Episode 1: Brains, Robots, and Free Will (Free Will and Morality Pt. 1)

Very Bad Wizards

Tamler Sommers & David Pizarro

Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.8 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 30 August 2012

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Dave and Tamler start out talking about the new wave of skepticism about free will and moral responsibility in the popular press from people like Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne.

Neuroscience figures heavily in their arguments, but Dave and Tamler agree that neuroscientific data adds little of substance to the case other than telling us what we already know: human beings are natural biological entities. Dave also accuses Tamler of being a hipster philosopher for abandoning a view once it got popular.

Next, we talk about what kind freedom we need to have in order to deserve blame and punishment. Do we need to create ourselves out of the swamps of nothingness? Dave comes out as a Star Trek nerd and asks whether we're all, in the end, like Data the android. They also wonder whether a belief in free will is all that's keeping us from having sex with our dogs.

Finally, Dave grills Tamler about his new book on the differences in attitudes about free will and moral responsibility across cultures. After seeing how long they've been carrying on, they then agree to talk about all the stuff they left out in the next episode.

Links

Coyne, J. “Why You Don’t Really Have Free Will.”

Sam Harris. “Free Will.”

Eddy Nahmias. "Is Neuroscience the Death of Free Will?"

Galen Strawson "Luck Swallows Everything."

Support Very Bad Wizards

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Very bad wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and a psychologist, Dave Pizarro,
0:06.5	having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics.
0:10.0	Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm out of allow to say, and
0:14.4	knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.
0:17.6	As for you, my fine friend, you're a victim of disorganized thinking.
0:22.3	I'm a very good man, I'm a very good man, I'm a very good man, I'm a very good man,
0:48.9	I'm a very good man, just a very bad wizard.
1:11.4	Welcome to very bad wizards, I'm Tamler Summers from the University of Houston.
1:15.8	And I'm David Pizarro from Cornell University.
1:17.7	This is our first podcast and we should maybe say a few words about what it is that we're
1:23.3	doing, not that either of us really know and why.
1:28.2	Yeah, I think that the motivation behind this was that you're a philosopher and I'm a psychologist
1:35.6	and there's increasing overlap in the two fields so much so that we met at conferences
1:41.8	and we've been talking now for a few years.
1:44.7	Every time we talked, it was I think quite entertaining for me, at least to hear you say
1:51.6	the crazy things you say and maybe you felt the same way and never said a crazy thing.
1:56.4	It was all pure, pure reason and I think that we thought it might be fun to kind of translate
2:06.0	this into a podcast.
2:07.2	What reality, it was just the thought that maybe we should have had a mic when we were
2:11.5	having some of those conversations.
2:14.6	And so we hope.
2:15.6	Yeah, I mean, so I'm a big fan of podcasts and general podcasts about movies, podcasts
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Tamler Sommers & David Pizarro, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Tamler Sommers & David Pizarro and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.