“…we hear a lot about how human beings are kind of just biological machines and just biological robots and that our behaviour is being determined merely by the operations of our brains. Now, the problem with those statements is that they're almost entirely true if you take out the justs and the merelies, all right? Then it's suddenly not so scary. Because I don't know about you but I'm pretty confident I am, indeed, a biological machine, if that's what an animal is, right, and I'm also pretty sure that what is driving my thought, the sort of hardware, as it were, underlying the software of the mind, is the brain. So I'm quite comfortable with the idea that, yes, I'm fully part of nature and, in a way, I'm operating under nature's laws but does that mean I have no free will? Well, only if you think free will is some kind of magic which enables us to stand outside of nature and create our own identities from scratch. Who thinks that? We all know we take after our parents, for better or for worse, and so forth. So I think we just have a more modest idea of what free will is and it relates to the political actually. You're free to the extent your choices are genuinely yours, that they're not being coerced upon you, that you've had the opportunity to reflect upon them and think about them. Now, if underlying all of that is biological machinery, I'm quite relaxed about that.”
Is there no free will - “only if you think free will is some kind of magic which enables us to stand outside of nature” – brilliantly said
Free will for Bagnini here is just free choice, a political free will, an ability to simply act as one intends to without coercion or interference (?from the state, ?anyone). This is a watered down “free will” and one that Sam Harris says is not the free will that people labour under the illusion of.
“no matter what you know about the processes that underlie it, everything we do can only be a consequence of a combination of two things: nature and nurture. Exactly what the balance is, who knows, but what other thing could it be? What would it mean for you to make a choice which had nothing to do with nature or nurture? That would be to make a choice that came from nowhere. That wouldn't be valuable free will. That would be just kind of a random decision generator, right?”
Oh god. So good. Did I write this?
Is the idea that, as we gain more scientific understanding of inheritance and neuroscience that there is little room for a magical version of free will, scary?
“Well, people are scared but I don't know why because, as I say, for all the time there's been human beings people have said, "Oh, look, he’s just like his mother, just like his father," right? But when people say, “Oh, you’re doing that because of your genes," it's suddenly scary but it’s exactly the same thought in scientific terms, isn't it?
Awesome.
Still Tony Jones doesn’t get it so he has to ask again..
“I mean, don't humans inevitably meet forks in the road of their lives where free will dictates which way they go? “
Bagnini patiently explains (again..!) (Is Tony Jones getting dumber?)
“I think the important thing is that if you think of free will as some absolute capacity to leap free of your conditioning and your experience and make a choice in a vacuum, that's not what happens at the fork in the road. You see, I think free will is something you can have more or less of. It’s the more you are able to reflect on what you do, to make the decisions for yourself rather than to be coerced by this, the freer it is. And so what happens at a fork in the road is there’s a sense in which at that particular moment, given your life experience to date, it is inevitable you're going to go one way or another. But the point is that point of inevitability has been reached as part of kind of your own story. So, you know, some people say that can't be free will but I think the alternative is just some kind of magical fantasy of just being able to escape the normal run of the universe and create ourselves from nothing.”
Could he say it any more clearly people…!!!
