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