Dialogos - Free Will and Agency - with Manuel Post (u61C0v1ykKo)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=u61C0v1ykKo

Well, thank you Manuel. Welcome. Welcome to Discord Diologos. Stealing that name from Jules and I’m here with Manuel Post today and we’re doing a video on free will versus agency. And I think we should explain a little, well I’ll explain what I mean by Diologos roughly. And then Manuel, you can add or subtract, but roughly, you know, I’m conceiving of the world in different conversation modes. And one of those conversations modes I call exploratory. And in exploratory mode, you’re out to discover ideas or find ideas or look at existing ideas and see how far you can get to the end of them and whether or not you can come to some sort of accord with all of that. Right. So that’s sort of my idea of what the Diologos will do. Now this necessarily means that in order to explain these ideas adequately, we’re going to be stating axioms. Right. And so there might be some debate in the beginning about these axioms or about ideas as we go along, because we’re going to have to state things and then be in Philea and Ikea to use the terminology instead of Philea Sophia. But I think that’s necessary. What do you think, Manuel, about my idea of Diologos there? How do you like that definition? Well, whenever I talk about a word, I look up its etymology. Daya is true and Logos is the word or speaking. So the way that I look at that is this. Well, like, for Vicky talks about intelligibility. Right. So what we’re doing is we’re trying to perceive the world through the intelligibility and then the interaction between us should facilitate that. And then in order to have the clarity, we have to do the things that you’re talking about where you’re clearly stating a thing and then exploring it. And then also, part of the exploration is necessarily setting a set of constraints around a thing. You want to make sure that you’re within the same space and that you’re looking at the same thing. And well, yeah, that’s some ground that needs to be established and fought over sometimes. Good. Yeah. Yeah. So I think we should talk about what prompted this. Right. So there’s a great deal of confusion because Sam Harris says we have no free will. Right. And I think my conclusion about that is that he confuses free will and agency. He doesn’t differentiate. And the reason why I think it’s valid to differentiate this too is because it’s two different terms and they seem to mean different things. Now, you can argue that no, no, free will and sure exactly the same thing. And fair enough, but I’m not starting from there. I’m starting from agency is something we start out with very little of when we’re born. Right. Because all my babies are we goes, right. And then as we grow older, we get more agency and then we sort of lose our agency. That’s our personal agency. And then that’s different from free will and free will. The way Sam Harris and others use it seems to be that their definition seems to be something like you can do whatever you want, whenever you want, however you want for any reason or no reason at all, as many times as you want with no repercussions, roughly speaking. And I mean, I don’t mean that to be dismissive. That literally to me seems to be what they’re talking about. Whereas when I’m talking about free will, I’m talking about a freedom of choice about how to use your agency. Right. So you have agency, there’s lots of things you can do with your agency. It crosses over with free will quite a bit, right. Because agency means we have choice to some extent. But free will is more about the choice of the things we engage in, the structures or the rules we engage in upfront. And we have a limited number of them. And I don’t want to make claims about how many we have, because I don’t know, and there’s different levels of analysis where we have free will. So I don’t know how to split that baby. And I don’t think I want to define that. But I’d like to say, for example, you have the free will to pursue the goal of flight, right. But how you pursue it is limited. So if your pursuit of flight involves no sort of external wings or a flight suit or a parachute or anything external to yourself, but you want to pursue that, you have the free will to do that, you will probably fall off a building and die, because it’s usually how these things go. But you have the free will to do it. Right. And then if instead you choose to do something closer to what the birds do, like say the Wright brothers did, then you’re more likely to be successful. And I only use that example because I was out there at the Wright Brothers Museum on Kildale Hills there, beautiful place. And it was interesting because they talked about this stuff. They talked about all the different people and what they were trying to do to fly and why the Wright brothers will say got it right in some sense and were able to fly when most of the other people crashed and a lot of people died, unfortunately. Yeah. So I think those definitions are fair. I think we might want to complexify it, right? Like there’s the will in the moment, which is severely limited. Maybe that’s the thing that Sam Harris is complaining about. But then there’s the will over time. And the further you go into the future, the more of the will can become real because you can organize the world in such a way for your will to manifest and develop your agency as well. So and then if we go about agency, right, like agency, you can see as an option space, right? Like in every situation, you have an option space and we can go into how that option space is constrained, but that option space is available to you. And you’re only going to manifest one of those options because they’re mutually exclusive because you can only do one thing over time. So yeah, that’s a nice way to start this off, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. So I like this idea of constraint in your free will. It’s not 100% free, we’ll say, right? There’s some limit to the freeness of your will. And if you’re complaining about that limit, fair enough, but it’s certainly not zero, right? And the same with agency, like if some agency, it’s not 100% and it’s not zero. And those two things do seem to overlap in some sense when we’re talking about them based on your perspective, right? Like, are you looking at this from the top down? Then you’re probably looking at agency or looking from the bottom up and you’re probably looking at free will, right? The things that do constrain your choice outside of yourself. Agency is the things that constrain your choice inside of yourself, we’ll say, right? So the limitations of your body, right? The limitations. So the limitations of your body are somewhat constrained by gravity, right? But they’re also built by gravity, right? But when you talk about things outside yourself, those are constraints to your free will, right? And things inside yourself are constraints to your agency. Does that sound fair? Well, I think you flipped them, right? Like the constraints inside yourself are, well, if we look at will as how we engage with potential, I think that is a better way of constructing it, right? So there is a potential out there and the will is the way that we want to shape it. And then the way that we can actually make that shaping happen is constrained by the physical world. And the way that we can have ideas is limited by our creativity and it’s limited by how we can manifest that creativity in the world or that is our agency, right? So there’s a two dimensional thing, right? Like there’s a thing that we, which isn’t real. And then there’s a thing that is real. And the thing that is real, that is the agency, which also goes back to, well, what is Sam Harris talking about, right? Like Sam Harris can only think in the real because all the other stuff is imagination basically. So then at that point, you’re going to equate the will that you have with the agency you can express in the world. And we see a lot of people do this. And basically what they’re effectively doing is they’re hamstringing themselves. They can’t engage with the creative element that’s outside the expected value or something, right? Like there’s some creativity that they can be receptive to, but the thing that requires transformation, right? That requires you to look at the world differently and then take action, right? Like that’s where the problem starts to creep in. Yeah, I like that. That’s a good point, right? And I think one of the reasons why I think Sam Harris is, well, there’s a couple reasons. I think Sam Harris is wrong. One is he claims 50% of the audience understands him and 50% doesn’t. Okay, but that’s one way to interpret 50-50 split. But the better way I think to interpret the 50-50 split is nobody understands what he’s talking about at all. And that’s why it’s 50-50, right? Because it’s a coin flip. Or there’s 50% of his audience that’s using the method of agency as equals free will and there’s 50% who says, no, no, no, agency isn’t enough to describe free will. Right, right. Well, the other thing is I don’t think you can tell people they don’t have agency. Like I think that’s a move everyone rejects naturally, right? Unless they’re already on the road to nihilism. If you’re already on the road to nihilism, yeah. The way that you don’t think you have agency, you’re sliding down that nihilism slide for sure. And I think that’s important. But also Sam Harris even says, well, we have to act as if we have free will, otherwise the world doesn’t work. And it’s like, well, now we’re getting into a definition of truth. Like what evolutionarily true things are things you act as if they’re true. So I mean, either Sam doesn’t understand evolution, is an evolution denier, or has some bizarre definition of truth that just doesn’t match anything that I would recognize as truth. So that’s another, if you have to act as if free will exists, I don’t know, and how are you measuring this? Like, how do you know that determinism is a thing? What would you use, where would you stand outside of the universe to determine if determinism is real? Like you’d have to have that objective third person perspective. Well, you can choose to believe in determinism, and then you can make it real for yourself. So that’s one way to fix that problem. Right, that would be true. But that, see, I would say, yeah, then it makes it true. Right. And then about the truth thing, right, like Peterson and Sam Harris said, it is an awesome conversation in two sessions, I think, which, and that was, no, no, no, no, that is what’s the truth conversation. Oh, the truth comes, oh, the first two were just on truth, right, right. So, so yeah, like, we can go into it, right, but the way I distinguish it’s like, like scientific truth isn’t the truth, it’s a fact, right, like, we have established this thing, right, like that, that measurement device set this thing at this moment, right, like, that’s not truth, that’s a fact. Truth is the thing that is, that is related to navigation, right, like, so, so something that is true allows us to have a description of reality that, that enables our action or our expression of agency in a way that can actually manifest the thing that we intend to achieve. So, so, so that, that is the best way to think of truth. And, and, and yeah, right, like, if we, if we take that idea and put it into evolution, then evolution says, well, the things that work, right, like, the things that do to perform their function are the things that are true, and they will be maintained because they will be adapted in some sense. Right, right, and then we can tie that back into Jordan Peterson’s conception of chaos versus order, and that chaos is something like the place where all the potential exists, right, and then you’re going into that place and creating, creating, not finding, creating, hobitable order, and the creating is actually really important in that model, and then you’re using your agency to do that, right, and, but it’s your free will that determines whether or not you even bother, right, like, so, so you have the, if you have the ability to do something, like, agentically, if you’re an agent that can do a thing, like, like dive into a pool, but you choose not to, the choosing not to is the free will, right, because the agency remains unchanged, you could dive into the pool, right, and so that’s another, I think, important distinction between free will and agencies, you have the free will to engage with chaos and create habitable order, but if you choose not to do that, you’re, you’re, you’re exercising your free will not to engage, and you have to because you can’t engage with everything, right, you’re just, you’re a finite creature with limited agency and with limited time and with limited skills and with limited cognitive abilities, right, with lots of limitations, some of them we don’t understand, and, and you know, when I say limitations, people place hard limits, it’s like, no, no, no, no, but cognitive agency day-to-day changes, sometimes I’m having a really good cognitive day, and sometimes I can’t remember my name, so, you know, what happens, right, and the same with my physical, right, sometimes I’m physical, I’m very quick, and sometimes I’m just not there, and, you know, you can control some of that to some extent, but you don’t have full control, and, and I think that’s, there’s full control ideas where people get messed up, they want full control, like, oh, science gives us full control, so we want full control, if we don’t have full control, we must have no control, it’s like, oh, crazy dichotomy, right, but yeah, that’s, I think that’s one of the confusions. Yeah, so to go back to Peterson’s map of order and chaos, he distinguishes two types of chaos, it’s the unknown, unknown, and the known, unknown, right, so the known and known is the potential that you have the agency to relate to, but then there’s a set of potential that you don’t have the agency to relate to, but, and this is what the story of the human race is, is like, we have successfully found ways to start interacting with that space, and the way that we did that is by, well, having an aspiration, right, oh, like, that is a thing that might happen, right, like flying, and then, and then we start doing crazy stuff, and then either we use the external worlds to facilitate our change, which is the function of technology, or we change the way that we’re looking at the world in order so that we can have a relationship with what’s happening that allows us to do the thing, right, like, and then that would relate to overcoming mostly emotional resistance and fear, and sometimes just literally the ability to see it, right, like, like, for Vekias’s conception of psychotechnologies, psychotechnologies open up spaces that were previously inaccessible, and you can think of reading as an example, right, when you gain the ability to read, your agency increases, I don’t know, like, exponentially it’s not that big enough. Right, right, yeah, yeah, and I liked it, so I think the thing that’s missing for Sam Harris, being an overly science believer, believer in the science cult, is this idea of potential, which is not engaging with potential, and so, well, I don’t have access to potential, therefore I don’t have free will, right, because something that I can’t understand is limiting my agency. It’s like, well, yeah, but that’s, it’s not actually limiting your agency, the thing that’s limiting your agency is your disengagement with the idea of free will. If you put the free will back in, right, because you realize there’s potential and that you can create from that potential personally, then that changes everything, because if you believe you can’t create from potential, let’s suppose you have, like, a closed world mentality where, you know, the world is at least knowable, if not known, then why would you do anything, like, ever? Like, everything’s either already been done or already could be done, and somebody else is probably doing it, because seven billion people, roughly, on the planet, so why would you want, and then, because if you do it and somebody else has already done it and you don’t recognize until too late, then you just wasted your time, and, you know, so if there’s no creation, there’s no way to create value or interface with value or enhance value, then yeah, why would you do anything? And it certainly seems like you don’t have free will if you can’t do anything, if you can’t create in the world, I think that’s a good analog for no free will, right, the inability to create. So I can understand where, if you have a closed world, you’re losing potential by definition, and then you can’t really do much, you know, maybe you can do some things, but you can’t really embrace all of the things that you could do in encountering chaos and creating habitable order from it, right? Yeah, so there’s a couple things where that goes for me. We’ve been talking about responsibility and how hard it is for people to take responsibility, and then, well, like, if you include this dimension of potential in the thing that you need to take responsibility for, right, that burden becomes insanely heavy, where it’s like a load, like, yeah, I’ve looked into that a bit, I guess. Anyway, but the responsibility element is, I think, really important, right, because if you’re in a closed world, like, you are relating to everything that you can take responsibility for, and then you can just organize things in a way where you’re perfect, or whatever, right, like, close to perfect as possible, while if you’re opening that space for potential, right, like, then that is definitionally not enough, right, like, relating to what is known is actually maladaptive, because that isn’t preparing you for the future, and then, well, like, what happens in our societies, we have external systems that impose that change upon us, right, like, we go to school, we get swimming lessons, right, like, parents push us to do the music thing, and sometimes we like it, right, so we ride that way for a while, right, like, and then maybe we get scared, right, like, and then we ride that way for a while, but at a certain point, you need to grow up and take responsibility for that process, and, yeah, right, like, then you need to navigate, and you need to have a way to interface with that problem, and I think this is one of the problems that humans have been trying to figure out over the ages, right, like, and this is why the free will debate is in the religious context, has always been there, so, yeah. Yeah, that’s interesting. Yeah, I like what you said there. There’s a lot, there’s kind of a lot wrapped up in responsibility, right, because, you know, to your point, the ultimate problem is, well, how much responsibility do I take for what, and perfection, in my mind, is just the religious purity of science, right, so when you invoke perfection, you’re doing the same thing as a puritan literally would do in a religion, right, we don’t want to purify, it’s just a purification process, that’s what perfection is, it just only applies to the religion of science or something, and that’s where you get into trouble, because you’re trying to be perfect, right, and then science tells you you can, even though that’s false, it lies to you, and it looks like you can, because for short bursts, it seems that way, but it only seems that way from a limited perspective like your own, locked in a box, ignoring all the things outside of it, and it only seems that way for a limited amount of time, even within that context, and so we don’t realize, oh, there’s a lot more going on in the world than that, and what we’ve done is fooled ourselves using science, and by limiting our attention, right, and our perspective, getting our perspective into a small enough box, and then bang, we can be perfect, and therefore, once we’ve done it once, we can do it all the time, because that’s how that works, and we can get the new science, right, and then we can update our old books with the new science, right, right, and I think that’s why the science cults are spreading, right, you get all these non-scientific science things, right, and then you ask what method, what method are you using, because they’re not using the scientific method, and they’re like, oh, we have this method, blah, blah, blah, and it doesn’t meet any of the requirements of a method, right, or certainly not a reliable method, and it’s like, well, if it’s not a reliable method, is it a science, because I kind of think not, right, and it’s tricky to see those things, because people make these great claims, but, you know, and they’ll use statistics, and it’s like, oh, and most people can’t use statistics to save their ever-loving soul, including a lot of the scientists, right, they’re not really good with statistics, and so what ends up happening is, you know, you have these baby sciences, which are just baby science cults that are trying for perfection in their own way, and substituting statistics for perfection, and say, oh, 80% of the time, right, that’s a good number, it’s like, but now you’re not, you know, you’re not there anymore, and then when the exceptions hit, people get very upset when they’re in the exception group, and the whole thing kind of collapses, because they don’t want to take responsibility for the fact that the world has randomness in it, and you can’t, you need to meet the potential and be responsible for it, you need to take responsibility for something outside of yourself, because you can’t create cool things by yourself entirely, and the fact that maybe Elon Musk seems to be able to, or, you know, maybe, you know, maybe there’s these other people that, out there, that seem to be able to, maybe they’re not doing that by themselves, like, maybe they have the whole of history behind them, for example, right, maybe they have all these books that they can read and draw, like, they’re standing on the shoulders of giants, even if they’re not standing on the shoulders of people alive today, and so if they’re not doing it by themselves, why should you be able to do it by yourself, and, you know, people are different, because evolution is real, so you shouldn’t expect everybody to have the same baseline cognitive ability, or cognitive understanding, or total cognitive load, or anything, and that’s when people get confused, and that’s why you have to take responsibility for, you know, and this is a very Christian idea, although it’s in many other religions, right, you have to take responsibility for the people who can’t, who don’t have as much, who can’t do as much, who, you know, are disabled, or whatever, right, I think those are burden you’re supposed to, in some sense, take some responsibility for, and that responsibility may just be participating in government, and letting the government assist, you know, and I’m not making any claims there, but you got to take some responsibility for the stuff that’s kind of outside of yourself, and then you’re exercising, you know, your free will, and your agency at the same time, hopefully. Right, and then, well, I don’t want to go into this rabbit hole too much, right, but it’s like, like, I think a lot of people have that sense, right, like I think everybody has that sense, right, and then they don’t have a good way, right, like, so paying taxes is taking responsibility, right, you’re contributing to the whole charity, right, but, but, but again, right, like, that’s outsourcing, right, that’s, that’s, that’s not in your agency, right, like, what you’re doing is you’re transmuting your agency into money, and then the money is the thing that’s acting for you, instead of you acting yourself, right, and what happens, well, you’re excluding yourself outside of the system that transforms you, right, like, because charity is not only for the other person, like, charity is also for you to have right orientation in the world, and when, when you lose that dimension, right, like, you, you, well, you don’t lose it, maybe some people never have it, right, but, like, when you’re not interfacing in that space, then you, you, you end up blinding yourself to, to part of, part of reality, and, yeah, like, so I want, I wanted to go back to the agency free will, right, so, so I think when, when you look at, at, at agency, you can conceptualize it as, as, like, a fan, right, like, it’s brought it out, like, that with different, well, or a tree, right, like, with different branches in different directions, and you can choose one, and then you can choose again, and you can choose again, and then, and then you can, you can look at the will as the thing that is doing the navigation across those branches down, down the stream, right, and then, and then the places that you might end up to are, like, can be so completely different, but, but, like I said before, right, like, they’re exclusionary, so if you go to this space, you cannot go to that space, right, because we’re constrained by time in, in, in the way that we move down that, that tree. So why, why is it important to look at it like that? Well, it, it gives you a sense of navigation, right, like, you, you can steer to the left, you can steer to the right, you can also always start steering to the left, right, like, you can always, and, and this also relates to decision making and responsibility again, in the sense that, well, you can, you can start going a direction, and at every point on that path, you can choose to not stay on the path and take a different direction, and then what does that say over responsibility? Well, like, that means that in this decision point where I’m at right now, in this point in time, I don’t have full responsibility for the outcome all the way up there. I don’t have responsibility for all the way up there, because this is the consequence of this point, this point, this point, this point, this point, this point, this point, and then at every point, I can make a new decision, and that relieves a lot of building from, from the initial decision, but it also puts on responsibility on all the other moments, which is maybe the thing that people don’t want to do, right, like, I chose this, I’m going to go for it. Right, right. Well, and a lot of people have success with that in various ways, right, a lot of people have success with, I’m just going to plow through it no matter what, it’s actually one of the properties that makes a good CEO, is somebody who, you know, the team says no, and they say we’re doing this, and the team says no, and they say we’re doing this, and the reason why it works in business is because people get exhausted fighting the, fighting the CEO, and just find a way to make it work instead, and, and it’s not reliable, it’s not, you know, reliable 100%, but it’s actually fairly reliable, and, you know, most businesses fail too, so, but there’s a lot of factors, it’s not always a bad idea, sometimes bad implementation, it’s not always a bad implementation, sometimes a bad idea, and sometimes neither of those things, sometimes it’s bad HR, or, you know, somebody gets upset, and then sabotage is a project, I’ve seen that, right, so you see these things if you watch, if you watch closely, if you listen, if you read, you know, autobiographies and stuff, and successful people, you’ll see these patterns in there, right, these patterns that people are trying to navigate, and then they end up with, oh, you know, oh, the key to success is, right, and it’s like, yeah, there’s a bunch of other stuff going on, and that’s where the free will is, in all those little decision points to your point, where we, that we get to make. All right, so what you were talking about is kind of submitting to an ideal, basically, right, like this is the ideal company, and then as CEO, I’m submitting to it, and then everybody else also has to submit to it, right, and then it was like, well, how do you get that alignment, right, well, we don’t want to talk in the CEO thing, they’re like, just go to your brain, right, like there’s parts of your brain that want to go left, there’s parts of your brain that want to go right, and you need to get that alignment, even if there’s disagreement, and, and well, now we get into, well, okay, so there’s this navigation problem, there’s this relationship to potential, how are we going to resolve that problem, well, we’re going to resolve that problem by having right navigation, right, like we’re not concerned with the point at the end, no, we’re concerned with every point on the way, and the ability to to perceive whether it is correct to continue on without it being like a mad homework for us, no, we want to have an intuitive relationship to that decision. Right, exactly, because life, you know, we always snapshot things, we kind of have to, right, especially historically, we have to snapshot things and say, oh, this is the moment, pivotal moment, whatever, but life comes at us continuously, and then there’s an arc of time, and so we’re slicing time up and saying, oh, this is the moment, but this is, this is the week, or this is the month, or whatever, but that’s not how it happens in real time, and so when you look, you get this sense that, oh, well, it should work the way it’s described, right, but the description, you can’t describe things in continuous time, like, I mean, you create a description and communicate a description in continuous time, but you can’t communicate continuous time to people, and you don’t have to, because they’re experiencing it as they exist, so, and it’s not relevant either, so, right, it’s not, well, it shouldn’t be relevant, but I think we get confused, right, and this is where we get the idea that, well, you know, children can consent, it’s like, no, they have limited agency, that’s the whole point, your agency changes, right, and so does your cognitive capacity, and so your ability to consent must also change, unless evolution is wrong, that’s a different problem, right, and so as these things, as these things go, it’s easy to take a slice and say, well, at 18, you know, you’re old enough to go to war or something, right, and it’s like, no, but, you know, you have to be 21 to drink, and it’s like, what, these are arbitrary decisions, because you can’t know each child is different, right, development, development doesn’t happen in stages, that’s false, that’s ridiculous, there’s not to say you can’t divide it into stages after the fact, but it’s after the fact, and that changes everything, and that’s always what we’re doing, is post-facto rationalization with all this stuff, because time’s coming at us continuously, we don’t have, and we don’t need a good way to describe continuous time, but if you, the person being communicated to, doesn’t understand continuous time, you’re going to get all confused about these things, it’s going to seem okay that, you know, we should go to war at 12, why not, we should let 12 year olds drink, why not, because they have limited agency, and limited cognitive capacity, and limited experience, which is tools, roughly speaking, or skills, to deal with the world, and so you have to be very careful with that, and you have to be responsible for it, and you have to be responsible for translating slices of discrete time, and just slices of discrete descriptions of discrete time, into what happened in the moment, all the continuous things that happened in the moment, all the things that had to go right for everything to go right, we’ll say, and that’s where the responsibility becomes hard, because there’s a lot of stuff to track, and you can’t track it all, so you have to outsource, but there’s responsibility in your outsourcing too, like oh, you know, I outsourced all my HR decisions to my head of HR, fair enough, right, or I outsourced all my ethical decisions to my church, fair enough, but you still have to take responsibility for all of that, in some sense, and remember to revisit it. So yeah, you brought up the idea of that the law, right, and the law is the structure that is not focused on the individual, it’s focused on regulating society, and if we start confusing, well, 18 and law, and therefore, like that’s where we get the big problems, and so yeah, like it’s a really big problem with this age and agency, and that points to a thing, and it’s like, okay, so how do we actually get this awareness, like where do we get this agency, and this willful, right, and then Paveki has this conceptualization of what we look through a thing when we are participating with it, right, so when I’m angry, I’m looking through my anger, which is the dialogue, right, like we’re looking through the logos right now, using the structure of intelligibility to connect things, and to form bigger intelligibilities, I guess, and and so when we’re looking through a thing, then in some sense, we are possessed by it, it takes it takes over our ability to navigate, and we’re navigating, expressing the thing, right, so if we’re navigating, expressing the end, and then at a certain point, hopefully, some people might not get there, right, like we gain the ability in the moment to recognize the thing, and then say, oh, this is me being angry, and now I can get a relationship, when I’m angry, I count to 10, when I’m angry, I don’t do these things, right, and then there’s this super imposition of this, well, rules, not, well, like this higher value that you use to constrain yourself in the moment, and when that happens, then in that relationship, right, like, well, that’s basically new potential, right, like that’s literally new agency, when you can count to 10, instead of actually acting it out, then you have engaged a new set of options of being with the world, and then when that happens more often, right, maybe you don’t have to count to 10, maybe you can count to five, maybe you don’t even have to count, and you can solve it in a different way, and that’s the process, that is how we get there, and that process happens in all directions, like all our agency, I think, well, that’s just a statement I do right now, is a consequence of that process, where we’re getting a relationship to the thing, and then a new option space opens, and then in that option space, we develop agency again, and then we get new options based. Yeah, that’s interesting, I like your conception there, so what we’re talking about really is adding potential to the world, right, so if you think about the stoic ethic, you know, your emotions cause you to respond, right, at least mentally, and then if you can separate your mental response from your physical response, that’s being a good stoic, and then, but what you’re doing there is you’re creating a space, you’re creating time in between feeling the emotion and acting on the emotion, or reacting to the emotion, and that gives you back the control of your action, so you can’t, you’re not gonna control your emotion, the emotion’s gonna happen, fair enough, it’s supposed to, that’s how we work, right, but now you’ve created the potential to consider your action or reaction, and that changes everything, but you know, I mean, I’ve got this whole saying, right, the silence is the sound of potential, right, because you’re creating that space and that time to make different, better decisions, and those decisions result in actions or reactions, however you want to frame that, or lack of action, right, that’s another thing, and so, yeah, it’s the, to some extent, it’s engaging in the creation of potential, right, just by sacrificing a little bit of time, which you know, sometimes is a bad decision, the tiger’s in the woods and you see it, then you know, react right away, don’t get all stoic about it and go, I’m gonna come to town and then I’m gonna decide if I want to run away from the tiger, right, but there’s a bunch of other circumstances where, you know, maybe we don’t need that anymore, or we only need it in limited circumstances, and honing that is the stoic ethic, like honing when to just react, right, versus when to take a breath, that’s really what stoicism in my mind is about. Right, and in my example, right, like it’s really clunky at the start, right, but then it’s, the time space starts compressing, and then when you’re at a point that you can just realize in the moment, oh, I’m angry, like, do I want to be angry? How do I want to be angry? Right, like when you’re there, then there’s a, the moment, right, becomes fluid, it just becomes part of your nature, and that is the way that you can solve the problem, like, oh, I need to stop from this tiger, right, like there’s this, I guess this also has to do with letting go, right, like trusting in the process, right, like, I’m angry, I’m expressing myself this way at this point, but in the future of my anger, I’m still going to be able to decide not to do it, so I don’t have to decide not to do it now, because maybe now it’s okay, and then when you have that trust in yourself, right, like then there’s another space that opens up, and then we get the whole story again. Yeah, yeah, and it’s important to call out, like, sometimes anger is the appropriate thing, like, if somebody transgresses, you should be angry, and you should express that anger, because if you don’t, that gives them permission to do it again, and, you know, you could say, oh, well, you know, only if they’re a bad person, no, people make mistakes and transgress and don’t realize it, but if you don’t tell them they transgressed, when they transgress again, that’s on you, not them, because you didn’t, you weren’t angry at them, and say, oh, no, I’m mad that you transgressed, so it’s not like anger is, like, something you want to stamp out no matter what. There’s no real valence to these emotions beyond the context, so in some contexts, anger is bad, and in some contexts, anger is good, and figuring out it is hard, and there’s a lot of responsibility, and you take responsibility for your agency, and that’s really, you know, where stoicism comes in, and stoicism is something like, take responsibility for your agency and let go of the things that free will limits you from engaging in any way, right? Right, that’s the other option space, not the option space, that’s another burden, right, like, oh, stoicism says, well, there’s things that you can’t do, and well, now we’re going to agree with some errors, I guess, a little bit. Yes, there’s things that you can do, and don’t try to do them, because if you’re trying to do things that you can’t do, then you’re just burdening yourself in ways, and then you get emotional entanglements, and all that stuff, so having the discernment between the things that your will and your agency, right, like they’re both important, what their capacities are, like how you can access them, how you should access them, where you should point them, where you shouldn’t point them, all of these things, when you get a sense of how that works, that frees up a whole lot of burden from yourself, which justifies this letting go, right, like when that burden is relieved, then every moment that you’re participating, that is a moment where you’re not feeling that burden, and therefore, you can make the decision to go somewhere else. Right, yeah, I like that, yeah, I mean, like I said, Sam’s definition of free will seems to be do whatever I want, whenever I want, wherever I want, however I want, for any reason or no reason at all, and it’s like, no, free will is definitely about choices, and in order to have choices, there have to be constraints, and the question is, what are the constraints, and are they valid, right, so we perceive constraints, do we perceive them correctly? Sometimes, sometimes not, because we’re not perfect creatures, because that’s purity, and we’re not pure, we can’t be, otherwise, evolution isn’t real, right, and the minute you ponder purity, evolution fails, like the whole evolutionary framework comes collapsing in on itself, it’s got to have lots of diversity, and so one instance may, in theory, be quote pure, but purity doesn’t last anyway, because entropy, so it’s pointless to even think about it, in some sense, like perfection and purity are just non-starters, except as ideals to move towards, right, they’re non-starters as implementations in the real world, and that’s where he gets, I think, wrapped around the axle on free will, is just this ridiculous definition of what free will is, but I think people have both free will and agency, right, and then, like I said, agency is a function of how old you are, in some sense, and other things, like, you know, if you’re born without a limb or something, or you lose a limb, or you lose an eye, or lose both eyes, you can’t, like, all these things affect your agency, but they don’t necessarily affect your free will, I mean, agency does have an impact on free will, and vice versa, but yeah, they’re very hard to untangle, so fair enough for Sam getting confused, although he claims to be a big brain, so I don’t know why he’s confused about that, but at free will, very important to engage with, because look, there’s no will without choice, and there’s no choice without constraint, and so there must be constraints in free will, otherwise it wouldn’t exist as will, it would just be free, you know, like free free, or something, freedom, like complete freedom over all axes of time and space, and yeah, we definitely don’t have that, but like, who wants that, then you can’t make decisions, and even if you could make decisions, you couldn’t feel good about them, because you couldn’t measure them, so measurement goes away, that kills science, by the way, and just quick aside, don’t do that, so yeah, there’s constraints of the world, but then there’s also constraints by you, right, like there’s things that you just won’t do, like those exist, even if you think they don’t exist, they do. Right, yeah, good point. So Dan is like, well, okay, like those things are there, so maybe I should choose them, right, like maybe I’m just gonna pick the set of constraints, and then I have my action space, which is like really specific, and maybe I have like three directions that are specific, but I choose those, I have a good relationship to those, and therefore I can do all the things that I need to do, and then when, well yeah, like how do you choose those constraints, like and here you go into, well like maybe you just choose them, right, like you’re not stupid, like you kind of know what’s right, like just choose constraints, and then what that constraints allow you to do, right, like it allows you to gain a new way of perceiving what you’re doing, right, like the way that your relationship with the world is changes as a consequence of those constraints, and then as a consequence of that change, you can see new options, like new ways of being in that space that previously weren’t available to you, because you were just, your attention was to diffuse, to be aware of what’s happening in that specific part, and yeah, right, like and then we can do, what was the word that Paveki used, I think Paveki used the word maximization, where maxim is a way of, well see, like a heuristic, it allows you to understand the situation in a specific way, and then he has this process of maximization that you rewrite the thing, and then you rewrite it again, and maybe you try to integrate other ideas into it, and then you try to make it smaller and smaller, and then, well you also live it out, and that interaction between those things allows you to fine-tune it to yourself, right, like what works for me, and the fact that you update it across time and in relation to other things is where the magic happens, right, like then, well we legit have emergence happen. Right, yeah, yeah, I like the maximization process, so and just to clarify, you don’t merely rewrite it, right, you’re not wrote copying, right, you’re rephrasing, and you’re making it bigger and smaller, and then bigger and smaller, and that’s the process of circumambulating the idea, roughly speaking, so you’re trying to get around the idea, right, and this goes back to filling the elephant, right, filling the elephant back, filling the elephant side, right, right, you just keep doing that, right, and so what you’re really doing in some sense is owning the idea to Peterson’s point, right, when he talks about be aware of unearned wisdom, right, yeah, be aware of unearned wisdom, and that’s not unearned if you’re taking a maxim, expanding it out, you know, wrestling with it, you know, grabbing it, and hopefully that’s what we’re doing here with the DLL, that’s right, we’re wrestling with this idea, you’re coming with your perspective, I’m coming with my perspective, we’re trying to find where they meet because we think that’s roughly more true than not, right, and yeah, it’s that whole process, it’s a very valuable process, and it’s a great practice, just to own ideas, right, so the maxim is like dialoguos with yourself across time, in some sense, right, right, and it’s really interesting, right, so this conceptualization that, well, like if you point at it, and if I point at it, then it’s more true than if I just point at it, then like that’s something really important, right, like there’s this thing where where if a thing can have its existence in a way that is durable, right, which means in my head and his head, like if that is a thing that happens, then it obviously is more durable than if it’s only in my head, because it’s allowed to be criticized by this massive brain and that massive brain, and yeah, like so these things, right, and then also then the process of like, okay, so if we push it a little bit this way, and then push it a little bit that way, then at a certain point, you start seeing, or not seeing, seeing is the wrong word, but you sense kind of like what it is, where like, what is the structure, what does it mean to be in relationship to this idea or this group of ideas, and then this is where the intuition is developed, right, like where you don’t have to think it through, but you can just follow the flow of the shape in your brain basically. Yeah, I like that idea. So there’s, what occurs to me now is there’s two sort of senses, right, so when we’re talking about something like intelligibility, right, intelligibility has reliability, and so you can talk about self-intelligibility, things that are clear to you, maybe subconsciously, right, I talk a lot about common sense, and my definition of common sense is something you know so well, that’s so embodied that you can’t explain it to other people. So when we say you don’t have common sense, it’s like, well yeah, but the person saying that can’t give it to them either, and that’s their flaw, not the other person’s flaw. It’s like, oh, when I’m talking about like, well I’ve got this common sense, yeah, but only you have it, and you can’t deliver it to somebody else, it was like, oh, and people when they hear that, they usually go, uh-oh, because they realize immediately that there’s something correct in my description, so there’s a bunch of things that are common sense to you and not common sense to everybody else, and some of them are going to overlap, so there’s a sense in which it’s intelligible to you, right, and it’s reliable to you, right, you see the reliability, but then there’s another sense of intelligibility and reliability outside yourself, and that’s where we’re outsourcing sanity, right, because we can only look out, we can’t look in, so we need other people to help us know if we’re sane, and that means they have to agree about certain things with us, right, and it’s like, oh, well if you see this thing as intelligible, and I see this thing as intelligible, then maybe it is common sense to all the people like us, right, and it’s like, oh, we’d like to be in groups like us, because then we’re, if people are like us, then they, then we have to communicate less with them, less energy, and they’re going to agree with us, which means, you know, less debate, which is less energy, right, and so we’re always looking for that external intelligibility and reliability and the internal intelligibility and reliability, and we shouldn’t confuse the two, because scale matters, and, right, and we’re limited creatures, so, you know, right, you know. I want to pick up on the point, right, like, the less energy, right, like, right, this seems to be coming back in this conversation, where it is this thing, and then you do, you’re being different in the world, and then there’s less energy needed to perform the action, and what does that do? Well, that frees up energy for more complex interaction, right, so if you go back to the social idea, oh, you’re thinking the same as I’m thinking, well, that means that we can do more complex thinking, and that means that our relationship, we can privilege different aspects in our communication, as opposed to this really basic layer, right, the common sense layer, and then if we make the second layer common sense, right, like, then we can go to the third layer, and then at a certain point, you get, well, yeah, you get the terrible babble, but that’s a different problem. Yeah, yeah, but, yeah, I like that idea of layers, you know, layers of common sense, and then how, you know, that gets back to how big is your tribe, roughly speaking, although I hate that language, but it’s not wrong, it just, we misuse it, and that does tell you what you can and can’t build, and because you can and can’t rely on, like, oh, I can rely on the guy taking out the trash to make sure he takes out the trash, right, I can rely on, right, so that frees you, not going to the dump, I live in the woods, I have to go to the dump, I have to take my trash, myself, to a place, I have no choice, and so that takes time, energy, and effort, right, and, you know, it’s okay for me, I have a convertible, and I live in the south, and I just put the top down and totally enjoy every little trip I have to make, because that’s one way to solve the problem, and in the process, I listen to podcasts, or what, right, so to me, I could turn this into, you know, going to the dump, it’s not such a terrible thing, but to other people, it’s like, oh, you mean, I have to be responsible for my trash, you know, all the way to the transfer station, oh my goodness, right, and so, right, right, imagining a city having to do that, right, it’s not possible, right, everything would be totally overwhelmed, right, you can’t even do it, because scale matters, and when you change the scale of the number of people in the area, now all of a sudden, the only plausible way to get rid of your trash as an individual is to outsource that to a system that is able to take in lots of trash all at once very efficiently, you don’t need that level of efficiency out where I live, because, you know, four people live where I live, so it’s not so bad, right, like everybody can go to the dump, and when I go, there’s never a line, right, so it’s not so bad, but yeah, you know, if you’re down the street in the big city, it’s like, then you’re in trouble, you could never do that, so these things really matter, and then all of that is wrapped up, because, yeah, it’s inefficient to some extent, like I said, I make it efficient, so I don’t care, but you have to make all these things efficient, and you have to be willing to do that, you have to take responsibility for making it efficient, how do you make it efficient, well, I’ve got a fancy car with a retractable roof, right, and I’ve got podcasts, and I’ve got this silly cell phone that gives me, you know, YouTube videos to watch while I’m in my car, because it automatically connects, and I had to set all that stuff up, right, and so there’s all these trade-offs we’re making in order to have different amounts of free will and agency, and conserve our energy, in some sense, or at least use it as efficiently as we can towards the goals that we’re trying to achieve. So basically, what you were describing there is, okay, we have the city, right, which would mean a complex coherent structure, and well, you can transfer that to your life, right, like, okay, like, I have these complex coherent structures in my life that I need to automate, right, like, if I don’t automate them, I will start malfunctioning, because that would be too big, right, like, and well, like, I guess going to the toilet and stuff like that are all of these things that you just do on autopilot, and you’re okay with it, and then, well, like, some of these things, right, which are more edge cases, right, like, Mark living outside on the edge, where you have to have a more intentional relationship, because you’re not familiar, but you also don’t need to have a specific answer to it, because it’s not relevant enough to warrant the attention to articulate a coherent, repetitive, efficient answer. Right, and then that ties back into free will, because it’s your free will to live in a city or not, and in which type of city to live in, because cities are actually, there’s a lot of, cities have a lot of things in common, they also have a lot of differences, so in Boston, the big trick, at least for me, was what you needed to find was a cheap apartment on the tee, with parking, because I had, I always had a car, always had a car, so, because I didn’t grow up in a city that big, although when I was young, we had buses, but that’s all we had in Lowell, but when you’re in Boston, man, you need to find the right place, and there were places, so places that were extremely cheap, right on the tee, in fact, the best part of the tee, the Green, the D, Greenline, best place ever, and also have parking, it’s like free parking, like wow, this is, you know, this is great, and it was cheap, it’s like, this is fantastic, and it happened to be in the, in the wealthy neighborhood, no less, the wealthy side of town, so it was pretty good, but then when you see people in the city, they’re like, oh, I don’t want to move out of the city because I don’t drive, right, or I don’t want to drive, like, fair enough, you know, commute to work and traffic, I totally feel you, I used to live outside of Boston, and it totally sucked if you worked in Boston to have to drive into Boston, you know, and so, you know, on the other hand, when I lived in Boston, I couldn’t find work in Boston, I was always traveling outside the city, I couldn’t use the damn trains, so, you know, there’s all the, but then when you go to something, say, look, you don’t have to live in the city, you could live, you know, in the woods, and then you buy all this other stuff, like all these different, different systems, but then you’re more responsible, because people don’t come and take your trash, you don’t have public transportation, most likely, you know, now you have to maintain your car better, right, now you’re responsible for, you know, washing your own house and making sure the outside’s okay and replacing the roof, and you don’t have to do that in an apartment in the city, right, or in a condo, even the outside’s taken care of, it’s the inside of the condo you’re responsible for, so, and there’s all these trade-offs, and when you, it’s interesting to me, because when you talk to people about, well, you know, look, you don’t have to do that, they’re like, what do you mean? Like, I don’t, right, we had Curtis, right, and he was like, are you Jeff Bezos on Amazon, they control my life, and I was like, no, you can just not buy from them, and you can just not, and then they don’t control your life anymore, and it’s, you know, it’s like, whoa, wait a minute, because that’s a, that’s a statement of free will, right, you can exercise your free will in not living in the city, not buying from Amazon, not, you know, not having a lawn, I don’t have a lawn, because that destroys the environment, by the way, you know, there’s all kinds of things that, you know, and the problem is people don’t want to make trade-offs, so they don’t realize what trade-offs they’re making, they’re just pretending like, oh, I’m getting all the stuff for free by living in the city, or I’m getting all this stuff for free by not living in the city. Well, but the, what they’re doing, right, like, they’re living out a narrative, like, I need to buy the cheapest way, because I need to be efficient with my money, right, that’s a narrative, if you never check your narrative, you don’t have the option not to act out the narrative, right, right, back to the look, seeing through, you’re seeing through the narrative, the world is, is, you envision the world through that narrative, and then, well, yeah, like, if you, if you have to buy the cheapest thing, and that’s going to be on Amazon, nine times out of ten, then, yeah, like, that’s where you’re going to go, and then Amazon is controlling you, but it’s only controlling you, because you’re in this narrative, and you’re not aware of the narrative, you’re not aware of the trade-offs that Mark was pointing out, right, like, being in that narrative is efficient, right, because, well, you can just go to Amazon, and then, you know, not to deal with stuff, right, because Amazon is going to deal with it for you, but if you’re outside of that narrative, you’re going to have to take your own responsibility, and that doesn’t mean that you should exclude Amazon from your life, right, but it just means that when you’re engaging with Amazon, you are aware that you’re doing that because you’re lazy, for example, and that’s a good choice to make sometimes. Yeah, no, exactly, I mean, I shop at Amazon, I order things off Amazon, got a package today, right, so not necessarily Amazon bashing, and it doesn’t always have the cheapest price, and in fact, usually, its recommendations aren’t cheaper than some of the other prices for certain items, right, so you think that you’re getting all this stuff, and a lot of the times what companies do is they change what they’re doing, so they give you a narrative, and you’re engaging that narrative, and it’s reliable, and then they switch the rules, and they don’t tell anybody, of course, sometimes they do, but people don’t look, right, the change to the user, the terms of service, or whatever, right, they’re changing the rules, are you paying attention to how they change a narrative, right, and some narratives don’t change with rules, so they just change, and sometimes it’s an accident, like I’m not saying companies are always doing this on purpose, sometimes they make mistakes because they’re made up of people who happen to make mistakes, so that happens all the time, and then you get these other companies coming in saying, make sure you get the cheapest price on Amazon by running our app on your phone, or whatever, and every time you visit Amazon, cheaper price, it’ll tell you, I have an app that does that, by the way, for my credit card company, so it doesn’t just do it for Amazon either, but these little holes exist in these systems, because yeah, we’re out-sourcing to narratives, and maybe that’s why people are so willing to believe Sam Harris’ treaty that we have no free will, these companies are controlling our lives, it’s like, no, no, you bought into that narrative, you can blow up that narrative, and I think that’s normally, Manuel, I think that’s a lot of what you and I do on the Discord server to people, right, is we say, no, no, no, no, what you’re talking about is a narrative, that’s not the truth, that’s not reality, those aren’t facts, right, that’s why I usually tell people, bring the data, just bring me some data, you gotta come with data though, you can’t just say you’re wrong, like you gotta say you’re wrong, and here’s why, like here’s the data that shows that you’re being anti-factual, or counterfactual, or incorrect, or mistaken, or a little bit off, whatever it is, happen to be wrong, but you’ve gotta realize we’re all stuck in narratives that maybe we don’t understand, and you have to prove that I’m in the narrative and not you, right, or I’m in the worst narrative, rather than you being in a worst narrative, like it’s all relative in some sense. Well, yeah, right, like when we’re going, well, what’s a good narrative, what’s a bad narrative, right, like that we’re like, okay, so now we need values to establish whether a narrative is good or bad, and then it’s like, well, yeah, but a narrative is a thing that is universal, and our values are implementations in the specific, so like in one situation it might be coherent with my values, and and then, and then another situation it might be opposing them, and it’s like, yeah, so there’s all of this complexity, and then, well, what’s the solution, well, we go back, right, like every moment you have the choice, right, so if you have the tools, and then Mark is trying to give you tools apparently, if you have the tools, then you can in that moment, as well as possible, make that decision, and then you can have the optimization for the instance, not for the, for the category. Yeah, I like, I like, a lot of people are going to nowadays perspective. We had, we had somebody on the description the other day, and actually his project, by the way, Emmanuel, is perspective, he’s trying to train people with perspective, and oh, it’s interesting, I didn’t quite, didn’t quite, I mean, I dove in a little bit, but I didn’t quite understand what, you know, how he was accomplishing this, but yeah, and that’s very much our project too, right, like, oh, you need, you need to understand that you can, and John Bervaike talks about this too, right, step outside of your perspective, and witness, right, yourself, prospecting, right, or aspecting, I think is more his term, but you need to understand that the perspective is the thing constraining your free will to your original point to some extent, and then that is informed by a narrative, right, and then, so, but you have to understand that there are perspectives that don’t match your narrative, and then of course, we want our narratives to match, because going back to what we said earlier, you want to be in a bigger tribe, so you can do more complex stuff, so you have to worry about fewer things, and it’s very disturbing when you meet somebody who has a different narrative, or doesn’t go here to that narrative, but there’s enough other stuff that we have in common that we can segue from one narrative to another, or, you know, judge narratives in relation to one another, or start to break out of these narratives, or actually just make decisions about good versus bad narratives, and that, that’s why we feel the sense of loss of agency and loss of free will, because we’re stuck in these narratives, and we don’t really realize, you know, the number of times I tell people, you don’t have to, you don’t have to obey the laws, like, people break laws all the time, you’re breaking laws you don’t even know about, because there’s so many laws, and you haven’t read any of them, probably, I mean, I’ve only read a handful, and I’ve read a lot more than most people, so, you know, you’re always breaking laws, so it’s not even within your control, because you don’t make the laws, right, but maybe how they’re implemented is, right, and I went over this in my power video, like, oh, I’ve seen people talk themselves out of tickets, if you can talk yourself out of ticket, who has the power, the cop, the justice system, the police, or you, well, it’s a negotiation, and sometimes you have the power, because you can deal with people one-on-one, and use your agency to explain to them the situation, and that way, you know, your agency can override whatever system you’re in to some extent, not reliably, maybe, but maybe reliably enough, right, because everybody wants perfect reliability or perfection, but they can’t have that, so instead, they just want the system to work the way they want it to work, without even understanding necessarily what that means, it usually just means that, from my perspective, I never do anything wrong, and therefore, the system should leave me alone, it’s like, wouldn’t that be nice? So, now we have the problem of narratives, and I think we’re going to go into territory, right, okay, so we’ve identified narratives are problematic, because they put you into a fixed relationship with the world, in some sense, not necessarily, because I think we’ve proven that, but that tendency is there, and that awareness of that tendency gives us the free will, or the free dom, to transcend these things, and then, well, what do you need? Well, then, then you need to have a superstructure that informs your relationship to these narratives, so that you don’t get stuck in the narrative, and I think that’s the ultimate answer, where this conversation is now converging to, because I’m making it converge with my agency, but yeah, and you call that worldview, right, like an understanding of the world, where that is coherent, in the sense that the coherence allows you to have a relationship to all the narratives, that’s basically, I think, the important thing, right, like, because then, the narratives are in relation to something else, and then that allows you to see them and judge them. Yeah, I like that. I like how we backed into the postmodern, postmoderns, or observers, not critiquers, argument, just from free will and agency, I think, and I think that’s, I think it is all tied together, right, so the thing that allows you to judge narratives is, roughly speaking, values, and the values that you choose to judge narratives, because the hierarchy of values isn’t static, it has to change with the ethical landscape, we’ll call it, right, the thing that allows that to happen is pointing at the ideal with its virtues, and so in order to judge narratives, you have to have some set of virtues, some set of values, and then you have to have tools to relate those values in the moment to the narratives you’re relating to, and that would have been a proper postmodern critique, but they didn’t do that. And you need another thing, right, like, so that’s the thing, the navigational aspect, and then you also have to think that you navigate, right, which we call the truth, right, like, the set of actions that have reliable results, right, and that’s the thing that’s relating to your agency, right, so now what we’ve done is we’ve created an is-ought gap, right, like, so there’s a realm that’s dealing with the what is, right, like the set of operations, and then set of ought, like, what are we trying to manifest in the world, and how are we going about choosing that? Right, right, and then I think that, you know, to, I think the great postmodern evil, as I like to call it, is this idea that you’re going to end up losing ethics, right, because in postmodernism, you’re not making value judgments anymore, you’re just carving things up endlessly, and so you’re not able to stabilize and have coherence, because if you’re constantly deconstructing and chopping things down, you know, to your earlier point, coherence doesn’t exist, if you keep decohering, that’s literally what postmodernism does, it decoheres everything, and then it’s like, well, now you have two options, you can either, like, stop engaging in that, which would probably be the best thing to do, right, like, just because the postmoderns didn’t talk about deconstruction, or just because the postmoderns only talk about deconstruction, doesn’t mean they were the only ones that knew about deconstruction, right, like, I’m fairly sure critique existed before postmoderns, in fact, historically, that seems to be true, I think Chris Peckow said it best, when the first man married the first woman, critique existed, I was like, oh, right, so critique as such is really kind of old, it’s not a sort of modern invention, or postmodern invention, or anything, and the idea of deconstruction is just, you know, a method of critique that’s existed for thousands and tens of thousands of years, so the problem, though, is that when you start to deconstruct, you’re not standing anywhere, and you’re going to deconstruct the thing that you are standing on eventually, and then, you know, again, you get back to this two choices, one is just cut it out, like, stop engaging with postmoderns, that’s the best choice, by the way, you don’t need it, you can just ignore it, and everything will be fine, we existed for tens of thousands of years without postmodernism, just fine, so I don’t think it’s adding anything useful, or the other thing you can do is assume that there’s a way in which now you’re a god, because you can deconstruct all the parts into the building blocks, and then rebuild them, but the problem is that you can’t do that, because the isot gap from Hume is real, like Hume’s guillotine is a real thing, and you need the ethical navigational methods in order to put things together in a way that’s reliable, right, and that’s coherent, so it has to be reliable and coherent, otherwise you can’t use it to move forward, to stand on, right, and that’s where this idea of historical grounding sort of is important, like history already told us things that worked and didn’t work to some extent, and maybe they’ll stop working, but maybe not, like maybe the things that have worked for thousands of years are going to continue to work for thousands of years, I don’t know, but it’s a good place to start, because you’ve got to start somewhere, right, and that’s usually where people get wrapped up, oh you don’t have to start, there’s no start and there’s no stop, right, that’s why postmodernism is, you know, I refer to it as evil, because there’s no stop, you can always continue to deconstruct, it’s not a useful thing to do after a certain point, what point, I don’t know, so maybe don’t do it, instead have intelligent critique where you’re trying to create systems that are more coherent and more reliable, rather than just deconstructing for the sake of deconstructing, deconstructing for the sake of reconstructing in your own ego fantasy or something, which I think is what people are using postmodernism for subconsciously even, like I don’t think they’re even conscious of it, to be fair to them, but I think that’s the problem, any sort of sojourn down the postmodern path is eventually going to lead you out of ethics, out of the realm of ethics, because you’ll be so concerned with deconstruction that you’ll never look at intelligibility and coherency as the two most important things, and you can’t build ethics without those things, like if you’re not reliable, if you’re not intelligible, if you’re not coherent, how are you able to be an ethical agent in the world, I don’t know, right, and then that’s why you don’t want free will, like if you don’t have ethics, you’ve got to take free will out of the picture, because if ethics isn’t being outsourced to lack of free will, how are you an ethical creature in your own mind, and I think that’s where the lack of free will comes from, or the willingness to believe that. Well, so that brings up a couple things, so first of all, like you kind of cheated for that, going immediately to ethics, because deconstruction is combinatorially exposing, right, that’s the first problem, so you already need to have ethics to deconstruct, it’s like, what are you going to deconstruct, and then the thing that we were observing, right, like in in the intersectionality, it’s like, okay, we’re having one value that we are coherent around, right, so we are bootstrapping the ethical structure from this one perspective, basically, and then what we get is we get a manifestation in reality that’s warped around this one thing, and then doesn’t have rightful place for all the other necessary things in order to have a coherent system, so that’s one thing, and then, well, the second thing is, well, like, where do you stand, right, like how do you get a place to stand? Well, you’re already standing somewhere, right, like you’re already using structures, you’re already doing things, and then the question is, like, are you going to use branches that are sawn off and floating in abstract space, or are you going to use something that is rooted in the ground, and it’s relating back direct to intelligibility, like physical intelligibility, so you have a relationship to what it is to be you and the things that you’re thinking about. Yeah, I’m going to push back on the ethics idea. I think that that’s one of the problems, that ethics is an asymmetrical game, and so what I mean by that is that you don’t need ethics to find the most annoying thing to you and deconstruct it in the moment, but you do need ethics to construct things, right, and so it’s cheaper, it takes less energy to just deconstruct all the time, right, but then you’re throwing yourself into existential crisis, like you’re creating domicide for yourself by destroying historical grounding, because you’ll get there eventually, like, oh, no, no, we’ll stop before that, which is what the French say, by the way, when they defend postmodernism. Well, no, no, nobody would ever apply postmodernism to X, it’s like, well, did you state that up front, because I’m fairly sure you didn’t, and that people are doing it, and they’re like, well, that’s crazy. Well, yeah, but your system doesn’t say they can’t, and you need your system to say that, right, otherwise, like, you got to start with axioms, otherwise, is it even a philosophy, or is it just a reprehensible, you know, collapsing to nothingness, which is what postmodernism seems to end up being in all cases, to fight, despite its staunch defenders. And that, that I think is the problem, is there’s an asymmetry, it’s cheaper and easier, it’s the easy way up, in essence, to deconstruct continuously, because you don’t need to consider values. You can just consider what annoys you in the moment. Well, that’s a fair point. Although, yeah, at that point, I don’t think you can be intellectually honest towards yourself. But that’s a different problem. Yeah, well, look, I mean, and if you have ethics, then you might have to be so yeah, I mean, I think this is tied into a loss of ethics. And so again, if you don’t, if you know subconsciously, or even consciously that you’re not an ethical creature, because you can’t answer simple ethical questions, right, then maybe free will has to go out the window. Because then you’re not responsible for being unethical anymore, right? Like, oh, there’s the ethical responsibility gone, I don’t have free will, Sam Harris said, so yay, now I can be a serial killer, or a murderer, or, you know, cheating my wife, or, you know, whatever else I want to do, right, I can set churches on fire, I can blow things up, I can kill myself, I can do whatever I want, because Sam Harris says that, you know, there’s no there’s no free will. So anything I do is automatically correct. And it’s a very dangerous thing to tell people, even if it’s correct, I’d say it’s irresponsible to tell people that, just because it does enable their ego to go in any direction the ego might want. And your ego is man, your ego is just one thing one minute, and something else is the next, and it’s not reliable or coherent, right? It’s, you know, the me me me is not coherent through time. So I’m gonna support some Harris a little bit. And it’s like, well, a lot of people act as if they don’t have free will. Yes. That point, like, I can’t agree with you. Like, but that’s because of the narratives that they’ve been sold. And, and, right, like that, that they’re just stuck in these narratives. And, and like, we, we behave this way, right? Like, when when we know someone who knows about a thing, then we go to them, and have them inform us of what we should be doing, so that we’re also seeing our ethics, right? But then the ethical decision is in the outsourcing, right? And then also in taking responsibility for the fact that you did outsource it afterwards, right? And right. But that’s a different navigational space at that point, which like, okay, like, and this is how we start, right? Like, we start outsourcing to our mom, and then our dad, and then, right, right. And we have to be a little fair, right? Like, you have to outsource, you have to outsource a lot of stuff to live in the world. And then how much stuff are you outsourcing? I don’t know. You want a house? Like, how many of the house components did you build yourself? Right? And then when you say build, what do you mean? Did you cut down the tree and mill the lumber, right? Like, it gets crazy. Like, did you did you cast the nails? Did you write? Did you blow the glass? Did you and it just goes on, right? Like, did you spin the wire? Like, well, if not, then you’ve outsourced all of that to somebody else. Like, fair enough. And you can argue about whether or not that’s outsourcing. But it is, it is outsourcing, right? Because sometimes wiring fails and burns down your house. And it’s like, well, whose fault is that? Is that your fault? Or is that the person who makes it fall? I don’t know. It’s hard because it’s been outsourced, right? So there’s, there’s an element of trust there. And then so we have to outsource. Fair enough. You got to outsource to live in the world unless you want to live in the woods alone, which is you’re not watching this. So fair enough. I won’t, I’m not talking to you then. And you can go live in the woods by yourself with a rock or a knife or whatever. You can make your own knife. So you can do all this if you wanted to. It is your option. You can make a YouTube channel and make tons of money. Well, not on YouTube. You can make a YouTube channel and maybe you could get a dollar someday. Right? No, no, no. That’s just this guy where like you did that. You went live in the woods. I’ve followed a few people like that. Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting. But, but you’re, you’re outsourcing all the time and you have to outsource like just to live a normal life because otherwise you take up all your time just eating. Right. And like maybe you want to. Some people do. It’s a thing. You can do that. Other people do that. You might have that option. Right. And then, and you know, in the past we all did that, like we didn’t have a choice. So it’s definitely an option. Like it’s something humans can do. So you’re, you, you have to take responsibility for the fact that outsourcing exists and then for the outsourcing itself and realize, oh, I’m tied up and connected with all this stuff I outsource to and all that stuff is tied to me. Right. And then it’s like, oh, and then there’s a great deal of responsibility because I was saying, right. And then it’s like, oh, that’s, that’s oh, number two. Right. And then it’s like, wow, well, that’s kind of a big deal at that point. And so that’s what you, that’s what you have to navigate in some sense. And that’s why you need the ethics. And maybe without the ethics, you can’t navigate the fact that you outsource and your ego and your ego does want to like, oh, I have my house, my house, the dad, you have a loan on that house, buddy. Is it really yours? There’s all kinds of stuff going on. Right. And, you know, I rent, then it’s not your house. Right. Like, it just gets worse. It doesn’t get better. So, you know, and it’s, it’s hard to understand what your responsibility is as an outsourcing without ethics. And so I think that’s why we’d prefer not to have free will, because then all that responsibility goes away from us. We don’t have to worry about the outsourcing we’ve done or the, you know, our ethical proclivities. We can just say, ha, it’s all out of my control. So I think I want to bind it back together into, well, okay. So we’ve been talking about responsibility. Well, what is our responsibility? Well, our responsibility is to be intentional and to learn. Right. Like the way that we improve our agency and our ability to have free will is through learning. Right. So if we start having this conception in our head and start looking at all these things that we’re doing, as if they’re relating to our ability to act in the world and our ability to navigate the world, then we might have a way of optimizing our relationship to developing these skills. Right. Like you kind of get a meta skill in some sense where you’re relating to the fact that you’re relating and you’re gaining agency there as well. And you’re also getting will there. Right. Like there’s, so there’s these layers of competence that you can get erected for yourselves. And yeah, so that’s where I’m going as a solution to this is like, yeah, be responsible. And I think this idea of ecology of practices, right, which would mean that you’d set up a set of rituals that you intentionally choose to assist you in this process. And then that allows you to do that better. And then what the ultimate goal is, is you’re not trying to find solutions. You’re trying to be a solution solving machine or whatever. Just human. Let’s just say human. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. And also like some responsibilities, we don’t have options on. Like you’re responsible for being an ethical creature and where and how you outsource that you’re responsible for. And so if you outsource your ethics to Sam Harris, you’re responsible for the fact that that may lead you to the conclusion that you have no free will, but that’s your responsibility. It’s not a fact of the world. Right. And, and, and, you know, but if you outsource your, your ethical, your ethics, or at least your morals to say a religion, then, you know, maybe that’s a better bet than Sam Harris. I don’t know. It seems to be, they’ve been in the business a little bit longer by thousands of years in most cases. So that might be a better plan. Right. And then that’s important. It’s important to know that there are some responsibilities that you have as a result of being born. And, you know, Sam Harris rightly complains about that. He says, you know, although he misstates, he makes up a, in my opinion, a bad error. Right. He says, we have no choice about being born. It’s like, no, no, no, maybe we had a choice about being born and we don’t remember because we were born. Right. Like, I don’t know. I’m not claiming that, but that’s possible, Sam. You’re just, you know, broad mind, broad, broaden your mind, buddy. It could be that we’re, you know, that we’re souls that exist outside of our corporeal form. Like, I don’t know. And we can’t, when I wake up, it was like, yeah, I wanted to wake up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, he doesn’t wake up. Waking up. Yeah. Yeah. He doesn’t waking up pockets. Like, what are you waking up to, buddy? You know, and, and yeah, but there’s an, element of responsibility in our birth, in the fact that we exist and that we’re in intertwined with the world. And, you know, we’re part of nature and nature is also part of us. And, you know, like nature’s constantly trying to attack us. I had a tick on me earlier this morning. I was like, how did that happen? Obviously, I mean, I live in the woods, so ticks happen, but like they’re trying to get me. And some of them have like bad diseases. You know, there’s a bunch of tick-borne diseases, like Lyme disease, which is probably the worst, but there’s a bunch of bad ones. And, you know, we have to take responsibility for that. If I don’t take the tick off of me, he’s going to potentially infect me, right? And then have babies and, oh, you know, there’ll be more ticks in the world, right? I got to take responsibility for the fact of my existence. And also take responsibility for my ethical stance in the world, or at least my moral stance in the world, if you want to divide it out that way. So, yeah, there’s definitely some element of responsibility that we have that we can’t get out of. And yeah, you know, that does, that is a limitation on us. Does that mean we don’t have free will? I don’t think so. The fact that we don’t have a choice about everything doesn’t mean we don’t have free will. I think that’s a crazy assumption to make. Yeah, so that goes back into an example, if I can’t go through the wall, like I can go around and move over, like that wall is not a constraint to my being. That wall is a constraint to a certain subset of actions that I can take. Exactly. And that’s what I think free will is. It’s constraints on how you interact with things, not constraints, you know, hard constraints on what you can and can’t do. Because if you’re interacting with the potential of the world, who knows? Right? So you can say, well, we can’t time travel. And you know, you can make a very good argument for physics says it’s not possible to travel through time. Right? But it might be possible to travel basically through gravity or something, right, which is roughly where wormhole is, you’re not really traveling through time, but in the act of traveling through gravity, you’re traveling through time, right? And so it’s not the same, but it is the same, right? It has some of the same aspects that having the others or so we theorize. So within that theory itself, maybe you can’t reverse time or travel through time in that directly. But free will in physics says that there are wormholes, right? Or at least theoretically, there are wormholes where you can get the effect of traveling through time, even though you’re not actually traveling through time. That would be an example of physics, free will, by the way, right? It’s maybe you can’t do the thing the way you want, but you can do basically the thing you just have to conform to different rules. And it’s like, oh, well, you know, and then there’s a function of agency to make that happen or not. Right? And that’s another thing that gets back into agency. You’re going to have to convince the rest of humanity to support you in your endeavor to do that. Potentially, yeah, or at least some subset. And that’s where we get into trouble, right? Back to the tribalism and the large enough tribe can do anything theory like, you know, we’ll have to do some videos on that for sure. Maybe with you or whatever. But yeah, there’s definitely some things about the size of the tribe and how long things last and whether or not just because you can build it, you know, can you keep it? Right? And again, yeah, maybe you can build whatever you want, but you can’t keep it because maybe some things that you build can only last a picosecond. I don’t know. Certainly how physics works, there’s a bunch of particles that can’t exist for very long. It’s like, oh, that’s interesting. It just seems like there’s a constraint curve going on here. That’s very interesting, right? And there’s these levels of things emerging out, right? And it’s like, whoa, that’s kind of weird. Right. And we also have to remember that our experience of time and the things that manifest and the intelligibility that manifests within that, there might be different levels and different ways of intelligentizing that might have, I don’t know, because I can’t think of them. Right, right. And intelligibility goes back to that free will. Like the intelligibility of the world somewhat determines what you see as your free will and what you see as your agency, right? So if you don’t see a world without Amazon as a delivery mechanism, and by the way, there’s a ton, like Walmart has a pretty good online system too, by the way. In fact, they deliver it sometimes faster than Amazon does. And a lot of times they’re cheaper. Then you’ve lost agency to engage with things that aren’t Amazon. But you did that to yourself. That’s not a condition of the quote objective world. It’s not a condition of reality, because other people are not engaging with Amazon. And so what does that say about you and your free will? Like the only person constraining your free will in that case is you. It’s like, oh, I can constrain my own free will. Yes, you can. Because again, it goes back to perspective and what we talked about earlier. Well, that’s a good closing statement, I think. We constrain ourselves into the quote. Oh, yeah, yeah. It could well be that the only reason why Sam Harris thinks we have no free will is because Sam Harris can’t imagine a world where we have free will, right? Because that means that he would necessarily maybe be an unethical actor, right? In terms of incapable of engendering ethics, because he doesn’t have a way to do it. And look, if I were that way, I’d want a way out too. And my way out might well be, oh, I just don’t have free will. So no, I don’t have to solve the problem. And then his book would be wrong as well. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. There’s a lot tied up in there, for sure. But yeah, Manuel, thank you so much for discussing free will and agency with me. I thought that was a really good conversation. I certainly got to think about it in new and different ways. So I think, you know, mission dialogos accomplished. How do you feel? Well, I think you dragged me against my will. You don’t have free will. I own your will. I control your will. Fair enough. I can be pretty persuasive. I would call that influence, you know, rather than a loss of agency on your part, we’ll say. But fair enough. So. Great life, people. Yes. Thank you so much.