0:00 In the early 1800s, the French scholar Pierre-Simon Laplace imagined a being that knew the exact position and momentum of every single atom in the universe.0:11 Whoa.0:12 Okay, so like a cosmic supercomputer.0:14 Exactly.0:15 And his whole point was, if this being—this "demon," he called it—had all that data, it could calculate the past and the future with perfect, absolute accuracy.0:27 Every event, every collision, every thought.0:30 So from the Big Bang onward, it's all just...0:34 billiard balls on a table.0:36 Right.0:36 Which kind of leaves no room for us to choose anything.0:40 It feels like the perfect next step after last week's episode, where we committed to wrestling with one big question from every angle.0:51 I mean, this might be the biggest one there is.0:54 Yeah, no kidding.0:55 And the thing is, science, for the most part, has sort of backed up Laplace's general idea.1:02 You know, cause and effect.1:04 Physical laws.1:05 The universe seems to run on a very predictable, deterministic script.1:11 We're just...1:12 part of that script.1:13 And that leads to those brain scan studies, which are so unsettling.1:18 The ones that show brain activity corresponding to a decision—like lifting your left or right hand—up to several seconds BEFORE the person is consciously aware of having made the choice.1:32 Oh, the Libet experiments.1:34 Yeah.1:35 It’s like your subconscious brain flips a coin, and then a moment later your conscious mind goes, "Ah, yes, I have decided to choose heads!" Right!1:46 It’s just taking credit for it after the fact.1:49 But...1:50 but that just feels so profoundly wrong.1:53 My entire experience of being alive is the feeling of making choices.1:58 I am choosing these words.2:00 I chose to have coffee this morning.2:03 The subjective feeling is...2:05 it’s EVERYTHING.2:06 It's the ultimate conflict, isn't it?2:09 The world as described by physics versus the world as described by...2:14 living in it.2:15 And what does it do to morality?2:17 If everything is just a long chain of cause and effect, what does it even mean to hold someone responsible for a crime?2:26 You can't.2:27 The whole architecture of our legal and ethical systems—praise, blame, justice—it all rests on the assumption that people could have done otherwise.2:38 If a person's actions were baked in since the dawn of time, then blaming them is like blaming a rock for falling.2:47 Mm-hm.2:47 And that's the core of the libertarian free will argument.2:52 Not political libertarianism, but the philosophical kind.2:56 It says that for things like meaning and responsibility to exist, we HAVE to be a special case.3:03 We have to be able to initiate new causal chains ourselves.3:08 Okay, so then you get the compatibilists, who come in and try to, you know, have their cake and eat it too.3:16 The great peacemakers of philosophy.3:19 Their argument is, basically, that we're defining "free will" the wrong way.3:24 How so?3:25 They say, look, freedom isn't about being able to violate the laws of physics.3:31 Freedom is simply being able to act on your desires without being coerced.3:36 If you wanted to leave the room, and nobody chained the door shut, you were free to leave.3:43 Wait, hold on.3:44 That feels like a total cop-out.3:47 It completely ignores the question of where the wanting came from in the first place.3:53 If my desire to leave the room was itself determined by my genetics, my upbringing, what I had for breakfast...4:01 then what kind of freedom is that?4:04 It's a much smaller, more modest kind of freedom.4:08 But maybe it's the only kind that's actually possible.4:12 It re-frames the question.4:14 The opposite of "free" isn't "determined," it's "coerced." And...4:19 I mean, that's not nothing.4:21 No, it's not nothing, but it doesn't satisfy that deep, gut-level intuition that I am the author.4:28 That I'm not just a ridiculously complex puppet whose strings trace all the way back to the start of the universe.4:37 I know.4:37 We're stuck between a universe that seems to run on rails, and a mind that insists it's the one driving.4:45 And we can’t seem to prove either one is an illusion.4:49 What does it say about us that we find the deterministic view so...4:54 horrifying?4:55 Maybe the belief in free will is itself a determined, evolutionary trait.5:00 The story we HAVE to tell ourselves to function.5:04 Ohhh.5:04 So believing we're free is the one thing we can't help but do.5:09 That's a twist.5:10 Yeah.5:11 We're machines that have to live and act as if we're not.5:15 And that paradox...5:16 I just don't know what to do with it.5:19 Maybe the only real choice we have is whether to think about it or not.
