In this video I explain why free will is incompatible with the currently known laws of nature and why the idea makes no sense anyway. However, you don't need free will to act responsibly and to live a happy life, and I will tell you why.
Sabine Hossenfelder: You Don't Have Free Will, But Don't Worry
IN ARGUING AGAINST what Sabine Hossenfelder said about the impossibility of us having free will due to such a thing having to contradict "the laws of physics" I was accused of possibly violating the ban on "arguing from consequence," a novelty in my experience so I thought I should think it out.
I looked for a standard definition of this claimed "fallacy" and decided to settle on what an atheist-materialist Youtuber probably did, one of those would be smarty-pants atheist materialists who put up websites of such things. Here's what the Wikipedia article on it starts with:
Appeal to consequences, also known as argumentum ad consequentiam (Latin for "argument to the consequence"), is an argument that concludes a hypothesis (typically a belief) to be either true or false based on whether the premise leads to desirable or undesirable consequences. This is based on an appeal to emotion and is a type of informal fallacy, since the desirability of a premise's consequence does not make the premise true. Moreover, in categorizing consequences as either desirable or undesirable, such arguments inherently contain subjective points of view.
Here is what the next one Google threw at me says:
Description: Concluding that an idea or proposition is true or false because the consequences of it being true or false are desirable or undesirable. The fallacy lies in the fact that the desirability is not related to the truth value of the idea or proposition. This comes in two forms: the positive and negative.
Since Wikipedia is under the constant ratfucking, um, "editing" of dedicated materialist-scientistic-atheist groups and the later one looks like it's put up by a member of the same ideological side, that's enough to start with. Though I wouldn't regularly rely on that kind of stuff.
Since Hossenfelder's arguments against free will are that it violates physical law her argument was a far more direct example of "arguing from consequence" because undelying it were several things she holds as desirable which she wants to protect with her arguments against free will:
a. the truth and totalistic efficacy of her conception of physical laws and their extension well past where physical law can be known to hold any validity,
b. the exclusive and totalistic nature of material existence to not only explain everything but to comprise everything,
c. the non-existence of anything that renders either of those false or untrue or diminishes their exclusive status as true. That is the essential and always unstated position of every scientistic-materialistic atheist I've ever encountered whenever they talk about such things.
Based on that I would say that if anyone was relying on argument from consequences, it was the atheists in the argument, including most of those in science who come up with assertions that they've demonstrated that. I would say any time any of them, especially the ideologues who call themselves "skeptics" argue against something because "it violates the laws of science, physics, etc." they are making a hidden appeal to consequences, supported by an unadmitted and rather massive skeleton of such desired consequences. Though those very desires are often stated within the very arguments they make.
Their argument fails entirely if someone doesn't accept that their ideological totalitarian system comprises the entirety of reality or can credibly explain it. And it doesn't make sense on its own terms.
In the case of asserting the materialistically deterministic and reductionistic character of our minds, what Hossenfelder takes up in her video-essay, the consequences for her preferred ideology are as real as it is for the things she doesn't like because they don't fit into her preferred ideological straight-jacket, more real, in fact because of the rigid and exclusionary monism of her preferred materialism. Nothing she likes, science, physics, up to and including the mathematics and logic that those should be based in (though often, as even she points out, that is more honored than practiced) can possibly escape the acid of discrediting any more than those ideas and thoughts she not only rejects but disdains. You should be careful when you throw such universal acid because it will eat through a lot more than you intend it to.
I will not go into the very long passage I wrote about the stupendous improbability of any one individual organism or a small group of organisms having the correct antecedent physical materials in their brains so as to produce, out of all the random possibilities of what could be there and what those could result in being true in a significant way but I would guess if such a probability could be accurately worked out it would make the near impossibility of a universe producing intelligent minds pale in remote probability. The typical atheist confronted with such an assertion would immediately make resort to those creator gods of atheism "natural selection" and "DNA" though I bet the probability of them explaining how Sabine Hossenfelder and her fellow ideologues managed to twig onto the truth as those creator gods left so many of their equally and not infrequently far more reproductively successful human beings in the dark would not be significantly more probable. Clearly many minds don't seem to contain the material antecedents of her kind of scientistic, materialistic atheism, that would seem to be a rather rare thing. You might call it "improbable." I think it might just add another layer of improbability onto what I already laid out. If they did twig onto it in such numbers it must be through some miracle that their own ideology detests as repugnant.
I have pointed out that her very attempt to change the minds of her audience proves that she, herself, rejects those consequences of her position that she doesn't like the logical consequences of it. She has that in common with every single other atheist I've ever read on this except, possibly Nietzsche who was a pathological amoralist and loved to contemplate violence that he, himself, was too much of a coward to practice and the far more admirable Richard Lewontin who admitted the truth that his rejection of things outside of his materialistic-atheist ideology was merely a matter of preference and not hard reasoning.
For me, not being a materialist monist, or a monist in matters of material or mental experience, I don't have any problem with the idea that science, mathematics, logic can find things generally and sometimes specifically true about physical reality nor that human beings can make judgements about their experience and observations (observations being a category of experiences) that can be true and honest and that those have actual significance on something other than chance and probability.
That's one of the things I guess I should think on more. Being a non-materialist has freed me from that kind of monist straight jacket. Perhaps that's the reason that atheist-materialists are so dubious about the possibility of free will, their system doesn't allow them the freedom to accept it, it doesn't even allow them to really take a hard look at what their ideology confines them to thinking about. Materialists reject freedom and aren't too good at getting the benefits of it.
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