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As I was completing my second edit of my video essay on the Terminator and the story of Sarah Connor, focusing on the amazing performance of Linda Hamilton, which I've categorized as one of the greatest performances, perhaps the greatest performance in action cinema. And you can get into the video essay if you want a fuller explanation of that, because it's not going to be the full focus of the audio commentary here. But as I was completing the second edit and we're going to get into why there was a second edit of this particular video essay, as I was completing the second edit, it occurred to me that there could have been a video essay entitled the Determinator about the themes of free will versus determinism in. In the Terminator. The D. Terminator. But at that point it was somewhat too late for me to re edit the whole thing around that theme. And I think actually the focus on Linda Hamilton was really what I wanted to get into in the essay. So I will leave that title the Determinator for a future essayist or video essayist, perhaps. Perhaps my friend the Feral Historian will pick up that title or stumble over it himself when he gets to his own essay exploring these themes in the Terminator. It seems that myself and the Feral historian are the two most closely related video essayists on YouTube, and I think it's possible we may do a collaboration of some kind in the future. Thank you very much for listening to that rambling introduction to the science fiction podcast with Damian Walter. And this is the audio podcast where I primarily do extended audio commentaries upon the video essays that are on the Science Fiction YouTube channel. The podcast is actually older than the YouTube channel, but the YouTube channel has become kind of the primary focus for the science fiction explorations that I'm doing and for the science fiction community, which you can also join on Facebook, which is just me prevaricating for a moment whilst I gather my thoughts and think about what I'm actually doing doing here in this audio commentary. Because in the video essay, I did focus more on the cinematic aspects of the Terminator rather than this discussion, which I'm going to frame as free will versus determinism or determinism versus free will. And the individual who left the rather rude review on itunes criticizing my pronunciation of the number three, which I am capable of pronouncing if I focus on my pronunciation or adopt an accent or a voice other than my own. And those of you who are still awaiting the ocean of story which is coming, I promise the update on the overall direction of science fiction and my critical Writing in this field is also coming and that will update you about the Ocean of Story, among a number of other things. But it's somewhat delayed now. This time the latest delay by this mini series exploring themes of revolution in science fiction. And this has included a pretty big video essay on technogarchy and the science fiction inspiration behind characters. Are they fictional? Are they real? It's hard to know sometimes. Characters like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, who are all very inspired badly by science fiction. There was just a couple of days ago an essay in the Guardian on this. I sometimes have suspicion that the mainstream media, this wouldn't happen weirdly in the alternative media. We would simply credit each other and say, I learned much of this from watching Video Essayist X, which I would do with my friend Feral Historian. We have credited each other a number of times because we watch and learn from each other. But there's an essay in the Guardian which is very similar to a lot of my talking points. There was an essay on the BBC that was very similar to a lot of my talking points. And Slavoj Iek agrees with me in my critique looking at the tripartite oligarchy that seems to be in place in the world which was identified by George Orwell, and he agrees that George Orwell did that. So you never know with these things. I'm not hurling accusations, but when you get into the situation where your video essays have hundreds of thousands of views, clearly other people have seen them and are influenced them. But please, please credit your sources wherever possible. Now I'm wondering where it may have been that I haven't credited my sources, but I always try to. So. And that was another. That tripartite oligarch essay was another one in this mini look at revolution in the build up to Andor Season 2. We're now in Andor Season 2 as I'm recording this, the first trilogy of episodes, the first story arc has screened. I'm planning on doing another major video essay because we already have a couple. There's the video essay on the Marxist influences in Andor. There's the video essay on the broader revolutionary themes in Andor. Both of those getting a lot of views at the moment. And I want to do, I think, a broader political essay asking what is Andor rebelling against and what is the rebellion, the revolution in Star wars actually against? Because my thesis is that when we actually politicize Star wars, which is what Andor has done, which is why it's so successful previously, Star wars is, I would assert, entirely depoliticized, which means you can, you can spot political themes in there, but they are not genuine political critiques. And all of this is coming together into this mini season on revolution in science fiction. And there's going to be some more to add to that. And I realize that my Terminator essays is in that vein because I think the strength of Sarah Connor, Linda Hamilton's character, quite apart from Linda Hamilton's performance, which is, I would say, in a sense, preternatural. She captures an aspect of the feminine hero which is rarely done, but he's done very well by James Cameron at least twice because he also gives us this in Aliens, Sigourney Weaver's character in Aliens. Again, a lot of this is in the video essay, which I don't think, I don't think I'm going to append the audio this time. I think it's just going to be the commentary because the video essays, really the point of them is visual communication along with the. The intellectual content of the essay, which is carried more in the audio. But for this all to grow into a form of communication. And people are saying to me that they're listening to the intro and then they're going to the channel to watch the essay. So the Terminator video essay is on the channel. You can go and watch it there. I don't think I'm going to continue to append the audio. I know I'm flip flopping around with this, but it also means I can put this audio commentary on the members section of the channel so people can also listen to it there. Because one of the other things that I'm trying to update you about, but it keeps changing so quickly, is trying to navigate this crazy territory of podcasts, YouTube, social media platforms that it's now my profession to navigate has been for my whole career, a large part of my profession to do that. And I'm doing it full time at the moment and to understand how all that works as a business. And it's like being a. As a writer. It's like being balanced on logs going down a whitewater river. You keep having to shift around to change your balance. So basically that's a bit of an apology for those of you who've followed me in one place and then my attention moves to another place. And currently the YouTube channel is the center of attention. You can support as a member on things like Patreon and the substack and so on. But it's very confusing for all of us how to navigate our way down this. Down this white water. Which is why. Why I ultimately, in that video essay, didn't. Didn't put all of the ideas in about determinism. And so I'm going to try and cover some of that here in the audio commentary. And one of the reasons I didn't is because. And I'm going to try and expand on why I believe this is. Is because this discussion on free will versus determinism is a very intense discussion. When I was participating on Clubhouse, which is now some years ago, which I was doing just before the podcast really took off, I learned a lot from these discussions on Clubhouse. And one of the things I joked about is that if you have a philosophical discussion, which was a large part of what was happening on that audio chat platform that was Clubhouse, I don't even know if it's still going to at the moment. I kind of miss many of the people I was talking with on there. We got to be good friends. So, hello, if any of you are out there listening. But one of the things I observed is that any philosophical discussion would either end up as a discussion about the double slit experiment, where photons seem to exhibit different forms of behavior, or free will and determinism. And this is because in our culture at the moment, these represent two points where we can't assert truth and factfulness and absolute knowledge. They're boundaries at which we can no longer do this. So the double slit experiment becomes kind of a discussion about the observer. Where is the observer needed? Do we need to reintegrate the observer into our discussions? Because what we basically did in science was remove the observers so we could define what parts of reality we could say things absolutely about. And the discussion of free will versus determinism hits you up against our beliefs about the nature of our reality. And now the dominant belief, I would say, in kind of Western culture, possibly wherever Western culture has spread around the world, is a materialist belief in a deterministic reality that if you took reality and rewound it in time back to its initial conditions and set it off again, all the same things would happen because we are in a deterministic reality. That's one way of talking about determinism. Another is that every event has a cause. That cause was an event, and there was a cause before that event. And so anything you might think, for instance, you might have the illusion that you're thinking or you're making a decision, but there are other events that led up to that event. And this chain of causation is completely determined. So you think you're making a decision, you think you're exercising free will, but actually this is just a point in a determined chain of causation. And what I find interesting about this discussion of free will isn't the attempt to make a reasoned argument for the existence or the non existence of free will. Because I tend to to the position that you can't make a reasoned argument over your experience of phenomenological reality. So I guess I'm making some kind of phenomenological argument here that the phenomenon you experience are the starting point for reasoning reality. So we should start with the idea that there is free will because we have the phenomenological experience of it and that whatever reasoned argument you can present can't ultimately trump experience. In a philosophical sense. I would make that kind of argument which then people would respond to. But that's not really what I'm interested in in the discussion of free will. Because another thing that I've observed partially on Clubhouse, partially on other discussions, other thoughts on this theme is that what we really hit on because this discussion of free will and determinism is about our current dominant idea of what our reality is, is that this is really asserted from. Or it might be better to say that you're really hitting on the essence of power in our society today. And that makes it in some ways one of the more dangerous discussions to have. I stumbled upon the YouTube algorithm has shown me a number of interviews with Ha Joon Chang. I think he's Ha Joon Chang, South Korean economist, a very left leaning economist. I think he's appeared into the algorithm because he was interviewed by Gary Stevenson and Gary Stevenson, Gary's Economics Gary is the number one selling book in the uk, has been for many weeks now. He's the fastest growing YouTube channel because he's making this argument that is very aggressively in the face of power in our society. Gary's argument is about that what's actually happening in our society is the rich taking all the money to simplifying it. Ha Joon Chang, I apologize if I'm getting your name wrong. Ha is making complementary arguments about basically the corruption of economics. The classical models of economics don't properly represent what's actually happening in our society. And he summarizes this in a very good quote that I shared to the science fiction community and my social media feeds that economists today are like Catholic clergy in the medieval era in that their primary function is to explain and reinforce and justify the power structures, the dominant power structures of the society. And That's a very interesting quote about economists, because I think that's true. I think that's absolutely true. And what the mainstream of economics do today, the neoclassical model of economics, I believe it is, is justify the power structures of today. Our financial institutions, our government policies, the oligarchies that we see very powerfully forming in our world today. And they all, their justification is fundamentally that they're making people richer. That neoliberal policies, which we thought about again in another one of these video essays in the Revolution series looking at Trans Metropolitan, Our economics justifies our neoliberal policies. And we've been told, and many people have been very convinced. I guess I was somewhat convinced up until the 2008 financial crisis. And that for me was looking around and saying, as they're putting interest rates down to 0%, and this is really in favor of all of the vested interests in society. You might have said, the people who should have lost their money or some portion of their wealth in that financial crisis, and instead the game was kind of rigged on their behalf and against everyone else. That actually this argument that neoliberalism and neoclassical economics and capitalism fundamentally were making people richer, that's when it started to fall apart for me. It may fall apart for you at a different time. You may still believe in it. I think it's harder and harder to believe in now. And actually that's false. And this whole construct of economists and neoliberal politicians and liberal commentators, someone like, I think, who we've also had some critique of recently because of his book Abundance, Ezra Klein, who's a very prominent. Absolutely, a liberal commentator, that this is all falling apart. Few fewer and fewer people believe in it. And like the collapse of religious belief at the end of the medieval era, coming into the modern era around the Enlightenment, you know, there's many consequences to the collapse of a mythos. I think when you stitch all of this together, what you have is a mythos. And as more and more people fall out of that, where most people go is they trend towards, as we can see, forms of authoritarianism. So if you look at the MAGA vortex of bullshit, if you look at the actual ideas in there, they are a critique of this whole neoliberal, neoclassical, economic, capitalist construct and people turning towards authoritarianism as an answer. And I would argue actually that the better direction to turn in is towards more left, socialist and even Marxist ideas that are a better critique. Put that to one side for a minute though, what does this all rest on? I think this whole model of reality rests on or this whole model of our economy and our society rests on our model of reality. And that model is very materialist and is fundamentally this determinist model. And our neoliberal politics has extrapolated as a kind of superstructure on top of this determinist model. And so what we're ultimately questioning is our whole grasp of reality at the moment. It's all in question. And that's why I think this discussion of free will versus determinism is very interesting, because it is the basis of our power structures today. And so in the video essay, I wanted to make the argument that there is a strong class bias in this idea of determinism in that it's largely advocated. If you go and look into the kind of pop philosophy world that are obsessed with discussing this by people like Sam Harris, very convinced determinist, he connects that completely fatuously to Buddhism. Sam has a very poor grasp of Buddhist practice. He does not or doesn't want to communicate the dialectic of Buddhism that would take you past many of the ideas that he sells, rather guru like to his followers. Then you have people like, I now forget his name. He's substantially younger. He's been rocking a little moustache for a while. I really like him as a human being. He's very intelligent. Without remembering his name. It. There's not much point in me referencing him though. Alex O'. Connor. Alex O' Connor and Alex. Alex's YouTube channel, as a skeptic has kind of been built up on this discussion of free will versus determinism. He's very much on the side of determinism. But I think really that the critique that I've tried to offer about folks like Sam Harris, Alex o' Connor is that they inhabit a rather privileged, powerful position in society. Alex is a. Comes from the top universities. I don't remember if it's Cambridge or Oxford. Sam as well. I think he's a Stanford graduate and they come from Western white male, privileged backgrounds. And I don't want to go too, too much further down in that direction of standpoint epistemology. I'm just really putting it there to say that it's certainly easier to play the mental game of having some reasoned philosophical argument against the existence of free will. If you have less need to radically assert in a very expensive form, at great expense to yourself, some necessity for you to have some ability to exert some will over the reality around you. And I think this becomes more and more necessary as you go down the socioeconomic stack of society and you encounter the problems that are often encountered. For instance, One issue I think would be addictions. The higher you up in society you are, the less necessary it may be to escape your addictions. The more you may be able to maintain certain addictions. And the less likely you are to be struggling with them. Because fundamentally. And if Sam Harris understood his Buddhist practice better. He would be able to make a Buddhist argument about this. That our addictions are a product of our lack of freedom. Of the extent to which we are. Our lives Are determined in an oppressive way by our society. Because they are escapes. All addictions are forms of escapism. And you can see this. Let's look at one of the most pernicious addictions of our time. Which I think is video game addiction, which is not now. The reason it becomes difficult to discuss. Is because most people encountering this. Is going to have a biochemical model of addiction. And they don't see how a video game could. Could feed in to that. Really, the biochemical part of an addiction is a more minor part. And video games can also develop dark loops of behavior. Which are triggering dopamine hits and so on. So there is a biochemical aspect there. But the primary addiction is driven by the need to escape. And different sets of things you want to escape from. So there's a reason why young men who are struggling with status in society. Gravitate to video games. Because they can give you the experience of status. And that is actually the thing that becomes addictive. Playing out your hero's journey in the video game. Is what you are addicted to. So if you're in that situation, the question then becomes, how do you escape that addiction? And the way you escape from it is by cultivating, at great cost, Some form of free will, Some ability to choose whether you're going to play that video game now or not. And the ways you cultivate that are initially by awareness. You understand you have an addictive issue with the game. From that awareness, you're then able to observe your behavior. So for a few weeks or months, you're not choosing not to play the game. You're simply observing that you keep choosing to play it. And over time, as you observe that behavior, you'll actually become bored of it. You'll become bored of your addiction. And that will help you to liberate yourself from that addiction. Which I did as a younger man in my 20s. And that was. Was bound up with also Buddhist meditation practice. Which is part of how I was able to do that. My 20s into my 30s. And if you're in A cultural, ideological construct, dominant ideology, dominant power structure that tells you that reality is entirely determined. And you can't practice free will. You can't make a decision. It must come from without you. And this is a very classic move of religions to say that you can't access. You need some grace from God to be able to make a decision. It's very dangerous. These religious constructs. And ironically, coming from the atheist, secular side of our society, the model of determinism is applying many things that are the same control structures that were once in our religious structures and now reappear because society and our power structures want to reassert control in the same ways. So I think it's very dangerous, this absolute belief in determined determinism. Undoubtedly we are embedded in many determined structures. But you do, as a human, have remarkable power if you know how to exercise it over those structures. You do have the capacity for free will. And where do we see this free will exercise? And this is the point I try to make around the character of Sarah Connor, who is a waitress who's a young working class woman. I do need to make this point because if you go and meet your working class waitress, she doesn't look like Sarah Connor, because Sarah Connor is played by Linda Hamilton, an exceptionally beautiful woman. This is often an issue with storytelling in the Hollywood mold that it has to cast very beautiful people in roles. So it slightly distorts our vision. If you cast a more ordinary looking human being in the role of Sarah Connor, you would see more straight away how she is a working class character. It obscures her working class ness to. To add that aspect. It's not that I'm saying working class people are never good looking, they often are. But if they are good looking, they end up with better options or sadly, often worse, more dangerous options than working as a waitress. But Sarah Connor is a waitress. This is a classic female working class job. Waiters as well. Don't want to be too gender biased here, okay? She is a woman basically at the bottom of her society. But who is it who is able to defeat the Terminator? And this is something James Cameron laudably does very often in his filmmaking. Again, we get into this in the video essay and I think in our society, and perhaps this is where we get to the revolutionary theme that it is the working class who are the experts at exercising their free will. As you move up society into middle class and the upper classes and the wealth and privilege that people have access to, actually these people are very detached from the ability to exercise their Free will, their will is exercised through the social structures they're embedded in. And it's very difficult for them to exit those structures. Whereas working class and we, we spoke about this in one of the earlier commentaries. The proletariat, the proletarian consciousness is the most aware of what it takes to exercise free will, to actually be able to assert your will in society. And this I think is. And you know, I wasn't thinking about this at all. So I'm very interested to have stumbled upon this. This is why I do these audio commentaries. They bring me to new ways of thinking that I think the essence of proletarian consciousness. And I may try and discuss this with the Fairy Underground people who I, who I adore for being the working class Marxists in the world. Well, not Marxist, the working class post leftists in the world. That might be best. And I really love their channel. Go and find Fairy Underground on YouTube. Super punk, super Proletarian, the Essence, because they were discussing it on their channel. I think the essence of proletarian consciousness today is the toolkit that the struggle towards the ability to exercise will in the world. And I think the reason the Terminator and Terminator 2 are powerful as movies, even more so in Terminator 2 is because that is the thing that they symbolically capture the proletarian struggle for free will against the machine. Because if you're not able to exercise any will in the world at all, our modern world today, you end up embedded literally in machines. You end up addicted to video games. You end up in kind of gamified status structures of workplaces. You know, you end to up addicted, trying to earn your McDonald's stars to get stuck on your badge because you can't exercise your will outside this completely rigged status structure. You end up running around after the stock market and financial investments because again, these are more machine like structures in our world. Okay, I think I'm going to end this audio commentary. I think I've made it to my, to my discovery in this about the relationship between the proletarian consciousness and the struggle for free will. I like that a lot. You can go and find the Terminator video essay and all of the other essays in this Revolution series and my courses and so on on the YouTube channel. You can get those ad free as a member. They're slowly being added on the the Patreon and the substack and the website. Damien G Walter.com come and join the conversation in the Facebook group Science Fiction on Facebook. Thank you very much for listening to this. I think I will add this in the members section on the YouTube channel. It will be on the podcast feed for free. Thank you very much.