- [Narrator] This video is sponsored by our wonderful
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over at Patreon.com/NerdSync.
Legends of Tomorrow is the product of characters from
Arrow and The Flash being thrown together
on one rag-tag team featuring heroes, villains,
scientists, assassins,
and bird people -
one of whom was only a barista two months ago!
- Because up until two months ago I was a barista!
- With Captain Rip Hunter,
aboard the time ship known as the Waverider,
the team travels through time
to stop the evil Vandal Savage from ruling the world
in the future, striving to put right what once went wrong,
and hoping each time that their next leap will be
the leap - nope, that's, that's the wrong show.
Now, of course, time travel is a big factor of this show,
but arguably the biggest theme is free will and destiny.
Despite all its plot holes and inconsistent world logic,
Legends of Tomorrow manages to get a few things right
about the concept of free will.
Do we have it or are we just puppets?
- There are no strings on me.
(heavy metal music)
(alarm horn)
- If you recall, a few months back,
I did a video which tackled moral responsibility
for superheroes with brain injuries, like Moon Knight.
In that video, I said this,
'Free will might exist, but if it does, then quote,
"It's only a small factor riding on top
"of enormous automated machinery." End quote.'
A few of you guys weren't super happy with me
skipping over the problem of free will so quickly
and carelessly, so
here we are.
And I think a perfect place to start is with
the characters Carter and Kendra,
who I remind you was only a barista two months ago.
- Two months ago, I was a barista!
- Their entire arc, since their first appearances
on Flash and Arrow, has been about their fate;
their destiny to be together.
You see, the two are actually a reincarnated
priestess and prince from ancient Egypt.
Their fates are intertwined with one another.
Every time they die at the hands
of the immortal Vandal Savage, they're born again,
and in their new lives they find each other,
discover their powers and history,
and try to kill Savage only to, more often than not,
fail and start all over again.
Moreover, they are destined to be together-together.
- Like, together-together?
- Well, I have been telling you
that you and I should be destined.
- But since the show is about changing destiny,
it only makes sense that Carter,
the one person on the team who had embraced
the idea that fates are fixed,
was almost immediately killed off.
As it turns out,
he was right.
In an episode at the end of the first season,
aptly titled Destiny,
we discover the big twist of the show so far.
The Time Masters, a council of time travelers
who supposedly watch over and protect the timeline,
have been manipulating everything.
And when I say everything, I mean
everything.
Every episode of the season leading to this moment,
every adventure and mission the team went on,
every single action they took had been orchestrated
by the Time Masters.
And hey, why stop at Legends?
This revelation means that everything in Flash
and Arrow has also been scripted by the Time Masters
using a powerful device known as the Oculus,
which allows the council not only to see the past,
but mold it to determine the future.
- Not a possible future!
Not a prediction!
You are looking at events as they will happen.
- As Time Master Druce explains,
free will and choice are simply--
- Illusions.
- In real life, we might not have a council of robed beings
deciding our every action,
but the view that free will is an illusion,
and that the actions we take
are determined by external causes,
is still present, and it's known as Hard Determinism.
The idea here is pretty straight-forward:
every event is caused by events from the immediate past,
which were, in turn, caused by more events from the past
and so on, and so on forever, and ever.
Everything that is happening, in the present,
is the necessary result of previous events,
just a long chain of cause and effect.
Essentially, nothing else could happen other than
what does happen.
There is no free choice.
And you may have seen some scientific studies
that suggest this to be true;
how are brains actually decide what we do
before we're ever consciously aware.
In fact, some scientists have found that delay to be up to
10 whole seconds.
Neuroscientist, David Eagleman compares the brain
to a newspaper; it gathers up all the information
you need to know and delivers it to your conscious self.
Everything in that newspaper has already happened.
Your conscious self merely reads about it afterwards,
and then takes credit, for what it just read.
Wait, Superman is dead?
That's interesting.
Oooh, I had a great idea.
What if, Superman
was dead?
But some scientists believe
that the chaos of the quantum world
doesn't follow this simple cause and effect.
There truly can be some random chance,
which means there's at least
some part of our world that isn't predetermined.
Does this leave us with a little room for free will?
It only makes sense then that Ray Palmer,
a man who's alter ego is literally The Atom,
would be the strongest advocate for free will on the team.
From the pilot episode,
Ray has shown that he's against the idea of determinism.
- Can't live with somebody putting a cap on my destiny.
- Even his relationship with Kendra
fought against her 4,000 year-old destiny to be with Carter.
When Rip reveals that the Time Masters have scripted out
every action they've taken, so far, in their entire lives,
Ray refuses to believe it.
He felt so strongly about establishing true free will
that he was willing to give up his life,
to destroy the Oculus.
The belief that humans are capable of entirely free actions
is known as Libertarianism.
Even though we can recognize that
the physical world is deterministic,
Libertarians believe that there's a difference
in the choices that we make.
Our actions can be caused by non-physical things,
like thoughts.
Through the idea of Agent-Causality,
any being with a mind can start a new chain
of cause and effect that isn't a result of anything else.
Like when Mick decided to hit Ray,
simply because he wanted to.
- You saying the Time Masters wanted me to do that?
- Unfortunately, there are some major problems
with this view, the most glaring would be
the notion that thoughts are non-physical things.
It's pretty widely accepted that thoughts are, at least,
somewhat tied to the physical state of the brain,
that's how an injury or neurological disease
can radically effect someone's feelings and behavior,
and hey, we're back at the Moon Knight video,
so let's just move forward.
At the very least,
it's sure feels a lot like we have free will, doesn't it?
Look at Legends of Tomorrow,
before the Oculus was destroyed,
there was only one place in the Universe
where free will truly existed -
The Vanishing Point, the headquarters of the Time Masters.
When the crew of the Waverider first arrived,
you'd suspect that they'd feel different somehow, right,
like the presence of true free will would wash over them,
as if they were characters in a grayscale world
experiencing color for the first time.
If a puppet was cut from its strings,
surely something would feel different?
But, nope, no one even realizes.
Turns out that,
not having free will feels awful lot like having free will.
Like Wile E. Coyote running of a cliff
not realizing there's no solid ground underneath him.
Of course, there is a great irony in Legends of Tomorrow,
in that the characters feel like
they're nothing more than actors performing a script,
which they are.
- Gonna apologize for pulling a gun on you,
but apparently I was just following a script.
- The Oculus was destroyed,
but the team is still being controlled.
Every action they take
has been decided by the show's writers,
who are acting as the Time Masters did,
scripting each adventure our band of misfits embarks on.
Even when predetermined events were changed
inside of the show -
like Snart giving his life in place Ray's,
despite the Oculus showing that Ray
would be the one to die -
those changes were still made by a couple writers in a room,
not Snart's free will.
So is this the theme of the show then,
that fates can't be changed, as we were led to believe?
One of the last moments of the season
seemed to emphasize that point.
Even though free will had been established--
- From this point forward, our actions are our own.
We have free will.
- Kendra, who had been fighting against her destiny
with Carter, at the beginning of the series,
ended up embracing it.
Even Ray, the outspoken proponent of free will, remarks--
- It's meant to be.
- Though the notion that we are not as free as we think
or feel we are can be a tough pill to swallow,
it can also be a relief.
As Martin Stein put it--
- Discovering one's life has already been predetermined is
ironically liberating.
- What do you guys think about all this?
Does free will exist,
and how do you think Legends of Tomorrow handles it?
Let's talk about it all in the comments
and I'll address some of your thoughts,
on Monday, during the show Tales from the Comments.
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