I found (most of) the transcript!
I inadvertently hit “select” before the whole thing was over. Here is what I copied (and no, not going to try to sort this by paragraph and spaces between them. This is sufficient to let me comment on key passages):
lo everyone. This is the vice president of internet infidels, Edward Tameisian. You all know me from my
published paper on the origin of evil and theistic art determinism. And I'm the contributing author of a book that
was released a couple of months ago called uh a drop a reason essays from the secular web. And for the sixth time,
I'm going to be interviewing the prince of all Christ myth theorists, the great and legendary Richard Carrier. And we
have a good list of discussions we're going to have today. and we're going to begin it by talking about whether there's libertarian free will or not.
So, I'm going to go into the description of how people choose and explain how the wheel works and then I'm going to bring
up some objections to libertarian free will and then I'm going to ask Carrier for his input. So, before we begin the
discussion on, you know, whether there's libertarian free will or not, we have to discuss, you know, how it is that people are able to will. Um, I was discussing
with Philip Gop the issue of whether one needs a desire or not. And he actually thought that someone doesn't need a
desire in order to choose. And I thought that was counterintuitive, like unreasonable thinking.
It doesn't even make it easy. Like, how can you choose if you're not interested? So, yeah. So, I'm going to I'll have to prove that one needs an incl. So, I'll
just give a a brief example that proves this. Okay. If I went up to most people and said, "Hey, do you want to eat, you know, a pile of dog waste?" They're
going to be like, "No, I'm not going to do that. That's crazy." And I say, "Hey, even if someone gave you, you know, 5,000 bucks to do it, would you say,
would you say yes to it?" They're going to be like, "No." And I'll be like, "Why?" they're going to be like cuz I'm not that inclined to win. So clearly, you know, you have like a can't factor.
The more you're inclined to something via an internal motivation, the more odds you have of choosing it. The less you're inclined you have, the less
inclined you are. You have less of a motivation to choose it. And it makes sense that when that inclination reaches absolutely zero, you won't be motivated
at all. And you'll you will cease to see the dog waste as a motive and you won't be able to choose at all. Now, here's
the thing. You'll still have the power in your brain, like the um part of your brain that if you accessed it, you could
eat it. But yet, you can't. And why? Because you don't have a motivation. So, actually, even then, you can't choose.
Now, someone might say, "Well, you can't choose. Doesn't this mean there's something wrong with you or you're just an automaton?" I'll say, "No, because
it's not as if the person wants to eat but can't. They physically can. They just don't want to. They're just because
when you see something as truly valous, you can't do it. So, there's nothing wrong with the freedom here cuz the person's still free to do as they
please. they just they're just not motivated. They just don't want to eat the food. So that this is
and you can even give an example of when they would, right? Like when like to save a life or some or for a million
dollars, maybe someone would do it for a million dollars, right? So like so yeah, obviously you can you can overcome uh
that, right? So obviously the capability exists and it really is just a but for desire uh explanation. Um but I think
whenever we're having conversations like this and I don't know what Goff specifically said uh like what he
thought he was talking about but um we have to go to the ontology like when we say desire what do we actually
physically mean like what's going on uh in the brain right so a very very
oversimplifica simplified version of this is that basically there's like synapses uh in which you've got
electrical potentials and chemical interactions and when you that when they
when it piles up enough, it actually becomes a cascade and it it flows, right? And but you have to pile all that
[ __ ] up physically to actually get the the signals to go down and actually move
your hand, move your mouth to say a thing, uh eat the poop or whatever. Like he to make the decision, uh there has to
be this cascade. And it's actually a physical thing that has to be built up. It's a form of computation. It's analog.
It's not digital. It's messy. It's complicated. It can be tricked and it could be an error and like all kinds of things, but it's still a physical thing
that's happening in the brain. And that's what we mean by a desire, right? Yeah. When you have that that
accumulation uh of what what do you call it? Synaptic potential that's able to push through
and lead to the cascade that results in everything else, right? So, um and so
yeah, obviously and it's literally physically impossible to move or make or
do anything without that potential happening. because literally the the circuitry doesn't work. Like there's no signal sent uh to move your hand or
whatever it is that that it ultimately results in. Even if it's just a conceptual idea, I'll eat the poop in concept.
Uh that's still a decision regarding what you're willing to say. So you've got the muscles of your mouth like all
of that stuff has to be activated. And even when it's like if you have Tourett syndrome and you're blurting out things
nonsciously, it's the still there that cascade is still there. It's still happening. It's just that you don't have conscious control of it because those
are different parts of the brain, right? So, so yeah, absolutely you 100% have to
have a desire to do an action, right? Like because otherwise it physically is impossible for you to do the action. And
that's any action. So any choice is an action of some kind, whether it's a choice to say a thing, even a choice to
believe a thing, like even a choice to like wander your mind internally from one fantasy to another or from one, you
know, one model of the future to another. like you're there those these are all physical things that are happening and require these physical
potentials and then those potentials are the desires that's what we're talking about and in psychology uh when you talk
about values right or virtues but they usually talk about them as values values
will be defined you'll see in textbooks in psychology as persistent long-term desires right so like there are desires
that just like almost always in place and that defines um the value you have
so you have these readily create these potentials because that's what having the value means is is you set that. So
to do that like if you're like an animal not a sensient person the same thing is true right um but of course the animal
doesn't have cognitive understanding of what it's choosing right it's it's making choices more intuitively than
anything right uh it has you can talk about it having certain kinds of knowledge and lacking certain kinds of knowledge and things like that but it
doesn't really have the cognitive comprehension of what it's doing right like it's not you know so so so but for
us we do and and that cognitive comprehension again is a physical thing that happens in the brain and it has physical effects
downstream in terms of whether you create or don't create these potentials, these synaptic potentials that result in
the cascade that results in action. So, so when you talk about free will, I mean, for the one thing, yeah,
absolutely action without desire is impossible. It's it's there's always a desire whether you understand that or
whether you're using the word desire in a different way or whatever it is, but in the basic sense of what a desire is, yeah, there always has to be a desire to
cause an action. And then the question is, well, are your desires just predetermined, right? Like you have no control over your desires? That's we
also know is not true because the creation of desires is another cascade potential that can actually set up the
brain to be more favorable, less favorable to creating these potentials in the future. And that's how you build values, right? It's Aristotle was right
about this that you got to habituate values. Uh and and because you're actually building the circuitry in your
brain that actually decides mechanically when you build potentials and when you don't and that would result in action.
So uh so all of this is true, but the thing is is that what gives us free will, what we mean by free will is that
we actually have this rational section of the brain that can monitor all of this. Not all of it. We're not in control of everything that goes on in
our brain. People with Tourette's syndrome, for example, don't have total control, but they have control over a
lot. And so when we're talking about free will, we're talking about what that control module can rationally decide. So
it can actually analyze the situation say based on my rational logical analysis of this thing I'm going to push
my potential you know create a desire to do this right so like the potentials are actually being dictated by the logic
circuits by the logical analysis that's physically going on in the brain and so that's free will the when we when we
lack free will is when someone interferes with that when we've made a decision or we want a particular thing and someone says no you're you're not
going to get that we're going to get in your way and do it or we're going to force you like put a gun to your head and so create a different cascade that
is not the cascade you wanted. You didn't choose that and you would not choose that if you had the ability to not choose it. Uh but they're actually
substituting their will for yours because they're saying I want this thing to happen. You don't want this thing to happen. Well, I'm going to point a gun
at you and tell you I'm going to kill you unless you do the thing. And so really it's the person with the gun's
will that is not the agent who's being threatened. It's not their will. It's technically their will in the sense that
they're choosing not to be shot. Uh but we we acknowledge that that is a violation of freedom, right? It's like
so and that's what we mean by violation of freedom. It's not a question about deterministic physics. It's all about
the question of are you free to make this decision or not which is really a political social reality uh on the
outside end and on the inside end you have the most common example is the insanity defense which a lot of people
don't understand how that works in court. Like most people think that you just clear you just get yourself
declared insane and then you're excused for all actions. And that's not how it works in in court at all. You could be
massively insane. You could have a million mental illnesses, certificates that you have of the mental illnesses and everything completely irrelevant in
court. The only thing they want to know for the insanity of the defense is did you know what you were doing and did you
have the ability to choose not to do it? Like did you do it anyway? Right? And so like an epileptic doesn't have conscious
control over the movements of their body. So they can't like that's not a question. They don't have free will over the movement of their body when they're
having an epileptic epileptic fit. But when you're not having epileptic fit, you do have rational control over your
body. So you so then you can be blamed for the things because really what's being blamed is the module that made the
decision, right? So in epilepsy, that module is not making the decision to have an epileptic fit. So it can't be
blamed for it, right? It didn't do it. But the module, the rational module that's deciding to act when you're free
to act, um it did do it. And so when we're looking for like responsibility, that's what we're looking for. Can did
that module cause it? The the rational module, the thing that actually constitutes you as a person combined
with all the the data and information. So like that's the thing we're looking for. So violation of free will is when
like the epileptic case or more common case is like you take a schizophrenic
who hallucinates that someone's attacking them. They kill them in self-defense and then realize, oh [ __ ]
that was a hallucination. They weren't attacking me all along. that would work as a defense if you could prove that that's what really happened, right?
You're not just lying. But if you can prove convincingly that that's what happened, you can get uh now you might
get sanctioned in terms of now you're being ordered to get treatment for your schizophrenia or something like that. You could be ordered to take meds or
whatever. Like there's not no consequence to this, but but you wouldn't be criminally liable because
you were acting in in good faith. Like would to kill someone in self-defense is legal. So there would be no reason that
you would think that was wrong in that situation because the information being given to you was completely fraudulent and you had no way of knowing that it
was fraudulent and you did the right thing in the context of the the fraudulent information. So you're
actually acting correctly like you're acting legally in that case. Um and there just wasn't any way for you to know that you weren't. Uh and so the
lack of knowledge that what you're doing is is wrong is the thing that gets you off. Uh there's there's a variety of
ways that you can use uh that you can't do things like ignorance of the law. There's there exceptions on how they work and stuff. You can go into all of
that, but in terms of free will, that's what we mean is uh are are we get are we acting rationally on the information
available to us or is something interfering with that? Are we being deceived? So like if someone cons you
into doing something, well, you lack free will because you're acting on false information. You're being deceived. So
you're not actually you're not engaging in informed consent in that case because you're being misinformed deliberately
and tricked. Uh so free will means having being able to have informed consent to what you did. Uh and because
of that, that's why you don't need like it wouldn't even not only would it not make sense for there to need libertarian
free will, the sort of magical power free will that defies determinism. Not only would you not need that, but you
actually desperately don't want that because if you had a thing that violated the rules of of deterministic physics,
that means that you could have so if you think like a logical argument, you've got premises and a conclusion. There's only one conclusion. There's no other
thing, right? The premises entail the conclusion. The last thing you want is for something to bump in there and say
you're going to choose the wrong thing. You're going to arrive at a different conclusion than the logical one
because random reasons, right? There's no reason. We're just it's just going to happen. Then that means that your rationality would be destroyed by this
libertarian free will power. Like this this ability to break deterministic physics would break rational thought,
right? So like, so you don't you don't want this sort of libertarian power of free will. That would actually undermine
free will. It would actually take away your free will by by subverting your will and replacing it with something
else randomly that you didn't rationally choose. Right. So um and so I think that's that's the the ultimate answer
that I give to that kind of presentation. Okay. Yeah. So I want to get into that because that's interesting because
people who are against determinism against determinism will say if you have determinism you can't think logically.
They'll use the same argument for that, but we'll get into that. You need determinism to think logically, right? Like you absolutely do. Like
imagine your computer like didn't work deterministically, but would just randomly make decisions like like so so no
program works like everything malfunctions. It's just completely unpredictable. Can't do calculations. It's not reliable. Um the only reason
computers work is because they are deterministic. The only reason, you know, that's it's the uh the funny thing
about like the sort of pseudo AI that people are hyping nowadays is kind of like this because it actually takes
rational thought and throws junk in there at random and that's why it hallucinates. It gets answers wrong. Uh
it's unintelligent, right? It's it's actually anti-intelligent in a way. Uh because it's the very thing that's
that's kind of basically it's a schizophrenic has been driven insane by this uh the way they've organized it,
right? So like you can't you couldn't have free will if you had that kind of system. Um so so that's why I think there people
are thinking in the wrong direction and I think it's mostly people aren't thinking this through and they aren't really aware of the brain
science as to why rational thought exists. like what's needed for rational decision-m like I don't think they
understand physically what's needed for that to happen in any possible universe not just our universe but any universe
for there to be rational thought there has to be certain things including a deterministic computation because that's
the only way to get rational thought um anyway yeah that's that's my uh my
tie rate on that sweet yeah so uh since we just got done proving that if you only have like one
desire and you don't have a desire to do something else you have to give into the only desire Like if I'm not if I'm if
I'm 100% inclined against eating poop and I'm not inclined at all to eat it, I can't eat the poop. But then
even even if you're going even if you have multiple like you can appeal to multiple desires, right? You have multiple operating desires. You can
appeal to different desires and you can generate new desires through persuasion. People can persuade you and you can
persuade yourself. But if you map out what's going on there, that's all deterministic as well, right? Like cuz it's computation. You're
being presented with information being asked to run a computation. You got an input, you got an output. And so that's
how you generate new desires. That's how you abandon old desires. That's how you select between multiple desires. Uh it's
all a physical process and would be in every possible universe because it has to be. There's no other way to like
rationally, sensiently choose or do do any of these things, create or destroy desires or select between desires. You
could not do this without a deterministic computational system. And you would never want to do it without you wouldn't want to get rid of the
deterministic system because that would actually undermine everything that you would want in terms of being able to like make rational decisions.
Okay. So now the second question is is when you have two desires does the greatest one determine a will the will
not the only one? I think I honestly think that the greatest one determines the will. I'll give a quick thought experiment. So I heard of Jonathan
Edwards talking about just you know the greatest mode of determining the will and I was like okay I'm going to do a thought experiment and try to go against
my greatest desire. So I was like, "What's my greatest desire right now?" I was like, "To not hit myself." And so I
was like, "I'm just going to hit myself." And yeah. Yeah. I think we talked about this before. Like this is
it's a tautology, right? Like so like like what you end up doing is obviously you're what you wanted most. So it's
it's self-defining. But if you turn and talk about it in terms of physics, right? So you've got two desires. You're
activating them both. They're both going to build potentials, but the one's potential that's stronger is going to physically cascade over the other one,
right? So like it's gonna it's going to overpower it. There's no way for a weaker electrical signal to overpower a
stronger electrical signal. It's physically impossible, right? Uh so so yeah, there the only way to get one
