18 thoughts on “on freewill”

  1. Tish Farrell says:
    October 19, 2020 at 12:08

    What a good video. Especially concur with the conclusion that we should concentrate on improving our thinking apparatus and be more discriminating about what we feed into it.

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  2. mugo says:
    October 19, 2020 at 12:57

    No. And Yes, it does matter. Most people’s sense of personhood rests in just this idea: that they have the absolute power to decide between possible futures. If you truly see the dualistic folly within the free will thought-process, then your personal intuitions about personhood, agency, and responsibility, will have to change. They can’t not.

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    • makagutu says:
      October 19, 2020 at 14:25

      Many of us living today live in cultures that require freewill to justify many things: poverty- they are not working hard enough; punishment- they could have done differently and so on

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  3. justcalmwildness says:
    October 19, 2020 at 18:25

    This is such a thought-provoking video, and the comments you made above are also so profound and make sense. Sometimes there is a need to unlearn certain belief systems if one wants to get ahead in life.

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  4. inspiredbythedivine1 says:
    October 19, 2020 at 21:26

    Excellent video.

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  5. mchapus@rocketmail.com says:
    October 20, 2020 at 13:18

    One of the defining characteristics of determinists is their apparent lack of humour! And it is chilling to hear when theories are being sold as absolute truth. Who can claim to know the universe?
    This has a very undemocratic tone to me; a drift towards an unconscious civilisation sold as a un refutable theory.
    Freedom is not freedom from responsibility; freedom is having to make choices and therefore having to take responsibility.
    Free will is necessary given the nature of consciousness. Consciousness is never in the present. It exists only as a perpetual temporal flight or transcendence away from the past towards the future. As temporal transcendence towards the future consciousness stands outside the causal order, the world of cause and effect events. Gary Cox

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    • makagutu says:
      October 20, 2020 at 15:35

      You would expect they would have some level of skepticism but no. We are too damn certain of things where certainty is impossible.
      But I think the greatest problem with any discussion on freewill is definitional.

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      • Barry says:
        October 21, 2020 at 01:15

        I think that you are right in thinking that the greatest problem with any discussion on freewill is definitional. At one point in the video clip the speaker made the comment that effectively everything that happens was determined at the Big Bang. It seems that she belongs to the hard determinism school of thought – a term I discovered while digging up on varying concepts that arose out of watching the clip. I felt it was uncomfortably close the theological hard determinism, the only real difference is that whereas here the “watchmaker” is the Big Bang itself, in the theological version the “watchmaker” is a deity.

        Then I discovered terms such as soft determinism and compatibilism where it is argued that free will and determinism are mutually compatible. And then free will itself has many subtle variations so that even if differences in understanding are miniscule at first glance, they eventually become mutually incompatible as each concept is expanded.

        I’ll simply continue to live with the fact that as human beings, we live with the experience that gives us the notion of there being some degree of free will, and leave the argument of whether or not it’s real or imaginary to those who have nothing better to do with their time.

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        • basenjibrian says:
          October 21, 2020 at 07:36

          Hard determinism also seems to ignore blind chance or accident or emergent properties that are not necessarily clearly pre-determined? Or do they claim that “the Big Bang” defined every single event down to the tiniest detail? That seems rather a bold claim for a primordial event of physics. I am skeptical of hard determinism because it seems to ignore the sheer fuzziness of the world.

          I do like Sabine, though. She has a very amusing blog that pokes sticks into the eyes of “Big Physics” (climate change? starving children? covid? No…what we really need to spend more money on is another particle accelerator!).

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        • makagutu says:
          October 21, 2020 at 11:18

          I’ll simply continue to live with the fact that as human beings, we live with the experience that gives us the notion of there being some degree of free will, and leave the argument of whether or not it’s real or imaginary to those who have nothing better to do with their time.

          This, my friend is a better approach

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