 Okay, we are recording, we're live. This is Stefan Kinsella. I'm doing a Kinsella on Liberty podcast. Usually it's just a rebroadcast of my interviews on other shows. Every now and then I will talk to someone else. This is maybe the third or fourth time I've done this out of 300 or so episodes. So I've got online with me, Steve Mendelson, an old buddy of mine, old Patton lawyer friend, old Patton lawyer colleague, kind of mentor. And Philadelphia, or what do you call it? You don't call it Philadelphia. What do you call it where you live? Philadelphia, well, I live outside of Philadelphia. This is Pitten Valley, Narberth, that's my stop. Narberth, same zip code, but different name. It is very peaceful. I'm on my back porch right now. And luckily they stopped mowing next door. So it's quiet. I wouldn't know. I haven't been there much in the last five or six months. I've been to my office three times since March 15th, twice to seeing a new office space. Silly, okay. Yeah. Yeah. But our lease is running out, so we're looking for new space. Well, we're gonna have fewer people because everybody's gotten used to working at home. So they're probably gonna, we're gonna offer people that option to continue. So we're just gonna have a smaller footprint downtown and see how it goes. Why would your footprint be downtown if you need a little footprint on occasion? Why not just make it in some cheaper location or something? Because we have staff and lawyers who live on all sides of Philadelphia in Jersey, in North, Southwest, so it's a central location now. Unfortunately, but that's the way it is. It is what it is, as they say. Yeah. I heard Michelle Obama say it yesterday. Michelle Obama said it yesterday. Okay, so let me just tell people what, so usually I talk about intellectual property and you're actually a patent lawyer and we're not gonna talk about that today, but maybe next week or so you and I and another fellow colleague are gonna talk about patent law. That'll be fun. Every now and then I deviate to other topics, usually libertarian related ones or Austrian economics. And, but sometimes it gets into philosophy. I, and as I mentioned to you, I try not to talk because when you said let's talk about faith and free will, first, I thought you meant for a podcast and I thought, well, I don't usually do podcasts on things I don't think I'm an expert on, but I know enough to have an interesting conversation and some people might wanna hear it. So you have a book, let me just share the screen. Yeah, the lack of expertise didn't keep me from writing a book about it. I believe and I got lots of libertarian friends who do that kind of thing too. Share screen. I'm gonna share my screen just to show your book. So you self-published a book, which is not, you know, that used to be, so here it is, shallow, how would you pronounce it, drafts? Drafts, shallow drafts. Faith and the absence of free will. And you'd have had some email and some phone conversations over the last few years about this issue. Yeah. And I think we both read, what's his name? Harris' book, Sam Harris' book on free will, right? Yeah, free will, absolutely. And I've read lots of other perspectives on that too over the years. In fact, this issue for me has always been one of the most perplexing in all philosophy. I think I've come to a sort of approach to it that works for me, which is sort of my own kind of cobbled together. I call it Austrian, Misesian compatibleism, you know, kind of borrowing on the dualism of the methodology of Mises and the Austrians with some of the conceptual insights of Ayn Rand, but also with a realist attitude about causality. I mean, ultimately I don't believe there's true free will. I think that we're either causally determined or that we're random. Either way, there's no room for free will. Or a mix. But it's still meaningful to talk about choice in an economic and an sociological sense. So that's kind of my wrapper of what I think. But you wrote the book or a book, and this is your first book, you just have another one that came out. I just released the second book, yeah. Yeah. How'd you find the Amazon process? I just published something on there too. I love it. It's great. This is shallow drafts is actually in its fourth edition because well, I screwed up the first one completely, but then I had the additional things to say and I found additional quotes to add. And it's so easy just to spit out another edition. I had read a book by somebody a while back and I reached out to him because I had found a typo and I had some questions to ask him about the substance of his book. And he said, thanks for pointing out the typo book since his publisher is never gonna issue another edition. There's no point in keeping track of those things. But with the Amazon, find a typo, spit out a new edition. Well, of course it has implications for copyright law because in the old days, there was all these rights that would revert back to the author if the book was so-called out-of-print or something for a certain amount of time. But now that means nothing on demand publishing. Yeah, it costs zero upfront. I didn't have to pay a penny to Amazon. Anytime someone orders a book, including me, you just pay for that book. And- But what I mean is if you were an author, you could count on getting the rights back if your book went into dissuade too. Oh, I see. Oh, okay. Now you don't have a publisher. I'm the publisher. So you don't have to worry about that. Right, and you don't have to worry about editors either. Well, and you don't have to worry about the delays and also the effective censorship, right? I'm gonna do, I wanna show you a cool thing about Zoom. You can do your own background. Can you see my- Yes, I know, I could- That's my front yard, actually. So I'm sitting here looking at that front yard. Wow. That's my bedroom. Very nice. So cool technology, Steve. That's a nice front yard too. I got a big park across the street. This reminds me of the stuff that we learned when we did Intel patents. Remember our block of video and the difference in coding? And just to tell people here, so you're a couple years older than me and you were like a couple years older the more experienced than me at the law firm in Philadelphia, a schnader where I joined in 1994. And you kind of, you did help guide mentor me on some patent law stuff, which I appreciated. Gave me some good tricks, some good ideas, some good techniques. You probably still use them to this day. Yeah, might even have one or two new ones since then. I don't know. Well, the funny thing is, you know, now that we're older, lots of the patents I wrote back in those days, now they're a public domain, right? They're all expired. So it's like- Absolutely. Maybe if I messed up, it's too late now for anyone to- Yes, sir. Okay, tell me what you, tell me what- So let me ask you a question. In your book, why, this is a meta question in a way. Why didn't you, did you put a free PDF online as well as what you've done on Amazon? So what do you have? A Kindle and a print version on- Amazon, yeah. Kindle and print versions, yep. Okay, why not post the, you have the file obviously. You probably have a PDF generated to do that. Yeah, yeah. Why not post that online too? Oh, well- You're not trying to get rich off this, right? No, I could. I did recently email it to everybody I know and attached it- Why not post it online? Why not say, okay, here's Steve Mendelson's book. Here's a PDF version online and even a MOBI or an EPUB version. But if you want to buy it on Kindle, you can. If you want to buy it in paper, you can. Well, you'll show me how to do that. You'll show me how to do that. You can post it for me. Man, you have a website. You have your law firms website and nothing else. I do have my law firms website. I do have my law firms website. You can make a little subpage. It could be BandoIP slash Steve or something and then you could put your free EPUB books on there. Huh. Post the PDF. But then that would be people looking at my website to try to find my book and that wouldn't be- Yeah, well, I would do a separate website, but I'm just saying there's one. Yeah, yeah. It's called a landing page. You want a landing page for your site. Landing page, yeah. So you want to tell people, okay, here's my book. If you want more information, go to shallowdrafts.com. That's probably not available. Who knows, it might be. I think it is. Not after this thing gets published. I think as soon as I publish this, someone's gonna homestead it and- There you go. Try to hit you up for it. Hold me up for it, yeah. Okay, so tell me, so what are your basic thoughts on the, I don't know if we'll even get to the free will stuff. So let's talk about the faith first, right? Let me tell you a story. Can I tell you a story? So I was an undergrad at the University of Michigan studying physics and my roommate, my roommate Dan was a dual major actually. He was a dual major in philosophy and anthropology, which he called majoring in philanthropy. But that's another story. But anyway, Dan made- We have dualism cropping up already. There you go. Dan made the outrageous statement one day that he could do better in an upper level physics class than I could do in an upper level philosophy class. And I said, that's ridiculous, Dan. I said, you haven't taken the lower level physics classes. You haven't taken the math classes. You couldn't possibly do better in an upper level physics class than I could do in an upper level philosophy class. Philosophy is half bullshit. I've been bullshitting my whole life and you're on. So I agreed to take 17th and 18th century continental rationalism, epistemology, and ontology with Dan. Like an elective or something? Yeah, not only was I the only student in that class who hadn't had philosophy 101. I was the only student in that class who wasn't a philosophy major. I had to go to the- So you know what I mean? There were no prereqs for that? You didn't have- There were. I had to get permission from the professor to take the class. How did you persuade him to make that mistake? I don't remember. I went into his office and I didn't tell him about the bet. But I said, I'd like to take the class. He said, well, would you get on your SATs? And I told him, he said, okay, you can take the class. And that was it. So I took this class with Dan and we studied Leibniz and Hume and Barkley and Spinoza and Kant. And I didn't understand a word of Kant. I'm pretty sure we read him in English but I still didn't understand a word of Kant. But I picked up a little from Barkley and Hume. Yeah, yeah. I picked up a little from Barkley and Hume. And I remember writing a paper for that class about describing, I go off into my backyard and it's a foggy morning and I see an animal off in the distance and it has fox-like characteristics. It looks like a fox and I believe it's a fox. As I walk closer to the animal and the fog lifts and it gets clearer and clearer, some of those fox-like characteristics now appear more dog-like. And now I believe that it's a dog. But my belief that it was a fox, I didn't control that process of reaching that belief. And I didn't control the process of that belief switching from fox to dog. It all happened automatically and involuntarily. I didn't choose my beliefs in the sense of control consciously controlling the process of going from evidence to conclusion. Yeah, it sounds like you're talking about free will now, not faith, but I guess that's why they're here. Well, first, this is just beliefs. I'm not talking about actions, right? I'm talking about beliefs. Well, it wasn't really both. Yeah, okay, fine. I'm talking about beliefs, okay? So I long have held that we don't choose our beliefs and I would argue with people wherever I could that we don't control our beliefs. And I would tell people who insisted that they did control their beliefs that they should do an experiment. Okay, I asked them, do you believe that God exists? And they'd tell me one or the other, yes or no? And I'd say, okay, for the next 36 hours, since you control your beliefs, choose to believe the opposite. You're a theist, choose to believe that God doesn't exist for the next 36 hours. At the end of 36 hours, you can exercise your control again and go back to your previous belief. Well, I never had anybody take me up on that challenge. Well, either we think the same way and we're both the same kind of swordasses or I might've got this from you, but I've done the same exact thing, like you don't choose your beliefs. And if you think you can, go ahead for the next two minutes, believe that the moon has made a cheese and I'll give you a million dollars. You know, so you can do that. And then people say, well, but I sort of think you can choose your beliefs over time. You can sort of brainwash yourself slowly in a sense. And I think some people do that. I used to be one of these atheists who thinks no one really believes in God, they just pretend to, but seeing people flying to the Twin Towers and that kind of stuff, I think they probably do believe it somehow. So, but I don't know. But I kind of think you're right. It's not action and belief are different things. Belief is what you think is true. Action is what you choose to do based upon your beliefs, something like that. So just to complete the previous story, so I took that class with Dan, he got a B plus on the class, I got a B. And then I said, okay, now it's time to take that upper level physics class with me. And that's when he went out and we ended up taking astronomy 101 together instead as a compromise. But in any case, I've been thinking about and writing- How did he score? What happened? In astronomy 101, we both got A's. So I let him off the hook. Well, I think philosophy is more rigorous than we engineers would think, right? It is more, and in fact, I think I've heard surprisingly that like philosophy majors, graduates get pretty high salaries in general compared to what you would think, like they're, you know, because people know that they're pretty good at logic and thinking and rigor and it's pretty deep stuff. Not that it's a science necessarily or, but anyway. No, it's certainly rigorous. I'll give them that for sure. So over the years, I have been arguing with people and every now and then writing an essay or two, mainly from my own consumption about my beliefs about beliefs. And I had written one a few years ago in which I got to the point where I said, okay, if we don't control our beliefs and if we always act according to our beliefs, doesn't that mean we don't control our actions? Doesn't that mean we don't have free will? And at that point I said, no, no, no, no, we can't go there. That's not good. Even if it was true, it wouldn't be good for society. We got to pretend that we have free will in order for civilization to continue. And then I picked up Sam Harris's book, Free Will, in which he says, not only do we not control our beliefs, we don't control any of our thoughts and we don't control our actions. And I said, oh, shit. Sam Harris wrote the book I was gonna write and then some and going all the way. And I said, now what am I gonna do? So I was kind of deflated because Sam Harris had already written my book and I was listening to an audio version of Seawolf by Jack London. And in there, the captain of the ship. Yeah, yeah, well, in that book, the captain goes off on this tirade about how we don't choose our beliefs and we always act according to our beliefs. Therefore we don't control our actions. And I said, well, shit, if Sam, if Jack London wrote this 100 years before Sam Harris wrote his book, well, I can write my book. So that's what I did. I wrote my book. I think, frankly, the stuff I say about free will may be controversial to many people, but I don't think much is new there. I say things in a different way, but the conclusions about free will are certainly in Sam Harris and Jack London and many other places. But I think what I have to say about faith is somewhat new because when Sam Harris writes a book about the end of faith and when Christopher Hitchens writes a book about faith, these guys are my heroes, but when they write about faith, they're denigrating religious faith. And to me, the psychological process by which we come to acquire- Wait, wait, hold on. You mean, so let's be clear for a second. You're talking about the four, what they call the four horsemen, these kind of new atheists? Yeah, Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett. Okay, and I've read a lot of Dennett, by the way. Yeah, well, we'll come back to Dennett because he's one of your compatibilists that we'll need to talk about. But I've read a lot of this stuff on the philosophy of consciousness. Yes. Yes. He's the co-author of that great book, The Mind's Eye, with Douglas Hofstadter, which is one of them. Yeah, I read- That's one of the dorm room geek-out books of all time. I read Gertel Escherbach, and I understood as much of that as I- Yeah, that's my Hofstadter, yeah. Yeah, but I understood as much of that as I understood Kant, so. Well, Hofstadter is one of these, he's one of these elusive, not gadfly, what's the right word? Like, he's kind of a dilettante, but a very smart one. Kind of like Robert Nozick. But anyway, go ahead. So, where was I? Oh. You're getting interested in this, like the implications of your- Oh, faith, the faith part. Right, sorry, I was talking about faith. So, to me, the psychological process, the operation that the brain performs when it generates beliefs is the same, whether those beliefs are what we call secular beliefs, like Shakespeare wrote Hamlet or Oswald shot JFK, and- What do you mean by the same? Okay. Because they're operating according to the laws of physics? Yeah, but also according to the laws of psychology. Our brain is performing a process that I call automatic involuntary, subjective evidence weighing, A-I-S-E-W, which I pronounce ASO. Automatic involuntary. Our brains are organs operating according to the rules of physics and chemistry and biology, just like our hearts and our guts and our eyeballs, whatever are operating according to physics and chemistry and biology. And they're just, the brain's doing its brain thing. It's automatic and it's involuntary. And some of the things that it does is generate thoughts and beliefs and consciousness, and we can talk about that. But it's just doing its thing automatically and involuntarily. And what it's doing is it's weighing the evidence that it has acquired over time. And it's doing it subjectively because everybody's brain is different and whatever- No, okay, yeah, no, okay. Let me just, for a second, we could keep going, but we can, there are several terms you're using that I think part of the problem with these discussions is people don't define their terms. Okay. So free will needs to be defined, right? And choice, maybe they're different concepts, right? Yes, yes. Also faith needs to be defined and even the word was already just used. Automatic involuntary, subjective evidence? Subjective, subjectivism needs to, because that's used in different senses like by economists and by ethicists. Okay, well, but go ahead. When I mean subjective, I mean that everybody is different. When I look at a tree in my- But that's not what subjective means. I mean, do you mean relative or do you mean, what do you mean? I mean, well, let me finish my side. When I looked at a tree before, people would tell me, look at the magnificence of trees. That has to be evidence for God's existence. And I looked at those trees in years past, to me that had probative value to supporting the conclusion that God exists. Hold on, you're using a legal, I mean, okay. So no one normal would use the word probative, okay. This is a little bit of a term. It's not a physics term, it's not a philosophy term. Pointing to- To me it has, it tends- Supportive, look, I talk about a scale, okay? We have a scale. Sometimes the scale has more than two sides. Sometimes the scale has two sides, right? God exists, God doesn't exist, okay? There's the scale. And there's evidence that can potentially be on either side of that scale. People look at- I know, but that whole way of describing it takes for granted a whole framework of looking at the universe, which is I think basically in parasystinological positivist, right? It's what I call monist. That's why I said dualism really on. I wasn't quite joking, I mean. But I think you're taking for granted a lot of things. Well, let me take a step back then. Let me take a step back. When you say dualism, you mean mind-body, right? We got these two things- Well, not exactly, but it relates to that. Dualism means that we understand the universe in terms of concepts. We are level cognitive, intelligent, human, and homo sapiens. We're not animals on the lower level, which are basically instinctual or whatever, or even more automatic, like the cricket with mask and clear, whatever they have instead of brains. We take the evidence of the senses, which that's what you were kind of referring to in your own, I must say, made up language. But in philosophy, this is called the perceptual realm, right? So we have percepts. We have evidence of the senses. We sense things about the universe. And now, according to the way I ran and some of the realists would look at it, our brains organize this sense data into higher level concepts to have a higher level understanding of the causal aspects of what's going on in the world. So that's how we understand and frame and think about the world. Now, even if we don't have free will, we're just a pilot in this little airplane riding around the world on this, you know, sea of foam. We still understand the world in terms of concepts. And because we perceive ourselves as having choice and values and we perceive other humans as being similar to us, we seek to frame them and categorize them and understand them in these conceptual terms in ways similar to us. So we think of them as having choice and making choices and having purposes. So it's the teleological realm versus the causal realm. The causal realm would be the realm of physics. And that's what you study with the methods of the natural sciences. But you have to study the teleological realms with a different methodology, which is what I mean by dualism. That's what means is meant by dualism. You understand there are two realms of knowledge in the world. One is understanding human teleology and purposes, which would relate to economics and human interrelationships and social things, even law. And then science or the sciences, right? The natural sciences, which goes back to causality. And to me, the compatibilism I believe in is that, yeah, in essence, we are determined or we're random, either one. I think we're probably determined because I don't believe in this quantum random stuff, but I could be wrong. Either way, it doesn't leave room for true free will, but it still leaves room for choice as a category or mode of explaining the teleological. Like if you wanna tell me you bought a brand new Mustang car, you're telling me as another human, you're communicating some information to me about a fact about the universe that you have a car, but you're calling it a car. So you're already organizing these different quarks into certain subgroups, right? And according to the function and the purpose that you imbue upon them and society imbues upon them, like there's a break, there's a clutch, there's a transmission, there's a electrical system. God could probably look at it as a bunch of clouds of atoms and understand everything, but we're not God, right? And no one's God. So you see what I mean? All I'm saying is whatever those processes are that you just described, right or wrong, whatever they are, they happen automatically and involuntarily, okay? Whatever- That's in the physical realm. They happen automatically and physically in the physical realm. But if you think of your children or your friends or your wife or yourself, you conceive of what you do in the language of teleology, of purposes, right? You say like, why did the guy rob the bank because he wanted to do this? Like he had a goal in mind and he chose the means at hand to do it. That's a perfectly reasonable way of explaining what he did. Even if on the causal side, we don't really have free will, right? I could be wrong about this. This is my compatibilism, which is always awkward. I mean, what's the solution to this? To be a monist and to believe only in determinism? And then what's the point? So let's say you prove that we all have, we don't have free will. So even your inquiry was determined from the beginning of time and whatever you're going to decide based upon this conversation or later in your life is equally determined. Or random, or somewhat random. Either way, either way, there's nothing you can do about it. You got it, that's right. By the way, by the way, there's a recent, this is a total aside, but there's a science fiction series that just came out a couple of months ago on a Hulu FX called Debs. You've got to watch this, Steve. Now blow your mind. You will love it. Have you heard about this? No. It's about all this stuff. It's about physics, free will, compatibilism. It's crazy. It's crazy good. One of the best TV shows, I think in a way I've maybe ever seen. Crazy. But go ahead. So, parallel universes, you know, the Everett hypothesis that there's many worlds and every choice breeds. By the way, let me ask you, as a physicist, do you think that your view of physics has matters? Like in other words, if you think that we live in a not Newtonian world, but in a deterministic world, or if you think there's a quantum world with randomness at the base, do you think that affects your analysis or do you think it doesn't matter? I think it doesn't matter. I think there are people who argue that quantum mechanics somehow explains free will. And I said, what? That's the opposite. Quantum mechanics is randomness. So, how is randomness? So, yeah. I've always heard that too. And you'll see in my book, I talk about determinism not being the antonym to free will. It's one possible non-free will existence is determinism, but also randomness. I happened to believe in, you said Newtonian as if that was separate from determinism, but I equate the two. And to me, our reality is mostly determined with a little bit of quantum randomness thrown in. So you actually, okay. I think that might be the case, but I tend to believe in determinism down to the bottom, the bottom turtle. Yeah, yeah. I don't really believe in randomness actually. I can't believe in cause, because to me, randomness means caught, randomness really in probability or just measures of ignorance, right? And I don't believe in this height. I don't believe in all these, the physicists want to become philosophers and they interpret their mathematical models in a certain way. It's fine as a model or as a metaphorical thing, but this stuff about Heisenberg and how the observer matters, there's only so much precision in reality because whenever you measure something, you interfere with it and that means that in reality, I think that's all too much, but I don't know. Well, right or wrong, right or wrong, yes or no, I don't think it's relevant to our discussion about free will because either way, either it's purely deterministic or it's deterministic with a little bit of quantum uncertainty, either way, I don't end up at free will. So I'm okay. Let me ask you this. Let me ask you this. How would you handle this argument? Cause this is the one argument that a lot of libertarians and libertarian come philosophers try to give for free will. Their argument is this kind of proof by contradiction argument, sort of like the Aristotelian argument that like for some of the basic axioms of philosophy, like the law of excluded middle or non-contradiction or whatever like you have to assume the opposite to contradict it. So you're basically, to deny it. So you're basically ending up in a contradiction. So it's sort of a proof by contradiction. And the argument is this, that when, let's say you and I are debating free will and I believe in it, you don't. You're assuming that your advancing arguments meant to persuade me that you're correct and that I can choose to accept the standards of reason or whatever you're advancing, right? I can choose to evaluate this and to decide or not. No, you have to stop using the word choose. This argument is that you have to presuppose free will because the very endeavor of trying to argue about it, presupposes free will. No, no, no. Yeah, no, yeah, but it's not valid. Have you heard the argument though? You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, I've probably had people say things like that to me. I don't recall specifically, but our beliefs aren't static because our evidence isn't static. Every moment of the day. No, but the idea is that when people give you evidence you have to choose whether to accept it or not as valid. No, that's the subjective part. That's the subjective part of automatic and voluntary subjective evidence weighing. Our brain assigns weight to pieces of evidence that we acquire and that assigning of weight also happens automatically and involuntarily. If you tell me... Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. I would agree with that, but do you agree that human knowledge has increased over the last several millennia? I mean... Absolutely. We have more. Our evidence is changing all the time. No, no, no, it's not just evidence. It's the process by which humans choose which they select, right? They select... Stop saying choose. Choose is a loaded word, right? You wouldn't say... I'm saying choose instead of... I don't know what are the word to use. It's a problem. It's a problem with the English language because we have words that themselves presuppose the existence of free will. We don't talk about a... We don't talk about a gumball machine choosing which gumball to dispense. Well, okay, that's funny. You say that because there are some... Maybe it's not you. I thought it was you. There are some patent claims. You and I have drafted or I've seen other people draft. Like there was one I saw where it said... Machine believes. Where it... Wherein the processor believes this to be the case. And so I know this is the imprecise use of metaphorical language to describe an aspect of the way the thing is configured and set up to work. But that's different. I thought you taught me that one time. But that's different. That's assuming that machines have the same quality as human beings, right? But they don't. They don't, exactly. And just like computers don't choose or don't believe, they don't exercise conscious control over their operations. You could see an engineer setting up a system and he would describe the operation by saying, okay, so if this happens, the robot will choose this or that. I mean, he's just trying to use the English language to describe what's going on. Right, because we don't have good words in the English language that... Well, we also don't have infinite knowledge. We don't have an infinite knowledge like from a God's eye point of view of the way the corks, the corkswarms are gonna work out. So we describe it in terms of teleological or purposive actions because that's the best way to get a descriptive view of what the system is doing. Right, and as you alluded to earlier, and as Sam Harris says, free will is an illusion. Yes, it feels like we have free will, but that doesn't mean that we do... Actually, okay, so hold on a second. Correct me if I'm wrong on this. I thought I heard Sam say somewhere or maybe it's in one of his books. I thought he had this whole thing about the illusion of free will as it itself an illusion. Like he had this point that... Right. We don't even experience... If you think about it closely for a second, you just examine your experience. There's not even the illusion of free will. In other words, that whole metaphor is what's used. That's used by pro free will people to denigrate the determinists, okay? They'll say, well, you just think it's an illusion. But as Sam pointed, I thought Sam pointed this out somewhere. Maybe you can correct me, but he says that the illusion itself is an illusion. Because if you don't actually experience, like you said, just like you're flying in an airplane. That's the Buddhist in Sam Harris. You're witnessing things rather than choosing. You notice it after it's been done, in a sense, right? Yeah, I don't... I actually kind of agree with that. I don't recall that in his book, Free Will. It might be there. I don't recall it. But, as I said, he's a big Buddhist, and that sounds like Buddhist talk. We don't have self for him. I'm surprised you like him, because he's sort of on the... A lot of the progressive left, which you're sort of kind of leaning towards, right? They hate Sam Harris because of his... Because he's realist about Muslims. Right, right, right. Well, yeah, I hear it. I hear it. Some things are bad on the others, or you're like, yeah, maybe he's not so wrong. Well, I would say that we could discuss Muslims and Islam in two different ways. We're talking about faith and free will. Let's talk about faith and free will, right? Basically, that implies a criticism of religion. So my point is that faith is that process. That process of automatic, involuntary, subjective evidence weighing is faith. Faith is what takes us from evidence to conclusion, right? You and I have discussed... What's your definition from? I mean, just where do you... I'm a philosopher. I made it up. Yeah, but that's... You can't just redefine a word. I know you could be your own lexicographer in patent law, but there are limits. You wanna communicate with people. See, to my mind as a sort of logical, rational person, there are two valid means of... There are two means of validating knowledge, or having valid knowledge, or sound knowledge about the world, okay, let's say. One would be evidence or experience, and the other would be reason, right? And they combine. They intertwine, of course, especially chronologically, but because you can't... So a baby can't reason about a gun being pointed at him. He's not afraid of the gun. He doesn't know what the gun is, right? But after a certain point, you combine these things. You can't have reason without any evidence to fill it. You'd be like a brain in a vat with no sensory data. You go crazy. But those two combined are the sources of knowledge, reason and evidence. Okay, but you need to expand... So you keep talking about evidence. So you lean on one of those, right? You need to expand your definition of evidence, though, because most of the evidence that we have in our possession is not what we've experienced. It's what we've heard from others. Most of what we believe you... That's a complicated topic, like historical evidence and things like that. But the point is, from a conceptual and perceptual sense, it's what you actually witness and perceive. So that's like raw information you're getting about the state of affairs of the universe. There is some correspondence between the real world and what you're perceiving. And then your brain integrates that to higher-level concepts, and that's where mistakes are set in. So I would say, I agree pretty much with Ayn Rand and her whole philosophy on this, that if you perceive something, you could never have a erroneous perception. And now people try out the thing of illusions and hallucinations as counter-examples. I don't think those are counter-examples because you're just not perceiving anything then. But if you're actually perceiving something, then that cannot be mistaken. Concepts can't be mistaken. It's like the animal in the foggy field. It looks like a fox. I perceive it as a fox. No, but that was your conceptual level. So you were trying to integrate it into a higher level of classifying the type of animal. That wasn't a first step. Right, I said... What was it? What was it a fox? What was it you... I said I saw a fox-like characteristics and my brain concluded it was a... I made it up. It's not a true story. Okay, but whatever it really was, that's what you... My point is that's what you were perceiving because that's what was physically causing your sense receptors to notice this. So whatever it was, that's what you were perceiving. Absolutely, I agree. If I see a stick in the water and it looks bent, my conceptual mind is making the mistake of thinking it's bent because I'm trying to go to that level. That's where you can make mistakes. Right, but you're perceiving a bend. I'm perceiving the stick, but I'm perceiving the stick in the only form possible given the physics of the matter and the way the senses work, the way light waves work. Right. And then all this stuff works. Right. So I'm perceiving the actual stick. Right. I'm just perceiving it in the form in an unusual form, which confuses my conceptual factors. Right. And again. So at the conceptual level, you can make mistakes. But my point is, all I'm saying is, all of that happens automatically and involuntarily. All that processing by our brains. That's the free will issue. I agree with you on that, but that's the free will issue. Well, so far we're just up to beliefs, right? We're just up to beliefs. So we're not up to actions. So the question is, what's the word faith and what should it be used for? To my mind, the way I hear it used all the time, basically faith is a third form of a third source of knowledge, which religious people use to justify believing in something for which they have no evidence and no reason. No, no. See, that's unfair. That's unfair. That's where atheists like you and me- It's unfair because I'm trying to actually give a comparative definition to the word we're using so that we can have a conversation. You are not giving them credit because they do perceive evidence for God's existence. You don't give that evidence any weight. You don't give that evidence any weight, but they do, of course they do. They look at a tree and they say, that is magnificent. That could not have happened randomly. That could not have happened without a designer, whatever their arguments are. Hold on, they're not witnessing. So that's not evidence and that's a reason. In other words, so they're not witnessing God. Okay, here's another piece of evidence. Another making an argument. So they're using the reason. Let's take a step back. Somebody once told me that E equals MC squared, right? I didn't even know what E equals MC squared meant. And yet I believed that E equals MC squared, why? Because people I trusted told me that that was true. So my belief that E equals MC squared was true, the evidence that I had were the statements made by trusted people. When I grew up, I was taught that God exists by people I trust, by my parents, by my clergy, by my siblings, by my friends. I was told that God exists. Then you grew up, yeah, then you grew up. Okay, but that was the evidence that I had. That wasn't evidence. It is evidence. It's the evidence that you have, that you base most of your beliefs on. What other people have told you, what you have read. If you believe that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, you didn't watch Shakespeare sit down at a table and write Hamlet. You don't have that kind of evidence. Even if I had watched him do it, that doesn't prove that he did it. I couldn't be wrong. Fine, but it's not, but it's still evidence. Of course, but it's still your evidence. I think you're equating the word trust with the word faith, which is giving the, by the way, it's giving the Christians and these religious nuts an out. Nobody, no. Well, everyone trusts someone. No religious person. No religious person says, I believe in the existence of God in the absence of evidence. Nobody says that. I completely and totally disagree. I hear. Have you asked them? In fact, a lot of the working out ones, yes, they will say, maybe we talked to different people, but I, or, maybe I'm missing. They say, it's written in this book. That's all the evidence you. No, no, no, no, no, hold on. Well, first of all, they're contradictory. So they will say, fine, fine. But if you ask them, they have you never heard any Christian say something like, well, if you could, if you could prove there's a God, that would, that would like make it pointless to have faith in them, right? Or they say, well, God's nature is inherently undefinable. So it just hasn't, they do the whole idea of the leap of faith or the act of faith. Why would you say a leap of faith? That's exactly an authority. That's exactly what the ASO process does. It closes the gap. It spans the gap from evidence to conclusion. When you have a belief that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet and, you know, whoever it is, Bacon did not write Hamlet, there are people who have written books about this issue on both sides. And there's evidence for and there's evidence against. And there's probably, in some of these disputes, there's probably no firm answer that we can ever, because it's not a repeatable scientific answer. Exactly, but that- And it's not a process of a priori argumentation where you can prove it by watching the production- It's not. It's based on the evidence in your possession and how your brain processes that evidence. Some people look at the same evidence and conclude that Shakespeare did write Hamlet. Some people look at that exact same evidence and conclude the opposite, that Bacon wrote Hamlet. Well, Joseph Sobrin wrote that the Earl of Oxford or someone was really the author of Shakespeare's play. Okay. And I know another guy that said it wasn't Shakespeare, it was just another guy with the same name. I heard that about Homer, but anyway. Actually, there's another crazy libertarian name, Alexander Galambos, Andrew Galambos, who argued that Thomas Paine really wrote the Declaration of Independence, it wasn't Jefferson. Well, I recently read- He's got some arguments for it. He's basically a conspiracy nut, but there are some arguments, true. We will never know for sure unless we can get a quantum computer and go back in time and recreate everything. We'll never know for sure. I recently read Thomas Paine's Age of Reason. It's great. He's so underrated. Anyway, back to faith. He was weak on intellectual property, I gotta say. So back to- He wanted copyright. Okay. So faith, anyway. I always change these classical liberals by based on how good they were on intellectual property. There is a process by which we go from evidence to conclusion because not everything is certain. And yet we form beliefs in the face of uncertainty. And that process of going from evidence to conclusion is what I call the automatic involuntary subjective evidence that our brain performs to process the evidence that we have. It does so subjectively, meaning it's based, everybody's different, but it happens automatically and voluntarily and the scale tips one way or it tips the other way based on that automatic processing. Now, I think that's what people call faith. Now, some people, you're right. Some people- I'm with you until that point. And I kind of, I think you're, I think you're- It's a little flip. It's a little flip. I don't think you're amateur philosophizing it. You're kind of reinventing the wheel, which is what a lot of people do. You gotta be careful not to be seen in the prank when you do that. Well, let me say it this way. I just take a lot of work to go through all the stuff, but when you go to the faith part, you just, that's, I'm with you. Like it's as a loose description of what we do. I would use maybe some slightly different terms, which I've acquired through my reading, but I think roughly you're right. But I would also say that when you dismiss it as being automatic, I don't know what that, it's true, but what is that true? It doesn't mean that our minds don't gradually get better in discovering real things. Right. Absolutely, it's not static. It's not static, it's dynamic. It changes all the time. Well, not that it's static, it has a direction. It has a direction towards truth. Well, maybe in the grand scheme of things, but- How can we have technological advancement if it doesn't have a direction? We make mistakes all the time. Cold fusion, I just read a great book. But we have a direction. We have a direction. We are more advanced technologically now than we were a hundred years ago and 500 years ago, et cetera. I don't know. I think, you know, if you look historically, probably the ancient- Just technologically. Wow. Ancient Greeks probably had it over our middle ages, but- We didn't understand the things we understand about chemistry now and- Okay, okay. Newly's equation and flight and space travel. Okay, so there's a direction, fine. All I'm saying is it's not static. Our evidence changes all the time and our beliefs can change when the accumulated evidence tips the scale the other way. That's what happened to me when I went from being- We don't have free will. Right, but- Yeah. Even though- Not even though- We don't have free will. Absolutely, because the brain functions automatically and involuntarily. In order for- The ones that survive- Fine. The ones that survive that do better tend to procreate and duplicate themselves. Fine, absolutely. We're in agreement. So, but the point is that, what's the point? The point is that from my perspective, those people who define, those religious people who define faith differently from the way I define it are mischaracterizing the psychological process that's going on in their brains because they are insisting that they are choosing and that it's not automatic and involuntary. That it's voluntary and that it's the result of their exercising conscious control over the process of going from evidence to conclusion. And I say that's wrong. So, I throw it back in their face. Hold up. You're redefining the word faith. Are you gonna define the word choose? Yeah. Choose. I'm saying that's what they're claiming. They're claiming to choose is to exercise conscious control over a selection process. There's a number of options and you end up with a single selection. Even that word's a little iffy because these words imply the existence of conscious control. And that's what choice is. Choice implies conscious control. Again, we don't talk about a gumball machine choosing a gumball, right? There's a mechanism in there that's spitting out the next gumball that's sitting ready to be spat out. And that's what our brains do. And there's a whole chapter in my book about how our brains are just like gumball machines. And that's what our brains do. They process that evidence that comes in and they spit out beliefs. Right. And that's where I got to. But you describe a gumball machine in terms of, I don't know, random or stochastic process. No, no, absolutely not. Mechanical. No, it's not at random. A gumball machine is not random. If you know exactly where every gumball machine is, if you know where every gumball is in a gumball machine and you understand its mechanism for operation, absent quantum mechanical effects, you can predict exactly the sequence of colors of gumballs. No one ever knows where every gumball is. Like that's a theoretical possibility. My point is when you're designing a machine. That's not so hard. But you don't need to. You just basically, you use statistics as my point. Use statistics to say, okay, let's arrange it this way in the theater to fall down this way or whatever. That's statistics, physics. I'm thinking of these, I guess I'm thinking of these games where like there's all these things. That's not a gumball machine. Right. I know. I think that doesn't, for some reason. A lottery ball machine. My mind went to the machine like in the arcade. Lottery. It's like a vertical wall where there's a bunch of pegs and you drop a disc in. Oh, Pachinko. That's Pachinko. Pachinko. It's the Japanese. When you design the game, you kind of know statistical regularities. You design it in such a way where it's not too easy to win, not too hard. Yeah, but in your Newtonian deterministic world that you believe in, if you knew where you dropped that initial ball and where the pegs are, you'd know where it was going. I know. I totally agree with that. But the point is you're designing this for human people who are gonna put a quarter into play it and you wanna give them a little thrill, a little experience and from their point of view, they're not omniscient. They don't know where all the particles are. And so for them, it looks random and so they're taking a guess and whatever. I'm just saying you use statistics to design these things. But what I'm saying is you don't use anywhere near that kind of model to explain other human beings you interact with and you know. You view them in terms of purposes. Like you assume that people you're dealing with have some purposes in mind. It's not random. It's not random. This ASO process is- I don't know if it's random or not. This ASO process. Maybe it's random. This ASO process is not random. There are reasons why we come to the conclusions we come to based on our genetics and our history. There are reasons why we have the beliefs that we have. Okay, it's not random. Well, yeah, there's reasons why. Although I will say that as a determinist sort of anti-free will type for all my life, basically, I've always disliked the sloppy determinism of the people that say things like, oh, well you were determined because of the way your mother raised you. Like these macro level things. To me, I was always a physics level guy. Like I think it's from some subatomic particle level. It's basically all determined by the four laws of physics, right? Something like that. It's mathematical. But it's not because of the environment in terms of like your macro environment. Like, oh, you raised Catholic or your mother had a guilt complex or something. Because that never is rigorous. Because you'll have twins, right? You'll have twins and they come out differently, right? They're not the same environment. They're not the same. It's not the same. But it's only never the same. It's never the same. If you go down to the micro level enough. And my point is the micro level has to be there. You don't have to go very far. You don't have to go very far, even for twins. Well, that's true. But I still don't think that's the explanation. The explanation has got to be further, further down. Like if you want to go to true determinism. But what does it matter for life? So here's the point. So I wrote an essay and I said, and then I read Sam Harris and he said, yeah, we don't choose our beliefs. We don't choose any of our thoughts. We don't choose our actions. And we don't. And so the implications are that it really is unfair to punish somebody for a transgression that that individual could not control. At the individual level. You know the obvious counter. Go ahead. Everyone's determined and it's because we're determined it's unfair to punish someone for something they couldn't have chosen to not have done. We can't choose not to punish them either. Well, if we punish them, it's because we had no choice, but it was predetermined. But this. So you're trying to have it both ways in a way. Well, no, I'm not. I read Sam Harris and in Sam Harris's book, Free Will, he talks about this and that was new evidence that I acquired and that new evidence made me also believe. It's not evidence. I disagree. Of course it's evidence. It's what somebody told me. You read words from someone. Yes, that's upon which most of our beliefs are based. Words that we hear and read from others. So that's what. The things you perceive with your senses or that you can replicate. So I perceive words. I hear words. That's a perception. I mean, what are you talking about? You list your beliefs. Okay. Do you believe that Seattle's the capital of the state of Washington? Sure. Why do you believe it? Cause somebody told you that. You don't know. I don't know if that's true. Anyway, but I think it is. But in any case. When you say you don't know, that's a whole question about the theory of knowledge. All I'm saying is most of what we believe and most of what we know is based solely on testimonial evidence, not perceptual evidence. Testimonial evidence. What Sam said is not testimonial. I agree with you that in a courtroom when someone gets on a witness stand and they testify to what they witnessed and they say this is what happened, that is a type of evidence. It's probative as you might want to call it as being, by the way, were you a philosophy school asshole too or just a law school asshole? I was only in that one class, but there's two, you don't have to explain that. I don't think the reasoning by some philosopher or thinker, I wouldn't call that evidence, but I know what you mean. I think you're using the term way more broadly than I would use it. Okay, I'll accept that. But the problem is that can lead to equivocation because you're sort of adopting the logical positive as empiricist mindset when you keep boiling everything down to evidence, but then you have to broaden the term of evidence so much to make that fit into your expanded. I'm just talking about what our brains chew on. Our brains chew on our perceptions and they chew on what we've heard. By the way, do you mean our brains or our minds? This is another whole topic. Well, it is and it's where my book starts. My book starts there. But would you agree there's a conceptual distinction between brain and mind? Yes, except for the fact that the mind is generated by the brain. The mind does not exist separate from the brain. The mind of consciousness, what we call our consciousness is just another type of thinking just like beliefs and feelings and emotions. It's the product of our brains. So that's where I start. I call that and some call it an epiphenomenal. Epiphenomenal, fine. I don't ask me how it's created. I know that it's created in me because I feel it. But conceptually, the word mind or the concept for mind refers to a different phenomena or entity in nature than the concept of brain. Right, but I don't believe. Mind, but you can't change your brain. I believe that my consciousness is, as you say, an epiphenomenal. I do not believe that my consciousness exists or will exist separate from my brain. When my brain stops functioning, my consciousness will disappear. I agree with that, of course. Okay, but you and I agree with that. But most people or theists and others who even are atheists and maybe let's stick to theists, believe that our soul, our consciousness, our spirit exists separate from our bodies and will continue to exist. And so it's easy for them to believe in free will because, number one, they believe that there's a separate entity, not an epiphenomenon, but a phenomenon, a thing called consciousness that it's... Forget the term. Forget the term. I don't think it makes... No, your terms are fine, but I don't think it makes it easier. I think they think it makes it easier, but... It's so much easier. It's sort of like when you say, where did the universe begin? You and I would say, we don't know. And they would say, oh, well, it started with God. And then if you say, well, where did God start? They say, I don't know. So they pushed the problem back on. No, they don't. They say God always exists. They don't say, I don't know. Well, whatever. But so we can say that out of the universe also. Listen, I didn't write shallow drafts to convince theists that we don't have free will. I wrote shallow drafts to convince my fellow atheists that we don't have free will. And as I was saying, it's easy for a theist to believe in free will because they believe that this consciousness that exists separate from our body, our minds, separate from our body, and they believe in miracles. So they believe that this non-corporeal, non-physical thing called consciousness can somehow modify and modulate and affect the neurons and the protons in our brains. I agree. They think there's a, they think, so this is where I was gonna go with that God analogy. They believe in a type of ontological dualism, I would call it. So they think, or maybe more than dualism, but they think there's two realms of reality. They think there's a spiritual realm, but they also think there's a connection between the spiritual realm and the physical realm. Like, so they think like there's a soul up there in heaven that somehow connected to a body somehow, right? Right, right. Whatever you, the details are boring. But the point is you never escape the dilemma of free will because even if you, it doesn't matter what the realm is. I mean, maybe our realm is really spiritual. I mean, if you look at the atoms, we're really empty space all the way down. So maybe we are spirits in a certain sense. So it doesn't matter if you transform or imagine the second realm of spirits. Now, your word miracle is interesting because to my mind, the word miracle is similar to the word faith. That's one reason I have trouble with you using it as a substitute for knowledge because you're using it as trust. And trust is a perfectly fine way of acquiring knowledge from other people who are experts in something. So I'm studying something. Miracle is the suspension of physical processes, right? It's no, it's faith is the belief in something with no reason. No, it's not. Something with no causes. They're the same thing. I have faith that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. I don't know that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. But that's not what the word means. It is, it's the... But the point... I would say you have a good reason to believe that. That's what I would say. I'm saying, what I'm saying is, is that my brain performs the exact same process in going from my evidence about Shakespeare to my conclusion about Shakespeare as the psychological process that takes me from evidence for or against the existence of God to a conclusion. Dude, you could say my brain performs the same experience when I experienced an endorphin rush when I'm parachuting out of an airplane because it's all mechanical. You're agreeing things that... Right. They're not the same. They are the same. The process is the same. But by that reasoning, the thing that happens in a cricket's brain is the same as it happens in your brain because they're all causal. I mean, you're emitting too many fine nuances that distinguish things. When we talk about conceptual reason, I don't know whether crickets have consciousness or not. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. I don't know. I assume, frankly, that you have consciousness. I don't know that to be the case, but I assume that since you and I are both human beings... So what does it mean? You know it in the sense of you have a reason to be certain about that. Well, I'm confident. Not certain, but I'm confident. I know, so you want to do everything on a spectrum like degrees. This is why you won't say, you know there's not a God. You want to say, well, you're like Harris and these four horsemen guys who... Oh, well... No, what are you talking about? Hey, Steve, there never could be evidence for God. You know that. Of course, there could be. How could there be evidence for God? How could there be evidence for an omnipotent, immortal being? How would he know he's immortal? If you got struck by lightning for saying that, that would be evidence for God. It wouldn't be conclusion. It wouldn't be proof, but it would be evidence for, huh? Well, that's where we disagree. I don't think that... I think the idea of God is totally impossible because part of God's definition is, he knows, say, he's omniscient. So he would have to know he's God, which means he'd have to be immortal. He'd have to know he's immortal. He'd have to be omnipotent and know he's omnipotent. But the problem is, even if you were omnipotent and even if you were immortal, you could never know that because tomorrow there could be a super God above you that was yanking your strings the whole time, which, by the way, is one of the early Christian beliefs that some of these Christian heretics believe that Paul hijacked the faith and that all the Christians were worshiping this sort of fake under God who thought he was God, but there's another God above him. But you can never be surprised at the links to which these mystics will go. They will come up with all kinds of crazy shit. And the Christians are not even the worst. I mean, I've been reading about Islam lately. If you read into the 13ers, and Islam is even crazier. And of course, Judaism has its own, and all they all do, they all have their crazy stuff. Yes, sir. It's incredible to me. They will just make up one thing after the other. Yes. So let me just, well, okay, so maybe God's possible, maybe God's not possible. You and I believe God does not exist. Now you say you know God exists. I believe he doesn't exist. You're not persuaded. No, I believe. I believe, I have beliefs. I don't. You're just not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. It's possible there could be a guy that knows he's gonna live forever. You think that's possible? Yeah, I think that's possible. How could you know you're gonna live forever? Seriously, tomorrow hasn't come yet. How do you know you're gonna be alive tomorrow? I don't know an asteroid's not gonna worry about the earth tomorrow, right? We don't know that gravity's gonna stop working tomorrow. We don't know that. True, true. I believe that that's not true. I believe that that's not true. I don't know. I don't know. We're gonna have to agree to disagree about whether God is even possible, okay? Yeah, so basically, you're the theist here. No, no, hang on. I'm moving over because the sun is getting in the way. I used to be a theist. I used to be a theist. And then the evidence that I had in my possession changed over time and my brain automatically and involuntarily switched from me being a theist to an atheist that happened over time. Once you automatically and involuntarily agree that I'm right right now, we'll be done with it. Oh, if I only could, I would. So, but let me go back to the, let me go back to- Maybe in five minutes, you're gonna change your mind. Let me just go back to justice for a second. So I said that at the individual level, it's unfair to punish somebody for transgressing when they had no free will. By the same token, it's unfair to reward somebody for doing good if they had no free will. It's unfair to do so when there is a limited, what? Who does that? Who rewards you for doing well? Well, your boss, if you do a good job, it gives you a raise. So you're basically trying to come up with an argument as capitalism. No, no, you're missing my point. My point is, is that there's an inherent unfairness to treating people that are worse based on their actions. Over which they had no free will, no conscious control. Well, again, whether that's deterministic or random, it doesn't matter. But like Sam Harris, I think that there is a societal justification for punishing transgressors and rewarding good doers because we wanna encourage them and we wanna encourage others and discourage them and discourage others. That's always been part of the argument. That's- For centuries, that's been part of the argument. Right. But not the part that says that it's inherently wrong to do that at the individual level, right? What's the difference? Whether you think it's inherently wrong or not or whether you just don't, like you, Steve Mendelson, don't want people running around, raping and murdering and pillaging and looting. But I do think that having that appreciation of the lack of free will temper and modify and reduce the punishments and reduce the rewards. It's more compassionate. Yeah, make us more compassionate. Absolutely. Yeah, but you still keep alighting the difference. You're talking about treating people, but treating is an action too. And so the people that are treating are determined too. So I don't know what you're, are you saying I want you people to choose to listen to me and therefore be nicer to criminals? I'm talking because I read Sam Harris and that tip my scale and whatever's motivating me automatically and voluntarily to talk now is spreading that word to others. And if it has the effect of having them automatically and voluntarily change their minds about these issues, that's the way this whole process works. People communicating with one another and that's how evidence changes over time. And that's how the leaves change over time. Just to let you know, I agree with almost everything you've been saying. I agree with all this. I'm just giving you sort of a devil's advocate, but. No, it's fine. I agree that we should, although from a criminal point of view, I would be more on the macroscopic level. I would say, listen, almost like almost everyone you hear of that is a horrible psychopath or sociopath or criminal. They're almost always like from a poor family, they were abused by their parents. There's always a reason. There's always a cause, right? Or almost. Even a physical brain defect. Yeah. No, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't incapacitate some people. I do think that, like, I mean, I've read stuff on this. There's different theories of punishment. Whether it should be restitution, retribution, rehabilitation, incapacitation. I tend to think incapacitation is the most justifiable and self-defense. Restitution, rehabilitation, retribution, no, they're less. And I actually think in a libertarian stateless free market order, you would tend to have a voluntary system without even any prisons, mostly. And you would rely upon voluntary ostracism and things like that. There's a whole literature on this, which is fascinating. But it's about giving people an opportunity to reintegrate back into society, pay your debts, do what you gotta do, apologize. Yeah, I don't know if I've talked to you about this before, but there's something about this, the Jewish idea of what do you call it, repentance? Yeah. The Christian sort of, yeah, the Christians like, remember that black church that was shot, the black Christian church that was shot up by this white racist guy a few years ago? Yeah, yeah. And all the black people, they forgave him? Yeah. He's like, well, he didn't ask for forgiveness, right? Right, no. He didn't even ask for it. Like, I love the Jewish idea that, okay, you have to admit what you did wrong, admit the harm you did, offer something to make it up and humbly ask for repent and ask for forgiveness and offer some kind of retribution. To me, that makes total logical sense. And I think that's roughly the way a justice system would work. Now, I think there would be some people that would be the super max type of DC criminals that would be, you'd either have to just kill them or they would just be killed by the family of the victims, you know, and no one would turn an eye or they'd be ostracized or outcast to coventry or to Australia. You know what I mean? It's something like that. But other than that, the whole penal system is totally screwed. And I took, so I basically agree with you on slightly different reasons, but... Yeah. But it's not, I wouldn't say it's because people, you know, if you rape and murder a young child or something horrible, even if there's an excuse or a reason for it, it's sort of like when the family dog mauls the baby, you got to put the dog down, even if it's a dog. Well, as I write in my book, when the lion kills a zookeeper, why do you have to put the lion down? That's what lions do. That's what lions are. I don't have the science behind that, but I think there's, I think, I don't know about that, but I do think if you have a pit bull that kills a baby. Yeah. But you're not doing it for retribution. You're not doing it to punish the dog. You're doing it to prevent the dog from hurting others. And that's the same thing. Retribution, as Sam Harris says, retribution is not a valid reason for punishing. It's not to punish the past activity. It's to prevent future bad activity. Although there is a book, it's an interesting book. The title is called Getting Evil. And I forgot to talk about it. That's Woody Allen's book. No, it's not. It's a philosophy of political philosophy. But he explains why even though liberal minded people like us, yeah, you might tend to think retribution is kind of retrograde and not really the humanitarian or the civilized way of dealing with crime. There are actually reasons that retribution has been and maybe could be justified as being integrated into the system. It's something to do with, it's like catharsis and all this kind of stuff. Because it makes you feel better. Yeah, I guess. Well, it makes the victims feel better. There are some victims who want to see their daughter's murder executed in the electricity. And who are we to say that it doesn't actually give them some relief? I'm not saying the cost is worth it. I think the cost is not worth it. But it's not dismissible, I think. Well, that's where the tempering of punishment and reward come in as a result of appreciating this lack of free will that we all have. I agree with you. I think that appreciating our influences in life. Like I said, most people that are psychopaths, you can point to something that happened to them when they were children. Absolutely, yep. Yep. Which is one reason I'm against banking. I don't know if you are, but I'm against corporal punishment and all these types of the ways we raise our children. There's a whole movement in libertarianism called peaceful parenting. And I've become more and more of an inheritor of that. Yeah, well, that's sense. Mostly because of my Montessori stuff early on. But yeah, I think if you spank your children as a way to get them to do what you think is right, and you're supposed to be their protector and you're the big powerful parent adult, what do you expect is gonna do to them psychologically? Now, I don't think it's the end of the world. I know, but I would spank the few times. As they say, I turned out okay. But there's probably rape victims who turned out okay, but that doesn't make me mean it's okay. Right, right. The question is, is it the right and moral way to, and it's the same thing as the punishment system, by the way, is punitive or punitive negative measures the right way to rear children? Anyway, I think if we want less psychopaths and sociopaths, we should not traumatize them when they're young. That's gotta be part of it. Yeah, I'm with you. It makes it difficult to figure out how to tread though. If you're constantly concerned about what the lasting implications of everything that you do might have, it gets to be very... Well, yeah, and that's a different concern. I mean, of course, that's the way life is. That everything you do has an opportunity cost, which means that if it forecloses some possibilities in the future, right? And as you go through life, then you've now foreclosed, like you and I will never be on the Olympic team doing something because... Anything. Yeah, I mean, we're not 21 years old or whatever. You know, we're not gonna be medical doctors now because we've already foreclosed that option by the past, but... But I'm talking about... I'm not talking about personal opportunities. I'm talking about the effect that you have on others. You know, when you're raising your kid and you're deciding, okay, do I give in and give them the bubble gum now or do I not? What's the lasting impact that's gonna have on this kid? Well, and I'm not saying that you shouldn't punish your kids because it will have an impact because everything you do has an impact. I'm simply saying the science of child rearing and the science or whatever you wanna call it, the morality of the situation militates against a punitive method, just like what you're saying. I mean... But then again, that has to be based on statistics, right? You have to look at what has happened in the past. I'm always talking to this modest evidence thing. Me, me, me, you're the one who was talking about Pachinko. I'm the one saying that... Well, that's a physical system. To determine whether spanking, to determine whether spanking is good or bad, you gotta look at people who've been spanked and who haven't and then look and see what the effects are. I agree that can help, but no. To me, it's more of a humanitarian thing. You just made an argument that we shouldn't punish people for committing crimes because they don't really choose to do the crimes. It's unfair to them. It's unfair to them at the individual level to do so. Yes. At the society level. No, I mean, why do parents spank their children because they say the kid did the wrong thing? He needs to be punished to learn his lesson. Right, so he won't do it again. Yeah, but the kid probably did what was natural at his stage of development. Of course it was. It absolutely was, because he doesn't have free will either. No, but he didn't have free will or... He didn't have free will either. Doesn't matter whether we have free will or not. We still respond to stimuli and response. Absolutely, absolutely. Yep. Can't help it. Exactly, no free will. I think we're pretty much agreement. Okay, we gotta sort it out? I think so. I do wanna mention compatibilism because you used that term earlier and that's not the context that I've heard it used in discussing free will. When Daniel Dennett talks about compatibilism, he's talking about determinism and free will being compatible. And that is bullshit. What they do is they conflate free will with freedom and they talk about autonomous beings. So that's not free will. Free will isn't freedom from influence of others. Free will is the ability for your consciousness to control your behavior. And... I think that might be right. I haven't read. I read Sam Harris' footnoted criticism of Dennett on that but I haven't read Dennett himself on compatibilism and I know that the standard philosophical defensive compatibilism is all over the map, number one. And it's not the same as mine. Like I said, I've tried to cobble together something based upon my appreciation of dualism which is the Mises idea that we understand different phenomena in the universe by different modes of cognition and reasoning. So we argue about economic and teleological phenomena using deductive reasoning from the inside. We argue about and understand causal laws, the physical laws of the world using the scientific method. To be able to put it briefly. Speaking of Daniel Dennett, can I read to you the epilogue from shallow drafts? On February 9th, 2017, I went to the Free Library of Philadelphia to hear Daniel Dennett speak about his new book from bacteria to Bach and Bach, The Evolution of Mines. Professor Dennett had just finished discussing the illusion of consciousness when the moderator opened the program to questions from the audience. I was lucky enough to be called on first. Although I had decided what I was going to ask Professor Dennett a day or two before the program, I still fumbled my delivery. I started well enough. Speaking of illusion, I said, do you still believe, I mean, does your brain still automatically and involuntarily make you believe that you have free will? Notwithstanding their shared title as two of the four new atheists along with Richard Dawkins and the late great Christopher Hitchens, Professor Dennett and Sam Harris have had some heated disagreements about free will. Bottom line, Sam says no, and Dan says yes. I must say that I found Professor Dennett's answer to my admittedly obnoxious question rather disingenuous. Basically, his answer was something to the effect of- Wait, wait, wait, is this, who's this talk, is this you talking? This is me, this is my book. I'm reading it to you. I was there. I know, I'm looking, I've got your book on the screen. Yeah, page 207. I asked him a question. Yeah, I'm looking right now. And then he responded, it depends what you mean by free will. If you mean the kind of free will that implies that we are not responsible for our actions, then who would want to believe in that kind of no free will? I wish the moderator had given me an opportunity to respond to his answer. And if I had had such an opportunity, I wish that I had thought fast enough to come up with the following response. But he did not, and I did not. So I'm left with writing it here. That's very disingenuous of you, Danny, I would have said. I'm not a big fan of cancer and my own mortality, but just because they both have unpleasant implications, that doesn't mean that cancer doesn't exist or that I'm not going to die. Would you as one of the four new atheists accept as ingenuous the following argument from a theist? If you mean the kind of world without a God, then who would want to believe in that kind of world? Yeah. That's the end. I agree with you, yeah, I got it on the screen here. Yeah, I agree with you, by the way. Thanks for indulging me. This is the problem with my, I've had with these guys. They're all, I'm lumping them together, but they're all scientific in my sense. Like they're all monist. They're all ultimately, well, Harris tries to be philosophical, but they're all ultimately empiricists, right? And that's my main problem is there's no appreciation for this role of reason as a source of knowledge and a contextual appreciation of how we acquire certainty in life, right? In knowledge. I think I can work with empiricists because they buy in large, stumble towards the right things, except when they get caught up in the latest hysteria, like global warming or COVID or something. Oh, eugenics, but by and large, they're steered in the right direction by reality, the laws of reality. What can you say? Well, here's what I say. I quote Richard, it is, I quote Richard Dawkins numerous times in my book. This is his statement. If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking can undo it. So if we don't have free will, that might not be comfortable, that might not be comforting, but just because it's not comfortable doesn't mean it isn't true and no amount of wishful thinking. Same thing with God, same thing with death. I want to believe in a world without God. Either way, that's not the actual end of my book. Keep going a couple of pages later and you'll see that we've got 30 more pages then. I see the joke. There it is. Yeah, that's my favorite joke. Did you hear about the one-armed fisherman called a fish this big? Well, you know the other joke. How do you get a one-armed guy in a cotton tree to get out of the tree? Ask him to clap? What? Yeah, you wave that. Give him a high five, wave to him? Yeah, okay. They're good. Politically incorrect as always. All right, I think we've done enough damage today. How about that? Are you okay with it? I love it. I mean, it's record, if it worked right. Yeah, uh-oh. We're gonna have to do the whole thing again. Take two. They won't know that this is already take two. We did this all week. No. You got to watch, trust, do you ever watch science fiction or television? Well, it depends what you mean, but no, not much. I watch Fox News every once in a while. That's science fiction. No, you got to watch, trust me. Chase, Steve, trust me, you've got to watch Debs. What's it called? Debs? Debs, D-E-B-S. Oh, not D-E-B, not Eugene V. No, Debs. It means developers, but it actually means something else. No, Debs. Okay. What is it on Netflix, you said? It's on Hulu. Oh, okay, I have to get my son to show me how to do it. It's about free will. It's literally about quantum computing, free will, physics, choice, determinism. That's it? But in a weird science, it's crazy. That's when people ask me, whether my book shall address this fiction or non-fiction. I say, it depends who you are. We have to wait and see. Right, right. We do this. I'll stop. I'm gonna stop now. Say goodbye to Kinsella's people. Bye, thank you, Kinsella people. I'll stop recording. Oh, no, I didn't. I stopped sharing. Hold on, I didn't stop recording. I didn't do anything.