Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophies This. Thank you to everyone who supports the show on Patreon.

Patreon.com slash philosophies this, philosophies this.org for everything else. I hope you love the show today.

So today we're going to be exploring the question of whether or not free will is an illusion.

And if you're coming to the podcast here today with some reservations about the subject matter, you know, maybe it seems overly abstract, maybe it seems a bit too self-indulgent, maybe your long lost father,

who you hadn't seen in 30 years, met up with you at a KFC Taco Bell and rambled to you about free will for 30 minutes.

And maybe it seemed much more interesting to him than it ever seemed to you. If that's the kind of stuff you're coming to the podcast with, well, then I hope by the end of the episode, I can offer you a slightly different association on all that.

Let's make some new memories together. Because just like we talked about with the nature of consciousness on episode one of this series, this relationship between free will and determinism, I mean, I get it on one level.

It can definitely seem like one of these overly philosophical things to be spent in your time worrying about. But in reality, if we're just being honest, I think this topic actually affects everybody around us on a level that's pretty easy to overlook if you're not paying attention.

Whether or not you are truly making free decisions when you think you are, that affects the rich person just as much as it does the poor person.

It affects people at every social, cultural, or educational level. It affects the way we see ourselves. It affects all these things. Because what's at stake at bottom whenever people stop and try to have one of these conversations about free choice is the very concept in our lives of moral accountability.

Whenever somebody does anything in this world, good or bad. The question is always how much can we hold them accountable for those good or bad decisions that they made.

And the very structure of human civilization is founded upon the idea that we can hold people accountable. In fact, somebody could make the case that not only is this not an overly philosophical thing to be worrying about, but that if you ever wanted to be able to call yourself an informed citizen in any real sense of the term.

Again, this isn't a fun wacky conversation. No, you have a responsibility to understand the different sides of this debate and how it affects people.

You know, every smart person out there always has to remain careful about falling into that trap of the Dunning Crew Grueger effect, where you're overestimating your level of understanding about something because you haven't really taken the time to hear the full complexity of what's being discussed, and then you're smart so you come up with convincing arguments for bad ideas.

And though, there's no definitive answer yet as to the question of whether free will is an illusion. There's undeniable value in knowing the state of the conversation, where you fit into it, where other people are coming from with their positions that you may disagree with.

At some point, you just got to decide, how self-aware are you going to be of the ideas that you're carrying around. Now, there's a lot to talk about. Can't possibly cover it all in 30 minutes, but I think we can make some real progress. So let's start with some historical context.

If you look back at the discussions that have gone on in the history of Western philosophy, whether or not free will is an illusion, this conversation, it's a topic that stands out among others as pretty unique.

It's unique because most conversations in the history of philosophy are the flavor of whatever time period they happen to be discussed in. It all usually goes the same way.

Philosophers will argue about something for a while, and then one of about three things eventually happens. They'll come to an agreement about it and move on to something else. They'll argue about it, can't agree, and then realize years later they've been arguing about all the wrong things entirely.

Or the conversation remains something open, almost like a collaborative Google doc where philosophers will come in and keep trying to make contributions over the course of the next few decades. Some of those problems eventually get solved, some of them evaporate.

But the discussion around whether or not free will is an illusion. That's an example of an open dialogue that's been going on for the last 2500 years.

And that's just where the historical record ends by the way. No doubt it was going on a long time before that.

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