"Relative to what I know, it is possible it may rain tomorrow." Just because you have incomplete knowledge doesn't mean that whether it will rain tomorrow or not is indeterministic.

At 13:35, in the model of deliberate choice, i don't think deliberation has sufficient causal explanation. Every time i am making a conscious choice, what i am doing is actually weighing the options in face of my desires. However, those desires are not chosen by me, they are determined by prior factors. In order to explain this observation, determinism must be the best explanation. For example, if have to choose between eating a broccoli or a cookie, i will consider the option that maximizes my pleasure. After some deliberation, i conclude that eating the broccoli will maximize my pleasure, because it is a healthy food, and i will fell good because of it. Notice that many prior factors explain my choice. 1) my prior experience with both foods. 2) my knowledge of nutrition. 3) the desire to maximize my pleasure. However, i never chose to have the desire to maximize my pleasure, it is simply something that i have as human. Also, your analogy of the billiards balls has a possible flaw. As temporal beings, we can only perceive a succession of moments. But a higher dimensional being (5D or more) would perceive our 4D space-time as a single prism of immobile objects. He would perceive the balls as a single entity that changes form along the temporal dimension/axis. So, it is possible that all time was created at a single point, and everything in the future already exists and already is determined. But as we are limited beings, we cannot perceive this.

Good video. One of the best arguments for lfw I have heard. You take the position that we take actions because we believe they will have causal effect on the world. This seems to undermine LFW. It is your belief in your actions having causal effect that is causing your action. Did you choose whether or not to have that belief? Ultimately, I reject lfw based on my own first order experience which outweighs the philosophical arguments. To the extent I think prior to taking an action at all (a relatively rare occassion among all of my actions), I do not get to choose the thoughts that enter my mind. And those thoughts dictate what I do.

First wanted to say, great video, and really well laid out. That said, I object to your line of argument being so focused on C3 Simplicity. I think the added complexity in the assumption of Determinism is justified because it offers much more of C1 Explanatory Power. If I ask you why you made this video you will give/have reasons and without those reasons you wouldn’t have made the video. The human mind seems to always do this because it gives explanatory power helping us to make sense of reality. We consistently trace these psychological phenomena back to brain chemistry and genetics with testable repeatable experiments. As Hume points out, our only criteria for knowledge is repeatable observation. What I’m getting at is that the very existence of psychology as a field of study and the correlative consistency with brain chemistry and genetics fly in the face of independent causal agents. Indeterministic causes to choices cannot make sense of these consistencies because numerous consistencies indicate causal relationships. All that is to say that even if determinism is false it still doesn’t leave room for independent free will. I “chose” to marry my wife but i never chose to find her attractive. I didn’t choose to fall in love with her or even to want to propose with her. Even if all these highly correlative phenomenon are indeterminate, I am still not the one in control of or choosing these feelings and without those feelings I 100% wouldn’t have married her. Free will still might be real, but its only basis appears to be conflicting intuitions and faith. No doubt that certain makes our “choices” all the more special and significant to us. 🙂

This seems off to me. We are easily aware of times where we need to add external causes to our internal decisions to understand why those decisions were made. There are piles of data demonstrating this. P1. Whenever we investigate if there are external causes that lead a person to make a choice, we either conclude that there is an external cause or we conclude that we do not have enough information to claim that the cause was external or self-actualized. P2. As our scientific data increases, more and more investigations occurring in P1 affirm an external cause than conclude that no conclusions can be drawn as to the cause of the action P3. All things being equal, it is more useful to make predictions about what will happen in the future to assume the future will resemble the past unless there is a reason to believe otherwise C. It is more useful to assume that any unknown cause for a choice is more likely to be an external cause than a self-actualized cause

We can do what we will, but we cannot will what we will. If I decide to do something, it is because I desire to do so, or because I desire something else and therefore do so to fulfill a different desire. I only desire the things I do because of the person I am, and I am the person I am because of my environment and how my biology/neurology interact with it, and I cannot change my environment without the desire to do so which I must also get from the things I just listed. I am autistic, this greatly alters my thought processes and makes me behave in ways I would not if my brain had been wired differently, hence my decisions are controlled by a factor I had no control over, hence all of my decisions are determined by my autism and how it makes me interact with the world around me. I cannot simply choose to not be autistic, I cannot simply choose to want to commit mass murder, I cannot choose to not want something that I can only get via mass murder

David! Free Will for the win

I reject your argument on the basis of such NOT being reflective of what is actually known. I can accept the idea of the simplest explanation being the best explanation SO LONG AS such actually encompasses the data that is known and is itself known to be an aspect of reality. I will grant that a data set can be compatible with ideas which are not shown to be an aspect of reality, but ANY supposition of an unsubstantiated idea is inherently questionable and thus pragmatically false. Your argument does NOT seem to address the following and is thus missing details known of reality. P1: Our cognitive abilities reside in our brain. P2: The brain is a process of chemical reactions. P3: Chemical reactions are deterministic. C: Thus, our cognitive abilities are deterministic. I see no basis to conclude that we are anything other than a deterministic process given what is actually observed with regard to our cognitive faculties at every level of review wherein there is sufficient detail by which to make a conclusion. Thus, I will grant that there are aspects of what occurs wherein there are unknown linkages, but the inference based on the available data is that the whole of it is deterministic. This is further bolstered by the understanding that we have no actual state of randomness of the sort required to give support to there being some actual state of indeterminacy in reality as opposed to being an issue of our limitations of knowledge. The issue being that the term random has always represented a state which was beyond our ability to predict, but was never an issue of such being non-deterministic. My idea of an actual random - given some particular state S there is any number of potential outcomes, such that a one to one relationship of a particular state to a particular outcome cannot rationally be claimed. However, it is the case that for every state S wherein there is sufficient capacity to review all relevant factors we have a particular outcome, we find that such always has an invariant relationship. This allows that every set of particular causes entail a set of particular effects. I will immediately grant that this is an inference (since an actual something allowing what I denote as an actual random is not off the table philosophically, but seems to have no basis for support within the context of reality), but it is an invariant inference insofar as we know such that it is also reasonable conclusion that this is a state of fact with regard to such linkages until such time there is grounds for some other consideration. -- Further, it would be useful for you to present a slide defining indeterminism like was done for determinism.

I couldn't listen to this. It was way too tedious, I being a "bear of little brains" thought it was needlessly muddled. I don't buy the idea of free will. What mechanism could possible cause uncauses thoughts?

I would like to provide a small critique to this argument. I certainly think an abductive argument is the right way to go about it but I think you have not applied it thoroughly enough. The part you need to focus on is the fact that as you mentioned, determinism asserts that it is not only sometimes the case, but universally the case that antecedent factors determine the entirety of a persons decisions in every single case. Not just partially or in some cases. The determinist has absolutely no grounds for this universal claim. There can be some instances where antecedent causes do cause us to make decisions and some where they don't. Since asserting the existence of free will in at least some cases does not invoke any more universal claims than the determinist but that the determinist establishes a universal which is not proven in order to argue for determinism. In your argument, you say that until evidence is provided for determinism, then we can't affirm it. But certain inductive arguments based on certain particular experiments have been provided. It is only by understanding that determinism is a universal claim beyond the scope of observation, that we can say that determinism still requires more moving parts and thus cannot be established based on the current evidence because it makes to many assumptions which are universal in their scope and therefore highly uncertain.

You're speaking from the proximate context of your experience. The ultimate context of reality when considered from a logical standpoint would tell you (a Theist) that there has to be a prime mover, even when we make choices and decisions. To argue that the agent is uncaused in the process of choice and decision making is to argue that man, like God, posseses aseity of mind. Aseity of mind is strictly a Divine property on the same level of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. It is incommunicable to contingent beings. Incommunicable: incapable of being communicated or imparted. Contingent: dependent on certain conditions or circumstances that occur or do not occur. Only God is the Unmoved Mover/Uncaused Causer. Only God possesses aseity of mind (incipiency of the will). The incipiency of the will is the claim made by free will proponents that man has the ability to originate his own choices and decisions regardless of any internal or external factors or conditions. Logic dictates that so-called “free-will-actions” by necessity cannot have any first (ultimate) causes beyond the agent.