Guys got a bunch of knowledge, but holy fuk the things he says in this video shows that he doesn't understand the concept of determinism

I'm not sure if he truly doesn't understand it or if he's simply deluding himself because it makes him feel better about the state of things

strong username to post content ratio

Jordan Peterson strikes me as someone who is genuinely pretty intelligent, but often uses that intelligence to justify some bs beliefs he has. He isn't a true logician, but he tries to frame himself out as one. He's smart enough to fool a majority of people into believing it, and has the conviction to do so because he most likely fully believes it himself.

Not sure if serious. Sam Harris' determinism is a philosophical disaster. The guy lost a ton of stock since he started debating outside his atheism sphere. As an atheist myself Harris and Dawkins are philosophical light-weights who only made a name for themselves by picking on the easy targets of fundamentalist christianity.

Funny you say that, because, I went into the Harris/Peterson discussion with hopes that Jordan would make a compelling case against Sam's arguments.

So it's not like I went into their discussion with a bias towards wanting Sam to be right, and Jordan to be wrong... it was the opposite, I wanted Jordan to show how/if Sam is wrong. Yet Jordans arguments were just not good, mostly. And this video shows me that he either does not understand Sam's argument fully, or he is deluding himself, either knowingly or unknowingly... Or there's actually a third option, he agree's with Sam, but he wants to protect his followers from the truth... I mean the truth hurts sometimes, and it might be for the best that you let certain people believe certain things, as it allows them to happily get on with their lives.

im pretty sure you can understand determinism and refuse to believe that people dont have free will.

are you just a peterson hater? srs

Agreed

He speaks in a very intellectual way and by doing so he is able to convince his fans that he what he says is true. For some reason people tend to give more credibility to someone like him when they don't even fully understand the meaning of what he says. Kinda like the crypto sheeps that can only use the same complicated arguments they see online but once you question them more fundamentally they can't answer.

I don't know that he really tries to frame himself as a logician, most of his beliefs and analyses (at least from what I've listened to, which is mostly biblical stuff) are from a psychological standpoint which doesn't necessarily agree with logic.

Why don't you *******s clean your room?

^this.

You can understand something, and refuse to believe something... not saying you can't

Not a hater of Jordan, i'm a big fan of Jordan Peterson.

I'm not a fan of how you and many like you pick sides though, and go straight to calling someone a hater for questioning someone elses idea/beliefs

I feel like I get these comments every time I make a thread challenging someones beliefs. Why is it that I must be a hater of someone... and not an admirer of someone, yet still want to challenge their beliefs?

That's what most career atheists do when debating religion; selectively debating the biggest fundamentalist idiots they can find on the subject. Very rarely will they respectfully debate someone who isn't borderline retarded and a biblical literalist.

he uses platitudes and tries to frame them as deep thought. he will never say something specific and counters any criticism as a misunderstanding of his "claims". he's a self help shill hiding behind the veneer of a psychologist

I'm not sure I'd call Jordan Peterson an Atheist. He actually makes this claim too, that people like Dawkins make the same arguments against god that a clever 13 year old would make.

is determinism the antithesis of free-will? from what i googled determinism seems to be a theory that actions are "determined" by natural laws.

but what exactly does that mean? for example, a natural law would be the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which is a binding physical law of our universe that essentially states that entropy has to increase over time. which means everything will break on a long enough time frame. in that sense, i would agree that you cant will something to not break, because that is determined by a natural law, but that doesnt seem like an argruement against free-will...

what i consider free-will to be is the action im taking in lifting up a pen on my desk is NOT determined by anything but my own will to do so.

Am wondering this too, I don't know much about determinism.

I took it to mean that actions are dictated by external elements, not just natural law. Like your environment has socially or culturally conditioned you to have the will to pick up the pen on your desk. Since your will to do so was influenced by other things, it isn't truly "Free" will.

Like, if you were not conditioned in any way and knew nothing about your environment, would you still pick up the pen?



someone tell me if I'm going in the right direction here.

smart move imo, like a tv preacher.

this the modern youtube version of a televangelist

What causes you to want to either lift up the pen, or not lift up the pen from your desk? You could reply "My freewill", but that would be to say that your will is free from cause and effect

Would you say your "Will" is free from cause and effect? I'm not trying to trick you or set you up for a follow up reply, but to think that your will is free from cause and effect is to say your "essence" is not of this universe... or well, to get deep, it could be to say that your essence IS the entire universe. But I mean, going down that route is one where it doesn't leave much for conversation

The best model imo is that there is no "free will" in the sense of you actually controlling outcomes, but there is also no exact determinism due to the probabilistic nature of quantum theory. Physicists use "free will" to mean outcomes that are not affected by the past. Note that this is completely different from the philosophical interpretation of "free will" that you see where people say their will is somehow able to control what they do and how they exist. On large scales, we have an approximately deterministic world, and our brains and bodies generally function in this regime. So, overall, we lead essentially deterministic lives, with some quantum randomness which we cannot control thrown in there.

If you think about it, much of the person you became is affected by your memories. When you were a child, initially, it was purely your genetic composition along with some epigenetic contributions that determined the architecture of your brain, that determined your responses to stimuli. You then formed memories which informed your future behavior. Eventually, you became the person you are. A lot of people think some kind of soul is involved in the decision making process, but there is not much evidence of this. It is also clear that when parts of the brain are damaged, you stop behaving the same way. There have been cases of people becoming perverted and sexually abusive to children due to a tumor in their brains. Srs. These were otherwise "good" people.

It is pretty clear to me that we are basically the equivalent of biological robots. What we call thinking is a complicated response to stimuli, and our brain often makes the calculation before we are even aware of our decisions consciously, as has been demonstrated by fMRI tests.

There is basically no free will, and there is a result in physics that says that if you have "free will" in the sense of your choices being independent of the past, then so must fundamental particles. I think the best analogy is a mousetrap. The trap is set, and it will respond when a mouse steps on it. The trap's "decision making process" amounts to simply being triggered by a mouse. It is not conscious or alive. A sufficiently complicated system of such "spring loaded traps" aka predetermined responses to given stimuli, along with the ability to record experiences and feed them back in as inputs can create a machine, that in my opinion displays behaviors similar to what we call "intelligence and consciousness". I believe physicists refer to such idealized machines as "information gathering and utilizing systems" or IGUS for short. Indeed, we are IGUSes...

I believe our "intelligence" is a kind of illusion. We are complicated enough that the overall determinism of our own minds is not obvious to us. However, remember that your brain is just a system of these particles working a certain way, and we also do know that if your brain is damaged, your mind will no longer be the same.

https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0403001
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem

keep blaming "determinism" for your failures in life. I'm sure that will work out in the long run

We do have the illusion of free will. Most people conflate the layers here (as explained by Brett Weinstein and Sean Carroll).

okay, well im that sense everything is dictated by the natural laws of the universe, including me picking up the pen. what im trying to say is the "will" to either pick it up on leave it be. i have a choice to do either, is that choice determined for me? i cant see a valid argument that it is. (i actually never picked up the pen)

i didnt watch the whole video but his idea of the chess game was pretty good. chess has a sub set of very defined rules that you cannot deviate from, but given those rules the amount of unique chess games that are possible is greater than the amount of individual atoms in the entire universe. at the beginning of each chess game it is impossible to know who will win the game, even though the game is dictate by set rules.

You could have just as easily said "Keep thanking determinism for your successes in life.", is it your thought that anyone who takes this view on the subject must be a failure? It would work both ways, if true

I can see an argument that free will is not free from cause and effect, but it doesn't have the implication that I feel like is being attached to determinism.

When presented with a choice, there are always aspects of the options that make one better than the other. If I am freely able to choose whichever option I want, I would choose the better option. So in essence the aspects that made that option more attractive havecausedme to choose it. But I was still free to not choose it, if I was so inclined. I think there is a big difference between external elements influencing your will and determining it.

You had the illusion of choice. I wouldn't say it's "determined" in the sense that we could theoretically predict future outcomes before they happen, due to the apparent (random) probabilistic nature at the quantum layer. But that is not something you control, soyoudidn't really have fundamental control in whether the pen was picked up or not.

See, I don't like that verbiage. To say he had 'the illusion of choice' implies he had no choice. Like, he couldn't have picked up the pen. Of course he could have.

At our scales, quantum indeterminacy plays virtually no role in outcomes. The future for us is overwhelmingly deterministic. (As it should be for life as a phenomenon to make sense. You take reasonable actions to avoid predictable outcomes. If the future were completely unpredictable, it would be difficult to justify any type of decision or show any trait to be adaptive, and lifeforms at our scales would likely never emerge.) Life requires a complicated set of prescribed responses to stimuli. For the selection process to make sense, these responses should elicit deterministic and predictable outcomes the vast majority of the time. That is one reason why there are no quantum lifeforms.

because he didn't- that's the whole point

that seems like a contradiction. if i never had control in making my action, then the outcome was determined, therefore all future outcomes would be predictable.

which is physically incorrect. you cant know if the cat is alive or dead lol.

maybe im just not understanding this properly...

Agreed.

I don't have beef with atheism in general, and granted Peterson isn't exactly one himself. I think he's a self help shill who tries to ride the fence on the issue of religion/atheism in an attempt to appease both without offering good arguments to support either side.

What I do take issue with beyond that is career atheists who essentially make a cult-like religion out of atheism while selling it as the ultimate source of logic and reasoning. I.e., people like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and even Christopher Hitchens to an extent. That is, they twist it into something it is not meant to be by making it a militant movement against all forms of "spirtuality".