00:00:17.520 Lincoln David doesn't mention much about free will on the beginning of the year.
00:00:23.040 But he is mentioned and it's mentioned in the context of creativity.
00:00:28.080 And I'm really attracted to this idea that human choice is indeed a product of creativity and it's certainly informed my own thinking on this whole idea.
00:00:38.560 I don't know how to divorce free will from choices that if choice exists in the world and then if choice exists in the world and
00:00:50.640 and we are the agents that do the choosing, then we have free will. Our will, the thing that we want is free to choose among these things.
00:01:02.880 Now it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be if, of course, as many people observe. If someone coerced you in some way, then your will is less free.
00:01:12.160 You want to do X, but you're not allowed to do X for fear of violence or something else. Fear of death perhaps.
00:01:19.200 So you can't do X, so your will has been constrained to do something else. You don't really have the free will that you did.
00:01:25.680 So I think free will is this spectrum, this degrees of freedom that you have.
00:01:31.680 And importantly with human beings, unlike with, say, dogs or cats. You have the classic experiment,
00:01:39.760 figure out what food the dog likes and so you put out two different kinds of food and you let the dog go to the one that it prefers.
00:01:49.520 The dog really make a choice. Well in one sense it kind of did because there were two things there in existence, but it did really contemplate or did it just rely upon what if genes were telling it to do.
00:02:01.600 Are we any different in this case? We are because unlike with the dog, we can choose to create something completely new that isn't there before us.
00:02:13.040 And that choice itself, that choice to actually do go through the effort of creating is itself a free choice that we don't have to make.
00:02:23.120 One can consider when, you know, in a similar situation in the evening, you want to have dinner, you've got a certain number of things in the fridge. There's a certain number of ways in which you combine them into interesting meals.
00:02:35.680 You can choose among them, that's a free choice, but you can also choose to do something completely different and go to the supermarket and buy some more ingredients or to call up a restaurant and get something delivered.
00:02:46.400 So on and so forth, et cetera, et cetera. We really can create new choices, bring new choices into the world. This is our creativity and action.
00:02:55.840 And the act of choosing among these things is what I would regard as free will.
00:03:01.280 So I just regard creativity, choices, and free will, and this capacity to explain the world as all intimately linked.
00:03:13.120 None of them have good explanations. And so it's for this reason I kind of agree with David where he says also in the book that they might all come along for the ride in the one jump to universality.
00:03:25.120 That as soon as you have this jump to explanatory universality, people being universal explainers, then all of those things come along, including consciousness as well.
00:03:37.040 Perhaps we don't know, but the point is that it seems like a parsimonious idea that these are all facets of the one deep profound mystery of what human personhood is about.
00:03:50.160 We're conscious, we're creative, we make choices in the world, we do those freely.
00:03:56.560 And so perhaps whatever the ultimate explanation is of these things or whatever the explanation of the future is that enables us to
00:04:06.800 create artificial general intelligence, that we will recognize that these words that we use, creativity, consciousness, free will, whatever.
00:04:16.880 That all of these things will come together in some way, we'll have a better understanding of each of them and the ways in which they are real.
00:04:23.760 But I say that they're real. One reason I say that they're real is because they are unavoidably part of the explanation of what it is that people are doing.
00:04:34.880 It's an explanation of their behavior, an explanation of how it is they create science and civilization and everything else.
00:04:44.400 That trying to remove any of them causes more problems than it solves.
00:04:49.920 You're left wondering if you think something like creativity isn't some kind of deep mystery,
00:04:58.000 that in fact all we need is ever more faster hardware and eventually we'll achieve escape velocity.
00:05:06.720 We'll have artificial intelligence that is creative and more creative than us and it's just a matter of processing power,
00:05:13.280 which seems to be the most popular idea right now.
00:05:19.360 Okay, this Nick Bostrom singularity idea that all we need is faster processing and once we've got sufficient amount of processing,
00:05:29.520 sufficient amount of memory, so on and so forth, then we will have an agent that is able to think faster than us about anything at all, better than us,
00:05:38.880 and therefore the problem of creativity is solved at the hardware, the hardware level.
00:05:44.480 Many of us think that it's completely wrong, that assumes a solution to what creativity is.
00:05:49.840 It's sidelines creativity and says creativity is no deep mystery that we are just
00:05:57.680 processes with some memory and there's nothing particularly special about the software.
00:06:01.360 Of course, what the beginning of infinity teaches us what David Deutsch's main point is
00:06:06.960 and a lot of this is that the hardware has very little to do with this mystery at all.
00:06:12.080 It's all about the software. This is the great mystery.
00:06:15.520 We have this algorithm running on our brains that is able to improve itself over time
00:06:23.280 and improve its understanding of the world at the time as well and it can augment itself with technology.
00:06:30.000 But it's got nothing to do with how fast we can think.
00:06:34.800 The computer can think faster than us, but it's not more creative than us right now.
00:06:39.280 But of all of these qualities I would say of the human mind,
00:06:45.200 which may be synonymous one with another, creativity, choices, consciousness,
00:06:51.600 the ability to be a universal explainer, free will.
00:06:56.080 That last one, the free will one is the most contentious one it seems to me.
00:07:02.080 And as I've observed elsewhere, there are certain philosophers who will deny free will
00:07:08.080 so, but regard some of the other aspects of this as deeply mysterious.
00:07:14.320 Sam Harris, who I respect very much and love to listen to on this particular topic,
00:07:20.080 has written a book, a vehement defense of the idea we do not have free will.
00:07:26.640 Simultaneously, he also argues that the deepest mystery in the universe,
00:07:32.800 aside from the existence of the universe itself, is the fact that we are conscious.
00:07:36.640 So, as he dismisses the free will issue, uprisers consciousness as being a profound and deep
00:07:46.000 mystery. And he says that his subjective experience of consciousness reveals to him
00:07:51.920 that free will doesn't exist, that you do not have a subjective experience of consciousness.
00:07:56.800 And here all I can say to that is we would just have to disagree
00:08:02.080 because I do have a subjective experience of consciousness.
00:08:06.400 Now, if you meditate and clear your mind of everything, it should be no surprise to you
00:08:12.320 that it seems as if you have no free will, because it then seems as if the thoughts are arising
00:08:19.760 unbidden by you, but if you are really trying not to concentrate and actively trying to dampen
00:08:28.560 down your thinking, then of course it will feel as though it will be a sensation.
00:08:36.000 And this is a theme running through Sam's philosophy, this idea of feelings, that you have the
00:08:40.480 sensation or the experience of not having free will or the absence of free will. I'm unsurprised
00:08:47.360 that you feel as though you've got an absence of free will when you're not thinking, when you're
00:08:51.120 trying to think hard about what to choose to do next. But if you try to be conscious of
00:08:56.800 the choices before you, I think that in those moments and you can be mindful in your conscious
00:09:03.840 experience of the present moment, I think you will find that you can experience the very real
00:09:09.920 sensation of actually having choices in the world and that you will freely be able to choose
00:09:15.040 one thing over another. But this takes us far and wide away from where I want to go with this
00:09:21.600 chapter just to say that almost in any of these debates where people end up at loggerheads about
00:09:28.320 the existence of free will or not, I think we can happily grant to people, okay, I'll agree with
00:09:34.400 you that your former free will doesn't exist, okay, for the purpose of moving forward and making
00:09:39.040 progress on this particular question. What's the particular question? The deep profound mystery
00:09:46.240 that almost everyone interested in this topic will agree as they're somewhere. So Sam might think,
00:09:52.320 well, it's not there in free will, okay, fine. It's there in consciousness, then I agree.
00:09:56.880 I think we need to solve that. That's a really important thing to solve. Now Daniel Dennett, of
00:10:03.040 course, has many of us when we've read his book, interpret him to be saying that consciousness
00:10:09.600 is no deep mystery. And so he dampens down consciousness, but what rises up for him is free will.
00:10:18.240 He's a compatibleist and he says, well, this is a mystery. It's compatible with the deterministic
00:10:24.640 laws of physics, which is my view as well. So it tends to be the case in Jaron Lanier makes
00:10:31.680 this point as well. But when people deny one mysterious aspect of reality, it tends to crop up
00:10:38.640 unbidden somewhere else in their ontology, you know, what they think reality consists of in some
00:10:45.600 way. And he uses the example of the nature of personhood, that if you dismiss the deep mystery
00:10:53.360 that is what it means to be a person. What a person is. And the fact that a person is in his
00:10:58.160 words, an infinite will of mystery, which is this idea that tries to capture the fact that we
00:11:02.880 don't have an answer to what a person is. We can't program computers to be people. He agrees with
00:11:07.200 David Deutsch there. He says that people who dismiss that as being some sort of deep mystery tend
00:11:12.160 to find themselves caught up in concerns or confusions about what the present moment means. Because
00:11:20.960 the people who dismiss the deep mystery of personhood are often reductionists in the physicalist
00:11:28.800 sense. They see a block universe, as general relativity might say, that the past times and the
00:11:36.800 future times, as well as the present time, or just instances of times. There's just times
00:11:44.080 often to the 13.7 billion years into the past and often to the extreme deep distant future.
00:11:51.040 But there's no privileged times. Yesterday is just as real as today as tomorrow in this
00:11:59.360 universe described by special relativity. There's block universe. All of the times exist in some way.
00:12:05.680 None of them are privileged. That's the picture we get. It's just your perspective. If you're on
00:12:11.920 the other side of the universe, then the time that you see is not simultaneous with my time.
00:12:16.720 We get into this deep questions of physics. But a person who believes that there's no mystery
00:12:22.800 there, then has to try and explain why it is that now here for you, things are special. Something
00:12:29.840 is different. The present moment is illuminated in a way that yesterday is not, that you don't
00:12:36.480 experience yesterday in the same way that you experience today right now. You only experience now,
00:12:41.040 now. So there's this weird mystery that exists in the universe about why the present moment is
00:12:48.480 different to other moments, why you experience the present moment is different to other moments.
00:12:53.120 This is what John and Lenny S is about people who try to deny the deep mystery of consciousness.
00:12:57.360 It tends to crop up in this other way. And so too, I would say with any of these questions about
00:13:02.240 creativity or freewill or choice and consciousness. And I've made this point before about
00:13:11.280 if you live in any city around the world and you look around, then what you see is less due to
00:13:21.120 the action of purely deterministic physical forces, you know, in the case of Sydney,
00:13:27.920 the action of geological weathering and erosion over time eroded out the Sydney basin,
00:13:35.120 you know, I've made this point before. But if you look at the city skyline of Sydney,
00:13:40.640 and I'll come back to this shortly with a specific example, you look at the city skyline of
00:13:44.400 Sydney, trying to use our natural sciences in order to explain what's going on there,
00:13:52.160 the appearance, what we see in this picture of the Sydney CBD, trying to use geology or plain
00:14:00.800 physics in order to explain any of this, is going to be a fruitless exercise. You're going to
00:14:07.840 miss the point if you try and use those natural sciences. You need to use the proper
00:14:14.640 explanation. Why does Sydney look like this? Well, the reason Sydney looks like this,
00:14:18.640 and there are a number of buildings there that are prominent, but let's take Sydney Tower there,
00:14:23.760 which is the tallest building at least as of today in Sydney. Someone chose to build that thing,
00:14:31.680 and someone chose to design it that way. Someone created the design and then
00:14:37.680 people came together and freely decided that they would put their efforts into constructing
00:14:43.520 and raising this thing up into the sky. That's the explanation. The geology and the physics
00:14:50.800 kind of by the by, they're the things that the people choose to use, to take advantage of,
00:14:57.840 their knowledge of those things in order to build structures like this. So if we seek to explain,
00:15:03.600 and not merely describe in terms of deterministic laws, then we must invoke creativity,
00:15:10.720 and various other abstract realities. Reality is indeed a unified whole, of course reality is
00:15:17.120 a unified whole, but at the same time we can divide it up into different ways, space time and
00:15:24.560 matter and energy, or fundamental particles and emergent objects like cats and galaxies,
00:15:31.120 or the physical and the abstract. And these various ways of dividing up reality, of dividing things
00:15:39.040 up, don't privilege one aspect over and above the other. It is as correct to say that the cat is
00:15:46.160 moving the atoms from A to B, as it is to say that the cat moves from A to B because the atoms
00:15:52.880 making up its body do, but there is a real distinction between, and this is another way of
00:15:58.960 dividing up reality, explaining something in terms of things that exist and having an
00:16:05.440 in principle description of what the particles are doing. And I've made this point with people
00:16:12.640 recently, and I guess I am going off on this tangent a little bit much, but let me just
00:16:19.440 hop on again for a moment about this. The explanation as to why at the higher emergent level that
00:16:29.360 certain things occur is really the explanation. It is not the fact that certain things were
00:16:38.480 determined to have happened because the big bang happened, and the laws of motion acted upon
00:16:44.960 particles over the time and caused them to appear where they appeared today. That is not an
00:16:51.920 explanation. That is an in principle you would be able to describe the motion of those particles
00:16:58.000 and where they end up today. And so this is why the fabric of reality Winston Churchill
00:17:03.600 copper atom story is just so deeply profound. And I think escapes sometimes the escapes discussions
00:17:16.160 on this topic. Let's just recap that. And you can fast forward the next 5 or 10 minutes as I
00:17:21.600 go through this yet again, but let me try and refine it in a certain way. The situation is this.
00:17:28.560 There is a statue in Parliament Square in London of Winston Churchill, and the tip of that statue
00:17:36.720 is a copper atom. Why is the copper atom there? Now on the one hand, you can say that, well,
00:17:46.640 the copper atom is there for the same reason that any atom is anywhere right now. And any
00:17:52.560 atom is anywhere right now because 13.7 billion years in the past approximately, the big bang
00:17:58.240 occurred and all of matter and space and energy exploded out from that point. And eventually
00:18:03.920 some of it over millions of years coalesced into stars, the first generation of stars. At the
00:18:10.080 end of their lives, some of them exploded in supernova, supernovae, explosions, and scattered
00:18:16.560 their contents across a wide region of space. And some of those atoms, due to astrophysical processes,
00:18:23.120 were copper atoms. Those copper atoms then coalesced, mixing with the hydrogen, helium, and the
00:18:29.040 intergalactic space, and some of them formed new stars and some of them formed planets as well,
00:18:34.480 like the Earth. And so the Earth formed out of this previously exploded star or stars
00:18:40.000 and contains copper and the copper atom again under the forces of nature, under gravity
00:18:45.920 and electromagnetism and so on and so forth, weathering and erosion, ended up in a certain place
00:18:54.320 where it was quarried and the forces of nature eventually caused it to end up at the tip of
00:18:59.360 Winston Churchill's nose. And that's why that copper atom is there, due to deterministic physical laws.
00:19:06.560 That's not an explanation. That's a general purpose statement about any particular bit of matter
00:19:16.640 anywhere in the entire universe. And when people try to invoke this, to explain a way, something like
00:19:26.480 free will, for example, and try to say it couldn't have been a free choice because you would
00:19:32.080 determine to do what you were determined to do because at the Big Bang, the laws of physics that
00:19:37.680 were there are still acting right now, and you have to obey these deterministic laws
00:19:43.440 in the same way that the copper atom had to obey a deterministic law to end up where it did.
00:19:48.400 It completely misses the point about what an explanation truly is.
00:19:52.480 Free will is not an attempt to get outside of the laws of physics, and it's an attempt to
00:19:57.360 explain what is really going on in the context of a deterministic universe. In the context
00:20:03.280 of a deterministic universe, we have species arising that didn't arise before.
00:20:11.840 But no biologist should be tempted to say, well, there's no such thing as evolution by natural
00:20:17.360 selection. Evolution by natural selection doesn't really create new species. All the
00:20:22.400 tapping is atoms are following deterministic laws of physics. They'll be ridiculous and I don't
00:20:28.160 think any physicist makes this point, I don't think any scientist, no biologist makes this point.
00:20:31.680 What they say is, the explanation of the origin of species is evolution by natural selection.
00:20:37.600 It's this emergent concept that these things called species exist, this thing called selection
00:20:44.560 exists, and that niches are filled on niches, as some people say, by organisms that are
00:20:52.000 fittest in that particular environment. The environment changes, the genes are selected against,
00:20:57.680 and the species can sometimes go extinct. To be filled by new species with genes that are
00:21:02.560 fitted for that particular environment. That's an explanation, it's an emergent explanation,
00:21:07.440 but all of those things are real. They're really happening. Selection is really happening,
00:21:11.760 adaptation is really happening, niches really exist and species really exist and fill those niches.
00:21:18.320 Now, precisely the same way, all we have to say is that the reason why, for example,
00:21:26.720 the copper atom is at the tip of Winston Churchill's nose, the explanation of that is that there was
00:21:33.280 a war called the Second World War involving two sides of great powers, dominant among them,
00:21:43.920 the United Kingdom and Germany, the leaders of whom were Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill,
00:21:49.600 and Winston Churchill eventually won the war for his side, and so we like to, out of respect,
00:21:56.480 remember great heroes who saved civilization, one of whom was Winston Churchill,
00:22:04.400 and as whom we learned recently, Karl Popper thought was a great epistemologist. I'll go back
00:22:10.160 to a previous episode for that one. Winston Churchill is, his statue is there with a copper atom
00:22:18.800 at its nose because we make statues out of bronze, so that they don't weather away quite so quickly.
00:22:23.920 But someone chose to build that statue, chose to design it in that way. And in fact,
00:22:31.120 groups of people came to that decision and freely chose to do so, and trying to eliminate choice
00:22:39.200 and freedom out of that whole picture is to break what would otherwise be a good explanation,
00:22:44.560 because we try to say it's merely determined by physical laws, deterministic laws,
00:22:54.560 then we've missed the entire point of trying to explain what's going on in the real world,
00:23:00.480 this reductionist conception of how it is that reality evolves over time is simply,
00:23:08.640 it's not false, but it simply misses the point, it's true vacuously. We can always say that anything
00:23:17.440 that happens was determined to happen, it doesn't get us very far. In denying the supernatural,
00:23:26.160 we don't have to embrace pure reductionist physicalism. We can take another avenue where we say,
00:23:35.280 yes, of course, physics is fundamentally true, it's correct as a description of reality.
00:23:44.400 But it doesn't explain everything that's going on, and besides, the strange thing is
00:23:50.960 that for someone who says they could in principle predict what a person is going to do next,
00:23:58.880 or predict what is going to happen next, if they had a full description of the laws of physics
00:24:06.240 and the initial conditions is doing nothing, in my opinion, but invoking the supernatural,
00:24:12.640 because what is this thing that is able to actually do that predicting?
00:24:18.880 Well, an oracle with the full knowledge of the laws of physics. Well, this oracle is basically
00:24:23.040 the omniscient, theistic God, the God that knows everything that's going to happen, the God
00:24:29.200 that created the universe and knows everything that's going to happen. So it is an appeal to the
00:24:33.920 supernatural. Now someone might say, oh no, we don't need that, maybe we can just have a super
00:24:38.640 computer of the future. I doubt it, this super computer of the future would have to calculate
00:24:47.040 all of the different alternatives that could possibly happen in countless numbers of universes,
00:24:52.640 and it would have to know with perfect precision what the initial conditions are
00:24:58.240 at any particular given time. So it can make this deterministic prediction,
00:25:02.160 but we know from physics you cannot have a perfect understanding of the conditions at any particular
00:25:07.600 time. For all the atoms in the universe, we're going to have a perfect understanding of where
00:25:13.520 exactly they are. We know that's not possible given the Heisenberg uncertainty of principle
00:25:17.520 among other things, but we know that we can't have this complete knowledge simultaneously of
00:25:22.400 every single atom in the entire universe, relativity for another reason. So this idea that we could
00:25:28.800 in principle, in principle have this predictive mechanism that would allow us to determine exactly
00:25:34.960 what's going to happen next, is itself an appeal to the supernatural. The device required in
00:25:40.400 order to do this would be magical. It would have to have all the qualities that an omniscient
00:25:46.800 creator of the universe would have. And so this is why I reject this idea that in principle,
00:25:53.040 the idea that we could, with full knowledge of the laws of physics and full knowledge of
00:25:59.600 the initial conditions, predict what's going to happen next, therefore you don't have free will,
00:26:03.280 I think is false, because I don't think such an in principle argument has any bearing on the
00:26:12.320 reality of free will. When in practice, it will never be possible. I'll never be possible because
00:26:18.080 no such device can do such a measurement of all the particles in the entire universe. It would have
00:26:23.760 to be a god of some sort. Okay, that takes me far away from anything to do with this chapter again.
