The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Robert Sapolsky: The Illusion of Free Will

Episode Date: October 18, 2023

I have been a fan of Robert Sapolsky’s for a long time. He is a creative force, with wide ranging knowledge, from primatology to neuroscience, and he is also a wonderful expositor of science. His previous book, Behave, was a wide ranging exploration of human behavior, at its best and worst. I have been wanting to do a podcast with him for some time, and the launch of his new book, Determined, gave us the opportunity. I got an advanced copy and we recorded this a few weeks ago, so that this podcast could post on the book’s publication date. Had it been anyone else, I admit I wouldn’t have bothered to go through the book. I have long felt the issue of free will is overplayed. The laws of physics are deterministic, and since biology and chemistry are based on physics, I have never doubted that free will is an illusion, but have also felt that for all intents and purposes the world we live in is indistinguishable from a world with free will, so we should take responsibility for our actions. As is often the case when reading Robert’s works, my view has now become more nuanced. His book masterfully discusses the neurobiology behind the illusion of free will, what actually interests me the most, and he effectively demolished claims of numerous philosophers, including Dan Dennett and others, that some magic occurs between the level of neurons and the level of the full brain that allows for some uncaused behavior. Along the way, we are taken on a masterful and fun ride through modern neurobiology. And at the end, Sapolsky confronts the more serious question of crime and punishment in a world where free will is an illusion, and convincingly argues that in a world where bad luck early on gets multiplied throughout ones life, society can far more effectively and honestly deal with crime by abolishing the notion of punishment, replacing it with behaviorally more effective methods. In our podcast, as we always do, we discussed Sapolsky’s origins. What got him interested in science. How did his 30 years working with primates impact on his view of humans, and more. I found it a fascinating discussion, and I hope you will too. As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to the Origins podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause. Robert Sapolsky is a genius, or so says the MacArthur Foundation, when they gave him a genius grant. Whether he's a genius or not, I've known him personally and of his work for many years and have always been impressed by both the depth and breadth of his work. You can tell how accomplished a scientist he is, by how many departments he's a member of at Stanford. He's a professor of biology and neurology and I think neuroscience and who knows what else at Stanford University. And he's worked on primates and neurobiology and a host of other things,

wrote a great book called Behave. And he has a new book out. And the new book is called Determined, The Science of Life Without Free Will. When I heard about it, I wanted to speak to Robert. We've been for years trying to set up a time to talk in general about aspects of neurobiology. And this seemed like a good starting off point. And I got to read the book before it came out. And it's a long book.

And for me, it was a challenge initially because as someone who recognizes that there is no such thing as free will based on the laws of physics and has seen a host of books that I find rather tedious about free will, some by people I've known. I was a little worried about reading this, but I knew that Robert always has gems to share. And the book is chock full of his own perceptions. It's fun, just like he's fun. And one can learn a lot about neurobiology.

And then discuss the important question of once you accept that there is no such thing as free will, he really takes on head first the more difficult question of what do you do about responsibility and guilt and blame. So in any case, we did what I love to do on the Origins Project, and we talked about his own origins, and he and I shared four things that I knew about. And then we had a rollicking discussion of many aspects of free will, neurobiology, society, and consciousness as well, which is a subject I've written about in my new book. And I was happy to see that it passed muster with him, one of the experts.

It was a great discussion. He's a remarkable individual and really fun to listen to and talk to. So I hope you'll enjoy listening to it and watching it. Add free on our Origins Project podcast on our Critical Mass website. where paid subscribers will get to see the whole podcast ad-free. Of course, you can listen to the podcast on any site that podcasts can be listened to. And then eventually the video will come up on our YouTube channel, on our Origins Project YouTube channel as well, a few days later, usually.

No matter how you watch it or listen to it, I certainly hope that you will be as thrilled and pleased and entertained and educated as I was when I had my dialogue with Robert Sapolsky. Well, thanks so much for joining me, Robert. We were saying before I pressed the record button that we were amazed. We actually never have been in the same room to our knowledge. We've crossed past intellectually,

and as you know, I admire and respect you tremendously. So it's such a thrill to finally, after all this time, be able to have a long discussion. So thanks for coming on. Well, thanks for having me on. The respect is mutual. That's great. I appreciate it. This was no easy task. In fact, it's probably this, this was one of the hardest things I've had to do for many reasons. I want to talk about your new book, which by the time this airs will be, I'm going to try and time it to the airing of your new book.

I have a pre-production version. Your book determined about free will. one of the hardest things for me, it was not an easy task to work through it for a variety of reasons. There's a lot there first. But also, I come into this with the absolute conviction from everything I know saying there's no such thing as free will. So it was hard for me, you know, accepting this fact. I thought, well, why?

Given that I don't, you know, think there's free will, why am I really motivated to go through this? And that was hard at the beginning. But, of course, what's great is that our reasons for my a priori regions for not thinking there was free will are almost not orthogonal, but don't have much overla. You actually know how the brain works, or at least a lot more than I do. And so your arguments really were quite useful. I don't think I needed them. I accept because basically you and I both don't think there's a magic somewhere in the middle and that's really what you need as we'll talk about.

So that was one of the reasons I found it hard. But the other is there's a lot in this book because this book covers so many different interesting things. And that was the other part. I love your mind. I've always loved your mind. I love your writing and I wonder the way we think. And it was just it was hard because it's a joy to read. I wanted to skip parts and I couldn't.

And the footnotes. of which there are tremendous. As a rule, I try not to read footnotes and books, but I read every footnote here because, of course, the footnotes are where you get to put in all the stuff where I really get to see how your mind works. In any case, it was worth the effort, and I hope this discussion will be worth people's effort

because we're really going to go, we're going to dig down and deep into the ideas as well as summarized them. But this is an origins podcast, And I like to find out about people's origins. I'm particularly interested in yours. What led you to where you, to the remarkable long and winding road that you've taken with so many branches,

almost like the emergent complexity of a neural system, as we'll talk about. So I've read a little bit of your biography that as much as I could find. And I found out your father was an architect, okay? And that clearly, and he was an Orthodox Jew. Your mother was, I assume, as well. The more we learned, the more we realized coerced.

Yeah, okay. Oh, interesting. Was she also, he was from Eastern Europe, he came from Eastern Europe? Yeah, he came over just after the revolution as a, like, young adolescent, a very good time to get out of that area. She came over from the old country as a fetus, so she didn't remember as much stuff back there as he. So she was born in the States.

Yeah. Oh, okay. And okay, so that, but now I want to find out a little bit, I mean, and you were brought up as an Orthodox Jew. Yeah. Now, and one of the things, you know, I was born as a, you know, sort of in a secular Jewish household and brought up in that way. Where the only thing I learned, my mother kept telling me about good about being Jewish

was that, you know, learning was a big deal in reading. She tried to convince me that was a big part of the religion. But you obviously love learning and reading. And of course, a lot of it's probably hardwired. But who had the biggest influence? So obviously your father had an influence because you write about him. But I'd like to learn about your mother too. who, for example, as an architect, when you were a kid, I know you've loved gorillas right away,

but what got you interested in that? I don't know that, and I'd like to. I'm not trying to get into too murky and quicksandish of, just for psychotherapy. But I was like eight when my mother, my mother started taking a to museum and natural history. And it was an incredible percentage of field biologists I've encountered who, like, instead of growing up out in the bush and his parents were missionaries or researcher, they grew up in some urban. And at some point, they stumbled into the natural history museum. That was it. that's that's the day they imprinted on geckos or whatever so we went into the primate exhibit somewhat randomly and if you ever go in there there's this stuffed mountain gorilla like right at the entrance

it may not be at the entrance anymore but like he's been on their postcards forever and he was shot by like Carl Ackley in 1912 probably with Teddy Roosevelt it is gun bear, but it's this like diorama of this taxidermed mountain gorilla silverback. And like something clicked. And if I'm going to get all fuzzy here and stuff, like both of my grandfathers died more than 50 years before I was born kind of thing and never do anything. And like something on some visceral level. This just seemed like this would be the greatest grandfather on earth. And I just wanted to go live inside the diorama.

I think that's what was going on there. That's where it came from. I was wondering there had to been something. It's where you grew up in New York. And there's not a lot of silverback gorillas, at least non-metaphorical ones. That's why I wanted to live in the diorama. I don't know about you,

but I'm still trying to come to. terms of the fact that Brooklyn has now become a trendy place to live. It was not then. Yeah, yeah, no, it wasn't then, exactly. But it gave you that opportunity, which, as we'll talk about, you know, gave you good luck and had a huge influence. Now I understand where that came from. And you basically did live in that diorama. I mean, you willfully chose as soon as you could, as far as I can see, to actually experience

to go and for then for three decades to continue to try and live in that diorama at some level. Yeah. It really impressed me and amazed me and also made me envious in some sense. Well, talk about privilege and good luck. Yeah. Yeah, no. Well, but you, you know, well, but for whatever reason, you took advantage of them. the privilege and good luck.

I would say it would be grit, but I know better. But so that's interesting. So your mother actually had the biggest influence that way. What about reading? I assume I'm always interested in, you know, reading was vitally significant for me, and I'm always interested in what, did you read a lot when you were a kid? And if so, did that example come from either parent or no? Oh, I read.

excessively and like I I guaranteed I was going to be like kicked in the rear and schoolyard perpetually by I don't know in fourth grade like who's your best friend essay and I said books are my best friend oh my god this kid has no instinct for how not to just beg to be abused and bullied um yeah books were were pretty great um it's it's tempting to do a whole escapeism thing, but I just part of it was also just getting padded on the head that this was like a nice metric for being a good, a good compliant boy. Were they available in the house or I mean, or or not? I mean, is that an example or something you picked up? Again, I'm interested just in comparing my notes to myself in some ways to say. A fair number. It was it was not quite a book-obsessed

house but there was like a decent number there but once once libraries started to be a part of the picture what we did have i i i do you remember the book of knowledge yeah of course oh my god we had the book of knowledge and like i would get up early like on sunday morning and just read the book where you could see like an article in there about like this newly finished ship called the titanic and it was like this ancient it was yeah is phenomenal. Yeah. No, it's, I, yeah, I, yeah, I love those things.

I, and I, and I, and I end up getting a subscription to book of knowledge type stuff, the time, life books. I'm life. Remember that I'm a 20 volume thing? It was my first thing. I spent my allowance on it when I was a kid, because, because there were books in my house, but not, but not, but not, yeah, not enough. And not that kind. Yeah, yeah. And so.

Yeah, one of them would show up like every six, and they smelled so good. Yeah. The first came out of the box. I still have them. I still have. I just put them up and I, you know, I'm never going to get rid of them because it, it, they mean so much. So there's so, you know, and of course, they're outdated, but that's what's great to, great to, that's what's great about science is they're outdated. It actually makes progress.

And they admitted somewhere afterward that that was wrong. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's the, being wrong as, well, you know, I, I talked about that in my new book. I think admitting you're wrong and not knowing is a key part of science. Now, okay, so now I see where the sort of background, by the way, as Orthodox Jewish, whether your mother was coerced in or not, did they have plans for you? I mean, my mother wanted me to be a doctor and my brother to be a lawyer, but did they want that kind of thing for you? Was there, did you feel any pressure to be a professional in that way? Frantic, ceaseless, crushing, heartless pressure to become a doctor.

Yeah, okay. where my my wife and i have like tried to figure out the chronology because it was a long time ago but we think this is the case uh that my father started off in med school like in the second year of the depression was going to be a cancer and ran out of money and uh never finished um like we've We've got his like stethoscope and microscope in the back of some closet upstairs from 1930, whatever. You know, there's a couple of possible holes in the story, but at least that can hold together broadly. So he knew how to do drafting. He had gone to Stuyvesant High School in New York and like he burned him to do that.

So he got a job doing that in an architectural firm and then decided to start. start going to architectural might school. And before it was over with, he was a professor of architecture kind of thing. But yeah, not quite daily, but not far from about the highest possible calling would be to go, like, be a doctor and cure cancer. Well, okay, that's it. Did he talk to you much about, I mean, did he talk to you much about science or his interest or did not?

I mean, no, that's not. Kids often forget to ask their parents what they're understanding better. They came in sort of frenzied monologues. He was a very, very large presence, but he was not a very approachable one. You know, he'd had a tough time of things and like he was doing his best. Yeah, yeah. Well, he obviously did, Ben. And it's interesting to see that that pressure came from a different

place for me and I've already said this a bunch of times. I'm sorry, I think in different contexts. Neither my parents finished high school but but the I and for them there was especially important to be a doctor because it represented you know going beyond and and and and I again when I got my first I got a fancy job at Harvard and I never forget my my mother phone my my then wife at the time and immediately said he still can go to medical school. There's still time. Uncanny. I had the same.

When I was getting, like, trying to pick where I was going to go have a job. I got an offer from my Cornell med school, the neuro there, and said, well, I'm considering it and coming back to New York or whatever. And they said, that would be a good inside connection if you decide. Oh, that is freakish. Yeah, that is. That's amazing. Oh, I'm glad I brought it up.

I wasn't going to, but that's fair. that is freakish. Now, you, well, I have to ask you this. Did you learn Swahili? I mean, I knew he started till. Did you ever, like, did you learn enough to? Yes.

I'm terrible at languages, but it was just kind of by force. I became sort of functionally fluent by about my fifth or sixth year there. And all has done is decay since then. And I took Swahili for two years in college, and it being the times that it was, the book was entirely written for, like, African-Americans thinking about root stuff. So it was mostly like learning how to talk about Charlie Parker and Swahili. Stuff like that. And it turned out the instructor was Tanzanian. So I learned Tanzanian, Swahili, which was like showing up in the Bronx speaking the Queen's English.

something to Kenya but you know I was I was eventually able to get by but I'm pretty bad languages I should have pointed out I mean people may wonder if who don't know why I even brought that up but you actually decided when you were still a teenager earlier teenager that in addition to learning about if you wanted to learn about guerrillas you would learn so you started to learn Swahili when you were in your early teens right yeah yeah I was writing fan letters to various primatologists when I was in high school and eventually got to sit at the feet of one for four years. And that was a major disappointment. Yeah, I sort of was intent. I think I had to

have been the only Jewish kid in Brooklyn in the 1970s sitting on the West Side independent train, in the B train, reading a biography of Jomo Kenyatta day after the day. Yeah, that would have gotten some. It would be interesting to see what would happen today if you were doing that. It's a different world. But you went, so it was kind of natural then to major, you went to Harvard, right, and did biological anthropology? Yeah.

And, you know, and that's sort of, I guess, biological anthropology. I'm wondering why it wasn't like more, I mean, biological anthropology is not directly focused on primates. You could have done primatology. And I'm wondering what, what, what, well, at the time, this was just at the time that like the great sociobiology shitstorm hit. In fact, it was amazing. It was amazing. E.O. Olson, did you take classes from him or something? My first semester is when he published sociobiology and, you know, like spending college, like arguing about whether he or Lewinton made sense. And it was incredibly stimulating time.

You know, at the time, a bioanthro included primatology. They, shortly after that, things got bad enough and there had been enough like drive-by shootings between the social anthro people and the bioanthera people that they, split into two departments, but yeah, that was. So you could do both. Yeah. And it's probably, you know, and as you say, and it's clear, I mean, you are, one of things I admire and I'm jealous of is, you know, I've always liked the idea of being a

generalist. And you, you've been a generalist in, in a clear way. I mean, achieving levels of levels in a wide variety of fields. And it's nice that you could start that generalization with bioanthropy. And it was it was for and it was a low profile department so you could get away with like just happening not to take all sorts of requirements and things. And it was it was nobody paid to the apartment. Then it was very quiet. It's sort of around then that I then started my like am I a neurobiologist through primatologist's crisis because said primatology god at whose feet I was sitting.

got sick my freshman year. He was fine and everything true, but he canceled all of his classes, including a couple I was going to take and sort of at the last minute saying, maybe I'll take an intro neuro class. They probably have something to say about behavior instead of just us evolutionary biologist. I was blown away by it. And like ever since deciding am I a neurobiologist or I'm a primatologist? and sort of that was...

See, you anticipated my question. I was wondering if you did, you know, biological anthropology and you liked primates, why you then went to do, you know, your PhD in neurobiology. And now that I guess that's the reason. It seemed like a jump. And sort of by then the way, the totally intellectually fabricated way

that I saw them as connected is like I go, study behavior and stuff in baboons and exactly at the point where I would say, wow, what's going on inside? I'm not going to lesion in disguise hippocampus because like I've known him for years and his mother was great. So I'll go do stuff to rats in the lab and just when I'm learning about the brain there and saying, huh, I wonder if this works in like real animals out in the real world. I get to go back to the baboons.

So they were synergistic. You know, I couldn't decide which. Yeah. Actually, I was, well, I guess it's because of the love of the bamboons or the great apes that, because I was going to say, you know, I actually just had a discussion with Peter Singer and who's lovely, interesting to talk to. And we talked about animal experimentation. And some of the silly things that have been done in the name of psychology on animals, the torturing of animals that didn't, you know, in order to try and understand who humans work,

when it was clear often that if you want to really understand, how humans work, you probably should examine humans. And, you know, and certain torching of rats was probably not going to give you huge insights into post-traumatic stress syndrome in humans and stuff. But, but, but I was, but you didn't want, but, you know, you could have chosen work on humans, but you just found apes more interesting? Um, I would say more understandable, but maybe the word is more palatable or more. I wanted to get out

and do field work somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Yeah, I know I can understand that. You know, and in your general, you are lucky to have a position that actually explicitly demonstrates your generalness. So I mean, again, I always wanted, but I didn't. I wanted to, I started a degree in history and as well as physics, but I quickly learned

that the intellectual baggage required me to do a degree in mathematics as well physics and that took up all the time. But you have professors in biological sciences, neurology, and this really always amazed me, neurological science and neurosurgery. And my mother would have been very happy if I had been a professor of neurosurgery.

Well, you better bet I trotted that out when I went back for Hanukkah. You know what? Yeah, I think at one point, the neurosurgery department had some sort of visiting committee and they suggested they needed a little more basic researchers in the department. So I was friends with the chief of neurosurgery who said, hey, can we put your name on the letterhead?

Ever since then, I've been a member of the department. I have to say, at one point, I was vice dean of the medical school of Case Western Reserve for about six months. And I don't think I ever told my mother. I worried about what that would imply. I said, but, you know, it did intrigue me. So your professor, I mean, and it's quite appropriate, given all of the breadth of your,

the lovely connections you make between neurobiology and, and behavior of human behavior and behavior of great apes. It is a lovely symbiotic relationship, and I guess it took someone like you to realize that that was useful. I'm intrigued that you, and I guess I'm intrigued and impressed that among that collection of departments in which you're a professor,

psychology isn't one of them. And I was wondering, I was intrigued by that. That's a good question, nor is anthropology there, although they've also purged, like, virtually everyone except the social and cultural anthropologists, so that war has been won there. I don't know. I talk to psychologists.

I can occasionally say the, write nouns and get away with it. But yeah, clearly some of the stuff I've done has involved my having to like interact with them a lot. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's interesting to me that. Anyway, we'll get, people will see when we talk about the context of trying to address this question of free will, which I want to now move to. You mentioned, obviously you've agonized. I guess that's the right way to put it. You've thought about, free will for a long time, obviously. And agonizing, by agonizing, I don't think the agonizing was, I suspect you recognized,

like me, that there was no obvious scientific reason why there should be free will. So maybe he didn't agonized by the science, but you agonized to try and understand how to, how to demonstrate explicitly, or address this question. How long you've been thinking about? Is it an issue that's always that's always bothered you? Well, I think once I started getting acne, that was right around the time when logical things happened. Like I was having all sorts of, like, angst and contradictions. And, you know, during one sort of particularly agitated period, I woke up at two in the morning one night and said, oh, I guess. it. God doesn't exist. What's going on? And then shortly after that was, oh, and there's no

free will. And that was followed by, and it's a totally empty, empty, and different universe. So that cured everything right there. That lesson to all. It did for me, too. I didn't, I'm going to try to an epiphany that way. In fact, I meant to ask you that. I notice that age 13 is when you, when you, when you of made that it's real had this realization these that's what your this bio says age 13 i i for me it was a gradual thing but i actually sort of became i mean age 13 was when i brought bar mitzvah and now that that experience enough was enough to turn me off religion forever if i hadn't if it hadn't already been that way was it was the age 13 a coincidence for you too or no uh no not at all of of course just from focusing on the ways in which often ancient and well-established cultures have influenced

your life and in which the purpose of every generation is to inculcate their offspring into the same cultural values. You know, age 13 is when they're really pressing court on that one. So that's kind of when inevitably this doesn't make any sense and this isn't right. Now you mention it though. It shows that they understood neuroscience a little bit because you point out how, in fact, prefrontal cortex and I mean, it's that period when things are developing.

So if you're going to inculcate, that's probably a really good time to do it. And especially do it in a way where they somehow make you feel guilty for a pogrom that happened in the 15th century. Yeah. So the greatest thing you could do right now is make your children messed up with that as well. Well, guilt is a huge part of that, I think. But, you know, it's interesting when you said you smiled when it cured everything when you woke up in the middle of the night. And I want to follow that up.

We'll come back near the end of this six or seven hour discussion to this question because almost you almost apologize or make it appear as if recognizing that there's no free will is and should be a depressing thing. But one could often say, and I'm often asked that, I mean, isn't recognizing there's no meaning. no, cosmic meaning to the universe and know God also a depressing thing. And we'll talk about its impact on morals because you talk about that. But for me, it was exactly the opposite. And maybe it's just the wiring. It's liberating and energizing to know both of those things. Because it makes sort of, it makes you understand your place and it makes every moment in some ways more precious if you understand that there's nothing guiding it and there's no and and that you're here for a short time and and and you dealt a set of cards and and and that's life and you might

as well use it well you're you're made of more resilient stuff than me somebody somebody did right by you leading up to that point or somebody's nutrient level when you were a fetus did right by you but yeah that's The notion, I mean, this is, I just agree to blurb a manuscript for a book of someone, a scientist who experienced just a horrendous family tragedy. And the book is about, like, how he has found comfort in science. And I sure can't wait to read it because, like, how do he do that? Science just seemed like the only intellectually sustainable default state to try to understand things, but it sure does not give comfort much. Yeah, well, I guess again, it's all in the attitude.

I do, since we're both atheists in that sense, but obviously for some reason or other, I've been labeled, it's higher in my profile. Because I've spent time trying to protect things like the teaching revolution in schools and got involved in that. Because the biologists weren't doing it enough, in my opinion. That's why. Right. You died for our sins trying to fight creationism. But because of that, I spent a lot of time talking to people about this issue.

And I do think that realizing one talks about loss of faith. And even that, that's already propaganda or that's already promoting a reality. that doesn't need to be. It's not a lot. You don't lose anything. You gain, I think. And if you indicate people that you can gain by making every, you know, recognizing every moment's more precious.

If you have a mentality and you recognize it, then you don't have to, then, then you gain. Anyway, I think that's the kind of, you know, if I'm going to do a feel good or try to try to be a, you know, I don't try to be advice or a, one of those kind of advice scientists. but but but if I did I mean that's what I think that's the that's your argument and I'm going to try and argue it later on I I I struggled a lot with the last half of this book because I could see your angst we'll get to it um but I think there's I I can see a happy way out and maybe it isn't but we'll see if I we'll see if if you think about it well I I think I finally it took me like a huge amount of time to get to the end there because Like, how can this not just be, well, this sucks and is pretty demoralizing, but, you know, we're adults, that's the way they work. To see that there is actually a good feature of it and a liberating one, I sure can't convince myself of it most of the time.

And not only did I write the damn book, I read it even at various points. Yeah, it's a hard pull. But it's kind of it's reminding me of that great rebranding that atheism has tried to do in recent years. We are not just about what isn't. We are not just a atheist. We're not just like saying, I don't believe there's a God. And as long as we're at it, I don't believe there's an Easter bunny. No, it's a positive.

And the whole rebranding is humanism. And to be able to say, like, the source of human goodness is, is human. That's not just saying, you know, it wasn't in seven days that the world got created and like smoting is probably not a good thing most of the time. Yeah, there's the,

there's rooms for positivity in there. I think, well, I think, you know, well, I think, as I'll argue, as, you know, and I, I did, It was reminded of a quote from my late friend, my late friend, Christopher Hitchens here. I mean, I don't think we have a choice, ultimately. And I think that we should, you know, I'm getting ahead of myself.

But in some sense, part of the last part of the book is saying, well, we have, how can we, we, we, we, wanting there to be free will and believing their free will is so, is so ingrained. How can we get over it? But I think we just recognize that not thinking, not thinking in terms of free will is just part of the way we're wired too. And that's, we don't have the, we don't have the choice to not want, to not emotionally want there to be free will. We have the, we don't have any choice.

I'll agree with you there. But we can intellectually through, through learning, I'll argue at some level, recognize rationally that there isn't. But, but I think, you know, recognizing, that we don't have the free will to not emotionally believe in free will is just something we have to accept, I think, and should not struggle with. To some extent, I mean, Robert, Robert Trivers, like one of the pioneering sociobiologists, during one period, got very interested and published some stuff on the evolution of the capacity for self-deception.

essentially saying if you're going to have a species that can know the future like the only way you're going to get up in the day is the ability for self-deception interestingly equally interesting is the notion that evolution of self-deception because the best way to convince people of your laws is to believe your laws and competition and all of that so he got very interested in that but just the very notion that if you're going to be this smart, it's a pretty helpful thing. Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, every one of us has to believe six impossible things for our breakfast just to get up.

You like your colleagues, you like your job, you're like your spouse, whatever it is. But you know, you just got to get out of bed. And that's okay. I mean, but a great thing is to recognize, it's okay to recognize it's an illusion, but to but to recognize it doesn't diminish the fact. fact that we know we have it and to say and almost revel in it but anyway let's get let's get to you know i could have spent a time talking about the last book behave which is a precursor this but this book determined is about free will and by the way it seemed to me not only of you agonized about it for

years when did you really start to think about it was when you realized that there's no god at the same time as when you began to think and then and then you've actually also put your not your money well you may your money where your mouth is you've actually gotten involved and if in in consequentially if there is no free will then there's a question of responsibility and punishment which we'll get to and you've got involved in prisons in in court cases and really taking this on which i really admire as well i you've internalized it or at least shown that well before it's lauded i should just basically say it's a totally fun hobby because it's a totally fun hobby you find out about some of the most

horrific things that can happen to people. And as a result of that damage, some of the most horrific things they could do to other people and like what totally broken system it is, blah, blah, blah. But it's kind of like, it's cool trying to convince 12 skeptics who are getting to decide whether or not this person is going to be in jail for life to think differently.

It almost never works. It's cool to have a smart DA during cross-examination. nation who wants to argue it. So, you know, it's another version of that. Well, it's okay. I always tell people, what you're saying is just simply, you have to enjoy what you're doing. I tell people that most scientists, most scientists, you know, I don't become scientists to save

the world, cure cancer or whatever. They do it because it's cool and they like it. And it's in the process, if something good comes out of it, that's great. That's great, too. but because dry ice is just like fun to play with yeah exactly yeah magnets and all the rest i often ask people why they didn't become physicists i was going to say because it's why it's so neat why didn't anyway by the way did you ever did did did you ever toy with that physical sciences or is always biological sciences that you always biological and always like cutting every corner

to like avoid the chemistry requirements and stuff just just not my temperament, I've had to spend years and years filling in the crater holes of where I didn't get the basic information. That's okay. That's okay because, you know, that's what it's for. I, you know, I learned a lot more physics after, got my PhD than before anyway. But, you know, that's where you, yeah, it's all right because that's called lifelong learning. Now, the basic premise of Determint, basically that there are, you know, and, you know, and,

And you might say, why is this, why is there so much here to just say two things? There's no one caused decision making. No decision is made by some magical thing. It's always caused by a series of causes, which then have causes, which then, as you said at the beginning of the book, turtles all the way down. And the second is that if that's the case, then the notion of responsibility for your decision making, if there's no spontaneous decision making, if there's no free will, if everything is based on some physical, biological, chemical process, then we have to renounce or at least rethink what we mean by taking responsibility for our actions.

Those are the two, if I were to summarize, is that a reasonable summary of the general context of the book? Yes. Okay. Now, having done that, I want to unpack it, and there's a lot to unpack. And I did. I have to say, you know, I was cursing you last night when I was reading the last 100 pages and staying up all night. But I took solace from the realization that I had no choice in the matter.

And do you know the quote from, I was alluding to it from Christopher Hitchens when it was asked about free will? Do you know his quote? He said, he said, yes, I have free will. I have no choice. But that's wrong. But I think if we just said, yes, I feel I have free will. I have no choice. That would be right.

Which reminds me of like one of the theological loops for getting to that. I can't remember Aquinas or who knows what or no doubt someone much more close-minded than that. saying like God is so glorious, so amazing, and having granted us free will, that we have no choice but to worship it. Perfect. That captures it. Yeah. Yeah, that's great.

I got to remember that's good. Well, look, periodically I'm going to read quotes of yours because I like them. And it'll let me a chance to give you a chance to expand upon them. Obviously, not in as much detail as the book. but at least give a sense. But basically, right off in the very beginning, where you talk about turtles all the way down, you say to reiterate, when you behave in a particular way, which is to say when your brain has generated a particular behavior, it is because of the determinism that came just before, which was caused by the determinism just before that and before that all the way down.

The approach of this book is to show how that determinism works, to explore how the biology over which you had no control, interacting with environment over which you had no control, made you you. And when people claim that there are causeless causes of your behavior that they call free will, they have a failed to recognize or not learned about the determinism lurking beneath the surface and or be erroneously concluded that the rarefied aspects of the universe that do work indeterministically can explain your character, morals, and behavior.

Now, so the point is, you know, to say that things are deterministic is fine, and then it'd be a very short book, and a lot of people have written not so short books that basically don't say any more than that, and I won't alert to some of those people. But you want to talk about the biology of this, and I think that, the neurobiology of it,

and I think that's what makes it incredibly enlightening to learn about this. But you basically come down to say, okay, you need to look at all of science to do this. And as a generalist, you, you, you, you, it fits in your sort of natural predilections. Crucially, all these disciplines, and you talk about many disciplines, collectively negate free will because they are all interlinked, constituting the same ultimate body of knowledge. If you talk about the effects of neurotransmitters on behavior, you are also implicitly talking about the genes that specify the construction of those chemical messengers and the evolution of those genes, the field of neurochemistry, genetics, and evolutionary biology

can't be separated. And it goes on. So this notion that there's this biological basis requires us, and we'll talk about each of those aspects particularly. but logically, you frame the argument as there's four complementary ways of thinking, and I want to get you sort of to elaborate on that. You say, we have a choice. The world is deterministic and there's no free will.

The world is deterministic and there is free will. The world is not deterministic and there's no free will. And the world is not deterministic and there is free will. So we're going to unpack those more carefully. But do you want to give it a sort of an expansion of those of each of those areas and what the central concepts of why there are fallacies in some and not others? Yeah. And, you know, two by two matrix where two of the four are a lot more interesting than the other two. One of them makes no sense at all, which is the world is not deterministic, but you don't have free will.

and I don't quite know how you get there and I don't think I've read anyone. That's just making sure, like, fill out the matrix there. There is not determinism and there is free will is this somewhat off in the ozone view of libertarian philosophy, libertarian in an intellectual sense rather than political. And, you know, I got pulled into reading any of this philosophy stuff, kicking and screaming, but it appears to be like a very minority view.

The most common one is that, yeah, yeah, it's a deterministic world. I'm not a lot right. I'm not a whatever. Yet there's like atoms and were made of cells and like there's rules to the physical universe and stuff, but somehow, somehow somehow, somehow that's compatible with us still having free will. And this compatibilism, one, is what I spend, like most of the book, tearing my hair out, because what the polls show is 90, 95% of philosophers say that they are deterministic compatibilists and like a shocking number of neuroscientists when you really

back them up in a corner and you try to get them to look at what it is that they just said are advocated. But it's this notion that, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course, like I'm a modern, it's 21st century, all of that. And we're made of stuff and the universe has rules and all that. But somehow, somehow, somehow, there's room for this intangible thing to still be lurking in there. And that's the essence.

That's the us of us. And that's the us of us that gives us agency. And of course, the fourth truly lunatic fringe version of the Matrix is the one that I'm saying, which is a completely deterministic world and there's no free will whatsoever. Compatibilism is incompatible with the way the world works. Okay, great. And a premise which I agree with as a physicist, and it was, you know, so I have my, we'll get to the, some of the physical arguments. but so it's for me it's wonderful to see the biological basis as well but but as a physicist it seems to me that that that's clear the the it's certainly interesting that 90% of the we'll get to it we'll get to the fact that you spend a lot of time it doesn't say much about philosophy um which is fine because um you know and uh and by the way it's not just me you know some people think i trash philosophy too much but i again was talking to peter singer singer who's a philosopher and it was fun it was fun to see him try to philosopher because a lot of philosophers talk about how animals don't have rights because it's clear they

don't have rights. I mean, as if there's, you know, and we'll get to it. But it's almost low-hanging fruit in some ways to see the arguments that are presented. Okay, that's great. That puts things in context. But you actually mentioned, and I think it's worthwhile saying, what do you mean by free will and what do you mean by determinism? The next thing, you talk about that. And so I'll give you a chance to sort of briefly explain what you mean by free will and what you mean by determinism. Well, this is where everybody like spends half the conference on arguing about definitions and stuff. But I think, well, maybe the place to start defining free will is what it's not, even though lots of people go for this.

And this is a super influential way of seeing free will where there isn't. because it's what runs through the entire criminal justice system. You got somebody on trial, and essentially trials revolver have three questions. Did this person, after they figure out what the person did, did the person intend to do it, did they know what the consequences were likely to be, and did they understand that there were alternatives? They could have done something else. And if the answer to those are yes, that's it.

The person showed free will and lock them up. and an equivalent myopia has run through sort of one field of like neurobiologists thinking about free will. And this is from this like a landmark famous experiment in the 1980s by Benjamin Libet. And you read any damn paper on the biology, and by the second paragraph, Outcomes Libet. And you want to screen. Libet's the one who's done that study. That's the famous one. he sat people down and basically said, here, do this, do this behavior and do it whenever you feel

like it. Press this button and, you know, whenever you feel like it. And we're going to hook you up to all sorts of like modern ways to see what's going on in your brain and your muscles and all of that. And out of it came this incredible finding. So you put people in there and like you're monitoring what's happening in their brains when they decide to do something. and what they reported was at the moment that someone said,

that's when I got the intention to press the button, you could already tell from their brain, like up to a few seconds before, that they had decided to push the button. Oh, my God, everybody learned. Neuroscientists have just shown your brain knows before you do, with, of course, this ridiculous, like, dichotomy there. but like people have been fighting about it ever since was the do can you tell the difference between

when you intend to do something and when you know that you intend to do it and was there a better way of measuring the milliseconds and like like there's still papers being published saying things like libid had his head up as he was so wrong like 40 years later people were still fighting over it because it's essentially the question of when you believe you intend to do something, has this imaginary separate construct, your brain already decided to do it. And both in that route and in the courtroom, that's the most ridiculously useless thing to do because, like the metaphor I use, it's like trying to review a movie based on only seeing the last three minutes of it. Because whether it's in the courtroom,

room or whether it's hanging with Libet and his detractors, in both cases, you're not asking the critical question. Yes, yes, yes, the guy intended to do this and knew he could have done. Yes, yes, yes, the person did or didn't intend before this part of their brain had a bunch of action potentials. Where did that intent come from? And if you're going to talk about free will, you're not off the hook if you just say the person intended to do that.

Yeah. Where did that intent come from? Why did that Psych 101 freshman show up to do this experiment for Libet that day, instead of like coming in and stealing the guy's laptop and sneaking out, why was that, where does intent come from? And the answer is, as you figure that out, that's where any semblance of free will goes down the drain. Okay, that's great. That's great.

Let me, let me, I was going to go to Libet anyway, but we'll take a break for a second to talk about determinism because I want you to explain it too. But since you brought up a little bit, and when I was writing my book on consciousness, obviously I had to address that. But, you know, it never, it never seemed to strike me as a problem because all it indicates is it confirmed my, I should say my pre, my predilection in advance, which was confirmed by everything I read about consciousness, which is it, consciousness is just a surface phenomena. So yeah, I mean, okay, so people report that's what but but everything we know it says you really know know what's your your perception of what's going on it's totally different than what's going on in your brain and so okay so that proves

it big deal what does that prove it just proves what you kind of know anyway that people that people sense of why they're doing what they're doing is is is is is wrong it's the same reason you know philosophers could come up and say there's there's determinism but but but but there's no free will why it's because reason is the slave of passion, as you might have said. Yeah, if you really want that to be the case, you can find a reason for it. But it's no, but Libet, I mean, it's fascinating. As far as you know, there's still debate about whether that delay was really there. Although you pointed out at one point, there's some evidence that the prefrontal cortex begins to experience some,

I don't know whether it's an action potential, tens up to 10 seconds before, which I was shocked. die, which is when they went from moving from medieval electroencephalograms on the skull to modern imaging stuff and to go back to tense. It's that point when people start arguing, can we tell the difference between intent and an urge? Are we seen urged? And it's at that point where you say, you know, this is sort of interesting. And I have like all sorts of respectable colleagues who I've spent a lot of time working on this problem, but it's not where you're going to prove or disprove free will because you got there for the last three minutes. For the end of it. Okay. And we'll get to the fact that it's a lot more than the last three minutes. You have to go through hours, days, years, millennia, and millions of years. But let's just clarify our definition. So I think you've discussed that a little bit. Let's talk about determinism. And in the context of what you mean and maybe in context of Laplace or. or someone else well not not a laplacean demon uh which is the other he always has to come up

in the second paragraph also just somewhere a little bit uh okay they they checked the boxes um i held off to three paragraphs before it did so i am a maverick um determinism i basically define it by exclusion, which is you look at why something happened, and as soon as you're informed enough to know that all sorts of things influence stuff that we're not aware of, that could be very distal in time or place, that could be subtle, that could be subliminal, blah, blah, blah, etc. It's when you look why something has happened and there's no contributing factor that requires invoking magic. That's the key point.

Invoking magic, we'll get to that. And as I say later, it reminds me of my favorite Sydney Harris cartoon, which I'll remind you of if you don't know of it at some point later. But this, okay, so that's the question of whether there's magic or whether things are, you know, or not. Really, I agree, that's what you really mean by determinism.

if the laws of nature somehow break down somewhere in the middle. And given that the laws of nature are deterministic, and one of the things I hope to, I don't know whether they're correct, I hope to change your picture of is when we get to quantum mechanics, quantum mechanics is deterministic. I think you've been led astray there. Although, you know, it's fine that the argument is that might not be, and you could still show it doesn't make a difference,

but I think it's even, you don't even have to worry, you about that. Well, I was at a path of last night saying, oh my God, I have the nerve to write two chapters about quantum mechanics and we're talking, I'm talking with you tomorrow. So you've just confirmed everything that I knew had to be working, which is like calling me a dilettante as a compliment. No, no, no, but it's okay. I mean, it's okay because what, in some sense, it was conservative. I would, I would, I'm going to be generous, but I would say where I would disagree with you, you go overboard and then show that even if it's overboard, it doesn't make a difference anyway.

But we'll talk about that. But I do want to get, I mean, central to all of this, just to make it clear, and that my understanding is from your book and my other things, the same, is that we realize that we, that most of, that our conscious, what we define as consciousness,

what we define as intent, what we perceive as all of these things, is just our awareness, is just the tip of an iceberg, that it's the last stage of a detailed behavior in the brain that we still don't understand, and we understand contributing factors, but that this sense of free will, like everything else, like even our sense of consciousness is somehow a post-hoelusion. I mean, we're piecing together a world in which we have an awesome. and in our brain and I'm me and and and and that's that's that's that's what our brains is

doing but it doesn't but it doesn't that's the that's the end result not the beginning is that are we perfect reasonable to say yeah okay now one of the ways to to to to demonstrate this other than just talking about the fact that reporting is unreliable And by the way, I know you read that part of my book on that. And the experiments of Michael Gazanaga on the split brain thing were for me just so overwhelming that you invent this perfectly rational explanation, which is obviously totally false for why you're doing something. But you give lots of examples because you know what you're talking about. I just sort of read a few and I appear to know what I'm talking about.

But one of the ways you can show that people, that this sense of free will is an illusion, is an experiment, a psychology experiment, that this sense of agency is illusory, is having people push a button when their hands are being controlled by something else. You want to talk about that for something? I found that quite interesting. Yeah, that's the one that really pushes lots of people over the edge. there. There are means these days. One, one like standard one is this very cool thing, transcranial magnetic stimulation, where you can stimulate a certain part of the brain and make somebody do something.

Like this is not suddenly make them become a libertarian when they weren't, but this is like, you could make their index finger contract no matter what you try to do. And if it's done subtly enough, you will believe you decided to do that. I mean, I've had that done on me, and it's the weirdest thing imaginable. Or there's all sorts of ways of manipulating the libid scenario where they add like an extra bell or something, which you were told is driven by your volitional, intentional, doing whatever, and where they can manipulate that in ways where you will feel as if you, decided to wait a little bit longer that time before buzzing it.

It's amazing. I mean, it's wonderful. It's wonderful the control you can have. I mean, to explicitly demonstrate these things, which one could talk about vaguely. I love that. And you really feel like you're choosing to press that button. You've had it down on you. It's the weirdest thing.

It's a good thing. I didn't believe in free will beforehand or else I would have stopped believing in free will. But, you know, we know this. There's incredibly smart people who are paid a whole lot of money to make you believe you really want to buy some nonsense crap that they're advertising. You know, it shows how much you want to believe in free will that you can do an experiment like that where you have this sense of agency. And it's completely explicitly an illusion because it was created.

And yet it doesn't, that's not sufficient to convince people. and we'll lead a lot more, and you spend a lot of time because you want to try and address all of the arguments that you've heard over the years, I think, that you're trying to finally address, because you've heard all of them. But you then go to consciousness itself, where I was really pleased to say that, you know,

obviously I think it's right because it agrees with me, but that, you know, consciousness is an epiphenomeno. I love that where you point, which, by the way, Nome Chomsky, you said to me in a different context, but he said, but where you say, consciousness is an irrelevant hiccup, which I was, I'm going to quote that over and over time. And the key part of this irrelevant hiccup, which is really central, and this is the whole part of the question, the hard problem of consciousness, as people, might say, some people have said, is what, you know, some people say the hard consciousness, problem

consciousness is what is the we that makes us, but the really interesting question of me is what gives us the illusion of a we? That's the problem I want to answer. But, but, but you say something like our brains generate a suggestion and we then judge it. This dualism suggests thinking back century. So it enters into even, I guess, into sort of the parlance of at least some of neuroscience and a lot of philosophy that somehow there's a separation between our brain and the we. You want to elaborate on that a little bit in your perspective of that? And it's totally false. And just to show sort of the pedigree that comes with like arguably the most influential compatibilist philosopher on Earth right now talks about exactly that model with a possibility generator, an idea generator that comes

and then you pick. Then the dichotomously pristine made of marshmallow you floating around up there picks among the possibilities based on your learning experiences and your values and all and like that's that's where free will slips in. Yeah, no, and I don't, and that, and you, I think I want to, I want to, there's an elephant in the room here and it's Dan Dennett. And, and I do want to, I do want to mention that because it seems to me it demonstrates, I know Dan, and I've been a friend of mine for a long time, but it amazes me how can, how someone who is remarkable in his arguments about many things can be so confused and logical that somehow, um, obviously. nonsense like that, if he can be that confused and logical, it should make you suspicious about the rest of the field.

Yes. And just to show where I think that's coming from, like I tiptoed around him with kid gloves insofar as I think a lot of his values come through a lot of his philosophizing in ways that I think that I think tell us about how he's gotten some very wrong conclusions. How can he be so smart that he concludes that this quote that gives it all away in one of his talks, and you can find a zillion versions of it on YouTube in one of his books, saying, oh, my God, I wouldn't want to live in a world in which no one thought there was free will because they'd just be running amok and a rapist and violence.

And besides, we wouldn't be able to feel like we earned our prizes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why the guy is invested in free will. There's not a whole lot of people who are saying, oh my God, if people stop believing in free will, I won't be able to feel like I earned my low socioeconomic status and my abusive parents and my, yeah, I will come to that. I think you mentioned that very thing at the end,

and I want to talk about a way out of that too. Maybe it'll help Dan. But you know what is surprising is to hear, Dan is, you know, like me, and in many ways, well, and always more well-known atheist. But it's so ridiculous to hear that sentence because you could replace free will with religion and God. And he would argue completely the opposite. I wouldn't want to live in a world where people didn't believe in there's God because if they did, then they'd be running amok. And like, Dan, don't you see the complete illogic of that? And I must say, I've seen...

God wouldn't have blessed me with my endowed chair. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. God wouldn't... But, but, you know, and I don't want to pick on Dan too much, although I think he deserves it in this case. Is this, all of this argument that somehow there's a generator or you're inventing something that no one's ever seen or measured,

that somehow allows you around, get around the problem, that there's no evidence whatsoever, and every logical argument you can think of shows there's no place for free will. And later on we'll talk about it, that reminds me of the God of the Gaps argument, the more we learn, the less place there is for free will to exist. It's a very similar argument.

When I was reading the book, I wrote a God of the Gaps at one point later on in the book. But let me remind you this, Sidney Harris cartoon, which you can use in your lectures if you haven't. It's two physicists that a blackboard, have you seen that, that's a long equation,

and then in the middle it says, and then a miracle occurs. And then one of the guys says the other, I think you should be a little more explicit at that step right there. But it's exactly that, right? It's perfect. It's exactly that.

And you have to presume magic. But what intrigued me, I do want you to elaborate on one thing, it's almost the last sentence of the of of um of um oh yeah in of that particular uh section of the book you say um okay thinking that it's sufficient to really know about the intent in the present is far worse than just intellectual blindness far worse than believing that is the very first turtle on the way down that's floating in the air in a world such as we have it's deeply ethically flawed as well

And you just leave that hanging there and maybe because you can want to talk about it later, but why is it ethically flawed? Because the subject about whether there's free will at the end of the day isn't about neuroscience and isn't about philosophy. It's about the fact that we've created a world that runs on a myth that is just

and runs on a myth that it is ethical, authentically defendable to have a world in which all sorts of people are rewarded for things they didn't earn and a vastly larger number of people live lives of misery and deprivation and her views having been entitled to it for things they had no control over either okay yeah and we'll get you know sorry okay good okay um i get worked up about this one yeah well good well i can't wait if you're worked up about this. Yeah, well, that's the part of the book where you can really sense the emotion and frustration and yet also fear that you're going to say something that, you know, that people are going to, anyway, it's interesting. And the bravery it took to write it down. I think you talk about that you were hesitant, you know, one of the many, there are lots of things that cause you to take time in writing this book, but how people respond to the obvious consequences of what you're saying is terrifying a little bit. I think I can understand that. You next,

about where intent comes from, where you really begin to get into, for me, the fascinating aspects of neurobiology, much of which I knew nothing about. And so it was great learning experience for me. Also, depressing, of course, because every time you learn, I mean, it's driven home, even things that are, the examples, the explicit examples and empirical examples of things that I might have presumed exist are depressing, like the fact that, that when you make decisions about things that you think are decisions, that you say in three different studies, subjects and brain scanners alternated between rating the beauty of something

or the goodness of the same behavior. And basically, and you say both types of assessments activated the same region, the orbital frontal cortex or OFC. The more beautiful or good, the more OFC activation. It's as if irrelevant emotions about beauty gum-up cerebral contemplation of the scales of justice. Namely, you make decisions and it's just explicit, not just where we know that, but you can measure the brain and see that it is,

that these external things which you shouldn't, which you don't think are affecting your rationality, are totally determining what you think is rational. Yep. And never in a million years with the average person who's just made one of those judgments and saying, oh, that's interesting. Why did you decide that? Oh, it's because my orbital frontal cortex evolved that it has trouble distinguishing between the two

because it's very recently that we evolved making moral assessments rather than just, like, appearance assessments. Oh, that's why I did that. Yeah, right. Exactly, yeah. And it's true. As you point out, that these moral assessments are recent. So, yeah, all of the biological machinery was developed without that.

and we've built up a morality and irrationally, again, trying to impose that on an infrastructure that wasn't based on any of that. Once again, if Hume had been around today, he would say, reason is a slave of passion. I mean, this gives me to that beautiful quote, I mean, which he presumed, presumed, I guess, on the basis of thinking about things, but not with the evidence that you have. And it's great to see evidence that specifically shows over and over again that reason is a slave of passion.

Well, and you used a great word for describing all of the cluge of like, oh, it's just this mishmosh that you kind of put together and improvised, which is the human brain. Another soundbite of the field. Evolution is not an inventor. It's a tinkerer. Okay, what do we got here? And we suddenly have like come up with the notion of love. were we okay give me some duct tape this part of the brain is going to handle it even though for a hundred million years has been doing this instead so there's going to be some mistakes yeah that's exactly it and and okay and then when you so you begin to in each of these cases for the first when you talk about the the biological basis of trying to address this fallacy of a free will of perceived free will you talk about you're trying to

again put meat on turtles all the way down, by saying, okay, you have this intent. What about the minutes before? What about the hours before? What about the days before? The millennia before, the millions of years before. And I want to, you know, unpack that a little bit. You talk about, you know, pre-existing tendencies towards aggression and, and, and, and, and how you say about all, because of how much life has taught them at a young age that the world is a menacing place, that people or that animals in particular that experience the fact that the world is a menacing place respond with the kind of aggression that you might have, that's not surprising. That they don't control that.

It's based on, it's based on their experiences, minutes, hours, years, or lifetimes or genetically beforehand. Yeah, exactly. One of the things that I was interested in, and I want to throw these things in because there's so many neat examples, is just to show a sense that, you know, when we talk about being good people by me, monogamous versus polygamous, you talk about different species and oxytocin and testosterone and vasopressin receptor levels. And why don't you talk about what happened? I was going to quote it, but you can talk about polygamous rodent species versus monogamous.

rodent species. And how and and and I found this fact, once again, fascinating. When you think about this, what we impose as a moral issue now, um, is a, is, is, is, is, is, is biological. This is, this is, this is like irresistible and so much fun to teach about voles. Vols are these little vol things that run around and there's all these different types. And there are mountain voles and Prairie voles in the great American West. And they turn out despite like having 99% of regimes in common, they have very, very different social systems in that prairie voles are monogamous. They form peribons and mountain voles are polygamous. And I always have to remember when I'm teaching this. Okay, which one is it? Garrison Keeler. Garrison Keeler talks about the great

like American values out and woe begone stuff that's in the prairie. It's the prairie voles who are monogamous they turn out not to be. But that's what I always have to remember before I mess them up. So, wow, how that happened? Because they're so closely related. They're so and incredibly cool work by like a bunch of neuroscientists over the last couple of decades have completely unpacked that system. When you are a male vol of either species and you're mating, you've released this hormone vasopressant from one party or brain. and what it does is it buzzes a party or brain having to do with reward and whoa they just explain sex feels good and then it turns out that because of just a gene duplication event a change in a promoter on a gene

in other words stuff that like dead white males and lab coats and molecular biology could explain in the prairie voles the receptor for vasopressin is more widespread and responsive than the receptor in the mountain voles. So for the same sex act, they get a whole lot more of a buzz. And at that point, like basic behaviorism takes over. Wow, that was great. I think I'll stick around. And instead, mountain voles are nomadic, the males there, and they're like gone the next day.

Okay, how do you know this? How do you know this? one of those experiments where like people's mouths have to drop open, brilliant like molecular manipulation, take the prairie vole version of this gene and plunk it down into mountain voles and you make them monogamous. You make a monogamous. It's amazing, yeah. I mean, that's the kind of thing I love. I mean, you can't argue with that, right? That's what's great about it. And okay, so what about us? And what about us?

And aren't we monogamous? But what about divorce rates? And what about most societies? A polygamy. And there's incredibly convincing evolutionary biology showing that among all the primates, we're right in the middle. We're like halfway between being a classic pair bonding monogamous species, the polygamous one.

And there's all sorts of interesting ways you can show that. But in terms of this, say, okay, so which version? What kind of vol are we? And it turns out we have different variants. Some of us have one kind. Some of us have one another. And that's predictive of things like how stable of relationships you form. That's predictive of things like how close you stand to an attractive person if you're already in a relationship. Oh my God. It's the same stuff. It's like the same stuff that before it's over with is produced like sonnets or divorce lawyers. So there's very human specific aspects to it. But whoa, even that is ultimately mechanistic. Yeah. And so when we come to responsibility, people who are condemned for one where

another, as you point out, a lot of these things are gene variants or affected by expression of genes, epigenetics, which I want to have you explain. The first time I really understood, well, I'm not sure I still understand, but the first time I think I understood it was reading your book. I never could quite understand how, but it's gene expression. Anyway, but you sum this up by saying thus the decisions you supposedly make freely in moments that test your character, like monogamy, let's say. Generosity, empathy, honesty, are influenced by the levels of these hormones in your bloodstream and the levels of variance of the receptors in your brain.

It's just that, not character. It's those, it's that. Uh-oh. All that's like fidelity, or if you're in a different society, all of the cultural values built around, you should be fine being the third wife, or you should want to get as many camels as possible to get as many wives. And that's the kind of people we are.

And whether it's one extreme or the other or one of the ones in between, it's imbued with value and cultural judgment. And that's not it. That said, you know, it's not all what version of the vasopressin receptor gene you have. And those studies showing that and different human correlates of, it's not everyone it's just at a higher than expected rate all all of our usual provisos there but if you knew about the vasopressin status plus three more the neurotransmitters and seven of the hormones and this and that you're getting close to saying that's why this person is this way

instead of that way well again i think of dan dennet again we're saying you know you you can't you may not be able to feel good about your accompli you know feel you deserve the prizes and similarly, you might, feeling that you've been a good person is great, but you may also realize that it's a genetic bit of luck as well. Or all the other biology. Or historical, genetic, historical. In fact, we'll talk about that. So that's minutes to hours, you know, hormonal influence on your actions, which are immediate.

But then you talk about, you know, weeks to years, really related to neuropeas. plasticity, which I guess I guess is becoming increasingly important. And you say to jump to sort of depressing in a way to read once again about adolescence and its importance because we've done of us can have control. I mean, when you think about that you're doomed, you're doomed in some ways to act the way you are because of a period in your life that you sometimes want to just forget. And you say, if you're an adult, your adolescent experiences of trauma, stimulation, love, failure, rejection, happiness, despair, acne, the whole shebang will have played an outsized role in constructing the frontal cortex because you point out that's when it's being constructed. Constructing the frontal cortex you're working with as you contemplate pushing buttons.

Of course, the enormous varieties of adolescent experiences will help produce enormously varied frontal cortexes. in adulthood. Boy, isn't that depressing? Yeah, but, you know, from my perspective, cool. Yeah, it's cool. The epigenetic mechanism for it. But, you actually, but in fact, you point out even a better reason it's not depressing

in some sense, it was a rhetorical question. Because the next page, you say, this suggests something remarkable. The genetic program of the human brain evolved to free the frontal cortex from genes as much as possible, namely, if the frontal cortex is being developed during a period of learning of experiences in a rational, intelligent, self-conscious species, you'd want that brain function,

which really is what's governing much of your rational behavior, I guess, to be as free from genes as possible to be based on experience. So you understand the world as it in principle is, as opposed to the world that your genetic ancestors might have experienced? Yeah. Like, basically, we have evolved genetically more than any other species to be free of our genes and free of their deterministic powers. And that's a great thing. It's not a bad thing.

It's allowed us to get where we are and necessary for us, for as complex a brain as we have, probably. Well, unless you spend your late adolescence where you're listening to speeches every day by a guy with a mustache and a brown shirt and saying here's who's responsible for problems in society, it means formative stuff is happening then, and that could be for better or worse. In fact, for worse, you point out that you talk about this ACE score, which is what's an adverse childhood experience score, which I guess psychologists can. can get by looking at all sorts of neglect and household dysfunction and abuse and all of these categories that you may or may not have experienced. And you say for every step higher in one's ACE score, there's roughly a 35% increase in the likelihood of adult anti-social behavior, including violence, poor frontal cortical development, cognition, problems with impulse control, substance abuse, teen pregnancy, unsafe sex, and other risky behaviors,

and increased vulnerability to depression and anxiety disorders. Oh, and also poorer health and earlier death. So, you know, that impact is remarkable. And one might say, how does that impact happen? And that's where I may be introducing this too early, but that's this connection between genes and environmental interactions, which I think is related to epigenetics.

So do you want to explain, I mean, people would say, look, how can this be? The genes are genes. You have a DNA. How can experience, it almost sounds Lamarckian. How can experience, experience is going to change that chemistry of the DNA backbone. So what are you telling me? And so why do you, why do you get around that question and explain it better than I could? Yeah. Experience environment, all of that doesn't change your genes. Your genes that are made up a sequence of DNA and a code and it doesn't change your genes. What experience does is change the on-off switches for your genes. How readily you activate a gene, whether you permanently silence it, how readily you activated under this circumstance, but not that circumstance. What epigenetics is about is the regulation of genes. And it turns out when you look at a species like us, the majority of our DNA is not devoted to the genes. The majority is devoted to the regulatory elements. The instruction manual is much longer than the DNA code itself. And what evolution is mostly about, if you want to get into a nuts and bolts level,

is the evolution of the regulatory control far more than the genes themselves. And what environment does, is forever after, in some cases, in some cases, even multi-generationally, make it easier or harder to activate certain genes. Yeah, in fact, you say that. What it comes to humans, it can be silly to ask what a gene does, which is the kind of thing my elementary biology might have asked because I don't know much. But you shouldn't ask what that does, but what it does in a particular environment, because it's the turning, it's the expression.

It's a turning on and off. The genes produce proteins. that give instructions for production of proteins and how, when that gets turned on and off, and my also understanding of how impactful those proteins are in subsequent things is also environmentally related. Because some of those proteins are switches that turn genes on or off. Yeah.

Sorry, you're regulating the regulators and it's regulators all the way down. It's these recursive loops. Yeah, okay. And that's, I think, incredibly important to realize that that's how when one thinks of there's, I guess, you know, you can say, okay, there's lucky genes, as people say, born with lucky genes. But when we talk about the spectrum of behaviors for which we think we have free will in the spectrum of people and for which we'll have to take responsibility for good or bad actions, you can say, well, there are two components.

There's gene variance. The population has gene variants. and some people do have lucky genes, and some people have unlucky genes, in the sense of getting a variant that, you know, related to vasos-pressin or whatever. And then there's the other aspect, which I really hadn't fully appreciated,

is exactly how the environment affects the mechanism by which environment affects gene regulation is the other aspect. So there's the variance in genes and their variance in environmental experiences. and it's that combination of those two that determines who you are. Neither of which you had any say in. Nine of which you had any say in.

Yeah, exactly. You didn't even get to fill an application form. Yeah. And just like you, yeah, in particular, we all realized we didn't have any say in the choice of our parents. And sometimes that's good and sometimes bad. But it goes far beyond that. Now you say, okay, That's, okay, so that's basic biology.

But beyond that, we go back more than just years and more than just your own life experience, but the life experience of your ancestors, culture, that you're irresistible. It's totally cool. It's totally cool. I'm a dilatant in this area because what do I know from like cultural anthropology or history or stuff? But different cultures are different, duh. And there are historically and biologically and ecologically logical reasons why different cultures wind up in different ways.

For example, like way back when traditional means of production, you could be a farmer or you could be a hunter-gatherer or you could be a pastoralist. And it turns out that pastoralists all the world over, whether it's yaks or camels or goats or whatever, are much higher than likely to generate what is called a culture of honor, where it's built around retribution, revenge, clan loyalties, feuds that go for centuries, where it involves forming warrior classes, high rates of aggression, all that sort of thing. And whoa, you hardly ever see that among the farmers or the hunter-gatherers. And what's that about? If the bad people come and you're a hunter-gatherer, they can't steal your rainforest. If they come to your farm, they can't steal all your, they can't harvest your crops at night.

But sneaky, low-down varmints can come and rustle your cattle at night. Pastoralists spend all their time raiding each other and stealing their means of livestock duck and like in Africa I hang out near a pastoralist tribe and like they have raids on each other and steal all the cows and people have to take revenge and all of that among pastoralists, you have a special vulnerability in being nomadic and in your wealth being a bunch of animals that could be stolen and they all evolve these similar cultures of honor and where if you do not answer, an insult to your honor with twice the retaliation, you're just like losing face and you're dishonoring you and your family and your ancestors and your people and all of that. And that turns out

to explain aspects geographical variations in violence on this planet. Or as another one, Another one, people whose ancestors or people who live in rainforests are much more likely than chance to invent polytheistic religions. People who live in deserts are more likely to invent monotheistic ones. And there's all sorts of ecological, you know, if you're living in a forest where there's like a thousand different edible plants that you can use, it's not that surprising that you decide that there's like a spirit inside each one of those different. plants and like a thousand flowers blooming. And like if you're living in the desert, everything gets

boiled down to just like survival and very singular things. And big surprise, they come up with singular religions. And, you know, people like Jared Diamond have done brilliant work analyzing how it is that this planet was overrun by the desert monotheists rather than the rainforest, polytheists and that's the planet we have now but that's a cultural difference and that one influences like from shortly after birth where you were being taught like ethics come from and who you were trying to please and whose foot or whose plural feet you'll be sitting at if you do things right and wind up in the in paradise afterward and and that's from culture Sure. And I never understood that what I think is important is that relates to what we're just talking about in a way that I hadn't really appreciated for. I knew that obviously culture affects people. And, you know, when I talk to people, you know, they don't seem to get when I talk about religion, isn't it surprising that the children of Christians turn out to be Christian, the children of Muslims turn to be Muslim? And if there's some universal truth, isn't that a little surprising? Of course, it's a cultural thing. But now you, when you talk about, say, the pastoralists and sort of retribution and,

and violence. Now I'm thinking biochemically or neurobiologically. So that experience undoubtedly affects the regulation of genes that that produce aggressive responses. So you can understand how that culture ends up affecting people whose DNA is the same, but the regulation of that DNA is is culturally determined in some sense. And like from a cultural perspective, the job of parents is to make kids who will have the same cultural values as them. And translated that into neurobiology is to have their nervous systems constructed in a way that this is what they will carry along.

Okay, here's like one of the all-time cool experiments. And it's the only time I have seen a particular word appear in a scientific journal. This was incredible work by this guy, Richard Nesbitt University of Michigan, one of the gods of social psychology. And what it was, one of those were the psych majors, like, come volunteer for this experiment or ask questions about whatever. So they go to the psych department and there's the lab they're going to down at the end of the hall and they walk down the hall from the elevator. And unbeknownst to them, the experiment occurs in the hallway, which is it's a narrow hallway, all these. like shelves and junk and stuff. And as they're walking down, there's a guy walking at you.

He's a big, beefy guy who's working on the project. And what he does is as he comes past you, he knocks into your shoulder, looks back and says, watch it, asshole. This is the experiment in printer. And then what they do is they, like, you come into the lab. And they give you all sorts of scenarios of like moral quandaries and what would you do in response to this. And what you see is people from the north, northern United States, having been bumped into, has no effect on their answers. And of course, there's the controls where the guy doesn't do that to you.

And people from the south were now far more likely if they were bumped into than not to advocate violent responses. to these norm violation scenarios, and they elevate their levels of testosterone and stress hormones. Whoa, are you kidding? The American South, instead of being settled by these nice, like, Quaker shopkeepers, were settled by these, like, crazy-ass Irish Scotsman Shepherds and stuff, and they brought a culture of honor.

And centuries later, you're walking down a hallway in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and that's going to influence how much, stress hormones you secrete and whether you advocate saying, eh, you know, they're just an idiot, but ignore them versus rip their throat out. Wow. This culture stuff persists. Wow. Yeah.

It's just, yeah, wow. I love these examples. I'm, I'm really happy. It's amazing because you can put meat on all of these. You know, the words sound nice, but the meat is what matters. I mean, that's what makes it science. And we talk about, you know, I wrote down education here because you talk. You talked about the purpose of parents in some sense is to inculcate those values and the cultural things to their children,

which is, by the way, the reason I argue that for public education, the purpose of education is to get you away from your parents, in my opinion, which I could never understand why in the U.S. we have this system where parents somehow are supposed to be able to impact on the elevate education of children, because that's the, and why I like why I'm not always a big fan of homeschooling, because it seems to me that's the great opportunity is to get people away to learn that the world isn't exactly necessarily the way their parents say it is.

Yep, exactly. Except, you know, it's not by chance that the school that your parents are going to send you to is going to teach some semblance of their exact same values. You're not going to go to a school if you're growing up in Kansas and they teach you that it is time for the workers of the world to unite and overthrow their change.

and you're not going to go to a school and chotka. And they didn't. Yeah. Yeah. The parents still get in there. Well, okay. So this, so this, we basically, I don't know whether we beat in a dead horse, but we certainly added a lot of color to it.

And the part of the book about intent, you basically say, to summarize, in order to prove there's free will, we have to show that some behavior just happened out of thin air in the sense of considering all of these biological precursors, the ones we've talked about and a lot more, obviously, in the book. It may be possible to sidestep that with some subtle philosophical arguments, but you can't with anything known to science. And I think that's the sort of the key thing. But then when we come to, then when we come to the padding of the, on the back, the question is, you know, people, you know, surely with grit and hard work you can overcome, you know, the bad luck.

of your existence. And the idea is that is a misunderstanding of history, which I think you basically say, look, okay, these people are saying, okay, there's no free will. I accept everything you said about hormones and everything. So clearly there's no free will in what you're doing now.

But somehow in the past, the past, there was something you could have done to make yourself a better person now. And somehow that it's okay, it's somehow we can bury the free will the past. You want to elaborate on that? Or if you're a particularly fancy compatibilist, somehow in the future, which somehow counts in the present, or whatever, it's a notion of like what brought you to this moment and the answer rather than being, because of what happened

a second ago and a minute ago, an hour and a million years ago in biology all the way, it's because of the key decisions you made back when, which is just like, oh, good, they've just explained it by saying the puzzle is now on back when. That's what we're now trying to explain. And the trouble is whatever was in the past once was now. And why did this behavior just happen? Because of one second before, one minute before, et cetera. It's this, it's one of the, like, dodges in there.

I mean, what you're bringing up also is this totally seductive dichotomy, which is like one compatriblest trick, which most people advocate, is that you'll say, okay, okay, there's some stuff we had no control over. Like, I don't have a voice that could sing opera. I'm not tall enough to play in the MBA. I don't have whatever receptor for whatever neurotransmitter so that I've got this amazing analytical skills, whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We have our natural attributes. And those are biological. Yeah. What isn't? What really matters is what do you do with those attributes? Do you put your shoulder to the grindstone? Do you squander your gifts? Do you, do you like get going when the going gets tough to you?

And that's where we've got this incredibly sort of Judeo-Christian temptation to say that. That is the playground of free will and judgment. It's what we do with what we were gifted or cursed. That's the measure of a person. And that's so destructive. I mean, like it's got a nice and ambi-pambi liberal version of it. which is when your kid does something good, don't tell them, oh, you must be so smart, say, oh, you must have worked so hard because you're fueling that side of the dichotomy.

And that's a good thing because that has instrumental value, not because it has moral value. But it's this huge dichotomy that the natural attributes we have are made out of atoms. And whether you show backbone in a moment of temptation, that's the stuff that's made out of the ferry dust. And the what you do with what you got, what you do with those crossroads and splits in the road and all those things is made of the same stuff because it's that frontal cortex of yours that decides, are you going to show impulse control, or are you going to do long-term planning, or you do it? And it's the exact same. How did you get the frontal cortex that you have because of one second ago and one minute ago and all of that? And that's why at some

point, somebody is going to decide to rob the liquor store. And instead, somebody is going to decide to devote their life to doctors without borders or something. Exactly. The point that somehow accepting that the instantaneous moment of what your, you know, that your, that your local intent at that moment is biologic control, but somehow what determined your local intent, which was earlier, isn't biologically determined. It's that irrationality. You do give a, you know, to pick again on dead horse, you pick a dead dead at a lot.

You know, basically he says that. He says, so, you know, when someone, when he argued with someone that we have no control over the biology or the environment thrown at us, then his response was, so what? The point I think you're missing is that our autonomy is something one grows into. It's a process that's initially entirely beyond one's control.

But back when it was happening, it was the same biology. So it wasn't anymore. And as one mature, as one learns, one's being able to control more and more one's activities. But the whole point is, you just learned that you don't control. I mean, you don't control them. You control them, but your control over that of that was determined. Because was, was once is. Yeah, exactly.

Was was once is. It's so clear when one puts it that way. I guess I don't see it. I think the fundamental question, and as a physicist, this is why as a physicist, I guess I never have found this whole issue. It seemed to be clear. It's that fundamentally everything,

everything is determined by a combination of nature, which is biology, physics, and chemistry. And none of those have fairy dust in them. Not even physics, we'll get to it. and and once you recognize that then then it's clear that that that that that that free will must be an illusion because because none of those none of those none of the the the physics and chemistry I know the physics I know the chemistry a little bit and the biology less all of them behave with rules of science that don't allow for that you know that gap in that Sydney Caras cartoon yeah exactly and

An awful lot of people work very, very hard and begin to have almost evangelical incoherence at points where they still manage to pull that out of the hat. There's still a special essence that doesn't obey those rules. Well, to me, it's very related, again, having spent a lot of time thinking recently about consciousness, to the same argument as where is the you that exists beyond your brain? I mean, it's the same really argument, isn't it? in some sense. It's a, where can that be?

If, you know, this is what there is. So where's the you if it's not there? And if it's beyond there, then somehow you're invoking some fairy dust to assume that that you is an independent existence. And the version of that that like makes us wet our pants the most is so when someone dies, there's no them anymore. Yeah. Yeah.

like that's that's enough to make almost anyone who rejects free will feel a little bit like queasy and dizzy at that point but yeah yeah well and my you've heard this my argument and people always say what happened to it and and the argument which i didn't invent myself but first was told to me is you know what was it like before you're born just imagine what was like before you're born and then but okay let's talk about the but but you are here and you spend some time on the cognitive prefrontal cortex, which is so important to learning and socialization and sociality and how those things are evolved. And you talk about the social PFC, that basically there's two, the prevental cortex is sort of control mechanism. I don't know whether you want to think of it as a control mechanism, but it does two things, right? It kind of inhibits, it either encourages or inhibits in the right, quote-unquote, right moment. So you want to discuss that a little bit. I guess the key thing I learned about from your, is this is two parts of the PFE, and I love saying these things because they make me sound

so literate biologically. Now I forget the words almost immediately. That's why I didn't become biologist early on, as I couldn't memorize words. I was awful at it. But there's the dorsalateral pfc and then there's the ventrometrial pfc and there's sort of the the ying and yang the devil and the devil and the angel on the side of you why don't you talk about that and and by the way i probably didn't become a physicist because i couldn't understand the concepts so you couldn't you couldn't memorize the jargon but oh well well it whatever yeah it was just okay you could have if you wanted to anyway The lateral, let's call it the egg-headed part of your prefrontal cortex and the ventral medial, your emotional over the top, hysterical part. Ventral medial prefrontal cortex is the means by which the more emotional parts of your brain, the Olympic system, funnel all of their opinions and quirks and yearnings and legitimate aspirations and stuff.

and send that information onto the frontal cortex. That's how your frontal cortex is figuring out what your gut is telling you. What biases are about to make you make a totally unfair decision? It's the ways in which decision making is influenced by emotion. And that's been a major revolution for the field of figuring out, no, it's not just your like gleaming calculator of a prefrontal cortex that's telling the limbic system, now's the time to give the person flowers, now's not the time to do whatever because you're going to regret it,

that there's as much flow of information from the emotional part of the brain to this egg-hedy bar to the brain. So the ventral medial, the emotional part of the prefrontal cortex, is getting that information and amid lots of other areas of the brain there that fomper around and confer and compare and contrast. and it's ultimately the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex that's the decider that sends out a message that is four or five steps away from your muscles, that sends out a message that's four or five steps away from telling your muscles not to do that, raising issues of free won't as well as free will. And these two areas of the brain are like very pertinent to this. big surprise the cortex was the last part of the brain to fully evolve evolutionarily the prefrontal cortex was the last part of the cortex to evolve the dorsalateral prefrontal cortex was the

last part of the prefrontal cortex to evolve and we proportionally have more of it than any other species out there so that's where your Calvinistic backbone dwells or your your turptitude or whatever. And it's the same thing. What kind of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex do you have today? It depends. It depends on what happened the second ago and a million years ago and all of that because stress and stimulation and certain gene variants and the levels of this hormone or the levels of that nutrients and certain cultural more produce different kinds of dorsalateral prefrontal cortices. And this is not just, oh, this is, this has to be the case from work. Like, go do imaging and look at the size of these in different people, and it reflects all sorts of logical stuff. People who were much better at, like, doing the right

thing when it's the harder thing to do, you go and look, and they have a bigger and or a more energetic dorsalateral prefrontal cortex than other people. Damage the prefrontal cortex, and you get somebody who can even sit there and tell you the difference between right and wrong. And nonetheless, at every juncture, they're going to do the impulsive, disastrous thing. And just to kind of stop you in your tracks, depending on the study, 25 to 75% of the men in this country on death row have a history of concussive head trauma to that part of the brain. Wow.

We're talking machines here. Yeah. We're not talking souls. Yeah, well, that's right. And that's amazingly powerful. Speaking of the PFC and the experience that you've had, there was a quote here that made me think, well, a lot of quotes made me think.

You see, all the individual pieces of these findings follow. So socioeconomic status predicts how much a young child's DLPFC, which is that whatever it's called. Yeah, the egghead. Yeah, the egghead activates and recruits other brain regions during an executive task. It predicts more responsiveness of the amygdala to physical or social threats, a stronger activation signal carrying this emotional response to the PFC by the VM PFC, which is the other, the emotional part of the PFC, I guess.

And such status predicts every possible measure of function in kids. Name naturally lower socioeconomic status predicts worse PFC. development. This does smack when a buzzword now is called white privilege which I have which I which is over well which I have issues with at some level but but we won't go there but this does

suggest I mean there is privilege and it and it's and it's undeniable. What it doesn't suggest is that somehow it you know it suggests the world isn't fair but it doesn't say that you can cure that by then doing something else because it just says, you know, you're stuck with the, with the, with your, with your, with your, with your

past. And suddenly, you know, society doing these other things is not necessarily going to solve your particular problems. Uh-huh. Here, here is where I have to disagree strongly. Okay. Good. Because as it's turning out, very little in your brain is irreversible. That's this whole field of neural plasticity. Yes. And when you look at how, how change occurs, an incredibly dramatic change, and explanations for why one out of every 10 or 100,000 of kids who grow up in some appalling circumstance wind up not having that profile and blah, blah, all of that. Change happens. Massive amounts of change can happen. And when you look at how that works, it's exactly as mechanistic as everything else that reinforces the

belief that we don't have free will rather than doing exactly the opposite. No, in fact, yeah, we're not in a disagreement because I guess what I wanted to say is that appropriately, in fact, that's my out at the last part of this book, I'm going to argue that that appropriately treating the world as if we have free will, understanding that we don't have free will, will allow the kind of positive change that, one that is that that that is necessary even personal positive change Rick we'll get there the possibility of change and how you do it can only be effectively done when you understand the mechanisms that imply we don't have free will if you want to understand how how to

affect you know you we talk about we don't have the ability to determine what we wish in some ways but we can but with that knowledge we can we can we can I think allow future development that may change what we wish. So we'll get there. And I think that's really important. But I guess what I was saying is that some of the societal solutions that are proposed, there's inequities and they're built in inequities in the world. And you're right, we should be trying to address those in a realistic way.

And a realistic way means thinking about the science and not thinking about airy-fairy, wonderful imaginary solutions. I guess that's that's my let alone nationalistic myths of equal opportunity. Yeah exactly you got it. Anyway so I think that the I love your summary part of basically the takeaway is that it's impossible to successfully exactly this is what I was going to I was looking for this quote was right in front of me it's impossible to successfully wish what you're going to wish for this chapter's punchline is that it's impossible to success. will yourself to have more willpower. And that it isn't a great idea to run the world on the belief that people can and should.

And that's important. But I want to come back to that because I think that does leave this loophole that while you can't successfully will yourself to have more willpower, what you can do is potentially with that knowledge and the recognition that people can learn and change, change. You can imagine ways to in the future adjust yourself to have characteristics that you might prefer to have. And that's really important. But you can only do it if you realize the real science behind it, which is that it's not, you don't do it by just strength of character.

You do it by thinking of the kind of things that change people for better or worse. And so I think that's really important. And if in addition to that, you're lucky enough to wind up in life where you can listen to a lecture. Yeah, exactly. That's the whole point. I mean, learning actually works. Otherwise, if we didn't think that, I don't think you and I would have been doing what we, well, we might have anyway. But, but, you know, it's that aha experience.

In fact, somewhere in the book, you say how devastating is to find something you fundamentally believe in is wrong. And I've always said, I found it the most energizing thing in the world. world. I hope everyone, my goal in higher education is that every student has something that they fundamentally believe is central to their being proved to be wrong. And that's the purpose of education, I think, because it opens your mind. Well, I think, as I said before, you're made of more resilient stuff than me. So good going. Maybe. Yeah, well, yeah, what maybe in that aspect, but I'm still, I still feel, I still envy all the other aspects of you. Anyway, and a, and a, and a, and a, and, and, and, and, I find them remarkable in ways.

I always find when people do things that I couldn't think of even doing in principle, and you're full of that. But anyway, let's, and we've already, okay, enough of that. Okay, I want to get to chaos and determinism, and then I want to get to the sort of the emotional heart of this, which is responsibility in the second half of your book. But so the argument, look, it comes down to this. Okay, people say, yeah, yeah, all that's true.

But nature has these weird characteristics. and one is chaos, that the world is chaotic and unpredictable. And, and, and that's, there's the out. There's the magic, there's the magic out because the world is unpredictable, either because when you never have more than two bodies, and as you described nicely here, you have chaotic systems. You can't, you can't predict the future of a three-body system, which is amazing when you,

think about it. It's just the first time I learned that was amazing. And I will give a plug, by the way, I, um, um, um, um, Timothy Palmer wrote a book called, um, um, uh, something, something, something of doubt, which I just actually, we had a, he's a physicist, he's a climatologist. It's a great book on chaos and, and, and, and, and understanding its implications for not just, not just climate science, but behavior and all sorts of other things. I highly recommend to take a look at it. I don't know if you saw it, but in some recent issue of science or nature, there was a paper entitled something like a statistical solution to the three-body problem, which of course, I immediately turned the page because I was not going to understand a word of it. I assume it really

has not solved the three-body problem. Statistically, well, yeah, I mean, but I mean, a statistical solution is chaos, especially if there are, if there are, you know, strange attractor, you can ask, what's the likelihood of the system is going to end, which is what meteorology is all about. the likelihood that, and you do that by running computer simulations many times over and you see where it goes, because you can't a priori do it. You change the initial conditions. Anyway, but chaos implies, and you go into this, that for many systems, small changes, extremely small changes in initial conditions, there's dramatic changes in outcomes. Can. Don't always, not don't must, but can. And that's an important thing too.

They don't always, but they can. And that seems to be suggested somehow there's this out. And I think, I don't know where you say it here, but basically I paraphrased this thing, not being able to, so this is an anti-reductionist argument. And as a reductionist, it's always amusing for me to see the anti-reductionism. as someone who's tried to understand the fundamental structure of matter.

It's always amusing. Because I'll argue later, emergent complexity, I think, is reductionism in a different form. But not being able to trace things to their fundamental constituents, not being able to go back to the fundamental constituents to be able to say how a system's behave

is not an out. And let me let you give your explanation, and then I want to add something to it from physics. Oh, good. Because every single person who says chaoticism is totally cool and unexpected and revolutionary is completely right. And every one of them who then says, and this is where you could find free will, is wrong because they always make the same mistake. They think that systems that are unpredictable are undeterministic. And that's the get out of free, get out of jail free card that they think they're pulling out of that point. And there is a universe of differences between determinism and predictability.

Chaotic systems, which occur in like molecules and cells and brains and societies and universes, chaotic systems are deterministic, or is that deterministic is the most like old time clock with gears, but because of the nature of the interactions going on are not predictable. And unpredictable does not mean you can pull free will out of that. That's the key point you make, and I think very important, is that unpredictable is not deterministic. The three-body system is governed by Newton's laws.

There's nothing more predictable than that. They're the same things that made the world, that ended the burning of witches when made it seem like the world was comprehensible by mathematics and causes had effects and effects had causes. Yeah, but they're unpredictable. But let me add for your ammunition, as I was thinking about this, it occurred to me the exact, almost the strongest version I can think of this,

is thermodynamics. Because there, I can't predict, there's no way I can predict where the atoms in this room are for many reasons. There's no way. but there's nothing stronger than the second law of thermodynamics. Okay, which says, it's all totally unpredictable, but it governs the world. There's a law that you can't break,

and every time people try and do it, they create perpetual motion machines because they try and avoid the second law of thermodynamics, and much of life is trying to avoid it. When I look at my study every day, it's trying to avoid it. And yet, there's nothing more, there's nothing stronger that, Nothing more deterministic than the second law of thermodynamics.

Yet it's based on the fact that I can, it's based on the fact that I'm, I have a system that's at a fundamental large scale level, unpredictable. They're never going to be able to say exactly where it's going to be puffing out. But by definition, if you've just climbed up a mountain, the bag of potato chips you brought with you were going to be like bulging outward. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's, it's, it's incredibly important that that, that, that that, that, that we, that it's, it's the basis of the world we live in.

Physics works for a world that's chaotic and unpredictable because, because it is deterministic, because there are certain things you can say with certainty. And one of them is that a closed system, in a closed system, the entropy of that system is going to, you remain the same or increase. And, and, and so, and that's deterministic. That's a rule. That's a rule. That's a law and a law that can be violated in spite of the unpredictability of the specifics of that system. And that's where I guess where I come from in physics. Okay. For the first time in my life, I'm going to start using the word thermodynamics.

It's exactly. Oh, good. Yeah, exactly. And you can, and it's just like I'm going to say, I'm going to remember that dorsal lateral or whatever, PFC, make myself sound good too. Okay. I want to jump ahead because you point out that we have developed, okay, so that in 1922 people would have said that, you know, someone who began shoplifting, you know, and urinating in public behaved a certain way because he chose to. In 2022, we now say they behave that way because of deterministic mutations of one gene in this particular example. point out that that so in in if if that I forget what you say but if if if if free will is determined by

what we know by level of ignorance there's something wrong if an instance of free will exists on only until there's a decrease in our ignorance so it's free will until we understand it and then it's not free will anymore and and as I say that's exactly the god of the gaps argument exactly you know thunderstorms are god and then we understand thunderstorms and where's the room left for God. It's not, even theologians understand it's not a good argument for trying to put God there because that shrinks.

And I don't understand why the free will people don't realize that shrinks each time we learn more about how systems work. Yes. Emergent complexity is interesting because the argument, and I've seen, in physics, there's this debate because these people say,

oh, well, you know, particle physics, these fundamentalize, okay, but really the really interesting stuff is the stuff that you can't explain at this reductionistic level. It's all the fascinating structures is how oatmeal boils. It's, it's, and, and, and, and there are things, you know, and, and there are things, you know, obviously the understanding things at a microscopic level don't necessarily help you understand. And there's lots of, and you give examples of emerging complexity, in particular, in neuronal systems. and but it's again it's not clear why that that that reflects anything the fact that you can't trace the end result from fundamental constituents is once again ignoring the fact that that

unpredictability is not the same as indeterminacy and and and evolution itself in some sense, it seems to me, when I was reading it, some thoughts occurred and I wanted to run them by you. I mean, you know, it's no great mystery. I mean, snowflakes are in some sense emergent complexity. You take the fundamental polar interactions in molecules and who would have thought they'd form these beautiful Christmas-like patterns. But more than that, evolution itself in some sense is a, because you point out that the whole point, of emerging complexity is that the individual constituents are just doing their own little thing without knowing what the whole system is doing, and somehow the whole system goes in a certain direction. And that's a remarkable statement. But, okay, so what? And, you know, but I wanted to ask

you, don't you see, I mean, I see evolution is exactly that. Biological systems evolved, not because they're heading in some direction or because globally something's happening, it's because the individual system sort of might be a genetic mutation and near nearest neighbor interactions, reproduction and other things are going to drive the system in a way that may, you know, in response to natural selection, will create an organism that has beautifully structured existence to make it look like they were designed. Exactly. And that's totally cool and amazing and emerging complexity makes me so happy.

I can't even begin to tell you that. And it's the greatest of all of that. But this is not a playground either where suddenly you can pull free will out of it. Because once again, it's built around the confusion of predictability and determinism. And the people who try to sidestep it and still somehow get free will out of it, always do the same trick that their model requires, once you've established an emergent level of something unexpected, that emergent level can reach down and change the constituent parts. And if and only if there's 10,000 ants and they have formed like a complex society,

like each individual ant now can like solve the traveling salesman problem on a piece of paper. No, the whole point of emerging complexity is that the stupid, simple little building blocks are still just as stupid and simple. But because there's enough of them, out of it has come something amazing and complex and adaptive. But in order to pretend you've pulled free will out of it, you've got to assume the system works in a way that it can't, that it doesn't. Exactly. Okay.

And now let me throw something out at you, which I only realized in the context of reading that description of yours, which I'm going to use now whenever I hear people throw emergent complexity at me. That emerging complexity is an extreme form of reductionism. Because emergent complexity is just saying, reductionism is saying the world, the complicated world is based on simple principles, few quarks, four forces, put them together and look what happens. Emergent complexity is saying exactly the same thing. The fundamental constituents aren't knowledgeable about the whole world. They're not complex. They're very simple. They have a few simple behaviors, a few simple properties that are restricted to. And out of that simplicity comes

this amazing complexity. So it's the ultimate force. It's the ultimate form of reductionism, it seems to me. Exactly. And the only reason and it's reductionism, which when you put enough pieces together becomes unpredictable, but you haven't like escaped from the laws of reductionism. And the only reason why emerging complexity is interesting, separate of a, because sometimes it's really surprising and beautiful, is that understanding some phenomena, it makes more sense to try to get it at that level than at the more reductive level. It's just more convenient. Yeah, exactly. But physics is also based on that. Most people, I've written about it one of my books. Most people don't realize physics does exactly that. The law, there's no, the laws of physics are not,

There's no law of physics as universal. So you discuss the laws that are appropriate to the scale at which you're exploring phenomena. And that was a revolution in our thinking about physics. And we actually have the mathematical underpinning of that, something called the normal normalization group. It doesn't matter. But that it's appropriate if you're a psychologist, if you're a behavior psychologist or neuroscience,

it's ridiculous to try thinking about quark interactions. It's not going to get you anywhere. But the same is true in physics. It's not a new phenomenon that you talk about the appropriate interactions at the scale at which you're looking at. And that's just another, you know. And you do that because you eventually want to finish your thesis and get a degree. Exactly. It's like the most accessible level.

Yeah, you want to, yeah, you want to exactly, you want to get results. And then that's what science is all about. Find a way to get results that work and that you can test. and nothing more fundamental than that. But you point out, I mean, this thing you just said that some level you have to reach down in order to find that miracle, in order to find that way, the emergent complex system

is to reach down and change the properties of the fundamental constituents. But neurons are still neurons, independent of whatever, and the mechanisms, neurons are not going to change no matter how complex the system there's in, their fundamental interactions are going to be the same. And I can't help but say, this, there's a whole chapter basis and it seems to me you must be doing it because that's

where all the philosophers are hanging their hats without saying it. Somehow they're all saying just that without having, without explicitly saying it because when you explicitly say it, it sounds ridiculous. And I can't help but think you must have for much of your life had to counter those philosophers or at least hear those philosophical arguments. that's really seductive and that's what it pivots around and like I stole this metaphor from someone ooh an emergent feature of water molecules is water molecules are not wet until there's a whole lot of them that's an immersion property however water is made of two hydrants and one oxygen. It's not the case that once things get wet, it's sustained because it's now two

oxygens and one hydrogen. Yeah, that's great. That's great. Okay, we will now move to quantum mechanics, but you'll be happy to know we're going to, we're going to gloss over it for many reasons, because I think it's a red herring in the first place. And you point out how it's a red herring for biological reasons, which I'm aware of, and I had a big debate once on stage with Mr. Hammerov about this. But yeah, I know. It's where I explained, you had the slightest understanding of what quantum mechanics was all about.

But the idea is, people say, look, quantum mechanics is indetermin. Because it has a fundamental indeterminacy that you perform an experiment and the results are probabilistic. You can't say with certainty, in some cases you can, but in many cases you can't say with certainty what the result. You can only say probabilistically what the result of an experimental be. And suddenly that fundamental indeterminacy appears to give you a way out. Let's give your arguments for why that's irrelevant, which is basically two, I think. I want to summarize them.

One, that randomness is not a good explanation of free will. and two, then when you actually think of the mechanics of the brain, the scale of which quantum mechanical effects might come about, which is something I've recognized too, but the scale of which they might be relevant is vastly different than the scale it's going to be, cause an activation potential to, or a whole slew of things to happen to make a decision.

They're vastly different scales. So why do you elaborate for a second? And then I'll say, explain why I don't think any of that matters anyway. because I had never heard this phrase before before starting to read about this stuff. The brain is a moist, noisy environment, which was very picturesque to me and kind of like unsettling and a little bit yucky. But I guess like for stuff at the quantum level to have any hope and hope in this case comes with like 23 zeros after it, any hope of being able to impact macro events. It requires a

synchrony. It requires all of these random events to be random in roughly the same way all at once. And it can't work that way statistically. And it especially can't work that way in moist, noisy environments like biological stuff, because what they're very good at is collapsing. sort of the indeterministic features. Yeah, the collapse of the way for, yeah. I mean, that's the arguments that are presented, that those words are problematic. But the idea is exactly that, that, you know,

I face it, because people talk to me, well, well, look at all this quantum entanglement and quantum teleportation. Maybe we'll be able to send people from here, there. I would have to Star Trek, as you know. And the point is, the only reason we can do that is we have to, is quantum mechanics is, so weird because we don't experience it. We don't experience it because we don't, we're not quantum,

we're classical beings and we are, we exist at a level where the quantum mechanical aspect of reality is hidden. It's an amazing thing that we humans even discovered that it's there. That, that in order to illustrate these quantum mechanical things, you have to very carefully prepare systems and unbelievably carefully prepare systems. That's why Nobel Prize. are given out for these things. It's hard to do. So that you get so that you can isolate the weirdness of quantum mechanics. Otherwise, it's not there. If it was, quantum mechanics wouldn't seem so strange. But it's it's not there because you know, you can't teleport a human because a human isn't a very carefully prepared state of two photons where you work very hard and you

isolate it from the environment all the time it's happening. So there are no further interactions which destroy quantum correlations and all of the rest. I mean, it is surprising that there are in biological systems, places where quantum coherence exists where you wouldn't have it expected it to, you know, maybe in photosynthesis, for example. But that's different than brain function, which is an incredibly noisy environment. And not just noisy, but the scale over which quantum fluctuations, even if they can happen, could happen, is vastly different than the scale where the important things related to neuronal processes and activation potentials and decisions. are made. Okay, so that's, I think that's really important. But the, but the, but the thing I want to stress to you is quantum mechanics isn't a determinant. So that whole argument is wrong in the first place. People get it wrong. Quantum mechanics is determined, quantum mechanics is based on a second order

differential equation. Schrodinger equation. Second order different equation says if you give me the initial, and it's a second order differential equation for the wave function, not for an observable, but it says you define it here. And for all, just like Newton, just like the three body problem, for all future times I can calculate exactly with 100% certainty what the wave function is going to do, at least in principle and practice I might not be able to. It's an incredibly, it's completely deterministic.

Now it is true that when you try and make measurements, those are probabilistic, but the underlying mechanism of quantum mechanism is completely deterministic. And so the fact that the results are probabilistic is just a red herring. And the example I would give you, I think, which I think is probably, you know, so people say, oh, maybe there's some accidental activation here that changes your view here. And that gives you an out because of quantum mechanics. The example that I think is really important is radioactivity.

Radioactivity happens because of quantum mechanics. So I can't tell you when a given uranium matter, is going to decay. But I can tell you with exact certainty that the laws of nature is determined that what the behavior of the radioactive system is going to be and how many of the... I can't tell you which one,

but I can tell you with certainty, you know, if it's big enough system, exactly how many of them are going to be decaying at any instant. And so while it appears as if you have that indeterminacy, it's really a red herring. The system is just determined. determined as in large scale as anything else.

And radioactivity is a perfect example. If a radioact, if uranium atoms, you put a bunch of them together, are going to have a well-known decay rate. The same is going to be true for neurons in your brain or anything else. It's going to, they're just as prescribed. So I would, if you would told me that I would not have had to have faked my way through writing two chapters on it. No, but on the other hand, it's good.

The fact that you were forced to do it is useful because then you were able to discuss the things you know, which is the processes in the brain and illustrate those, which I can't do, illustrate exactly how implausible, even if it were true, how the processes that determine free will in your brain aren't going to be affected by quantum mechanics. And anyway, well, we're now going to now spend the last half hour, So talking about the last half of your book. It's really not the last half. So I feel better.

It's like the last third. Which gave me solace when I realized how much I had left to read when I, before I got to the end. The question of what we do about this. So given that it's undeniable that the world that we don't have free will based on science. So there's no loopholes. There's no places for the magic to occur. Why do we have the illusion of free will?

And why is that a good thing? You ask about it at the very beginning of this. And it seems to me, you have mentioned too, there's an obvious reason, right? Because it allows us to function effectively. The illusion of free will allows us to go about, whether we're early hominids or not, to go about living the life, creating the illusions that allow us to live our daily lives.

And evolution, therefore, picks us we don't have the choice. We don't have the choice to not believe in free will. If we want to be psychiatrically resilient, one of my favorite definitions of clinical depression is it's a pathological failure of the ability to rationalize away reality. That's great. Oh, I like that. Yeah, absolutely. And here's the point. When I say we have no choice, well, we don't have a choice, but we can learn intellectually. We can learn. Every time I'm going to say I have a choice, I'm going to say we can learn if we're exposed to the right teachers or the right time and the right place. we can learn intellectually that free will doesn't exist. You and I can learn that. But that does not

mean that we emotionally, since reason is a slave of passion, that in our daily lives, we don't go about our daily lives every day because we're, you know, we function well enough to be integrated in society that we don't go around behaving like everyone else, like we are making choices and we're and we're doing that. So it's, so, but it's the same as saying, you know, the fact that evolution requires us in some sense to believe in, if you will, is the same as saying, well, evolution may, you know, in principle suggest, you know, it's okay to, you know, kill your neighbor under certain conditions, but we do have learning that allows us to override, at least intellectually override that that fundamental evolutionary remnant.

So, so, so, so, so, so I think the second half of your book in large sense is about how we understand, override, and utilize it to make a world which isn't bad. It may seem like it's bad and and and and and and, and, and, and, and, uh, so, um, if I go to So you know, you summarize basically saying, yeah, well, I don't think we need to summarize anymore biological turtles all the way down. But what do we do with that? And the first question is, you know, will we run amok? Because the first thing you can think of, it's the same as the question people have with Aeasius. If we don't have free will, then why, then why care, then why should we try and be good? Why should we, you know, let's just do what we do and we, you know,

I'm not responsible for what I do, so who cares? And I think just like for atheism, I mean, you could have that attitude. But I think the thing you point out is that that even that's not a natural consequence of accepting the absence of free will any more than accepting that there's not a God. if you look at the statistics and you look at the data, does not promise naturally behave, quote, unquote, immorally. That when you actually look at the data, people who don't believe in a god,

generally don't behave any more immorally than, and often sometimes more ethically than people who do. I want to let you out elaborate on that. Which is, thank God, because that solves the running amok problem. The literature, there's been like a handful of studies about the ethical implications and making people believe more or less in free will, but there's a massive literature on the relationship between ethical behavior and belief in deities and stuff. And it's exactly what you show.

in part because a lot of the time religious people are telling you about how ethical they're being and a lot of the time you're measuring things as being ethical, which don't really matter to atheists and all sorts of other confounds in there. But the most interesting thing about that literature is exactly paralleled in the free will one. You know, prime someone to believe less than free will. for the next 10 minutes and they cheat more on a on a economic game and and even though it's not clear if that really does happen all the time but get someone who hasn't believed in free will for a long long time and there is exactly as ethical as someone who really believes in very hard

and the religion equivalent is one that like i don't know why by get some sort of almost transcendence something out of, when you look at people who have thought long and hard about where does goodness come from and what sort of person I want to be and what does this all mean and why are we here? And if they've thought long and hard about it, it almost doesn't matter if their conclusion is and there's no free will or there's no God or if their conclusion is there's a god with all these attributes. On the average, they're going to be more ethical than other people because they've thought long and hard.

And it's the doing that that's almost certainly the guarantee because you care about what counts as the right way to live your life, enough to have thought long and hard about it, and enough to have had a moment of crisis and enough to have felt lonely because there's no God or enough to... Yeah, it's because that stuff matters to you enough to have thought about it and to have thought about how you feel about it. And that's what it's about.

We're not going to run amok. If we train kids and people with as much value-laden ideas about why are you the way you are and why did this person become the way they become? came as we invest in theological or agentive arguments about it, it would be, we're not going to run amok. You know, and here's a psychological experiment I've done. Because I, you know, with the atheist thing, not the free will thing, you know, you give a, you give the standard, you know, somewhere the standard dialogue, you know, how we trust you atheists, be moral if you don't think God holds. And when I hear that, I always ask the question,

and I've done this to a audience that only once did someone come over. Where I say, okay, if you didn't believe in God, would you go and kill your neighbor right now? And generally, except for one exception where someone put up his head, said yes, you know, people say no, because they have reason. They have thought. They, you know, they have, and that's, and by the way, that's Steve Pinker's argument for why God is redundant. Because, you know, if God's, if God said rape and murder was of innocent people was okay,

would it be okay? And, and, and, and most people say, no. And then you say, well, then Steve Pinker would say, well, just get rid of the middleman. You don't need the God to say it. But I think the point is if you ask people, okay, just imagine you didn't believe God. Would you then, you know, steal from your neighbor? you know, beat your kids. And people, you know, and when I think about it,

they realize that it's not, even if they think it's their belief in God, even if that's what they're telling them, fundamentally, if they have reason, they think of all the reasons why they shouldn't be doing the bad behavior anyway. And it's superfluous. And I think the same, you know, is true for free will. Ultimately, if you think of reason and rationality, you're going to, the behavior is going to be the same, regardless of whether you believe in free will or not.

So that's my little psychological memory. You try it in your class sometimes to see if anyone would. Sounds good for me. But you give the example, of course, of Scandinavia. Everyone's perfect example of idyllic society. It's having problems now. But, you know, there's a secular society where people on the whole are, you know, better behaved and more generous, blah, blah, blah.

We won't go into it. You give a lot of examples. I would argue that part of the reason is the same reason I'm invigorated by the fact of lack of meaning in the universe is that if you focus on the here and now, if the here and now is all there is, then you pay much more attention to the here and now. And if you pay much more attention to the here and now

and you're rational, you're going to begin to behave on the whole in a in a in the kind of the kind of you might say ethically good behavior that happens naturally so so getting rid of the here of the hereafter and and instead of thinking of now as the all that is is is is actually a positive motivator to behave well not a negative one exactly yep now and you do point out the religion your religion generally tends to have people treat people better, but only in their in group. And the world is an example of that. But again, I would argue that that's not so much a problem of religion. We ran once,

in my institute, I ran a workshop in the origins of xenophobia. But surely, I mean, that's again something over which we don't have control, right? Even at the biological level, the immune system is the very basis of xenophobia, right? As beautiful way of stating it. Yeah, I mean, you know, and if it works for single-nailed animals and immune system, and, you know, it's a natural thing. We have to overcome it as rational beings, just as we have to ultimately overcome our illusion of free will. It's the same thing.

And so, yeah, I don't blame religion for that. I blame evolution. But here's where I see hope in where it's sometimes and where you see despair maybe. I don't know whether it's really that strong. You have a great section on how we learn. I mean, it's beautiful. I never knew. I knew about Eric Kandel, but I never knew these beautiful diagrams. And it's just a lovely way of learning about the neurobiology of how learning happens. It's just beautiful, just spectacular. And then you find out like this is occurring in sea slugs. It's the same molecules in us. It's unbelievable. That's same molecules in sea slugs.

and us. Which is why learning about how change occurs not only shows you that that's not incompatible with dropping free will, it proves that you can see the building blocks. You can see the building blocks or exactly. You can see how learning, you can see that it's not, again, it's not a mystery. I mean, at some level it is, but I mean, at the fundamental basic level, you can see how naturally it's possible for a system. And not only that, you can see how that neurobiology of learning is affected by stress and conditioning, because you can see when these, you know, how these

neurotransmitters are going to be, whether they're going to be expressed or how well the system is going to receive them and respond to them are based on environment. And so you can see exactly how environment and past experience will affect learning as well. But you see, that's where the fact that change happens is for me the great hope because I guess I see I've often said and now I don't know whether I'll you know and I guess I'd say I call this better living through chemistry but which is really what's happening is thinking about how the world really works can give us more effective ways of producing a better world than living under the illusion that it works other ways and I And so let me give you my thinking on this.

And I want to see what you think, what you think about this, that as I was about to say before, I've often said, and I don't know if I'll say it anymore, that we live in a world in which is no free will, but for all intents and purposes, it's a world that is identical, it looks identical on the surface to a world in which there is free will. So it, and what I said following that,

and now I'm going to change what I say, I think, I said, and therefore it makes sense to behave as if we have free will. Now, in some sense, I think that's still true. But now I would amend that. I would say it's indistinguishable on the surface from a world in which there is free will. But we should behave in a way that understanding that that's an illusion. but reproducing it in a positive way by realizing that there isn't free will. Namely, we may not have choice to now of what we wish to do.

And this is what I was saying earlier. But by learning, we can change. And therefore, if we realize we don't have free will, we can say, how can I be a better person? Well, let me think of the neurobiological influences that I can have today, tomorrow, the next day, so that the day afterwards, when I think of the, antecedents that caused me to behave a certain way, those new antecedents will be,

will allow me to act better than it was now. And so I see recognizing change and only understanding that there's no free will is a way to actually do what you're thinking you're doing by free will, namely becoming a better person. Cool. And there goes Dennett down the drain, among other things. That's, that's beautiful. I mean, a mid, That is our grounds for hope. And that is our grounds for like neural plasticity. Things can change. Things can change an awful direction.

Someone who was open-minded and tolerant back when is now bitter or whatever. But it can go in opposite directions as well. And understanding not how to change yourself, but understanding the circumstances in which you will be changed and a beneficial way is a very good thing. And it's the effective way of doing it. You can only do it effectively if you understand how it happens. And if you have this illusion that you have a choice,

then you'll probably never be able to effectively change. Well, you might be able to, but it's an accident. And I think it's not just true. And you've illustrated between, say, 1922 and 2022, it's not just the case in an individual level. It's the case in a societal level. By learnings, and you and I are devoted, I think, to learning. It's an education.

That is a way to affect our understanding and our behavior in a way that makes not just us better individuals, but society is a whole better so we don't draw on quarter people. We don't have public hangings. But we can only do that, once again, and you have an amazing chapter, which is scary, on retribution. and punishment to show that we love it. But once again, knowing that we love it is the same thing as knowing that we don't believe in if you will.

That's okay. Knowing it gives you the opportunity to overcome that. To overcome that it's hardwired in one way and to know how to change your environment in a way so that you don't enjoy punishment as much. Yeah. It lets you figure out like the joy of retribution. okay, how much does it weigh?

What does it smell like? Does it do more of this or that in this circumstance? Here's how we could turn brutally violent people into people who will be like really aggressive sons of bitches when they play chess. Yeah, when they play chess, exactly. And you talk about it's really hard. You talk about Scandinavia, but, you know, people want to punish people who've done really bad things. but of course, and this is where I would also sort of differ in at least semantically describing things. I think you would say people don't have responsibility for their actions in a fundamental sense.

And I would say we should treat them as if they have responsibility, but that doesn't involve punishment. Okay, if I run someone over, I ran them over. There's no denying that fact. I'm responsible for the fact that they got run over. Now, I may not have had control over that. But then the response to that is saying, okay, you're responsible. What can we do to ensure that that doesn't happen again? That should be the response.

Not I'm going to slap you in the head. But you are responsible. I would say you are responsible. But if we understand where it comes from, the response to that responsibility is a very different one. It's to say, how can we ensure, sure, If you have schizophrenia, we have to probably ensure that you're not in a position to hurt other people. Not punishment.

And if there's a treatment, we have responsibility to treat. You're just, you're dichotomizing between what you're calling responsibility and control. Yeah. I would use a dichotomy between mechanistic responsibility and moral responsibility, but it's the exact same thing as what you just said. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and, and well, but you talk about it, you know, and I think your argument, oh, quarantine is a lovely one. You talk about the origin of the word, and you really,

in some, you're really quarantining people, just as you'd quarantine people who would know, in a way that protects others around them, but not as punishment. You know, you're not keeping a kid at home from school as punishment if they have a cold. You're doing it, you know, for other reasons. And, um, and, and that, And this quarantine, which can be, as you say, what is, funnishment, which is a lovely word in Scandinavia, where you think that, you know, taking people who have done horrific things, like you give the example, this well-known serial killer, the guy who killed all those people on that island in Sweden. I was Sweden or Norway.

I can't remember. Anyway, it's one of those scorned countries. Yeah, Norway, I think. And what they did put them in jail and put them in an environment where he is, you know, a nice environment to live in. And their attitude is, you know, let's see if we can make sure he, you know, whatever conditions caused him to do that again, cause him to do that won't happen again, which is very rationaling to say, although most of us, you know, many people intrinsically emotionally want to say, kill the bastard, draw and quarter the bastard, do this, you know. And what Antinavian culture has produced as the response to the horror of him is that instead of a visceral desire to make him hurt, what all those. interviews of parents of etc. showed was a visceral desire to be able to say, yeah, we never have to think about this guy again.

His grandiosity. Yeah. He's a clown. He's a violent clown, but good, he's a way we never have to think about him again. That's what their culture has been able to detour the viscera of grief. And if we think about it logically, I think we can say we can direct our culture in that direction. I mean, even we not have to, so, yeah, we naturally might, our inclinations and our experience might not make us want to do that now, but understanding how change happens. The very thing that you some sense say is depressing to me offers great hope. In fact, the only hope, I think, ultimately, to get better is to understand how the world really works. If you don't understand how the world really works, it's an accident if you improve it. It's a complete accident. I guess I would I would afraid I'm giving you words that may be useful but I when I read your stuff I thought it's this almost sounds like the kind of thing some self-help artists would say but I think it's true the change we want doesn't come from within it comes from without the change we want is going to come from without is going to put ourselves in circumstances which can cause a change it's not going to come from willpower we don't have because we didn't have it in the first place now become the sort of person who has become the sort of person who has been

is able to put themselves in a different circumstance. Yeah. The last two things, and I want to go another two or three minutes, you've been great, or maybe five minutes. I want to come back to Dan, and it's about not during praise for accomplishments, which you mentioned, which I thought was, it is hysterical.

And so if that's what it's all about, then what are we talking about it for? But more than that, actually, I, again, I'm going to present myself as a devil's advocate. I don't think we disagree. But I would say that accomplishments, we don't deserve praise for the accomplishments. It's the same.

We go back to the ancient Romans, who separated the artist from the art, which when I first learned that, I used to like ancient history, and I was amazed. It seemed so foreign to me, but it's again so obvious. I thought, well, okay, so this is the artist's big deal.

They would say God, you know, God is speaking to them, but that doesn't make this person particularly good. But what we can do is we can say accomplishments can be recognized as amazing. and you can be recognized as amazing if you're brilliant or you know it's not something that intrinsically means you're good or we have you pat them back for but we can say yeah let's recognize you're an amazing person it's nothing wrong with that you've achieved something amazing let's all celebrate that

so i i guess i can instrumental what was that only if it's instrumental only if it inspires other people that person more likely to do it again. That's as good of a tool as anything, sure. Yeah, but I mean, the fact that you had no choice in some level in being the person you are doesn't make your accomplishments less amazing, doesn't make Einstein less amazing, doesn't make you less amazing to me. You're still amazing to me, even if I know you didn't have choice, Robert, you really are. But yeah, so I think, I think recognize that.

So I think, you know, even someone like Dan Denick can at least, you know, say, okay, well, the book you've written, you know, or the arguments you've given are amazing arguments, and they've convinced me of this or that. And yeah, we'll give a prize for the amazing arguments. You're the person who happens to receive it. Big deal, but the arguments are the, you know, it's, and it's like what, you know, in some sense, it's what I've won prizes, you've won prizes, but I try to have the attitude of Feynman in that regard, who basically said, yeah, the prize is nice, but the real, the really neat thing was the discovery. You know, that's, that's what the great, and that's, And finding that out is cool.

It's the thing, as you would say, is cool. And that's what makes it worthwhile of the prize. I want to end with two things. This was a hard book for you to write. It's clear it was a hard book for you to write. I mean, the agony of saying some of the things that you say that you know are going to be unpopular or difficult for people to accept. It may sound nutty, as you say at one point or another,

clearly gave you pause. How do you feel after having written it? nervous as to who is going to feel deeply offended and hurt by it. But at least on a local level, as a college teacher, I've like flaunted my atheism enough to have a little bit of experience of the pushback that it gets. Although mine has always been very compassionate, concerned people who are saying, please, please, please, I want to be able to save your soul. I love you. Your soul is in danger. you know, what am I expecting with that?

What I'm expecting, in addition, is having to focus a whole lot more on hundreds of pages and decades of thought about this stuff. I don't live this way most of the time. I'm fired in judgment and entitlement and all that sort of stuff. And like one percent of the time, I can achieve. this mindset. And because I've been trying to do it for a long time, I like to think I achieve it in circumstances where it's more consequential. Like, should we consider somebody's well-being and needs to have been earned to be greater than we consider somebody else's? You know, let's stop for a second and really think about it because that doesn't make sense. And I can think that way,

and more importantly, I can feel that way for a couple of minutes at a time, before it disappears. Well, that's what I was asking. I mean, some books I've written, I didn't know which have just changed the way I think about the world without, you know, I knew what I wanted to say, but having written them,

they, they allow, they help me personally. Is this self-help at all? Having formulated this in a coherent way, does it help you spend maybe instead of one percent of your time, 2% of your time? Yes.

Yes, and not because this has been a, journey of intellectual discovery because oh my god i'm sitting here talking about this to all sorts of people when i do one of those they're going to be on top of me in a second so i i kind of let's try to live this way a little bit more maybe maybe that's the cynical out um i once went to one of those dolly llama conferences where he hangs out with a bunch of neuroscientist and he's got a bunch of his like all-star monks yeah we all talk to each other and we realize our vocabularies are so different I did the same thing of the Vatican once

and we had nothing to say each other. You're a braver man than me in terms of who you hung out with and like at one point one of the monks said something about what they do with their anger and they said

something that was totally unexpected and it was gorgeous and it was something I could never have never reviewed the world for and I said wow that's amazing this guy functions on a different planet it. Wow. That would be, and all that's come out of all of this is like, yeah, like every now and that I can do that. And it's good when you're able to do it. But you just said something that

actually comes to the actually last thing, one of the last pages in your book. But when you said, maybe it's not right to think that one person's needs and desires are more than another. And you say, the only possible moral conclusion is that you are no more entitled to have your needs and czar is met than is any other human. There's no human who's less entitled than you to have their well-being considered. Well, in fact, that's a philosophy, which actually Peter Singer, I mean, it's fresh on my mind because I've talked to Peter, the principle of equal consideration, which he says is true not just for humans. You're being, you know, speciesist, as he would say. but no being has more entitled than any other being to have their needs and desires met and not need to suffer.

So what you've been driven to by this is a beautiful philosophy of in some sense effective altruism, but more importantly, the philosophy that's led Peter to, I think, to be an amazingly ethical individual about humans and other animals. It's changed my own thinking, I have to say, about the world. that not, I think this argument can be extended and it's natural to beyond humans to other species as well. Just don't expect me to find it to be easy to be that way all the time and don't expect it's going to be easy for you. But it'll be a good thing if we do because. Yeah, exactly. I'm now, I'm now a vegetarian, for example, and I wasn't before.

And it's not, you know, well, it wasn't that difficult. But let me end with the last few sentences of your book because I want to, I think it's nice. Those in the future will marvel at what we didn't yet know, which really resonates to me because, of course, as you know, my new book is exactly that. I love the fact that it'll be out of date and the fact that not knowing is what it's all about. And if they don't marvel at what we don't know, then my good. we've made a big mistake that progress has ended. There will be scholars opining about why in the course of a few decades around the start of the third millennium, most people stopped opposing gay marriage.

History majors will struggle on final exams to remember whether it was the 19th, 20th, or 21st centuries when people began to understand epigenetics. They will view us as being as ignorant as we now view the goitered presence who thought Satan caused seizures. That borders on the inevitable. but it need not be inevitable that they also view us as heartless. And I think that that's important.

That means what you and I have been talking about together, that we can learn to change and be less heartless, but only understanding how the world works. So I don't view this book and your work as in any way depressing or pessimistic. Just as I take the fact that there's no meaning in the universe, as energizing. I take this beautiful piece of work on understanding how the world really works at the level of behavior as uplifting and a blueprint for thinking about how can we can make

the world a better place. So I think you've done God's work as my atheist friend, Steve Weinberg, used to say. So thank you so very much. It's been a blessing. It's been a real pleasure. And I know I appreciate the time that you allowed me to take of yours. And I wanted to do it. Well, I thought I wanted to give you the time that was necessary. I wanted to give it the arguments the time they deserved. And we could have spent longer, but it's been a pleasure. Likewise, I hope we could do this in the same room some time and talk for hours and hours and errors.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to that. It's a real privilege. Thanks again. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. This podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation, a non-profit organization whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place in the cosmos by providing access to the people who are driving the future of society in the 21st century and to the ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world.

To learn more, please visit Originsprojectfoundation.org.