This is made in philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

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Philosophy bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.

One way to exercise my freedom would be to act unpredictably, perhaps not to have a typical

introduction to a philosophy Bites interview, or to cut it abruptly short mid-sentence.

That's the view of the famous philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett.

He also believes that humans can have free will even if the world is determinist.

In other words, governed by causal laws.

And he...

Daniel Dennett, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Delated to be with you.

The topic we're going to focus on is free will worth wanting.

That seems a slightly strange way into the free will topic, which is usually a question of do we have free will,

not whether we wanted or what's worth

wanting. How did you come at it from this point of view?

Well I came to realize that many of the issues that philosophers love to talk about when the topic

was free will were just irrelevant to anything

important. There's a sort of bait and switch that goes on. People get excited and

worried about free will. I don't think any topic is more anxiety-provoking or more genuinely

interesting to everyday people than free will, but then philosophers replace the interesting

issues with technical metaphysical issues which are simply not that important.

...