Sir your voice is overwhelming!

These videos really get you thinking in a new way. I love it!

Thank you for another great video! For me personally, as a Thelemite, I'm deep in this conversation on free will. (and i have to think of "true will " in context of the conversation ) I appreciate this channel for opening up this subject for discussion.

I have been thinking about this problem a lot and I have a few ideas. There are ways to make free will work in both deterministic universes and probabilistic universes. For a deterministic universe, free will is possible if the laws of physics are humean or anti-humean. That is, if the laws of physics say what "will happen" vs what "must happen". It's a very subtle difference - the first allows for free will but the second doesn't. For probabilistic universes, like what quantum mechanics proposes, you can have free will that is compatible with the laws of physics if there is something (say, a soul-like entity) that has access to all the branches of the universe and chooses one of them (collapses the wave function on that branch). Of course, this is very roughly speaking. In that case, your decisions would be compatible with the laws of nature (since you're choosing one of the available branches), but you'd have to come up with something that does the choosing and a way for the choosing to occur. I propose something better: something that is completely natural, is based on the current laws of physics and it's... "somewhat free". It is also compatible with personal identity. My proposal is this: Suppose I am hungry. I walk down the street and I see some guy eating a croissant. I think "I'm hungry, let me kill this guy and get his croissant to satisfy my hunger". What does this mean, neurologically? Well, visual information entered my eyes, was transformed into electrochemical impulses, reached my visual cortex, was interpreted, was transformed into the qualia of seeing, then into the conscious awareness of "some guy with a croissant next to me". Then, based on my somatic markers (to use one of Antonio Damasio's terms), meaning, the way I am "feeling" (hungry, in this case, which is a neurological state of some neurons excited and other neurons silent), my neural network came up with a useful idea: kill the guy to get his croissant and solve the problem of hunger that I'm facing. Of course, this is only one idea: another idea is to steal his croissant, another is to ask him nicely to give me half of it, another idea is to completely ignore him and buy a croissant myself and so on and so forth. But, somehow, this idea raised to the surface. So what happens next? Well, the "idea" (meaning, a certain neural pattern) stimulates the frontal cortex which (hopefully) overrides it. The frontal cortex is saying (through its own neural patterns) "This is completely crazy! No way I'm doing that! I will go a buy a croissant myself, instead". And you take the decision to ignore your previous "crazy idea" (according to the frontal cortex) and go and buy the croissant. Now why would that be? Did you choose "freely" to not kill the guy but buy a croissant, instead? Well... yes. Yes, you did. Of course, this "choice" was "just neural firing patterns" that felt like thinking "This is completely crazy! No way I'm doing that! I will go buy a croissant myself, instead." - the patterns where such that it stimulated your auditory cortex in such a way to "hear these inner words in your head". But what about the freedom to act like that? Your brain's structure, genetic make-up and accumulated experience were the factors that determined this action - the causal factor are these things, that's what it means to be "you". There is no contradiction or paradox.

I'm don't have free will. KZfaq algo controls me.!

no.

It is amazing to me how our subconscious brain is able to interpret and react at times before we, our conscious brain, is even aware of what's happening. I was sitting earlier watching KZfaq and I dosed off just barely- not really all the way asleep but totally unconscious of what was happening around me. All the sudden I wake myself up hollering "Hey, cut it out!" and then I realize- just as I finish saying this- why I'm saying it- my cats are underneath my chair fighting. Now I had no idea they were even in the house when I dozed off- so my brain had to have heard what was happening and reacted appropriately- totally on auto pilot. The same thing happened when my mother who has congestive heart failure lost the ability to breathe- at 4 am. I was asleep- of course- and somehow, I heard her- she was unable to speak and could only whisper very weakly- all the way from the other end of the house- 30-40 feet away through 3 walls- and I reacted by getting up, getting half dressed, and going to her room- while asleep. I woke up standing in her room, trying to figure out what was wrong with her. Then I realize she can't breathe- call an ambulance- and she turned out to be ok. Thats how we found out she had congestive heart failure- we had no idea before this. So not only am I shocked I heard anything- but I'm also shocked it registered to me that it was that important, that I was able to get up and get dressed, navigate a dark house, etc.- all while unconscious. I remember being totally shocked after it was over and wondering how I ended up in there, what she had said or done- I couldn't remember anything but just waking up standing at her bedside. Makes you wonder how many things your brain does this with, and you only notice when something goes wrong, and your attention is called to it. I think that's the brain being like "Wait- there's a new variable here- we don't know what to with this... " and so now it has to involve you- it makes a request for you to be present and conscious- and that's when you become aware.

It's very difficult to determine if there's "free will" when you dont even bother to define what "free will" is in the first place.

"Free will" is all about choices we make, but if the universe splits to parallel universes all the time everywhere, then we are constantly making all the possible choices that do not violate the laws of nature and logic, without being aware of that. I need to choose if to walk right or left in the crossroad, in the universe I went right I feel I choose right freely according to the best of my judgment, and in the universe I went left I feel I choose left freely according to the best of my judgment. If free will was true than what we do was more related to what we think we should do.

Well I'm an alcoholic that's been sober almost 11 years, so I know that I have free will about whether or not I use alcohol. That's Undisputed.

It's simple, you have will power, and you are free to use that will power, hence you have free will. Free will is just something that rides along the stream of consciousness.

When someone asserts that free will exists, that also assumes that the self also exists, because there is an "I" making decisions. Why do we assume that the self exists? Is it possible to have an experience of not having a self (psychedelics & meditation) ? What is this feeling of "I"? If there is no "I" making decisions, then does that mean they're happening by themself?

(Note for thought*) Socrates' view on free will, believing that the unexamined life is not worth living, was the wisdom and will for self-control, which for him required reflection or conscience, in other words, for Socrates free will is impossible without self-control, for people without self-control arent capable of free will because being slaves to their passions they lack the free-will required for self-control. "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" "Love is the law," "Love under will"

What’s interesting is every single time we make a choice it’s based on judgement, aguments or instincts which means it depends on the past. But if we want to choose between two numbers 1 and 2 there is no reason why you would pick 1 over the other. In this case you simply pick it randomly so you don’t know where the choice is comming from as if you didn’t even made a choice. Then if you choose between instinct and logic it’s almost like the same thing you don’t know why you did it 😝

It's an illusion inside an illusion. When you play a 1 video game its seems you have free to drive a car, change clothes, choose a weapon, enter a room, pick up an item. It is free will but only within the limits of the program. If there was only 1 game you would never know what you were missing! Another game might have trains and shipping logistics. Tour options for freewill are just focused on different choices. Each game could be a universe unaware of each others physics. I would say we are in only 1 possible game/universe so we can't not tell. We have free will within the limits the wave function. The catch is we can't go back so its always guiding and limiting our possible choices. If someone is attacked by a bear a loses an arm. The next day your free will options would be different. The options appearing in your subconscious would change. You would have knowledgeof a bear attack and approach the differently. Also the lack of an arm would prevent your free will from working. Somethings you could not do anymore. This would just change your choice options in the program. Eventually your freewill free would drift towards things that were options. If everyone one only had 1 arm than you wouldn't know what you were missing. That would be a normal game. LOL I always comment an each time I can explain 0003% of what I actually think! Freewill is another one that's connected in a weird way :0

You are free to do as you want. You are not free to choose what you want.

The take away? Well it’s quite simple: when John Searle says his “daddy.” That’s all

I believe that free will is nothing but an illusion. I had no free will saying that it was determined that I would.

“The faculty of the will to choose without the choice being determined in any way”…

Allow me to summarize this debate: "There is no scientific or philosophical path to free will. All of our current understanding of the world points clearly to there being no such thing as free will. Moreover, the concept itself is unintelligible." "Yeah but I really _feeeeel_ like I have it! And psychological feelings are obviously on par with everything we know about the universe somehow. It's not like our feelings are wrong all the time or anything."

Free will is a contradiction, impossible in principle, not because of determinism in itself, but because of identity, i.e. consistency of personality. In other words, will has to be determined, it is what defines a person, or otherwise, if not uniquely determined, it is equivalent to multiple personality disorder.

Robert Kuhn muddles up all the good work he does with this series by bringing in "God" into the name of the series as well as conversations of the series. A clear indication of somebody confused with himself while being an apologist for religious hocus pocus that we've made up with the poorer part of our imagination and the weaker part of our emotions.

Could free will emerge or grow out of quantum randomness / indeterminacy?

What would be the actual problem if we abandoned the idea of Free Will? The only practical problem I see, is how then to assign responsibility to certain actions. The reason we need to assign responsibility to actions is to determine how behavior can be influenced by sanctions. Punishing or rewarding someone for something he/she isn't responsible for seems unfair, as the sanction is ultimatively in vein. Which offers a perfect workaround for the Free Will problem: If we assign responsibility to those, who can be most reliably influenced by sanctions, so that the outcome of a decision to act changes, we can restore the validity of sanctions even in a completely deterministic universe.

I want to believe we have no free will.

In making a choice, your brain uses processes and memories that have been built up over your entire life based on your personnel experiences. Free will is simply the ability to pull on these resources and choose a course of action based on them. In this respect free will is simply making an informed decision based on your own very personal experience. Whether the decision is predetermined by the laws of physics or not is irrelevant, since it is impossible to determine what that predetermined outcome would be.

I think the problem of free will is deeper than anywhere discussed in this video. Even if there is some mysterious form of mental causation, it is clear that we cannot freely choose the circumstances that underlie our existence: to give some examples, we cannot choose our parents (and therefore we cannot choose our heredity), the place of our birth which for most people remains there place of citizenship, where history will unfold about them in a local sense, and have many causative impacts on them, the economic opportunity we do or do not have as children, or basic level of hereditary intelligence, (already mentioned but a specific element of heredity that is very determination, as for example, whether we would 'choose' to vote for Donald Trump or not), if there is other intelligent life in the Universe, what planet we exist on, or similarly, what universe we may exist in. These kinds of things, and infinitely many others, such as the state of our internal molecular biology at any given movement, form up the background of our existence, not just at the moment of our conception, birth, or early childhood, but throughout our lives, until the moment of of death, which we do not usually have control over either. It is inconceivable that we can have a broader sort of 'free will' if such basic aspects of our existence so clearly do not come about as a result of free choices. So even if there is some agency located within ourselves, that agency's primary characteristics form completely outside of itself... and are not choices made by the agent. I have of course made up my own definition of free will, but it seems to me that it is the only meaningful form of free will. Free will must truly be free, unconditioned, or at least not so significantly conditioned as it is by the background factors of our existence. This should be so clear as to not require explanation, but we seem to have a deep psychological need to believe we have something like free will; this need is almost certainly related to human biological evolution (of the sense of self)...

“You can do what you decide to do, but you cannot decide what you will decide to do” -Sam Harris You don’t need to think that much further past this quote to realize that you’re a slave to your neurons. As Homo sapiens, we only need to comprehend as far as our specie’s demands are satisfied so there’s no way we can compute all the traces of our urges which thus results in this illusion of free will. We’re just observing a movie at the end of the day.

We all have our own will. Perhaps that is all and perhaps it is all we need to feel free.

Thanks so much

Answer: fat no

It’s self-refuting to deny freewill.

Information emerges from physical brain, that mean there's more information that what's in the system's state variables. Can the emergent concept affect future brain physical states? This concept is at the end of the video.

I just read the brain is a doppelganger of the universe. Similar structure, cool !

Is “free will” simply the ability to act autonomously? How autonomous do you want to be to consider yourself “free”? Mendel and Darwin say I’m not free from my ancestors. Kahneman and Tversky say I’m not rational. I’m influenced by advertisements, political rhetoric, diet, and even the smells in the room. Maybe freedom is simply not being actively coerced? Good ad campaigns and political rhetoric comes pretty near coercion, particularly when it’s targeted, such as what happens on social media. Perhaps the ability to imagine various scenarios and their related outcomes, counterfactual thinking, gives me more “freedom” than other creatures? I think this gives me more freedom in the sense that I can better align my decisions with desired outcomes, but I think that is closer to a definition of intelligence than freedom. Maybe free will is the weighing of expected harm/benefit from a given decision. Do I marry Jane? Well, Jane is very nice, lovely, healthy, etc. But there are other women I could marry. Maybe I want to prioritize my career instead. Different fields of science focus on different aspects of decision-making using words like intuition, emotion, moral values, identity, belief, desire, and reason. Many of these factors are likely to overlap in making a particular decision. It seems to me perfectly consistent with what we already know about the inner workings of the brain that our experience of making a free decision is merely the weighing of these various overlapping realms. Perhaps the articulation of the relevant concepts, expected outcomes, etc. in conscious thought is useful for complex decision making. I still can’t make sense of the “free” part of the decision. Colin McGinn’s “mental causation” is another word for a soul because it has to be free from your neurons in order to give you free will, but of course we know that our psychological experience is our brain because we can use various physical mechanisms to manipulate it. I still feel like I have free will, but I don’t think I do.

Free will.. on life support.

The only place where free will may exist, is in our inner life, where imagination creates new situations and ideas. We are gestating entities where our imagination and desires glimpse new possibilities: we need reincarnation where both our present life's distilled experiences and our inner dreams are reconciled. Free will has to be hidden for a new dawn of present experiences to emerge from the past. Philosophers have long warned us to live as if death is always present in order to create a better future: the future is now. Free will hides in the meaning of Time itself.

the underlying theme to this debate and many other conflicting theories of dimensional mechanisms is paradox, it already binds and gives relevance to free will and determinsim....Paradox is what actually matters, it already exists without doubt...

Yes, there is free will up to some extent which will help in deciding one's future . First of all we have to accept & understand that we are conscious beings or one can say immortal souls. So soul operates the body through mind .when we are going to do something good or bad our soul or conscious tells us by giving good or bad feeling that we are doing something bad, our soul or conscious will try to stop us but its our choice weather we listen to our soul or not. we knowingly do what we want to do, we are not innocents we ignore our conscious which tried to stop us to do wrong, this is the point at which we have free will & when we do something good our soul or conscious is very happy & we all know through that satisfaction level we feel. So i think our soul or conscious tells us before doing it that we are doing something good or bad, it means that we have free will up to some extent.

Very interesting, thank you!

Would help to better understand how free will, subconscious and brain might interact. Perhaps subconscious brings free will into the brain, which then is embedded in all the activities of the brain.

How we define Free Will?

Brain not, brain is me! I can be free, depends on who I am, but freedom is never "in abstracto", you can not see freedom, you can only "be in" or "have" freedom, empiricly we can only recognize determined things, science can in principle only recognize determined things, nobody has ever seen freedom! Like Kant explained, freedom is proven in that moment I can think it!

Without freewill. Parts of infinite cannot make seperate identity because infinite doesn't need anything like identity self contained.

The " gap " is the hard problem of consciousness and consciousness being an emergent property of the brain will always remain a mystery for science because awareness could not observe awareness as an objective object since that would be an experience within consciousness. Awareness could not observe awareness any more than fire could burn itself or water could moisten itself. Nor could any machine reveal to you your subjective existence because that existence is what gives you the knowing that you exist which is unique only to you. So, seeing consciousness as an emergent property of the brain is unfeasible. Since free will flows along the stream of consciousness it will also always remain just a mystery that we can't see to be reducible to physic stuff. Do we have some freedom? I believe so, a native Indian saying says, " within a person are two wolves, one good, the other evil, and whatever wolf we feed the most we become. A human being is a lump of impulses and when we learn to control those impulses we can make our life peaceful for life. Do past experiences affect us? Answer: Yes, because they condition our psyche as the saying goes violence begets violence but that is related to experience and not biology. So, as I see it, biology doesn't make you the person that you are, so it doesn't determine the type of person you are because people can change and cultivate themselves through spiritual practices.

The brains, dont have Free will. People do. The brain isn't a seperate personality.

Along with John Searle, I agree that free will is nonsense but putting free will aside for a moment, I disagree with John's comment made at 6:15 where he said "Is there any part of the universe that we know is indeterministic and the only part we know FOR SURE is quantum mechanics.". I disagree with the "FOR SURE" part of his comment. This comment supports the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics which is fine but it's not fact and is still only a theory. Just because a human is unable to know the outcome of a quantum event doesn't prove that indeterminism or randomness exists. If the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics was fact, then no one would be talking about and supporting other theories of quantum mechanics such as Bohmian mechanics (a.k.a. pilot wave theory) or the many-worlds interpretation where both of these interpretations are deterministic and not random.

Free will: The idea that there is a "self" that makes choices that are not wholly determined by antecedent events. Does it happen? I don't know.

"Do human brains have free will?" The very question itself stem from the assumption of the exercise of a free will. It is not a machine that asks the question. Read John Eccles.

"Free will" implies you can have some causal effect (will) on your decision making, but in order for the decision to be "free" you need to do it from outside the causal chain that leads up to that decision. You need to invoke something outside of causation if you want to explain free will (e.g., a soul, free will is an illusion, etc.). You never make choices, you just impose meaning on events after they've happened.

Consider this. Our thought and behavior result from hierarchical neural networks. Lower level (deterministic) neuronal activity produces higher-level "emergent" activity that has additional characteristic than those of what produced it - the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That is "self", "consciousness," and "free will." You can study each and never discover what produced it. These emergent phenomena do not strictly depend on antecedent events; they become new entities that can produce thought, behavior, and self-control, and decision-making. In this way, humans have free will (subject to genetics, early childhood development, life experiences, and any forces extant at the time of a decision that would bias the decision). Thus, humans have constrained free will; they have choice, and in most cases, humans are responsible for their words, behavior, and actions.

Free will helping people to feel better would promote human survival and consistent with evolurion.

A hard determinist will tell you that you are totally controlled and powered by whatever state immediately precedes the choice you are making, but then, will tell you that you still have to do the mental work, come up with a plan and make it happen by your own initiative, or nothing will happen. Pretty useless determinism if you ask me.

Why is the question of free will important to us? What does it say about the mind that we're even able to consider it?

So I watched that whole thing to learn that the answer is we do not know? Oh well, it was still interesting. I love the mystery of it all. If we knew everything life would be boring.

Brain and mind are different entities. Brain is just a seat for mind. Memories can reside in heart also. Few heart transplant surgeries have proven it. Mind is it's own realm and it's closer to our true self. But, mind has the tendency to believe in physical. If we turn our mind to inner reality, we realize the eternal truth.

The brain is the operation center, spirit energy plays the call, the brain runs it. Stay on the bright side.

I don’t understand why the randomness of quantum mechanics is such an anathema to free will. Isn’t this what we would expect from a fully independent being with free will? If not, what is the answer we are looking for to help us define (or constitutes) free will?

To everyone that knows I didn't know the concept of a multi departments resulted in the dryer baby concept, thanks for the reminder, l would never had dreamed it unless she'd told me and the originals I'm sorry I didn't ask anything from you

Can help to focus on the past that is coming than to focus on the future that already happened.

I am wondering if on determinism we should rename evolution to progressive deterministic development since there is no randomness and no survival of the fittest (who will be a prey and who will be a predator, their speed, their capacity to make "free choices" isn't really there etc.) but we could calculate all of those if we would know initial conditions and all the laws of the physics.

Seems to me that trying to tackle free will is pointless until you understand conciousness. And we don't understand conciousness.

Quantum Mechanics is the answer to free will. The observer modifies what he observes. When a person, driven by its desires or lack of something, makes the decision of visualizing what he wants in the future, for example, a trip or making a youtube channel to answer questions, by the same visualization that person materializes what he or she disired to become true. He or she out of infinite possibilities makes something become a material reality by observing it in advance.

Free Will?! Free Brittney!!

Made me think, do we exhibit free will in dreams?

Love it

What strikes me is if you take someone that is born into a cut off world from religion , technology and advances and was never brought up into Christianity. How is this person judged by God if they act upon their response to free Will. Do we have free will or act spontaneously on the environment in which we are grown into. For instance every second that we encounter we react based on that second We encounter free will or just survival. “The shows are the best. ‘

Human brains are the only brains we know of, including the brains which were part of the species which came before us, which has free will. Humans have the POWER to alter the fate of the universe because of our ability to think freely about the universe. The universe is ordered. Human thought is abstract, but in order to alter the fate of the universe, the human brain must work in concert of the order of the universe. You cannot violate the laws of the universe, this would be the strongest argument against freedom of the will, but daily we are reminded that people decide to violate the laws of the universe. Since most people don't regard themselves as an integral component of the universe, instances where humans wrong one another don't seem important, but the mastery of the universe requires the maximum level of human cooperation. The maximum level of human cooperation is the strongest force in the universe and it is the reason why the universe created us, so if we fail to be the strongest force in the universe, it's because we have free will and rather violate the laws of the universe than work together and be our intended purpose. So, in the future, when people live free of fear from harm from any neighbor, people will ask the question and feel as though they lack free will because being consistantly good for generations will make it seem as though you lack free will, but the truth is that people are mastering what it means to be human, and there is always the freedom, but people know a better way to live. Furthermore, every animal is different. The reason why a fully charging Grizzly bear will halt if you, a human, stands his ground is because it has no will. It's conscious and has instincts, but it is a naked animal which has to protect its health, and it will halt because it has no way of determining how it relates to you. On the other hand, the same grizzly protecting its cub will exhibit very different behavior, I think this behavior is still instinctual. Bears are solitary animals, and I believe that pack or social animals are the ones which develop wills. For instance, Chimpanze certainly engage in warfare, I believe that dolphins do the same. These aren't free wills, they are still instinctual behaviors they are engaging in, but the social aspect of the engagements is on a higher level than the solitary acts of solitary animals. Our will is the product of evolution, and it is a product of a prolonged evolution as a social family line. Communication is a critical aspect of there being will because it allows many to act as a single force. We had the hands and body shape to build innovatively, but when our brains allowed for abstract communication, we gained freedom of will because the universe is ordered by law, and not itself an abstraction. If you were a robot you would not think to create free will and you would not. We don't see with our eyes, and inside my body is complete darkness, everything you are is your consciousness and you are conscious of the dreams you remember. Consciousness is what you and every animal relies upon for survival. In each living body, everything of the outside universe is absorbed by the brains you are working with. It's your brains interpretation. Consciousness is essentially accepting the universe as real, and this is a survival tactic for all animals. The will has to do with producing future results, and I think there are some animals, including elephants which have will, elephants have memory and they have a purpose to their migration, and abstraction is the freedom. We are blessed with both abstract thought of the universe, and absolutely everything we experience and know of it is a feature of our brains and consciousness, and we have a physical form which allows us to craft the things which allows us to realize of purpose in the universe. There is no purpose for anything you have in your life whatsoever, unless everything in the universe has genuine purpose. So if you have experienced genuine purpose in you life before, and know that purpose exist from personal experience, you understand that everything in the universe has purpose, and the neurons in your head is the only thing the universe has constructed to understand itself. You are the universe because all you do is absorb all of the universe you can possibly absorb, and you can never separate yourself from the universe, and if you think there is a purpose to anything, you must conclude that there is a purpose to everything, for all time. Quantum indeterminacy might give rise to randomness, but are we prepared to conclude that we've mastered everything to know at the quantum level. I don't believe there is something mystical occuring in the brain, and everyone ought recognize that a person with a hole in their brain are seriously effected, but for consciousness, I think people fail to recognize the obvious that animals too are conscious, and for the will, there has been 1 billion years of chemistry involved in constructing one, I'm not expecting people living in the space stone age to have the answers to everything, but people ought recognize that the decisions they make are each and collectively each the real value in the universe. The universe doesn't place a value on anything, everything is simply influenced by the forces of the universe. Human decisions place a value on things in the universe, the force is stronger than all of the forces in the universe combined. It's the power of decisions along with work. The universe does no work, only living things do work. Humans do the best work in the universe because we are different from the other animals and have abstract thought of what can be accomplished in the universe. What can be accomplished in the universe is a limit on what works in the universe, not a limit upon what is attempted to suffice or work in the universe, again, to be successful in the universe you have choices to make and are required to make the correct one, which is the true arguement against a free will, but our primitive civilization knows unequivocally that there is a free will because countless individuals make counterproductive decisions which are devastatingly bad. We are not tasked with being perfect, but abstraction means that there is some person who would literally try everything, so, the universal will needs to guide in a fashion which disallows actual free will, in favor of, dynastic collective will. Determinism, you don't maintain the same consciousness or will throughout your life. Determinism is more to do with being in time. Time is a real aspect of the universe and it is relevant to every aspect of our lives. Our consciousness will relegate something to the subconscious, like driving the final stretch home. Humans are not born knowing anything. We learn just as a cub learns to hunt from the lioness. You are solely your consciousness and will, and as time passes, your will is what's most subject to change, but you become conscious of more of the universe, especially if you continue learning. I exist not! Do you own the jacket you are wearing? Refer to Kant, but what is the single thing every living thing owns? Their consciousness! All the universe is absorbed into the consciousness, if you are not conscious, you are claiming to own nothing. Ergo, you are nothing, therefore you exist not! You couldn't possibly be this wrong about yourself now could you! The doctor is correct that we have free will to do according to our neurons in rejection of other's neurons, but this is not an examination into the question of free will, this is an analysis of our interest in "being" free, which is actually a political philosophy consideration. Your unique abstraction is the extent of your free will, and exercise of the will in the universe is a political consideration. I think what the doctor is describing is a duality and conflict of multiple wills. This type of person need to be approached and taught how to function within the bounds of the law with this duality. A person ought to be judged on the behavior exibited by the individual, and unless the duality is a diagnosable split of true good versus true evil, both halves of the brain can learn not to engage in unlawful activity. Denying free will is to deny you existence as human. We are free, and go to the beach to get a tan, turtles swim to the beach to instinctually lay their eggs. What are all the wonders we can do with the world, and most of us, especially most of the people you have interviewed, spend all of their time in civilization or the city. These are not natural constructs, they are principled in the laws of the universe, else they would not stand. We have a degree of freedom what we can do in the universe, and we have to freedom to dream anything possible. You'll never master the universe until you realize that you were the only thing designed to. I don't know the mechanism which gives rise to free will, I just know how to observe the fact that it exist in the universe. I live in a neighborhood of houses. Those houses are only there because of free will, otherwise the landscape would be natural, and these house are distinct from bird's nest because they each look different from the other. There are principles which they all must follow to stand as a house, but the variety of houses validate the presence of abstraction, and it is the ability to think of the universe in abstract terms which gives rise to freedom to do all the things possible in the universe.

so at 21:10 he says determinism is not free he also says randomness is not free but we are looking for the answer to the 'free' question is 'what is free will' I think we can narrow the question to "what is free" so what is it ? any ideas ? no examples please ideas what is it exactly ?

Still feel that free will somehow causes / determines things, not figure out yet, but have something to do with subconscious.

Everyone just assumes, as an unargued philosophical bias, that, whenever we speak of ‘free will’, we all intuitively seem to know what we’re talking about… If physicalism were true, then how is it possible for the physicalist to change his mind, explain the ‘problem of other minds’, avoid becoming a solipsist, engaging in intelligent discourse… For the physicalist (like John Searle), it really IS a problem, not so much because it leads him to the absurd conclusion of a Boltzmann brain, but because the alternative, determinism, ineluctably and unavoidably leads him into the realm of the metaphysical where ‘consciousness’ could be synonymous with ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’, all of which raises the question of… God! But… rather hold to the absurd than even considering the possibility of God having breathed life into the creature to give them their ‘elan vital’!

There is no free will. Every choice has a price.

Free will is absolutely impossible, even for a God. Our will is mostly subconscious, that's the strike one against it being free. Strike two: to have a complete control of your will, you must have an awareness of every minute action you can possibly take at any micro-moment, and understanding of every possible implication of that action. Since there is practically unlimited number of options, one's brain would be immediately overwhelmed and shut down. Instead, our will is randomly predetermined by a combination of many things: the state of our brain's chemistry at the moment, what we had for breakfast, did we get enough sleep, did we argue or make love, the weather outside, the political climate, cosmic rays causing damage to a particular part of our brain etc, etc, etc. The combination itself is practically unlimited. That's why some people believe in a Flat Earth, and others don't, some people put on a mask, while others refuse, some people take medication, others won't; that's why 30 years ago the current insanity in the White House would be prevented or fixed immediately, but today we can't/won't do anything about it, that's why some people study and understand Science, while others don't, that's why, while collectively we know exactly what causes a lot of problems in our life, and, collectively, we have all the information needed to fix many problems right now, we still won't do it, we can't even be certain when, how or if ever we will get to doing it.

davidson had a good idea with free will in anomalous monism. there are mental events and physical events. mental events are propositional dispositions. physical events are non mental events. physical events are strictly deterministic and mental events are not. in that case, there is an asymmetrical supervenience relationship between the mental and physical. to illustrate: we can be angry long after the physical events that caused us to be angry have dissipated, and, that anger has physical effects, but, we were never guaranteed to become angry in the first place. how would that work? in a heuristic system where every event is unique and temporary, a functional system (say, vision for recognizing kinds of objects) must represent through interpretation. there is no guarantee of how such a system will type inputs or that it will faithfully do so. having billions of such 'microrealizers' (shoemaker) under the same constraints where these interact and instantiate other mental events, that's a heck of a lot of deterministic activity going on but only where outcomes are probablistic. so, when we further have functional systems that evaluate what to do with that kind of information via feelings first (propositional dispositions; belief, fear, hope, anger, anxiety, etc.), the causal nexus has to be seen in those terms. such systems are themselves fully explainable in physical terms, but what those physical states of affairs realize are probablistic mental events that are not governed by the same laws as those of purely physical states of affairs. in this way, yes, mental events are ultimately physical events but mental events are not strictly discrete physical events. free will and determinism are compatible.

Kudos -- 444 Gematria -- 🗽

We do not have absolute free will, but we DO have free agency.

it is very interesting that when someone is reaching his limits to understand the world and universe, he maybe found something beyond..

psychology is neurobiology. nothing comes out of thin air.

This subject is way over my understanding but to me, it seems; determinism provides parameters, quantum mechanics presents options, free will allows choice. Throw in nature/nurture, then free will outcomes reduce to opportunity/character/morality.

If there's no free will how can you trust your own judgements. Or how do decide what's moral?

Using quantum physics to explain free will sounds a lot like the god of the gaps. Finding the area we dont understand and attribute that to god or in this case free will. Acceptance is the answer! We dont have free will!

The best choice I ever made was to stop clinging to free will.

There is a difference between expectation and anticipation. If I anticipate an act I can choose a response beforehand. But if I am not aware that the action is going to occur my response might be different. I'm more independent now than I was at the age of five, and I was more independent at the age of five than I was as an infant. Here, independence means that I can control my responses and modulate when they will occur. Finally, we are all going to hit the brick wall, but we get to decide how fast or slowly we approach it, more or less. Our nature (awareness) responds to what occurs to it and generates will in a way that is partly heritable and partly determined by our choices.

Might be that consciousness brings free will out of quantum randomness.

Why ignore magic?

As long as we are trapped within our biology, we can exist without exercising any will. When we go against our biological urges or impulses, we are forcing our will over our nature. I think the question is not if free will exists, I believe there is evidence it does, but the question is, how much free will do we actually exert. Not everything we do requires free will. I bet people can go through their entire lives like a leaf in the stream, because their biology dictates to them when and how to behave.

Taste is very psychological. We must have experiences, or else we're stuck with just brains and nothing more.

It’s a fascinating question. Does knowledge of it make anyone live their life differently?

Could the possibilites of quantum world present choices to people? The random quantum develop possibilites which the brain / mind sees as choices.

Kunt of a question, that. Depends how much you can extrapolate yersel. (Or how far you zoom out). Either way, ha ....

The brain is part of the body, so the question should actually be: Does the human body have a will? He has that, and he lets it be felt permanently in all basic needs.

The same as if you would ask whether USA has fee will. Contains many units, needs, competetive intentions, etc etc.. Like brain. Would somebody say that it is about randomness? It is about choices and satisfaction after decision. So why the pain hurts so? It is just signal ending somewhere in the brain..☝️

I think that the idea of the physical, the biological, is linked with determinism. I don't know if this is something that can be changed. The consciousness within the body however, seems to be linked with free will, as in actually being able to make different things at any given time

There are exorbitantly more things which a man does not want than things that a person wants. Hence there is a natural will in every living being.

In fact I don’t think free will makes us human at all that would be good will and enough people have revealed an absence of that while exercising free will to make think they are less than human , my guy

The speaker in blue has his right shoulder shaking while the left isn't shaking.

I'm not an expert. But the problem could be in the definition of causation. Why not look at the 4 interpretations of aristotle?

I am conscious of the fact that my brain is selfserving. Altruism and love are subordinate to evolutionary necessity. Which is survival and the urge to spread my genes.

free will is the possibility to chose - make mistakes or not

Every living entity (agent) has free will, not just humans. Agency/ semiotic theory, relates. Every agent is a mind-body. An agent makes choices from its ecosystem that are contingent on the tools (body) that it has at its disposal. Agents with hands & vocal chords have very different predisposition to agents with scales & fins, or wings & feathers, or fur & paws, and that's why they habituate very different choices. And the choices they habituate wire their neuroplastic brains (Doidge 2008**). Which brings us to the first major error. Human brains are not separate from the body. Brains don't have free will... people do. The second major error frequently made by many people is the assumption that lesser agents are governed by instinct. They aren't. They too, have free will. But what is mischaracterized as instinct is just free will playing out in a much-reduced horizon of options. A frog in a pond has fewer options to choose from, and this gets mischaracterized by persons-in-labcoats as instinct. There is no such thing as instinct. It's a reduced horizon of options. .. meaning, a smaller world of fewer options in comparison to the cultural worlds that humans inhabit. **Doidge, N., 2008. The Brain that Changes Itself. Melbourne: Scribe Publications.