#360 — We Really Don’t Have Free Will？
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Summary
In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, I speak with neuroscientist and author Robert Sapolsky about the concept of free will and his new book, "Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will," by which he argues that there is no such thing as a science of life without free will. In addition to being one of the only scientists who has fully accepted the implications of science as we know it on this topic, Robert is a professor of biology, neurology, and neurological sciences and neurosurgery at Stanford University, and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "Geniuses Grant." He is also the author of several works of non-fiction, including a memoir, a book, and most recently, "Deconstructed: The Science of a Life without Free Will" and a pamphlet on the subject of "free will" which he co-authored with his good friend and fellow scientist, Dr. Robert A. Shapiro. We discuss the limits of intuition, the emergence of consciousness, the primacy of luck, the consequences of physical beauty, the logic of reasoning, and other topics as always, as always on the topic of "Free Will". As always, if at any time you don't like the way you feel thinking about these things, if your thoughts on these things are driving you crazy, by all means pull the brakes, because you're going to want to hear the other side of the conversation, and let me know what it is you think about it! And if you're tired of it, or if it's driving you mad, then you want to get back to it, by listening to it again, then pull up a seat on the bus, because it's going to the bus. -- -- make sure to check out the bus -- it's a good one. -- and if you like it. -- -- by the end of the episode, you'll get a copy of "A Science of A Science without Free will" by Robert's excellent book, which is out now! -- by clicking here! -- if you do, you won't regret not having read the book yet? -- and it's good enough to be sure you'll agree that it's worth reading it? -- or at least you'll have the chance to do so? -- and you'll know that it'll be worth it, right? -- by all kinds of things you can do so because it'll make you feel better about it?
Transcript
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welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing
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okay well i wasn't going to have much of a housekeeping but um just before turning on the
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mic i learned that danny kahneman has died um what a mensch he was i didn't know him well i've
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really only hung out with him a few times we did i think one blog interview a long time ago i think
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2011 or so that's on my website somewhere and uh episode 150 of this podcast is audio from an event
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we did in new york at the beacon theater which i recall being a lot of fun danny was 90 today when
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he died so he would have been that would have been about five years ago he would have been 85
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just a beautiful mind and really good company again i did not know him well i have people close
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to me who were very close to him and obviously i'm quite sorry for their loss life is short even if
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you make it to 90 so let's use the time wisely and that's what i did earlier this week when i spoke
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with robert sapolsky robert is another extraordinary scientist he is the author of several works of
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non-fiction including a primate's memoir behave which was really a wonderful book and most recently
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determined a science of life without free will in addition to being one of the only scientists who has
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fully accepted the implications of science as we know it on this topic robert is a professor of biology
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neurology neurology and neurological sciences and neurosurgery at stanford university and the
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recipient of a macarthur foundation quote genius grant today we dig deep into the topic of free will
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we speak about the limits of intuition the views of dan dennett complexity and emergence so-called downward
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causation abstraction abstraction epigenetics predictability fatalism we discuss the work of
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benjamin labet or labet however that's pronounced neither of us knows the primacy of luck historical change
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and attitudes about free will the implications for ethics and criminal justice the psychological satisfaction
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of punishing bad people understanding evil punishment and reward as tools whether we have to give up on
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meritocracy the consequences of physical beauty the logic of reasoning and other topics as always on the subject
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of free will if at any time you don't like the way you feel thinking about these things if my conversation
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with robert feels like it is literally driving you crazy by all means pick another podcast today
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i have learned through experience that this topic really more than any other is destabilizing for some
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number of people some people appear vulnerable to having the notion of free will undermined in any way
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i can't say i understand that but my inbox proves to me that it's true so if you're one of these people
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or discover that you are over the course of this conversation by all means pull the brakes
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i am here with robert sapolsky robert thanks for joining me again well thanks for having me on so we
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attempted to record a conversation some months ago and our robot overlords were not kind to us and
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schedules being what they are we have taken this long to get back to it but um so you've had a proper
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book tour in the meantime and perhaps talked yourself to death on the topic of free will
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i'm going to drag you back to it because uh people want to hear us converge on that but um well this
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this one's going to be great because actually we we've reached the same conclusion we're the two people
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on earth who agree yes well i think that there might be something we disagree about here in terms of
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the you know how we live with the implications of what we agree about theoretically so that could be
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interesting to uncover but i'll remind people the book is determined a science of life without free
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will and it's a great book it's a very large book unlike the book i wrote on free will which is a
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effectively a long essay or a pamphlet uh you have written the proper multi-hundred page book and um
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parts of it really are laugh out loud funny it's really it's just it's a great read and you reveal
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a lot of relevant neuroscience or just a lot of neuroscience which in many cases may or may not
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be relevant i think we both agree that it's it's a pretty simple argument that would put one in doubt
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of of free will and not put one in doubt of just its existence but that it's even a coherent concept
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you know let's take it from the top and perhaps we can start with a with a definition of free will
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what what do you think you're denying the existence of in your book well my definition has been giving
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people apoplexy uh for these months because it's a very forget hard can't incompatibilist it's a very
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hard-assed stance which is show me a neuron show me a brain show me a person who has just done
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something produced a behavior and show that the exact same thing would have happened if everything
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about that neuron's history was different that that neuron had just acted free of history right
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right right and and this is in the philosophical literature there's there's a conception that is
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often derided as a belief in libertarian free will the the notion that one could have done otherwise
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if you just rewound the movie of your life to precisely the you know the the frame that you were in
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a few minutes ago the idea is that if you the conscious agent decided to think or feel or do
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otherwise you could have you could you could change the movie of your life and there are many people
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in philosophy who deny that that's the right notion of free will that's not a type of free will worth
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having uh and it's birthed this whole literature on compatibilism which you know i think you and i
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both feel that compatibilists like dennett simply change the topic do you remember my um analogy to
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atlantis that i hit dan with yes yeah i mean this may or may not fully cover it for you but it
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it sort of does for me i imagine so i i just i asked dan to imagine that we lived in a world where
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more or less everyone believed in the lost kingdom of atlantis and what i see compatibilists like dan
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doing is coming along saying you know don't worry atlantis is real it's just it just happens to be the
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island of sicily and then they go on to argue that sicily answers to most of the claims that
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people have made through the ages about atlantis now it's just obvious at a glance that this isn't
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quite true because much of what people have said about atlantis is really you know quite crazy and
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incompatible with any history of sicily i mean in particular they're they're enamored of the idea that
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there's a there was an advanced civilization that disappeared underwater right so people really are
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confused and the notion of libertarian free will while it is in fact indefensible as well you know
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you and i'll go on to discuss it really is what people feel they have most of the time they really
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they feel they have it they feel they can decide to do other than they did despite what you said about
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the the deterministic implications of neurons and they they think they could have done otherwise
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not due to randomness you know that's not what anyone feels is governing their conscious acts of
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willing and in addition to that they want to hold other people accountable for their behavior in a way
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that it isn't just a matter of because it's a good way to influence the future behavior of other people
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but because they really think people are the ultimate causes of how they behave so this has ethical
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implications and legal implications i mean what what has it been like for you to make your case
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since you published the book what collisions with people have you have become predictable and
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what you know what what arguments do you find the least persuasive the most frustrating what is it like
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to be out there um the argument that has been most ever present and crazy making is uh the one just
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based on intuition it just feels like it just feels like i'm exercising free will when i'm choosing to
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turn the light switch on i didn't need to do that i didn't have to do it i could have done a cartwheel
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in front of it instead and i chose are you telling me that's not free will just this intuitive sense
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of over and over seeing people who go through yes yes i understand genes there's genes we're made of
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cells we're made of atoms there's uh material basis to the universe going through all that but but in
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that moment where i'm making a decision it is just so palpably me me separate of all that brain yuck
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that there's a me there who's choosing and you know that's great i fully agree with your book except that
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it just doesn't feel like it feels when uh i'm making a decision i've i've found that to be the
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most uh sort of reliable people digging in their heels and i think that when you cut through what
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dan dennett is saying much of the time he is saying it just feels like it so let's talk about sicily
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yeah he's saying that and he's also saying that it is politically and socially dangerous to push
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this argument too far which is ironic i mean he's somebody who would be very quick to separate
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political concerns from any claims about truth you know philosophical or scientific in other contexts
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but in this one he really does tend to conflate them he just says this is bad for us to think this
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way to rob people of their sense of that they are they are the true roots of their conscious
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agency uh that is there's something undermining of personal and social projects to that we really
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have to figure out how to shore up yeah and he'll he takes that in two absolutely oh surreal directions
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the first one i i had a debate with him a few months ago which was very interesting but one direction is
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he will say people want to be held responsible for their actions if people do something they know is
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wrong they want to be punished for it which i never quite figured out and the other one is i think
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driving a lot of his uh sort of thinking about this is the parts of him that are not thinking about
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this and that are very self-interested where he has these howler of quotes of things like oh my god if
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people stop believing free will there'd be murderers running around it would be sheer chaos it would be
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anarchy and how were we supposed to feel when we can't take credit for the rewards and prizes that we
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get and my thinking whoa bummer yeah that's that's the real problem with letting people know that there's
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no free will damn can't take credit for all my accolades i think that's what's uh powering a lot of
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him there well we'll get into the the psychological and social implications of accepting this view and i
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do think that you and i might have a slightly different experience there and a different set
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of intuitions but before we do perhaps tell me why the common claim around complexity theory and
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free will being an emergent property thereof why doesn't that knock you back on your heels and
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convince you that this is all just it's just a matter of our not having a completed science of the
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mind if we did have one we may well find a a space for precisely the free will people think they have
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well it's it's uh the notion that there's no free will popping out of emergence is is heartbreaking for
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me because i think emerging complexity is like the coolest thing on the planet the fact that one ant makes
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no sense and one neuron makes no sense put a thousand of them together and the ants make colonies and
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the neurons start baby stepping towards consciousness and it just emerges with properties that are only
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describable on the emergent level a single molecule of water as the standard one goes does not possess
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the property of wetness wetness is emergent only at that upper level so it seems like it should be
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perfectly clear then that oh amid consciousness popping out and theology and complicated ant colony
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that free will that free will should pop out of there also and the trouble is every single person
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arguing that emergence is the pathway to free will does the same you know i'm not trying to be
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pejorative here uh the same sleight of hand which is it relies on a type of downward causality that doesn't
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exist you get this emergent amazing unexpected unpredictable wonderfully cool adaptive thing
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that emerges up at the upper level and it gives you abilities then to in effect reach down and change the
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component parts of your emergent system and in effect it's always relying on a model
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where once ants are having this amazingly complex society once you have a brain that can do human
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brain sort of stuff it can reach down and make the ants smarter than they were and make the neurons
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smarter than they were and the whole point of emergent complexity is you start off with some simple
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components that are stupidly simple have a very small number of rules for how they interact with the
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neighbors and out of that comes complexity and the amazing thing about complexity is once that happens
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those little ants those single neurons are still just as simplistic and just as narrow in their options
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as they were beforehand it's not the case that when ants form a whole emergently complex society
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that suddenly individual ants can speak french or something they're still the same simple pieces and
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every model that somehow pulls free will out of emergence requires that the building blocks the
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constituent parts have suddenly gotten fancier and they don't and that's the whole point of it
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yeah well let's linger on this point because um you're introducing here a claim that uh you know
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you're you're dismissing as as spurious and it's a claim that i've never quite understood but i i've heard
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serious people make it or people at least who have real scientific and philosophical bona fides they
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they they they have made this claim of you know downward causation from you know higher level causation
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that you know emergent properties that are are not simply the sum uh however you know bewildering in
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their complexity of their micro level constituents right so you you take a brain and you know all of
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its parts and and their and their various states right so you just you have a neurophysiological soup
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that has structure right you have all the connections between neurons and you know receptor densities and
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you know all of the respective charges at one moment in time and as you just pointed out this whole
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system becomes capable of things that no individual part is capable of on its own and it wouldn't even
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make sense to talk about such a capacity in terms of a single unit right in the same way that you you
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just said by your analogy to water you know there is no wetness of a single molecule because the grosser
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property of wetness the emergent property of a system of water molecules is simply their disposition to
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slide freely past one another when water is in its liquid state and if you only have one molecule
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it's not sliding freely past anything because there's just one of it yep but it is still true
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to say that in the case of water what that water does is still entirely a story of what all those
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individual molecules do as causal agents in relation to one another at their microscopic level right so it's
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all the gross level phenomenon even the emergent phenomenon that you that you can't conceptualize
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without reference to the whole it is simply a story of what's happening at the bottom level so
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they're really the reductionism still runs through and there's no downward causation of a higher level
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property influencing the behavior of its lower level constituents and in the case of a brain there's nothing
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that emerges on the basis of neuronal complexity that then exerts its effects downward on to simpler
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constituents whether it's neurons or their behaviors in any way other than it simply being more of a
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story of all of those individual units doing what those individual units are doing all the while
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yeah exactly i mean all of these notions are predicated on the idea that when you throw enough water
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molecules together wetness occurs if and only if suddenly all of those molecules switch from h2o
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to o2h that's what wetness is and it doesn't happen i mean amid that yeah philosophers argue about is there
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hard downward causality there's obviously downward causality i can sit and think here about global warming
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and my heart may start beating faster and we've just seen wonderful downward causality going from a very
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abstract cognitive part of my cortex to brain stem regulation of my autonomic nervous system that's
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great but it's not changing the basic nature of the building blocks down there the neurons are doing
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exactly what they would be doing if instead they were beating the heart was beating faster because i just
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carried a cow up a flight of stairs or something it's simply a different entry point to it and all of the
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free will models i'm glad you said you've often been a little unclear what exactly these advocates are
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advocating because uh that's certainly been the case with me but when i really try to figure out what's
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being proposed it's and the constituent parts get smarter or the constituent parts get freer and it
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doesn't happen that way well let's linger on this analogy you just gave or this instance you just gave
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which because it it does pry at some of the intuitions here so we have this experience of being
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minds you know and you know we're language using primates but so much of our world and and its influence
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upon us is a matter of ideas it's a matter of talk you know with others and talk you know internalized
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talk to ourselves our own thoughts and so as you just pointed out you know you and i could each
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experience a mere sentence spoken in our direction or or you know decoded from our computer screen you
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know we we open our browser windows and we both look at the cover of the new york times and if we saw
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on that cover a headline which read there's been a a nuclear bomb dropped on manhattan and no communication
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coming from the city as of the moment but millions are presumed dead those are just words there is a
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simple sentence and it would it would enter our minds again through our eyes or or ears um it gets
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decoded through language circuits if we can find no reason to resist its implications which is to say no
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reason to doubt it right if it we this really is the new york times we didn't go to a fake website it's not
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april 1st we're not being punked where you are our computer hasn't been hacked etc whatever we have
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to fight our way past to give the these phonemes credibility once they have it and we believe that
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this sentence is actually mappable onto the world so we are engaged in this act of cognition then the
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floodgates open as you point out in in a downward way i mean with a full physiology of panic and horror
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etc well it would immediately change the way we feel and what we do next and the temptation
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here because given the kind of richness of this experience let's leave aside for a second that
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this cascade of effects offers absolutely no indication of free will right i mean you and i
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would helplessly be moved by this this stimulus but leave that aside people feel like the role of
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mind here this sort of ethereal strata of you know the the what it's like the qualitative character
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of our experience simply can't be a bunch of complicated billiard balls slamming into whatever's
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next in line so there is this downward causation picture suggests that there's something more complicated and
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more ethereal and more abstract that has been born based on all the complexity and now it moves
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downward and it's moving downward it's imposition onto you know our mere physiology is something other than
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the micro correlates of mind all the while buzzing in a merely physiological way all the time you know
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one domino hitting the next and that's the thing that's never made sense to me this turnabout in a
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mysterious you know even magical way where mind is imagined many of these people seem to agree that
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mind mind on some level is what the brain is doing and yet this reversal of causality seems to
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invoke a kind of magic that is something other than what the brain is doing all the while as a physical
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system well i think you and i are one or two of the few people who would actually say the word magic at
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that point um and on some level actually mean it yeah that's exactly what's happening and to use your analogy
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it just seems inconceivable to people that a vast number of billiard balls bumping into each other
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as a result of this news about new york city those billiard balls can produce you bursting into tears
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you being frantic about loved ones you going full steam into denial you whoa bill now the billiard
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worlds have to be working differently they have to have changed with news like that and again yeah it's
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constituent parts that are just as simple and stupid and nearest neighbor interaction type stuff as they
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were beforehand and none of that has anything to do with the amazing versions of downward causality
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i mean you could look at a whole bunch of pixels on a screen and if that's like repeating your
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childhood trauma of you're watching bambi and mom has just met her fate again your autonomic nervous
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system is going to go crazy and all of that but it's still made of neurons and the neurons still
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release neurotransmitters and they still do the same old thing and yeah it's just it's so hard
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i think for people to feel the the oomph the the viscera the momentness with which moments of strong
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downward causality evoke which is to say when more abstract things cause many very you know meat and
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potato ancient things to change in your body that something magical hasn't happened there well because
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of course the the the more abstract thing even the the most abstract thing that anyone can conceive
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has at its level of neural representation the same billiard ball characteristics right so if you and i
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can have a discussion about you know prime numbers i say to you you know there's it's been proven that
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there must be an infinite number of prime numbers right there's no final prime number and you dust off
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your mathematics and you say yeah yeah i agree with that strange right i mean that's pretty amazing
00:27:11.280
it's amazing that we think we know that we have you know that we would bet a lot of money on the on
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that being true right so what the hell are we talking about we're talking we're not talking about
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something that has yeah obvious physical instantiation out in the in the real world we i i just
00:27:24.800
here i'll give you a concept that will have representation somewhere in your brain the prime number
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larger than the largest one our species will ever find even if we live a trillion years there's going
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to be a limit to the number of prime numbers we consciously find and articulate to one another
00:27:44.320
i'm now referencing the the very next one whatever that next one is that's an intelligible concept
00:27:50.640
that has some representation in our brains now but that the representation is a state of our brains it is
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we're talking about complicated billiard balls yeah and it just seems so inconceivable at that point
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that you know the the way i often frame it in terms of the way emergence works is if you took a chimp
00:28:14.560
and you gave him as many neurons as we have and the same general distribution of cortical to limbic to
00:28:22.000
lower level all of that give a chimp that many neurons and that chimp is good to invent
00:28:27.440
theology and philosophy and aesthetics because it's just going to pop out it's going to be an
00:28:33.760
unrecognizable theology i would assume but it's just going to pop out of there because with enough of
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those pieces and that just seems whoa just throw enough pieces in there together and you get people
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who are willing to kill each other over like trickle-down economics whether it's right or wrong
00:28:52.880
hmm okay so let's have a sidebar conversation here about what we're not denying because i people
00:29:02.400
hear in any argument against free will a kind of nullification of of various distinctions they
00:29:10.480
care about and i think are right to care about and this is this goes by dennett's compatibilist
00:29:15.920
change of subject the sorts of free will worth wanting right so we're not denying that there's
00:29:21.440
a distinction between voluntary and involuntary behavior for instance or or the distinction between
00:29:27.200
a person whose prefrontal cortex is perfectly intact and you know healthily tuned and is a model citizen
00:29:35.120
and one who can do none of those things because he's got brain damage and zero impulse control and has a
00:29:44.800
variety of you know syndromes that will for which we now have clinical names um so maybe talk for a
00:29:50.000
moment about what remains once you strip out this the magic here what is so important about us i mean what
00:29:58.320
what what is the neural correlate of our humanness right i mean where where is civilization in the brain
00:30:05.200
where is where is being a mensch in the brain how would you you know what what what don't you want to
00:30:10.240
damage uh if you want to be um a person of high moral integrity and productivity and a good friend a good
00:30:18.720
husband etc well you know all of those double-edged sword sorts of things um you want to have for
00:30:27.440
example the neural underpinnings of empathy but you don't want to have so much of it that somebody
00:30:33.840
else's pain is so painful to you that all you think about is how to stop your pain you got to
00:30:39.840
get sort of a middle range with that you want to be able to oh i don't know understand somebody and
00:30:48.320
have a sense of theory of their mind but you don't want to have a life in which nobody can ever surprise
00:30:55.200
you you don't it's it's all these like inverted you sort of things where you know there's an
00:31:02.400
optimal in the middle and you don't want too much and you don't want too little the version of that
00:31:07.280
i've spent half my career mulling over is you want the exact right amount of stress and when you do
00:31:14.480
you love it and you pay for it and we call it stimulation and too little is boring and too much
00:31:19.520
as you're ulcerating and this yeah brains having to fine-tune stuff and context dependency and change
00:31:29.200
their criteria and different settings and it's like intensely complicated stuff and it seems
00:31:36.720
inconceivable that say there's a neurobiology to why somebody firmly firmly firmly believes in free will
00:31:46.080
until they're getting blamed for something and then they come up with a situational explanation wow that's
00:31:53.440
an interesting thing a brain that was able to do that flip there just now yeah it's extraordinary and
00:32:03.520
mostly it's extraordinary because it comes out of rational building blocks and billiard balls
00:32:09.440
okay so the general picture here is that we're claiming there is no space in the physics of
00:32:17.200
things and the biology of things for the free will people think they have to be hiding um i would also
00:32:23.200
say there's no space for the the ego to be hiding but let's leave that aside i mean i think that's the
00:32:27.680
obverse of the same coin but uh so there's you know take the the simplest description here i mean what
00:32:34.720
people have are their genes you know their genomes and the bodies and brains built upon
00:32:43.040
that information and everything the environment has done to that system causally from conception onward so
00:32:53.440
you know within utero and once you were born and every moment thereafter your collisions with the
00:32:59.920
world and with other people have tuned your body and brain then therefore body and mind to be in
00:33:07.920
precisely the state it's in now right and there's no other stream of causes i mean i would just add
00:33:14.480
that even if there were that doesn't give scope for this freedom people think they have because even if
00:33:19.840
you wanted to integrate a an immortal soul into this clockwork you didn't pick your soul you didn't pick
00:33:26.240
your parents you didn't pick your genes you didn't you didn't pick the world into which you were born
00:33:30.000
you've got no responsibility for any of that and you also didn't pick your soul if you have one right
00:33:34.240
and you can't account so i i i love that point of yours that you've made about we didn't even get to
00:33:41.440
pick our souls that's wonderful right so you can't you you can't account for why you didn't have the
00:33:47.440
soul of ted bundy and presumably if you did you'd also be raping and killing women and making that your
00:33:53.280
life project so talk about epigenetics for a second i mean haven't some people argued that
00:33:59.520
epigenetics offers a an alibi here for freedom seekers yeah and not in the slightest all it does
00:34:07.120
is give one pathway for something people figured out oh i don't know a couple of centuries ago and
00:34:15.120
sort of compared to victorian beliefs which is the way kids are raised influences the sort of adult who
00:34:22.640
comes out the other end there's a connection between the two oh my god you can't just put
00:34:28.000
sick kids into a into a nicu and like they don't need maternal physical contact oh you can just have
00:34:35.840
you know calories and warmth is sufficient to make a baby macaque monkey grow up normally all of that
00:34:42.880
whoa people figured out who you are is like deeply influenced by all sorts of stuff in your early life
00:34:50.640
and all people have needed is a mechanism for how it works that way and epigenetics is an immensely
00:34:58.000
powerful one it doesn't change your genes it changes how your genes are regulated or framed a different
00:35:05.040
way it changes how your genes function in different environments and that's a like extremely powerful way
00:35:14.640
that one can explain how you get multi-generational effects of trauma as soon as you could find
00:35:22.000
epigenetic effects on things like eggs and sperm which is becoming more and more apparent things you know
00:35:28.480
it's a totally powerful mechanism but it's not that once you have conscious awareness and decide that you
00:35:36.720
are a free organism you can now choose which of the epigenetic things that happened to you in childhood
00:35:42.640
you reverse right now you don't suddenly get a downward switch that could do that it's as
00:35:49.360
emergently cool of a mechanism for making us who we are as any of the other pieces in there
00:35:56.240
but again it functions with with the rules of billiard balls so where does predictability come here
00:36:05.360
into the picture here so i i think many of us are have argued and it seems patently true that if
00:36:12.480
if our behavior were totally predictable like if if i could have in advance shown you a transcript
00:36:20.480
of everything we were going to say in this conversation you know down to the last um and
00:36:25.440
ah and grammatical error that would prove that we were automatons in some sense right that you know
00:36:33.120
this is just laplace's demon applied to us it's all it's all determined uh it's just one domino hitting the
00:36:39.920
next but people put a lot of stock in the fact that we we don't live in that sort of world it's
00:36:45.920
we're not perfectly predictable in part because even fully determined systems or fully deterministic
00:36:53.360
ones are so complex that you know we just you can never measure the the initial conditions such that
00:36:58.880
you could predict far in advance again like it's like predicting the weather on 50 tuesdays from today
00:37:05.360
but there's also it's thought contributions that are random whether this is quantum indeterminacy or
00:37:15.120
some other sort of randomness again i've never understood why people imagine that gives scope to
00:37:22.960
free will because what what you're introducing is some version of rolling the dice and if you know if
00:37:28.800
your behavior is pushed around by by the rolls of the dice i don't know why anyone feels like that
00:37:33.840
confers greater responsibility to them yeah exactly what talk about this variable of predictability
00:37:41.200
versus unpredictability because to my eye unpredictability doesn't actually create space
00:37:48.080
for free will it just creates the enduring mystery which i agree we have and live under which is we don't
00:37:55.920
know what's going to happen next but you know i would extend that to you don't know what you're going to
00:38:00.720
think next right and that for me that actually undermines the the lived experience of free will
00:38:07.920
right so okay this is such a fundamental area where people just get bollocked up because you're right
00:38:17.840
the world is not predictable the future was not set at the big bang laplace was wrong in that sense
00:38:23.280
and because of things that not only we don't know if you'd like to continue listening to this
00:38:30.560
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