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Do We Have Free Will?
Do humans have free will or are our decisions entirely products of chemistry, physics, and genetics? Is there a difference between the brain and the mind? Could a neuroscientist with enough knowledge of our brains know every decision that we’ll make? The answers to these questions cut to the heart of what it means to be human.
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Script:
In the external, or physical, world, we’re all aware of standard cause and effect, right? You know, “Object A acts upon Object B with Force X.” We all get that, because it applies to just about everything — from electrons to athletes.
But now consider events in your internal, or mental, world. What causes your thoughts?
Some of our thoughts have external causes, like when we touch something and suddenly realize it’s hot. We don’t deliberate whether or not to pull our hand away, right? Our brain has already fired the instruction to do so — involuntarily. In some strange sense, “we” didn’t really pull our hand away at all — because “we” didn’t choose to do it. Our brain did it before consulting us.
A second cause of our thoughts is internal. Say you’re thinking about giving a big presentation and as you do so, you get increasingly nervous, and your blood pressure and your heart rate jump up. Now, nothing external is acting upon you. You’re doing all the “causing” internally, right? Your anxious thoughts are causing your brain to send signals to your heart, and we get that.
But now, I want you to consider a third category of your thoughts — it’s your conscious choices — something as simple as choosing where to go for lunch.
Now when you introspect, when you think about your thinking, do you believe that you’re the active agent in charge of the process, or that you’re just a passive recipient of the instruction — that you have no choice in the matter, it’s all external forces — be they environmental, genetic, chemical, biological, or neurological?
In other words, do you think all your thoughts have external causes beyond your control, or do you think that you control some, if not most, of your thoughts?
Now let’s stay with our lunch example for a second… back to the question…I ask you “Where do you want to go for lunch today?”
Now, if all you are is a brain, an exhaustively physical system of neurons and synapses, then there’s no “you” that’s gonna be making a “choice” at all. Your thought processes are basically just a complex series of colliding electron-dominos crashing into one another. It’s just physical cause and effect, right — something that can be exhaustively understood in terms of physics and chemistry? There’s no “you” that’s an agent that’s deliberating, or choosing, or exercising free will.
And that’s why, if you are just a brain, you cannot have free will. You would just be a physical machine — a very complex but programmed computer.
But, if you’re something more than your brain — if you’re the thing that has the brain — then, when I ask you “Where do you want to go for lunch?,” you’re going to start deliberating — you’re going to be weighing your taste preferences, the commute time, perhaps even counting calories. You’d be weighing various reasons to choose one place over another. You wouldn’t be caused to think about any of these things. You would choose to think about these things, and you could stop anytime you wanted to.
So, what we have here, therefore, are two different types of things: an immaterial mind and the material brain. You are the thing that has the brain — you are not your brain.
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We have no free will
Yet our unfree will has taught us to believe it and it works for our conscious being.
Its not bad to not accept reailty if our reality to deny it makes a difference.
If believing in free will works better than not so , than it works better.
That has the reality of unfree will gave us as a gift to believe in it in order to survive as conscious beings to survive.
Therefore in the sake of saving consciousness made humanity
Believe in free will. Reality can confront reality and make a difference that is good. Creativity would die out in our world just as the unconscious world would kill off its own consciousness
Cuz No matter how often the world reality kills our reality through realization, its will grows each own back because of the reality.
We are sometimes idiots in order to be human .
A mind is immaterial in the same way a poker round is immaterial. The players, the cards, the table: none of those are a poker round. The "poker round" is an immaterial concept, it's a formalized activity. An activity the physical humans play with physical cards around a physical table in a formalized way, getting the emergent property of "poker round". The same with mind, an activity of our brain. No need to go supernatural on that.
There's a free will so far as we're above the nature as human beings, or have the self-consciousness, with knowledge about right and wrong, to know the consequences of our decisions, and make choices, but considering that our mind is limited, so part of our decisions is still controlled by our instinct, or the group-spirits, depending on how mature we're as individuals, and so our free will is limited, or different for each individual.
So… When does he give a real argument?
As far as scientists and buffoons alike can show, all components of decision-making are either based on cause and effect, or random. Allowing for a combination of both. Any other option, the thing this muppet is arguing for, is nothing but dogmatic faith-based religious wishful thinking.
Baby girl did you forget that your consciousness isn't the only part of you as a person?
A decent explanation until you tried to explain why people believe in determinism. You’re essentially saying people are lying to themselves about free will to avoid accepting it. That’s disingenuous.
if you take any partical and put it in a computer than you can know what it would be in the future as a system, but acording to the uncertainty principle it can fail because it may not work acording to logic so it may be impossible.
Is PragerU controlled opposition to give easy wins to their critics? I can’t really imagine how this video would be different if it was designed intentionally as fodder for other people to react to and call dumb.
Good explanation
Isn't this guy a senator from Pennsylvania now?
This argument is invalid and is framed in an emotionally charged way. Your choices are a product of your wants. You can not determine your wants. Try to make yourself stop wanting something. It's impossible. You want what you want and there's nothing you can do to change that unless you're granted additional information that makes you stop wanting it. If I'm asked where I want to go eat lunch, I'll base my choice off my wants…which are beyond my control. Additionally, I can alter someone's personality by making changes to their brain. Indeed, we've seen massive changes to people who have undergone brain surgery, brain injury, or been placed on certain medications. These personality changes cause huge shifts in behavior and ultimately choices that people make. Freewill is an illusion.
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A lucid refutation of Physicalism and a good illustration in support of Mind/Body Dualism…
While it is so that ‘free will’ (in the libertarian sense) just does not follow from a Physicalist point-of-view, you do however make the mistake of merely assuming, as an unargued philosophical bias, that ‘free will’ (which you do not bother to define), necessarily follows from the existence of an external mind (or ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’) – you simply can’t stop there – you have to ask: what causal effects impact on the mind? We all have desires, needs, greeds, fears… and a slew of other emotions that all determine, direct and guide our choices, and when you consider that, you realise our choices, while they have the appearance of being ‘free’, are all determined by a priori causes!
Under the rigour of critical analysis, we quickly discover that ‘free will’ (in the Libertarian sense) is entirely illusory!
There is no doubt – while we have all been endowed with a ‘will’, our will is just not free (in the Libertarian sense)!
Luther, whether we like it or not, had it right!
(Subjective) experience is a really poor measure of what actually is – ultimately, our reasoning must be firmly grounded in the Truth of God and His revelation if we are to make sense of things…
The shelf is an illusion, but the will is not, it's hard to explain why, but having thoughts is prove that this theory of not having free will or atleast something that we call will is wrong, because there is not a single human action that is not after a thought, which makes human actions conscious, like let's say I want to switch off the TV, I need to have a thought of it before I do that, right? But I can have a thought about doing something in 5 years or when I become old, right? Our will makes our thoughts into actions, we shape our dreams into reality basically… If I don't have free will, then me having thoughts are meaningless, unless thoughts are telling us the future, but the future's existence is unprovanable.
The absurd and unlivable implications of materialism, which contradict my basic intuitions and experiences, eventually led me out of naturalism and materialism to idealism and eventually to deism and theism and then Christianity.
I have free will therfore I like this video 😀
What mind? Where is this mind? Got news…if it happens to your brain…it happens to your mind. There is no mind/brain…just brain. Just 3 pounds of wires folks…that’s it.
Someone hasn't been checking out DALL-E 2
Yes, there is no YOU that’s an agent. He got it right. The self is an illusion.
Conscious choice are just things that you get to observe, not things you get to metaphysically choose.
3:00 So he’s claiming that the brain isn’t responsible for this? LOL
This guy is dumb. Having a soul doesn’t give you free will either.
Materialism has nothing to do with the problem of free will. If you think it does, you haven’t thought through the problem deeply enough.
Our brain is more complicated than it seems. As what neurologists say, what we call free will and awareness are consequences of whole electrobiological processes in different parts of our bran. Even things that we call mind, mindset or perception or even feelings are consequences of processing the external events, data and our experience. We recevie information, information would be processed in our brain and then we receive a command from our brain and it is called decision making. No problem if we call it free will. Because we decide independently. independence means no other person , organization , media, etc can force us to do something. But we can't decide independent of our brain. We are not machine, because our finding, perception or attitude can effect our decisions. But if we assume that there is a free will beside our brain , it means that it can do things without any stimulation or direct cause , which is violation of casualty
My child development professor unironically used this clip for class. yikes
great video
But you DON'T have free will, and while you CAN stop thinking about where you want to eat, your actions are still going to be calculable. That's why when someone does something that we expect them to do we say that they're "predictable". If your parents raised you a different way, if you had chosen to eat a different type of food one day, your actions would still be the outcome of external causes (genetics, events around you), and therefore, predictable. You are your mind, your brain, because your body without a brain wouldn't survive and wouldn't decide where to eat, but the brain could be attached to some tubes to keep it alive and THINKING.
The thing is that you still have free will (kind of), because, while the majority of your life has been shaped by the people before you and around you; you are making some decisions (not all of them, like digesting and dreaming)
If the mind always defaults to its best interpreted logical choice for every single circumstance it's encountered, then every single one of us would constantly be in a state of the best version of ourselves. In other words, whenever we make a wrong choice against our better judgement, then the better and more logical choice was not made.
Yes, we do have free will; because the stars have blessed us with it.
Well I know that I do, as for everyone else, I base that on faith.
This video in a nutshell: "You think, therefore god." There, I just saved you 5 1/2 minutes.
Okay, I give up: where has this cultist hidden evidence for his bizarre, anti-physics assertions?
Nice wishful thinking there, Agent 47 chromosomes of which 3 are #21. How convenient that it is blocking the view to all that inconvenient biology you've chucked out the window to make your fallacious non sequitur. Might want to stick to throwing Ray Comfort fruits at your victims, because despite it being the perfect channel for it you're clearly not cut out for whatever you're trying to pull here…
0:19 Cause and effect still apply to processes that are going on in your head.
0:26 That isn't a thought, that's a reaction and its a reaction that is made before the 'message' of the stove being hot even reaches your brain. Your body is already moving away before from the stove by the time the pain 'message' is received by the brain. Your brain isn't deciding anything, that would be your spine. Cause and effect.
0:52 Nope that is your brain responding to external data which trigger internal cause and effect. Without those external data/forces your brain would have nothing to work with.
1:20 Nope still the same as before, Its still your brain reacting to external data/forces. You are still the 'active agent' and yet you can not escape then influences of external forces.
1:40 All of those things effect how and what choices you make. There is a reason as to why is you get hit in the head hard enough or often enough it can literally change the way you think. That reason is VERY simple. Your brain is a physical thing and acknowledging that does not reduce us in anyway.
Not even a minute into this video and PragerU is showing why they do not produce any kind of educational content because they can't get even basic facts right. These are things that I learned in middle school and this fool is getting wrong. And the more of the video plays shows the more that they don't care about about educational content. They care about making people feel the way that they want them to feel. Its feelings over facts with these clowns. PragerU wants you to think that unless there is something magically about you, you are somehow less than you.
k have a thoughts therefore a god. well, then why are people who are once believers leaving religion by the droves.
Did no one consult anyone who graduated at least high school before making this?
You started out bad with misunderstanding of science in the first sentence. And then it went fast downhill. But hey, you gotta deny the pesky science and reality to be a good apologetic.
Yes, we will consider our food preferences. But we didn't pick those preferences. One day we tried anchovies and we either liked them or we didn't. Our repulsion or enjoyment of anchovies isn't something we decided; it's based on biological things we didn't select to have or not have. In order to choose a preference, you'd have to have a preference for the preference you're going to choose. Ad infinitum.
In order to author your thoughts, you'd need prior thoughts to base the thoughts you wanted to think on. Ad infinitum.
We're at the mercy of whatever does or doesn't occurs to us (at any given time). Perhaps it simply doesn't occur to you to look both ways when crossing the street, and so you only look right, but not left… Which causes you to get hit by a car, which makes you a paraplegic, or maybe just a broken neck, and severe brain damage. Good ideas pop into people's heads all the time – just imagine if the idea for Paypal never occured to Elon Musk. Usually inventions occur to us because there's a problem, and our brains, being the calculators they are, "sees" a solution… But not everyone sees the answer to the problem, but the person that does gets credit for it, but that person is simply just lucky to have been born with a brain that's capable of such problem solving, whereas many others were not.
We're also at the mercy of whatever we remember. Ever lost your keys? If we were truly in control, then we'd never forget anything – but we're not in control. We're at the mercy of whatever we remember, and when we remember it… Could be in two minutes, or fifteen minutes, or two hours, or even _never_!
And so: You sir are completely wrong. We do not have contra-causal free will. Everything Comes Down To Luck.
It sounds like you're trying to scare people with "then you're just a brain!" Sort of implying that that should be viewed as a bad thing… "Just a brain"… Brains are made of atoms, and atoms are energy… And when you zoom in to a certain point, things get very strange at those super-subatomic levels, and beyond. "Brain" is only a sound we "humans" make as a label… Birds and crickets don't have names for things… They just interact with things accordingly. Someone taught you to be dismissive and disgusted with what we call "nature"… They robbed you of wonder.
"There's a mind separate from a human body that gives us free will as evidenced by our ability to consider decisions."
Easy refutation, if it's our mind that does this and not our brain, why does brain damage effect our decision making?
How is us starting to formulate a decision anything other than a reaction to the external factor of a question being asked of us
What are "reasons that inform our decisions" other than us trying to recall external factors that we've remembered in the past, causing us to pick one over the other?
How is a mind, upon careful considering of these three questions, anything but an unnecessary addition to try and justify free will because it makes you uncomfortable to think of it not existing?
Well, can you tell my soul to stop with the lactose intolerance because I miss real ice cream.
Throwing that inconvenient science right out the window again eh? Can't say I'm surprised, a lot of your scientifically illiterate following high on confirmation bias and presumably some form of bath salts pay you to do so after all…
Prageru want to be proud of their bigotry. they don't want you to tell them they are bigots because of external factors
The fact is, yes, while your thoughts may seem unpredictable, they’re fairly predictable. Your argument doesn’t have evidence, only logic. You’re trying to argue that causality and decision making cannot be reconciled. What you don’t understand is that physical phenomena is predictable, but with so many degrees of freedom variables get muddy and wee perceive it as random. Now, there is such a thing as true randomness but that has to do with how superposition of quanta works. If you want to call me a materialist, fine, I guess that’s what I am. I’m a researcher, I don’t make serious claims without first thinking of counterclaims. I’m not going to call you anti-science, but you certainly are unable to provide solid evidence for your claim. There’s a reason it takes years to prove a hypothesis in research, because we don’t stop until every stone is left unturned and every error is corrected. That is the difference between you and the scientific community, we work hard to be as objective as possible.
Did this guy say our brain causes a reflex? He must have never taken any A&P class in his life…our brain doesn't cause a reflex our spinal cord does.
This is the best Prager U offers? What a joke!!!
I LOVE PragerU 🇵🇱❤️🇺🇸 They speak true
Bad video, oversimplified and disingenuous. Explaining the rather complex issue of free will in this way is just another echo in this chamber.
IT's impossible to have a discussion about what free will is until you define what it is.
Example Cambridge Dictionary,
define free will
the ability to decide what to do independently of any outside influence:
No one told me to do it – I did it of my own free willAnother good articleDoes Science Disprove Free Will? A Physicist Says No | Mind Matters
Never have I ever seen an opinion with such a flawed logic.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) said:
"A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills."
In addition the only being conceived of with a free will is called God. Of course people make choices but that's not exactly free will, is it? If we remove the word free from free will won't we have a better understanding of the subject?
Scientists hav Nemade machine that cans cana brain and see which parts light ups d kinda recreate the pictures they are thinking about at the time.