess when it has been programmed to perform those functions but the reality of what the computer is if you turn it sideways and look at its edge well it includes mechanisms such as a hard drive a hard drive is also known as a hard disk hard disks today technologically are manufactured in different ways but one form of a hard drive is literally a spinning disk it's a disk that turns and there's a magnetic needle that measures that reacts to in effect like iron filings not quite accurate but anyway magnetic markings that are on that disk it's not so different from playing a CD a compact disc fewer and fewer people use that kind of technology today it's not that different from a record player a vinyl record a technology maybe nobody has seen today the point being that even though a computer can mimic certain kinds of human reasoning when human beings have trained it and programmed it to mimic that reasoning although a painting can mimic the appearance of a human being when human beings have if you like trained a piece of canvas trained paint on canvas prepare instructed and formed the canvas to have this resemblance the resemblance is misleading and incredibly shallow and to take one seriously as an allegory or explanation for another is fundamentally absurd in the same mode that a great deal of religious thinking is fundamentally observed it's insisting that an abstraction is somehow more real than the things being abstracted from now when I debated this with real-life determinists they insisted that the computer that plays chess has everything in common with a human mind because they claimed that this disk this plastic disc with metal needle reading instructions and computer code and performing the act of playing chess that this was itself literally the product of evolution I remember in the conversation I said are you sure you really mean the word literally when you say that this computer program is produced by evolution do you not think it would be more honest for you to say figuratively or abstract lis it's produced by evolution and they were referring to certain types of procedure in computer programming normal people say procedurally generated where you human being sets up a program to to some extent invent explore different possibilities sift them figure out which ones are more effective reject strategies that don't work and use strategies that do this kind of thing it's still computer programming guys it's still coding it's not evolution and of course again this is like the comparison of the painting I was trying to use Socratic method and get the other person to consider this in what ways is a computer playing chess similar to and dissimilar from biological evolution well there's no natural selection there's no meat selection right this is one of the most fundamental elements evolution there's no predation there's no disease now again we could go on and on we could try to make a list of all the essential defining characteristics that mark something as evolution or a product of evolution and how those things relate to the functioning of the mind including you know distinctive elements of how consciousness operates like sleep and the contrast we have between the sleeping mind and the waking mind the contrast we have between the the mechanism of your eye adjusting to light in darkness and things like your hand that you can decide to control and the other side was not able to engage in this kind of discourse at all they got angry at me and showed it at me so sue Crowe this is one of the problems the Socratic method it takes two to tango the other side needs to be willing to really entertain those questions and to explore the definitions of terms that they rely on which definitely in this case includes the definition of determinism itself the last refuge of the determinants is to try to retreat behind this excuse the determinism is merely an explanation for reality as we already experienced it that adds nothing to that reality and subtracts nothing to it which is again like a Christian telling you that the soul is merely a description of your heart or spleen your organs that it therefore can't be refuted and this is again a clewd the fact that we're into the religious mentality precisely because you set up an idea like this with the claim that there is no possible evidence that can refute it so it's both the case that there is no empirical reality for this notion of a magical force that determines my choices that in fact makes all of my choices and actions in a voluntary in the same way that the dilation of my eye is involuntary there is nothing I can see or measure that actually determines these things but there's also nothing hypothetically possible that ever can be experienced that would refute it this comes back to Karl poppers definition of falsification if you can't at least hypothetically come up with some form of evidence of experience that would falsify your idea then it's not scientific it's in the world of religion and dogma and it's very significant to point out that Karl Popper used this theory primarily to criticize psychology and psychotherapy psychological theories in his time he was very concerned with the way that for example Freudianism seemed to propose ideas that were religious in nature and that were impossible to really debate dispute debunk there was no there weren't susceptible to evidence they weren't based on evidence and they also couldn't be refuted by evidence and on the contrary we have to structure ideas in such a way where we say well look maybe you could convince me that you know my control over my hand really is as involuntary as the dilation of my eye maybe you could convince me that there is this empirically real thing that you call the chain of causation of cause and effect but from where I'm sitting the empirical reality that we depart from these debates is indeed that whereas the dilation of my eye responds to the presence an absence of light in a cause-and-effect manner that that description applies in that case that does not apply very well to me and my reverie whether I'm waking or asleep coming up with ideas about what I'm going to do in the future ex nihilo while I'm while I'm awake just engaging in speculative thought or I'm lying down half-asleep and sound asleep thinking about what I might do in the future what I'm doing at that time empirically is very very different from what a computer is doing when it plays a game of chess by reading the instruction set with a metal needle written down and already written down set of instructions playing off of a disk just as what I'm doing in thinking is very different from a painting of a man sitting deep in thought