Free Will: Does It Exist?

Will you hit play on this episode?? It feels like that decision is totally within your control — but what if it’s not? What if free will is just an illusion? Lots of people are using science to say that free will is a trick of the mind, that whether or not you listen to this episode, or eat a taco, or do a silly dance right now — it’s all predestined. But do we really have science receipts for that? We find out by talking to neuroscientist Prof. John-Dylan Haynes and theoretical physicist Prof. Sean Carroll. Find our transcript here: https://tinyurl.com/ScienceVsFreeWill Check out Sean Carroll’s podcast, Mindscape, here: https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/ In this episode, we cover: (00:00) When you remember you have free will (02:21) What is free will? (04:26) The argument against free will(18:07) The argument for free will This episode was produced by Meryl Horn with help from Rose Rimler, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, Michelle Dang and Wendy Zukerman. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Wendy Zukerman is the executive producer. Fact checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and video editing by Bobby Lord. Music written by Bobby Lord, Bumi Hidaka, So Wylie, Emma Munger and Peter Leonard. Thanks to the researchers we spoke to for this episode, including Dr. Nicolas Rouleau and Dr. Andrea Lavazza. And special thanks to Chris Suter and Humdinger Studios. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. You can join us for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hi, I'm Wendy Zukerman and this is Science Versus, the show that pits facts against free will.

• 0:11Speaker 00

  Today on the show, does free will exist or is it just an illusion? It's a debate that scientists and philosophers have been having for a very long time. But now the internet has entered the ring. There's a meme that's been going around social media. And in these videos, you'll see people saying, I just remembered I have free will. And then they do whatever the hell they want. In one, there's a guy who dumps all his silverware out into a drawer and mixes it up. He doesn't even sort the spoons from the forks. In another video, you'll see a man eating potato chips and then climbing a ladder to his attic, where he sits on a stool and continues eating potato chips. But then he'll bleep like a goat.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  So on the one hand, you have this celebration of our freedom, our free will, our ability to control our destinies and eat potato chips and bleep like whoever we want. But what if that freedom isn't real? There are pockets of the internet telling us that basically everything has been destined before you even think of picking up a fork.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  I think free will is is an incoherent idea. We know that it doesn't exist and we know that what people think they have is an illusion. I don't think we have a shred of free will.

• 1:32Speaker 00

  If this sounds mad, it's not. Going back decades, scientists have been publishing papers showing that free will might not exist. So are we kidding ourselves if we think we're freely making decisions? That I'm the one deciding to tell you the science instead of going, macaw or bleep? Anyway, I did that. I made the choice to do two animal sounds, or did I? Today we find out. Because when it comes to free will, you may think you have the power to decide to...

• 2:04Speaker 00

  But then there's science.

• 2:09Speaker 00

  Science versus free will is coming up just after the break.

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• 4:24Speaker 00

  Welcome back. Today on the show, free will, does it exist? Merrill Horn, PhD, is going to tell us all about it.

• 4:32Speaker 04

  Hi, Wendy.

• 4:33Speaker 00

  Hey, Merrill.

• 4:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, we're going to crack this whole free will thing.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  That's great.

• 4:37Speaker 04

  Well, do you do you think we have free will, Wendy?

• 4:39Speaker 00

  From what I know, I think it probably is an illusion, but it's such a good illusion that I don't know how we move on from that. Obviously, I think I have free will. I think I make choices. So how do you get behind that mirror?

• 5:00Speaker 04

  I mean, that's what the science is helpful for, right? You don't have to just listen to us philosophize about, do we, do we? Like, let's look at the science.

• 5:09Speaker 00

  Exactly. So where do we begin? How do we, can we get, can we get behind the mirror? Or is it just philosophizing?

• 5:18Speaker 04

  I think we can. I think the science will actually help us see, like, yeah, what's going on kind of behind the scenes.

• 5:24Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 5:25Speaker 04

  But first, to just kind of set the stakes. You know, this might all feel like some silly little thought experiments, but the answer here does actually seem to matter.

• 5:35Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:36Speaker 04

  So like, there have been some psychology experiments that get people to read something crapping on free will, like something that says, quote, "Science has demonstrated that free will is an illusion," unquote.

• 5:49Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 5:50Speaker 04

  And then the scientists see if reading that thing changes people's behavior. And these studies find that people will act worse. They're more likely to cheat, less likely to help other people, and more likely to be aggressive after reading stuff like this.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  Wow, which makes absolute sense. If you tell me by the end of this episode, I don't have free will, I mean...

• 6:13Speaker 04

  You're just going to be an ass.

• 6:16Speaker 00

  I don't have a choice. Is that the idea? Is that the idea? What is, what is free will? I guess that is that it? That I just do not have a choice? Everything is predestined?

• 6:27Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, let's take a step back maybe and like, get some terms straight. I don't think it means you will be an ass.

• 6:34Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 6:34Speaker 04

  But we could, like, let's look at one.

• 6:36Speaker 00

  Any more than you already are.

• 6:40Speaker 04

  So yeah, here's one handy definition that's used by some scientists.

• 6:45Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 6:45Speaker 04

  So, okay, first, there needs to be a choice involved. So you're at the ice cream shop trying to decide between the chocolate and the caramel.

• 6:54Speaker 00

  Right.

• 6:55Speaker 04

  Which for me is a tough one.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  Chocolate, obviously.

• 6:58Speaker 04

  What? Caramel's pretty good. But if I have free will, it means that I am the one deciding. Like, it's not a random choice either. The idea is that I have the freedom to really pick between these two different flavors.

• 7:12Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 7:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it sounds, sound good?

• 7:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 7:15Speaker 04

  That's basically our definition.

• 7:16Speaker 00

  Oh, okay, yeah. But there is a world where you're not actually making that choice.

• 7:20Speaker 04

  Yes, so that's, that's the big question. Like, is that feeling of having a choice real or not? Because for long, for centuries, there have been challenges to this idea. So basically, as soon as we started discovering the laws of physics, you know, the fact that we have gravity and all these forces that can explain why things do what they do, we've gotten this picture of the world that's like a clockwork. You know, the reason something happens is because something right beforehand made that happen. And you could also kind of predict what's going to happen next by looking at these forces. And you can explain like, why things do what they do.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  Right, if you put a ball down a hill, thanks to gravity, you know it's going to roll down. That's a long bow from, I don't pick my ice cream flavors.

• 8:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, so there is a lot of dots to be connected there. But our bodies, you know, your body choosing that ice cream flavor is just made of a bunch of molecules. We're made as the same stuff as that ball. And so in theory, couldn't we predict like, what our bodies are going to do next just by looking at those molecules and then like, applying the laws of physics, biology, neuroscience, whatever? I talked about this with John Dylan Haynes. He's a professor at a neuroscience center in Charité, a medical school in Berlin. And he had a sort of visualization for how to imagine this in this like, clockwork.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 8:50Speaker 05

  You're kind of like in this, on this rail, like a, like a carriage or a train. And you're in this, on these tracks and there's no way of escaping the laws of nature. You're kind of constrained to the path that the world is going to go.

• 9:03Speaker 04

  So going back to that ice cream decision.

• 9:06Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 9:06Speaker 04

  You know, ideally, you'd be able to see like, what's going on in my brain as I'm trying to make this choice and see like, can, can someone just looking at my brain sort of figure out what I'm going to choose in advance?

• 9:17Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:18Speaker 04

  So John told me about this experiment that kind of changed everything. So it's the 1980s and there is one scientist, a neurophysiologist, who ends up doing this pretty famous experiment.

• 9:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, so the person who started this whole thing off was Benjamin Libet.

• 9:37Speaker 04

  So this guy, Benjamin Libet, he wants to kind of see what's happening in our brains as we're making just one stupid little decision.

• 9:45Speaker 00

  Okay, and the idea is that... You would see the patterns of neurons firing or whatnot, and that they would have fired as if to say, "chocolate flavor." But you only consciously decide chocolate after those neurons have fired? Is that what we're looking for in the brain?

• 10:09Speaker 04

  That's the idea, yeah. Like, what's the order of events here? Can you see any signs of chocolate neurons firing before people are like, "I made my decision to get the chocolate ice cream." That's basically what he's gonna do.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  Okay, interesting.

• 10:22Speaker 04

  Instead of bringing people into an ice cream shop, he does something much more basic. So imagine if you're in this experiment, he has you come into the lab, you sit down in a chair, and he gives you these instructions.

• 10:34Speaker 05

  You see your hands, and what I want you to do is sometime when you feel spontaneously the urge to flex your wrist, please do that.

• 10:42Speaker 04

  And then you flap your hand, like, up and down.

• 10:45Speaker 05

  Exactly, exactly.

• 10:46Speaker 04

  Like a wave.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  Okay, a wave. A wave with your whole hand. Got it, okay. So whenever you feel the urge,

• 10:52Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  Flap your hands.

• 10:54Speaker 04

  But meanwhile, he wants a way to track exactly when you made your decision. So he puts this thing on the wall.

• 11:01Speaker 05

  Like a clock, just with one single point, like a simple clock.

• 11:05Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 11:05Speaker 05

  And he asks people to remember where the point was when they made the decision to move now.

• 11:12Speaker 04

  "I'm gonna flex, I'm gonna do it."

• 11:13Speaker 05

  "I'm gonna do it now." And then you flex it.

• 11:17Speaker 04

  And then later, the person would say like, "Yeah, I made my decision to flex my wrist when the point on the clock thing was at like the 3 o'clock position."

• 11:24Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 11:25Speaker 04

  And then meanwhile, Lebet's got this EEG going on, so electrodes on the person's scalp that can measure electrical activity of the brain.

• 11:33Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 11:34Speaker 04

  And then he can also see when they flex their wrists, because he has something else that like reads out muscle activity. So now, he has the time people say they made this decision.

• 11:44Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 11:44Speaker 04

  And then he has the time they actually flex their wrists, and he has those brain signals throughout this whole time. So now we're kind of ready to see like what is going on. Like, if we are the ones calling the shots, if I have the power to flex my wrist now, you'd expect to see a certain pattern of events. First, you make that decision to flex.

• 12:06Speaker 05

  You're in control, and then the brain comes later. And that was kind of what he was expecting. What he found was that this brain signal happened even before people made up their mind, and that's the paradox.

• 12:19Speaker 00

  So that he would see activity in the brain, then people would think, "I'll flap my wrist now."

• 12:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. He sees a little like blipity blip in the brain before people say they decided to flex their wrists.

• 12:34Speaker 00

  It's not that convincing, though, because, I mean, what was it? He found it was like a couple of seconds difference. Maybe people just didn't look at the clock properly, right?

• 12:45Speaker 04

  It was even less than, yeah, it was half a second.

• 12:48Speaker 00

  Half a second? Different. And that could be the time that you consciously decide to flip your wrist, and then you look up at the clock, right? I don't think my free will doesn't exist, thanks to this study.

• 13:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, lots of people had criticisms like this, right? And so, you know, this old experiment from the 80s wasn't like the last word on the question of free will, of course. Like, John actually decided to do a more modern take on this experiment using, you know, newer equipment. So, yeah, now it's the early aughts, 25 years later, and he does FMRI.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  Yes, this is what we need, yes.

• 13:29Speaker 04

  So now you can get a more detailed picture of like what brain activity is happening where, and they can use these fancy computer programs to analyze all that data.

• 13:38Speaker 00

  Oh, this is excellent, yes, yes, okay.

• 13:40Speaker 04

  So John and his team bring in a bunch of volunteers, 14 of them.

• 13:44Speaker 05

  So what they were told to do was to spontaneously, at some point, they could decide on themselves to decide between a left or right button, and then to immediately press the button.

• 13:54Speaker 04

  So, left button or right button, whenever they feel like it. And then John, meanwhile...

• 13:58Speaker 00

  Whenever they make the choice.

• 14:00Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm. And then meanwhile, John is getting all this data from the scanner, and then he looks at the results with his student.

• 14:09Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 14:09Speaker 04

  And it turns out that they did replicate that old experiment from the 80s. It held up. And they found something even more extreme. So he sees a brain signal that was happening even earlier, whereas before it was a half a second difference between when they started to see the blip and when people said they made the decision. Now, John could see a signal seven seconds before people said they made the decision. Yeah.

• 14:38Speaker 00

  Seven seconds?

• 14:40Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  Let's just count that, okay? Yeah, let's demonstrate what seven seconds is, okay?

• 14:46Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  So I will make it sound like a... I do a better chicken than goat, so...

• 14:53Speaker 04

  Oh, sure.

• 14:54Speaker 00

  Okay, do you want to set the timer?

• 14:56Speaker 04

  Okay, okay.

• 14:57Speaker 00

  Okay, okay. So I feel like I'm making the choice between goat and chicken, and to make an animal sound at all, so...

• 15:06Speaker 04

  Time we started?

• 15:13Speaker 04

  That was seven seconds.

• 15:14Speaker 00

  That was all, so that time, but in reverse, my brain had possibly already made the choice to go...

• 15:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Something in your brain was like, "Oh, yeah, I'm gonna start setting the stage, I guess, for me to make this noise." Seven frickin' seconds. John was surprised when he saw this. He was like...

• 15:38Speaker 05

  "We really have to make sure this is correct."

• 15:42Speaker 05

  So we went and did all sorts of controls.

• 15:45Speaker 04

  He saw that it was real, that he saw the signal seven seconds before people said that they made the decision.

• 15:51Speaker 05

  So there's something deep in your unconscious that seems to be preparing. It's already almost as if the brain made up its mind, but you don't know about it yet.

• 16:02Speaker 04

  For me, it does kind of take care of the criticism we were talking about, where it's like, "Oh, maybe people are just a little bit bad or reporting exactly when they made the decision." Because in seven seconds, that was a long time. They're not gonna be that late.

• 16:12Speaker 00

  So does John know what the blip means? Like, what is happening in the brain when the brain is making the choice?

• 16:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, what does the blip mean? Is it your brain actually deciding, "Should I move the left finger or the right finger ahead of time?" Or is that signal just kind of like foreplay? Like, parts of your brain kind of gearing up, getting ready to make this decision that doesn't actually happen until later?

• 16:38Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 16:39Speaker 04

  What is going on in the blip?

• 16:40Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 16:40Speaker 04

  So, yeah, so John wanted to answer this, so they use machine learning algorithms to try to answer this question. Can they predict whether people will move their left finger or their right finger before they say they made the decision?

• 16:55Speaker 00

  Okay, and so if his algorithm could predict it, that means that there is a pattern in the brain saying, "Push the left button, push the right button"

• 17:07Speaker 00

  before we are consciously aware of it. That would be, if he could predict it well.

• 17:12Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 17:12Speaker 00

  But if he couldn't predict it so well, we don't know what that blip is doing.

• 17:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, here's what he found.

• 17:18Speaker 05

  It turns out that you can make a prediction, but it's not perfect, which is quite interesting.

• 17:22Speaker 04

  So it was about 60% accurate?

• 17:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, something around 60%. So you're tossing a coin, you're at 50%. You can predict it 60%, so a little bit above chance.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  What does that mean to you, Mira?

• 17:37Speaker 04

  Well, I wasn't that impressed, to be honest. It was like 60%.

• 17:40Speaker 00

  It's a far above random chance, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:46Speaker 04

  But then, so after John's study comes out, there was another group that did a similar experiment using a different technique and zooming in on this time period right before people say they made the decision. And they get it up to over 80%.

• 18:00Speaker 00

  Uh-huh. 80% now?

• 18:04Speaker 04

  80%.

• 18:06Speaker 00

  Okay, okay.

• 18:10Speaker 04

  And other studies were coming out, too, most of them all replicating the fact that like, yeah, there is something going on in the brain before people say they made a decision. And these studies end up being hugely influential, you know? John's study gets cited almost 3,000 times by other papers.

• 18:27Speaker 00

  3,000 times?

• 18:30Speaker 04

  Close to that, yeah.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  That is for the folks who are not complete nerds in the room. That is a hugely influential paper.

• 18:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:39Speaker 00

  Okay, I don't, I don't see a paradox here, though, because we still may have made the choice for that first domino to fall, right? For that first brain activity. It's just that consciousness comes a little later.

• 18:57Speaker 04

  I guess you're kind of getting at like, what is the me? Like, is there some part of me that can still direct some neurons around without me being aware of it?

• 19:05Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 19:06Speaker 04

  Which still feels like it's really changing the idea of what free will means for most people. I would think most people would say, "No, I know when I made my decision to flap my wrist."

• 19:14Speaker 00

  Okay, okay.

• 19:15Speaker 04

  And it's not like some unconscious thing happening in my brain.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  So people, scientists believe this. They believe, what are they, what are they?

• 19:23Speaker 04

  They're arguing about it.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  They're arguing about it, yeah, of course.

• 19:27Speaker 04

  On the one side, you have people who are like, take these studies and run with them to say like, "So free will is an illusion." You know, clearly, all these studies, that's what they're saying. We just, you know, our decisions are kind of being made without our conscious awareness. But then there's, there are other people, including lots of scientists, who are not convinced that these experiments mean that there is no free will. So up next, I'll tell you the most convincing argument that I could find on how free will is still totally compatible with all of this science.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  Coming up.

• 20:05Speaker 06

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• 22:08Speaker 00

  Welcome back. Today on the show, free will. Was I making a choice when I said that? Or that?

• 22:16Speaker 04

  Or that?

• 22:18Speaker 00

  Merrill Hawn is about to tell me why I did make that choice, and I'm sorry about it as well.

• 22:27Speaker 04

  That's okay. I'm making the choice to forgive you.

• 22:32Speaker 00

  All right.

• 22:35Speaker 04

  So yeah, so far, we've been building up this picture where there's no free will, right?

• 22:39Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 22:40Speaker 04

  We've seen this evidence that our brains are kind of coming to decisions on their own before we're aware of it. But next, we're gonna hear a different story. So let me introduce you to Sean Carroll. He's a theoretical physicist and professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. What's the best thing that you've done recently with your free will?

• 23:02Speaker 11

  The best thing I've done recently with my free will? I think I really perfected my French onion soup.

• 23:09Speaker 04

  Ooh.

• 23:09Speaker 11

  I don't know. Is that okay? Like, I really worked on this. You gotta spend a lot of time caramelizing the onions.

• 23:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I can never be bothered.

• 23:19Speaker 04

  Mmm, you rush it.

• 23:21Speaker 00

  I just eat raw onions, basically.

• 23:26Speaker 04

  I mean, I haven't even attempted French onion soup. I can see where your problem is.

• 23:32Speaker 04

  But besides cooking tips, you know, we also talked about how free will can exist alongside all the science that we've been talking about.

• 23:41Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 23:42Speaker 04

  And to me, the best way to explain this is to actually talk about something completely different. Let's talk about the weather.

• 23:49Speaker 11

  Weather predictions use atmospheric science, fluid mechanics. When you talk about the atmosphere around you, what do you talk about? You talk about its temperature, the pressure, the humidity, the velocity of the wind, things like that.

• 24:03Speaker 04

  So that's how we predict the weather. Temperature, pressure, super useful concepts.

• 24:09Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 24:09Speaker 04

  But the weird thing is, this stuff doesn't exist when we look at individual atoms and molecules that make up the weather. Like, you can't look at one little atom and see that it's 20 degrees outside.

• 24:26Speaker 00

  Uh huh. Yes, a tiny little atom doesn't know what's going on in the rest of the world.

• 24:31Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm. You can't see these bigger, like, these bigger things, temperature, pressure, that kind of thing.

• 24:38Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 24:39Speaker 04

  Only emerges when you get a bunch of atoms together. And so, yeah, it's like you have to see how a bunch of these guys are all behaving together as a group to see certain properties.

• 24:52Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 24:52Speaker 04

  And that idea is called emergence.

• 24:55Speaker 11

  The idea of emergence is there are multiple ways of talking about the universe. So we distinguish between the microscopic theory, that's the lower-level theory with all the atoms and things like that, and then the emergent macroscopic, higher-level theory, where there's people and puppies and baseballs and stuff like that.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm. Okay.

• 25:16Speaker 04

  So another example I like here is the ocean. Wendy, do you agree the ocean is real?

• 25:24Speaker 00

  Shut up, game movie.

• 25:27Speaker 00

  I refuse to be trapped.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  Yes, the ocean is real.

• 25:34Speaker 04

  There are waves, there are currents, there's tides. Everyone knows the ocean is real.

• 25:38Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 25:39Speaker 04

  But if you zoomed in and looked at like an individual water molecule, you can't see any of that stuff. It's not like you would see a teeny, tiny wave in a water molecule. Those things only exist when you get a bunch of water molecules together doing all kinds of crazy stuff.

• 25:54Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 25:55Speaker 04

  And so maybe that's how free will works too, that feeling that you are the one choosing the ice cream. It's not necessarily an illusion, it's just emergent, something that only appears at a higher level. Here's Sean.

• 26:11Speaker 11

  The you that is making that decision is a sort of collective emergent phenomenon that comes out of all of the microscopic properties and processes going on in your brain, each one of which obeys the laws of biology, if we're talking about neurons and synapses firing, et cetera, or the laws of physics if we're talking about the atoms and molecules.

• 26:35Speaker 04

  No matter what's happening in your brain with the neurons, that doesn't necessarily mean that what's happening at the higher level, this experience that we're having of making choices, it doesn't necessarily mean that that is like a fake experience or a one that is like not real just because of like all the stuff happening at the lower levels. It's just like two separate levels.

• 26:58Speaker 00

  Oh, the ocean is real. That's what he's saying.

• 27:01Speaker 04

  The ocean is real.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  The ocean is real.

• 27:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:04Speaker 00

  Mmm, okay. So where do we go from here then?

• 27:09Speaker 04

  Well, so it's, this is basically what, like, now a lot of academics think is really important for understanding stuff like free will, because maybe you can have a system that is sort of, you know, billiard balls, like this deterministic clockwork at the lower levels, but maybe things get weird and like indeterministic at like the higher you levels, which for me is like, it's still a little unsatisfying if we can't actually like, you know, know how the, you know, me choosing my ice cream emerges from like neurons zapping each other. But Sean was kind of like, well, you know, it just might take us a long time to figure

• 27:53Speaker 04

  out exactly how the emergent properties come about.

• 27:56Speaker 11

  I think there are so many examples of things that we never thought we'd be able to understand. Like, I'm sitting on this chair. Why doesn't it collapse? Back in the day, you would have just said, "Well, it just is. It's made of, you know, wood or metal or whatever. There's nothing deeper about it." But now we say like, "Oh, no, we understand that it's made of atoms." And actually, it took us a while to figure out why atoms take up space and have some solidity to them. And it took us even longer to figure out how the atoms get together and gang up and make a solid substance. But now we do, and we sort of take it for granted.

• 28:31Speaker 04

  It took us like 100 years to figure out why chairs are solid. Like, yeah, we just started working on this whole free will thing in the brain. Like, just because we haven't figured it out yet doesn't mean free will is like fake.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  Yes. Okay. So from your reaction to this, it feels like you still think we have free will.

• 28:54Speaker 04

  I do. I mean, I think there's still, I still have questions. But yeah, I don't think, I don't think we have enough evidence to say it doesn't exist for sure.

• 29:04Speaker 00

  And all of the brain studies are so basic. Press a button, don't press a button. Flap your hands, don't flap your hands. And there is a long way from that to should I have children? Should I marry this person? You know, if we really don't have free will, these big, complicated decisions that you think about day to day. I mean, for those who argue we don't have free will based on those brain studies. They are making the assumption that what happens in the brain when you have to make a literal flip decision is the same process as these bigger, complicated decisions that we're making.

• 29:49Speaker 00

  And that is an assumption.

• 29:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, that's another criticism that some scientists have made too. Like, these little decisions that people are doing in the lab are just too simplistic to like, really say anything about what's happening in our brain for much more complicated decisions. And one thing now that really annoys me that I see people doing is when they use those lab experiments kind of as an excuse to say, and therefore, like, we can do whatever we want. Like, we don't have any responsibility. Because like, no matter what is happening in the brain, we still have the experience of making choices freely.

• 30:25Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 30:25Speaker 04

  So to just kind of pretend we don't is BS.

• 30:29Speaker 00

  What is the alternative, right? You just watch The Matrix over and over and over again.

• 30:34Speaker 04

  And remember John, who did the seven second experiment?

• 30:38Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 30:38Speaker 04

  He also thinks some version of free will exists. Like, when his paper came out, it sounded like he was a little bemused by the fact that so many people were interpreting it as this like slam dunk against free will.

• 30:51Speaker 05

  We were quite careful also, by the way, not to say in that 2008 paper that there's no free will, which is interesting because people keep citing that paper and saying, we claim there is no free will. It actually doesn't say that. We took that out of that paper deliberately so that we could publish the findings in a penance of the philosophical implications of the study.

• 31:13Speaker 00

  So what does he think it means then?

• 31:16Speaker 04

  So where he comes down, where, and what I basically agree with is that like, yeah, even though there are neurons doing stuff in the brain before we make a decision, it's still us. And so maybe we do just need to expand that idea of like, what we are. You know, there are tons of things that our brains are doing behind the scenes that we're not aware of. And that's all part of who we are.

• 31:39Speaker 00

  Yes. We are still the neurons kicking off that domino.

• 31:46Speaker 00

  Even before consciousness kicks in. But then it brings this whole question of Meryl. What is consciousness?

• 31:54Speaker 04

  Right.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  Next time, we tackle science and philosophy on Science vs.

• 32:00Speaker 04

  So I finally get to do my episode on consciousness?

• 32:03Speaker 00

  I mean, it's your free will, right? You can make that episode.

• 32:06Speaker 04

  All right.

• 32:08Speaker 00

  Thanks, Meryl.

• 32:09Speaker 04

  Thanks, Wendy.

• 32:11Speaker 00

  That is Science vs. Free Will. How many citations are in this week's episode, Meryl?

• 32:16Speaker 04

  We have 22 citations. So to find those, go to the show notes and you can find a link to the transcripts there. And we'll also put a link there to Sean Carroll's podcast, Mindscape. And he just did a deep dive into free will recently with The Philosopher. That's a great episode if you want to get an even nerdier take on this question.

• 32:35Speaker 00

  Great. This episode was produced by Meryl Horn with help from Rose Rimler, Kenny Foster Keys, Michelle Dang, and me, Wendy Zukerman. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. I'm the executive producer. Fact checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Video editing and sound design by Bobby Lord. Music written by Bobby Lord, Bumi Hidaka, So Wiley, Emma Mungah, and Peter Leonard. Thanks to the researchers we spoke to for this episode, including Dr. Nicholas Rulo and Dr. Andrea Lavazza. A special thanks to Chris Suda. Science vs. is a Spotify Studios original. You can join us for free on Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts. We're everywhere. I'm Wendy Zukerman. Back to you next time.

• 33:20Speaker 12

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• 33:52Speaker 13

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