Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

Well, do you make decisions?

Do things happen as a consequence of your choices?

Is that not part of assembling and forming the world?

And don't we all know that the world that we aggregate around us is in some wise a consequence of what we've aimed at?

Of our own free choice?

And you might say, well, I don't believe in free choice.

It's like, do you believe in your wife's free choice?

Try treating her like an automaton for a week and see how well your relationship goes.

Well, dear, I know that you really can't help how you are, and you're just moving robotically through the motions, and no matter how disarrayed our relationship happens to be, I can't attribute any responsibility to you because I know at your core you're nothing but a mindless, deterministic robot.

It's like, you can't even have a relationship with yourself with that attitude, much less someone else.

And so you might claim to be determinist, which, by the way, is not a useful scientific stance, because the universe is not a deterministic place, and it can't be...

conquered by algorithmic calculation.

And we know that, and that's actually a fact, not an opinion, because at the quantum level, the world is fundamentally indeterministic, and that indeterminism makes it self-manifest to all the levels of reality.

It doesn't work technically, and it doesn't work practically.

It's a preposterous scheme, and you mostly want to believe it so that you don't have to take responsibility for your life.

But the catastrophe of that is that

That potential that you encounter when you awaken is in that potential is everything that could ever possibly be offered to you if you only knew how to seize it.

And you know that because you're beckoned forward into the future by the fact that something new and redeeming could still make itself manifest.

And if you don't have that, you can't get out of bed.

You say, I'm hopeless.