It's Monday, April 23rd, 2018, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds.

I'm Indra Viscontas.

And I'm Kishorehari.

Each week, we bring you a new, in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics, and society collide.

We endeavor to endeavor, and why it all matters.

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You know when like neuroscientists start talking about this idea that we don't have free will?

Oh no. This whole conversation gives me a headache. I don't know what to make of it. Like, why is free will

such an interesting thing for neuroscientists to poke at? Well, I mean, you could argue it's really

what makes us human, right? The fact that we can make choices, that we can do the things that we want

to do. And it's very important to us.

When we lose our illusion, if it's not, if it's an illusion, or, you know, our thinking that we have free will, we get very depressed. You know, we, you know, we get very stressed. It's a,

it's a bad thing. It seems to be very important to us. I'm not arguing that free will is not important, but I think there are lots of things that make us human down to our biology.

Yeah. So one of the things that's always bothered me about the argument coming from neuroscience that because there's a lot of, that there's so many of the processes that the brain does are not

available to us consciously, that there's this huge iceberg of stuff that we just aren't

aware of and therefore consciousness is just this tip and in fact that it happens post hoc,

that all this stuff happens first and then we become conscious of the decisions that we made,

you know, the things that our brain does, and therefore we have no free will. To me, there's always,

there was always like a missing link in that argument. And that missing link reminded me of a lot of

different aspects of evolution. And so when I learned about Ken Miller and his new book, it's called The Human Instinct,

How We Evolve to Have Reason, Consciousness, and Free Will.

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