Robert Sapolsky: The Illusion of Free Will

[Music] hello and welcome to the origins podcast I'm your host Lawrence Krauss Robert zapalski is a genius or so says the MacArthur Foundation when they gave him a genius Grant whether he's a genius or not I've known him personally and of his work for many years and have always been impressed by both the depth and breath of his work you can tell uh how how accomplished a scientist he is by how many departments he's a member of at at Stanford he's a professor of biology and neurology and I think neuroscience and who knows what else Stanford University and he's worked on primates and neurobiology and a host of other things wrote a great book called behave and he has a new book out um and the new book is called determined the science of life without Free Will I when I heard about it I wanted to uh to to speak to Robert we've been for years trying to set up a time to talk in in in general about about aspects of neurobiology and this seemed like a good starting off point and I got to read the book before it it it came out and it's it's a long book and it for me it was a challenge initially because uh as someone who recognizes that there is no such thing as free will Will based on the laws of physics and has seen a host of books that I find rather tedious about Free Will by some by people I've known I was a little worried about reading this but I knew that Robert always has gems to share and the book is is chockful of his own perceptions it's it's fun just like he's fun and um and one can learn a lot about neurobiology and then discuss the important question of once we accept that there is no such thing as free will he really takes on head head first the more difficult question of what did he do about responsibility and guilt and blame so in any case we did what what I love to do on the origins project we talked about his own Origins and he and I shared more things than I knew about and um and then we had a rolicking discussion of many aspects of Free Will neurobiology society and Consciousness as well as which is a subject I've written about in my new book and I was happy to see that uh it passed muster with him uh one of the experts it was a great discussion he's a remarkable individual and really fun to listen to and talk to so I hope you'll enjoy listening to it and watching it ad free on our Origins project uh podcast on our critical mass website where paid subscribers will get to see the whole podcast ad free of course you can listen to the podcast on any on any site that podcasts can be listened to and then uh uh eventually the uh the video will come up on our YouTube channel on our Origins project YouTube channel as well a few days later usually uh no matter how you watch it or listen to it I certainly hope uh that you will uh be as thrilled and pleased and entertained and educated as I was uh when I had my dialogue with Robert spolski [Music] well thanks so much for joining me Robert we we were saying before I pressed the record button that we we're amazed we actually never have been in the same room to our knowledge uh We've crossed paths intellectually and and I and as you know I admire and respect you tremendously so it's such a thrill to finally after all this time be able to have a long uh discussion so thanks for coming on well thanks for having me on the uh respect is mutual that's great I appreciate it um I it's this this was no easy task in fact it's probably this this was one of the hardest things I've had to do for many reasons I want to talk about your new book which by the time this airs will be I'm going to try and time it to the to the Airing of your new book I have a pre-production version um your book determined about free will one of the hardest things for me it was not an easy task to to work through it for a variety of reasons there's a lot there first but also I come into this with the absolute conviction from everything I know saying there's no such thing as free will so it was hard for me you know accepting this fact I thought well why I'm I given that I don't you know think there's free will why am I really motivated to go through this and and that was hard at the beginning but but um of course what's great is that our reasons for my a priori reasion for not uh thinking there was Free Will are sort of are almost or not orthogonal but don't have much overl you actually know how the brain works or at least a lot more than I do and so your arguments really were um quite useful I I I don't think I needed them I AC be because basically you and I both don't think there's a magic somewhere in the middle and that's really what you need as we'll talk about so that was one of the reasons I found it hard but the other is there's a lot in this book because this book uh covers so many different interesting things and that was the other part I love your mind I've always loved your mind I love your writing and I the way we think and it was just it was hard because it's a joy to read I wanted to skip parts and I couldn't and and the footnotes of which there are tremendous i i as a rule I try not to read footnotes and books but I read every footnote here because of course the footnotes are were you get to put on all all the stuff you where I really get to see how your mind works in any case it's it was worth the effort and I hope uh this discussion will be worth people's effort because we're we're really going to go we're going to we're going to dig down and deep into into into the ideas uh as well as summarize them but this is an Origins podcast and I like to find out about people's Origins I'm particularly interested in yours uh what what led you to where you to the remarkable long and winding road that you've taken with so many branches almost like a uh the emerging complexity of of a neural neural system uh as we'll talk about you're you so I've read a little bit of your biography that I could as much as I could find and I found out your your father was an architect okay and and that clearly and he was an orthodox Jew your mother was I assume as well um the more we learned the more we realized coerced yeah okay oh interesting was she also he was from Eastern Europe he came uh from Eastern Europe yeah he came over just after the revolution as a like young adolescent a very good time to get out of that area yeah um she came over from the old country as a fetus so uh okay she didn't she didn't remember as much stuff back there as as he she was born in the states yeah oh okay and okay so that but now I want to I want to find out a little I mean and you were brought up as an orthodox Jew okay yeah now and one of the things I you know I was born as a you know sort of in a secular Jewish household and brought up in that way where I where the only thing I I learn my my mother kept telling me about good about being Jewish is that you know learning was a big deal and reading she she tried to convince me that was a big part of Rel religion and but you obviously love learning and reading and of course a lot of it's probably hardwired but but um who had the biggest influence you're so obviously your father had an influence because you right about him I but I'd like to learn about your mother too who for example as an architect when you were a kid I know you want you've loved gorillas right away but what got you interested in that I don't know that and I'd like to um I'm I'm I'm not trying to get into too uh too murky and quick sandish of uh just for Psychotherapy um but I was like eight when my mother my mother started taking me to Museum of Natural History and it was an incredible percentage of field biologists I've encountered who like instead of growing up out in the bush and whose parents were missionaries or researcher they grew up in some Urban and at some point they they stumbled into the Natural History Museum that was it that's that's the day they imprinted on geckos or or whatever so um we went into the primate exhibit somewhat randomly and if you ever go in there there's this stuffed mountain gorilla like right at the entrance it may not be at the entrance anymore but like he's been on their postcards forever and he was shot by like Carl akley in 1912 probably with Teddy Rosevelt it is gun bear but it's this like diarama of this taxidermia Silverback and like something clicked and if I'm going to get all all fuzzy here and stuff um like both of my grandfathers died more than 50 years before I was born kind of thing and never knew anything right and like something on some visceral level this just seemed like this would be the greatest grandfather on Earth and I just wanted to go live inside the diama I I I think that's that's what was going on there that's where it came from okay I was wondering there had to been something because where you grew up in New York and you there's not a lot of silverback gorillas at least non-metaphorical ones that's why I wanted to live in the diarama I don't about you but I'm still trying to come to terms with the fact that Brooklyn has now become a trendy place to live it was not then yeah yeah no it wasn't then exactly I but but uh but you know it but it gave you that opportunity which as we'll talk about you know gave you good luck and and and um and and had a huge influence now I understand where that came from um and you basically did live in that diarama I mean you you willing willfully chose as soon as you could as far as I can see to actually experience to go and for then for three decades to continue to try and live in that diarama at some level which really it really impressed me and amazed me and also made me envious in some sense but I'll talk about privilege and good luck yeah yeah know it well but you you know well but for whatever reason you you took advantage of the privilege and good luck um I would say it would be grit but I know better um but so so that's interesting so your mother actually had the biggest influence that way what about reading I assume uh I'm always interested in in you know reading was vitally significant for me and I'm always interested what did you did you read a lot when you were a kid and if so did that example come from either parent or no um oh I read obsessively and like I I guaranteed I was going to be like kicked in the rearend schoolyard perpetually by I don't know in fourth grade like who's your best friend essay and I said books are my best friend oh my God this kid has no Instinct for how not to just beg to be abused and bullied um yeah books were were pretty great um it's it's tempting to do a whole escapism thing but I part of it was also just getting paded on the head that this was like a nice metric for being a a good a good compliant boy were they in the available in the house or I mean I mean uh or or or not I mean whe is that an example or something you picked up again I'm interested just in comparing my to my notes to myself in some ways just um a bare number it was it was not quite a book obsessed house but there is like a decent number there but once once libraries started to be a part of the picture well we did have I I do you remember the Book of Knowledge yeah of course oh my God we had the Book of Knowledge and like I would get up early like on Sunday morning and just read the book where you could see like an article in there about like this newly finished ship called the Titanic and it like this ancient it was best was phenomenal yeah no it's I yeah I yeah I love those things I and I and I end up getting a subscription to Book of Knowledge type stuff the time life books life remember that 20 volume thing was my first thing I spent my allowance on it when I was a kid because because there were books in my house but not but not but not yeah not enough not that kind yeah yeah and so yeah one of them would show up like every six and they smelled so good yeah first came out of the box I still have them I still I just put them up and I you know I'm never going to get rid of them because it it they mean so much there's so you know that and of course they're outdated but that's what's great to Great to that's what's great about science is they're outdated it actually makes progress and they admitted somewhere afterward that that was wrong yeah yeah exactly that's the being wrong as well you know I I I talk about that in my new book I think you're wrong and not knowing is a key part of science um now okay so now I see where the sort of Background by the way as Orthodox Jewish whether your mother was cortin or not did they did they have plans for you I mean my mother wanted me to be a doctor and my brother to be a lawyer but did they did they want that kind of thing for you was there did you feel any pressure to be a professional in that way um frantic ceaseless crushing heartless pressure to be become a doctor yeah okay um where my my wife and I have like tried to figure out the chronology because it was a long time ago but we think this is the case uh that my father started off in med school like in the second year of the Depression was going to be a cancer what and ran out of money and uh never finished um like we we've got his like stethoscope and microscope in the back of some closet upstairs from 1930 whatever um you know there there's a couple of possible holes in the story but at least that that can hold together broadly so he uh you know he knew how to do drafting he had gone to Styers High School in New York and like okay learned how to do that so he got a job doing that in an architectural firm and then decided to start going to architectural night school and before it was over with he was a professor of architecture kind of thing but yeah not quite daily but not far from about the highest possible calling would be to go like be a doctor and cure cancer well okay that's it did he talk to you much about I mean did he talk to you much about science or his his interests or did I mean no that doesn't kids often forget to ask their parents what they're understanding about it um they came in sort of frenzied monologues um he was he was a very very large presence but he was not a very approachable one um you know he he'd had a tough time of things and uh like he was doing his best yeah yeah but well he obviously did but and it's it's interesting to see that that pressure came from a different place for me for me and I've already said this a bunch of times so I think in different context my neither my parents finished high school but but the I and for them there was especially important to be a doctor because it represented you know going Beyond and and um and and uh and and I again one when I got my first I got a fancy job at Harvard and I never forget my my mother phon my my then wife at the time and immediately said he still can go to medical school there's still time uncanny I had the same when I was getting like trying to pick where I was going to go have a job I got an offer from like Cornell med school a neuro there and said well I'm considering it and coming back to New York or whatever and they said that would be a good inside connection if you decide oh that is freakish that you yeah that is that's amazing oh I'm glad I brought it up I wasn't gonna but that's that is freakish now you well I have to ask you this did do you did you learn Swahili I mean I know you started to did you ever like did you learn enough to yes I'm I'm terrible at languages but it was just kind of by force I became sort of functionally fluent by about my fifth or sixth year there um and all has done is DK since then um I I took Swahili for two years in college and it being the times that it was the book was entirely written for like African-Americans thinking about root stuff so it was mostly like learning how to talk about Charlie Parker and Swahili stuff like that well at least and it turned out that the instructor was Tanzanian so I learned Tanzanian Swahili which is like showing up in the Bronx speaking the queen's English or something to Kenya but you know I was I was eventually able to get by but I'm I'm pretty bad languages I I should have point out I mean people may wonder if who don't know about why I even brought that up but you actually decided when you were still a teenager earli a teenager that in addition to learning about if you wanted to learn about gorillas you would learn so you started to learn swall hey when you were in your early teens right um yeah yeah that's I was writing fan letters to various primatologists when I was in high school and eventually got to sit at the feet of one for four years and that was a major disappointment yeah I I sort of was intent I think I had to have been the only like Jewish kid in Brooklyn in the 1970s sitting on the wests side independent train the B train reading a biography of Joe M Kenyata day after yeah that would have gred some it would be interesting to see what would happen today if you were doing that it's a different world but um you went so you that that it was kind of natural then to Major um you went to Harvard right and did biological anthropology yeah and um and and you know and that's sort of I guess biological anthrop I'm wondering why it wasn't like uh um uh more I mean biological anthropology is not directly focused on on primates you could have done primatology and I'm wondering what what what well at the time this was just at the time that like the great sociobiology storm hit in fact it was amazing it was wison did you take classes from him or something my first semester is when he published sociobiology and yeah like spending College like arguing about whether he or Leon made sense and it was incredibly stimulating time um you know at the time bio anthro included primatology they shortly after that things had bad enough and there had been enough like driveby shootings between the social anthro people and the bio anthro people that they split into two departments but yeah that was thatat were yeah and it's part of you know and you and as you say and and it's clear I mean you are one of the things admire and I'm jealous of is you know I've always liked the idea of being a generalist and you you have you've been a generalist in in in a in a clear way I mean we achieving levels of levels in a in a wide variety of fields and and it's nice that you could start that General generalization with bio anthroid uh and it was it was and it was a lowprofile department so you could get away with like Just Happening not to take all sorts of requirements and things it was it was nobody paid attention to the department then it was very quiet um it's sort of around then that I then started my like am I a neurobiologist or primatologist crisis because said primatology God at whose feet I was sitting uh got sick my freshman year um he was fine everything but he canceled all of his classes um including a couple I was going to take and sort of the last minute saying ah maybe I'll take an intro neuro class H they they probably have something to say about Behavior instead of just us evolutionary biologist I was blown away by it and like ever since deciding on I neurobiologist or on my primatologist and sort of that was that see you anticipated my question because I was wondering if you did bi you know biological anthropology and you like primates why you then went to do uh you know your PhD in in neurobiology and and now that I guess that's the reason I it seemed like a jump but uh and sort of by then the the way the the totally in intellectually fabricated way that I saw them as connected is like I go study behavior and stuff in baboons and exactly at the point where I would say wow what's going on inside I'm not going to leion this guy hippocampus because like I've known him for years and his mother was great um so I'll go do stuff to rats in the lab and just what I'm learning about the brain there and saying huh I wonder if this works in like real animals out in the real world I get to go back to the baboon so they were synergistic um you know I couldn't decide which yeah actually I was well I guess it's because of the love of the bamboon or the great apes that because I was going to say you know of I actually just had a discussion with Peter Singer and and who uh who's lovely talk to in we talked about animal experimentation and and some of the silly things that have been done in the name of psychology on animals the torturing of animals that didn't you know in order to try and understand how humans work when it was clear often that if you want to really understand how humans work you probably should ex examine humans and and and and you know and certain T certain torturing of rats was probably KN going to give you huge insights into post-traumatic stress syndrome in humans and stuff but but uh but I was but you didn't want but you know you could have chosen to work on humans but you just found Apes more interesting um I would say more understandable but maybe the word is more palatable or more ah I wanted to get out and do field work somewhere in the middle of nowhere yeah no I can understand that you know and in your general you you you are lucky to have a position that that actually explicitly demonstrates your your general um something again I always wanted but I didn't always because I wanted to I started degree in history as well as as well as physics but I quickly learned that the intellectual baggage required me to do a degree in mathematics as well as physics and that took up all the time but but you have you have you have professors in biological sciences neurology and this really always amazed me neurological science and neurosurgery and and and and my mother would have been very happy if I a professor of neurosurgery but who you better bet I trotted that out when I went back for Hanukkah you know what know yeah I think at one point the neurosurgery department had some sort of visiting committee and they suggested they needed a little more basic researchers in the department so I was friends with the chief of neurosurgery who said hey can we put your name on the letter head oh ever since then I've been a member of the department I that's I I I have to say at one point and I was vice dean of the medical school at Cas Western Reserve for about six months but uh and I don't think I ever told my mother I worried about what that would imply so but um but you know it did intrigue me so your professor I mean and it and it's quite appropriate given all of the breath of your the lovely connections you make between neurobiology and and and behavior of of human behavior and and behavior of of great apes it's it is a lovely symbiotic relationship and it's and I I guess it took someone like you to realize it was that that was useful I I'm intrigued that you and and I'm I guess I'm intrigued and impressed that among that collection of departments in which you're a professor psychology isn't one of them and I was wondering I was intrigued by that um that's a good question nor is anthropology there although they've also purged like virtually everyone except the social and cultural Anthropologist so that that that war has been won there um I don't know I talk to psychologists I can I can occasionally say the right nouns and get away with it but yeah clearly some of the stuff I've done has involved my having to like interact with them a lot yeah yeah no it's interesting to me that anyway let we'll get you people will see when we talk about the context of trying to address this question of Free Will which I want to not move to you mentioned you obviously you've agonized I guess that's the right way to put it you've thought about free will for a long time obviously and agonizing I by agonizing I don't think the agonizing was I I suspect you recognized like me that there that there was no obvious obvious scientific reason why there should be free will but so maybe you didn't agonize about the science but you agonized to try trying to understand how to how to demonstrate explicitly or address this question how long youve been thinking about is it an issue that's always that's always bothered you or um well I think once I started getting acne that was right around the time when logical things happened like I was having all sorts of like unst and contradictions of and you know during one sort of particularly agitated perod I woke up at two in the morning one night and said oh I get it God doesn't exist what's going on and then shortly after that was oh and there's no Free Will and that was followed by and it's a totally emply empty and different universe so that cured everything right there adolescent did for me too I I I didn't I'm sure to had an epiphany that way in fact I meant to ask you that you I noticed that age 13 is when you when you kind of made the real had this realization Le that's what your this Bible says age13 I I for me it was a gradual thing but I actually sort of became I mean age 13 was when I brose bar mitzvah and that the that experience enough was enough to turn me off religion forever if I hadn't if it hadn't already been that way was it was the age 13 coincidence for you too or no uh no not at all of of course I would say just from focusing on the ways in which often ancient and well-established cultures have influenced your life and in which the purpose of every generation is to inculcate their offspring into the same cultural values uh you know age13 is when they're really pressing court on that one yeah so that's kind of when inevitably the this doesn't make any sense and this isn't right so you know now you mention it though it shows that they understood Neuroscience a little bit because you point out how in fact the prefrontal cortex and I mean it's that period when things are developing so if you're going to inculcate um that's probably a really good time to do it and especially do it in a way where they somehow make you feel guilty for a pagum that happened in the 15th century so the very wor thing you could do right now is make your children messed up with that as well yeah well guilt is a huge part of that I think um but you know it's interesting when you said you smiled when you came when cured everything when you woke up in the middle of the night and I I want to follow that up we'll come back near the end of this um six or seven hour discussion um uh to this question because almost you almost apologize or make it appear as if recognizing that there's no free will is and should be a depressing thing but one could often say and I'm often asked that I mean isn't recognizing there's no meaning no Cosmic meaning to the universe and no God also a depressing thing and we'll talk about its impact on morals because you talk about that but for me it was exactly the opposite and maybe it's just the wiring it it was it's liberating and and and and in energizing to know both of those things because it makes sort of it makes you understand your place and it makes every moment in some ways more precious if you understand that there's nothing guiding it and there's no and and that you're here for a short time and and your Delta set of cards and um and and that's life and you might as well use it well you're You're Made Of more resilient stuff than me somebody somebody did right by you leading up to that point or somebody's nutrient levels when you were a fetus did right by you but yeah that's the notion I mean this is um I'm I I just agree to blurb up manuscript for a book of someone a scientist who experienced just a horrendous nightmares family tragedy and the book is about like how he is found comfort in science and I sure can't wait to read it because like how'd he do that um science just seemed like the only intellectually sustainable default state to try to understand things but it sure does not give Comfort much yeah well I guess again it's all in it's long all in the attitude I I do I I since we're both atheists in that sense but obviously for some reason or other I've been labeled it it's it's higher in my profile and because I've spent time trying to protect things like the teaching revolution in schools and got got involved in that because the biologists weren't doing it enough in my opinion that's why you're right you you died for our sins trying to creationism but uh but because of that um I spent a lot of time talking to people about this issue and and I I do think that that that real that realizing one talks about loss of faith and even that that's already propaganda or that's already promoting a reality that doesn't need to be it's not a you don't lose anything you gain I would think and if you indicate people that you can gain by making every you know recognizing every moments more precious if you have the mentality and you recognize it then you don't have to then then then you gain anyway I think I that's the kind of you know if I'm going to do a Feelgood or try to try to be a you know um I don't try to be advice or uh one of those kind of advice scientist but but but but if I did I mean that's what I think that's the that's the argument and I'm going to try and argue it later on I I I I I struggled a lot with the last half of this book because I could see your angst we'll get to it um but I think there's I I can see a happy way out and maybe it isn't but we'll see if I we'll see if you think about it well I I think I finally it took me like a huge amount of time to get to the end there because like how can this not just be well this sucks and is pretty demoralizing but you know we're adults that's the way the world to see that there is actually a good feature of it and a liberating one um I sure can't convince myself of it most of the time and not only did I write the damn book I read it even at various points um yeah it's a it's a hard pull but it's kind of it's reminding me of that great rebranding that atheism has tried to do in recent years we are not just about what isn't we are not just a theist we're not just like saying I don't believe there's a God and as long as we're at it I don't believe there's an Easter bnny no it's a positive and the whole rebranding is humanism and to be able to say like the source of human goodness is human um that's that's not just saying you know it wasn't in seven days that the world got created and like smoting is probably not a good thing most of the time um yeah there's the there's there's rooms for for positivity and there yeah I think well I think you know I well I think as I'll argue as you know and I I I did was reminded of a quote from my friend my late friend Christopher Hitchens here I mean I don't don't think we have a choice um ultimately and and and I think that we we should you know in so I'm I'm getting ahead of myself but in some sense part part of the last part of the book is saying well we have how can we we we we wanting there to Be Free Will and believing their Free Will is so is so ingrained how can we get over it but I think we just recognize that that that not not thinking not thinking in terms of free is just part of the way we're wired too and that's we don't have the we don't have the choice to not want to not emotionally want there to be free will we have the we don't have any choice I'll agree with you there but but we can intellectually through through learning we argue at some level recognize rationally that there isn't but but I think um you know uh recognizing that we don't have the free will to not to not emotionally believe in Free Will is just something we have to accept I think and should not struggle with um to some extent I mean Robert Robert triers like one of the pioneering social biologists um during one period got very interested and published some stuff on the evolution of the capacity for self-deception yeah essentially saying if you're gonna have a species that can know the future like the only way you're going to get up in the day is the ability for self-deception interestingly equal interesting is the notion that evolution of self-deception because the best way to convince people of your laws is to believe your laws and competition and all of that so he got very interested in that but just the very notion that if you're G to be this smart um it's a pretty helpful thing oh yeah yeah well I always say we all every one of us has to believe six impossible things for a breakfast just to get up you like your colleagues you like your job you like your spouse whatever it is but you know you just got to get out of bed and and um and that's okay I mean but but great thing is to recognize it's okay to recognize it's an illusion but to but to but to um but to recognize it doesn't diminish the fact that we know we have it and to say and and almost Revel in it but anyway let's get let's get to you know I I could have spent a time talking about the last book behave which is a precursor to this but this book determined is about Free Will and by the way it seemed to me not only have you agonized about it for years when did you really start to think about it was it when you realized that there's no God at the same time as when you began to think and then and then you you've actually also put your not your money well you made your money where your mouth is you've actually gotten involved and if in consequentially if there is no free will then there's a question of responsibility and Punishment which we'll get to and you've got involved in prisons in in court cases and really taking this on which I really admire as well I you've internalized it or at least shown that well before it's lauded I should just basically say it's a totally fun hobby because it's a totally fun hobby you find out about some of the most horrific things that can happen to people and as a result of that damage some of the most horrific things they could do to other people and like what totally broken system it is blah blah blah but it's kind of like it's cool trying to convince 12 Skeptics who are getting to decide whether or not this person is going to be in jail for life to think differently um it almost never works and it's cool to have a smart da during cross-examination who wants to argue with so you know it's another version of that but well it's okay I I always tell people what you're what you're saying is just simply you have to enjoy what you're doing I I tell people that and most scientists most scientists you know don't become SCI scientist to save the world you cure cancer or whatever they do it because they it's cool and they like it and it's in the process if something good comes out of it that's great that's great too but yeah because dry ice is just like fun to play with yeah exactly yeah yeah magnets and all the rest that's why I'm I often ask people why they didn't become physicists I was going to say because it's why it's so neat why didn't Anyway by the way did you ever did did did you ever toy with that the physical sciences or is always biological sciences that always biological and always like cutting every corner to like avoid the chemistry requirements and stuff just just not my temperament I've I've had to spend years and years filling in the the crater holes of where I didn't get the basic information that's okay that's okay because you know that's what it's for I you know I learned a lot more physics after I got my PhD then before anyway but but uh you know that's where you you you yeah it's all right because that's called like long learning now the basic premise of determined um basically that there are you and and and you might say why is this why is right is there so much here to just say two things there's no uncaused decision-making no decision is made by some magical thing it's always caused by series of causes which then have causes which then have as you say at the very beginning of the book Turtles all the way down um and the second is that if that's the case then what then resp the notion of responsibility for your decision- making if if there's if there's no Rand no spontaneous decision- making if there's no free will if everything is based on as on on some physical biological uh chemical process then then we have to re we have to Reen renounce or at least re rethink what we mean by taking responsibility for our actions those are the two if I were to summarize is that a reasonable summary of of of the of the general context to the book yes okay um now having done that we'll we I want to unpack it and there's a lot to unpack um um and um and uh and I did I have to say I you know I was cursing you last night when I was reading the last 100 pages and and I staying up all night um but but uh but I had to I took soless from the realization that I had no choice in the in the matter and and do you know the quote from I was alluding to it from Chris richin when he was asked about free will do you know his quote he said he said yes I have free will I have no choice but that's wrong but I think if we just said yes I feel I have free will I have no choice that' be right now which reminds me of like one of the theological Loops for getting to that I can't remember aquinus or who knows what are no doubt someone much more close-minded than that saying like God Is So Glorious so amazing and having granted Us free will that we have no choice but to worship it uh perfect that captures it yeah um yeah that's great I got to remember that's good well look I periodically I'm going to read quotes of yours I like them and it'll it'll allow me a chance to give you a chance to expand upon them obviously not in as much detail as the book but at least give a sense um but basically right off in the very beginning um uh where you talk about turtles all the way down you say to reiterate when you behave in a particular way which is to say when your brain has generated a particular Behavior it is because of the determinism that came just before which was caused by the determinism just before that and before that all the way way down the approach of this book is to show how that determinism Works to explore how the biology over which you had no control interacting with environment over which you had no control made you you and when people claim that there are causeless causes of your behavior that they call free will they have a failed to recognize or not learned about the determinism lurking beneath the surface Andor be erroneously concluded that the rare verified aspects of the universe that do work in deterministically can explain your character morals and Behavior now um so the point is it's e you know to say that that things are determin is fine and then it'd be a very short book and a lot of people have written not so short books that basically don't say any more than that and I won't alert to some to some of those people um but you want to talk about the biology of this and and I think that the neurobiology of it and I think that's what makes it incredibly enlighting enlightening to learn about this but but you you basically um uh come down to say okay you need to look at all of science uh to do this and as a generalist you uh you you you it fits in your pre your your sort of natural predilections crucially all discipline all these disciplines talk about many disciplines collectively negate free will because they are all interl constituting the same ultimate body of knowledge if you talk about the effects of neurotransmitters on Behavior you are also implicitly talking about the genes that specify the construction of those chemical Messengers and the evolution of those genes the field of neurochemistry genetics and evolutionary biology can't be separated and it goes on so this notion that that there's this biological B bis requires us and we'll talk about each of those aspects particularly but but but logically you frame the argument as there's three there's sort of four complimentary ways of thinking and I want to get you sort of to elaborate on that you say well you have a choice the world is deterministic and there's no free will the world is deterministic and there is Free Will the world is not deterministic and there's no Free Will and the world is not deterministic and there is Free Will so um we're going to we're going to unpack those more carefully but do you want to do you want to give it a sort of a an expansion of those of of of what of each of those areas and what this Central concepts of why there are fallacies in some and not others yeah um and you know 2 by two Matrix where two of the four are a lot more interesting than the other two um one of them makes no sense at all which is the world is not deterministic but you don't have free will and I I don't quite know how you get there and I don't think I've read anyone that's just making sure like fill out the Matrix there um the there is not determinism and there is Free Will is this somewhat off in the ozone view of libertarian philosophy libertarian in an intellectual sense rather than political and you know I got pulled into reading any of this philosophy stuff Kicking and Screaming but it appears to be like a very minority view um the most common one is that yeah yeah yeah it's a deterministic world I'm not a uh I'm not a lite I'm not a whatever yet there's like atoms and we're made of cells and like there's rules to the physical universe and stuff but somehow somehow Som somehow that's compatible with us still having Free Will and this compatibilism one is what I spend like most of the book hair tearing my hair out because what the polls show is 90 95% of philosophers say that they are deterministic compatibl lists and like a shocking number of neuroscientists when you really pack back them up in a corner and you try to get them to look at what it is that they just said or advocated um but it's this notion that yeah yeah yeah it of course like I'm a modern 21st century all of that um and we're made of stuff and the universe has rules and all that but somehow somehow somehow there's room for this intangible thing to still be lurking in there and that's the essence that's the US of us and that's the US of us that gives us agency and and of course the fourth truly Lunatic Fringe version of The Matrix is the one that I'm saying which is it's a completely deterministic world and there's no free will whatsoever compatibilism is incompatible with the way the world works okay great and a premise which I which I agree with as a physicist and I was you know so I have my we'll get to the some of the physical arguments but so it's for me it's wonderful to to see the biologic iCal basis as well but but as a physicist it seems to me that that that's clear the the it's certainly interesting that 90% of the we'll get to it we'll get to the fact that you spend a lot of time it doesn't say much about philosophy um which is fine because um you know and uh and by the way it's not just me you know some people think I trash philosophy too much but I again was talking to Peter simmer singer who's a philosopher and it wasn't fun it was fun to see him trash philosopher because lot of philosophers talk about how animals don't have rights because it's clear they don't have rights I mean as if as if there's you know and and we'll get to it but it's almost lwh hanging fruit in some some ways to see the arguments that that are presented okay that's great that that that puts the put things in context but you actually mention and I think it's worthwhile saying what do you mean by Free Will and what do you mean by determinism the next thing you you talk about that and so give a chance to sort of briefly explain what you mean by Free Will and what you mean by determinism well this is where everybody like spends half the conference on arguing about yeah definitions and stuff um but I think well maybe the place to start defining Free Will um is what it's not even though lots of people go for this and this is a super influential way of seeing Free Will where there isn't because it's one what runs through the entire Criminal Justice System you got somebody on trial and essentially trials revolver and three questions did this person after they figure out what the person did did the person intend to do it did they know what the consequences were likely to be and did they understand that there were Alternatives they could have done something else and if the answer to those are yes that's it the person showed Free Will and lock them up um and an equivalent myopia has run through sort of one field of like neurobiologist thinking about Free Will and this is from this like a landmark famous experiment in the 1980s by Benjamin libbit and you read any damn paper on the biology and by this second paragraph out comes libbit and you want to scream Li's the one who's done that study that's the famous one he sat people down and basically said here do this do this behavior and do it whenever you feel like it press this button and you know whenever you feel like it and we're going to hook you up to all sorts of like modern ways to see what's going on in your brain and your muscles and all of that and out of it came this incredible finding so you put people in there and like you're monitoring what's happening in their brains when they decide to do something and what they reported was at the moment that someone said that's when I got the intention to press the button you could already tell from there bre like up to a few seconds before that they had decided to push the button oh my God everybody learned neuroscientists have just shown your brain knows before you do with of course this ridiculous like dichotomy there but like people have been fighting about it ever since was the do can you tell the difference between when you intend to do something and when you know that you intend to do it and was there a better way of measuring the mill seconds and like like there's still papers being published saying things like libbit had his head up is he was so wrong like 40 years later people are still fighting over it because it's essentially the question of when you believe you intend to do something has this imaginary separate construct your brain already decided to do it and both in that route and in the courtroom that's the most ridiculously useless thing to do because like the metaphor I use it's like trying to review a movie based on only seeing the last three minutes of it because whether it's in the courtroom or whether it's hanging with libbit and his detractors in both cases you're not asking the critical question yes yes yes the guy intended to do this and knew he could have done other yes yes yes the person did or didn't intend before this part of their their brain had a bunch of action potentials where did that intent come from and if you're going to talk about Free Will you're not off the hook if you just say the person intended to do that where did that intent come from why did that psych 101 freshman show up to do this experiment for libbit that day instead of like coming in and stealing the guy's laptop and sneaking at why was that where does intent come from and the answer is is as you figure that out that's where any semblance of Free Will goes down the drain okay that's great that's that's great let me let me I was going to go to liet anyway but and we'll we'll take a break to for a second to talk about determinism because I want want you explain it too but but since you brought up liit and I and when I was writing my book on Consciousness obviously I had to address that but I you know it never it never seemed to strike me as a problem because all it indicates is it confirmed my I should say my pre my predection in advance which was confirmed by everything I read about Consciousness which is that Consciousness is just a surface phenomena so yeah I mean okay so people report that's what but but everything we know it says you really don't know it's your your perception of what's going on is totally different than what's going on in your brain and so okay so that proves it big deal what does that prove it just proves what you kind of know anyway that people that people's sense of why they're doing what they're doing is um is is uh is is wrong it's the same reason that you know philosophers could come up and say um there's there's determinism but but but there's no free will why it's because um reason is the slave of passion that's you might have said yeah if you if you really want that to be the case you can find a reason for it but it's no but but liit I mean it's fascinating as far as I know there's still debate about whether that delay was really there although you pointed out at one point Point there's some evidence that the preal cortex begins to experience some some I don't know whether it's an action potential T up to 10 seconds before which I was shocked I which is when they they went from moving from medieval electrograms on the skull to Modern Imaging stuff and take go back to T it's that point when people start arguing can we tell the difference between intent and an urge are we seeing the urge and it's at that point where you say you know this is sort of interesting and I have like all sorts of respectable colleagues who have spent a lot of time working on this problem but it's not where you're going to prove or disprove free will because you got there for the last three minutes for the end of it okay and we'll get to the fact that it's a lot more than the last three minutes you have to go through hours days years Millennia and millions of years but but let's but let's just it just to clarify our definition so I think you've discussed that a little bit let's talk about determinism and and in the context of what you mean and maybe in context of a or or someone else well not not a leian demon uh which is the other he always has to come up in the second paragraph also just somewhere around a littleit okay they they checked the boxes um I think I held off to three paragraphs before it did so I am a Maverick um determinism I basically Define it by exclusion which is you look at why something happened and as soon as you're informed enough to know that all sorts of things influence stuff that we're not aware of that could be very distal and time or place that could be subtle that could be subluminal blah blah blah etc etc um it's when you look why something has happened and there's no contributing factor that requires invoking magic that's the key point the invoking magic we'll get to that and as I say later I think reminds me of my favorite Sydney Harris cartoon which I'll remind you of if you don't know of it at some point later but um but this okay so that's deter that's sort of the the question of whether there's magic or whether there's or whether things are you know or not really that I agree that's what you really mean by determinism if there's some if the laws of nature somehow break down somewhere in the middle um and given that the laws of nature are deterministic and one of the things I I hope to I don't know whether they correct I hope to change your picture of is is is when we get to Quantum Mechanics quantum mechanics is deterministic I think you've been LED astray there although you know you know you I it fine that you the argument is it might not be and you could still show it doesn't make a difference but I I think it's even it's you don't even have to worry about that well I was up half of last night saying oh my God I had the nerve to write two chapters about quantum mechanics and we're I'm talking with you tomorrow so you've just confirmed everything that I knew had to be learning which is like calling me a diletant as a compliment no no no but it's okay I mean it's it's okay because what in some sense it was conservative I would I I would I'm going to be generous but I would say where I would disagree with you you go overboard and then show that even if it's overboard it doesn't make a difference anyway so it's but but I but we'll talk about that but but but I do want to get I mean Central to all of this just to make it clear and and that we you know that my understanding is from your book and my other things is the same is that we realize that we that most of that our conscious what we Define as Consciousness what we Define as intent what we perceive as all of these things is is just our awareness is just the tip of an iceberg that that that it's the last stage of of a of a detailed behavior in the brain that we still don't understand and we understand contribut contributing factors but that that this sense of free will like everything else like even our sense of Consciousness is somehow a post collusion I mean we're piecing together a world in which we have an us and in our brain and I'm me and and there's some continuity and and that's that's that's what our brains is doing but it doesn't but it doesn't that's the that's the end result not the beginning I is that are we is that reasonable to say yep okay now one of the ways to to to to demonstrate this other than just talking about it the fact that reporting is unreliable and by the way it was um I in I know you read the that part of my book on that and it's the the experiments say Michael gazano on on the split brain thing were for me just so overwhelming that you that you invent this perfectly rational explanation which is obviously totally false for why you're doing something but you give lots of examples because you know what you're talking about I I just sort of read a few when I appear to know what I'm talking about but um but one one of the ways you can show that people um that this in sense of free will is an illusion is is an experiment a psychology experiment that this sense of agency is auser um is uh is um is having people push a button when their hands are being controlled by something else you want to you want to talk about that for something I found that quite interesting yeah that's that's the one that really pushes lots of people over the edge there there are means these days one one like standard one is is very cool thing transcranial magnetic stimulation um where you can stimulate a certain part of the brain and make somebody do something like this is not suddenly make them become a Libertarian when they weren't but this is like you could make their index finger contract no matter what you try to do and if it's done subtly enough you will believe you decided to do that I mean I've had that done on me and the weirdest thing imaginable or there's all sorts of ways of manipulating the libbit scenario where they add like an extra Bell or something which you were told is driven by your volitional intentional doing whatever um and where they can manipulate that in ways where you will feel as if you decided to wait a little bit longer that time before buzzing it there's it's amazing I me it's wonderful it's wonderful the control you can have to to just I mean to to explicitly demonstrate these things which one can talk about vaguely I love that and you really feel like you you're press you're choosing to press that button you've had it done on you it's it's the weirdest thing it's a good thing I didn't believe in Free Will beforehand or else I would have stopped believing in free will but you know we know this there's incredibly smart people who are paid a whole lot of money to make you believe you really want to buy some nonsense crap that they're advertising you know it shows how much you want to believe in Free Will that you can do an experiment like that where you have this sense of agency and and it's completely uh completely explicit in illusion because it was created and yet it doesn't it it it that's not sufficient to convince people and we'll need a lot more as we'll talk as and you spend a lot of time because you want to talk about you want to try and address all of the arguments that you've heard heard over the years I think that you're trying to finally address it say you know because you've heard all of them but you then you then go to conscious and self where you I was really pleased to say that you know obviously I think it's right because it agrees with me but but um but that you know Consciousness is an epip phenomena I love that where you point which which by the way n Chomsky said to me in a different context but he said but where you say Consciousness is an irrelevant hiccup which I was I I'm going to quote that fantastic um and and um the the key part of this irrelevant hiccup which is really Central and and this is the whole part of of the the question the the hard problem of Consciousness as people would might say some people have said is what is what you know some people say the hard Consciousness problem Consciousness is what is the we that that makes us but the really interesting question to me is what what gives us the illusion of a we that's that's the problem I would want to answer but but um but you say something like our brains generate a suggestion and we then judge it this dualism suggests thinking back centuy so it's it it enters into even I guess into into sort of the parlance of at least some of Neuroscience and a lot of philosophy that somehow there's a separation between our brain and the we you want to elaborate on that a little bit in your perspective of that and it's totally false and just to show sort of the pedigree that comes with like arguably the most influential compatibilist philosopher on Earth right now talks about exactly that model with a possibility generator an idea generator that comes and then you pick than the dichotomously pristine made of marshm mow you floating around up there picks among the possibilities based on your learning experiences and your values and all and like that's that's where Free Will slips in yeah and I and that and and you I think I want to I want to there's an elephant in the room here and it's Dan dennet um and and and I do want to I do want to mention that because it seems to me it demonstrates I Know Dan and been a friend of mine for a long time but it amazes me how conf how someone who is remarkable in his arguments about many things can be so confused and logical that somehow um obvious nonsense like that uh if if he can be that confused logical it should make you suspicious about the rest of the of the field yes and just to show where I think that's coming from um like I I tiptoed around him with kid gloves in so far as I think a lot of his values come through a lot of his philosophizing in ways that I think tell us about how he's gotten some very wrong conclusions um how can he be so smart that he concludes that this quote that gives it all away in one of his talks and you can find a zillion versions of it on YouTube in one of his books saying oh my God I wouldn't want to live in a world in which no one thought there was free will because they'd just be running a muck and rapist and violence and besides we wouldn't be able to feel like we earned our prizes yeah yeah yeah why the guy is invested in Free Will there's not a whole lot of people who are saying oh my God if people stop believing in Free Will I won't be able to feel like I earned my low socioeconomic status and my abusive parents and my yeah I we'll come to that I think you mentioned that very thing at the end and I want to talk about I want to talk about how a way out of that too maybe it'll help Dan but um but um oh good but but you know what is surprising is to hear Dan is you know like me and and in many ways well in always ways a more well-known atheist but it's so ridiculous to hear that sentence because you could replace Free Will with religion and God and he would argue completely the opposite I would want to live in a world where there's where people didn't believe in there's God because if they did then they' be running a mck and like Dan don't you see the complete illogic of that and I I must say I've SE God wouldn't have blessed me with my endowed share yeah yeah exactly exactly God would but but you know but and I don't want to pick on Dan too much although I think he deserves it in this case um uh is this all of this argument that somehow there's a there's a generator or you're inventing something that no one's ever seen or measured that somehow allows you around get around the problem that there's no evidence whatsoever and every logical argument you can think of shows there's no place for free will it's and I later on we'll talk about that reminds me of the god of the gaps argument the more we learn the pl the less place there is for free will to exist it's a very similar argument when I was reading the book I I wrote on God of the gaps at one Point later on in the book um but let me remind you this Sydney Harris cartoon which you can use in your lectures if you haven't um it's two physicists at a Blackboard have you seen that that that thing a long equation and then and then in the middle it says and then a miracle occurs and then one of the guys says the other I think you should be a little more explicit at at that step right there but it's exactly that right it's it's perfect it's exactly that and and you have to presume Magic but what intrigued me I do want you to elaborate on one thing it's almost the last sentence of the of of of um of um oh yeah in of of that particular uh section of the book you say um okay thinking that it's sufficient to merely know about the attent in the present is far worse than just intellectual blindness far worse than believing that is the very first turtle on the way way down that's floating in the air in a world such as we have it's deeply ethically flawed as well and you just leave that hanging there and and maybe because you going want to talk about it later but M why is it ethically flawed um because the subject about whether there's free will at the end of the day isn't about neuroscience and it isn't about philosophy and is it's about the fact that we've created a world that runs on a myth that is just and runs on a myth that it is ethically defendable to have a world in which all sorts of people are rewarded for things they didn't earn and a vastly larger number of people live lives of misery and deprivation and her viewed as having been entitled to it for things they had no control over either okay yeah and we'll get you know sorry okay good okay um get worked up about this one yeah well good well I can't wait if you're worked up about this yeah well that's the part of the book where you can really sense the emotion and frustration and yet also fear that you're going to say something that you know that people are going to yeah anyway it's interesting I'm in The Bravery it took to write it down I think you talk about that you were hesitant you know one of the many there were lots of things that caused you to take time in writing this book but but how people would respond to the obvious consequences of what you're saying is is terrifying a little bit I think I can understand that um you next talk about where intent comes from where you really begin to get into the into for me the fascinating aspects of Neurology much of which I knew nothing about and so it was great learning experience for me also depressing of course because every time you learn I mean it's driven home even things that I the examples the explicit examples and empirical examples of things that I might have presumed exist are are depressing like the fact that that when you make decisions about things that you think are decisions that you say in three different studies subjects and brain scanners alternated between rating the beauty of something or the goodness of the same behavior and basically and you say both types of Assessments activated the same region the or orbital frontal cor cortex or ofc the more beautiful or good the more ofc activation it's as if IR relevant emotions about beauty gum up cerebral contemplation of the scales of Justice namely you make decisions and and it's just explicit not just we we know that but you can measure the brain and see that it is that these that these external things which you shouldn't which you don't think are affecting your rationality are are totally determining what you think is rational yep and never in a million years with the average person who's just made one of those judgments saying oh that's interesting why did you uh decide that oh it's because my orbital frontal cortex evolved that it has trouble distinguishing between the two because it's very recently that we evolved making moral assessments rather than just like appearance assessments oh that's why I did that yeah right exactly yeah and and and it's true we we as you point out that that we that these moral assessments are are recent so yeah all of the biological Machinery was developed without that and we've built up a a a morality and irrationality again trying to impose that on on a infrastructure that wasn't based on any of that once again if if Hume had been around today he would say that reason is a slave of passion it's I mean this gives meat to that beautiful quote I mean which he presumed presumed I guess in on the basis of thinking about things but but not with the evidence that you have and it's great to see evidence that specifically shows over and over again that reason is a slave of passion well and you used a great word for describing all of it clude of like oh it's just this Mish MOS that you kind of put together and improvised which is the human brain um another sound bite of the field evolution is not an inventor it's a tinkerer okay what do we got here and we suddenly have like come up with a notion of love where we okay give me some duct tape this part of the brain is going to handle it even though for a hundred million years it's been doing this instead so there's got to be some mistakes yeah that's exactly it and and okay and then when you be so you begin to in each of these cases for the first when you talk about the the the biological basis of trying to address this fallacy of of Free Will of perceive free will you you talk about you try and again put meat on Turtles all the way down but saying okay you have this intent what about the minutes before what about the hours before what about the days before and the Millennia before the millions of years before and and I want to you know unpack that a little bit um you talk about um uh um you know pre-existing Tendencies towards aggression and um um and and and uh and how you say about all because of how much life has taught them at a young age that the world is menacing place that people or that animals in particular that that experience the fact the world's aggressive is a menacing Place respond with the kind of aggression that you might have that's not surprising that that they don't control that it's based on it's based on their experiences minutes hours years or lifetimes or genetically beforehand yeah exactly one of the things that I was interested and I I want to throw these things in because there's so many neat examp examples is um just to show a sense that you know when we talk about being good people by being monogamous versus polygamist you talk about different species and oxytocin and testosterone and and vasopress and receptor levels and and why don't you talk about what happened I was going to quote it but you better you can talk about polygamous rodent species versus monogamous rodent species and and how and and and I found this once again fascinating when you think about this this what we impose as a moral issue now um is a um is a is is biology and biological um this is this is like irresistible and so much fun to teach about vs VES are these little V things that run around and there's all these different sub types and there are mountain vs and Prairie vs in the Great American West and they turn out despite like having 99% of their genes in common they have very very different social systems in that Prairie vs are monogamous they form parir bonds and Mountain vs are polygamous and I always have to remember when I'm teaching this okay which one is it Garrison Keeler Garrison Keeler talks about the great like American values out in wakon stuff that's in the prairie it's the Prairie VES who are monog they turn out not to be but that's that's what I always have to remember before I mess them up so wow wow how'd that happen because they're so closely related they're so and incredibly cool work by like a bunch of neuroscientists over the last couple of decades have completely unpacked that system when you are a male v of other species and you're mating you've released this hormone Vaso pressant from one part of your brain and what it does is it buzzes a part of your brain having to do with reward and whoa they just explain sex feels good and then it turns out that because of just a gene duplication event a change in a promoter on a gene in other words stuff that like dead white males and lab coats and molecular biology could explain in the prairie vs the receptor for vasopressin is more widespread and responsive than the receptor in the mountain vs so for the same sex act um they get a whole lot more of a buzz and at that point like B basic behaviorism takes over wow that was great I think I'll stick around and instead Mountain vs are nomadic the males there and they're like gone the next day okay how do you know this how do you know this one of those experiments where like people's mouths have to drop open brilliant like molecular manipulation take the Prairie version of this Gene and plunk it down into Mountain vs and you make them monogamous you make them monogamous it's amazing yeah I mean that's the kind of thing I love I mean you can't argue with that right that's what's great about it and okay so what about us and what about us and aren't we monogamous but what about divorce rates and what about most societies allow polygamy and and there's incredibly convincing evolutionary biology showing that among all the primates we're right in the middle we're like halfway between being a classic uh parir bonding monogamous species polygamous one and there's all sorts of interesting ways you can show that but in terms of this say okay so which version what kind of V are we and it turns out we have different variants some of us have one kind some of us have one another another and that's predictive of things like how stable of relationships you form that's predictive of things like how close you stand to an attractive person if you're already in a relationship oh my God it's the same stuff it's like the same stuff that before it's over with is produced like sonnets or divorce lawers so there's very human specific aspects to it but whoa even that is ultimately mechanistic yeah it's and and so the and and when we come to responsibility people who are condemned for one way or another as you point out a lot of these things are Gene variants or affected by expression of genes epigenetics which I want to have you explain the first time I really UND well I'm not sure I still understand but the first time I think I understood it was reading your book um uh I never could quite understand how but it's gene expression anyway but but you you sum this up by saying the decisions you supposedly make freely in moments that test your character like monogamy let's say generosity empathy honesty are influenced by the levels of these hormones in your bloodstream and the levels of variance of their receptors in your brain it's just that a character it's those it's that oh all that's like uh Fidelity or if you're in a different Society all of the cultural values built around you should be fine being a third wife or you should want to get as many camels as possible to get as many wise and that's how we that's the kind of people we are and whether it's one extreme or the other or one of the ones in between it's imbued with value and cultural judgment and that's not it that said you know it's not all what version of the vasopress receptor Gene you have and those studies showing that and different human correlates of it's not everyone is just at a higher than expected rate all all of our usual provisos there but if you knew about the Vaso presentent status plus three more of the neurotransmitters and seven of the hormones and this and that you're getting close to saying that's why this person is this way instead of that way well again I think of Dan Dennett again was saying you know you can't he may not be able to feel good about your accomp you know feel you deserve the prizes and you and similarly you might feeling that you've been a good person is is is great but um but you may also realize that it's a genetic bit of luck as well or all the other biology all or historical genetic historical in fact we'll talk about that I want to so that's so that's that's minutes to hours you know hormonal uh influence on your actions which are immediate but then you you talk about you know weeks to years really related to neuroplasticity which I guess I I guess uh um um is becoming increasingly important um and um and you say to jump to sort of depressing in a way to read once again about adolescence and its importance because we none of us can have control I mean when you think about that that you're you're doomed you're doomed in some ways to act the way you are because of a of some of a period in your life that you sometimes want to just forget and you say if you're an adult your adolescent experiences of trauma stimulation love failure rejection happiness despair acne the whole shabang will have played an outsize role in constructing the frontal cortex because you point out that's when it's being constructed um constructing the frontal cortex you're working with as you contemplate pushing buttons of course the enorm varieties of adolescent experiences will help produce enormously varied frontal cortexes in adulthood boy isn't that depressing yeah but you know from my perspective cool to the epigenetic mechanism for it but you you actually but in fact you point out even a better reason it's not depressing in some sense it was R question because I the next page you say this suggests something remarkable the genetic program of the human brain evolve to free the frontal cortex from genes as much as possible namely if if the frontal cortex is being developed during a period of learning of experiences in a in a rational intelligent self-conscious species you'd want that brain function which really is what's governing much of your rational Behavior I guess to to be as free from genes as possible to be based on experience so you you are you understand the world as it in principle is as opposed to the world that your genetic ancestors uh might have experienced yeah like basically we have evolved genetically more than any other species to be free of our genes and free of their deterministic powers that's that's a great thing it's not a bad thing it's allow it's allowed us to get where we are and and and necessary for for people for as complex a brain as we have probably well unless you spend your late adolescence where you're listening to speeches every day by a a guy with a mustache and a brown shirt and saying here's who's responsible for problems in society yeah means formative stuff is happening then and that could be for better or worse in fact for worse you point out that you talk about this AC score which is what's a adverse childhood experience score which I guess psych psychologists can can get by looking at all sorts of neglect and household dysfunction and abuse and all of these categories that you may or may not have experienced and you say for every step higher in one's AC score there's roughly a 35% increase in the likelihood of adult antisocial Behavior including violence poor frontal cortical development cognition problems with impulse control substance abuse teen pregnancy unsafe sex and other risky behaviors and increased vulnerability vul vulnerability to depression and anxiety disorders oh and also poorer health and earlier death so um you know that that that impact is is remarkable and and one might say how does that impact happen and that's where I may be introducing this too early but that's this connection between genes and environmental interactions which I think is related to epigenetics so do you want to explain I mean people would say look how can this be the genes are genes you have a DNA how can how can experience it's almost sounds lamaran how can how can experience experience is going to change that chemistry of the of the dnaa backbone so what are you telling me what get and so why do you why do you get get around that question and explain it better than I could yeah experience environment all of that doesn't change your genes your genes that are made up a sequence of DNA and a code and it it doesn't change your genes what experience does is change the onoff switches for your genes how readily you activate a gene whether you permanently silence it how readily you activate it under this circumstance but not that circumstance what epigenetics is about is the regulation of genes and it turns out when you look at a species like us the majority of our DNA is not devoted to the genes the majority is devoted to the regulatory elements the instruction manual is much longer than the DNA code itself and what evolution is mostly about if you want to get into a nuts and bolts level is the evolution of the regulatory control far more than the genes themselves and what environment does is Forever After in some cases in some cases even multigeneration uh make it easier or harder to activate certain genes yeah in fact you say that when it comes to humans it can be silly to ask what a gene does which is the kind of thing my elementary bi biology might have asked because I'm I don't know much um but not you shouldn't ask what that does but what it does in a particular environment because it's a turning it's the expression it's it's a turning on and off the genes produce proteins that give instructions for production of proteins and and how when that gets turned on and off and my also understanding of how impactful those proteins are in subsequent things is also environmentally related because some of those proteins are switches that turn genes on or off yeah so you're regulating The Regulators and it's Regulators all the way down it's these recursive Loops yeah okay I mean and and that's I think incredibly important to realize that that that's how when one thinks of there there's I guess you know you can say okay the luck there's lucky genes as people say born with Lucky Jeans but when we talk about the spectrum of behaviors for which we think we have Free Will and the spectrum of people and for which will'll have to take responsibility for good or bad actions you could say well there are two there are two components there's Gene variance the population has Gene variants and some people do have lucky genes and some people have unlucky genes in the sense of getting a variant that you know related to vasos presson or whatever um and then there's the other aspect which I really hadn't fully appreciate is exactly how the environment affects the the mechanism by which environment affects uh Gene regulation is the other aspect so there's there's the there's the variance in genes and the variance in environmental experiences and it's that combination of those two that determines who you are neither of which you had any say in nine of which you had any say in yeah exactly you didn't even get to fill out an application form yeah um and uh um and uh just like you yeah in particular we all realize we didn't have any say in the choice of our parents and sometimes that's good and sometimes bad I me and uh and but it it goes far beyond that um now you say okay that's okay so that's basic biology but beyond that we go back more than just years and more just more than just your own life experience but the life experience of your ancestors culture that irresistible it's totally cool uh it's totally cool I'm I'm a diletant in this area because what do I know from like cultural anthropology or history or stuff but different cultures are different yeah um and there are historically and biologically and ecologically logical reasons why different cultures wind up in different ways for example like way back when traditional means of production you could be a farmer or you could be a hunter gatherer or you could be a pastoralist and it turns out that pastoralists all the world over whether it's Yaks or camels or goat or whatever are much higher than likely to generate what is called a culture of honor where it's built around retribution Revenge Clan loyalties feuds that go for centuries where it involves forming Warrior classes High rates of aggression all that sort of thing and whoa you hardly ever see that among the farmers or the hunter gatherers and what's that about um if the bad people come and you're a hunter gather they can't steal your rainforest if they come to your farm they can't steal all your they can't Harvest your crops at night but sneaky low down varmints can come and rustle your cattle at night Pastor lists spend all their time raiding each other and stealing their means of livestock and like in Africa I hang out near a a pastorless tribe and like they have raids on each other and steal all the cows and people have to take revenge all of that among pastoralists you have a special vulnerability in being nomadic and in your wealth being a bunch of animals that could be stolen and they all evolve these similar cultures of honor and where if you do not answer an insult to your honor with twice the retaliation you're just like losing face and you're dishonoring you and your family and your ancestors and your people and all of that and that turns out to explain aspects geographical variations and violence on this planet or as another one another one people whose ancestors or people who live in rainforests are much more likely than chance to invent polytheistic religions people who live in deserts are more likely to invent monotheistic ones and there's all sorts of ecological you know if you're living in a forest where there's like a thousand different edible plants that you can use it's not that surprising that you decide that there's like a spirit inside each one of those different plants and like a thousand flowers blooming and like if you're living in the desert everything gets boiled down to just like survival and very singular things and big surprise they come up with singular religions and you know people like Jared Diamond have done brilliant work analyzing how it is that this planet was overrun by the desert monotheists rather than the rainforest polytheists and that's the planet we have now but that's a cultural difference and that one influences like from shortly after birth where you were being taught like ethics come from and who you were trying to please and whose foot or whose plural feet you be sitting at if you do things right and wind up in the in Paradise afterward and and that's from culture and I never understood that what what I think is important is is that relates to what we were just talking about in a way that I hadn't really appreciated before I knew that c obviously culture reflects people and you know when I talk to people you know they don't seem to get when I talk about religion isn't it surprising that the children of Christians turn out to be Christian the children of Muslims turn out to be Muslim and if there's some universal truth isn't that a little surprising of course it's a cultural thing but now you when you talk about say the pastolis and and and sort of Retribution and and violence now I kind of now I'm thinking bi biochemically or neurobiologically so that experience undoubtedly affects the regulation of genes that that that produce aggressive responses so you can understand the the how that culture ends up affecting uh people who whose DNA is the same but but but uh but but the regulation of that DNA is is culturally determined in some sense and like from a cultural perspective the job of parents is to make kids who will have the same cultural values as them and translated that into neurobiology is to have their nervous systems constructed in a way that this is what they will carry along okay here's here's like one of the all-time cool experiments and it's the only time I have seen a a particular word appear in a scientific journal this was incredible work by this guy Richard Nesbit University of Michigan one of the Gods of social psychology and what it was one of those where the psych Majors like come volunteer for this experiment and or got to ask you questions about whatever and so they go to the psych department and there's the lab they're going to down at the end of the hall and they walk down the hall from the elevator and unbeknownst to them the experiment occurs in the hallway which is it's a narrow hallway all these like shelves and chunk and stuff and as they're walking down there's a guy walking at you he's a big beefy guy who's working on the project and what he does is as he comes past you he knocks into your shoulder looks back and says watch it this is the experiment in print and then what they do is they like you come into the lab and they give you all sorts of scenarios of like moral quandries and what would you do in response to this and what you see is people from the north northern United States having been bumped into has no effect on their answers uh and of course there's the controls where the guy doesn't do that to you and people from the South were now far more likely if they were bumped into the not to Advocate violent responses to these Norm violation scenarios and they elevate their levels of testosterone and stress hormones whoa are you kidding the American South instead of being settled by these nice like Quaker shopkeepers we're settled by these like crazy ass Irish Scotsman Shepherds and stuff and they brought a culture of honor and centuries later you're walking down a hallway in an aror Michigan and that's going to influence how much stress hormones you secrete and whether you Advocate saying ah you know they're just an idiot but ignore them versus rip their throat out wow this culture stuff persists wow yeah it's just yeah wow I love these examples I'm I'm that's I'm really happy with it's amazing because you can put meat on all of these you know the words sound nice but the meat is what matters I mean that's what makes it science and uh and we talk about you know I wrote down education here because you talked about the purpose of parents in some sense is to incult inculcate those values and the and the cultural things to their children which is by the way the reason I argue that for public education the purpose of education is to get you away from your parents in my opinion which I could never understand why in the US we have this system where parents somehow are are supposed to be able to impact on the Elevate education of children because that's the and I like why I'm not always a big fan of homeschooling because it seems to me that's the great opportunity is to get people away to learn that the world isn't exactly necessarily the way their parents say it is yep exactly except you know it's not by chance that the school that your parents are going to send you to um is going to teach some semblance of their exact same values you're not going to go to a school if you're growing up in Kansas and they teach you that it is time for workers of the world to unite and overthrow their chains and you're not going to go to a school in amatka and they yeah yeah the parents still get in there well okay so so this so this we basically I don't know whether we beaten a dead horse but we certainly added a lot of color to it um and and and the the part of the book about intent you basically say to summarize in order to prove there free will we have to show that some Behavior just happened out of thin air in the sense of considering all of these biological percursors the ones we've talked about in a lot more obviously in the book it may be possible to sidestep that with some subtle philosophical arguments but you can't with anything known to science and I think that's the sort of the key thing but then when we come to then then when we come to the padding of the on the back um the question is you know people um you know surely with with grit and hard work you can overcome you know the the bad luck of your existence and um um and the and the idea is that I is that is a misunderstanding of History which you I think you basically say look okay these people are saying okay there's no free will I accept everything you said about hormones and everything so clearly there's no free will in what you're doing now but somehow in the past the past you there was something you could have done that you know to make yourself a better person now and somehow that that it's okay it's somehow we can bury the Free Will in the past you want to elaborate on that or if you're a particularly fancy compatible list somehow in the future which somehow counts in the present or whatever it's a notion of like what brought you to this moment and the answer rather than being because of what happened a second ago and a minute ago and an hour and a million years ago in biology all the way it's because of the key decisions you made back when which is just like oh good they've just explained it by saying the puzzle is now on back when that's that's what we're now trying to explain and the trouble is whatever was in the past once was now and why did this Behavior just happen because of one second before one minute before etc etc it's it's this it's one of the like Dodges in there I mean what you're bringing up also is this totally seductive dichotomy which is like one compatibl trick which most people Advocate is that you'll say okay okay there's some stuff we have no control over like I don't have a voice that could sing opera um I'm not tall enough to play in the NBA I don't have whatever receptor for whatever neurotransmitter so that I've got this amazing analytical skills whatever yeah yeah yeah we have our natural attributes and those are biological yeah what isn't what really matters is what do you do with those attributes do you put your shoulder to the grindstone do you squander your gifts do you do you like get going when the going gets tough to and that's where we've got this incredibly sort of judeo-christian temptation to say that that is the playground of Free Will and judgment it's what we do with what we were gifted or cursed that's the measure of a person and that's so destructive I mean like it's got a nice naby pabby liberal version of it which is when your kid does something good don't tell them oh you must be so smart say oh you must have worked so hard because you're fueling that side of the dichotomy and and that's good thing because it has instrumental value not because it has moral value but it's this huge dichotomy that the natural attributes we have are made out of atoms and whether you show Backbone in a moment of Temptation that's the stuff that's made out of the fairy dust and the what you do with what you got what you do with those Crossroads and splits in the road and all those things is made of the same stuff because it's that frontal cortex of yours that decides are you going to show impulse control or are you going to do long-term planning or either and it's the exact same how did you get the frontal cortex that you have because of one second ago and one minute ago and all of that and that's why at some point somebody is going to decide to rob the liquor store and instead somebody's going to decide to devote their life to Doctors Without Borders or something exactly the the point that somehow accepting that the instantaneous moment of of of what you're you know that your that your local intent to that moment is biologic control but somehow what determined your local intent which was earlier isn't biologically determined it's that it's that irrationality I had you know you do give a you know to pick again on dead horse you pick a dead D lot you know uh but basically says that he says so you know when someone when he argued with someone that we have no control over the biology or the environment thrown at us then it response was so what the point I think you're missing is that our autonomy is something one grows into it's a it's a process that's initially entirely Beyond one's control but back when it was happening it was the same biology so it wasn't anymore and and and and as one matures one learns one's being able to control more and more one's activities with the whole point is you just learned that you don't control I mean you you don't control them you you know you you control them but your control over that of the of that was determined because was was once is yeah exactly was was once is it's so clear when one puts it that way I I guess I I I I I I don't see it I think the fundamental question and as a physicist this is why as a physicist I I guess I never have found this whole issue it seem to be clear here is it fundamentally everything everything is determined by a combination of of of of nature which is biology physics and chemistry and none of those have fairy dust in them not even physics we'll get to it and and uh once you recognize that then then it's clear that that that that Free Will must be an illusion because because none of those none of those n the the the physics and chemistry I know the physics I know the chemistry a little bit and the biology less um all of them behave uh with rules of science that don't allow for that you know that Gap in that Sydney Carris cartoon yeah exactly and an awful lot of people work very very hard and begin to have almost Evangelical incoherence at points where they still manage to to pull that out of the Hat there's still a special Essence that doesn't obey those rules well it's it's to me it's very related again having spent a lot of time thinking recently about Consciousness to the same argument as where is the you that exists beyond your brain I mean it's the same really argument isn't it in some sense it's where can that be if you know this is what there is so where's the U if it's not there and and and if it's beyond there then somehow you're you're invoking some fairy dust to assume that that you is an independent existence and the version of that that like makes us wet our pants the most is so when someone dies there's no them anymore yeah yeah like that's that's enough to make almost anyone who rejects free will feel a little bit like queasy and dizzy at that point uh but yeah yeah well and my you've heard this my argument and people always say what happened to it and and the argument which I didn't invent myself but first was told to me it's you know what what was it like before you born just imagine what was like before you're born and then but okay let's talk about the but you are here and and you spend some time on the cognitive prefrontal cortex which is so important to learning and social uh socialization and sociality and how those things are are you know evolved and um you talk about the social PFC the the um that um that basically there's two the preval cortex is sort of control me I don't know whether you want to think of it as a control mechanism but it does two things right it it kind of inhibits it e either it it either encourages or inhibits in the right quote unquote right moment so you want to discuss that a little bit I guess I guess guess the key thing I I learned about from your is this two parts of the PF and I love saying these things they make me sound so literate biologically now I I forget the words almost immedi that's why I didn't become biologist early on I couldn't memorize words I was awful at it but there's the dorsal lateral PFC and then there's the ventromedial PFC and there's sort of the the ying and yang the EV the devil and the angel on the side of you when when don't you talk about that and and by the way I probably didn't become a physicist because I couldn't understand the concepts so you couldn't you couldn't memorize the jargon but oh well well whatever yeah it was just okay you could have if you wanted to anyway the lateral let let's call it the Egghead part of your prefrontal cortex and the ventral medial your emotional over the top like hysterical part um ventral medial prefrontal cortex um is the means by which the more emotional parts of your brain Olympic system funnel all of their opinions and quirks and yearnings and legitimate aspirations and stuff and send that information onto the frontal cortex that's how your frontal cortex is figuring out what your gut is telling you what biases are about to make you make a totally unfair decision you're it's the ways in which decision making is is influenced by emotion and that's been a major Revolution for the field of figuring out no it's not just your like gleaming calculator of a prefrontal cortex that's telling the lyic system now is the time to give the person flowers now's not the time to do whatever because you're going to regret it that there's as much flow of information from the emotional part of the brain to this Egghead part of the brain so the ventral medial the emotional part of the prefrontal cortex is getting that information and amid lots of other areas of the brain there that fumer around and confer and compare and contrast and what it's ultimately the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex that's the decider that sends out a message that is four or five steps away from your muscles that sends out a message that's four or five steps away from telling your muscles not to do do that raising issues of free want as well as Free Will and these two areas of the brain are like very pertinent to this um big surprise the cortex was the last part of the brain to fully evolve evolutionarily the prefrontal cortex was the last part of the cortex to evolve the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex was the last part of the prefrontal cortex to evolve and we proportionately have more of it than any other species out there so that's where your calvinistic backbone dwells or your your ttitude or whatever and it's the same thing what kind of dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex do you have today it depends it depends on what happened a second ago and a million years ago and all of that because stress and stimulation and certain Gene variance and the levels of this hormone and the levels of that nutrients and certain culture More Produce different kinds of dorsal lateral prefrontal cortices and this is not just oh this is this has to be the case from like go do imaging and look at the size of these in different people and it reflects all sorts of logical stuff people who were much better at like doing the right thing when it's the harder thing to do you go and look and they have a bigger Andor a more energetic dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex than other people damage the prefrontal cortex and you get somebody who can even sit there and tell you the difference between right and wrong and nonetheless at every juncture they're going to do the impulsive disastrous thing and just to kind of stop you in your tracks depending on the study 25 to 75% of the men in this country on death row have a history of concussive head trauma to that part of the brain wow uh we're talking machines here yeah we're not talking Souls yeah well that's right and and and well that's that's power that's amazingly powerful speaking of the PFC and the experience that you've had it there was a there's a there was a quote here that made me think well a lot of quotes made me think you say all the individual pieces of these findings follow so Soo socioeconomic status predicts how much a young child's D dlpfc which is that whatever it's called um a yeah a activates and recruits other brain regions during an executive task it predicts more responsiveness of the amydala to physical um or social threats a stronger activation signal carrying this emotional response to the PFC by the VM PFC which is the other the emotional part of the PFC I guess and such status predicts every possible measure um of function in Kids U name naturally lower socioeconomic status predicts worst PFC development this this does smack when a buzzword now is called White Privilege which I have which I which is over well which I have issues with at some level but but we won't go there but but this does suggest I mean there is privilege and and and it and it's and it's undeniable what it doesn't suggest is that somehow it you know it it suggests the world isn't fair but it doesn't say that you can cure that by by then doing something else because it just says you know you're stuck with with the with the with with your with the experience of your past and suddenly you know Society doing these other things is not necessarily going to solve your particular problems aha here here is where I have to disagree strongly okay good because as it's turning out very little in your brain is irreversible um that's this whole field of neuroplasticity yes and when you look at how change occurs an incredibly dramatic change and explanations for why one out of every 10 or 100 thousand of kids who grow up in some appalling circumstance wind up not having that profile and blah blah all of that um change happens massive amounts of change can happen and when you look at how that works it's exactly as mechanistic as everything else that re enforces the belief that we don't have free will rather than doing exactly the opposite No in fact I yeah we're not in a disagreement because I guess what I wanted to say is that appropriately in fact that's my out at the last part of this book I'm going to argue that that appropriately treating the world as if we have free will understanding that we don't have free will will allow the kind of positive change that one that is that that is necessary even personal positive change re we'll we'll get there the the possibility of change and how you do it can only be effectively done when you understand the mechanisms that imply we don't have free will if you want to understand how how to affect you know we talk about we don't have the ability to determine how what we wish in some ways but we can but with that knowledge we can we can I think allow future development that may change what we wish so we'll we'll get there and I think that's really important but but I guess what I was saying is that some of the societal solutions that are proposed there's inequities and they're built in inequities in the world and that's and you're right we should be trying to address those in a realistic way and and a realistic way means thinking about the science and not and not thinking about ay faery wonderful imaginary Solutions I guess that's that's that's my let alone nationalistic myths of equal opportunity yeah exactly you got it anyway so that so I think that the the I love your summary part basically the takeaway is that it's impossible to successfully exactly this is what I was going to I was looking for this quote was right in front of me it's impossible to successfully wish what you're going to wish for this chapter's punchline is that it's impossible to successfully will yourself to have more willpower and that it it isn't a great idea to run the world on the belief that people can and should I and that's important but I want to come back to that because I think that does leave this W this loophole that while you can't successfully will yourself to have more willpower what you can do is potentially with that knowledge and the recognition that people can learn and change you can imagine ways to in the future adjust yourself to to to to to have characteristics that you might prefer to have and exactly and that's really important but you can only do it if you realize the real science behind it which is that it's not you don't do it by just strength of character you do it by thinking of the kind of things that change people for better or worse and and and so I think that's really important and if in addition to that you're lucky enough to wind up and life where you can listen to a lecture yeah exactly that's the whole point I mean learning actually works otherwise you and I if we didn't think that I don't think you and I would have been doing what we well we might have anyway but uh but um but we you know it's that aha experience in fact somewhere in the book you say how devastating it is to find something you fundamentally believe in is wrong and I've always said I found it the most energizing thing in the world I hope everyone my my goal in higher education is that every student has something that they fundamentally believe is Central to their being proved to be wrong and that's the purpose of Education I think because it opens your mind well I think as I said before you're made of more resilient stuff than me so good going maybe yeah well yeah what maybe in that aspect but I'm I'm still I still feel I Still Envy all the other aspects of you anyway um and and and and I find them remarkable in ways I always find when people do things that I couldn't think of even doing in principle and and you're full of that but anyway let's and we've already okay enough of that um okay I want to get to chaos and determinism and then I want to get to the to the to sort of the the emotional heart of this which is which is responsibility the second half of your book but so you the argument it look it comes down to this okay people say yeah yeah all that's through but nature has these weird characteristics and one is chaos that the world is chaotic and and and unpredict able and um um and and that's there's the out there's the magic there's the magic out because the world is unpredictable either because when you never have more than two bodies and as you describe nicely here um uh you have you have chaotic systems you can't you can't you can't predict the future of a three-body system which is amazing when you think about it it just the first time I learned that was amazing and I will give a plug by the way I I um um uh Timothy Palmer wrote a book called um um something something something of Doubt which I just actually we had a he's a physicist he's a climatologist it's a great book on chaos and and and and understanding its implications for not just not just climate science but behavior and all sorts of other things I highly recommend you take a look at it I I don't know if you saw it but in some recent issue of science or nature there was a paper entitled something like a statistical solution to the three body problem which of course I immediately turned the page because I was not going to understand a word of it I assume it really has not solved the three body problem statistically well yeah I mean but it I mean a statical solution is chaos especially if they're if there're if there are you know strange attractor you can ask what's the likelihood of the system is going to end which is what meteorology is all about what's the likelihood that and and you do that by running computer simulations many times over and you see where it goes because you can't a priori do it you change the initial conditions and anyway um but chaos implies and you you you go into this that that that that for many systems small changes extremely small changes in initial conditions can prod dramatic changes in outcomes can don't don't always not don't must but can and that's an important thing too they don't always but they can and that seems to be suggests that somehow there's this there's this out and um and and I think I don't know what you say here but basically I I paraphrase this saying not being able to so this is an anti-reductionist argument and and and as as a as a reductionist it's always amusing to for me to see the anti-reductionism as someone who's tried to understand the fundamental structure of matter it's always amusing um because I'll arue later um emergent complexity I think is reductionism in a different form but but um not being able to trace things to their fundamental constituents not being able to go back to the fundamental constituents to be able to say how a system is behave is not an out you want and let I'm going to let you give your explanation and then I want to add something to it from physics oh good um because every single person who says chaotic ism is totally cool and unexpected and revolutionary is completely right and every one of them who then says and this is where you could find free will is wrong because they always make the same mistake they think that systems that are unpredictable are undetermined and that's the get out of free get out of jail free card that they think they're pulling out of that point and there is a universe of differences between determinism and predictability chaotic systems which occur in like molecules and cells and brains and societies and universes chaotic systems are deterministic or that deterministic is the most like oldtime clock with gears but because of the nature of the interactions going on are not predictable and unpredictable does not mean you can pull Free Will out of that that's the key point you make and I think very important is it un unpredictable is not not deterministic they the three body system is is is governed by Newton's Laws is nothing more predictable than that they're the same things that made the world that ended the burning of witches when made it seem like the world was comprehensible by by mathematics and and and and causes had effects and um and effects had causes uh uh yeah but but they're unpredictable but let me add for for your ammunition as I was thinking about this it occur Ur to me the exact this almost the strongest version I can think of this is thermodynamics because there I can't predict there's no way I can predict where the atoms in this room are or what the you know for many reasons there's no way but there's nothing stronger than the second law of Thermodynamics okay which says even it's all totally unpredictable but it's but it governs the world there's a law that you can't break and every time people try and do it they create perpetual motion machines because they try and avoid the second law of theonomics and much of life is trying to avoid it when I look at my study um every day it's trying to avoid it and and yet there's nothing more there's nothing stronger that got nothing more deterministic than the second law of Thermodynamics yet it's based on the fact that I it's based on the fact that I'm I have a system that's at a fundamental large scale level unpredictable never going to be able to say exactly where it's going to be puffing out but by definition if you've just climbed up a mountain with the bag of potato ships you brought with you are going to be like bulging outward yeah yeah exactly and it's it's uh it's incredibly important that that that that um that uh that we that it's it's the basis of the world we live in we physics works for a world that's chaotic and unpredictable because because it is deterministic because there's are certain things you can say with certainty and one of them is that a closed system in a closed system the entropy of that system is going to the same or increase uh and and and and so and that's deterministic that's a rule that's a law and a law that can't be violated in spite of the unpredictability of the specifics of that system and and that's why I guess where I come from in physics so okay for the first time in my life I'm going to start using the word thermodynamics great that's exactly oh good yeah exactly now and you can just like I'm G to say I'm going to remember that dorso lateral or whatever PFC make myself sound good too okay um one we'll come to I I want to JP ahead because you point out that we have developed okay so that in 1922 um people would have said that you know someone would began shoplifting um you know and urinating in public behaved a certain way because he chose to in 2022 we now say they behave that way because of deterministic mutations of one gene in in this particular example and you point out that that um so in in if if that I forget what you say but if if if Free Will is determined by what we know by level of ignorance there's something wrong if an instance of Free Will exists only until there's a decrease in our ignorance so it's free will until we understand it and then it's not free will anymore and and as I say that's exactly the god of the gaps argument exactly you know thunderstorms are God and then we understand thunderstorms and where's the room left for God it's it's not a even theologians understand it's not a good argument for trying to put God there because that shrinks and I don't understand why the free will people don't realize that's shrinks each time we learn more about how systems work um yes emerging complexity is interesting because um the argument and and and and and I I've you know I've seen in in physics there's this debate because these people say oh well you know particle physics these fundamental okay but really the really interesting stuff is the stuff that you can't explain at this reductionistic level it's all the fascinating structures it's how oatmeal boils it's it's it's uh and and and that that and you know and and there are things you you know obviously the understanding things that microscopic level don't necessarily help you understand and there's lots of and you give examples of emerging complexity in particular in neuronal systems um and um but it's again it's not clear why that that um that reflects anything the fact that you can't trace the end result from fundamental constituents is once again uh ignoring the fact that that that unpredictability is not the same as indeter as indeterminacy and um [Music] and evolution itself in some sense it seems to me when I when I was reading it some thoughts occurred and I wanted to run them by you I mean you know it's no great mystery I mean snowflakes are in some sense emerging complexity you take the fundamental polar interactions MO ules and who would have thought they'd form these beautiful christmas-like patterns but but more than that um uh Evolution itself in some sense is a because you point out that the whole point of of of of emerging complexity is that the individual constituents are just doing their own little thing without knowing what the whole system is doing and somehow the whole system goes in a certain direction and that's a remarkable statement but okay so what um and you know but I don't you I want to ask you don't you see I mean I see evolution is exactly that SI biological systems evolve not because they're some they're heading in some direction or because globally something's happening it's because the individual system sort of might be a genetic mutation and near neighbor nearest neighbor interactions reproduction and other things are going to drive the system in a way that may you know in response to Natural Selection will will create a an organism that has beautifully structured existence to make it look like they were designed exactly and that's totally cool and amazing and emerging complexity makes me so happy I can't even begin to tell you that and it's the greatest of all of that but this is not a playground either where suddenly you can pull Free Will out of it because once again it's built around the confusion of predictability and determinism and the people who try to sidestep it and still somehow get free will out of it always do the same trick that their model requires once you've established an emergent level of something unexpected that emergent level can reach down and change the constituent parts and if and only if there's 10,000 ants and they have formed like a complex society like each individual ant now can like solve the traveling salesman problem on a piece of paper no the whole point of emerging complexity is that the stupid simple little building blocks are still just as stupid and simple but because there's enough of them out of it has come something amazing and complex and adaptive but in order to pretend you've pulled Free Will out of it you've got to assume the system works way that it can't that it doesn't exactly okay and now let me throw something out at you which I only realized in the context of reading that description of yours which I'm going to use now whenever I hear people throw emerging complexity at me that emerging complexity is an extreme form of reductionism because emerging complexity is just saying right reductionism is saying the world the complicated world is based on simple principles few quirks four forces put them together and look what what happens emerging complexity is saying exactly the same thing the fundamental constituents aren't knowledgeable about the whole world they're not complex they're very simple they have a few simple behaviors a few simple properties that are restricted to and out of that Simplicity comes the amas complexity so it's the ultimate Force it's the ultimate form of reductionism it seems to me exactly and the only reason and its reductionism which when you put enough pieces together becomes unpr predictable but you haven't like escaped from the laws of reductionism and the only reason why emerging complexity is interesting separate of a because sometimes it's really surprising and beautiful is that understanding some phenomena it makes more sense to try to get it at that level than at the more reductive level it's just more convenient yeah exactly and but physics is also based on that I most people written about in one of my books most people don't realize physics does exactly that the law there's no the laws of physics are not there's no law of physics is universal so you you discuss the laws that are appropriate to the scale at which you're exploring phenomena and that's a that was a revolution in our thinking about physics and we actually have the mathematical underpinning of that something called the normalization group it doesn't matter but that that that it's appropriate if if you're you know if you're if you're a psychologist if you're a behavior psychologist or neuroscientist it's ridiculous to try thinking about Quark inter actions it's not going to get you anywhere um and so and but the same is true in physics it's not a new phenomena that that you talk about the the appropriate interactions at the scale at which you're looking at and that's just another you know and you do that because you eventually want to finish your thesis and get a degree exactly it's like the most accessible level yeah you wanna yeah you want to you want to exactly you want to get results and then that's what science is all about find a way to get results that work and that and that you can test and um nothing more fundamental than that um but you point out I mean this this thing you just said that some level you have to reach down in order to find that miracle in order to find that way the emerging complex system has to reach down and change the properties of the fundamental constituents but neurons are still neurons independent of what whatever and the the mechanisms neurons aren going to change no matter how complex the system there's in their fundamental interactions going to be the same and I I can't help but say this there's a whole chapter based on this and it seems to me you must be doing it because that's where all the philosophers are hanging their hats without saying it somehow they're all saying just that without having without explicitly saying it because when you explicitly say it it it sounds ridiculous and and I can't help but think you must have for much of your life had to counter those philosophers or or at least hear those philosophical arguments um that's really seductive um and that's what it pivots around and like I I stole this metaphor from someone oh an emergent feature of water molecules is water molecules are not wet until there's a whole lot of them that's an immersion property however water is made of two hydrogens and one oxygen it's not the case that once things get wet it's sustained because it's now two oxygens and one hydrogen yeah that's great that's great okay we will now move to Quantum Mechanics but you'll be happy to know we're going to we're going to we're going to gloss over it for many reasons because I think it's a red herring in the first place um and you point out how it's a red herring for for biological reasons which I'm aware of and I I had a big debate once on stage with Mr hamov about this but um uh uh yeah but yeah I know where I explained have the slightest understanding what quantum mechanics was all about but um but the idea is people say look quantum mechanics is indeterminate because it it has a fundamental indeterminacy that you perform an experiment and the results are probabilistic you can't say with certainty in some cases you can but in many cases you can say with certainty what the result you can only say probabilistically what the result of an experiment will be and suddenly that fundamental indeterminacy appears to give you a way out um let's give your Arguments for why that's irrelevant which is basically two I think I want to summarize them one that um that Randomness is not a is not a good explanation to Free Will and two that when you actually think of the mechanics of the brain the scale at which quantum mechanical effects might come about which is something I've recognized too but that the scale of which they might be relevant is vastly different than the scale it's going to be cause an activation potential to or or a whole slew of things to happen to make a decision they're vastly different scales so why don't you elaborate for a second and then I'll say explain why I don't think any of that matters anyway um because I I had never heard this phrase before before starting to read about this stuff the brain is a moist noisy environment yes which was very picturesque to me and kind of like unsettling and a little bit yucky um but I gu like for stuff at the quantum level to have any hope and hope in this case comes with like 23 zeros after it any hope of being able to impact macro events it requires a synchrony it requires all of these random events to be random and roughly the same way all at once and it can't work that way statistically and it especially can't work that way in moist noisy environments like biological stuff because what they're very good at is collapsing sort of the indeterministic features yeah the collaps the way yeah I mean that's the arguments that are presented that those words are are problematic but the but the idea is exactly that that you know I I face it because people talk to me well well look at all this quantum entanglement and quantum teleportation when me will be able to send people from here there I would about Star Trek as you know and and um and uh and the point is the only reason we can do that is we have to is quantum mechanics is so weird because we don't experience it we don't experience it because uh we don't we're not Quantum we're we're we're classical beings and our we are exist at a level where the quantum mechanical aspect reality is hidden it's an amazing thing that we humans even discovered that it's there that that in order to illustrate these quantum mechanical things you have to very carefully prepare systems and unbelievably carefully prepared systems that's why Nobel prizes are given out for these things it's hard to do so that you get so that you can isolate the weirdness of quantum mechanics otherwise it's not there if it was quantum mechanics wouldn't seem so strange it but it it's it's it's not there because you know you can't teleport a human because a human is in a very carefully prepared state of two photons where you work very hard and you isolate it from the environment all the time it's happening so there no further interactions which destroy Quantum correlations and all of the rest and um I mean it is surprising that there are in biological systems places where Quantum coherence exists where you wouldn't have expected it to you know maybe in photosynthesis for example but but that's different than than brain function which is incredibly noisy environment and not just noisy but the scale over which Quantum fluctuations even if they can happen could happen is vastly different than the scale where the important things related to neuronal processes and activation potentials and decisions and uh are made okay so that's I think that's really important but the but the but the thing I want to stress to you is quantum mechanics isn't indeterminate so that whole argument is wrong in the first place people get it wrong quantum mechanics is is termin quantum mechanics is based on a second order differential equation wrting equation second order different equation says if you give me the initial and it's a second order differential equation for the wave function not for an observable but it says you define it here and for all just like Newton just like the three body problem for all future times I can calculate exactly with 100% certainty what the wave function is going to do at least in principle in practice I might not be able to it's an incredibly it's completely deterministic now it is true that when you try and make me measurements those are probabilistic but the underlying mechanism of quantum mechanics is completely deterministic and so the fact that the result results are are probabilistic is is just a red herring and the example I would give you I think which I think is probably you know so people say oh maybe there's some accidental activation here that changes your view here and that that gives you an out because of quantums the the example that I think is really important is is radioactivity radioactivity happens because of quantum so I can't tell you when a given uranium atom is going to Decay but I can tell you with exact certainty that the laws of nature is determined that when what the behavior of the radioactive system is going to be and how many of the I can't tell you which one but I can tell you with certainty you know if it's big enough system exactly how many of them are going to be decaying at any instant and so while it appears as if you have that indeterminacy it's it's really it's really a red herring the system is just determined I as as in in large scale as anything else and radioactivity is a is a perfect example if if a radioa if uranium atoms you put a bunch of them together are going to have a well-known Decay rate the same is going to be true for for neurons in your brain or anything else it's going to they're just as prescribed so I would if if you had told me that I would not have had to have faked my way through writing two chapters on it no but on the other hand it's good way the fact you were forced to do it is useful because then you were able to discuss the things you know which is the processes in the brain and illustrate those which I can't do illustrate exactly how how implausible even if it were true how the the processes that determine Free Will in your brain aren't going to be affected by quantum mechanics and um and um anyway well we're now going to talk we're going to now spend the last half hour or so talking about the last half of your book it's really not the last half so I feel better it's like the last third um and uh which I which I which gave me soulless when I realized how much I had left to read when I when I when I before I got to the end um uh the the um the the you know question of what we do about this but but part so so given that given that it's undeniable that the that the world that that we don't have Free Will based on science that there's no loopholes there's no places for the magic to occur um why do we have the illusion of Free Will and why is that a good thing you ask that at the very beginning of this and and and it seems to me yeah all right you have mentioned too it's there's an obvious reasons right because because it allows us to function effectively the illusion of Free Will allows us to go about from whether we're early hominids or not um to go about living the life creating the illusions that allow us to live our daily lives and evolution therefore picks us we don't have the choice we don't have the choice to not believe in Free Will if we want to be psychiatrically resilient um one of my favorite definitions of clinical depression is it's a pathological failure of the ability to rationalize away reality that's great oh I like that yeah absolutely and it it and and and here's the point when I say we have no choice we have a well we don't have a choice but we can be we can learn intellectually we can learn every time I'm going to say I have a choice I'm going to say we can learn if we exposed to the right teachers at the right time in the right place um we can learn intellectually that Free Will doesn't exist you and I can learn that but that does not mean that we emotionally since reason is a slave of passion that in our daily lives we don't go about our daily lives every day but because we're we're you know we function fun well enough to be integrated in society that we don't go around behaving like everyone else like we making choices and we're and and and we're doing that so so it's so but it's the same as saying you know the fact that Evolution requires Us in some sense to believe in Free Will is the same as saying well Evolution may you know in principle suggests you know it's okay to you know kill your neighbor under certain conditions but we do have learning that allows us to over at least intellectually override that that fundamental evolution um Remnant so so so so I think the second half of your book in large sense is about how we understand override and utilize it to make a world which isn't bad it may seem like it's bad and and and and and um um and and uh so um if I go to um so you you know you summarize basically saying yeah know well I don't think we need to summarize any more biological Turtles all the way down but what do we do with that and the first question is you know will we run a muck because the first thing you can think of is the same as the question people have with asist if we don't have free will then why then why care then why should we try and be good why should we why why should we you know let's just do what we do and we you know I'm not responsible for what I do so who cares and I think just like for atheism I mean you could have that attitude but I think the thing you point out is that that even that that's not a natural consequence of accepting the the the absence of Free Will anymore than accepting that there's not a God if you look at the statistics and you look at the data is not does not Primus naturally behave quote unquote immorally that that um that when you actually look at the data people who who who who don't believe in in in in a God uh generally um don't behave any more immorally than and often sometimes more ethically than people who do I'm want to let you elaborate on that which is uh thank God because that solves the running muuk problem the literature there's been like a handful of studies about the ethical implications of making people believe more oresent free will but there's a massive literature on the relationship between ethical behavior and belief in deities and stuff and it's exactly what you show um in part because a lot of the time religious people are telling you about how ethical they're being and a lot of the time you're measuring things as being ethical which don't really matter to atheists um and all sorts of other confounds in there but the most interesting thing about that literature is exactly paralleled in the Free Will one you know Prime someone to believe Less in Free Will for the next 10 minutes and they cheat more on a on a economic game and and even though it's not clear if that really does happen all the time but get someone who hasn't believed in Free Will for a long long time and there is exactly as ethical as someone who really believes in very heart and the religion equivalent is one that like I don't know I I get some sort of almost Transcendent something out of um when you look at people who have thought long and hard about where does goodness come from and what sort of person I want to be and what does this all mean and why are we here and if they've thought long and hard about it it almost doesn't matter if their conclusion is and there's no free will or there's no God or if their conclusion is there's a God with all these attributes um on the average they're going to be more ethical than other people because they've thought long and hard and it's the doing that that's almost certainly the guarantee because you care about what counts as the right way to live your life enough to have thought long and hard about it and enough to have had a moment of Crisis and enough to have felt lonely because there's no God or enough to yeah it's because that stuff matters to you enough to have thought about it and to have thought about how you feel about it and that's what it's about we're not going to run a muck if we train kids and people with as much value Laden ideas about why are you the way you are and why did this person become the way they became as we invest in theological or agentive arguments about it um it would be we're not going to run a muck you know and here's a psych ological experiment I've done um CU I you know with the atheist thing not the Free Will thing with you know you give a you give the standard you know somewhere the standard dialogue you know how can we trust you atheist be moral if you don't think god holds and if you you know um um and and what when I hear that I always ask the question and and I've done this to an audience that only once did did someone come up why I say okay if you didn't believe in God would you go and kill your neighbor right now and and and and and you know and generally except for one exception where someone put his head said yes um you know people say no because they have reason they have thought they you know they and and that's and by the way that's Steve pinker's argument for Why God is redundant because you know if God's if God said rape and murder was of innocent people was okay would it be okay and and and and and most people say no and then you say well then Steve paker would say well just get rid of the middleman you don't need the god to say it but I think the point is if you ask people okay just imagine you didn't believe in God would you then you know steal from your neighbor you know beat your kids uh and people you know and and when they think about it they realize that it's not even if they think it's their belief in God even if that's what they're telling them fundamentally if they have reason they they're they think of all the reasons why they shouldn't be doing the B bad Behavior anyway and it's it's Superfluous and I think the same you know is true of free will ultimately the if you think of about reason and rationality you're going to the behavior is going to be the same regardless of whether you believe in free will or not so that's my little psychological you try it in your class sometimes to see if if if anyone would sounds good to me yeah uh you know but you give the example of course of Scandinavia everyone's perfect example of the idilic society is having problems now but but um but you know that there's a you know a secular society where people on the whole are you know better behaved and and more and more generous blah blah blah we won't go into it you give a lot of examples I would argue that part of the reason is the same reason I'm invigorated by the fact of lack of meaning in the universe is that if you focus on the here and now if the Here and Now is all there is then you pay much more attention to the here and now and and and if you pay much attention here and now and you're rational you're going to begin to behave in a in on on the whole in in a in a in the kind of be the kind of you might say ethically good behavior that happens naturally so so getting rid of the of the Hereafter and and instead of thinking of now as the all that is is is is actually a positive motivator to behave well not a negative one exactly yep now and you do point out the religion your religion generally tends to have people treat people better but only in they're in group and the world is an example of that but again I would argue that that's not so much a problem of religion we ran once uh in my Institute I ran a workshop in the origins of xenophobia but surely I mean that's again something over which we don't have control right even at the biological level the ime system is the is the very basis of xenophobia right as as beautiful way of stating it yeah I mean you know and and if if it works for single sailed animals an immune system and you know it's it's a natural thing we have to overcome it as rational beings just as we have to ultimately overcome our illusion of Free Will um it's the same thing and so yeah I don't blame religion for that I blame um Evolution um but but here's where um you I see hope in where it's sometimes in where you see um despair maybe I don't know whether it's really that strong you have a great section on how we learn I mean it's beautiful I never knew I knew about Eric kandal but I never I never I never knew these beautiful diagrams and it's just a lovely way of learning about the neurobiology of how learning happens it's just beautiful just spectacular and then you find out like the is occurring in sea slugs it's the same molecules in us it's unbelievable that's same molecules in sea slugs and us which is why learning about how change occurs not only shows you that that's not incompatible with dropping free will it it proves that you can see the building blocks you can you can see the building blocks are exactly same you can see how learning exact you can see that it's not some again it's not a mystery it's a I mean at some level it is but I mean at the fundamental basic level you can see how naturally it's possible for a system and not only that you can see how that neurobiology of learning is affected by stress and conditioning because you can see when these you know how these neurotransmitters are going to be whether they're going to be expressed or how well the system is going to receive them and respond to them are based on environment and so you can see exactly how how environment and and past experience will affect learning as well but you see that's where the fact that change happens is for me the great hope because I guess I see I've often said and now I I don't know whether I you know and I guess I'd say I call this Better Living Through Chemistry um but which is really what's happening is is thinking about how the world really works can give us more effective ways of producing a better world than living under the illusion that it works other ways and um and so let me give you my my thinking on this and I want to see you think what what you think about this that I've as I was about to say before I've often said and I don't know if I'll say anymore that we live in a world in which there's no free will but for all intents and purposes it's a world that is identic it looks identical on the surface to a world in which there is Free Will so it it and what I said following that and now I'm going to change what I say I think I said and therefore it makes sense to behave as if we have free will now in some sense I I I I think that's still true but now I would amend that I would say it's it's it's indistinguishable on the surface from a world in which there is free will but but but we should behave in a way that understanding that that that's that's that's an illusion but reproducing it in a positive way by realizing that there isn't free will namely we can we may not have choice to now what we wish to do and this is what I was saying earlier but by learning we can change and therefore if we realize we don't have free will we can say how can be a better person will let me think of the of the neurobiological influences that I can have today tomorrow and the next day so that the day afterwards when I think of the antecedants that cause me to behave a certain way those new antecedants will be will will allow me to act better than it was now BEC and so I see recognizing change and only understanding that there's no free will is a way to actually do what you're thinking you're doing by Free Will namely be becoming a better person cool and there goes dennet down the drain among other things that's that's beautiful I mean amid that is our Grounds for Hope um and that is our grounds for like neural plasticity things can change things can change in awful Direction someone who was open-minded and tolerant back when is now a bitter old whatever um but it can go in opposite directions as well and understanding not how to change yourself but understanding the circumstances in which you will be changed in a beneficial way is a very good thing and it's the effective way of doing it it's if you can only do it effectively if you understand how it happens and if you have this illusion that you have a choice then you'll probably never be able to effectively change well you might be able to but but it's an accident and and and and it's I think it's not just true and and you've Illustrated between say 1922 and 2022 it's not just the case in individual level it's the case in a societal level by learning so well you know you and I are devoted I think to learning it's it's it's an education we can that is a way to affect our understanding and our behavior in a way that makes not just us better individuals but society as a whole better so we don't draw on quarter people we don't have public hangings um even though we re but we can only do that once again and you you you have a amazing chapter on which is scary on retribution and and Punishment to show that we love it and and but once again knowing that we love it is the same as knowing that we don't believe in Free Will that's okay knowing it gives you the opportunity to overcome that to overcome that WIS hardwired in one way and to know how to change your envir environment in a way so that you don't you don't enjoy punishment as much yeah it lets you figure out like the joy of Retribution okay how much does it weigh what does it smell like does it do more of this or that in this circumstance here's how we could turn brutally violent people into people who will be like really aggressive sons of when they play chess yeah yeah when they play chess exactly and you talk and and you talk about it's really hard you talk about Scandinavia but you know you people want to punish people who've done really bad things but of course and and this is this is where I would also sort of differ in at least semantically describing things I think you would say people don't have responsibility for their actions in a fundamental sense and I would say we should treat them as if they have responsibility but that doesn't involve punishment okay if I run someone over I ran them over there's no denying that fact I'm responsible for the fact that they got run over now I may not have had control over that but then the response to that is saying okay you're responsible what can we do ensure that that doesn't happen again that should be the the response not I'm going to slap you on the head but you are respon I would say you are responsible but the but if we understand where it comes from the the the response to that responsibility is a very different one it's to say how can we Ure sure if you have schizophrenia we have to probably ensure that you're not in a position to hurt other people not punishment and if there's a treatment we have responsibility to treat um you're you're just your dichotomizing between what you're calling responsibility and control yeah I would use a dichotomy between mechanistic responsibility and moral responsibility but the exact same thing as what you just said yeah yeah and and and well and but you talk about it you and I think your argument of quarantine is a lovely one you talk about the origin of the word and you really in some you're really quarantining people just as you'd quarantine people who have another kind of sickness I in a way that protects others around them but not as punishment you know you're not keeping a kid at home from school as punishment if they have a cold you're doing it you know for other reasons and um and that and this quarantine which can be and and as you say what is funishment funishment which is a lovely word in Scandinavia where you think that you know taking people who have done horrific things like you give the example this well-known serial killer the guy who killed all those people on that island in in in in Sweden um are was Sweden or Norway I can't remember anyway it's one of those soric countries yeah Norway I think um and what they put him in jail and and put him in a in a in an environment where he is you know a nice environment to live in and and their attitude is you know um let's see if we can make sure he he you know whatever conditions cause him to do that again cause him to do that won't happen again which is very rational thing to say although most of us you know many people intrinsically emotionally want to say kill the bastard draw on quarter the bastard do this you know and um and what Scandinavian culture has produced as the response to the horror of him instead instead of a visceral desire to make him hurt what all those interviews of parents of Etc showed was a visceral desire to be able to say yeah we never have to think about this guy again his grandiosity yeah's a clown he's a violent clown but good he's a way we never have to think about him again that's what their culture has been able to detour the viscera of grief and if we think about it logically I think we can say we can direct our culture in that direction I mean even we not have the so yeah we naturally might our our inclinations and our experience might not make us want to do that now but understanding how change happens the very thing that you some sense say is depressing to me offers great hope in fact the only hope I think ultimately to get better is to understand how the world really works if you don't understand how the world really works it's an accident if if you improve it it's a complete accident and and I guess I would I would phras I'm giving you words that may be useful but I when I read your stuff I thought this almost sounds like a the kind of thing some self-help artist would say but I think it's true the the change we want doesn't come from within it comes from without the change we we want is going to come from without it's going to put oursel in circumstances which can cause that change it's not going to come from willpower we don't have because we didn't have it in the first place now having become the sort of person who is able to put thems in a different circumstance yeah the last two things and I want to go another two or three minutes you've been great maybe five minutes I want to come back to Dan Dennis about not during during praise for accomplishments which you mentioned which I thought was it is hysterical as as if that's what it's all about then what are we talking about for but but more than that I actually I again I'm going to present myself as a devil's advocate I don't think we disagree but I would say that accomplishments we don't deserve praise for the accomplishments it's the same we go back to the ancient Romans you know who separated the artist from the art um which I when I first learned that I used to like ancient history and I was amazed it seemed so foreign to me but it's again so obvious I thought well okay so this is the artist big deal they would say God you know God is speaking to them but that doesn't make this person particularly good but what we can do is we can say accomplishments can be recognized as amazing and you can be recognized is amazing if you're brilliant or you know it's not something that intrinsically means you're good or we have P them back for but we can say yeah let's recognize you're an amazing person it's nothing wrong with that you've achieved something amazing let's all celebrate that so I I guess I Canal what was that only if it's instrumental only if it inspires other people only it makes that person more likely to do it again that's just good of a tool as anything sure yeah but I mean the fact you had no choice at some level in being the person you are doesn't make your accomplishments less amazing doesn't make Einstein less amazing doesn't make you less amazing to me you're still amazing to me even if I know you didn't have Choice Robert you really are but yeah so I think I think recognizing that so I think you know even someone like Dan Den can at least you know say okay well the book you've written one you know or the or the arguments you've given are amazing arguments and they've convinced me of this or that and yeah we'll give a prize for the amazing arguments you're the person who happens to receive it big deal but the arguments are the you know it's and it's like what you know in some sense it's what i' I've won prizes You've Won prizes but I try to have the attitude of Fineman in that regard who basically said yeah the prize is nice but the real the really neat thing was the discovery you know that's that's what the great and that's and and finding that out is cool it's the thing as you would say is cool and that's what makes it worthwhile at the price this I want to end with two things this was a hard book for you to write it's clear it was a hard book for you to write I mean the agony of some of saying some of the things that you say that you know are going to be unpopular or difficult for people to accept that may sound nutty as you say at one point or another clearly gave you pause how do you feel after having written it nervous as to who is going to feel deeply offended and hurt by it but at least on a local level as a college teacher I've like flaunted my atheism enough to have a little bit of experience of the push back that I get um although mine is always been very compassionate concerned people who are saying please please please I want to be able to save your soul I love you your soul is in danger well you know what am I expecting with that what I'm expecting in addition is having to focus a whole lot more on hundreds of pages and Decades of thought about this stuff I don't live this way most of the time I'm HED in judgment and entitlement and all that sort of stuff and like 1% of the time I can achieve this mindset and because I've been trying to do it for a long time I like to think I achieve it in circumstances where it's more consequential like should we consider somebody's well-being and needs to have been earned to be greater than we consider somebody else's you know let's stop for a second and really think about it because that doesn't make sense and then I can I can think that way and more importantly I can feel that way for a couple of minutes at a time before it disappears well that's what I was asking I mean some books I've written I didn't know which have just changed the way I think about the world without you know I knew what I wanted to say but having written them they they they allow they help me personally is this self-help at all having having formulated this in a coherent way does it help you spend maybe instead of 1% of your time 2% of your time um feeling or no yes and not because this has been a journey of intellectual Discovery because oh my God I'm sitting here talking about this to all sorts of people when I do one of those they're going to be on top of me in a second so I I gota let's try to live this way a little bit more maybe maybe that's the cynical out um I once went to one of those Dolly llama conferences where he hangs out with a bunch of neuroscientists and he's got a bunch of his like Allstar and we all talk to each other and we realize our vocabularies they're so different than I did same thing to the Vatican once and we had nothing to say to each other you're a braver man than me in ter of who you hung out with and like at one point one of the monks said something about what they do with their ancher with they and they said something that was totally unexpected and it was gorgeous and it was something I could never never viewed the world for and I said wow that's amazing this guy functions on a different planet wow that would be and all that's come out of all of this is like yeah like every now and then I can do that and it's good when you do able to do it but you just said something that actually was comes to the actually last thing one of the last pages in your book but when you said maybe you know it's not right to think that one person's needs and desires are more than the other and you say the only possible moral conclusion is that you are no more entitled to have your needs and Ms met than is any other human there's no human who's less entitled than you to have their well-being considered well in fact that's a philosophy which actually Peter Singer I mean it's fresh on my mind because I've talked to Peter the principle of equal consideration which he says is true not just for humans you're being you know um speciesist as he would say but no no being has more entitled than any other being to have their needs and desires met and not need to suffer it's a so what you've been driven to by this is a beautiful philosophy of in some sense effective altruism but more importantly the philosophy that that that that's LED Peter to I think to be an amazingly ethical individual about about about humans and other animals it's changed my own thinking I have to say about the world that that not I think this argument can be extended and it's natural to to to Beyond humans to other species as well just don't expect me to find it to be easy to be that way all the time and don't expect it's going to be easy for you but it'll be a good thing if we do because yeah exactly it's not I'm now I'm now a vegetarian for example and I wasn't before and it's not you know well it wasn't that difficult um um but learn the last let me end with the last few sentences of your book cuz I want to I think it's it's nice those in the future will Marvel at what we didn't yet know which really resonated to me because of course as you know my new book is EXA is exactly that I love the fact that it'll be out of date and and and the fact that not knowing is what it's all about and that and if they don't Marvel at what we don't know then my goodness we've made a big mistake that we progress has ended there will be Scholars apping about why in the course of a few decades around the start of the Millennium most people stopped opposing gay marriage history majors will struggle on final exams to remember whether it was the 19th 20th or 21st centuries when people began to understand epigenetics they will view us as being as ignorant as we now view the goed presents peasants who thought Satan caused seizures that borders on the inevitable but it need not be inevitable that they also view us as heartless and I think that that's that's important that means it what you and I have been talking about together that we can learn to change and be less heartless but only under understanding how the world works so I don't view this book and your work as in any way depressing or pessimistic just as I take the fact that there's no meaning in the UN universe as energizing I take this beautiful piece of work on understanding how the world really works at the level of behavior as up lifting and a blueprint for thinking about how can we can make the world a better place so I think you've done God's work as my atheist friend Steve Weinberg used to say so thank you so very much it's been a bless you too it's been a real pleasure and I I I know I appreciate the time that you allowed me to take of yours and I wanted to give well I thought I I wanted to um to give you the time that was necessary I wanted to I wanted to uh uh give it the the arguments the time they deserved and and we could have spent longer but it's been a pleasure likewise I hope we could do this in the same room some time and talk for hours and hours and errors because I'm looking forward to that it's a it's a real privilege thanks [Music] again I hope you enjoyed today's conversation this podcast is produced by the origins project Foundation a nonprofit organization who whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place in the cosmos by providing access to the people who are driving the future of society in the 21st century and to the ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world to learn more please visit originpro foundation.org

Channel: The Origins Podcast

Views: 306,818

Keywords: The Origins Podcast, Lawrence Krauss, The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss, The Origins Project, Science, Podcast, Culture, Physicist, Video Podcast, Physics

Id: mSWJmzMoTyY

Length: 178min 34sec (10714 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 18 2023