Factually! with Adam Conover - Free Will Absolutely Does Exist with Dr. Kevin Mitchell

Episode Date: February 14, 2024

Is free will a scientific fact? Dr. Kevin Mitchell, neuroscientist and the author of Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will, certainly thinks so. While some, like recent guest Robert Sapolsky, argue that biology and physics can explain away free will, Kevin begs to differ. Join Adam and Kevin in this episode as they dive into how evolution paved the way for free will and unravel the common misconceptions surrounding the "I" that makes choices. Find Kevin's book at at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. You know, a couple of weeks back, we had a neuroscientist named Dr. Robert Sapolsky on, and he made a case grounded in neuroscience that there is no such thing as free will. He argued that the sense you have that you're making a decision,

that you decide what to eat, what clothes to put on, and who to make out with, that sense that you have all the time every day is an illusion. For Robert, the you that you imagine driving the car of your life is actually baby Maggie in the passenger seat next to you with a toy driving wheel. He argued that physics, neurobiology, and your own history conspire to make you powerless in your own life. And given this powerlessness, he went on to say that people do not have moral responsibility for their actions. Now, this is a take. It goes against all of our instincts, our intuitions about how our own minds work, but it is not coming from nowhere. Advances in neuroscience have given us an ever more refined sense of the mechanisms

that actually underlie all of our actions. So if you want to make the argument that we're just chemical machines, the last few decades of science have given you a lot of shiny parts to make that case with. Well, this week on the show, we're doing something a little bit different because this week we have an expert on to present an opposing take. This week's guest is also a neuroscientist, but he argues that physics and biology do not negate free will and that, in fact, evolution created free will in organisms both large and small.

It is a fascinating argument. I know you're going to love this episode, but before we get into it, I just want to remind you that if you want to support this show, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free. We have a community discord, a lot of other great perks as well. Hope to see you there. And now let's get to this week's guest.

I am honored on the show today to have Dr. Kevin Mitchell. He's a professor of genetics and neuroscience at Trinity College in Dublin. And his most recent book is called Free Agents, How Evolution Gave Us Free Will. It is absolutely fascinating. Please enjoy this interview with Dr. Kevin Mitchell. Kevin, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks very much. Thanks for having me. It's a thrill to have you. You're here for our second episode in the last couple of months about free will. We recently spoke with Robert Sapolsky, who's a neuroscientist who wrote a book about why he does not believe any of us have free will.

I don't know how he decided to write the book, but that's a terrible joke. I hate it. We're starting in a bad place. I'm making bad decisions. You wrote a book that makes the argument that in fact, I am responsible for those decisions, that we do have free will. So tell us what the starting point of that book is and why is this a pressing

issue for you? Yeah, great. So why is it a pressing issue? That's such a good question. So partly because it's the foundation of, of our systems of, of moral responsibility. So, and pretty much everything that we do in our daily lives, it feels like we're making decisions. It feels like we're in control of our actions to some degree, at least, not necessarily completely and more in some circumstances than others, but that feels like the basic phenomenology of our existence. We're thinking about what to do, we're deciding things, we're reasoning out, we're maybe even telling other people our reasons and so on. And yet, um, some scientists and some philosophers would say, well, that's all an illusion. So, uh,

it's all just a neural circuits whirring away. And we're just, we're just robots playing out our pre-programming, um, leaving really nothing for you to do in that process. Or even, you know, it could be reduced to the level of even physics. We're just bags of atoms and molecules. And the laws of physics are going to determine where those atoms and molecules go, which is just necessarily going to entail your next state, whatever that is. necessarily going to entail your next state whatever that is so um so there's some challenges to this idea of how it could be that we as whole selves could be in charge of what we do and it's not um it's not an easy thing to get around because those challenges have some weight to the but what i wanted to do in the book was try to figure out, well, okay, how could it be that we can be in charge? And actually, how could any organism, not just human beings, but how could any animal or any kind of living organism be said to do anything?

There's just stuff happens, you know, an animal is just a place where stuff happens. And, um, that didn't seem to sit, that didn't sit right with me. And so what I wanted to do is try and figure out, is there a way that we can naturalize the idea of, of free will and agency that doesn't involve any sort of supernatural spirit or any ghost in the machine, but where the, the, the, the organism itself could be in charge of things. That's what I was setting out to do. I find that really fascinating. And I feel like you've identified exactly the same problem that I have with this issue, which it's very similar to the mind-body problem in philosophy of how can the, I talked about this a lot in our previous episode, how can our experience of consciousness be made commensurate with our

understanding of physical reality? I'm a materialist. I believe that the only things that exist are physical things. Stuff is the only stuff that exists. I don't believe that there's some special mental realm that my mind exists in that some other dimension of consciousness that then somehow interacts with the material world, because this just doesn't match anything we know of science it seems very complex it requires

a lot of weird postulations but then you have the experience of being conscious uh and and it feels like a different thing than physical things do for the problem of free will seems very similar where hold on a second i i believe that physical laws uh, are what govern the universe or at least are under, you know, that's how we understand them. Um, but also I have the experience of free will and I don't think I can simply deny or, or toss out that experience very easily. And so how can we, how can we put these two things in the same box? It's, uh, and, and understand them both simultaneously when they seem to contradict each other.

Yeah. Yeah, no, that's it. Exactly. And I think that's the intuition that's really difficult for a lot, for, for,

for a lot of people to wrap their head around, right. Which is, uh, because we're all, uh, scientists trained to be materialists. Uh,

and as you said, there's just stuff, there's no supernatural stuff, right? So how can it be that, uh, something like a thought can push material stuff around in my brain? It seems to be just a ridiculous sort of unscientific thing to even think, right? And so what I wanted to do was set out and see, well, what would that mean, right?

What would it entail for a thought to push atoms around and make neurons fire in my brain? And actually, ultimately, I think that you can come to an understanding that what a thought is, and we're already deep into this. This is the only way to get into this topic is dive right into it. So what a thought is, a thought is not immaterial. A thought is a pattern of neurons firing in your brain but it's it's a pattern that means something it means something to the organism and so it's it it can have causal power in what happens in your brain and and and your brain is a control system for your behavior because when some neurons are active, other neurons will be active and so on, right?

So, but it's the meaning part that's really key there. So the question then is, okay, well then how does a thought, how does a pattern of neural activity come to have meaning for an animal or for a human being? And that is a really deep question. And actually to try and tackle it, what I did in the book was start with the origin of life itself. Because if we want to understand meaning, we really have to understand things like purpose. And if something has meaning and value, it has to have value relative to something, relative to some goal. And for living things, the goal is simple.

Persist. just keep living and and reproducing and it's and sure but even yeah even before reproducing though just survive right yes so just persist just uh you know just be a thing that keeps itself in the same sort of pattern through time and that's a basically a reasonable definition of life is that it's it's some pattern of processes and stuff but really it's the it's the processes that are important that all reinforce each other uh that make up a whole kind of a set of of interlocked processes that keep going through time even though the second law of thermodynamics says it shouldn't. It says that order should just dissipate.

Yeah, it's anti-entropic, that everything else is winding down and falling apart, and life is the one thing that goes in the opposite direction. Absolutely. Absolutely right. And so to do that, living things, first of all, they have to have some kind of a boundary, right? They have to separate themselves from the rest of the world. And they usually do that with a cell membrane or a cell wall. In us, it's ultimately the skin and a multicellular organism. And then they have to do work, right? They need to take in energy, free energy, in order to keep resisting the second law of thermodynamics that says things should fall apart. So once you have that, once you have systems like that, then systems that do that well, that have a certain configuration that reinforces everything in a robust way, will tend to persist. And systems that are a little more precarious will fall apart so you get this

immediate selection even before you have reproduction for organization that uh that that functionally keeps living things alive so we've already got a few uh of the key ingredients we need there we've got purpose which is just this circular thing of staying alive. We've got a kind of an organization that could be one way or another, and we've got functionality in the organization. So it's designed, in this case, it's evolved with systems that are good for keeping those processes going when something changes. It's easy to persist if the universe is, uh, is, uh, cooperating, but it rarely does. So things are changing out in the world and our living organisms have to adapt to them. So what they need is some control system. They

need to sense things out in the world. They need to react to them in the appropriate way. So if something goes out of balance, they bring themselves back into balance. So now what you get is something else because now it's useful for an organism to have some information about what's out in the world. And we've gone,

I mean, it's really important, we've gone way beyond physics now. We've gone way beyond the physics of non-living things because they don't depend on information nothing means anything to them they have no value or purpose um and they're not trying to do anything but living things are so that's the kind of the basics and then once you once you get that uh once we you ground those concepts i want to i want to stick on that point really quickly because i think you made a really,

that's a really great point because so often when we're having this conversation about free will, we're saying, well, the laws of physics just operate on you and cause what you did to inevitably happen. But it is a bit of the wrong level of explanation to say like the laws of physics do exist, but we're talking about a much more complex system.

We're talking about the behavior of a living organism, which has other rules and laws and principles layered on top of the laws of physics. It's a little bit like saying, Oh, like your computer, you know how Google works. It's just electricity.

Yeah. Well, yes, it's electricity, but you can't just explain it via electricity. You need to understand the principles of computer programming and databases and information science. Those are real forms of science that are on top of the system of just like electrons moving around, you know, silicone wafers. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, you said that you said it really well. And it's funny because I hear some sometimes people say things like, well, absolutely. I mean, you said that you said it really well. And it's funny because I hear some, sometimes people say things like, well, you know, what do you think electrons work differently when they're in your, in your brain or atoms, you know, the laws of physics are changed or something like, you know, their basic properties are changed. No, of course they're not changed. Like the, the, the basic properties of electrons are not changed when they're in my computer, but the behavior of the electrons has changed, right? Absolutely, it's changed.

Of course, the behavior of electrons is different in my computer than it is, you know, any in other places because the computer is organized in a certain way. And that organization imposes some higher level constraints. Yeah. And actually that idea, like living beings just are sets of constraints they're just constraining all their bits from really becoming one with the universe right that's the bad that's the end state that we want to avoid this is a very galaxy brain thought i i i'm understanding what you mean that like yeah it's just forcing forcing all the molecules inside you to like do to just do a constrained set of behaviors rather than just

like dissipate and decompose which is what they want to do yeah exactly that's exactly right right so being you involves doing work to keep being you and keep all those bits organized. Every part of me just wants to turn into dirt at all times. And I'm just trying to desperately hold them all inside this meat bag. Right. For as long as we can, we want to stave off the inevitable. That's the comedy of life. Yeah. And that's also, so that continues, right?

I mean, so you can think about this idea that a bacterium has some control systems to keep, to sense things in the world and to, and to keep itself alive by reacting to them appropriately. So for example, a lot of bacteria move around, right? So if it was just sitting there, it has to take in energy. It does that by getting food, right? So it takes in sugars and stuff and it uses them to fuel its own metabolism. But inevitably, it could run out of food because it eats it all, right? Or it's frenzied at all. So it might have to move somewhere else. Well, where should it go? So it might have to move somewhere else. Well, where should it go? So this is where a bacterium gets some information about things in the world. So it has little proteins that sit on the surface that can detect a molecule of sugar or something like that out in the world. And then that conveys a little signal into the inside of the bacterium, which influences where the bacterium moves. influences where the bacterium moves.

Yeah. And so what evolution sort of instills in the design of the bacterium is that it tends to move towards food and it tends to move away from threats, you know, bad things, bad chemicals and so on. So now you've got some behavior that's controlled, that's adaptive, right?

So it's appropriate behavior based on the circumstances that helps the thing stay alive. And that whole kind of organization is what's doing the work, right? It's using its machinery, it's using its parts to do it, but the parts are not in control. The whole system is in control, especially because there's loads of stuff in the environment that it has to respond to, right?

It has to integrate loads and loads of information at once. It's not just responding to one little thing at a time. Nature is not so accommodating. So, yeah, so the whole system is, you know, an organism is a proactive, information-seeking, sense-making kind of thing that is uh controlling it controlling itself and acting as a cause on the world right it's not it's it's insulated from the environment but it can act on the environment and is this your view of what free will is this sounds to me like you're approaching a definition well i think it's the what i would call that is a kind of, it's agency.

Maybe, maybe, you know, the most basic kind of agency we can think of. And what, what we see when we look across evolution is that that kind of agency, I think it's fair to say it gets deeper. It gets sort of more powerful. The organism gets more insulated from things that are happening outside it and what we see in multicellular animals is of course they develop control systems as well that involve uh neurons right so the nervous system is basically a control system to help the animal decide what it should do to coordinate all its all its uh bits using muscles and, of course, to sense things out in the world. And so many organisms, for example,

will sense, like little worms, will sense things by smell or by touch. So they can respond to lots of cues in the environment that are just right around them. And then they can go through some layers of processing to integrate those signals. So the worm can make a kind of, again, a holistic decision

about what to do and then execute one of a repertoire of actions. Now, in a worm, that repertoire of action is really simple. It's like wriggle forwards, wriggle backwards,

eat something, look for a mate, wag my head around, turn around. Shit, make fertilizer. Exactly. Yeah, make babies, whatever. backwards, eat something, look for a mate, wag my head around, turn around. Shit, make fertilizer. Exactly. Yeah, make babies, whatever. Okay, so it's not very complicated.

But the same ideas at play in us, it just gets much, much more complicated. I mostly wriggle, eat shit. Yeah, eat shit, mate. Look, we came from worms. We're still wormy in some way and I mean that's like that's a joke but actually it's a super good point that you make there because we do have all the same basic biological

imperatives right you know we have to take in food we do have to get rid of waste we do have to drink we have to sleep we have to you know we have to seek shelter and all these kinds of things so so we do have to drink. We have to sleep. We have to seek shelter and all these kinds of things. So we do have basic biological drives. But on top of that, we have scaffolded all these other kinds of goals that are much more related to the things that we're doing in a closer, more immediate kind of way. kind of way so so yeah over evolution that that system got more and more complicated and the distance between the sensors and the motors got more and more right so and what i mean by that is that there's more and more intervening levels of neural processing going on right right it's not just like there's some up here there's not just some little stimulus on an outside cell membrane that causes the bacteria to move forward or away.

I receive a stimulus and I go, oh, that's an interesting stimulus. But also I'm kind of hungry and I need to call my mom and I'm a little bit sleepy. So maybe I'll just lie here for a little while longer and then I'll think about getting up and make some coffee. Like it's much more of a complex set of stimuli and processes going on here. Absolutely. So, and I would say, actually, even in the bacterium, it's not such a simple stimulus response kind of a thing. There's still some complicated stuff in the middle. It just gets vastly more complicated when you get to creatures with nervous systems, especially with big brains and lots of these intervening levels.

So, what happens is, you know, you could say in a simple system that when a sensor gets activated, it sends a signal and the signal does something in the system. But when you get a little bit more complicated, they're not really signals. Instead, they're what we call representations. So they're information that is just kind of held there and presented to the rest of the nervous system. And it's decoupled from immediate action. So you can think about it, right? So for example, your visual system might process a load of information and parse the kind of visual scene that you're looking at. And your visual scene right now includes my face, right?

So there's a part of your brain that's active, that is representing the information that there's a face out in the world and that it looks like this. Yep. And so that's information that, as you said, you can think about. You don't have to act on that immediately. That's part of the cognition that's going on. I'm just sitting here and listening and processing. Yeah, exactly.

And so there's lots of options open to you you're thinking about you know the conversation you're thinking whatever other things are are going on and you're prioritizing certain goals you're carrying out an activity that actually isn't even just choosing an action from one moment to the next because we're having a conversation and that that conversation is going to last like an hour right so that's a thing that we're doing yeah that that choice to have a conversation is now informing what we what we're going to do for the next 60 minutes so the control of behavior just gets much much more sophisticated um organisms like us of course can plan over a much much longer time horizon so actually i skipped over a little bit that's important in that evolutionary story

so worms worms can sense things right next to them right they either have to touch them or they smell them which means they're effectively literally touching the molecule that they're smelling yeah so because of that they they inhabit the here and now they're not, they're not thinking about anything beyond that, right. They don't plan for anything in the future because they have no time horizon. They're just, they're just, it's very, it's all quite immediate. But when, uh, when vision, when vision evolved and hearing as well,

now we have a different kind of a, of a sense because those are distant senses. We can see things off in the distance. And first of all, we have to do some work, right? We're not directly detecting the things that we're interested in because we're not interested in photons hitting our retina. We're interested in what they were bouncing off of in the world, right? We're interested in objects in the world. That's the information we need to make adaptive behavioral choices so so first of all we need these extra levels of of processing that allow us to to to parse the objects in the in the scene yes i i think it's so brilliant that you say we're not interested

in photons we're interested in what they represent and you're the amount of processing that that necessitates is enormous that yeah we're not literally there are some things we're like oh my god photons ah i have a hangover like i don't want all these photons i gotta close the i gotta close the blinds but most of the time we're combining those photons using our very complex brains into an image. And we're saying, ah, I'm looking at Kevin right now. Um, these photons add up to something.

Let me respond to, here are some photons that are a threat, or here are some photons that are a friend or that make me horny. Oh, these are some very horny photons. Horny photon patterns. Let's say, yeah.

Yeah. So again, it's another level of complexity and, and like system on top of just the base physical reality. Yeah. And what you get there is, first of all, because we can see things off in the distance, we can plan about things in the distance, right? So we can have goals that involve me, you know, walking some distance away to get to

something, right? And we can also represent those things to ourselves in our minds, you know, walking some distance away to get to something. And we can also represent those things to ourselves in our minds. You know, like I could. Yeah, absolutely. So now we're into the realm of real cognition, right? And it's interesting to think, well, what is your cognition about? What are the elements that you're actually thinking about? And like I said, you're not thinking about photons. You're not thinking about vibrations in the air. You're actually thinking about. And like that, you're not thinking about photons.

You're not thinking about vibrations in the air. You're thinking about sounds. You're thinking about language. You're thinking about objects in the world. And what organisms can do with these amazing nervous systems is build up this model of the world, what's out there right now. But they don't just do it in a naive way. They learn from experience, right? So you

know that I'm a human being because you've seen human beings before, right? And so every time that we're sort of perceiving the world, that's not a passive process. That's a super active process of making sense of the world by recognizing objects and then by linking them to the stored knowledge that we have about the properties of human beings, the properties of whiteboards and computers and everything else that's in our environments right now. So we build up this very, very sophisticated inner cognitive world, a world of ideas about things in the way about objects, about, uh, about what we can do with them about, uh, what they might do to us. You know, those are threats and opportunities and so on. Um, and that's the, that's the stuff that we need to think about. And by, by thinking

about it, we ultimately can just like our worm, control this repertoire of actions that we could do, right? So this is where it really starts to get into free will. It's like, what controls what you do in the moment? And there's a couple of ways that you can think about this. One is the way I just described, right? You're really thinking about stuff. It's really you thinking about things that matter at the level of the organism, right? Yeah. At your level. So, and you've got, and you've got reasons for doing things, right?

You know about things that have happened in the world in the past. You, you were in some scenario, you did an action, it turned out really well. And therefore you're going to do that again, or be more likely to do that next time, right? Or it turned out really badly. So you're definitely not going to do that again or be more likely to do that next time. Or it turned out really badly. So you're definitely not going to do that next time. So we learn about the properties of things in the world. We learn about sequences of events. We learn about cause and effect, causal relations, the consequences of our own actions.

And all of that is used to guide our decision making. Now, I would say when we're doing that, that is just you making a decision. Like what else would you want for it to be you making a decision? But there are other ways to think about it. And I know, for example, that you had Robert Sapolsky on recently. And what Robert would say is, I think he'd probably agree with all of that up to the point where I say it's you doing it. And he would say, no, it's up to the point where I say it's you doing it. And he would say, no, it's just all the circuits that they're configured that way. Yeah.

You didn't choose any of those things and it's all just predetermined. And whatever scenario you're in, sure, all that cognition is going to happen, but there's only one possible outcome every time in every situation that you're in. Right. Only one possible outcome every time in every situation that you're in, right? One possible outcome could happen. Can I pause for one second? Cause I sort of want to pull apart some parts of the argument here. Yeah.

Um, because one of the big problems when we talk about free will, and one of the big problems with literally every philosophical conversation, which this is, is defining terms and defining what the problem is. Yeah. Most of the time people are talking past each other. Yes.

So I, I love the explanation you've given of everything so far. If someone were to say to you, Hey, I don't think humans have free will, right? I don't think we choose to do anything. You've just described the way in which as a matter of physical reality, humans are choosing systems. That is literally all we fucking are. We're, we're extremely complex systems that respond to stimuli in very complex ways by evaluating. Okay. We have many stimuli. We're processing are. We're extremely complex systems that respond to stimuli in very complex ways by evaluating. Okay. We have many stimuli. We're processing it. We're turning it into an image. Is that a friend? Let me compare that to my memories. Let me check my list of wants and

needs and desires. What's the best thing to do in this moment? I'll do this. Right. And so if you were a scientist, you know, from another planet, come to Earth, you'd look at humans and go, ah, these are choosing systems. You know, these are extremely complex. I was about to say AIs. That's very stupid. We're NIs. We're NIs. We're natural intelligences.

And so that answers one version of the question, is there free will? Because you're saying this is literally part of the physical reality of humans is to make these choices but then the sort of questions that robert asks are come from a different he's asking a different question he's uh he comes at it a little bit more from uh you know a presumption in that we have in our legal system, for instance, which is that, uh, if somebody, uh, you have free will, if you could do one thing or do another, and you had the capacity to choose otherwise two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and you had an equal chance of taking either one of them, it was entirely up to you. And Robert makes an argument that so far, I don't think

anything you've said responded to, which is that, Hey, well, no matter how complex the system is, we live in a deterministic universe. And so much of that system is conditioned by everything that's happened to you past in your life. And so therefore you could not have chosen otherwise at you are a choosing system perhaps, but the system would always make the same choice given the same stimuli.

And therefore there was never a choice for you to make in the first place. You're just a train running along a track and the lever is flipped one way or the other, and you're going to go down track A or track B and the guy in the, you know, driving the engine doesn't have any choice either way. And so do you, do you agree with my framing? And if so, how do you respond to that? You've got that perfectly. Yeah. So. So what I would say is, first of all, I completely agree with Robert that the sense of free will that some people have, which is this absolutist kind of sense, which is that you can do, you're just absolutely, excuse me, that you're just absolutely free to do anything in any circumstance, completely unaffected by anything

that has ever happened before, is just ludicrous. That's not a thing that any organism would want to have. It would just mean you're not using any information. You're not taking anything from evolution or from the way that you developed

or experiences that you've had. None of that matters. None of that is allowed to influence your decision. It just has to be what? Like just random. That's just a random behavior generator, right? So that absolute, almost kind of magical version of free will is just off the table right from the get-go, I think.

And I think Robert probably agrees with that. However, all of these influences don't have to add up to complete determination, right? And that's the question. So everything that I described there about having these basic sort of biological imperatives, about building up a map of the world from your own experience, about having these kinds of circuits that will weigh up various alternatives. It's absolutely true, for example, that some people are more sensitive to threats than other people. They've got a little dial, metaphorically, that's just tuned a little bit, up to 11 maybe, that makes them just really sensitive to threats.

And that's kind of part of their personality. And that affects their behavior. So can they choose to change that? Probably not. No, that, that, so they may not have that kind of complete freedom. However, that doesn't mean that in every single moment, those kinds of simple tunings will direct your behavior so that there's only one possible outcome. And there's a few reasons why, why I would say that.

First of all, um, it's not the right kind of information, right? Those little tunings are so general that there's no context, there's no nuance. That's not what organisms need to get around in a complicated world, right? We really do need to know about stuff and the particularities of the situation and weigh all the various things, right? We're not just reacting to one little thing in isolation. Yeah. And secondly, all of those cognitive processes are so complicated. They're so computationally complex that actually it's impossible for them to have a single outcome every time, right? It's just, well, it's impossible for them to have a single outcome every time. Well, it's not impossible. The only way it could be is if actually the physics of the universe were completely deterministic.

So if the argument actually boils down to it's all physics at the bottom and that's just deterministic, then we're on a different kind of territory. And we can have that conversation too. If it is that your psychology, the set of reasons that you have right now just necessarily says, here's one outcome that's the right thing to do in every scenario. Well, that's just wrong. I think things are just too complicated for that to be the case and we know that the machinery that we're using to perform these operations is noisy right so neurons are really noisy wet jiggly places you've got proteins moving around bouncing off each other there's all kinds of of jitteriness that uh that you know the organism actually has to tame that. It has to try to make its circuits work as robustly as possible, but it also uses it.

That variability is part of what allows organisms to explore and adapt and not just be simple passive stimulus response machines. I love this. Yeah, so the variability is, first of all, it's inescapable. It's just physically not the case that if you ran these computations over a finite time that you would always get the same outcome. We've got all kinds of nonlinear feedback, kind of chaotic-like systems where the computations just won't produce the same outcome every time. It's kind of like trying to predict the weather. So we can predict the weather pretty well for the next minute.

Really well. Pretty well for an hour from now. Quite well. Pretty well for a day from now. And then after that, it thinks that the predictions will often be correct. I've covered myself how much better weather prediction has gotten over the past you know 20 years and how you know they can now predict you know 10 or 30 days out much better than they could before but you're right i so i just i i push back slightly

against weather prediction as this unpredictable thing because my god we've gotten massively better at it but okay good we've done better yeah it is the paradigm of a chaotic system sure that you know even if you know all of the inputs you may not be able to uh exactly predict the outputs because they interact with each other so chaotically and by the way the same thing is true of the technology that people are calling artificial intelligence that people are playing with now one of of the problems of these systems is for putting them in any practical use, like large language models and the like, is that it is, they're inherently unpredictable. That, you know, there's always a chance that some output is going to come out that you did not

expect because it's sort of a thing that is so complex. You set it up and you don't really understand why it does what it does. You're like, okay, here's what came out the other end. And that's a very simple, you know, human created, you know, analog of something that might be similar to human minds, not nearly as complex as a human mind. Yeah. Yeah. And also they, they use variability in those things. That's how they come up with something different every time. Right. And so, and we, and we use that variability as well. But I mean, more fundamentally, though, you put your

finger on it earlier when you said in the weather systems that we have finite information there. Well, we have finite information when we're trying to figure stuff out. And it's incomplete information and it's ambiguous. When we're even just doing perception, we're seeing things, we're inferring that there's objects out in the world, but sometimes we're wrong. Sometimes we make mistakes. And so the information that we have about the state of the world, the knowledge that we have about the relations between things, the predictions that we're making about what would happen if I did such and such, those are very uncertain, right? All of them have some level of uncertainty, some finiteness to the information. And then the computations that have to happen also have to happen fast. We don't have the luxury to just sit around and wait for these computations to run. We have to do something.

fact it's just not true that those computations will always produce the same outcome every time because the brain is operating with incomplete ambiguous information and having to just do the best it can and the other thing is like it's optimizing over so many variables at once right so you might be hungry uh you might be afraid you might be looking for shelter. Also a little horny. You might be thirsty, whatever you might want to do. There's all kinds of things that we're doing. We've got long-term goals. We've got short-term goals that are sort of nested within them. Again, in economics, you can look at this theory of bounded rationality where we make decisions based on the information that we have, but there's not one right answer necessarily.

You know, there may be multiple options that are equally good and we have to model along a lot of the time. So, like I said, I think the only way that you could get that kind of psychological or neural determinism is if it rested on pure physical determinism. That is, if in the entire universe, there's only one timeline possible just based on the low-level laws of physics. And that just doesn't hold either. So the physics just doesn't say that, right?

So the idea that physics says you can take the state of a system and define it with precision um and then apply the laws of physics to it so it's just a set of atoms or subatomic particles or quantum fields whatever level you want to talk about um and you apply the right equations and then the equations have a single outcome right they single output at the next time spot and the next and the next and the next for all eternity yeah or forwards and backwards right so that's a view of of the universe that um has been put forward by some physicists but there isn't really any good evidence to support it really not at all so it's a sort of an idealization or a set of a that rests on a set of assumptions

yeah So it's a sort of an idealization or a set of a, that rests on a set of assumptions. Yeah. Now you're blowing my mind because this is like so often when we're having this conversation, I feel like we sort of revert to without meaning to very facile, like, you know, middle school level philosophical questions. And so I do it myself and I've done it in what talking about determinism. Hey, if you, if you started the universe at a particular point and you knew the position of every molecule and every atom, couldn't you therefore know exactly what was going to happen? And you're right. This is simply an assumption of mine. Sure. Um, uh, I don't know enough about

physics to know if it's the case. So we can go down. So, I mean, it used to be, for example, so Newton, you know, came up with his laws of motion, famously used them to predict things like the orbits of the planets. And we can do that really, really well, like hundreds and hundreds of years in advance. Right. Solar eclipses and all that kind of stuff. Right. predict solar eclipses and then all that kind of stuff right now that has given i think the impression that this that classical physics is classical mechanics is completely deterministic because we were so good at it right yeah um however that kind of a system is like the absolute

optimal system that you would want to to make those kinds of predictions because it's these things floating around in space they're really really, really isolated from each other. It's just simple, simple systems of, you know, two components and so on. Even when you start adding in three, right,

you make it a three body problem. It already starts to get really, really complex. Yeah. When you have three gravitational wells or whatever orbiting each other, there's, it becomes almost impossible to predict. Exactly.

Like the forces become so complex. Exactly. And all of Newtonian physics is itself, you're right, this is where like our conception, or at least my conception of physics comes from. It's the first physics you learn in high school. You learn like, oh, you get the equations, you roll the ball, you can predict the amount of force that comes out. You know, you literally, I remember doing little experiments in high school where you're experimenting with determinism.

It's like do the math and then it'll come out the other end, you know? And this is how far the thing rolls. Yeah, it's cool. But that itself is a higher order, you know, sort of level of understanding the universe because we know that underneath that is quantum physics and all these other things,

which are the underlying system. Um, but we're sort of using our higher level understanding of physics, uh, as we're, we're applying that same notion of determinism to the rest of it. Like it's, it's a very, the way that we understood physics in 1700, you know, the 1700s, those assumptions don't necessarily hold. Yeah, exactly. And so for things like the orbits of the planets, it's a very simple linear system, right? But most other things in the world are non-linear.

They've got lots of components that have some kind of feedback interactions with each other that mean that actually they'll show chaotic dynamics. So if there's a little change at one point, then the system might go off this way or it might go off that way, right? And what that means is that the future is unpredictable. Now, the question is whether it's actually determined in principle. It's just that we can't know it. And that's the way that some people interpret it.

However, if you go down to the quantum level or even at the classical level, then the idea that it's deterministic, like I said, is an assumption. In quantum physics, we know that it's not, right? So we know that if you think about the equations that govern the evolution of some quantum system that has a bunch of particles in it, the famous one is called the Schrodinger equation. The Schrodinger equation is going to tell you how this thing called the wave function is going to evolve through time. And it does it very, very deterministically, right?

It gives you very precise kind of values for the wave function over time. precise kind of values for the wave function over time. However, when you want to actually look at the thing, that wave function collapses because what the wave function is is a set of probabilities of things that might happen if the atoms in the system interact with something. And it doesn't have to be, it's nothing special about observation by a human, it's just any kind of interaction will, you know, collapse that superposition and one of the outcomes occurs. But as far as we know, and I mean, this is very contentious what this really means, but as far as we can know, the one that happens is just random, right?

It's a random playing out of those probabilities. There's nothing else. There's no other cause there that we don't know about. It just is underdetermined, but something has to happen because time is marching on and interactions are happening. And that something will just be one of those things with a certain probability. So what that means is that the future is not set, right? This idea of this single timeline is just not right. The future gets fuzzy and it gets fuzzier the farther you go in the future, which is why the weather forecasting kind of comes into play because, yeah, maybe we're out to 20 days. Well, probably depends where you live. I can tell you that's not true in Ireland.

But, yeah, but beyond that, the degree of uncertainty, the fuzziness of the estimates just increases the further you go into the future. And so I think the future just is like that. And what that means is you've got this sort of underdetermination by the low-level laws of physics. By themselves, they don't say exactly what the next state of the system is. And that's crucial because what that means is the way a system is organized can have some causal power over what happens. And if it was true that all of the causation was exhausted down at this low level, there's no slack in that system. If everything's determined, just one thing is going to happen. But if multiple things could happen, then something else can have an effect. And that something else is the way the system is organized. That's so fascinating. To me, it looks like there's multiple levels of, I don't know if I want to use the word indeterminacy, but unpredictability, where you've got the quantum level, as you described. But then you also have, look, you've used the laws of physics to build an incredibly complex system whether you're talking about weather whether you're talking

about human cognition whether you're talking about i don't know the way that a large language model is on a server that is powered by electricity that is programmed by people you have all these other layers of organization that are in truth different from, you know, simply determined physical laws. Absolutely. That do have causal power, both on the very level of high organization and on the very low level. That's it. And we come back to where you started when you were saying, you know, that now each of these levels is kind of concerned with different things. It's got its own with different things it's got

its own operating principles that are that are that it's operating under and the details down here don't matter that much right and so that's where you know we talked about thoughts being meaningful patterns of neural activity and exactly the same thing applies right when you're thinking about things there's a certain level that the system is causally sensitive to. So if the pattern means dog, that's one thing. And if the pattern means bird, that's something else, right? But the details of the pattern aren't that important, right?

It's going to be instantiated in some kind of firing of neural activity, but it's a little arbitrary. It's variable exactly the details, right? So the system is running on meaningful patterns the neural firings and the physical stuff is just the that's just the medium that's just the substrate but the details down there are not so are not so relevant right yeah so can i can i say one other thing too about this the determinism thing because um you know this it's possible for people to say okay yeah there's there's indeterminacy at the quantum level but it it you

know it evaporates or it kind of averages out when you get up to classical levels and i just want to say that even at classical levels the idea of determinism just rests on a whole load of assumptions and one of those is that you can define the state of a system right now with infinite precision. Okay. That is, you could say everything about me, say, so you could, you could describe the position of every atom, the momentum of every atom with complete mathematical precision. So with a number that just keeps going on and on and on, right.

Right. So we keep on adding decimal places to the decimal points. Now, if you have that, and you submit that to Newton's laws or Maxwell's laws or whatever it is, and you let that system run out, even if it's kind of got some chaotic non-linearities to it, it would still be determinist, right right you'd get one sort of set of things that would follow for all time however that's the premise however it's not possible to define a system with infinite precision right it's the god's eye view is what it's sometimes called in in philosophy yeah and like that sort of underlines the fact that only god could possibly have that view. How would one do this? Yeah. And I would say not even, right.

Not even God. Let's say not even the universe knows these, these numbers with infinite precision. So there's a, there's a theory which would, or an argument here, which says that, um,

in order for this idea to be true, for these numbers to be given with infinite precision, um, that, that the, the amount of information in the universe at any time would have to be true, for these numbers to be given with infinite precision, that the amount of information in the universe at any time would have to be infinite, right? And we know that information is not some immaterial floaty thing. It has to be instantiated in physical stuff.

The arrangement of physical stuff is what information is. And so the amount of information that can be included in any finite space is itself finite. So it couldn't be the case that, you know, when the big bang happened, the information about how all the particles would evolve through all of time was already there. Oh, wow. I know it's a head fuckers. No, I'm sorry. You're a, you're a neuroscientist, right? Yes.

This is an extremely powerful physics philosophy argument you've just made that you've blown my mind with. moment would contain all of the information that you know you could if you if you knew the starting position of everything at the at the beginning of the big bang you could predict what's happening in this moment and this moment and this moment if you had that perfect god's eye view yeah um for that to be true the universe would have to have been infinitely large at that moment and we know right that it isn't even small steamy we uh and it and it's expanding so the amount of information there's actually information being created as the universe expands because there's more ways for this stuff to be arranged and you're talking about information in like the the there's a sense in which physicists use that word that's a little bit different from how we use that word um but it is like uh there's a

physical sense in which that information couldn't have been contained in that moment because it would have i'm following i'm just not sure i like have this urge sometimes to when i have an expert on they say something i understand it and then i want to regurgitate it back to make sure the audience gets it too because i'm dumber than the expert. And the audience might be, and I'm losing my ability to even repeat what you're saying, but I do understand it. Right, it is tricky, right? Let me try and encapsulate it in a different way.

So when we're making predictions about the weather, those systems, as we run those simulations on day after day after day, they start very good, right? So there's very little deviation here but as they go further and further they become more and more variable depending on the so what we've done is we've truncated the numbers that we're adding so when we're taking wind speed measurements and temperature measurements all the all the parameters that

we feed into the model those are numbers that are truncated after a certain point. Right. The wind speed is, it's 10 miles an hour, or is it 10.5 miles an hour, or is it 10.252, or is it 10.523? At some point, you're chopping it off. Yeah. Exactly. Now, where you chop it off is going to manifest in a greater degree of uncertainty in the

forecast further into the future, right? So if you have a 10.5, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, you'll get a little bit more precision further into the future, right? So those numbers, and if you have the numbers infinitely, your simulations would probably be predictable, right? And deterministic. However however what i'm saying is that the universe doesn't know what those numbers are right now right into the future those are future numbers and things are just fuzzy in the future and in fact like this is going to get even deeper i apologize but like if you think about the nature of time what makes the present? Well, one way to think about it is the present is the moment, the duration of time in which events happen when all this fuzzy indefiniteness

becomes definite because things are interacting with each other. They're being forced to take on certain values and then time marches on. Then we're in the past, which is fixed, but the future is really open and it gets more open the further away you go. So, I mean, all of this is a long winded, uh, discussion about physics and sort of metaphysics,

all of which is to say, uh, at least it's the case that physics has not proven that, uh, there's only one timeline. Okay. Um, so that's the,

that's the weakest way to phrase the, uh, the conclusion. There are stronger ways to say, in fact, I would say that it's only one timeline. Okay. So that's the, that's the weakest way to phrase the conclusion. There are stronger ways to say, in fact, I would say that it's quite the opposite, right? There may be, there may be physicists or philosophers who disagree with you about some of these particulars,

but at the very least we can say they have not proven their case beyond the shadow of a doubt. You would still be having an argument here about uh how deterministic the universe is and so therefore if we're talking about free will we should not take it as established that the universe and the laws of physics are deterministic and that it's even sensical to say oh if you understood the position of every single molecule in the universe and every single electron you could predict exactly what someone would do. Therefore, no free will would exist, which is the premise of a lot of these arguments. Well, we can't even establish whether or not that hypothetical makes

sense beyond the shadow of a doubt. So there's a huge assumption there. What a wonderful argument. This is you've you've I want to get Robert back on the show now because I've got some more questions for him. No, I mean, he has he's he's a great thinker in his own right. That's why I love having both of you on. But I also want to ask, though, that that definition of free will that we're still talking about is to me still kind of odd, because the when someone in this version of the argument asks is there free will what they're asking is given the state of the universe at this moment could i have chosen to do otherwise or was my you know if i knew the position of every single molecule blah blah blah right would that predict my behavior or do i have the power as a thinking entity to change

the laws of physics with my mind, right? And to just like with no cause whatsoever, with no preexisting cause whatsoever, um, everything in my being and upbringing and physics and everything else is causing me to go left, but I'm going to wrench the wheel to the right. And that, to me, is a strange way to frame the problem or at least frame the question, or at least one that is not obvious. Why would that be the thing that we are talking about when we're talking about free will? There's a lot of other ways to frame it, right? Yeah, no, I agree.

And I think you've sort of reiterated this absolutist view that you have to be free from every prior cause in order to be called free will you know for that to be called free will and it's just a it you know you could say it's the it's too high a bar but i think it's just the wrong bar right there's not that's not a thing that a living organism could want and still be a self through time, right? I mean, the whole point of being alive, like we talked about earlier, is constraining your bits to keep being you through time, right? There isn't this instantaneous view misses the whole point of life. It's a continuous process that extends through time. So if we're not thinking about that, we're missing the whole point. I feel that there's some people who,

when they're trying to solve these big philosophical questions about the relationship between the experience of consciousness and the body, demand a solution to the problem of dualism. How can there be mind stuff? And there's also physical stuff. And how do these things connect, right? And then when you try to solve the problem and say, actually, they're the same thing, and you are but a physical organism who is experiencing, your experience is the experience of being a contained system that is subject to physical laws, then they go, no, that's not good enough for me i want to be a separate brain stuff and how does that interact like but you're not that solves the problem if you're not yeah and well

no i think you're right you know there is that reaction and and um it's funny again you know you can you can think about in neuroscience how when we're describing these systems right these incredibly elaborate, beautiful, exquisite systems that we have for weighing up all these alternatives, for storing all this knowledge, for learning a causal model of the world and ourselves and using that to, to, to adaptively direct our behavior, you know, you can say, well, okay, yeah, you know, neuroscience is showing that's just these neurons firing. That's just your amygdala getting activated. That's just your prefrontal circuits doing this, right? It's just a, it's just a rephrasing of it.

So that what you're saying is all that cognition is just an illusion. And really it's just neurons firing. And that's what I want to say is wrong because actually the details of the neurons firing are not so important. What's important is what they mean to you as an individual in, you know, your real personal experience through your life and so on. Right. It's sort of like, it's sort of like saying, um, this novel is just ink on paper. Well, yes, it's just ink on paper in some sense. In another sense, a person in a different place wrote it down and published it and had thoughts and feelings that they're expressing to me via language.

It's also all those other things you can't simply say, oh, but it's just ink on paper. Well, it is and it is not. You are missing something if you say that. in fairness one of the things that some people are you know concerned about free will will say is that okay you know we've evolved uh like other organisms we can do things for reasons and that and that's good everything that i just described so far is us doing things for reasons but they might say but you can't you can't come up with those reasons right you? You can't come up with your intentions. Those just happen. And then you act on them.

Sure, you do. But you can't decide what you want to do. You can do what you want. You can't decide to do what you want. And I think that also that's wrong. I think we decide what to want to do all the time. So when we decided to have this conversation, for example, we then in the process of doing that or by virtue of doing that decided to want to keep talking to each other, right?

You know, that's a goal. We set a goal. It's not an immediate thing. It's something that lasts for some time. So we have an objective. We have an activity. While we're doing that, that goal that we chose is informing and constraining our behavior suitably and appropriately as we're going through time. And so all of our behavior is like that.

So this idea that we just have intentions that just sort of arise and then we carry them out like this pre-programming kind of thing just doesn't fit with our real lived experience of coming to those ideas by reasoning right by that process of reasoning and the other thing about it that humans have that other animals don't at least probably not to the same degree is that we can think about those reasons right so we've got this extra level uh where we can think about our own thoughts we can express them to each other, of course, because we have language. But we can, you know, for example, we might say, okay, yeah, I think I have a belief that such and such is the case, but I'm not that certain about it. Now I have a belief about the belief, right?

So that degree of certainty, what we call a metacognition, allows us to now have what were just sort of the elements of cognition now be objects of cognition. Now we can think about our own thoughts. And that's hugely powerful. And I think it kind of really, you know, this evolutionary trajectory was one of life freeing itself from the immediacies of the physical environment and keeping itself going and then animals getting more and more control as they go along. And I think that degree of metacognition gives us this sort of ultimate level of control over our own thoughts to the point where we can decide, you know what, I can think about my future behavior. the point where we can decide, you know what? I can think about my future behavior. I can make a decision that's, you know, I can adopt a policy about a way I think I should behave. And in the future, that is going to inform what I do, but it's because I chose it, right? It's because I'm choosing it now that it informs it in the future. So yeah, future me may be pissed off that past me made a choice that committed future Kev to some certain actions, right?

But again, the whole point of being a self is that those instantaneous time slices of you, that's not you. You're the thing extended through time. Yeah. That's not you. You're the thing extended through time. Yeah. You know, we're just the momentary avatar in the world of that self that is continuous through time. Oh my God. I'm sorry. You're just dropping like mind explosions in every sentence. Yes. You're right, Kevin. That is the nature of self is it's extended through time. And at every moment I am but a slice avatar of my long-term self extended through time and at every moment I am but a slice avatar of my long term self extended through time which changes

as I live and that my self changes yet I at every moment am that self what an incredible paradox that you've just laid upon us in half a second I was thinking about the metacognition issue too because again it's the degree to which this question

of do we have free will just seems more and more facile the more you ask it. Because, well, how about all the times that I do something and I didn't choose to do it, right? I just react quickly. I have a reaction. And then afterwards I ask, why did I do that? Hold on a second. I'm not happy that I did that.

Why did I do that? Then I have to go think about, oh, I was hungry. Oh that I did that. Why did I do that? Then I have to go think about what, oh, I was hungry. Oh, I was hungry. That's why I, I was just hungry. Okay. And I was in a bad mood. That's why I snapped at that person. Okay. You know what? I'll make sure I have a granola bar before the Monday morning meeting. Um, so that I don't do that again. Right. Like that is, that, that is me experiencing a lack of conscious control and then exercising conscious control over my behavior and using my conscious control to, I go, I have to go talk to my therapist and decide to talk to my therapist about this. There's so many layers of complexity that the question of, did I have free will at that

moment? Doesn't even like begin to address. Like it's too simple of a question and framework is what I'm coming to here. Exactly. And I think that the idea that it's absolutely all or nothing, that's what you're coming to, right? That's an allude. That's just a wrong framing. And what you've done, right? That case that you just highlighted, why would you notice that, right? If it wasn't for the fact that it's different from the way you control your behavior a lot of the time, right? We know those situations where, shit, why did I do that? Why did I say that? I wish I hadn't done that. And so, you know, we get a picture where we don't

just have absolute free will that we exercise with complete freedom and, you know, divorced from everything in the world at all times what we have is degrees of freedom first of all just physically the future's open so we don't have to go looking for where the freedom could come from it's there already instead what we have to do is is explain well given the future's open how do we control it right how do we make the things happen that we want to happen in the immediate timeframe and then further and further into the future? That's what controlling behavior is. And so that gives a very different framing. And it allows us to recognize that you could have more or less free will in some circumstances. And by free will there, I mean the ability for rational control over your behavior. And of course, we recognize that it's super important to realize, for example, that children have less rational control over

their behavior than adults do, that people with mental illness have less control, that drug addicts have less control, that people who are hungry or who are in some addicts have less control right uh that people who are hungry or um you know who are in some some desperate you know circumstances have less degrees of freedom than other people and so if you know if you just deny free will altogether then you're denying that there's anything to compare between those kinds of different scenarios it just seems pointless to me that's're also not right. A big part of Robert's argument is a moral one that when you look at our legal system, for instance, or just our systems of shame and guilt, the way we treat each other, we treat each other as free actors in many cases when we are not. Robert would argue in all cases.

many cases when we are not right. Robert would argue in all cases, but, but, you know, I, I, I certainly agree with that point that in vastly many cases, people are the product of not just nature, not just nurture, but both. Right. And they, and they had no control over the situation. And that is a moral, uh, that's, that's a moral issue that we should be concerned with. But you raise a very good point that if you say, well, there's no free will whatsoever, then you lose any basis by which to distinguish between some people's behavior and other people's behavior. I'm not saying that some people should be punished

for their behavior because free will must exist to some degree, but there is a difference between someone who is in the throes of a very serious addiction and someone who is not. I can look at someone who, you know, I quit drinking a couple of years ago. Now, when I go to a concert and I see everybody missing the beginning of the concert because they're lining up for beers because they have to have a beer at that concert, right? I can look at those people and say, those people are being driven by addiction and they don't realize it. That's, that's my reaction. And by the way,

I'm not being judgmental. Some people enjoy that and it's fine for them, et cetera. But I can look at that because I see that that's how I used to behave. And I can draw that distinction. Right. And if I if we say, well, there's no free will whatsoever, we lose the ability to draw that distinction. And that's a real distinction between people. Absolutely.

I think it's really important. And and it's it's kind of funny to me that Robert makes the argument that way. First of all, as if we don't already do that. Right. So, so the legal system, you know, absolutely already takes people's circumstances into account to some degree. Now it may do it more in some jurisdictions that I would say it should do it more generally, but it does do it to some extent, you know, extent. Not guilty by reason they were hungry or whatever it is, right?

You know, those are things that we do take into account in our dealings with other people. And again, you know, maybe some people take them into account more than others. But yeah, if you're not allowed to see that we have some degree of control over our behavior, then what are you comparing? It just doesn't make any sense to me to think in those ways. And I also think, you know, that Robert makes really good points. We should take those things into account. Yeah. And if the legal system is not doing it enough now, well, great.

We should think about ways that it could do it better but first of all you know sociologists and psychologists and legal scholars have been thinking about this stuff and working on these problems for centuries so this is not a new it's not a some it's not a revelation from neuroscience that uh these kinds of causal factors are at play right you don't need to know something about your amygdala to know that growing up in poverty limits your degrees of freedom. But secondly, the idea that you have to rest that argument on this metaphysical claim that there's no free will whatsoever, to me, that's just mistaken. And in fact, I think it actually undercuts the argument, as we've just been saying. If you don't allow that there's some free will then what are you even arguing about right maybe this will be a good place to end because i feel like um there's a i feel like you could talk to robert for an hour and you would not convince

him certainly right i have done we had a debate and we feel to convince each other. I'm sure of that. And there's similar debates in philosophy. I find the mind body problem to be one. There are people who are committed dualists and there are people who are committed materialists and they often feel like they're talking past each other. And to me, it often seems as though we reach the limits of our human ability to intuitively understand the way that the world actually works.

It makes me think of quantum physics since we were talking about it earlier, right? Every single time I talk to a quantum physicist, I've talked to Carlo Rovelli twice on this show. He's a wonderful quantum physicist and big thinker. I took classes on it in college, right? And every single time you talk to one of these folks, you're like, how could this be true? It doesn't make any sense to me. And then they say, well, here's how the math works out.

And you're like, well, I can't do the math. So I guess I'll take your word for it. And then they say, well, if you think about it this way and that way, like you get this really beautiful picture. And if you really work very hard to listen to one of those experts, or if you become one of those experts yourself, you can get glimpses of, okay, here's how the universe works. I think I got it. And then you go back to your regular life and you just

start walking around and you forget it. And you cannot maintain that in your mind at all times, because guess what? The human brain was not designed to operate at that level. We are working at such a far remove from, you know, what human cognition is designed for. It's incredible that we got there in the first place. And we just, guess what? Quantum physics is always going to seem kind of fucked up to you.

You're never going to feel like you intuitively get it unless you make a career out of it. And maybe, maybe Carlo himself really gets it. But for the rest of us, sorry, guess what? It's going to seem like nonsense

your entire life, even though it's true. And you just have to accept that. And that's how I sometimes feel about these questions. Like, I think that, you know, for the mind-body problem, how could it be that my consciousness, which seems so different from anything physical, is part of physical reality? Guess what? It fucking is. And I just have to accept it.

And there's no way that it, because it is built to not understand that, that fact, right. It is built. I am in fact, a thinking thing. Yeah. And the nature of me being a thinking thing makes it feel like there's a separate reality that exists inside my skull, even though guess what? My brain is my mind. Sorry. And I, I feel the same way about this question that when folks are like, wait, but hold on a second. Is there free will, even though I am but subject to physical laws, the same as everything else? there must be some other sense. And you're like, you're saying, no, no, no, you, you are experiencing free will. Your experience of free will is you as a choosing organism that is subject to physical laws. And then people still have this emotional reaction of no, no, no, that's not good enough. That's not the way that I meant it. And you're sort of saying, yes, it is. Sorry that you can't

accept it to a certain extent. Um, or. Or maybe I'm saying that to these people. That's how I feel when I talk to you. Yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. And it's funny because you're, you know, part of the reason I wrote this book was to try and wrap my head around this stuff. You know, I mean, deep problems and what I wanted to, you know, it's, it's just not satisfying to either say, you know, what I wanted to,

you know, it's, it's just not satisfying to either say, you know, it all boils down to physics and the whole phenomenology of our everyday experience is just an illusion. Um, that just to be, there's just not good evidence for that.

But on the other hand, it's not good enough to say, well, there must be a ghost in the machine, some magical soul spirit thing that's really driving things. It feels like that. So, uh, and you know, and science will never explain never explain that you know i think those two things are not fine with me they didn't sit with me and i wanted to find a kind of a middle way to say well let's see if we can get a naturalistic framework to explain how first of all starting with any

organism how it can do things how it can control, how it can be a holistic entity that has some causal power that is part of the physical universe, but it's not just pushed around completely by low-level physical laws, right? You get higher-order principles at play. And while there's only, all I've done in the book is sketch a framework that I think could be workable. And there's loads and loads and loads of details to fill in. But, well, I guess for me, it's enough to let me sleep at night. To say, okay, yeah, I can see these higher order principles could work like that. But I'm like you as well, because they fritter away sometimes when I'm not, you know, you kind of have to keep an eye on them to keep yourself in that frame of mind, because it's not, it's not an intuitive place to be. And I think that you could, your argument could be completely correct.

And by the way, you've convinced me of so, so many pieces of your argument. Oh, I got a big thumbs up. I'm so happy. You know, just that, like the, the amount of indeterminacy that is in all the different levels of these systems and the fact that yes, living beings are nothing but choosing organisms, um, uh, or choosing systems. Right. Um, and that lines up with the fact that we feel that we have free will, all these things make intuitive sense to me or are starting to make intuitive sense to me. And yet you could spread that, that message out to everybody around the world. and you would still have people coming up to you going this

free will exist come on you know like it there's some way in which our intuitions will always bump up and we'll always go back to that place of of confusion and uh uh discontinuity i feel like yeah and then you know at some point point things just have to get pragmatic. So we can take these big metaphysical cloudy nebulous sort of ideas. At some point we have to boil them down. So when we are, for example, determining whether someone was

responsible or not responsible for an action by reason of insanity, say, that's a really pragmatic judgment that has to be made. So it's not the case, I guess I'm saying, that these things just live up in the clouds as these ideas that can't be settled. Because actually, in practical terms, we do settle them all the time. And the case I just gave is one very sharp, kind of stark example. But in our daily lives, as we're interacting with each other, we're thinking about our reasons.

We're thinking about other people's reasons. We're dealing with these ideas of each other as thinking, reasoning, acting agents all the time. And of course, we're judging people on what they did or what they didn't do or what they should have done and so on. So that's the water that we're swimming in cognitively a lot of the time when we're doing social cognition. So yeah, it gets grounded pretty quickly once you have to live in the world. Right. It reminds me of when I was a freshman philosophy major and, you know, you read Descartes evil demon thought experiment of what if there was an evil demon who was creating my reality for me? What if I was in the Matrix, basically? Yes. And that's very fascinating when you're a freshman in college. Sure. Like, how do I know that isn't true? Well, you sure don't act like it, do you? You sure don't act as though you're living in an illusionary world created by an evil demon and that no other people exist and they're just illusions to you. You sure like, you know, get angry at them and want to kiss them and want to go get some food to eat. And like, that's the practical reality of, of everyday life. And there is truth value in there too. And,

you know, if you, if you only live in the thought experiment world, you do miss something, you know, like you, you have to, you still got to decide what to fucking eat tomorrow,

whether or not you believe free will exists. Exactly right. Kevin, I could talk to you for 10,000 years. This has been so fascinating, but we should probably wrap it up. The name of the book is, do you think we solved it?

Do you think we solved it in this conversation? Yeah, we're done, right? Yeah, absolutely. We can all go home. Everyone's done. That's the last, this is the last book that will ever have to be written on the subject.

Well, if people are as fascinated by your viewpoint on this as I am, the name of the book is Free Agents. You can pick up a copy at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. Where else can people pick it up and where can they follow your work, Kevin? Well, it's in good bookstores everywhere. Of course, it's on Amazon.

You can get it from Princeton University Press website if you prefer. And I am, well, they can follow, so I have a website that has my academic works and other things, talks and other writings and so on. And I'm on Twitter at Wiring the Brain and very happy to talk with anybody on there. And I also have a blog, which is called the Wiring the Brain blog. Thank you so much for being here, Kevin. It was absolutely fascinating. It was my pleasure. Thanks a lot. I really enjoyed it.

Yeah, it was my pleasure. Thanks a lot. I really enjoyed it. Hey, why don't you sign up on Patreon and support the show directly? Head to patreon.com slash adamconover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad-free. You can join our community Discord. We have a community book club where we read books together and discuss them. It's so much fun. I'd love to see you there. For 15 bucks a month, I will read your name in the credits on this very podcast and put it at the end of every one of my video monologues. This week, I want to thank April, Nicole, and Suchi Su.

Thank you so much for your support of the show. I want to thank my producers, Sam Roudman and Tony Wilson, everybody here at HeadGum for making the show possible. If you want to see my tour dates as a stand-up comedian, head to adamconover.net slash tour dates and would love to see you there. Also at Adam Conover, wherever you get your social media. Thank you so much for listening or watching

wherever you get this show. I'll see you next time on Factually.