You don't have free will, but don't worry.

Sabine is brutal in how she gives "certain" types of philosophers, who keep on insisting that their Ph.D. in philosophy makes them some sort of universal scientific authority, a painful wedgie. I love it!

You say "don't worry" as if I have a choice!

"you're not here to make the choice. Youve already made it. You're here to understand WHY you made it." -The Oracle

My reaction to realizing free will was an illusion, if anything, was to get mad less often--particularly at people.

I always considered free will to be silly, but I’m not an intellectual so I just thought I was just explaining away things to make myself feel better. For example, I’ve been an addict my entire life. When I was little, I never thought I wanted to be the guy in my family everyone talks poorly about. Then I realized I was the guy everyone talked poorly about before I ever took a drug or a drink. I didn’t realize I grew up in an abusive home until I turned 40 when I went to therapy. I thought good parenting including instilling fear and guilt and shame to make sure I followed the right path and that I was too weak to adhere to it. As I looked back at my life, I realized I never made a single decision with free will. I made decisions based on what I thought would please my parents. It put me in a life I found unbearable and against my true nature. Its caused mental health issues. My head is always loud with my inner monologue giving me unsolicited advice from the perspective of everyone I know. I willing took alcohol and drugs, but it quieted the noise. I didn’t want to do it. I felt like I needed to just hear my own thoughts again. I know it sounds like I’ve spent my life looking for something to blame, but I can’t help think that if I were raised by intelligent parents who taught me how to like and even love myself instead of being told how much of an inconvenience and a problem I was, maybe I wouldn’t have been an inconvenience or a problem. Mental health problems are not free will.

When I was asked as a child “what do you want to be when you grow up”, I’d always enthusiastically reply “I want to be a robot”. Today I found out I’m a biological robot. Mission accomplished!

The fact that I'm sitting here eating these cookies after working out for an hour tells me all I need to know about free will.

I wrote a paper arguing this standpoint in a philosophy class years ago and people thought I was crazy. Thank you for the validation!!!

Defendant: "The particles made me do it! Judge: "Ten years!"

Interestingly Roger Penrose has spent a lot of time trying to convince the world that free will exists. I had the pleasure of attending a lecture series he gave many years ago, not long after his somewhat controversial book The Emperors New Mind came out, where he expounded on his ideas, many of which he didn't really give full voice to in his book. The overwhelming insight was that he is a closet hidden variable physicist, and he believes that free will exists in part because quantum processes are not random, but have some deeper structure, one that can be tied back into the physical world. (As an example of an indeterminate but not random process he, of course, gave Penrose tiling as an example.) I think there is a critical point to be made here. An assertion that free will cannot exist because quantum processes are truly random is implicitly asserting this randomness as a basic axiom, not just an interpretation of QM. One can argue this one forever, but it isn't yet an accepted axiom of physics, and it isn't hard to find physicists who, in their hearts, don't believe in it. Personally I won't make a call on this. We clearly don't yet know enough to assert this as undeniable truth. There is nothing that says we have to make a choice about it either.

I have felt this my whole life, but did not have the words for it. Thank you so much, this video gives me such a feeling of clarity.

This was very freeing. I’m not going to become a terrible person, but I will be less mad about misfortune and to take more joy in my successes and less or no regret in my failures while keeping the lessons learned. Thank you! ✨💎✨

“You can chose to believe that reductionism is not correct.” Apparently not.

Interesting theory. The problem I have is, it assumes a LOT of 1 way relationships between the laws of nature and human consciousness, and that these are calculable. This is a huge leap considering that we still do not even fully understand enough about how these things actually work to make these assumptions.

Well, I recently discovered you and I’m thrilled that I have. I’ve ordered two copies of your new book so I have someone to talk about it with. And while I may not have come to the conclusion by myself, or for myself, I do have the ability to make decisions, thank you for your videos they keep my brain afire.

"I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined and that we can do nothing to change it look before they cross the road." -- Stephen Hawking

"...because you embody the problem and locking you up will solve it." I've been waiting since the 90s for someone to say this with clarity. It's so basic and yet our legal system doesn't get it. My version of this was "an unacceptable behavior aberration easily solved by imprisonment". Morality doesn't enter the picture. This is easily the best channel on YouTube.

Great video 👍 I would also add this: If we assume 'free will' can exist we have four possible combinations Exists Believes Yes Yes Yes No No Yes No No For the first and fourth cases there is no problem but for the second case, if free will exists and we don't believe in it we will miss out on the opportunity to shape our own futures. However, if it doesn't exist and we choose to believe, it won't make a difference except, as Sabine says, to maybe improve our wellbeings and to enable us to examine the information we receive and the way we process it. Also, we can argue that our belief in free will is not an act of free will. Your description of the illusion of free will as the awareness of internal calculations is very helpful for me. Free will is the product of awareness. Awareness could simply be separate brain regions with different motives communicating, aware they are different but still out of 'our' control. However, I feel grateful that I can experience the story unfolding. If I'm not grateful, I'll be bored and miserable till I die 😂

Came for the clarity, stayed for the brutality.

The problem with this position concerning free will is that it defines the term differently than what most laypersons mean when they use it. You could accurately state scientifically that every decision is dependent on everything that came before it, and that at an atomic level or below, the causative interactions are only dependent on prior interactions. But even if free will may be an illusion created by consciousness, it is inescapably significant to the discussion that we don't fully understand how consciousness arises, or in some senses even how to define it. The bottom line is that our nervous systems are machines who's purpose is to make decisions, and when those are made deliberatively at a conscious level, that is what we call free will, in common language use. It's critical when telling people that something is not as they believe it to be that a clear distinction be drawn between scientifically precise definitions of the words used, and how people normally use the words. Failing to do so risks alienating people from science, because they will frequently conclude that it makes no practical sense.