Whenever i watch a Sabine video about free will, it is never by choice.

I don't believe in free will, but I do believe in reasonably inexpensive will.

I'm a medical doctor . I happened to like physics and I find your channel is hervorragend. Keep up the good work!

Sabine, you do great transitions. I don't even realize I am watching a commercial about Brilliant until I am halfway through the ad.

"To be a UKpostsr you don't need to know anything!" CLASSIC 😂

"A man can do as he will, but not will as he will" - Arthur Schopenhauer

Sabine. I'm not a frequent youtube commenter, but I have to say thank you for this video. It has brought me a lot of peace. Weirdly. I don't know enough to know if you are right, but your explanation helped me a lot to leave my anxiety behind. In a very functional way, you have dramatically improved my life with this piece. Sadly, you didn't actually create free will denial, but explaining it to me turns out to have been more important. It releases me from feeling bad for the things I should have done or feeling pride in the things I have. The same goes for those around me. I don't need to feel bad or good because of what 'they' have done. Its just the universe doing its maths. Weirdly, it gives me some of the peace I can see that religion gives to others. In fact, if you decide to start a Free Will Denier religion, let me know where I can send me subscription.

I love videos like this because regardless of whether you agree or not with the presenter, they encourage you to think and ask yourself hard questions about what you actually believe in. So much of what we consume with our eyes and ears nowadays attempts to push an agenda or manipulate rather than stimulate thought and discussion.

I used to worry about this, but then I realized that it feels like we do, and that's the best we can manage.

Sabine trolls the internet in her own dry humor way and I am constantly here for it. 😂

I am so happy I found your channel Sabine. Thank you!

The free will conversation has become quite interesting. In my own experience, it seems whenever there was a leap to be made in my life I literally felt pushed in a particular direction. I may have chosen otherwise but in my heart it would have been wrong to take a different path at those moments.

I'm a psychologist (albeit a junior one) and in my time I have come across people who have had some realisation (or sometimes they may say 'epiphany' ... rarely in a positive tone) that they don't have free will. It is very rare that this is based on the realisation that comes from understanding quantum mechanics or differential equations, but simply from learning over time how much of the world around them dictates their choices (or rather, limits them). The crisis that emerges is not one to be sniffed at; how would you feel if you had the thought that nothing was in your control? That you were on a fairground ride that you had never chosen to be in and that whatever curves, splashes (or even horrors) were always going to happen regardless of how much you loved of hated being on it? You are on a fixed rail in a single direction and all you can do is hunker down or throw your hands up in the air. Well, in my very humble opinion, I believe determinism to be the correct answer to the the question of free will, but the challenge is how to then answer the devastated people who, for them, this is hideous, terrible and stripping them of the meaning of their existence. I am kinda fortunate that I am a research psychologist and rarely client/patient/service user/insert-correct-name-here facing but also have the task of being pointed at by people who find out what I do and being ordered to "reveal your secrets!" Well ... from what I have seen: some people who seek out psychology due to past trauma (which is pretty much everyone) can take from this a certain comfort: if this was always going to happen to them, then they had no say and they no part and it was not their fault (which is never is), and sort of ... accept that this was 'fate'. They couldn't have done anything to stop it and absolve themselves of the self-hate and self-blame that is often par of the course for these people. Others become extremely bitter: for them, the fact that this would have always happened to them and that no matter how strong, how resilient, how brave they were, would never have made a difference. The cold, indifferent world would have always won. So, the absence of free-will to the individual (who is probably not a physicist/philosopher/etc.) seems to be more complex than the concept itself, because on our level it really does not matter at all if is exists, but what follows from the question of it. Outside of the noble disciplines of the physical sciences, the real world implications are way (WAY) more significant, and the idea may be thousands of years old, but the actuality of it is so new because the noble(er? 😛) disciplines of the social science are still trying to catch up. Some people may paraphrase the Tolkien quote: "Go not to the psychologists for an answer, for they will say both 'yes' and no'." And .... they have a point. My advice is probably going to be: go to a psychologist if you are seriously considering your existence and the doing so is having detrimental effects on your life. My other advice would be: you have as much free-will now as you did before this video/that appointment/that realisation, and consider what you could do now ... which is almost anything you can imagine. If you want to stop reading this rambling comment: do so! If you want to dress up like a chicken and move to Norway to study pine trees and howl at the moon every night: do so! If you have a choice (real or imagined) then that has to be worth something .... right?

"If you wanna become a youtuber, you don't have to know anything" I love this woman

The late, great Christoper Hitchens was asked this. Hitchens always found it to be a boring question. When asked if he believed in free will he answered very simply... "I have no choice." I still think it was the best answer ever given to this question. Most people don't really think about what they're asking. They just can't seem to let go of the false notion that they are in control of their decisions.

I agree with what you're saying. I was lost up until about 15:50 when it came back around to explaining choice. If Im getting this right, what you are saying is that choice is not free will and a lack of free will doesn not mean a lack of choice.

"I'm a physicist, please see a psychologist." This cracked me up! Between the content and Sabine's humour, my poor pea brain can barely take it. I love this channel.

We are like travellers on a train and must go where the rails take us, but we can enjoy the views from the window and the company of our fellow travellers.

During my late teens, a girl asked me if I "believed in fate?" It seemed obvious to me that of course fate exists because wether we choose to travel the globe, throw ourselves under a train or devote our lives to charitable causes, then surely THAT is what was fated. I think its only really an issue (psychologically) if you KNOW how its supposed to turn out BEFORE it happens. However, I take consolation in the fact that, try as we might, we cant know how the book ends until it's written! #Spoilers! 😄

Thank you for taking the time to do this

Am I the only one who can't wait for the days when a photon can go left or right without being judged for its motives?

"I find the question stunningly uninteresting" oh how I wish I could use this line in work meetings! Edit: 2:06 - "for simple questions like 'does free will exist?'" hahaha I love Sabine's style so much

The best example that nailed the free will concept for me is this thought experiment: Imagine you knew some twins and you knew for certain that one of them had free will and the other did not. You have access to all the resources in the universe and your mission is to find out which one is which. How can you find out? You can't, because having free will and not having free will is identical. It doesn't matter what you try to do, you can't create any experiment to tell which one is which.

As I get older, I'm realizing that the way I make decisions is almost one-to-one the way my father and mother made decisions, and that they also made decisions the way their parents did. Of course, all of them did this in their own way, yet the similarity in patterns is undeniable. But I don't know whether this has anything to do with your discussion of free will, or if your discussion simply sent my thought processes off onto another tangent typical of me.

Lol "I'd find it creepy if the decisions.. came from somewhere else than in my brain." Agreed! :) Enjoyed that one, Sabine. Having a science background, and in taking a philosophy class, I actually wrote a paper on the subject which I entitled, Soft Free Will, wherein I argue just about the same thing, that ultimately the constituent details determine our decisions, but the feeling that we have free will is useful to the degree that we feel in control of our own thoughts. Your elucidation of the creepy feeling it would be for something outside of us to make the decisions, is a beautiful and personal synopsis, and I thank you for the smile and the chuckle as I remember pondering this topic. I appreciate your detailed and fun-filled explanation. Thanks and keep up the fun videos! :-)

I, for one, did not click on this video by my free will. I clicked on it because of who I am , because of my inclinations, tastes and interests. And those I certainly did not choose. I learned what they are by introspection, the same way I learned what my favourite colour is, my favourite food or my sexual identity etc etc. I didn't choose my hobbies, my favourite colour; and I can't choose - for example - a different favourite colour tomorrow, or to be religios. I believe I clicked on this video because I always would've clicked on this video ; had I decided against it I always would've decided against it. And so on and so forth. Keeping it short. Because I decide to. Or did I?

Since my teenage years, I've tried but never quite understood what is meant by the notion of 'Free Will' meant, (its has a very fuzzy etymology and seems to be wholly made up by religious types and kept alive by philosophers). It's a totally superfluous concept. What is clear that we humans have a decision making capability that can be shaped to some extent and that is enough. I typically derive a lot of insight from Sabine's videos (a big thank to you, Sabine for that) but however most discussions I hear on free will by public intellectuals get convoluted and messy and this video is no exception.

"please, don't blame me of this, its bot my idea" speaks for everything.

My Grandfather was something of a philosopher, he was also a coal miner, and a doughboy in WW1. He'd been a few places and seen a lot of trouble and he told me once that a man had about as much free will as a rock in an avalanche. I guess that is really true.

Sabine is killing it with her humorous bits, smartly added throughout the serious stuff. I want more of it please.

Wow. I am a biologist whose dream died. I feel your pain. The 3-5 year grant period wrecks those who want to go down untrodden paths. I love your videos.

I read Michael Montaigne's essay on determinism when I was a teenager, and free will never made a shred of sense to me afterwards. The defenses of it seemed terrible, geniuses like William James and Sartre willingly choosing, in my eyes, to be stupid just this once. The idea of "will" itself, even the idea of a choosing entity, these are just made up ideas that form the structures of our perception. The burden of proof is on these suppositions, not the other way around

I had this realisation when I was 12 that every action was was caused by every action before it and so on, and nearly had a breakdown trying to find someone else who understood what I was talking about because none of my classmates or teachers or even older 20 year old friends on the internet at that time did. I didn't know that it was called predeterminism at the time and wasn't until a couple years later that I finally found out. Meanwhile all throughout my 12-14 year old school years, I was losing my mind arguing with both religious and non-religious teachers about how free will didn't exist because of this and it was awful because I thought I was going insane because no one else understood what I was saying.

hi!, im 16 and you're genuinely my favorite science youtuber. You always keep everything grounded while still discussing interesting topics, keep it up😁

“Let’s stick with the particles that are stable.” Good advice for every situation.

I've been thinking about this my whole life and came up with exactly the same conclusion as Sabine - free will at a individual level is just the output of what the brain's algorithm churns out. I have a computer science background, and this is exactly like a function that returns an output with deterministic inputs plus some random elements in the calculation. Without the randomness, you would get the same result every time if the inputs are exactly the same. People are mistaken the randomness as free will - I am deciding what I want to eat for lunch, and thinking it's free will. But it's just some calculation based on past experiences plus randomness that gave the final result.

Sabine's recognition of the provisional nature of science lends huge credibility to her message. Also, I love the deadpan german humour. We need more Sabines and less dogma!

You're nearing the the 1million mark. Congrats and well deserved. Very informative video as always.

Your videos are a joy to watch, Sabine.

There is a rather popular solution among neuroscientists for the quandary determinism poses (to some) which she didn’t mention, which is the illusion of free will as a byproduct of the mind and indeed its intrinsic complexity .. works for me

I love how Sabine can talk about complex topics in relatively simple language and still manage to throw in a few devastating jokes in a really subtle way. Where does humour come from? Is it a choice?

I once told my psychotherapist that I didn't believe in free will. He was very frustrated with me at that moment. He might have had a point. Even if we do not have true free will, it might not be psychologically healthy to shape your life around that belief.

Sounds pretty good to me. Very in line with the "be yourself is all that you can do" I believe in.

People hate the idea that there not in control of their life. And to tell them that it’s not true well you’ll get some that accepts it and others who will fight to the very end to defend that they are.

This may help to wrap your head around why you feel like you have free will when you actually don't: You can choose any option you want, but you can only choose the one you want. The one that is the result of the "calculation", as Wittgenstein puts it.

I have only recently come across your site, but definitely love it. Look forward to catching up with all your other videos. Keep up the excellent work. I bet it would be very interesting and satisfying to sit down and have a coffee with you.

This video was even more interesting than most of your videos. I love existential discussions! Personally, I believe that particles do have free will on some level, but your perspective sounds much more practical than mine.

There is one problem with this line of reasoning - consciousness. While the existence of free will is incompatible with our current understanding of physics, that understanding is deeply flawed with respect to consciousness. It’s not that modern physics is incomplete WRT consciousness, it is entirely silent on the subject. There is no understanding or description of it whatsoever. This is a problem because if free will did exist, then it’s consciousness that would be the operator of that free will. Eventually we will construct a new physics that will account for consciousness and it’s entirely possible that this new physics will be compatible with free will, or perhaps it won’t. So for now, I don’t think we can definitively say that free will does or doesn’t exist.

I hope so, because the idea that I am responsible for all the stupid things I do is horrifying.

I started watching this video, then I decided I wasn’t going to, and I ended up watching it anyway. I think it was determined that I would find out that my decisions are determined.

Your way to explain things is not just really clear but also hilarious😄

I love how Sabine compares the free will question as "simple" when compared to what happens "in LHC collisions" 🙂

I've had the definite sensation of being a passenger in my brain, that the whole free will thing was a useful illusion for day to day getting by, as long as you remember from time to time that your brain makes decisions and you then claim credit for them after the fact.

I'm so happy I discovered your chan! Your videos are always thought-provoking, thank you for that.

As a programmer, it's my nature to work with "functions" in the programming sense: input, processing, output. I see no difference whether it's a biological machine making decisions or a sophisticated enough AI. I believe all my characteristics are the results of the genes I inherited and largely the environment I grew up in. If time would rewind and I were put through the same experiences again, I wouldn't have made different decisions. And based on these previous experiences, I make my future decisions. If I got food poisoning from a restaurant, I would avoid it next time, probably no matter how many times time has rewind and have me go through the experience again. To put simply, humans are just like the current deep neural networks, or that deep neural networks are modeled after biology. We are constantly learning and constantly making calculations based on past experiences to arrive at a decision. If anyone can write down this decision function, we can't have free will because then it will be deterministic. This is what I've always believed in.

Actually the algorithm decided I would watch this video

To understand why we make the choices that we do we would have to be aware of all the reasons we made our choices, which is simply maddening. Our brain keeps us from being aware of our breathing, heart beat, all the mechanical activities our bodies automatically do to keep us sane and focused on what we are focused on…it’s an adaptation that has helped us thrive

As someone who suffers from indecision, I find this an absolute win.

I swear that I am your biggest fan! I believe in your words. You are such a critical thinker, and I admire clear speaking about deep thoughts. Thank you so much for putting your truth out there!

To me the question about free will is the same as the questions about destiny. But I think when we talk about destiny it is a bit less about our specialness so it is easier to discuss. And the great thing is that it is irrelevant if destiny exists because for example in order to achieve something in life you have to do something first. Whether you were meant to do this great thing or not is irrelevant because to the outcome is still the same retrospectively. So neither free will nor destiny is an excuse to do nothing, to fall into nihilistic behaviour or to do anything stupid.

I not only learn things from Sabine, I think that Sabine is hilarious. Great work. I have "decided"to keep listening regularly.

Dr. Sabine, Thank you very much for reopening this Topic with a wider range of research and study!

I actually had a rap-debate on this topic with a friend who's since passed on.

We are witnessing an equation solving it self. No free will

You are just awesome genuinely, the work you do and the way you bring it out! There should be more people like you in our society.

Fantastic video. As someone dealing with existential mental health issues my whole life, you learn early on in the therapeutic journey that we must see ourselves as observers of our thoughts without attaching to them. I like how you said you use your neural circuits and memories to make decisions. The past is determined so that means our new decisions are determined too. Thank you for touching on these subjects so conscientiously!

The key insight of this whole video that got me screaming at the screen "Yes, yes, Yes!". Was that the brain is a calculator and we can't know the result of the calculation until it's done. That waiting for the the calculation to be completed is what people call "Free Will". That sums it all up for me. That is, your brain is making decisions and doing comparisons and calculations, but given the same input it's just like any other calculator and it's going to come up with the same answer. There was a story on NPR a few years ago about a women with short term memory loss that reset every five minutes or so. Given the same input she would answer EXACTLY the same, the same face expression, the same way she paused, everything to the point it was hard to believe it wasn't just a repeat of the recording. That was extremely insightful to me that, yes, we are just organic computers.

Hi Sabine, if I may ask, can one test any statement about the existence of free will with an experiment, whose outcome could falsify the statement? Either now or in the future? If the answer is no, then doesn't the whole question about the existence of free will belong in the sphere of theoretical (or perhaps computational) astrology?

"And that is why, if you want to become a UKpostsr, you don't need to know anything." Sabine H. As always, your videos are always great. Sometimes, you even have great lines in them. Thank you for all your videos!

Glad to see you are getting closer to that 1mil milestone in subscription. You deserve a lot more of course

I've been saying this sort of thing to people for decades, citing the laws of determinism, cause/effect etc. I always get the same response... people deny that they are living their life on a train track and that they are in control of their own lives. Always missing the point. I actually take solace in the fact that I'm just a difference engine, weighing up everything as a "will I / won't I" decision, which has already been pre-determined based on factors beyond my control. It means nothing is actually ever my fault when it goes tits up. As I always say "I don't choose to like what I like. I was born, and this is what I am." People always think they choose what they believe in too, such as God. As if they have control over what they know to be true just by wishing it or denying it. Absurd.

I think a lot of people might be getting caught up on the will part and ignore the free part. It's like you said, of course we make decisions. We do have a will. But it's not free. It's predetermined by a bunch of factors. But for us humans in the day to day, it doesn't really make a difference. It only matters for bigger issues like climate change, as you pointed out.

it's actually even worse; your neurocircuitry comes to a conclusion, and then some other neurocircuitry makes up a story about how you came to that conclusion, but you never actually know

You do such great job explaining things so we can understand. I love your dry, serious humor. Cracks me up.

Wittgenstein died in 1951 but the graphic at 15:35 says 1939 and yes I can’t believe I noticed either

😅I love these sorts of discussions, unfortunately I have very few friends to discuss them with😔so its almost always online.

Had me at: "the ability to change the past, just by using their thoughts " brilliant.

Nice piece as always👍 Side question: Is the book coming out as audiobook as well (preferably in german and even more preferably spoken by sabine herself) ?

I love your videos and can feel my brain stretching when I listen to you. Thank you. But I can't help coming back to this one. The trouble with a purely deterministic universe (plus some randomness, or not) is that it eliminates the possibility of meaning. If all is ultimately determined, then I've just spent 20 minutes listening to some noise, bearing no relation to any external reality, and I'm just making some meaningless signs in the comment section. It is in the end very much a philosophical question, and not, I'm afraid, 'stunningly uninteresting'. Of course there is a great deal of determinism in the universe, of course my freedom of action can be reduced under certain circumstances to zero, of course my thoughts are not nearly as much my own as I like to think (see Daniel Kahneman, 'Thinking Fast and Slow'), but if there is not even the potential in the human mind for free will, however limited, then our - your - attempts at communication are valueless and can have nothing to do with something called truth. Free will may present difficulties to physicists, but it is philosophically indispensable.

People who act strongly deterministically and make decisions based on past events are generally also referred to as rational. I think determinism and free will are not even opposites in the end. Perhaps one is even strongly dependent on the other. After all, free will does not mean that you can make all decisions chaotically independent of the past. What we perceive as free will is ultimately nothing other than determinism itself.

Having to put an arrow pointing to you labeled physicist had me cracking up out loud. Thank you do much for making the world a better place by helping more people understand science.

“If free will doesn’t exist, then it never existed in the first place, so why does it matter?” will hold a firm grip on my perspective for a while 😆 Thanks so much for the video!! ✌️ 😁

In the end it even doesn't matter if free will exists or not. Your life is how it is and you do the stuff you do. Just have fun living and do whatever ever you think is the best, no matter if it is deterministic predefined or randomly chosen at the moment, it doesn't make a difference. The intention and the reaction counts, not how you got there. And yes, I tell this that way because I also had my time where I realized, that free will might not exists. My guess is, that the chance free will can exist is 1/3. 1/3 eliminates the possibility because of a completely deterministic universe, which doesn't seem to be real and the other 1/3 would be in an absolutely undeterministic universe, which would have violated physics. In the last third free will would be possible but doesn't mean it has to be real. We might be just extremely complex but not completely unpredictable.

So the answer on "making decisions" or "free will": you are set of particals and behavior of this set can be described using equation and some input must define only one output (and occasional 'random' jumps at that time do not increase "free" decision making). "So that you don't have free will doesn't mean you don't make desicions". Actually it is, your "decision" is only result of particals interactions. It is impossible logically jump from all this quite good explanation to conclusion "You decided to watch this video".

This is easily one of the best science channels on youtube, one of the best Pysics channels - I very much like how when you end up past physics and into philosophy not only do you recognize it you know your stuff about other philosophers!

LITERALLY keeled over at " and to be a youtuber you need to know NOTHING" classic and brilliantl humor, this my 1st time seeing you and i love u subbed and buying your book!! i love the brainy stuff!

I don't know what I'm going to eat for lunch next Monday, or if I will skip lunch entirely. But apparently, it's decided already, so no matter if I try to make my friend or a computer make the decision for me, I've already decided that as well. So I don't make decisions, since I don't have free will, yet constantly I feel like I'm making even really difficult ones, and sometimes being scolded for making bad decisions, even though I never made them. Seems kinda unfair. Especially since I can't look at the CMB and see what I'm going to have for lunch next Monday ☹

I do not be believe in the concept of free will. A person makes decisions based on experience, availability; and/or other factors. Love your candor 03/05/24

Ive always thought about this, like how everything that has ever or will ever happen can just be mapped to function that takes in an arbitrarily large amount of parameters. These parameters being the initial conditions that set things in motion to bring what all has happened in the past into fruition as well as bringing everything, that hasn't happened yet, but will happen, into fruition.

It definitely takes a lot of pressure off if my life decisions aren't mine. Maybe I'll just stop making decisions.

I found your video by chance....I think....It was like drinking from a fire hose. Every sentence deserves discussion. So enlightening! Worthy of study.

The following comes from "axiomatic" by Greg Egan. The story from which this quote is plays in a world in which people can communicate with their future selfs, thus knowing their future lifes. "Knowing the future doesn't mean we've been subtracted out of the equations that shape it. Some philosophers still ramble on about 'the loss of free will' (I suppose they can't help themselves), but I've never been able to find a meaningful definition of what they think this magical thing ever was. The future has always been determined. What else could affect human actions, other than each individual's - unique and complex - inheritance and past experience? Who we are decides what we do - and what greater 'freedom' could anyone demand? If 'choice' wasn't grounded absolutely in cause and effect, what would decide its outcome? Meaningless random glitches from quantum noise in the brain? (A popular theory - before quantum indeterminism was shown to be nothing but an artefact of the old time-asymmetric worldview.) Or some mystical invention called the soul ... but then what, precisely, would govern its behaviour? Laws of metaphysics every bit as problematical as those of neurophysiology. I believe we've lost nothing; rather, we've gained the only freedom we ever lacked: who we are is now shaped by the future, as well as the past. Our lives resonate like plucked strings, standing waves formed by the collision of information flowing back and forth in time."

"The idea that Will is all we need has led to utopian plans ... all of which is somehow magically supposed to pop out of nowhere if we just have the will. This belief in free will puts the blame on individuals when really the problem is the way we've organized our societies." Well said.

I agree with everything you said in this video. However, I think the problem of free will is of a slightly different nature (depending on the definition of "free will" of course, but that's always the case with everything). You spoke of the different scopes and languages that disciplines use, concerning different levels of emergent properties. I think the conflict between physicist's determinism and philosopher's indeterminism (or the insistence that there is something like free will even if that means that somehow quantum particles are supposed to have a free will too) comes from different ways the two disciplines approach the problem of how the human mind works. Philosophers start to look at phenomena of the mind itself, complex results of brain functions if you will, and try to go back to the most elementary level to find out how they work. This approach often leads to the conclusion that there has to be some kind of free will. On the other hand (and this is my subjective interpretation), physicists start to look at elementary particles and work their way up to find out how new properties emerge on higher levels of complexity. This apparently tends to lead to the conclusion that everything has to be deterministic, ultimately including the human mind. The physicist approach is that everything is ultimately a large equasion, while the philosophic approach is that the human mind possesses a non-reducable complexity beneath which every discussion is more or less futile. So I think the real problem is that we are not able to completely harmonize those two approaches. Between elementary physics and neural biology there seems to exist some sort of deterministic continuum, but there is a gap between our understanding of neural functions and our understanding of mental phenomena as philosophers see them. Perhaps we will be able to bridge this gap in the future, but this still would leave us with the problem of different approaches and logics of argumentation. So my conclusion from this would be: Everything in the universe is ultimately determined in some way or another, but that doesn't mean that there is no free will for us humans. It's just not the universal, independent free will that libertarians talk about. Perhaps one could call it a kind of "blurryness" resulting from our inability to combine the different approaches and levels of emergent properties into one great theory of the human mind that would enable us to understand everything about our thoughts. In terms of everyday life, and in terms of systematically dealing with phenomena of the human mind, we might as well assume the existence of a free will, because we can't, as the Wittgenstein quote you brought up says, practically predict the result of a thought process or decision before it happened. So one could say that our minds are deterministic, but not determined. (There might be the hypothetical possibility that a very advanced supercomputer could correctly calculate the outcome of a human thought or decision process before it actually happens but then we have the problem that it probably wouldn't be able to compute its own calculation process because that would require an even more complex computer, leading to an infinite regress. So from all that I can tell, we will probably never get rid of this "blurryness"). One final note: I think some philosophers, myself not excluded, tend to get a bit too defensive when confronted with physicists or biologists dealing with this kind of question. They might be under the impression that the other disciplines are encroaching on their territory or that they want to take away philosophy's right to exist. While every scientist probably thinks that his discipline is the most interesting and important, I also think that every discipline has its right to exist. As I said, it's a matter of different approaches, and the "philosophy of the mind" can tell us many things that neural biology or physics can't, not to mention the parts of philosophy that deal with normativity (like ethics or political theory).

I noticed a comment along the lines of - if we don't have free will we cannot judge someone for committing murder. Of course we can. Because our judgement of them will change how society acts, and if we're not to judge anyone for committing such an act, it would be far more prevelant. Not having free will and not being able to change the world around you are very different things. Your actions are a result of your own reasoning, so if you believe you cannot have an affect on the world or on your own life, you will act differently to if you think you can. Whether that was determined by a series of quantum effects and deterministic processes (which I believe it is) is mostly irrelevant

Oh Sabine...you may not be a psychologist or philosopher, but your comedy is superb. You're a superb professor also 😊

Thank you for such an interesting content its always well structured and detailed , one question can you explain more about random jumps and what are the cause of it ?

Love this video. I think it's clear most people don't even know what they mean by "free will", and they're picking the wrong aspect of it to get all angsty about it.

I’d say that free will is generally understood to mean the possibility that someone could have made a different decision from the one they made in the circumstances they found themselves. There may be situations in which a special definition of free will might be useful but using that definition in a general discussion is avoiding the question of whether there is free will. Another thing is the apparent misuse of so-called randomness and uncertainty for events for which the outcome can be statistically defined. These are slipped in as an avenue allowing for free will (and I particularly have quantum physics in mind). However, that would mean an ability to defy statistics (randomness and uncertainty) in choosing the outcome. I don't believe in free will, as it is generally understood to mean. That has implications for how we should change behaviour associated with reward and punish.

Loved the don't need to know anything thing if you're a UKpostsr. Very drole and often true but totally inapplicable in your case Sabine as one of the very best and my personal favourite.