What is Determinism? (Free Will)

An explanation of the metaphysical position of determinism with respect to free will, which claims that the universe is deterministic. This is the broad definition of determinism which includes both hard and soft determinism (or compatibilism).

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Information for this video gathered from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy and more!

[Foolishpoorlytrying]

First off, you do an amazing job at breaking down complex ideas for us laymen to understand. I'm taken aback that you don't have more subs and views. So many people are missing out on some good knowledge.

I lean heavily towards hard determinism. If you haven't already made the video for hard determinism, I respecfully would like to suggest the incorporation of nihilism in it. I'm sure you know the relevance. If not, cool, just a thought.

[jeanphilippe]

Hey Carneades! Love your videos, just a heads-up (totally unrelated to topic), IF I remember correctly and IF my biology teacher was correct back in the day, currents in the brain are not causes by moving electrons, like an electric current. They are caused by the chain-reaction of expulsion from the neuron of a certain molecule (can't remember which one). But according to the teaching I had, It's not an electric current. You can still call it a current though! You might have made that pedagogical choice though, which is okay too!

Sorry about the long text, keep up the awesome work! (Insert a 5G brain control joke here) :)

Cheers!

[CMVMic]

Beautifully done Carneades!! Loved it!

[alsatusmdA]

To quote myself from your previous video: “The weakness of political libertarianism is that it views organization as inherently authoritarian and so libertarians never organize any movements to speak of. And though political and metaphysical libertarianism seem only superficially related, it is easy to assume people have both libertarian politics and libertarian metaphysics, at least if you ignore the part about the laws of physics. As for the laws of physics, they determine what an agent can or cannot do but not really what an agent does or doesn’t do when the agent can do it. Even deterministic laws tend to be contingent though, so things often happen otherwise than we may assume.” Deterministic laws tend to be contingent because they prescribe what should happen, describe what happens or frame a construction of what can happen in a given case. If it is easy to assume people have both libertarian politics and libertarian metaphysics, it is conversely easy to assume people have both non-libertarian politics and (hard) deterministic metaphysics. Specifically, it is easy to assume people have both authoritarian politics and deterministic metaphysics or democratic politics and compatiblistic metaphysics.

[doomakarn]

Free will isn't a matter of whether you have it or not - it's a spectrum.
- If every action you take has been determined since the beginning of time you effectively have no free will.
- If let's say a random event happens every 1 million years - there is some free will to existence but barely.
- If a random event happens every second, your future from your inception is not determined it can only be estimated.
- If everything is completely random constantly, you cannot exist and it is raw chaos.

The only entities that truly have absolute and true free will exist beyond logic and the very concept of free will and causality. In other words, God and any entities greater.

We are not imbued with free will, contrary to what the Bible proposes.

Edit: After some thought, we could in fact have free will if the concept itself chooses to exist or not - meaning every concept was given a choice.

If the concept itself chooses to choose to exist, then it will - if not, it won't. If they choose to choose something else, or don't choose at all - fine, that is as it is. You might say that it's future will decide it's answer, but why assume that the concept is bound by time and logic?

In other words, we are us, we are the universe, we are god, we are the choice, we are everything, and we are nothing, and we chose to exist, we aren't us, we aren't the universe, we aren't god, we never chose, we aren't the choice, we aren't everything, and we aren't nothing, we chose to choose or not. We are every other option, and non-option and we simultaneously are none of it and beyond it and below it.

Ultimately nothing and everything lead us to this decision and our future is determined and the outcome is random and continues to be random.

This "choice" probably exists beyond concepts and below concepts to everything and nothing. The grandiosity here is unfathomable and exists outside of logic. But for us, this concept or thing or whatever it is has chosen this path - and we are part of it, and we chose this, we chose to be determined, we chose to undertake logic, we chose to be as we are. We have both free will and we don't, and we cannot fathom why or why not.

Philosophy, logic, science and reasoning cannot give us the ultimate answers. We cannot likely through any mechanism get the answers - and we chose to have it that way.

[BelegaerTheGreat]

(Waterfall drops.)

6:00 Issues with Libertarianists' Quantum argument:
1.That we have theories explaining the quants deterministically, and we have no proof of them being wrong. (Well that is a double-edged blade, because neither has "quantum positions and velocities exist, we just can't measure them" been proven.)
2.(9:40) "It hasn't been shown that indeterminate states of quants contribute to free will." Well, just as above, it also hasn't been shown otherwise.
3.Ok, an interesting point raised, is that "if there are choices indeed completely independent from the chooser's biological reasons, upbringing, or anything else, then they are random, and our position in life can be atteibuted only to luck".
To this I reply, that the independence of a choice may not necessarily mean it is random, but maybe it is the consciousness, the I, that makes that decision.
So what does the conscioisness make decisions based upon? We cannot know for sure, but let me propose this:
We make (independent) decisions based on laziness. In some cases, there are causal arguments for taking action, and causal arguments for withholding it. Withholding is easier, acting is harder. What if it is the consciousness that has a say in those cases? What if our mystical consciousness, the true us that we cannot understand, but can feel, decides? And when you stand there, wondering whether you should approach that girl or not, it is your consciousness deciding the course of the universe?

I agree that causal effects can influence the decision-making, rendering the consciousness more inclined to pick one option over the other, but it always has a choice.
Why do I think so? There is no proof nor disproof of it, but I FEEL like that is the truth, I FEEL my consciousness making decisions. And we base our axiomatic systems on nothing other than intuition after all.

[kmdash]

The oast one, how reasons influence our free choice, I think is explained by existentialism. Choice is a phenomenon, an experience. We choose an action, and we choose the reasons for that action. In that sense, we are creating the causes for our actions by telling a story of our actions and from that perspective there is more free will than we may think, not just that we can choose to steal bread to feed a starving family, but that we choose that narrative as well.

[jps]

I submit that "free will" is what we call a decision at the intersection of (a) who we are and (b) the environment we're in.

[Pfhorrest]

Did my comment about quantum physics get deleted somehow?

[johnmanno]

Love your videos. Alas, an error. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle means that the assertion that an electron has a position and momentum is meaningless. It does not mean that it *actually* has a simultaneous position and momentum and we just can't observe it. It means that both cannot be known simultaneously. And that's not because of size or whatever, it's a fundamental law of physical nature. It would be akin to saying that somewhere "out there" there are round squares.

[hessylaguna]

Like in your Libertarianism video where I also commented, you misunderstand the Libertarian's applications of quantum physics in these philosophical questions. What a Libertarian would argue has very little to do with the measurability of particles. It's based on hidden local variables which according to Bell's Theorem, either do not exist or are not local. If they don't exist, which is more likely and more widely accepted, then determinism is not how the universe works.

[leonmills]

I watched your videos on Pyhrronian skepticism you say you adopt a form of pyrrhonian sceptism the argument for pyrrhonian scepticism can be equally used to defend epistemic Relativism what do you think about that?

[Pfhorrest]

Worth noting that compatibilism and soft determinism are not coextensive; the latter is a subset of the former. You can be a compatibilist and also think that there is true randomness in the world; you would just think that that randomness is not related to free will, and that if there was not that randomness then free will would be no worse off.

(This would be me. From a certain impossibly objective perspective even quantum mechanics may be deterministic, but from any possible subjective perspective there is effective randomness in the universe, according to our best understanding of it today. Nevertheless, that does nothing at all to help free will, and in fact would only hurt it if its effects were more pronounced; it is only because on a macroscopic scale we are *sufficiently* determined that our brains are able to reliably carry out the functionality that constitutes free will, which on my account is largely synonymous with moral judgement: the ability to examine one's own desires and desire that they be like this or like that, possibly instead of how they actually are, and for those second-order desires to be causally effective in changing which of our first-order desires prevails in directing our behavior. Ala Frankfurt, or Wolf.)

[theyoshine]

Many people have made the assumption that it is the outcome of fate to make it seem as though freewill exists. But what about the idea that fate appearing to exist is simply the outcome of greater freewill?

[docdoc]

I wonder if any ism is good or evil and limited by each written and spoken language depending on version or individual interpretations of said limited languages 🤔

[Marcara]

The arguments I've read against free will assume that determinism exists in its stead. But the problem is that their disproof of free will is actually a disproof of the legitimacy of philosophical individuation, but they never touch on it. Essentially, they attempt to prove that all distinction is ultimately made arbitrarily. Ergo, distinguishing a self-caused (or uncaused) causal system understood as a free-willed human being from the rest of the causality of the universe is faulty. Instead, it's all deterministic. However, this criticism of philosophical individuation doesn't stop at the human being but applies to all distinction and all causal systems.

So the identity of 'toaster' is ultimately arbitrary as well as literally all things. Simply, there is no absolute rule as to why we distinguish any part of the universe from itself. Thus the supposed free will of the human being isn't any more legitimate than the supposed boundaries we create around the partition of the universe which we then label 'toaster'. So the human being is as uncaused as the toaster is. Furthermore, there is no distinction between cause and effect that isn't ultimately arbitrary too. So then determinism doesn't exist instead of free will because this argument against free will also destroys the concept of determinism by invalidating any distinction made between cause and effect and so nullifying the concept of causation.

So what do we call someone who believes in free will and determinism because they believe that they're both a product of philosophical individuation? And while they aren't compatible with each other the process which informs either perspective is the same and cannot be used to disprove itself; so they're forced to exist in contradiction.

[Scythwolf]

A basic thing that determinism can't prove is: Does the world I know go on after I die? Did it exist before I was born (or I start remembering) If this can't be proven to me there is a form of free will. Since the only world I expierience is the world I KNOW. This world is different from every other world of every human beeing. So I can only be determined within my borders and the sensory I have available. This world is a free will within compared to the other world of every human or the bigger objective world.

[PhokenKuul]

The universe is probabilistic. This can be seen in quantum chemistry and quantum biochemistry in the atomic and molecular orbital theory that shows electrons are located around atoms or molecules in probabilistic orbitals that show the likeliness of an electron to be located anywhere. This relates directly to chemical reactions by influencing the probability of any reaction taking place based upon the probability of the location of the electron, the state it is in, the orientation of the orbital etc which are all probabilistic. And life is just a bunch of chemical reactions, including all processes like thoughts and feelings etc. Normally in a lab the effects are small and not noticeable due to the large numbers of molecules taking part in any reaction, just one gram of water has somewhere around 10^22 molecules of water in it. But in a cell like a neuron the number of atoms is much less and so these quantum probability effects actually become important. Time also plays an important role as in the lab several minutes or even hours are not unusual to measure reaction times. But in enzymatic catalytic reactions in cells, a second might as well be a million years. Probability is driven by the number of potential incidents which increases with time as well as with interactions. This also relates back to Entropy, which is also probabilistic, but that is a story for another day.

[vekeboxi]

Everything you say doesn't have to read in the video, you should rather write down keywords and short sentences, also please use pictures.

[rickyddricky]

Is the scientific academia going to recognize me for this?