https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=uC6BPg7IDpA
Could you please discuss free will and Sam Harris’s and others ideas of its non-existence? Well, that’s a good complicated question to kick things off So I want to tell you a little bit about how to conceptualize free will I think first because it’s obvious that we don’t have infinite free will our our choice our choices are constrained in all sorts of ways and I think part of the reason that there’s a a continual discussion about free will in the philosophical in the philosophical literature is because Just conceptualizing the issue properly is extraordinarily difficult So I like to think about it at least in part the way that you think about a game You know if you’re playing a game, obviously the game has rules so if it’s a chess game or a basketball game then there are things that you can do in and things that you can’t do and But and so it’s a it’s a it’s a closed world in some sense But the fact that there are things you can’t do when you play a game Also seem to open up a universe of possibilities for things that you can do so Chess obviously constrains you to a board and to a certain number of men and to a certain pattern of rules But the strange thing is is that when you put in those rules because rules sound like limits They sound always like things you can’t do but when you set up a constrained world like that and you lay out a System of rules what you do is open up an infinity of a near infinity of possibilities same with music you know music has rules obviously and and if you follow the rules then you can make an infinite variety of music and so And so there’s a there’s a very interesting Dynamic that’s hard to understand between constraint and possibility and There’s a deep idea that’s associated with that that I read in some Jewish commentary on on the biblical stories that I I read a long time ago Talking about the relationship between God and man and the idea was that God Imagine a being with the classical attributes of God omniscience omnipotence and omnipresence all seeing all knowing and all powerful What is a being like that lack and obviously the answer is nothing right because by definition those three traits Provide for absence of limitation, but then that’s exactly what’s lacking is limitation and there’s some strange connection between limitation and and I was saying say limitation That that’s rule governed as I mentioned before and the opening up of possibility So That isn’t necessarily the case that now determine determinism and limitation aren’t exactly the same thing But they’re analogous and they need to be discussed together Okay, so now so that’s the first thing is that or whatever our free choice is it isn’t limited It’s or it’s limited. It’s it’s deeply limited now. Here’s another thing if I take my arm and I go like this See I’ll do that again Now you see there’s a movement like that and then my hand stopped just before my my other hand now it takes a certain amount of time for the neural messages to go from my brain to my arm and back and The time it takes my hand to go like this and stop is actually shorter than the time it takes a message to get to my brain and back so what that means is that when I When I plan this movement, which is called a ballistic movement It’s called a ballistic movement because it’s like a bullet once you let it go. It’s gone. There’s no calling it back I’ve actually organized the neurological and muscular sequences that enable that action before it’s implemented I set all that up and then it’s released and the whole thing cascades and so once the Action has been released. Let’s say then I don’t really have any free will because I can’t stop it now So so you think about that it looks like there’s a temporal gradient with regards to free will is that as you look out into the future May perhaps the farther out you look into the future The farther down the road, let’s say The more free your choices are but the closer they get to implementation the more they become deterministic governed by standard causal processes and there’s some transition point where they change from Being what we would describe as choice that we haven’t got to free choice yet, but at least to choice There’s some transition point between that and ballistic movement here’s another way of thinking about it like we know for example that people who are expert at playing the piano look ahead of where they’re playing and And they’re doing the same thing. They’re watching the notes. They’re seeing where they’re going But and then they’re disinhibiting the automated structures that enable them to play what they’ve practiced so thoroughly they’re disinhibiting those structures and then they go automatically and then what happens if you make a mistake is that consciousness notes the error and then unpacks the Motor sequences that have been practiced and then you repractice them and sequence them again until they become automatic and deterministic So there’s choice in that you’re reading ahead But there’s no choice in that once you’ve read ahead and disinhibited the actions then they run Ballistically and then you can think about the same thing that’s happening when you’re driving in a car You don’t look right in front of you when you’re driving a car because whatever is right in front of you if you’re going 40 miles Now or whatever you’ve already run over You look a quarter of a mile down the road and that gives you the opportunity to see what’s coming and to set up a sequence Of increasingly automated movements that culminate in whatever it is that you’re doing while you’re driving And so there’s a gradation from choice to determinism a temporal gradation and and I don’t often See that addressed when people talk about free will now Sam’s issue with free will is that if you get someone to do something like Lift their finger and you and you scan their brains using a variety of techniques while they’re doing that what you’ll see is that There’s an action potential that even and you ask them to voluntarily move their finger, so they’re doing it. Let’s say by free choice There’s an action potential that you can that you can read off the brain that occurs before the person Either moves their finger or let’s say decides to move their finger and that occurs quite a bit before the feeling of Voluntaryism or that voluntary act and so that’s been read by Benjamin Libet who did the experiments as Indication that even the feeling of voluntary choice is determined, but I don’t think that that’s a very useful way of addressing the issue because The the issue of when you lift your finger in up again is it? Requires pre-programming to disinhibit like you know how to do this, right? You don’t have to learn to do that So you have a little automated circuit that does this sort of thing all these finger movements and everything you can see babies Practicing them and they develop automated circuitry that tends to be posterior left hemisphere in order to Run those those automated processes out and what you’re basically doing when you decide to do something that’s a routine that you’ve already practiced or made out of subroutines that you’ve already practiced is disinhibiting them and The the degree to which you might regard that as free exactly is unclear as are the temporal limitations So I don’t think that Libet’s experiments Demonstrate conclusively that there’s no such thing as free will even though there are action Potentials that indicate that there is brain activity signaling even the onset of a voluntary choice Voluntary choice early now Another thing that we might look at in relationship to that is Yeah, so we can look at it phenomenologically and we could also look at it in in relationship to how people treat one another so Phenomenologically, it seems clear that we have free choice and it isn’t obvious to me why we have consciousness if free choice isn’t real Because consciousness looks to me like a mechanism that deals with Potential before it’s transformed into actuality. Let’s say and and I think consciousness is also The the faculty so to speak or a manifestation of the faculty that enables us to pre-program Deterministic actions. So again, let’s think about someone playing the piano. They’re practicing, you know After you repeat and you repeat Your finger movements if you’re playing the piano any complex motor skills like that You have to repeat it repeat it repeat it repeat it and you’re using consciousness to program it to sequence the motor movements and to pay attention to them that all seems voluntary and it Involves the activation of a tremendous amount of your brain because if you’re doing something new a lot of your brain is activated And then as you practice it the amount of brain that’s activated Decreases it shifts from right to left and then it shifts from frontal to Posterior and a smaller and smaller area so what’s happening is that consciousness is creating little machines in the back of your head that do things in an automated manner and The the the voluntary Consciousness looks like consciousness appears and feels that would be the phenomenological and as if it’s doing that voluntarily and it is Associated with a different pattern of brain activity and so Okay, so there’s that there’s the phenomenal logical reality of Voluntary choice and effort as well because conscious programming of that sort is also effortful. It doesn’t seem to run deterministically like a clock does and then finally There’s also and I don’t know what you think about this With regards to evidence, but what constitutes evidence is not always that easy to determine even in the scientific domain. So In that think about how we think about ourselves and other people and how we treat ourselves and other people You can imagine that you’re like a clock running down and that’s like a deterministic model, but people aren’t clocks We’re dissipative structures a clock is something that runs downhill but human beings You can look up dissipative structure. I think that was an idea that was first formulated by the physicist Schrodinger we Work we’re not we’re not clocks by any stretch of the imagination and we take energy in and we disperse energy and And we were anti and tropic in a temporary sense so that makes us and so and life is as well Schrodinger wrote about that in a book called what is life and We don’t what we seem to do this is how it looks to me We don’t contend with the present and we’re not driven by the past instead what we see in front of us is a landscape of possibility and In my wilder moments, I think that’s associated with the physical idea of multiple universes, but that’s in my wilder moments It’s just a speculation and so what we see in front of us is a an array of Potential universes and those are the universes that we could bring about as a consequence of our actions and it and we make choices To the right or the left there’s a lot of mythological speculation about that sort of idea too in an ethical sense because We decide what sort of reality that we want to bring into being and so we encounter potential Like God did at the beginning of time when he made order out of chaos chaos is this chaotic potential we confront chaotic potential with our consciousness and we cast that into reality and That now then you think well, is that really the case? well That’s hard to say because there are limits to our knowledge about consciousness and about reality But if you treat yourself like you’re a free moral agent with choice and that you can determine The course of your life then you seem to get along better with yourself and to be less anxious and to be more productive and if you treat other people like that that they’re free agents that are making voluntary choices about how reality is going to come into Being and you reward them when they do it properly and you punish them Or otherwise discipline them when they don’t when they do it badly then your relationships with them seem to work and then if we Predicate our society on the presupposition that each individual human being is capable of doing just that Then we seem to have extremely functional societies And so and this is something that Sam Harris has been taken to task for many times is if you dispense with the idea of free will How is it you organize your relationship to yourself? Your interactions with your family and your relationships with the broader social community. It’s a very complicated issue. So I believe Strongly that we have free will that we’re responsible for our choices. Those choices are constrained in many many ways I think there’s a gradient of free will from free out into the future to increasingly constrained as the present Manifest itself to deterministic in the moment when in the moment of action We and we might think that we enter the realm of deterministic causality at the moment of action something like that That’s how it looks to me