Let's have Sam Harris on Lex's podcast. It would be great.

This dude doesn't understand the position he's criticizing.

He massively misrepresents what Sam's standpoint on this is.

But did you choose to introspect ? Did you choose to choose to introspect ? etc.

"He wants to change our minds so he believes we have the capacity to choose." Semantic argument: If he's changing your mind, you are not changing your mind therefore you don't need to choose. Empirical argument: We almost never choose what we believe. The world confronts us with sensory and cultural information and that which makes the most sense to us is what we believe. If freewill is an illusion and you know you have freewill because you observe it... how does that make it NOT illusion? Saying that we don't understand that we are being tricked, or how we're being tricked, does not mean we're not being tricked. The more we learn from Neuroeconomics the more we see the mechanics of decision making. Experiment shows decisions are made subconsciously before we even realize a decision has been made. For any given decision we should be able to answer, "What could have caused you to choose differently?" Anyone unable to name an environmental, experiential or genetic counter-factual that would have resulted in an alternate decision is being obtuse, probably deliberately. A possible exception might be randomly choosing between things we don't care about. But even then if you ask someone to pick a number randomly 1000 times some numbers will be favored suggesting preference or method are perhaps always present.

The guest completely misses the mark here. It’s called the “illusion” of free will for a reason- because it’s convincing. His argument is essentially that we experience free will so it must be objectively real as well. What Sam and others like him argue is that our experiences and sense of free will is based on mechanisms that were either based in biology or our environment- both of which are out of our control. As an example, many people would instinctively say that love is a real thing, right? Well it’s really just a series of chemical reactions that happen in our brain that happens for a variety of complex reasons. At the end of the day though, we have no real control over how and when these chemical reactions are set off.

Feeling like you have an “I” is not scientific evidence that this “I” exists. Same goes for free will. All that tells us for sure is that we have these thoughts and feelings. We cannot prove an external world exists with 100% certainty either. I think this is likely the case but I’m agnostic on this point because we simply cannot see beyond our own perception. This guy has it all backwards!

I see his point, but I think the issue is that agency, and the illusion of agency are identical to the observer.

This is baffling. He understands that the table exists but it is perceived differently. And surely he understands that the table is a collection of particles and fields even though he can't experience it that way. But for choice, freewill, he assumes that the perceived experience *is* the whole truth? This hardly seems scientific.

I had no choice but to watch this video

Flat Earthers use the same logic to prove the Earth is flat as this guy uses to prove freewill.

This guy is talking out his ass.

Ironically being an objectivist means denying objective reality when it doesn't match with your personal ideology.

I agree with a lot of what Yaron believes about the role of government and coercion. But damn, he really mischaracterises Sam Harris here

Weird that he mentions Harris because he speaks like someone who hasn't actually listened to his arguments.

Also what's funny is everyone's admiration of Sam Harris, while if determinism is true idk why you all praise him since he has no other choice as to be this way (ofc this means you can still like a person but praising someone for their work is a whole different story)

It always makes me laugh when people insist there is no such thing as free will. We have evidence of it all the time. Every morning I wake up and make a conscious decision about when to get my dead ass out of bed. The fact that we can't measure it does not mean it isn't there. It just means we don't understand it yet.

No matter how deep you go in this rabbit hole you still end up with either a super chaotic physical system or magic. Even if that magic makes you feel good about thinking you are not a chaotic collection of neurons influenced by what you eat, what you see, what you read, input from other senses, electric fields(some cool stuff can be done by electrically stimulating certain parts of the brain or "combing neurons" making you more confident or act like a psychopath for a limited time etc. ), etc that makes some neurons fire somewhere.

Yaron says we can observe our self and there is an "i", but through meditation we also observe that there isn't an "i". I have nothing interesting to add but I thought that was a conundrum in itself.

This guy doesn't get it. All that we're saying is that your mind is subject to the same causal chain as the rest of the universe.

no no no no Harris isnt suggesting you have the power to choose to want to change your life, hes just asking you to try and see if whether mindfulness can help you deal with life better. Everybody (in the neuroscience community) agrees that your ego will always exist as long as you have a frontal lobe of your brain intact. And that ego makes you think you have a choice.

Yaron is a breath of fresh air for a lot of people

This guy seems very non nuanced in his understanding- like a smart cab driver .

we all make decisions based on our own best interest, self preservation and reproduction demand it. research has shown that the brain will fill in incomplete data based on the sum of it's experience. so people see what they want to see and hear what they want to hear and what they believe to be true, as far as they're concerned, is true.

Not sure if Yaron is Strawmanning Sam or genuinely doesn't understand. It seams like he really has no idea what he's talking about. All he does is define Free will in such a narrow way it becomes useless, it is still either deterministic or random, and is merely a term meaning the ability to choose or introspect. This doesnt even address Sam's argument.

Why does he have a picture of Ben Stiller on the thumbnail?

Speaking of which, when are we due to give that part back to the fish...?

Yes you can look at your conciousness, and if you pay attention closely, you witness that you do not choose what arises inside of it. The more aware we become of what arises in conciousness, the more freely we choose what we want to act upon. But still, as sam talks about, all of these happenings in conciousness arise based on a string of prior causes that happen throughout our lives. Somthin along those lines. For instance, all the external stimuli that our brains process throughout our day, happens without our knowing. An example of this could be, imagine walking into a conveint store, there are several posters on the window, you walk by, glance at them, but not throughly paying attention to them. Your conciousness seen them all, but "you" the agent of your conciousness did not. Let's assume there was a poster with a movie titled on their, later that night, "you" decide to watch that movie. Now in this moment, you don't know why you choose this movie, but if you were to rewind the day, you can see that this movie seeped into the subconscious mind, and then entered the concious mind somtime after. Not saying that is certainly the reason why that movie would be choosen, but it does explain how information gets into our minds without us knowing, in turn creating future decisions...its all mysterious

Can someone in plain english, state what the characteristics of "free will" are and how that differs from what we have. If it differs? I don't think this particular point is made well enough to agree or disagree but there are interesting conversations being had below using jargon I don't know.

The subjective experience of free will is one among many definitions used to describe "free will". It's usually insufficiently related to the general definition of the term which is used to suggest that free will doesn't exist, and thus not a helpful argument or counterargument. Similarly for the moral perspective of "free will". Instead, I'll look more at the 'objectivist' version of "free will". Free will is said to not exist due to determinism, which means all your actions are predetermined. Predeterminism is the inversion of the idea of predictability. Predictability says that, given the state of a system at time t-1, you can know exactly what it will be at time t. Also, that this applies to all t from t=0 (or 1, if you want to ignore the singularity of the big bang) to now. There are three problems with that argument: 1) You _cannot_ know the state of a system, as a whole. For example, even with infinitely perfect knowledge, knowledge of a position means you _cannot_ know the momentum. And if you don't know both, you can't perfectly predict the consequences of that item's behavior. 2) The system's behavior is chaotic. Without perfect knowledge of the starting state, subsequent behavior will necessarily diverge in ways that you cannot predict. And we already showed that you can't have perfect knowledge. 3) It is a dependency cascade. To know the state at t, you need to know the state at t-1; to know t-1, you must know t-2; etc. Even ignoring the other problems, you must know the state at t=0 in order to derive all the rest of the states, which means predictability requires knowledge on the scale of the age of the universe. It's not just that you 'can' know any universe state at any arbitrary time if you know the state at any other time, but rather that you _must_ know _all_ states in order to know _any_ state. Consequently, "If some entity knows everything about everything that ever has or ever will happen, it will know what any choice you make will be." Which is a bit of a tautology, and meaningless in terms of determining whether free will exists. So, given a universe at t0, predicting the state of the universe at t1 is fundamentally and intrinsically impossible. Thus predictability based on past state is impossible, which partly neutralizes the argument of predeterminism. The other half of predeterminism is the "hindsight is 20/20" effect. If state S0 can lead to S1, and you see state S1, you can say that it must be the result of the prior state being S0. However if S0 can _also_ lead to S2, saying that S1 is a necessary consequence of S0 is false. That's why predeterminism is insufficient a limit to suggest free will can't exist; you also have to take its inverse, predictability. However, while the universe is chaotic, it is not random. It's like the issue of predicting weather vs predicting climate. Predicting weather (the exact state of the system) out beyond a few days is impossible, but predicting climate (the bounds limiting what state the weather can be in) is doable out to a century or more. It's like a Julia Set, which are an infinite number of possible values constrained within a small range of movements. And the problem is that people use "free will" as the term to define both the weather analog and the climate analog. The deterministic universe argument essentially claims that "climate" can be predicted, and thus "weather" does not exist. This doesn't even get into the possibility of the brain maybe being closer to a quantum computer than a classical computer, and thus subject to quantum indeterminacy. And no, that doesn't make your decisions "random" any more than a Julia Set, or weather, is random. Rather, it introduces a chaotic (unpredictable) element to the decision-making process. This is relevant if you reduce the scope of observation to the individual, rather than the entire universe. Overall I believe free will exists because the arguments against it are done in a sort of "spherical frictionless cow" type of reasoning that fails to distinguish terms, and conflates problematic arguments on different scales in order to avoid addressing those problems. Your decisions are predictable in the broad "climate" sense, but that still leaves wide ranges for actual decisions to fall within (either from the broad state of the universe, or possibly even the local state of your brain).

It never ceases to amaze me to witness grown ass men being so confused about core topics like free will after a lifetime of thinking and having a fairly large audience/following of their work. His mind resists the idea that free will is an illusion because he thinks it would undermine his belief in personal accountability. The twist is that it wouldn't because free will doesn't have to be real for us to realise that personal accountability is useful and makes everyone's life better. It doesn't matter if you could not have done otherwise, life is better when people are thrown in jail when they commit a crime regardless of whether free will is an illusion or real.

im so happy seeing in the comments how i dont have to be the guy to call this guy's bogus criticism. he clearly didnt seriously engage with harris' free will stance.

A lot of critics it seems are misrepresenting Sam Harris' work. He is merely saying that much of our choices are limited by our experiences and environment. Our free will is not absolute. We can only choose among the choices we are aware of. Akin to a multiple choice exam. Life subjectively provides us with limited options. My opinion is that the key to expanding our choices is creativity and education. I think neither sides of this debate is entirely right or wrong. Lex likes to take shots at Harris in a way that makes me wonder if he has really thought this though. It appears to me to be a knee-jerk reaction or confirmation bias on his part as it seemingly strikes a chord in him on an emotional level.

Great clip!

Absolutely agree about evolutionary psychology's hubris in narrative exposition. Let's not get ahead of ourselves... Also completely agree that the subjective is the vehicle of objectivity.

Sorry Lex, but Sam would crash your dream about perfect world in the same way like Dan Carlin and Malice did.

Ignorance does not support an argument for magic. Imagine stumbling upon a black box that no one can open. Imagine smoke comes out of the box. One person claims that given our current, but surely incomplete, understanding physics surely the mechanisms inside the box are driven by physical processes like every other complex mechanism we've so far discovered. Another person says, "Well until we've been able to study and categorize samples from the box and open it up and have a good look around, there's no reason to assume that it conforms to our understanding of everything else!" One of these people are blowing smoke.

We all experience that we have an I, but an experience does not have to be equivalent to reality as it is. We allow things or thoughts that are not "real" to affect our subjective reality all the time, the feeling of an psychological I or self is just the most persistent and recurring thought.

We have free will within the boundaries of our mechanism. So we do and we do not. I always view it as something similar to a video game like wow or runescape. We have the power to direct our life in specific ways determined by goals and ideas presented to us, but the whole point is to enjoy the game and become better within the character. One could argue that the actions takin in video games are all illusion and there is a "force" beyond determining everything (colors, actions, etc.) and while thats true that doesnt mean we are powerless or that we should just give up. Structures or limits allows us to play, if there was no structure everything would be nothing.

This guy doesn't get free will. Or for that matter much else. Sam Harris would tear him a new one. Btw I had no choice but to write this.

To me, it’s obvious that free will is only a game we play with ourselves. But rather that there is a continuously streaming plethora of mechanics at play far before our human system begins picking up on stimuli that causes us to form a reaction, or perhaps an adjustment of sorts. Then, eventually, we adjust to the ever changing external world around us in the form a what our ego consider’s a choice. However, this short interval of awareness is only partial to the greater process. Much of which we don’t notice and are incapable of noticing. Hence, we cannot author a choice that is heavily influenced by what is beyond our comprehension can we? Of course not! We do this process every second. Sometimes its done in rapid wavelengths, like changing a radio station to find a pleasant tune. And other times in longer wavelengths, like developing a meaningful friendship with another human. It’s the entire concept of life itself. A relationship between the inner world and the outer word. And our singular perception is what limits our ability to know this truth without being helped to see it. So it’s understandable to believe you have free will. But honest self-analysis proves otherwise. Just try it. Try being completely honest with yourself about your life. Try not to make yourself look better than you are, that’s the ego fogging your lenses. But, I digress. In short, once our conscience becomes aware of these mechanisms, for lack of a better word, in the intellectually active stage of this process that pumps out reactions like a finely tuned machine, we mistake it for something we authored in our ego. *That’s the illusion* But really, being aware of our choices is just one stage the same process. The other stages we aren’t aware of, at least not consciously. And certainly not in manners that can be stored to our memory and conveyed with articulate detail later, which would be the case if we did completely author our choices and indeed have free will in the western conception of the term. I like to think of it in terms of the light spectrum. The infrareds and ultraviolet scant be seen by the naked eye. Doesn’t make them not real. Also doesn’t mean your eye created the light just because you can see it. For what it’s worth

Get Spira or the monk at Vedanta Ny

I’ve been looking forward to this interview for soooooo long

Omg you disagree with Seth Harris? watch out his minions will destroy you

If free will is a thing, then what is unfree will supposed to be?

ACTUALITY VS. REALITY.... NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSED. ...There is an important difference! ...in Actuality, the table exists. And it may perhaps also not exist. ...because Reality is something like a filter... for example, some people who have had a stroke don't always see what is there. They will even draw half of a face because that's all they see [in their reality]. ...their reality is slightly different than one who sees the whole face. ...something that could clarify SO MUCH ideas about life. I feel like some of the smartest people overlook this.. and if only they realized it; how much more space and ideas would flourish in their experience of life.

Hmm observing that the table is there doesn't necessarily mean it's actually there. We assume it is based on consensus and the physical laws we currently understand and observe. Our reality, like consciousness is an assumption, that we think is true but cannot easily be proven.

He talks jist like Barry Kripr i wonder if thats who he based his character

This man is confused. He thinks making a choice is free will. The scope of the argument against free will is that there are constraints and external variables determining the thoughts that arise in our minds and choices that we make.

That is a miss representation of what Harris says about free will. We know that people react to stimulus, if you know there is a good outcome from that stimulus, then that is what you do. At no point free will comes into the equation.

I'd love to see Lex and Sam Harris talk

This guy clearly does not understand evolutionary psychology. Everything he claims evo psych has trouble explaining, evo psych has explained. It’s always hilarious to watch non-scientists try to grapple with scientific concepts. Nothing new here.

Yaron Brook, a wise man! Totally agree, we need more information about the brain, way more information; we probably know next to nothing about how this extraordinarily complex thing that is our brain works. People try to compare the working of the brain to how a computer works and the two most likely have absolutely nothing in common.

Interesting that the guest has the opposite experience I have when you introspectively observe your consciousness. Every time I try to closely observe the creation of my thoughts, it’s always so clear that they’re just appearing, seemingly out of nowhere. How can one truly author their own thoughts? Answer: they can’t. It’s an illusion, and so are you 🤪

Evo psych is not unscientific. It's a science built upon two of the most successful scientific fields, Darwinian evolutionary theory and cognitive psychology.

The mind is not to be quantified, it's meant not to be figured out period. In a sense, it's our path to existence (past, present and future). Trying to put a scientific measure on the mind is like trying to put a band aide on a broken bone, it won't work. It's like trying to figure out who God/ creator is whether you believe in it or not. There are certain answers we are not meant to find in the state of being, meaning when we "die" we will receive more knowledge and then on to the next stage.

All one does, is that what is possible. Could have done differently, is a "prediction" (not really) about the past. Which is worthless. Basically one can only react with the other parts of the environment in such a way that it connects the past with the future. This leaves out all choice. But since we are almost always observing ourselves doing things, we are enormously biased into believing that we have control over these happenings. While in fact, we have no clue at all what exactly is happening within us, nor outside us in the universe. And in fact there is no inside, nor outside, untill we use words to devide reality into such abstractions.

I mean,.. just because we're able to observe ourselves, that doesn't mean we've escaped our nature and the dictatorship of circumstance beyond our control. I think this is where our species, or brains if you will, faceplants. All these "what is consciousness and/or free will" questions that go round and round in these circles, are rather muddled to me and I suspect are due to our ability to generate complex narratives about ourselves rather than what is necessarily a difficult question. The fact that we possibly have the best brains on earth, does not necessarily make the whole thing mystical. We marvel at our ability to endlessly marvel at ourselves. In other words it's just an extension of the aforementioned narrative. If we could agree that the content of these narratives are the problem rather than our ability to create them, I believe things would look up for us in general.

Lex is arguing against a straw man. And of course emotions are programmed and also partially controlled by hormones.

How is determinism unscientific? Einstein would agree with Harris. It doesn't matter what we think we experience if we understand that what we experience may be flawed and not representative of the whole picture.

Free Willy!!

This might be the biggest misunderstanding of Sam’s argument against free will that I’ve ever heard

To believe you are the thinker is to be thinking without knowing that you're thinking

Similar to Heideggers disagreement with Descartes. “I think therefore I am” - before that one have to reflect on what is this I who thinks. Some might argue that Heideggerian thinking undermines scientific values such as objectivity, which I don’t deny. However, I think he points to a blind spot of scientific inquiry and maybe even a border.

If it is seen that there is a "You", then what is it that is seeing that? (I think it'd be so amazing if more scientists practice nondual self inquiry)

He doesn't understand what he is arguing against. Typical "Randroid"🙄

Dude should have just said, ”sorry, that topic is way out of my league. . Next question”.

If he was not reasomable, he would not have came to this arguement.. there are many rational reasonabilities. He favors one, and that leads to favoring of a specific interpretation and conclusion.

Totally misses the point. Free will exists in some capacity, but the genes that have allowed humans to continue do not lie (they dictate our actions to help promote our species). And to say that something exists whether you think it does or not, does not factor in how people have different minds to interpret things. Colors for instance, are the easiest way to see how people can see the same thing but come away with a different result.

Yaron Brook should know from his reading of Ayn Rand that free will is limited to the choice to think or not to think, everything else is determined. I am very disappointed he didn't use this opportunity to explain this important concept of Objectivism!

He doesn’t seem to know very much about evolutionary psychology. It is scientific in the most basic sense: it’s a theory that generates surprising hypotheses, and then conducts experiments to test those hypotheses. Whenever I hear someone blithely assert that ev psych or anything else is unscientific, I find myself asking, “what exactly do you know about science, anyway?”

He didn't understand Sam's point.

“Everyone is afraid of free will” - Yaron Brook It seems to me he is the one afraid of NOT having free will. I don’t understand why that bothers so many people. If tomorrow you found out everything up to this point in your life hasn’t happened because of your free will, does that make your life any less meaningful? NO! And in fairness to Sam, Yaron’s argument for free will existing wasn’t any more scientific than Sam’s. “I experience it. I can see it” isn’t really much of an argument especially considering how easily our mind can play tricks on us

Here’s a simple explanation of why free will cant exist. Can you ever create a robot with free will? The answer is no, because you either program the robot to behave a certain way, or you build in a system which makes the robot behave randomly. Either way the robot is not freely behaving, cos to freely act it would be outside the laws of physics and would break the laws of physics

Sam Harris talks for over an hour to say that you don't have free will because you can't choose "who you are" or "what you want". This is just sophistry. If you have anything like free will it is to enable you to try to get what you want and need in an ever changing environment. It's about action, not being.

Any topic raised surrounding free will seems to ALWAYS attract determinists. They voraciously deny the freedom that they exercise daily. That's funny to me,

Nothing he said even remotely proves free will, and this is coming from someone who spends 50% of his day trying to prove it myself. But his arguement is an old arguement that can easily be duped and his calls to his own intelligence as some how proof and his trying to point out sam harris's(I dont like Sam's arguement either) paradox/contradiction while completely obviously to his own is just like *channels Biden* "come on man"

There is no spoon

I think Hulu's show Devs does a pretty good job explaining Sam Harris' beliefs of free will to a lay person. It is simply the idea that given a set of all inputs, a person would make the same choice 100% of the time. So when Sam Harris or others wants to give you more information to change your mind, it is still consistent with those beliefs. They are providing another data input, when factored in, may change the choice you make. But that is still not free will because now given the new input, you would still make whatever choice you ended up making 100% of the time.

What does a determinist yell out during sex? Oh causality! But seriously, I enjoy treating determinists exactly how they deserve.

I think this guy's talking about volition and not free will.

You ve free will but you ve to train it otherwise you re just a victim of manipulation, tho his arguing is weak

You don't need science to realize that choice is an illusion. You just need logic and reason. You didn't chose your parents, your DNA, your environment, or even your soul (if it exists) was predetermined. This guy may be very intelligent but on this particular matter he does not understand, or perhaps he doesn't like the idea and just wants to push back however he can rationalize in his mind.

It's really unfortunate that he doesn't see how liberating the finding of selflessness is, this man needs to meditate. Saying we all "feel" like we have an "I" so therefore a seperate "me" exists in my head is not scientific. We have self-awareness, but that's not the same as saying there is a mini-me inside my head that is seperate from experience.

Experiential free will is certainly real. We definitely feel like it’s true, and conduct our lives as if it is. However, it’s fundamentally logically incoherent to believe that free will is at all consistent with our current understanding of the natural world. It very clearly violates the law of cause and effect. I don’t really even understand why this so difficult to grasp for some people. If free will is actually occurring in humans, what the hell does that say about AI? Do we need to build machines that are so complex that free will emerges somehow, completely independent of it’s machinery, and programming?

It's fine if you want to believe in determinism. You can choose to do that.

Nah this guy misses the point. The argument for the deterministic mind is based on fairly irreducible logic. We accept that 'a causes b causes c causes d' as a basic concept in all of physics past a particular size and set of conditions, and part of this is accepting the idea of every action having an equal and opposite reaction. As far as we are aware, 'something' does not ever come from 'nothing' - at least this is true almost all of the time, outside of certain phenomena that we currently just don't yet understand. His two main arguments in this clip seem to be that a) consciousness is one of these things that we don't understand, and b) denying your own personal perception of your own free will is a non-starter. To point 'a' I would say, just because you don't yet understand something doesn't mean that you shouldn't still base your 'best current hypotheses' on overwhelming logical precedent. He seems to me to just not like the idea of a deterministic mind, and so appears to be looking for excuses to discount it. I would argue that he doesn't have a good enough excuse. To point 'b' I would say, well... not meaning to be rude, but it's almost not worth arguing: the fact that personal perception is not reliable, or often even remotely accurate, can be demonstrated in an almost infinite number of ways. Added to this, I would even argue that it is demonstratably possible to 'train' yourself to observe just how unbidden your own thoughts and decisions are, in which case, to use his own position against him, one might use perception to argue that free will is indeed not a thing. (Disclaimer: I am not a qualified scientist, engineer, philospher or anything like. Just a guy who watches youtube videos :) )

This has nothing to do with free will. It’s so simple. You cannot experience free will directly. If you think you do, you aren’t playing close enough attention. It’s funny how sure he is that reality is there without consciousness.

Ouch. If you honestly love Harris' stuff, as you said, then at least pay him the courtesy of understanding his position. It sounds like you didn't even the read the first couple of pages of Free Will. Your point: Why is Harris even trying to convince us when his whole argument is that it's not in our will to be convinced? You don't need free will to be convinced of an argument. Try to observe your own mind when someone persuades you of something: What persuaded you? Why were you persuaded? Can you take credit for it? No. The merit of arguing for something does not lie in your interlocutor having free will. Please read the book next time.

Sam Harris argues that our conclusions and decisions are made by impulses. Impulses that are an effect due to preceding causes. So trying to change someone’s mind does not become redundant. You may contribute to a new cause that makes someone make a more rational decision. I barely understand what Brook’s argument is suppose to aim at.

3:03 This idiot just misrepresented or just outright lied about what Sam Harris has been saying for years. I feel Sam's frustrations regarding people like this.

Yaron @ 1:02 "Emotions are too complex to have been programmed into our minds". *Yaron has to reassess his understanding of biological complexity.* He lost.

Isnt determinism more theistic and supernatural than free will?

Lol this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about

The arguments I keep seeing for determinism can be reduce to "we aren't gods therefore" . Or because I can't directly control my brain or biology therefore free will is an "illusion" because I'm constraint by reality. The set of actions I can manifest are directly confined by reality and time therefore the choices I make from the limited options I have are predetermine? So the only way to have a will is to be an infinite? That can simultaneously do everything and create everything else that isn't? oh but you don't know what your subconsciousness is doing! and your consciousness is embedded in it so therefore everything you experience has been predetermine? Idk the way people argue for determinism is almost religious like. like they are appealing to a creation myth without the God

Unless we live in a simulation made by something bigger we absolutely have free will!

I think Yaron is making a moot point here. He is essentially trying to redefine the classic definition of free will. Just because you can feel and converse with your own "I" does not mean free will exists. One does not need to understand the inner workings of the human mind to come to the conclusion that free will does not exists. If we understand all the pieces that make up the human mind and determine that each of these pieced works in a predictable way then isn't that enough?

I like this guy

Months later, and this comment section is full of people saying Yaron presents and straw man or doesn't understand Sam's argument, then not substantiating that claim at all. I studied Sam's free will argument for years. Yaron is no scientist, and he's obviously not as well-spoken as Sam is on the subject, be he's right on the points of fact. I'm willing to bet nearly all the folks who say Yaron doesn't get it could not possibly summarize it themselves.

I can' believe this guy passes for an intellectual. He doesn't understand anything that he is criticizing.