How to Dissolve the Problem of Free Will and Determinism (Video)

the way he flat-out rejects Free Will as unscientific is bold and refreshing, especially coming from a Philosopher.

The talk is pretty confused. He starts with defining "free will" as "Power or ability sometimes to do otherwise than what one in fact does", which he then demolishes.

Skip to 40:25. After describing the problems with elan vital and dormative potency (namely, no explanatory power while claiming to have it, that is playing the role of curiosity-stoppers), he starts supporting the idea of distinguishing when people are "in control" of their behavior and "not in control" for the purpose of determining whether they should be held accountable for their behavior, as an alternative to "free will".

But this concept of "in control" is never explained, and all arguments he gives are just applause lights. He hails empiricism, science, neuroscience, lack of strange metaphysical speculation, and appeals to audience's intuition ("It's so obvious that when I'll start pointing it out you're going to go "Duh!".").

(I only skimmed the video; most of it introduces some standard ideas.)

His arguments only undermine the conception of free will as ultimate origination, but have nothing to say about (the more defensible) conception of free will as choosing on the basis of one's desires.

...if you were to go back in time, and all of the states of affairs were identical, then you would get the exact same outcome...the causes are the same; the effects are necessarily the same.

Am I misinterpreting him, or does his elaboration of determinism contradict quantum mechanics? He correctly points out at 11:10 that quantum mechanics doesn't provide support for free will (as he defined it), but he doesn't bother to reformulate his definition of determinism so that it doesn't require a Newtonian-like mechanics.

science likes causes...it likes laws...it likes mechanisms...it doesn't like this mysteries occult power of "free will"...

Yeah, science doesn't like mysterious occult powers without mechanisms, except when it does. Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation was an occult force without a mechanism (which is why many natural philosophers on the Continent dismissed it as a throwback to the natural magic tradition of the Renaissance). Is gravity unscientific?

our brains make our decisions for us, we really have no say in the matter, and we'll be cool with it.

This sounds as if there is a homunculus sitting inside of us somewhere that is just along for the ride, but lacks causal power to change the direction of our bodies. What is this "us" that isn't our brain and where is it?

It may not have much in the way of new content, but it is stated pretty clearly and concisely, and they way he flat-out rejects Free Will as unscientific is bold and refreshing, especially coming from a Philosopher.

As far as I know, the demarcation problem hasn't been solved, so saying something is "unscientific" is simply a kind of name-calling. The video (which I did not watch from start to finish) seems to be bog-standard philosophy (at least how it was done while I was in university). According to the philpapers survey, less than 14% of philosophers accept or lean towards libertarian free will. Of those philosophers that accept or lean towards free will, most do not accept the version of free will that he rejects in the video. Even for a philosopher, that doesn't seem very bold or refreshing.