Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Free Will, Morality, Responsibility, Intuition | Robert Sapolsky

Episode Date: December 29, 2023

In today’s episode Robert Sapolsky joins Theories of Everything to discuss some of the most important topics of our time. Topics discussed include morality, free will, the justice system, intuition, and chaos theory. YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0IqA1hYKY8

Professor Robert Zavolsky, you were once asked, what was the most powerful moment that you've had when you were investigating primates? And you recounted the tale of Benjamin. So I'd like you to retell that for our audience and also explain its significance to you, please. Well, Benjamin, just as orientation, for more than 30 years. I spent my summers studying a population of wild baboons in a national park in East Africa, going back to the same animals each year and, you know, beginning to feel fairly connected to them after a while amid having the usual primatologist rules of like, amid having the usual primatologist rules of like, don't interact and don't interfere and that kind of thing.

There was one baboon who I was very, very fond of named Benjamin, who was a bit of a bozo might be the most appropriate way of stating it. And like, if there were, you know, stinging ants to step on, he was going to step on it every time. If there was a bunch of like thorns in the bushes, he was the one who was going to stumble into it. But very fond of him. And I was doing an observational sample on him

one day where you sit there and you write down everything that he does for 30 minutes. And he proceeded to spend the whole time asleep. This was the middle of the day and he was under a bush and fell asleep. So I sat there for these riveting 30 minutes. And by the time that was over and he happened to wake up then, we discovered all the other baboons had left us. All the other baboons were just off foraging and they were nowhere to be seen. And he sort of looked around and freaked out. And I got up on top of my Jeep and binoculars and looked around and finally spotted them on like some distant hill. And there was a moment where he then looked at me and projecting and anthropomorphizing all of that, but he knew that I knew where they

were. And I got back in the Jeep and drove very slowly while he sort of trod alongside and we found the other baboons. And that was just like a moment of a sense of connection, like nothing I had ever felt before. Is that allowed? Because you sense that he knew what you were thinking and he sensed that you had this knowledge and you're not allowed to intervene, but you're like, I want to help this guy. Yeah, it's very squishy

because to some extent, you're not a fly on the wall. You're a close relative in lots of ways. I had one occasion where this juvenile male communicated to me in a way that was pretty demeaning. There's a vocalization that, you know, you're some low-ranking baboon. You're about to get trashed by some higher-rank it's perfectly obvious and there's a distinctive facial expression you make at that point which is to everybody else saying is anybody interested in coming and watching my back on this and and defending me so this was this squirrely

little juvenile who had irritated somebody and this big male was clearly about to just trounce him. And you could see the kid did this, can anybody join me facial expression that everybody else around him, and of course, nobody else wanted to get involved. And you could see in a moment of sheer desperation, he looked at me and made the facial expression, which I thought was phenomenal it was phenomenal from the standpoint of he was hoping i would understand what he was saying interspecies communication at the same time i was extremely sort of dissed because once again i was the last resort i was the last one being picked for the team everybody else said no okay might as well like try him as if he was hoping i would like run over the guy with my jeep or something so that that was a fairly unique moment and and tragically i had to pretend i didn't understand what he was saying and he got trounced but that was that was a fairly special moment of all the species you could have studied, and humans being one of them, why did you choose baboons? Well, I didn't choose them. I was shipped off to them. My first love were mountain gorillas,

and I was like eight when I decided I was going to go study mountain gorillas up in the mountains of the moon and Central Africa, all of that. And it turned out that was not a place logistically very easy to go do field work in. And I also kind of turned into a physiologist and was interested in hormones and these guys. And you're not going to do physiology on mountain gorillas. It was just not plausible. So baboons made a ton of sense.

They live in these big social groups they live out in the open they are not endangered any of that stuff in contrast to mountain gorillas and i kind of inherited my troop from a grad student who was just finishing up his thesis at the time so you know everybody can't go and live with mountain gorillas. You got to adapt to circumstances. So instead, 30 plus years with baboons. with a fine-tooth comb as well as behave and why zebras get ulcers. So I'll have some questions about all three. But we'll start with determined. So in a passage fairly early on in the book, maybe chapter two or three, you said these are questions that you mentioned philosophers posed to you that left you gasping in defamed awe, quote-unquote. What does it mean to become aware of a conscious decision? What do deciding and intending actually

mean? Can you decide to decide? So I will ask you, professor, what does it mean to become aware of a conscious decision? What do deciding and intending actually mean and can you decide to decide? Well, the way in which I get in everyone's faces at this point, is that what does it mean that you've become aware of a conscious decision? Let's translate that into what does it tell us about free will? And where I am a major irritant is my conclusion is it tells us nothing about free will whatsoever. Conscious intent has nothing to do with the free will debate, whether that was conscious or unconscious has nothing to do with it. And one of my starting arguments in the book, which is that we have no free will whatsoever. All we are is the outcome of our biology over

which we had no control and its interaction with environment over which we had no control. And it's interaction with environment over which we have no control. And sort of the strongest way in which people cling to a free will belief is you make a decision. You decide I'm going to have, you know, chocolate ice cream instead of vanilla. You are conscious of it. You are conscious of your intent. You know you're not being coerced into doing that. You're not being forced. You have other options. You know that there's a good likelihood that if you say chocolate, you're going to be given chocolate ice cream. So you understand the contingencies there. And you make a choice. You act on your intent. And for the vast majority of people, that's a moment that just resonates with free will. That just feels, it's so palpable. It's so in the moment. And the consciousness seems so important. And for me, it's completely irrelevant.

It is like asking somebody to review a movie and they only get to see the last three minutes of it. review a movie and they only get to see the last three minutes of it. Because what that analysis leaves out is the only question you can ask at that point, where did that intent come from? How did you become that sort of person? Not only the sort of person who would prefer chocolate to vanilla, but a person who would be ordering ice cream at that point, a person who had the socioeconomic luxury of doing so, a person who liked the taste of, a person who... How did you become who you are at that moment? And what made you who you are is all that biology interacting with environment over which you had no control, and we are nothing more or less than the outcome of what came before. And in that regard, conscious or otherwise in the moment, an incredible sense of intentionality

right in front of your face or an offhanded one, none of it matters in the slightest because the only question to ask is, how did you become the sort of person you are in that moment? And you had no control over that so why isn't the argument much more simple by saying look you're determined by the laws of physics whether the laws of physics have indeterminacy to them whatever you're determined by the laws of physics and you don't determine the laws of physics so therefore you have no free will why isn't it as simple as that? Why do we go through a rigmarole of biology and neurology and psychology? Well, if we're having some nice interdisciplinary sort of hegemony here,

yeah, you know, it's ultimately all down to physics and the physicist only talk to God sort of thing. You know, it happens that my training is such that it is most accessible to me from the standpoint of biology. But yeah, ultimately, it's that level as well. It doesn't mean there are not features of it at the biological level that could only be understood at the biological level, like any emergent system. And it's just been easiest for me over the years in terms of my training and proclivities to be much more interested in the brain than in cosmology or something. But ultimately, it's the same exact thing. It's a material universe, and nobody who is willing to admit it is a material universe universe and there are things like atoms and cells and

stuff out there. Nobody who gives in as a starting point to that and then says somehow there's still free will, none of them can provide a mechanism in which somehow you can step outside all of those rules every now and then. And that's when we're acting freely. We're just biological machines. We're materialist machines. We are complicated ones beyond imagination. But yeah, that's all there is. And nobody arguing for free will can come up with something that does not rely upon a magical step of nonsense somewhere in the analysis much of this comes down to the definition of free will so what would be your definition of free will um it's one that infuriates the philosophical compatibilists the one who say yes it's a material

world but somehow that's compatible with free will. It's infuriating to them. In fact, two weeks ago, I had a debate with Daniel Dennett. In case you didn't know, I've spoken to Daniel Dennett for about three hours. It's a large behemoth podcast, and it's already out. The link is in the description. In fact, two weeks ago, I had a debate with Daniel Dennett, who's one of the most visible of philosophy compatibilists, and he actually used the word daft. He said, I was being daft and insisting on this as a definition of free will,

whereas for me, I think it's the only possible thing. Okay, so a behavior happens, and you ask, why did that occur? Did that person just exercise free will? Where did that behavior come from? And you're asking, what went on in the brain a second ago? But you're also asking, what of the environment over the previous minutes to hours triggered that behavior? And you're also asking, what did this morning's hormone levels have to do with how sensitive the brain would be to that? And then you're asking what have previous months been about in terms of neural plasticity. You're asking about adolescence and childhood and even fetal life, where what was going on then was directing the brain you had at this moment. You're asking something about genes. You're asking something about the culture

your ancestors invented, because that was going to influence how your mother was mothering you within minutes of birth. And it turns out that makes a difference. Why did that behavior occur? Because of everything from a second ago to a million years ago. And how does one then define free will? If you want to prove there's free will, show me that this brain just produced a behavior and show me it would have produced the exact same behavior independent of its history leading up to it. That moment changed that morning's hormone levels, change the genome, change what the fetal environment was like, change the color of the socks that person is wearing today. Change all of those. And if you still get the exact same

behavior, you've just proven free will because you've demonstrated behavior that is being an uncaused cause that is independent of its history. And you can't. And nobody who argues for free will can show how that occurs because it is so embedded in this matrix of everything that got you to that moment that there's simply no wiggle room in there to say and then for half a second biology and the physical laws of the universe it gets turned off for half a second and then you decide to do what you do uh-huh so what would be some of the alternative definitions of free will that don't rely on uncaused causation? That's what our legal system runs on, which makes no sense whatsoever. I mean, often after a trial is about, did this person do this or not? It comes down to, did they intend to do that?

Did they know what the likely consequences were going to be? And did they realize they didn't have to do that? Nobody was holding a gun to their head. And if the answer is yes to those, for at least the American legal system, you have culpability, you have responsibility, and it is fine to convict you. And none of it asks, where did that person's intent come from? And for the legal system, free will is you knew you were doing it, and you knew what the likely outcome was going to be, and you knew you didn't have to do it there were alternatives and that's a pathetically misguided medieval notion of the gears the nuts and bolts of how we make decisions and how we become who we are like there's another range in which there is this

hugely seductive magnet that pulls people towards believing they're seeing free will, which is that most people are willing to admit, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's some stuff we had no control over. You had no control over how tall you are or what your digit memory span is like, or if you're a sprinter or a marathon runner or neither and if you have perfect pitch and what color your eyes are yeah yeah there's all this stuff that we were handed yeah that's biology that you were gifted or cursed with or whatever yeah you had no control over that but then what do you do with it do you show tenacity do you show self-discipline when the going gets tough do you get going or are you in someone who is gifted in all these ways and then you're self-indulgent and you squander

all of it and it is this massively false dichotomy that there are attributes that you were given which are biological over which you had no control and what you then do with them is made of the stuff that's made out of magic. And this dichotomy is utterly false, because what you do with your opportunities, whether you show self-control or self-indulgence, whether you have emotional regulation, whether you're good at long-term planning, whether you always miss the opportunity to do something, or if you never miss the opportunity to miss an opportunity. In all those cases, that's anchored in neurobiology as well, a part of the brain called the frontal cortex, which has a hell of a lot to do with whether at junctures in life, you're going

to make the right decision in the face of a more tempting alternative. And the frontal cortex and how it became what it is in your brain is completely the outcome of one second before and a million years before as well. It's made of the same biology. It's not a separate domain. and there's this temptation that for people an awful lot of them what free will is is oh you're given these attributes what you choose to do with it and because that's inspiring as hell you look at somebody who grew up under awful circumstances and yet somehow they surmounted it with incredible self-discipline and it's moving and it's inspirational and it's wonderful and all of that. But all that happened is they lucked out that that part of their brain happened to be good at what was needed to beat enormous odds against them and pull this off.

It's the same biology. It's brain yuck and cells and molecules. And it's the exact same thing. And all you have to do to appreciate it is look at a finding that is just astonishing in terms of the frontal cortex makes you say, don't do it. Don't do it. I know it's tempting. Don't do it. Hold out. You're not going to regret it. This is going to be great if you can just show some self-discipline. You take five-year-olds and the socioeconomic status of their parents is already a significant predictor of how well their frontal cortex works, how thick the layers are of it, its metabolic rate, and what direction does that correlation go? No surprise. If you are born into poverty, by age five, on the average, you're going to have elevated stress hormone levels compared to everyone else. By age five, those stress hormones have a hell of a lot

to do with how your frontal cortex develops. And at age five, you were already paying the frontal cortical price of having chosen the wrong family to have gotten born into because it is more stressful and adverse to be raised in poverty than not. And your frontal cortex is already paying the price for it. And already at five years of age, the socioeconomic status of one's parents is already a predictor of how well your frontal cortex does the harder thing when it's the right thing to do. Whoa, that's just free will. That's just Calvinistic gumption and backbone. It's the same biology and environment and the same. Some of us had much better luck than others, and there's nothing to it more or less than that. What are the implications for morality of this view? Well, this is where

things get fairly contentious because this is where I leave far behind what would be viewed as sort of a progressive, liberal, incremental sort of approach, which is one of edge cases. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In general, we believe there's free will, but keep in mind, some people have less free will than other people, or keep in mind that in some circumstances, we all have less free will than normal. And yeah, just keep in mind those when you're making, no. If there's no free will, blame and punishment make no sense whatsoever. Praise and reward make no sense whatsoever. Nobody has earned anything. Nobody is entitled to anything. Nobody's needs deserve more consideration than anyone else's. And just as minor side shows, the criminal justice system makes no sense intellectually or morally,

and just as much so with the mirror, meritocracies make no sense intellectually or morally. And we currently run the world where we think it is okay to treat some people much better than average because the things they had nothing to do with to treat some people much better than average because the things they had nothing to do with and other people much worse than average likewise and not only do we that do that but then we slather them with hypocrisy about how this is a just world and people get what they have earned and you have to have an unrecognizably different world, and I recognize that. If one is going to accept none of us are entitled to better treatment than anybody else, and hating somebody makes as little sense as hating a virus that's good at getting into your lungs. Because none of that makes sense within a standpoint of we are just biological machines that have arrived at this moment.

Why can't someone say that rather than precluding moral responsibility, that that's actually the starting point? So namely, look, we have a variety of influences over our decisions and our life outcomes. and our life outcomes. But if someone, let's say Alice, Alice grew up in a neighborhood that's drug-ridden, all of her parents did, her two parents did drugs, all of her siblings did drugs, and everyone she knows, and they sell it, and so on.

Yet she comes out of this not wanting to do so or escaping that. With all the factors against her, then I would say she deserves much more praise than the average person who doesn't do drugs. And conversely, if Bob grew up in a white-collar neighborhood with white-collar parents and he did something fairly benign like steal a loaf of bread, the proverbial loaf of bread, the cliche, then that person deserves much more scorn than if Alice was to do so. But there's no deserve. And this is back where it's so emotionally appealing to look at Alice and say, there's hope for the world.

And that's so inspirational. And you so want to reward her for that. And to look at Bob, who's this self-indulgent creep. But once again, it is not by chance that they became who they are. Okay, here's a way of stating that. Like, you sit there and you're trying to make sense of some awful appalling act that somebody carried out. And it happens that six months ago, they had a car accident that destroyed their frontal cortex and massive neurological damage there. And they've had no ability to

regulate their emotions and impulses since then. And what most people are willing to say is, well, yeah, that's kind of, there's something involitional going on. There's some sort of organic problem. And that's relatively easy for us because what made him who he is, most importantly, one singular catastrophic event that wiped out his frontal cortex. person who may have just done something appalling and where'd that come from? And what becomes the challenge is it's a thousand, it's a hundred thousand nearly microscopic little silk threads of things that went on in the past that made this person who they are. And it is so much easier to see the attribution of a singular unsubtle event because it's really hard to identify all these subtle. What do you mean your mother's nutrient levels in her bloodstream back when you were a fetus is going to have something to do with how well you stick to a diet 50 years? That has something to do with it. Whether your ancestors were collectivist or individualist cultures has something to do with who you feel responsible for

in society. Yeah, that's why it is so tough because whatever went on with Alice and whatever went on with Bob, absent some really dramatic car accidents. It was a gazillion little threads of biology environment that went on before. And it's really hard to see them because it's complicated science. And a lot of them we haven't discovered yet, but we know the shape of them. And what mostly is hard to believe is take a zillion of those little threads and combine them together and you have as deterministic of a cable as is provided by like a singular like sledgehammer to somebody's forehead when would you say that someone is accountable for their actions well once again showing i'm out in lunatic fringe here. Nobody is accountable for their actions.

There is no earned. There is no deserve. And none of us are justified in having any sense of that when we judge somebody else or when we personally feel entitled to something. Okay, that's great. That's totally ridiculous and impossible to imagine the world running on that. And what I at least like say over and over in my soapbox is, yeah, this seems unimaginable, but we've managed to do bits and pieces of precisely this, subtracting responsibility out of a scenario. of a scenario. We've done it over and over and over again, historically, in our own lifetimes, all of that. And each time we've done that, not only hasn't the roof caved in on society, it's become a much more humane place. We figured out at some point that destructive lightning storms that wipe out everybody's crops, they can't be caused by the old woman with no teeth living at the edge of the village who doesn't talk to anybody. People can't do witchcraft and control the weather, and it's not okay to burn them at

the stake at that point. Oh, we subtracted responsibility for weather out of the realm of human volition. And it's like a good thing we don't burn people at the stake anymore. It's a good thing we think that mothers did not cause their child schizophrenia because the mothers had this psychodynamic Freudian toxic view of hating their child. It's a much better world that we figured out. No, it's actually a neurogenetic disorder. It's a much better world that some people can accept that, like, have crappy luck, and you wind up with one variant of a gene that codes for a hormone receptor in your hypothalamus, and no matter what you're going to do, you are going to be morbidly obese because your brain cannot detect a satiation signal.

And it is not because you are self-indulgent and have no self-discipline. It is not because unconsciously you hate yourself. There's something screwy with the satiation plumbing there. And once you were able to subtract that out, and when you do these studies, implicit biases and such, the only implicit bias that is increasing in intensity in society over the last 20 years is bias against obesity, weight biases. You get rid of that because you figure out something about the nuts and bolts of metabolism and how the brain reward system works and, whoa, subtract that out and that's going to be a much better world. It's a much better world that we figured out somewhere along the way that, oh, some kids

have a screwy cortical layer thing going on in their cortex. And as a result, it's a very hard thing to tell the difference between a lowercase b and a lowercase p and they have trouble learning to read and they've got dyslexia and not only is this a good thing to figure it out because now there's ways to better teach somebody when they're dealing with something like this but you're not raising them to think that they're lazy and unmotivated and you're not raising them in a society that thinks that they were lazy and unmotivated. Oh, it's screwed up plumbing. It's screwed up engineering. And every time we've done that for centuries and centuries, every time we realize, oh, that's not a realm of moral turptitude.

That's a realm of screwy biology. Every time we have done that, the world becomes a more humane place. It becomes a better place. So yeah, it's totally unimaginable that we could function day to day thinking nobody has earned anything. Nobody has deserved anything. I am no more special than anybody else. Oh my God, I can manage that 1% of the time on a good day because it's really hard. And people do things and I feel pissed off or somebody says, you know, that's a lovely shirt you're wearing. And for a brief second, I feel like I'm a better human than average. And yeah, I can't do it all the time, but we have to recognize that nonetheless, we can change our mindsets in those ways,

because we've done so dramatically over and over again. And every time we do, the world becomes a better place. To be clear to you and to people watching, I am not a believer in free will, but I'm also not a believer in not free will. I think it's extremely complex. And the more I look into it, the less certain I am in any direction. So you're not irritating me at all when you say, like, I irritate people with these claims. I don't care. It's all fun, and I love contending with these thoughts. you see just how unconvincing that is. I sort of spend a lot of time with public defenders trying to teach juries about the brain, and yeah, how long somebody is going to spend in prison winds up revolving around this stuff,

and people don't like this argument. There are a litany of unconscious motivations that we have almost no access to, if any, that influence our decisions of what we think is a rational deliberation. So if one was to turn that onto you and say, hey, you say you don't believe in free will because you've come to this conclusion with an analytic investigation of the quote-unquote evidence, but rather what's lurking behind is something else. But rather, what's lurking behind is something else.

Maybe it was 30 years ago you ate Cheerios instead of Corn Flakes. Or because there's this want inside you for compassion for the dispossessed, and you see this view of free will can hopefully lend some credence to that, and this distaste for people who blame. So what if someone was to say well how do you know like according to your own theory or your own statements your own thesis our decisions aren't come about with clinical deductions but rather with these post-hoc rationalizations and sort of apropos of that i should should say, counter to what you said, I did not come to this stance analytically. I was 14 when I decided there was no free will. It was a somewhat like adolescent angsty period for me in a sort of particular domain that was causing me a lot of distress and seemed to have all sorts of utterly contradictory things about the nature of how stuff worked. And literally one night I woke up at two in the morning and I said, oh, I get it.

There's no God. And there's no free will. And there's no purpose to the universe. It's a huge, empty, indifferent universe out there. And that was like what I have felt and thought ever since. And all that sort of I did in my training thereafter was, okay, let's learn the nuts and bolts about this. Let's look at primate behavior from the standpoint of evolution and physiological ecology. Let's look at human behavior from the standpoint of hormones and

genes and neurons. All I've been doing is filling in the pieces ever since. And, you know, you ask a very reasonable question, which is like, do I have enough evidence yet to reach this extreme of a conclusion? And at this point, becoming a total pain in the butt, even more so, like if it was 500 years ago and a scientist came in and said, wow, I just noticed I met this guy who had his head bashed in by somebody's like ax or something and his behavior changed afterward. And I have a theory that the thing up in here has something to do with behavior. Okay. And I'm going to call it neuroscience.

You know, it's baby steps. At this point, we know enough. We know that for every increased bit of adversity that a child is exposed to, and there's formal scales that can quantify this, for every increased incidence of sexual abuse, psychological abuse, physical abuse, family member incarcerated, family member with a mental illness, etc., etc., for every increased step, there's an approximate 35% increased likelihood that this person is going to commit antisocial violence by the time they're 25 years old. You look at that, you know enough. You look at the fact that if you were born into poverty in my swell, terrific country,

there's about a 95% chance that you will still be in poverty as an adult. will still be in poverty as an adult. You look at these circumstances and we know enough about that this is a world that is not working justly. And this is a world in which the notion of responsibility makes no sense whatsoever. And thus at this stage, what I say to people who are believing in free will is you were arguing that there exists this thing called free will. The onus is on you by now. Go and prove it. Show me the mechanisms by which behavior emerges that is independent of everything we know about the brain down to the subatomic level. Show me how that works. The onus is on you at this point, because by now it's not 500 years ago when I'm going to call this neuroscience. By this point, we know enough about any of this. We

know enough about like why it is that the students I have in my classes at Stanford University wound up being there and why it is two miles away in the county prison. The 20-year-olds in there wound up in the way they are. And yeah, there's Alice's and Bob's, and there winds up being explanations for the exceptions. And the exceptions are not due to magic. The exceptions are due to the same nuts and bolts sort of mechanisms going on there. And at this point, I think we know enough

that the onus is on somebody saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Somehow, every now and then, at really important moments, all this stuff stops working and something else magical happens. And we can treat you way different from how we treat everybody else based on that. We can lock you up forever or we can give you a salary that's a lot bigger than everybody else. Or we could convince you you are a morally better human than others. And yeah, go and show me how that damn thing works by now, because we sure know how it doesn't work. Again, this sounds like it depends on the definition of free will. So there are compatibilist definitions that would say that, hey, by you saying that there is no room, like we're just squeezing out, show me where it comes in.

It excludes the compatibilist definition of, hey, it doesn't matter. It could be determined. You could still have determinism and free will. So it doesn't sound like a scientific question, determining which definition of free will is the correct one. So what if someone was to ask you, how do you know that the definition of free will you're using is the one that we should be using? Because you take the pieces apart of the compatibilists who say, here's how you go from a world made of atoms and neurons, and here's how stuff can happen that is completely independent of that at times.

And you look closely at every one of those mechanisms, and it's based on nonsense. Let me give you one example. Chaoticism. Chaoticism is totally cool. Butterfly effects, strange attractors, all of that. And what that tells you is certain domains of the universe work in ways that are intrinsically unpredictable. That is not, we don't know enough yet. By their very nature, it is unknowable.

It is unpredictable. Cellular automata, you know, there's a whole universe of knowledge about that. And it's totally interesting and cool. interesting and cool. And it's not just because sometimes it turns out that all the interesting stuff out there has chaoticism going on, whether it's societies or individuals or individual cells and stuff. But there's a whole school of compatibilists who say, aha, this is where you get free will from. Chaoticism is the basis of free will. And you look at the argument that they make, and there's a fundamental error that they make every single time which is they say in this domain it's an undeterministic world and that's the building block for free will amid what is over one over all of deterministic

they make the same mistake they confuse something that is unpredictable with being undetermined. And every single one of the arguments for free will coming from chaoticism eventually decides that unpredictability equals this is a system that can act in an uncaused way. Or you look at the people who look at quantum indeterminacy and they say, aha, and like, I'm not a physicist, but aligning with what I take as the majority of physicists, you say, really, quantum indeterminacy is for real. The Copenhagen school is for real. And they say, aha, the fact that there is indeterminacy on the subatomic level, that is where free will comes from. And you look closely at how they explain this occurs, and it's gibberish every time. Because either it depends on subatomic effects bubbling up to a level where it affects

what hundreds and millions of neurons do, and it can't work that way. Or if it could work that way, it's a mechanism for randomness of behavior. It's not a mechanism for like the moral fibers and principles you will take to your death. It's for randomness. And the only models they have for how you could take the randomness of quantum indeterminacy, if it happened to bubble up to the surface and get free will from it, requires all sorts of ways in which, and here's the word that always comes in at this point, a way to harness, harness the indeterminacy at your large emergent macro levels and make it work to your advantage. And it doesn't work that way either. And every single person compatibilist out there saying, oh, you know, the fundamental indeterminacy of the universe, blah, blah, blah, it doesn't bubble up that much. And if it did, it would just make randomness.

And you've just somehow said you can have a thought now and then on your big emergent macro level. And as a result, like the spin of your subatomic particles are going in a different direction. And as a result, you ask for chocolate ice cream instead of vanilla. It's gibberish. ask for chocolate ice cream instead of vanilla it's gibberish and once again the onus show me how you're like indeterministic gibberish get actually turned into a hundred million neurons in this part of the brain working differently and at that moment you choose chocolate or show me how the fact that there's unpredictability to chaotic systems, but there isn't indeterminacy to them.

Show me still how that turns out to explain how Alice turned out to be different from everyone else she grew up with. And yeah, I give up at that point. You win, but show me, prove it to me. It's not up to me anymore to prove that there's mechanisms and there's gears underneath the surface there's someone named scott aronson who says it's a large mistake that is being made in these free will debates that something is either random or it's determined

because you can have something that's indetermined but not random so random means that you have a known probability distribution that's the technical definition but's also, I'm sure you've heard this famous math problem called P versus NP. It's gained some traction recently. So there are complexity classes like polynomial time, solvable and polynomial time for P, and then non-deterministic polynomial time for NP. But then there are a vast amount of others like X time, and then there's BPP, and then QPP, and so on. So BPP stands for bounded error probabilistic polynomial time. And Scott would say, look, that's the one where there are known random distributions. And then also NP of non-deterministic time. And I know this is just jargon, but the point is that it's a large unsolved problem in the computer science literature if QPP lies in BPP or BPP lies in QPP. So in other words, we don't know if every situation that's indeterminate has a known

probability distribution to it. And if there isn't, like it's a large unknown problem if there isn't that could be a route for free will so what if someone says that there were conflating indeterminacy with randomness okay i would say the same thing again um go get that and i should note i don't understand a word of what you said in the last three minutes because like i'm not that that's i'm completely clueless there um but it's the same challenge show me how p versus np problems and whether some things are unsoluble and whether you know kurt goddell's was left-handed or right-handed and what happened to somebody's cat you know show me how that determines somebody's moral decisions. Show me. Show me, like, in my world, what we understand are things like when threats of unemployment go up among blue-collar workers, rates of spousal abuse double to triple, reliably.

double to triple reliably. Show me that when you have doctors that have gone without sleep, if they are white, the more hours they've gone without sleep, the more implicit racial bias they show. Show me any one of those things. Show me grow up pickled in alcohol because your mother was addicted to it while you were fetus and you have fetal alcohol syndrome and show me a mechanism that explains how you are overwhelmingly likely to wind up cognitively impaired, etc., etc. Like, okay, show me how math gets us there and show me how that, you know, violates all the principles that we know about the biological mechanisms by which things work. It's up to those people at that point to prove it. wanting there to be no free will. I just want to bring up what I think the audience may be thinking. So what if someone says, how do we know? All that's what's been outlined are what I'm sure you've heard many times, like these are influences, this quote-unquote word influences,

it says 99, like even in these studies said 95% chance of so-and-so, not 100. So how does one know that these factors determine you? And then also, I'll throw something else out for an exploration later. When someone says, yeah, but show me, show me this. See, I could imagine that in the 1800s, someone could say, there is such a thing as actual indeterminacy. There is such a thing as in principle randomness. But then someone would be like, no, no, no, show me. Like every single thing we know is because we lack precision in our experiments. We're Laplacians. If we knew the position and the velocity exactly, we could predict everything. And every single time, every single time in science, when we feel like we've

had an all-encompassing model, there has then been a large model shift where we say, look, show me 99.99% of the evidence says so-and-so. Yeah, but 99.99% of the evidence in the 1800s said everything was determined. And then it was just a little bit. We could solve that little bit, that 1% extra. That 1% extra turns out to be Pandora's box that opens up an extra 1000% of unknowns. So that the whole show me the evidence response should be rather than show me the evidence like, okay, I don't know of the evidence. Response should be, rather than show me the evidence, like, okay, I don't know of any evidence. I'm going to shrug my shoulders and say, hey, I have good reasons to

believe in the lack of free will, but I also know that my current understanding is incomplete, and so I don't put my stake in the ground so staunchly. Okay, that's a large paragraph for exploration later, but the first question was, how do we know? How do we know that those factors you had mentioned are ones that fully determine us rather than influence us? Well, we're back to whether I'm allowed to say at this point. And professor, I don't mean to be disrespectful at all. I hope you're not taking this on. No, not in the slightest. Great.

You know, this is where I come back with the, okay, the onus is on you. And I've, I've been hammering at that for the last 15 minutes. Um, yeah, if you're a scientist, you talk in probabilities. Absolutely. You do not say this is how the world works. You say, this is our current understanding of it. And you could look at trajectories of that. And yes, all of that is true, but you could begin to imagine where influences stop being influences after a while. Let me give you an example of this. Okay. So there's a gene. It's got something to do with brain chemistry, this neurotransmitter serotonin. This gene comes in a couple of different flavors. And if you have flavor A, the bad version of this gene, that's about a 5% increased likelihood of you growing up to have antisocial violence. That's an influence. That's not a very big influence. That's not very interesting in and of itself. Like, ooh, let's do some genetic determinacy-based. Yeah, that's minor. Add in a second domain of knowledge. Now let's look at developmental psychology. Have that variant of

the gene and grow up subject to childhood abuse, and you've got about a 30-fold increase in your likelihood of showing antisocial violence as an adult, and there's about 40% predictability. Okay, that's a big jump. That's still, okay, now let's bring in the sociologists. Grow up in a neighborhood that has high levels of inequality and crime and having this gene variant now synergistically interacts with that. And you're up to about 75% predictability. Now bring in an environmental toxicologist who looks at the lead levels in the drinking water because lead has something to do with frontal cortical development and put in some knowledge about that. And you're up to about 85%. and put in some knowledge about that, and you're up to about 85%. And I think what people can see at that point is like, okay, let's all meet back again in three weeks and see what we've learned

during that time. And during that time, there's going to be 10,000 new science papers published. And all we're doing is saying, okay, A is influential. A and B, you have more predictability, A, B, and C. And at some point, if you're in the range of like 95% predictability, yeah, you're still just seeing influences. I haven't proven the point, but show me how in hell it is moral to run a world deciding that all 100% of those cases have deserved their punishment, have deserved their negligence, have deserved to have their needs considered less than other people, when you could explain 95% of the variability with nuts and bolts luck. you know, the onus stops being about proving,

explain to me how and how you could tolerate a world that could explain 95% of the variability of who shows antisocial violence as an adult and operate a world in which you are going to hold 99% of the people responsible. Like what kind of world is that? What kind of world are you like leaving if that's like supposedly a moral way to use knowledge? oh, this person just did this such appalling thing. And we could not imagine a mindset in which we would say, we have no more grounds for hating that person than we do for hating an earthquake. And yeah, we've got to protect society from them, but they had no responsibility whatsoever for that.

I can't imagine a world like that. And here's a way to think about it. If it was 500 years ago, probably most people listening to this in factories to the point that they're worked to death. And it's okay if somebody has a beast of burden and they're being obstreperous that day, it's okay for them to beat them to death because animals don't have that. And that would have seemed intuitively obvious. And to an awful lot of people, it would have seemed intuitively obvious that some people are meant for slavery. They're simply unable to take care of themselves. And this is in fact charitable of you to bring them in as a slave and feed them now and then. And here we are 500 years later, and it is intuitively obvious that none of that stuff is okay. And child labor and animal beating and slavery, and it's intuitively obvious to us by now that saying something like some people are meant to

be slaves makes no sense at all. And it's intuitively obvious, say in my age group, that some kids have trouble learning to read because there's cortical malformations in the cortex. And this is something called dyslexia. When I was a kid, it was intuitively obvious that that kid in the same classroom as me who was not learning to read was just kind of lazy. They just don't pay attention. And it was intuitively obvious to me then, and it's no longer. It was intuitively obvious to me then, and it's no longer. And whatever is intuitively obvious, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is a realm in which nonetheless, people need to be held responsible for their actions.

Five years from now, you're not going to think that way, or your grandkids are not going to think that way. And all you are is a byproduct of your place and time and work to not be crippled by that fact. So it seems again, like you mentioned, it seems intuitively obvious that child labor is wrong and slavery is wrong and Auschwitz was wrong. Are you suggesting that that's merely a product of our time and culture and they're not objectively wrong? That, hey, if it was to change a little bit from now then that's also fine because whatever's our moral intuitions at the time well yeah it happens to be that the moral arc in the west since the enlightenment and i sure am not somebody to

overemphasize how glorious the enlightenment is for like human progress and decide that western european culture is the root of everything good that has happened how glorious the enlightenment is for human progress, and decide that Western European culture is the root of everything good that has happened. People like Steven Pinker have argued that in books of his, like The Better Angels of Our Nature, all of that. But nonetheless, there is a trajectory of who we consider to be an us has been expanding for centuries, us has been expanding for centuries, whose needs we consider to be worth paying attention to, who deserves our care and protection. And, you know, we all differ as to how much we extend that umbrella to somebody who is homeless, somebody who is mentally ill, somebody who's on the other side of the planet, whose lifestyle we can't understand in the slightest, somebody who looks different from us, speaks different, prays different, loves different,

eats different, smells different. But nonetheless, what we see is a trajectory over centuries, like the Geneva Convention and rules of warfare could not have been invented in the 18th century. Doctors without borders, Animal Protection League, things of that sort. So at least until we have a very, very different world and a pretty appalling one in the future for us, at least what we could see is the trajectory has been moving in the direction of expanding this umbrella of whose us-ness counts enough that their needs count, and translated into my world, expanding where we are just going to have to adjust what seems morally intuitively obvious to us over and over again for us to say,

oh, and I had no idea, they're not responsible for that either. The fact of a trajectory that's fairly consistent doesn't imply the correctness of that trajectory. Oh, absolutely not. If historically there was an oscillation where every 300 years we oscillated between societies that thought slavery was okay and the Holocaust-like events were okay, and then ones that despised them with contempt and so on, would you then be arguing for, well, there's a relativism there, there's a subjective nature to it, and we just happen to be in one of those, in the trough or the crest?

Absolutely. Maybe we're on the uphill swing, and of course my view is we've got a hell of a ways to go. But yeah, nonetheless, with what we got at the moment moment make a good argument for me why it is okay to work children to death in textile factories um yeah relativism contextual moral and the world will be unrecognizably different all of that, the trajectory we have to work with at this point virtually guarantees that within our lifetime, things we've been willing to treat people poorly for because we felt they were responsible and things we were willing to treat people better

than average for because we thought they had earned it. We're not going to think that way anymore, because we think differently about sexual orientation and sexual identity. And like, it's not that long ago that people thought very differently. So let me be radical this time. In the book Determined, which again is in the description, you can see it on screen, the book cover right now, And I recommend that you read this book. Okay. Thank you. So in this book, there seems to be an acceptance of the schema of turtles all the way down. You say, someone says, I decided to go to the gym. And you say, yeah, but how did you decide to go to the gym? Or what were the factors that brought you there? And then you could just repeat this over and over but there's also an acceptance of the turtles all the way down of this is just how the world is that there is no bottom turtle so why can't the person just be something like the physicist where the physicist would say

i'm sure you've heard this holography business where there's something that happens in the bulk like in the center but then there's something that happens at the boundary at infinity okay so i'm sure you've heard this Whether or not this is comprehensible to anyone, it doesn't matter. The point is you've heard that somehow something that happens at infinity can influence what happened now. So why can't someone say, look, again, I'm being super radical here, that the person could say, hey, why can't my feelings of free will, and you say, well, where did that one come from? And I say, that came from another feeling of free will and you say well where did that one come from and i say that came from another feeling of free will down here and you say yeah but where did that one come from

and so on and so on why can't it be yeah yeah but we're already accepting turtles all the way down so my free will goes all the way down and it's it happens at the boundary at infinity because long before we get to infinity at some, the turtle is one having to do with blood flow in the placenta when you were a fetus. At some point, the turtle is something about epigenetic modifications of your genes. At some point, the, well, yeah, this was my showing free will with that also. And that was free will with that also. And at some point, we've left behind the realm where one can sort of invoke that.

And that is a very radical suggestion on your part and very counter to what most of the free will people do. They don't say, Oh my God, turtles all the way down. You know, the only way you're saying that is that that goes on infinitely. What about the big bang? What if that's when free will come in no very few of them are saying that what they're saying instead is somewhere a couple of turtles down there's a

turtle that could float in the air magically they're not saying there's something with like the recursive property of like turtles all the way, wait, are we talking about infinities now? No. They're saying a turtle can float in the air. At some point, a neuron could do something just because it wanted to do that. And the turtle is floating. What I think is happening in many of these discussions, and I'm sure you felt this when you were debating Daniel Dennett

or maybe some other people, is that lurking under this whole whether or not you have free will question is a what is you question. Yeah. Yes, right. Okay, so professor, who are you? Like what defines you? That one is totally challenging. And it speaks to the most appealing, most intuitive versions of it, which is that, yeah, yeah, there. There is the most radical sort of, you know, dualism going on there imaginable that there is a me that's in your brain but not of it. And like when the going gets tough, that's the part that's in charge. It's incredibly difficult to simultaneously say, yes, there has emerged from all of that this thing this conscious awareness of this thing i call me and at the same time like i know about neurotransmitters at the same time we are not only biological machines but we are biological machines that can know that we are

biological machines and understand where emotions come from and things of that sort so that can know that we are biological machines and understand where emotions come from and things of that sort. So that, you know, you've got to deal on both levels. Like I am vastly in love with my wife and I know at the same time, it's got something to do with what variants of like oxytocin receptors I had in my brain and olfactory receptors and my upbringing, all of that. And ooh, does that destroy the feelings of the former? Because it has a mechanism, not in the slightest. You like, you know, some gazelle does something amazing and it leaps 20 feet in the air. And like a biomechanics nerd could explain exactly which fulcrum was responsible for doing that. And you could reduce them to a bunch of equations.

And it is no less amazing to see that a gazelle can do that. Like we could function on multiple levels. And we have to recognize that our me-ness is merely the end product of all that stuff comes before. But nonetheless, that me can still feel the mechanistic phenomenon of pain, so much so that it feels real. And we have to function on both levels. But again, that's not easy. We're the only species that knows our

machineness not only do we know our own mortality we know that there's gears underneath this sounds like you're not a dualist oh no i am not so does that mean you're a modest or non-dualist or oh god you you've forced me in terrain where, the semantics have left me way behind. That's out of my pay grade to choose that. I just don't think there's a me that's not made out of biological, squishy, yucky stuff. Okay. Well, the reason I say that is that there's a mathematician named Raymond Smullion, an incredibly playful mathematician. He died, unfortunately, about 10,

20 years ago or so. I'll get the exact date and put it on screen. But anyway, he had this dialogue between a man and God, and it was just his own prose. And it was a man saying to God, arguing, why did you give me free will? Why did you make me responsible? Like, that makes you responsible, God, because you put this onus on me. And then God was saying, well, do you want me to take away your free will? You may go raping and pillaging. And then the guy's like, well, if I do that, then aren't I now morally responsible for what I do in the future? Because I am understanding of that. So I'm upset with you for even giving me this choice, God. And they go on and on and on. Toward the end, God says to the man, you say you're determined. Like they have this argument about whether or not free will exists and what is it. God says to the man, you say you're determined, like they have this argument about whether or

not free will exists and what is it. God says to the man, you say you're determined by the laws of physics as if you're this creature pushing up this rock of the laws of physics, but the laws of physics are just so much more larger than you, you can't, and so it always wins. But in order for you to say that, you would have to say what separates you from the rock. So you would have to draw a distinction between you and the laws of physics. The reason I bring this up is this has to do with identity.

So if we're not able to say what the we is that's separate, this is why I used the word modest earlier, the we is that's separate from the laws of physics, then how can we even say that the laws of physics determine us when there is no difference

between us and the laws of physics, then how can we even say that the laws of physics determine us when there is no difference between us and the laws of physics? Whoa. Well, that's a complicated question. Um, I think, oh, you know,

this is, this is not just sleight of hand, but I think somewhere in there, you're, uh, you you're gonna have to subtract god out of this picture um i mean that that that's assume a square wheel as sort of a starting point there um i think that makes for a lot of inherent contradictions which were the type swirling around in my head back when I was 14. I think invoking that, even invoking a God of limited means, God can do anything that is doable. God can't make a boulder that's too heavy for God to pick up. God can't sin, all of that. You know, even within that framework of sort of Aquinas,

still, if you got God in there, it's not going to work. Let's forget about God because the dialogue wasn't an argument for God. The dialogue was more like in Douglas Hofstadter where you have someone who's somewhat of a fool and then there's a wise person who knows more and is challenging the fool. It's something like that, so it doesn't make a difference if it was God or Goff. Okay, make that argument in a God-free way then, and let me see what I can do with it. Well, Goff is saying to you, like, hey, what separates you from the laws of physics? Like, if you're a monist, if you're not a dualist, unless you're a trialist, like a quadrupolist or something else, unless you're that, unless you go upward rather than downward, collapsing to monism or non-dualism, then what separates you from the laws of physics in order for you to say that you're even determined by them and not the same as them or an expression of them?

Maybe stated that way, yes, we're just an expression of them. Maybe stated that way, yes, we're just an expression of them. They play out on the level that causes emergence of properties that include things like consciousness, and I sure as hell can't, like, define it beyond that. So that gives you all sorts of properties that can't be described at the more reductive level. Sir, just quickly, even to use the term like take the laws of physics or take the neurotransmitters, the word take there implies the separation, which is what's being questioned here. So, it's begging the question. Yeah. Maybe another way, I may not be appreciating sort of the subtleties of sort of the philosophical difference, but at least strikes me that there maybe there is no difference we're just manifestations of the physics rather than separate entities that are determined by it oh well that's super interesting that that may just be my being a physics troglodyte that that may not have any insight into it at all, but I'm not seeing a difference there. I want to get into your other books, but while we're here, people talk about the readiness

potential. Can you just quickly talk about the different interpretations of the readiness potential, also what it is, and what do people think it means? Great. Totally fascinating, irritating neuroscience experiment, one of the most famous of all times, fascinating irritating neuroscience experiment one of the most famous of all times um done in the 1980s if you write around about the neurobiology of free will you're practically required by law to mention this study somewhere in the first few paragraphs it was a study done by a guy named benjamin libbett and i don't actually know if it was pronounced libby or, but Libet, uh, Benjamin Libet famously, famously what he did was he took a volunteer and sat him down at the table and said, here's a button, press the button whenever you feel like it. And we're putting this clock in front of you. It's

got like a three second sweep hand on it. So it's really easy to see sort of subunits of time. The second you make your conscious decision to press the button, tell me where the hand is on the clock. When did you reach this conscious intent? And we're going to wire up your arm muscles so we can tell when in fact you begin to move your muscles. And we find out that predictably about 200 milliseconds after you become aware of your intent, your muscles start contracting. So that makes wonderful sense. And we're also going to hook you up with a bunch of electrodes on your head, this being the 1980s, no such thing as brain imaging, but electroencephalography. And we're going to look at a part of the brain where we could recognize a waveform coming from there when it, those neurons, have committed to making your muscles do something.

When that part of the brain has decided. everybody is consistently about three-tenths of a second, 300 milliseconds before somebody first said they were consciously aware, I'm going to do it. 300 milliseconds before, that part of the brain had already committed to it. Your brain had decided before you were consciously aware. And what neuroimaging studies have done since then is shown five seconds before you could pick up the signal of that stick electrodes into individual neurons into people's brains you could pick it up to seven or eight seconds before in other words everyone said oh my god your brain has decided before you think you have decided free will is a total sham and people have been arguing about this like crazy for 40 years since is there a difference between intending to do something

and being aware that you intend to do something right is there a difference between free will and the ability nonetheless to veto that afterward with free won't? Is there a difference between an urge and a decision? Is there a difference between... And people have been fighting over it and it's incredibly interesting stuff. And once again, getting back to where I was at the beginning, I think that has absolutely squat to do with discussions about free will. Who cares if these neurons had this action potential pattern before you were consciously aware or not that you had this intent to do this?

How do you become the sort of person who had that intent and not just the sort of person who would decide at that moment to press that button? How do you become the sort of person who could go to university and could develop an interest in psychology and would the sort of person who could go to university and could develop an interest in psychology and would have sort of the right combination of extroversion and curiosity that you volunteer for one of these psych experiments? How do you get a frontal cortex

so that you would actually go at the time that you signed up for? How do you turn out to be the sort of person where you are not sitting there saying, oh, I'm smarter than these researchers. I'm just going to intentionally screw up their results by doing the opposite of what I think is going on. How do you turn out to be the person who would sincerely do that? How did you turn out to be the sort of person who, instead of doing the study, you walk in the room and you see they're all busy with that experiment and you steal the grad student's laptop and leave quickly where'd the intent come from and that's exactly where i say the most boring thing on earth is to argue about the difference between intent and awareness of intent and what's going on in those

milliseconds and yeah that's cool stuff that's wonderful people are still arguing about libit 40 years later people are still literally publishing paper same things like libid had his head up his rear like it's still contentious yeah go and argue about that it's got nothing to do with the free will argument why do you show up on time as a volunteer for that today start there. Do you have any idea of what the function of consciousness is? No. And I'm terrified about going anywhere near it. Like, once a decade, I force myself to read a review paper by the neurobiologist who were trying to understand consciousness. And what I find out each decade is, at least in my primitive view, they're no closer to explaining it

so I can exhale with relief and wait another decade before I read a review paper again. I don't want to go anywhere near it and once again, that's fine by me because it doesn't matter if that was a conscious intent or an unconscious one. Neither, in my view, tell us the remotest thing about free will. Would you say that qualia are real? To the extent that they could form a real imprint in how your brain works that it leaves a footprint that it leaves scar tissue that it leaves a transient ripple that something is different now in there than it would have been before yeah it's real in the same way that emotions are real in the same way that you know his sensory modalities are real yeah somebody sneezes in the other side of the room and there's like one synapse inevitably in your brain that just did something

as a result that it wouldn't have done otherwise so it's real in that regard whether it's interesting or consequential as a whole other matter but yeah all of this is you know built of those like fundamental building blocks how did your debate with daniel dennett go talking about consciousness and free will that we have to talk about daniel dennett well thank god we avoided consciousness and thank God we avoided theism because it would have been very boring because we're both like strident atheists. But it just struck with sort of free will issues. Well, not surprisingly, I thought he had logical flaws out the wazoo. And I think in lots of ways, what they were built around was he puts way too much faith in intuition. He says, when we choose to do something, it just feels so intuitively real that we chose to do it, that free will has to exist. real that we chose to do it, that free will has to exist. When you boil down what he says with a lot of words, that's kind of what he's saying. He's saying it's so intuitively obvious that our intuitions are correct and intuitions are terrible guides. They're awful litmus tests for

deciding how the world works and how the world should work. And when you look closely at his writing, what you see between the lines, and in some cases in the lines, is what you get when you really push a lot of these philosophical compatibilists against the wall. They're not really saying there is free will. They're saying, oh my God, it's going to be such a sucky, depressing world if people started believing that there wasn't free will. They're saying, oh my God, it's going to be such a sucky, depressing world if people started believing that there wasn't free will, that we really do have to believe there is. Dennett has said things like, would you want to live in a world in which murderers and rapists were just running around? Would you want to live in this Hobbesian sort of nightmare? I sure

wouldn't. There better be free will because it would be such a drag. And if there isn't, we still have to say there is. And then he says what I think is the most revealing thing. He's had this quote in a couple of his books and like YouTube lectures. He would say, would you want to live in a world like that? And then he says, would you want to live in a world where you really didn't deserve to get your prizes and your praise wow that's a serious problem for humanity dan there that oh no i can't feel great anymore about my privilege and and like a good fortune and such when you really look between the lines it's either because it would be so damn depressing and unnerving to say this is a world without free will that we're going to pretend that there is, or I am so psychologically invested in my tenured chair and all the other ways in which things have worked out well for me that I am resistant to it.

When you really push the incompatibilists um there's a lot of emotion driven the driving the irrationality are you sure you're not strawmanning the compatibilist or are you being like a bit facetious um actually i'm not because when they use words and Dennett has used this word, an argument, an incompatibilist philosophical stance, he says is deplorable. He uses that word. That is not the word of an objective thinker. That is a value-laden word. That is someone saying, don't say there's no free will because the impact you're going to have on people's morals is deplorable. We've left behind logic and thinking, let alone evidence-based science, way beyond that

if he's using a word like that. I agree that if Daniel said that as a dismissal of someone's arguments against free will, then that would be an ad hominem. That wouldn't be an actual rational argument. But maybe he was just saying that, but also gave some rational arguments. Because you can believe in something for unconscious motivations, like we talked about earlier, or even conscious motivations. But you could also say that they have some truth-making characteristics, and that's why I believe in it, so they can coincide. Oh, absolutely. But when you look at his logical argument, he's basically saying, intuition feels so real. Come on, doesn't it feel real to you? So, I know you're saying he's basically saying this. I don't mean to press you.

I'm so sorry, Professor. Like, please don't feel like I'm challenging you. So, when you say that the compatibilist basically says this, or Daniel Dennett basically says this, what is he actually saying? Can you recapitulate his argument or a compatibilist's definition of free will in such a way that they would agree with it? Because otherwise the criticism would be to you like, hey, look, you have this great book, great book, well-researched, but it's not contending with the actual philosophical literature. I'm a huge fan of yours professor for years for literal years show your critics right here now you understand their

definition of free will here it is critics i understand it well um when you look at the book actually well for starters i probably have about five more minutes before i need to get going so nothing like the hardest question you've asked. It's one reason why in the book I have quotes again and again and again, because I'm not a philosopher and I sure don't trust my interpretations. And I asked the reader to at that point say, is it making sense for me to say that they're suggesting this is how stuff works? I don't know, maybe I'm missing the point, but did they just say this? Yes, they did just say this. So at a lot of

points, I am not relying on myself to try to summarize paraphrase because I'm incapable of doing that competently. But when you take apart what someone like Dennett is saying, But when you take apart what someone like Dennett is saying, he is totally accepting of edge cases. He's saying, like, you shouldn't execute 10-year-olds who do terrible things. There's a maturational process. He's even willing to say words like the brain or the frontal cortex. Safi. He's willing to say stuff like that so that there's edge cases. If somebody has a massive brain damage, that's, yeah, let's talk about it. If somebody is mentally ill, yeah, he's willing

to recognize edge cases, but he says for most people, they mature into sufficient control over their intent, as evidenced by the power with which their intuitions align with that, then it's a fair world to hold them responsible for their actions. That's really all he's saying. Anytime he has a word intuition that comes into his writing, immediately rip up the three pages before and after because what he has just done i have to applaud you because i don't know how you train your dog to be silent when you clap when most of the time that just means come come boy come girl well as you can see that that was a transient effect anyway um okay sorry continue please you know because and i'm

not trying to sound snarky here well i am being snarky but i've like anytime he has the word intuition come into his writing pay no attention to the previous couple of pages because what he has just said is i've allowed myself to run on subjectivity here and to say that just because something feels intuitively real, I'm going to say it's real. Okay, I know you got to get going. So how about I just tell you some of the questions that I had that had nothing to do with free will and see if you have the time to answer them. Sure. Okay. In 2016, you published an article called Psychiatric Distress in Animals vs. Animal Models of Psychiatric Distress. This was in Nature

Neuroscience, by the way. Congratulations. Thanks. You mentioned that the realm of our uniqueness in psychiatric distress is shrinking. So the paper was in the direction of taking what occurs with us humans and then applying them to animals such as depression that is psychiatric conditions normally related to us to non-people so do you see the direction going the opposite where we can apply something in the psychological domain from animals to humans now i imagine this is difficult because we just don't have a synonym for freud of animals but if you could even imagine for a moment, what would that research even look like? Could that be conducted? Well, probably the best work out there is by people who would be called cognitive ethologists or cognitive neuroethologists who say is their starting point something that used to seem radically crazy. Yes, animals are thinking. Not only do they have feelings, which made no sense at all to seem radically crazy. Yes, animals are thinking. Not only do they have feelings,

which made no sense at all to Descartes and for like a lot of people since then, and they think as well and they reason and they reason with some of the same logical heuristics that we do. And thus they make some of the same logical mistakes that we do in ways that are incredibly revealing. And yeah, let's just decide some really

elegant experiments and some of the best, like most charming studies being done out there, being done by cognitive ethologists who can reveal, wow, this chimp understands what that other chimp knows and what that other chimp doesn't know. So studies like these are incredibly revealing and I think are great. Those show us a ton. In the realm of that particular paper, this was like a special issue they had on psychiatric models of psychiatric disorders in animals. And they asked me to sort of write an overview at the beginning. And I was saying, like, if you're like Joe Scientist being nice and objective in your

big lab coat, you will never say this is rat anxiety. This is anxiety-like behavior. This is an animal model for the human one. like behavior. This is an animal model for the human one. And my saying, when you really look at the features of it, these are not models. This is not anxiety like behavior. This is what anxiety is for a rat. This is not a rat who is crippled by it. This is not a model for an anxiety disorder. This is an anxiety disorder once you have the tools to translate it into rat from human. And the continuity is far, far more striking than the discontinuity. Yeah, we can feel anxious about global warming and what's going to happen to our

great grandkids and UV melanomas they're going to get. And a rat could simply worry about whether they're going to get a shock in the corner of that cage. But the building blocks of it are identical, and the means for manipulating it are identical. So my point there was the continuity is way more striking than the discontinuity. Since the 12 years or so since you published the Stanford lectures, which by the way, I just did a search by a sort by most popular on Stanford's YouTube channel, and you are second to Steve Jobs. I don't know if I've ever spoken to anyone who's second to Steve Jobs in any metric. Weren't we all second to Steve Jobs in some way or other? I hope we're not second to Steve Jobs when it comes to ignoring modern medicine and using alternative medicine instead. But

separate of that, well, that's nice to know. That's kind of cool. We can put aside the whole, you're not allowed to accept praise for the remainder of the next few minutes. But yeah, so congratulations on that. I'm congratulating myself that I'm speaking to you because I feel famous just by even speaking to you, like some osmosis effect. Okay, so my question is, since that's been published, I think it's about 12 years ago or so, what's been most surprising to you? Some new research result that's come out in what you've covered? Oh, bits and pieces. I actually i'm getting right i'm teaching the same class again this spring and like each iteration of it i don't know five percent of the material has changed since the

previous time um what's been what's challenged the field most like what's upended it the most okay let me think because that's a very good question um okay here's one people have gotten sophisticated enough to with any luck no longer be saying uh this is caused by genes let alone the even worse version of it is this gene causes this behavior this is a gene for intelligence this is a gene for alcoholism this is you know horrific people have instead gotten to the point of being able to say gene environment interactions change environment interactions in their sleep um and that's great until somebody lets loose some how or some scientist who scientists says they have found the gene for whatever. And that's usually some like goes, okay. So that is maybe been from 20 years to go to 10 years ago.

Most people at least remembering to say gene environment interactions rather than just genes do this. gene-environment interactions rather than just genes do this. I think what has most been challenging, at least in one domain, is, okay, so here are these genes that are relevant to schizophrenia. They're not causing schizophrenia. They're interaction with environment. Remember to say that and take your vegetables. Ooh, here's a bunch of genes that are relevant to antisocial behavior. They're modulatory. They're interactive. they're synergistic with environment all of that so hooray we're modern but more and more what you see is it's the same damn genes which is like this huge challenge there's there's this gene called disc disc one disrupted in schizophrenia one which shows you how insightful people were when they like named it we have no idea what in hell this does but it's disrupted in schizophrenia and that's statistically

reliable and disc one turns out to be disrupted also in in affect disorders and bipolar disorder and schizoaffective disorder and and it's an overlap of all these genes. So what the field is becoming very challenged by, there's the exact same mutation, which in some people give rise to ALS, amyotropic lateral sclerosis, and in other people gives rise to frontal temporal dementia. Like these genetic overlaps, it's not just the same gene, it's the same mutation in the same gene. So that's been enormously challenging in the last 10 years. How much the Venn diagrams of genetic influences and the overlap, how much more overlap there is than anybody.

Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're modern now. We're not looking for the gene for schizophrenia. We're looking for the 11D different genes for schizophrenia and their environmental interactions. Whoa, 93% of those 11D genes turn out to be implicated in bipolar disorder as well. turn out to be implicated in bipolar disorder as well. That's, like, that one is real tough and real challenging. And that's stuff that's emerging from where you can get massive databases of people's genomes and proteomes and epigenomes and all of that. And you've got so much data that you could see patterns that nobody can make any intuitive sense of because it's just too complicated. But one of the things that's apparent in it is like not just lots of genes and each one contributes only a smidgen to any given trait, but way overlaps in these networks far more than people used to think. So that's been a very challenging trend

in the last dozen years or so. Now, a question I have, if you have the time, I'll just state it and you can let me know if you have the time to answer. Okay, maybe good for a couple more minutes.

Yeah, maybe one last question. Man, what a career you've had, I'm sure you know. I don't need to say it to you, but what I'm curious about is what are you most proud of? Oh, I guess this is like, God help me for, uh, for using a term like this. Um, like this um the fact that all of these factoids and like i've carpet bagged into a lot of different disciplines over my time and and like a lot of factoids along the whole um but a coherent whole that kind of matters

and not just in an intellectual kind of way um but okay here's here's where like um like almost too sheepish to say the sentence. Like making people think there is no free will has something to do with social justice. It's not just about enzymes and neurons and childhood experience and sociological trends. Like you put all these pieces together and it explains a hell of a lot about human foibles and human suffering. And that's kind of cool to get a sense that, you know, imperatives come out of this. Here's why people habituate over time so that you're never satisfied. Here's the nuts and bolts of that. Here's the nuts and bolts of why it feels good to punish somebody, even if they didn't do anything. Here's the nuts and bolts about why we see attribution where there really isn't and why we like to act upon it. Like, pulling those pieces apart, like, that explains a lot of, like, human misery. So it's kind of cool that some of this stuff is relevant to that. Do you see that as committing the same error that Daniel was committing by saying,

like, look what a deplorable world it would be if we had no free will, whereas you're saying, no, look what an illusion or a Kaukainian world it would be if we did have a lack of free will and belief in it? I'm saying that, and anyone who would complain about that tell me why it would be a good world if we go back to burning people for being witches and deciding people with schizophrenia have been sleeping with satan like if you're going to say this is value laden for me to say this and has a lot of subjectivity argue the other side of it based on values then like tell me why this isn't a better

world that we don't believe in witches and demons anymore and all of the modern much subtler more masked versions of the same sort of belief systems and the same sort of justifications for acting upon that that somebody can be a better person than somebody else and thus deserves more consideration of their needs in life. Yeah, you're going to say this is based on subjectivity. Go argue for the validity of the opposite subjective view. Oh, gosh, I know you got to get going. But what I was saying is that, look, we could believe in free will because it has truth-making characteristics to believe in it or believe in not free will because, look, we could believe in free will because it has truth-making characteristics to believe in it, or believe in not free will because, look, there's something truthful about not free will. Or we can say, what are the implications of these views? I like the implications in this end better,

therefore I'm going to believe the premise that led me to that conclusion. And that's entirely different. That's basically what I'm saying. Yeah. And if you're saying, oh, it's just based on the subjectivity of, you like this outcome better, no wonder you're arguing for that. Yeah. Tell me saying, oh, it's just based on the subjectivity of you like this outcome better. No wonder you're arguing for that. Yeah. Tell me why, like slavery and witch burning and, you know, any other. Tell me why that's a better way for the world to be.

You want to bring it to that level. You're going to have to argue that that's a better world to say that kids who can't learn how to read because of dyslexia are actually lazy as hell and should grow up thinking about themselves that way thinking yeah that mothers of kids with autism caused it because they're cold and incapable of love refrigerator mother yeah you want to you want to push it to that go make the argument that that's a better world to be in um but yes, I am going to have to run out. All right. Thank you so much for spending a slew of your time and being so generous. I appreciate it, Professor. It's an honor to speak to you, and I hope to speak to you again. Thank you. Well, pleasure, and thank you for pushing back on stuff. This was fun. The podcast is now concluded.

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