Life Without Free Will || Robert Sapolsky

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
For most people on Earth. Responsibility is the incorrect attribution
of things that justify on happiness in life and on
happiness that we are willing to hand out based on
our belief that people had control over things which they

(00:21):
did not. That's most of the human experience.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today's episode is
sponsored by Unlikely Collaborators. Their mission is to entangle the
stories that hold us back as individuals, communities, nations, and
humanity at large using the Perception Box lens. They do
this through storytelling, experiences, impact investments, and scientific research. Unlikely
Collaborators the only way forward is inward. Later on in

(00:50):
this episode, I'll talk a lot more about the perception
box and how it relates to this episode, But right now,
let me tell you about today's guest. Today we welcome
Robert Sapolski to the show. Robert is Professor of Biology
and Neurology at Stanford University and a research associate with
the Institute of Primate Research at the National Museum of Kenya.
His research has been featured in the national geographic documentary

(01:12):
Stress Portrait of a Killer. At age thirty, Robert received
the MacArthur Foundation's genius Grant. He is author of Why
Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, A primate's memoir, The Trouble with Tassocerone,
and Monkey Love. His latest book is called Determined, A
Science of Life Without free Will. In this episode, I
talked to Robert Sapolski about life without free will. Humans

(01:34):
like the idea of having control over their lives, but
Robert as searched that free will is just an illusion.
Robert argues that life beyond free will may sound unpleasant,
but explains the profound consequences of this belief in reforming
the justice system, meritocracy, and education. We also touch on
the topics of philosophy, quantum physics, mindfulness, grit, and responsibility. Wow,

(01:57):
this was such an incredibly exciting conversation with one of
my intellectual heroes. And just being able to chat with
him and freestyle and arm wrestle a little bit about
the nature of free will is very exciting for me,
even though we have different definitions of free will. As
you'll see when you listen to this conversation, we don't
agree on everything. I really have the deepest amount of
respect for him, and I encourage you to weigh in

(02:19):
on your own thoughts on this conversation in the comments.
I'd love to hear what you think. This is a
really important topic and whatever your belief on it, I
think that this topic needs to be supported by evidence
and logic. So, without further ado, I bring you this
really stimulating and enriching conversation with Robert Sapolski. Well, I've
been really been looking forward to this for a long time,

(02:40):
this chat and es. Yeah, as a fellow cognitive scientist,
I feel like we can really nerd out today. You know,
this is not gonna This doesn't have to be like,
you know, an a media interview where they just ask
the questions and you answer them. You know, I really yeah, yeah, yeah,
I bet you'd like a break from that anyway. So

(03:01):
I wanted to start off by understanding a little bit
about your own the only links in the causal chain
that led up to you even being interested in pret
will to begin with.

Speaker 1 (03:11):
Well, I think I mentioned somewhere in the book, Yeah
I did. I was fourteen when I decided that none
of this made any sense. I had, oh, you know,
early adolescent, some sort of angsty crisis of things converging
and turmoil and mold and all that, and well, one

(03:36):
night I woke up like a two in the morning
and I said, oh, I get it. That's why there's
no God. And then like shortly after that, and there's
no free will, and then it's a totally empty and

(03:57):
different universe. So that kind of came in this epithanal moment.
So I've been quite convinced of this ever since. And
I realized for the book, I discovered some of the
notes I was vaguely referring to I had taken in college.
So I've been like thinking about this stuff for a
long time.

Speaker 2 (04:18):
You have you have you got interest in biology for
a reason as well? What do you think really attracted
you to that level of analysis there?

Speaker 1 (04:26):
I'm going to diverge from that a bit, and that
I think it was just purely emotional. You know. My
mother took me to the Museum of Natural History in
New yorkle all the time, and we went into the
primate exhibit and something just clicked, something just imprinted. This

(04:49):
famous stuffed mountain gorilla there who was shot by some
Grandel naturalists in nineteen twelve and stuffed. It was just
something emotional. It just resonated. I want to live inside
those diamas. So it was only sort of by college
that kind of the scientific bits and pieces for it

(05:10):
began to fall into place.

Speaker 2 (05:12):
Beautiful. Well, I've been a longtime follower of your work,
and I show your videos in my class at Columbia.
I show this one video of you talking about dopamine
where you say, and there's no rout on earth that
will press for an afterlife. You know, we're weird, very

(05:32):
weird specie we are weird, which actually I think is
a good segue into the topic of free will. You
have this quote, which I think just it summarizes the
whole book. We are nothing more or less than the
cumulative biological and environmental luck over which we had no
control that has brought us to any moment. And so

(05:52):
do you think that leads to the conclusion that we
have zero free will?

Speaker 1 (06:00):
If having to edit for length, I had to turn
that sentence to four words, it's completely obvious there's no
free will. And I think the thing, maybe the fact
is that I'm kind of half neurobiologist and half primatologists.
So the two different realms has had me. The primatology

(06:23):
I actually have to talk to ecologists now and then
an evolutionary bilast and the neuropeople I'm like hanging with
molecular biologists. I think I as a result sort of
inadvertently stumbled into having a respect for more different disciplinary
approaches to the science stuff. And I think the critical

(06:47):
point is, Okay, a behavior has occurred. It's wonderful, it's awful,
it's in between blah blah, why did it happen? Which
urons just did that a second ago? That's good to
figure out. But what sensory stimuli the prior minute prompted
those neurons, and what hormone levels this morning made that

(07:07):
brain more or less sensitive to those stimuli? And what
about previews three months and were you traumatized or stimulated?
And lessons in childhood and fetal life and genes and
culture and ecology and eventually evolution. And I think the
key thing in there is that saying you've got to
look at all of those is not because someone would

(07:32):
study the literature on supposedly, how so you look at
that and it's not just whoa I've just like spent
fourteen years studying the behavior genetics and you know what
it influences? It module a it's just all of that.
But you sure can't say that it disproves free will

(07:53):
because there's this hole in the adoption studies, or you
get somebody who's an endochronology and you go through each
of those. It's not that you could then say, ooh,
somebody identify as a whole in one of these disciplinary approaches.
But thank god, ecologists could answer that. Or you don't

(08:15):
believe that, like fatal environment does this or that, but
you know sociologists here that plugs the whole. That's not
the point. The most critical point is so you sit
there and the reason why you got to look at
all these different disciplines is not because each one has
a fatal limitation explanatory power and you can't rule out

(08:38):
free will just based on being an endocrinologist or just whatever.
But whoa, the people who study this other field, they
can plug that hole. So you get enough of these
disciplines that we could plug all the holes. That's not
the point. Overwhelmingly. The point is these are not all
different disciplines. They're all one by definition. If you're talking

(09:02):
about genes, you're talking about evolution, and you're also talking
about whatever proteins you made in your brain this morning.
If you're talking about yesterday's hormone levels, you're also implicitly
talking about what your fetal environment was when you were
constructing your glands and how react to It's all one
continuous set of influences. And when you look at that,

(09:25):
it's just one big, magnificent arc environment and biology bubble.
When you look at it, there's not a damn crack
anywhere in that arc that you can shoot horn in
something happening that is independent of all that stuff that
in some ways the no, no, no, it's not a

(09:47):
multidisciplinary approach. This is all the same thing, and there's
no space in there.

Speaker 2 (09:54):
Well, I think you did an excellent job in your
book of taking down the magical free will argument that
we somehow have some sort of magical free will. And
I think that you know that you did a really
great job of that, And I think that there are
certain compatibilists who needed to hear that. For sure. I
think i'm a flavor of compatibilists that that's still you know,

(10:17):
that's on board with you. But I also think that
there's multiple ways to define the term free will. Yeah,
I'm a little more flexible and.

Speaker 1 (10:27):
Let's go at it then, But well, yeah, what's your definition?

Speaker 2 (10:32):
Well, the first thing I have a question about, and
this is really just for my sake of understanding, not fighting,
but understanding, for us to understand each other, you know,
And who is the we? There feels like a little
bit of like a cryptodualism in here. If we are biologed. Look,
both of us can agree that we're biologed, that we
are biological organisms. But as a biologist, don't you agree

(10:56):
that we're biological control systems? And is not the whole
purpose of biological control systems feedback and homeostasis and organisms
to control their survival and reproduction?

Speaker 1 (11:07):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (11:07):
Wo absolutely so then yeah, okay, okay, good, Okay, We're there,
We're there. Yeah, let's keep going. Let's keep going. You know,
if we are nothing more than our brain processes, you know,
we're prediction machines. Where we are goal directed machines, so
we do have some innately built goal directions that are
not completely influenced by external constraints. I suppose that your

(11:31):
perspective seems to me like a very and tell me
how I'm wrong. But it feels to me like a
very behaviorist sort of interpretation of the we part.

Speaker 1 (11:41):
Well, the we is somewhere between like almost acceptable metaphor
and tongue in chee like all all the like. If
you're a social biologist evolutionary psychologist, you sitting there saying, okay,
so what does a prairie roal wanted you with that
in this circumstance, and then they like feel obliged to say,

(12:02):
of course, when we say what does the aryable want,
it doesn't actually want it in order the course's evolution
that's been sculpted by execuseias of selection, and that this
is not a conscious process. We're just using it as
a shorthand. And when you really unpack it, we me
I is just as much of a shorthand, because it
would be a pain in the neck at that point

(12:23):
to instead say, well, when I say me, I actually
mean the concatenation of gene environment nonlinear. It's a shorthand.
There's no me and there that's anything more than like
the emergency outcome of all the little pieces there. And
it rarely makes sense anymore to try to understand meanness

(12:46):
by just looking at the little constituent parts. But that's
all it's made of.

Speaker 2 (12:51):
You know, when you look at what humans want out
of free will, I think we have it, you know,
we have I mean, I think the magical free will
thing confuses people sometimes. Human biological organisms really care about
their ability to change, goals to well, to change. You
definitely talk about change, and we'll get to that. They
want to be able to make decisions. They want to

(13:13):
feel like they have some sense of choice. You know.
The idea of choice in your model is also is
really interesting because the question is, well, how do you
define the word choice. What's your working definition of choice?
Let's start there so we could be in the same terms.

Speaker 1 (13:27):
Okay, just to be totally totally in your face. Choice
is the erroneous belief that you were the agent.

Speaker 2 (13:33):
Oh my gosh, okay.

Speaker 1 (13:37):
Change in your behavior and or taste just now, I mean,
because okay, elusion. So we're just going to leave in
that bucket for a while here. What's the job of
all organisms is the drive towards reproduction, individual selection, passing
copies in their genes. And that's just like innate, its fundamental.
I mean that like vines thinking that way when they're

(14:01):
strangling fig trees or something. They just want to have
more babies and have that. Well, this is just today.
But then you get like people in the Shakers who
when extinct because they all chose to be celibate, or like, oh,

(14:21):
but don't forget kin selection. You can also maximize your
reproductive success by also investing in the reproductive success of
your relatives as a function of their delete degree of relatedness.
And that's why like plants cooperate with each other based
on like surface proteins and their degree of relatedness reflected
to that. And that's why baboons all they think about

(14:43):
is are you like my cousin or not? And that's
us that's can you kinship terms like all anthropologists but
doing for centuries or kinship terms, because that's just like
giving the cultural frosting on your evolutionary innateness. And then
you have some who adopts a kid from the other
side of the planet, and that just goes down the

(15:07):
tips of the notion that well, I think what we've
just when I just inavertly did, was go through there's
the hole in anyone who says evolution of behavior just
proves free will. Mm hmm, yeah, those are holes. No,
you're absolutely right.

Speaker 2 (15:24):
You admitted earlier that you know. It was actually an
interesting segue at the beginning because we talked about you know,
rat lever presses and how there is something uniquely human
about about human decision making. You admitted that you know
the humans are don't you think that that human organisms
are decision making machines? And do you not think that
an organism is a causal nexus where some of the

(15:46):
at least some of the fully causually determined processies can
reasonably be described as choices at least. But he sounds
like you're saying no.

Speaker 1 (15:54):
No, no. I mean, if if all rolls down a hill,
as results of it, all of the molecules inside it
are turning over and over and over. Wow, look at
that causality.

Speaker 2 (16:10):
Well, we have a lot build in. That's a very
behaviorist sort of way of treating humans. Well, we other
black box.

Speaker 1 (16:17):
We're not black And in fact, the more we open
up the black box, the more clearly we can see
the gears, gears in a way where like you know,
Descartes goes out the window with anything about like organisms
and machines, but gears like enough to get thirty thousand
people show up. Society for Neuroscience meeting each year because

(16:40):
they're so intent on how complicated the damn gears are.
And that's not even talking to like the political scientists
or but yeah, all that opening up the black box
does is show the mechanisms. And what it also shows
is the power of that we never even suspected was there.

(17:04):
On a certain level, the last five hundred years of
Western culture could be described as people saying over and over, Wow,
I had no idea biology had something to do with that.
That's a little bit of a monomoniacal way of looking
at human history, but that we've just been learning that
over and over and over and somewhere in there you

(17:28):
look at the deceptions and self deceptions with which the
world has worked in the past until people figured out, oh,
I had no idea biology had something to do with it,
and we've done that. We're doing it right now. We're
looking at, you know, people with a certain variant of

(17:49):
E leptin gene. No matter how damn much they want
to will themselves to have willpower, they're going to be obese,
as has been every member of their family. And we
sit there and then attribute agency and choice when it's
just mechanism. I think, what runs through all of this,

(18:09):
and the sense that an awful lot of the compatibilist philosophers,
when you really read closely what they're saying, what they're
saying is, oh God, they're better be free will, because
what a bummer it's going to be otherwise. So this
is why there's free will. You know, I'm being snarky there,
but when you consider how much all of us operate
on that, there's an entire literature and evolutionary biology about

(18:33):
the evolution of our capacity for self deception, because like
reality is quite a drag sometimes.

Speaker 2 (18:42):
And I think that's a really good point. I mean,
I think that it's totally fair. By the way, anyway,
everyone hearing the chainsaw massacre that's occurring right now, just no,
just go with it with us. Go we hear we
hear it, Yes we hear it. But we're safe. Robert's safe. Right.
You got some you got some angry compatibilists out there,

(19:04):
but but I you know, I'm not an angry compatibilist.
I have a lot of sympathy for your project. It's
it's one of those things where like I'm with you,
I'm with you, I'm with you, and then they're like
the very last step, I'm like, not with you, you
do know what I mean. So I have a lot
of sympathy for you saying you know that, you know,
just one could just say you could have just simply
said we have a lot less control. So much of

(19:28):
as an illusion, you know, on the role of unconscious
processes is so great, and even our conscious processes we
think we're we made those this, you know that we
but to give us like no wiggle room, whats that's
the step, that's the that's where we're zooming in here.
That's what we're zooming in here.

Speaker 1 (19:46):
Yeah, And you're right, like if I'm trying to be
a good dinner guest or something, I'll do a whole
lot lesson We really need to reform the criminal justice system.
And it's really gregious that like three quarters Statford undergrads
come from wealthy families and like something's something. No, there's
nothing there at all. And when you're saying that's the

(20:10):
point where you say no, no on that way nineteen
nine percent of the time. Also, I constantly react in
life as if I believe in agency and have a
whole lot of faith in my own and have a
lot of self congradulatory instincts about my own sense of agency,
but it's not the case in every every now and then,

(20:30):
I managed not to be a hypocrite. And it takes
a lot of work, and it lasts for a few
seconds before I lapse back into being a person of
my place and time.

Speaker 2 (20:42):
It's very interesting. Different people thoughout the course of humanist
have come to different conclusions. A lot of very smart people,
you know, I've come to very different conclusions about this.
William James, you know who I know that you have
had bouts of depression. He had a lot of bouts
of depression. He has the famous quote, my first act
of free will will be to believe in free will.

(21:02):
That's one of his famous quotes. Your dog likes dogs
like that, they like.

Speaker 1 (21:10):
They love William James.

Speaker 2 (21:12):
They must be big, they must be big William James fans.

Speaker 1 (21:17):
They mostly just take the beard William James. Yes, you know,
poray for him. And all that's happened is has become
clearer and just to really like put the uh Earth
on our shoulders, weighing us down. All that has happened

(21:38):
is a stronger and stronger moral imperative to act this way.

Speaker 2 (21:43):
M hmm. Yeah, well, you know, we'll definitely get to
all those the implications for more responsibility, et cetera. I
want to stay on the the that initial assertion for
a second before we get to all the implications. I
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in December. So what's wrong? Tell me what's wrong with

(23:16):
saying that we quote we as a bunch of brain processes.
See it's funny. Some people might say you're being really reductionist, reductionistic,
but I would say you're not being reductionistic enough. Look,
if all we are are a bunch of brain brain
processes that control quote ourselves as a physical organism. Well,
obviously the brain processes were influenced by their genes and

(23:38):
an entire developmental history. I give that to you. But
aren't they still the physical processes that are causally producing
behavior in the present, even in the proximal link of
the causal chain. Are you denying that?

Speaker 1 (23:50):
No? Of course, yeah, I think.

Speaker 2 (23:54):
Because because because this is why I say that, And
I'm so glad that at least we can agree in that,
because I think that that's the kind of free will,
the kind of free will worth wanting or that most
people actually want.

Speaker 1 (24:06):
Okay, but just to take the wind out of my agreeing,
all of them say, but that conceives nothing. I think
what we've come into here are the different definitions of
free will, and society is perfectly happy to function on
some very proximal definitions of free will.

Speaker 2 (24:28):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (24:29):
All the legal system is built around is when that
person did that, did they intend to did they understand
what the consequences would be, and did they realize they
had alternative options? And if the answer is, like all
of that, they intended to do it, it's guilty. And
they even thought about it three seconds beforehand, so it's

(24:50):
premeditated guilt. And all the people who have spent forty
years like futzing over Libbert and the Libert experiments, what
their since asking is, you know, science equivalent to the
same courtroom one, which is when that first person first
decided they had an intent to do something, had their
brain already decided, Oh my god, let's fight over milliseconds

(25:14):
and what our measurement essays can actually tell us with
what resolution? And the problem in both cases is I
think the metaphor I use in there and the book
is that's the reviewing a movie based on its last
three minutes, because the courtroom and the Libet obsessives are

(25:35):
never asking where did that intent come from in the
first place, because that's ultimately the only question you could ask,
because if you really want to understand this human stuff,
we've got to be able to explain not just why
did this kid show up from site one oh one
and do this experiment for Libbet to press the button?

(25:55):
But why didn't they steal the laptop on the way out?
Why weren't they in prisoned that day instead? Because they
were like fetal alcohol sinsre Why were they not able
to do that? Because they were actually like in a
village in mouretainy evading a warlor Where did that intent
come from? And in some ways, I think what shows that, like,

(26:20):
if you start with intent, you're missing at least ninety
seven percent of it. Is you can't wish for what
you're going to wish for yet, and you can't intend
to intend something, and you can't think of what you're
going to think for yet think next, and you can't
will yourself to have more willpower, and all of those

(26:43):
are more obscure ways of saying, that's what intent is
made of, and there's no volition in there in the
slightest because there's an explanation why the kid didn't steal
the laptop or isn't dead in Somalia, biological and environmental
luck and everything that brought them to that moment.

Speaker 2 (27:04):
But this is the thing we can't get away from this,
like implicit cryptodualism, because I am the organism. So look,
even if whatever the decision that has been made for
me that i'm that I think that I'm illusive, that
I illusively, it's not a really illusion because like, can
I take responsibility for the fact that I am the organism?

(27:25):
I mean there is a space that this takes up
right here, right here well, and that there are processes
happening and whatever decisions. You know that it is part
it is me. It's not part of me.

Speaker 1 (27:34):
It is me.

Speaker 2 (27:35):
It is me.

Speaker 1 (27:36):
And that's fine if you want to define responsibility in
this sense of like I'm the person who caused the
atom is making up this pillow to go from there
to there. If you want to say the rolling ball
is responsible for why all those little like molecules inside
keep turning over and over and over and you're getting

(27:57):
like seasick. Yeah, responsibility in this purely instrumental, value free way.
But that's not how we use the word responsibility. We
use it. I'm deciding if somebody earned their corner office
in their corporation, or if they earned their jail sentence,
or if they earned on some level not having friends,

(28:19):
or if they it's responsibility that's just like maarated in judgment.
And that's the type of responsibility that you know is
so much worse than simply not making sense.

Speaker 2 (28:34):
Yeah, I read a lot of Jeffrey Gray, the biologist's work.
I don't know how familiar. You probably aren't quit Jeffrey
Gray's work.

Speaker 1 (28:41):
It's been a while, but yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:43):
Like creeping up on the hard problem of consciousness I
think is the best book ever written on consciousness. I'm
going to have to maybe talk loud to overcome the
Chainsaw massacre. But there's a quote that Jeffrey, you know,
Jeffy Gray tries to cover the idea of responsibility. I
wanted to read a quote to you. He says responsibility
has to do with the correct functioning of the feedback

(29:05):
systems that control in individual's interactions with environmental rewards and punishments.
These operate largely unconsciously. The conscious recognition of a decision
to act and the ensuing action is my decision, and
my action comes after the event, but they nonetheless are mine.
Save for the relatively rare case of illusion or experimental manipulation,

(29:26):
Responsibility for instrumental behavior lies with the entire system. That
is scare quote to me, it's unconscious as much as
its conscious part. So this is my question based on
Jeffrey's way of thinking, which I tend to agree. What's
wrong with the way we do things legally, which is
to say that if your brain is capable of learning
from reward and punishment in a way that falls within

(29:47):
the typical range, then you a physical organism and cybernetic system,
not a magical, dualistic soul. I give you that are
responsible for your actions, and punishment might retrain you and
influence your future behavior. Whereas if you're brain is quote
messed up in such a way that you can't learn
in a reliable manner, such as you cover schizophreny in
your book, then say you're not responsible. What's wrong with

(30:09):
punishment as a tool for learning for the guilty individual?
Debt and deterans.

Speaker 1 (30:13):
For everyone else, it's perfectly great that sits. It's a
good instrumental tool. We like using it way too much
and for all sorts of wrong reasons. But if it's
just being used in an instrumental way, that's one of
a gazillion things in your armamentarium or whatever. But I
think you made a critical sign in the line in

(30:36):
the sand dichotomy. There dualism when you sit within the
normal rage, which is I think in many ways the
most reasonable compatibilist approach, which is to say, okay, okay, okay,
we recognize there's some edge cases. If the position shows
up and they have an IQ of sixty, all bets

(30:58):
are off. We're going to run the system differently with them.
And if we like somebody shows up in they're seven
foot four, all bets are often how we assess there
like basketball skills, because yeah, the edge cases, Remember, be
nice to the kid with dyslexia. It's not their fault
that they're not learning how to read. But that's where

(31:19):
that one's the false dichotomy.

Speaker 2 (31:20):
You're saying. So you're saying, Scott that that if you're
in the normal range, then it's like not, yeah that
somehow the rules apply differently. Yeah, I hear what you're saying,
or at least I can. I can. I can see
it through your head of how that that must have sounded.
But you know, if the normal learning mechanisms are in place,
to me, that is an important chain in that call

(31:42):
the thing that is you, that is causing a change
in the world, learning from your mistakes in the past.
Yes you can, if you can't. You know, my friend
Sam Harris, you know, is obsessed with the rewind the tape.
You know, it's like it's like he can't think of
free will as anything else, but the you know, if
you rewind the tape, you wont can't do differently. But
I'm saying, what about the few? Sure the humans care,

(32:02):
not just about a magical time machine that we're not
going to have in our lifetimes, but people, you know,
I take a cybernetic free will perspective, and that's just
my perspective, and I contrast that from the magical free will.
So like I give you, I give you that you
made a great compelling case in your book why a
lot of people, including a large chunk of capatabus, need
to you know, give that up. But I also think

(32:25):
that what humans care about when they care about free
will are the kind of cybernetic mechanisms of goal attainment,
being able to make changes to your subconscious system through
conscious effort or intentionality. I know you don't, you don't
believe that's the thing. But you know, my whole, my
whole research background is through Herbsimon, you know, Carnegie Mellon

(32:47):
and the whole, like I mean, I was trained from
day one to learn about means ens analysis, you know,
and like the cybernetic perspectives. So don't you think that
cybernetic free will is a free is a free will
worth wanting? And that's all I'm all arguing here.

Speaker 1 (33:00):
Absolutely it would be great.

Speaker 2 (33:02):
Okay, it doesn't exist, doesn't exist, It doesn't you mightn't
be great.

Speaker 1 (33:06):
And if existed, the second you can show like the
feedback loops of like phosphorylation pathways and you were amygdala
and every other aspect which you can explain why somebody
who has gone through sexual assault forever after without consciously

(33:28):
even realizing it, their heart will beat faster when they're
in a space that in some way resembles that we've
just shown that the notion of us consciously being part
of the feedback loops and the cybernetics most of the time,
all of the time, even once in a millennium, but

(33:50):
all the time are not really there. I mean the
second you get someone like like Jonathan Height and he
sticks you to a brain scanner and you're making a
moral decision about some like thought experiment, and you can
tell what the person is going to decide by looking
at their limbic systems activity before you can tell by

(34:11):
looking at their frontal cortex. The frontal cortex isn't thinking
and choosing, it's doing a post talk rational is when
you can actually like in real time show look look,
look the amikdala activated before the dorsaladal prefrontal cortex did.
There's no choice going on. There is is post hak stuff.

(34:32):
But what I think you're emphasizing this is incredibly like
emotionally important thing, which is it's great if we can
explain the past and here's why, like what happened to
Hitler when he was still in diapers, explain everything and
why you know Alexander the Great screwed up after a while,

(34:53):
or if you want to be Jared diamond. But what
we really want to do is, as you said, predict
the future. Uh.

Speaker 2 (35:00):
Brains are good at most.

Speaker 1 (35:05):
But where you get into trouble was exactly like the
punchline and my couple of chapters there, like chaoticism and stuff.
There are a whole lot of things that are unpredictable
but are still deterministic, and we've got this huge cognitive
bias to decide that if it was unpredictable, some sort

(35:27):
of magic happened. If there's no way to tell if
A or B caused this, and it's not just because
you don't have good enough of like instruments, but it
is fundamentally by the nature universe impossible to tell if
A or B caused this to happen. Maybe nothing caused
that to happen. If it could have happened without be A,

(35:48):
and it could have happened without B, maybe it could
have happened without both of them, and it just happened.
And that's mistaking unpredictability for determinism. I mean that was
like the legal system got past that in the nineteen twenties.
I make references the same as law case work. Two people,

(36:08):
separate people did something negligent, and both of them started
fires that got out of control, and the fires happened
to converse together and burn down somebody's house. And the
court at that time was the very first one that
said you can't get away with the lawyer for fire
maker A saying hey, the house would have burned down

(36:29):
even if my gud didn't do it, while lawyer B
is saying, hey, the house wouldn't have burned down, saying
you can't get away with that just because we didn't
know which ember was most responsible. There was causality there,
even if there was a predictability, and the legal system
like officially like a case name that law students have

(36:52):
to memorize, sort of that one out in the nineteen twenties.
But they framed it as statistical guilt you can have like.

Speaker 2 (37:01):
That's actually really interesting, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (37:03):
And that's kind of how they approached it. It can't
be that every single person in the firing squad can say,
if I hadn't shot my gun, they would still be dead,
so I'm not guilty. I didn't do anything. What I
think is more fundamental for us is instead of framing
it as there can be such thing statistical guilt that
there can be such a thing as things that are utterly,

(37:27):
implicitly unpredictable and never will be. But they're still made
out of stuff and stuff that operates with the same
rules since the rest of the world. And I think
that's where. Okay, show me we can predict now, and
if you can't, it's because there's some magic dust somewhere

(37:47):
along the way.

Speaker 2 (37:49):
Today's podcast is sponsored by Unlikely Collaborators. Their mission is
to untangle the stories that hold us back as individuals, communities, nations,
and humanity at large using the perception box lens. They
do this through storytelling, experiences, impact investments, and scientific research.
Today's conversation with Robert really illustrates the importance of expanding

(38:10):
the walls of our perception box. The perception box is
the invisible mental box that we all live inside, and
it can seriously hinder our ability to understand one another
and to understand ourselves. In this episode, Robert sticks to
a very specific definition of free will, arguing that we
don't have free will because there is no human thought, feeling,
our action that is not caused by the accumulation of

(38:33):
biological and environmental luck, over which he argues we have
no control. But regardless of your own definition of free will,
from a perception box perspective, the perception that we have
real agency can significantly impact our sense of hope and
our ability to reach our goals. Our perception of agency
really does matter a great deal, especially in terms of
how we respond to how we're feeling inside. It's that

(38:56):
response that can greatly expand our perception box and also
allow us to see new possibilities for our lives moving
forward despite our past. To find out more about unlikely
collaborators and the perception box, go to unlike a collaborators
dot com. Hey man, I'm glad that you you took
on the project of showing how silly the magic free

(39:16):
will idea is. So I am really glad, But it's
it's just interesting because you go one by one and
you say, well, and then you acknowledge. For each example,
you're like, yes, I acknowledge that even this doesn't one
hundred perus and explain. But then you're kind of like,
but if you add it all up, it can't it
can't be, you know, But that's not this equivalent of
proof that.

Speaker 1 (39:38):
No, and it's not just adding it all up. Work work,
how many balls I'm juggling in the art. It's the
whole point that it's all ultimately exactly one seamless continue
of biology interacting with the environment whatever. There's still no proof.
But it's at that point that I become like my
most infuriating pain of the ass the book by doing

(40:01):
something where like the low rent version of that, philosophers
already say that's ridiculous, and I multiply it a zillion fold.
Somebody's just done something very consequentially behave they have pulled
a trigger and like you can identify, here's the four
and a half motor neurons that told those muscles to

(40:21):
you know, extend or contract or whatever. And like this
philosopher Alfred Melee stops after the first step of saying, okay,
show me that those four neurons would have done the
same exact thing, no matter what else all the other
neurons in the brain were doing. And Key at that
point says that's ridiculous, that's unfair, that's too high of

(40:44):
a bar. My view is that isn't even the first
baby step, because you got to show those neurons would
have done the exact same thing, no matter whether they're
at person was sleepy, happy, hungry, tired, or whatever in
the minute before, and no matter what their hormone levels
were that morning, and no matter what the previous four

(41:05):
months had done to their nigdler or hippocapus, and no
matter and no matter all the way back to and
no matter if we had evolved to be a more
polygamous species than we are or a more monogamous one,
because like whatever the savannah was feeding us back when,
show me that every single one of those things could
be dramatically different, and those foreign neurons still would have

(41:27):
done exactly what they did. And that's it. You've proven
free will. You have just shown a spectacularly convincing case
of something being a causeless cause, and you can't do it.

Speaker 2 (41:41):
I get, I get where the things stuck here is
that it's just you're you're.

Speaker 1 (41:47):
You're not.

Speaker 2 (41:47):
Are you willing to entertain there might be other definitions
of free will that might be equally valid from the
from the human eye perspective.

Speaker 1 (41:56):
Yeah, but pain of they asked, now, But they're wrong
because humans humans are But I mean the organism experiencing
the world, you know, has its own sort of I
I just think that the uncaused cause you know, it's
because I agree with you.

Speaker 2 (42:11):
But I think that confuses the everyday human that's searching
for free will, because I think we do have built
into the machinery of the human genome, human brains, you know,
the way that we the things that make us different
than rats. We have a lot, a lot, not as
much as we think we have some I'm with you
there and with a lot of determinists there, but we

(42:32):
have something that allows us, you know, even through like mindful.
This is what's so interesting I had I had a
I had like a four hour debate with Sam Harris
on my podcast about very similar issues you and you
and him must be friends or something. I have similar ideas.

Speaker 1 (42:46):
We have different styles, I think, but.

Speaker 2 (42:49):
Maybe different styles but similar.

Speaker 1 (42:51):
Yeah. I basically agree with everything he has ever said
or thought in his life until it comes to like Islam.
But anyway, that's that's a whole other show, right.

Speaker 2 (43:00):
And that's all other can of worms. But sticking with
the idea of free will, it just seems like his
whole project of trying to help people practice mindfulness, meditation
and to be more mindful by your choices and create
more of a separation of space between your gut feeling
and the way that you act on it in the world.
To me, that is a uniquely human capacity that gives

(43:22):
us a certain form of free will, will worth wanting.
Do you disagree with that? Do you not see that?
I know how you define free will, but I'm saying
you open to expanding your definition of free will beyond
how you currently define it.

Speaker 1 (43:37):
No, because expanding it just to get back to general
the outcome of well or genes and an evolution. All
of that is this sense of agency, not expanding it
because the science is of why we believe and have
such a strong emotional needs of believe in free will,
because the alternative is unpalatable as hell. But okay, so

(43:57):
back to meditation. Let's break that down into like, make
it mechanistic and okay, so you like by breathing in
deeply and exhaley slowly, you stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system,
and as a result, your vagual nerve makes your locust
surrealius be less aroused, and as a result, you're amiked

(44:19):
to us silenced by gabber as you can interneurons and
you secrete less corticoism, and if you do that a lot,
all the relevant synapses will show plasticity, so that could
become a much more effective everyday sort of thing. Okay,
that's great, because at the bottom of that barrel is
you chose to start meditating or deep breathing. But that's

(44:42):
exactly where you've just looked at the whole film with
the last three minutes, because you look at two people
who have both decided to do that because, like the
doc told them, their blood pressure is getting too high
in their family since they're too irritable, and they both
decide they should do this because they've read it works
and all of that, and it just doesn't work for

(45:03):
one of them because they can't relax. Why is it
they can't relax because their genetics plus whatever, plus early
environment makes for a default load network that's a little
bit too hyperactive for their frontal cortex to tell it.
Stop thinking about the rent, stop thinking about like the
bills you need to pay, and just focus on your breathing.

(45:26):
Or because two people are both equally in need of that,
and only one of them does it because the other
one has no respect for reading and has never read
about it, or grew up in a way where they
hated their parents and they hated their teachers, and they
as a result are like borner rebte by choice against

(45:46):
anyone who's telling them anything that supposedly is good for them.
So screw that. It's at every step of the way.
You don't just need to explain how it is the
person decided I want to start doing deep breathing and
mindfulness because this is a much better way than like
taking beta blockers or something. You need to explain how

(46:09):
they found out about that. Why do they learn how
to read? Not everyone gets that luck. Why do they
believe what they read? Why is it that they were
capable of extrapolating from this work for the Dalai Lama
to doing this extrapa sort of speculative predicting the future
kind of thing of whoa, maybe it'll work for me.

(46:30):
Where'd they get that sense of efficacy. Maybe they're depressed
as hell and they say this could never possibly work
for me because they're learned helpless. Okay, where did that
come from? Why don't they wind up having lower blood
blood pressure from mindfulness breathing because they're Sarah Jung transporter
and their trauma and child, and all of that make
them depression prone, and they're less likely to say, wow,

(46:52):
I'm going to cheat that to you because that's going
to work, because their proclivity is, nah, I'm screw up,
or I will be able to like be disciplined enough,
or or where that choice come from.

Speaker 2 (47:08):
Yeah, look, I'm with you, Like it's you keep explaining
to me why there's no magical free will, and you
don't have to convince me of that. You don't have
to convince me.

Speaker 1 (47:15):
That there's also no logical free will if you don't
allow yourself to stop at the I decided to do that,
I intended to do that.

Speaker 2 (47:26):
But you know, you have this tendency to break something
very complex, you know, down into its most like atomic parts.
And I think you know, it's an interesting question, you know,
with talk about human quality, right, how are you going
to break that down for me? You know, like the
emergent property of what it means to be human that experience. Yes,

(47:47):
you could start going and describing to me all the
constituent biological parts, but there is a an emergence of
the biological organism of the experience of being human. You
know that level analysis just doesn't really, it's not satisfactory
to the organism experiencing the whole gestant.

Speaker 1 (48:05):
Except every now and then one of those little biological
constituent parts is not so little. Why did this person
do this? WHOA, We just found out that they underwent
the biological phenomenon of being shuttled from foster home to
foster home when they were eight years old and sexually
abused in the process. And if you want to reframe

(48:27):
the world in my like narrow vocabulary, that was a
biological process because it epits genetically screwed up it. And
that's why they just robbed the liquor store, and you,
growing up with piano lessons in the suburbs, did not.

Speaker 2 (48:45):
Yeah, and I think that's actually a very good reason
to show more compassion to even very angry people, you know,
you know, the people that we were supposed to be
primed to dislike, you know. And I think that you
make a very good case for why we could use
a lot more compassion for each other. So yeah, again,

(49:05):
you don't have to convince me that we don't have
magical free will. I guess I'm trying to find a
way into this where I suppose the kind of agency
I describe you just simply would not there's no universe
in which you're going to conceptualize that as a free
will worth wanting. And I think maybe maybe that's just
a that's I need to accept that.

Speaker 1 (49:23):
Where it's getting there at the last minute, because we've
constructed a world where we are willing to judge and
punish and reward people based on what they did in
the last three minutes. Wow, you helped the old lady
cross the street. Wow, you pulled the trigger. And we're

(49:43):
perfectly happy to run society on that and make people punished,
undergo punishment or a reward for things they're not responsible for.
I mean, in terms of edge cases, we've gotten to
the point that we can figure out, okay, okay, that
hurricane probably wasn't caused by an old, toothless woman who

(50:05):
lives by herself, and thus we decide that she's a witch,
and okay, okay, we've decided what seemed intuitively just obvious
three hundred years ago, which.

Speaker 2 (50:16):
Is, what is that? What in the world? What in
the world?

Speaker 1 (50:23):
That's that's our national geographic clock on the hour. It
makes a different animal sound, except years ago we dropped
it and thus when it's like the flamingos, we hear
the lion roaring, and we totally screwed up our kids
zoology sense. But we have to deal with the fact
that three hundred years ago, people just as smart as us,

(50:44):
and just as compassionate and just as willing to say, nonetheless,
this is the nature of the world, had a very
high chance of saying it's okay for four year olds
to be worked to death in factories, or some people
are meant for slavery, and in fact you're doing them
must say a favor by doing it because they couldn't
take care of themselves. And we now know three hundred

(51:06):
years later that that isn't the case, and we just
have a completely different set of intuitions right now, If
somebody like skips the partying in the dorm and studies
all night and as a result they've got a better
GPA than everybody else, we haven't reached the slavery doesn't

(51:27):
make sense state of saying there's a reason why some
people party all night and some people and that's great,
make this guy. Let this guy be more likely to
become a doctor at the other end of it after
they graduate. But they didn't earn it, They're not more
deserving of their high or low GPA.

Speaker 2 (51:46):
And that's a super interesting argument concerning my earlier work
on redefining intelligence beyond IQ and the kind of structures
we have for gifted education and giving certain people access
and other people not having access. I think that's a
really really interesting and uh and and quite quite valid point.
I'm trying to think of specific examples to give you

(52:07):
just because I want to see I really want to
see the way the world. The way you see the
world is what I really want to want to do here,
So the.

Speaker 1 (52:13):
Way I sure again emphasizing the way I managed, with
a great deal of effort to see the world about
one percent of the time.

Speaker 2 (52:21):
Yeah, yeah, fair enough. This is so I'm thinking about
the case of, you know, a person goes an autopilot
for for most of their addiction. Let's say they're addicted
to alcohol, and they feel like one day they just
woke up and they're like, you know what, Let's say
they reached rock bottom, you know, and they're like, yes,

(52:43):
all these things in my calls will chain have led
to the moment of me hitting rock bottom. But I
am making this choice to take the very long, strenuous.
It's not that the decision they're making this moment caused
the magical change, but it sets off a chain of
events for you years to come. It might take years
before they get to a point where they feel happier

(53:04):
about where they are with this their relationship with this addiction.
So these processes can take a long time. But don't
you certainly you would agree there are these these conscious
processes and top down approaches that can influence the bottom
up aspects. But I suppose you just you just can't
conceptualize that as as a as a as a type
of free will. Is that right?

Speaker 1 (53:25):
A type of free will that has occurred independent of
all those other influences and has the unprovable capacity to
reach down and change the very nature of those components.

Speaker 2 (53:38):
Have some capacity? Yeah, well it does. It seems to
me like it does have some capacity to influence. Not completely,
but there is you know, you just you make a
very strong argument in your book you're about there being zero.
You know, I don't view it as all or nothing.
I view I see I view free will as a continuum,
and I actually think that there's a big difference between

(53:59):
the coma to the free will that a comatose patient has,
the free will that a non comatose patient the free
will that someone who has a full you know, set
of like a psychopath. That is a mutual interest of
both of us. The science neuroscience of psychopaths. You know,
I think they have less free will. I would argue
in a lot of ways because there are systems for
learning about reward and punishment is altered than from someone else.

(54:22):
And I think that that that influences the free will
that that humans care about care about.

Speaker 3 (54:28):
But again we're at that that point definition and yeah,
and the effect at the end of the day, it's okay,
you want to be believe in free will and you're
going to find it to be too depressing otherwise or whatever.
You know, be happy, your brother, and I just want
you to do okay in life, so you could believe
in that most you know, if you have this very

(54:50):
reductive sort of definition, A very large percentage of Earth's
misery is caused by our belief that people should be
help respond for things they were not responsible for. You
really aren't a sub human because you were born into
this ethnic group that my culture has decided has no pain.

(55:12):
Sensations for years and years, so it's okay for us
to do an Armenian genocide, or there's really not an
explanation why if you have felt lonely your whole life
because you have an off putting personality, Like that's a
whole other realm in which we run the world on
the notion that that type of pain is like logical,

(55:35):
that the person in some way caused that, in some
way is responsible. And maybe what we're getting to is
like this where I sort of try to get to
at the end, which is if the notion that there's
no free will like depresses the hell out of you,
because oh my god, I've got an I View League affiliation,

(55:59):
and I worked damn hard. I could have become a
drug addict because like all sorts of friends from my
upper middle class suburb wound up experimenting with ecstasy at
some point, I worked incredibly hard, or like, do you
have any idea how many hours of sleep deprivation I
had to endure to become a cardiothoracic surgeon, or to

(56:22):
like remember the homeless are it?

Speaker 1 (56:26):
They count to you? And to do something nice for them,
Like if those are the things that you feel bummed
out about if there's no free will, By definition, you
were one of the lucky ones, because what you are
facing is the possibility that you did not really earn
the things for which you have been rewarded and privileged

(56:49):
and gifted. But for most people, what life is about
is it's a world run on myths of this being just,
and the pains in your life are due to the
fact that you wound up having the wrong variant of
this gene, or your face wasn't symmetrical enough, or you

(57:12):
were too short, or you were too loud and raucous,
or you were too had too much body odor, or
your makeup of NMD eight glutamate receptors with some that
you could never get a good score on a standardized
test would for most people. What you're explaining is it
was bad luck. It's not because you have a shitty

(57:33):
soul or you lack self discipline. So in a sense,
it's almost by definition, anyone who's going to go out
and buy a book and god awful long book that's
going on about minutia, and they're probably spending a substantial
part of their life feeling rewarded for things that they
had no control over, rather than feeling punished or despised

(57:56):
or ignored for things they had no control over. So
by definition, I'm writing for the wrong audience because anyone
who would read this book is going to feel bummed
out by the notion of it. And for most of
humanity who aren't reading the book because they have no
running water and they're in the middle of South Sudan,

(58:16):
yeah they're not going to find out. But for most
people on Earth, responsibility is the incorrect attribution of things
that justify on happiness in life and onhappiness that we
are willing to hand out based on our belief that

(58:37):
people had control over things which they did not. That's
most of the human experience.

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(01:00:31):
This is so relevant to politics. You know, you have
the left over here arguing that everything is the fault
of the system, and then you have the right over
here arguing that every people need to just take more
responsibility for their actions. Both of them are just yelling
each other over both of these extreme perspectives. What is
the implication of your view of free will for reconciling

(01:00:52):
both of those perspectives.

Speaker 1 (01:00:55):
Well, sweep them both out the door, and here being
you know, meet and Sam Harris. We're like so far
out on the lunatic fringe of this as you keep
coming back to, but not whatsoever, come on none. But
it's the only possible logical extension if you take things
to where it takes you. But where does this supply?

Speaker 2 (01:01:15):
I don't agree with that. I don't agree with that.
So you say that so confidently? You say that so confidently.

Speaker 1 (01:01:20):
I say so confidently because it's true and I can't
function with it. Ninety ohe percent of the time, So like,
I understand that, but what does this do to everything?
The interesting thing is, not only does it make it
seem like a totally radical thing, the criminal justice system
makes no sense whatsoever and has to be totally gotten
rid of. Fortunately, we could still run society in a

(01:01:43):
way so the dangerous people aren't dangerous. We can keep
them from being dangerous, but don't preach them about how
they have a terrible soul or temperament like whoa. The
whole criminal justice system needs to be thrown out. Equally,
so the entire system of meritocracy has to be thrown
out because that makes us little sense. Yeah, make sure

(01:02:03):
your neurosurgeon is like competence that they've actually learned, like
how to do their thing like keep us safe from
murderers running around in the street, and keep us safe
from neurosurgeons who were picked randomly, because after all, one
of us dessert. Nonetheless, both make no sense whatsoever, and
there's something terribly wrong if the end product of it

(01:02:24):
is neurosurgeons or any of the rest of us who
would listen to something like this feel like we have
earned a higher consideration of our needs and well being
than any other person out there.

Speaker 2 (01:02:39):
Yeah, there's a humbling there's a humbling spirit to what
you're saying. And I like that. I really like that spirit.
I think that there's so many deep iblications of this,
you know, the question of who is responsible for any outcome,
you know, because it usually most no outcomes, just the calls,
the factors, just one organism. So you know, you had

(01:03:01):
me thinking earlier about this idea of statistical guilt. Is
that what you called it? Yeah, yeah, I can. I
can't stop thinking about that because it's the first time
I heard that phrase. But I think it's so interesting
because there's some interesting research talking about in codependent relationships,
whose fault is it and and and the reality is
that it's both their faults, I mean false And even
the word fault is interesting here because what gets tricky

(01:03:24):
is people say, don't victim blame, you know, don't victim
blame by saying that the one victim, you know, the
viewing the world as though there's always in every situation
one victim and one purpetrayer, as though like there can't
be two perpetrators at the same time, as though there
can't be two victims at the same you know, but
the emergent sort of explanation statistic statistical guilt. I love that.

(01:03:46):
I'm going to be using that a lot now, is
that you know, the thing about statistical guilt is that's
not victim blaming, right, but it's but it is being
honest that there are a lot of it's a system
of factors that have come together to predict one hundred
percent accuracy if we knew, if we were a La
Mark demon, you know, predicted that that that that these

(01:04:07):
two would be fighting in this relationship. But to say
that it's entirely the husband's fault and zero percent, it's
like from your from this perspective, doesn't seem to it
doesn't break it breaks down that sort of way of thinking, right.

Speaker 1 (01:04:22):
Oh, completely yeah. But what it also gets you to
is it's not both of their faults. It's not both
of the and it's not both of the perpetrator's faults,
and it's not the overachiever's wondrousness like its just Hopscotts
is over all of this stuff because a lot of

(01:04:43):
that is premised on the notion that we're trying to
figure out a fair way of distributing responsibility. Oh sometimes yeah, I.

Speaker 2 (01:04:53):
Know this is true. This is tricky because you know
the Republicans, they love to call people who don't succeed lazy. Right,
So the opposite end of taking credit is, you know,
a blaming the lack of achievement for under for laziness, right,
And well, you're saying, you can't you can't, you know,
to have someone take credit for achievment, But you also
can't have someone you know call them a loser because

(01:05:17):
they didn't succeed.

Speaker 1 (01:05:18):
And at the same time, like our nice stereotypical leftists
are just as incorrect when they're saying and this person
who has just like spent two years volunteering for Doctors
Without Borders has a tremendous capacity for empathy. That makes
it's good. It's good they turned out that way and
do what.

Speaker 2 (01:05:38):
They can't take credit for having that empathy.

Speaker 1 (01:05:40):
But they're not a better person or a worse person
because of it. And they shouldn't have like a higher
likelihood of having access to a vaccine that will stop
a pandemic caused virus they didn't turn it.

Speaker 2 (01:05:57):
It's so interesting. I really am trying very hard to
see the world through your eyes and think through the
logical implications of it, because I think there is like
I think there's so much great grains, so much truth here,
and I think about but I'm not like one hundred
percent with you, you know. I think about grit and your
whole chapter on grit and this is, this is a
trait I've studied with Angela Duckworth and you know, and

(01:06:19):
I and one one big myth is that well, IQ
can't be changed, but GRIT can be changed much more
than IQ. That that one, I argue. I tell people,
what the hell are you talking about? Both GRIT and
IQ have about the same heritability coefficient. I mean, there's
there's no evidence suggesting that one of the traits is
more valuable than the other. But they always say intelligence

(01:06:39):
you can't change, but you could. So I think we're weird.
We're agreement on that, pet Peeve, right, But what you know,
the thing if I did, if I, if the I
being this organism here decides to expend effort against what
it wants to, you know, it doesn't feel it right,

(01:07:01):
Like I wake up in the morning and I don't
feel like going to the gym, you know, but I
fight against that motivation. And even if it's causing my
organism pain to make it to the gym. I exert
the effort, you know, the time on task that makes
me more likely that tomorrow I might be more likely

(01:07:22):
actually to wake up being more motivated to go to
the gym. See I view that as a as an
important form of human cybernetic free will. But I guess
you don't.

Speaker 1 (01:07:34):
Yeah, you can't take credit for why you have got
a frontal cortex because more self disciplined than that of
the person next to you, because it had something to
do starting with like your mother's socioeconomic status when you
were a fetus. That's not a big explanatory part of it,
but all of it together. You didn't choose to have

(01:07:55):
a frontal cortex that's better at ignoring dopaminergic anticipatory off
saying let's go to something fun instead.

Speaker 2 (01:08:03):
But you don't think you can't give complete credit. You
can't give like an A plus credit for it. I agree,
but by you're saying zero zero, so there's like no
credit you're willing to give that organism for deciding to
overcome its inertia in that moment to put you on
a better path for self development in the future. See

(01:08:25):
you don't. You don't I would give credit to an
organism for doing that. I probably would.

Speaker 1 (01:08:29):
But would you thus blame an organism that decides to
do that and can't pull it off? Would you decide
they were that's controversial. They don't have self discipline. They
it's the same thing you've framed. Oh, it's false dichotomy
between like emotional.

Speaker 2 (01:08:45):
Intelligence and IQ or or IQ IQU.

Speaker 1 (01:08:48):
And grit and yeah, and you can show that in
terms of heritability stuff. I would take the sort of
a larger way of saying the exact same thing, grit
and self discipline or lack of and all of that
is made out of the same stuff as the rest
of the universe is made out of the same stuff
as why you're faster at answering questions on Jeopardy than

(01:09:10):
the next person. It's made of the same like it's
not fairy dust, it's made of atoms. And it's the
same pathways that not only give us better or worse
natural attributes, it's the same pathways that then determine whether
we take advantage to them or squander them, or or

(01:09:33):
like never miss an opportunity, to miss an opportunity or
get our nose to the grinds. It's the same stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:09:41):
Yeah, I really hope we're not talking past each other
because I find myself listening to you, and I find
myself listening to you and agree with you, and then
making a point that disagrees with you, but I actually
agree with what you're saying. You know, our actions have
consequences in the world, obviously, okay, and our thoughts don't
necessarily have direct consequences on the world. Some people have

(01:10:02):
argued that our free will is in that free won't
is in that, you know, our ability to inhibit our impulses,
and and and and some of that is we have
some uniquely human capacities for that kind of putting the
breaks on. You know, lions don't seem to have as
good of a capacity to put the brakes on as
some humans. Some humans are worse than some lions. But anyway, but.

Speaker 1 (01:10:26):
We really don't want to understand why we're less likely
to predate the old woman crossing the street than what
a lion. We're not interested in, like why we think
in redwood trees and crabgrass, don't we're trying to make
sense within species and forces us back into this this realm.

Speaker 2 (01:10:47):
Yeah, I think that's what affords us by viewing free
will as a continuum, you know, and being able and
giving people the hope and optimism that they can make
changes in their lives that fundamentally change their agency in
ways that give us a fretty will with wanting that
the organism cares about. But I guess you don't see in.

Speaker 1 (01:11:07):
La No, And like I'm going to get off this
and my wife is going to say, how was it.
I was going to say, oh, it was a total blast,
totally fun guy to talk with. And as a result
of that, if I know that you're in the car
that's trying to merge in the lane in front of
me three and a half years from now, I'm more
likely to get let you merge in. And if we

(01:11:28):
went on a mammoth hunt together, I would like make
sure you got the best piece first, because well, totally
fun talking with this guy. He was great. But you
don't deserve to get to merge more than anybody else
or get the bigger piece of mammoth meat. It's not
by chance that you wound up this way, and it's
not by chance that I wound up a valuing you

(01:11:49):
being this way and like it's just down from there.

Speaker 2 (01:11:54):
I think that's what that's there's something really fundamentally, it
gets really emotional about this that I will want to
take out of it because you know, so my personal history,
which is really quick, like I no one believed in
my potential for anything when I was a kid. I
was in special education for a learning disability in auditory
and they all thought I was dumb. And I decided again,

(01:12:15):
and you were rethinking the word decide here today, But
I decided in ninth grade that I didn't want to
be a victim of the system anymore. That I didn't
want to I didn't want people to just view me
as one dimensional work through my lens of my learning disability.
And I really made a lot of efforts to take
myself out of special education learn I studied extra hard,

(01:12:35):
Like maybe I was not gifted with the genetic genes
that make learning easy, but I really put in a
lot of effort to learn better. Now, so it's an
interesting question to this day, do I take yeah, because
I do, Like obviously I'm like, yeah, I take some
credit for you know, and it's called the hero's journey, right,
But you're kind of smacking down the hero's journey, you're saying,

(01:12:58):
you're you're really taking the hero's journey. You're sub it.
You know exactly, you're no free will and construct even
constructing that narrative. Yes, and you're saying.

Speaker 1 (01:13:09):
It's a bummer for you because when you decided it worked,
and it's not. It's it's not a bummer for somebody
where you explain why it is that even though they
decided and they knew this my only hope for a
happier life, it didn't work. They're not less deserving than
less deserving consideration or any of that. And like, just

(01:13:32):
as one of the with those foreign neurals have done
the exact same thing. If you had, by sheer random
luck been raised and I don't know Tehran or so
with parents who are iyatotas, they would have said, this
is your fate because you have a bad soul, or
or you were cursed with this inability to learn how

(01:13:54):
to read well because you did something terribly I don't know.
If you're born in the middle of block seen this,
you could very readily have parents who have that same
attributional system and you would never have said, hey, I'm
going to start trying to pay attention board Before you
know it, I'm going to like have a podcast some day,
just that one thing your neurons would have done something

(01:14:16):
different three and a half minutes ago. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:14:19):
I have a lot of empathy for what you're saying.
I like that look, I like the spirit of what
you just said. But I also think that there's a
certain free will in us trying to help people who
don't have those advantages. I mean, there's a reason why
you know, I wrote this book is supporting creative and
students with worrying difficulties because there are science showing that
there's things we can do to take people who have
had unfortunate circumstances and give them greater opportunities to be

(01:14:42):
in a position to have the free will worth wanting,
is what I'm saying. But I guess you just don't
see it that way, and and and part of me
today is just wanting to really understand the way you
see the world so that I can see what I think.
What do I even think? I'm open to changing my thoughts,
you know, well, I guess I have no choice in
I'm according to you.

Speaker 1 (01:15:00):
But I like one of my hearers Wilma Rudolph. Wilmam
Rudolph in like nineteen sixty was the fastest human woman alive,
and she got like umpteen gold medals. And she grew
up as one of twenty two children of a sharecropper
in Tennessee and had polio. She was in lake braces

(01:15:24):
until she decided at some point in adolescence that I'm
going to overcome this. She's the fastest woman of that.
Oh my god, she I so admire her, and that
is so so so wrong. It's a good thing, though,
if in part as a result of admiring her, I

(01:15:45):
internalized and said, wow, maybe I can be more accomplished
or show more discipline. It's a crappy thing if I
decide that thus she is more deserving of being left
on the lifeboat than somebody else.

Speaker 2 (01:15:59):
Yeah, familiar merits. So what's the alternative to meritocracy? As
you see it?

Speaker 1 (01:16:03):
Let competent people do the things that require their sort
of competence. Let dangerous people be in a position where
they can't be dangerous. But it shouldn't be all that
different from if your kid is sneezing a lot, keep
them home from kindergarten. That day, they can still play
with their toys and you still tell them you love

(01:16:25):
them to bits. They're just sneezing, So let's make sure
that they can't like damage the world where they're sneezing
propensities and try to deal with this like sneezing wave
that's ruining society. By getting tough on sneezers, you know,
it protect us from stuff. Have competent people doing the

(01:16:46):
things we need to have done competently, and maybe if
you really need to motivate them, it's okay for you
to say good job, nice going, or maybe give them
a better salary than everyone else, sir, or resources to
do more of what it is that they're good at,

(01:17:06):
but not because they earned to have their needs be
more worthy of consideration than that of any other human.

Speaker 2 (01:17:17):
I like that, and that's.

Speaker 1 (01:17:19):
The only possible outcome, and I can't do it. I
can't think that way almost all the time. So yeah,
it seems totally crazy and impossible, but it's gotta be.

Speaker 2 (01:17:31):
I remember you gave a talk at the learning and
brain or no, not learning, but there was some education conference.
I'm blank. Now we have a picture together. I guess
it took I was like, I came up to you,
I was like, I'm such a big fan of yours.
So and I realized that we have similar views about education.
So could it be that one of the implications of
this is moving away you said meritocracy, But also I

(01:17:53):
would just say, such a such a standardized testing obsessed
culture where we reward with you know, the ability to
get entrance into universities, to be able to get jobs,
you know, how they performed on these tests, which there are.
There is a substantial genetic component to I mean, we've

(01:18:14):
published data on this on the you know, predicting the
g factor of standardized achievement test scores, you know. And
that's controversial to say that in some circles, but it's
relevant to this conversation. I've argued for more of a
self actualization focused education system where we really honor each
the sacredness of each individual child's journey, you know. And

(01:18:36):
I guess you would just say that journey is not
freely chosen, and it's just like almost irrelevant than to
the practical thing. But I think we probably both agree
on the you know, the free will thing, aside that
we need a major shift in our education system.

Speaker 1 (01:18:52):
Yeah, and not just recognize that cheap people get different
SAH scores, and there's got something to do with their
genes over which they had no control, But just as
documenta bely, it has something to do with the fact
that they grew up in a neighborhood with far, far
more liquor stores than grocery stores that sold fresh food.

(01:19:13):
That's a pretty gate break predictor of someone who's going
to be antisocial and some of their behaviors by this
time they're twenty. Yeah, all of that stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:19:23):
So if you take two people who take two kids,
one has a knack for learning, comes very easy, and
they never have to do their homework ever. Very rarely
do they need to read the book, and they ace
all the tests. You take person two, child too, who
is struggles so much but decides they're going to put
in fifty times in the effort, et cetera. You would
say that child too does not deserve any more credit

(01:19:44):
than child one, is what you would argue, right.

Speaker 1 (01:19:47):
Even though every every echevar instinct tells us to give
more to do. We're educators, and oh the one who
works the way up and Horatio alcheor yourself up on
your bootstraps. That's like the most egregiously illogical thing I
do in my sleep.

Speaker 2 (01:20:07):
I mean, if that child is their organism, though, yeah,
I feel like the organism can take I guess the
question is what does it mean to take credit for something?
You can't say that like, well, that was that other
organism that did it. Certainly it is this organism that
did it. So in one sense you can take credit,
but in another sense you shouldn't take too much credit.

Speaker 1 (01:20:31):
Yeah, it's like that great John Searles quote that I
have somewhere in the book Berkeley Philosopher, where he says,
so what am I supposed to do? I go into
a restaurant and the waiter comes up and wants me
to order, and I say, well, I'm a determinist. I'm
just going to lean back and see what I order.
It can't work that way. It's unseparable.

Speaker 2 (01:20:52):
You're not a fatalist.

Speaker 4 (01:20:53):
You're not a fatalist, no, because that's like the two
biggest things is, oh, efforts and tenacity or lack thereof
is a different flavor of thing than your natural attributes.

Speaker 1 (01:21:06):
And the other one is if we have no free will,
that means everything is is nothing can change.

Speaker 2 (01:21:12):
Nothing can anything that.

Speaker 1 (01:21:13):
And when you look at the mechanisms by which like
change happens, by which someone who was it whatever and
is now an ex white supremacist or whatever or any
any it's the same. It's a mechanistic explanation.

Speaker 2 (01:21:32):
Beautiful. I'll end here today, even though you know we
we have quibbles on definitions of what what we want
to include in the free will. I'll read a tweet
that I wrote a couple years ago that even Sam
Hiris agreed with, and I feel like you're you're I think, well,
I think we'll both we'll both end on this agreement. Well,
I could be wrong, even though we probably don't have
ultimate free will. And that's really what your book tackles,

(01:21:54):
in my opinion, is ultimate free will. We have witness consciousness.
You literally have a front row seat the unfolding of
your life story. That's reason enough to stick around. Your
life story is sure to have twist and turns you
could never have predicted. Do you agree with that?

Speaker 1 (01:22:09):
Absolutely?

Speaker 2 (01:22:11):
And so that's one reason to stick around and to
enjoy the preciousness of human existence.

Speaker 1 (01:22:16):
Because no matter how much we're made out of adams,
you know, the right kind of music is still like
the greatest thing ever.

Speaker 2 (01:22:25):
And you can't take that human experience away from us.
You know, it's still it's still a transcendent experiences make
life worth living in a lot of ways. Yep, thank
you Robert so much for being my podcast. This is
a sign of respect for you that I asked you
so many challenging questions because I usually am not disengaged.
I'm usually not disengaged with my guests, so I have

(01:22:50):
such deep respect for you. That's what this shows.

Speaker 1 (01:22:53):
That's great. Well, this this has been a total blast.
Any any time you want to r wrestle some more
of this was so that's good. It's just fun.

Speaker 2 (01:23:01):
Thanks, I love it. Thank you. Thanks for listening to
this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to
react in some way to something you heard, I encourage
you to join in the discussion at thusycology podcast dot
com or on our YouTube page The Psychology Podcast. We

(01:23:24):
also put up some videos of some episodes on our
YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check that out.
Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show,
and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior,
and creativity.

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