KOL293 | Faith and Free Will, with Steve Mendelsohn

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 293.

This is my discussion with my old friend and colleague, patent lawyer Steve Mendelsohn, about faith and free will and related issues, some of which are discussed in his book Shallow Draughts: Faith in the Absence of Free Will (2017) (PDF of this book and his most recent one posted here [Shallow Draughts] and here [Sequitur] with his permission). (Steve and I worked as patent lawyer associates together from about 1994-96 or so in Schnader Harrison in Philly.)

Yes, yes, I know I normally talk only about libertarian legal theory, or, mostly, IP, and try to avoid discoursing about topics I don’t think I’m an expert on … like faith, concept formation, knowledge theory, free will, compatibilism, and the like, but, hey, what the hell. Caveat listener!

Related:

• KOL471 | “What Is Property? And What Is Not? — Part 1,” Capitalism & Morality (Vancouver) (see in particular text at note 3: “In society, others’ free will introduces the risk of interference with possession, necessitating property rights to protect it. [Note: I do not mean to imply here there is free will in the causal sense, but it’s too complicated to get into in such a talk, and not necessary either. 3. My friend Steve Mendelsohn, the “law school asshole” mentioned above–he and I have disagreed before on free will. See KOL293 | Faith and Free Will, with Steve Mendelsohn. I have not talked in detail about free will, but have mentioned it here and there: Peikoff on Copyright, Michael Jackson; Memories of Meeting Rothbard in 1994; Remembering Tibor Machan, Libertarian Mentor and Friend: Reflections on a Giant, the section “Free Will/Downward Causation”. Re the current talk, Steve commented to me: “Apparently I listened too long because I got to the part where you imply that free will exists. So sad.” My response: “Basically as I have tried and failed to explain, I’m a dualist and think have different realms of phenomenon to understand and different concepts and terminology appropriate to each—to causal world and the teleological world. If and insofar as we find it useful or indeed unavoidable to understand and characterize our and other humans actions as purposive, that is as action, not mere behavior, aimed at achieving “chosen” or selected ends, then there is no other vocabulary to use than to describe the action as one where we choose our means and ends. But this “choice” is the way we conceive of and describe human action, th way we characterize it in a teleological sense. It does not mean that there is “free will” in the causal sense. But it’s hard to explain which is why I use shorthand. Similar when talking about natural law or natural rights I will sometimes refer to ‘God” as a placeholder concept even though there is no real “God.” It’s just language.]
• Peikoff on Copyright, Michael Jackson
• Memories of Meeting Rothbard in 1994
• Remembering Tibor Machan, Libertarian Mentor and Friend: Reflections on a Giant, the section “Free Will/Downward Causation”

Grok Summary:

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Faith and Free Will with Steve Mendelsohn – Show Notes

Introduction and Guest Background

0:02 – 2:10

In this episode of the Kinsella on Liberty podcast, host Stephan Kinsella interviews Steve Mendelsohn, an old friend and patent lawyer colleague from Philadelphia. Kinsella introduces the episode as a rare direct interview, one of only a few among his 300+ episodes, which typically feature rebroadcasts of his appearances on other shows. Mendelsohn, a mentor to Kinsella during their time at the Schnader law firm in 1994, joins from his home in the peaceful suburbs of Philadelphia, specifically near Narberth. The conversation begins with a light discussion about Mendelsohn’s current situation, including his limited visits to his office due to remote work trends post-March 2020.

Remote Work and Office Space Changes

1:14 – 2:10

Mendelsohn discusses how his law firm is adapting to remote work, with their office lease expiring and plans for a smaller downtown footprint. He explains that the central Philadelphia location remains necessary due to the geographical distribution of staff and lawyers across the region. The conversation touches on the phrase “it is what it is,” with Kinsella noting its recent use by Michelle Obama, setting a casual tone before diving into the main topic.

Introduction to the Main Topic: Faith and Free Will

2:10 – 3:44

Kinsella outlines the episode’s focus on faith and free will, a departure from his usual topics of intellectual property, libertarianism, and Austrian economics. He admits to not being an expert in this area but finds it suitable for an interesting discussion. Mendelsohn, who has self-published a book titled Shallow Drafts: Faith in the Absence of Free Will, shares that he and Kinsella have discussed these ideas over years via email and phone. Both have read Sam Harris’s book Free Will, which influences their perspectives, with Mendelsohn noting the topic’s philosophical complexity.

Mendelsohn’s Book and Publishing Experience

3:05 – 8:52

The discussion shifts to Mendelsohn’s book, now in its fourth edition on Amazon, which he finds easy to update due to the platform’s on-demand publishing. Kinsella highlights how this eliminates traditional publishing issues like rights reversion and editorial delays. They explore the idea of making the book available as a free PDF online, with Kinsella suggesting a dedicated website or landing page. Mendelsohn agrees to consider this, noting he’s already shared the PDF with contacts but hasn’t posted it publicly.

Philosophical Journey and Beliefs

9:35 – 20:03

Mendelsohn recounts his philosophical journey, sparked by a college bet with his roommate Dan, who challenged him to take an upper-level philosophy course despite his physics background. This experience led to his paper on belief formation, using the analogy of mistaking a dog for a fox in fog, illustrating that beliefs form automatically and involuntarily. He argues that we don’t control our beliefs, proposing an experiment where theists try believing God doesn’t exist for 36 hours, a challenge no one has accepted. Kinsella shares a similar anecdote, suggesting belief in God may be genuine, as evidenced by extreme actions like the 9/11 attacks.

Defining Faith and Free Will

20:03 – 37:51

Mendelsohn introduces his concept of “automatic, involuntary, subjective evidence weighing” (ASO), equating it to faith, the process by which brains move from evidence to conclusions, whether for secular beliefs (e.g., Shakespeare wrote Hamlet) or religious ones. Kinsella challenges this, arguing that faith, as used by religious people, implies belief without evidence or reason, distinct from trust. They debate the nature of evidence, with Mendelsohn emphasizing testimonial evidence (e.g., trusting authorities) and Kinsella insisting on perceptual and rational sources, drawing on Ayn Rand’s philosophy to distinguish between perception and conceptual errors.

Compatibilism and Determinism

37:51 – 56:25

The conversation turns to free will, with Kinsella outlining his Austrian-Misesian compatibilism, which reconciles deterministic causality with teleological explanations of human choice in economics and sociology. He distinguishes between causal (physical) and teleological (purpose-driven) realms, arguing that even without true free will, choice remains a useful concept. Mendelsohn, skeptical of free will, sees actions as determined or random, citing quantum mechanics but agreeing it’s irrelevant to the absence of free will. They discuss a libertarian argument for free will via proof by contradiction, which Mendelsohn counters by emphasizing the automatic nature of belief formation.

Implications for Justice and Punishment

56:25 – 1:20:46

Mendelsohn argues that lacking free will makes punishing or rewarding individuals inherently unfair, though societal benefits justify it to encourage or discourage behavior, as per Sam Harris. Kinsella agrees but favors incapacitation over retribution in a libertarian justice system, suggesting voluntary ostracism and restitution in a stateless society. He contrasts Jewish repentance (requiring acknowledgment and amends) with Christian forgiveness, citing a church shooting where forgiveness was offered without repentance. They discuss how childhood trauma, like spanking, may contribute to criminal behavior, advocating for peaceful parenting to reduce such outcomes.

Critique of Compatibilism and Dennett’s Views

1:20:46 – 1:27:19

Kinsella critiques Daniel Dennett’s compatibilism, which conflates free will with freedom, contrasting it with his own version based on Mises’ dualism. Mendelsohn reads from his book’s epilogue, recounting a 2017 encounter with Dennett, where he challenged Dennett’s belief in free will. Dennett’s response—that free will implying no responsibility is undesirable—was deemed disingenuous, akin to theistic arguments avoiding uncomfortable truths. Kinsella agrees, criticizing the “new atheists” (Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett) for their empiricist, monist tendencies, though they often reach correct conclusions despite lacking a robust appreciation for reason.

Closing and Media Recommendations

1:27:19 – 1:28:59

The episode wraps up with light-hearted banter, including politically incorrect jokes about a one-armed fisherman. Kinsella recommends the Hulu series Devs, which explores quantum computing, free will, and determinism, urging Mendelsohn to watch it despite his limited TV consumption. They humorously note the podcast might be a second take, thank the audience, and sign off, with Kinsella fumbling to stop the recording.

Transcript (Grok)

Introduction and Background

0:02

Stephan Kinsella: Okay, we are recording. We’re live. This is Stephan Kinsella. I’m doing a Kinsella on Liberty podcast. Usually, it’s just a rebroadcast of my interviews on other shows, and every now and then, I will talk to someone else. This is maybe the third or fourth time I’ve done this out of 300 or so episodes. So, I’ve got online with me Steve Mendelsohn, an old buddy of mine, an old patent lawyer friend, an old patent lawyer colleague, kind of a mentor, in Philadelphia—or what do you call it? You don’t call it Philadelphia. What do you call it where you live?

0:33

Steve Mendelsohn: Well, I live outside of Philadelphia.

0:39

Stephan Kinsella: Outside Philly, right? This is Penn Valley?

0:46

Steve Mendelsohn: Penn Valley. No, what’s the train stop on the Main Line that you do? Narberth. That’s my stop.

0:50

Stephan Kinsella: Narberth. You’re not Narberth, same zip code but different name?

0:55

Steve Mendelsohn: Okay, okay. So, you’re in the peaceful suburbs of Philly.

1:00

Stephan Kinsella: It is very peaceful. I’m on my back porch right now, and luckily, they stopped mowing next door, so it’s quiet. How’s Philly doing lately?

1:07

Steve Mendelsohn: I wouldn’t know. I haven’t been there much in the last five or six months. I’ve been to my office three times since March 15th, twice to see new office space.

1:14

Stephan Kinsella: Philly, okay. Yeah.

Discussion on Office Space and Remote Work

1:21

Steve Mendelsohn: Yeah, but our lease is running out, so we’re looking for new space.

1:27

Stephan Kinsella: What are you going to do?

1:32

Steve Mendelsohn: Well, we’re going to have fewer people because everybody’s gotten used to working at home, so we’re probably going to offer people that option to continue. So, we’re just going to have a smaller footprint downtown and see how it goes.

1:38

Stephan Kinsella: Why would your footprint be downtown if you need a little footprint on occasion? Why not just make it in some cheaper location or something?

1:45

Steve Mendelsohn: Because we have staff and lawyers who live on all sides of Philadelphia, in Jersey, North, South, West. So, it’s a central location, you know. Unfortunately, but that’s the way it is. It is what it is, as they say. I love that expression.

1:52

Stephan Kinsella: I heard Michelle Obama say it yesterday.

2:03

Steve Mendelsohn: Michelle Obama said it yesterday.

Introduction to the Podcast Topic

2:10

Stephan Kinsella: Okay, so let me just tell people what—usually, I talk about intellectual property, and you’re actually a patent lawyer, and we’re not going to talk about that today, but maybe next week or so, you and I and another fellow colleague are going to talk about patent law. That’ll be fun. Every now and then, I deviate into other topics, usually libertarian-related ones or Austrian economics. But sometimes it gets into philosophy. As I mentioned to you, I try not to talk—when you said let’s talk about faith and free will, first I thought you meant for a podcast, and I thought, well, I don’t usually do podcasts on things I don’t think I’m an expert on, but I know enough to have an interesting conversation, and some people might want to hear it.

2:47

Steve Mendelsohn: The lack of expertise didn’t keep me from writing a book about it.

2:59

Stephan Kinsella: I know, I know. Believe me, I have lots of libertarian friends who do that kind of thing too.

Steve Mendelsohn’s Book on Faith and Free Will

3:05

Stephan Kinsella: Let’s see here. I’m going to share my screen just to show your book. So, you self-published a book, which is not—you know, that used to be—so, I heard it’s “Shallow Drafts.” How would you pronounce it?

3:19

Steve Mendelsohn: “Shallow Drafts: Faith in the Absence of Free Will.” And you and I have had some email and some phone conversations over the last few years about this issue.

3:32

Stephan Kinsella: I think we both read Sam Harris’s book on free will, right?

3:44

Steve Mendelsohn: Absolutely. And I’ve read lots of other perspectives on that too over the years. In fact, this issue for me has always been one of the most perplexing in all philosophy. I think I’ve come to a sort of approach to it that works for me, which is sort of my own kind of cobbled-together—I call it Austrian-Misesian compatibilism, you know, kind of borrowing on the dualism of the methodology of Mises and the Austrians with some of the conceptual insights of Rand, but also with a realist attitude about causality. I mean, ultimately, I don’t believe there’s true free will. I think that we’re either causally determined or that we’re random. Either way, there’s no room for free will. It’s still meaningful to talk about choice in an economic and in a sociological sense. So, that’s kind of my wrapper of what I think.

4:32

Stephan Kinsella: But you wrote a book. This is your first book. You just have another one came out?

4:47

Steve Mendelsohn: I just released the second book, yep.

4:56

Stephan Kinsella: How’d you find the Amazon process? Because I just published something on there too.

5:01

Steve Mendelsohn: I love it. It’s great. This is actually “Shallow Drafts” is actually in its fourth edition because—well, I screwed up the first one completely, but then I had additional things to say, and I found additional quotes to add. It’s so easy just to spit out another edition. I read a book by somebody a while back, and I reached out to him because I had found a typo, and I had some questions to ask him about the substance of his book. And he said, thanks for pointing out the typo, but since his publisher is never going to issue another edition, there’s no point in keeping track of those things. But with Amazon, find a typo, spit out a new edition.

5:44

Stephan Kinsella: Well, of course, it has implications for copyright law because, in the old days, there were all these rights that would revert back to the author if the book was so-called out of print or something for a certain amount of time. But now that means nothing with on-demand publishing. It cost zero upfront. I didn’t have to pay a penny to Amazon. Anytime someone orders a book, including me, you just pay for that book.

6:07

Steve Mendelsohn: No, but what I mean is, if you’re an author, you could count on getting the rights back if your book went into disuse, you know.

6:14

Stephan Kinsella: Oh, I see. Okay, now you don’t have a publisher. I’m the publisher. You don’t have to worry about that, right? And you don’t have to worry about editors either. Well, and you don’t have to worry about the delays and also the effective censorship, right? I’m going to show you a cool thing about Zoom. You can do your own background. Can you see my—yes, I know, I could—that’s my front yard, actually. So, I’m sitting here looking at that front yard. Wow, my bedroom. Very nice technology, Steve. That’s a nice front yard too. You got a big park across the street.

6:47

Steve Mendelsohn: This reminds me of the stuff that we learned when we did Intel patents, remember, about block—block of video and difference in coding?

6:59

Stephan Kinsella: Just to tell people here, so you’re a couple years older than me, and you were a couple years older, more experienced than me at the law firm in Philadelphia, Schnader, where I joined in 1994. And you kind of did help guide, mentor me on some patent law stuff, which I appreciated. Gave me some good tricks, some good ideas, some good techniques. You probably still use them to this day.

7:23

Steve Mendelsohn: Yeah, might even have one or two new ones since then, I don’t know.

7:30

Stephan Kinsella: Well, the funny thing is, you know, now that we’re older, lots of the patents I wrote back in those days, now they’re public domain, right? They’re all expired. So, it’s like, absolutely, if I messed up, it’s too late now for anyone.

7:42

Steve Mendelsohn: [Laughter] Yes, sir.

Publishing and Sharing the Book

7:48

Stephan Kinsella: Okay, tell me what—so let me ask you a question. Your book—why, this is a meta question in a way—why didn’t you put a free PDF online as well as what you’ve done on—so what do you have, a Kindle and a print version on Amazon?

8:04

Steve Mendelsohn: Yeah, Kindle and print versions, yep.

8:10

Stephan Kinsella: Okay, why not post the—you have the file, obviously. You probably have a PDF you generated to do this, yeah?

8:15

Steve Mendelsohn: Yeah, why not post that online too? Well, you’re not trying to get rich off this, right? No, I could—I did recently email it to everybody I know and attached it.

8:21

Stephan Kinsella: Post it online. Why not say, okay, here’s Steve Mendelsohn’s book, here’s a PDF version online, and even a Mobi or an EPUB version, but if you want to buy it on Kindle, you can, if you want to buy it in paper, you can.

8:34

Steve Mendelsohn: Well, you’ll show me how to do that. You’ll show me how to do that. I can—you could post it for me. You have a website, you have your law firm’s website?

8:40

Stephan Kinsella: I do have my law firm’s website. A little sub-page, it could be IP Steve or something, and then you could put your free e-books on there, post the PDF.

8:46

Steve Mendelsohn: But then that would be people looking at my website to try to find my book, and that wouldn’t be—

8:52

Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, well, I would do a separate website, but I’m just saying, there’s one, do it. Yeah, you have—it’s called a landing page. You want a landing page for your site.

9:05

Steve Mendelsohn: Landing page, yeah.

9:11

Stephan Kinsella: So, you want to tell people, okay, here’s my book. If you want more information, go to drafts.com. That’s probably not available. Who knows, it might be. I think it is. After this thing gets published, I think as soon as someone’s going to homestead it and there you go, try to hit you up for it, hold me up for it.

9:30

Steve Mendelsohn: Yeah.

Philosophical Background and Beliefs

9:35

Stephan Kinsella: Okay, so tell me, so what are your basic thoughts on the—and I don’t know if we’ll even get to the free will stuff, so let’s talk about—you want to talk about faith first, right?

9:43

Steve Mendelsohn: Let me tell you a story. Can I tell you a story? So, I was an undergrad at the University of Michigan studying physics, and my housemate, my roommate Dan, was a dual major, actually. He was a dual major in philosophy and anthropology, which he called majoring in philanthropy, but that’s another story. But anyway, Dan made—dualism cropping up already, there you go—Dan made the outrageous statement one day that he could do better in an upper-level physics class than I could do in an upper-level philosophy class. And I said, that’s ridiculous. And I said, you haven’t taken the lower-level physics classes, you haven’t taken the math classes, you couldn’t possibly do better in an upper-level physics class than I could do in an upper-level philosophy class. Philosophy is—I’ve been bullshitting my whole life, and you’re on. So, I agreed to take 17th and 18th Century Continental Rationalism, Epistemology, and Ontology with Dan, an elective or something. Not only was I the only student in that class who hadn’t had Philosophy 101, I was the only student in that class who wasn’t a philosophy major. I had to go to—there were no prerequisites for that. I had to get permission from the professor to take the class.

10:47

Stephan Kinsella: How did you persuade him to make that mistake?

11:11

Steve Mendelsohn: I don’t remember. I went into his office, and I didn’t tell him about the bet, but I said I’d like to take the class. He said, well, what’d you get on your SATs? And I told him. He said, okay, you can take the class. And that was it. So, I took this class with Dan, and we studied Leibniz and Hume and Berkeley and Spinoza and Kant. And I didn’t understand a word of Kant. I’m pretty sure we read him in English, but I still didn’t understand a word of Kant. But I picked up a little from Berkeley and Hume.

11:29

Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, yeah, I picked up a little from Berkeley and Hume.

11:50

Steve Mendelsohn: And I remember writing a paper for that class about describing how I go off into my backyard, and it’s a foggy morning, and I see an animal off in the distance, and it has fox-like characteristics, looks like a fox, and I believe it’s a fox. As I walk closer to the animal, and the fog lifts, and it gets clearer and clearer, some of those fox-like characteristics now appear more dog-like, and now I believe that it’s a dog. But my belief that it was a fox, I didn’t control that process of reaching that belief, and I didn’t control the process of that belief switching from fox to dog. It all happened automatically and involuntarily. I didn’t choose my beliefs in the sense of consciously controlling the process of going from evidence to conclusion.

12:36

Stephan Kinsella: Sounds like you’re talking about free will now, not faith, but go—well, first, this is just beliefs. I’m not talking about actions, right? I’m talking about belief.

12:49

Steve Mendelsohn: Okay, okay, fine, talking about beliefs. So, I long have held that we don’t choose our beliefs, and I would argue with people wherever I could that we don’t control our beliefs. And I would tell people who insisted that they did control their beliefs that they should do an experiment. I ask them, do you believe that God exists? They tell me one or the other, yes or no. And I’d say, okay, for the next 36 hours, since you control your beliefs, choose to believe the opposite. If you’re a theist, choose to believe that God doesn’t exist for the next 36 hours. At the end of 36 hours, you can exercise your control again and go back to your previous belief. Well, I never had anybody take me up on that challenge.

13:37

Stephan Kinsella: Well, either we think the same way, and we’re both the same kind of smartasses, or I might have got this from you. But I’ve done the same exact thing, like, you don’t choose your beliefs, and if you think you can, go ahead, for the next two minutes, believe that the moon is made of cheese, and I’ll give you a million dollars, you know, something like that. And then people say, well, but I sort of think you can choose your beliefs over time, like you can sort of brainwash yourself slowly, in a sense. And I think some people do that. I used to be one of these atheists who thinks no one really believes in God; they just pretend to. But seeing people fly into the Twin Towers and that kind of stuff, I think they probably do believe it somehow. So, but I don’t know, but I kind of think you’re right. It’s not—action and belief are different things. Belief is what you think is true; action is what you choose to do based upon your beliefs, right, something like that.

14:27

Steve Mendelsohn: Right, so just to complete the previous story, so I took that class with Dan. He got a B+ on the class; I got a B. And then I said, okay, now it’s time to take that upper-level physics class with me. And that’s when he went out, and we ended up taking Astronomy 101 together instead as a compromise. But in any case, I’ve been thinking about, in writing—how did he score, what happened? We, in Astronomy 101, we both got A’s.

15:03

Stephan Kinsella: So, I let him off. Well, I think philosophy is more rigorous than we engineers would think, right? It’s—it is more, and, in fact, I think I’ve heard, surprisingly, that philosophy majors, graduates, get pretty high salaries in general compared to what you would think, like, because people know that they’re pretty good at logic and thinking and rigor, and it’s pretty deep stuff. Not that it’s a science, necessarily, but—anyway, no, it’s certainly rigorous. I’ll give them that, for sure.

15:41

Steve Mendelsohn: So, over the years, I have been arguing with people and every now and then writing an essay or two, mainly for my own consumption, about my beliefs about beliefs. And I had written one a few years ago in which I got to the point where I said, okay, if we don’t control our beliefs, and if we always act according to our beliefs, doesn’t that mean we don’t control our actions? Doesn’t that mean we don’t have free will? And at that point, I said, no, no, no, no, we can’t go there. That’s not good. Even if it was true, it wouldn’t be good for society. We got to pretend that we have free will for civilization to continue. And then I picked up Sam Harris’s book, “Free Will,” in which he says, not only do we not control our beliefs, we don’t control any of our thoughts, and we don’t control our actions. And I said, oh, Sam Harris wrote the book I was going to write, and then some, and going all the way. And I said, now what am I going to do? So, I was kind of deflated because Sam Harris had already written my book. And I was listening to an audio version of “Sea-Wolf” by Jack London, and in there, the captain of the ship—

16:53

Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, yeah.

16:54

Steve Mendelsohn: Well, in that book, the captain goes off on this tirade about how we don’t choose our beliefs, and we always act according to our beliefs, therefore we don’t control our actions. And I said, well, if Jack London wrote this 100 years before Sam Harris wrote his book, well, I can write my book. So, that’s what I did. I wrote my book. I think, frankly, the stuff I say about free will may be controversial to many people, but I don’t think much that is new there. I say things in a different way, but the conclusions about free will are certainly in Sam Harris and Jack London and many other places. But I think what I have to say about faith is somewhat new because what—when Sam Harris writes a book about the end of faith, and when Christopher Hitchens writes a book about faith, these guys are my heroes, but when they write about faith, they’re denigrating religious faith. And to me, the psychological process by which we come to acquire—

17:54

Stephan Kinsella: Wait, wait, hold on. You mean, so let’s be clear for a second. You’re talking about the four—what they call the four horsemen, these kind of new atheists, Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett. And I’ve read a lot of Dennett, by the way.

18:23

Steve Mendelsohn: Yeah, well, we’ll come back to Dennett because he’s one of your compatibilists that we’ll need to talk about. I’ve read a lot of this stuff on the philosophy of consciousness, not—

18:37

Stephan Kinsella: Yes, he’s the co-author of that great book, “The Mind’s I,” with Douglas Hofstadter, which is one of—okay, yeah, I read dorm room geek-out books of all. I read “Gödel, Escher, Bach,” and I understood as much of that as I understood Kant. So, well, Hofstadter is one of these—he’s one of these elusive—not gadfly, what’s the right word, like, he’s kind of a dilettante but a very smart one, kind of like Robert Nozick. But anyway, go ahead.

19:15

Steve Mendelsohn: So, where was I? Oh, getting interested in this, like, the implications of—you’re basically a—faith, the faith part, right? Sorry, I was talking about faith. So, to me, the psychological process, the operation that the brain performs when it generates beliefs, is the same whether those beliefs are what we call secular beliefs, like Shakespeare wrote Hamlet or Oswald shot JFK. And—

19:49

Stephan Kinsella: What do you mean by the same? Because they’re operating according to the laws of physics?

20:03

Steve Mendelsohn: Yeah, but also according to the laws of psychology. Our brain is performing a process that I call automatic, involuntary, subjective evidence weighing, A-I-E-W, which I pronounce ASO, automatic, involuntary. Our brains are organs operating according to the rules of physics and chemistry and biology, just like our hearts and our guts and our eyeballs, whatever, are operating according to physics and chemistry and biology. And they’re just—the brain’s doing its brain thing. It’s automatic, and it’s involuntary. And some of the things that it does is generate thoughts and beliefs and consciousness, and we can talk about that. But it’s just doing its thing automatically and involuntarily, and what it’s doing is it’s weighing the evidence that it has acquired over time, and it’s doing it subjectively because everybody’s brain is different, and—

21:07

Stephan Kinsella: Okay, yeah, no, okay, let me just for a second, we can keep going, but we can—there are several terms you’re using that I think part of the problem with these discussions is people don’t define their terms. Okay, free will needs to be defined, right, and choice, maybe they’re different concepts, right? Also, faith needs to be defined, and even the word—what was the word you just used—automatic, involuntary, subjective evidence, subjective, subjectivism needs to—because that’s used in different senses, like by economists and by ethicists. Okay, well, so, but go ahead.

21:43

Steve Mendelsohn: When I mean subjective, I mean that everybody is different. When I look at a tree in my—

21:51

Stephan Kinsella: But that’s not what subjective means. I mean, do you mean relative, or do you mean—what do you mean?

21:57

Steve Mendelsohn: Well, let me finish my—when I used to, when I looked at a tree before, people would tell me, look at the magnificence of trees; that has to be evidence for God’s existence. And I looked at those trees, and in years past, to me, that had probative value to supporting the conclusion that God exists.

22:17

Stephan Kinsella: But hold on, hold on, you’re using a legal—I mean, okay, so no one normal would use the word probative, okay? This is a term—it’s not a physics term, pointing to philosophy term, pointing to—it has—it tends to support. Look, I talk about a scale, okay, where we have a scale, sometimes the scale has more than two sides, sometimes the scale has two sides, right? God exists, God doesn’t exist, okay? There’s the scale, and there’s evidence that could potentially be on either side of that scale. People look at—

22:41

Steve Mendelsohn: But that whole way of describing it takes for granted a whole framework of looking at the universe, which is, I think, basically empiricist and logical positivist, right? It’s monist. That’s why I said dualism early on. I wasn’t quite joking. I mean, but I think you’re taking for granted a lot of things.

23:06

Stephan Kinsella: Well, let me take a step back then. A lot of things. Let me take a step back. When you say dualism, you mean mind-body, right? We got these two things.

23:19

Steve Mendelsohn: Well, but it relates to that. Dualism means that we understand the universe in terms of concepts. We, higher-level cognitive, intelligent human, you know, Homo sapiens, we’re not animals on the lower level, which are basically instinctual or whatever, or even more automatic, like the cricket with ganglia or whatever they have instead of brains. We take the evidence of the senses, which you—that’s what you’re kind of referring to in your own—not saying made-up language, but, you know, in philosophy, this is called the perceptual realm, right? So, we have percepts, we have evidence of the senses, we sense things about the universe. And now, according to, like, the way Ayn Rand and some of the realists would look at it, our brains organize this sense data into higher-level concepts to have a higher-level understanding of the causal aspects of what’s going on in the world. So, that’s how we understand and frame and think about the world. Now, even if we don’t have free will, and we’re just a pilot in this little airplane riding around the world on this sea of foam, we still understand the world in terms of concepts. And because we perceive ourselves as having choice and values, and we perceive other humans as being similar to us, we seek to frame them and categorize them and understand them in these conceptual terms in ways similar to us. So, we think of them as having choice and making choices and having purposes. So, it’s the teleological realm versus the causal realm. The causal realm would be the realm of physics, and that’s what you study with the methods of the natural sciences. But you have to study the teleological realms with a different methodology, which is what—that’s what I mean by dualism. That’s what Mises meant by dualism. You understand there are two realms of knowledge in the world: one is understanding human teleology and purposes, which would relate to economics and human interrelationships and social things, even law, and then science or the sciences, right, the natural sciences, which goes back to causality. And to me, the compatibilism I believe in is that, yeah, in essence, we are determined, or we’re random, either one. I think we’re probably determined because I don’t believe in this quantum randomness stuff, but I could be wrong. But either way, it doesn’t leave room for true free will. But it still leaves room for choice as a category or mode of explaining the teleological. Like, if you want to tell me you bought a brand new Mustang car, you’re telling me as another human, you’re communicating some information to me about a fact about the universe that you have a car, but you’re calling it a car, so you’re already organizing these different quarks into certain subgroups, right, and according to the function and the purpose that you impute upon them and society imputes upon them, like there’s a brake, there’s a clutch, there’s a transmission, there’s an electrical system. You know, God could probably look at it as a bunch of clouds of atoms and understand everything, but we’re not God, right? And no one is God.

26:58

Stephan Kinsella: All I’m saying, all I’m saying is, whatever those processes are that you just described, right or wrong, whatever they are, they happen automatically and involuntarily, okay? That’s in the physical realm. They happen automatically and physically in the physical realm. But if you think of your children or your friends or your wife or yourself, you conceive of what you do in the language of teleology, of purposes, right? You say, like, why did the guy rob the bank? Because he wanted to do this, like he had a goal in mind, and he chose the means at hand to do it. That’s a perfectly reasonable way of explaining what he did, even if, on the causal side, we don’t really have free will, right? I could be wrong about this. This is my compatibilism, which is always awkward. I mean, what’s the solution to this? To be a monist and to believe only in determinism, and then what’s the point? So, let’s say you prove that we don’t have free will, so even your inquiry was determined from the beginning of time, and whatever you’re going to decide based upon this conversation or later in your life is equally determined or random or somewhat random. Either way, either way, there’s nothing you can do about it.

28:20

Steve Mendelsohn: You got it. That’s right. By the way, there’s a recent—this is a total aside, but there’s a science fiction series that just came out a couple months ago on Hulu, FX, called “Devs.” You’ve got to watch this, Steve. It’ll blow your mind. You will love it. Have you heard about this?

28:32

Stephan Kinsella: No, it’s about all this stuff. It’s about physics, free will, compatibilism. It’s crazy. It’s crazy good. One of the best TV shows I think, maybe ever seen. Crazy. But go ahead.

28:45

Steve Mendelsohn: So, any parallel universes, you know, the Everett hypothesis that there’s many worlds and every choice breeds—by the way, let me ask you, as a physicist, do you think that your view of physics matters? Like, in other words, if you think that we live in a not Newtonian world but in a deterministic world, or if you think there’s a quantum world with randomness at the base, do you think that affects your analysis, or do you think it doesn’t matter?

29:04

Stephan Kinsella: I think it doesn’t matter. I think there are people who argue that quantum mechanics somehow explains free will, and I said, what? That’s the opposite. Quantum mechanics is randomness, so how does randomness—yeah, so, yeah, I’ve always agreed with that too. And you’ll see in my book, I talk about determinism not being the antonym to free will. It’s one possible non-free will existence is determinism, but also randomness. I happen to believe in, you know, you said Newtonian as if that was separate from determinism, but I equate the two, and to me, our reality is mostly determined with a little bit of quantum randomness thrown in.

29:55

Steve Mendelsohn: Okay, so you actually—okay, yeah, I think that might be the case, but I tend to believe in determinism down to the bottom, the bottom turtle, yeah, they are, yeah. And I don’t really believe in randomness, actually. I can’t believe in—because to me, randomness means—randomness, really, and probability are just measures of ignorance, right? And I don’t believe in this Heisenberg—I don’t believe in all these physicists who want to become philosophers and they interpret their mathematical models in a certain way. It’s fine as a model or as a metaphorical thing, but this stuff about Heisenberg and how the observer matters, there’s only so much precision in reality because whenever you measure something, you interfere with it, and that means that, in reality, I think that’s all too much, but I don’t know.

31:01

Stephan Kinsella: Well, right or wrong, yes or no, I don’t think it’s relevant to our discussion about free will because either way, either it’s purely deterministic, or it’s deterministic with a little bit of quantum uncertainty, either way, I don’t end up at free will. So, I’m—let me ask you this, let me ask you this, how would you handle this argument? Because this is the one argument that a lot of libertarians and libertarian philosophers try to give for free will. Their argument is this kind of proof by contradiction argument, sort of like the Aristotelian argument that, you know, for some of the basic axioms of philosophy, like the law of excluded middle or non-contradiction or whatever, like you have to assume the opposite to contradict it, or to deny it, so you’re basically ending up in a contradiction. So, it’s a sort of a proof by contradiction. And the argument is this, that when, let’s say, you and I are debating free will, and I believe in it, you don’t, you’re assuming that you’re advancing arguments meant to persuade me that you’re correct, and that I can choose to accept the standards of reason or whatever you’re advancing, right? I can choose to evaluate this and to decide or not. No, so you have to stop using the word choose. This argument is that you have to presuppose free will because the very endeavor of trying to argue about it presupposes free will. Have you heard this argument?

32:43

Steve Mendelsohn: Yeah, no, yeah, but it’s not—it’s not—you heard the argument though, you know what I’m—yeah, I’ve probably had people say things like that to me. I don’t recall specifically, but our beliefs aren’t static because our evidence isn’t static every moment of the day.

32:57

Stephan Kinsella: The idea is that—hold on, the idea is that when people give you evidence, you have to choose whether to accept it or not as valid. No, that’s the—that’s the subjective part. That’s the subjective part of automatic, involuntary, subjective evidence weighing. Our brain assigns weight to pieces of evidence that we acquire, and that assigning of weight also happens automatically and involuntarily. If you tell me—

33:29

Stephan Kinsella: Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. I would agree with that, but do you agree that human knowledge has increased over the last several millennia? I mean, absolutely, we have more—we have our evidence is changing all the time.

33:34

Steve Mendelsohn: No, no, it’s not just evidence, it’s the process by which humans choose—which they select, right? They select—saying choose, choose is a loaded word, right? You wouldn’t say—say choose instead of—I don’t know what other word to use. It’s a problem.

33:52

Stephan Kinsella: Point is, it’s a problem with the English language because we have words that themselves presuppose the existence of free will. We don’t talk about a gumball machine choosing which gumball to dispense.

34:06

Steve Mendelsohn: Well, okay, that’s funny you say that because there are—maybe it’s not you, I thought it was you—there are some patent claims you and I have drafted, or I’ve seen other people draft, like there was one I saw where it said, processor, wherein the processor believes this to—case. And so, I know, this is the imprecise use of metaphorical language to describe an aspect of the way the thing is configured and set up to work. But that’s different. I thought you taught me that one time, but that’s different. That’s assuming that machines have the same quality as human beings, right? That’s—

34:41

Stephan Kinsella: They don’t, exactly. And just like computers don’t choose or don’t believe, they don’t exercise conscious control over their operations. You could see an engineer setting up a system, and he would describe the operation by saying, okay, so if this happens, the robot will choose this or that. I mean, he’s just trying to use the English language to describe what’s going on, right? Because we don’t have good words in the English language that—well, we also don’t have infinite knowledge. We don’t have infinite knowledge, like, from a God’s eye point of view of the way the quark swarms are going to work out. So, we describe it in terms of teleological or purposive actions because that’s the best way to get a descriptive view of what the system is doing, right? And as you alluded to earlier, and as Sam Harris says, free will is an illusion, yes, it feels like we have free will, but that doesn’t mean—

35:39

Stephan Kinsella: Hold on a second. Correct me if I’m wrong on this. I thought I heard Sam say somewhere, or maybe it’s in one of his books, I thought he had this whole thing about the illusion of free will is itself an illusion, like he had this point that, right, that we don’t even experience, if you think about it closely for a second, you just examine your experience, it’s—there’s not even the illusion of free will. In other words, that whole metaphor is what’s used, that’s used by pro-free will people to denigrate the determinist, okay? They’ll say, well, you just think it’s an illusion, but Sam’s point, I thought Sam pointed this out somewhere, maybe you can correct me, but he says the illusion itself is an illusion because if you—you don’t actually experience, like you said, it’s like you’re flying in an airplane. That’s the Buddhist in Sam Harris. You’re witnessing things rather than choosing. You notice it after it’s been done, in a sense, right? ¹

36:44

Steve Mendelsohn: Yeah, actually, I kind of agree with that. I don’t recall that in his book “Free Will,” it might be there, I don’t recall it. But as I said, he’s a big Buddhist, and that sounds like Buddhist talk. We don’t have—yeah, self. I’m surprised you like him because he’s sort of, you know, a lot of the progressive left, which you’re sort of kind of leaning towards, right, they hate Sam Harris because of his—because he’s realist about Muslims, right?

37:08

Stephan Kinsella: Right, well, yeah, I—that—well, some people good on some things and bad on the others, or you’re like, yeah, maybe he’s not so wrong. Well, I would say that we could discuss Muslims and Islam in two different ways.

37:27

Steve Mendelsohn: Talking about faith, let’s talk about faith and free will, basically, that implies a criticism of religion. So, my point is that faith is that process, that process of automatic, involuntary, subjective evidence weighing is faith. Faith is what takes us from evidence to conclusion, right? You and I have discussed—

37:51

Stephan Kinsella: Definition, I’m just—where do you—I’m a philosopher, I made it up, yeah, but that’s—you can’t just redefine a word. I know you can be your own lexicographer in patent law, but there are limits. You want to communicate with people. See, to my mind, as a sort of logical, rational person, there are two valid means of validating knowledge or having valid knowledge or sound knowledge about the world, okay? Let’s say one would be evidence or experience, and the other would be reason, right? And they combine, they intertwine, of course, especially chronologically, but because you can’t—so a baby can’t reason about a gun being pointed at him. He’s not afraid of the gun; he doesn’t know what the gun is, right? But after a certain point, you combine these things. You can’t have reason without any evidence to fill it; you’d be like a brain in a vat with no sensory data, you’d go crazy. But those two combined are the sources of knowledge: reason and evidence, okay? But leaning—so you keep talking about evidence, so you lean on one of those, right?

39:06

Steve Mendelsohn: You need to expand your definition of evidence, though, because most of the evidence that we have in our possession is not what we’ve experienced; it’s what we’ve heard from others. Most of what we believe, that’s—that’s a complicated topic, like historical evidence and things like that, but the point is—

39:27

Stephan Kinsella: The point is, from a conceptual and perceptual sense, it’s what you actually witness and perceive. So, that’s like raw information you’re getting about the state of affairs of the universe. There is some correspondence between the real world and what you’re perceiving, and then your brain integrates that into higher-level concepts, and that’s where mistakes get set in. So, I would say I agree pretty much with Ayn Rand and her whole philosophy on this, that if you perceive something, you can never have an erroneous perception. And now people try out the thing of illusions and hallucinations as counterexamples. I don’t think those are counterexamples because you’re just not perceiving anything then. But if you’re actually perceiving something, then that cannot be mistaken. Concept can be mistaken. It’s like the animal in the foggy field; it looks like a fox, I perceive it as a fox, that was—

40:20

Steve Mendelsohn: No, but that was your—see, that was your conceptual level, so you were trying to integrate it into a higher level of classifying the type of—that wasn’t a percept, right? I said, what was it, what was it, a fox? What was it? You said, I saw fox-like characteristics, and my brain concluded it was—I made it up, it’s not a true story, okay? But whatever it really was, that’s what you—my point is, that’s what you were perceiving because that’s what was physically causing your sense receptors to notice this. So, you were—whatever it was, that’s what you were receiving. I agree. I see, if I see a stick in the water, and it looks bent, yes, my conceptual mind is making the mistake of thinking it’s bent because I’m trying to go to that level, and that’s where you can make mistakes. I’m perceiving the stick, but I’m perceiving the stick in the only form possible, given the physics of the matter and the way the senses work, the way light waves work, that all this stuff works. So, I’m perceiving the actual stick, right? I’m just perceiving it in a form, in an unusual form, which confuses my conceptual faculty, right? So, at the conceptual level, you can make mistakes. But so, but my point is, all I’m saying is, all of that happens automatically and involuntarily. All that processing by our brains will issue—

41:43

Stephan Kinsella: I agree with you on that, but that’s the free will issue. Well, so far, we’re just up to beliefs, right? We’re just up to beliefs, so we’re not up to actions. The question is, but—so the question is, what’s the word faith, and what should it be used for? To my mind, the way I hear it used all the time, basically, faith is a third form, a third source of knowledge, which religious people use to justify believing in something for which they have no evidence and no reason.

42:05

Steve Mendelsohn: No, no, see, that’s unfair, that’s unfair. That’s where atheists like you and me—it’s unfair because I’m trying to actually give a coherent—you are not giving them credit because they do perceive evidence for God’s existence. You don’t give that evidence any weight, you don’t give that evidence any weight, but they do, of course they do. They look at a tree, and they say, that is magnificent, that could not have happened randomly, that could not have happened without a designer, whatever their arguments are.

42:41

Stephan Kinsella: Hold on, they’re not witnessing—so that’s—so that’s not—that’s not evidence, and that’s a reason. In other words, they’re—so they’re not witnessing God, okay? Here’s another piece of evidence, so now they’re making an argument, so they’re using reason. So, the—let’s take a step back. Argument makes sense. Somebody once told me that E equals mc², right? I didn’t even know what E equals mc² meant, and yet I believed that E equals mc². Why? Because people I trusted told me that that was true. So, my belief that E equals mc² was true, yeah, the evidence that I had were the statements made by trusted people. When I grew up, I was taught that God exists by people I trust, by my parents, by my clergy, by my siblings, by my friends. I was told that God exists.

43:52

Steve Mendelsohn: Then you grew up.

43:52

Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, then you grew up, okay? But that was the evidence that I had, that evidence—it is evidence. It’s the evidence that you have, that you base most of your beliefs on, what other people have told you, what you have read. If you believe that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, you didn’t watch Shakespeare sit down at a table and write Hamlet. You don’t have that kind of evidence. Even if I had watched him do it, that doesn’t prove that he did it. I could be—but it’s not, but it’s still evidence, of course, but it’s still your evidence. I think you’re equating the word trust with the word faith, which is giving the—by the way, it’s giving the Christians and these religious nuts an out.

44:25

Steve Mendelsohn: Nobody—no, well, everyone trusts someone, so no religious person—no religious person says, I believe in the existence of God in the absence of evidence. Nobody says that.

44:38

Stephan Kinsella: I completely and totally disagree. I have asked—in fact, a lot of the hard ones, they—yes, they will say—maybe we talk to different people, but I—or maybe I’m—they say, they say, it’s written in this book, that’s all the evidence—

44:51

Steve Mendelsohn: No, no, no, no, no, no, hold on, a lot—well, first of all, they’re contradictory, so they will say things contradict, fine, but absolutely. But if you ask them, they have—you never heard any Christian say something like, well, if you could prove there’s a God, that would make it pointless to have faith in him, right? Or they say, well, God’s nature is inherently undefinable, so it just has—they—the whole idea of the leap of faith or the act of faith, why—why would you say a leap of faith? That’s exactly trusting an authority. That’s exactly what the ASO process does. It closes the gap; it spans the gap from evidence to conclusion. When you have a belief that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, and, you know, whoever it is, Bacon did not write Hamlet, there are people who have written books about this issue on both sides, and there’s evidence for, and there’s evidence against, and you—there—and there’s probably, in some of these disputes, there’s probably no firm answer that we can ever—because it’s not a repeatable scientific experiment, and it’s not a process of a priori argumentation where you can prove it by—it’s not, it’s based on the evidence in your possession and how your brain processes that evidence. Some people look at—some people at the same evidence and conclude that Shakespeare did write Hamlet; some people look at that exact same evidence and conclude the opposite, the Bacon—Joseph—Joseph Soyinka wrote that the Earl of Oxford or someone was really the author of Shakespeare’s play.

46:40

Stephan Kinsella: Okay, and I know another guy that said it wasn’t Shakespeare; it was just another guy with the same name. I heard that about—about Homer, but anyway, actually, there’s another crazy libertarian named Alexander Galambos, Andrew Galambos, who argued that Thomas Paine really wrote the Declaration of Independence; it wasn’t Jefferson.

46:53

Steve Mendelsohn: Well, I recently got some arguments for it. He’s basically a conspiracy nut, but there are some arguments. True, we will never know for sure unless we can get a quantum computer and go back in time and recreate everything. We’ll never know for sure. I recently read Thomas Paine’s “Age of Reason”; it’s great. Yeah, he’s—he’s so underrated. Anyway, back to faith. He was—he was weak on intellectual property, I gotta say.

47:24

Stephan Kinsella: So, back to—so wanted copyright, okay, so faith. Anyway, these classical liberals, by—based on how good they were on intellectual property—there is a process by which we go from evidence to conclusion because not everything is certain, and yet we form beliefs in the face of uncertainty. And that process of going from evidence to conclusion is what I call the automatic, involuntary, subjective evidence that our brain performs to process the evidence that we have. It does so subjectively, meaning it’s based—everybody’s different, but it happens automatically, involuntarily, and the scale tips one way, or it tips the other way based on that automatic processing. Now, I think that’s what people call faith. Now, some people—you’re right, some people—

48:19

Stephan Kinsella: I’m with you until that point, and I kind of—I think you’re—it’s a little flip, you’re amateur philosophizing it, you’re kind of reinventing the wheel, which is what a lot of people do. You got to be careful not to be seen as a crank when you do that. Well, let me say it this way, take a lot of work to go through all the stuff, but when you go to the faith part, you just—that, that’s—I’m with you, like, it’s as a loose description of what we do. I would use maybe some slightly different terms, which I’ve acquired through my reading, but I think roughly you’re right. But I would also say that when you dismiss it as being automatic, I don’t know what that—it’s true, but what does that prove? It doesn’t mean that our minds don’t gradually get better at discovering real things.

48:58

Steve Mendelsohn: Absolutely, it’s not static, it’s not static, it’s dynamic, it changes. Not that it’s static, that has a direction. It has a direction towards truth, well, maybe in the grand scheme of things. How can we have—how can we have technological advancement if it doesn’t have a direction? We make mistakes all the time, cold fusion. I just read a great book. We have a direction, we have a direction, we are more advanced technologically now than we were 100 years ago and 500 years ago, etc.

49:33

Stephan Kinsella: Would you—I don’t know, I think, you know, if you look historically, probably the ancient Greeks probably had it over our Middle Ages, but they didn’t understand the things we understand about chemistry now and—and, okay, okay, so Newton’s equation and flight and space travel, okay, so there’s—there’s a direction, fine.

49:54

Steve Mendelsohn: All I’m saying is it’s not static. Our evidence changes all the time, and our beliefs can change when our evidence, when the accumulated evidence tips the scale the other way. That’s what happened to me when I went free, right? But this, even though this happens, we don’t have free will, absolutely, because the brain functions automatically and involuntarily in order—survival mechanism, the ones that survive selection, the ones that survive do better, tend to procreate and duplicate themselves, fine, absolutely.

50:31

Stephan Kinsella: We’re in agreement, so, but the point—the point is that, what’s the point? The point is that, from my perspective, those religious people who define faith differently from the way I define it are mischaracterizing the psychological process that’s going on in their brains because they are insisting that they are choosing, and that it’s not automatic and involuntary, that it’s voluntary, and that it’s the result of their exercising conscious control over the process of going from evidence to conclusion. And I say that’s wrong, so I throw it back in their face.

51:14

Stephan Kinsella: Hold up, you’re redefining the word faith. Are you going to define the word choose?

51:22

Steve Mendelsohn: Yeah, choose, choose, I’m saying that’s what they’re claiming. They’re claiming to choose is to exercise conscious control over a selection process, alright? There’s a number of options, and you end up with a single selection, okay? Even that word’s a little iffy because these words imply the existence of conscious control, and that’s what choice is. Choice implies conscious control. Again, we don’t talk about a gumball machine choosing a gumball, right? There’s a mechanism in there that’s spitting out the next gumball that’s sitting ready to be spat out. And that’s what our brains do. And there’s a whole chapter in my book about how our brains are just like gumball machines. And that’s what our brains do; they process that evidence that comes in, and they spit out beliefs, right? And that’s where I got to—

52:00

Stephan Kinsella: You don’t—but you describe a gumball machine in terms of—I don’t know, random or stochastic process?

52:12

Steve Mendelsohn: No, no, absolutely not, or mechanical, no, it’s not a random—a gumball machine is not random. If you know exactly where every gumball is in a gumball machine, and you understand its mechanism for operation, absent quantum mechanical effects, you can predict exactly the sequence of colors. No one ever knows that’s—no one ever knows where every gumball is, like, that’s a theoretical possibility. My point is, when you’re designing a machine, but you don’t need to, you just basically—you use statistics, is my point, use statistics to say, okay, let’s arrange it this way, they’ll fall down this way or whatever, not statistics, physics. I’m thinking of these—I guess I’m thinking of these machines, these games where, like, there’s all these—that’s not a gumball machine, right? That’s—you mean, like, a lottery? For some reason, a lottery ball went to—my mind went to the machine, like, in the arcade, it’s like a vertical wall where there’s a bunch of pegs, and you drop a disc in—that’s Pachinko, Plinko, it’s the Japanese. When you design the game, you kind of know statistical regularities; you designed it in such a way where it’s not too easy to win, not too hard.

53:28

Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, but in your—in your Newtonian, deterministic world that you believe in, if you knew where you dropped that initial ball and where the pegs are, you’d know where it was going.

53:35

Steve Mendelsohn: I know, I totally agree with that, but the point is, you’re designing this for human people who are going to put a quarter in to play it, and you want to give them a little thrill, a little experience, and, from their point of view, they’re not omniscient. They don’t know where all the particles are, and so, from them, it looks random, and so they’re taking a guess, and whatever. I’m just saying, you use statistics to design these things, but what I’m saying is, you don’t use anywhere near that kind of model to explain other human beings you interact with. And, you know, you view them in terms of purposes, like you assume that people you’re dealing with have some purposes in mind. It’s not random, it’s not random, this ASO process, random or not, maybe it’s random, this ASO process is not random. There are reasons why we come to the conclusions we come to based on our genetics and our history. There are reasons why we have the beliefs that we have, okay? It’s not random.

54:32

Stephan Kinsella: Well, yeah, there’s reasons why, although I will say that, as a determinist, sort of anti-free will type for all my life, basically, I’ve always disliked the sloppy determinism of the people that say things like, oh, well, you were determined because of the way your mother raised you, like these macro-level things. To me, I was always a physics-level guy, like, I think it’s from some subatomic particle level, it’s basically all determined by the four laws of physics, right? Something like that, it’s mathematical, but it’s not because, you know, of the environment in terms of, like, your macro environment, like, oh, you were raised Catholic, or your mother had a guilt complex or something, because that never is rigorous, because you’ll have twins, right? You’ll have twins, and they come out differently, right? They’re not—they’re not the same environment, they’re not the—it’s not the same—only same if you go down to the micro level enough. And my point is, the micro—you have to go very far.

55:36

Steve Mendelsohn: You don’t have to go very far, even for twins, no, well, that’s true, but I still don’t think that’s the explanation. The explanation has got to be further, further down, like, if you want to go to true determinism, but what does it matter for life? So, here’s the point, so I wrote an essay, and I said, and then I read Sam Harris, and he said, yeah, we don’t choose our beliefs, we don’t choose any of our thoughts, we don’t choose our actions, and we don’t. And so, the implications are that it really is unfair to punish somebody for a transgression that that individual could not control at the individual level.

56:25

Stephan Kinsella: The obvious, you know, the obvious counter reply to that—well, go ahead.

56:33

Steve Mendelsohn: Well, if everyone’s determined, and it’s because we’re determined, it’s unfair to punish someone for something they couldn’t have chosen to not have done, we can’t choose not to punish them either.

56:47

Stephan Kinsella: Well, if we punish them, it’s because we had no choice, but it was predetermined, but so, so you’re trying to have it both ways, in a way.

56:53

Steve Mendelsohn: Well, no, I’m not. I read Sam Harris, and in Sam Harris’s book “Free Will,” he talks about this, and that was new evidence that I acquired, and that new evidence made me also believe—

57:06

Stephan Kinsella: It’s not evidence, I disagree. Of course, it’s evidence; it’s what somebody told me. You just read an—you read words from someone, yes, that’s—that’s upon which most of our beliefs are based, words that we hear and read from others. So, that’s things you perceive with your senses, or that you can replicate. So, I perceive words, I hear words, that’s a perception. I mean, what are you talking about? You list—list your beliefs, okay? Do you believe that Seattle’s the capital of the state of Washington?

57:37

Steve Mendelsohn: Sure.

57:37

Stephan Kinsella: Why do you believe it? Because somebody told you that. You don’t know—I don’t know if that’s true, anyway, but I think it is. But, in any case, that’s a—when you say you don’t know, that’s a whole question about the theory of knowledge.

57:50

Steve Mendelsohn: Well, see, all I’m saying is, most of what we believe and most of what we know is based solely on testimonial evidence, not perceptual evidence. Testimonial evidence—what Sam said is not testimonial. I agree with you that, in a courtroom, when someone gets on the witness stand, and they testify to what they witnessed, and they say, this is what happened, that is a type of evidence. It’s probative, if you, as you might want to call it, as being—yeah, by the way, were you a philosophy school too, or just a law school?

58:22

Stephan Kinsella: I was only in that one class, but it’s too—you don’t have to explain that. The reasoning by some philosopher or thinker, I wouldn’t call that evidence, but I know what you mean. I think you’re using the term way more broadly than I would use it.

58:35

Steve Mendelsohn: Okay, I’ll accept that, but the problem is that can lead to equivocation because you’re sort of adopting the logical positivist, empiricist mindset when you keep boiling everything down to evidence, but then you have to broaden the term of evidence so much to make that fit into your expanded—I’m just talking about what our brains chew on. Our brains chew on our perceptions, and they chew on what we’ve heard. By the way, do you mean our brains or our minds? This is another whole topic.

59:05

Stephan Kinsella: Well, it is, and it’s where my book starts. My book starts there. Would you agree there’s a conceptual distinction between brain and mind?

59:11

Steve Mendelsohn: Yes, except for the fact that the mind is generated by the brain. The mind does not exist separate from the brain. The mind, the consciousness, what we call our consciousness, is just another type of thinking, just like beliefs and feelings and emotions. It’s the product of our brains. So, that’s where—in philosophy, they call that an—some call it an epiphenomenon, epiphenomena. Fine, I don’t—ask me how it’s created. I know that it’s created in me because I feel it. Point is, conceptually, the word mind or the concept for mind refers to a different phenomenon or entity in nature than the concept of brain, right? But I don’t believe mind—but you can’t change your brain. I believe that my consciousness is, as you say, an epiphenomenon. I do not believe that my consciousness exists or will exist separate from my brain. When my brain stops functioning, my consciousness will disappear.

1:00:04

Stephan Kinsella: I agree with that, of course, okay, but you and I agree with that, but most people or theists and others who, even are atheists, maybe, but stick to theists, believe that our soul, our consciousness, our spirit exists separate from our bodies and will continue to exist. And so, it’s easy for them to believe in free will because, number one, they believe that there’s this separate entity, not an epiphenomenon, but a phenomenon, a thing called consciousness, that—

1:00:38

Steve Mendelsohn: Forget the term, forget the term. I don’t think—I don’t think it makes—no, your terms are fine, but I don’t think it makes it easier. I think they think it makes, but it’s so much easier. It’s sort of like when you say, when, where did the universe begin? You and I would say, we don’t know, and they would say, oh, well, it started with God. And then, if you say, well, where did God start, they say, I don’t know, so they push the problem back.

1:01:05

Stephan Kinsella: No, they don’t. They say God always existed. They don’t say, I don’t know, well, whatever, but so we can say that about the universe. Listen, I didn’t—

1:01:10

Steve Mendelsohn: I didn’t write “Shallow Drafts” to convince theists that we don’t have free will. I wrote “Shallow Drafts” to convince my fellow atheists that we don’t have free will. And, as I was saying, it’s easy for theists to believe in free will because they believe that this consciousness that exists separate from our body, our minds separate from our body, and they believe in miracles, so they believe that this non-material, non-physical thing called consciousness can somehow modify and modulate and affect the neurons and the protons in our brains.

1:01:56

Stephan Kinsella: I agree, they think there’s a—they think—so, this is where I was going to go with that God analogy. They believe in a type of ontological dualism, I would call it. So, they think—or maybe more than dualism, but they think there’s two realms of reality. There, there’s a spiritual realm, but they also think there’s a connection between the spiritual realm and the physical realm, like, so they think, like, there’s a soul up there in heaven, right, that’s somehow connected to a body, somehow, right, like, right, whatever, the details are boring. If—but the point is, you never escape the dilemma of free will because, even if you—it doesn’t matter what the realm is. I mean, maybe, maybe our realm is really spiritual. I mean, if you look at the atoms, we’re really empty space all the way down, so maybe we are spirits in a certain sense. So, it doesn’t matter if you transform or imagine the second realm of spirits. Now, your word miracle is interesting because, to my mind, the word miracle is similar to the word faith. That’s one reason I have trouble with you using it as a substitute for knowledge because you’re using it as trust, and trust is a perfectly fine way of acquiring knowledge from other people who are experts in something, have studied something. A miracle is the suspension of physical processes, right? It’s—faith is the belief in something with no reason.

1:03:26

Steve Mendelsohn: No, it’s not—happening of something with no causes, same thing. You’re—I have faith that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. I don’t know that Shakespeare—but that’s not what the word means.

1:03:37

Stephan Kinsella: It is, it’s the—but the point—say you have—you have a good reason to believe that, that’s what I would say.

1:03:44

Steve Mendelsohn: I’m saying, what I’m saying is that my brain performs the exact same process in going from my evidence about Shakespeare to my conclusion about Shakespeare as the psychological process that takes me from evidence for or against the existence of God to a conclusion. Dude, you could say my brain performs the same experience when I experience an endorphin rush when I’m parachuting out of an airplane because it’s all mechanical. You’re acting—things that, that, right, they’re not—they’re not the same.

1:04:21

Stephan Kinsella: They are the same, the process, but—but by that—but by that reasoning, the thing that happens in a cricket’s brain is the same as happens in your brain because they’re all causal. I mean, you’re omitting too many fine nuances that distinguish things when we talk, conceptual reason.

1:04:34

Steve Mendelsohn: I don’t know whether crickets have consciousness or not. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t, I don’t know. I assume, frankly, that you have consciousness. I don’t know that to be the case, but I assume that since you and I are both being, you know—so what does it mean, you know it, in the sense of you have a reason to be certain about that, you have certain—well, I’m confident, not certain, but I’m confident, I know. So, I know, so you want to do everything on a spectrum, like degrees. That’s—this is why you won’t say, you know there’s not a God. You want to say, well, you’re like Harris and these four horsemen guys who—oh, well, so evidence for God. Hey, Steve, there never could be evidence for God, you know that.

1:05:11

Stephan Kinsella: Of course there could be. How could there be evidence for God? How could there be evidence for an omnipotent, immortal being? How would he know he’s immortal? If you got struck by lightning for saying that, that would be evidence for God. It wouldn’t be conclusive, it wouldn’t be proof, but it would be evidence for, huh?

1:05:30

Steve Mendelsohn: Well, that’s where we disagree. I don’t think that—I think the idea of God is totally impossible because part of God’s definition is he knows, say, he’s—he’s omniscient, so he would have to know he’s God, which means he’d have to be immortal, he’d have to know he’s immortal, he’d have to be omnipotent and know he’s omnipotent. But the problem is, even if you were omnipotent and even if you were immortal, you could never know that because tomorrow there could be a super God above you that was yanking your strings the whole time, which, by the way, is one of the early Christian beliefs that some of these Christian heretics believe, that Paul hijacked the faith, and that all the Christians were worshiping this sort of fake under-God who thought he was God, but there’s another God above him. But you can never—you can never be surprised at the lengths to which these mystics will go. They will come up with all kinds of crazy, and the Christians are not even the worst. I mean, I’ve been reading about Islam lately. If you read into, like, the—the Thirteens and Islam, Islam is even crazier, and, of course, Judaism has its own, and all—they all do, they all have their crazy stuff.

1:06:54

Stephan Kinsella: Yes, sir, incredible to me. They will just make up one thing after the other, yes. So, let me just—well, okay, so maybe, maybe God’s possible, maybe God’s not possible. You and I believe God does not exist, and you say you know God doesn’t exist. You’re not persuaded—

1:07:06

Steve Mendelsohn: No, I believe—I believe—I have beliefs. I don’t—just not sure, right? I’m not sure. I’m not sure that Shakespeare wrote—possible there could be a guy that knows he’s going to live forever. You think that’s possible?

1:07:20

Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, I think that’s possible. How—how could you—how could you know you’re going to live forever, seriously? Tomorrow hasn’t come yet. How do you know you’re going to be alive tomorrow? You and I don’t know an asteroid’s not going to wipe out the Earth tomorrow, right? We don’t know that gravity is going to stop working tomorrow. We don’t know that.

1:07:37

Steve Mendelsohn: True, true, I believe that that’s not true. I believe that that’s not true. I don’t—I don’t know, I don’t know, I—we’re going to have to agree to disagree about whether God is even possible, okay?

1:07:49

Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, so, basically, you’re the theist here.

1:07:56

Steve Mendelsohn: No, no, hang on, I’m moving over because the sun is getting in the way. I used to be a theist. I used to be a theist, and then the evidence that I had in my possession changed over time, and my brain automatically and involuntarily switched from me being a theist to an atheist. That happened over time, automatically, involuntarily. Agree that I’m right right now, and we’ll be done with it.

1:08:19

Stephan Kinsella: Oh, if I only could, I would, so. But let me go back to the—let me go back to—maybe in five minutes, you’re going to change your mind. Let me just go back to justice for a second. So, I said that, at the individual level, it’s unfair to punish somebody for transgressing when they had no free will. By the same token, it’s unfair to reward somebody for doing good if they had no free will. It’s unfair to do so when—

1:08:45

Steve Mendelsohn: There is a—in a limited—what—who does that? Who rewards for doing well? Well, your boss, if you do a good job, he gives you a raise. So, you’re basically trying to come up with an argument as capitalism—

1:09:00

Stephan Kinsella: Go ahead, no, no, you’re missing my point. My point is that there’s an inherent unfairness to treating people better or worse based on their actions, yeah, over which they had no free will, no conscious control. Again, whether that’s deterministic or random, it doesn’t matter. But, like Sam Harris, I think that there is a societal justification for punishing transgressors and rewarding good doers because we want to encourage them, and we want to encourage others and discourage them, and—

1:09:33

Steve Mendelsohn: Always been part of the argument, that’s—that’s, like, for centuries, that’s been part of the argument, right? But not the part that says that it’s inherently wrong to do that at the individual level, right?

1:09:46

Stephan Kinsella: What’s the difference, whether you think it’s inherently wrong or not, or whether you just don’t like—you, Steve Mendelsohn, don’t want people running around raping and murdering and pillaging and looting?

1:09:57

Steve Mendelsohn: But I do think that having that appreciation of the lack of free will will temper and modify and reduce the punishments and reduce the rewards, compassionate, yeah, make us more compassionate, absolutely.

1:10:16

Stephan Kinsella: And, yeah, but you still—you still keep evading the difference. I mean, you’re talking about treating people, but treating is action too, and so the people that are treating are determined too. So, I don’t know what you’re—are you saying, I want you people to choose to listen to me, therefore be nicer to criminals?

1:10:28

Steve Mendelsohn: I’m talking because I read Sam Harris, and that tipped my scale, and whatever’s motivating me automatically and involuntarily to talk now is spreading that word to others. And if it has the effect of having them automatically, involuntarily change their minds about these issues, that’s the way that’s the way this whole process works, people communicating with one another, and that’s how evidence changes over time, and that’s how beliefs change over time.

1:10:58

Stephan Kinsella: By the way, just to let you know, I agree with almost everything you’ve been saying. I agree with all this. I’m just giving you sort of a devil’s advocate, but no, that’s fine. I agree that we should—although, from a criminal point of view, I would be more on the macroscopic level. I would say, listen, almost like, almost everyone you hear of that is a horrible psychopath or sociopath or criminal, they’re almost always, like, from a poor family, they were abused by their parents, there’s always a reason, there’s always a cause, right? Or almost, even a physical brain defect, yeah. Now, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t incapacitate some people. I do think that, like, I mean, I’ve written stuff on this, there’s different theories of punishment, whether it should be restitution, retribution, rehabilitation, incapacitation. I tend to think incapacitation is the most justifiable, and self-defense, restitution, rehabilitation, retribution, no, they’re less. And I actually think in a libertarian, stateless, free market order, you would tend to have a voluntary system without even any prisons, mostly, and you would rely upon voluntary ostracism and things like that. There’s a whole literature on this, which is fascinating, but it’s about giving people an opportunity to reintegrate back into society, pay your debts, do what you got to do, apologize.

1:12:19

Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, I don’t know if I’ve talked to you about this before, but there’s something about this, the Jewish idea of—what do you call it—repentance, yeah, which the Christians sort of—to the Christians, like, remember that Black church that was shot, the Black Christian church that was shot up by this white racist guy a few years ago?

1:12:45

Steve Mendelsohn: Yeah.

1:12:45

Stephan Kinsella: And all the Black people, they gave—they forgave him, like, well, they—he didn’t ask—he didn’t ask for forgiveness, right? No, he didn’t even ask for it. Like, I love the Jewish idea that, okay, you have to, like, admit what you did wrong, admit the harm you did, offer something to make it up, and humbly ask for, you know, repent and ask for forgiveness, and offer some kind of—you know, to me, that makes total logical sense. And I think that’s roughly the way a justice system would work. Now, I do think there would be some people that would be the supermax type of D.C. criminals that would be—you’d either have to just kill them, or they would just be killed by the family of the victims, you know, and no one would turn an eye, or they’d be ostracized or outcast to Coventry or to Australia, you know what I mean, something like that. But other than that, the whole penal system is totally screwed, and I—so I basically agree with you on slightly different reasons, but, yeah, but it’s not—I wouldn’t say it’s because people, you know, if you rape and murder a young child or something horrible, even if there’s an excuse or a reason for it, it’s sort of like when the family dog mauls the baby, you got to put the dog down.

1:13:54

Steve Mendelsohn: Even if—well, as I write in my book, when the lion kills a zookeeper, why do we have to put the lion down? That’s what lions do, lions are—

1:14:16

Stephan Kinsella: Behind that, but I think—I think, I don’t know about that, but I do think if you have a pitbull that kills a baby, yeah, but you’re not doing it for retribution, you’re not doing it to punish the dog, you’re doing it to prevent the dog from hurting others, and that’s the same thing, retribution, as Sam Harris—retribution is not a valid reason for punishing. It’s not to punish the past activity; it’s to prevent future bad activity.

1:14:49

Steve Mendelsohn: Although there is a book, it’s an interesting book, it’s—the title is called “Getting Even,” and that’s—

1:15:02

Stephan Kinsella: Woody Allen’s book?

1:15:02

Steve Mendelsohn: No, it’s not, it’s another guy, it’s a—it’s a philosopher, political philosopher, but he explains why, even though liberal-minded people like us, yeah, might tend to think retribution is kind of retrograde and not really the humanitarian or the social or the civilized way of dealing with crime, there are actually reasons that—

1:15:34

Stephan Kinsella: Retribution has been and maybe could be justified as being integrated into the system, something to do with, it’s like catharsis and all this kind of stuff. It makes you feel better, yeah.

1:15:45

Steve Mendelsohn: Yeah, I guess, well, it makes the victims feel better. There are some victims who want to see their daughter’s murderer executed in the electric chair, right?

1:15:53

Stephan Kinsella: Right, and who are we to say that it doesn’t actually give them some relief? I’m not saying the cost is worth it. I think the cost is not worth it.

1:16:05

Steve Mendelsohn: Yeah, it’s not dismissible, I think. Well, that’s where the tempering of punishment and reward come in as a result of appreciating this lack of free will that we all have. I agree with you, I think that appreciating our influences in life, like I said, most people that are psychopaths, you can point to something that happened to them when they were children, absolutely, yep, yep.

1:16:29

Stephan Kinsella: Which is one reason I’m against spanking. I don’t know if you are, but I’m against corporal punishment and all these types of ways we raise our children. There’s a whole movement in libertarianism called peaceful parenting, and they—I’ve become more and more an adherent of that, yeah, well, makes sense, mostly because of my Montessori stuff early on, but, yeah, I think if you spank your children as a way to get them to do what you think is right, and you’re supposed to be their protector, and you’re the big, powerful parent adult, what do you expect it’s going to do to them psychologically? Now, I don’t think it’s the end of the world, I know, but, you—I was spanked a few times, and, as I say, I turned out okay, but, you know, there’s probably rape victims who turned out okay, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay, right?

1:17:26

Steve Mendelsohn: Right, the question is, is it the right and moral way to—and it’s the same thing as the punishment system, by the way, is, it’s like, is punitive—are punitive, negative measures the right way to rear children? Anyway, I think if we want fewer psychopaths and sociopaths, we should not traumatize them when they’re young. That’s got to be part of it.

1:17:46

Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, I’m with you. It makes it difficult to figure out how to tread, though, right? If you’re constantly worried about what the lasting implications of everything that you do might have, it gets to be very—

1:17:59

Steve Mendelsohn: Well, yeah, and that’s—that’s a different concern. I mean, of course, that’s the way life is, that everything you do has an opportunity cost, which means that it forecloses some possibilities in the future, right? And as you go through life, then you’ve now foreclosed, like, you and I will never be on the Olympic team doing something because—

1:18:17

Stephan Kinsella: Anything, yeah, we’re not 21 years old or whatever, you know, we’re not going to be medical doctors now because we’ve already foreclosed that option by the paths. But I’m talking about—I’m not talking about personal opportunities. I’m talking about the effect that you have on others, you know, when you’re raising your kid, and you’re deciding, okay, do I give in and give him the bubble gum now, or do I not? What’s the lasting impact that’s going to have on this kid?

1:18:49

Steve Mendelsohn: Well, and I’m not saying that you shouldn’t punish your kids because it will have an impact, because everything you do has an impact. I’m simply saying, the science of child rearing and the science, or whatever you want to call it, the morality of the situation militates against a punitive method, just like what you’re saying. I mean, but—and, but—and again, that has to be based on statistics, right? You have to look at what has happened in the past to this evidence thing—stop me, the nature of—you’re the one who was talking about Plinko.

1:19:31

Stephan Kinsella: I’m the one saying that, well, that was a—that’s a physical system. To determine whether spanking—to determine whether spanking is good or bad, you got to look at people who’ve been spanked and who haven’t and then look and see what the effects are, huh?

1:19:38

Steve Mendelsohn: I agree that can help, but, no, to me, it’s more of—it’s more of a humanitarian thing. It’s—no, you just made an argument that we shouldn’t punish people for committing crimes because they don’t really choose to do the crimes, it’s unfair, it’s unfair to them at the individual level to do so, yes, the societal level, a justification. I mean, why a parent spanks their children, because they say the kid did the wrong thing, he needs to be punished to learn his lesson, right? So he won’t do it again.

1:20:08

Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, but the kid probably did what was natural at his stage of development, was it? Absolutely, was, because he doesn’t have free will either.

1:20:20

Steve Mendelsohn: No, but he didn’t have free will, he didn’t have free will either. Doesn’t matter whether we have free will or not, we still respond to stimuli and respond to environment.

1:20:32

Stephan Kinsella: Absolutely, absolutely, yep, can’t help it, exactly, no free will. I think we’re—we’re pretty much in agreement, okay, we got to sort it out, I think so.

Compatibilism and Daniel Dennett

1:20:46

Stephan Kinsella: I do want to mention compatibilism because you used that term earlier, and that’s not the context that I’ve heard it used in discussing free will. When Daniel Dennett talks about compatibilism, he’s talking about determinism and free will being compatible, and that is what they do is they conflate free will with freedom and they talk about autonomous beings. So, that’s not free will. Free will isn’t freedom from influence of others. Free will is the ability for your consciousness to control your behavior, and I think—I think that might be right. I haven’t read—I read Sam Harris’s footnoted criticisms of Dennett on that, but I haven’t read Dennett himself on compatibilism, and I know that the standard philosophical defense of compatibilism is—it’s all over the map, number one, and it’s not the same as mine. Like I said, I’ve tried to cobble together something based upon my appreciation of dualism, which is the Mises idea that we understand different phenomena in the universe by different modes of cognition and reasoning. So, we argue about economic and teleological phenomena using deductive reasoning from the inside. We argue about and understand causal laws, the physical laws of the world, using the scientific method, to put it crudely. Well, speaking of Daniel Dennett, can I read to you the epilogue from “Shallow Drafts”?

1:22:32

Steve Mendelsohn: Sure.

1:22:40

Steve Mendelsohn: On February 9th, 2017, I went to the Free Library of Philadelphia to hear Daniel Dennett speak about his new book, “From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.” Professor Dennett had just finished discussing the illusion of consciousness when the moderator opened the program to questions from the audience. I was lucky enough to be called on first. Although I had decided what I was going to ask Professor Dennett a day or two before the program, I still fumbled my delivery. I started well enough. Speaking of illusion, I said, do you still believe—I mean, does your brain still automatically, involuntarily make you believe that you have free will, notwithstanding their shared—as two of the four new atheists, along with Richard Dawkins and the late, great Christopher Hitchens, Professor Dennett and Sam Harris have had some heated disagreements about free will. Bottom line, Sam says no, and Dan says yes. I must say that I found Professor Dennett’s answer to my admittedly obnoxious question rather disingenuous. Basically, his answer was something to the effect of—is this—who’s this, is this you talking, this is me, this is my book, I’m reading, I was there.

1:23:45

Stephan Kinsella: I know, I’m looking, I got your book on the screen, yeah, page 207. I asked him a question, I said, right now, does your brain—and then he responded, it depends what you mean by free will. If you mean the kind of free will that implies that we are not responsible for our actions, then who would want to believe in that kind of no free will?

1:24:07

Steve Mendelsohn: Yeah, I wish the moderator had given me an opportunity to respond to his answer, and if I had had such an opportunity, I wish that I had thought fast enough to come up with the following response, but he did not, and I did not, so I’m left with writing it here. That’s very disingenuous of you, Danny, I would have said. I’m not a big fan of cancer and my own mortality, but just because they both have unpleasant implications, that doesn’t mean that cancer doesn’t exist or that I’m not going to die. Would you, as one of the four new atheists, accept as ingenuous the following argument from a theist: if you mean the kind of world without a God, then who would want to believe in that kind of world?

1:24:55

Stephan Kinsella: By the end, I agree, yeah, got it on the screen here, yeah, I agree with you, by the way, I agree totally. Thanks for indulging me. This is—but this is the problem with my—I’ve had with these guys, they’re all—I’m lumping them together, but they’re all scientistic, in my sense, like, they’re all monist, they’re all ultimately—well, Harris tries to be philosophical, but they’re all ultimately empiricist, right? And that’s my main problem, is there’s no appreciation for this role of reason as a source of knowledge and a contextual appreciation of how we acquire certainty in life, right, in knowledge. I think I can work with an empiricist because they, by and large, stumble towards the right things, except when they get caught up in the latest hysteria, like global warming or COVID or something, you know, or eugenics. But, by and large, they’re steered in the right direction by reality, the laws of reality.

1:26:12

Steve Mendelsohn: What can you say? Well, here’s what I say. I quote—it is, I quote Richard Dawkins numerous times in my book. This is his statement: if something is true, no amount of wishful thinking can undo it. So, if we don’t have free will, that might not be comfortable, that might not be comforting, but just because it’s not comfortable doesn’t mean it isn’t true. And no amount of wishful thinking, same thing with God, same thing with death. I want to believe in a world without God, yeah, by the way, that’s not the actual end of my book. Keep going a couple pages later, and you’ll see—now you have to go 30 more pages down. I see the joke, I see the joke, there it is, yeah, that’s my favorite joke. Did you hear about the one-armed fisherman caught a fish this big?

1:27:02

Stephan Kinsella: Well, you know, the other joke about—there’s a—how do you get a one-armed guy caught in a tree to get out of the tree? Ask him to clap.

1:27:08

Steve Mendelsohn: What? Yeah, you wave—give him a high five, wave to him, yeah.

1:27:13

Stephan Kinsella: Okay, very good, politically incorrect as always. Alright, I think we’ve done enough damage today. How about this, are you okay with it?

1:27:19

Steve Mendelsohn: I’m—I love it. Well, I’ll record it—I mean, it’s recorded, if it worked right, if not, we’re going to have to do the whole thing again, take two. They won’t know that this is already take two, we did this all—no, you got to watch—you got to trust—do you ever watch science fiction or television?

1:27:37

Stephan Kinsella: Well, it depends what you mean, but no, not much. You don’t watch, like, Netflix series?

1:27:43

Steve Mendelsohn: I watch Fox News every once in a while, that’s—

1:27:51

Stephan Kinsella: You got to watch, trust me, Steve, trust me, you got to watch “Devs.” What’s it—what’s it called? “Devs,” D-E-V-S, oh, not Deb, not Eugene V., no, “Devs,” it means developers, but it actually means something else. Okay, what is it on, Netflix? You said it’s—

1:28:05

Steve Mendelsohn: On Hulu, oh, okay, I have to get my son to show how to—free will, it’s literally about quantum computing, free will, physics, choice, determinism, that’s it, but in a weird science—it’s crazy. That’s when people—people ask me whether my book “Shallow Drafts” is fiction or non-fiction. I say it depends who you are, we have to wait and see.

1:28:35

Stephan Kinsella: Right, right, okay, well, why don’t we do this? I’ll stop—I’m going to stop now, say goodbye to Kinsella’s people.

1:28:45

Steve Mendelsohn: Bye, thank you, Kinsella people.

1:28:52

Stephan Kinsella: Alright, stop sharing. I stop recording—oh, no, I didn’t, I stopped sharing, hold on, I didn’t stop recording yet, hold on, I didn’t do anything.

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1. See Remembering Tibor Machan, Libertarian Mentor and Friend: Reflections on a Giant, the section “Free Will/Downward Causation”: Harris: “The illusion of free will is itself an illusion.” [↩]