What is Free Will? | Episode 210 | Closer To Truth

In the scene where Dr. Khun is lifting weights he is still wearing his usual all black dress clothes hahaha

Thank you Dr. Kuhn for bringing closer to truth to us

Thank goodness Christoph arrived to end the madness. Lawrence's summation that begins at 23:51 is beautiful

Ah, the drama of thinking! Thanks for this series Lawrence.

Excellent episode Mr Kuhn.

Kuhn, thanks so much for bringing these questions to light. It reminds me of my days working with Tooley, van Inwagen, Dennett, etc.when I was studying philosophy. I personally worked under Tooley's direction. You should see his office or basement. He literally hired some third party to organize all his stuff because you had to delicately navigate around stacks of papers and books without knocking them over. Lol. Anyway, love you, brother. You ask the right questions.

Excellent episode. Realized in slightly different way than others.

I agree events in the physical world are determined by previous events and choices. I can't wrap myself around the suggestion that free will and consciousness is determined by previous events. To me awareness, consciousness and free will are not physical, they are free from the physical world and causual events and determinism. Peace!

The self-reflection that makes meaningful verbalization possible is a break with the instinctive reactions characteristic of the lower animals. This break is the equivalent of what we call free will.

What is Dennet talking about, biology is physics essentially, but on a larger scale than the physics of particles. Or to put it another way, biology is chemistry and chemistry is physics, so biology is still physics. Its like he's treating biology as a set distinct to the physics set, but it's a set inside of the physics set (as a Venn diagram)

Millions should just subcribe to this channel..The best on planet earth

Great video...kudos.

Excelente! Cada vez que vejo um vídeo deste canal, mais dúvidas eu tenho...

Dennett: "the key to free will is understanding that free will is a biological level phenomenon it's not a physical level phenomenon. We are freer than our parts...Our parts don't have free will, but we do." " so we have to get clear about what "avoiding" is and then we can begin to see the biological dimension. Because what's happened on this planet for the last four billion years has been an explosion of avoiding. Avoiding dissolution, avoiding being eaten, avoiding starving to death. What evolution has done is designed organisms that do a little avoiding... How do you avoid something? You avoid something by anticipating it and taking corrective measures..... Free will is our capacity to see probable futures, futures that are gonna happen, in time to take steps so that something else happens instead." "We are not deluded about our sense of our own capacity..." - This is brilliant!

Free will is something that we can never have.

How would a deterministic physical reality produce feeling of free will, deliberation about what to do, choices, and other such phenomenon?

I honestly do not even know whether or not I am CHOOSING to watch this video or if its just something that is happening to me?

Thought is will. Thought believes reality is deterministic, because thought itself determines.

We are semi autonomous, pre programmed organisms. Semi-autonomous, because most of the stuff we do, we do "automatically" without conscious input. We have a "mind" which is a separate emergent property of the brain, which oversees our automatic actions. The mind, like a supervisor, has the ability to "overrule our automatic responses and train our automatic responses for particular tasks, so that they no longer need direct supervision. It is our mind that has "free will", and the ability to change what we would do automatically. A good example would be me typing this post. My mind is telling my fingers what to type. My fingers (part of the brain) having been already trained by my mind diligently, does as it is told. The mind supervises this task in real time, not interfering, unless it sees something it doesn't like. (thought, spelling, etc) Then it directs a correction. Last, after a final review, the mind makes the choice whether to hit the send button or not. That is freewill. We are pre programmed to do certain things. Scientists have done tests on babies to affirm this. Fear of hights, walking, and speach, pain avoidance, eye limb coordination, are among a long list of things that are pre programmed in our bios.

Enjoyable episode: Very well produced. I especially enjoyed ending summary and narration from Lawrence. As to the topic area, I think Dan Dennett got it exactly right.