Here you are listening to this show.

You made a conscious, willful decision to download this episode, to put your earbuds in, to press play.

At any moment, you could decide you've had enough. You can press stop, delete this

episode, never hear from me again. Nobody is stopping you. There's no grand force in the universe

that is conspiring to compel you. You made of choice. One of thousands of choices you've made today. You have

free will. You have the ability to influence events around you, the capability to affect your

words and actions and the responsibility to be your own moral agent. But hold on, isn't there this thing called physics?

Like, isn't the whole point of physics to build a causal structure to the universe? If we were to

zoom into your brain as you're making a choice, all we would see is sodium ions wiggling back and

forth and some electrical signals passing here and there, that's all physics. And we have

laws of physics that describe and predict how it all goes down. So does physics destroy free will?

If it's all just forces and laws and actions and reactions going all the way down to a subatomic level,

then is what we call free will just an

illusion? We have no choice but to try to answer this question. Get it? It's a free will.

Joe. Listen, if there's no free will, then I'm not really responsible for the quality of my jokes, right?

Anyway, check this out. There are some experiments that just make you stop, make you

reconsider everything you've ever known, the kind of experiment where you just need to step

outside into the cold air with your favorite beer or favorite kind of cheese or perhaps both

and just stare at nothing for a while. And for me, one of those experiments was conducted by

Benjamin Libet in the 1980s.

He wired people up and asked them to just randomly flick their wrists whenever they feel like it.

Totally random, totally their choice.

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