I think Kaku is arguing that free will is not an illusion (I'm not entirely sure). In any case his argument is flawed (there are much better arguments on both sides) and he demonstrates that although he is arguably a brilliant physicist, he is no philosopher. His argument appears to be that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle disproves determinism therefore free will is true.
Essentially, Kaku seems to be pitching determinism versus free will as though one or the other must be true, but it's quite possible that both are false, depending on how we define the free will and determinism (and as far as I can tell he doesn't define free will at all!). If he is saying that free will is true if determinism is false, then he is mistaken. The concepts of uncertainty, indeterminacy, randomness, and so on do not establish self-determination which is the key to free will. If quantum physics has anything to say on this topic, it is that human decisions must allow the possibility that randomness may affect those decisions.
Here is an argument from British philosopher Galen Strawson:
(1) When you act, you do what you do, in the situation in which you find yourself, because of the way you are.
It seems to follow that
(2) To be truly or ultimately morally responsible for what you do, you must be truly or ultimately responsible for the way you are, at least in certain crucial mental respects. (Obviously you don’t have to be responsible for the way you are in all respects. You don’t have to be responsible for your height, age, sex, and so on. But it does seem that you have to be responsible for the way you are at least in certain mental respects. After all, it is your overall mental make up that leads you to do what you do when you act.)
But
(3) You can’t be ultimately responsible for the way you are in any respect at all, so you can’t be ultimately morally responsible for what you do.
Why can’t you be ultimately responsible for the way you are? Because
(4) To be ultimately responsible for the way you are, you would have to have intentionally brought it about that you are the way you are, in a way that is impossible.
The impossibility is shown as follows. Suppose that
(5) You have somehow intentionally brought it about that you are the way you now are, in certain mental respects: suppose that you have intentionally brought it about that you have a certain mental nature N, and that you have brought this about in such a way that you can now be said to be ultimately responsible for having nature N. (The limiting case of this would be the case in which you had simply endorsed your existing mental nature N from a position of power to change it.)
For this to be true
(6) You must already have had a certain mental nature N-1, in the light of which you intentionally brought it about that you now have nature N. (If you didn’t already have a certain mental nature, then you can’t have had any intentions or preferences, and even if you did change in some way, you can’t be held to be responsible for the way you now are.)
But then
(7) For it to be true that you and you alone are truly responsible for how you now are, you must be truly responsible for having had the nature N-1 in the light of which you intentionally brought it about that you now have nature N.
So
(8) You must have intentionally brought it about that you had that nature N-1. But in that case, you must have existed already with a prior nature, N-2, in the light of which you intentionally brought it about that you had the nature N-1 in the light of which you intentionally brought it about that you now have nature N.
And so on. Here one is setting off on a potentially infinite regress. In order for one to be truly or ultimately responsible for how one is, in such a way that one can be truly morally responsible for what one does, something impossible has to be true: there has to be, and cannot be, a starting point in the series of acts of bringing it about that one has a certain nature; a starting point that constitutes an act of ultimate self-origination.
There is a more concise way of putting the point: in order to be truly morally responsible for what one does, it seems that one would have to be the ultimate cause or origin of oneself, or at least of some crucial part of one’s mental nature. One would have to be causa sui, in the old terminology. But nothing can be truly or ultimately causa sui in any respect at all. Even if the property of being causa sui is allowed to belong unintelligibly to God, it cannot plausibly be supposed to be possessed by ordinary finite human beings.
So if our definition of free will requires self-determination, free will is impossible and it doesn’t matter whether we are the way we are because of natural laws, heredity, environment, randomness, or all of the above. We simply can't be the way we are because we self-determined it, and because we make our decisions based on the way we are, we cannot make our decisions on the basis of self-determination. It's an old argument...
Bertrand Russell put the point rather simply decades earlier:
"We can act as we please, but we cannot please as we please."
- Bertrand Russell
"For to ask whether a man be at liberty to will either motion or rest, speaking or silence, which he pleases, is to ask whether a man can will what he wills, or be pleased with what he is pleased with? A question which, I think, needs no answer: and they who can make a question of it must suppose one will to determine the acts of another, and another to determine that, and so on in infinitum."
Anyway, let's look at Kaku's comments in detail (and for more detail on Kaku's fallacies go here)
Essentially, Kaku seems to be pitching determinism versus free will as though one or the other must be true, but it's quite possible that both are false, depending on how we define the free will and determinism (and as far as I can tell he doesn't define free will at all!). If he is saying that free will is true if determinism is false, then he is mistaken. The concepts of uncertainty, indeterminacy, randomness, and so on do not establish self-determination which is the key to free will. If quantum physics has anything to say on this topic, it is that human decisions must allow the possibility that randomness may affect those decisions.
Here is an argument from British philosopher Galen Strawson:
(1) When you act, you do what you do, in the situation in which you find yourself, because of the way you are.
It seems to follow that
(2) To be truly or ultimately morally responsible for what you do, you must be truly or ultimately responsible for the way you are, at least in certain crucial mental respects. (Obviously you don’t have to be responsible for the way you are in all respects. You don’t have to be responsible for your height, age, sex, and so on. But it does seem that you have to be responsible for the way you are at least in certain mental respects. After all, it is your overall mental make up that leads you to do what you do when you act.)
But
(3) You can’t be ultimately responsible for the way you are in any respect at all, so you can’t be ultimately morally responsible for what you do.
Why can’t you be ultimately responsible for the way you are? Because
(4) To be ultimately responsible for the way you are, you would have to have intentionally brought it about that you are the way you are, in a way that is impossible.
The impossibility is shown as follows. Suppose that
(5) You have somehow intentionally brought it about that you are the way you now are, in certain mental respects: suppose that you have intentionally brought it about that you have a certain mental nature N, and that you have brought this about in such a way that you can now be said to be ultimately responsible for having nature N. (The limiting case of this would be the case in which you had simply endorsed your existing mental nature N from a position of power to change it.)
For this to be true
(6) You must already have had a certain mental nature N-1, in the light of which you intentionally brought it about that you now have nature N. (If you didn’t already have a certain mental nature, then you can’t have had any intentions or preferences, and even if you did change in some way, you can’t be held to be responsible for the way you now are.)
But then
(7) For it to be true that you and you alone are truly responsible for how you now are, you must be truly responsible for having had the nature N-1 in the light of which you intentionally brought it about that you now have nature N.
So
(8) You must have intentionally brought it about that you had that nature N-1. But in that case, you must have existed already with a prior nature, N-2, in the light of which you intentionally brought it about that you had the nature N-1 in the light of which you intentionally brought it about that you now have nature N.
And so on. Here one is setting off on a potentially infinite regress. In order for one to be truly or ultimately responsible for how one is, in such a way that one can be truly morally responsible for what one does, something impossible has to be true: there has to be, and cannot be, a starting point in the series of acts of bringing it about that one has a certain nature; a starting point that constitutes an act of ultimate self-origination.
There is a more concise way of putting the point: in order to be truly morally responsible for what one does, it seems that one would have to be the ultimate cause or origin of oneself, or at least of some crucial part of one’s mental nature. One would have to be causa sui, in the old terminology. But nothing can be truly or ultimately causa sui in any respect at all. Even if the property of being causa sui is allowed to belong unintelligibly to God, it cannot plausibly be supposed to be possessed by ordinary finite human beings.
So if our definition of free will requires self-determination, free will is impossible and it doesn’t matter whether we are the way we are because of natural laws, heredity, environment, randomness, or all of the above. We simply can't be the way we are because we self-determined it, and because we make our decisions based on the way we are, we cannot make our decisions on the basis of self-determination. It's an old argument...
Bertrand Russell put the point rather simply decades earlier:
"We can act as we please, but we cannot please as we please."
- Bertrand Russell
"For to ask whether a man be at liberty to will either motion or rest, speaking or silence, which he pleases, is to ask whether a man can will what he wills, or be pleased with what he is pleased with? A question which, I think, needs no answer: and they who can make a question of it must suppose one will to determine the acts of another, and another to determine that, and so on in infinitum."
- John Locke
“Newtonian determinism says that the universe is a clock. A gigantic clock that’s wound up in the beginning of time, and it’s been ticking ever since according to newtons laws of motion.”
Fair enough. But "determinism" and “Newtonian determinism” are very different things, and Newtonian mechanics is not the only deterministic model.
“Einstein was a determinist. Does that mean that a murderer, this horrible mass murderer isn’t really guilty of his works because he was already pre-ordained billions of years ago? Einstein says well yeah, in some sense that’s true. Even mass murderers were predetermined. But he said, they should still be placed in jail.”
I'm not sure Einstein said any of that, but I'd agree with that murderers should be placed in jail of course!
“Then Heisenberg comes along and proposes the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle…and says nonsense. There’s uncertainty. You don’t know where the electron is. It could be here, here, or many places simultaneously.”
At the risk of stating the obvious, uncertainty means we don’t know where the electron will be. It does not mean it is here here or in many places at the same time. We are uncertain. The question is - why don’t we know where it will be - and there are several hypotheses. The Copenhagen interpretation leads to indeterminacy (i.e. some events have no cause). But there is also the pilot-wave theory, the Ensemble interpretation and others which are agnostic toward determinism or indeterminism.
"This of course Einstein hated because he said god doesn’t play dice with the universe. Well, hey, get used to it. Einstein was wrong. God does play dice.”We need to be clear that the word "god" here is being used in the sense of "nature". Bell’s theorem demonstrates that Einstein wasn't wrong about determinism in general, but rather local determinism. Eventually Einstein accepted the Ensemble interpretation...
“The attempt to conceive the quantum-theoretical description as the complete description of the individual systems leads to unnatural theoretical interpretations, which become immediately unnecessary if one accepts the interpretation that the description refers to ensembles of systems and not to individual systems.” – Einstein
Anyway...back to the video...
"Every-time we look at an electron it moves, there’s uncertainty with regards to the position of the electron. So what does that mean for free will? It means in some sense we do have some kind of free will. No one can determine your future events given your past history. There’s always the wildcard. There’s always the possibility of uncertainty in whatever we do.”
If we assume, like Kaku, that the universe is indeterministic (meaning some events aren’t caused), it does not follow that “in some sense we do have some kind of free will”. A-causal events would support the idea that there is no free will because they are by definition - "non-willed". Also - if no one can determine your future events - does that in itself demonstrate the existence of free will?
"So when I look at myself in the mirror, I say to myself, what I’m looking at is not really me. It looks like me, but it’s not really me at all. It’s not me today, now, it’s me a billionth of a second ago because it takes a billionth of a second for light to go from me to the mirror and back.”
This is irrelevant. The fact that our perceptions of reality are actually models of reality has nothing to do with free will.
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