Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Why There’s No Such Thing as Free Will w/ Robert Sapolsky (#395)

Episode Date: February 18, 2024

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 Whether or not there is free will has tortured scientists from many fields since philosophers in ancient Greece started wondering about it. But for one scientist, there’s no question about it… Meet neuroendocrinology researcher, bestselling author, and Stanford University professor – Robert Sapolsky! Sapolsky’s journey has led him from studying stress and neuronal degeneration in wild baboons in Kenya to exploring the relationship between schizotypal disorders and the emergence of shamanism and the major Western religions. But more recently, Sapolsky has plunged into philosophical waters, studying free will, or rather the lack thereof, to come up with A Science of Life Without Free Will. Today, he’s here to present his case! Tune in. Key Takeaways: 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:27 How can we understand free will without understanding consciousness?  00:04:30 Panpsychism  00:07:25 Quantum indeterminacy and free will  00:15:17 Do baboons have free will? 00:19:36 Are there levels of determinism?  00:30:46 The neuroscience of free will 00:37:42 Free will, ethics, and a criminal justice reform  00:45:58 Punishment and justice in Judaism  00:54:37 God’s omniscience and free will  01:01:16 What can we learn from baboons?  01:05:26 The most magical discovery 01:08:11 What did Robert change his mind on?  01:10:08 Outro — Additional resources: 📚 Get Determined by Robert Sapolsky on Amazon: https://a.co/d/csNwICN  📝 Get one month of Snipd Premium for free with this link: https://get.snipd.com/Cx7S/brianSnipd Snipd lets you take Smart Notes 🧠 with AI 💡 — it’s my favorite podcast player 😀 ! 📢 Ownership of your health starts with AG1. Try AG1 and get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3K2 and 5 FREE AG1 Travel Packs with your first purchase 👉 https://drinkag1.com/impossible ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we're featuring renowned neuroendocrinologist, best-selling author, and Stanford University Professor Robert Sapolsky. He's one of Stanford's top-rated professors, and you'll see why in today's episode. Robert's journey has led him from studying stress and neuronal degradation in wild baboons in Kenya to exploring the relationship between schizophrenia disorders and the emergence of a shamanism and the major Western religions. But more recently, Sapolsky has plunged into philosophical waters, studying free will, or rather what he claims is the illusion and lack thereof. He's come up with a new narrative to describe the science of life without free will. In his book determined, he combines neuroscience, anthropology, quantum physics, chaos theory,

and philosophy to tackle some of the most important questions of the human species. You'll see I push back on him with my requisite love and respect, but no one gets a free pass on the Into the Impossible podcast. I want to ask the questions, I know you wish you could ask my guest, and you will. Today, he's here to present his case, and you'll be the judge.

Who's right? Is free will an illusion? Or do we have control? And are we the determinants of our future? Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, out. Robert, as you know, I'm a physicist.

I've had on many physicists. I love talking to physicists, but I also love talking to biologists, neurobiologists, and all sorts of folks. I always have a problem with these people when I talk to people like David Chalmers, and that it seems hopeless. Cosmology seems hard, but consciousness seems impossible. And to me, how can we understand the notion of free will if we don't have a notion of consciousness that everyone accepts? So is that, am I making a fallacious argument, or is it really the case that you could not understand free will until you understand how consciousness itself emerges. Nicely, I think fortunately one could ignore consciousness, and I completely agree with you.

Once a decade, I force myself to read a review paper on sort of neurobiology of consciousness and see with great relief that it still isn't making any more sense to me, and I don't think it's making any more sense to the people working on it because it's so, such a damn intractable problem. But fortunately, in my view, the issue of consciousness is not terribly relevant to assessing free will. And that's because I think the problem people get into when believing in free will and just having such a strong intuitive sense of it is they get caught up in the notion that if there is conscious intent and there is conscious awareness that you have alternative behaviors available to you, that's it. Case closed. That's the requirements for

deciding that there's free will. And in my view, whether or not that intent is conscious or otherwise, whether or not there's alternatives, whether your brain decided milliseconds before you were consciously aware that you had intent to do something, all of that is kind of cool and fascinating. and has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not there's free will. Because in my view, focusing on that is like asking somebody to read the last three pages of a book and assess what they think of a book. Because what you're doing there is not asking the only question possible, which is, okay, hooray, you have conscious intent to do that.

And when you did that, you felt a sense of ownership over your intent. Where did that intent come from? How did you turn out to be the sort of person who would have that intent at that moment? And it's in that realm that I think one can find that there's not a shred of space for free will to operate in. And all we are, the outcomes of all of those priors that made us the sort of person who would have that intent in that moment. And the trouble is in that moment. It's so tangible and we're so conscious of having that intent that we have to have done that freely. And that doesn't begin to address the issue.

How do you become that sort of person? You mentioned person. And throughout the book, I can't help but wonder, because I have a lot of respect for my consciousness colleagues. It's hard not to when you talk to people like David Chalmers or Philip Goff. But again, some of them resort to the last refuge of the scoundrel and they will come up with, they will come up with panpsychism. Now, I'm a physicist.

So I understand the properties of particles extremely well. And I understand that electrons are fungible. You've seen one, you've seen them all. They basically have three properties, mass charge, and spin. So at what level can you obliterate the notion that consciousness perhaps is panpsychic, that it exists in an electron? Or where do you come down on the panpsychism? Because again, you mentioned person, and I agree, we could talk about free will,

but it would seem that you might have to extend it to the top quark if they're right. So where do you come down in panpsychism and before we pivot to the notion of what I call scale dependent free will? But please, what do you think about panpsychism? Basically, the notion of the emergence of things like consciousness, and I'm basically winging it here coming out of the... They are too, by the way. Don't worry.

That's very nice to hear. Out of the reductive building blocks, clearly that's the case. Clearly, we haven't a clue how things like that work and where you're... you're now supposed to hand wave and say things about, you know, non-linearities and non-additivity and such. For me, it's a sort of highfalutin version of what me as a neurobiologist is sort of much more puzzled by an equivalent. Yeah, we kind of know a lot about how a neuron works. We know a fair amount about its constituent parts. We know about what makes its ion channels open and closed.

down to the X-ray crystallography level. And we know a fair amount about what comes out at the other end, like language and longing and behavior, whole organism behavior, or even the behavior of like 100 million neurons at a time in one part of your brain and how you go from the lower level to the upper level is this hugely challenging problem. And the way you wave your hands at this point is to just say things like neural circuits. It's neural circuits that. And neural circuits, yeah, obviously, but that's the great explanatory gap right now.

We can tell you what one neuron does, and we know a fair amount about, you know, systems level, but like making the leap in between. And I sense it's a similar problem here. You know, somewhere at the end of the day, it's quarks all the way down and somehow thus, you know, that's got to be relevant, but it's not a level I can. make the slightest headway with. Yeah, I mean, so it seems to me a problem in that if you do, suppose, as these thinkers do, that these inanimate objects that I call fungible, are participating in the consciousness project, then it must be that at some level you go from, you know,

indeterminism. I don't think you would argue that quantum processes themselves are not deterministic, right? I mean, you mentioned in the book, both the classical version, of, you know, everything is chaos, you dispose of that, but you also talk about determinism in the context of quantum mechanics. So do you accept that quantum mechanics, I mean, do I understand you're correct that quantum mechanics is indeterministic? I mean, we can't know the outcome of the famous double-slit experiment as you go through in the book. So given that, you know, if these panpsychics are correct, that electrons are participating in consciousness project, then at some level, you'd go from, yeah, the atomistic,

notion of the fundamental building blocks of nature that are indeterminate, and then somehow you'd get to determinism. So is the key word, you know, the kind of organism? I mean, what is the L, in other words, I'm always curious to know. What is the fundamental building block of free will? Like, what objects have free will? And it could be as complicated as a human being. It could be a paramecium. But what level of complexity is the first one to achieve the ability to not have free will in your in your nomenclature well, I guess we've got a living system argument here. And before we know it, we're going to be splitting hairs over whether viruses count as living and you know, whether one is looking at a metaphor of sort of drive or or literal versions of it.

But in terms of sort of the crowd that argues that quantum and determinacy is the way in which you can squeeze some free will out of the system. First off, I am not a physicist. I'm incredibly ignorant in this area. Second, my opinion that quantum indeterminacy is indeed indeterminate is almost entirely a result of my reading like physics for dummies type books and seeing that most people in the business agree with the Copenhagen interpretation. But essentially, I conclude that while immensely cool and thank God I'm not trying to figure out how that stuff works for a living, that ain't where free will can come from. And I think I essentially see it sort of three arguments for that. The first one is the scaling up problem, which is the notion that the indeterminism of a

quantum event on a subatomic level, the notion that that somehow is going to bubble up enough to form your moral backbone is ludicrous. And here we get into sort of all these notions of the brain, brain tissue as being moist and collapsing sort of quantum sort of structure. And it's just not going to bubble up far enough. It's not going to bubble up far enough because even if somehow all the quantum events in one neuron sort of happen to all go. in the same direction at once in the same way, one neuron has virtually no voice and what's

going to come out, you know, just the sheer numbers. Ooh, it may have something to do with the interactions between a neurotransmitter and its receptor. And there's a guy who argues a Dartmouth that sort of, that's the fundamental. There's something called glutamate receptors in the brain, and they're really important. That's all you need to know about them. And under one circumstance, it's magnesium blocks up the receptor and you have to kick it out with all sorts of fancy electrophysiological changes in a neuron to open up for cascades of consequences and ooh, maybe the magnesium is subject to quantum indeterminacy and that could somehow invade the whole system with fascinating implications.

And like your average synapse has hundreds and hundreds of these receptors and your average in neuron has 10 to 50,000 of the dendritic spines that contain these receptors, and your average brain has AD billion, and it's just, you know, zeros out the wazoo, and the odds of any of that manifest in anything is vanishingly impossible. The second one is the one that, the reason why this can't make sense is the one that Sam Harris attacks so efficiently, which is, this is a mechanism if, somehow things did bubble up to the level of influencing macro brain stuff that could sort of manifest in behavior.

This is a prescription for randomness. And like every card-carrying compatibilist philosopher out there saying it's a deterministic world, it's saying quantum stuff, you know, randomness is not the stuff you're going to build, your moral philosophy out of. or as Sam puts it, if that were really the case, we'd spend all our time saying, oh, I've no idea why I just said that in terms of the influence of randomness. And I always elaborate on that saying you wouldn't actually be able to see that. You would just make gargly sounds with your voice because the movement of your laryngeal muscles

would be random as well. So the randomness problem. and using randomness to explain, like, the fundamental things that make us who we are. Hey there, fellow magicians traveling into the impossible. Tis I, your favorite astrophysicist? Professor Brian Keating, today's been really heavy on the brain surgery and brain science, not the rocket science that I'm an expert in. But I know you're enjoying this incredible voyage into the mind

and into the question of free will versus its absence, the eternal question. I want to ask you a question and it will reveal whether or not you have free will or are determined by my influence. I'm an influencer, after all, as you know. Would you please take my suggestion and click on the subscribe button if you haven't? Only about 18% of you who watch these videos are regular subscribers. So please do subscribe. And don't be afraid to share. It won't diminish my opinion of your free will in any way.

Now back to the episode with my friend Robert Zippulski. People like Daniel and Dennett come up with like a real unconvincing circus trick, which he says, ooh, we use the randomness to generate possibilities. And we then consciously choose among them and make sure we don't do something silly. And instead, we pick the most irrational one, which makes no sense whatsoever. The third way in which quantum indeterminacy isn't going to get you free will is sort of the Hail Mary that people sort of pushing this do at that point, which is, okay, okay, the stuff that bubbles up and probably all the way to the surface and is random that somehow, and here's the

word that comes in, you can harness, you can harness this indeterminacy in a top-down sort of way to then shape it into your free will. And I think I'm being polite when saying there is not a whole lot of neurobiological reality to these models that suggest that somehow your macro level can reach down and get quantum and determinacy to work to your own benefit for wealth and pleasure and all of that. Yeah, it doesn't work that way. I want to pivot to what I call the minimum viable consciousness or minimum. And I'm sorry to be so obsessed with this, but, you know, I'm just a simple astrobi. physicist, Robert. I can't, I can't grasp, you know, when they, when they think about, you know,

what's it like to be a bat, you know, and by the way, I want to come up with a book, what's it like to be Thomas Nagel, written by A-Bat, Aaron Bat. So that's my next book. But you and I have something really extraordinary in common. We both studied intensely baboons and baboon behavior. Yeah, I have, I have three brothers and I have multiple sons. And I've been studying baboons all my life. Are baboons sort of the quantum of in a system of assessing free will? I mean, it seems to me if you start off with human beings, there's so much variation and there's so many variables to assess and control, it's impossible. Even if you did have the ability to say, let's look at the free will of a person in Pyongyang versus a person in Santa Cruz, you'd get perhaps different

observable data evidence. What is the minimum viable? entity that could or could not exhibit free will. Is it a baboon? Well, given that I don't think anything can generate free will, it's sort of easy to sort of decide that doesn't apply to baboons or applies to anything else down there. My view is the commonality among all living things, including primates and apes and us, is that we're nothing more or less than biological machines interacting with environment. And what I try to do in the book, I devote one really, like, in the thick, thicket sort of chapter to taking on sort of the false assumption a lot of people make when you say, oh, there's no such thing as free will.

And they say, that's ridiculous. That can't be because if that were the case, nothing can ever change. And what I go through is an analysis of how things change on the level of how an aplegia, a see. slug, which is like famous in neurobiology circles, how an aplegia learns to do something new. And like amazing Nobel Prize winning work has shown down to the molecule, down to the gene, down to the promoter, down to the transcription factor, exactly what's going on when an aplegia learns to retract its gill in response to a stimulus that previously it wouldn't retract it to. And this is amazing and quite literally down to the molecule.

And then how about when somebody learns to be a white supremacist because of how they were raised or somebody learns to like this type of music or somebody learns to stop being a white supremacist? What's going on? And it's the exact same genes. And it's the same molecules. And it's basically taking people through here's the machinness of how behavior changes. And not only doesn't the lack of free will not preclude change, what it does is it reinforces the machinness of the process.

So the continuity between us and all the folks down there, what I, you know, inevitably at some point someone comes to Laplace and Descartes and sort of arguments that there's a massive gulf between animals and humans. And what you wind up getting is they're machines and we're not. not. And their machine is usually then means, ooh, even though it seems like they're in pain when you do something awful to them, it's just a simulation of pain. It's a simulation of feeling because they're just machines and we're not. And what everyone is supposed to do at that point is say, yet here's another element, which Descartes was wrong because animals have emotions

just like we do. And that's true on a certain level. And what I do at that point is say, oh, Dick Hart was completely wrong with for the opposite reason. We're machines also, just like all the animals, it's a continuity. It's a continuity with everything that can respond to an environment in a way that's adaptive and can change over time. When I look at this problem of determinism, an analogy to the hard problem of consciousness and I don't know, the easy problem of consciousness or soft problem, I come up with this idea. You know, I want to get your, input on kind of the weak and strong aspects of determinism. Like nobody, you know, last night I'm driving home from Los Angeles to San Diego and you're going down the five if you've ever been

down the five. And there's an accident, you know, and I can see there's an accident. And by the time I get to Orange County, I know with 100% certainty that in the next three minutes, the people that are trying to get back north to Los Angeles are going to encounter a horrific Southern California traffic jam. So I've determined, I have complete and utter omniscience of what's going to happen to them, ignoring ways and everything else, right? But does it matter? I mean, it's not like there's any information or sick.

I can't communicate with them. There's nothing I can do about it. So I guess, and I don't mean this insulting, but, you know, so what? On a certain level, the weak, what I call weak determinism is like that. I have this omniscient God's eye perspective, but it's inconsequential. It doesn't mean that I'm not going to hold them guilty if they decide to run over, you know, my neighbor's dog. which maybe you would too, but maybe you wouldn't. So are there levels of determinism where,

you know, in other words, I'm going to find conciliation between, you know, where I might agree with you that, you know, certain things are determined without having to buy the whole book. As you say, you know this sounds crazy. You actually say this in the book at the very beginning, which I love, your honesty. But are there different levels of determinism? In other words, to find a conciliance, Can we say that certain things are determined but aren't significant and certain things are significant but not determined? Or is everything always determined at all times forever? I'm going to be out on a lunatic fringe here and that I think it's determined in every domain. Nonetheless, we agree that there's all sorts of aspects of determinism going on that are not interesting. like, whoa, I'm going to scratch my nose right now.

And as a result of moving my arm, all sorts of quarks moved in my arm and went in this direction. And like that was sort of a mechanistic sort of event. And that's like of no interest whatsoever when thinking about the level of do we have free will or not. That matters. And what it's really about is where we view. responsibility. And if you don't believe in free will whatsoever, as is the case with me, you think the notion of responsibility for behavior makes no sense whatsoever. And that runs the gamut of making sense of Putin and Hitler and Stalin and all that sort of thing, down to

like not getting carried away with yourself as somebody says, oh, that was so nice of you, the way you help that old lady cross the street. Praise, blame, punishment, reward make no sense at all if there's no free will and there isn't. One thing I've often brought up when I've had conversations with my friend Sabina Hassanfelder, who's a proponent of something called. Oh, she's your friend? Yes, yes, right? She's so cool.

She is such a unique combination of neurons. Wow. Yes, she is. I'm happy to put you guys in touch, too, if you like. That would be great. So, Sabina and I will have our camaradergyny kind of arguments back and forth. And one of the things on super determined is I said to her, Sabina, I've never met somebody who acts like they have no free will.

In other words, I believe you believe that you don't have free will. But if you were to act like that, I think you'd be in an insane asylum. In other words, the people that we classify as basically acting on these impulses, sociopathic desires, et cetera. I mean, have you ever met a sane person, right? Like someone, you know, one of your colleagues that truly believes they have no free will and acts as if they don't have free will. In other words, they make completely, you know, unpredictable, perhaps, maybe or completely predictable choices in every situation? Or does everybody have this, you know, interface that Don Hoffman calls, you know, kind of the desktop that allows them to

survive in life? And that gives the illusion that they're actually making choices. Have you met somebody that behaves like they have no free will? No. And in theory, we should. And I attempt to. And I succeeded about one-tenth of one percent of the time, which is a real point to the book. She's fascinating in that regard. I remember the evening when my wife was sort of looking at some lectures and said,

oh, my God, you've got to look at this person. She's amazing. And she was indeed amazing. And I sure hope that, like, people buy my book before watching her YouTube lectures, because all they need to do is watch them and not bother with, like, this ridiculous book. Yeah, it's not possible. I admit it. And I admit it to my intellectual shame and ethical shame because I respond all the time as if there is free will.

Somebody cuts me off in traffic and I'm pissed off at them. Somebody says, ooh, nice, nice shirt you're wearing today. And for a brief second, I feel like I'm a better human than average. And yeah, it's, it's, but what I sort of go over and over in the book towards the end is, nonetheless, we can do it in areas that really matter. we have figured out that there is no free will and agency when it comes to controlling the weather. And thus, when there is a horrible hailstorm, it doesn't make sense to find the old toothless woman at the edge of the hamlet and accuse her of witchcraft and burn her at the stake. It's really good that we figured out that's a realm in which there's no responsibility or free will.

and it's really good that we figured out that schizophrenia is a neurogenetic disorder, rather than being caused by mothers who have psychodynamic, unconscious hatred of their child. And yeah, that's not a realm of response. We can do it over and over and over. We have figured out like domains in which free will is not there. And not only doesn't the roof cave in, the world usually becomes a much more humane place at that point. And thus, maybe what I'm left with is if it's going to be hard to decide that blame and praise and none of that make any sense whatsoever and act upon it, save it for when it really matters,

save it for when we were judging someone harshly and do the work at that point to work through how there was no free will and save it for the circumstances in which you decide you're entitled to something special and work through ways in which you actually did not earn that. and like save it for when it matters. Do the hard work then. You mentioned in the book, you're, you know, an atheist. We'll get into your Jewish roots and my Jewish practice maybe later. But you do mention Buddhism at one point and one, but not as if you're an expert, but merely to just, you know, kind of codify some of the ideas in the book that have a basis in philosophical and spiritual ideas.

And obviously, I'm talking with Sam Harris pretty soon next month, actually, about the, you know, very topics, so I'll ask him in more detail. But I remember a quote from the Dalai Lama when he, he doesn't have any children. He's a, he's a bachelor, a confirmed bachelor, right? So, but he was, he has a brother. And he was asked, when your brother dies or, you know, if your brother were murdered or killed right now, how would you feel? Would you, you know, and he said I would, I would try to feel nothing. But he didn't say that he wouldn't feel anything. So I just, I get, I come away from that as, you know, Buddhism even, you know, is perhaps not the, not the answer. But, but again, on a daily level, at a practical level, you know, I have to ask you, yeah, if you're,

if you're cut off in traffic, it's natural to, you know, to presuppose that, you know, someone who studies and believes there is no free will wouldn't hold somebody accountable, but you're also a human being. And that, that did make me wonder, you know, is free will not only, you know, scale dependent, you know, the galaxy, the Indromeda Galaxy over there, you know, that does that have, you know, a free will? No, it operates by exactly Newton's laws, as far as we know, except for maybe the central black hole that has to be described by Einstein, but that's about it. So is this scale dependent? No, it's completely determined. But then on the level of, you know, people, is it, but when you study these things, it seems, it seems hard to know how you could be

wrong. In other words, have you thought, is there a scenario or variety spectrum of scenarios that could dissuade you from belief that free will is illusory? Are there any series of experiments that could do so? Yeah. And it's sort of a scenario which I actually had a debate two weeks with Daniel Dennett, who's like leading compatibilist philosopher. And when I aired this, he used literally the word daft. He said, that's just daft. And he is in other sort of settings called that view deplorable, which is, okay, you say, why did a behavior just happen?

Because these neurons just, you know, did this and those other neurons didn't do that. And why did they do that? Because of some of the environmental stimuli in the previous minutes. And why were you this degree of sensitive to those stimuli? Because your hormone levels this morning. and neuroplastic events in your brain in recent months to decades, and your childhood when you constructed your brain and your fetal life and your genes and culture.

And like, where did that behavior come from? It's the outcome of everything from one second ago to a million years ago, and all of which interact in ways that are unwelcoming of the notion of the sort of magic that is required to insert free will into there. So with that point, I say, show me a behavior that has just happened. Show me a person.

And its action is completely independent of its history. Change the genome of that organism. Change that childhood. Change what that person had for breakfast. Change what size underwear they're wearing. Change everything. And if the exact same behavior occurs at that point, that's it.

You've just proven free will. But with all due respect, I think my audience would be wanting me to push back with love and tenderness and say, well, you know that's impossible. Like I always say cosmology is the hardest science because even astronomy, there's literally in this galaxy right there, 100 billion to perhaps a half a trillion stars. And those stars have different properties. And you can study stars, even though you can't change a temperature of our sun, you can change a temperature of a sun over there and see what happens. or you can examine the environmental effects of a different star with different properties and a different solar system. You can't do that with our son.

But with the universe, unless your friend Andre Linday across the quad from you, my friend Andre Linday is right. There is a multiverse, unless he's right, which I have some, you know, we debated that. But there's only one universe. So we can't go back and say, well, what if there was one yadogram more matter at 10 to the minus 18 seconds during the electrow week? You can't do that. So you're basically providing me a falsifiability rubric that's impossible to instantiate.

So how do you react to that? I mean, you're giving me an example, but it's not only technically impossible. You know, it's impossible on the face of it to create a new big bang with different parameters to then lead to all the organisms matter and energy we have in our unit. Okay. Well, first off, that's a low blow. Two responses to it. The first one is, I think at this point, if it were.

hundreds of years ago and somebody showed up and said, whoa, we just discovered something when you bash somebody's head in, their behavior changes afterward. And we think that thing up there may have something to do with behavior. And I'm going to count as the first neuroscientist when they write this all up. There's not a whole lot of knowledge. When we at this point understand what prenatal environment has to do with epigenetic programming of genes in your brain, when we understand, what hormones this morning in your bloodstream have to do with sensitivity of neurons and that when we understand what the culture your ancestors invented 500 years ago has to do with how you were mothered and thus how you constructed this part of the way when you see all these pieces in place

at this point the sort of the low blow thing that I would do in return is say no actually the onus of proof is now on the people who are saying there is free will Show me a mechanism for how free will works that is independent of all of that stuff. Show me one in which you can have a homunculus in the brain that is in the brain but not of the brain. And for my money, we know enough at this point that rather than saying, okay, show me an experiment that would disprove free will, show me the proof of it at this point because we have such a tightly woven matrix of understanding. of where behavior comes from, from one second or a million years ago, blah, blah, blah, that I think the onus is in the opposite direction.

But in terms of maybe getting a baby, baby step version of sort of experimental evidence, okay, so let's look at a neuron that does something that looks like it's acting freely. Let's see, can one ever see that? And neurons will have spontaneous action potentials every now and then. and individual synapses will have spontaneous release of little packets, little vesicles of neurotransmitter, and the whole world of fascinating stuff has been done on that. And oh my God, even if you're going to like talk to me about your childhood and what happened a second ago, this neuron just released a packet of neurotransmitters for no discernible reason.

It just acted spontaneously. It just showed indeterminacy, you could come up to that level of function. And whoa, at least on that. And then you look at supposed randomness in the nervous system. And what you see is, under some circumstances, your brain, in effect, decides this is a time for some randomness in this part of the brain. Some circumstances will make the spontaneous release of packets and neurotransmitters more likely to happen than in other circumstances. In other words, your brain has determined, this is a good time for some indeterminacy. And this has as much to do with free will as like, you know, you sign up for an improv class.

And the teacher then says, okay, start the scene right now, be spontaneous. This, you know, most of what people then pull out when saying, okay, well, let's find a building block of a neuron that indeed has just done something. without any antecedent causes influencing, even on the level of, oh my God, it just dropped a packet of neurotransmitters into the synapse for no discernible reason. If you were showing, here are circumstances that make that much more likely to happen than others, you haven't proven free will. So my being this pain in the ass at this point is, I think we got enough knowledge that go and show us a mechanism by which a neuron just did something free of all of that,

rather than having to do the opposite, which is saying an answer to, well, what about this? What about that? What about you can't explain? Yeah, we have the genome, but we can't explain what every single gene is doing it. Yeah. Show me something that works outside of this very tightly woven structure of causality and like the onuses on people who are still saying this free will, despite the fact that they're willing to admit that there's things like molecules out there.

Hey there, fellow explorers of the impossible. Did you know that every week I send an email out to an interested group I call magicians? These are for my Monday magic messages. Every week I send out an incredible cosmic musing, something I've been thinking about, an appearance that I've made on other people's podcasts or in videos of my own. Something that's purely genius from around the world of STEM-type subjects. I also include something that is a wonderful image that I found from some of you, the listeners and subscribers to the email and to the podcast.

And lastly, I share the conversation that I've posted in the previous week on the Into the Impossible podcast on this YouTube channel or audio channel. So if you want these Monday magic musings, it's easy to sign up. It's easy to leave if you want to, but I hope I will suppress that urge on your free will to leave by the incredible content in these Monday magic messages. So please go to Brian Keating.com slash list. And as a bonus, once a month, I give out a free chunk of the early solar system, a meteorite that's really four billion plus years old.

You'll get that for sure if you have a .edu email address when you sign up. So go to Brian Keating.com slash list and sign up. So pivoting, you mentioned, you know, kind of some of these potential experiments. I can think of a lot of them, but I might be more sadistic than other people. And thank God that I'm not a biologist. Yeah, I'm such a bad biologist, Robert, that, you know, in high school when I would do dissections of frogs and stuff, I was so bad. The frog would live, you know, it was awful.

I'm terrible. I don't know what you biologists do for, to get so good at what you do. But so what I might do is something deeply unethical. I actually like Sabina, she and I have one thing in common. We have twins. And, you know, you might engineer some kind of twin study, right? So you could do a type of behavioral modification where you take a child. I'm not going to do this to my twins, although sometimes one of them really pushes my buttons. But the point being, yeah, could you actually, you know, envision some scenario where, yeah, you have some idealized twin or maybe even at the level of, you know, multiple, I mean, my, your colleagues can make billions of paramecium or whatever that, that nematode was or you're mentioning before that are identical clones, basically, not only twins, but clones.

So I guess this is all just a segue maybe because I want to pivot to some of the downstream implications of your fascinating work, one of which has to do with, with the criminal justice system. So, you know, given, given a notion, let me first ask you, would you want to live in a world where people weren't, you know, where there was a strict, hard problem of determinism interpretation. And that we did view the person who cut me off or drove slow in the left lane. You know, if you ever drive slow in the left lane, Robert, God help you. But, but, you know, would you want to live in such a world?

And what are the ethical and societal implications of some of your ideas, if enacted? I think, you know, within some degree of, like, lunatic constraint, it would be wonderful. It would be a much, much more humane world because this is what we have shown over and over there. What we see is stated most broadly in terms of what the implications are of dumping a concept of free will is we run the world right now on the notion that it is okay. to treat some people way better than average because of things they had nothing to do with and it is okay to treat other people way worse than average for things out of their control and then to like get insulted injury by afterward preaching about how this is a just world and people you know need to be held responsible for their actions in a world in which we recognize

our machinness all we can do is come up with a much more humane way of making sense of people's behaviors around us. I think it would be a great thing. I can't imagine it sort of applied broadly enough so that this would be an unrecognizable world, but the recognizable versions would be a whole lot more humane because the recognizable changes that we've come up with over time have made it better. Well, you know, I look at things as simple and organizational structure as the Department of Physics that I'm in or I used to be in when I was up at Stanford. You know, you can't imagine holding people unaccountable. You know, God help you if you try to take away someone's sabbatical, you know, or make, make professor teach an extra course, right?

That's the gravest sin in academia. But let's take some sort of, you know, fatalistic view. You don't believe in God. I understand that. But let's say you were a god or you had this godlike power. Or your emperor, you know, Donald Trump gets back in office, Robert. So tell me, what would you instantiae? How would you, what baby steps or what initial forays might you take with a benevolent dictator like yourself in charge of humanizing making the world a more humane, ethical place?

What would you do? Maybe starting from treatment of animals and then maybe extended upwards? Well, I guess the very first thing that would be done, which would be, you know, sort of the foundational sort of building block to this whole revolution is nobody could ever again talk about how somebody compliment them on their cheekbones. Wow, you have such lovely, look at your cheekbones and all of that. No, the world has to come to terms with the fact that these are zygomatic arches and that you had nothing to do with like bone morphogenic protein. teens. Like, you know, that is the building block. Talk to my plastic surgeon. Talk to my plastic. Okay. Once that one's out of the way, the next thing you need to do is get rid of the entire criminal justice system and not apply any nice like NPR tote bag notion of reforming it, of saying, you know,

there's lots of problems with it. But the starting point is people have some responsibility. No, you got to get rid of a system that has any notion. that retribution is a virtue in and of itself, that has any notion that anyone has earned deserves any sort of punishment because it makes no sense at all. So just as your listener is bound to have apoplexy, sort of compounding it by saying, and the exact same thing applies to a meritocracy, the notion that anybody has earned their better than average salary or they're better than average access to a vaccine or clean drinking water or a corner office in their corporation, that that is just as intellectually and morally suspect. Okay, so at that point,

there's no blame, there's no praise, there's no nothing. How are you supposed to run the world? And this is where the knee jerk is, oh, grace, you're just going to have murderers running around the streets? Obviously not. And the horrifyingly mechanistic sort of metaphor that I always use at this point, which is the only one that can make any sense is you got a car and its brakes don't work and it's dangerous. It's going to kill someone. Maybe it already did. This is dangerous. You can't have it out in the street and there's a solution. You lock it up, you put it in a garage and you keep society from being harmed by it. But you don't go in every day and take a sledgehammer and bash it on the hood as punishment for the person that it ran over.

You don't like read it, read Christ's sermon on the mount and the hopes that it will have a better carburetor afterward. You know, it's possible to save the world, protect the world from cars whose brakes make them dangerous. And oh my God, that's so ridiculously mechanistic. You know, that may sound like dehumanizing us. It's a hell of a lot better than demonizing us with sermons. and we see a baby step version of it all the time. You can have a human who's dangerous. They are dangerous to people around them.

And you need to protect society from them. And what you do as a result is when that's your five-year-old and they're sneezing, you don't send them to kindergarten tomorrow because they say if your kid has a nose cold, please keep them at home so they don't get everybody else sick. Oh my God, you constrain, you quarantine them. and you protect society from their sneezing all over like somebody else's kid, but you don't sit them down that next day and say you can't play with your toys today because you've done bad and you've got a rotten soul and somehow that's affected your sinus have

canals or something. No, we have subtracted effortlessly responsibility out of that domain and we figure out how to protect society from five-year-olds who sneeze too much. We can constrain their behavior. We don't constrain it one smidgen more that's needed to make them safe. We don't pontificate about it and moralize about it. And we even feel a responsibility to put some research into why kids get nose colds and sort of look at root causes. And that would be the exact same way with any version of damaging human behavior.

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going to hit some Talmudic. So those of you out there who hate when I waxed talmudically, it's your signal to tune out, but you're going to miss some interesting fireworks, I suspect. So, Robert, do you remember from your Yeshiba days, the punishment for the goring ox? No, I don't. When an ox gores a man or a woman to death, the ox shall be stone to death, and it's flesh shall not be eaten, but the owner of the ox is not to be punished. Now, that's the first time the ox that gors. The second time the owner does get punished, but you still kill the ox. And you might be thinking, well, what the hell? Like, you know, why would you kill this ox? But I think it's a

capitulation to the cruelty of crime. And obviously, let's make the example a little bit more concrete. The car of your neighbor, you know, ran over, God forbid, has for shalom. runs over your wife. And it was a driverless car. Okay. Let's let's just, you're in San Francisco. So that could actually have, God forbid it happens. But I'm saying in that situation, can you imagine the cruelty to you as a survivor of seeing every morning the car just in your neighbor's driveway? I think it's a capitulation that makes sense from the perspective of, as you said, you have to lock certain things up. And yes, you made it a toddler or you made it, you know, a car or something like that. But nowadays, that's the interpretate. We don't have

oxen. I don't have oxen. I don't have like a pit, you know, and so we make up, but I have a pool and I have to put a fence around the pool. And if I don't do that, there are certain punishments legally. If somebody drowns in it, that's my responsibility. So I guess, you know, the notion of living in a world where these things are not ascribed to be blamed, you know, or something to be blamed for. I'm pointing to the Talmud or to the Torah even as an example of something where you would actually kill the inanimate object or the ox or whatever as a way of avoiding cruelty to the survivors. So how do you react to that? How do you react to this notion that, you know, we have an obligation to survivors and so forth of not having murderers or rapist or, you know, I mean,

all sorts of crimes wouldn't necessarily be traced back to a volitional action, right? So how do you react to that, to the obligation to the survivors of crimes or criminals, et cetera? First off, that makes total sense emotionally, viscerally, even as we dance around the bizarre history of animal criminality, the notion that there's been courts that have executed, you know, chickens for having pecked at somebody's ankles or such and some fascinating legal cases from the Middle Ages that have remarkable relevance to the present. But in terms of that, Yes, emotionally this makes sense. If someone did something beyond appalling to my wife, my, and like they were given what they do in

Norway, a 20-year sentence and were given a penthouse suite in the prison there and all sorts of stuff, and the notion that even if there was one second in the years to come of that person's imprisonment where they sat down to a meal and they were hungry and they took a spoonful of something and said, ah, that's good. The world is an unjust place if as a result they could feel that moment of place. Yes, we all know that. And what we're dealing with here is a major problem in neurobiology, which is we activate reward circuits in the brain when we punish. Punishing feels good. Punishing is driven by dopamine. mean punishing, drive sort of limbic, emotive parts of the brain, you get mock juries,

and when they're deciding if somebody's guilty or not, they're using their cortex, when they're deciding what the punishment is, they're using their limbic part of the brain and reward centers. We will pay to be able to punish them. It feels wonderful to punish somebody righteously. And it feels wonderful. When there's third-party punishment, I am a victim of something horrific, and thank God, someone has stepped in to punish the Ms. Grant who's done that to me. And like we invest enormous societal resources and making third party punishers sort of exist. We give dental insurance

to police and things like that. You know, all that feels great. But an argument that I make there is what counts as justice served and what has been needed for people to say justice has been served. And you go through the history of punishment. And 800 years ago, it was flaying somebody alive in the town square where everybody gets to watch. And here's the person scream as you eventually dismember them and throw their body parts in a fire and feed them to the dogs. And everyone walks away from it back when and saying, yeah, justice has been served. And then it came to sort of, okay, you'll, you'll just hang them in public. And then it was okay, you know, if you're a bloodthirsty crowd, you're going to have to get your sense of satisfaction.

Justice has been served by knowing we hung them behind the closed wall of the prison. And you're going to have to, and now you've got to be satisfied that we just put them to sleep. And our sense of what counts as justice served has evolved. Yeah. And it becomes much less bloodthirsty. And if you're in Norway, where Anders Breivik, the, the, the. white supremacist who murdered 70 people in this. And it was the worst crime in the history of Norway. And it is unbelievable the extent to which that was an attack, not just on those people,

but the very fabric of what Norwegian society is supposed to be about. And he was given the longest term possible in Norway, like a 21-year sentence. And the West endlessly pointing out that he's got like a fitness machine is he's got a three-room suite. Conjical visits. All of that, except as far as I know, no one would be willing to make a conjugal visit with him, which probably has a lot to explain how he wound up being the broken, this sort of damaging person that he is, but that's a whole other story. And the Norwegian stance in interviews with family members of people he killed after he

was convicted, and they said, has justice been done? and they would say, yes, he's been put away, and we don't have to think about him anymore. This mediocre clown of, like, toxic ideology and, like, his supposedly being a neo-Nazi knight of the Templars. And, yeah, we don't have to think about this guy anymore. Justice has been served. And someone as unlikely for me to cite as sort of a font of wisdom, William Barr, who was Trump's Attorney General at some point, pointed out what we want out of society when we are a victim, when we have that unbelievable pain, is to know that society has taken our pain seriously enough to met out

whatever is the most consequential thing society is willing to do. And if 800 years ago was flaying somebody alive with molten lead or somebody in the town square, and now it's putting somebody to death in a Texas prison injecting with something, or putting them in a prison in Oslo where they nonetheless, you know, can take college classes remotely. If it's the most extreme thing society is willing to do, that's very satisfying to victims, because all it is done is validate, yeah, that's how bad we recognize you feel in response to it. And what that counts as has evolved enormously. And the fact that society has put its best efforts into making sure this individual is never again going to damage anybody can be just as, you know, sense of justice

having been done. Yeah, I think there's also an societal, you know, kind of, you know, of effect as well, in that, you know, part of the function of the judicial system is to prevent vigilanteism and that you feel that you don't want individuals, you know, imagine if the lone wolf killer, you know, imagine Breivik's sentence was one year, not 21 years. I mean, I imagine the victims would feel very differently. I don't want to get into, you know, George Bernard Shaw's, you know, definition of prostitution, you know, it just depends on your price. But at a certain level, yeah, you don't want there to be an incentive. And I think you're claiming, and I would probably tend to agree with you, there is a sense of righteousness and so forth of punishment. And you're saying that activates dopamine. I think that is the very reason, Robert, not to turn this into a Harusa, you know, a Talmudic session. But they notice that the ox is not to be eaten. Now, I can't make that analogy with the Waymo next door on Market Street in San Francisco that kills, you know, somebody's wife. But you're not going to eat it or not going to use it for parts of your Tesla. But the point was it was very hard to get meat back then, right? So the ox was

valuable for its flesh. It could be used for its flesh or for other purposes. So they explicitly say, you're not to benefit from the death of this animal. It's purely to kind of restore the cosmic justice of not inflicting further pain on the victims to see their loved ones killer, you know, in this case, an ox. Now in Judaism, we believe that, you know, humans are made in the image of God and therefore have infinite worth, even a murderer. And so it's very, it was said that when when lives were taken in the Talmud by a criminal court, it needed multiple witnesses. The Sanhedron had a vote. And if they voted to kill a person twice in 70 years, they were considered bloodthirsty. Now, the last thing I want to talk about before I get, I want to actually get it, finish up with your

work on baboons, because as I said, I've got brothers and sons. But, but, but actually, before we do that, just a little bit more a bit forbearance on your behalf of my Judaic kind of leanings. And that's the concept of, you know, this, this omniscience not being compatible with free will. Now, I had thought that this was, you know, really not to say what you said is unsophisticated, but that the notion that God is omniscient is really different, you know, from the sense that we have of him knowing every single thing that happens. I mean, even in the Torah itself, it says God regretted that he made man. Now, obviously, and it says in the New Testament, Jesus wept, you know, so if Jesus knew, you know, what would happen because he was a godhead figure in the tripartate God, then, you know, he would know everything.

So why would he weep? I mean, it wouldn't be. And similarly, why would God regret something that he had done? Why would he say that mankind is evil from his birth when he created the, so I wonder, in Judaism, there's a concept called Sim-Sum, which means that God, restricts his abilities and withdraws them in order to give Behiara or free will to the individual. So I wonder, you know, how do you react to this? I see this as the only way, as a, you know, I actually call myself a practicing agnostic in that I go to temple, I keep kosher, I, you know, learn Hebrew, I study the partial. But, you know, in terms of do I know

a scientific level, do I feel at a scientific level evidence rising to the level of science? No, absolutely not of the existence of God. But I try to act as if God does exist because I don't think, you know, Pascal's wager, you know, should be ignored. But I guess I'm asking you in a long-winded, very rambling fashion, I apologize, the notion that God, you know, if you say that God restricts his free will, is there, is there room enough for free will in man? Or is it completely, just speaking, I'm asking you to speak biblically now, not scientifically. Does that not

represent the space needed to at least maybe have the illusion of free will if not free will itself? So talk about God's restricting of his free will, at least in the monotheistic tradition. Does it have a place in the prospects of determinants?

It's a great resolution to that problem. The notion of God of limited means that God can't make a boulder too heavy for God to pick up. God can't make a triangle with more than 180 degrees. That sort of thing. He can, by the way, he can incurb spaces. So don't worry.

He can make a triangle. 900 degrees, actually, it turns out. They're a cosmologist. I should have bought that out before. Don't worry. No, about that stuff. God can know everything that's knowable, but there's lots of things that are unknowable.

And it strikes me that's sort of the most meaningful version of believing of that. is one feels a tremendous compassion for God because he could never go to a movie and be surprised by the surprise ending. Bummer, there goes that source of pleasure on a night off kind of thing. And it could also be used as a great sort of moral imperative. The Quakers have this line, all God has is thee. The notion of a limited God, God can't go in and, you know, catalyze social justice right now. all he has is you as the vector for that. And, you know, that's wonderful.

Well, that is great. And that's a good way of resolving, you know, God whose hands are somewhat tied. And that's why you got people being let off to the ovens and how could God. And that's, but all of that said, that's within the framework of, you know, I'm an atheist. and I get something resembling the echoes of my childhood religious pleasure and sense of comfort by seeing that you get enormously complex adaptive systems that can emerge from simple rules. You don't need blueprints and you don't need blueprint makers. And within that framework, a discussion of, you know,

where does omnisophonificence, as you can tell, I don't say that word very often because it doesn't play a role for me much. But where does that fit in? It doesn't. But nonetheless, the notion of a God of limited means is a great emotional solution to how does God allow like liver flukes to make wildebeest feel pain. What kind of God is that? It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing.

Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Well, we've talked about so much. I can't resist closing with this fact that, you know, I believe that humans and chimpanzees or baboons may be shared, you know, 98.8% of our chromosomes in common. I've often, you know, wished it was 100% because, you know, be so, be so delightful to try to understand, you know, how this tiny little difference can make such a, such a dramatic outcome, the leverage of that. And so I want to pivot to your work with baboons as we close. So you work with baboons for a long time in Kenya, and it's provided, you know, some really revolutionary insights into stress and behavior. And I wonder, you know, what was to you

the most unexpected parallel between baboon societies and stressors, in particular, and human society stressors? Is there something that we can learn as adults in the most advanced societies around the world? What can we learn from baboons in a way to adapt to our dresses, which are, you know, nowadays the Zoom connection doesn't work. That's likely as hard as it was for baboons during the drought in Kenya in 1988. So anyway, tell me, Robert, what can we learn from your fascinating work and parallels between baboons and human beings? The most relevant thing is how I came about wasting the first 20 years of my life studying baboons, which is I started with them around age 20, very interested in the physiology of stress,

stress-related disease and what does your social rank have to do with who gets the rotten cholesterol levels and immune dysfunction, things of that sort. And baboons live in very competitive hierarchical societies with a great deal of aggression and displacement aggression. And these were wild animals where I figured out the means to be able to dart them and esthetize them now and then and see what their bodies were up to. And what I thought, I was absolutely certain I was good at discovery as a 20-year-old, was that, like, if you get a choice in the matter and you're a male baboon and a bunch of not so interesting reasons why most of my work focused on males, but if you have a choice in the matter, you want to be a high-ranking baboon

because you've got the psychological control and predictability and outlets and things of that sort that, like health psychologists sort of focus on. And it's reflected in them. They, on the average had the lowest stress hormone levels. They had the best immune function. Ooh, dominance rank is destiny. And what, you know, it took me about 20 years to start figuring out is it didn't so much have to do with that. It had to do with what sort of culture of the troop that you were in. And that's not a silly, non-scientific term. And some troops, it's much better being low ranking than in other troops. What did the culture have to do with that? That was relevant. what does your personality have to do with it? And there are some alpha male baboons who have the exact

equivalent of classic definition of type A personality. They would see threats that other alpha individuals would not. And that would be hugely predictive after controlling for the same rank, if your worst rival taking a nap on the other side of the field sends you into a frenzy in all of that, you're going to have on the average three times the resting stress hormone levels as somebody of the same rank who can tell the difference between that and a real threat. The thing that probably most sort of caught me off guard and required me to be a 40-year-old or a 50-year-old to appreciate is if you're a male baboon and you've got a choice in the matter

and you could choose between being an alpha male or being a male who has a lot of social grooming partners, go for the latter every time. That's far more protective of health, social affiliation. And that's what all the people who talk about social capital, and why health is declining in Western societies and bowling alone and all those sorts of metaphors. Wow, it took me early 20 years to figure out that like having somebody to groom you now and then and even more importantly, someone who you are willing to groom is way more important

than who gets the dead gazelle. The fact I think you demonstrated, you know, is that controlling temper was actually an asset. Like on the way up, the more aggressive, the more temper, the more temper, you know, mental, the more type A, the more confrontational and aggressive, the more successful they'd be. But then the ones that really had longevity in a whatever department chair sense, they were the ones that could modulate their anger, their raw, brute physical strength. And I think that's a beautiful metaphor for human beings, males and females to take into account. You know, we shouldn't neglect the fact that both sexes have their own personal challenge. Well, Robert, if you'll indulge me for the last few minutes with a couple more minutes,

I'd love to ask you two questions that are pertinent to our conversation and really give an insight to you not only as a scientist, but as a human being. So if you wouldn't mind answering two final questions, I would very much appreciate it. So they both relate to something said by Sir Arthur C. Clark. Actually, I'm going to ask you three questions. The first statement by Sir Arthur C. Clark, and I should preface this, I am the associate director of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego, where I understand you have a colleague, Professor Vargas, which I've never met, but I'd like to meet him now that I

heard about him in your book. But at UCSD, we have the center. And so one of his most famous quotes is any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I want to ask you, what is the crowning achievement? You know, if we're talking to the Andromeda Galaxy M31, and we want to have a little bit of swagger about what we've created or understood or come to learn about in your field, any field. What would it be? What technology or learning lesson is most magical, in your opinion? We have the means not only to think about something, to have a thought, a memory,

and emotion, and something changes in the function of the blood vessels in your left big toe, but we can watch something unpleasant happening to somebody else, and the same change can occur in our left to big toe. I think that's immensely cool. And the fact that we are wired that whatever is an unexpected pleasure that came from out of nowhere is going to be exactly what we expect by tomorrow and is going to be too little two days from now. I think those two things are really,

really interesting ways of starting to explain, like, what we're about as a collection of atoms when the aliens come to figure us out. Okay. The next quote from Sir Arthur goes as follows, when an elderly, I'm not calling you elderly, but when an elderly distinguished scientist says something is possible, he or she is very certainly right. But when he or she says something is impossible, they're very much likely to be wrong. I want to use that as a springboard to ask, what have you changed your mind on? What have you been wrong about, if anything?

I made one horrendous bad move late in graduate school when I decided that something I was getting some hints at neurobiologically, in fact, was kind of, eh, me, whatever. That's not very interesting, and decided not to pursue that. And that turned out to be adult neurogenesis, the fact that the adult brain could make neurons at some point. I saw a little and yeah, nah, I'm not going to, I'm much more interest in what's killing the neurons and stress and such. So that was a major, major wrong turn on my part. Things that I've been wrong about, all of them have been like pretty pedestrian things.

You know, this type of receptor is a whole lot more central to neuron death than that type is, or dominance rank is a whole lot less important for understanding health psychology than social affiliation is, I don't know, I guess I'm pretty doctrinaire and fundamentalist. In this domain, I was 14 when I decided there's no free will and also in the same breath that there is no God and that there's no purpose to anything and it's a vast, empty, in different universe, all of that. So, you know, we're supposed to have 95% confidence and say, you know, our tentative model for all of that. The emotionally driven stance that I have had throughout is a purely extremist one, which is, yeah, free will doesn't exist.

All right, Robert, we've reached the end of the conversation when I asked the final question, which is related to the name of the origin of this podcast, which is called Into the Impossible. Little known fact, without Arthur C. Clark, we wouldn't have the word podcast because the word pod and podcast comes from Open the Pod Bay doors in 2001 of Space Odyssey. And one of the Apple employees said, well, this pod contain all this information, all this digital information, we'll call the iPod, an iPod in homage to the Pod Bay in 2001. And now we have podcasts that have come from that. So Arthur C. Clark is intimately related to many aspects of the podcast, including this very podcast name, which is Into the Impossible. And it's a saying from Sir Arthur that goes like this. He goes, the only way of determining the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. I'm going to ask you that in terms of advice to your former self. We have a lot of young

men and women, a lot of young scientists, academics, and graduate school postdoc, a lot of professors even around the world, listen to it. What advice, life advice, Would you give? You have 30 seconds to go back and visit your 20-year-old self. What do you tell him to give him the courage to go into the impossible? A, maybe it's not worth it. B, if you decide to do that, everything you say yes to within a framework of that's going to take a lot of intense commitment, be really aware of all the nose that are

implicit in that and all the things you're going to have to turn your back on and really figure out before you sign on the dotted line? Any heuristics to know, like, besides the fact that it might be pretty determined that you're going to say yes to too many things, any heuristics or rubric that our listeners could use to gauge whether they should say no more often? Or less often, perhaps, or in different domains. Nah, I wish I could find somebody who could tell me that. Well, I wish you a season of many happy returns and a destiny of continued thriving. Robert, thank you for spending so much of your time with my audience today. My pleasure in a thoroughly unexpected version of the pleasure.

I'm very glad you took me in these directions. Thanks. Likewise, I'm sure. I hope to meet you someday when I come up to Stanford or you're down here. If you want to hear a contrasting view from that of Robert, you'll want to watch my interview with David Chalmers. noun professor who even came up as we discussed the concept of the hard problem with consciousness. And click here for the best conversations on the end of the Impossible podcast over the past few weeks.

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