Free Will Is Real (with Kevin Mitchell)

Are we truly characters with agency, or are we just playing out our programming in the great video game of life? Contrary to those in his field who claim that free will is an illusion, neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell insists that we're agents who wield our decision-making mechanism for our own purposes. Listen as the author of Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will explains to EconTalk's Russ Roberts why the debate between free will and determinism rests on a flawed foundation, and how the evolution of the ability to make choices and take actions provides the best argument for human agency. Topics include why habits, rather than simply limiting our freedom, also help us live better lives, and the role emotions such as guilt, shame, and regret play in building our character.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  Today is November 12, 2025, and my guest is neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell. His latest book is Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will. Kevin, welcome to Econ Talk.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  Thanks very much. Thanks for having me.

• 0:50Speaker 00

  This is a deep, subtle, nuanced, fresh look at a very old question, the question of free will versus determinism. But it's much more than that. It's an overview of evolution. It's an overview of how evolution created increasingly complex life forms here on Earth. And most interesting to me, it's a very nuanced framework for thinking about what it means to be a human being. Related episodes on the other side of the free will determinism debate include my discussion with Robert Sapolsky on his book Determined, and the recent episode with Girav Suri on his book, which is a McClellan, The Emergent

• 1:31Speaker 00

  Mind. Kevin, you start with a beautiful metaphor of the video game that your son's playing, and the difference between your son as a player and the bartender, who is what's called an NPC, a non-player character.

• 1:50Speaker 00

  Who your son as a player encounters in the game. Explain why that metaphor is relevant for for this conversation.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that it kind of struck me. I mean, it was a true story like I was literally watching him play this video game and it struck me that the the game kind of encapsulated this concern that people have had over over millennia, really, that, you know, there was the contrast between him as the player where he seemed to be acting really for his interests, you know, he had goals in the game, he was pursuing those goals, he was making decisions, given the scenario that the game presented to him and so on. And then these other people that he would encounter, these non player characters like the bartender, where, you know, you go and you you you ask them something and then the

• 2:41Speaker 01

  bartender as which is just pieces of code, really, responds somehow, right? But it seems like they're also characters, they're also entities, these non player characters, and the concern is that, you know, what you you have this sort of intuition that that there's a difference, right? That you say, well, I'm doing things because I want to for my own reasons and they're just playing out their programming. And then the concern is like, well, OK, but what if I'm just playing out my programming? You know, what if I'm just acting out my genetic, you know, what the genetic code says I should do, generally speaking, or what my experiences have wired into my brain at any moment so

• 3:24Speaker 01

  that, you know, I have an illusion of choice, but maybe I'm fooling myself, maybe I'm a non player character, just an automaton. And that's the existential freak out moment that you can have when you start thinking about these issues too deeply.

• 3:43Speaker 00

  And, you know, it comes down, one way to capture that you talk about in the book is the question of agency.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:51Speaker 00

  The bartender has no agency. The bartender is programmed to behave in certain ways when encountering certain things, unless the bartender goes rogue, which does not really happen in our current world.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:08Speaker 00

  Or the makers of the game could introduce a random element into the bartender's behavior, but even that is pre-programmed. So, the bartender is, clearly has no agency.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  The worry is, is that, well, your son doesn't either. You know, he's supposed to do his homework, but he's gotten into this terrible habit, we'll talk about habits a little bit, but he's gotten into this terrible habit of playing video games, so he thinks he's choosing to play the video game, when in fact, he's just a victim of his own, as you say, his own code. We're all just code, whether it's DNA, or our past, or our nurture, or nature, or life experiences, and so on. So, to make this even more vivid, I want you to make the reductionist case for determinism, the hard version, the strong version. And

• 5:03Speaker 00

  I think, I have a horse in this race, I want to confess, listeners know, I am, I would like there to be free will. I am troubled by the determinist case. I find it difficult, but I wish it weren't so. And so I found your book very comforting in that sense.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Okay, good.

• 5:22Speaker 00

  But, in my reading, you do a very fair job in steel manning, as the expression goes, and giving the, a fair version of the determinist case. And you make it a number of times in the book, and I think each time you do it well. So make that case, the case that there's no free will.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Right. So, the, the sort of...

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Strange thing about this is that it seems like we go about making decisions all the time, right? That seems to be the kind of bedrock of our experience. And yet, there's these lingering doubts that people have had for thousands of years about how this could possibly be the case. And if it was trivial to rebut them, then there wouldn't have been a need to write the book, right? So they have some purchase. I mean, they have some... These are strong intuitions once you start thinking about them. And the first level is the level we already talked about, the idea that, yeah, you know, it seems like we're freely in control of our actions, but actually, we're being driven by our habits, we're being driven by this, the psychological programming that's in our

• 6:27Speaker 01

  minds, based on our past experiences. And I think, you know, someone like your previous guest, Robert Sapolsky, would argue for that. He would say that all of the experiences that you've had to date are shaping your mind and your brain in such a way that when you encounter some new scenario, you develop the intent to do something, but that's... And you do that, right? You do what you want to do, but the emergence of the intent is not up to you. You don't have a hand in that. Your brain is just suggesting it to you.

• 6:59Speaker 00

  And you feel it, but that's an illusion, is the claim.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's... The argument is that that's an illusion, exactly, that you're not really free when the intent just pops into your mind, and then you carry it out, right? That would be the argument. Now, I'm gonna jump ahead and say, I just don't buy that argument. There's lots of evidence that the intent doesn't just pop into your mind, that in fact, you're actively involved in making the decision about what to do. The intent is the end point of that product... Oh, sorry, of that process, that you are actively engaged in, right? It doesn't just appear most of the time. I mean, in some cases, it's true, but not... One of the key things here is you shouldn't extrapolate from what happens in one kind of scenario to every kind of scenario.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  And I think that's a mistake that people have made across this literature generally. Okay, so we've got this, but we've got this sort of psychological intuition that maybe we are really non-player characters, right? We're just driven by all of our past experience to, you know, like not really have a choice in the moment, just at a psychological cognitive kind of level. But you can go below that, right? Neuroscientists are very much materialists in that they're interested in how the machine works, right? And as neuroscientists, we've been incredibly successful in getting in there and studying what's going on, not just in people's brains, but in animals as they're making decisions, right?

• 8:26Speaker 01

  So we can, you know, with things like neuroimaging technologies, where we can scan someone's brain while they're making decisions, we can kind of see the cogs turning. You know, we can say, well, look, I see something happening in your brain when you're making a decision, and it's in this circuit or this circuit. And if you make this decision, I'm, you know, I'm likely to see more activity in your amygdala or your prefrontal cortex or wherever the case might be. And that, you know, gives the impression that actually the, your brain is making the decision, not you. And that's a weird framing, right? Because it kind of suggests, on the one hand, we have this very materialist, reductive

• 9:11Speaker 01

  sort of view of the mechanism. And then on the other hand, you've got you. Well, like, what's you? Some free-floating kind of ghost in the machine? It's a strange framing. And I think there's two ways to look at this neuroscientific evidence. One is to say, clearly, your brain is making the decision, not you. And the other is to say, you're making the decision using your brain. Like, what else would you use? Obviously, there's going to be activity in your brain while you're making a decision. But still, you know, there's other, there's other experiments in, in animals where it's not just observing what's happening, it's driving activity. We can go in and we can activate

• 9:52Speaker 01

  specific parts of an animal's brain and we can make it go to sleep, we can make it move forwards or backwards or roll around, we can make it hunt, we can make it, you know, do reproductive behaviors, you know, all sorts of things can be kind of remote controlled in, you know, mice and rats and so on. We can even change the way that they think. We can change their decision making so that they're more risk averse, or they're more impulsive, or something like that. And once you can do that, you know, when you can control the machinery of decision making, it really just focuses the mind on the mechanistic

• 10:32Speaker 01

  aspect. And it leads to the, to the kind of intuition that the whole organism as an agent is actually not doing anything. It's a place where stuff is happening, but it's really being driven around by what's happening within its parts. And that's, that's obviously a concern.

• 10:53Speaker 00

  I just want to mention, you know, we had Patrick House, Isak Fried on for an episode where they talk about, they were doing brain surgery. Isak Fried was the surgeon, Patrick's a neuroscientist, but Isak Fried's a surgeon and he's doing, trying to reduce seizures. And he's got this young woman's head, her top of her head off and she, he's in her brain. And he's poking around to make sure that when he takes something out, he doesn't hit something, quote, important, it all seems pretty important. But he's running a sensor around. And one of the things he does, he pokes in at one point and she starts giggling. And he says, what's so funny? And of course,

• 11:37Speaker 00

  She doesn't have an answer. There's no answer to that. The right answer is she's giggling because the humor part of her brain's been stimulated electrically by a surgeon. So she makes something up. She says something like, "Horses are funny," because there's a horse somewhere in the... I can't remember the exact detail. But that's disturbing because we think we laugh because things are amusing. But you could argue that we only laugh because our neurons fire in the laughter region and we exhibit a chuckling or giggling.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so a lot has been made of these kinds of cases where, especially in people with neurological damage to some part of the brain, they can do things for reasons that they're not aware of. And then, when you ask them, they often make up a story. It's called confabulating, right? So they make up a story. They're trying to interpret their own behavior because they don't have access consciously to some processes that they normally do. And then they make up a story post hoc, right? And so this is an example where people have, I think, over-extrapolated from that kind of data. So they say, "Okay, well, here in these patients with neurological conditions or under conditions where it's

• 12:51Speaker 01

  a particular experimental setup that uses some psychological thing, it gives you subliminal processing that you're not aware of, sort of a sneaky psychologist's design, right? You can also get people to confabulate even when they don't have any neurological damage.

• 13:08Speaker 00

  And the claim is that it's all confabulation at the extreme. And that's the...

• 13:12Speaker 01

  That's the extrapolation.

• 13:14Speaker 00

  I want to be fair to Gaurav Surya. But to some extent, the argument in the emergent mind is that your neurons are firing and you're responding. You're moving your arm, you're running around, you're spending your time imagining something in the future, whatever it is. And you convince yourself you're doing that because you had a reason. But it's all part of the hardware running in the background. And that's one extreme.

• 13:46Speaker 00

  The other extreme is, which I find even more interesting, is the Big Bang. It's what William James calls the iron block, that everything from the beginning of time was inevitable. If, once the Big Bang happened, it was inevitable that in 2025 Kevin Mitchell would be a guest on Econ Talk and we'd be having this conversation because it's all physics, all atoms and molecules. And what's wrong with that argument?

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's a very seductive argument and it carries a lot of force. So the idea is, we started at the psychological level. We said, you're psychologically determined to act in certain ways. And then we went down to the neuroscience level and said, the implication is, look, all that psychological talk is kind of epiphenomenal. It's not really causal. The fact that you believe something or desire something is not actually the cause of your behavior. It's these neurons firing in the machine. So it reduces behavior to a kind of the output of an electrical engineering system, almost, right? At the neural level. But why stop? Like, why stop at that level? You can keep going down because you can say, well, look, neurons are made of molecules

• 15:04Speaker 01

  and atoms, and they're going to obey the laws of physics. So everything that happens within you is actually dictated by the laws of physics. So there you get to the deepest sort of level of determinism, exactly the concern that you just articulated, which is that if those laws are fully deterministic, then everything that happened from the Big Bang till now was already predetermined.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  It's all cooked in.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  It's cooked in. So let me just explain what that means for something, for the laws to be deterministic. What it means is that if you have the state of the universe at a given time point, and you can, it's fully defined, fully precisely defined at some time point, then you just apply those numbers to the laws of, whether it's, you know, it could be Newton's laws, it could be the Schrodinger equation when it comes to, you know, quantum fields and things like that, whatever the level at which you're doing the calculation. And then there's just an outcome that's inevitable as you go along, right? That's the argument. You know, we interpret that idea that the laws are deterministic really from Newton's

• 16:14Speaker 01

  laws of classical mechanics. Because, you know, what he showed, say, for the orbits of the planets is that, you know, when you can really, really predict where they're going to be thousands of years in advance, right, very, very accurately. And there's no, there doesn't seem to be any chancey element there. There's no bit of randomness there in those equations.

• 16:34Speaker 00

  And if they get it wrong, if you get it wrong because there's a comet that you didn't anticipate, that's just you didn't have the full state of data about the system. It just, yeah, that, in other words, there's the equivalent of the idea of an omniscient god who would know everything, then could obviously, because the universe is subject to the laws of physics, that god would know everything that would happen from the beginning of time till the end of time, whatever that means, but at any point in time, as you say, it's just mechanics.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  Yes, so there's this sort of fictional being that was proposed by a French mathematician whose name was Laplace, which came to be called Laplace's demon. And the demon in this case was this omniscient being. And the interesting thing for this being was not just that they could predict everything that was going to happen, but that actually time would be meaningless for them. All of time would just be laid out as a whole thing all at once, because any moment going forwards or backwards would entail every other moment in it, right? So that's the sort of argument. And in fact, if you look at Einstein's, you know, theory of relativity, he has this idea of a block universe where it's very much the same idea, that everything is sort of

• 17:53Speaker 01

  fixed and there's no, there's actually no definition of the present moment within that, right? Nothing distinguishes the present from other, from the past and the future, which is interesting, given that that's such an obviously important part of our, of our experience, that, you know, these major physical theories don't know what to say about it. That's an interesting sort of thing, that a wrinkle that gets, that gets overlooked, I think.

• 18:22Speaker 00

  My philosopher friend. Here at Shalem College, one of my philosopher friends tells me that scientists aren't good at philosophy. He thinks their view of time is just wrong. And that's another episode, but yeah. But that's the implication of the iron block is that there's no before, during, or after. It's just the way we experience it. It's all pre-done.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  There's no, "Oh, I wonder what will happen tomorrow." No, you don't.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:50Speaker 00

  I mean, you might, but...

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so the implication is, right, if, first of all, the implication is the future is fixed. There are no possibilities. So possibilities just don't exist. That's not a thing that exists in a deterministic universe. And so the idea that we might be exercising choice doesn't even arise, right? It's just not relevant or applicable, yeah, under those circumstances. And so the odd thing about this, from my point of view, looking at the debate that has raged for millennia, is that it's always free will versus determinism. And determinism, many people just take it that physics says that that's the case. Physics is deterministic, that that's a result of physics. And it's absolutely not.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  It's just physics doesn't say at all that the world is like that. So it's really weird that the entire debate in free will, when you're talking about free will, people just assume that it's free will versus determinism. And in fact, you can make a very good argument from physics that there's inherent indeterminacy in the way that things evolve in physical systems. And that's true at the quantum level, which is, I think, well-known. But it's also true at the classical level, which is less well-known. And the implication of that, then, is, well, now we've got a different challenge. If we're talking about free will, in a deterministic universe, you have to ask, where could the freedom come from? There's no freedom in that universe. Everything's just inevitable.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  But in an indeterministic universe, where many things could happen, where there's some probabilistic nature to what goes on based purely on the laws of physics, well, then you have to ask for an organism, where does the control come from? Right? How can an organism have some control over what goes on? Because it feels like either the universe is deterministic, in which case you have no choice, or at the low levels, there's some indeterminacy. But if the way that the indeterminacy plays out, just in terms of physical interactions... If you can't affect that, and it ultimately manifests in your behavior, then you also have no choice. So it feels like we're the horns of a dilemma.

• 20:58Speaker 00

  And I challenged Robert Sapolsky, at least mentioned this role of quantum indeterminacy. And he writes about in his book, he rejects it for those reasons. He's saying, yes, there is indeterminacy in the universe, but since you can't control it, it only acts on you, you don't act on it. I think that was his argument, but it's certainly a good argument.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  It is a good argument, but it misses one vital point. And the vital point is this, and this is really actually the kind of the core, I guess, if you want to say metaphysical argument in my own approach. The argument is that the fact that the future is open, that when you have some indeterminacy at the low levels, and that comes from not just from quantum stuff, there's other arguments for why there must be some indefiniteness to the future, that the future is really open. If that's true, then what it means is many things could happen. It's just not the case that the current state of the universe says only one thing could happen.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  We started time t, the current state. Then at time t plus one, it's actually a bit indefinite. Multiple things could happen. And then the question is, what other kinds of factors could constrain what happens? And there you get the possibility that actually the way that a system is organized could do some work to constrain the trajectories that are possible, the possibility space that emerges. And so this is actually utterly commonplace, even though people seem to think it poses this huge metaphysical problem. Like the computer I'm using right now is constraining the paths and trajectories of electrons within it

• 22:45Speaker 01

  by virtue of the hardware being organized a certain way, and by virtue of the software that it's running. And it does that without violating the laws of physics. It's not going down pushing individual quantum events around. It's actually not meddling. Or micromanaging at that level, there's still all this noisy improbability sort of happening down there, sorry, indeterminacy happening down there. What it's doing is constraining the possibility space of how things could go at a macroscopic level, right? So it doesn't matter, like, my computer running this program, it's not affected by individual electrons zigging or zagging, it's affected by populations of electrons, right?

• 23:27Speaker 01

  And robust sort of emergence statistical behavior in the circuits that are doing things. So you can get macroscopic organization that controls things at a macroscopic level without, like I said, violating anything. There's no new laws of physics, there's no overriding the core theory of quantum mechanics or anything like that. It's just that that level, the core theory of quantum mechanics, is just not causally complete. Because it's inherently got probabilistic elements, it opens some causal slack for something else to be involved.

• 24:00Speaker 00

  But I really like this argument you make, and I don't fully appreciate it. It's very subtle about how the system itself is affecting the question of, say, agency. So I want to talk for a minute about evolution, which is the way you frame, again, I'll say it this way, the way you frame the human experience. So in one view, in the determinist view, my choices and freedom and agency is an illusion,

• 24:41Speaker 00

  and I'm fooling myself, and that's just built into the hardware and software of the human body and brain. You have a different view, or a way of, different way of thinking about it, and it takes you 300 pages to really lay it out. So I don't want to, I don't want you to try to do this in 144 characters. Try to give us the flavor of why, a different perspective on what we're doing and where we came from and how our...

• 25:14Speaker 00

  The processes of the human biology are relevant to this question.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  No, that's great. So, I mean, my approach in the book is, yeah, like you say, to take an evolutionary approach to try and understand not just how humans can control their behavior, but how any organism can be said to be doing anything, right? I mean, so, you know, before life emerged, there weren't any doings in the universe. There were just happenings. Things were happening. And then at some point, these entities emerged that seemed to be able to do things, right? They're causal agents unto themselves. And that's a really deep question. And it felt to me like if we didn't get a handle on it at that level, we'd never understand humans, this most complicated sort of instantiation of these powers as we see them.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  So what I wanted to do was build up some of the concepts gradually and naturalize them so that it didn't feel mystical if at the end, you know, I was talking about us doing things for a reason, things having meaning for us, acting on purpose, things having value. We can, we can get a handle on those ideas in very simple organisms, even at the origin of life, and get a sense of what does it mean? Like, we want to understand what it means to be a human being. At the core of that, the question is, what does it mean to be a living being? What is life really about? And, and for me, the core element of life, which is actually, I think, often overlooked in biology, is agency. It's the fact that living things do things. They act in the world. So, all of this hinges on this

• 26:50Speaker 01

  idea of macroscopic organization. And the one extra element that you need to add to this to understand it is the idea of selection. So you could have, in a, you know, a complex system, many things could happen. And when that's true, then you could end up going one way or the other, right? Now, the question is, can you arrive at an organization that is better at persisting as a pattern than another organization? And just randomly, by chance, somewhere in there, you'll get some patterns of activity that are sort of self-reinforcing.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  So, in our world, on our planet, that emerged as sets of chemical reactions that reinforce each other. So you get these sets of reactions where, you know, the product of one reaction is the substrate for the next, and you get these sort of interlocking cycles that all reinforce each other. And it's thought that these probably started out as what we call geochemistry. So it was chemistry and probably like deep-sea vents that started to produce organic molecules with lots of, you know, hydrocarbons, basically, doing these sorts of complex, interlocking chemical reactions that ultimately became a pattern that is stabilizing itself as an

• 28:14Speaker 01

  entire regime. Whereas, you know, patterns that just happened to arise that were unstable, well, we just don't see them. It's just a sort of a, it's a tautological kind of dynamic where things that are good at persisting tend to persist. They're then the substrate for further evolution and so on. And eventually, this geochemistry became biochemistry, and we had, you know, free-living organisms that are, you know, they're contained within a little membrane, a little bubble or a cell wall that separates the inside from the outside. And then they're also, in a sense, trying to persist. They're doing work. They're doing thermodynamic work to keep that pattern, that dynamic pattern, going, right?

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Which is, again, that's a completely new thing. There was nothing like that in the world before that.

• 29:04Speaker 00

  So let's, let's take an example that would, and I'm not sure what you're going to say in response to this, but a flower, a plant, will turn toward the sun.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  I turn toward the buffet. Um, or the football game, whatever, or, or your book, you know, I, I have my own actions. The flower is, we might think about, you know, a rock that gets strewn from a volcano is happening. It has no agency. It has no control. It is subject to the laws of physics. And if we had all the data, we can tell you where the, where the rock's gonna land. If we know the force at which it's expelled from the volcano, what angle. Uh, there's some chaotic stuff about when it bounces around, but let's put that to the side.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 29:57Speaker 00

  The flower acts as if it has agency. We don't think it, I don't, I mean, some people do think it has consciousness. Yeah, it's been argued, but I don't. Uh, so I'm gonna say it, it looks, that's an illusion. Uh, you know, if the flower can't talk, but if I could turn to the flower and say, why, why'd you, uh, why'd you bend over that direction? You say, well, I like the sun. It's, I think it's good for me. And I've learned that when I do that, I, I do better. It doesn't talk. It can't explain itself, but it looks like if, if, if I didn't know better, it looks as if it has agency and autonomy. I, when I turned to the football game, um, when, when say my wife in, in the restaurant

• 30:42Speaker 00

  wants me to be talking to her and I find myself unconsciously trying to check the score, uh, am I any different from the flower? Um, what's going on there? I mean, what's, what's significant about my wetware? The combination of my brain and, and body and DNA and cells has, is much more complicated than the flower in a certain dimension, but am I really any different?

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. So this is the journey that the book tries to trace is this trajectory from as if agency.

• 31:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  To real agency. And, you know, what you, you, when you were talking about real agency, you mentioned the word consciousness there. And as an idea that you were, there's an extra element here. It's not just the. You're acting for reasons. It's that you're aware of what those reasons are. You would be able to articulate them if somebody asked you why you did something. You might be able to interrogate them yourself and ask, is this a good reason for doing something and so on? And so, so that's the highest level that we know of, of agency, which has this level of meta cognition, where you're aware of your own mental processes, right? But the trajectory evolutionary was a long way to get there. And it starts out with a much more simple kind of agency, which still is purpose of, right? There's still a purpose to it.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  They're still acting for reasons, even if the reasons are kind of baked in by evolution. So even like a bacterium that is, has a tendency to move towards a food source, for example, is acting for a reason relative to its purpose and its purpose is to persist. And it's not aware of that. There's no awareness.

• 32:22Speaker 00

  Right. It's just driven by the millennia, eons of natural selection and randomly mutations to get to that point.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Exactly. But the purpose is a very real thing. You can't understand what's going on without, without recourse to saying that, that the reason this thing is configured in the way that it is, is that that's a good policy to have that favors its persistence. And so, you know, I talked about things being this sort of dynamic stability, right? A living thing is just being a set of dynamic processes, a pattern that's trying to persist through time. The problem is the world doesn't cooperate, right? The world is changing. It's a dynamic hostile environment usually. And what that means is that living organisms, it pays for them to be reactive or adaptive to as, as conditions change.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  Or proactive.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Even, even better, even better is to be proactive, exactly, to anticipate possible changes in the environment. And so what organisms have evolved, and this includes the very simplest organisms like bacteria, is a way of gathering information about what's out in the world and a way of linking that to a policy or a decision. What to do about it. So our little bacterium has a policy sort of biochemically wired into it that when it detects food through this receptor that sits on the membrane of the cell and it gives a little wiggle inside the cell, then the cell changes its direction of motion, right? The little bacteria, they swim around with kind of like an outboard motor.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  So what's interesting there is that if you look at that system, you might say, okay, well, clearly the bacterium is literally being pushed around by its parts. You can see individual proteins inside it, changing their biochemical confirmation or activity, and the eventual result is food out here, bacteria moves this way. And that's basically similar to what I was talking about with the neuroscientists, where they say, you only did X because this part of your brain was active and it connects to your muscles in this way, and this was the action that was instituted as a result of that. However, I think what you can do is actually zoom out a little bit and say, well, wait a minute.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  Actually, if I give my bacterium a food source like that, it doesn't always move towards the food. It depends what else is around. It's actually integrating lots of things. I mean, when we do an experiment that the only thing we have in the experiment is there's some food over here and there's a bacterium, then we get a pretty reliable result, even though it's executed in a probabilistic fashion. But if we put other things around, now that's much more naturalistic. Now our bacterium is having to act like a holistic agent. It's having to say, wait, okay, there's a food source over there, but maybe the pH of the solution is too low over there, that'll kill me. Or there's other kinds of things, or maybe their metabolic state is actually fine. They're not low on fuel, so they don't need to go towards food.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  Maybe they're dividing, whatever it is, right? So when you take a more holistic view, what you get, what you get, rather than this mechanistic reductive thing being pushed around by its parts, is you get an organism that's encountering the world in a proactive way. It's not sitting there waiting for some stimulus. It's always active and it's exploring the world, it accommodates to new information. It integrates a bunch of things and then it kind of makes an all things considered judgment. That's optimal, given multiple goals and multiple parameters that it's trying to trying to satisfy. And I mean, there's a direct analogy to to economy here in terms of bounded rationality

• 36:07Speaker 01

  and trying to optimize over multiple conflicting goals and time scales and so on.

• 36:11Speaker 00

  And local maxima and right.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 36:16Speaker 00

  It could be that going forward a few inches seems like a bad idea, but if you just go afoot, it's a fantastic paradise for this bacteria.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah. So so living systems have tried to have had to evolve control systems that allow them to adapt to changing conditions and that basically give them the power to act in the world as a holistic entity, as an agent. And the reason is that the, you know, the agent is acting for reasons that favor its persistence as a whole thing. It's not like the individual proteins within a bacterium are not trying to persist. The whole pattern is trying to persist. Even if it's, even if it's only as if, like, once you get strong enough, there's actually no difference from as if and and really is. It's until you get to points where there's now this meta awareness

• 37:10Speaker 01

  of goals and reasons and so on. So so I think we can start with the simplest life forms. We've got purpose, we've got meaning, value, we've got information, kinds of causation that are at play that transcend just physics, right? When when a receptor binds a food molecule, like a sugar on the outside of the cell, there isn't any transfer of energy or momentum that's pushing anything around. There's just an informational change. There's a confirmation of the protein inside the cell that is a signal, right? So we have a kind of causation that, again, is not is not at play in any nonliving part of the universe. This this was something that came along with life.

• 37:52Speaker 00

  Well, the thing that's beautiful about it, the way I would phrase it, take it probably from you, is it's not mechanistic. It's not determinate. It's not.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  You can't predict, no one could predict it. It's not, even the omniscient demon might have, or God, it's fun that Lopas called it a demon, would have trouble anticipating it because you'd have to look inside the cell. Now, if you had all the information, maybe you could. But the other thing I want to emphasize here, which I think is the reason the book is so thought provoking, I want to go back to my football game.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  So I'm not going to make it about me because I don't want anyone to draw any conclusions about my marriage, but let's say Kevin, you're, well, we'll call it Keith. Keith is at a restaurant with his wife Kathy, and Keith, in the middle of a conversation where Kathy's sharing something personal, finds himself looking, turning his head and looking at the game. What's interesting about the human experience that your book forces you to think about is that Kathy doesn't say, well, he can't help himself. It's all predetermined. Kathy says, why aren't you listening to me? Don't you love me?

• 39:18Speaker 00

  Why are you not giving me your full attention? So Kathy, inside her skin, inside her shell of humanness, is going to make working assumptions about Keith's motivation, Keith's agency, and she's going to hold him accountable.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:40Speaker 00

  And really what your book, part, we'll turn to character in a minute, but what your book reminds us is that, you know, if Karen does that enough, Keith might become a better conversationalist. Or he might end up getting divorced because Karen is either frustrated, hurt, would think she could do better somewhere else, going to move away from the rock, like the bacterium.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:05Speaker 00

  And that, that's the way we live as human beings. Nobody lives, forget the philosophical questions of free will versus determinism. Nobody lives for a second. Well, they do occasionally because they want to excuse their behavior, but almost no one accepts in their own life the idea that they can't control themselves. After the fact, they might say that, but everyone holds as a model that we have choice, we have agency. We shame, as you point out, we shame people who who act badly in our in our view. We honor people who act well, which would make no sense in a deterministic universe. Are we

• 40:49Speaker 00

  just, does the illusion extend to keep going and going?

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does make no sense. And I think you're right to say that even the most ardent free will skeptic, the most avowed free will skeptic doesn't live like that, right? And the implication is not just about whether we make decisions and should be held accountable for them. It's about what it means to be a human being. Because if you think that actually you have no agency and autonomy at all, you're you're not a human being. You're not a person. I mean, the the definition of a person is someone who has enough autonomy to to to be afforded the dignity of being thought of with personhood, right? I mean, it just doesn't mean anything.

• 41:31Speaker 00

  At least after a certain age, at least after a certain age.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Absolutely. But it doesn't mean anything to be a self if you don't have some autonomous kind of control. But I want to, so you touched on a really important aspect here, which is the idea that Keith could learn or could be trained not to look at the football game during during a conversation or dinner with his with his wife, right? So that is the next sort of stage in the evolutionary process is once we go from unicellular organisms, where they have to figure out what's out in the world and what should I do about it? We get this transition in evolution to multicellular organisms, and then they had to reinvent this equipment for figuring what's out in the world and what should what should I do

• 42:14Speaker 01

  about it, and the ability to actually move around in the world. So they invented sensory organs, eyes and ears and whiskers and antennae and so on, and they invented muscles and limbs, and things for moving around, and they invented a control system. To to hook those things up to each other and to adjudicate over complex sets of possibilities. And that is, of course, the nervous system. And the amazing thing with the nervous system is, you know, evolutionarily, you can wire in some preconfigured control policies that are just good things to do, like, you know, an escape response of a startled rabbit or something like that. It's not thinking about anything. That's wired in by evolution. It doesn't require any learning. It's a reflex. Exactly, right? And we have our own reflexes as well that are just

• 43:00Speaker 01

  good things to do. But nervous systems are amazing because they can learn, right? So what that means is that it enables individual organisms over their lifetime to acquire new information. And most of the information that they're interested in is based on how things have turned out, right? They've been in a certain scenario. They've tried some action and it either turned out well or it didn't. And if it turned out well, then that's a piece of information that they can use. Actually, either way, it's a piece of information that they can use if they're faced with the same scenario again, or a similar scenario. And this is where we learn not just about, you know, the outcomes of actions,

• 43:44Speaker 01

  but we also learn about the nature of the world, the kinds of entities that are out in the world. We can categorize them as like living or nonliving, cats or dogs, human beings, males or females, things you can eat, things that might eat you, whatever it is, right? You you develop these categories where when you learn something, when you learn one thing about a member of a category, it doesn't just apply to that one thing. It applies to everything else, right? If you've ever been bitten by a dog, you can be shy of all dogs in in the future because you know they're the type of thing that can bite you. So we can build up this complex kind of model of the world that's populated with all of these kinds of entities, categorical relations between them,

• 44:29Speaker 01

  causal and sort of network of causal relations. And those causal relations particularly apply to what I can do in the world and what things in the world can do to me. And then that's the array of information over which we're.

• 44:46Speaker 01

  Operating when we're making a decision and we're trying to say, what's the best thing for me to do? And you're drawing on all that past experience. And you know, you mentioned habits, which habits get a bad rap because there's a sense in which having a habit is just reducing your freedom. And, you know, in one sense, that can be true. But in another sense, it's really good, right? So I've got lots of habits that I apply all the time, where a habit is basically just like, I know in a certain situation, this is a good thing to do. And I don't need to think about it actively now. I don't need to expend cognitive resources and precious time, because I've thought about this loads of times before. I

• 45:29Speaker 01

  know what's a good thing to do. That's just a super, super efficient way to manage your control system and make the most out of the learning from experience that you've had. And so when you're faced with a scenario in which, you know, that's very, very familiar, there may be a habitual response that you engage in. And then the question is, okay, for free will, what does that mean? How do you interpret that?

• 45:51Speaker 00

  So I want to go back one second, and I want to read what you say about habits, because it's, I think, so fascinating, eloquent as well. This idea that you get bit by a dog and your brain learns very quickly what a dog is that doesn't look anything like the dog that bit you. Different color, different species, doesn't matter. The brain is able to generalize. Of course, it makes mistakes, too. It's a bias. Bias is powerful. It helps you generalize. It also leads you astray, if I can use a bad, make a bad pun about

• 46:30Speaker 00

  dogs. You know, it reminds me, a student once said that my exam in economics was unfair because, quote, "Professor Roberts expected us to apply the material to things we'd never seen before." That was, yes, that was the goal. And that's called thinking. So if you know four times six is 24, and then I say, well, what's four times seven? You say, well, I don't know. You haven't taught me that. Well, then I didn't do a good job because I didn't teach you what multiplication really is. And the whole idea would be that I don't have to teach you every single case of math and multiplication. It's good to know them by heart, but obviously saves time, it's a habit.

• 47:09Speaker 00

  But the amazing thing is that you're referring to is the ability to learn and to carry knowledge forward and generalize is unique to human beings, more or less. There's some, obviously, animals that can do versions of it. But I want to read your quote about habits because it has the thing at the end that's really quite spectacular. Quote, "We tend to think of habits as bad things, but really they are tremendously useful shortcuts that enable animals, including us, to navigate familiar settings and scenarios in adaptive ways with a minimum of cognitive effort and time expended on deliberation. We've done all the hard work of thinking about this already, so why do it again? Our brains know how things are going to turn out, broadly speaking,

• 47:51Speaker 00

  if we behave in tried and true ways in most of our everyday contexts." Okay, that's the first part of the quote, but here's the punchline, which I think is just spectacular. You're right, people are sometimes asked, if you could go back in time and give your younger self some advice, what would it be? In reality, what happens is precisely the opposite. Our past selves are giving advice to our present self all the time to ensure it has the best possible future, end of quote. Expand on that.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, well, thank you for reading that out. Because I think that for me was a sort of a, when I kind of got that concept, I felt like it was going to be useful because that's basically what learning is, right? We have learned from the past and it extends into the future. But you know, the other thing that this encapsulates is, again, a kind of a deeper metaphysical question of what it means to be a self. And for, you know, in a physics kind of a frame of mind, or even a neuroscience frame of mind, the self is just the physical organization of the thing right now at this moment in time. And to me, that's just physical stuff. That's not the self. The self is the continuity of that pattern through time.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  And for us to be a self means not just maintaining this pattern of physical processes, it means maintaining our psychological selves, our biographical information.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  All of the knowledge that we've learned, all of the habits that we've picked up, plus all of the projects that we've committed to that extend into the future, right? I mean, right now, I'm committed to all kinds of of things that I'm doing over time that will continue to inform my behavior, even though the choice I made to do them might have happened a long time ago. You know, if somebody chooses to go to college, then they've made a choice that informs, but also constrains what they're going to do over every day for the next four years or whatever it is. So the necessary thing is to think of the self as having this extension through time. And actually, it's got temporal parts, right? So we like to think of ourselves as having spatial parts.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  Of course, we do, we've got hands and legs and arms and heads and whatever. But we've also got temporal parts, right? And so right now, I'm a part of myself. And that self extends through time and includes my past and future selves. So, sorry, that got a little, that got a little philosophical.

• 50:26Speaker 00

  No, it's really important. It's really important because it gets at what I love about your, one of your critiques of the free will concept is that it helps to frame it as as constraints. So when I make, you know, here's a, you know, the famous example is Ulysses, Odysseus binds himself to the mast. Because he doesn't want to be seduced by the song of the sirens in in the Odyssey. And so is he constrained? Is he constrained if he chose to be constrained? You know, how do you start to think about that? And that's, your point is that that's not constrained. That's a constraint that was chosen.

• 51:10Speaker 00

  So it's not a constraint the way the determinists might think about it. And you point out, and this is where I think this is really beautiful. It's a philosophical observation, but it's quite spectacular.

• 51:24Speaker 00

  If I was unconstrained, so I'm not at the whim of my past, I'm not at the whim of my DNA and the way it was encoded, I'm not at the whim of where I was raised by my parents. I'm free, I've got free choice, that's free will. And you say, and your point is, I'll let you elaborate on, but the way I understood it was, your point is that that's not even a meaningful statement. I mean, how could that possibly be? It's a, that's a, it's not a person if you have no, no history, no, no biology. So of course we're constrained. The question is, can we choose in, within those constraints to do things?

• 52:09Speaker 01

  Exactly, that's exactly right. And I think they, you know, the reason I set that up that way is that because some people argue for this absolutist version of free will, where they say, if you're subject to any constraint whatsoever, when you're making a decision, then you're not free and you don't have free will. It's like an all or nothing kind of scenario. And what I wanted to say was, well, think about the scenario you're proposing here, where I can act for no constraint, like, which means for no reason, with no history, I'm not allowed to have any memory of anything, I'm not allowed to have learned anything, because any of those things is a constraint on my behavior. Um, yeah, it just becomes a meaningless thing, where actually what happens in that scenario is the self evaporates, there's nothing left, there's just a random behavior generator.

• 52:54Speaker 01

  So it was a way to say that that objection, by setting up free will in that way, it just becomes an absurd kind of thing. It's not, it's not what we're talking about.

• 53:05Speaker 00

  It's a straw man.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. And much more realistic is to say, well, yes, I am constrained, I'm constrained to act like a human being by millions of years of evolution, and I'm constrained to act like me by all of my past. And me acting like me is just what it means to be me, there isn't anything else. Uh, in fact, when people really act out of character... It's often a sign of mental illness, right? I mean, we take that as a pathology. When people start acting in ways that are not their normal personality or against their own interests or, you know, in ways that are sort of unusual given their biographical history and their psychology. So that just is what it means to be you. And then the question is, okay, within that, within that set of constraints,

• 53:52Speaker 01

  is it so much constrained that at any moment you actually have no choice, right? You're in so much control of yourself that you've ended up with no choice. And that's sort of where Robert Sapolsky ends up. It's a sort of ironic point that is like, we're so controlled by our psychology that it leaves us with no choice. And there's just actually no evidence for that. And in fact, when we're making decisions under conflict, I mean, it's like, there's lots of habitual things that we do where we pre-decided, that's fine. There's some scenarios you can imagine where you don't care what the outcome is. You know, if I say, do you want Coke or Pepsi? You may not have a preference.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  And so, but, you know, if I'm your waiter and you're there at a restaurant and other people are waiting for you to make your decision, there's a time constraint. What's important is that you decide one or the other, right? And actually, there's very good evidence that we can use kind of some of the noisiness of our mental neural processes as a resource to break a tie there, for example. So when you don't know. So you can have a habitual response. You can have a kind of an arbitrary response. Or you can have a response where you do care, where it's a conflicted scenario. You really care, but you're not sure, right? You've got good reasons to do both A and B. You can make separate arguments to yourself. You can deliberate over those. And then, at the end of that process,

• 55:20Speaker 01

  you know, at the beginning of that process, it's not determined. It's really open what you're gonna do. And by the end of it, you will have decided by weighing up these different reasons and against each other. And it's just not the case that you're kind of running through, you're running the parameters of a scenario through a preset algorithm where the weights of these different factors are already set. What you're doing in deciding is figuring out what those weights should be. Because it's not just one thing at a time, it's lots of them, right? So that's a process that, you know, on the psychological level, that feels like what deliberation is doing. On the neural level, that looks like what deliberation is. And on a philosophical

• 56:03Speaker 01

  level, you can just say, well, that's just what deciding, that's the agent deciding, like, what more do you want? That's what's happening.

• 56:11Speaker 00

  Let me give you a harder case. And I, you know, I'm trying to resist being a cheerleader, because I do like what you're saying. But let me try to give you a more challenging case. You gave the example of Coke and Pepsi. Do you drink either of those?

• 56:29Speaker 01

  Rarely. And when I do, I prefer Coke.

• 56:32Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  As it happens.

• 56:34Speaker 00

  But in my case, I literally don't like Pepsi. And the reason, I used to drink Tab, which is a drink that some of our older listeners may remember. And when Diet Coke came along, I thought, this is awful. I can't stand this. But I got used to it. And it became my drink of choice for a long time. So let's take a, so that's a simple example. But let me take a slight variation on that. So my wife and I have coffee every morning, almost every morning. And I like my coffee with a lot of cream or milk and a lot of sweetener. Some people would say, I actually like drinking milk, sweet milk with a little

• 57:15Speaker 00

  bit of coffee flavor. And I don't think it's so good for me to drink that milk and the and the sweetener. It's really chemicals and or if it was sugar, it's not good for me either. So every once in a while, I say, well, I'm gonna drink it without those things. I'm just gonna drink my coffee black. And I hate it. Right? But I'm also aware in the back of my mind that if I did it for a month, Or two, it would become what I'm used to and the coffee I drink now would become cloying and disgusting. It's so sweet, which is what my wife says about many of the drinks

• 57:56Speaker 00

  I love. She just can't drink them and they're my favorites, like Diet Coke say. So, let's talk about that process. I have a choice tomorrow morning. I could have my coffee black or without those things. And I convince myself that, you know, I like it with the sugar and the cream. There is a chance, I think I have agency. I think I can give those up. And I could fool myself into saying I choose not to. But you as the outsider might say, you know, his self-control is a mixed bag. I think he's just fooling himself. He's had it with the milk and the sugar or the sweetener so many times, can't choose anymore.

• 58:40Speaker 00

  He's stuck. That habit has burned into the, this is a variation on what I ask or observe about. I just, I've lost my autonomy there. How do you think about, how do you think about that, that kind of situation?

• 58:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. So first of all, I think there's a whole kind of suite of things happening there, right? It's a whole set of conflicting, yeah, sorry, conflicting motivations that you're trying to, to navigate through, right? And operate over. And so, you know, what's, what's interesting is that as a human being, you have some awareness of those things, some meta-awareness of those things, right? So, any, any animal can do things for reasons. You know, many animals can learn things about the world. They can, they can think about what they should do. They make decisions and so on. But they don't necessarily have this extra level, this meta-cognitive level where they're aware of those kinds of things

• 59:36Speaker 01

  and they have an ability to plan further into the future, which is really the Humans cognitive superpower is that the future for us is open ended, right? It's not just an hour from now, it's not just a minute from now or a day from now. It's uh, we can think millennia in the future if we want to, even after our own lifetimes. So that ability means that what now far future goals become part of the calculus of our decision making, right? So you might say, I mean, in the, in the example you gave with, with artificial sweeteners is probably not going to have um, health effects, but say you were a sugar addict there, right? And, and you were, uh, you know, you had, your doctor said, well, you have incipient diabetes. You really need to cut out this sugar.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  Well, now you'd have two conflicting goals, right? You have a short-term hedonic drive in the sense that you like the taste of sugar and you're used to it and your brain is kind of expecting it. And then you have this longer-term conflicting goal, which is you, you don't want to uh, become unhealthy and so you're trying to weigh these things up against each other, right? So this is where um, we get this, this question of metavolition. Can we control our own desires? And this is something that-

• 1:00:53Speaker 00

  As Harry Frankfurt said, we're the only animal, the philosopher said, we're the only animal that has desires about our desires. And I guess what I'm asking is, can I control that desire about my desires? I like the idea of it. I have a feeling about it, but can I do anything about it?

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  So I think what's interesting, you can, you can phrase that question in two ways. You can say, is that something humans can do as a species? Is that an ability that humans have generally speaking? And then you can ask, maybe it's also true that some humans have it more than others, right? I mean, it's perfectly possible that what we call free will in humans uh, on the philosophical front is basically equivalent to what psychologists call executive function, which is the ability to control impulses, to uh, operate with multiple things in your mind at the same time, to keep something in working memory, to switch between tasks if conditions change

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  or payoffs change, um, and to uh, you know, resolve conflicting goals over multiple time scales. And some people are better at those things than others. Some people are more impulsive than others. And so- And I think that's true for multiple reasons. It's probably true in terms of just some innate traits that people have of being more impulsive or not, but it's also that these are learned skills, right? Executive function is not just a bunch of faculties that emerge from nowhere. They're skills that we learn. And those, I mean, you know, anyone who's raising kids knows that we go to quite some effort to tell them, uh, no, you can't have everything you want the second that you want

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  it, or you have to put your own needs behind someone else's. You have to share your sweets. You have to, you know, act in a pro-social way, right? All of those elements are inculcating skills of self-control and rational and also especially pro-social behavior on which our culture and civilization depends. So all of those elements, um, they require this meta-capacity for metavolition, and that's effortful. And over a lifetime, um, that, you know, it begins with a kind of a teaching or indoctrination, but eventually those ideas, or it's good to share things, it's good to not be selfish,

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  it's good to plan and not be, you know, have immediate gratification all the time, they become, um, you know, internalized and they become part of our cognitive machinery, basically, that informs what we're doing, not just, you know, what do I want to do now, but what should I want to do now? What should my desires be here? It's a kind of a conscience, right? An internal check that eventually, you know, ultimately manifests in what we call morality as an emergent, um, not just as an emergent system in a society, but as an emergent suite of psychological faculties that we each employ unless we're psychopaths in our daily, in

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  our daily lives.

• 1:03:59Speaker 00

  So I want to talk about that for a minute, maybe more than a minute. It's such an interesting question. One of the most powerful parts of that William James essay I mentioned, the dilemma of determinism is, he points out that if you think everything's predetermined, he gives an example of a brutal, sadistic murder of a man who kills his wife and despite her pleas for mercy, kills her in a very horrible way, most of us would believe that he could have done otherwise. He was not an automaton. He was not programmed in any way to do that. Most of us would believe that it is possible that after he did it,

• 1:04:44Speaker 00

  he would have regret. It is also true that many of us would judge him. And James's point is that all those emotions, judgment, regret, the decision to go through with this in a rage, or in calm, he was calm, to make it a better story. Those are, in a deterministic world, those are just meaningless. There's nothing, you can't judge him. It was predetermined from the Big Bang onward. Shame, one's own shame is meaningless. You should not be, in the deterministic world, you should never be ashamed of something

• 1:05:25Speaker 00

  you did because you had no choice. And we all rebel against this in all kinds of ways. And in determinism, you bear no guilt for your actions and you earn no praise. So this idea that character is something you build, or that you would culcate in your children, again, is just a pitiful human error.

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just a conceit or an illusion.

• 1:05:57Speaker 00

  And James has a fascinating set of observations about this, but again, I don't want to go down that road. But here's my question. I think we both agree that that's, it's not a world I want to live in, and I don't think it's the world I actually live in. So let's say, through a set of...

• 1:06:22Speaker 00

  Well, I'm not going to say how it happens, but I become a better person. My character improves. I don't look away for my wife at the football game. I give up the sugar in the coffee. I help more old people across the street carrying their groceries for them. I give up my seat on the bus for someone even older than I am. And people give up their seat all the time for me, which is fascinating. Here in Jerusalem at least. So I become a better person. I visit more people in the hospital, et cetera, et cetera. And I feel good about myself. Because I used to be a really not so nice. But should I? Should I feel better? Good about myself?

• 1:07:05Speaker 00

  I mean, isn't that just another example of how I was raised? I may have rebelled against it or, you know, younger. Just another example, the suite of neurons and other things I have in this in this skull of mine. Should I feel proud of myself? Quietly, of course, quietly.

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  Right, right. Yeah, no, I mean, all of these things are super interesting. And I guess there's multiple levels to these these processes. So the first thing, thinking about these emotions. We have these social emotions, right? So shame and guilt and praise and, you know, admiration and so on. These are, these are social emotions that are that they arise in response to people's actions, judged through the lens of whether they're pro-social or not. And I think, you know, evolutionarily speaking, you could see why a species that relies on pro-sociality would have these emotions. They have a functional role to play

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  in making sure that we keep each other acting in the way that's most beneficial for everybody, right? And that's why we have been able to survive in communities. So there's a sort of a naturalistic way to think about morality as just a system that helps reinforce pro-social communal behavior.

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  That then gets internalized into our psychology. Now, the other one that you mentioned there was regret. And this, this becomes amazing because regret is actually guiding our actions all the time, but in an anticipatory way, right? So a lot of the time, what we're thinking is, okay, I've done something bad, something in the past, it didn't turn out well. Somebody, you know, it was greeted with a social opprobrium and shame because it was seen as antisocial. And I've, you know, I didn't enjoy that experience and so I regretted having done that. Now, all of us have had occasions like that where we've regretted doing things, right? And we learn, you know, not to do that particular thing again.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  But we also can, can generalize beyond specific cases to say, if I did X right now, these would be the consequences. And some of them I might like, but some of them I would regret because other people would judge me in this way, or I might even judge myself, right? I might disappoint myself in that, in that situation. And then the anticipatory regret is part of the system of decision making, right? That's one of the parameters that is weighed when you're, when you're judging different kinds of scenarios. So this forward looking aspect of our decision, decision making informed by our past, through

• 1:09:53Speaker 01

  the lens of, of other people's judgments that might, that might occur if we did A, B, or C, that, all of that is crucial to the way that we guide our own behavior and the way that we build our own character. And I think, you know, the distinction between character and personality is really interesting. You can think of, you know, with infants, infants, say, we talk about things like temperament, where, you know, some animals are, some animals, some infants are just more active, say they're higher surgency, they call it, than others, right? But you can't tell if they're extroverted or not because it just doesn't make any sense for a baby, right? But later on, they will have these personality traits, how conscientious they are, how neurotic.

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  And we talked about how impulsive people are and things like that, that are, you know, they're really sort of not things that we choose. They're underlying predispositions. And I have a, a previous book we called innate, which is all about how those things come about. But the idea that our behavior then is just determined by those things in a way that sort of doesn't involve us is just a naive misconception, right? There are predispositions, but they're just a baseline. They're just a kind of tuning of some internal parameters that inform how we meet the world and how we engage with it. But over time, what we're actually doing is building up these characteristic adaptations

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  to our experiences, given the way that we've, you know, felt them and experienced them, which is partly due to our innate psychology and so on. So you get this sort of emergent kind of entrenchment of what becomes character through our experiences, but not in a way that those experiences are just things that happen to us, where we're passive in this process. If we're actively making choices, then the way our character emerges is as a result of the accumulation of all those choices that we have made, some of which are choices about the basis on which we've made those choices, right?

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  So, yeah, it is, I hope, a more nuanced kind of view of character as this thing that emerges through a trajectory of a lifetime, that we are involved in that. You know, it's not just things that happen to us, it's our active choices. And again, you know, some people are more actively aware of, more mindful of those things than others. We can be more mindful of them on some occasions than on others. I think if we're, you know, if we're harried, if we're stressed, if we're tired, we're probably acting in different ways than, and ways that might, you know, that we might say, "I regret doing that. I shouldn't have done that. I shouldn't have said that. I shouldn't have snapped at this person.

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  I was tired, I was irritated," and so on. And, you know, we make, we understand that. I think when we're... Interacting with other people, we realize that not everyone is fully in control of everything that they're doing at every moment. And in fact, we recognize in, you know, in extreme cases in the law, for example, that some people have diminished responsibility, people with mental illness or some kind of impairment, I mean psychosis, with drug addiction or some kind of compulsion, we recognize that they have less of that kind of control over their own actions. Or if they're, you know, inebriated, or even if they're a child versus an adult, you know, we recognize that those are skills that emerge through time and they require maturation and experience.

• 1:13:27Speaker 01

  So, you know, rather than having this sort of thing where it's either 100% free will, totally unconstrained, this magic metaphysical sort of nonsense notion, or it's like the choices are either that, or you're just robots carrying out your programming at every moment. There's no reason to accept either of those extremes. We can have a position in the middle where we say free will is what is the term that we use for an evolved suite of biological capacities that people may have to varying extents, that they exercise to varying extents, that may be constrained to varying extents in different circumstances and conditions. And all of that is, is a way of

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  recognizing, I think, our core humanity as being autonomous agents. But also, you know, recognizing the limitations on it and the ways that it can be infringed in, in many, many different kinds of ways.

• 1:14:28Speaker 00

  Well, the thing I like in my individual interactions with other people, or at least the way I like to think of myself trying to be. And, and you're, the way you talk about it, I think is very powerful and the way you write about it. Behavior is multifaceted. It's not caused by this lockstep reaction to all these different factors. All these different factors are going on. And yes, we deceive ourselves, which we haven't talked about. We often will say, oh, I did that because, when in fact it was 12 things. Or that person did that because, and it was, it was 12 things. But we, one thing is, we like one thing. So, you know.

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:09Speaker 00

  But, you know, when I'm Looking at you and you do something that I think is cruel or selfish. I like to think that that's not all you are. I'm not going to pick the one thing. I'm going to say, well, maybe he was just really tired and maybe he had a fight with a friend the night before, or maybe he got a bad visit to the doctor. And I really love not judging you when you fail. And I actually really like praising you when you succeed. So if you visit the person in the hospital, I'm going to presume you have a good heart

• 1:15:50Speaker 00

  and not because you want to impress, say, your colleagues. So that's the way I want to behave as an individual in the world, looking at others.

• 1:16:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:00Speaker 00

  Looking at myself is different. Looking at myself, I want to be a little tougher on myself. I also want to forgive myself, but that's a different, that's a whole other conversation. But what I want to add is that the state, the state cannot act the way I act. In other words, if the state says, oh, I was a criminal, a murderer, he probably had a bad childhood. And similarly, this person created something fantastic, but he doesn't deserve earning a lot of money from it because it just means he had good parents and he had an innate,

• 1:16:40Speaker 00

  he got, he was on the far right-hand side of the tail of, right-hand tail of the focus, concentration, obsessive work, et cetera.

• 1:16:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:51Speaker 00

  I don't want to live in that world where the government acts that way. And the reason is, is because, and I think, you know, I talked about this supposed, I don't know what, remember what he said. I also talked a little bit about with Sam Harris when we, a little bit of our morality conversation, we talked a little bit about morality. Deep down, it does make a difference.

• 1:17:13Speaker 00

  Right, we don't believe that it doesn't matter whether you punish criminals or not. We don't, most of us, we don't believe it. Oh, there's no reward, they don't need reward. Incentives aren't important, financial incentives, to get people to do the right thing because it's all baked in. We don't feel that way. And we don't actually think, oh, I can't help myself by putting this penalty on. I just must have been preordained. We act as if we have agency and I think that we're rewarded with knowledge and information that confirms it, that we're right.

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I mean, I agree. And I take a very kind of, I guess, a pragmatist's view. I mean, you talked about William James and that pragmatist tradition of thinking about, you know, systems like morality and our social conventions that have built up around them, where, you know, it's very hard to do some philosophical exercise or thinking about free will in this absolutist sense and then say what the implications should be for something as complicated as our legal system, or even just something as complicated as the normal kinds of modes of interaction that we have with each other, where holding each other

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  accountable for things and holding ourselves accountable for things is just a normal part of that process, right? I mean, we think about, you know, moral responsibility as this sort of burden, but, you know, your responsibility is my rights. And those are two sides of the same coin, and that's just how society works. So I think for me, the important thing is to say, look, you can't really draw sweeping kinds of conclusions about the way society should be structured or a particular system should be structured based on these metaphysical claims or arguments or conclusions. They can inform them, right? But they can inform them, they can be taken in multiple different ways because there's

• 1:19:14Speaker 01

  just layers and layers. And there's always a counter argument. You say, I shouldn't blame this person for committing this terrible crime, but on the other hand, I should protect other people in society from them, and I also should not lock them away forever, and I should give them a chance to be rehabilitated. And, you know, so all of these things, factors are there. And I guess, you know, the one thing I would say is that... There's a history of many smarter people than me thinking about these things in terms of sociology and jurisprudence and the legal systems that we have and moral philosophy and all these sorts of other aspects. It's not like, you know, it's not like the lawyers

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  and the sociologists have been waiting for the neuroscientists to show up and say, how should we think about these complex things, right? It's just, it's a sort of, yeah, it's a slightly arrogant idea that we could have the answer to these, to these complex questions. I think there's information that we can offer that's important to take into account so that we're not, you know, deceiving ourselves. But there's so many layers of complexity, you know, beyond, beyond what I've talked about in those other realms that it's, yeah, I don't feel confident extrapolating and I wouldn't, I wouldn't argue that anyone else should either.

• 1:20:37Speaker 00

  You know, I think the fascinating about this is you, as you point out in the book, we alluded to it briefly. These arguments are not just from the 20th century. William James wrote the 18, I think is the essay we're talking about. I think he gave it as a talk, I think Harvard Divinity School in 1884 or so, 1888.

• 1:20:56Speaker 01

  Eighty-eight, I think, yeah.

• 1:20:58Speaker 00

  And my, my colleague here, who I mentioned earlier, he said, it hasn't, we haven't really made any progress since then. That's as good an answer as you could find. It's, you know, he might like your book as a more thorough answer, but he thinks James had it right and it hasn't, it hasn't changed much.

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, to be honest, I think Epicurus had it right. And that was, that was 2,500 years ago.

• 1:21:21Speaker 00

  That's what I was gonna say. The amazing thing is that before we had any great scientific knowledge, there are people on both sides of this, but, but the determinists were arguing for determinism long before modern science. It's just fantastically amazing. I want to...

• 1:21:40Speaker 00

  I want to read a passage that is about the dynamism of the self that you talked about earlier, and I'm going to ask you a hard question.

• 1:21:47Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:21:48Speaker 00

  I think it's well, I think it's a legitimate question, but we'll see. Here's the quote. "That lets us recognize something vitally important. Life is not a state, it is a process. You are not just alive, you are living. That is an activity you're doing, each of your cells is doing. You are more than the pattern of physical matter that makes up your body right now. You are that pattern persisting through time. The individual atoms and molecules in cells that make up the pattern are being turned over and exchanged with the outside world all the time, but the pattern remains. Life is thus, like a storm, or tornado, or flame.

• 1:22:33Speaker 00

  None of these things is made of the physical atoms or molecules contained in it at any moment. Those elements will be replaced in the next moment. The storm is the ongoing process that is organizing or constraining all those molecules into a higher-order pattern. It's the physical relations between all the elements that is maintained. The difference is that storms or flames fairly quickly blow or burn themselves out, but life does not. Life goes on." It's a really, end of quote. It's a beautiful statement of what you were talking about earlier. But here's what's funny about it, if, I don't know, again, if I'm being fair or not, but

• 1:23:16Speaker 00

  it's a very Buddhist conceptional life, the dynamism, and yet, your conception of the self would, I think, be rejected by the Buddhists.

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:27Speaker 00

  Because they believe the self is an illusion.

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:23:30Speaker 00

  So, I don't know, have you thought about that at all?

• 1:23:32Speaker 01

  I have.

• 1:23:33Speaker 00

  And do you want to comment on that? Please do.

• 1:23:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's a great, it's a great observation. Thanks for the question. I've had some discussions with Buddhist practitioners and philosophers about this idea. So, the notion that, in Buddhism, is that, you know, if you look inside yourself... You know, to try and find where this self is, you won't find anything. And you know, this, this is an old idea. And David Hume also talked about this. You know, Sam Harris talks about this a lot, where the idea is like, there isn't a part of the brain. You can't find inside your brain where the self is.

• 1:24:09Speaker 00

  The manager. Where's the person in charge? I want to talk to that person.

• 1:24:14Speaker 01

  Right, I want to talk to the manager, right? You won't find them in there, okay? And I think that that's absolutely true, but it also doesn't mean that the self doesn't exist. And so there's a, there's a kind of a slight of raising here that happens when people say the self is an illusion. Because illusion can be taken in two different ways. And what they mean is usually it's not what we think it is. That's fine. Lots of things are not what we think they are. Gravity is not what we think it is, but I'm not going to jump out the window, right? You know, so things can be not what they think they are and still have an existence. But usually, so they often will justify the claim on the basis, it's not what we think they are.

• 1:24:56Speaker 01

  But then, in some cases, they'll, they'll make hay by smuggling in the other meaning of illusion, which is it's not a thing at all. It's not real, right? So I'm happily, I'm happy to say the self is not what we think it is, in a naive folk psychology kind of a way. But that doesn't mean it's not a thing and not real. And I think, I mean, you can draw an analogy. Basically, what I would say is that the self is this bundle of, of ongoing interests and all our memories and everything else about us, this pattern that persists through time, which in human beings includes all of the psychological aspects that are, that are instantiated in that pattern.

• 1:25:37Speaker 01

  And that's fine, like if someone wants to say to me, you're nothing but a bundle of Kevin interests and Kevin memories and Kevin goals and desires and ongoing projects and commitments and so on. I'm like, okay, that's fine. I don't mind that. I still, as a self... Have some causal power because those things give me reasons, right? Now I've got Kevin reasons and I've got Kevin control over things that that happen. So, you know, you can say, just in neurosciencey kind of terms, that the self is is present in the in the way that there's a sort of a centralized locus of control,

• 1:26:18Speaker 01

  right? And it has to be centralized because we can only do one thing productively at a time. And so we need a system that actually can make an all things considered judgment about the state of the world and all our goals and so on, and then execute in a competitive fashion, one option over another. That's just the way the control system is designed. And I think, I mean, the other aspect, you can think, well, we were talking about Coke and Pepsi earlier. You know, if you go to the Coca-Cola building and you go into Coca-Cola and say, where's Coca-Cola? Where is this Coca-Cola that thing, right? There is no, you won't find it in there. You will find managers and so on, but they're not Coca-Cola, right? The CEO is not Coca-Cola.

• 1:27:00Speaker 01

  There's a corporation that exists as a whole abstract entity that that's ongoing. There's turnover of people within it. It exerts control as an entity in the marketplace and so on. And that's fine. I think that's right to think of a corporation as a holistic entity in that way, where you can't reductively identify some bit within it that is the essence of the entity, right? And I would think the same thing for us.

• 1:27:29Speaker 00

  So let's close with a,

• 1:27:34Speaker 00

  I'm gonna make a confession and I'm curious for your thoughts.

• 1:27:40Speaker 00

  I suspect, I don't know how many people are still listening to this conversation.

• 1:27:45Speaker 01

  Everyone.

• 1:27:45Speaker 00

  If you are.

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  Everyone's still listening.

• 1:27:47Speaker 00

  I'm sure they're all been fascinated, but some of them may have fallen by the wayside. And I mentioned that because I find this, I think, much more fascinating than the average person. I suspect you do too. And and one of the reasons I find it fascinating is that it deeply enhances my sense of of being a person.

• 1:28:11Speaker 00

  Sometimes I'll find myself in a social situation. I'm at a sporting event or I'm getting on the bus and I look around and hear all these people. I know something about them, I'm pretty sure. They all have brains. There's something like mine. They're on their phone, they're talking to their friend, they're reading a book, whatever it is, they're gazing off into the distance. And this is not a, an erotic comment. I imagine, I think about how strange it is that they're wearing clothes. Because we're all just a bunch of animals. And we have these weird civilizational pretensions of clothing and manners, and we're

• 1:28:54Speaker 00

  on a bus that humans created. And every once in a while, I think, you know, it's really kind of an extraordinary thing, that we're something more than just biological creatures. And more than that, we're biological creatures that think a lot about what it's like to be a biological creature with a brain. And I think we're the only biological creatures that do that, who wonder why we're here and make up or receive information about that question and think about it. And, and the reason I like your book, is that it reminds me about that, and it forces me to think about it. And when I go home to dinner tonight with my wife, and I give her

• 1:29:37Speaker 00

  my undivided attention, and I don't check my email or a sporting event, I feel good about myself. And I remember that that's not easy, and I'm gonna work at it. And I'm curious, you spent a lot more time than I did with your book, writing it. Did it force you to change the way you go through the world in any way like that? I mean, so hats up, my hats off to you. It affects me. How about you?

• 1:30:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's funny, it was such a process for a long period of time, that I imagine that it has changed me, but in such gradual ways that I might not have noticed.

• 1:30:16Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:30:17Speaker 01

  But yeah, there are occasions where absolutely I'll try to take a kind of a step back from the immediacy of, say, the emotionality of a situation, and, and recognize, you know, what's going on, sort of internally, and say, okay, you know, I'm not forced to, to think like this. I can have a broader sort of appreciation of what's, of what's going on.

• 1:30:44Speaker 01

  You know, I think there's whole sorts of areas of psychotherapy, actually, that are really aimed at this kind of thing, where, you know, one of the elements of psychotherapy can be becoming aware that you are reacting to things instead of responding to them. So if you're very reactive, you can learn that, right? And you can learn sort of certain ways to not be like that. And for some people, that, you know, it impairs their living and it becomes a kind of a pathology and they, you know, seek help for it and so on. So those are ways in which that sort of meta-awareness of the way that your mind is configured is valuable.

• 1:31:27Speaker 01

  And, you know, that the admonition to know thyself, I think, is a kind of a power, right? You know, it does give an extra power. And of course, it's not easy to wield that at every moment, but I think it's worthwhile trying.

• 1:31:45Speaker 00

  My guest today has been Kevin Mitchell. His book is Free Agents. Kevin, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:31:51Speaker 01

  Thanks very much, Russ. It's been a pleasure.

• 1:31:59Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.