https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=JpMpEU9_wv4
Welcome everyone to another voices with Verveki. I’m, you can tell I’m already so happy. I’m here again with the amazing Rick Rapetti. And we’ve had, like Rick and I’ve had so many great discussions and dialogue even into DL logos already. And, you know, and we’re also meeting off camera working on projects together. It’s, Rick, it’s always such a pleasure to have you here. So welcome. Thank you. It’s not just a pleasure. I always feel honored to be a part of all the work that you’re doing, John. Well, thank you, Rick. So I asked Rick here. Well, you know, he’s you’ve seen a lot on the philosophy of meditation, transformative experience, mystical experience, psychedelic. Rick has opened up about this both theoretically and existentially, even personally. And again, I want to thank him for his courage around that. And I know that’s been very helpful to people. But there’s another area of Rick’s work that is related to all of this. And hopefully we’ll get that relation into the discussion that I’d like to foreground a little bit more. Now, the traditional way that you get this in the first year when you open your textbook would be, here’s the big problems in philosophy, the existence of God. And then there’s another one called free will and determinism. And I have to say that sort of the I’ve generally not found that that area very interesting, probably matters of personal taste or how it’s brought up. But I found what Rick has had to say about it very interesting and very enlightening because of he. I don’t want to trespass on Rick’s modesty. But for me, he’s doing a couple of really cool game changing moves that take it out of the tired kind of argumentation. And I don’t want to be insulting to analytic philosophy, but Rick, it’s doing something, a couple of moves around this. And so what I want to talk about with Rick is I want to talk about agency and aspiration and what’s at stake. And so we’ll put a link to a more sort of technically precise paper that Rick has written. But we want to do something together here that’s much more exploratory, much more sort of trying to open up the way this has been discussed. So what I want to do is point out maybe a good starting point. And Rick and I both agree we’re not going to be sort of stuck to the particular paper. But there was a move made in the I want to talk about some of the moves in the paper because they go way beyond the specific argument of the paper. One of them, which I thought was really powerful. And I’m not going to ask Rick to reproduce that argument. You can read the paper. You’re going to have to trust that it’s a validly constructed argument. Which is this move where you show that sort of some of the standard arguments against free will. You know, the manipulation argument, etc, etc. Right. The standard arguments and the structures, the impossibility argument that you can make an exactly symmetrical argument for free will on their behalf. And the two arguments are logically symmetrical and you get something like a Kantian antinomy, which is logic takes you to… Here’s a valid argument, right, from these premises, completely denying the possibility of free will. And then here’s one taking the same premises and just working off a different set of entailments. And here’s an argument for the possibility of free will. And I thought that was, for me, it articulated and foregrounded something that I’ve always sensed about this, which is that there were trade-off relationships in these arguments that were not being properly acknowledged. So I’ve said a lot, Rick. I’ll shut up so that you can now at least what’s your first sort of response to that initial probative question. Well, I’m not sure what you’re asking, except maybe for me to speak to that, the way in which those two sets of arguments… I can summarize them pretty easily. All right. So before I even do, maybe a good way to frame them is just to point out that these are questions of compatibility. Yes. Yes. So they are logical arguments. They are questions about whether or not free will is logically compatible or incompatible with the nature of causation, construed as deterministic or as indeterministic in general, or some abstractions on that, like, you know, maybe even the just speaking about the nature, the causal nature of reality, regardless of what its content is. Right. So the question is whether or not free will, whatever that is, that’s another big question, whether or not it’s logically compatible. Right. So there’s one argument, like you said, that says that they’re incompatible. And the other one, so therefore, you know, if the world is caused in either deterministically or indeterministically or some combination of both or neither, either way or any which way, you can’t have free will. And then because they’re logically incompatible, if one is true, the other has to be false. And then the other one says, no, take those same entailments in that argument, flip them. It’s a kind of inversion of the entailments. And then they are compatible. They’re logically compatible. So you’ve got two sets of good arguments. One that says they’re logically incompatible. The other one says, no, no, free will is possible with those those causal premises. And so they’re kind of equal. Or you said like a Kantian antinomy. I didn’t use that terminology in the paper, but it was implied. You know, anybody who’s familiar with that, you know, that problematic will see that there. I’ll say a little bit more just for so people don’t have to go read the paper. So the one argument which I call the optimist dilemma, I’ll call anybody who believes in free will an optimist and anybody who rejects free will a pessimist. I don’t mean to be emotional about it. It’s just not a favorable attitude toward it or an unfavorable attitude. Some some might call you a there are other terms that you could use, but I’ll just stick with those. The optimist faces a dilemma. OK, and the dilemma goes like this. Premise one, either determinism is true or false. So either determinism or indeterminism. Right. If determinism is premise two, if determinism is true, then. The causes of your actions predate your existence and they are necessitated by laws of nature and initial conditions of the universe. And therefore, your choice was completely necessitated before you ever even came into existence. Therefore, it wasn’t up to you. Therefore, you don’t have free will. Right. Amplifying it. That’s the second premise. And spelling it out a little bit. The third premise says if indeterminism is true. Then your choices are completely random. You can’t control the outcome of a random process. Therefore, it wasn’t up to you. Therefore, you have no free will. Conclusion, whether determinism or indeterminism is true, free will is impossible. You don’t have free will. That’s the dilemma that the believer in free will is presented with by the skeptics who reject free will. And there’s two camps of those, the hard determinists. They were in premise two. If determinism is true, you can’t have free will. Or hard indeterminists. That’s in premise three. If indeterminism is true, it’s all random. It’s not up to you. It’s not free will. Right. So when you unite both hard determinists and hard indeterminists, this is just terminology. You get what’s called hard incompatibilism. Free will is incompatible with both determinism and indeterminism. Now, for a long time in Western philosophy, determinism was the big thing ever since the scientific revolution. But after quantum stuff came around, the people who were already committed to denying free will said, well, quantum stuff isn’t going to help you either because of randomness. And so I don’t know if that’s a kind of bias that they were already committed, this kind of confirmation. Oh, there’s a way around free will. No. I don’t know. I don’t want to accuse people of motives. But although there’s a lot of that in the free will literature, usually it goes the other way. The people who believe that free will is compatible with causation are called compatibilists. And the incompatibilists usually accuse the compatibilists. Kant called it a Richard Sutterfuge, I think. Or was it Nietzsche? A bunch of big shot philosophers have just rejected compatibilism as if it was some kind of fraud. OK, so that’s all in the background, these kinds of debates. You know, you asked me before we started the recording to say eventually why it matters to me. We’ll get to that later. Yeah. All right. So that’s the optimist dilemma. If you believe in free will, you face that problem. And then there are variations on premise two, what you mentioned earlier, the manipulation argument and others. There are variations on premise two and three. I don’t have to go into them for now. I know. But if it comes up later, I will. So I flip that argument. Beautifully, by the way. Thank you. And say, well, you know, you deniers of free will, the pessimists, you face an equal and opposite dilemma. And the first premise is the same. Either determinism is true or false or determinism or indeterminism. Even if, by the way, I should mention, even if the world is largely deterministic, if there’s some indeterminism bubbling up from the quantum level, that’ll mess up all the deterministic predictions and everything else. Right. So how you interpret if determinism is false, determinism could be true of everything at the macro level. You know, the level of medium sized dry goods, as some philosophers try to the world that we live in for the most part, doesn’t matter. All right. We’ll talk about that more later. All right. So the first premise is the same second and third premises in the pessimist dilemma. Flip the entailments from the second and third premises in the first document. So it says, well, if determinism is true, then your choices are not random. Yes. If randomness means you can’t control it, then non-randomness means you can control it. And therefore you could have free will. That’s the second premise. And then the third premise says if indeterminism is true, then since determinism implies there are never alternatives, only one history, then there are alternatives. In which case you could have done otherwise, in which case on that interpretation of free will, the ability to do other than what you did, you could have free will. Therefore, conclusion is the negation of the conclusion in the first argument. Either way, free will is possible. Not necessary, not true, but possible. The first one says impossible. So this the second argument says possible. So it’s a really good homologous kind of thing. I love that argument. So I’m glad you appreciate it. It’s a beautiful argument. It’s a beautiful argument. And it shows that a proposition has multiple different contrast classes that are implicit in the background. And we take a proposition to be fully speaking everything that it might be ruling out. And of course, it’s not. It can’t possibly. Very reductive. Yeah. The conditions are, to quote you, their implicatures or their implicational structures are combinatorially explosive. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Because they’re holistically interconnected with the meaning of every part of the proposition and the negation of everything that it excludes. And every other like the joke that you make about the most complex thing in the universe being the brain. Well, plus one. Right. But plus everything else. That’s true propositions. And, you know, it’s a mathematically oriented mind. This propositional mode of knowledge, which is just one of the four Ps. Right. There’s a tendency among analytic philosophers to ignore a lot of that other stuff. Right. And just treat things on this most reductive, simplistic, what’s explicitly stated in the argument. But that also gives you tunnel vision. And then you don’t see like, oh, somebody gets hit with that optimist dilemma. And they think free will is impossible. Right. Because they’re just not thinking of the implications. Yeah. You know. Yeah. No. You know. Yeah. The same kind of reasoning slightly flipped, which is implied by the reasoning that gets you from premise one to two to three to four in the first argument. Those same kinds of implicatures get you to the opposite conclusion. So then what I say in the paper is, okay, so it’s a stalemate. Yes. And then the question is, which one is more credible? Are there any extra logical reasons for thinking, you know, any of them, either argument is better or any of the premises in them are better? Exactly. And that was so that combination of moves I found really elegant and insightful. It’s like, right. It reminded me of John Hicks move when he in the interpretation of religion, when he was saying, look, we’ve had all these arguments for the existence of God and all these arguments for the against and we haven’t been able to bring about a definitive conclusion. What we should conclude is a meta argument, which is the universe provides spiritually ambiguous evidence. Right. And then what? What? A big analogy. Yeah. Yeah. So what do we do then? Right. And then you can put in shelling back that we’re most probably spiritually immature rather than spiritually mature. So what should be our fundamental stance towards spirituality if we are really spiritually immature facing spiritual ambiguity and that changes the whole problematic rather than there is a God, there isn’t a God. You get shifted into this other more existentially like exigent and pressing question of weight. It’s really possible that the universe is spiritually ambiguous. I’m spiritually immature and those two are probably reinforcing each other in powerful ways. What do I do now? Right. And so you don’t write, you don’t you’re not trying to resolve the debate. You’re trying and you’re not even dissolving it in a Wiccan standing fashion. You’re moving outside of it and saying, look, look, the debate is actually masking sort of a deeper issue. And I saw you doing exactly that kind of thing. It’s like, wait, wait, wait. Pardon me. I love that analogy. Oh, well, good, good. Because I love John Hick. He’s a brilliant philosopher. Oh, yeah. John Hick is great philosopher. In fact, when he’s stepping outside of that framing, one of the things that he does is phenomenological and existential and kind of observational, experiential, where he says, you know, when I’m around people who seem spiritually mature in any religion, they all have a certain kind of glow about them. They’re altruistic, they’re humane, they’re centered, they’re grounded, they’re they’re ethical. They’re insightful. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, they have meaning that, you know, they’re healthy, they’re wholesome, that there’s something sacred about them. And, you know, they seem to all be accessing the real with the capital R. Yes. Yes. Some way, regardless of their ideological differences, there’s a parallel whenever you go into a temple, a mosque, you know, an ashram, whatever it is, there’s something going on there. Yeah. That was what I saw you doing. Something strongly analogous to that, I hope. And you seem to be that seems to be landing with you. So good. Yes. So you basically say, OK, you know, we got to step outside the logical framing because it’s basically antinomous. And so what do we what do we do? So what do you go there? What’s the next move? I know what it is, but I want you to like what’s the like you say, is there is there another way in which we can approach what we were trying to approach with this debate? Well, one of the ways that I move, I made a number of moves in there, so I’m not sure which one you you you like the most or you’re hinting at. But Strossen’s argument, I like it because it kind of glosses over the nature of causation, which is what divides this determinism or indeterminism, which is defined debate in free will literature for centuries. Right. You know, first couple of centuries, deterministic in the last century, indeterministic, you know, but both of them really. But he’s like the version of the impossible, what I call the impossibility argument you’ve talked about in connection with the dilemma or the paradox of self transformation that Yes, all transcendence, Gauss, Kallard picks that up. Yeah, yeah. It’s related. His reasoning is related to that. But in the free will angle of it, I’m not sure if it’s the same paper where you talk about with the self transformation, because I see the almost the same reasoning from Strossen in the impossibility argument as I’ve heard you talk about with the paradox of self transformation, where he said he’s talking about being ultimately morally responsible for yourself. And most philosophers who write about free will and moral responsibility consider them largely interdependent, if not identical or inseparable. Right. So if you’re not ultimately autonomous in some sense, you’re not ultimately morally responsible for your actions. Right. So in in the paper that I mentioned from Strossen, something with the word impossibility in it. But it’s in my footnotes, but he makes the argument it goes something like this. In order to be ultimately, which he means completely, fully, the buck stops with you morally responsible for an action or choice that you made. You would have to be completely unconditioned by prior mental states and prior worldly existential conditions. Right. How does he frame it? He says, whenever any agent makes a choice or enacts a volition, they’re doing so as a function of their mental state just at and just at. And just prior to the moment where they exert their agency, whether it’s just making a choice, a decision or acting on it, whatever. Right. So and that’s intuitive. That’s incredibly intuitive. And he’s he’s like, it doesn’t matter what those causal antecedents are, what the nature of them is, whether they’re deterministic or indeterministic. It’s completely irrelevant. The problem transcends the nature of causality, in other words. Yes. So your choices are always a function of the mental state that you’re in. That’s that’s axiomatic. Right. They don’t just come out of the blue like a sneeze or something or a seizure. You know, they come out of your cognitive volitional total mental state landscape somehow or another. Yes. Right. So that’s what he’s claiming. And so that’s always a function of all the things that you’ve been exposed to. So like, it doesn’t matter nature or nurture determinism and determinism. It doesn’t matter what the causal history is of your mental states unless you were autonomous all the way back to the first one and the second one and the third one. Like, unless you are completely unconditioned and completely autonomous, you are not fully responsible. All these causal antecedents and environmental conditions, genetics, whatever, have influenced you. So you’re kind of a victim of circumstance in some way, shape or form. You’re not fully. You might be partly responsible or when it’s proximally responsible in some local causal sense, you know, you had an intention, you acted on it, but you’re not ultimately responsible for it. Right. And there’s a lot of intuitive cases that you could think of that could justify that, you know, that kind of reasoning. So he says, unless, you know, you could have created yourself ex nihilo from nothing, where you’d be in a pristine, unconditioned state of your own choice, I suppose, where you could create yourself as an autonomous being. I’ll interject here, maybe in the future we can create autonomous beings on an assembly line like discs on a pro, you know, new discs or new programs, new computers with no programming in them, but a cable. And somehow or another, you know, it can become, you know, it turns itself on and whatever until then. It’s not going to happen. So, of course, you can’t nobody can create themselves from nothing because you would have to pre-exist to author your own existence. Right. So he calls that a causa sui, Latin for self-caused being. Right. I’ll interject here because that to me, that to me is that to me just speaks of the Christian heritage of this. Because, I mean, the invocation of creation ex nihilo, self-creation and causa sui being the unmoved mover of everything else. I mean, this is an inherently theological proposal he’s making. And it’s like. It might be intuitive because of our. Exactly. That’s what I’m proposing to you. That are those intuitions, you know, Kantian intuitions or are they Christian intuitions that have been given to us by a Kantian, I mean, a priori, I don’t mean coming from Kant, right, purely a priori. Or are they intuitions that have been internalized into us by a long and powerful Christian heritage? Because, as I said, this when we when you what I like about Strassen’s argument, because when I talk to people about free will, they say all this stuff and then you sort of push them and then they get to, well, no, creation ex nihilo and I’m an unmoved mover and basically I’m a god. Right. And it’s like. And that and that means nothing is causally responsible for anything. You get Spinoza’s argument that then only God only God could be free because everything else is going to be determined by God if there is such a thing as God. Right. And it just strikes me that you get into this very, very weird place. And so I guess what? This is a long winded way of me saying I find these intuition. I’m very suspicious of these intuitions. I’m very suspicious of them. Yeah, so am I. Everything is conditioned. Does it mean automatically that there’s no freedom at all? That’s just too easy. It’s too quick. It can’t be that simple. Especially, you know, your friend Greg Enriquez has a phylogenetic model. Right. In my first book on free will, I wrote a similar model and I made a country of free will. And I made a kind of construct similar to the geological column, which is not an actual column. It’s a construct, a causal column, which was almost like Greg’s. Right. That, you know, there is, you know, Newtonian billiard ball type atoms and whatnot. And then there’s life and then there’s mind. You know, so you’ve got locomotory organisms, locomotion that can move themselves as opposed to ones that can’t. Right. Every single step in the evolutionary trajectory involves some new abilities that weren’t there before. So all these emergent properties that seem to be, and that’s this autopoiesis thing that I hear you talking about all the time, self organizing systems that when they reach a new level of organization, they have self regulating abilities that previous iterations in the causal stream that led to them lacked. You know, and it doesn’t mean that these things are supernatural or anything. They’re not inconsistent with the laws of the universe. You know, so like, but there are real differences there. There are real differences. There’s real difference between a rock and a paramecium. And there’s real differences between a paramecium and a fish between a fish and a primate and a primate and a person. Like there are real differences there. And it’s the argument does not take any of that ontological. That’s that simplification of propositions. Yes. What did Wittgenstein say? Caught in the grip of a view. Yes. Yes. It’s kind of analytic propositional deductive argument thing with premises about determinism. That’s very, very blinders involving. It rules out and ignores all this other complexity. And I have a friend who criticizes me whenever I say complexity. He says, OK, so you’re right. He’s got that determinism, therefore no free will thing in his mind. He says, OK, so you’ve got the laws of nature. You got initial conditions and then complexity, poof, free will. And I’m like, no, it’s not just poof, free will. It’s a very, very complicated thing. There’s different kinds of causality. Yes, exactly. Bill, your causality is not the same from even tropistic plant causality, which is different from locomotory animals that have sensory motor feedback mechanisms. And the preponderance of the self-organization within an entity also increases both quantitatively how much it is part of what it is to be that thing and also qualitatively, how how recursive and how many feedback loops there are within the self-organization. Like like it’s I mean, the whole proposal of autopoiesis is that one of the essential features of life is that life is self-making. That’s what autopoiesis may. Now, it doesn’t mean absolutely self-making the way Aristotle’s unmoved mover is or God, the Christian God is creation ex nihilo. But it does mean like you can’t. And the proposal is you can’t explain, for example, evolution unless you give life particular properties that non-living things don’t have. And the way you explain those is because life is a self-making thing in and it has to take care of itself in a way it’s got homeostasis. Yeah, yeah. All living things are homeostatic. So one of the terms that I used in my in my dissertation and in my first book on this was largely based on my dissertation was a term I might I don’t know if I it’s a neologism of mine, but it’s a term that I used called autotelic as in teleology. Yes, we we can. Generate new ends for ourselves. Yes, yes, yes. This is something that other species can’t do. We can redesign our volitional structures. Yes. Well, that takes me to aspiration. So, yeah, so I want to say three things. I want to do another analogy. So part of the problem I’ve always had with Strossen’s argument is I take it as as a reductio, a modus tolens on the framing. Let me give you an example. So this was an argument that Cohen and other people made in the 1980s. We were using these logical standards for judging whether or not people were rational. And then it turns out that that algorithmic standard can’t actually be met by any fine finite information processing being for combinatorial explosion. And so especially what Charniak was arguing and saying, look, look, it’s not that people lack rationality, is that you’ve used a logical standard that makes it impossible for any finite being to be rational. Right. And so when I hear arguments that, you know, you know why you don’t have free will because you’re not an unmoved mover completely cause a sweet thing, I go, what? How did that standard get to be that standard? Like, like, what is it in your presuppositions and intuition that makes that like, again, other than our Christian heritage? Like, why, how, like, why set that? Why make that the standard for the application of the term freedom? So that’s another analogy. It’s like maybe we’re using the wrong kind of normative theory and drawing the wrong kinds of descriptive conclusions from it. And then the other thing is, you know. What you’ve been talking about, autotelic is, by the way, it’s used by Chiksep Mahai in his description of the flow state, it’s an autotelic state. I got it from him because I certainly read that book when it came out. I’ve read it a few times. Yeah. Well, and that’s again sort of another thing I wanted to bring up. Not only, I mean, and you’re already challenging it with the descriptions of causation. I mean, a lot of the arguments presuppose a Newtonian linear billiard ball model of causation. They fail to take into account the combinatorial explosion that faced any account of causation, even between inanimate objects. This is an old problem, but it doesn’t seem like when I ask you what caused the sinking of the Titanic, you will give me different answers depending on what is relevant to the question at hand. You may say it hit an iceberg. You may say the British were competing with Americans for the dominance of the shipping lanes. You may say the ice age that actually produced the like you can say the temperature of the water, you could say British industry at that time had impurities in the steel, and that meant that the steel couldn’t withstand. Like, right. And the point is, and this is something that Dan Schiappi and I argued a long time, is we can never give the cause because that the cause of something, right, neutrally is the entire previous history of the universe, which means science would fall prey to this problem if we use that standard. Well, you can’t tell me you can’t tell me that this virus causes Corona, right. It causes the disease because, you know, it’s actually what we’re actually doing in science is we’re talking about causal relevance, which what are the most causally relevant factors for the problem we’re trying to address, right, right. Yeah. Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon or not has nothing to do with Covid, even though this this hard determinist argument, by the way. Let me I’ve said a couple of times about how this propositionally narrowed way. So let me just give a sample of how how foolish it could be. But many people are totally gripped by this. Yeah, people that I’m arguing with all the time. And that that that’s a breadcrumb to remember. Why does this matter to me? Right. But so here’s the hard determinist argument in a nutshell, the consequence argument. If determinism is true, then my choice now at, let’s say, time one. Right. Was causally necessitated from the Big Bang at time zero. Yes. The initial conditions. Right. So in accordance with the laws of nature. Right. So let’s let’s call the initial. The state description is a theoretically complete conjunctive proposition that describes all the facts. Yes. Initial conditions of the universe or at any time, at any time, sometime before you were born or at the moment of the Big Bang. Right. Call it a state description. The you know, the state description right now is I have a laptop. I’ve got pictures behind me. Just as an infinite number of these propositions, so it would be P1 plus P2 plus P3. Right. Put them all together. Call it P at time zero. So P subscript zero. P is the proposition that represents the state of the universe at time zero. And the proposition that represents the state of the universe right now will call it PN. Right. And at the end of some set of numbers. Right. And subscript it, which includes my choice. The choice that I just made right now. Right. Right. OK. If determinism is true, then P0 plus the laws of nature entail PN. Yes. Right. And. I can’t. Change the past. I can’t change the laws. Therefore, given P0, necessarily PN. Yes. Right. And because it’s necessarily there’s this kind of modal closure where no alternative to PN is possible. Right. So you see this kind of there are no alternatives. There’s only one history of the universe from P0 to PN. Nothing else is possible. So some people will even go brilliant people like Peter van Inwagen have defined determinism as the view that there’s only one trajectory that’s possible in the history of the universe, the one necessitated from P0. Right. State description at time zero entailed the state description at time one, at time two throughout the entire linear linear history of the universe. Right. As if Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon did cause COVID. Yes. Right. So the whole thing, it kind of globalizes causation, which then ignores all the smaller relevant causes, some relevant, some are not. So this is a kind of modal fallacy. I’ve argued in my conversations about it’s a blending of necessities. They’re not all equally necessary in the same ways. Yes, yes, it’s not. But people fall into that. And because of this view, they think, OK, this is a cosmic rerun thought experiment. I think it was Dennett who came up with this one. It’s very clever. If you rewind, if you could rewind time the way you rewind the DVD back to the Big Bang and you had the same initial conditions in the same laws, you press the play button. The universe would unfold exactly the same. I’d make the exact same choice. Everything would be identical, just like a DVD. No matter how many times you rewound it, it would be identical. Therefore, there’s no free will. Right. Because you always do the exact same things, given those causal antecedents. Right. And this is, you know, and people who are in the grip of that view, they just think, you know, there’s never any alternatives because of determinism. So there can’t be free will right now. We wouldn’t we wouldn’t we wouldn’t accept that explanation in scientific theorizing. It’s like, well, why are these species this way? The Big Bang and everything since everything. Why do airplanes fly the Big Bang and everything since? Like these are non explanations. Right. Why does Rick Rappetti have a Harry’s razor blade instead of a Gillette one? The Big Bang. Right. Everything, everything, everything. Yeah. And it loses everything. So here’s another thing I want to bring up that’s not in the paper. OK, what is this thesis determinism? What is its content? Yes. OK, here’s an interesting thing. From the Buddhist point of view, there are no holes, really. There are aggregates don’t form holes. They’re just aggregates. Right. So I’m mentioning that right now because determinism is a kind of hole and it’s made out of a bunch of other aggregates that aren’t holes called laws. Determinism is a generalization that says that we don’t know all the laws. But when we do, we collect them all. L1 plus L2 plus L3 dot dot dot LN equals determinism. And everything is governed by all those laws. Determinism is the thesis that abstracts from all laws and says all of nature is uniform and lawlike. It’s a nomological, necessitarian kind of view. Right. What is a law, though? OK, in philosophy of science, the greatest consensus view among most of the brilliant philosophers of science is that laws are counterfactual, supporting generalizations, because that’s why you said science would fall apart if we globalized everything like that. Because there are no counterfactuals. There’s no real possibility. Right. It rules out. Right. So here’s the thing. Right. Salt is soluble, even if the grain of salt never hits water. Yes. Right. It gets burned in a fire. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t soluble. Right. It has a counterfactual property, a dispositional property. Exactly. Which means that even though it’s not a part of that universe that Van Inwagen says only one possible outcome, all right, it’s false, according to Van Inwagen. And these hard determinists that salt is soluble. No, only the ones that actually dissolved were soluble. Yes. Yes. And I call this view actualism. Yes. Whatever doesn’t happen. What do you call it? Eventism, where all you see, like you reduce all making of difference to events and you fail to take into account conditions and relations. Constraints and things like that. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a very related view. So but I call it actualism for a very particular reason, just to make a very, very simple point. This view of determinism, this hard determinist view that says because of the consequence argument, if the laws and the initial conditions hold, then there’s only one history to the universe. Nothing else is even possible. Right. Therefore, there’s no free will because you have no alternatives. You couldn’t have done otherwise. Right. That’s hard determinism. That entails actualism, that whatever never happens wasn’t possible. It was not even possible. Right. There are no possibilia, as we call them in conceptual terminology. Right. In hard determinism. OK, so then there are no counterfactuals, but laws are counterfactual. So determinism is the set of all counterfactuals. So what hard determinism is on analysis is non-counterfactual, some kind of counterfactual non-counterfactualism. It’s one case. It’s oxymoronic. Yes, exactly. Exactly. So when I take it seriously. Yes, it’s oxymoronic. It literally contradicts itself. I’ve made this argument elsewhere in print. I’ve made similar and converging arguments before I met you, which was yours. I’m not surprised. But yours are better. Yours are better. They’re very clear. This is my field. This is my field. I’ve worked on free will for a decade. Yes, powerful. So let’s put these two big moves together. One is the initial move that, you know, trying to get the trying to resolve this logically just leads to antinomy. And when we look at this, we’re, you know, we’re ultimately getting a self-contradictory position. So this is very liberating. It’s liberating and kind of like a Heideggerian or Wittgensteinian way, which is the thing is you got to get free from a particular cultural cognitive grammar. Again, I’ll just say it one more time that probably has some significant historical provenance to it. You got to let that go. All right. In order to try and get back to something that connects with intelligibility, science and the fact that human beings seem to be able to aspire in their lives in ways that seem to make a real difference. I agree, 100 percent. There’s also a link. Buddhists will like Jay Garfield and not just own Flanagan, who’s not a Buddhist, but he’s a scholar of of Asian religions. And he’s a kind of East West. I don’t know if you know him, but he wrote that Bodhisattva’s brain. I read his book on what I think he called it, The Really Hard Problem or something like that, meaning, yeah, yeah. Well, once he got once he got invited to one of those Dalai Lama meets the neuroscientist and philosophers things, he’s been working on all this Asian philosophy stuff. But Jake Garfield and Owen Flanagan and a few others who are familiar with or enmeshed in Buddhism have critiqued the whole free will problem as a Western problem rooted in Augustine, whose theodicy needed to get God off the hook for the evil in the world by giving human beings free will. Yes. So Augustine is the first theologian slash philosopher in the Western tradition who said, we have a kind of unmoved. We have the kind of free will libertarian free will. We are prime movers unmoved. We’re like and made in the image and like this of God. So we’re little mini gods. We have free will. And God gave that to us. And then like Descartes said in the fourth meditation that we we misuse our will when when things are neither clearly and distinctly true nor clearly and distinctly false, we should refrain. We should withhold judgment. That’s where we go wrong. That’s sin. You know, when we make believe, we know things that we don’t. But, you know, this is a whole tradition in Western theology and philosophy that does start with Augustine. I just want to say something about Augustine. I think that Buddhist critique is really spot on. But Augustine’s position is it’s complex, maybe even convoluted, depending on your overall appraisal of Augustine, I like Augustine quite a bit, but I’m not going to acknowledge that Augustine has this already seems it’s really hard to get this nailed down because of the ideas of original sin and total depravity. And, you know, of course, Luther is going to pick this up and Calvin’s going to pick this up, too, but we seem to be free to sin, but not free to achieve salvation. It’s a very and he’s against Polygous. Yeah. Yeah. Polygous drops a complete symmetry. Well, I have a quote from Polygous actually in my signature on my Gmail because he was basically saying he was basically arguing. Oh, I mean, there was obviously theological things, but he was basically arguing that freedom is a symmetrical notion. If I’m free to sin, I have to be there has to be freedom for me to be saved as well. I agree with symmetry. I think there’s a problem with the ASEM Susan Wolf is an asymmetrist who she’s got this Kantian view about reason, you know, when it’s working, we’re reason responsive, you know, that that’s kind of. I forget, I forget exactly where where she puts she doesn’t treat them the same way. Right. Right. Oh, I guess what I think what she think when we act inappropriately or wrongly or we make bad choices, we’re not fully reason responsible, reason responsive. Therefore, we’re not fully reason responsible. Right. And therefore we’re not fully free. We’re only I think we’re only free when we are in line. Freedom Within Reason is the title of the book that she writes. Right. And she’s the she has the she has the inversion of Augustine. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Look, I’m not by the way, I take just just I take the fact that you can generate arguments both ways for asymmetry to actually be a meta argument for symmetry. That’s me, too. Yeah. Yeah. My intuition about all those antinomies that there’s some meta level at both sides have to be correct. I was just listening to Ken Wilbur on the integral stage with Bruce and Layman. Right. And and he he said something. Bruce Alderman and Layman Pascal. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I always forget that last thing. Alderman and Pascal. Yeah. Where Ken Wilbur was was saying. I forget what models he was talking about. He asked one of them about all these different models that you’ve ever come across, epistemological models, metaphysical models, I forget which set of models he was talking about. But he would developmental models. He said, have you ever found one that you thought was absolutely false? And I think it was Layman who said no. And he said, my intuition is that they’re all partly true. They all have to be partly. And that reminds me of that Anakantavada view, the Jane view of non one side. Yes, yes. We’re accessing some part of reality. So every angle on it has got something right about it. You can’t just reject things. You know, somebody saw something there. That’s my that’s my kind of very liberal. That doesn’t mean that all positions are equally good. No, no, no, no. I don’t think I don’t I don’t think the Janes are relativists either. The absolute sense, I think that they believe that the more paradigms and perspectives you get, the closer to truth. Yeah, that’s a very platonic kind of argument. So I want to take you back, Rick, to what spawned this. So let’s say we I just wanted to sort of not defend, but explicate Augustine a little bit more contracts to Polygius. I was never 100 percent comfortable with these genetic arguments that, oh, well, like the Buddhist critics that I mentioned before, they’ll say the Western belief in free will came from Augustine. We Buddhists, we don’t have a God creator, so we don’t need free will and we don’t believe in the self. So, you know, forget all that nonsense. Right. Too quick and easy for me. Yeah, I don’t want to blame it on Augustine. I mean, I think there’s precursors going back to the Stoics and there’s obviously stuff in St. Paul and of course, there’s people after Augustine. There’s Luther, there’s Calvin, right. There’s a lot. So I pointed that whole heritage. Aristotle, too. And even the the atomists had some, you know, they had some. Yes, the famous were right. Aristotle thought that voluntary behavior made the actor or agent who performs it praiseworthy or blameworthy. And there is a notion in neoplatonism of an aspect of the psyche that is completely self-moving. Right. And so there are precursors all all the way through. And so I don’t want to I don’t want to hold Augustine hostage. However, I want to do say you go first. You want to say, I appreciate I get it. And your caricature of the Buddhist doing the giving the raspberry to Augustine. I totally and total sympathy with that. But there nevertheless, there is a point that which is like this notion of free will isn’t an isolated thing. It’s bound to and I keep bringing this up. Notions of a God, notions of how causation works. Right. Even notions of how explanation work that are all very, you know, ethnocentric, very Christos, you know, Eurocentric in the sense of a Christian neoplatonic Christian history. I think that point of the Buddhist argument is well spoken because it’s like if you weren’t concerned with whether or not there’s an evil God, what and this allows me to circle back, by the way, what’s at stake other than other than how do we get God off the hook for the evil and somehow make us little gods, but nevertheless doomed, finite, fallible beings, which has always been a problematic thing like other than that. And this is but I want your answer, not just the answer. Right. What’s at stake? Like what’s at stake? Like. So I don’t feel crushed by the fact that I’m not an unmoved mover. I don’t feel crushed by the fact that I’m not self-created. I want in fact, I want my my I don’t even know if I regard freedom. I don’t regard freedom as an absolute good. I regarded it as instrumental. I want my thoughts as determined by the truth and my actions as determined by the good and my my experience is determined by the beautiful as much as possible. I don’t want an absolute art, an absolute. So like what is it I’m losing? What’s at stake? And and and so I take I’m trying to be charitable to the Buddhists. I’m reframing the question. I’m taking it away from the raspberry, which I agree shouldn’t we shouldn’t pay attention to that. That’s just insulting and name calling. Right. And it’s just reverse ethnocentrism. Right. Instead, I’m reframing it as OK, let’s instead of making it an accusation, let’s form it as a question. What’s at stake? What’s at stake in this other than. A theodicy, other than trying to hold human beings responsible for evil and yet a credit God with absolute sovereignty and all the stuff that Spinoza was wrestling with, what’s at stake for me? You know, Bruce Alderman and Lehmann Pascal, now that I remember their last names, they asked me the same question. I was on their show the other day and. I’ll give you the same answer, but I’m going to add more because we’re going a lot more. This whole episode is about that. That was just a small part of that that episode. So look. I want a couple of things to say, first of all, although you already said, let’s put that ethnocentrist Buddhist reverse thing in context. I want to point out that technically that’s a kind of genetic fallacy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This idea emerged in this context. We have no use for that context. Therefore, that idea is invalid. Well, that’s silly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s a genetic fallacy, right? Well, that’s like, you know, a drunken old man came up with the proof of this mathematical problem that nobody could solve. Therefore, we should ignore the proof. You know, that’s that’s a fallacy. So even if it’s true that that’s where that concept of free will entered into the Western world, so what? Right. That doesn’t invalidate it. But also, historically, like I said, Aristotle, the atomists, you said Plato, like there are places in pre-Christian philosophy. Yes, and I brought those up. Yes. Yeah. But one of the strongest ones for me is Aristotle just saying, look, actions are praiseworthy or blameworthy if they are voluntary, you’re not responsible if you’re incontinent and you wet your pants, you know, but if you are continent and, you know, you relieve yourself on the sidewalk out in the city, you know, we blame you for that. Right. This is an intuition that I think Aristotle had before Christianity arrived. Right. But Aristotle wouldn’t think of voluntary as the claim that and this is, of course, completely appropriate to Aristotle, that human beings are somehow unmoved movers. No, no, no, no, no. So he didn’t. So he didn’t have that idea that we’re unmoved movers. Yes. Right. So he’s immune from this accusation. Yes. Yes. He predates it. So that’s what I’m saying. Historically, there’s precedence for this kind of thinking prior to Augustine. And so that’s one thing. Another thing is he put that he’s really a brilliant guy, Aristotle. Now, he hit that nail on the head as far as I’m concerned. Why does it matter? Almost all of our norm, not all of them, some of our normative judgments about beauty. Are not moral type judgments, but most of our normative judgments about interpersonal behavior are about praise and blame and guilt and responsibility. So if you mistreat me, I don’t think I need Christianity to tell me whether or not I should hold you responsible for having mistreat me. Yes. Somebody shoves you into me on a crowded subway in New York City. And I realize you fell onto me. I won’t be as angry at you, rationally angry as if you shoved me out of the way so you could get into the seat before me. Yes. Right. So that’s voluntary behavior. So to the extent that you have self-regulative or autonomous abilities over yourself, it makes sense. And this is a very, very primary. David Hume made this argument. Yes. We hold people responsible intuitively to the extent that they’re in control of their behavior. Frankfurt made a bigger Harry Frankfurt, the bullshit guy about that when he made that distinction between freedom of action and freedom of will. If you have the ability to regulate your own volitions, and this is a Buddhist thing, this comes right out of the Eightfold Path, right volition or right intention. Right. These intentions are Dharmic and these are a Dharmic. Right. These are skillful and these are unskillful. So I approve of those and I disapprove of those. Those are volitional attitudes. Those are second order attitudes towards first order volitions. I want to have these kinds of volitions. I don’t want to have those kind. Right. And so beings that are capable of doing that are responsible for their behavior. And beings that can’t like a lion, it’s in heat or whatever. We don’t say it raped that other lion or that’s just it’s operating on a different scale. So we’re beings that can regulate our emotions and volitions and all sorts of other aspects of ourselves. So we are causally more proximally, relevantly responsible. Right. We’re literally causally responsible for our behavior in the way in ways in which other animals are not. They’re more governed by stimulus response. Total online engagement with the environment, the agent arena relationship determines their behavior in ways in which ours loops through our conscious volitional, you know, we I believe that we really do have free will. Let me let me tell you about a study, a very quick one. Empirical evidence. Now, of course, somebody who wants to keep pushing that Buddhist criticism will say, were those Westerners who were studied? But but four year olds studied, identified what they thought their free will was as being able to do what they want. And that’s what Frankfurt said, animals and children that can act on their desires. He called that freedom of action. Right. Six and seven year olds, they’ve been socialized, the Kullberg and all these stages of development, they’ve internalized norms. They know that there are consequences to their behavior. They said that free will means they’re able to not act on their desires. Yes, yes. Put those two things together and you have a level of agency that animals don’t have. Animals normally. Well, some animals can’t like I try to take that apart, but it’s a generalization that’s relatively true. A rat might smell the peanut butter and see a cat and do some kind of calculation about how close that peanut butter is to the cat and decide not to go for the food. Right. So it can have a desire to eat. It has an equal and maybe stronger desire not to be eaten. You know, but those might all be on the first order. Whereas human beings are capable. And if you practice mindfulness, then you know, because that’s part of my argument in the paper, you’re capable of stepping outside of your volitional, the whole thing and looking at it and picking and choosing what you want to cultivate and what you want to downgrade. And, you know, we are self designing beings. Some of us are more capable of doing that than others. Right. So for me, there’s a spectrum. Right. We have real agency. Why does it matter to me? Well, because I think if we let me use one of Dennett’s what he calls an intuition pump, right, like the cosmic rewind. There’s a wasp with a long Latin name that begins with the first syllable specs, S-P-H-E-X. And and he says, let’s just call it specs. Right. Because it’s a much longer Latin name. So, you know, animal psychologists playing around with specs notice that it digs a little L shaped burrow in the ground. It’ll numb its prey like a beetle or a ladybug or whatever. It stings it with some kind of numbing agent that paralyzes it. Doesn’t kill it. So it stays alive and fresh. And it’ll bring it to the edge of the burrow and it’ll go down and look inside the burrow, make sure that no other animal has gone in there, that it’s safe. And they’ll come back up and pull the prey down and put it in the burrow and then leave and go look for more food. And then eventually it’ll lay its eggs right in or adjacent to that paralyzed thing. So that’s fresh food. It’s like a refrigerator for seems like brilliant behavior. Right. But then it said the scientists have discovered that while specs is in the burrow, looking, checking that the coast is clear, if they move that prey one inch away from the hole, specs will come up, see it, go get it, pull it back because it had its back to the hole. It’ll go back down and check again. And it seems so smart. Wow. It checked again because maybe it’s being set up. It looks smart until you do it a thousand times in a row and it’s robotic. Yes. X then Y, if X then Y. It can’t learn. Right. So then it says, it seemed intelligent, it seemed free, it’s a stimulus response algorithm. There are no alternatives to it. It’s always the same. And then it says, we’re just more complicated than specs. We look like flex, but we’re just pseudo flex. Because if you rewind that big back to the Big Bang and hit the play button over and over again, we’re just like specs. Right. That’s the intuition pump, right. That the hard determinist has. That’s why people, when they hear this kind of thing, they’re like, I have no free will. Right. So I believe we have free will. And I think it matters. It matters to my sense of self. I don’t want to think of myself as specs or as just a more complicated specs. I do believe that I have some genuine ability to change myself in ways that are not hit the Big Bang. And it’s always the same. Hit the play button from the Big Bang. I could be wrong. But here’s another thing that I do, because these arguments. Were thrown at me when I started studying free will. And I’ve been battling with these people and their arguments ever since I got interested in free will, which is a deeper problem, which I’ll remind you of in a moment. I’ve just been trying to show how I could have free will against these arguments. So that’s my personal motivation. Right. I believe that free will exists. I really do. Phenomenologically, experientially, morally, in every way, shape or form, it seems intuitive to me. That we have some kind of legitimate self-regulative agency. OK. Why? So I want to make sure I’m understanding you, because like there’s been a criticism of the analytics, standard interpretations of causation and free will being the unmoved mover being the and the idea of determinism, everything, the Big Bang is actually being an incoherent position. Right. And so you’re trying to step away from that. I just want to remind everybody of all the argument. Don’t now go and hear him saying all the things. No, I don’t believe those things. I’m saying I’m kind of bouncing around, not in a very linear sequence. No, that’s fine. You’re exploring, which is good. Yeah. So what I’m trying to say is, and I was about to say my original motivation for free will is different, but kind of leading up to that, say throughout my life, I always did believe that we have free will. And I think it matters. Like, I think if we were specs like all of our normative judgments would be inappropriate. Almost all of them, almost all of them. Yeah. But what’s so Danit’s argument is a weird argument because we can only recognize the robotic nature of specs from a higher order perspective in which we could see possible alternatives that are not available to specs. And now he’s presuming that there is some stance that we that we can appeal to that we can’t get to, from which we could say, look at those human beings, look at the silly human beings, look at all the possibilities that they that are not available to them, that look at how they’re trapped in their behavior. And I think my question to Danit when he makes those arguments is, who is making that argument? Because you’ve already told me that human beings can’t be there. What’s your epistemic access to that point of view that says, oh, but human beings are just like that, too, because human beings can’t get to that perspective that would legitimate that claim. He just does the magic wave. But there’s no difference, which is like, you know there’s a difference between you and specs because you can make judgments about specs that specs can’t make. Right. And so there’s a precept. You see what I’m trying to say here. There’s a presupposition of a perspective on human beings that is actually denied to human beings in order to assert that human beings are in no way fundamentally different from this bug. And it’s like, I don’t know what I don’t know who’s making that claim and from where they’re making it, because it’s not any human being or the argument. It becomes a performative contradiction. And if it’s not a human being, I want to know who they are and why I should how I could even understand them or trust them. So that’s like that’s the thing that I find maddening about those kinds of arguments. I just wanted to give you my response to that argument. That’s fine. But in all fairness to Dennett, many of his critics say that they think he’s inconsistent, but he actually he does the thing about specs and the cosmic rewind just to really spell out why people are caught in that view and he says, no, I think even though if it is a deterministic world, then the rewind thing will happen. But it just looks as if we’re no different from specs. But really what we are is we’re highly flexible. We can learn and we have all these self-regulative abilities. And it could all be deterministic. And he says, like what you said, I want my reasoning and everything, my good logic and my good values to determine what I do. He he he grabs hold of that premise that I use that says if it’s determined in the right way, good for me. Right. You know, and I make the same thing. If determinism entails that I become enlightened, go determinism. I don’t care. So so he calls himself a compatibilist. But his critics say your arguments against compatible is because he entered he does a very good pro and con thing. Your arguments. It’s like Descartes, the critics of Descartes. You your skepticism is better than your non skepticism. Yes, yes, yes. Once you let the genie out of the bottle, Descartes, you can’t have knowledge, you know, he’s a compatibilist. He believes that we have determinism is compatible with free will, free will is compatible with determinism, free will of a certain kind. What kind of reason responsive or self-regulative with, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think everything like that. Yeah, he’s apologize to get it. But in fairness to me, I’ve heard these arguments that I was criticizing. Oh, yeah, yeah. Right. No, it’s I’m glad that you pause so that your listeners don’t think, you know, either you or I accept that view as constraining in a way that, you know, the way I was presenting it was to just give a sense of when I came into the free will debate, those were the things that I had to deal with. Now, what brought me into a free will debate? I’ve talked about this with you in another episode or two was my mystical experiences, but particularly my precognitive ones. Yes, yes. So my interest in free will, what was totally about time. Yes. Like, how could I know in the year, let’s say, 1976, what would happen in 1977 a year later with all these random contingent accidental things happening and people making all kinds of choices? How could I have free will if I had these genuine these seem undeniably genuine precognitive experiences that can’t be dismissed? It’s more rational to think that they were improbable than to think that the standard probability explanation, which is what usually scientifically minded people who reject precognition will say, you know, our brains are always trying to predict the future and you’re not counting all the bad predictions and like, you know, so it’s like when you hit the lottery, you think you were destined by God, but, you know, it’s just probability somebody’s going to hit it, you know, this kind of thing. So my interest in free will was originally based on my worries that maybe we don’t have free will because of my precognitive experiences. That’s interesting because that foreshadows, again, a theological precursors because the Christians worry about whether or not God’s foreknowledge limits us and even God. Right. Yes. Yeah. And I’m not sure if I mentioned this on a previous show with you or with someone else, but the model is it’s independent of God. There’s a fatalistic version of it. If Plato was right, that truths are timeless. Yes. Aristotle addressed this, too, when he said tomorrow there either will or won’t be a sea battle, so he addressed this issue about logical fatalism and time. And I guess he believed in Plato because he said there’s a truth about that. We just don’t know it yet, but it’s timeless. So it’s true that at time t tomorrow, if you index it the right way, it’s a timeless like in 1492, Columbus lands in the Americas. Right. So if you index it to the time, that statement is timeless. It’s truly true. It’s true. Right. So there are these true statements like state descriptions about every single moment in the history of the universe. Right. And they’re like they’re like freeze frames on that DVD when it’s not moving. So if you go to any time there it is frozen, an image, the state description. Right. So this is the logical fatalism. Logical fatalism says that if propositions are timelessly true, they stack up like that. And it’s, you know, if you can be outside of time, they’re all equitemporally available because you’re not at any time. Right. And so but they’re all frozen and they’re motionless. So it’s like a Zeno’s arrow. That’s exactly what I was thinking. It’s exactly what I was thinking. And so but like the one in 1492 was eternally there. If we could go back or go ahead. So it could have been otherwise. So it’s almost the same argument as hard determinism. And in my book, I analyze the logic of all of these arguments and show how they’re identical modal arguments, they have all have the exact same structure. You could have epistemic operators, modal operators, no matter which operator, theological operator, no matter what, an omniscience operator, no matter what operators you put on it, the logic is identical. That’s brilliant, Rick. That’s brilliant. Yeah. Just so that. Yeah. And so that was my first thing. There’s a precognitive version of it. Yeah. He had a like a like a drop of omniscience or a drop of logical fatalism. However the hell I accessed it precognitively, I was struck by that was one of the first things that really threw me philosophically. It’s existential. Like so when I was when I, you know, and another thing that I had, I think I definitely mentioned this to you. I think I did that. Oh, yes, I did. One of my first vision type experiences. Felt like Indra’s net and Plato’s forms. Yeah, all in some same kind. And I didn’t know the language of either of those things until years later. When I read those things, I was like, oh, that’s like what happened to me. Yes. Oh, that’s right. So a couple of those experiences and that one, I left it almost as if a god had told me you need to study philosophy. I didn’t want to. I went to the local college and looked at the philosophy books. I was like, this is boring, dry, logical, analytic crap. They don’t know anything about what I’m experiencing. But eventually I wound up majoring in philosophy. And so the first independent study I got to do, you know, what an independent study? I don’t know if they have them. We do. We do. Yeah. So for those of us who the audience who don’t know, you just you and a professor agree that you will research some topic and they’ll give you a bunch of readings and you meet with them throughout the semester. You keep giving them drafts. And by the end of the semester, you’ve got a paper on it. It’s a much bigger paper than you would write for a regular course. It’s an independent study. You get three credits for it was on free will. Because everything that I ever read in my philosophy studies was nowhere near any of my personal interests. So I. One of my favorite teachers, Eric Steinberg, who wrote a book about Hume’s inquiry for Hackett, you might have even assigned it. If you ever taught that Eric Steinberg, Hume’s inquiry or something, I forget translator or whatever you call it. He agreed to do that with me. He gave me a whole bunch of readings and they had things like that in there, like I think it was Alvin Goldman who had this puzzle about the book of life. And if you could read it, open it up and it was all about your life. And it says that he’s going to turn the page now. You know, would you would you falsify it? You know, this kind of like I came close to something, but nothing ever really. Right, right. But then what did I wind up hitting with? Arguments about hard determinism, arguments against libertarian. And so like I just to kind of. Integrate all of that with my own inquiry, I had to address all those arguments. I agree with you, I don’t look at it the way that that they do. I try to break frame and that’s why I bring in Buddhism and I critique. I critique the Buddhists with some arguments from the Western side. I critique the Western some arguments from the Buddhist side because the Buddhists reject agency and free will. They reject the South. Yeah, agent and agency. They reject. But well, most of them do not all of them do. But those who don’t are a very small minority that. Yeah, and I want I don’t want to get into the self no self debate. Chris and Greg and I Chris, not to be after Greg and Rick and I, we we we hammered away at that in the in the elusive eye. I just finished that that that was a great series. Oh, thank you. So, I mean, I wonder, here’s another analogy. You’ve like the previous ones. I was thinking about Zeno and I was thinking about how many people don’t accept the consequence of the Zeno argument. Zeno’s argument is, you know, at every moment, the arrow is at rest. That’s logical. It’s just filling the space that it’s in. So zero motion plus zero motion plus zero motion. People see it. So there is no motion. And most people go, oh, that doesn’t make any sense. And yet your point is that’s exactly the same logical structure that people are using in these debates and it’s again, it’s unclear to me as to why, you know, one phenomena, we hold on to the phenomena and reject the logical. And no, there’s come on, there’s got to be motion that there’s something wrong with that way of doing the other. Oh, yeah, there’s no free will. And it’s like, what? Like, again, I’m not advocating for free will. It’s like, like, there seems to there seems to be an extra logical move in whether on whether we privilege privilege our phenomenology or logic. There’s an asymmetry. Yeah. And here’s an analogy for you with some of your other work. In the elusive eye, you talked about how the criteria for a thing being real has longest time been processual and not object oriented. Exactly. There’s no self. Wait a minute. Yes, yes, yes, exactly. Process. Yes, yes. Why is there no self, but everything else, which is a process, is real? Yes, exactly. I made that argument with Buddhists like, sorry, but if there’s no self, there’s no Buddha, there’s no anything. There’s no enlightenment. But then they’ll go, oh, yeah, diamond sutra says that in there. And like that’s make up your mind. You’re having it both ways now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s a that’s very problematic. Yeah, that’s that’s a that’s a kind of equivocation. Yes, yes. You know, you’re flipping the levels kind of like it like Wilbur’s pre post pre-trans fallacy, the pre-trans fallacy. Yeah, I find that asymmetry that people like they don’t realize. Yeah, yeah, it’s like that. It’s exactly like that. Why are you using a substantial notion of realness for the self? And for everything else, you use a processual. And like and like what like why do why have that asymmetrical use of the term? It’s the same as like why? Why in this instance do you privilege your phenomenology over the logical argument, all right, which is. And in this one, you privileged the logical argument over your phenomenology. Right. Heraclitus OK here. Parmenides OK there. That’s exactly right. And the answer, of course, is you’ve got to put them together and that would give you Plato, which is a place to end for this. Rick, of course, I invite you to come back. I’d like to talk more about this was so rich and so juicy. I like to come back and move a little bit more. I think we’ve done due diligence to the whole metaphysics, you know, the free will determinism thing, and then move more centrally into let’s let’s now accept that there’s agency and aspiration in some robust sense. And what is the preliminary to that? We didn’t get exactly exactly. And then move into talking about that. Yeah, I’d love to talk about that next time. So as always, Rick, any I like to give my my guess. Any last words before I stop recording? Well, I just want to put this as a seed. I’d love to talk about my counters to Strossen’s impossibility argument. I would like. Yes, yes, yes. OK, we could take that up around the issue if we could maybe transfer it a little bit to the version that Agnes Callard talks about. I think they’re very related. So we could bring mine up in the beginning, but then shift over into the more I would use that aspect of it. All right. OK, so let’s do it that way. Thank you so much. This is so much fun and so much. I’ll see you soon.