If you reject materialism, then the discussion is at a stalemate. If you believe that there is a metaphysical soul or ego that allows for free will, then no argument can be made that satisfies any condition for that not to be the case. It can just be argued that metaphysical reasons supersede all natural explanations for any cause, or explain supposedly uncaused causes. I would (loosely) quote Sabine Hossenfelder here when arguing against Bertrand Russell. Mathematics is not reality, it merely describes it with a language. Even if cause and effect is not used in mathematical formulae, that does not mean cause and effect that we see in our lives does not exist, that just describes a lack of syntax for it in mathematics. And although I am untrained in this field I would further suggest that if cause and effect relations can be understood causally or retrocausally, then that can be evidence for Einstein's 'block universe' theory in which the future has already happened, which would describe predetermined fate rather than free will. We can already prove that mental disorders that effect decision making can be described with biological processes. I argue that if that is the case then all decision making, impaired by mental illness or not, can be understood biologically. Even if you drill down into supposedly uncaused decisions that are 'too small' to have causes. If you cannot sufficiently explain why you choose one thing over another thing that does not mean that the explanation is free will. If anything that suggests your inability to explain your own decision making through a lack of evidence that is unavailable to consciousness but is available to the brain making the decisions.

the thing i find always fascinating about these discussions, as philisoptically interesting as they are, is that the answer, either way, changes nothing whatsoever, you can't actually "do" anything with the answer, at least for the most of humans who are more concerned with how they will be able to get their childice fed tomorrow i personally believe there is no such thing as "free will", (i am a logician by trade), but i also believe that the illusion that it does exist is absolutely crucial to society being able to persist in a cohesive state. imagine what would happen if every human suddenly, all at once, understood there is actually nothing they can do to affect how their life proceeds... i am glad this non-possibility will forever remain firmly in the realm of "thought experiment" mental masturbation is indeed very enjoyable staring too long into the abyss, however.... somewhat less?

Very good video man. There’s essentially no representation of libertarian free will on KZfaq.

He was wrong in the first minute. When you flip a coin, the conditions are what determine heads or tails. The coin could not do otherwise given the conditions , this is false.

What's wrong with saying that just because it is true doesn't mean that it had to be true? Isn't it begging the question to assume that because something is true it had to be true?

Oh my... you only asked questions and undermined the foundations of our reality, but offered no answers to save us from the vanishing ground.

Love your videos. As a physicist and educator, I would like to remind readers that the “laws of physics” are relatively simple descriptions or models of reality created to help explain what usually happens in our observable universe. Indeed these laws clearly continue to change or evolve over time as scientists try to further explain any anomalies (miracles!?).

He fell for the same trap as Marx by critiquing everything to oblivion.

To me this video is very hard to understand. I did not understand any of your counter arguments except for maybe the first one, which I think is still questionable. Consider reaching out to Alex to discuss this topic more?

Your fisiology state can change your choices and behaviors. You can be manipulated to do something and think that you did because you wanted. You can't choose an option that is not available or that you don't know it exist (its beyond your knowledge). Your restricted by laws (nature) you can't choose to "fly" by yourself or teleport, and all your choices are rooted on primitive insticts.

Intellect and deliberation doesn't solve the problem, because you don't freely decide what reason convinces you.

Reality is as simple or as complex as you want to make it. Facts are just opinions that most people agree with. Nothing can be in the mind.

13.42 in and I haven't learned a thing about Wittgenstein's philosophy. I'm outta here

Isn't "want" just another name for "will"? Seems silly to impose an arbitrary criterion on will that it has to be secondary to some sort of "deeper will". Isn't that just moving the goal posts?

Also the way you described Quine’s deflationary and theory-dependent stance towards existence talk sounds a lot like Carnap with his principle of toleration - in mathematics for example we can speak Platonistically or Intuitionistically and there is no further fact as to who is right. Am I right that this is essentially the same view?

With some more fundamental disagreements with your stance sir , but you clearly show deeper knowledge of both the depth and width of this discussion , unlike the other side, unfortunately . From raymond tallis to dan dennet to sapolsky just as a relatively present sample of this topic, the other side to yours seem more like a fad. Great job . Wish you the best Edit : a question concerning the want / desire / duty , what do u think the extent of effects of the philosophy of language side to this (searle austin etc)? Thank you

I was halfway into this video when Schrodinger's cat jumped into my lap. Or came to mind, same difference. I would argue that the truth of any future claim is in a state of _indeterminacy_ until probabilities collapse sufficiently to resolve the truth claim. The cat is neither alive nor dead until you open the box. Aristotle was on the right track.

Reality as I perceive it seems more “real” to me than the theoretical ideas of objects out there with my perceiving creating properties. It’s not an illusion - what I sense is real, the forms by the fire are imaginary.

Shape and location are also subjective/not real. Shape is your brain putting an arbitrary border around the toy car. There is more matter outside of the car shape. Location is similarly only meaningful with respect to an observer.

He also slips between consciousness as awareness and as mention/cognition/rational thought.

👨🏼‍🍳's 😗🤌🏻

In fiction, the case for fatalism is often made through prophesizing an event and then showing that in every different scenario that leads upto it, it always finds a way to happen, so nothing can be done to prevent it. For example, if we could go back in time and change things, it still wouldn’t help if I had a life jacket because I would still find a way to drown. Perhaps someone would drown me then, so next time I’d travel alone and get caught in a storm, get carried away so far with no hopes of returning that I’d just let go of the life jacket and let myself drown. Yada yada yada… So, each time I try to prevent the causes in order to prevent the resulting event, there appears new causes to make it happen. Can we really determine that simple truths are not causally related to events? Of course, you won’t suddenly find yourself drowning when you were in a desert with no water resource in sight just a minute go simply because a simple truth says you will drown, but it can cause you not to go to the desert in the first place or give you a reason to leave the desert anyways. Can’t simple truths be causally related to events, albeit indirectly? Also, how can we even identifying a certain event as a simple truth without doing the same for all the other events that lead up to this ultimate event? If the occasion of me drowning is a simple truth, then should be the fact that I don’t bring a life jacket. Why is it that the events that lead up to me drowning are not certain but the case of me drowning is? I don’t know if these are valid arguments though since we can never be aware of these truths and thus, find ways to prevent it. Still, determinism makes more sense to me than fatalism. Another thing, doesn’t Aristotle’s argument align with the Copenhagen interpretation? Not that the interpretation is certainly true, just checking my understanding of both

Hi, Nathan, somewhat tangential, but I was wondering if you thought that it’s possible to argue for idealism from epistemic theories of truth. Of course, such theories will generally only say that truth is always knowable, but since that seems to entail that truth is always known, we could bite the bullet on that implication and just say that all truths are known because they are all mental entities. This conclusion doesn’t follow as things stand, since one could accommodate the claim that all truths are known by positing God, while also insisting that facts about the universe are not in God’s mind, but I wonder if there isn’t something there.

Critique something worth your time. Amaranthine: how to create a regenerative civilization using artificial intelligence

Excellent analysis and critique. Surely Kastrup would reframe his arguments if confronted by these observations, perhaps in a way which would refine and clarify his own ideas. I doubt he “thinks he’s wrong”, yet I can’t help but agree with your assessment.

Nathan, I wrote several comments but I deleted them because I thought they were inadequate. I have a simple question that can lead to very long answer: How do you respond to Robert Sapolsky's Determined?

thanks for this its hard to get all this historical detail without the help of an expert or huge amount of research

😂 this guy completely misrepresents both of Katrina arguments. He doesn’t understand idealism and also doesn’t understand that Bernardo’s analogies are not literal. They are just a way to explain ideas that the human language cannot directly describe. Kastrup is a dbl PHD, computer science and philosophy, worked at the CERN Laboratories large Hadron collider, worked in the fields of consciousness and AI and ran a large high tech firm that designed and produced technology used in pretty much every cell phone in the planet. I think this guy suffers from science envy.

Very good points. I only want to point out that because we all collectively, even Mr O'Connor, experience ourselves as having free will and making decisions that we feel we could have made differently in many cases, then if he is asserting that this is not true and we are existing in a delusion where reality is actually the counterfactual then the entire burden of proof is on him. Just like we all experience a clear sky as being blue, if someone comes along and says that color isn't blue at all it's red, then they entire burden of proof is on them to prove that the entirety of humanity is wrong in what they are all experiencing subjectively. Also from the perspective of someone that has studied and worked in science I dislike when people try to use a scientific theory to prove other than what it was intended for. A theory of motion is an approximation that is based on observation and useful to the extent that we can fairly closely predict the path an object will traverse if we know starting conditions. Theories and laws are MODELS that are either useful or not useful. They are not right or wrong, true or false. That's scientism at its worst. So saying that we can fairly accurately predict the movement of an object through space under perfect conditions therefore the entire universe is deterministic is complete and utter nonsense. Trying to decipher the ultimate nature of the universe from physical laws is not possible and not the purpose they are intended for anyway. Newton's Law of Gravity is wrong, incomplete. We know this because we needed Relativity to solve some serious questions about gravity. Yet it's very useful in many situations. It does NOT say anything at all about the deeper metaphysics of existence. It says what it says about universal gravitation and that's all. And it's wrong to boot. Besides, if free will doesn't exist because the universe is deterministic, that entire premise was destroyed when quantum mechanics came along. And no, I don't have to prove agency. Disproving their premise is enough.

For the next week or so, look for happy signs. You're still people lol. Keep yourselves balanced

decisions are part of that. nothing you do can change anything, but if you could stop deciding, that would itself be changing everything. and we just don't know the future, so the fact that there is one of it, makes no real difference if we don't know it.

I feel like Kastrup is two theorists fused together, I agree with half of him, his anti-realist evolution angle, but his more Jungian, naive side just doesn't mesh with the rest of it. Though I think your points concerning metaconsciousness are bad, you need to reassess your assumptions on the nature of consciousness.

Alex O'Conor is triggered and delusional

My own issue with Bernardo’s vision of idealism is as follows: if consciousness is the foundation of ultimate reality, I cannot buy into that idea of that form of consciousness being less sophisticated than that of a human being. I don’t believe that higher ideals such as morality, musical harmony, mathematical proofs and love are emergent, man-made inventions. I believe that they are fragmented reflections of an underlying, objective reality. Is Kastrup’s refusal to acknowledge this due to the fact that it resembles a more traditionally theistic view? I’m not sure. But I will never be able to reconcile the idea that bland, person-less consciousness is at the heart of ultimate reality, and the precise sophistication of physics, math, and the humanities are evolutionary accidents. If we as humans are the way that consciousness knows itself, there must be some forward thinking capacity built into that primordial consciousness. If that is true, then the bland, person-less consciousness that Kastrup identifies with idealism is not, in fact, bland, or person-less.

So, if the claim "You will drown" is eternally true, and such truth depends on the event of you drowning, doesn't it follow that you are eternally drowning? What am I missing?

yeah, cos believing what the majority believes is not a fallacy at all...

you are not very smart

Russell's theory of descriptions is probably what you expect from a mathematician/ philosopher. It's relevant to philosophical discussion particularly I would suspect in the language of religion and ethics. In everyday speech logical analysis of sentences is not necessary and in fact would make communication clumsy if not impossible. In Russell's theory a proposition may have meaning but be senseless. In most ordinary coinversation a sentence has to be meaningful and make sense. So Frege was right as far as that goes but Russell knew that ordinary language use had made many philosophical discussions, if not trivial, then pointless. However, it was the kind of theory that made some of his opponents criticise him as an 'ivory tower philosopher.'

This is a reminder how convoluted and tortuous Western philosophy is. The case for idealism is relatively simple: what we experience, empirically, is "mind." No, not "your mind" per se, or any particular mind, but just Mind. Senses and sensations are also just "mind." What you think is tangible is mind. What you think is hard and soft are just mind. Space and time are just mind. Empirically, this is it. If you think there's more, you've "grafted" something onto your pure experience informed by received knowledge. But if you doubt everything, question everything, assume nothing, and deconstruct the fabric of your ontological constructs radically, you come to one undeniable conclusion: Only Mind. And this is also, coincidentally, the conclusion of the spiritual masters, sages and great teachers from time immemorial. But don't take their word for it, experience it yourself. Sit down, stop thinking and spinning your thoughts, and just experience it. Sense reality as it is. Unfiltered. Uncontaminated. Unadulterated. Without commentary and prejudice. Purely. And if you go deeper, you may also realize that there's no mind at all.

40:21 This objection makes me think of Dr. Josh Rasmussen’s Counting Argument against Materialism. If I’m not mistaken, Dr. van Inwagen is a physicalist/materialist… so that seems to be quite an interesting parallel.

Another banger of a video sir!! Can't wait to expand my knowledge!

Trurh ultimately depends on probability because fate depends on probability. We simply can't say something will happen only that it probably will or will not happen.

bivalence is useful only in some formal systems, and since reality is not a formal system only a philosopher could arrive at your conclusion

I'm enjoying the video! But isn't the consideration of the reasons for a choice, like choosing Spain's beaches and architecture over Italy's food and historic sites, going to come down to which of those features you desire to have on holiday, which again comes down to a thing about ourselves that we can't control? We just kinda reflect on what we think it will be like to experience them and then notice which one appeals to us

The most obvious rebuttal to Predeterminism is that it takes a mind to determine something... Therefore, the Atheist/Materialist axiomatically contradicts him or herself by just proposing a determination... They are, at least, promoting Subjective Idealism by the proposition itself... If it has been determined that the universe begin and end... there has been a content filled determination made & matter itself cannot conceptualize nor make decisions based on conceptions... That is, neither the vacuum of space nor the particles within it/that it is made of... are able to conceptualize... nor, therefore, make decisions/determinations. So, again, axiomatically... by Reason & Science... Predeterminism is inherently a contradiction... and, then, isn't logically consistent. It is idiotic to claim a determination without the entailment of there being a thing that determines. " No subject no object, " OBVIOUSLY!

Nice video! Saying we cannot ever say something true about the future unless present states determine it to be so might sound strange, but even stranger does it sound to think a proposition can be true without ANYTHING WHATSOEVER in the world *making* it true. If you reject Aristotle's solution for this reason, then you not only give up truthmaker theory, but even the "truth supervenes upon being" thesis... which is endorsed even by most who reject truthmaker theory. It strikes me as an incredibly radical proposal! love your channel btw.

Edit: I consider causation more as a transfer/transformation of energy from one form or event into another. Gravity causes the fall of a Apple because gravitational energy is transformed into kinetic energy. Edit: Me throwing a object transfers kinetic energy from my hand to the object. Edit: The causal chain then is established by having the causal factor as the origin of a part of the effects energy. Or alternatively the causes energy as the origin of the release of additional energy

The Chess example is a good one but I agree with the comments that say that it doesn't get you there. And for me it's very intuitive that, if somehow we could snapshot the Universe right before the game starts, and after the game we reset to the snapshot moment, the game would play out exactly the same. You would always "choose" to move the knight instead of the bishop, no matter how many times we ran the experiment. And this is because all of our "decisions" are made by everything we've lived so far. We are a very complex state machine. Good video nonetheless. I would love to see a discussion with Alex about this topic, although we may quickly reach a point of "agree to disagree".

It is another great video and argument. I love this channel. With all of the nonsense out there it is great that there is some people like yourself and a few others who can actually speak for truth and logic. Great stuff. We need more people like you in this world.

If we assume that a statement about the future can be true but also accept that we can change it with our actions, then that statement is only true depending on our actions in the future. But if we were to call statements that depend on our actions in the future "true", then many contradictory statements would also be true. For example, the statements "you will get married next year" and "you will not get married next year", despite being contradictory, would equally be true, since both are true depending on what you do in the future.