Introduction to Free Will a...

Introduction to Free Will and Determinism

(00:00) [Music] Free Will versus determinism does Free Will exist it seems like events in the universe are necessitated by previous events and yet that seems to contradict to go against the very powerful subjective impression that we all have we have a strong need to think that

(00:51) the way we are and the kind of person we are is somehow a matter of our own creation that I am what I am because I have to some degree at least made myself into the kind of being that I am this is one reason why we value free will it gives us the sense that there

(01:13) are more than one pathway into the future that we could go down if determinism is true there's only [Music] one free will is is the foundational philosophy in a sense our fundamental beliefs about what a human being is rely on what we think about Free Will and it

(01:36) reaches into all different kinds of components and sub areas of philosophy our entire legal systems and the notion of moral responsibility how does physical causality work how we could be the ultimate creators of our own will we have psychological forcing subliminal

(01:58) advertising and it's important to recognize these are all threats to our autonomy our ability to make choices could have enormous implications for how we think about human beings do we have free will and then why do we feel like we do we have evolved this human desire to

(02:20) understand Free Will for many these two words Encompass what it means to be human what it means to truly be an individual to be deserving of your accomplishments and to accept responsibility for your mistakes most of us acknowledge there are some things we cannot control the genes we

(02:46) inherit our birthplace our parents we recognize that we are shaped by both nature and nurture yet we may long for a third component known as choice to validate the sense of control control we have over our lives however recent advances in modern science put this notion of control into

(03:04) question by reading electrical activity in the brain researchers say they can predict a person's voluntary choices several seconds prior to them being consciously aware of their decisions and the laws of nature discovered by physicists don't appear to allow any exception for Human Action so is Free

(03:20) Will real imagined or just a useful human construction great minds from the past have attempted to reconcile both the apparent truth of cause and effect and the desire to be in control of one's own actions but can modern developments in science and philosophy provide a

(03:37) definitive answer to this age-old problem with such powerful consequences on our Notions of identity morality and law this is an issue Humanity cannot afford to get wrong do we have free will that's a tricky question I used to ask myself this question that is a

(03:54) fundamental question it shapes your worldview in many ways we pretty much have free will if you look at it absolutely not yeah I think we do yeah I don't think we have free will I hope so it's quite an interesting question really it's a very complex question the concept of Free Will is

(04:25) very important for us because we make sense of Our Lives by assuming that we are agents that is that we make decisions that we make choices what makes my life meaningful is in fact the series of choices that I make who to hang out with what kind of career to start what to do today as

(04:44) opposed to tomorrow and so on and so forth so we make sense of we what we do of Our Lives as a kind of a narrative of our actions and our decisions so it makes us special what makes us different from machine for example or robots that we might imagine is that we under some

(05:01) particular circumstances when we perform actions could have refrained from performing so suppose we have Joe he wants to maximize his wealth and he believes that by evading taxes he can maximize his wealth so he's got reasons for doing this but he's got counterveiling reasons as well after all

(05:25) he thinks he might be caught he's also has some desire to do the right thing now suppose the net force of these reasons puts him in a quandry about whether to evade [Music] taxes he's torn do I evade taxes do I not evade taxes what's going to settle how he acts

(05:47) in these torn decision situations say Joe's situation in which he's torn between doing the right thing for moral reasons or doing the wrong thing for self-interested reasons [Music] intuitively we think like how does a settling happen well Joe settles Joe as agent right it's not his desires or

(06:11) beliefs that settle how the decision is going to go rather it's Joe [Music] himself was something I decided to do internally generated or was it due to some external influence and we're pretty good at being able to sort of Judge that and to the extent that we think it was

(06:32) internally generated we have the feeling that it was coming from within we attribute that to this idea that we have free will we freely chose that we had agency but that feeling itself could be an illusion if someone asks do you have free will the first thought is okay well