354 | Christian List on Free Will and Levels of Reality

Did I have any freedom in choosing this particular podcast guest? At the level of particles, fields, and the fundamental laws of physics; no. At the level of human agents navigating the world, yes. Today's guest, Christian List, is a philosopher and political scientist who has arguably done the most to articulate the "compatibilist" perspective on free will, according to which the freedom of rational agents is entirely compatible with underlying mechanistic laws. The reconciliation depends on thinking carefully about emergence and the relationship between levels of reality. Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code MINDSCAPE at this link and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/mindscape #sponsored Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/05/18/354-christian-list-on-free-will-and-levels-of-reality/ Support Mindscape on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll. Christian List received his D. Phil in Politics from Oxford University. He is currently Professor of Philosophy and Decision Theory and Co-Director of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy https://www.mcmp.philosophie.uni-muenchen.de/index.html at LMU Munich. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a member of Academia Europaea the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Among his honors are the Joseph Gittler Award from the American Philosophical Association. He is the author of Why Free Will Is Real https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674979581 and (with Philip Pettit) Group Agency https://global.oup.com/academic/product/group-agency-9780199679676?lang=en&cc=gb. Web site https://list.userweb.mwn.de/ LMU web page https://www.philosophie.lmu.de/en/directory-of-persons/contact-page/christian-list-087028b0.html Google Scholar publications https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=b6mn5-gAAAAJ&hl=en Amazon author page https://www.amazon.com/stores/Christian-List/author/B004BU9R7C Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_List

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Got something to say about the world around you? Squarespace gives you everything you need to turn that voice into an online presence, whether that's a blog, a brand, a business, or all three. Start with Blueprint AI, or a professionally-designed template, and make it your own with simple drag-and-drop editing. Build your audience with built-in email campaigns, share your story through video, and track what's working with integrated analytics. From passion project to full-blown business, Squarespace grows with you. Head to Squarespace.com/culture for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use offer code CULTURE to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Your joints help you keep doing what you love. Give them daily support with Ancient Nutrition Multi-Collagen Protein. Two scoops deliver 20 grams of collagen from 10 types, including clinically-studied eggshell membrane, plus vitamin C and probiotics to support skin, hair, nails, and joint health. Visit ancientnutrition.com/protein and use code PROTEIN for $15 off. That's ancientnutrition.com code PROTEIN.

• 1:12Sean Carroll?

  Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Hey, has everyone heard about the idea of free will? The idea that, you know, individual people have the ability to make choices and decisions based on reasons that can have a causal influence on how the world behaves? Yes, you have. I know you have. Don't worry. I'm just kidding. You've heard about free will. It's a hot topic. For reasons that I will admit, I do not completely understand why free will is such a hot topic. But on the internet in particular, people like, you know, making claims, and I really think that they're not always listening to each other. There are claims about determinism, indeterminism, compatibilism, incompatibilism,

• 1:57Sean Carroll?

  responsibility, blame, whole bunches of things that are bounced around. It surprises me, and I guess I should be happy. That so many people care about what is, in some sense, a relatively abstruse philosophical point. I've certainly not noticed any difference between people who say they believe in free will and people who say they don't believe in free will in how they act, in how they behave, in how they treat what it means to make a choice, or to place responsibility or blame on anyone else for making a choice. So I guess I should be happy that there's some sort of philosophical discussion going on here. As many of you know, I have two things that I like to say about free will.

• 2:42Sean Carroll?

  One is about the determinism versus indeterminism thing, which is, I like to say, it doesn't matter whether the laws of physics are deterministic or indeterministic. That's an interesting question to ask, but has nothing to do with free will. Even if the laws of physics were indeterministic, I would still think that you could either believe in free will or not. In particular, quantum mechanics has nothing to do with free will. Quantum mechanics does say that to observers in the world, the world is indeterministic. And there's this weird backwards logic, according to which people start from a conviction that there is no free will, and convince themselves that must mean that there is determinism

• 3:24Sean Carroll?

  in the world, and therefore, quantum mechanics can't possibly say that there's not, which is very backwards and very wrong to me. So that's one thing, I think. The other thing I think is that compatibilism is roughly right. That's my personal take. Compatibilism is just the idea that even if there's determinism at the lower level, you can still talk very fruitfully, and should talk very fruitfully, about free will at higher levels, the level of people and their actions. So I've said that many times, in many different places. It's time to get it right. In other words, time to talk to somebody who is really, truly, an expert in these questions, and who has thought through them very, very carefully, and see how the experts think.

• 4:05Sean Carroll?

  And unsurprisingly, there's many points of agreement, and many points at which I learn new things by talking to these experts. So Christian List is a philosopher. He is at the Institute for Mathematical Philosophy, not Mathematical Physics, Mathematical Philosophy in Munich. And he's done a lot of work in many different areas, a lot on social choice theory, he's written papers about quantum mechanics, but I think that he's probably most well-known for his Defense of compatibilist free will. That is to say, he is explaining why, given how the world is structured and given the metaphysical commitments we have in our understanding of emergence and how the world appears to

• 4:48Sean Carroll?

  us in layers and different levels and so forth, the right stance to take is treating people as agents who have free will and therefore moral responsibility. And not only does he say that, but he defends it and he investigates what it means to say that, what it means to be an agent, what are the necessary criteria, how it fits together, how you can extend these ideas from individual human beings to groups, to nations, potentially even to large language models or other kinds of AIs. At what point do you say that the AI has free will? As Christian will emphasize here, that's a different question than whether the AI is conscious.

• 5:32Sean Carroll?

  In fact, it's a much easier question and maybe a more important question. We really should start thinking about these questions more than we do. It'd be nice to have a rigorous philosophical framework with which to do that. He's the guy who has it, so let's figure out what that framework is. Let's go.

• 6:08Sean Carroll?

  Christian List, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

• 6:11Speaker 03

  Hi, Sean. Nice to be on your podcast.

• 6:14Sean Carroll?

  Yeah, it's very good to have you on. You've been a philosopher working on a lot of things, including quantum mechanics. Weirdly, we're not going to talk about quantum mechanics for the most part today. Maybe at the end, we'll bring it up, but we have other fish to fry, as we say, in this part of the world. For the listeners who are not philosophy experts, you know, there's lots of different kinds of philosophy you can do. There's moral philosophy and political philosophy or whatever. What kind of philosopher are you? What is the world, the specialty in which you live?

• 6:44Speaker 03

  Okay, so, well officially, my area is described as philosophy and decision theory. So this is at least my job description here in Munich. I work at the so-called Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, which is a fairly interdisciplinary place. But the people working here are philosophers who interact with several neighboring disciplines. So we have people in areas overlapping with maths, with physics, with economics, with cognitive science, with AI, with neuroscience, and with a whole bunch of different things. So it's an inherently very interdisciplinary place.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  And, yeah, so I think my interests have been all over the place around individual and collective decision-making and a whole bunch of metaphysical questions that are raised by this.

• 7:38Sean Carroll?

  I love the idea of a center of mathematical philosophy. Is that a thing? Do other places have centers for mathematical philosophy?

• 7:45Speaker 03

  I think the MCMP, Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, is probably the only place with that kind of name and label. But of course, there are other places with related interests. So there is a very good place in Amsterdam called the ILLC, Institute for Logic Language and Computation. They do a bunch of things that overlap with what we do. My former department of philosophy, logic, and scientific method at the London School of Economics also specializes in similar things.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  So, yeah, we are quite a big place in this area, but by no means the only one.

• 8:31Sean Carroll?

  I guess it does make sense. I love the idea that, you know, I'm well aware with philosophers of physics, of course, but philosophers of economics, philosophers of biology, philosophers of computer science also have this mathematical bent, logicians, I suppose. And so it must be fun to have them talking to each other.

• 8:50Speaker 03

  Absolutely, yeah. So no, the interdisciplinary nature of the place was one of the big attractions for me when I chose to come here. And yeah, I absolutely love it.

• 9:00Sean Carroll?

  And I want to sort of give away the punchline of a lot of our discussion right away. And then we can back up and lay the groundwork. But we're going to be talking about free will. And there's a... Free will is weirdly popular topic on the internet. I don't know if you know this, but people love debating free will.

• 9:20Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 9:21Sean Carroll?

  And maybe you could just lay out the options for us. I know that there's this idea that you're a determinist or not, but that's not really how philosophers think about it.

• 9:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay. So the big distinction in the philosophical landscape is that between compatibilism and incompatibilism. I mean, as I'm sure a lot of your viewers know, there's a longstanding debate about whether we could have free will if the world is deterministic. So determinism would obviously be the idea that if we fix the state of the universe at a given point in time, then there's only one possible trajectory of future states under the laws of nature. And that seems to prevent the idea that there are forks in the road, decision nodes, where I can do one thing or I can do something else. And

• 10:17Speaker 03

  the idea of free will is so much bound up with having choices between alternative possibilities. And so that leads many people, the so-called incompatibilists, to say, well, if the universe is deterministic, then there can't be free will. And then on the other side of the divide are the compatibilists. They say that, well, even if the universe is deterministic...

• 10:41Speaker 03

  We could still have free will and then they try to give us an account of free will, which is often gonna be a little bit more subtle or nuanced, uh, that then tries to make sense of free will in this scenario. And I don't know, I mean, I could also go into the, the sort of two conventional options. I mean, two, so two conventional options on the map are roughly the following two. Um, uh, one would be to say, um, it's just a mistake to define free will in terms of the possibility of doing otherwise. So here the idea is what matters for free will is not alternative possibilities, but what matters is simply that, um, an agent can endorse, um, their actions.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  So if, if I do something which is in line with my goals, my motives, I believe in it, I want to do it. Uh, it expresses my character. I mean, you can spell this out in a variety of different ways. Then those compatibilists say that's sort of good enough for, um, uh, counting the whole thing as, as, as free. Right. And then the other type of compatibilist in, um, uh, takes a different strategy. So they'd say, well, no, some form of choice between alternative options, um, is actually important for free will. So we, we, we must give an account of, um, you know, how, uh,

• 12:05Speaker 03

  we could do otherwise. Um, uh, but then they try to render this compatible with determinism by redefining what it means to say, I could have done otherwise. So, um, so for instance, I mean, give a trivial example. So this morning I had, uh, coffee rather than tea. Um, now I want to be able to say, oh, I could have done otherwise. I could have had tea instead. So what those compatibilists then, uh, would say is that, um, It wasn't required that at the time of the choice, it was genuinely possible for me to have tea. Because maybe if the universe was deterministic, only one thing was possible. Maybe only the coffee trajectory was a real possibility. However, what what those compatibilists would say is,

• 12:51Speaker 03

  what matters is that if the world had been a little bit different, so if I had had a slightly different back history, maybe I'd had a desire for tea instead. But then things would would have been ever so slightly different. Then if things had been a little bit different, then the trajectory would have unfolded in a different way, in the in the tea direction. And then that's good enough for for free will. So those that second kind of compatibilists basically redefines can do otherwise in terms of a counterfactual conditional. And those are sort of the conventional options out there.

• 13:28Sean Carroll?

  Can you can you tell us which one you are?

• 13:31Speaker 03

  So I actually like to reframe the debate. So I I mean, what I've just given you is the sort of standard framing. Of course, that's also what I present to my students when I give an introductory lecture on on free will. But but I mean, maybe in a now we will go into much more detail. But sort of in a nutshell,

• 13:56Speaker 03

  my point is that this standard debate frames things in the wrong way because it fails to distinguish between different levels of description at which we can think about the world, namely, a physical level on the one hand and a level of agency on the other hand. And then my claim, and I'm sure we'll get to discuss this properly. My claim is that, once we carefully draw the distinction between levels, this opens up new space for for defending free will in a more interesting way.

• 14:29Sean Carroll?

  Good, that makes perfect sense. Thank you for the for the preview, and we will get there. Do you have a quick standard response to the claim from some people that you're not defending free will, you're just redefining what it is?

• 14:46Speaker 03

  Well, my, so my response is that actually the strategy that I'm then about to explain more properly gives us a wonderful rebuttal of this objection. So what I would say is that some of those standard compatibilist roots that I very quickly summarized earlier on really can be accused of redefining free will or watering down free will. I mean, if I, for instance, if we say that free will does not require the possibility of doing otherwise at all, free will does not require alternative possibilities at

• 15:29Speaker 03

  all, then we have definitely watered down free will compared to our common sense understanding of free will. I mean, if you ask people outside academic philosophy, I think most people will think that some notion of choice is really essential for free will. Yeah. So if we take this away, we have redefined or watered down free will. But even if we redefine, can do otherwise, just in this counterfactual way, arguably we've still ever so slightly redefined free will or watered it down. Because, you know, I want to say, you know, this morning, I really could have chosen tea instead. It's not just if the world had been a little bit different, I would have chosen to, sure.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  I mean, if the world had been different, a lot of things could have been different. But what I want to say is, at the moment of choice, you know, it was open to me. I mean, I could have gone the coffee way, and I could have gone the tea way, and I opted for one, but the whole thing was under my, under my control. And, and so, so, so, yes, I mean, I, I, I totally get the point that some versions of compatibilism look like they are redefining or watering down free will. And my, my whole point is, you know, if we reframe the debate in the right way, we can avoid that.

• 16:45Speaker 04

  Observe: The North American Dad. 50s, great polo collection. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana. An offer appears in minutes. Remarkable. He squints, reads it again, smiles and says, "Dang, that's a good offer." The highest form of approval. No haggling, no hassle, no one called him "boss." He's still on the couch. Astonishing. Sell your car today on Carvana.com. Pickup fees may apply.

• 17:15Speaker 05

  Still waiting in line? Again? That's time you'll never get back. Save time and money with Stamps.com. Over 4 million businesses have skipped the line with Stamps.com. Join them to save up to 90% off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now. Print postage for certified mail, registered mail and packages in seconds. Then schedule a pickup right from your home or office. For a limited time, go to stamps.com and use code PODCAST for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply.

• 17:45Sean Carroll?

  Okay, that's very actually super duper helpful. I mean, I'll confess, and I think a lot of my longtime listeners know, I'm already totally on board with your way of thinking about it, but it's not my professional expertise either. So hearing the true experts explain the ground rules is very helpful. The other thing I wanted to very quickly get on the table is, most of what you just said doesn't involve words like determinism or indeterminism. I mean, you didn't use those words that much. And so it seems like compatibilism versus incompatibilism, which is, like you say, the way that philosophers generally think about it, is just kind of orthogonal to determinism versus indeterminism.

• 18:26Sean Carroll?

  And a lot of the online debate, I got in trouble for putting a social media post that says, "If you start talking about free will and immediately talk about whether the laws of physics are deterministic or not, you clearly don't understand the debate." So could you explain, was that a little bit too much? Or is that basically is compatible, I guess, with what you're thinking?

• 18:50Speaker 03

  Well, I think it definitely goes in the right direction. But, I mean, maybe to anticipate one of the key points.

• 19:00Speaker 03

  I think to just ask, is the universe deterministic or not? We just frame it like this, and that's actually the way it gets framed in a lot of metaphysics textbooks. That's the way the question is framed in the influential work of Peter van Inwagen, who developed one of the most famous arguments for incompatibility. If we just ask, is the universe deterministic or not? My view is that that's a somewhat under-specified or ill-defined question. I think the distinction between determinism and indeterminism can be drawn, but it becomes fully meaningful, fully well-defined,

• 19:42Speaker 03

  only once we carefully specify the level of description at which we're trying to draw that distinction. So now, once we have a system carefully described and we are crystal clear about the level of description, then we can actually ask, relative to that level of description, are we dealing with a deterministic system or not? Right. And sure, I know those people who think that some fundamental theory of physics gives us deterministic laws of nature. So I suppose that was the mainstream view, at least until Einstein. They would be able to say, yes, there is a level of description

• 20:27Speaker 03

  at which the physical universe behaves deterministically. And so then that would mean if you fix the trajectory of the physical universe at that level of description up to a particular point in time, then this trajectory admits only one normologically possible continuation. So only one possible continuation among the other trajectories that are admitted by the laws of nature. So far, so good. But now it is also entirely possible that if we re-describe the very same system at a different level.

• 21:07Speaker 03

  At a more macroscopic level, for instance, the determinism indeterminism distinction can come out in a different way, such that if we now look at a sequence, not so much of these super finely described microstates, but we look at a sequence of macrostates, each of which is more coarse-grained, up to a particular point in time, and we then ask, well, what are the possible macro-level continuations of this sequence of macro-level states under the laws governing the system? Well, then it could actually be that two or more distinct sequences of macrostates are fully compatible with the laws governing the system.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  And whenever you've got this kind of pattern, you'd have some form of indeterminism relative to the macro level of description, while having determinism relative to the micro level of description. And the general point is, of course, systems that we study in the sciences admit many different levels of description. I mean, we know there is the level of particle physics, there's a level of chemistry, which is already more coarse-grained.

• 22:21Speaker 03

  There are various biological levels, so the level of, let's say, individual cells, but then there is also the level of larger biological systems, organisms. We can keep going like this. So there's many different levels of description that differ in the level of differ in the level of grain or detail with which we describe the world. And so there's nothing weird about recognizing that at some levels you might have deterministic dynamics, deterministic behavior of the system, and at other levels you have indeterministic behavior of the system. I mean, in a thought experiment, you could even have, so with my friend and co-author Marcus Privato, we just, for just for conceptual intuition pumping,

• 23:05Speaker 03

  we considered this thought experiment. You could even Conjure up a hypothetical system, which admits infinitely many different levels of description, maybe ever more fine-grained. And you could have determinism at odd-numbered levels, and you could have indeterminism at even-numbered levels. And the whole thing would be a coherent scenario. I mean, of course, we are not saying that the world is like this, but it's a perfectly coherent scenario. And what it does show is that, in the case of such a system, you can't really say, "This system is deterministic simpliciter," or "This system is indeterministic simpliciter." But what this kind of thought experiment highlights

• 23:50Speaker 03

  is that the distinction between determinism and indeterminism is really very much a level-relative, a level-specific distinction. And so, back to your point. Yes, I wholeheartedly agree that if someone says, "Oh, you know, fundamental physics is deterministic," which is, I suppose, an open question, but let's call it at least a principle-life possibility. So if someone says, "Okay, fundamental physics is deterministic," then the reason why this doesn't automatically refute a free will, even on the sort of alternative possibilities categorization of free will,

• 24:35Speaker 03

  is simply that the kind of indeterminism, if any, that is required for free will, is not the form of indeterminism at that micro-physical level of description, but it would be indeterminism at what I call the level of agency, the agential level, which is a completely different level of description. And given this whole logic of, you know, level specificity of the distinction, indeterminism at the level of agency is actually fully compatible with determinism at the level of fundamental physics. And yeah, so that's sort of the direction in which I would, you know, spin or take the comment that you made.

• 25:16Sean Carroll?

  So, no, I love that. It makes perfect sense to me. Am I paraphrasing it correctly to say, or exemplifying it to say? Even if the fundamental laws of physics were 100% deterministic and it was little billiard ball atoms bumping into each other and interacting.

• 25:32Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 25:33Sean Carroll?

  When I flip a coin, I don't know whether it's going to come up heads or tails. And so at the level of people flipping coins, the world is indeterministic and we should treat it that way.

• 25:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, yeah, I mean, basically, I agree, just maybe with a, just a slight twist or nuance. I mean, you say, I don't know how the coin is gonna land. I mean, it's true, we don't know how the coin is gonna land. But that framing makes it sound as if it is just an epistemic phenomenon. So just something to do with unpredictability or our informational limitations when it, when it comes to figuring out the details of the microstate. And, and that would then invite the objection that, you know, when, when, let's say, when

• 26:23Speaker 03

  I talk about free will involving indeterminism at the level of agency, then, you know, this could look like, oh, what we really have is just unpredictability at the level of agency. But that's not the same as kind of genuine openness of choices. And so, once more, the, the objection would be, this is not good enough for, for free will. But, but, I mean, here's my, my, my response to that. My, my response is, I mean, it's not the case that we only treat properties, patterns, phenomena at the absolutely most fine-grained microscopic level as real.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  I mean, that would be absurd if we, if we said, you know, anything that you can't identify or pinpoint at the level of particle physics or at the level of, you know, whatever it is, superstrings or something, and, and any such thing you can't pinpoint at that most fundamental level is somehow unreal. I mean, then a whole bunch of things become unreal. Solidity of surfaces becomes unreal. Organisms become, become unreal. Societies become unreal. Universities become unreal.

• 27:35Speaker 03

  Unemployment becomes unreal, war becomes unreal. And I mean, you know, to tell people that these are not real phenomena. I mean, these are just absolutely real phenomena. So we've, we've got to start with a philosophical view that, that takes the human perspective seriously. And that also takes the sort of common sense ontology of the world seriously. So we, we need to have a philosophical picture that can recognize the reality of, for instance, ordinary macroscopic objects and properties. For this reason, what I'm saying is if our best descriptions, even from a scientific perspective of certain macroscopic phenomena,

• 28:21Speaker 03

  lead us to treat these phenomena as behaving indeterministically. You know, for instance, because in, in the case of dice or coin tosses, because stochastic modeling is the right way to go from a scientific perspective, then we should just say, well, that's as scientifically well supported as anything we say in particle physics, and we should just take it at face value. And that's, you know, just as real as the kind of thing that, that we say about a more fundamental physical level. And so therefore I want to say this form of high level indeterminism, you know, Marcus Pivato and I have also called this phenomenon sort of emergent indeterminism.

• 29:05Speaker 03

  And we shouldn't think of this as just epistemic. So we shouldn't think of it as just to do with informational incompleteness or something like that. But we should really think of it as, as on take, as a real phenomenon.

• 29:21Sean Carroll?

  Good.

• 29:22Speaker 03

  That's the little miss that I would put on, on, on your way of framing it.

• 29:26Sean Carroll?

  I like that much better. It's, it's a classic example of, of course, what you said is absolutely what I wanted to say, but you said, you said it better having thought of it more. So this is a wonderful segue into maybe we should, you know, give this picture of the world as a period in levels. It's due. So put aside free will. Just for a moment, but and I think you've already said a lot of it, but I want to give you a chance to sort of fill in whatever we need to understand here. You're claiming that there are different emergent levels of description related by coarse graining. And there's always a question in that picture of how much sort of independence or autonomy we should grant to the different levels. So what would you feel about that?

• 30:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, okay.

• 30:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, as I, as I already explained, we can think about the world at many different levels of description. I gave these different examples from physics to bio, to chemistry, to biology, to psychology, to, you know, sociology, economics, micro, macroeconomics, and so on. Now, what, what matters is not just that when we move from more fine-grained microscopic descriptions to more coarse-grained macroscopic ones. We sort of coarse-grain and we throw out information. I mean, we do throw out some information, we abstract away. But we, we do this not just because of computational or systemic limitations, but we do it in order to

• 30:56Speaker 03

  identify patterns while sort of getting rid of noise or of extraneous details. Because there's some low-level details that are relevant for the lower level, but that may not be relevant at all for the macroscopic description. And so then, in a sense, it's, it's illuminating if you extract the signal and get rid of the noise and focus on the macro pattern. So for a start, the coarse graining is done for a principled reason. Secondly, of course, it's not just that we coarse-grain when we move from low-level descriptions to high-level descriptions, but we also use different concepts and categories.

• 31:40Speaker 03

  To think about the world. So, I mean, even, you know, philosophers of chemistry point out that a concept such as acidity, which is a chemical concept, doesn't really have a neat physical counterpart. So if you sort of think about it already, acidity can't be sort of easily translated just into purely physical concepts. And that becomes all the more significant as we move up this kind of explanatory hierarchy. And I mean, it's pretty clear that a whole bunch of psychological concepts can't really

• 32:20Speaker 03

  be reduced to purely physical, chemical or biological concepts. So even, you know, psychology, I think it is fairly widely accepted, is not, is not reducible to neuroscience. And, and the most important, I mean, if we look at the sort of big picture, I think the most important dividing line is one between sub-intentional and intentional levels of explanation. And so, let's say, physical explanations, chemical explanations, they're clearly sub-intentional.

• 33:02Speaker 03

  We use some form of dynamic or stochastic modeling to describe the relevant processes, but we don't use any intentional vocabulary there. There are no goals, there are no purposes, there are no beliefs, there are no, there's no semantic content of anything, there are no representations. And on the other hand, you know, once we, once we move into the domain of psychology, cognitive science, the kinds of domains where we then also think about agency or think about rationality, think about minds, mentality, then also think about social phenomena, we make very significant use of intentional language or intentional, intentional concepts.

• 33:50Speaker 03

  And I think there are very good reasons why intentional language, intentional concepts can't really be reduced to sub-intentional concepts or sub-intentional language. And if we are sold, I mean, again, there is a whole bunch of separate arguments as to why this this reduction is not quite possible. But if we are sort of sold on the idea that some of the concepts and categories required for intentional explanations are not reducible to concepts and categories from one of those sub-intentional levels of description, then that gives us a good case for saying there is a kind of explanatory autonomy that the higher level enjoys relative to the lower level.

• 34:33Sean Carroll?

  So this is great because I want to really press on this claim about reducibility. Of course, it's crucial to these kinds of arguments and I'm never quite sure what is being meant. I know that in Phil Anderson's famous paper on Moore's Different, he says over and over again, of course, reductionism is true. What he doesn't like is constructivism, where you actually go from the lower level to derive what you mean at the higher level. I mean, I would think that acidity has some definite precursor at the lower level.

• 35:12Sean Carroll?

  And maybe it's just we can't identify it, or we don't use that concept in its own right at the lower level. But it's still a coarse-grained notion in some sense. So do you mean more than that, or less than that, or exactly that?

• 35:27Speaker 03

  Okay, good. So one of the reasons why a lot of people are tempted by various reductionistic positions is that they accept the idea of supervenience. So supervenience is a very natural idea. It's basically the idea that all the high-level facts that obtain

• 35:52Speaker 03

  As some kind of necessary byproduct of low-level facts. So for instance, if we put all the low-level building blocks of this world, all the elementary particles and so on in place exactly as they are in our physical universe, then you have also thereby put you and me in place, you know, with our, with our brains and minds and everything. So the supervenience ideas, you know, everything that is, that is true about Sean and Christian as, as people, as, as agents, is necessitated by a bunch of extraordinarily complex things that are true about the underlying physical system. So far so good.

• 36:36Sean Carroll?

  Yep.

• 36:36Speaker 03

  And everyone who accepts the, the claim that this is true is a supervenience physicalist.

• 36:44Sean Carroll?

  Okay.

• 36:45Speaker 03

  And now the, the, the tempting, but nonetheless, kind of invalid argument would say, well, because supervenience physicalism holds, because all these high-level facts, high-level properties supervene on, on low-level ones, we should therefore also be able to explain everything in, in low-level terms. Or we should be able to translate high-level descriptions into, into low-level ones. And, and that's actually the step where the so-called non-reductive physicalists, which I find the much more compelling position, would, would, would, you know, no longer agree.

• 37:29Speaker 03

  And so the, the, the point is supervenience does not imply explanatory reducibility. And I can, I mean, there's different ways one can make this point. I mean, I can, if you want, I can give you the sort of absolute nerdiest argument, which.

• 37:50Sean Carroll?

  I think you have to give us the absolute nerdiest argument just by saying that, yeah, we, we need that.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  Okay, so the, well, I mean, I, I, well, I'm not even claiming that it's the absolute nerdiest argument because I'm sure people, people can come up with even nerdy arguments.

• 38:05Sean Carroll?

  It's a challenge, yeah.

• 38:06Speaker 03

  Let's, let's, let's say at least one candidate for a very, very nerdy argument. Okay, so.

• 38:13Speaker 03

  So the kinds of languages that we use to describe systems are all countable languages. So that means they permit us to form as many expressions as there are natural numbers. You know, that's infinitely many, but it's countably infinitely many. So you can easily convince yourself that any of the standard logics that you find in logic textbooks are countable. But also English is a countable language, German is a countable language. I mean, anything that you can write down with the help of a finite alphabet and so on is gonna be a countable language. So languages that we use are countable, languages that we use in the sciences are countable. Okay, so far so good.

• 38:57Speaker 03

  Now, it follows immediately that if you have a countable language available for describing things, that means you can come up with infinitely many but still countably infinitely many descriptions. Okay, so that means with a countable language you can describe countably many properties, for example.

• 39:20Sean Carroll?

  Okay.

• 39:22Speaker 03

  Now, suppose that the following is the case. We're dealing with a, we're dealing with a physical universe. And let's suppose the set of possible microstates that this physical universe can be in, or any other physical system, let's suppose the set of possible microstates is infinite. So there are infinitely many possible microstates. That seems completely reasonable because, of course, initial conditions could be chosen in different ways. So it's, we're always dealing with systems. I mean, with sufficiently realistic systems would in principle admit infinitely many possible microstates that they can be in.

• 40:08Speaker 03

  Now, macroscopic properties that we might be studying in, you know, one of these high-level sciences, you know, be it biology, be it psychology and so on, they always correspond to sets of states, right? Because any property is realized by a whole, by a set of states. But once you've got a countably, once you've got a countable, sorry, once you've got an infinite set of possible microstates. You automatically have uncountably many possible subsets.

• 40:40Speaker 06

  From kickoff to the final whistle, trade the biggest moments in football on Kalshi, America's number one prediction market platform. Kansas City takes on defending champions Seattle. Currently trading at forty one percent to win. A one hundred dollar trade pays out two hundred and forty four dollars if they come out on top. Download Kalshi, use code HOOPS to get twenty five dollars when you trade twenty five dollars. K A L S H I. Kalshi, trade what's next. Eighteen plus only. Restrictions and eligibility requirements apply. Event contract trading involves risk and may not be suitable for all investors. Kalshi products are not available in all jurisdictions. Prices, values and available markets may differ from those mentioned. For more information, see kalshi.com/ regulatory.

• 41:17Speaker 07

  Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings and sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November third at Whole Foods Market.

• 41:45Sean Carroll?

  Ah, okay. Even if it's a countable number of microstates.

• 41:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, so even if it's a countable number, I mean, yeah. So of course it might even with with systems that you described with the help of the real numbers, you might even have uncountably many, you know, microstates. Well, you know, then you don't even have a chance. But even even if you even if you concede for the sake of argument, there are only countably many possible microstates of your system, as many as their natural numbers. Then still, there are uncountably many sets of of these states. And so that means, at least in principle, I mean, this is really just a purely combinatorial thought experiment, there are uncountably many properties that that we could be considering. Now, of course, most of those properties are of absolutely no interest, no explanatory

• 42:31Speaker 03

  relevance and and so on and so on. But the point is that there are, at least extensionally speaking, there are far more properties out there than a countable language would allow us to describe. So if you have a countable language for talking about microstates. Just for pure combinatorial reasons, almost every property that corresponds to a collection of those microstates will not be describable by an expression in this in this countable language. And now, when we think about macro properties, you know, if you accept supervenience, okay, good. Then what we do know from supervenience, from supervenience would follow,

• 43:14Speaker 03

  that any macro property does have a kind of extension or corresponds at least to an extension that would be a collection of of microstates. But it would have to be at least, if you just go with this combinatorial line of reasoning, it would be some kind of mega fluke. If that turned out to be one, that your low-level countable language allows you to describe. I mean, you might be lucky. It might be that somehow the only explanatory relevant or explanatory salient properties are those that can be picked out with the help of the low-level language. But I think now we've kind of reversed the sort of burden of proof.

• 43:55Speaker 03

  Because I think the proponent of explanatory reducibility would have to show that. And combinatorics are kind of stacked against the reductionist. So this is the kind of, this is the kind of nerdy argument as to why even if you grant supervenience, there's still no guarantee that high-level descriptions of properties are reducible to to low-level descriptions.

• 44:25Sean Carroll?

  I like it. And I think now the audience knows what mathematical philosophy looks like when it's when it's done properly.

• 44:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course, I could also say not all mathematical philosophy is quite like this. And this argument admittedly is in a quiet taste. So I think some people will like it more than others.

• 44:45Sean Carroll?

  But I think it's at least a friendly acquaintance of a question that, to my mind, is still unclear in the world of levels and emergence and things like that, even though I'm a big fan in general. It seems that if you if you do buy the supervenience thesis, which it sounds like you're willing to do. So if you had exactly the same microphysical system, you would also have exactly the same higher-level properties.

• 45:13Sean Carroll?

  And also, the higher-level theories are more or less autonomous. You don't need to know the micro theory. I can do thermodynamics or flip coins without knowing about the standard model of particle physics. Then there's two things going on simultaneously. One is that the higher-level concepts and objects fit into an autonomous dynamical framework, like we can describe what happens with them. But also, they're observable, right? Like, you know, if you talk about a fluid and it has a temperature and density, those are the quantities you need out of the vastly reduced set of information you had about the atoms and molecules. And also, we can measure them. I mean, is that, do those two things go hand in hand automatically?

• 45:58Sean Carroll?

  Or is that some nice miracle that the world provides us?

• 46:02Speaker 03

  Well, of course, it's true that a lot of the high-level properties are of interest to us, precisely because, you know, they play a role in our lives. And, you know, we as biological organisms have also been kind of evolutionarily selected in such a way as to be sensitive to certain properties of the environment and not others. So I don't find it particularly surprising that microscopic properties are particularly well measurable from our perspective as compared to certain microscopic properties.

• 46:44Speaker 03

  And, I mean, I would also add that, you know, I mean, in principle, there's many different levels of description that one could use to think about a system. And now, which levels of description are explanatory relevant or interesting is, of course, somewhat dependent on, you know, what your goals as an observer are, what your, what your interest as an observer are, what your perspective on the world is. And so...

• 47:24Speaker 03

  So I mean, I don't find it very surprising that, you know, we as humans operating at a particular scale, you know, biological organisms of a particular size, find certain levels of description particularly interesting and salient. And, you know, who knows if we were intelligent beings at a completely different scale, you know, maybe we would be sensitive to different features of the world at a very different level of description. So there's definitely a certain amount of kind of interest relativity to our choice of levels.

• 48:01Sean Carroll?

  Good. I think that's a good amount of background where we can now circle back to the free will question. You know, you made a good case earlier that free will at the macroscopic level is not just an epistemic matter, what we know and what we can predict. There's a sense of genuinely, it could have gone the other way. So, but at a more detailed level, what is the difference between saying that agents at this level of description have free will versus just there's some indeterminism at this level? Are there conditions under which we can finally say, yes, that that that object in front of me is an agent with free will?

• 48:42Speaker 03

  Yes. Yeah. So, I mean, my proposal is that we should use a checklist of three conditions for assessing whether a particular system, a particular organism has free will. And they are the following. First of all, intentional agency. So only systems that qualify as intentional agents are even candidates for having free will. And then, I mean, there's a lot more to be said exactly about what an intentional agent is, but we can perhaps come back to that later. So for instance, my water bottle that I have here is not an

• 49:24Speaker 03

  intentional agent, and it's not even a candidate for having free will. So intentional agency is the first condition. The second condition is indeed alternative possibilities. But these, I think, have to be alternative agential possibilities.

• 49:44Speaker 03

  Um, you know, corresponding to the choice options uh uh between which an agent uh can make choices um uh and then the third uh condition is um what I call causal control over the resulting actions. Philosophers sometimes also speak of mental causation. And so this is um the condition that says um um the the the purportedly chosen action um uh must count uh as uh having been um caused by the agent's mental uh state

• 50:23Speaker 03

  and must not uh count as having been caused just by um for instance, an underlying uh physical process of the of of of the body, as in a reflex, for instance. So, you know, if the doctor hits my knee with a little hammer, my leg shoots up um uh and of course, some bodily process causes that movement. Um but we are not really dealing with a case of mental causation here. So whereas if I intentionally lift the bottle, then you might say, well, I had a desire to lift the bottle. I formed the intention to lift the bottle. And then uh my uh relevant uh arm movement, the performance of the action systematically

• 51:06Speaker 03

  co-varied with the presence or absence of those intentional mental states. And so then we say, I I qua agent, not just qua physical system, uh had causal control over the resulting action. And um and so um I think free will requires all three things, intentional agency, alternative possibilities, and uh causal control of the resulting actions. And so if you just had a system that displays some form of high level

• 51:36Speaker 03

  Indeterminism, that would not by itself qualify as having free will, because that system wouldn't necessarily satisfy the agency condition, it wouldn't necessarily satisfy the causal control condition. And so it's really just the interplay of these three things that really amount to free will.

• 51:57Sean Carroll?

  So I like where this is going, but you're using a lot of words like intentionality and reasons. And I worry that if I were a skeptic, which I'm not, but if I were, I would ask like, how do you know that a system has those properties? I mean, a large language model might respond in a certain way if I said, why did you reason in that way? But I'm not at all convinced that it's actually giving me an accurate response.

• 52:25Speaker 03

  Good. So yeah, so I mean, the large language model is of course super interesting. Still, let's set it aside just for a second. So let me first say something about the general methodology and then if we look at the complicated case later. So the general methodology is this. I am sort of quite drawn to and was also originally quite influenced by Daniel Dennett's work on the intentional stance, which yeah, which you know well and which I'm sure, you know, your listeners are also very familiar with.

• 52:55Sean Carroll?

  They, sorry, they might not be. Give us a little tiny flavor.

• 52:59Speaker 03

  I'll give a little bit of a summary. So Dennett basically said, okay, there are some systems which we can understand perfectly well by just viewing them as physical systems. Let's say the solar system, how do the planets revolve around the sun? You take a physical stance towards that system, you write down a physical model, you can explain the thing. But then there are other systems, like you and me, human organisms, whom or which we can't understand adequately by just viewing them as physical systems. I mean, if you really wanted to, you know, make sense of you and me just as.

• 53:45Speaker 03

  Aggregates or conglomerates of vast numbers of molecules, I mean, good luck. So we'd have no chance of explaining why you and I managed to, you know, coordinate on this, the time for this this conversation. I mean, you know, we agreed to meet today, but we agreed weeks ago. And we and we could actually reliably predict that we were going to show up for this for this thing. At a purely physical level, just focusing on the molecules making up the body, we'd have absolutely, you know, no, no chance. So then it says, well, with some systems, to make sense of them, to understand them, to explain them, to predict them. You've got to take an intentional stance towards them.

• 54:28Speaker 03

  So you've got to view them as agents with beliefs, with desires, with goals, with intentions. And once you look at them through that lens, then all of a sudden, their behavior becomes intelligible to us. Whereas from the purely physical perspective, it would be a kind of complete mystery. So obviously, the key to understanding and human behavior is to to realize human beings are intentional agents. Okay, so then it then says, well, that's really all there is to the notion of agency. Whenever you've got a system that you can, I think he says, usefully and voluminously explain and predict

• 55:11Speaker 03

  from the intentional stance by viewing it as an agent, well, then that's good enough, that's an agent. But I mean, I think the problem with Dennis' perspective is that it is kind of a bit too instrumentalist, because then agency is just in the eye of the beholder. So, you know, to be an agent on this Dennettian view is just to be interpretable as an agent. So if the thermostat is well interpretable and well predictable as an agent, okay, well, then that's fine. That's it is an agent, and there is nothing more to the story. And I want to go a little bit further. I want to say, well, to be an agent is not yet the same as to be interpretable as an agent.

• 55:54Speaker 03

  Because, you know, one is is a sort of epistemic criterion, and the other one is sort of ontic. Rather,

• 56:02Speaker 03

  If if a system is interpretable satisfactorily adequately only by viewing it as an agent. So if it is if viewing the system as an agent is explanatory indispensable. We can't explain it adequately in a different way. Then the explanatory indispensability of viewing the system as an agent is a very good, strong indicator, good piece of evidence that we are truly, really dealing with an agent. So if it turns out that I have absolutely no chance of making sense of you, Sean,

• 56:41Speaker 03

  without viewing you as an intentional agent, that's very, very strong evidence that you really are an agent. And so you you you you see the point. So the indispensability of taking the intentional stance towards a particular system is strong evidence that we are really dealing with an intentional agent. And it's this indispensability test that I also use in order to assess whether a system should qualify as an intentional agent from the perspective of the free will debate. And now to just quickly relate it to the the issue about AI.

• 57:25Speaker 03

  I mean, I totally admit that it's a complicated issue. Because I mean, there are all these big debates, you know, are these L L M's? Are they just stochastic hets? So, you know, are they are they really just glorified versions of the sort of text correction, text extension, autocomplete software that we have on on our smartphones? Or are they are they something else? Or do they mimic mimic agency? Or do they do they do they genuinely have agency? And and I mean, you find people on both sides of the of the divide here.

• 58:09Speaker 03

  And also, of course, the technology is in flux. So, you know, maybe at an early stage of the technology, we were sort of very much at the stochastic pet end of the spectrum. But of course, the technology also advances and the systems increasingly get engineered in such a way as to be explicitly designed for reasoning abilities and so on. And what I would say is simply this. Now, once we reach the point where those systems also satisfy this indispensability test, so where you just cannot make good explanatory sense of them without viewing them as genuine intentional systems,

• 58:54Speaker 03

  then we've got good evidence that they really are intentional systems. And my feeling is that whether we like it or not, we are kind of heading in the direction where more and more systems maybe are like this. And that's actually also why I think that this set of criteria for free will, intentional agency, alternative possibilities and causal control might, I don't know whether now or in the future, but might potentially force us to conclude, prompt us to conclude that some sophisticated AI systems also qualify as having free will.

• 59:31Speaker 05

  I'm Hannah. I've lost seventy five pounds in twenty months with GLP-1s plus diet and exercise. On Row, I've gone from struggling to run a mile to running farther every day. You can access FDA-approved GLP-1s online. Get the support you need to reach your weight loss goals. Go to row.co/weight to see if you qualify. I'm a paid Row partner. Twenty percent average weight loss in one year in non-diabetics with obesity or overweight with a weight-related medical condition versus 3.1% in placebo arm. RX only. To stay informed about serious side effects, go to row.co/safety.

• 1:00:02Sean Carroll?

  I'm Jake Stauk, co-founder and CEO of Serval. We built Serval to automate the IT work that slows companies down. Onboarding, password resets, access to applications, my laptop stopped working. While employees wait for help, their real work is put on hold. IT desperately wants to automate this work, and that's why they need Serval. You just tell Serval what you want to automate in plain English, and it's built. No drag-and-drop workflows, no expensive consultants. Employees get unblocked, and IT teams go from drowning in tickets to building what actually matters. With Serval, IT becomes the AI engine powering the entire company. This is a new way to run IT.

• 1:00:44Sean Carroll?

  We guarantee you'll automate 50% of all tickets, and we'll prove it to you in a free four-week pilot. Go to serval.com/tickets. That's S-E-R-V-A-L dot com slash tickets.

• 1:01:02Sean Carroll?

  At the risk of entirely derailing the conversation, the story that you told, which I'm very sympathetic to, about finding it indispensable to use some of these concepts to talk about these systems, reminds me of debates over philosophical zombies and consciousness. And as a physicalist, I want to say, I can't conceive of a zombie philosophically, because the zombie is supposed to be something that doesn't have conscious experience but behaves exactly down to the atom as if it does. And what I mean by consciousness is just that that's the way, the best possible description of this system at this level involves the language and concepts of consciousness.

• 1:01:46Sean Carroll?

  And this sounds at least a little bit parallel.

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I mean, so yeah, that's, so that, yeah, the whole consciousness issue that raises a separate set of, separate set of issues.

• 1:02:01Sean Carroll?

  I know.

• 1:02:02Speaker 03

  I mean, just for, for full disclosure, so while my theory of free will is a fully, wholly Against the background of physicalism and indeed non-reductive physicalism, as we've now discussed at some lengths. When it comes to consciousness, I sort of go in a slightly different direction. I it's not something that I had kind of antecedently expected, you know, when I started to think about these issues. I sort of expected that I was that I would be a physicalist with respect to consciousness as well.

• 1:02:43Speaker 03

  And no, I'm maybe ended up surprising myself by coming out on the other coming out on the other side. And I mean, just in a nutshell, the extra complication with consciousness that that simply isn't there with with free will and agency. Is that consciousness is first personal. And when we talk about phenomenal consciousness, we're really talking about first personal experiences. We're talking about first personal facts. We're talking about the first person perspective.

• 1:03:23Speaker 03

  And by contrast, when we ask, you know, is a system an agent, does a system have representations?

• 1:03:31Speaker 03

  Does a system have alternative possibilities between which it can choose? Does it have causal control or mental causation in relation to its actions? These are all third personal questions that we can in principle formulate from the perspective of an ordinary scientific third personal observer. And so that's why I actually think the study of free will and agency can be done completely unproblematically from the ordinary third personal scientific perspective. And so methodologically, that's sort of much closer to what David Chalmers would call the easy problems of consciousness. Right. Sorry, yeah, exactly.

• 1:04:13Speaker 03

  Whereas the the the hard problem is, you know, how how do we make sense of, in a sense, the first person against the background of this.

• 1:04:25Speaker 03

  Third personal impersonal scientific picture of the world. And that's, I think, the sort of big structural difference between the consciousness debate and the and the free will debate. And, you know, while in the case of free will, I've kind of completely convinced myself that you can be a physicalist, you could even be a physical determinist, and yet you can embrace free will and you can even embrace free will with the idea that there are alternative possibilities at the level of agency and and everything fits together nicely. Once you recognize the sort of leveled architecture of the worldview, I find that it is much,

• 1:05:04Speaker 03

  much harder to properly accommodate consciousness as first personal experience, not just as third personal descriptions of the whole thing, but as first personal experience within this purely third personal or impersonal worldview of of the of the sciences. And so I found myself ending up in a place that is actually even more radically non-physicalist on consciousness than even Chalmers's view. So David Chalmers rejects physicalism, but in a sense doesn't reject the the sort of,

• 1:05:47Speaker 03

  in a sense, ordinary impersonal third personal picture of the world. So I mean, that he accepts the framing that we've got to think of a world that we can talk about from a scientific perspective. And then the debate is all about what sorts of properties must populate this world in order to make sense of consciousness. And then the physicalists would say, you know, just having a world with physical properties is enough. And then Chalmers, in the in the his classic wonderful book, The Conscious Mind, nineteen ninety six, says, no, physical properties alone are not good enough. You need to also have phenomenal properties, and the phenomenal properties do not supervene on the physical properties.

• 1:06:31Speaker 03

  And that's then how he makes sense of the zombie thought experiment and his and his view that that zombies are. Conceivable and metaphysically possible, albeit not normologically possible. But this still concedes the framing that you can look at the whole thing, in a sense, third personally, impersonally, from the perspective of the sort of Olympian scientific observer studying those systems from the outside, adopting the kind of view that Nagel would call the view from nowhere, in a sense. And then we just debate, what properties do

• 1:07:10Speaker 03

  we need to throw in in order to make sense of consciousness? And I'm sort of much more on Nagel's side and think that actually the problem lies with a view from nowhere, with the impersonal perspective. We can't really properly accommodate consciousness in our worldview without recognizing the sort of fundamentality of the first personal perspective. And that leads me to think that we must really postulate genuine, irreducible first personal facts over and above the third personal or impersonal

• 1:07:52Speaker 03

  facts that we have in the physicalist worldview. But once you introduce these first personal facts, then you are really quite radically outside the standard physicalist picture. And then that raises a whole bunch of new challenges. But that was sort of a quick summary of why I think the consciousness debate is structurally different from the free will debate.

• 1:08:14Sean Carroll?

  Perfectly fair. I get it's refreshingly honest that you follow the conclusions where they go when you think about these things. But I do want to give you time. You've laid out an interesting case for why thinking about free will has to do with levels of description and the existence of the possibility for things having been otherwise and the existence of agency and intentionality. Okay, if there are these levels, then there are also higher levels than individual people. There are groups, there are corporations, there are nations. At what point do we start attributing free will to them?

• 1:08:53Speaker 03

  Yes, yeah, no, great, great question. So, um, so in, in fact, I, I sort of got into the, the whole subject of agency in a, in a slightly non, non-standard way, because I, I began my career working primarily in, in social choice theory. So the study of collective decision-making and also the mathematical modeling of collective decision-making. And in the course of this work, I collaborated a lot with Philip Pettit, a philosopher in Princeton and at the Australian National University. And Philip and I, on, on the one hand, did some work together on the aggregation of judgments.

• 1:09:37Speaker 03

  So this is sort of a collective choice problem, more or less in the kind of Condorcet-era social choice theory tradition. But we also, in particular, then wrote a book together on the subject of group agency. And so in this book, we discussed the question of whether it sometimes makes sense to view certain collective entities, especially organized collectives, institutional collectives, like firms, corporations, collegial courts, universities, even states in their entirety, whether it makes sense to view those collectives as kind of unified agents in their own right.

• 1:10:16Speaker 03

  And an important observation is that in, on real life, we do this all the time. I mean, we, we, we treat collective entities as, as agents. You know, we talk about how the airline treats us. We, we ascribe goals and intentions to, to firms. But it's not just the kind of common sense thing, but we, we also do this in the relevant sciences. So in economics, the theory of the firm views firms and corporations as rational actors and applies the very same rational choice theoretic models to, to explain their behavior.

• 1:10:56Speaker 03

  In international relations theory or some areas of strategic studies, entire countries or states get treated as unitary rational actors. In fact, if we look at the history of game theory, the whole field was developed quite significantly in the aftermath of the Second World War in the context of strategic studies, where, you know, studying, for instance, at the time, the strategic interaction between the United States and the Soviet Union was a major driver for developing game theoretic models. So this idea that corporate entities can be rational agents in their own right,

• 1:11:41Speaker 03

  it's not just a common sense idea that we find, but also very much an idea that is entrenched in the social sciences. And so that led us then to think, you know, how can we develop philosophical foundations for this idea? And of course, I mean, you see immediately how this raises many interesting metaphysical or philosophy of mind questions. What you say about the sort of mental states or the analogues of mental states of those corporate entities. And it also raises many normative questions about the sort of responsibility that those entities can have. And so Philip and I, in our book, we defend a realist theory of group agency.

• 1:12:25Speaker 03

  So we think that corporate entities can truly be intentional agents with functional states that qualify as beliefs, functional states that qualify as desires or goals or preferences, and then with an ability to systematically interact with their environment on the basis of those states. So basically, pursuing their desires in line with their beliefs. And we don't think that those corporate entities are phenomenally conscious. So they are, you could think of them as kind of zombie agents, if you like, but, you know, zombie corporate agents. But if you are a realist about group agency, as I am,

• 1:13:09Speaker 03

  then there is the obvious question whether we should ascribe free will also to those entities.

• 1:13:16Speaker 03

  And again, I think my theory of free will, especially with its catalog of the three criteria, the three conditions that I mentioned earlier, can actually allow us to think about that question systematically. Because these three criteria, intentional agency, alternative possibilities for choice, and causal control of the resulting actions, they are portable criteria. They are not criteria that are just sort of custom-made solely for the human case. But those are criteria which at least in principle could be applied to other entities as well. So you can use these criteria and ask, do chimpanzees fulfill those criteria?

• 1:13:58Speaker 03

  And if so, the answer would be they have some form of free will. And I think, I mean, I'm not a primatologist, but you know, given everything that I've read, I think we should conclude, yes, absolutely. And I mean, it would be very weird if somehow, you know, humans come out as having free will and absolutely none of the other animals do, not even our closest relatives do. But then similarly, I mean, earlier we talked about L L M, so we talked about A I systems. You know, if we think that our best explanations force us to say such and such A I systems are intentional agents,

• 1:14:43Speaker 03

  because viewing them that way is kind of indispensable. If our best explanation forces to say that they are choice makers, they are genuine decision makers, they're choosing between options. And if they also force us to say they have some kind of analog of mental causation, so let's say their high-level representational states are the sort of controlling difference-making variables in relation to what they do, then we'd have to say that those systems do qualify as having free will in this sort of functionalist sense. And I think exactly the same should be said also about group agents. So if we have a corporate entity that satisfies those three conditions, intentional agency, alternative possibilities for choice, and causal control, the sort of corporate-level analog of mental causation,

• 1:15:27Speaker 03

  then we should conclude, yes, there is a sort of functionalist sense in which that entity does have free will.

• 1:15:37Speaker 03

  And I mean, although this conclusion, I mean, might sound a little bit revisionary and weird at first sight, it becomes less weird once we recognize that free will is not the same as consciousness. So we are not thereby forced to conclude that they are conscious, they're not, corporate entities are not. But secondly, I think, on reflection, the conclusion should even be welcome, because, I mean, those entities, as we all know, are very powerful. They really play an important, enormous role in our contemporary world, in our social environments. They can cause a lot of harms and do big damages. In fact,

• 1:16:17Speaker 03

  their power is much greater than that of typical individuals. And so, we should better have certain frameworks in place for thinking about corporate responsibility and even for corporate liability, and even something like corporate criminal liability. I mean, all of those are very important notions, and, you know, lawyers take those notions seriously and debate them. And if we, if we accept the general story, that some form of free will is a sort of necessary condition for fitness to be held responsible, then it's

• 1:16:55Speaker 03

  a kind of congenial finding that that necessary condition is also satisfied by some of those corporate entities.

• 1:17:05Sean Carroll?

  And I guess we didn't go into it in detail, but would you say that there's this close connection between the satisfying your criteria for free will and our legitimacy in assigning responsibility or blame to various agents?

• 1:17:23Speaker 03

  So, I would say that free will, in this functionalist sense that I've defined here, is a necessary but not quite sufficient condition for fitness to be held responsible. I mean, I suggested earlier that, you know, maybe chimpanzees could be said to have free will, or some version of free will, under those conditions. Now, we don't want to say that chimpanzees bear moral responsibility, or let alone legal responsibility. So...

• 1:17:55Speaker 03

  I would therefore think that free will understood in this way is a kind of necessary precondition. And then there are some additional conditions that also have to be in place for responsibility. For for instance, certain normative cognitive capacities need to be present in the system. And in addition, certain epistemic conditions must also be met, informational conditions.

• 1:18:17Sean Carroll?

  Okay.

• 1:18:18Speaker 03

  And and of course, moral philosophers have debated in detail what the nature of those conditions is, but but but but nonetheless, I mean, free will is sort of an important part of the of the package. And this kind of analysis suggests that, yes, indeed, corporate entities, you know, could tick the box there.

• 1:18:42Sean Carroll?

  And this brings up an issue that I've been wrestling with myself quite a bit. A slight difference between the kind of coarse graining and collective behavior we get in physics and the kind we get in the social sciences, which is that in physics, when you have a bunch of atoms and they come together and you find that it's useful to assign temperature and density and pressure and things like that, the system itself suggests the right way to coarse grain, right? Like, it's it's not making any choices about it. Whereas in groups of human beings, we vote or we invent a system of representation or something like that, and voting systems and representation systems could be giving

• 1:19:26Sean Carroll?

  us wildly different results. So it's sort of not naturally emerging, but it's imposed from us. Is that a a real important difference? Or am I just making a big deal out of nothing?

• 1:19:38Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, the the the observation is is is right, but what I would say is this. So.

• 1:19:48Speaker 03

  You know, suppose you're dealing with a group agent and you're interested in what sorts of beliefs or preferences or overall collective attitudes to ascribe to this group agent, this qua corporate entity. And then you're right that it might be relative to a particular voting method or institutional structure or aggregation rule that we define the group agent's beliefs or the group agent's preferences. And of course, those corporate attitudes will

• 1:20:26Speaker 03

  be contingent on the aggregation rule in question. But what you can then say is, well, the group beliefs or group judgments supervene on the individual judgments relative to the organizational structure that defines that entity. So the organizational structure might be written, for instance, in the articles of association of this entity. So the constitution, you can think of this as its sort of software or something like this, or its operating system that specifies how the thing works. And then you've just got this sort of perfect

• 1:21:05Speaker 03

  analogy with a kind of computer. So the high-level states of my computer also supervene on low-level states, but they do so relative to the operating system running the thing. And the operating system is the sort of much more contingent social level analog of the kind of, you know, normological constraint that is naturally given to us in the case of a physical system, but it sort of plays a similar role. So in the case of the physical system, maybe the normological constraint in question is just given by some laws of nature and then... That that that sort of fixes the the nature of a particular supervenience relation

• 1:21:50Speaker 03

  that we're interested in. And in the in the corporate case, the nature of the supervenience relation is relative to the organizational construction organizational structure, which is the sort of system relative normological constraint, so so to say.

• 1:22:06Sean Carroll?

  Does thinking in this way help us decide the very hard question of what are good systems of aggregating beliefs in corporations or or countries for that matter?

• 1:22:18Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, so the the way of thinking that I've summarized here is heavily influenced by social choice theory, the sort of field in which, as I mentioned earlier, I started I started out and social choice theory is sort of the formal study of aggregation rules, aggregation mechanisms. And for a long time, social choice theory focused primarily on things like a preference aggregation or vote aggregation or utility aggregation. But in the last 25 years or so, many of us have worked a lot on the aggregation of judgments, also the aggregation of beliefs.

• 1:23:02Speaker 03

  And social choice theory gives us a sort of wonderful set of axiomatic tools for thinking about the nature of different aggregation methods and for comparing them. So very often, the way we proceed as we we formulate a bunch of disiderata, minimal conditions, a sort of wish list of criteria or requirements that a good method of aggregation should satisfy. And then, once you've got a wish list of such axioms or criteria or disiderata, then we use mathematical analysis to ask, you know, do there exist some aggregation methods satisfying those criteria simultaneously?

• 1:23:43Speaker 03

  And, you know, sometimes we end up with a negative result and impossibility result. So that's the sort of landmark result of the field, arrows of possibility theorem is best known example of this. But sometimes we also get a possibility result. Also it turns out that a bunch of conditions can uniquely pick out a particular aggregation rule.

• 1:24:04Speaker 03

  And then to the extent that we find those criteria very obvious, intuitive, appealing, you know, normally compelling. That would give us very strong reasons to to adopt the relevant aggregation rule. And yeah, and so one of the things that Philip Pettit and I also do in our book is we import some ideas from social choice theory. To then suggest the systematic way of thinking about different organizational structures of group agents.

• 1:24:35Sean Carroll?

  We did have Philip as a guest here on the podcast, by the way.

• 1:24:37Speaker 03

  Wonderful. That's great. That's terrific. Yeah.

• 1:24:41Sean Carroll?

  We got both of the co-authors there. All right. So just sort of as a final thing to get to get on with, to wind up. Well, let's go back to the L L Ms, because this is the sexy topic right now that everyone is interested in. I hear your previous argument that it's very plausible in your mind that you have these three criteria for free will. And maybe L L Ms, it's an empirical question whether they will get there, do have it, et cetera.

• 1:25:09Sean Carroll?

  There's various worries I have about this. Let me just mention one. When I have an L L M in front of me, I can prompt it in such a way as to effectively totally change its personality. Very quickly, right? I can, you know, I can tell it to like, okay, henceforth be more impetuous or be more conservative. Or, you know, act like this person or whatever. There doesn't seem to be a kind of stable identity at the core of the L L M. Is that something that maybe should or does play a role in having free will or being an agent?

• 1:25:43Speaker 03

  Um, yeah, that's a, that, that, that, that is a good point. And of course, this is also one of those areas where the technology is in flux. So because these different, these systems differ quite a lot with respect to how stable or volatile their personality is. And I mean, I hear that companies like Anthropic.

• 1:26:05Speaker 03

  Devote a lot of resources to developing the personality of Claude and, and, you know, employ philosophers to, to, you know, also seek this sort of philosophical input on, on, on this. So I mean, to some extent, this is a kind of a bit of a contingent issue, which is in flux. But, but, but I think here is the, the issue where this, this does matter. I mean, from a normative perspective, it is often said that agency and responsibility is also a kind of forensic accounting device in order to be able to kind of make stable action attributions across time. And so if I now hold you responsible for something

• 1:26:49Speaker 03

  that you did in the past, for instance, then there is a sort of background system of assumptions about personal identity that, that plays into this judgment as, as well. So if, if I had to operate on the assumption that, you know, they are just very short-lived time slices of Sean and no extended personal identity, that would very significantly change our views and verdicts when it comes to responsibility attribution in, in, in a diachronic setting. And, and I think the point that you raise is, is, is really relevant

• 1:27:31Speaker 03

  for that sort of debate. I mean, if you have an AI technology that is extraordinarily attitudinally volatile, then, you know, maybe you just have these very short-lived time slices and those are the kind of meaningful units of agency. And then somehow you, you already jump to a kind of completely transformed instance of, of, of, of the system. And that completely breaks our normal moral understandings of, you know, agency and responsibility that we are familiar with in the, in, in, in the, in the human case. And, you know, once again, I think what this, what this highlights is,

• 1:28:15Speaker 03

  Once these new, once these novel intentional systems come on stream, corporations now have been around for a while, but you know, relative to the history of humankind, they're still somewhat new or modern, but I mean, they've been around with us in the modern era. AI is this is much more recent phenomenon, but once these new intentional systems, new intentional agents come on stream, there's a bunch of things that turn out to be sort of somewhat parallel to the human case, where lessons from the philosophy of mind, or lessons from the philosophy of action, or from rationality and choice theory, or from indeed moral philosophy, nomadic theories carry over.

• 1:28:57Speaker 03

  But then there are also some new features of those systems, which are which are quite different, and which then force us to revise or adjust or update our systems of concepts and categories. And I think that's also where we'll have to go with with the AI systems.

• 1:29:14Sean Carroll?

  Can you ever imagine being friends with an LLM?

• 1:29:18Speaker 03

  Not for me.

• 1:29:20Sean Carroll?

  Maybe that suggests some extra things that we have in the back of our minds when it comes to whether or not we should treat things as agents.

• 1:29:28Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, of course, agency on my kind of picture is a functionalist notion, and agency has no built in consciousness requirement or consciousness condition. I mean, some kind of functional awareness, of course, sure, but but not the sort of phenomenal consciousness condition. And as you know, there's a lot of debate at the moment about whether AI systems are conscious or sentient. There isn't the sort of absolute, absolutely complete consensus on this, but I mean, my hunch is that at the moment, the sort of somewhat dominant view is still that the

• 1:30:09Speaker 03

  current systems we have, despite their remarkable functional capacities, are not yet phenomenally conscious.

• 1:30:21Speaker 03

  But I mean, all of this is in flux.

• 1:30:23Sean Carroll?

  Yes, it is.

• 1:30:24Speaker 03

  And also, it's another example of how this new technology is a sort of test case for all these both metaphysical and neuroscientific debates about about consciousness.

• 1:30:35Sean Carroll?

  Well, I I hope that the philosophers can do their best to sort of run ahead of the changing story because it's changing very rapidly. And we're going to have real world implications that matter coming at us very fast.

• 1:30:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's exciting times, but also scary times. It's a bit of a bit of both, but it's definitely an interesting time to do philosophy.

• 1:30:55Sean Carroll?

  Absolutely, a total fair, a totally fair description there. So, Krishnan Lisk, thanks very much for being on the Mindscape Podcast. This was fun.

• 1:31:03Speaker 03

  Thanks, Sean. This has been fun.

• 1:31:28Speaker 03

  500 orders a month was manageable.

• 1:31:31Speaker 07

  5,000 is madness. Embrace intelligent order fulfillment with ShipStation. The only platform combining order management, warehouse workflows, inventory, returns, and analytics in one place. What used to take five separate tools, ShipStation does in one. Automate fulfillment and rate shopping to ship up to 15 times more with up to 90% savings. Go to shipstation.com and use code AUDIO to try ShipStation free for 60 days. You know what's wild? Most people are still overpaying for car insurance just because it's a pain to switch. That's why there's Jerry. Jerry is the only app that compares rates from over 100 insurers in minutes and helps you switch fast with no spam calls or hidden fees.

• 1:32:15Speaker 07

  Drivers who save with Jerry could save over $1,400 a year. Before you renew your car insurance policy, do yourself a favor. Download the Jerry app and see what you could save today. Rubrik is the security and AI operations company built for what

• 1:32:30Speaker 06

  happens after an attack hits, not just the moment before. AI has turned the threat landscape into quicksand, moving too fast for any human to fully predict. That's why an agentic cyber resilience platform matters. Automated recovery, clean data, a business that keeps moving no matter what hits. One platform, not a patchwork of stitched-together tools and gaps. Don't wait for the next attack. Secure and accelerate your business at rubrik.com. Again, rubrik.com.