Robert Sopolsky, welcome to Within Reason.

Thanks for having me on.

So on a scale of 1 to 10,

just how bored are you of people making jokes about free will

to the effect of whenever you do anything they say,

hey, it's not your fault, you couldn't help it.

Oh, I don't know.

I've been telling people for a long, long time

that I don't think there's any free will,

so I've been hearing that as a response for a long time so by now it has

sort of a sentimental nostalgia so that's good.

Sure well I mean although what we're talking about today really isn't any kind of joke, I can understand why it is somebody who hasn't really thought about it before that much, it might sound like one.

I mean, the most recent book, Determined, is essentially an attack, a philosophical attack on what might be considered

one of the most fundamental elements of being a human, of being alive, of being a conscious agent, and that is our ability

to make choices.

It's something that I've spoken about on my YouTube channel

before.

So I think that people listening will probably

have a vague idea of the arguments surrounding the existence or non-existence of free will but your book kind of takes two parts.

There's the part one here's here's the bad news and then there's the part two of here's what we can do about it or here's how we might respond to this realization that there is no freedom.

So I think it would be worth going over the first part just a little bit because everybody has a slightly different

approach to arguing why there is no free will. There are lots of different ways to do it, but hopefully

...