FREE WILL: Are We Better Off Without It?

The Next Big Idea

Next Big Idea Club

Science, Social Sciences, Society & Culture, Education

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 18 January 2024

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Do we have free will? Do we have a choice in what we do? Philosophers and theologians have debated these questions for centuries; Robert Sapolsky answered them when he was 14. Free will, he concluded, simply does not exist. Robert is now in his mid-sixties. He has degrees from Harvard and Rockefeller University; he won a MacArthur “genius” award; and he’s a professor at Stanford, where he holds joint appointments in biology, neurology, and neurosurgery. But despite how much time has passed and how long his CV has grown, he never lost his youthful fascination with free will — or our lack thereof — so he decided to write a book about it. It’s called “Determined,” and in addition to assembling a formidable case against free will, Robert makes the intriguing argument that if we can abandon our illusion of volition, we can build a more humane world. Support the show by becoming a Next Big Idea Club member. (Use code PODCAST for 20% off.) We’re hosting a live taping in New York City on January 31st. Come on by! We’d love to meet you. You can learn more here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey folks, real quick before we get started,
0:02.8	we're hosting a live taping of this show
0:05.3	in New York City on January 31st.
0:08.2	I'll be taking the stage with Chris Dixon,
0:10.4	a venture capitalist at Andresen-Haroitz, who's helped direct more than $7 billion to
0:15.8	crypto technologies.
0:17.8	He has a new book coming out called Read Write Own, Building the Next Era of the Internet. and I plan to ask him is crypto dead are
0:26.6	blockchains over is web three irrelevant or do these technologies still have the
0:32.4	power to shape the future?
0:34.0	To learn more, go to betaworks.com slash events or follow the link in the episode notes.
0:40.0	LinkedIn presents. notes. is the next big idea. Today is a world without free will, a better world. Do humans have free will?
1:15.0	When you order a scoop of chunky monkey ice cream and decide whimsically at the last minute to change to chubby hubby instead?
1:23.5	Is that you, the unique individual floating between your ears,
1:27.8	making that decision?
1:29.2	Or is it just to quirk in the patterns of the swirling atoms that comprise each of us, just the causal chain of a biological process playing itself out?
1:39.0	If this question doesn't interest you, maybe it reminds you of the bloviations of stone philosophy
1:45.6	majors in college. Here's another question that might interest you. Would the
1:50.4	world be better if everyone believed we did not have free will?
1:55.0	Or at least believed that we had less of it.
1:58.0	This is the argument made by Robert Sepulci, the MacArthur Genius Grant winning Stanford
2:03.9	Neuroscientist in his new book,
2:06.2	Determine, a science of life without free will.
	...

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