Here’s a video Philosopher’s Cabin asked me to review. We met its author, Sabine Hossenfelder, before, when she was trying to explain how black holes enhanced Diversity, or the other way around, or whatever.
Watch first, then we’ll discuss.
Not only have we met Hossenfelder before, we’ve met all her arguments, too. Her first is that if only people knew they could not make choices, they would make better choices. Her second is that everything is models, and the models say she doesn’t exist.
She begins by saying she knows people don’t want to believe they don’t have free will. Which is, you have to admit, hilarious. If there is no free will, people have no choice but to believe as they do. Everywhere and all the time. Including believing they have free will.
But if you can believe you have free will, you have free will. Because if you can make a choice, you can make a choice, and that’s what free will is. And no, my dear woke enemies, no one ever claims all actions we make are freely chosen. That’s absurd, and easily seen to be false. I never think how much acid to squirt into my stomach after eating. It just happens, and I suffer or benefit, and with no choice. But I can choose to have that second cookie or not.
I want to emphasize that “all the time” above, because it escaped Hossenfelder’s notice. Since if there is no free will, there is never free will, there is no point in trying to talk people out of it. They’d have to make a choice not to believe, which they can’t. Because it would require free will.
So the premise of her entire video is silly. If there is no free will, I had no choice but to say she is silly—a counter argument she anticipates, but dismisses with a sneer. She never attempts to answer this specific sane rational logical convincing argument, because, we assume, she cannot.
Since I do have free will, I will not say what I really think of her efforts, as this is a family blog. Instead, I will pick on how she pronounces “science”, which comes out of her mouth like “sow-eye-ence”. Such fun. And don’t even get me started on that blue thing she’s wearing. Don’t get mad, Hossenfelder, I had no choice but to tease you. If you want to tease me, wait until you hear me speak German.
Hossenfelder says there are better things to worry about than the lack of free will. Alas, if there is no free will, you have no choice but to worry, if you do worry, and you have no option to change your mind and worry about better things.
We know there is free will, because we make choices of the sort Hossenfelder wants us to make, indeed sometimes agonize over them. The observations are there, and certain. How it is we have it, well, that is a different question. I don’t know. Do you? But to say we don’t have what we observe to have because we can’t explain how we have it is like a woke man saying that since he can’t understand how only women can get pregnant, that therefore some men can get pregnant. It is absurd.
Hossenfelder, like many before her, thinks she has solved the question of how we “really” don’t have what we observe we do have. And that is models. Models mean, “in a nutshell, that the whole story of the universe in every single detail was determined already at the big bang. We are just watching it play out.”
Some physicists have the bad habit—this is the choice they made—to measure a thing, model that measurement, and say that the measurement and model is the thing. The map becomes the territory. Physicists are thus exactly like the carpenter with only a hammer who thinks he can build a whole city with only that hammer. Except with physicists it’s rulers. They believe that what can’t be measured with their rulers doesn’t exist. Even if they can see it, hear it, taste it, or think about it. Because a ruler can’t be put up to a thing, like free will, to them, disproves its existence.
Our Sabine says to dismiss her models as incomplete is to “deny scientific evidence”. Now where have we heard that before?
As a side note, Hossenfelder is also wrong, quite quite wrong, about quantum mechanics, and her claim that “nothing determines [QM] outcomes.” Something does. Something must, or they would take no outcome at all, ever. She makes the same mistake here with her ruler. Since she cannot figure out what the cause is—that cause isn’t in her model—she says there is none.
There are some laughs in the video. She says, “If you have done one thing, there is no evidence you could have done something else because, well, you didn’t.” As as logical argument against free will, it’s right up there with “You’re a poopy head.” She says people who want to play word games is “fine by me” but that she “will continue” to choose “to complain that’s just verbal acrobatics.”
I spilt my beer at the laugh line near the end. “Just because free will is an illusion,” says our Sabine, “does not mean you are not allowed [to choose] to use it as a thinking aid.”
Comedy gold.
Bonus Argument: The NPCs who respond in comments with dismissive self-satisfaction nearly prove Hossenfelder’s main contention.
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Hysterical.
Hossenfelder: “I hope I have convinced you that free will is nonsense.”
Everyone: “… HOW!?”
Bell’s inequality which “proves” that local realism is false is fatally flawed. No, the math is correct. It’s the argument that is flawed. What it really shows is that sine waves (analog reality) are not triangular waves (digital straw man). Which absolutely no one is debating, because it’s true by definition. And physicists have based their work on this model for decades. Put another way: One cannot deduce the probability of the outcomes of rolling two dice by using coin flips. That’s what Bell’s theorem boils down to.
Quantum “woo-hoo” is a lie, and has been from the very beginning. Quantum theory is wave theory, with certain limitations and parameters. The math is hard because it represents geometry.
The famous double slit experiment shows a fatal flaw in the prevailing “woo-hoo” Copenhagen interpretation. In order for the photon to “pass through both slits” and “react with itself” to make the interference wave pattern, it would have to simultaneously travel both faster and slower than the speed of light. This contradiction has been ignored by physicists for a century, because they have been taught to ignore it.
Rape of reality by Sabine
1. Volition [the “Will”] is the intellective appetite in a manner analogous to the Emotions [or sensory appetites]. That is, it is a hunger for [or revulsion to] products of the intellect [aka “Concepts”]. Let’s say, sec. arg., you conceive World Peace as a Good and therefore want to achieve it.
2. The Will as such is determined. It is ordered to the Good as we Conceive it, whether we think the Good is World Peace or Racial Hygeine or Save the Planet or Chocolate.
3. But these are Ends, not Means, and there is always more than one way to skin a cat [should you Conceive Cat-Skinning as a Good].
4. The Intellect is not perfect. You don’t know everything [unless you live in your mother’s basement and surf the internets]. For example, if you have Conceived World Peace as a Good, there next arises the question of how to achieve it: demonstrating in the streets and chanting three word slogans? Or the Old-fashioned means of conquering all your opponents, a la Octavian Caesar or Han Wu-ti?
5. This is why Aquinas never wrote of Free Will, but of Free Choice [liberum arbitrium]. The Will as such is determined to the Good, but the Means are up for grabs.
6. It is also why we cannot withhold consent from the proposition 2+2=4. Because in cases like this one [assuming standard arithmetic] we do have complete knowledge.
7. Aquinas gives examples in which Free Choice does not figure: e.g. a scholar absent-mindedly scratching his beard while deep in thought. He lumped all such as Habit, but in his system, that included Training, Genetics, and so on.
Free will is a genuine problem for the non-Christian, since causality (as it operates in science) excludes By Assumption any uncaused cause.
(Except for true randomness – which makes no sense, and does not exist in nature; but is a useful mathematical tool.)
And even for most Christians there is the genuine problem that if God’s omniscience and omnipotence is taken to include all of time (when God is understood to be ‘outside’ of time) – then there seems no space for free will to operate from. The metaphysical system of (most) Christianity seems to allow for no possibility of FW.
Yet, at the same time, Christianity is built around love – which entails genuinely free will; including the real and positive choice to follow Jesus Christ.
Christians, of all people – and all religions – seem therefore to be the staunchest defenders of free will.
This leads to an incoherence, which can only be solved by declaring free will to be real and necessary – but a mystery, asserted but not explained.
What is required is – I think – to see free will as a divine attribute, characteristic of God and shared by Men (which is, of course, in-line with Christianity). How this is explained is then another problem.
In the end, there must be a situation which Just Is.
Its almost funny (if it wasn’t so tragic) but before atheism was subsumed by Marxist Critical Theory and Postmodernism, “Free Will” was the most valuable human attribute and the one thing they claimed you abandoned if you submitted yourself to the foolishness of “religion”.
You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice.
If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.
You can choose from phantom fears and blindness that can kill.
I will choose a path that’s clear,
I will choose Free Will.
That was an atheist anthem for decades, and now that even their precious atheism has become nothing more than a tool for Marxists, they are abandoning free will for “shut up, live in the pods, eat the bugs, own nothing and do as you’re told”.
I remember watching that video and laughing throughout.
I’m also thought of you. I’m kind of surprised and glad to finally see you comment on it!
Penny: So, what’s new in the world of physics?
Leonard: Nothing.
Penny: Really, nothing?
Leonard: Well, with the exception of string theory, not much has happened since the 1930s. And you can’t prove string theory, at best you can say “Hey, look, my idea has an internal logical consistency.”
Penny: Ah. Well I’m sure things will pick up.
She doesn’t blink much, this Sabine sort. Sociopath I expect.
I was going to make a defense of her argument, but then I thought “why bother?”
”There is no free will
It only seems that way when one is caught in the devil’s snare.
The logical end of scientism – to be so certain about the sterile clockwork deterministic mechanisms behund everything, you end up uncertain about anything. Paradoxically, the deification of science ruins everything. Not just the good, but even the enjoyment one would normally get out of stupidity and evil. Even C.S. Lewis called it out in one of his tomes, I think it was ‘The Abolition of Man.’
As usual atheists poo-poo’d the thought that their intellectual offspring would ever devolve to such a level; and as usual without any evidence or philosophical argument to the contrary or even a grasping hypothesis as to how muh’atheism would avoid that quandry.
Well as demonstrated by the above and by tranny-tyranny that holds a knife to their professors’ throats, atheism is wrong, as usual. Little wonder many of their lot and liberal ilk are turning into general deists and spiritists of some sort, hoping that some mysterious think floating around in space-time (lol) will deliver unto them and the world a trippy drug-fueled outer-body experience afterlife followed by delivering humanity the dogma of inevitable progress they are longing for. You can identify this sort who are the Joe-Roganites that are open to the “wisdom” of the classical religions that they select at their modernist clnvenience, but take none of them at their word. Just pick and choose at the buffet line hoping whatever outcome preserves whatever moral balance and descriptions of reality they are comfortable having before it goes too far even for them. Something that delivers the “Luuuvvvv” that will usher in the Earthly paradise they want where the gays remain, government health care is provided for entirely free, and you can pet all of the animals.
Atheism is like that… a Disney animated princess dancing around a well singing, “Ha-ah-AHHHHHH!!!!” as little colourful birds gather around it. A perfectly modeled thing produced by the imagination of an assembly line animator in the mystical realm of Korea at a low low price.
Crikey Johnno.
Hello Dr. Briggs,
You presented the following argument…
“But if you can believe you have free will, you have free will. Because if you can make a choice, you can make a choice, and that’s what free will is.”
I suspect you are begging the question with this argument. The following is an effort to make this explicit.
P1. If you are able to believe you have free will, then you are able to make a choice.
P2. If you are able to make a choice, then you are able to exercise free will.
P3. If you are able to exercise free will, then you have free will.
P4. You are able to believe you have free will.
The conclusion “you have free will” follows from these four premises; however, I assume Sabine Hossenfelder is denying your P2. If so, then your P2 begs the question.
With Much Fear and Trepidation,
Brian
A pound of crickets has more protein than a pound of beef ‘it’s science’,
so shut up and eat it. Nothing but an argument by misappropriated
authority the flawed argument of a tyrant. What a surprise she’s a
WEF darling the would be masters of reality.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/03/one-hundred-years-of-relativity/
Bruce G : And even for most Christians there is the genuine problem that if God’s omniscience and omnipotence is taken to include all of time (when God is understood to be ‘outside’ of time) – then there seems no space for free will to operate from. The metaphysical system of (most) Christianity seems to allow for no possibility of FW.
I watched a number of Reformed Theology Apologists, and that is exactly what many believe.
They go to a number of scriptural passages to prove how God intervenes or contravenes in human affairs against the “will” or the “benefit” of the people involved. They especially cite the statement where God says “I will harden the heart…” of this King or that Pharaoh. They don’t consider that this is merely a predictive sense in that the King or Pharaoh was often considered a god. The prediction is that God, by revealing Himself, puts the King or Pharaoh at odds with what they believe about themselves.
The scripture that they completely ignore is the scripture about Hezekiah’s illness. It was God’s Will that Hezekiah die. Hezekiah imposes his own will against the Will of God and lives.
While it may have been God’s Will that Hezekiah die, that death only represented one means to an end. Being ‘Outside’ of time God saw a way around Hezekiah’s choice through different means.
This debate stretches way back, at least to Liebniz (for) and Voltaire (against).
She seems to be conflating so-called “Laws of Nature” with the uniquely human attributes of free choice and free will. Two entirely different things. But if you disagree with Sabine (or Fauci) you are disagreeing with SCIENCE! Why? The consensus-thingy, that’s why. Which, as we all know, is very very scientific, no?!
The so-called “Laws of Nature” she references extensively and over and over were only discoverable, definable and made understandable by human beings BECAUSE THEY HAD THE FREE WILL TO CHOOSE TO INVESTIGATE AND DEFINE THEM.
Without free will and free choice these laws would no doubt still exist but she and all other humans would be entirely ignorant of them. Without free will and free choice she would be living in a cave or in trees amongst the other millions of species on earth that do not have the uniquely human attributes of free will and free choice.
Capish Sabine?
I think you are being unfair to Ms.H. here. Her basic argument is that physics has no evidence to support a non deterministic universe and therefore that our belief in free will is illusory. That’s fully correct in context – there are no places in the deriviation of “the laws of physics” from observation in which the line {magic happens} appears – what do we have are lots of lines that say {unknown stuff happens here} but that’s part of the process: unknown is not the same as unknowable.
Admittedly her application of these ideas is over-complicated and somewhat self-contradictory – see telearb dot net slash node slash 14 for a simpler and clearer version – but that does not make it wrong, merely preliminary.
Free Will
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1083.htm#article1
That God, being outside of space-time, knows what choices people will make within space-time does not negate free will. My wife almost always knew what I would order at the diner, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t freely order it. A free judgement [liberum arbitrium] does not mean that third parties will not guess or even know what those choices will be.
Give Sabine as many workers as she wants, to lift a 500 kg block (perhaps a pyramidon); she still doesn’t know how to do it – according to the crickets to my email to her.
Of my own free will I post this comment. Nobody claims that there is no causality. Events occur due to causality. But causality is not all that is. The gulf between our very shaky interpretations of quantum physics and the actual universe is very large. We exercise free will constantly. How does it work? We’re not sure but we can see it working. To paraphrase the master just a tiny bit – “It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are who made the guess, or what his name is … If it disagrees with observation, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.” (Richard Feynman).
Taking her argument to its logical conclusion, there are also no such things as consciousness, intelligence or creativity.
The considerable effort she put into that video was simply, metaphorically, the far edges of random fractal patterns of a disturbance in the fabric of space-time early in the big bang (which also *had* to be there), no more significant than dust eddies in the breeze.
You, she and I only think we have consciousness. We’re not really comprehending the world around us, we’re just following an intricate script that was the inevitable product of the first disturbance of energy, and the illusion that we’re comprehending it and thinking about it itself is just a further manifestations of those inevitable motions of particles.
It sounds absurd, because it is. It sounds like she is trying extremely hard to rationalize something that implies the existence of something outside her science. Science is her God, so she has to make up Just So Stories to explain things that confound the capabilities of her God.
Or I had to type this on a fundamental universal level. Just particles in motion.
QM is utter poppycock for precisely this reason. We haven’t detected or measured a charge field or aether or whatever it’s called; therefore it doesn’t exist; therefore we do have spooky action at a distance, and God plays dice.
One question I’ve always wanted to ask of Sam Harris, or Sabine, or any denier of free will is this: How would the experience of living feel different if free will did exist? How does this illusion of free will we are experiencing differ from the real thing?
I read about 1/3 of her book “Lost in Math,” I’m thinking I may never return to finishing it. It seemingly went nowhere, and very slowly…
“This debate stretches way back, at least to Liebniz (for) and Voltaire (against).”
Before this, it was Erasmus (Catholic, he wrote On Free Will) against Luther (Protestant, he wrote On Slave Will: he praised Erasmus because he was the opponent that understood that the point of the Reformation was the lack of free will).
Before this, it was younger Augustine’s Confessions (for Free Will, Catholic theology derives from this) against older Augustine’s The City of God (against Free Will, Protestant theology derives from this)
Augustine created the mess tryning to argue against two different heresies of his younger days and older days. This is why Eastern Orthodoxy had no Reformation
God created Time. God is not bound by Time. Within Time, He created us and all that is about us. God made us in His Image and Likeness. God has Free Will. God gave to us the Gift of Free Will. God, our Creator, has given to us, His commandments which we are to obey, using our Free Will. If we willingly refuse to obey His commandments, then we undergo just punishment for not obeting our Creator. These are the facts.
God’s ways and thoughts are far above our ways and thoughts. God does reveal much to us, all that we need, to know Him, to love Him, to serve Him.
Using our Free Will to Know God, that brings us to Loving God, which beings us to fully desiring to Serve Him, by living His plan for us by obeying His commandments. Not a mystery, when one does all in and through Jesus Christ, led and guided by the Holy Spirit. The choice is ours.
God bless, C-Marie
I was walking up the stairs behind a lovely young lady.
Neither of us, of course, had freely chosen to walk those stairs at that time — it all was Big Bang Pre-Determined.
Equally compelled by fate & forces I could only dimly comprehend, I reached out and squeezed her lovely young butt, bouncing fatefully before me. Of course this was nothing I, myself, would have chosen to do; the time-space continuum made me do it.
She became upset (undoubtedly because she’d been pushed that way by that Same Big Bang) and called the police, who equally were evidently fated to arrest me and take before a judge. He asked me if I was guilty.
“HOW COULD I BE GUILTY OF ANYTHING SINCE EVERYTHING I DO IS DONE REGARDLESS OF MY WILL. Guilt is dead!”
He seemed dubious so I explained that we were all just passengers in the Big Vehicle which is a fated life and are absolutely NOT responsible for exactly nothing, ever.
Naturally he was intrigued (compelled to be intrigued by such a volitionless possibility, I’d guess). He glanced sideways at the rather attractive young lady who had been fate-forced to be the prosecuting attorney. “And if I were to step down from the Bench and squeeze her butt?”, he whispered. I shrugged, “Clearly that is what fate had in mind. It’s not your fault!”
“So no one can be guilty of anything?”. He grinned.
“Absolutely not!”, I explained. We’re all categorically incapable. And just as we would not find the passenger in the car, driven by a drunken idiot, guilty of Drunk Idiocy, so too can we not find any actual human being guilty of anything ever. We can’t help ourselves so why bother?!”
And so we don’t.
Do you?
Mark Helprin, in his luminous work, A Winter’s Tale, put it this way:
“Nothing is random, nor will anything ever be, whether a long string of perfectly blue days that begin and end in golden dimness, the most seemingly chaotic political acts, the rise of a great city, the crystalline structure of a gem that has never seen the light, the distributions of fortune, what time the milkman gets up, the position of the electron, or the occurrence of one astonishing frigid winter after another. Even electrons, supposedly the paragons of unpredictability, are tame and obsequious little creatures that rush around at the speed of light, going precisely where they are supposed to go. They make faint whistling sounds that when apprehended in varying combinations are as pleasant as the wind flying through a forest, and they do exactly as they are told. Of this, one is certain.
And yet, there is a wonderful anarchy, in that the milkman chooses when to arise, the rat picks the tunnel into which he will dive when the subway comes rushing down the track from Borough Hall, and the snowflake will fall as it will. How can this be? If nothing is random, and everything is predetermined, how can there be free will? The answer to that is simple. Nothing is predetermined, it is determined, or was determined, or will be determined. No matter, it all happened at once, in less than an instant, and time was invented because we cannot comprehend in one glance the enormous and detailed canvas that we have been given – so we track it, in linear fashion piece by piece. Time however can be easily overcome; not by chasing the light, but by standing back far enough to see it all at once. The universe is still and complete. Everything that ever was is; everything that ever will be is – and so on, in all possible combinations. Though in perceiving it we image that it is in motion, and unfinished, it is quite finished and quite astonishingly beautiful. In the end, or rather, as things really are, any event, no matter how small, is intimately and sensibly tied to all others. All rivers run full to the sea; those who are apart are brought together; the lost ones are redeemed; the dead come back to life; the perfectly blue days that have begun and ended in golden dimness continue, immobile and accessible; and, when all is perceived in such a way as to obviate time, justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but something that is.”
Not so. Ye Ol’Statistician gave the gist of it.
Take your understanding of “time” and throw it out. “Time”, the “past”, the “Future” and your little line graph are all abstractions. There is and has only always been eternity and “now.” God is Existence and Eternity itself. He doesn’t change. He doesn’t have what we consider “memory” or “forethought” as we understand these things, any more than we say He has a “face” or prefers “male” pronouns much to the chagrin of the cultural revoltionaries. The point is that these things don’t matter where He is concerned.
He observes all immediately, simultaneously, everywhere, and forever at once, and all of nature is in accord with His Will. Only humans and angels are exempt in that they can choose to try and harmonize themselves to what He wills or doesn’t will, and animals to an extent in so far as their wills and intelligence are instinctually driven and not tied to rationality.
Our freedom and our obedience or rebellion is allowed within the context that He wills it to be, not as He desires us to be.
We play a massive multiplayer game and He is playing along by the rules He set, and there is an “end” once the complicated scoreboard reaches it maximum in all categories as His providence has determined.
The players are all unequal. The angels, outside of tike themselves are observe eternally, but do so succesively, higher orders passing knowledge down to lower orders who receive it, eternal, at one, but heirarchially.
Humanity is all over the place. An uneducated simpleton can inform an expert, just as well about what is truthful. Humanity wrestles with knowledge via changes. He can fluctuates from being more informed or less informed at any time. Then there is what he comprehends about what he has learned, then there is whether or not he acts upon what is learned and comprehended.
One of those things he can is what God wills of him, as a group or in particular specifically for him. One avenue is general revelation by God, or in rare instances, private revelation. God may choose any mode to convey it to him. By showing up Himself. By messenger accompanied by proofs depending on the importance. By recorded general instructions that are conveyed orally or through writing, or by the most common way – providence.
Providence as observed in history or nature. God tells the puzzled Job to consider His magnificient created works. The Isrealites are reminded of how God has saved amd punushed their ass throughout their history. Americans and Eurpeans and modernists and disobedient Popes are shaking in their shoes as the prophecies of Fatima unfold and Sr. Lucia’s ignored warnings about Communists coming for them, and remibding them of the choice offered to them to change Russia into either a blessing or a chastisement that they’ve refused to take.
That’s it really… what are we choosing to do with the knowledge we are given of what God generally or specifically wants and the thinga He says will happen or that He is going to do? Do we choose to harmonize our lives with what He wants and accept what He does? Or do we play “La Resistance”?
The thing about providence is that it is always a mystery. And thus every decision made woth regards to ot is an act of faith. There are things hidden from even the angels. And even when the Word became flesh, in His humility, the Lord Jesus Christ Himself cut Himself off from some of the Knowledge that only the Father had and in that ignorance placed Himself solely in the hands of the Father to lead Him. “Not my will, but Thine be done.”
This is where it really matters.
Your other ordinary decisions about what you order at Taco Bell or go for Chinese are all well and good and the world is full of such indifferent options that God doesn’t care what you do, but He is pleased to let you have them and discriminate accordingly as you like.
Then there are the BIG Decisions where you are now being tested so that you might grow into what He hopes you’ll be. What is that? God only knows. If you’ve got the balls to trust Him, then just do what your knowledge knows He wants, imperfect or lacking as it may be at whatever stage you are, don’t worry too much. In the moment, you’ll know what is sufficient for you to have as He wills it by providence. Yes, even if it is to the cross and your death. Play your role. The things and other people in your path are exactly where God knew they’d be, by their own witting or unwitting decisions.
The Christian doesn’t need to get obsessed with the details. Leave that to the Experts to slit their wrists and throats over. So clever they are with their models! Hopefully they’ll lay out their presentation well at the Final Judgment Courtroom. That includes the Angels, from whom a third decided to fall from grace because things didn’t go as they simulated on their computers and they found this very very unfair because who doesn’t trust THE SATAN ™? He is the best of Experts. The patron saint of intellectuals who adore all that light bearing and brightness he was good at. He came this close to uncovering what God was hiding!
Meamwhile, everyone else sensibly decided to wait to see how things eventually go and learn when it is appropriate? Who is like God, after all? Remember that when your little one asks about complicated things too much for them to take, provided their public school ze/zer/zeacher hasn’t already gotten to them.
Fauci, and our governments at least learned enough to try and imitate He Who they are so envious of… Take the shot! Just trust them! Trust the providence of Klaus… He is good for it, he has access to Experts who like the angels all pass esoteric knowledge off to each other and being our superiors just know they can circumvent God and replace Him. The Anti-Christs are clever, which is what makes them so scary!
So decide this day whose will you’ll serve. Your decisions will either play into God’s or the WEF’s hands. Is the WEF controlling your free will? Did 2 weeks to flatten your will work?
Well, there’s your answer!
God is no more giving you the illusion of Free Will any more than Klaus. But if you believe otherwise, then spread your cheeks for Klausy, cause it don’t matter. You’re making the right choice, because you can’t make any choices, so every progression is the right action by default! Ask Ms. Hoeff. Or don’t. Just stand or sit there. Stare at the screen. Blink. Think. Think again. Blink again. See? I’m controlling you now!!! I now command that you move on to your next internet or life activity.
Notice at the beginning of the video she strongly asserts hard determinism and says that every future event is predetermined physically to happen by past events stretching back from the Big Bang. Then, of course, she waffles from this when she mentions quantum physics and asserts that events must then be “random” and cannot be predicted from the past around 3:25 to 3.45 in the video. Well, which is it? Are all events linked to the past or not?
At any rate, materialism or physicalism is NOT science. It’s a religion; it’s a belief. We don’t have evidence from science or, from any other field, that only physical entities exist, that human beings are purely physical, or even that matter has an absolute mind-independent existence – if matter even exists at all. This person is only asserting a worldview as “science” without warrant.
By the time you get half way in the video, it gets quite boring and it sounds like you’re hearing a robot talk. It sounds rather monotonous by the time you get to the end of the video. Are we nothing but advanced robots that came about by an accident? I doubt it.
It is sad to see philosophy masquerading as science. Logic is a human construct and a branch of philosophy, and is flawed at its root. Contradictions and paradoxes lie at the heart of logic. See Russel’s paradox: “Does the set of all sets that do not include themselves include itself?”
The Science says Free Will doesn’t exist. [CliffsNotes]
“Free will,” as a philosophical concept discussed among the Scientians!, is mostly just deconstruction via semantics.
From a relevant perspective, “free will” is the ability to accept or reject God once you reach the logical conclusion that everything isn’t a random coincidence (as the Scientians! would have you choose to believe).
C-Marie has explained it better than anyone, although I have to add that God’s Mercy is above all.
As an aside, it is both fascinating and depressing to observe how The Science’s disciples desperately refuse to acknowledge anything that they can’t explain, even in theoretical terms.
All in the context of a culture that can’t even define a woman.
Not sure what you mean McChuck by the statements “Logic is a human construct and a branch of philosophy, and is flawed at its root. Contradictions and paradoxes lie at the heart of logic…” If you mean that logic is pointless altogether then what’s the point in trying to think logically or rationally? And couldn’t someone just dismiss your statements as having ‘reasoning’ or ‘logic’ that’s just another “human construct” with no implications on how one ought to think as such?
“It is sad to see philosophy masquerading as science. ” Depends on what you mean by “philosophy” or what particular philosophy or worldview you’re talking about. If it’s a phony idea like materialism then yes. My point of calling materialism/physicalism a “religion” was not that all beliefs that can be labeled as “religious” are flawed or unwarranted, but rather that physicalism is bankrupt of evidence and thus it practically takes the character of a completely faith based religion of its own for people that endorse it.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s not possible to fully separate science from philosophy considering that science can only be done with certain philosophical notions about the world, namely that the world is rational, mathematically ordered, has laws or, at least, regularities that can be observed and predicted. After all, the discipline of science was historically formed, at least in part, by people working in philosophy like notably Francis Bacon.
Yes, God is absolutely, utterly, completely, merciful. Just take a look at our sins that He forgives when we avail ourselves of His Graces of Repentance!! Only the Living God can and does forgive as He does.
Also, remember, that God our Father loves us completely dearly, and He loves fathering us. Do receive His fathering you through His Son Jesus. Do receive leading and guiding by the Holy Spirit, and you will be brimming over with Joy in the midst of everything, because you look to God, and Joy will flood you into smiling the biggest smiles ever!!
God bless, C-Marie
I watched the video twice, and still couldn’t make out her reasoning.
Apparently, we have no “free will”, because everything is made up of “particles” (so?), and everything was pre-determined at “the Big Bang.” Okay, Sabine, if you say so.
Now, who or what pre-determined the Big Bang, she doesn’t say, but from that point on, (she tells us) the Universe is proceeding according that Big Bang plan, and we are just kidding ourselves if we think we have free will.
Maybe this poor woman was raised a Calvinist and exchanged that faith for Scientism. In any case, she is acting here as a metaphysician who thinks (believes) that “It was all written in the book of life before time began.”
I think what our poor Sabine needs, besides a makeover (what IS that thing she’s wearing?), is a nice dose of Rumi, the Persian (Sufi) poet who first introduced me, before I became a Christian, to the idea of God as the BELOVED. Sabine needs more poetry and less certainty. Don’t we all.
“Wean Yourself” by Rumi
Little by little, wean yourself.
This is the gist of what I have to say.
From an embryo, whose nourishment comes in the blood,
Move to an infant drinking milk,
To a child on solid food,
To a searcher after wisdom,
To a hunter of more invisible game.
Think how it is to have a conversation with an embryo.
You might say, “The world outside is vast and intricate,
There are wheat fields and mountain passes,
And orchards in bloom.
At night there are millions of galaxies, and in sunlight
The beauty of friends dancing at a wedding.
You ask the embryo why he, or she, stays cooped up in the dark with eyes closed.
Listen to the answer.
“There is no other world.”
“I only know what I’ve experienced.
“You must be hallucinating.”
Bravo, Matt.
A few things…
She says “we do not guess, we *know* that brains are made of particles,” and “we *know* we can derive from the laws for the constituents what the whole object does.” But know neither! Both of these are ::wait for it…:: *philosophical* presuppositions.
But wait? Doesn’t she say reductionism isn’t a philosophical position, and that to deny it is to deny Scientific Evidence?
And yet, even to accept the proposition, “information acquired via empiriological methods is something we ought to do” – even this is a philosophical position. It is in fact, and as you would say, a “choice.”
In closing, I would simply like to point out that if we had no free will, we should never have been able to discover that we had no free will. The very notion, “free will,” should never even have occurred to us.
@John Trevor Berger
I suppose that it is possible that we are compelled to consider the possibility that we have no free will by the same force that denies it to us. Which seems unnecessarily spiteful.
Wait. Does she think the consequences of quantum theory are determined by the position and velocity of particles? The old mechanical philosophy went out in the early 1900s. It doesn’t even work for mechanics when you project too far out or have too many bodies in play. The laws of mechanics only apply in bounded circumstances defined by [wait for it] a priori assumptions. If you don’t think so, try dropping from the Tower of Pisa a cannonball and… a dollar bill.
But relativity and quantum theory [or as we used to say, Parmenides and Heraclitus] even though incompatible — one postulates a world in which change is an illusion; the other, a world in constant change — give rise two the two sects of atheism: one believes that all is predetermined by the initial conditions of the Big Bang; the other holds that all is chance. The cafeteria atheist will swing back and forth depending on what frightens him at the moment: First Cause or Free Will.
re: “We haven’t detected or measured a charge field ”
Well, a simple gold-leaf electroscope (Leyden jar with gold leaf foil leaves) can measure charge, with the amount of deflection proportional to ‘charge’ on the plates. Raise that charge much higher (like scuffing across a carpet in winter) and YOU can directly measure ‘charge’ by the pain felt when you discharge that ‘charge’ into a door knob …
Ms. Sabine’s Hossendfelderian dress might be looked upon as proof that there is no free will.
@Dieter Kief
Well played sir.
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We really need to do away with this religious superstition that people drive cars. The science is in, people! It’s the steering column, brake pedal, and throttle which control the car, not the 150 lbs of meat inside of it. The whole claim that 150 lbs of meat could somehow control two tons of metal fails basic kinematics. While it’s true that cars appear to exhibit intentional behaviour – transporting the meaty contents to and from various locations – these are just an emergent phenomenon. Furthermore, economic and evolutionary analysis demonstrate that cars which fail to transport the meat to the correct locations wind up being unable to refuel or seek out mechanical repair. It’s just a system of mechanical homeostasis, with the appearance of being meat driven. I know you want to believe that cars choose where they drive, but at the end of the day the science is settled.
” “nothing determines [QM] outcomes.” Something does. Something must, or they would take no outcome at all, ever. ”
If determinism is tue. Your argument is “if determinism, then no indeterminism”.
” “nothing determines [QM] outcomes.” Something does. Something must, or they would take no outcome at all, ever. ”
If determinism is tue. Your argument is “if determinism, then no indeterminism”.