Rationally speaking, is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry and science education. For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptic's Doug. Welcome to, rationally speaking, the podcast, where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense. I'm your host, Masimo, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gillard. Julia, where are we going to talk about today?

Today, we're going to tackle the never ending philosophical debate about free will.

In a nutshell, the intuition about free will is that we we feel constantly like we're making conscious choices about what to do and how to act.

But now that we understand that the universe is largely deterministic, then it feels like that's incompatible to many people with the idea of making conscious choices, because it seems to suggest that we're just, you know, no better than wind up toys or billiard balls bouncing into each other and that there's nothing that nothing that we could choose to do other than what the, you know, physical laws of the universe have already sort of laid out for us in their inexorable path.

And then if that's the case, that raises a bunch of questions about whether, first of all, why we feel like we have free will. And second of all, how we can hold anyone morally responsible for the things that they do.

And then it raises other questions like if the universe were not deterministic and to the extent that it isn't deterministic, does that actually help the situation?

Right. So this is a natural area of interaction between philosophy and science.

There is quite a bit of neurobiology or cognitive science that has been done on well, they don't call it free will.

They call evolution normally.

And but that's enough to distinguish themselves from the philosophers. Absolutely.

Actually, I think I'm going to argue in a few minutes that there is a good reason to use the term evolution rather than than free will. But at least I got in my joke before you got to the detail.

That's right. Before we get to the details.

So it might not include a couple of definitions by philosophers, which is perhaps something to bring up, because as you as you pointed out, philosophers have been talking about this for quite some time. And I think they've been making some strides that are informing in and, of course, being formed in return by the cognitive science. So, for instance, David Hume defined freewill as, quote, a power of acting or of not acting according to the determination of the will.

In other words, free will is the ability to act according to some kind of considerate desires. So you have a desire and you act on it. Timothy O'Connor put it this way the ability to select a course of action as a means of fulfilling some desire. Now, notice that the last one, for instance, is a very operational definition of free will. It doesn't say anything about how you obtain it. It doesn't say anything about determinism. An indeterminate just says, look, if you have a desire and or you want to pursue a course of action and you're capable of making decisions that bring you toward that course of action, that's what I call free will.

So it doesn't take into account the question of whether you are free to have some other desire than you actually do.

Right.

Right now, as you pointed out, the question, the question classically has been interpreted as if everything that happens in the universe is the result of causal necessary relations. That is the laws of physics. Then how can we have a free will in the sense of a decision making mechanism that is independent of both external and internal influences? External influences will be environmental and internal influences, of course, would be genetic right now.

I think that actually the question as put, I, I think I'm going to argue that it's incoherent. Oh, wow. Yeah, great.

OK, I have to quickly find something else to disagree with you.

Oh, well, you got I don't know, you might not have the free will to do so before the end of the year. No, I mean, seriously, if you put it that way. Right. Which is in fact the way in which it is, it is put in a lot of these discussions, then what do we mean by free will, by will the will coming from where if it's not influenced by your genetic make up, your environment, your development, your social influences, the laws of the universe and all that, what is it coming from?

That would be that sounds to me like the equivalent of a ghost in the brain kind of thing. So you got consciousness that it's somehow floating out there independently of a brain substrate. Well, how is that possible? That would be a mystical concept. So I think that if we interpret free world that way, we get straight into mysticism.

Yeah. So free will. I had this minor insight recently about what's going on there. I, I consider it an example of what I call concepts that collapse when you look too hard at them. And so basically these are our concepts where you haven't quite pinned down the definition.

But every state of the world you envision doesn't actually seem to capture what the concept is that you're you're staring at.

So so with free will. And one of the commenters named Allen laid this out pretty similarly to how I think about it.

People feel like determinism lead.

To a lack of free will, because the laws of physics set everything in motion exactly, you know, a long, long, long time ago and, you know, we can't do anything to change that.

But randomness also feels like it would preclude our ability to have free will because, you know, rolling the dice and doing exactly what the guy tells you, you know, is not OK, that's determinism.

But I'm just trying to pick some sort of intuitive probabilistic, right. Yeah.

So, you know, I think it sort of struck the death blow to the coherence of the concept when you realize that that not only does it not feel like free will to to imagine that your decisions are caused by something, it also doesn't feel like free will to imagine that your decisions are not caused by anything.

Exactly. Exactly. Now, what are you talking about? Yeah, go ahead. I have a great quote from a philosopher who I hadn't heard of before named GGC Smart. He's an Australian philosopher of mind. And he described the problem of trying to get free will through through indeterminism through, as some people like to cite quantum phenomena that they think this will sort of give us the free that we've been trying to find. And he says Indeterminism does not confer freedom on us.

I would feel that my freedom was impaired if I thought that a quantum mechanical trigger in my brain might cause me to leap into the garden and eat a slug.

Yes, exactly. Which is what I'm saying. Just no more disgusting. Yes.

Which is, of course, an event with a very low probability, but still now the principle of the thing we're focused on here. Yeah. And the point is, it's important because there has been a whole cottage industry over the last several years of people, some philosophers, but even some physicists actually interested in some neurobiologists arguing that the solution to the question of free will comes from quantum mechanics and from the fact that quantum mechanical processes may, in fact, reverberate at a level that actually has an effect on, you know, cellular processes at the level of the brain.

Well, fine.

That may or may not be the case. I mean, we actually have no evidence that quantum mechanical level processes do have an effect that is microscopic enough to be to affect the way the brain functions.

But even as you just pointed out, even if that were in fact the case, that would purchase a best random well, not free will.

Well put.

And so, as you put it, if it if it turns out that you're determinists and you're not and you can't get free will, but if you're indeterminism, you also can get from all that begins to seriously point to the possibility that free will is, in fact, as defined, a incoherent concept right now.

That said, I think we need to cover the basics in terms of of the classical philosophical treatment of it.

So as you probably know, there are three major ways of looking at the problem of free will from a philosophical perspective.

There are people who are called compatible lists, and these are the people who think that the universe is, in fact deterministic except for quantum mechanics.

So it's deterministic plus randomness.

But they think that it is that this in itself does not preclude freewill. We'll go back to that in a minute, because the question, of course, is, well, how is that going to work?

And for instance, Daniel Bennett is one of the most famous compatable lists in this area. You wrote a couple of books in farrowing free world, the best one of which I think was the first one, which was called elbowroom. Right.

The freewheel worth having a variety of free will with. Exactly. The second position is the so-called libertarian incompatible ests. This had nothing to do with libertarians in the political sense.

These are people that think that the universe is not deterministic, but if it were deterministic, that would in fact preclude free will. OK, so there are the incompatibilities in the in the sense that if the universe turned out to be deterministic, that would think that free will you couldn't have free will. But they think we do have free will because they reject the notion of determinism. And then there is the final category is the deterministic incompatibilities. And these are people who think that determinism is in fact real and that therefore you can't have free will.

My colleague at will provide at Cornell University is one of them is a very well known philosopher and historian of science, mostly of science, really.

You know, if one or more of these is a consensus view is one predominant, it's hard to tell when I talk to people that are in philosophy mind, which, of course, is the area that deals with this sort of thing or with people that are interested in metaphysics. I get the impression that most people are compatible these days, but I don't really have, you know, strong evidence to back that that up. It's just that most people I talk to seem to be compatible as it is.

So the argument that you and I were just laying out about the incoherence, sort of dissolving the question, so to speak, about how the concept itself doesn't really make sense, is that is that compatible?

Does that go along with one of the good questions approaches or is that a separate viewpoint?

It's a good question.

I think it would be a form of compatibility and it is, in fact, a form of federalism, very similar to the one that Dennet approaches uses. If you go through. When it's raining, you see that his project is, in fact something like what you call dissolving the problem, which, by the way, it's a very common project in philosophy.

Oh, yeah. No, that's actually one of the practices and philosophy that I write to solve your problem. Yeah, absolutely.

Instead of sort of solving them. Yes. Now. There are some things that I think the question then is, OK, well, in what sense of resolving the problem find? We agree that you cannot have any meaningful sense of free will in either, regardless of whether the universe is deterministic or not.

So there's incoherence at the level then and what whatever we're going to get coherence. So I think that that level we need to talk about cognitive science for a minute. So there are a couple of things that we absolutely have to cover. The second one I'll get into it in a moment is the famous Libit Benjamin Libit experiment and talk about that of the 70s.

OK, because those are you know, there's just no way to talk about free will without mentioning them. But before you get there, so I have a couple more recent examples of neurobiological research that sort of hinges on this. And this is relevant to this discussion.

First one is this. So suppose you have a problem quitting smoking.

I know you don't smoke or do. I don't know. I thought you didn't know, but I suppose you did.

And you have a problem quitting, just like most people do.

Then there is at least potentially a very simple solution. All you need to do is to ask a neurobiologist to inhibit your insula. The insula is a small portion of the cerebral cortex that is part of both of your of the hemispheres.

And if you inhibit, your addiction will be gone completely, which is an interesting example of how you can do a very specific physical interaction with your brain and all of a sudden something that you were incapable of winning.

You're now capable of winning.

It's like you just threw a switch that sort of augmented the power of your of your freedom of choice in that area.

Now, unfortunately, if you do it that way, I wouldn't recommend that actually as a as a sort of a normal thing because as a normal procedure, because if you do that, it turns out there are some side effects that you might not want.

Oh, like, well, you would experience loss of libido. You become apathetic. You will not be able to emotionally appreciate music any longer, and you will develop a peculiar inability to distinguish fresh from rotten food.

So there goes your gastronomy specific side effect. So that's right.

So the reason I brought up that is that the point is that experiment is because it does seem to indicate that you could do physical. There are obviously physical interactions you can do with the brain, and that alters dramatically your ability to make that sort of decisions. Another one that's a lot more subtle is this. If you stimulate with low level electrical currents, the parietal cortex of the brain, it turns out that what happens is that the subject begins to desire to engage in a particular action, like rolling their tongue, going, it doesn't do it.

It just has the desire of doing it. Now, you turn up the the current and all of a sudden the guy actually does roll the tongue.

So the interesting point there is that not only there is a specific area, the parietal cortex, that induces a choice, so to speak, to make a particular action. But in fact, you can you can go depending on the level of the interaction that you're having with the brain at a low level, you just induce the desire but not the action at a higher level. There's some kind of threshold that is crossed and this does become the trigger, the action.

All of those, of course, kind of experiments seem to sort of favor the idea that, oh, well, a bunch of robots, all you need to do is to push a button and that sort of stuff. Right.

But I think that's mistaken because it seems like the the idea that, oh, if I show that by acting on the brain in this way or that way, I can control the subject's ability, will or ability to do this or that.

Well, of course you do, because our desires and our and our ability to translate those desires in actions have to go through the brain.

Yet there's no way out of that. Right. I mean, it's just it seems like some people seem to say, well, if you find a neurobiological correlate of X, therefore I've explained that it's not.

You just explained which part of the brain is in charge of doing X, but there had to be a part of the brain charged with doing extra, which we're back to the mystical ectoplasm, right?

Yeah. I mean, this sounds like more of a bloated dualism.

Yeah, exactly. Free. Better. Yeah, exactly. Um, so those are interesting experiments. I was I was looking into some to see what neuroscience was relevant.

And I was taking a slightly different tack of of looking at whether there are situations in which the actual feeling of freewill, like can we actually separate out that feeling of freely choosing our actions, our decisions from from the actual act of freely choosing our decisions. And and there's some sort of suggestive evidence that that that those two things are actually. Operable. So just just for example, people with schizophrenia, one of the one of the most telling signs of schizophrenia, is reporting the delusion that your actions are being controlled by some external force.

People say it feels like you're being you're a robot and someone else is controlling what you do. Obviously, that's not the case. So, you know, you are making choices, but you don't feel like you're making choices. So I think that's your objective.

So there is a separate neural pathway that essentially is in charge of confirming that you own a certain action. Yeah, you're right. There are there are several other examples of sort of pathologies that showed that sort of thing.

Now, the non pathological version of this thing is the Benjamin Libit experiment. Right? So I think we need now I'd like to give a, if you don't mind, a fairly detailed summary, this thing, because these experiments are I've often felt almost almost without failure brought up when it turned when it comes up to free will.

And yet little liberty itself did not interpret those experiments as well.

Exactly. I have my own I read a very brief summary of them. I don't know the exact details. I have my own ideas about why it wouldn't be a reputation of good. So I'm curious.

So let's summarize the experiment and then and then we'll talk about it. So the classic these are classic experiments that have been done by Benjamin Libit and his colleagues in the 70s at the University of California, San Francisco. But they've also been repeated several times in a variety of way. In fact, there's a sort of a little cottage industry of doing these kind of experiments and extended extending its original findings.

So but as I said, it's important to an extent exactly what it is that Libya did in and what it got out of it.

So he asked these subjects to carry out a simple action, like pressing a button as many times as they wished within a particular time frame.

So, you know, you have a certain number of minutes and you push the button as many times. You want to ask the subjects, however, to note the exact time when they felt the urge to push the button.

OK, that is, when is it that they became conscious basically of of wanting to do it and they could choose for themselves whether to press any time they could choose at any time within, say, a certain amount of time.

And then all they had to do was to report when is it that they felt like they were going and they had made the decision of pushing the button.

OK, now then Libit and his colleagues measured the interval between the moment in which the subject was conscious of having made a decision to press the button and the moment in which the button was actually pressed. The time delay was on average, about 200 milliseconds. Mm hmm. Now, so far that there's nothing extraordinary. Right. You make a decision about an action and it takes about 200 milliseconds for your brain to communicate that decision to your muscles so that the action can actually be carried out.

Right. Right. The experiments were pretty sophisticated, but also took into account the variability in the subjects reporting then, you know, the delay, which was about 50 milliseconds between being aware and extra reporting, being aware how to be able to measure that.

That was actually one of my big theories about what was going on.

Say, ah, I don't really want to get into that kind of detail, but I reread the article and in fact, we can probably post a link to the original Libit experiment. But there are some really ingenious ways in which they got it that so they estimated that on average it was a fifty milliseconds sort of delay, which meant which still left about 150 milliseconds.

Fifty millisecond delay between when they become angry, when they said that they decided to press the button and between becoming aware and actually reporting that they became aware.

Of it, right, because you can become aware of something, but then they think still a little bit more time to actually communicate that awareness to somebody else.

Did he measure the the becoming aware in their brain or was this self reported?

As I said there, no, it did measure through electrodes.

OK, so there wasn't a direct measurement, right? There was an indirect measurement.

OK, now here's the part that we are part of of the whole the whole experiment.

So what they did also, they measured through a separate system using an electroencephalogram, the secondary motor cortex activity, which was correlated with the act of pushing the button, because after all, if you want to push the button, you don't just think about pushing the button.

You actually have to move the muscle. So there has to be another part of the brain that is actually involved into starting initiating the action, giving the command to the to the muscles.

Right. That's the secondary motor motor cortex.

Now, the surprising part was that the Liberty and colleagues measured the activity in the secondary motor cortex 300 milliseconds before the subjects said that they made the conscious decision.

In other words, they're the part of the brain that is in charge of their muscles was actually activated before they were aware of having made a decision.

So, OK, so this is it was activated before they reported make the decision or activated before that moment of awareness that you're saying before the moment of awareness.

Right now, not only that, that was the initial difference was only three hundred milliseconds. But as it turns out, people had done similar experiments in following years and they have reported cases of delay of up to seven seconds. So that's a lot. No, that's a lot of time.

That's a decimal point in there somewhere that we're missing. No, there's no decimal point. Seven seconds. It's a long time until it turns out. Now, it turns out that when you make decisions like, for instance, you know, I'm going to get up and get a beer or something like that.

Well, you actually make that decision at the level of the motor cortex several seconds before you become aware of the fact that you're about to get up and go to get a beer.

Oh, does this have anything to do with the sensation of being on autopilot? Yeah, pretty much. Oh, that's right. So that's something we're already familiar with, that we can do things without intending to do them. Right.

So the idea, therefore, is that, you know, so the conclusion was that it looks like the conscious, the the conscious so-called decision, the pushing the button is actually enough after the fact. It's a simple becoming aware of the real decision which was made much earlier, you know, even before the motor cortex got started.

Now, so doesn't that that's typically interpreted as say, well, that undermines the idea of free will, because it turns out that when we think we made the decision of pushing the button, all we've done is actually becoming aware of a decision that was made at a subconscious level right now.

So that's the that that's the idea. Now, you want to give your take on this and then. No, no, no.

You already sort of touched on it. I thought that might gone.

Well, the interesting part it I thought was this is a really nice article about this whole general idea of free will and how neurobiology and philosophy interact in this area. The the author of the article is a philosopher. His name is Adina Russkis.

And Roski says is interesting. Is this a reinterpretation of the bits result? That is very interesting.

So first, the first thing to point out is that these experiments actually concerned a very narrow and obviously artificially constrained aspect of conscious will. Right? I mean, we're not talking about decision making in general.

We're talking about like what college they go to. Exactly what's on your finger precisely.

We're talking about just pushing a button on a random point.

So the subjects in experiment were not asked to do anything like what we normally associate with deliberation, like what you just said, going to college or buying a car or whatever it is.

There is an explicit laying out of options, reasons to pursue a course of action or not that there was nothing like that. Right. And that is an important part of what we mean when we say we're making a decision.

So in a sense, one can argue that that Libbard experiments don't actually address conscious will at all because the subjects were simply told to report when they felt the urge to push the button.

So if you think about in some sense, it's really not surprising at all that they reported that urge after it arose, but it wasn't a decision in that way in the sense of a deliberative decision.

That's an important distinction.

Yeah, right now it is also possible that what it measured was was simply therefore that the time that it takes for a subconscious urge to become to come to the point of awareness, if that is the case, then then then it is not surprising, of course, that the activity in the secondary motor cortex can be measured before we consciously know what's going on.

You know, the analogy actually that Russkis comes up with is, you know, there's no difference.

This is not a different. From someone moving rapidly to avoid an obstacle and then becoming aware after the moving right, right, right. That you've just moved the way you do that subconsciously, and then you say, oh, what am I doing? Oh, I've been avoiding the obstacle. Right. Right. Yes.

That's not even autopilot so much as just being on reflex.

It's just we are we actually have all these examples of of things that that our body, our I'm trying to say something other than ourselves but ourselves that we decide to do.

Man philosophy can make even a simple word like me or I feel good about it. But you know what? I'm trying to say that, you know, we do these things and clearly no one's making us do them, do them, but we don't actually feel like we decided to do them.

So we are actually familiar with the sensation of lack of free will right now.

The other thing is, I mentioned a few minutes ago that that Libit himself actually had some reservations about interpreting his own experiments in terms of free will because he thought a free will and actually much more to do with sort of a veto power that the conscious mind has.

So, you know, I have the urge, for instance, to get up and get a beer. But then my my conscious thinking comes in and is now actually a beer is essentially liquid carbohydrates. I really don't need carbohydrates because otherwise the more I'll have to go to the next time I went to the gym.

And so I'm going to veto myself as opposed to something like animals who, you know, they have their programming and they just carry it out and they never sort of decide to maybe I won't do it.

My genes want me to do right. Right. There is no deliberation. So in this sense, freewill becomes the act of the process of deliberating.

And that's why I said at the beginning of the episode that it's actually probably better to abandon the word free will entirely because it's so confusing and incoherent and use volition because pollution is, in fact, you know, the the the idea that you are deliberating, you're making decisions at a conscious level which may or may not override your unconscious processing of of the part of your brain.

Interesting.

While we're talking about research from psychology, neuroscience, there is, I think, a relevant phenomenon called the introspection illusion.

So I should back up and say we've been talking about free will on the level of sort of molecules and quarks, but.

Right.

But you can talk about the question, the paradox of free will and sort of a broader level, like, oh, actually, earlier you were talking about genetics and the environment, determining what you do and other people have talked about whether we can be said to be freely choosing what to believe or how to act, given the pressures of our culture and our society that that shape our beliefs and our actions.

So the introspection illusion is in the context of that latter version of the freewill argument. It's the tendency for people to trust the reliability of their own introspection, while not distrust or while distrusting the introspection of other people. So people will attribute freewill to themselves when explaining their behavior.

But when they talk about why other people behave the way they did, they talk about, well, you know, there they believe that because their parents believed it or they, you know, acted that way because, you know, they have this built in tendency to act that way as opposed to talking about that person choosing to act that way. So there have been a number of studies, one in which they asked college students about personal decisions in their own and in their roommates lives.

They were they regarded their own choices as being less predictable than their roommates choices. And and then they asked in another study stuff at a restaurant. And the the restaurant staff described their co-workers lives as being more determined, having fewer future possibilities than their own lives.

Yes. Well, better than ever is. Right. Right. Actually, this reminds me of a point that was made by Michael Shermer several years ago in one of his early books on belief and where he showed actually reportedly some research that he had co-authored about religious beliefs.

And basically what he was asking to people was, well, why do you believe in God and why do you think other people believe in God? And he found the same kind of difference. That is when when people were asked, why do you believe in God, they would normally give some variation on the idea of intelligent design argument or cosmological argument. In other words, what they thought was reasonable that the foundation. Great example. Yeah.

And then when they were asked, well, so why do you think other people. Well, you know, they have faith there. That's the result that they are bringing. It's a result of what they were taught exactly.

So and so forth. I really liked Hume's discussion of freewill or actually I don't know if he uses that term, but he talks about liberty and necessity. And so he's talking about this concept of necessity, which is really hard to pin down. And he talks about that.

But basically the feeling that things had to happen the way that they happened.

And he so he talks about how necessity is just a function of our state of mind, of our state of ignorance about a situation or knowledge about the. Situation, so he says the necessity of any action, whether of matter or of mind, is not, properly speaking, a quality in the agent, but in any thinking or intelligent being who may consider the action. And it consists chiefly in the determination of his thoughts to infer the existence of that action from some preceding objects.

So I just think that's important to bring up with the introspection illusion, because if we you know, if we don't know what we're going to choose, then it feels like, you know, we're at liberty that, you know, the choice was necessary.

But someone else who, you know, is thinking is consciously aware of our situation and the influences on us is going to feel like it's predictable right now.

I want to go back for a minute to one more time to do Russkis paper, which, as I said, is one of the best that I've ever read actually on this topic in recent years. And what Russkis does at some point or the end of the paper is to provide a sort of a class classification of five different types of free will.

So talk about diffusing the concept that the other actually breaks it down into five different things from a neurobiological perspective.

And so these are these are the the five types. One is free will as the initiator initiation of motor activity in the brain.

So that's essentially what Limbert's experiments where addressing that kind of free will.

The second one is the idea of the brain having an executive function or executive control. So the veto power, again, that Libit was talking about, that was not addressed by these experiments. But that's but but there is some subsequent research about the executive control of the frontal lobes of the brain.

The third one is what you were talking about earlier, the feeling of ownership, which it turns out as its own neurobiological basis, which is different from the other two. It's a different circuit that actually tells you as a matter of feedback, yes, this was my action. This was my decision, as opposed to the schizophrenic who says it's somebody else's decision. Right. Or the people with a split brain who whose hands go in different do different things and interact with each other.

And hence, in fact, that meant to bring that up when I've talked about schizophrenia. Right.

So that's the feeling of ownership. The fourth type of sort of, quote unquote, free will or type of volition is as an intention.

Intention is what philosophers, philosophers think of it as a representation of the representational stage between deliberation and action. So. So you're thinking about something, you're deliberating about something. But before you act, you sort of imagine how you're going to act. Right. So that sort of thing is what what philosophers do as intention. And that also turns out to have a separate, you know, partially separate neurological substrate. And finally, there is sort of the broad decision making, which, of course, can be a process that can take hours or days depending on the object like you were you were saying earlier about, you know, should I go, which college should I go to?

And that sort of stuff.

The really deliberative that is a really deliberative.

It involves, of course, language centers of the brain. It involves higher functions of, you know, logical functions of the brain and so on and so forth.

So if we are and possibly there is more, but if there are at least five different sort of subtypes of decision making in, each one of them relies on a different or at least partially different circuitry in the brain. Now we're beginning to see, I think, why it is useful to do as sort of a philosophical analysis of the concept. You sort of break it down and you start to say, well, this thing doesn't make any sense, this one does.

And let's see what we can do about it, as well as a neurobiological analysis, because ultimately we're talking about the brain.

So ultimately, the substrate has to be obviously, you know, large, you know, that's well put.

I have an idea that I want to run by you.

This is my attempt to explain why it is that we feel I mean, OK, I think that that we've done a pretty good job, you know, given the constraints of time, laying out the explanation for why the question is incoherent to the extent that it is.

And we'll see how good, depending on the comments that we get published.

But yes, pretty good to me. It sounds good.

Yes, but but I think it's it's difficult and also very valuable to to be able to explain why we feel like there's a paradox.

So, you know, when you want to resolve the paradox, you can explain why.

You know, one of the two conflicting one of the two mutually contradictory views is the right one. The other one's the wrong one.

But but that often doesn't make it feel like you've actually resolved the paradox until you, you know, explain where the illusion came from.

So, OK, my idea was that the seeming paradox of freewill and determinism comes it actually stems from people's duelist intuitions or, you know, the sense that they're that they're not actually composed of their physical brain and body. They're just you know, they're essentially like this little, you know, tiny person sitting inside the brain.

What's it's called the Cartesian Theatre, right? That's right.

You know, and, you know, making decisions that then the physical brain acts upon anyway, so.

OK, so we all agree, you know, it's easy to see that every choice we make is completely determined by the state of the world at the time of the choosing, give or take a little quantum indeterminacy.

And the hard part is reconciling that fact with our competing intuition that we're really making the choice. So my attempt to reconcile the two intuitions is when you examine a choice that you're making, you can say to yourself, this choice was completely determined by the state of the world at the time that I made it.

And that state of the world includes my emotions, my preferences, my beliefs, my history, my habits and so on. And all of those were already determined by that point in time. And so I have no choice but to take the action that they collectively entail. So how can it be that I'm really making this choice? But the key here is that you are nothing more than the sum total of those emotions and preferences and beliefs and habits and so on.

So to say that those things together determine your choice and to say that you make the choice are actually the same thing.

And the seeming paradox comes from the fact that we have this inclination to think that we we have this ineffable self that separate from our traits and that we we we talk about those traits belonging to ourself in some sense, when when really they are ourselves.

You find that connection actually them.

I think that makes perfect sense. Thank you.

That reminds me, I was looking up when you when you were explaining your idea. That reminds me of a classic Dilbert cartoon on free will. As it turns out, Dilbert has actually covered free in a variety of a number of ways. But this particular cartoon was actually mentioned to me by will provide the story in the canal that I that I mentioned earlier. So here's how it goes. So so there's, you know, the two characters. One is sitting at the computer screen and the other one is the little dog that somebody.

Yes. So at the doctor's, do you think the chemistry of the brain controls what people do? Of course. Then how can we blame people for their actions? Because people have free will to do as they choose.

Are you saying that free will is not part of the brain? Of course it is, but it's the part of the brain that's out there just being kind of free.

So you're saying that free will part of the brain is exempt from the natural laws of physics?

Obviously, otherwise we couldn't blame people for anything they do.

Do you think that free will part of the brain is attached or does it just float nearby? Oh, shut up.

I like how that sort of draws out, like the the implied beliefs that people have that, you know, we don't articulate as such because they're clearly ridiculous.

But that's that's, you know, the sort of subconscious way that we review the situation.

And of course, there is a very good way to conclude any any talk about free will or incoherent concepts. That is. Oh, shut up. Oh, shut up.

Right. That's the ultimate philosophical argument because they're so.

But what about therefore, we have a few more minutes. What about these moral responsibility things? So what are we done with that now? What have we done with that now?

Well, you know, to me, because I'm not really a moral realist, it's not so much of a problem because moral responsibility to me was never really a real thing in the first place.

But but a useful I mean, it's a useful construct in the sense that we I mean, we evolved to feel moral outrage at people who violate the the, you know, social rules because, you know, that was evolutionarily advantageous. And I mean, aside from being good, Fregene, it's good for us today.

It's good for us as individuals to, you know, show outrage and to want to punish people who do things that are harmful to other people into the fabric of the society we live in.

So you can totally justify maintaining our our, you know, harsh judgments of people who act, you know, in ways that we think are immoral on without even having to talk about their responsibility. We can just talk about it from a utilitarian standpoint that it's good for society to keep those intuitions right.

So I was going to say, you don't actually need to buy into moral realism to say something like, well, you know, that person did make a decision to act in a certain way and therefore he is, quote unquote, responsible, not in some kind of immaterial, ethereal, universal moral sense, but responsible in the sense that, well, we don't want those kind of people to do those kinds of things. So we're going to lock him up, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So as opposed to whatever. So the thing becomes interesting. I read an article about this very recently. It becomes interesting because it becomes interesting when more and more juries are faced with an argument from lawyers, from defense lawyers, where they bring up evidence from neurobiologists as well.

Wait a minute. If somebody has a tumor in the prefrontal cortex or something like that, all of a sudden and there are cases like this that have been well documented, all of a sudden this person becomes violent or becomes, you know, a compulsive gambler or something like that. We have plenty of evidence. These kind of things happen. So the argument goes, if that is the case at a pathological level, you know, how can you be sure that the person that is now being accused of a crime doesn't have a smaller version of this, which we're not being able to capture yet at a neurobiological level?

And so in some sense, he's not, in fact, responsible, even in the limited sense of responsibility we're talking about. We might get some philosophers up on the stand in that courtroom.

There's a whole new career for philosophers of mine out there, but I think it is an interesting point.

Now, my reaction to that when I read the article was, yes, but there is, in fact, a reasonable distinction to be made between a pathological case. I mean, we do it all the time, even outside of this context. We you know, you can say, for instance, that a cancer is cell replication gone gone wrong? Well, we all have self replication, but we we can tell when it's gone wrong and it's become pathological as opposed to when it's a normal function.

So I think that similarly, you can make an argument that clearly if you have a tumor that has demonstrably affected your behavior because it is demonstrably pushing against certain areas of the brain that did interact with volition that affect evolution, then yes, I think your defense lawyer has, in fact, a good case.

But if you could not demonstrate that anything measurable is gone off again, it's gone it's gone wrong, then you don't have that kind of defense available because for all effective purposes, for all we can know, your brain is working functionally normal and therefore you are just as responsible in quotes as any other normal human being would be.

Yeah, although I still think that that seems like one extreme end of the spectrum on which there are plenty of other more ordinary cases in which, you know, I actually have lawyers arguing about this person's grew up in this harsh environment and that determined the way he saw the world and, you know, viewed women and or, you know, this person, a pixie sticks before this happened.

And so she was, you know, in a heightened state of I don't remember how the Kennedy defense, the Twinkie defense secretary of defense.

That's right. No, but yes, absolutely. There are borderline cases and there are grey areas. Right. So, as I said, there is one extremely obvious case where people, in fact, have been, you know, absolved of crimes because demonstrably they were under, you know, that the actions were the result in front of anomalies, anomalies in the brain. So so there are situations that are, in fact, grey areas where, for instance, environmental circumstances can be used as mitigating circumstances.

And in a court of law and, you know, the fact that there is no zero one choice, there's no there's no sharp answer, a short, sharp separation between the clear cases and everything else doesn't undermine, I think, the fact that, yes, there are cases where there is a clear pathology and we can make that decision very easily.

And then there are other cases where we have to make our best guess, just like anything else in life.

Yeah, although, of course, we want it to stay as great as possible just for, you know, the the benefit of philosophers career.

Absolutely. All right. Now that we've solved the problem of free will, we will wrap up this section of the podcast and go on to the rationally speaking, PEX. Welcome back. Every episode, Julie and I pick a couple of our favorite books, movies, websites or whatever tickles our rational fancy. Let's start as usual with Julia Spik.

Thanks, Massimo. I am currently in the middle of about two thirds of the way through a book by one of my favorite authors. Name is Douglas Hofstadter, a true polymath. You may have heard of his most famous book called Good Ol Eschbach. Yes. Which won the Pulitzer.

I read it when I was young. Yes, me too. It was a formative experience in the life of many a geek.

So this book I'm reading now is called Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, and it's basically a study of creativity and cognition.

But but through framed as a project in which Douglas Hofstadter and his research team were trying to create creative thinking in a computer program.

And so he goes through all of these analogies that he's sort of taught the computer how to think about.

So simple things like a simple example would be ABC is to ABCDE, as Oreste is to. Don't ask you, are you do you just increase the, you know, last letter by one and then so the computer got good at those and then they would throw at a harder example.

So, for example, ABC is to Abdeh as X, Y, Z is to and here it's hard because you can't just increase Zibi one because you're at the end of the alphabet.

So then there's this question of what's the best answer is the best answer to say X y a.

So you took the alphabet is like as modular as the right word.

Yes. Circular or here's the solution that the computer eventually came up with that everyone agreed was the most elegant. You think of ABC and X, Y, Z as a sort of mirror images because they're at opposite ends of the alphabet. And so instead of increasing the last letter of the sequence by one, you reduced the first letter of the sequence by one.

So Atkiss to ABCDE as X, Y, Z is to WIC now, which is clever.

It is clever, yeah.

So you talked about how they actually built this capability for creative analogies into the computer and it's very interesting.

Nice. My take, my pick is also a book. It's why some things should not be for sale. The Moral Limits of markets. Oh interesting. By Deborah Satz. It's a fairly philosophically sophisticated analysis. This is but is accessible to the general public. This is published by Oxford Political Philosophy.

And as the title says, the question here is, should we put limits on on markets in general or certain particular markets, for instance, markets for prostitution, prostitution or organ donation or even health care reform? And why? And on what? What on what basis? And the book is fascinating because it starts out actually with a historical background on on the philosophical theory of markets going all the way back to Adam Smith. And readers might be surprised to actually find out what Adam Smith said as opposed to what most people today think.

He said, yeah, he's the guy with the of the invisible hand, obviously.

But yes, he's remarkable in these concerts. And so it makes for interesting reading even right there. But then the other states moves to contemporary debates and it actually analyses the second part of the book is about analyzing individual examples of markets and making really interesting arguments. Obviously, this is political philosophy. So there's plenty of room for disagreement on things.

But the challenge of the book is because the arguments are very well put together and they're very comprehensive in terms of the other analyses, the positions of a variety of different theorists, then the question is, well, if you disagree with her, take on what grounds and what exactly went wrong with her reasoning. So it's a very challenging, interesting reading for anybody interested in markets and fairness and of injustice and just saying I intend to check that one out.

Thanks, Massimo. We are overtime now. So this concludes another episode of rationally speaking. Join us next time for more explanations on the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

The rationally speaking podcast is presented by New York City skeptics for program notes, links, and to get involved in an online conversation about this and other episodes, please visit rationally speaking podcast Dog. This podcast is produced by Benny Pollack and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York. Our theme, Truth by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission. Thank you for listening.