This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series Minds, Brains and Science, given by John Sell, was originally broadcast in 1984.

In these lectures, I have tried to answer what are, to me, some of the most worrisome questions about how we as human beings fit into the rest of the universe. Our conception of

ourselves as free agents is fundamental to our overall self-conception. Now, ideally, I would

like to be able to keep both my common sense conceptions and my scientific beliefs.

In the case of the relation between mind and body, for example,

I was able to do that.

But when it comes to the question of freedom and determinism,

I am, like a lot of other philosophers,

unable to reconcile the two.

One would think that after over 2,000 years of worrying about it, the problem of the freedom

of the will would by now have been finally solved.

Well, actually, most philosophers think it has been solved.

They think it was solved by Thomas Hobbes and David Hume and various other empirically-minded

philosophers whose solutions have been repeated and improved right into the 20th century.

I think it has not been solved. In this lecture, I want to give you an account of what the problem

is and why the contemporary solution is not a solution, and then conclude by trying to explain

why the problem is likely to stay with us.

On the one hand, we're inclined to say that since nature consists of particles and their relations with each other, and since everything can be accounted for in terms of those

particles and their relations, there is simply no room for freedom of the will.

As far as human freedom is concerned, it doesn't matter whether physics is deterministic,

as Newtonian physics was, or whether it allows for randomness or indeterminacy at the level of

...