Good morning John, I don't know
whether I'm capable of making a decision.
Like on the scale of things, I'm a very good decision maker. I can crack them out like no problem.
What I mean is that I don't know if I or anyone is capable of doing anything that wasn't
predetermined from the moment of the Big Bang.
I've seen some fairly compelling arguments that, like, the initial starting state conditions for the universe
define the words that are coming out of my mouth right now.
Pantsuit. Golden tugboat. Larger park.
Larger park! That had to have come from nowhere, right? No, it came from the Big Bang.
At least, that's what a lot of smart people say. No matter what I do right now, I am not making a decision
Like, just, just AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH
[playing guitar and singing]
♪ ♫ Down to the beach I'm strolling, ♫ ♪
♫ ♪ but the seagulls! They poke at my head, not fun, oh seagulls! ♪ ♫
♪ ♫ Stop it now. ♫ ♪
I didn't really think about what was over there before I did that.
Doesn't seem possible that, like, not only me singing that song
but also, the lyrics to the weird seagulls, Yoda's song, and all the way to Emily Dickinson
and William Shakespeare, all that stuff
was just the inevitable consequence of particles knocking against each other
and seeking lower energy states.
[chagrined groan]
And if there is randomness, if it is in fact impossible to predict everything that will ever happen
based on the starting conditions of the Big Bang,
then it's not, like, human decisions that are introducing that randomness,
it's weird quantum fluctuations.
It's particles doing particle things.
"Me", the story that I tell myself about myself,
is just another...inevitable physical phenomenon.
I'm just a ball rolling down a hill.
And I've come to a place where I kind of rationally accept this.
In philosophy this is called "determinism": that everything that happens is part of
an inevitable chain of cause and effect.
But in my everyday life, of course I ignore this!
I choose, with the free will that I don't have, to ignore the fact that I don't have free will.
Because I know--wait for it--that if I accepted the fact that I didn't have free will,
I would make a bunch of different decisions that would negatively impact
my ability to joyfully flourish on this space ball.
Side note: I'm calling planets "space balls" now,
and if you don't like that, there's nothing I can do about it.
Me calling planets "space balls" is just an inevitable consequence of the starting conditions of the universe.
Sorry!
Anyway, where was I?
Accepting that I am not actually making decisions does not fit with my lived experience.
Like, I can say "Free will doesn't exist!", and then I still have to, like, decide what to make
my video about. I have to decide what to have for dinner. I have to decide what the next word
is that's gonna come out of my mouth.
And so--and this is the actual point of the video--
I live...in intentional ignorance of a reality.
I also kind of do this Re: the inevitable situation
in which there will be one human being left and then that last human will die.
I'm a science dude. I believe in the intrinsic goodness
of having a more accurate understanding of the world today than you did yesterday,
both as individuals and as a collective species.
And yet there is a very short list of things I think it's just better to ignore.
Because my ultimate goal isn't to have, like, the perfect understanding of the universe.
My ultimate goal is to find happiness,
and to help other people do that too.
I don't know that this video has served that purpose, but... I tried.
John, I'll see you on Tuesday.
If you're feeling a little rough after that one, I apologize. That's not my goal.
This always helps my toddler! Uh, my little boy:
[copious fart noises]
Hopefully, that's--that's better now.