Moving this video to mauz15's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

*beg

Sending this video to Beggar's Canyon to plea for a little attention - beg requested by original submitter mauz15.

Unfortunately, i think this either went over my head, or i simply didn't see any real conviction towards an answer of "do we have free will in a morally relevant sense?"

So i almost feel like he has been telling me things that i knew were true (assuming determinism is true) and have decided or theorised these things independantly and on my own - but without giving me the information that he seems to be presenting as new. Which i believe is that we may have free will even under determinism in a morally relevant sense.

Free will in a morally relevant sense, in my head, is translated to "Are we responsible for our actions given a deterministic universe?" And the argument never seems to get into swing. I feel i have been presented with no new information or argument to sway my opinion.

But it may have gone over my head. When discussing or listening to things like these, i have no formal education on them, but i have thought about them in my own mind for as long as i can remember. This obviously leaves me behind on terminology and such.

I don't know if i should feel proud of myself that i was pondering all this when i was 6 years old. I used to ride a bike, and wonder whether God (i wasn't religious, God was simply my all-knowing observer with infinite calculating power) would know if i was going to turn left or right. And i would wiggle the handle bars but ultimately know that, if God DID know what i was going to do (ie. if the universe was deterministic) then he would even know that i was going to make an attempt to trick him. Not because he could see the future, but because he knew the culmination of all my life experiences and that this is the decision i would make. And i even used to argue with my sister that just because she could hit a target i couldn't didn't mean that she was better, because she may have had a favourable wind, or it was fractionally warmer than when i took the shot, etc.

Or was the purpose of this to make me ask the question "Am i morally responsible in a deterministic universe?"

I think i'm a little too tired to even get out what i want to say. I also want to know why we're to assume we're in a deterministic universe when the uncertainty principle shows us that we CANNOT accurately predict a future snapshot of the universe from a snapshot of it. And if we're to also assume that the uncertainty principle is determined (if you know the right variables), then why did he actually state that the snapshot example was proven to be false when he mentioned it!?

I'd love to discuss it, if anyone knows what happened here and has the patience.

'Brehon Law' was the law of ancient Ireland, thousands of years old, the most successful and persistent law in the world.

It was not about punishment, it was about rectifying and correcting harm that had been caused, and whomever caused the harm had to correct it at his own cost and with his own time.

Punishment is most certainly crime.

If you look hard enough and long enough, you will realise that science, like religion, has nothing to say about free will.

dannym: The reason we cannot accurately predict the future in our universe, is that because we exist inside the universe, the mere fact that we start measuring means we change the result. If you could observe the universe from outside the universe and account for every detail, then we live in a deterministic universe. This means that in the strictest sense, we do not have free will. We however have the most free will of anything we've ever observed, and thus our society is made as though we have free will, and we live as though we have free will.

We can never break our free will, because we live inside our own universe, in which it seems that we do have free will.

Irishman: Science has plenty to say about free will. Religion too, but that's mostly because it serves their purpose - if God is all knowing, all powerful etc. we need free will to have any form of morality to be distinct from him, if we don't have free will then everything bad that happens because of people is his fault. I think that's why free will was invented in the first place (but there probably is an evolutionary reason for its existence).

^dannym3141
I think the crucial part is when he talks about Austin's putt (around the 55 minute mark) and what follows after. At least that's what did it for me.

The point as I saw it is that whether you could have done otherwise given the exact same conditions is morally irrelevant because you cannot know the exact conditions anyway. What's relevant is whether you could have done otherwise given approximately the same conditions, because all decisions are made on the basis of approximations anyway.

When we judge whether a certain action is right or wrong we never know the exact circumstances that led to these actions. So what we actually judge is a class of situations in which the circumstances resemble each other to varying degrees. Determinism breaks down in the face of such uncertainties, and is therefore irrelevant to the morality of the action.

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The duration of this video has been updated from unknown to 1:23:38 - length declared by Boise_Lib.