Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Lesson 2.3: Laplace's Demon
15 Plays13 days ago
If every event has a cause, then perhaps your next thought was written into the universe long before you were born.
Topics Discussed
- The American, French, and Latin American Revolutions as products of the Enlightenment
- Moderate vs. Radical Enlightenment thinkers
- Three explanations for historical change
- How the rise of the social sciences transformed explanations of human behavior
- Laplace's Demon and the idea of causal determinism
- The distinction between causal determinism and hard determinism
- Earlier forms of determinism
- The emergence of social physics
- Historical and philosophical objections to hard determinism
- Scientific challenges from non-Euclidean geometry and quantum mechanics
- Why indeterminism does not automatically establish free will
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Free Will and Revolutionary Ideas
00:00:00
Speaker
Today we begin our discussion of the problem of free will. Now in typical Garcia fashion, I'm not going to do this the way that my teachers taught me the problem of free will, at least not at first.
00:00:17
Speaker
What I'm going to basically try to do is try to incept you, right? ah Put some thoughts in your head without you knowing that I'm doing so.
00:00:29
Speaker
So what does that mean? I guess what I'm telling you is that we're going to begin with a pretty long story time.
00:00:37
Speaker
And we'll see what you think. You know, we'll see if I was successfully able to get in to your mind certain thoughts that people from the late seventeen hundreds early eighteen hundreds were having.
Revolutionary Movements of the 1780s
00:00:52
Speaker
We are. ah Let's say we're starting in 1780-ish. Lots of radical ideas going on during this time period. Of course, there's two very important revolutions. Maybe you've heard of them. The American Revolution and then later the French Revolution.
00:01:10
Speaker
There's also, by the way, lots going on in Latin America. If you are not familiar with the time period, that's when all the revolutions or independence movements, I should say, started happening.
00:01:22
Speaker
There's also across Europe ah in the 1800s, lots of talk about rights and citizenship and equality. And the very modern take of nationalism comes about during this time period.
00:01:40
Speaker
So politically, lots going on. And that will feed into ah what we're going to be talking about today. So Let's start with the American situation. It's a little bit easier.
00:01:52
Speaker
But of course, the 13 colonies were a part of the British Empire prior to 1776.
00:02:00
Speaker
And i want to just make one thing clear real quick. Not everyone was on board with independence. It's hard to get figures on this kind of stuff, but you can roughly think to yourself that there's three logical categories.
00:02:18
Speaker
There's the people that wanted independence. There's the people that didn't want independence. And then there's people that were just kind of on the fence. They didn't know, right? Would it be better for us? Would it be worse?
00:02:30
Speaker
I don't know, maybe you would have been on that camp, right? It's hard to be confident about such a big change in the political order.
00:02:41
Speaker
But in any case, some people, some colonists believed some of the following things. Very famously, they believed that taxation without representation was unjust.
00:02:54
Speaker
And funnily enough, it was drinks that sort of really drove this home. You've probably heard of the Boston Tea Party. There's also ah something going on with rum.
00:03:06
Speaker
If I can summarize this for you. Both of these goods, rum and tea, were being consumed basically daily in the colonies. And so whenever the British Empire would, you know, throw some policy that would muddy up things, these goods would get more expensive for the colonists and that bothered people.
00:03:27
Speaker
And so they actually started doing, you know, ah black market stuff, right? Like under the table kind of stuff. And that was already beginning to show them, hey, we can do this without the British Empire. Things are better without the British kind of looking over our shoulder and telling us what to do.
00:03:45
Speaker
So some colonists believe that and they were thinking, yeah, independence might be a good idea.
Philosophical Influences on American and French Revolutions
00:03:51
Speaker
There was also some radical philosophical ideas. Governments derive legitimacy from the consent of the governed.
00:04:00
Speaker
Basically, it seems like people should have a say in, you know, what their government does and says. and And it should be the case that the government is only really justified when they're doing a good job and keeping their citizens happy.
00:04:17
Speaker
Then there's this idea of individual natural rights. And so all of these ideas were fairly new and radical and different and against the way things had been going on for a long time.
00:04:33
Speaker
And so some people started to foment a revolution. And of course, in 1776, a group of elites went ahead and moved forward with that idea.
00:04:44
Speaker
Again, it wasn't everyone that was on board, but when so certain elites get on board, of that's when kind of things happen because they have the ah resources and they're part of networks and they sort of are the movers and the shakers and they get things to happen.
00:04:59
Speaker
By the way, these elites that fomented this revolution, well, they drew on the philosophy of John Locke. This is important.
00:05:10
Speaker
Because the American Revolution, of course, was a war with the British, but also produced lots of interesting ah written doctrines with ideas in them that were fairly novel, right? Separation of powers.
00:05:26
Speaker
religious liberty, an expanded representative government. These are philosophical ideas. These are ideas, in other words, that were scattered about the writings of people like John Locke and Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes.
00:05:41
Speaker
And so people were saying that philosophy had escaped you know, the book, right, the written text and entered history itself. But what I want to kind of plant the seed of right now is that out of all the different, you know, philosophical ideas that were around,
00:06:01
Speaker
The founding fathers of the United States, they didn't end up instantiating or putting into effect the most radical ones. In fact, they sort of chose the more moderate ones. Yes, they moved away from ah monarchy and some of the things that were going on in Europe.
00:06:23
Speaker
But they didn't go all the way when you consider the entire set of radical philosophical slash political ideas that were around at the time period.
00:06:34
Speaker
You know where these more radical ideas did ah start manifesting themselves? Over in France. So... France, I don't even know how to nutshell this for you.
00:06:50
Speaker
Pretty serious problems going on over there. a Massive government debt, food shortages. That's never good, by the way. That's usually when the pitchforks start coming out.
00:07:01
Speaker
Gross inequality between social classes. We're talking... You know, the wealthy elite basically not doing anything ever, not having to work because they own so much land that they can live off the rents paid on that land. And so it was, you know, on the one hand, some people were working all day long every day.
00:07:24
Speaker
And on the other, people were just like living lavishly without having to really lift a finger. So that's ah that's not a recipe for political stability.
00:07:35
Speaker
And of course, political exclusion, um certain um sectors of society basically had no say whatsoever in what was going on politically.
00:07:47
Speaker
So none of that is good. And to make things even worse, the monarch... At the time, the monarchy in general, they just were were looking like they were not going to budge a finger, like nothing. So basically, it looks like, hey, these people are in the way if we want to change things.
00:08:10
Speaker
And so 1789, tensions explode. Here is the storming of the Bastille. And yeah, things got very warlike very quickly.
00:08:24
Speaker
If I could say something about distinguishing the American and French revolutions besides the ideas that will take hold, is that the American Revolution wasn't really that much of a revolution. i kind of already made that point, right? But you just kind of changed who the elites were. Instead of them being British, they were American elites.
00:08:44
Speaker
But a lot of the social hierarchy sort of stayed the same. So the American Revolution is more so just the American independence. Whereas in France, they really shook things up.
00:08:58
Speaker
I mean, they really changed the social order of things. Why is this so? Well, once they basically you know had the king as a hostage i don't know what else to call it ah all these different groups that took control in france didn't exactly know what to do and of course this is because not all enlightenment thinkers recommended the same thing We had the moderate Enlighteners on the one hand, and these are the people that were influential in the American independence movement.
Moderate vs. Radical Enlightenment Thinkers
00:09:38
Speaker
And you've already heard their names before, right? Voltaire is pictured here. Leibniz is that, you know, best of all possible worlds guy. David Hume and Immanuel Kant you haven't officially met yet, but you will soon.
00:09:55
Speaker
And yes, they were enlighteners. They favored religious toleration, right? That's a big difference from a centuryly century earlier, you know, Protestants and Catholics going to war with each other. So they did want religious toleration. They wanted legal reform.
00:10:12
Speaker
They wanted greater liberty and they wanted a constitutional government. It's not just whatever the king wants, right? So they wanted these things and that those are enlightenment values.
00:10:24
Speaker
But they weren't as radical as some of their philosophical peers. Some of them still often accepted monarchy. They still said, well, you know, there's room for a king.
00:10:36
Speaker
And they were even OK with social hierarchy, where some people sort of had greater you know status than others for good for their entire lives.
00:10:47
Speaker
They were still okay with colonial empires. People that I've mentioned already, like John Locke, they actually invested in colonial enterprises. And maybe the thing that, you know, makes them the most moderate is the gradual change part of it.
00:11:03
Speaker
They didn't want to overnight change everything. They were okay with changing things, a bit ah you know, a little bit at a time, right? Piecemeal kind of stuff. And so those are the moderate enlighteners. I'll give you one more here just because I i have Voltaire on the screen.
00:11:20
Speaker
But people like Voltaire actually were hoping that enlightenment wouldn't really happen from the bottom up or they were thinking it wouldn't happen from the bottom up.
00:11:31
Speaker
They were thinking that instead it would happen in a top down kind of way. So this is called enlightened despotism. And it essentially means that you have a king that is very enlightened and they basically force reforms on the population.
00:11:50
Speaker
So you can see that's very different from what we're going to hear from people like Dolbach who thought, well, we got to you know start with education and it it's going to go from the bottom up. You educate everyone and then the whole society becomes enlightened.
00:12:04
Speaker
These moderate thinkers, they weren't really all the way in that direction. Who was all the way in the you know more radical enlightenment side? Well, we've also covered these people.
00:12:18
Speaker
These are Spinoza, who was around in the 1600s. Didderot and Dobak, who are best friends, by the way, besties. ah And the American, Thomas Paine. It's always nice when we get to talk about ah Thomas Paine because he sort of was sanitized a little bit, but he had really radical thoughts, right? He wanted education for everyone, including girls. That's different.
00:12:46
Speaker
ah universal suffrage, right? Everyone should be able to vote. And he wanted more of a social safety net. He actually, i mean, he wouldn't use these words. He wouldn't say universal basic income, but he kind of felt like, you know, people need land. And if you can't give them land, you know, ah to grow their food and stuff, you got to give them money.
00:13:06
Speaker
So the government was sort of supposed to ensure the well-being and even thriving of their population. Right. So this is not a small government. This is a government that that gives and provides and helps nourish the minds and bodies of the population.
00:13:26
Speaker
So Thomas Paine, very, very radical. In any case, what these radical enlighteners all had in common, some of them more radical than others, sure, but in general, they favored democracy, complete freedom of thought, equality before the law, and separation of church and state. Let me just pause right there and kind of double click on each of these.
00:13:51
Speaker
But they wanted democracy as in direct democracy, as in everyone actually votes on laws and policies and everything. This is not what happened in the American independence movement and the... ah ensuing years, the American founding fathers actually made a constitution that's a representative form of government, right? You you don't vote for laws, typically.
00:14:19
Speaker
You vote for people that go represent you who will They will be the ones that make the laws, right? So this is very different. The moderate and lighteners wanted a little bit of a distance between regular Joes, who they might even call like the masses, right? The vulgar people who aren't very educated and actual, you know, legislature, right?
00:14:44
Speaker
So they wanted a little bit of a distance. And so they had that middle person, right? You vote for someone to go represent you. Well, the radical enlightener said, yeah, you don't need that. Just, you know, teach people, sure, education for everyone. And then let them vote. Let them actually honestly decide, right? No intermediaries.
00:15:01
Speaker
So that's fairly radical. Complete freedom of thought. That means, of course, that you don't shove religion ah down their throat and you don't um put you know your your views. You don't what's the word I'm looking for?
00:15:17
Speaker
You don't engage in censorship. There you go. Equality before the law. Right. That means, you know, no aristocratic privileges. If you've heard in the modern age that there's two tiers of the justice system, meaning that if you're rich, you basically get treated differently and things go, you know, a lot more smooth for you than if you were very poor.
00:15:41
Speaker
Well, that was exactly what was going on in um most parts of Europe. At the time, there were the elites, the aristocrats, who literally had a different judicial system.
00:15:57
Speaker
In other words, they would be judged by their own peers, meaning other aristocrats. And, you know, their fines were they typically wouldn't get, you know, hard labor. They would get a fine and they were pretty small fines at that.
00:16:11
Speaker
And so these radical enlighteners were saying, yeah, forget all that. We want total equality before the law. No more two-tier justice system, none of that. And of course, separation of church and state.
00:16:24
Speaker
So all of this amounted to them rejecting monarchy, right? No kings. no aristocratic privilege, no religious authority, right? That's for sure. Dobak and Diderot were extremely anti, ah you know, the church. So none of that.
00:16:41
Speaker
And of course, no permanent social hierarchy. You're not, you know, able to buy yourself some elite status that you keep for the rest of your life. They even thought, these radicals, that revolution is okay when you are confronting oppression. In other words, if you are a population who is being abused and neglected and whatever else, oppressed by your king or your, you know, whatever a government is in place,
00:17:13
Speaker
you're allowed to foment a revolution, to overthrow that government. So the radicals, of course, some of this you might like. It sounds, you know, um like things that you agree with. But at the time, you have to realize that there was a whole lot of Enlightenment thinkers, way more than I'm mentioning, by the way. I mean, I'm just trying to keep it simple here. But ah Even when you take that big set of people or even the smaller set of people that I've considered for you, you can still divide them roughly into two camps. There are the really radical ones, the ones that wanted to go all the way.
00:17:51
Speaker
And the more moderate thinkers who are saying, well, you know, stepping stones, Let's not, you know, change everything all
The Radical Phase of the French Revolution
00:17:59
Speaker
at once. Right. So so that is a ah good way to distinguish um between the different camps of enlightenment thinkers.
00:18:08
Speaker
Well, why do I bring up the radicals? The revolution went up, you know, they got pretty gnarly, to be honest. And um after some more radical thinkers took power,
00:18:21
Speaker
They executed the king ah in the public square, right? It was pretty gruesome. And they executed a whole lot of people, right? Because political fact political factions began to fight with each other. And eventually, one person named Robespierre took control.
00:18:41
Speaker
And what the French call le terreau began which is we translate as the reign of terror. And yes, it was extremely brutal and basically tyrannical, right? So a movement that began with the goal of liberty eventually became repressive itself.
00:19:07
Speaker
And so typically, as happens in these situations, there is a lot of chaos and out of the chaos, a tyrant or a dictator arises ah promising to restore order and all that.
Napoleon and the Enlightenment
00:19:23
Speaker
And in this case, it was Napoleon Bonaparte. And, you know, Bonaparte reminds me a little bit of people like Julius Caesar, because when you look at the policies that Julius Caesar enacted, sometimes they sound pretty good. Yeah, yeah you say that sounds like a good idea.
00:19:44
Speaker
But it's sort of the way they did it, right? Julius Caesar did it as a dictator and he just kind of imposed his will on Rome.
00:19:56
Speaker
That's what happened in the case of Bonaparte as well. You kind of like... some of the institutions that he ah you know put in place, right? Legal equality or equality before the law, that's nice. Secular government, a merit-based administration. In other words, you don't get to buy your position anymore because you're an elite.
00:20:19
Speaker
You actually have to deserve it. Wow. What do you think of that? So these are the institutions that Bonaparte put into place. But it's again, it's the way he did it. He didn't just do it in France.
00:20:34
Speaker
He conquered a ton of Europe and forced those revolutionary institutions on those conquered territories.
00:20:45
Speaker
And then he crowned himself emperor. ah That's that's telling because typically the pope crowns you, but he crowned himself and then his wife. So he is definitely um power hungry, tyrannical. Even the way he waged war changed over time because he was just realizing he has so much power that he can do whatever he wants. And so it's it's paradoxical. It's kind of twisted because the revolution change.
00:21:14
Speaker
in a way, advance freedom and other enlightenment values, but it also concentrated power in the person of Napoleon Bonaparte. So it's it's kind of a strange um social situation going on here. He wasn't to put down definitively until 1814.
00:21:37
Speaker
So Napoleon would be on the scene for a bit Okay, let's talk now about what was happening over in Latin America.
Latin American Independence Movements
00:21:47
Speaker
If you were to take a um Latin American philosophy course, you will probably read a ton of documents from this time period because as you are, you know, becoming independent and you are, you know, determining your own destiny,
00:22:07
Speaker
as a nation, you have to talk about what that destiny is going to look like. And so a lot of political philosophy and just philosophy in general, Latin American philosophy was written during this time period.
00:22:20
Speaker
um i won't really mention much of that right now. i will say that the Latin American independence movements sprung up precisely because of the chaos that was going on in Europe as Napoleon was basically, you know, waging war with all the yeah monarchies.
00:22:42
Speaker
Well, the monarchies couldn't take care of their possessions in Latin America. And so several Latin American thinkers said, well, you know what, now is a good time to declare independence.
00:22:55
Speaker
and they did. Here at the bottom image we have Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla who was a priest and he was instrumental in setting off the Mexican revolution. The first revolution was actually in Haiti and then i should say that Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla was not terribly successful in his military um actions.
00:23:22
Speaker
In fact, he was dead within a couple of months of the beginning of the independence movement. Also pictured though is Simón Bolívar who was extremely successful militarily speaking.
00:23:37
Speaker
He won so many battles against the Spanish royalists when liberating ah various Latin American countries that he even got the nickname Libertador which means the liberator.
00:23:51
Speaker
And so he is kind of a pivotal figure in South American history. In any case, this is a time period where we begin to get what eventually becomes the world that we recognize today, right? These are the beginnings of the modern world.
00:24:09
Speaker
One more interesting effect of the Napoleonic Wars, the French armies, of course, as I already mentioned, conquered a bunch of territory. Some of this territory was in German-speaking countries. Now, of course, Germany as a nation doesn't exist yet. There's just a bunch of random little German states.
Impact of French Occupation on German Thought
00:24:37
Speaker
But the French occupied ah one particular German region near Trier. And they were there for basically a decade.
00:24:48
Speaker
Eventually, of course, Napoleon is defeated in Russia and he gets chased all the way back to France. And so the occupying armies have to leave the German states.
00:25:01
Speaker
But once they had left, they had already left their institutions in place for, again, about a decade. And so these places had been socially ah changed, right? They had been revolutionized.
00:25:16
Speaker
And guess who would be born into one of these territories? None other than a child named Carl. Little Carl, last name Marx. He would, of course,
00:25:31
Speaker
really be influenced by this transformed political environment. And he's going to have a lot to say in you know, let's just say the middle 1800s. So more on Marx much later.
00:25:47
Speaker
Let's sort of kind of wrap things up here by reminding you of the first story time that we had, right?
Bacon's Influence on Modern Science and Thought
00:25:56
Speaker
Or story time way back when, because this whole thing is tied together.
00:26:01
Speaker
We began with ideas from Francis Bacon. 1605 is when he wrote ah some important texts describing the way that he envisioned science to to be, or the way it should be at least.
00:26:18
Speaker
And of course, his whole idea is that through repeated experimentation and exploration, right, really really interrogating nature itself, we would engage in a new kind of induction, a new way of thinking altogether.
00:26:36
Speaker
overthrowing the ways that Europeans had been thinking for literally thousands of years. So he wanted to get rid of the old ways of thinking and instantiating and putting into place, sorry, a new model of reality.
00:26:55
Speaker
So this new approach to thinking, not only was it a radical departure from the systems of thought that had been in place for, again, millennia, But it wasn't limited to knowledge. It wasn't just about that.
00:27:10
Speaker
Because once you start looking at reality, once you start thinking about knowledge in a different way, eventually it comes to have effects on how you live and how you expect you should live.
00:27:28
Speaker
And so in other words, Changes in our conception of knowledge and thus in science would eventually have political, religious, psychological ramifications, right?
00:27:43
Speaker
It changes what we think about who we are and how we should live. And so we can in a way see that this is a big transition that took centuries to get us to the modern world.
00:27:59
Speaker
Things had been operating for thousands of years under the Aristotelian worldview. people, not just Francis Bacon alone, but people like Bacon started agitating and pushing for a new way of doing science and understanding knowledge.
00:28:16
Speaker
And eventually that sort of, you know, that ball got rolling and it had ramifications across the whole of society. Right.
00:28:27
Speaker
And as you can tell, as you know, we were seeing with the rise of Napoleon, transitions are hard.
Theories of Revolutionary Causes
00:29:21
Speaker
Now that we have quite a bit of historical context, let's move into some food for thought. Here's the question that I want to us to consider. Why did these revolutions happen?
00:29:35
Speaker
So obviously there's a ton of literature on this and there's no way i can you've even come close to covering that in one lesson.
00:29:47
Speaker
But I'm going to give you a little snapshot of three possible answers to this question. First and foremost, this is a very popular one among philosophers, but First of all, it's this notion that ideas themselves caused revolutions.
00:30:09
Speaker
They can cause revolutions. Ideas, in other words, live in our minds and they have causal effects. They actually change your behavior an even measurable way.
00:30:22
Speaker
And so when ideas become sort of endemic on society, right, once they spread around ah like a contagion almost, then they make things happen, right? So that's one idea. Number two, it's actually not ideas in and of themselves, but social forces that cause revolutions.
00:30:44
Speaker
I'll get more into that in a bit, but here's another one. It's not social forces nor ideas. It's actually small little changes in the daily, you know, experiences of people that sort of snowball into larger effects. And sometimes those larger effects are revolutions.
00:31:07
Speaker
So three different ideas here and I will explain each of them now. Camp one is the ideas matter camp. People that believe this kind of thing are people like Steven Pinker and Jonathan Israel.
00:31:23
Speaker
Jonathan Israel, by the way, has a cool book named A Revolution of the Mind that is all about the radical enlightenment. So that's pretty interesting. So what do these people believe? Well, they hold that ideas have genuine causal power.
00:31:41
Speaker
Once you have an idea, again, kind of like a contagion, right? Once you catch this idea and it really sort of, you know, gets it its claws into you and you're thinking about it a lot, then you change how you behave. You change how you see the world.
00:32:01
Speaker
And that makes big events happen if enough people believe in this same idea. So we have examples like Locke's theory of rights. Now this is 1600s when he he came up with this and it took about a century for a lot of people to believe in this account of rights and be familiar with it.
00:32:22
Speaker
But once they did, They were thinking to themselves, you know what, i I do think it's a little unfair that people, for example, decide how much I should pay on taxes without me having any say in it whatsoever.
00:32:36
Speaker
So things like that. Enlightenment criticism of monarchy. If you never heard any criticism about kings, you might think to yourself, well, this is just the way things are.
00:32:48
Speaker
But when you hear some real solid criticisms of the monarchy, you think to yourself, well, Maybe things could be different, right?
00:32:59
Speaker
New ideas about equality such that everyone is equal before the law. Hey, what do you think of that? That sounds nice, right? And new conceptions of citizenship. It's not that we are the subjects of the king and the king can do whatever he wants with us.
00:33:17
Speaker
We're citizens and he has certain duties to us, right? So all these ideas matter Because once they enter your mind, then you see reality differently and you act differently. And those actions eventually become, you know, a revolution.
00:33:38
Speaker
Right. So ideas change minds and minds shape history. OK, that's a very intuitive view. And obviously in a philosophy class,
00:33:49
Speaker
you almost assume this is the case, right? You're studying these ideas precisely because it seems like ideas matter and the you know the kinds of ideas that enter your mind matter because that will affect how you behave.
00:34:04
Speaker
So very intuitive for our purposes here. However, it wouldn't be really my course if I didn't complicate things further with more possibilities. Here's another camp.
00:34:19
Speaker
And I really like this writer, this historian named Peter Turchin. ah This is the idea that social forces matter or to use Turchin's language, social dynamics. Okay, what does this mean?
00:34:37
Speaker
Basically, there are certain social pressures, social patterns that we see in history and those are the ones that really kind of tend to have the causal effect that earlier we were attributing to ideas.
00:34:56
Speaker
Let me give you an example here that is relevant to the revolution in France. This is called elite overproduction. That's when too many educated, ambitious elites are competing for too few positions.
00:35:15
Speaker
This is actually what some people say it's is happening right now. where a lot of people go to college, almost everyone. i mean, I'm not sure what the numbers are, but um ah a big number big chunk of the population goes to college and a bigger chunk of the population than normal also gets advanced degrees.
00:35:35
Speaker
But then there's no immediately you know available good job for them. And so they become a little disenchanted. And next thing you know, they're you know protesting and doing marches and stuff.
00:35:49
Speaker
and so they're they're upset that's what was happening but times 10 in france you had people who were rich and they were you know passing down their wealth uh that generational wealth to their children and the children would um you know you can purchase in those days you can actually sort of purchase elite status So if someone became rich, they could just purchase you know a kind of status for themselves.
00:36:18
Speaker
And so now you had a lot of people who were going to school, who were you know having elite status. But there wasn't a position for them or a role for them or, you know, they they felt like they weren't getting what they deserved in some sense.
00:36:36
Speaker
And of course, when you have people like that, people that have networks and have money and they're upset, that's a dangerous combination.
00:36:47
Speaker
And so next thing you know, they're agitating and this leads to political instability and of course, eventually even radical movements. Because if you did everything you were supposed to do, right, to be an elite, and then you don't get what you think you deserve,
00:37:07
Speaker
Well, then you're going to say to yourself, this system sucks. There's something wrong with this system. We have to change it. And that's how a radical movements get going. So ideas matter, but they matter less than the underlying social conditions that make populations receptive to them.
00:37:28
Speaker
In other words, for an idea to take hold, you need a population that's ready for it. And it is things, social pressures like elite overproduction that make a population ready for radical ideas. All right. So that is the social dynamics position.
00:37:49
Speaker
Let me give you one more, camp three. It's the little things that matter. I happen to really like ah Lynn Hunt's books on this
Empathy, Literature, and Social Change
00:38:00
Speaker
subject. You can check out her book, Inventing Human Rights.
00:38:04
Speaker
But also relevant here is Juan Enriquez. He wrote a really nice book published by MIT Press called Right, Wrong, How Technology Transforms Our Ethics.
00:38:18
Speaker
Let me see if I can nutshell this whole idea for you here. History is shaped by countless small changes, right? So it's not social patterns, social pressures, social dynamics, and it's not ideas by themselves.
00:38:36
Speaker
It's actually just, you know, you got to go to an even lower level, just the individual level. the things that people do every day, that's what really ultimately causes the snowball effect that results in something like a revolution.
00:38:54
Speaker
Let me begin actually with this idea of new technologies because we don't think about how technologies change our um way of looking at things too much, but they really, really, really do.
00:39:07
Speaker
And the technology that we're talking about in this time period is actually just might not sound too radical to you, but, you know, things like the printing press and different genres of literature.
00:39:24
Speaker
So now people were able to write novels and you can mass produce those novels and get them in as many hands as possible.
00:39:35
Speaker
And moreover, people during this time period, because that was happening, were becoming more literate. More people knew how to read. And so these, you know, in a way, these are tiny individual changes.
00:39:49
Speaker
Now you can read. Now you have access to novels and other kinds of books. So what happens then? Well, this is where Lynn Hunt comes in.
00:39:59
Speaker
She notes two specific genres of literature as very important in this time period. The first one I've already mentioned is the novel. Think about how wild it is to read a novel. I mean, you're kind of, we're all jaded, you know.
00:40:16
Speaker
ah we've We've been reading books our whole lives, probably, hopefully. But when you read a good novel, you are literally envisioning the world through the mind of someone else. And if you have a really good writer on top of that, you are actually sort of experiencing what the characters are experiencing.
00:40:40
Speaker
Now, let's just say that you are a middle class person. You can actually experience what a lower class person lives by reading a novel about the experiences of a lower class person, lower socioeconomic status.
00:40:55
Speaker
Or if you are a man, you can experience what a woman might experience by reading a novel that takes the perspective of a woman.
00:41:06
Speaker
and so on and so forth, right? You can take all kinds of different perspectives when you're reading novels and that's exactly the kind of novels that were super popular in this time period.
00:41:18
Speaker
So not only could people read and they had access to, you know, more books, but these books really helped them think and see and even feel the way other people think and see and feel in the world.
00:41:35
Speaker
And the result of this was greater empathy. People now were able to realize that, you know, sometimes it seems like our social system is unjust, right? I don't see the negative effects of this, but that person does. And now I know about their plight. I know about their situation.
00:41:55
Speaker
And so that is empathy growing. over time because of technology, right? The technology of the printed novel.
00:42:07
Speaker
So that's one example that Lynn Hunt gives us. One more because I think it's so wild, but this is also a time period where people are, you know, more entrepreneurial and they are running their own businesses. And if you want to have a successful business, gets guess what's ah very useful?
00:42:27
Speaker
you probably want to be polite and clean and your you know your business place should be fairly also clean. right So different um people might have different opinions on this, but in general, there was a new genre that was coming about, which is books on manners. People would literally write books on how it is that you should present yourself and what things you should avoid doing. Definitely don't wipe your snot on your hand and then rub it on your, you know, clothes. That's not, you know, that's not good.
00:43:03
Speaker
So all these different books on manners were being written and people were reading them because they wanted to be clean, not only for business, but also just, you know, ah because it was trendy, I guess.
00:43:17
Speaker
And so next thing you know, People were treating each other a little bit better. Why would this be the case? Well, it turns out that if you find someone to be disgusting because, you know, the snot thing on the hand and whatever, then you actually, parts of your brain actually activate that sort of dehumanize that person.
00:43:39
Speaker
Which means that if you find someone disgusting, you don't treat them like a real human being. But if they're behaving better, in in terms of manners at least, if they are doing all the right things, then that part of the brain doesn't you know fire up.
00:43:55
Speaker
And so you start treating most people as actual human beings. And so that is how ah these new forms of literature, both novels and books on manners, improved the behavior of people in general.
00:44:12
Speaker
That's how it happened. No one intended a revolution. It wasn't the case that, you know, someone was saying, if we write novels on this, you know, eventually we'll have a new social order. no none of that happened.
00:44:25
Speaker
It was just technology doing what technology does. It changing our ethics, our ways of being with each other and with the world.
00:44:36
Speaker
And so through millions of small actions, people changed how they thought and felt every day when reading a novel or being a little more you know cleanly.
00:44:48
Speaker
They changed how they perceived others and how people perceived them. And so that is another theory as to how it is is that these revolutions happened.
00:45:00
Speaker
In a nutshell, through greater empathy and by seeing people as human beings, this sort of made ideas, philosophical ideas like universal rights more plausible, but not not just like, you know, philosophically plausible, but psychologically plausible.
00:45:19
Speaker
Yes, it makes sense that people have ah human rights. We're all the same, aren't we? And you wouldn't be able to have that thought if you basically saw you know other people as disgusting and never were were able to take their position on something, right? So their their view of things.
00:45:38
Speaker
So that is the Little Things Matter camp. Well, I hope I did my job here and got you thinking about some different explanations as to how it is that the revolutions happened.
00:45:51
Speaker
Of course, I didn't cover every single possible scenario, but I gave you three possible scenarios. Now, let me tell you why. Just two quick reasons.
Social Science and Free Will
00:46:01
Speaker
Number one,
00:46:03
Speaker
It really is the case that social science has this effect on us. I think maybe when I first told you about camp one, the ideas matter camp, you thought, that sounds pretty good. That sounds right.
00:46:19
Speaker
But hopefully, as I gave you the two other scenarios, you thought to yourself, that sounds kind of plausible too. And so what social science has the power to do is to get you to think about how it is that we can explain human behavior.
00:46:40
Speaker
Well, explaining human behavior is exactly the kind of thing that was on the rise during this time period.
00:46:51
Speaker
In other words, people were thinking to themselves, I think that just like we developed, you know, the laws of physics that explain how planets move,
00:47:03
Speaker
We can also sort of develop social laws of nature that explain how it is that, you know, humans come to their their decisions and, you know, figure out why they take certain actions.
00:47:18
Speaker
Well, once you start thinking that way, essentially the view that humans are predictable, then you really start to question, okay, well, if humans are predictable,
00:47:32
Speaker
What's with this idea of free will? Ah, I hope you can see now that is how the problem of free will became so prominent. When social science arose, people began to realize that humans are a little more predictable than they thought.
00:47:53
Speaker
And that gets you wondering about whether or not we really have free will.
Determinism and Probability in Philosophy
00:48:33
Speaker
The year, my friends, is 1814. fourteen We are in Paris, France. And the person of the hour is Pierre-Simon Laplace.
00:48:49
Speaker
Laplace is an interesting historical figure ah for various reasons. First of all, he is a mathematician and scientist extraordinaire, basically contributed to every area of thought in his time period.
00:49:07
Speaker
He also, by the way, was politically significant. He was, first of all, the teacher of Napoleon when he when Napoleon was in the academy. And then he sort of, you know, worked in the court of Napoleon. And then when he sort of saw that Napoleon was, ah you know, approaching his downfall, Laplace was actually instrumental in helping ah to get rid of Napoleon.
00:49:37
Speaker
So Laplace, you know, I bet you you can write ah um a movie about this guy. a Very interesting figure. We are covering him today because in 1814, he wrote an essay on probability theory.
00:49:54
Speaker
This is not the first essay that he wrote on the subject. He had been writing on this for 20 years. But this is an essay for the public. It wasn't for other academics.
00:50:09
Speaker
He wanted to popularize science and mathematics. So I have a soft place in my heart for someone like that because getting the population to know about more math and science is I think a good thing.
00:50:24
Speaker
In any case, Laplace in this essay for the general population articulated what we today know as causal determinism. Okay, which means we're getting into the problem of free will now.
00:50:42
Speaker
Let's learn some important concepts. And we'll begin, of course, with causal determinism. This is the view that all events are caused by prior events in conjunction with the laws of nature.
00:50:59
Speaker
That is a very fancy way of saying that it's basically the view that all events are forced upon us by the past plus the laws of physics.
00:51:13
Speaker
Maybe putting it even more bluntly, everything that happens has to happen because of the way the world is and how the laws of nature act upon the world.
00:51:28
Speaker
So that is causal determinism. Now maybe you still need a little more clarification. Well, Laplace actually gives a helpful metaphor to understand causal determinism.
00:51:44
Speaker
Now he didn't call it a demon, but today we call it Laplace's demon. It is a thought experiment proposed by Laplace. And you're supposed to imagine an intelligence that knows the exact position and motion of every particle in the universe.
00:52:03
Speaker
Now, if this intelligence had this information and a complete description of all the laws of nature, right, a complete understanding of how reality works, then this intelligence, this demon, could calculate the entire past In other words, engage in retrodiction, as well as all of the future.
00:52:29
Speaker
In other words, prediction, all with perfect accuracy. So today, maybe we don't like thinking about demons so much, but you can imagine a supercomputer, a super intelligent AI.
00:52:45
Speaker
and it knows a complete description of the universe and has a perfect understanding of reality, of the laws of nature. This super intelligent ai can see the past and the future like a book, right? It's all written before its eyes.
00:53:03
Speaker
So let me give you Laplace's quote, which is very illustrative about this intelligence or demon.
00:53:15
Speaker
We ought then to consider the present state of the universe as the effect of its previous state and as the cause of that which is to follow.
00:53:27
Speaker
An intelligence that, at a given instant, could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings that make it up, if moreover it were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, would encompass in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atoms.
00:53:55
Speaker
For such an intelligence, nothing would be uncertain, and the future, like the past, would be open to its eyes. So there it is Laplace laying out causal determinism, really making it a scientific hypothesis, essentially.
00:54:16
Speaker
So what does this have to do with free will? Causal determinism typically is seen as implying hard determinism.
00:54:30
Speaker
So it's a different kind of determinism. This time it's about free will. Hard determinism is a view that since every event is completely determined by prior causes and the laws of nature, then this includes every human thought, choice, and action.
00:54:52
Speaker
In other words, this implies that genuine human free will does not exist. A hard determinist might argue in this way, physical laws, we can say gravity, strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, they determine the behavior of all objects.
00:55:14
Speaker
Of course, our brains are just physical objects. Moreover, Their inner workings must conform to physical law, right? Brains just have to be subject to the same laws that govern everything else.
00:55:30
Speaker
Of course, our brains also produce our choices. So our choices then are determined by physical laws, not us.
00:55:41
Speaker
Therefore, free will is an illusion. There it is, my friends, the case for hard determinism. Now, we will look at arguments against hard determinism, sort of.
00:55:56
Speaker
But before I do that, I want to make sure one thing is clear about Laplace's contribution. Laplace did not invent the idea of determinism, not even the idea of causal determinism.
00:56:11
Speaker
That idea was around in those days and other mathematicians and scientists did discuss it. However, he does play an important role in a sense. So let me give you a quick sort of history of determinism because it goes way back, like way, way back. So the Stoics were determinists in a way.
00:56:35
Speaker
They viewed the whole cosmos as a radically cohesive living being, which they called Zeus. In other words, they saw all of reality, all of nature, the whole universe is...
00:56:51
Speaker
like an animal it's like an organism and so that means the whole thing is one thing one being and of course they call it zeus to put this maybe a little too simplistically they basically saw nature itself as divine right and we're all part of nature so i guess we're all a little divine And so if you take the whole set of nature, that's Zeus. That is God. All of reality itself is God.
00:57:21
Speaker
Okay. Everything in this cosmos is related to everything else. It's all in a state of unity and cohesion. And that's because...
00:57:33
Speaker
The thoughts of Zeus, right, what we might call divine reason, they control the cosmos. they the The thoughts of Zeus govern every single event that happens in our reality.
00:57:50
Speaker
You can think about it sort of like the laws of nature, That whole idea of the laws of nature, it came from this idea from the Stoics thinking that Zeus has thoughts that govern all of reality, right?
00:58:06
Speaker
The thoughts of Zeus are the laws of nature. This means that everything that happens has to happen. That sounds familiar, right? in Determinism. And so the whole idea of Stoicism is that what you need to do is accept reality as it is, or at least accept that everything that happens has to happen instead of resisting it, right? Don't try to resist it. the You have to live in accordance with nature.
00:58:32
Speaker
That's what that means for them. And this view is known as Stoic fatalism or it is sometimes known as Stoic determinism. So you can see, determinism goes back to at least the 300s BCE.
00:58:49
Speaker
You can also find chunks of deterministic thought in Christian philosophy couple of hundred years later. Augustine had a lot of thoughts. Augustine was first a pagan, then had certain theological views, then changed his mind, whatever.
00:59:07
Speaker
In his later writings, Augustine basically endorsed something like determinism. He said that humanity is profoundly corrupted by original sin. In other words, once Adam and Eve sinned,
00:59:22
Speaker
They messed up our minds and we're all a little less free, a little less rational, just in general, cognitively degraded. And so, human beings cannot freely choose God to save themselves. In other words, we because we are cognitively degraded, we can't even really choose what's best for us.
00:59:44
Speaker
That's how little free will we have left. Basically, none. Instead, salvation depends entirely upon God's grace. God chooses who to give grace to and who to not give grace to.
01:00:02
Speaker
So you might think that through your good works and your good choices, you can earn God's grace, but no. Augustine is pretty clear about this. God freely bestows it upon those whom God chooses.
01:00:16
Speaker
And so none of your actions really have an effect on whether or not you get grace. back your action In fact, your actions aren't really even that free because you are cognitively degraded. You don't have the mental power to be free.
01:00:32
Speaker
So this is known as theological determinism. So there is another kind of determinism. Spinoza, now fast forwarding to the 1600s, was also a kind of determinist, and it also stems from his view of God. Now, Spinoza's view of God is closer to the Stoic view than to the view of the Christians.
01:00:59
Speaker
Because Spinoza also thought that God was nature. Spinoza, though, also went further and said that there's actually only one substance in existence.
01:01:10
Speaker
The Stoics said there's one organism, but Spinoza said there's really just one substance. And so this is called theological monism. And so because there's only one thing, everything that happens is a logical necessary expression of that one thing, right? Nature's eternal essence.
01:01:32
Speaker
So maybe to put it again somewhat oversimplified, but everything that happens is a consequence of the way that reality is. There's only one thing in reality and so the essence of that one thing causes everything to happen the way it does.
01:01:52
Speaker
This is known as logical determinism. And it's another kind of determinism, right? Everything that happens is a logical sort of almost like mathematical consequence of the nature of reality itself.
01:02:07
Speaker
So Spinoza is sort of using logic and math to argue for determinism. That is different from Laplace, as I will make clear in a second.
01:02:18
Speaker
It's also different from Dobak. Doback, of course, famously rejected all supernatural explanations. He was very atheistic, like hardcore atheist, right?
01:02:31
Speaker
The way that he argued for determinism is by saying that basically you don't make yourself It's actually all kinds of external forces that cause our behaviors.
01:02:47
Speaker
And these material forces, we're just not aware that they're acting upon us. If we were, we'd realize, oh yeah, we're not free at all. But all these things are actually what dictate our beliefs and desires and hence our actions.
01:03:03
Speaker
And he's talking about things like education. culture. Today, we might include in there biology, right, or genetics. Also our, you know, socioeconomic circumstances.
01:03:16
Speaker
All these things make us who we are and essentially leave no room for us to make ourselves. And so that is why Dobak argued for determinism. All these external material forces are acting on us to determine what we do.
01:03:35
Speaker
Well, even though Daubach and Spinoza, both enlightenment thinkers, even though they they both argued for kind of determinism, it's still not the kind of determinism that Laplace endorsed.
01:03:51
Speaker
Laplace does take it a little bit further. He doesn't invent, again, determinism, but he makes it into a scientific hypothesis.
Scientific Challenges to Determinism
01:04:01
Speaker
He ties it in with the laws of nature and a complete description of reality. In other words,
01:04:09
Speaker
If you are going to actually be you know ah capable of predicting future events, you have to know the state of affairs of all of reality. You have to know how reality is.
01:04:21
Speaker
And you have to have a perfect understanding of the laws of nature. And once you do the conjunction of that information, that's what allows you to see what is determined.
01:04:35
Speaker
So this is different. This is novel. There is something new here. And you can tell because soon after Laplace, the field of social physics was proposed.
01:04:47
Speaker
Social physics, ah, this is the rise of the social sciences that I mentioned earlier. And this field is very interesting. Here's two interesting factoids from the field of social physics.
01:05:03
Speaker
They understood things like suicide and crime rates to be the products of social conditions. Let me just harp on one of these crime rates or crime itself.
01:05:16
Speaker
These early social scientists basically got rid of the idea of free will. They just didn't want them in their models. And instead, they saw that external material forces are what give rise to our actions.
01:05:33
Speaker
So they actually thought that there is no such thing as a criminal. There's only social conditions that give rise to criminality. And so that is a very different take, right? There's just conditions that give rise to crime.
01:05:49
Speaker
That is reconceiving of our social world without criminals. Very different, right? And they had to do that because they were literally eliminating free will as a factor in their explanations.
01:06:05
Speaker
So that is sort of the trajectory that Laplace set in motion. So now we are able to see where we are. If we are literally reconceiving of reality such that there is no such thing as criminals, for example,
01:06:22
Speaker
Now there is a plausible, ah even scientific route to denying that there is such a thing as free will. And so dilemma number four for us will be, do we really have free will?
01:06:39
Speaker
We will cover three positions on this topic and you have already met the first contender, hard determinism. So let's move into some objections to hard determinism.
01:06:55
Speaker
Let's begin with the objections from Wilhelm Leibniz. Now, Leibniz technically was around before Laplace, so he wasn't responding to causal determinism.
01:07:08
Speaker
He was actually responding to Spinoza's logical determinism. Nonetheless, he was worried about what would happen if people didn't believe in free will. Now, imagine that people really, truly, honestly believed that they don't have genuine free will.
01:07:28
Speaker
Well, one thing that leibniz Leibniz discussed was that people would probably you know end up becoming morally lazy and even fall into psychological despair.
01:07:43
Speaker
In other words, they would be completely distraught because nothing that they do seems to be really genuinely coming from them. They will feel like puppets. Now, there is actually good psychological evidence of this.
01:07:58
Speaker
If you look into something called self-determination theory, you will find out that people who feel that they are being controlled externally They sort of have a lot of things going on with them. They have decreased intrinsic motivation.
01:08:15
Speaker
They have a lower subjective well-being. There is a bunch of things that go on when you feel like you're not in control. And so Leibniz is right, sort of, on that point. That's not exactly, of course, how he expressed it, but yeah, sort of.
01:08:31
Speaker
Another thing that Leibniz is worried about is that it seems like our moral and legal systems are basically founded upon the assumption of free will.
01:08:43
Speaker
So when you stop believing in free will, then you kind of, you know, have erased the foundations of our moral and legal systems for yourself.
01:08:55
Speaker
What does this mean? Well, basically, our very ideas of things like moral praiseworthiness and moral blameworthiness and guilt, they all rely on us actually having caused our actions. Right. So if you do something that is awesome, it's very good for other people, but you don't have genuine free will.
01:09:20
Speaker
then you kind of did it like a robot, right? You robotically were righteous. You were robo-righteous. That's not exactly praiseworthy. It's just like something that happens naturally. You didn't even try to be good. You were just good.
01:09:35
Speaker
And the same goes when you were being bad. If you have done something bad, you can just say, well, you know, and I'm not in control. And what are we supposed to do? How are we going to blame you? You aren't in control if none of us have free will.
01:09:49
Speaker
So that's one thing. What about the legal system? Punishment sort of is based upon, at least in the minds of some people, on people being guilty in the sense that they chose to do the wrong thing that they did.
01:10:04
Speaker
And so this undermines our whole system of criminal justice. Now, let me give you a quick objection to this line of thinking. Number one, ah Well, let's start with the legal justice system.
01:10:19
Speaker
One thing we can say about that objection is that it doesn't really say that determinism is false. It just says that our moral and legal systems are based on free will.
01:10:34
Speaker
So we would just have to, says the hard determinist, redesign these systems. And in fact, this is exactly what they were doing, right?
01:10:46
Speaker
the people who were into social physics, what they were really doing is reimagining and re-describing how it is that society works without the assumption of free will.
01:10:59
Speaker
So it is at least possible to imagine that we might be able to describe our society and our moral systems and our justice system without the assumption of free will. i mean, that's at least a possibility, says the hard determinists, the the people that don't believe in free will.
01:11:20
Speaker
Let me mention one more very nuanced thing here. Leibniz's arguments are not saying that causal determinism is false.
01:11:32
Speaker
They're saying that it's harmful. And harmful does not equal false, right? So in other words, one possible retort to Leibniz is that you actually haven't proved that determinism is false, Mr. Leibniz.
01:11:51
Speaker
You've only shown that if you believe that it's true, it hurts you, which is not the same thing. I hope you can tell. So that's a very interesting nuanced objection that I've seen in the literature.
01:12:03
Speaker
And it does seem to be true, right? He's not actually arguing that it's false, just that it sucks to believe in So that's one thing. Let's get into scientific objections now.
01:12:15
Speaker
Because these are actually targeting determinism itself or at least trying to undermine belief in determinism. So maybe they won't show that determinism is false, but you will lose confidence that this kind of determinism, causal determinism, is true.
01:12:34
Speaker
Which is maybe enough to say, well, you know, I don't know then that hard determinism is true. Okay. During the 19th and 20th centuries, confidence in causal determinism declined.
01:12:49
Speaker
This was in part due to developments in mathematics. An approach to geometry that had originally inspired determinism, a kind of geometry known as Euclidean geometry, turned out to be just one of many possible geometries.
01:13:07
Speaker
Now, I don't want to get too far into this before your eyes roll into the back of your head. That's what happens when you mention math. But Euclidean geometry used to be thought to be like the absolute foundational 100% realer than real, truer than true mathematical fact.
01:13:29
Speaker
In other words, they used to think this is beyond doubt. It is the truth. It is how, is it you know, reality works. And then they were basically trying to prove it. um And one theorem, sorry, one axiom seemed a little questionable.
01:13:48
Speaker
And so they explored what happens if you don't assume that axiom. And basically, they discovered that Euclidean geometry is just one possible geometry. And so that means that it's not necessarily a direct link to reality. It's just a tool.
01:14:08
Speaker
Geometry, like all mathematical systems, are tools that we use to try to approximate reality itself. It doesn't mean they actually perfectly represent reality. Now, for us, that's pretty easy to understand.
01:14:25
Speaker
That is a much more popular view today. But in the 1800s, you know, some people really thought like, oh man, math is like, in a way, the realist of the real, right? It is helping us discover the fundamental nature of reality. So that was a big shock to people.
01:14:46
Speaker
And after that, all the non-Euclidean geometries started springing up, scientists tended to, you know, kind of open up their views a little bit about the relationship between science and reality.
01:15:02
Speaker
They saw their theories really as models or approximations. Mathematics was more so a tool rather than a perfect description of reality.
01:15:16
Speaker
So the reason why this is important is because once Euclidean geometry was known to be just one possible geometry, this really kind of, you know, lowered the confidence of people that something like causal determinism is even scientific fact, right, or scientifically testable.
01:15:38
Speaker
Because the whole idea of causal determinism is that if you had a perfect description of reality, and you used the you know laws of nature and of course in that process you would use mathematics then you would be able to predict everything that's going to happen and everything that already happened and whatever right well if math can't actually help you do that anymore if that's not the way math works anymore Well, that sort of takes some of the wind out of the sails of causal determinism.
01:16:12
Speaker
Okay, that's just one scientific, more mathematical objection. Let's look at one more that comes from 20th century physics. You've probably heard of this. It's called quantum mechanics. Now, it would be impossible for me to try to nutshell quantum mechanics for you right this second.
01:16:36
Speaker
All I want to say is this. Quantum mechanics ushered in a whole new way of thinking about physics. Before quantum mechanics, Newtonian mechanics was the regular way of thinking about the universe.
01:16:52
Speaker
And in Newtonian mechanics, basically the universe is one giant machine, right? You can think of like gears sort of like, you know, synced up and crunching together. and and this way of looking at the world, you can make precise calculations if you had the right information.
01:17:12
Speaker
All you have to do is, you know, measure things, get really good approximations, and you can make really good calculations about basically anything. But then quantum mechanics came about and it was a really weird discovery because they were looking at the behavior of really small things.
01:17:31
Speaker
things like electrons and photons, and they discovered that they move in fundamentally probabilistic ways. What does that mean? It means that you actually cannot predict where an electron will go under certain conditions.
01:17:51
Speaker
The best you can do 50% chance it'll go this way and chance it'll go that way. And so in a nutshell, there are no certainties in quantum mechanics, only probabilities.
01:18:09
Speaker
Again, causal determinism is all about certainty. If you had a perfect description of the universe and you perfectly understood all the laws of nature and then you math that mess, you can predict and retrodict everything.
01:18:28
Speaker
Well, quantum mechanics says you can't do that. It is simply not possible to get perfect accuracy in our predictions because of quantum mechanics, because of the behavior of really tiny objects.
01:18:44
Speaker
Maybe you want a visual diagram of this, sure. In determinism, one event leads to another event necessarily. And that second event also necessarily leads to a third event.
01:19:00
Speaker
Basically, every event is caused by prior events in conjunction with the laws of nature. That's determinism. That's how it works.
01:19:11
Speaker
Perfect prediction is possible as long as you had all the information that you needed. Well, indeterminism, which is what is implied by quantum mechanics, says no to that. Basically, if you have some event that you have, you know, knowledge about and it involves a quantum object, something like an electron,
01:19:37
Speaker
Well, it actually could go one of two ways. There's a 50% chance it'll go this way and chance it'll go that way. which means of course that perfect prediction is not possible.
01:19:53
Speaker
And then that leads to another event. And again, you have a 50% chance it'll go this way, 50% chance it'll go that way. You don't know where it's going to go, the the little tiny object you're measuring.
01:20:07
Speaker
And you make your guess, but you might be wrong and and ended up going this way. And so that is indeterminism. That is what is implied by quantum mechanics.
01:20:19
Speaker
And this, again, really takes us the wind ah out of the sails of causal determinism. Something like Laplace's demon kinda isn't possible under this way of looking at things because perfect prediction and retrodiction is not possible.
01:20:38
Speaker
The best you can do is some kind of, you know, really good educated guess. So that really kind of does undermine causal determinism. Now the verdict is out. Some physicists still hold hope for something like determinism.
01:20:56
Speaker
Other physicists are all in on quantum mechanics and this, you know, probabilistic view of reality. What does it mean for free will?
01:21:07
Speaker
Well, you might think that, hey, some people don't believe in causal determinism anymore and they're really smart because they're physicists.
Free Will: Determined or Random?
01:21:16
Speaker
That's awesome. That means we have free will.
01:21:19
Speaker
Yeah, unfortunately, it is not clear that this is the case. Just because it is unclear that causal determinism is true doesn't necessitate or necessarily imply that you have free will.
01:21:37
Speaker
Here is an argument suggesting exactly that. If determinism is true, then our choices are determined by factors over which we have no control.
01:21:49
Speaker
Okay, we've been covering that view this entire time. If causal determinism is true, then there is no real free will. Here's another view. Let's just say that indeterminism is true.
01:22:03
Speaker
And there's, you know, some quantum elements going on when we make choices or whatever. That means that our choices, maybe not every choice, but some of our choices are actually just chance occurrences.
01:22:16
Speaker
Notice that what a quantum event is, is not you causing, you know, the electron to go this way or that way. It's just a 50% chance it'll go this way or that way. In other words, you're like a coin.
01:22:32
Speaker
If what a choice is involves some kind of quantum event, you're a coin. There's like a coin being flipped in your head. And that doesn't feel like free will.
01:22:46
Speaker
If you're choosing between chocolate ice cream and vanilla ice cream at whatever ice cream shop and what happens in your head is a coin toss that seems arbitrary. That doesn't seem like real free will.
01:22:59
Speaker
And so determinism leads to no free will and indeterminism, it's almost worse because it's like a coin toss in your head. That's not that doesn't feel like free will. And so because those are basically our options, either determinism or indeterminism, well, then you end up not having free will.
01:23:25
Speaker
Either our choices are determined or they are a chance occurrence and neither of those is really free will. So again, even though we came to this idea that we don't have free will from causal determinism, even once we let go of causal determinism, it doesn't become immediately evident that we do have free will.
01:23:52
Speaker
Now, I understand this is a lot to take in and it is a heavy topic, maybe one of the heaviest after, you know, considering arguments against God's existence.
01:24:06
Speaker
Please do review the terms and the arguments and especially the objections to hard determinism to really understand sort of all the content and and it really does take a little bit of effort to wrap your mind around this problem.
01:24:23
Speaker
And if things weren't already difficult enough, there's actually two other views within the problem of free will. And we move toward those views next.