So two years late here, but what I'm picking up is this basically: We have an illusion of free will because as an individual we can make decisions based on our own thought processes, but this ultimately IS an illusion because as any other force of nature, we do not decide what the thought process being generated is. We can guide this pathway with enough mindfulness, but even the thought of "I need to be more mindful in my thinking" was not ultimately something we decide to think out of nowhere; it is generated originally by our internal hardware and previous experiences and physical programming that built up to the moment of the thought "This is something I need to do" occuring to us as an involuntary reaction to a situation or other uncontrolled string of thought.

Lex typically records his interviews right after he finishes his limo driver job.

"Free will is an oxymoron! Where there's will there's no freedom and where there's freedom there's no will" - Swami Vivekananda

Thank you for helping me forgive myself for not appreciating my partner and not showing him the compassion that I should have. He passed away feb7,2022 and I have so much regret. I was blind and I didn't know that I was blind. I would give anything to go back in time to tell him how much I love him.

I like listening to how free will is an illusion while I grind for something in a game.

A student asked his philosophy professor: "how do I know that I exist?" "Who is asking?" the professor replied.

43:08 this is where I am at 54 years old. It totally switched my own self hate, anger, and agression to compassion, understanding and empathy and patience for my own self. And it had to be done for myself first internally, before I can see it in others. Done with the blame and shame game. Reorients you toward mutual understanding. Reprogramming myself from a very mentally ill dysfunctional family system. It takes time. Lots of time and experience.

"My Will is Nature's Will" ... this is the insight that always come up when I meditate on free will. It is quite freeing.

Can we just talk about the fact that this is an hour-long "clip"?

Free Will? What did he do now?

Love this conversation. Using the node example, which is always how I explain it (nodes popping up from a fabric, looking around, believing they are not 'attached' to the fabric when in fact they are), my own meditation, study, and examination of multiple theories of how consciousness arises suggests to me that nodes not have free will because they're attached to the FABRIC... but what they DO have is the ability to calculate, disassociate, reconnect, send data, and NUDGE. If energy waves do not become 'particles' until they are observed (what we know in physics), then we (nodes) nudging the data, focusing on specific types of data, organizing it, sending packets, interacting and writing local protocols before returning a computation.. ALL of that is taken into the larger neural network in a causal feedback loop. A neural network/brain of universal size is still affected by every node, every neuron in that mind. Free will exists... How much have you remodeled the data, solved its problems, invented new array organization tables to present that data before returning its information to the larger network. To use film examples, even Neo unplugged and rewrote pieces of the architect's design before realizing that some things repeat.. some parts of the system can be bent, but others can be remade, can evolve. We just don't understand the architecture yet. Once we do, our influence as a node increases, our contribution to evolving the system can increase based on our willingness to examine the way in which we are interacting with higher order rules and data. Can we disassociate from the hardwiring often enough to understand where we as a node are in our influence and evolution wthin the system? Donald Hoffman would suggest that our next frontier is to learn how to remove ourselves from the VR interface that we think is the system in order to rewrite the OS of that system. Once we can do that, we will achieve actual free will and one of our choices will be whether to go back into the system at all or to change the type of system running.

I agree with Sam about not being able to locate a source to an action even if you’re the one doing it. Sort of like not being able to access the source of pain in your stomach. You just feel the pain in the stomach but where does the pain originate is unclear. In fact you can experiment by pinching your arm, the feeling will be located on the point of where you’re pinching but you can’t access the transmitters, the highway of information nor the receiver in this experiment. Yet this doesn’t disprove free will. I can command my arm to move and look for myself as the commander and I’m unable to locate me as the source. But how could you sense the command being originated? I still think this doesn’t disprove me being the originator of the choice. How can we expect the eye to see itself when it’s looking? You can track your memory, go back and remember things sort of like following a path, you can make decisions like going two days to the future and two days to the past and search for specific memories. You can access the memories at will but not your initial process of choosing between one date or another. I don’t think not being able to track the causality of a decision back to you as the origin proves or disproves free will or you as the source. It simply means that you can’t access you as the originator.

“Turns out you were right, I’m gonna ask you about free will.. I just can’t help it.”

Sam is an illusion. It's actually Ben Stiller.

Max Planck states, "Consciousness is fundamental and matter is derived from consciousness". We are "IT" in our finite moment choosing between our infinite possibilities in our finite moment, ie: "Free will"

Sam’s ability to meet people where they’re at when they start to stray off topic and somehow still relate what he was saying to it is amazing

Nice! The summary of a 1 hour freewill episode is also 1 hour. Great Sam and Lex!

“You talk negatively about robots” Lex took it personally

It's an interesting and strange subject. I feel as though I have agency and choice, which is how I would define free will. Can I understand information? Yes. Can I, to the best of my ability, understand the consequences of my actions? Yes. Do I have the ability to decipher between different options and predict possible outcomes? Yes. So how is that not free will? Of course there are many things outside of our control as well. I just don't think those things constitute a lack of free will. Sure, you don't have 100% control of every aspect of yourself. But that doesn't erase the aspect that you absolutely do have control over.

I’ve had the thought that free will really isn’t free will. There’s so many times I’ve made of my mind to do something and then something happens that’s out of my control to stop my next action. It’s happened a crazy about of times. And I’m just like wtf. Life is crazy.

Lingering regret is a bit like pain after the event, say a burned finger. "OK. Yes. You hurt. You were burned. You can stop throbbing now. You're not touching the burning thing anymore." But maybe the healing, which takes a while per physiological laws, and concomitant, persistent pain is to ward off repeating the mistake and ingraining the lesson, etc.

His arguments get infinitely more convincing when he does the Spock eyebrow lift. I'm going to practice that.

This guy right here is the limit of how smart an NPC can get. He recognizes his limits as an NPC which is crazy considering he has no free will, but it would seem that you need free will to recognize that you don't have it. I guess he is a very advanced NPC which deserves the utmost respect.

I study Zen and Sam is totally teaching the Zen teaching - everything he says is completely in line with our practice.

- If we create robots that really can suffer, that would be a bad thing. - This is how I know you're not Russian. lmao

Clips are an illusion

Back to same podcast after 1 year and still amazed to hear it all over again

Words from a soldier that I met really impacted me. He said freedom is earned and it comes with responsibility. Ture freedom is elevated when you act responsibly and let things go. It is not an entitlement that the stupid or dumb understand. Free will is only within your available freedom that you have responsibility for because if you abuse of it, it will diminish.

I found this extremely interesting from an artist perspective. A lot of visual artists and musicians (myself included) talk about this feeling you get when you reach a certain level of ability in their specific skill. Its like you don't even have to think about the creation or the process, you just "channel" it, it comes from you out of nowhere and the more you try to harness your intentions to create art, the more it really inhibits the process. A lot of people use the metaphor "It comes from God" but really we dont know where it comes from, but all we know is its definitely not our "free will". Thoughts?

4:13 OMG, I'm not even kidding when I say that Sam just reminded me that my wedding anniversary is in 1 week lol. I need to pause the video now and go look for a gift. Thanks Sam!!

I think if you really, really understand molecular/cellular biology, genetics and so on, it becomes very clear that free will is in fact just an organism that has a certain biological makeup, with a certain collection of experiences, reacting to a stimulus. It’s not so much a free choice, as it feels to most, but an incredibly complicated biological reaction. He’s right that it’s not what it feels like.

The notion of free will and the sense of self can be envisioned as a personal theatre, an intimate space from which we observe and experience the unfolding spectacle of life, intricately part of the entirety yet uniquely perceptive of its play.

Understanding free will totally disabled my hate centers… it also caused me to go slightly insane.

I think Christopher Hitchens put it best: "Of course we have free will; we have no choice".

Sam Harris is such a remarkable person. He's not only an atheist or antitheist. He's not only a secular humanist. He's someone who genuinely cares for sentient beings who can suffer. He proposes a moral landscape traversable by all sentient beings. He supports ways for sentient beings of all kinds to find a better way in life: one towards ataraxia and eudaimonia. He teaches about unperturbedness and wellbeing. Just like the tetrapharmakos, Sam teaches not to fear the god(s) and not to worry about death, and he also teaches both that what's good is easy to get, and that what's terrible is easy to endure. We should all try to be more like Sam. We should all be teaching each oursleves and others about the tetrapharmakos, meditation, self-actualization, and dispelling myths like Self-Ego, Free Will, and others.

One thing I have believed for most of my life is that there are many unknown reasons for everything that happens. I usually give the example that if I left the house, but forgot my keys, I may very well have been in a fatal accident had I not forgotten my keys, and it saved my life, as well as many other things that did not happen, simply because of that one little thing. And I will live on to be part of the never ending script that is being written at a fundamental level in which the universe plays out without any one's consent. Another thing I live by is that even though it may seem like people are acting a certain way on purpose, even though to you it is wrong or detrimental, I don't believe they really understand what it is they are really doing, or they wouldn't do it. We are all guilty of doing things and later regretting it only because we didn't know at the time that we would regret it. Knowledge is powerful and without it we arre reckless and our lives can be very meaningless, Life is like a long rollercoaster ride. We didn't build the rollercoaster, and we didn't decide to be afraid or not, but yet we will be on it, constantly reacting, in order to get to the end of the ride with all the experience of having taken the ride. I supose that is similar to what Sam Harris is trying to say here, in so many words. Just me and how I think...

Another good example is when an athlete is in the zone. The experience of self is gone and freewill does not exist. There is only playing , The game is playing you.

Sam: ‘if thinking about your mind this way makes you feel terrible, well then stop. Switch the channel, get off the ride.’ Also Sam: spends an hour talking about how we don’t actually make choices.

How you act on the forces that shape your decisions is no one's decision but your own. I think being predisposed to making decisions is an important distinction from saying we have no free will. That's like me saying a dice is always going to land on the same side. Depending on the forces that act on it, the side cam be limited to a *number of likely outcomes within a range*

If free will is an illusion, then the word "ought" should never be uttered again.

Loosing the sense of free will for me helped me grow empathy and patience, with both myself and others.

Lex is such a programmer lol, works out everything in his mind with a Computational thinking, First Principals theory, and then adds an if statement involving love, death, and conscientiousness

He speaks about meditation alot but forgets that the schools of thought that developed meditiation were the rishis who spent years practicing and they came up with the idea of conciousness being immaterial and pure when stripped of the biology and memory. Believing you dont have free will takes away power from you. And since its debatable it would be beneficial to choose the side which would help you since the lack of evidence of free will is comparable to the lack of evidence of no free will.

Being emotionally aware is all conscienceness truly is. Being a realist in life thought allows a better understanding of free will

Free Will can be an 'illusion' yes, but you'll have to unpack it in more layers than what is currently being offered; in other words, the illusion aspect is deeper than the basic understanding of why it is or may be so. Its basic phenomenon (to the degree that the illusion idea itself must manifest itself in more than two stages in any given form) starts somewhere, is subjected to a number of things related mostly to MEST, and only then brings about the end-possibility, which then makes (the argument for) the interrogation of the REALITY aspect (thereof) highly possible.

I tried to tell the judge it wasn't my fault i have no free will but he wasn't buying it..

Can you change the past? No Can you change the present? No, it is as it is. Can you change the future? How can you if you can’t even change the present moment? All people can do in the present moment is be the observer of their experiences, the external and internal worlds.

@ 7.10 he is referring to CHuang Tze for example about the difference between nature's way and human way. @ 9.00 yes about no self, then no mind, no reward, nothingness etc, Yes I happen to record and post about 8-10 videos related to those today in my channel in which most of them are shorts. Then, after posting, I found this video (and another one by Fridman and Lee Cronin. So, it is definitely an interesting subject - especially related to the awakened state. (I have to go to sleep now. Will check from here tomorrow...good night)

I do find the topic of speaking aloud to yourself quite interesting. I think the reason for this is actually quite simple though. The brain has many "modules" dedicated to certain things. The connections between those "modules" can be weak and therefore the communication between them weak or takes a long time. By transforming an idea (a set of related neurological cascade events) into sounds, these "modules" can use an alternate route of communication.

Back when I was in school, I tried to explain to my Nietzsche professor that every word out of my mouth was emerging from some mystery space. She wasn't having that idea at all. Furthermore, our values, and their hierarchical organization, are what gives us the ability to select between alternatives. You chose one way/thing over another because doing so appeals to a superordinate value in the hierarchy. It is rule-following behavior and you are not the author of those values. Even the act of editing your own value hierarchy can only be done by the authority of superordinate values that already exist in your mind. Harris' argument against 'AI that can suffer' seems to be an argument against Life, i.e., that it would have been better to have never existed due to the fact that we suffer.

The way I explain it is that every decision I make is the one that I think will benefit me most in the moment. There is literally nothing I can do or think that I think will result in any negative outcome. People always bring up doing volunteer work or philanthropy, but at the end of the day, people do it to feel better about themselves. We are hardwired to do this stuff through evolution

Wow excellent deep dive. ty Lex for posting this "clip" ... look at the length hahhaaa... but best part were your final words.... such poetry! Loved by a nerd like me!!!❤❤❤

Lex is REALLY set on his theory that we're living in a computer simulation.

Free will is to become the conductor of destiny. When you realize your own loops, what most call habits, and then learn to start your own loops similar to starting a fire, and when that fire becomes sustained, when your loops gain their own momentum, the formation of habits under conscious direction, is what I would consider "free will" as far as I understand it at this point.

There are three tracks that can guide your decisions and actions: conscience, ego, and fear. Free will is exercised when we decide which track to follow. Conscience leads to meaning. Fear and ego lead to regret and despair. Choose wisely.

@42:00: So, I have to choose between Miami and Austin, before I finish going through my mental checklist on each I've already made up my mind, or, do I have to process some of the data first then the choice is made? How far in advance is the choice determined? That is an intriguing concept, and if true has to imply that your consciousness is constantly updating every input, cataloging, and revising those decisions along the way, on every topic...

I like Sam's right eyebrow.

We can’t magically summon motivation that isn’t there. We can’t know what we don’t know. We can’t act in the past or the future. We absorb stimuli, process, and respond. This makes people uncomfortable so they reject it 🤷‍♂️

Maybe I don’t completely understand this. And I started listening to Robert Sapolsky’s book Determined and had to stop. It was mind blowing and so dense and it required an immense amount of concentration to follow. Def not a book to listen to in the car. I tend to agree with determination and no real free will but I am so unclear how this intersects with some kind of divinity and meditation and Sam doesn’t make it clear either….at least to me. So if there is no free will, and we then decide to have more compassion for humanity isn’t that in itself a level of agency in life? Choosing a different perspective…it alludes to free will on some level. There are things like prayer, meditation, helping others etc that make my life experience very enjoyable, but am I even choosing that path or am I just along for the ride?

I think the double slit experiment explains this. Once observed you can say that’s the only way it could be but in reality it’s a cloud of possibilities and only after observing it can you say how it worked out. If you set up the universe exactly the same the double slit could be different and so could we on our decisions

I stew in feelings of regret day after day. Much of my life is a look back at stupid mistakes I made in my youth but, at the time, were things I believed I had to do. It would be nice to play those moments over, but I can't. These regrets are an algorithm running in my head that I constantly want to reprogram and play over again, an algorithm I can't stop. I'd like to stop the algorithm, but it's easier said than done. Maybe I'll take up meditation, or tell myself I really had no choice and forgive myself. (These are pains I inflicted upon myself, not others)

Seems like free will can only exist if we have something like a soul outside of the physical body that makes the final decisions when we act. That would also be consistent with the idea of a final judgment of the soul for the decisions made.

The self is experiencing certain signals in the brain and interpreting them as qualia. We can call it a 1-way-interface because the physical signal flows in one direction and is experienced. However, if the interface is a 2-way-interface then the self could act back on the physical brain (possibly very sublty). We would call it the free will - non-determinism because the non-material self could act back on physcial world. We know material world is not the original one because in materialism its not possible for something to begin from nothing therefore we need to postulate existence of non-material/non-physical realms in which the self exists. We know it must be a 2-way-interface because otherwise the physcial brain would not think thoughts about consciousness aka self. We would experience the brain but not the thoughts about the self.

This conversation articulates perfectly a practical scientifically backed perspective that makes the Christian ideal of forgiveness far easier to exercise. I had this same awakening 10 years or so ago and my life became so much less burdened with resentment. Who knows what mystery brought me to this perspective.

Sam is the kind of guy who can't wait to tell his kids there is no Santa

Lex Fridman "clips"

I've been fascinated by determinism 15 years or more. Free will has never made sense to me since hearing about it.. I also don't have any illusion of free will when I pay attention. It's very freeing for me too

How about this, although unpractical freewill exist. To me, having choices is the vehicle in which freewill exist, simply because if we have more than one choice we are free to make different choices on our own, but we may make the wrong one come to find out. For example, if I knew then what I know now I'd have made another choice, but I didn't and can't know then what I know now, so while I'm free and was free to make some choice, it wasn't practical for me to make the correct choice because of my lack of knowledge. Something like that:)

If free will is an illusion, how does one avoid slipping into nihilism. When one slips into nihilism and nothing matters than it is easily justifiable to conduct terrible things which lead to immense misery as he spoke of?

I understand what Sam means when he says not experiencing the illusion of free will. As I watched this clip, I felt myself just zoning out, while being so attentive to the words he was saying. It felt like I was not purposely trying to listen, I was just doing so without even having to think about listening

Time machine. The invention to settle the debate between free will and determinism is a time machine. Put one person back in time but have their memory of the future wiped out, then see if they keeps making the same choices or actions. If on the n-th repetition they made a different choice, that's an indication of free will (or broken memory wiping machine).

I'm listening to this conversation while fairly drunk, this makes me think this would be supremely interesting if we could hear these arguments from the point of view of someone influenced by various psychoactive drugs.

This is a topic that I am also interested in exploring. People like Mooji and Ramana Maharshi talk about it. We could have no free will as many people understand it, but maybe the will is free in the sense that there's no restrictions in possibilities that exist for the will, whatever causes it.

Depends on how you define free will. The only reasonable definition states that an agent has free will if its decisions are unpredictable. If you program a computer to make a decision for you based on read-outs from, say, a sample of radioactive material, the decision will not be deterministic - and it's not an approximation, as quantum effects that govern radioactive decay are probabilistic in nature (or even better - measuring spins of particles). Therefore, in principle, free will does exist. Whether it's utilized in every day life is another question - as the choices one makes lie on a spectrum of free will, and the amount of freedom depends on the knowledge that the observer has over the external and internal circumstances of the agent. But in principle, perfect free will can and does exist, and from this it follows that it has to manifest to some degree in every day life too.

Regret isn't thinking you could've acted differently, it's knowing you would have if you could go back. Believing free will doesn't exist is as silly as believing it does, so long as it's a belief, it will not truly change your experience. It will likely just thwart you. Not feeling a sense of free will is as much proof for it not existing, as feeling a sense of free will is for it existing.

Alan Watts said something similar, rather concisely… We go back-and-forth in labor over what we’re going to do for hours or days, and then, at the last moment, we just make a snap decision and go with it.

The demonstration of Sam's patience during this topic of "free will" is immaculate. This is something which I definitely need to work on.

Guys, I can feel the struggle to put such complexity in world and sometimes it is even hard to follow.. free will as being free to chose, but not much said about Free Will as will being free from influences that would direct your actions.

I am 60 and dyslexic, particularly with technology and a computer screen. Please can someone direct me to his videos? Everything he is saying makes complete sense to me but I am unable to put my thoughts into actual words in the way he can. I am sure I can learn more from him. Everything he is saying relates to addiction in so many ways

Reminds me of that bit in Ayn Rand refuting the mechanistic materialists-they use mind to deny mind.

After reading the book “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman I have to agree with Sam, here. The book asks you to do little experiments with your thinking and it convinced me. Highly recommend reading it.

This dude should be a lawyer because he could convince me my own dog hates me or i would be happier without thumbs. Dudes good.

Dr. Harris it would be interesting to share thoughts. Sometimes we are confused but cannot explain it but we can argue it away to make it disappear so confusion no longer lingers in our mind.

The question you have to ask is "free from what?". If the answer is "free from physics and causality", then you have to ask yourself if the question “do we have free will“ is a good one.

At min 53, when speaking about Elon and the high propensity of fires... I'm a hospice nurse so when my phone rings, the range of chaos and fires are wide. I love that grounding perspective of my life. Decreasing suffering.

We cannot control who we are attracted to. Say you fall in love with a significant other. You , at least I don't know the "free will" reason why I am attracted to her. Love is a prime example that proves that we are not in control of our free will. We just gravitate to that special person...

If there's no free will, does that mean that Im not in control of my actions? If Im not in control of my actions, how can I be held responsible for those actions?

The more conscious one becomes of what unconciously motivates one the more you become in charge or the more you free up your will.

As interesting as this conversation is, the argument Sam is making boils down to something pretty simple. Everything in reality is played out through cause and effect, and the concept of "free will" that most people think they have is something like, "I have control over the effect of my own causes" which is by definition impossible. In order for free will to be true, you have to define it in some other way.

This is fascinating and I think it has value. I think we're all here listening to this because we find it interesting. I want to know more about this. Personally I think that we are experience machines, and we get to experience. And we also get to experience the same thing in different ways which is pretty fascinating. I was watching a video today on Buddhism talking about the meaning of life and how there is no meaning of life. But if you are pressed to, you can say that the meaning of life is to give life meaning. What is the thing that feels the greatest and how do we give our life meaning? That is to live in the moment and have an experience of life, in the moment. Self expression. It's what we do. We experience and we express. In and out. Anything that centers Us in the moment, is healthy and expressive is good! That could be playing an instrument in a band or going for a walk on a beautiful day in a park or working out in the gym or painting a picture or dancing or just anything. So don't look for the meaning of life look to give your life meaning. Live in the moment and have an experience of life and don't defer that experience by worrying about the future of fretting over the past.

I am going to listen to this another couple of times to get my head around it properly. I love it. ❤ I still cannot understand how language influences thoughts and which comes first 😮

Aren’t we free to be consciously aware? Yes certain circumstances are out of our control like the next thought that arise, but we are capable to witness these thoughts and be consciously aware.

Hating someone, is like drinking a deadly poison, and then, expecting the other person to die.

You know you’re in for a heavy podcast when the clips are an hour. Getting my teeth in this one back at work today!

Free will is confined to our physical makeup for survival, and interacting with other people and our environment. Technical progress reduces our scope of free will… our lives are based on a risk and reward system. Rationality predetermines your choices.

“I’m finally going to experience free will” The fact you decide to look for it was willed in itself. What a word game.

9:55 is synonymous with Descartes’ “(I doubt therefore) I think therefore I am”

This is the best I’ve heard Sam articulate this point. Not sure if it’s free will, or automation that makes him think more lucidly about this subject.

So I didn't choose to have the thought of choosing to have the baconator for lunch, which I did choose so therefore I made the choice. It's like saying you didn't choose to be born. Ofcouse not. But saying there is no free will is saying absolutely everything is out of our human control and not by choice. Which is false. Imagine telling a Judge you didn't have free will.

A discovery can be made and summarised by saying “life simply happens”. On examining all thought, realising what mind and thought actually is, one comes to know that the notion of free will is even laughable. The best we can hope to come up with is that as life is happening on a moment to moment basis we may imagine that we are making choices, but once seen through it becomes impossible to go back to that illusion. Another way to look at it is as if life has already happened and we are just living through it with our somewhat limited intellect having the impression that we are somehow in charge of what’s happening. So what’s the point of such realisations ? Freedom from psychological fear, that’s all.