 Martin Luther was a big guy and he had a truly epic debate with Erasmus where he said that God knew all human decisions before they were made He really didn't appreciate Erasmus's free willy comments So historically one of the most debated ideas in philosophy has been free will We all sort of feel like we make our own decisions But when you look at things like hypnotism and brainwashing you start to wonder if it's really just a feeling Maybe someone or something else is pulling our strings and we don't know it The biggest problem in establishing whether or not humans have free will is really defining what that is I mean, I know that I want it because I'm American damn it and it has free in the name But what is it really like if I say free will doesn't exist and you say yes It does if we're talking about different things We could be arguing forever and actually agreeing with each other without knowing it And if you read the back and forth between philosophers about free will you'll realize that that's pretty much exactly What's been happening for two millennia some philosophers to find free will as though every time somebody made a choice If you rewound time to that point they could choose something else totally independent of the chain of events leading up to that decision That's actually pretty easy to disprove because although it's technically possible that you might choose to get hit in the face With the tennis racket you're not going to because that's dumb people make decisions by reasoning out the best choice available in a given situation and if you Rewind time to that particular point their knowledge and reasoning would be exactly the same So why wouldn't their choices be the same other philosophers decided that free will meant freedom from interference People might make the same decisions over and over again But those decisions were governed solely by their minds and not by the effects of the world around them This is also pretty easy to disprove because psychology has definite examples of changing people's decisions by changing their environment Like if you say is this man guilty you will get more people to convict him than if you say is this man guilty or innocent Just adding two words drastically changes the choices that people make so saying that their minds are totally free from environmental influence It's pretty obviously wrong So our decisions aren't totally free But are they at least partially free or is everything that we decide unknowingly governed by forces beyond our control? No matter how you end up deciding what to eventually do whether you're using your so-called gut instinct or Really sitting down and puzzling out what might happen your brain is the beginning and end of that process now brains are very complicated things But we've been examining them pretty closely for a long time and we've never seen anything in there besides matter like the same kind of matter that makes up chairs or planets and That matter doesn't behave in any way that we wouldn't expect from chemistry or physics Like no matter how long you look at a carbon atom that's part of a neuron no matter how Important the decision that that neuron is involved in that carbon atom Just does what you'd expect the carbon atom to do every time without fail Which means whenever you choose between coke or Pepsi or between religions or philosophies or even when you choose to change your mind That decision is the direct result of a chemical equation unfolding in your brain exactly the way that it has to You might still define that as having free will but your brain doesn't have any Categorically different chemical processes than a robot there are more of them But even though most people wouldn't be willing to say that robots have free will your decisions are pretty much just the result of your Chemical programming so if you're talking about will you're already talking about something that's governed by the laws of physics the way That everything is you already sort of know that it's not free Suggesting that inherently physical stuff like your brain in the decisions that it makes could just suddenly Magically stop behaving the way that stuff behaves doesn't make a lot of sense But that still leaves us with a really interesting question Knowing that our decisions are governed by the rules of physics and chemistry are humans still responsible for their actions Well, yes and no Hume suggested that even though the human will wasn't free from the laws of physics You could still attribute decisions and behavior to it Like if you programmed a mean robot some sort of jerk machine You couldn't really get mad at the robot for its behavior, but you could still say things like I don't like this robot It keeps hitting me in the face with tennis rackets. I don't like what it's programmed to do You could say the same thing about people who are jerks physics may be ultimately Responsible for everything that they do or think but if physics has programmed them to be jerks It's okay to not like that I think that this is actually a really healthy way to approach human relationships and punishment But maybe you have a different interpretation. Please leave a comment and let me know what you think Thank you very much for watching. If you want a free thunk sticker choose to send your mailing address to thunkshow at gmail.com Don't forget to blah blah subscribe blah share, and I'll see you next week