https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=hdENDumGiWw
Well, I didn’t know where you were going with that story. But you pulled it together pretty well. Thank you. Yeah. That’s what happens when you listen and just see what comes up, right? Yeah. Okay. Well, I didn’t hear what you talked about, so I put down some questions. Okay. And you can do whatever you want with them. All right. All right. Dear Dr. Peterson, do you believe that mankind truly has free will? Or are our actions slash thoughts all predetermined? If the latter, how do we find meaning in this? It’s not a matter of belief. The future is unpredictable, technically speaking. The universe is not deterministic, technically speaking. There isn’t any dispute about that. You’re not a clockwork machine. And the reason that we know that is because a clockwork machine can’t compute the transforming horizon of the future. So now whether or not that means we have free will, that’s a different issue because it’s not exactly obvious what free will means, and it’s obvious as well that to some degree our will is bounded. But it certainly does mean that whatever you are, you’re not a deterministic clockwork machine. And whatever the universe is, it’s not a deterministic clockwork machine. So now I said that’s bounded. I can show you an action that’s deterministic. So this is called a ballistic movement. So I’ll do this. Okay. So it’s a very rapid movement, and it’s a complex movement because I accelerated my hand very rapidly and I stopped it just before it hit this surface. And the amount of time it took for my hand to move from here to here is shorter than the amount of time it took for the message from my hand to get to my brain and back if I want to adjust the movement once it’s released. And so to make a ballistic movement, I have to set up the action in a deterministic manner and then disinhibit it and let it run. And when it runs, I can’t control it. That’s why it’s called a ballistic movement. A ballistic missile, intercontinental ballistic missile, is ballistic like a bullet because once you shoot it, you can’t control what it does. And so it does look like as we implement our actions, the horizon of possibility collapses into a deterministic actuality. But the farther out into the future we look, the less determined our perceptions and actions necessarily become. And we don’t… Well, I’ll leave it at that. So I can give you a contrary vision that’s associated with what I talked about tonight. You’re not a clockwork machine. What are you? You’re a visionary. And to understand that, you have to reconfigure how you think about the world because most of you undoubtedly think like scientific materialists, at least in part. You’re probably not very good at thinking like scientific materialists, but because very few people think scientifically in a very thorough manner. architecture of your thought is going to be of that not nature. And so you think there are objects in the world and you think that you react to the objects and in a deterministic way, and none of that’s true. You don’t see objects that are objective. You see patterns that are functional and they don’t determine your action because you’re not a clockwork machine driven by stimulus. All of that’s wrong. Imagine what you confront when you wake up in the morning. You might say, well, I wake up in my bedroom and I confront the furniture. It’s like… That’s sort of like thinking that imagine you’re at a theater and you’re watching a play and the stage is set with the props. And the actors come on and they say their lines and you say the props caused that. Like none of that’s even vaguely true. And you know, the props in a play aren’t objects either. They’re facilitators of the symbolic message of the play. And I think you can say that about the objects in the actual world. They’re not objects. They’re facilitators of the symbolic meaning of the play. And then what do you confront when you wake up in the morning? Well, it’s not the damn furniture in your room. It’s the possibility of the day. The possibility of the day makes itself manifest to you and it presents itself as a problem. How will I interact with what’s transforming in front of me in a manner that will bring about the desired end? And you might be very bad at that, which just means you’re impulsive and after the realization of very short-term visions, and so you’re more hedonistic and immature in your visionary orientation, or you’re sophisticated and you integrate the possibility that makes itself manifest to you with a higher order and sophisticated vision. And then you grapple or wrestle with that emergent possibility to realize it, and by doing that you participate in the creation of the world. And the fact that you’re of that kind is the reason, for example, that our culture is predicated on the idea that you’re made in the image of God, because God is the spirit that confronts chaos and possibility and transforms it into habitable reality. And that’s you in the microcosm. And that’s a divine thing that you’re participating in. And you can tell that because if you do it right, it’s deeply meaningful. And you can tell that because if you do it right and it’s deeply meaningful, the habitable that you generate from the encounter with chaos and potential is good. And so the word that manifests itself at the beginning of time, the creative word, confronts potential, the tohu va’abohu, the wasteland, the water, the deep, all of that symbolic representation of potential, uses truth and love to shape that potential and produces the order that is good. That’s why it says in Genesis, repeated over and over after each day of creation. And God saw what he had created and it was good. And so if you’re oriented properly in your life, when you contend with the transforming horizon of the future, which is the entrance of becoming into being, that’s another way of thinking about it, then you contend with that as a high order ethical actor and you transform that potential into the habitable order that is good. And that’s the sine qua non of ethical action. And we all recognize it as such. So that’s the answer to that question.