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Welcome to Watching Westworld, the officially unofficial podcast for Westworld on HBO.

I'm Jim.

I'm Aaron.

And this is not a feedback podcast.

So, Aaron, what the hell are we here to do today?

A couple of weeks ago we were amusing about not being professional philosophers of any sort

and wishing we had someone with a little bit more qualifications or education,

information on the topic to talk about things like what does it mean to have free will

versus things being determined, deterministic.

And how does that apply to our lovable host and humans here in Westworld?

And as luck would happen, one of our fans hooked us up with an actual philosopher.

Aaron from the Embrace the Void podcast and philosophers in space.

Welcome to the show, Aaron. Maybe tell the listeners a little bit about yourself

and your qualifications with regard to philosophy.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me on.

I always love to chat about sci-fi and philosophy.

So, my background, and I'm not nearly as important as the fun stuff we get to talk about,

but like I come to this from an analytic philosophy background.

I mostly have focused in ethics and the nature of personhood

and how that has applied to lots of different subjects.

I've also been consistently very obsessed with the problem of free will

...