I've been grieving over a recent decision. This video has helped.

Holy _shit,_ what an articulate, well-said, and well-edited video that summarized my own thoughts better than I ever have on my own. This is genius. As another commenter said: _instant subscribe._

Thank you for helping to understand the "Fre Will"😊😊😊

Thanks for the video. In the end, it essentially shows the obvious contradictions and total failure of the reasoning behind the claim that free will ultimately does not exist. I wonder why this more or less absurd idea of the absence of free will persists in philosophy. Regardless of the degree to which the environment determines individual behaviour and decisions, there is always a choice. The claim that the unconscious determines decisions and therefore cancels out responsibility is absurd. Even in the context of religious social pressure, there have always been sinners by choice. They know that a certain action is wrong, but they find a way to justify it.

My first real philosophical crisis was after reading Spinoza and doubting free will. I still think there is a good chance free will doesn't exist, but it's not totally certain

Free will seems to be an evolution of our culture and religion to teach us to control the physical aspects of our life and thus have the cognitive free will to decide with the morality we have chosen

Your videos stir within my unconscious a fantasy to suffer in new ways that I cannot even imagine, so that I can be a mirror in which others can project their own primordial fears and inspire new horrors to amuse themselves with the way H.P. Lovecraft did.

Really good content my friend

What makes this so difficult, I think, is that we view our ego, our persona and ourself as different entities than our physical mind. We think therefore we are is true, because all we are is "that what thinks". Without "that what thinks" there could never be the perception of the ego. Through its own complexity the mind tricks us into being (or having) something more than merely itself. In my opinion "the artifact of free will" is also a result of this. If we separate what "we" do from what the unconscious causes it to do there will always be a possibility of accountability and considering things as choice. The "I" becomes responsible for what it is forced to do. Of course the church manipulated this into a power structure. However, they might always argue that the human is more than its physical mind and that a metaphysical entity (such as a soul) could play the role of the observer and judge of what the physical mind causes the physical body to do. This then being almost similar to a super-ego, ego, id structure as described by Freud. This conflict between the predetermined devine will and conscience (knowledge of good and evil, free will etc.) can be found all over religious history. I think it may even explain many of the divisions and conflicts between religious cultures.

Instant subscribe

Nice

I'd like to know more about choices without consciousness. At first it seems a bit oxymoronic since our choices are based on what we will or desire. So how does that work, how to conceive of choices without free will?

"In order to experience full pagan enjoyment one needs to go through the christian experience" Zizek. What he means here is that the assumption of a free regulatory agent (what we call I) independent from the Big Other (the guarantee of meaning) that is partly responsible for ones fate is necessary for the experience of jouissance. So one could say what you are doing here is just the primitive desire of resolving all tensions or what i would argue is that because one cannot overcome the axiom of being free in ones experience independent of the truth of the axiom, when you argue about the abolition of the idea of free will you directly put yourself in a higher position than the others because you can not assume yourself in your life as an non free at least to an extent. And if hypothetically we abolished the belief of free will we would abolish desire as such. Lastly you could interpret greek myth that we are all playthings of the Gods as just a defense mechanism to the unknown known that we are responsible for our fates. In a sense the symbolic was and as it seems still is to caught up in the desires of the ego-ideal.

What's the source of the zen story in part one?

I died to self was born again a living sacrifice for The Kingdom of God with free will to do so!

Great video, but i have a question. If our choice is not a result of free will, if we cannot control the mechanism in our brain that make the choice for us, then when we judge someone in the justice system, what exactly are the so-called "guilty" party being judged for? What is this party being punished for?

Nobody Is born free sadly😢😢

Dude, the rehabilitation of the criminal is possible only in the presence of free will, and only by accepting the statement that the criminal can be a non-criminal if he wishes.

Underrated channel. what a shame

Since you mention Lacan and Freud every other sentence you should know that Free Will or Desire is central to humans and emerges with the divided subject. You cannot "combine" Lacan/Freud with other philosophies because psychoanalysis is the clinic of discourses and is not a weltanschauung (a vision of the world) but quite the opposite.

All is good except the ending, why does always have to be some sort of happy ending compelling to do good? The benefit I see is the reduction of stress as in the end you know you are just a puppet but somehow being compelled to be "good" or "evil" its redundant.

Does animals also feel like they have free will ?! Do they regret decisions ?

He was right...I give up

The thing is, is that Nietzsche also rejects Sam Harris and his ilk, who believe in Determinism/Pre-Determinism. Nietzsche rejects "Free Will" but only the idea that we as single things are 'Causa Sui'. Nietzsche also rejects determinism/Pre-Determinism as mechanistic nonsense and the absurd I deas that there is some sort of teleology or roadmap of Nature that is set in motion at a certain time or that an 'Effect' obeys it's 'Cause'. The nonsense that me brushing my teeth 10 years ago 'causes' me to be here right now as if all prior events were obeying it or set in motion like clockwork. Like some people thing the 'big bang' set things in motion like a clock and everything follows as if on rails. This is just mechanical doltishness. Nietzsche believes that all exists are simply *Strong Wills* and *Weak Wills* (We could perhaps enlighten this further and include that everything simply is Strong Wills and Weak Wills, Strong Drives and Weak Drives, Strong Forces and Weak Forces). This goes for the *Organic* and *Inorganic* the same. Just of varying degrees and intensities. With the whole uniting pathos being Will to Power. To absorb, to command, to conquer, to become master, to consume, to overpower, to exploit, to gain ascendancy, to take that which is outside in to oneself, to direct to ones goals etc. The pertinent quote from Nietzsche is here - The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far, it is a sort of rape and perversion of logic; but the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for "freedom of the will" in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one's actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Münchhausen's audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness. Suppose someone were thus to see through the boorish simplicity of this celebrated concept of "free will" and put it out of his head altogether, l beg of him to carry his "enlightenment" a step further, and so put out of his head the contrary of this monstrous conception of "free will": I mean "unfree will," which amounts to a misuse of cause and effect. One should not wrongly reify "cause" and "effect" as the natural scientists do (and whoever, like them, now "naturalizes" in his thinking), according to the prevailing mechanical doltishness which makes the cause press and push until it "effects" its end; one should use "cause" and "effect" only as pure concepts, that is to say, as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and communication - not for explanation. In the "in itself" there is nothing of "causal connections," of "necessity," or of "psychological non-freedom"; there the effect does not follow the cause, there is no rule of "law." It is we alone who have devised cause, sequence, for-eachother, relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose; and when we project and mix this symbol world into things as if it existed "in itself," we act once more as we have always acted - mythologically. **The "unfree will" is mythology; in real life it is only a matter of strong and weak wills.** It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in himself when a thinker senses in every "causal connection" and "psychological necessity" something of constraint, need, compulsion to obey, pressure, and unfreedom; it is suspicious to have such feelings - that person betrays himself. And in general, if I have observed correctly, the "unfreedom of the will" is regarded as a problem from two entirely opposite standpoints, but always in a profoundly personal manner: some will not give up their "responsibility," their belief in themselves, the personal right to their merits at any price (the vain races belong to this class). Others, on the contrary, do not wish to be answerable for anything, or blamed for anything, and owing to an inward self-contempt, seek to lay the blame for them selves somewhere else. The latter, when they write books, are in the habit today of taking the side of criminals; a sort of socialist pity is their most attractive disguise. And as a matter of fact, the fatalism of the weak-willed embellishes itself surprisingly when it can pose as "la religion de la souffrance humaine"; that is its "good taste." Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil, 21.

I am enjoying your videos, but Brahman is a Vedic (Hindu) concept and Buddhism is defined precisely by rejecting it in favour of Anatman (no self). Also the text you quote is from the Upanishads and is not Buddhist.

I am reading Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, the chapter about free will (hence how I ended up here). He is talking about a kind of freedom though, but I don't understand what he means. He's writing: 'As for him [Kant] the complete empirical reality of the world of experience coexists with its transcendental freedom. For the empirical character, like the whole man, is a mere appearance as an object of experience - time, space, and causality - and subject to their laws. On the other hand, the condition and the basis of this whole appearance - which as a thing-in-itself is independent of these forms and therefore is not subject to time distinctions but is persistent and unchangeable - is his intelligible character, i.e., his will as thing-in-itself. It is to the will in this capacity that freedom [...] properly belongs. This freedom, however, is transcendental, i.e.., it does not occur in appearance. It is present only insofar as we abstract from the appearance and from all its forms in order to reach that which, since it is outside of all time, must be thought of as the inner being of man-in-himself. By virtue of this freedom all acts of man are of his own making.' I understand the empirical reality and appearance as object of experience, which has no freedom/free will. But what is this transcendental freedom?

What's actually having the experience that you call "my life" is God/The Absolute. Infinite Mind is pulling your strings, so to speak. You're a puppet with a brain. When the hand moves you think "I did that", well, yes and no. You could say the brain made the hand move, but who made the brain move? The river flows, the tree grows, the cow moos, the hand moves, it's all just happening on its own. “Events happen, deeds are done, but there is no individual doer thereof.” There's no I, there's just the memory of an "I/me" which then presupposes the existence of a future "I". The "I" is an illusion. There is no I. You're a verb with a name. PS: none of what I just said is true.

love your videos, but this one is a bit poor. Harrisi's spiel is really superfluous and entirely dependent on temporality and individualism. In the ending you should at least mention Sartrian freedom since it is basically a more coherent version of your conclusion. The critique of christianity is really problematic since one of the pioneers of free will was Augustin of Hippo and his conceptualisation of it was the cornerstone of christian theology.

Im in the Matrix

The flesh lusts against the spirit and the spirit lusts against the flesh. Only my spirit can talk to Spirit.

Consequentally we have to be compassionate with the many people believing in and upholding the illusion of free will, since they don't have free will either :) More generally, if you are looking into the human condition from all perspectives: physics, quantum mechanics, astronomy, biology, psychology, sociology, philosophy, etc... we can only come to the conclusion that at any moment in time we are what we are, and what is simply... is. That doesn't mean we should just accept everything - such as war or torture -, but it invites us to look at humanity with compassion and the realization that it will take time for enough cause and effect to change what is. If humanity won't destroy itself I do believe that over the course of the next thousands (or maybe ten thousands) of years - we eventually will become more compassionate and peaceful. Since from an evolutionary perspective we just came out of our caves and created our 'modern' societies with still a caveman mentality. Eventually our genes will catch up. Pfiew, longer post than I intended :D

I am the otter of my own fat. At least I thought I was.

You already lost credit with me with Allen Watts.

Fear and Greed are the two primary emotions. All others are derived from them.

I use to think Sam Harris was smart but I realized he is not after many years of contemplating free will and determinism. “Soft determinism” is true. If hard determinism is true then no experimental evidence could be trusted nor could our senses. If hard determinism is true then all debates are rendered useless. One cannot contemplate in a hard deterministic universe but only the illusion of contemplation. If the contemplation is an illusion then the results of the contemplation could never be seen as wise or correct. That would mean the person holding a belief of hard determinism admits they have lost a debate in advance. Obviously libertarian free will is wrong because minds are interacting with a world and other minds and they respond in an ordered way. If hard determinism was true crimes could never be said to be crimes. A person could always claim they couldn’t have done otherwise. Even if they were locked up to keep the public safe any feelings of guilt or wrong doing could never said to be objectively wrong. In fact if hard determinism was true thinking, logic, morality, truth, and intelligence could never be shown to be objectively true but only subjectivity true. Since objectively is necessary for truth nothing could ever be said to be true. In this video I assume hard determinism is being argued for and therefore the video