Making Sense with Sam Harris - Making Sense of Free Will | Episode 5 of The Essential Sam Harris

Episode Date: February 14, 2023

In this episode, we examine the timeless question of “free will”: what constitutes it, what is meant by it, what ought to be meant by it, and, of course, whether we have it at all. We start with the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky who begins to deflate the widely held intuition and assumption of “libertarian free will” by drawing out a mechanistic and determined description of the universe. We then hear from the philosopher who has long been Sam’s intellectual wrestling opponent on this subject, Daniel Dennett. Dennett and Sam spar about definitional and epistemological frameworks of what Dennett insists is “free will,” and what Sam contends could never be. The author and physicist Sean Carroll then engages Sam with more attempts to find a philosophically defensible notion of free will by leaning on the unknowable nature of the universe revealed by quantum mechanics. We then listen in on Sam’s engagement with the mathematician and author Judea Pearl who focuses on matters of causation to tease out a freedom of will. After a historical review of Princess Elizabeth’s famous exchanges with Rene Descartes, we hear from the biologist Jerry Coyne, who firmly agrees with Sam that a deterministic picture of reality leaves absolutely no room for anything like free will. We then hear from the curiously entertaining mind of comedian and producer Ricky Gervais who was thinking about free will while taking a bath when he decided to phone Sam. We conclude with Sam’s own response to concerns that an erasure of free will inevitably result in fatalism, loss of meaning, and passive defeat. Sam insists that the loss of free will actually pushes us in the opposite direction where we begin to see hatred and vengeance as incoherent and start to connect with a deeper and truer sense of genuine compassion.   About the Series Filmmaker Jay Shapiro has produced The Essential Sam Harris, a new series of audio documentaries exploring the major topics that Sam has focused on over the course of his career. Each episode weaves together original analysis, critical perspective, and novel thought experiments with some of the most compelling exchanges from the Making Sense archive. Whether you are new to a particular topic, or think you have your mind made up about it, we think you’ll find this series fascinating.

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Welcome to The Essential Sam Harris. This is Making Sense of Free Will. The goal of this series is to organize, compile, and juxtapose conversations hosted by Sam Harris into specific areas of interest. This is an ongoing effort to construct a coherent overview of Sam's perspectives and arguments, the various explorations and approaches to the topic, the relevant agreements and disagreements, and the pushbacks and evolving thoughts which his guests have advanced. The purpose of these compilations is not to provide a complete picture of any issue, but to entice you to go deeper into these subjects. Along the way, we'll point you to the full episodes with each featured guest.

And at the conclusion, we'll offer some reading, listening, and watching suggestions, which range from fun and light to densely academic. One note to keep in mind for this series. Sam has long argued for a unity of knowledge where the barriers between fields of study are viewed as largely unhelpful artifacts of unnecessarily partitioned thought. The pursuit of wisdom and reason in one area of study naturally bleeds into, and greatly affects others. You'll hear plenty of crossover into other topics as these dives into the archives unfold. And your thinking about a particular topic may shift as you realize its contingent relationships with others.

In this topic, you'll hear the natural overlap with theories of consciousness, artificial intelligence, belief and unbelief, ethics, violence and pacifism, epistemology and knowledge, and more. So, get ready. Let's make sense of free will. Free will is a topic that's notorious for its linguistic dead ends and frequent inklings that everyone might be talking past one another. There's a lot of retracing of one's steps and trying to find the snag in the line that seems to be jamming the whole thing up. The conversation can drift into helpless semantic arguments disguised as genuine differences. It's rife with charges of intentional misunderstanding, and it's littered with contentions that someone is changing the subject or shifting definitions in order to rescue

a maybe psychologically necessary but ultimately disingenuous picture of the universe. So we'll try our best to navigate this famously thorny subject and highlight the failure points that can derail the conversation. You may not end this compilation with a perfectly clear answer to the timeless question of whether we have free will, but you will come to know which constellations of philosophical positions lead to a consistent stance. And hopefully, you'll also understand clearly how it is that when Sam connects the dots of the universe with logical argumentation and careful observation of our first-person experiences, he firmly argues that the concept of free will is incoherent and the sense that we have it is illusory. The topic of

free will is so intimately related to the subject of consciousness that it would be incomplete and unwise to leave out the contingent stances that tie the two together. You can imagine many conditional statements about the nature of consciousness that act as logic gates in a conception of free will. A logic gate is an if-then statement of analytics. If condition A is true, then the truth of condition B must follow. For example, if the earth is spherical, then it's night on the opposite side of where it's day. It's quite possible that committing to a particular epistemological approach inevitably leads to diametric positions on consciousness and free will. The two deep ideas may be locked in a forever flip-flopping inverse relationship, destined

to always be fighting it out over which one is merely an illusion, and which one couldn't be. The flipping of these values might occur as we move from first-person to third-person vantage points, and up and down the scales of analysis of the universe. But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. Let's first try to establish a touchpoint for a general notion and common feeling of free will. This is a feeling that Sam is convinced is very widely held and what the ordinary usage of the term free will refers to. So you chose to listen to this episode, right? You saw it listed as an option, thought about it, chose to click it, and here you are.

But you also feel like you didn't have to, right? You could have clicked on a different topic, or a song, or you could have decided to do something else entirely. That feeling that you could have done otherwise at any point in the past is pointing towards what's called libertarian free will. Sam contends that this is what most people feel like they actually have and what most people mean

when they casually claim to have free will. Sam argues that this kind of free will is an illusion that evaporates when you examine it closely So let's see what he means If we rewound the universe to the precise moment you clicked this podcast episode What does it mean to say that you could have done otherwise? If by rewinding the universe we mean Resetting the physical conditions in precisely the state

and position they were in a few minutes ago, keeping in mind that this would also reset your physical system, including your brain, to that precise moment. Could you have done otherwise? That precise state of the universe resulted in you choosing this episode. Could it have resulted in anything other than that? It seems like the answer to that question has to be no. Each physical state of the universe gives rise to the next, and the next, and so on,

in what is called a causal chain. There is no way to break that causal chain. You can start at any moment on the chain and move backwards to the that causal chain. You can start at any moment on the chain and move backwards to the prior link forever. These links extend back infinitely into the past towards the Big Bang and the start of the universe, where we eventually shrug at the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing in the first place. And of course, the causal chain extends into our future, even though those particular links

are much harder to see. This description of things is generally called determinism, and in this view, there is clearly no place to insert libertarian free will, no place to map your feeling that you could have done otherwise onto reality. But it gets even worse for the stability of our initial feeling of freedom. If you add some randomness to our causal chain, let's say through the findings of quantum mechanics, and the next chain is impossible to calculate precisely, free will still runs into problems. If we rewind the universe again, but now add some random dice rolling to determine the

precise state of the universe in the next moment, then many things could happen and the next link in the chain might be fundamentally mysterious on some level. But still, did you choose it? You didn't even roll the dice. And the random number that comes up that determines the next state of the universe doesn't rescue free will for us anyway. Indeterminism may make the future inherently unknowable, but it still doesn't get us to a coherent description of libertarian free will. Could anything? Sam doesn't think so. And as much as humans have longed to find this ultimate kind of freedom,

it appears to be logically impossible and demands breaking the laws of physics, something that is otherwise known as performing magic. This presents some unavoidable problems for many religious philosophies that build upon the foundational truth claim of libertarian free will and construct systems of ultimate punishment and reward for our choices with different variations of heaven and hell. Sam has pointed out that this crisis for religious philosophy is much more devastating than any uneasiness about the undignified truths of our animal evolution that offend the religious doctrines of creationism.

Here's an example that Sam has written about to really drive that point home. Let's say that we exchange all of your atoms and quarks one by one with those of Jeffrey Dahmer. Dahmer did some pretty awful things, namely murdering people and eating their bodies. So after the exchange of all your atoms for his, you would be Jeffrey Dahmer, and you would do exactly what he did. But if you're protesting and saying, that's not so,

because you would make very different choices than he did, if you're insisting that you aren't a cannibal or a murderer, then you're insisting on the existence of a metaphysical soul, something that is not beholden to the laws of physics, but can somehow move them around. This soul would have remained intact and unchanged even when we did the atom swapping. Your soul would be in Dahmer's body, but it would still be you. We'll get to the problems with the metaphysical substance like soul a bit later in this compilation.

But let's assume for a moment that the soul exists. Even this doesn't get us the kind of libertarian free will we wanted. Because you didn't choose your soul either. And apparently, neither did Jeffrey Dahmer. Or anyone, for that matter. A simple way to put it is that every choice is determined by either nature, nurture, randomness, soul, or some combination of the four, none of which you chose at any point in an infinite causal chain.

Dahmer was apparently unlucky to be given the soul, nature, nurture, and randomness that he got. And presumably, you've been a bit luckier than him in at least one of those four ways. Luck swallows everything at this level of analysis. So what does this imply for a God who holds you cosmically accountable for your actions? For some thinkers, it erases him entirely, or it casts him as having a very bad sense of humor at the very least. Many thinkers have stumbled across this potentially fatal flaw in the logic of religious philosophy

and have gone to great lengths to try to reconcile the issue. A bit later in the compilation, we'll read from a classic case with a famous letter exchange from the 1600s between the celebrated philosopher René Descartes and the far too unknown critic Elizabeth, Princess of Bohemia. Just a note here. Sam has pointed out that his argumentation on free will has resulted in some readers and listeners feeling that the rug has been pulled out from under them. has resulted in some readers and listeners feeling that the rug has been pulled out from under them. He insists that taking on the insight that libertarian free will is an incoherent concept actually has tremendously important and beneficial impacts if ingested fully. So, if you're feeling a bit off-kilter psychologically, stick with this compilation as we push towards a nuanced and deep understanding.

You might find that losing this cosmic notion of libertarian free will actually activates a new sense of compassion and forgiveness. You're also going to hear from some thinkers who argue that the truth of determinism does not negate the reality of free will, though they will argue that perhaps we're forced to reassess what we may have thought free will was in the first place. These thinkers are called compatibilists, and Sam is entirely unconvinced by them. But we'll try to offer a good defense in this compilation, and we'll revisit the idea that there could be different levels of examination of the universe where we might be able to locate and speak about a will worth calling free.

We'll also hear from some thinkers who struggle with the balancing act of having to act as if we have free will, for pragmatic reasons of maintaining society and possibly for psychological stability. Sam considers all of those moves to be guilty of redefining the term into something entirely different and evading the inescapable, obvious truth. And he might be right, but we'll do our best to air the compatibilist challenges fairly in this enduring philosophical debate, which shows no signs of quieting down. One of the most glaring implications of this topic is how we ought to think about crime and punishment. This brings us to our first clip, which is with Robert Sapolsky, who's a professor and

researcher of neurobiology at Stanford University. In this segment, he and Sam are wrapping up a tour of the brain as they shift the discussion to the idea of moral responsibility and free will. We're going to ease our way into this minefield of a conversation with Sam's guest doing most of the talking here, as he lays out an automobile analogy which reminds us of the mechanistic nature of our biology and its emergent behaviors. This is from episode 91, an episode titled, The Biology of Good and Evil. good and evil. Let's just step back and remind people of the problem here. Maybe you should make the case briefly about why this notion of free will is an incoherent idea scientifically. And you might pull from your book this great description you have of what you call car free will. Okay. And much of it winds up being most relevant, implicit in that metaphor,

for criminal justice system, how we judge people harshly. One angle I take in trying to convince people there's no free will is just to look at the sheer number of things influencing our behavior. So you do something aggressive, you do something aggressive and you're asked why you did it and you come up with a very rational explanation that's dripping with a sense of agency. And here's just some of the things that influenced how likely you were to do that behavior. If you were sitting in a room with smelly garbage, that made you more likely to do that. If you are male or female and your testosterone levels have been elevated for the last day, that's more likely to have happened. If you've been traumatized five months ago and neurons in your amygdala grew new connections, that's more likely to happen.

If as a third trimester fetus, you were exposed to elevated levels of stress hormones from your mom's circulation, that as well. If your ancestors were nomadic pastoralists wandering grasslands or deserts with their herds and came up with a culture of honor and you were raised in that, you are more likely to have done that as well. Wait a second. Ecosystems 500 years ago have an influence on, yeah, turns out people's cultures are greatly shaped by that and it greatly shapes how their brains develop. Okay. So if there's that realm of argument, whoa, there's a whole lot more stuff going on under the hood, a whole lot more subterranean influences than one would

think. A second style of argument is when you manipulate one of those variables, like take somebody and stick them in a room that smells of rotten garbage, and your average person becomes more socially conservative on a questionnaire. And afterward, you would say, that's interesting. Last month when you filled this out in a room that smelled like petunias, you had this or that attitude and now you've put it differently. And they'll say, well, this event that happened in like middle Peoria last month has utterly changed my mind. No, it was a sensory influence that sensitized your insular neurons. So you can manipulate people on a biologically

unappreciated level and change behavior. But probably for me, sort of the most emotionally sort of salient way of getting at the free will issue is to just look historically and look at the stuff that we understand now, if we're reasonably educated, reflective, thoughtful people, whatever, we know that epileptic seizures are neurological disorders. They're not because somebody has slept with Satan. We know that certain types of learning disabilities are not children being lazy and unmotivated. It turns out there's cortical malformations. We know that certain times when somebody is completely inappropriate in their behavior,

it's because they've got a neurochemical disorder called schizophrenia. behavior, it's because they've got a neurochemical disorder called schizophrenia. Most of us have gotten to the point where free will has been subtracted out of that equation. If you have somebody with treatment-resistant epilepsy and they have occasional seizures, they can't drive a car. But you don't feel like justice has been served and they're getting their due punishment when their driver's license is inactivated for a while. You say it's not them, it's their disease. There's a biological explanation that sidesteps notions of agency or free will. And at that point, all you have to do is look at how much of this stuff we've learned in

the last century, in the last 50 years, of this stuff we've learned in the last century, in the last 50 years, in the last 10 years, in the last five years. We never heard of von Economo neurons more than 20 years ago. And either you've got to conclude, that's it, tonight at midnight, we're never going to get a new scientific fact again, or you're going to conclude that the march of science is going to continue exactly as is, and the number of ways in which we say, oh, it's not him, it's his brain, it's this weird quirk of it, it's just going to grow more and more until we're not talking about them and their diseases or them and their weird quirks, but we're talking about every one of our individualities and their

biological ones. And when it's in the realm of inappropriate human behavior, criminal activity, somebody does something violent, that's a biological phenomenon. That's not to say you don't do anything where you forgive everything. Forgive is an irrelevant word. If a car's brakes are faulty, you don't let it out on the street. It's going to kill somebody. You fix them if you can. And if you can't fix them, you put the car in a garage for the rest of time. But no one would sit there and say the car has a rotten soul or it's deserving the punishment by putting in seclusion in the garage there. It's a mechanical problem. And if somebody says, wow, that's so dehumanizing

to view us as just biological machines, that's a hell of a lot better than sermonizing us into having bad souls. Sapolsky's analogy drives us towards a mindset of how to think about punishment and retribution in a universe without free will. The implications are similar to a stance that is sometimes called the quarantine model of justice. The analogy presents a quarantine not as a punishment, but a necessary measure to ensure a level of societal safety while we work on a cure. This quarantine analogy is something

far too familiar to all of us since the year 2020, but it's a useful metaphor to keep in mind because it casts every dangerous or otherwise destructive behavior as a sort of infection or disease, which, of course, ought to motivate a sympathetic response that recognizes the bad luck of being a victim of the universe and urge us to find the remedy for those destructive behaviors. If we keep in mind Sam's argument that contra-causal free will is incoherent and couldn't possibly exist, then we really do have to drain a deep existential

and cosmic moral responsibility from a masked intruder who breaks down the door and threatens to kill our family. But this act of noticing that neither he nor anyone else from a masked intruder who breaks down the door and threatens to kill our family. But this act of noticing that neither he nor anyone else is the true author of his own actions doesn't make the problem and emergency of this person in our presence go away. We're definitely still in danger. So let's pause this moment and consider three different ways of dealing with it. Pause this moment and consider three different ways of dealing with it. Let's say this masked man has just busted the hinges off your front door, barged into your room, and pointed a gun in your direction.

You look at the table in front of you and see three different pieces of technology that you could use to deal with this problem. Let's allow our minds to invent some new sci-fi gadgets here. On the left is a normal gun with lethal bullets. Let's also say that it has perfect aim and will always hit its target right between the eyes. If you pick this one up and use it, you're sure to kill the intruder. To the right of the gun is our next option.

It's a button that, if pressed, will drop an inescapable and impenetrable cage down over the intruder, rendering him stuck and harmless to anyone outside of the enclosure. In essence, it will create a perfect quarantine zone with a population of one. If you press this button, you will be safe, the threat will be neutralized, the intruder will be caged, and presumably could be transported away to be dealt with elsewhere. And to the right of that button is our last option. This is a very special kind of laser beam device that rearranges the brain of its target and takes out any murderous ideas in it. And it does even more than that. It turns its target into a genuinely happy person on a path to objective fulfillment and contentment. It can instantly transform the most frustrated, angry, distressed, and homicidal person

into a paragon of moral behavior with the temperament of a contented yogi. Let's call this fancy laser beam device a cure gun. Keeping in mind that this intruder is not ultimately responsible for his actions, how could we ever morally justify using the gun on the left that would kill him? And is there any moral argument against using the device on the right, the cure gun? If you're raising some mental objections that using the kill gun would be justified because it would act as a sort of social deterrence

and prompt many other would-be intruders to rethink their life choices, that line of reasoning can be debated, and we will get to some of Sam's conversations which deal with that response. But it becomes very difficult to see how choosing the kill gun, and thereby foregoing the opportunity to use the quarantine cage or the cure gun, because the intruder deserves to be killed, would be defensible.

Now, we certainly don't have a cure gun at this point, and the very notion of the thing raises important discussions about what a cure gun would actually do and if there are such things as dangerous moral states that are well described as pathogens. But that is a debate for another compilation about ethics and Sam's argument in favor of an objective notion of morality. The quarantine button has closer analogies to our current technologies that can temporarily paralyze, which might be easier to imagine like tasers or lassos. And of course, if the intruder is then picked up and taken to an

institution that is focused on offering all kinds of therapy, psychological rehabilitation, or even medicinal intervention, all of those efforts can be thought of as amounting to an elaborate cure gun. The erasure of free will results in a view of the intruder and his actions as a dangerous and malfunctioning physical system, which could be altered or at least isolated if we had no fix. If we could disarm a hurricane, we would. If we could quarantine a hurricane, we would. But it feels ridiculous to punish a hurricane for the damage it caused. And if people are ultimately just particularly complex storms of physics, then this same attitude towards crime and punishment of humans

starts to feel illuminating and informative. Okay, so with that in mind, we're going to jump right into Sam's conversation with a philosopher, Dan Dennett, who has long been the thorn in Sam's side on the topic of free will. You should know that Sam and Dennett have a close personal and professional relationship. They were two of the four horsemen of new atheism, along with Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. All four men were staunch critics of religion and collaborated in many popular discussions on that topic after 9-11. Sam and Dennett's alliance on that issue may be ultimately rooted in this very topic because of the religious reliance on the incoherent notion of libertarian

free will. In this exchange, you'll hear both men agree that that idea is irrational and jumbled to the point where it is barely worth talking about. But you'll also hear very stark disagreements as Dennett attempts to find what he calls the free will worth wanting. Dennett goes on a search for what could provide a foundation to build a real, workable form of moral responsibility, and he finds that at an admittedly arbitrary social level, a level that he has analogized elsewhere as a person having the kind of physical and biological system that grants him entrance into the moral agents club. Also note that Sam recorded this conversation at a bar with one microphone after a conference in the early days of the term free will.

As I see it, there are two completely intention themes out there about what free will is. One is that it's incompatible with determinism, and the other is that it's the basis of moral responsibility. I think it's the second one that's the important one. That's the variety of free will worth wanting. And I think the other one's a throwaway. And I agree with you. Indeterminist free will, libertarian free will, free will libertarian free will is a philosopher's fantasy it's it is not worth it it is just it's just a fantasy so we agree on so much we have no love for libertarian indeterminism for agent causation for all of that metaphysical gobbledygook. We're both good naturalists. And we both agree that the truths of neuroscience and the truths of physics,

physics doesn't have much to do with it actually, are compatible with most of our understanding, our everyday understanding of responsibility, taking responsibility, taking responsibility, being morally responsible enough to be held to our word. I mean, you and I both agree that you are competent to sign a contract, me too.

You know, if you go and sign a deed or a mortgage, very often if it's notarized, the notary public will say, are you signing this of your own free will? And I recently did. I said, yeah, I am. That's the sense of free will that I think is important. I have it. There are a lot of people that don't have that free will,

and it has nothing to do with indeterminism. It has to do with their being disabled in some way. They don't have a well-running nervous system, which you need if you're going to be a responsible agent. I think you agree with all of that. So I certainly agree with most of that. I think there's some interesting points of disagreement on the moral responsibility issue, which we should talk about. I guess I want you to also express what compatibilism means to you. And if you recall the way in which I got that wrong, feel free to say that, but I'll then react to your version of compatibilism. My view of compatibilism is pretty much what I just said, and you were nodding. And you were not considering that a serious view about free will.

One of the abiding themes in my work is there are these tactical or diplomatic choice points. You can say, oh, consciousness exists. It just isn't what you think it is. Or you can say, no, consciousness doesn't exist. Well, if you've got one view of consciousness, if it's this mysterious, magical, ultimately insoluble problem, then I agree consciousness in that sense doesn't exist. But there's another sense, much more presentable, I think,

which, of of course consciousness exists it just isn't what you think it is that was a central theme in elbow room with regard to free will and in consciousness explained with regard to consciousness my view my tactic and notice those two views they look as if they're doctrinally opposed they're not they're two different ways of dealing with the same issue does free will really exist well if if free will means what dennis says it means yes and you agree if it means what some people think then the answer is no yeah i understand that but i would put to you the question, there is a difference between explaining something and changing the subject. So this is my gripe about compatibilism. And this is something we'll get into. But I assume you will admit that

there is a difference between purifying a real phenomenon of its folk psychological baggage, which I think this is what you think compatibilism is doing, and actually failing to interact with some core features that are just ineliminable from the concept itself. Let me surprise you by saying, I don't think there's a sharp line between those two. And I think that's quite obvious. That whether i'm

changing the subject i mean i'm so used to that retort about any line along this so no i think that's that's just a debater's point we should just set that aside saying you're just changing the subject is a way of as we're declaring a whole manifold, a whole variety spectrum of clarificatory views, which you're not accepting because you're clinging to some core part of what free will is. You want to claim that free will, the core of free will, is its denial of determinism.

And I've made a career saying that's not the core. In fact, let me try a new line on you. Because I've been thinking, why doesn't he see this the way I see it? And I think that the big source, the likely big source of confusion about this is that when people think about freedom in the context of free will, they're ignoring a very good and legitimate notion of freedom,

which is basically the engineering notion of freedom when you talk about degrees of freedom. My arms, my wrist, my shoulder, my elbow, those joints, there's three degrees of freedom right there and in control theory it's all about how you control the degrees of freedom and if we look around the world we can see that some things have basically no degrees of freedom that rock over there and some things like you and me have uncountably many degrees of freedom because of the versatility of our minds, the capacity that we are, we can be moved by reasons on any topic at all. This gives us

a complexity from the point of view of control theory, which is completely absent in any other creature. And that kind of freedom is actually, I claim, at the heart of our understanding of free will, because it's that complexity, which is not just complexity, but it's the competence to control that complexity. That's what free will is. I mean, let me ask you a question about what would be ideal from the point of view of responsibility. What does an ideal responsible agent have? Mainly true beliefs, a well-ordered set of desires, cognitive adroitness to change one's attention, to change one's mind, to be moved by reasons, the capacity to listen to reasons, the capacity for some self-control. These things all come in degrees,

but our model of a responsible adult, someone you would trust, someone you would make a promise to, or that you would accept a promise from, is somebody with all those degrees of freedom and control of them. Now, what removes freedom from somebody is if either the degrees of freedom don't exist, they're blocked mechanically, or some other agent has usurped them and has taken over control. A marionette and a puppeteer. And so I think that our model of a free agent says nothing at all about indeterminism. We can distinguish free agents from unfree agents in a deterministic world or in an indeterministic world. Determinism and indeterminism make no difference to that categorization. And it's that categorization which makes the moral difference.

So, yeah, I agree with almost all of that. I just need to put a few more pieces in play here. I think there is an important difference. Nevertheless, I agree that there is no bright line between changing the subject and actually purifying a concept of illusions and actually explaining something scientifically about the world. But in this case, the durability of free will as a problem for philosophers, and now scientists, is based on people's first-person experience of something they think they have. People feel like they are the authors of their thoughts and intentions and actions. And so there's a first-person description of this problem, and there's a third-person description of this problem. And I think if we bounce between the two without knowing that we're bouncing between the two,

we are losing sight of important details. So people feel that they have libertarian free will. And when I get emails from people who are psychologically destabilized by my argument that free will doesn't exist, these are people who feel like something integral to their psychological life and well-being is being put in jeopardy. People feel that if they rewound the movie of their lives,

they could do differently in each moment. And that feeling is the thing that is what people find so interesting about this notion that free will doesn't exist, because it is so counterintuitive psychologically. Now, I can tell you that I no longer feel that subjectively. My experience of myself, I'm aware of the fact that it is a subjective mystery to me how these words come out of my mouth. It's like I'm hearing these words as you're hearing these words, right?

I'm thinking out loud right now. I haven't thought this thought before I thought it, right? It's just coming. And I am subjectively aware of the fact that this is all coming out of the darkness of my unconscious mind in some sense. There's this fear of my mind that is

illuminated by consciousness, for lack of a better word, and I can be subjectively identified with it. But then there's all the stuff that is simply just arriving, appearing in consciousness, the contents of consciousness, which I can't notice until I notice them. And I can't think the thought before I think it. And my direct experience is compatible with a purely deterministic world right now. Most people's isn't, or they don't think it is. And so that's where, when, when, when you change the subject, so the analogy I used in my, my article that responded to your review is the notion of Atlantis. So people are infatuated with this idea of Atlantis. So people are infatuated with this idea of Atlantis. I say, actually, Atlantis doesn't exist. It's a myth. There's nothing in the world that answers to the name of Atlantis. There was no underwater kingdom with

advanced technology and all the rest. And whoever it was, Plato was confused on this topic or just spinning a yarn. And you, compatibilism, your variant and perhaps every variant takes another approach. It says, no, no, actually there is something that conserves much of what people are concerned with about Atlantis. And in fact, it may be the historical and geographical antecedent to the first stirrings of this idea of Atlantis. And there's this island of Sicily, the biggest island in the Mediterranean, which answers to much of what people care about with Atlantis. And I say, well, but actually what people really care about is the underwater kingdom with the advanced technology. And that is a fiction. So you and I are going to agree about Sicily. 99% of our truth claims about Sicily are going to converge. But I'm saying the whole reason why we're talking about Atlantis in the first place is there's this other piece

that people are attached to, which by you purifying the subject, you're actually just no longer interacting with that subjective piece. Yeah, that's well put. Your position is that you can see very clearly that what people really care about is that free will should be something sort of magical. And you're right, a lot of people, if you don't think free will is magical, then you don't believe in free will. And that's what I confront and say, well, I got something which isn't magical, which is perfectly consistent with naturalism and gives us moral responsibility, justification

for the way we treat each other, the distinctions that matter to us like who do we hold responsible and who don't, who do we excuse because they don't have free will. It gives us all of the landmarks of our daily lives and explains why these are what matters. And indeed, though, if the mystery, if the magic is that important to people, I agree with you, that magic doesn't exist. And if we're going to tie free will to that, then I would say, no, free will doesn't exist. Now, you said something very interesting. You said that the reason people believe in this is because they feel it or they think they do. They sort of intuit they could have done something different

in exactly the same situation. I agree with you that that's what they think. But I don't think that it is a forlorn task to show them that that's not really what they should think about this, about the very feelings they have. Let's talk about control. One of the things you said is, yeah, you can't control your genes. You can't control your environment. That's right. And as a sailor, I can't control the properties of the water. I can't control the wind, but I can control the boat. the properties of the water. I can't control the wind, but I can control the boat. I can't control how hard the wind blows,

but given how the wind blows, I can control the boat. Now, maybe you couldn't control the boat because you don't know about how to control a boat, but I do, and I can control the boat. And your argument is trying to remove the very idea of control from the world. Well, again, I agree there is this practical distinction and an important one between people we can treat as responsible agents who can behave themselves.

We're going to let that one fade out as the derailment of disagreement starts to get underway. But it's worth your time to listen to the whole two hours of that conversation. Both Sam and Dennett have written extensively on this topic, as well as Consciousness, and we'll be sure to point you to some of their best work at the end of this compilation. But before we continue on with the clips and hear some thinkers who align fully with Sam and some others who don't, let's see if we can figure out what might be behind this sometimes bewildering breakdown between Sam and Denon.

Sam flagged a concern that this debate can slip between first-person and third-person accounts of the world. Sam guesses that this is a major source of confusion. Let's take a closer look at that with a simple scene. We'll start with the first person view. Put yourself in a seat on an airplane. You're a bit thirsty, and the beverage cart is making its way down the aisle to you.

The flight attendant asks you what you'd like to drink. You see the choices on the cart, apple juice, orange juice, soda, water. You ponder things for a moment, make up your mind, and you ask for orange juice. After a few satisfying sips, you go for another and suddenly experience a muscle spasm in your arm. The movement causes some juice to spill on your neighbor's pant leg. Okay, let's isolate two separate actions to consider in this scenario. One action is the choice of the orange juice, and the other is the armed twitch and the armed twitch in his belt.

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