Edit: I feel I need to clarify what I'm saying here. I don't have a problem with sponsors in general. I don't have a problem with channels endorsing useless products or services - if you decide to put your money in them, that's your business. I don't even have a problem with this channel taking BetterHelp's money per se. What I have a problem with is this channel's role in the 0.1% of viewers who think BetterHelp must be a trustworthy company because their favourite channel recommends it. They need help and are seeking it, but end up with useless self-proclaimed "therapists", some of which are AI, and a bigger credit card bill than promised. Oh, and their personal information sold to social media companies. That is just wrong, and it pains me that a channel which is also one of my favourites, plays a part in that. I was aiming for vague enough not to get sued, but clear and concise. It ended up being just dumb and confrontational. I hope this edit is more useful and somewhat constructive. Original comment: Please, do not ever, _ever_ again take money from that personal information traitor and a senseless scam that is betterhelp. I don't want to have to stop watching this channel because it enables taking advantage of people for the hardships of their life.

The lawyer at the start was pulling some Saul Goodman type shit

FTC Gives Final Approval to Order Banning BetterHelp from Sharing Sensitive Health Data for Advertising, Requiring It to Pay $7.8 Million

Defense: my client had no choice but to commit the crime. Jury: and we have no choice but to find him guilty - his guilt was determined billions of years ago, so we cannot change it.

I'm not convinced free will exists. However, I live my life with the assumption that it does because I don't have a choice.

mama always said: the purpose of your mind is to perceive reality, do try to get it right.

Any system complex enough to perfectly compute the future of the evolution of the universe would basically just be the universe.

I have watched the entire series several times. As it progressed things referenced early on and in other videos come into focus. This is a master class in communication. Thank you

First thing better help can help you with is sharing your most personal secrets with anyone that'll pay.

Jury: "while it's impossible to know if he's guilty or not, based on your argument, we better throw him in a box and check in 5 years"

I thought the title of the video read , _"Does The Universe Allow Free Wi-Fi?"_ , lol

Neither strict determinism nor randomness can provide us with free will: If one thing is like going somewhere by train, the other is sitting within a boat which readomly moves here and there. If free will exists, it - or some kind of "precursor" of it, maybe disguising itself as randomness - must be inherent.

The experience of free will is what the universe gives. Genuine free will is most likely an illusion, but such a statement does not free one from that illusion

The lesson from accepting determinism isn't to not punish crime, it's that sometimes restorative justice might be wholly more constructive to addressing it than punitive justice, because more than just people's personal character is involved in decision making. Or that things like reducing lead levels in the water supply might be better policy than trying to regulate religion or speech or whatever.

I love this channel, and watch every single video like a little child stick to the Tv screen!

I love how the theoretical framework for philosophical questions can be approached from the perspective of fundamental physics. Who knows what or when we will find the the final pieces of the puzzle, but for now, this kind of analysis is certainly one of the great tasks of humanity.

If the universe don't fit you must acquit!

Fyi better help is a scam

I actually think about stuff like this all the time, and it completely transformed how I see “bad” people. If you were born as them, you would have the exact same thoughts and do the same things by definition. They didn’t choose to be themself, therefore, it’s not their fault. We should discourage harmful actions, but we should also understand that they didn’t choose to be this way. Therefore, it is completely unethical and unproductive to punish “bad” people for the sole sake of retribution. We are really behind on how we handle people we don’t like. They need to suffer after all, because you suffered because of them, regardless of if it would make the world a better place or not. It just feels right. We don’t like to think of these people as human, and we like to believe we have free will. It’s like we’re hardwired to think this way, since it makes us feel better about our existence. I just hope we will come around someday.

This was so well done, I've watched everything you guys have produced, some videos more than once, and I have enjoyed and learned so much. I don't know why you don't have millions of subscribers, but I for one really appreciate the hard work and consistent excellence. I love the choice of content, the imagery, the long form presentation, and even the narrator's voice! I hope all is well with you and yours, I look forward to more of your work, take care

So, it wasn't up to me that I upvoted?

Without freewill, everyone is off the hook for the things they do. It's not even worth having the discussion because the implication is nobody is responsible for anything. If that's the case, it's not my fault for being upset that my life is so awful because the universe decided that I should have an awful existence while someone else gets the lottery and gets to have a wonderful existence. It makes you wonder, if that's the case, then why? Why the spite? If there is no consciousness making decisions and it's all random and we're all doing what nature is gonna do anyway since the very beginning of time, then why does it feel like this isn't the case? The simplest answer and the only answer is of course we have free will (even if it's not true). If it was determined tomorrow that we can confirm without a doubt we don't have freewill, then it's not ethical to punish anyone. Murderers are doing exactly what they should be doing. It's like getting mad at a wild animal for doing what they do. I never understood why anybody actually cares about this question or takes it seriously. Yes, we have free will because it feels like we do. If we didn't feel like we did, then we wouldn't feel anything. We'd be observers locked in a cage, forced to experience things against our will. I would say "no, I don't want that" and my body still does it. There has to be a point in which I avoid pain because "I" don't want to experience a bad experience. Life can be boiled down to seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, while non living things like rocks don't care one way or the other. They don't seek anything, and they don't avoid anything. Things happen to them because they can't will, they have no choices to make. But it's a very scary thought, that consciousness could be trapped in a rock and being an observer without the ability to make things happen, so if fall into lava you are released into the lava, or you're sitting in some wasteland for a billion years, being moved around by the enviroment, weathering you down, smaller and smaller, or maybe you find yourself perfectly reserved just under the surface for billions of years in perfect darkness. It's best to be human, for sure. I personally subscribe that existence itself is infinite, that it's not possible to have a finite of anything. It doesn't make sense to have an arbitary limit or border in which things stop existing. If I travel in a straight line, will i reach an edge? No, literally no because light travels slower than the expanse of the universe. So as I travel straight, the universe expands faster than my ability to keep up. I can travel for infinity in one direction, and all matter (even if finite) will find itself remixing an infinite amount of different ways. If the universe is something that breathes in and out, that it expands and contracts and this is the big bang happening over and over and over, it's happening an infinite amount of times. If we live in a universe where it was once so dense that light couldn't escape before the big bang, then how long was it sitting there waiting for something to happen to kick off time and the expansion of space? For infinity? If not then, then where did it come from? You reach a point, where you must surrender to infinity. It's not possible otherwise. Even if infinity is in the future and that's where we're heading, there is an argument to make I have to live this life exactly as it plays out because every possibility must be possible and must play out an infinite amount of times, and this can be scary because it sort of robs you of agency. But I'd make the argument, if you want to do something and you do it, that's free will even if it was gonna happen. What something feels like, is actually very individualistic and personal to the observer. Each one of us, is living in a different universe - our heads. How I experience the universe is literally different than how a totally blind person experience's the universe. I have access to experiences that a totally blind person cannot even imagine even if you explain in great detail what looking at a galaxy looks like. You can explain a star, but unless you experience brightness and light, being told about lumination is as meaningless as any fiction trying to describe an impossible thing like trying to describe an exotic color that rests directly in between the cool and warm colors, giving a true middle. I transitionary color, a color you cannot see with the human eye or even measure, could totally exist for another species. I remember feeling bad for insects with very short lifespans, but then someone told me they probably experience time in a distorted way so it feels as long to them, as 90 years feels for us. This seems to be backed up by science, because perception of time seems to be directly linked the heart rate of an animal. If you have very fast heart rate, time appears to move slower but on average your heart will beat the same amount of times as a slower heart beats. A mouse that lives a year has a much faster heart than an elephant, but on average both of their hearts will be the same amount in their lifetimes. For an elephant, time moves fast. As we get older, humans heart rates beat slower so time feels to be moving faster as we get older.... I make this comment, because what I'm really trying to get at is experiences boils down to the individual having the experience and there's no "objective" reality. We are all experiencing a unique thing because only I know what it's like to be me and only YOU know what it's like to be you even if we have identical experiences, how we feel about them is different. We could experience the same thing and I could get great pleasure out of it and you could suffer a great deal of pain. So the argument about free will is as moot of a conversation as exotic colors. I guess it's fun to talk about, but unless we can FEEL it and EXPERIENCE it, it's not actually real. If FEELS like I have free will, so therefore it's real to me regardless if I'm wrong. I cannot be wrong, because how I feel is more real than anything. It's why education is so important and we try and help people escape ignorance. It's why religion fights so hard to invade your world view and change it. God isn't real unless you believe in God. God is super super super real to the a person with faith. It's super important to be mindful of competing ideas and which actually give people the best sense of happiness way more than actual stone cold hard facts. Facts don't make people happy, how people feel about those facts and how it informs them of themselves in relation to everything around them can bring them peace, and so facts can be harmful to one person and liberating to someone else and I think we sort of try and ignore the human element in math. How we feel about results in math is vastly more important than what it says.

I love the intro of chaotic systems to this question of causal determinism.

Excellent. Listened and read about quantum mechanics quite a bit, and this was not only the clearest explanation but also the most entertaining.

i've had this personal joke recently where anytime someone asks why: "anything" happened or why did i do something, i just say because entropy. 😂

"if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice" Freewill by Rush c:1979

I've watched every one of Dave's debunks and response videos, and this guy was the hardest to listen to, BY FAR. He's literally poisoning anyone who ignorantly listens and believes. Thank you for exposing these people, and doing what you're doing. Keep up the good work.

I like these videos. I think I have watched most of them by now. I like the flow between stories/parables to history to science. It is well done.

What all can't be said, must be passed over in silence.

Every video on this channel is masterfully written, narrated and produced. Thank you all for making them :)

How do you find what to upload is blowing my mind. Thank you for this precious video as always

I’m glad it was predetermined that I’d enjoy this video.

I was just perusing your "back catalogue", 'cos I'm a nerd, and lo and behold, your drop another new episode. Get in... Absolutely love what your team creates. Ticks all the nerdy/geeky boxes for me!

The subtle, deadpan delivered, joke at the end was masterful.

Perfect! Thanks for the birthday present

Control is an illusion. You will try anything to stay safe but shit just happens.

The belief in free will is actually a strong argument for its existence in some measure (in my opinion). A version of yourself that doesn't believe in free will will think and act differently than a version of yourself that does believe. The possible thoughts and actions of a mind that believes in free will is much more varied and unpredictable than a mind that doesn't. The laws of nature can't direct or predict how you create an abstract painting, what philosophies you will hold, what music you listen to, how you dream at night (if you dream), which groceries you buy at the store or even how you die. Of course the unpredictability varies from person to person based on their measure of awareness and mental structure--some people may be more deterministic than others. When we weigh decisions on our minds and hold to them, especially despite any struggles or obstacles we encounter because of them, our decisions go on to influence the quasi-deterministic aspects of our subconscious, giving us control of our tendencies. Many of our decisions have no rational or evolutionary reasoning to them, especially if we choose to believe in free will. Edit: when we choose to believe or disbelieve in free will, we may be proclaiming our own capacity for experiencing free will.

That particle emitting waves animation make a lot of sense! Now I can understand what they meant by how light can be both waves and particles. Thanks!

Zeno the Stoic had a slave who stole something and was about to be flogged. He defended himself by pointing out that Fate (in which the Stoics believe) determined him to steal. Zeno responded by "it determined me to flog you for that".

Whoever wrote it is master of storytelling

this channel is so underrated. hope yall get more subs

Without any competition, by far the best channel on KZfaq. Congratulations and go ahead. I enjoy watching your videos again and again...

Such a wonderful piece of knowledge you provide us every month. Thank you so much!

I listen episodes from the is channel every night when I got to bed. Absolutely love the narrator. 💫🙏

3 minutes. Blessed.

Superb as always. A really good exposition of the issues (plus a few ideas I hadn't heard of or thought about). If anything, this just reinforces my sense that we at the very least don't know (and perhaps can never know) whether the ideas of either free will or determinism correspond to whatever "reality" may be out there in our universe. In other words, those (like me) of a scientific persuasion who tend to believe in a deterministic (albeit often chaotic and even stochastic) universe are in effect holding that position as much on the basis of faith than those (also like me) who like the idea of free will. I take some comfort in the thought that while "belief" is easy (especially with "faith" as a guide), "knowledge" is hard. Thus, I'm happy to live with the possible cognitive dissonance of wanting to believe simultaneously in free will, determinism, chaos theory AND quantum mechanics, while taking the intellectually modest stance that I'm not at all sure that I (or perhaps anybody else) yet understands what relationship (if any) exists between those ideas in "reality".

Absolutely brilliant, yet again. Thank you.

To believe in free will is to assume such powers of agency as to constitute a true _first cause,_ in defiance of causality itself. Obviously we're nothing so unnatural as walking causality violations. Also remember Godel's incompleteness theorem, and that there's a key distinction between information that is indeterminable insofar as being unavailable, in contrast to being truly indeterminate - acausal determinants being a contradiction in terms. A favourite example here is that of a split-brain patient, after severance of the corpus callosum as drastic but effective therapy for life-threatening seizures; in examination following recovery, the patient, via stereo headphones, was asked into one ear to take a sip from the glass of water on the desk before her. Having complied, the question was then put to the opposite ear of why she'd performed this action, replying "because i was thirsty".. a perfectly plausible posteriori rationalisation.. and all that free will can be. Popper would remind us that an intrinsically unfalsifiable hypothesis isn't even strictly scientific. But as far as illusions go it's a perfectly agreeable one, and more importantly we still need to be held accountable for our actions, and protect society from those who do not, hence this realisation of what free will is and isn't has little more than philosophical bearing - there's nothing else to do but continue going along with it regardless, *the social imperative* certainly being no farce.

Great video. I've always suspected that free will doesn't exist, but that the illusion of free will does exist. And maybe that's fine.

I love you so much for these videos I cannot even express it in words... Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Predeterminism, the idea that all events are determined by preceding causes and that the future is fixed, faces significant challenges from modern scientific theories. Quantum mechanics introduces inherent indeterminacy at the subatomic level, where particles exist in states of probability until observed. This probabilistic nature contradicts the notion of a predetermined universe. Chaos theory further complicates the picture by showing that even small changes in initial conditions can lead to vastly different outcomes, a phenomenon known as the "butterfly effect," which implies that precise prediction is impossible. Moreover, sensitivity to initial conditions in chaotic systems suggests that tiny variations can cause dramatic and unpredictable changes, undermining the idea of a fixed future. Additionally, the concept of retrocausality in some interpretations of quantum mechanics and the temporal symmetry in physical laws suggest that future events could influence the past, allowing for actions that effectively cancel out their own logical course

I think the bigger question is: what even IS free will? like... think about it... is there a concrete definition of it... one that doesn't demand further questions... it's one of those questions that fries your brain if you think about it too long

These guys put out some kick ass episodes.

It's always a good day when you guys upload a video. Absolutely brilliant work. Thanks 👍

37:45 _... and you can follow classical physics to track its progress and predict its future behaviour._ No, not even close! You just located the particle in the place of one detector cell, having its momentary position for a point in time. At this point, the particle is in a superposition of _many different momenta_ which takes away the predictability. You didn't turn it into a classical particle since no such thing exists. You literally say it yourself by mentioning Heisenbergs relation of uncertainty (a more precise translation of 'Unschärferelation').

A new sleep video just dropped!

Thank you for these videos.

I can't help but feel that the point where an epistemological notion of free will becomes useful is similar to the fuzzy line where the distinction between mere causality and teleology becomes meaningful. Perhaps somewhere between a lump of matter rolling off a cliff and a lump of matter deciding to steer clear of the cliff with all the falling rocks, the distinction might become mathematically intriguing.

Thanks

At one point, I was heavily disturbed by the likelihood that all human actions could be deterministic. I learned about Spinoza's philosophy and much about his life, albeit from secondary sources, and how his deterministic view actually led him to peace with his religious prosecutors because it was simply fate that they would prosecute him. Upon learning this, I understood that a deterministic view of the world did not have to be pessimistic or something that detracts from human meaning, but something that points us to a direction of absolute acceptance of life and of others. There is peace in accepting fate. Amor fati.

The day made ❤

*gives us an existential crisis* "This video is sponsored by BetterHelp!" The perfect marketing scheme

Given a choice between steak and chicken, surely it has been predetermined that I will have lasagna.

Love every video you guys make, keep up the incredible work guys

I particularly enjoyed this one, nicely done.

Thanks!!!

Thank goodness, I have to get an early night tonight, couldn't have done it without this godlike narration

Babe! Wake up! Another History of The Universe vid just dropped!

I've watched every video this team has released (more than once), can anybody suggest more channels that have great storytelling like this? Thanks

so it seems the universe does allow free will, but still somehow doesn't allow a reality in which taxes are non-existent

Love it! From Brazil

This makes me feel better about all the stupid decisions I made. It wasn't me.

Even though free will is a delusion, we can hold to account because we have no free will to not hold them to account.

Undisputed, best universe channel out there

Another fabulous episode by the brilliant Paul Sutter. Thank you.

the flaw in schroedingers cat is the assumption that you have to "open" the box.. . "hey , you alive in there?" "meow" *quantum collapse*

"You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill I will choose a path that's clear, I will choose freewill"

Three body problem has no analytic solution. That does not mean it is unpredictable and unmeasurable. We can still simulate the outcome with extremely high precision. In fact, very few problems have analytic solution. Does not mean law of physics and mathematics do not work.

yet another awesome video!

Every decision you make is reaction based on a past experience that happened to you. Plus to believe that your decisions has any sort of significant impact on the entire universe is very egocentric.

Okay now, this has only been out for 22 minutes and it's a 50 minute video, yet there are 72 comments.

@11:52, fun fact: that shown, is not actually a "total solar eclipse", but a 'ring of fire' annular eclipse.

Your channel never ceases to deliver excellence. I've been with you since the beginning and you never disappoint.

Sorry. Misread the title. I thought it said free wifi.

Simple answer: Yes. I chose to come and say this.

The isotropic principle means all bad luck and negative outcomes are spread out evenly over time. You can't use the argument put forth by the defense, because we've all been affected by the same chain of events so they basically all cancel out. Whatever's left is due to our own decisions, so we must be responsible for them like it or not.

High quality videos. Always.😊

Imagine sitting there in the courtroom listening to the defendant lawyer yapping on about why the origins of the Milky Way and the sun's nuclear fusion reaction explains why his victim is not guilty for a murder. Talk about grasping for straws xD

free will exists because i can put butter on my sandwich while upside down in front of 200 people

Thank you 😊

Thank you!

There is no link between free will and determining guilt in a court. People are prosecuted for their act and the prejudice resulting of said act. It would be like having a machinist refusing to replace a defective piece because "it cannot be responsible of creating a failure, it has no free will!"

I think we have plenty of avenues to excuse bad behavior without invoking physics.

Universe will allow free will until such time you piss the universe off. Then prepare for retribution.

The best nights to fall asleep are the nights one of your channels releases a new video :)

I think most of the people who claim to believe that free will doesn't exist would also claim to believe that consciousness doesn't exist, if they believed it were incompatible with materialism. I don't think any sane person could believe either thing, even if they say they do, think they should, and want to.

The problem is that free will and responsibility are not the same thing. If you accept that we don’t have free will in this context, that normally means that you are essentially a meat robot, responding to a combination of internal and external stimulus, correct? If so, then a negative consequence can be a strong external stimulus to discourage the unwanted behaviour in the future, so punishment is still effective. Accepting responsibility, and expressing and feeling genuine remorse can indicate a change in internal state that would result in different behaviour should the external stimulus occur again, with or without free will.

I would love to have this as a podcast it would make an amazing series

The way you say that newton and Galileo were the first is so hilarious.

I hate better help, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. They are so scummy, i dislike the fact that this channel is sponsored by them.