This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute.

For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.

So that the topic of free will, I mean, I can approach that in so many ways,

but I suspect that you will have encountered certain challenges to the belief in free will, particularly from the side of science,

and particularly brain science and, you know, I mean, brain MRIs, you know, and brain scans that

seem to show there's no free will. That's sort of the claim. And I'll come to some of that

in a moment. So I just want to show you how one free will, that's sort of the claim. And I'll come to some of that in a moment.

So I just want to show you how one can think about that, part of which is to take a step back from that, not just looking through the microscope, but the brain may lose the bigger

picture there.

And so just to begin that, I just want to ask a you know, more cultural and political kind of question first, perhaps,

not a social kind of question.

Because there are two, we talk about freedom.

Freedom is also a political term, and we want to think what that means.

And if you look at our culture, choice and freedom is actually a big thing.

People want their autonomy to be acknowledged. They want many things in their life to be there,

free choice that should not be interfered with by any kind of authority. We talk about free speech, for example. This is Berkeley campus after all, right? So there's a lot of freedom in that as well, so much so that we even think that's a very high value, if not the highest one. Choice is sort of what embodies our autonomy and it seems our dignity as free people. And so these kind

of preferences that we find so important have something to do with freedom, it seems. And yet,

let's say we have all these choices. and there are a lot of questions about that.

But let's say we do indeed have all these choices and the freedom of our preferences.

Then there is still the question, what do we do with our freedom?

Now we have all the freedom of choice. Where do you go with that? What do you really want? Why is that

even a question? If freedom and free choice were an end in itself, this question would not

...