Based Camp: Can Determinists Believe in Free Will?

Episode • Jun 2, 2023 • 36m

Written by an evil AI for SEO purposes: Title: Unraveling Free Will: A Discussion on Determinism, Quantum Physics, and Consciousness Description: In this engaging and thought-provoking video, join hosts Malcolm and Simone as they delve deep into the philosophical debate around determinism, free will, and the role of quantum physics in our understanding of the universe. Stemming from their Calvinist backgrounds, they present a unique secular viewpoint on determinism and its compatibility with free will. They explore the concept of free will as an emergent property of reality, interacting with a mechanistic universe. This enlightening discussion will challenge you to reconsider your understanding of free will and determinism. Whether you are a scholar of philosophy, quantum physics enthusiast, or someone who is simply curious about the universe and our place in it, this video promises a riveting exploration of these complex concepts. Don't miss this insightful exploration into the nature of free will, the determinism of the universe, and the role of quantum events in shaping our reality.Translation:So a person may say, well, because the future isn't exactly determined, because there is variability added by, for example, quantum events or, or, or by timeline branching, right? That means that we don't live in a deterministic universe, and thus the, the problems created by a deterministic universe as it relates to free will don't exist within our reality.

Whereas the problem that it's created by a deterministic universe for free will is that regardless of your free will, the future will always only end in one way. This is what people who are against, you know, who think these two things they're in a battle will believe. The problem is, is it doesn't actually fix the problem because the only way that free will like meaningfully exist, like the the problem, the in compatibility with free will and determinism.

The reason it comes into play is because your free will isn't shaping the future. If the future is shaped by random quantum events that have nothing to do with your free will, but are probabilistic occurrences in the fabric of reality, then your free will has all of the same problems it has in a completely deterministic universe.

Without quantum events, what needs to happen for free will and the way that that people who believe that free will is incompatible with determinism want free will to work. The way it has to work is free will. The events of sort of your consciousness or your sentience have to be able to change the course of the universe.

They have to be able to essentially break the laws of physics, and I personally don't understand why this would be a comforting thought. So from our perspective, the things I am thinking. Are completely determined by the things that have happened to me before and who I am, sort of my existing state to want free will to matter within this context.

Either who I am needs to not matter, or the things that have happened to me before need to not matter. Basically, you need sort of a random number generator within every person's consciousness in a way that actually removes autonomy from them.

Yeah, because then it's not you. If it's not, if it's neither your nature nor your nurture that causes your actions, what?

What kind of free will is

that?

📍 Hello, Malcolm. Hello

Simone. What are we talking about today? Our

mechanistic universe.

Our deterministic worldview. Yes. So we had mentioned this in a previous podcast as something that's really important to how we see the world, different. Cultures can sometimes see things in different ways, and sometimes those ways they see things can continue even after the culture.

Secularizes. This is one thing with us. We both come from Calvinist backgrounds and one of the most famous things about the Calvinist tradition is that it has a deterministic view of the universe that it believes the future is already written, and we as secular individuals still believe this

now, let me explain what I mean here. This doesn't mean that we don't live in a universe with splitting timelines. We might live in a universe with splitting timelines. However, those timelines don't split based on any aspect of our free will. They split based on quantum events. Our free will is an emergent property of reality.

But it also interacts with reality. And this is a really interesting thing about determinism that I think a lot of people miss, is they think that a belief in determinism is antagonistic to a belief in free will when I think it really isn't. So I'll explain what I mean by this, starting from a religious perspective.

So when I look at the decisions that I made yesterday from where I stand today on the timeline, all of those decisions are set. They only could have happened in one way. However, yesterday when I made those decisions, I had free will in every one of those decisions I was making. Yet God exists outside of the timeline.

He is looking at the timeline as a third party observer, able to see the whole timeline at once. His perspective of any point in time is the same as my perspective of any point that happened in the past. And as such, he does not interfere with free will, even though the timeline might be preset.

And this is where the splitting universes becomes relevant to a deterministic perspective. So what we mean by determinism from a secular perspective is that our free will is an emergent property of the mechanistic nature of reality. What we mean by determinism is that fundamentally matter and reality is basically a mathematical equation.

So there is a mathematical equation that governs how the universe interacts. And it may not be exactly an equation, it may be a set of rules, but it determines how every individual molecule will move based on where that molecule was before. Our free will is an emergent property. Of the movements of these fundamental forces of reality, and yet that emergent property can interact with the future, but not in a way that breaks these physical laws.

So while we may live in a branching timeline, our free will has nothing to do with how that timeline branches that timeline is branching based on, if not random, Physically structured and mathematically predetermined quantum events. As such, we have free will. My free will does determine the actions I take in the future.

However, that free will also completely exists within the mathematical construct of our reality.

So what this means is that if someone had the capacity mentally or with some kind of crazy super computer, one could technically probably predict every small action. That would take place in a universe. Of course, they would be like quantum branching and I don't really know how that would play out, but you could still technically know everything that will happen because things will fall in place like clockwork.

Right?

Where quantum branching added variability to potential future events. Free will played no role in that variability, right? And thus, it is not relevant to the question of whether you can have free will in a deterministic universe. Hmm. Do you understand what I mean when I say that? Can you maybe word that in a different way?

I do not understand what you're saying. Okay.

So a person may say, well, because the future isn't exactly determined, because there is variability added by, for example, quantum events or, or, or by timeline branching, right? That means that we don't live in a deterministic universe, and thus the, the problems created by a deterministic universe as it relates to free will don't exist within our reality.

Yeah, because then it's not you. If it's not, if it's neither your nature nor your nurture that causes your actions, what?

What kind of free will is

that? Yeah, it's a meaningless, free will to us. A world in which a person has this sort of random number generator, free will, I guess I'd call it, is a world in which you have less meaningful free will. So from our cultural perspective, you have more meaningful. Free will in a deterministic universe, then you have in a non-deterministic universe, and, and again, we have to group deterministic universes into two categories.

A deterministic universe in which you can totally predict the future, or a deterministic universe in which there is some level of probability, but that probability isn't influenced by free wills.

Now, what are your thoughts on this, Simone? How does this affect how you see the world?

One thing that I encountered the first time I heard this kind of argument was that it would be dangerous for people to spread this information because it would give people the impression that they weren't responsible for every action they took.

And at first I just accepted that at face value, and now I think it's a fairly ridiculous assertion because no, it's, it's really dumb per this worldview. You know, every, every single action that you take is 100% your responsibility. It is a product of your nature and your nurture. And it also 100% affects how the world works.

You know, it's, it's like if you're looking at a giant Rube Goldberg machine and you see like that there's this, this. Portion at which a ball bounces off of something bouncy. Maybe you're that bouncy thing in this universe, but that's still something that affects how the universe works. It's still something that matters.

And so I, I think that's, that's important. And of course, every experience you have, every belief you hold is going to affect these outcomes. That is the, the, the, the. The nurture element of what causes you to do what you do. So these things, your beliefs, your viewpoints, really, really matter. And I think what's interesting about our mechanistic view of the universe and how it also dovetails with Calvinism and other like sort of more theistic Mechanistic views of the universe is that it really, to me has kind of the opposite effect.

Instead of making me think, oh, none of my choices matter, I'm not responsible for anything I ever do. I have this feeling like, Oh my gosh, I could really matter. I'm really extra super responsible for what I do because everything that I believe will affect how I act. And so my beliefs really, really matter.

And you see a lot in Calvinist tradition or history. You know, you see the like, Early colonial pilgrims writing like, oh gosh, like, am I saved? Am I a really important person or no? No. I'm like, I'm wretched. I'm horrible. I'm damned. I'm, I'm a terrible person. And they, they're really thinking a lot about their position in the mechanistic universe, am I going to be something that matters?

Am I not going to be something that matters? And I think they're also acutely aware of. How their beliefs affect these things, right? Like if, if you have the hubris to believe that you are that you are redeemed, you are saved, maybe that means that you're depraved and that you're not saved because what kind of holy person would believe that they're superior and actually good, right?

But then once you believe that you're damned and you're super dedicated to try to redeem yourself. Then you start to see, you know, there's this weird

oscillation between, well, this is something which I think is really important in, in terms of radical self responsibility, is when you see the world this way, it means you're, you're, you're responsible even for your own thoughts.

Yes. You know, if you have a thought, and this is something you saw in Colonial Calvinists and stuff like that, which would make you a bad person, then you had to think. Oh my God. This thought may mean that I actually am one of the people who is predestined to go to hell. Mm-hmm. That I actually was created as like this joke, this, this foil to the saved.

Mm-hmm. Um, And so you are responsible for everything that goes through your head. Everything. That's the component of who you are. Yeah. It's

like hyper agency. It's super

hyper agency. Hyper, yeah. And, and this is what, when we talk about hyper agency, you know, I think a, a way to explain this to somebody who might have trouble.

You know, ganking, I guess is the word they use these days, what you're saying. Um, Oh, grokking, grokking, grok. That's what the kids say, right? I don't ganking fancy new words. So suppose you have a murderer, right? And this murderer says, Oh, I'm not really fully responsible for murdering these people because I was abused as a kid.

Right? That is a level of not taking responsibility. That is possible even in a universe where people believe in free will because they still believe that some things influence an individual when you take full ownership over the fact that yes, you are a creation of the things that happened to you in life.

And you get to, to some extent, choose, and you are destined to either choose or not choose to overcome those things and take total self ownership. You don't get to ever say, I don't have responsibility for this decision, or I don't have responsibility for this emotion. I'm allowing myself to feel because it's who I am as a human, or because my parents did X, Y, or z.

No, every, everything you have is part of who you are and so what you're searching for constantly within yourself, and you're trying to prevent. Is that you are the type of pre-programmed person who does evil things, who succumbs to the flow of society rather than trying to determine what's good and what's bad and going down the good path no matter what you have to face, going down that path.

And, and I love that level of radical self determinism that you never can say, it's not my fault. Because something that happened to me before, because I was abused, because of something in society, because of, because all of us are complete constructs of the things that have happened to us in the past.

And the way we judge ourselves is whether or not all of those things created somebody who tries to overcome that and take responsibility for themselves or not. And I really love the way you put that sort of, what is it, radical agency. Yeah.

I'm trying to think about how, because I don't think either of us held this mechanistic view of the universe when even we first met.

I'm trying to think. Yeah, I think a little bit, but not as strongly as I do now because it was always sort of a weird outlier thing I thought before, and then I started talking with Simone about it and it became part of our like regular daily conversation. Part of the way we held ourselves to account for everything.

Uh, you know, there's, there's never an excuse, there's never an excuse. You either took, made the decision that was optimal, given your moral framework, or you didn't, and you either developed immortal framework as dissociated from the influences of society as possible and, and tried to go to a first principles approach as much as possible while still being true to sort of your traditional view of the world.

You know, understanding that you are a product of those traditions, but trying to optimize them or you don't. And I, uh, I, I think what it was is I held this view before, but I didn't live by it. When I met you, you really lived by it in a way that sort of almost shamed, uh, the portion of my brain that said, no one can really handle this level of responsibility.

And through that, shining example, you proved to me who I could be and I started moving along that path, and I think a way that sort of created a feedback loop between us.

Hmm. Yeah. A very, a very useful feedback loop. Oh, I'm, now I'm just trying to model or understand the key differences in worldview between.

A universe in which everything that will happen has happened. And time is an illusion that we're experiencing based on sort of our biology and some weird glitch of our consciousness that, that view versus a view in which, I guess what would we call this?

A procedural world. A procedurally generated world. What, what is the opposite to this and, and what are the implications

of Generated world would still always have the same outcomes dependent on its pro previous states. That's true. I guess I call it a r a random number generator, consciousnesses. That's the way I see it.

I think to have the other perspective, you need to believe that the physical world doesn't really exist in a meaningful sense. Hmm. And that the thing that exists in a meaningful sense is people's consciousnesses and people's sentiences, and that they are manifesting the physical world to some extent.

I, I think that's really the opposite perspective. Well, yeah, because

I, I'm, I'm genuinely struggling to understand how you could not believe that the world is,

and again, I think this is a cultural thing, so it's one of the things we talk about in our book is. People hugely underestimate how quickly humans evolve and how quickly humans can co-evolve with.

A belief system. And that if, you know, if we both have come from Calvinist traditions that the individuals who didn't naturally just see the world this way, left the tradition and that individuals in their community, you know, regardless of their ethnic background or, or, or where they came from, who did see the world this way, drifted into the community at a much higher rate.

This is what we mean when we say the sociological aspects of an individual. Determined at, the genetic level, are much less determined by. Things like ethnicity, which takes hundreds of thousands of years to change and more things like Optin community such as religious traditions or where an individual chose to, to to live ancestry, like where they moved.

Like Silicon Valley's a good example of this. You know, in the Gold Rush, people who moved to Silicon Valley disproportionately we're taking. Really high payout, low probability of success bets. And then, is it any surprise that like the Silicon Valley ecosystem arose there for a completely different set of reasons, and it wasn't, it wasn't based on like one ethnic group or anything like that.

It was basically a beacon from everyone from everywhere in the world who was like, okay, uh, I have a mindset. That is predispositioned to low probability, high reward payouts. And this is how you can get people. Who like us, who see things in a culturally biased way and are just incapable of seeing it outside of that cultural bias.

And this is something that I think we should try to correct for if we have some sort of biological bias towards seeing the world in an incredibly deterministic fashion. However, I don't really know, like if you look at like our wider philosophy, This is why we believe in cultural pluralism .

I actually think that there are some benefits to having specialized ways of seeing the world within some subpopulation groups and that, you know, like there's some aspects of Judaism that I like try to engage with and I just can't get, like the snake oven story. I can do that as a cultural outsider and it just feels wrong to me.

You should, I probably explained

this story for context. Okay.

Three rabbis are having a disagreement around whether a, uh, an oven is kosher or not. I can't remember. One of them was like, it's either kosher or not kosher. Anyway, he says, it's definitely not God talks to me.

Uh, he, I have a personal relationship with him and he has told me, It's not kosher or it is kosher. I don't remember what he was arguing and the other two said, no, you've gotta look at, our traditions and it clearly the, you know, taking the other side of the argument here.

And he's like, no, no, no, no, no. Here, watch. Like I, he's like, I understand, like I agree with you that based on our traditions or whatever the tourist says, like, you guys are right, but God has told me that that's not true, and I can prove it. Look, if uh, if it's not true, then the rain will fly upwards. The, that river will move backwards.

That building over there I just pointed to will randomly explode. Like I don't remember all the things he did, but he just did a number of like impossible miracles on command saying, God, if you believe this, do this miraculous thing in the universe. And. He was the villain. He was wrong. And he was supposed to be wrong.

He was supposed to know better. And the other rabbis, they go to God and they're like, look, God, I'm sorry, like you disagree with us. But um, uh, this is basically outside your jurisdiction. And then um, uh, uh, God laughs like he takes his humorously and he's like, well, I guess what is it? It is not in heaven.

Or something like that. And, and, and the point being is that sort of the legalistic interpretation of things, the cultural interpretations of things matters more than the objective truth of those things. From like a fun, because I'm assuming that God has more access to like objective truth than humans.

I mean, there's different ways you can, you can read this, but like from a different cultural perspective, I just, it, it seems. It seems so obviously wrong, and I think the same way that many people can look at our deterministic view of reality, and it just seems obviously wrong, but I believe we live in a better world where certain humans are programmed to see the world one way, and certain humans are programmed to see the world another way, and that I can talk to those humans congenially and gain access to this different perspective of reality.

They have. And this is why it is so important to us to maintain this cultural pluralism. People wonder why we're so like fervently and fanatically worried where they're, they're like, well, you believe that you and your, your descendants will be okay in the face of population collapse. Why are you worried about saving other people?

Is because other people are different from us. That's the advantage, and this is where it gets so crazy when people are like, you guys are racist, or You only want people like you to exist in the future. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. Like we've got us covered. What we're terrified about is the people who see things in a way that we can't begin to understand.

That's what we're afraid is gonna disappear because they have some perspective of reality that our brains aren't built to model. Yeah.

Like I see it as a, a genuine moral failing on my part, that I'm having difficulty modeling or understanding a non mechanistic view of the universe. And imagine a world in which I couldn't go on to like, Reddit or some other place online, YouTube and like find someone's multiple people's explanations of this.

Imagine a world in which I can't course correct for that. That is not a very good world.

Yeah. But I mean that's also part of a Calvinist perspective. Your intrinsic wretchedness. Well, no, but this is also something that we really believe about ourselves, is that humans, uh, at any specific point in time are a failed race. We are wretched and, and, and horrible, and we will constantly fail.

That doesn't absolve us from responsibility to try to overcome our limitation. And so we can accept that we have these intrinsic limitations. They may even be biological limitations. So that means our brains process reality, but the fact that we are wretched and limited does not free us from the responsibility of trying to overcome that.

Yeah, totally. And to that extent, I love that you take that responsibility on and, I am just so honored that , you Really forced me to live with my values, Simone, because it wasn't something I was doing before we got into a relationship, and I really appreciate that.

I, I'm glad that you are diluted into thinking that somehow I'm making you better person.

But yeah, I mean, This is all very interesting stuff. Uh, and I, I love having these conversations with you because I can just kind of dumbly muse about something and you'll make it a thing, and then suddenly your lives are different because we're committing to some kind of new world for you, or set of values that like really, , changes our views and makes us better people more effective.

So, , I think the one final thing I'd like to talk about within this subject is, the concept of in minority report, there are the precogs, right? There are these psychic people who are able to tell when you are about to commit a crime, and they will arrest you before you commit your crime, so that you.

Don't commit it. And then there's this sort of moral question of, well, but if you haven't committed the crime yet can you really be arrested? Like, that's not fair. And we're entering an age in which now there are polygenic risk scores for all sorts of things. You know, right now they're for things like gum disease and brain fog and certain types of cancer, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's.

But I'm sure in the future there will be polygenic risk scores for like, Murdering people and, stealing things and violence assault, uh, risks of all sorts of bad behaviors. Embezzlement, you know, there, there could probably be polygenic, risk, risk for all sorts of, of behaviors. Maybe not something that's

specifically, well, I mean, you know what I mean?

The answer to this is obvious. A genetic propensity from a Calvinist perspective is not, predestination. Yeah. Everything is nature and nurturing. You have responsibility for mastering yourself and therefore you cannot punish someone for it. Mm-hmm. Until they do. And we don't believe we live in a minority report universe because no one has access to this total information.

E except for a God. Right. And, you know, we do believe in a God, uh, other people don't. But what I would say is, is. That God is already punishing or rewarding us based on the decisions we're going to make from a Calvinist cultural perspective. So, uh, we already live in a minority report, okay? So it, it, it's, it's irrelevant.

As a question to pontificate upon upon it is the height of human immorality. To think they can pass these judgements on other humans in, in fact, passing these judgements on other humans means that you probably deserve to be punished. Uh, you're one of the bad guys. You know, that's the classic Calvinist perspective, which is to say if you think that you are in the saved group, you almost certainly are not.

The Schrodinger, you know, the, the, the I love you because you're beautiful. Uh, no, I, it's , you're beautiful because you don't know you're beautiful. Which of course creates the recursive loop, which is as soon as she realizes that someone could be beautiful because they don't know they're beautiful, then she knows she's beautiful. But through knowing she's beautiful, she's not beautiful.

It's the same thing as being a good person uh, from a Calvinist or secular Calvinist perspective.

Well, then what would you say about also the recent, I would say surging meme, that people, I guess, shouldn't be arrested or punished if they have gotten a bad role of the dice in our mechanistic universe.

Like, oh, well you were born to an abusive family. You've lived a tragic life, and now you're. Assaulting people on the streets, you shouldn't be jailed.

It's not fair. There's some things that, that, that you inherited, some everything you are is a result of the reality that existed before you. Mm-hmm.

Therefore, you are always, when a hundred percent responsible for who you are. Mm-hmm. I, I mean that's unfortunate, but it is who you are. It is the painting that was painted by reality. Mm-hmm. The, the problem with that mindset is they want the world to be fair, and this is one of the many ways that fairness causes evil because it removes moral responsibility from the individual.

So the response that our worldview has to that view is essentially the world is not fair. Rise

above. Yeah. And that these people are not any more or less responsible for their actions than. Anyone else in the world, everyone is completely a product of, of their environment, their genes, and their past experiences.

The, the fact that that's the case does not absolve you from responsibility. Those things may have made that person a bad person, deserving of punishment, but it made that person a bad person deserving of punishment. It created that evil, and when you absolve a person of that, you lead to much higher rates of negative actions across society.

When a person thinks they're not responsible for their own actions, actually this, this brings me to a point. That you see historically, and it's something that you know, one of the things we ask in our, the pragmatist guided to crafting religion is why, you know, so both the pr, the, the Calvinists and the Quakers were anti-slavery.

Yet if you look at Calvinist slave ownership rates, they were like 0.5%. You look at Quaker slave ownership rates, which you can see from Wills go through the book for citations on this. Don't just take it from me. They were like 40 to 70%. They were really high. And the question is, is wait, what? I thought that they were anti-slavery.

And, and they were anti-slavery. Like morally, they thought slavery was bad, but they just did it anyway. And so the question is what was happening there? Right? And I think here you have the two extremes on these ideas of free will, ? From the perspective of a Calvinist, if they even thought about owning a slave, if they even considered the idea, they were proving to themselves that they were a bad person and that they were always gonna go to hell, no matter what.

Through having those thunks, through allowing yourself to become a bad person through allowing yourself to even be the type of person who might do that, you, you prove your inevitable fate at the end of the timeline, whereas to the Quaker, Well, you know, uh, in the moment they were really doing it for good needs.

They could, treat the slave well. They, they could, over the course of the time, oh, uh, do more good deeds in the future than they'd done in the past. Uh, you know, they really have free will and they can course correct around this in the future. And, uh, sort of this, this other belief in free will, this belief that they're a product of the things that have happened before them. That they're a product of the things that led them to the slave auction and that absolves them of responsibility in some way. And that these things can be course corrected in the future because their free will can always change who they are that absolves them from responsibility and leads to more immoral actions.

So I genuinely believe, and I know everybody believes their own culture is superior to other cultures. Isn't that just the way humans are? There, there's a difference between saying, I like my culture more than other cultures for me and my family, , and then saying that that means that other cultures shouldn't exist, and I even believe that we have something we can learn from Quakers.

I'm just glad that, you know, I, I, I, I guess I take more pride in the way that my ancestors handle that moral challenge than the way their ancestors handled that moral challenge. But ain't that just the way things are right? We, you wouldn't hold your traditions if you didn't take any pride in them.

And there are many things to take pride in within the Quaker tradition that aren't, that are different from that they held lots of slaves and they claim to be against slave holding. Okay.

Nice try Malcolm. Well, what can I say? It's, it was an evil thing to do. You're attempts at diplomacy are,

I'm not as good diplomacy as you because Simone has the ability to like genuinely.

Think kindly of other people in a way that I just, oh, you've heard this on the other podcast. She can genuinely get in other people's mental spaces and defend them. Oh, oh, our listeners know, and this is why I rely on her guidance to be a good person. And why I, and this is one of the great things, even if I had all of my environmental conditions, you know how we talk about two people can become a single entity when they get married?

Well, I went into marriage knowing all of my flaws, all of the things that were etched into my identity, that made me a bad person. And through combining my identity with Simone's, I was able to partially overcome those things through to an extent. Having her as a voice in my ear for the rest of my life I am able to be a better entity.

And so even though we are predetermined, and even though me choosing to marry her was to an extent predetermined, it was one of those high variability, predetermined things where I, I really got to through who I was at the predetermined entity shape the future. Through choosing her, and I'm really glad, uh, if you have our mindset, that statement will make perfect sense.

If you don't have our mindset, it'll seem completely contradictory and it's very hard to communicate. Maybe we can do another video where we explain this better, or maybe you can just read The Pragmatist Guide to Life, which explains the concept in a lot more detail. Always, if you're like, I wish you had citations on this, or, I wish you explained this more concisely or better.

Read our books. That's where we like went over every paragraph 50 or 80 times where we cite like every third paragraph. Like if you want all of those things, be reading a book, not listening to a podcast, you're listening to a podcast cuz you're lazy and you wanna have a parasocial relationship with us or something.

But we really appreciate

your listening.

You really appreciate you listening

that you subscribe if you are not already

subscribed. Oh yeah, that would be nice if you subscribe. I take way more self-worth out of that than I probably should. He, he

does.

I, I literally update that page. Multiple ti like every two to three

hours.

Yeah.

That's always something you're watching.

It's either that or book reviews or people who've responded with criticism to our books. And you go and update them right away with more information. No,

already I'm like, oh, I can't. But we always try to respond to criticism. And again, this is something we mentioned in other things, people, they don't understand how receptive we are to criticism if it's based on reality and facts.

So often we get criticism and then we chase down whatever the criticism was and it's just. Wrong or the person like didn't know about something and they didn't. Yeah, it's certainly shame because uh, yeah, I am very open to changing my mind. And so are you where we are capable of changing our

minds? Well, because we feel that we're extremely responsible, which again, I think feels very counterintuitive, treatable to people.

If there's a. If there's a person with a mechanistic view of the universe, I don't think that people simultaneously expect that they're gonna be extremely neurotic about course correction and changing their views and changing and like controlling their behavior.

So, but Calvinists have always been neurotic about that.

Yeah.

So it's a fun thing to think

too good deterministic universe view, because every wrong thing you do proves

who you are. Yeah, speaking of, uh, immense responsibility for things, it's time for us to pick up the kids and do dinner, so I will see you in

the kitchen. I am very excited for dinner tonight. I am very excited to give you some big hugs today and to see the kids again.

Can't wait to

see you soon.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

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