Free will does not exist
Think from KERA
KERA
4.7 • 910 Ratings
🗓️ 15 October 2024
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If everything happens for a reason, and those reasons are beyond our control, maybe we don’t have free will after all. Robert Sapolsky, professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss his case against free will, which he says is the logical choice if you look at the ways our lives are shaped by forces that start from our very biology. And we’ll hear why, even without this control, we are still bound to be moral and decent humans. His book is “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will.”
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Our laws make some exceptions about criminal culpability for people who have severe mental illness because we mostly agree that a person who commits a crime while, say, experiencing psychosis was not truly in control |
| 0:23.0 | of what their brains told them to do. |
| 0:25.8 | But what makes us so sure we're in charge of our own decisions? |
| 0:30.5 | From KERA in Dallas, this is think. |
| 0:33.1 | I'm Chris Boyd. |
| 0:34.1 | Every one of us, including those of us in excellent mental health, is the product of innumerable forces beyond our control, a swirling sea of hormones and neurons and genes and environmental and cultural and evolutionary forces going back millennia, all of which combined to influence who we are and how we act in every moment. Perhaps nobody truly |
| 0:57.2 | decides anything. And if that's true, a lot of what we believe about good and evil, reward, |
| 1:03.5 | and punishment and willpower and motivation, it all starts to collapse like a house of cards. |
| 1:09.4 | Robert Sapolsky is professor of biology and neurology |
| 1:12.4 | at Stanford University and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant. His new book is |
| 1:17.8 | called Determint, a science of life without free will. Robert, welcome to think. Well, thanks for |
| 1:24.7 | having me on. So this book is filled with science, but you actually start with a fable about cosmic turtles. |
| 1:31.5 | What is the short version of that story and what makes it useful here? |
| 1:35.3 | Oh, just this joke we used to tell each other in college when we thought we were being clever. William James was giving a lecture about the nature of the universe. |
| 1:48.0 | Afterward, this old woman comes up and says, |
| 1:51.0 | Professor James, you have it all wrong. The world is on the back of a turtle. |
| 1:55.0 | And he says, oh, okay, but where does that turtle stand? |
| 1:59.0 | And she said on back of another turtle. And he said, ah, madam, but where does that turtle stand? And she said on back of another turtle. And he said, |
| 2:02.3 | ah, madam, but where does that turtle stand? And her response was, it's no use, Professor James. It's |
| 2:08.6 | turtles all the way down. Okay. And how does that relate to our brains and our free will? |
| 2:16.5 | Okay. So we do something and like we ask why, why did that happen? |
| 2:23.2 | A person does something wonderful. |
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