Rationally Speaking #39 - The Science and Philosophy of Free Will

Rationally Speaking Podcast

New York City Skeptics

Society & Culture, Skepticism, Science, Philosophy

4.6 • 787 Ratings

🗓️ 17 July 2011

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode we tackle the never ending debate about free will, which David Hume famously defined as “a power of acting or of not acting, according to the determination of the will.” We do this with a couple of twists. We begin by examining the concept of free will from the standard philosophical perspective, then ask what — if anything — modern neuroscience can tell us about it, and come back to the interface between philosophy and science to explore how the two approaches may complement each other.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.
0:22.6	For more information, please visit us at NYCCEceptics.org.
0:31.1	Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and
0:40.3	nonsense. I'm your host, Massimo Piliucci, and with me as always is my co-host, Julia Galev. Julia,
0:46.1	what are we going to talk about today? Massimo, today we're going to tackle the never-ending
0:50.2	philosophical debate about free will. In a nutshell, the intuition about free will is that we
0:58.4	we feel constantly like we're making conscious choices about what to do and how to act.
1:03.8	But now that we understand that the universe is largely deterministic, then it feels like that's incompatible to many people
1:14.4	with the idea of making conscious choices, because it seems to suggest that we're just,
1:18.8	you know, no better than wind-up toys or billiard balls bouncing into each other,
1:23.3	and that there's nothing that we could choose to do
1:27.7	other than what the physical laws of the universe
1:30.4	have already sort of laid out for us
1:32.6	in their inexorable path.
1:35.1	And then if that's the case,
1:37.7	that raises a bunch of questions about whether,
1:40.4	first of all, why we feel like we have free will
1:42.8	and second of all, how we can hold anyone
1:45.5	morally responsible for the things that they do. And then it raises other questions, like,
1:52.3	if the universe were not deterministic, and to the extent that it isn't deterministic,
1:56.8	does that actually help the situation? Right. So this is a natural area of interaction between philosophy and science.
2:03.8	There is quite a bit of neurobiology or cognitive science that has been done on, well,
	...

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