 into just and I don't know how much time if you have time constraints as much time as you need okay or you want until you get tired of speaking to me oh that could be a long time which means it's ad infinitum because to get tired of speaking to me is an impossibility exactly exactly the only part I might get tired of is listening because I like to talk so that's the only challenge okay I'll try to keep more quiet no no no you're doing great I did not mean that I meant the part of me liking to talk not the part of listening so so let me let me let me posit something and tell me if if you agree or disagree how this fits in I mean it strikes me and and I'm I believe in free will I think you do from from what I've heard I know Sam doesn't but I think you do so my view is that we are with that every one of us there's a component evolutionary component there's a genetic component that that has a say in who and what we are there's clearly environmental component there's there's influences and then there's the choices we have made along the way to engage with our minds or not to engage to be lazy or to use our reason and that to me that is the most important component and that in a sense can override the others in that's what makes us human ability to override them does that is that make sense does that is that the way you think about the world so so let me step let me take out the free will conversation from the discussion for a bit so one of the there are many points on which the tractors of evolutionary psychology will like to focus on each of which are perfectly incorrect some of them are scientifically based but most of them are ideologically based in other words most of the people who hate something about evolutionary psychology it's because it attacks their essential pet ideology of theirs so if I am religious I hate evolutionary psychology because where's God in your thing if I'm a postmodernist I hate evolutionary psychology because there are no human universals if I'm a radical feminist I hate evolutionary psychology because it's not true that there are evolved sex differences and so on and so forth okay so one of the things that people argue regarding evolutionary psychology is they say oh but it is a form of well it is not a form it is the form of biological determinism if you provide a biological evolutionary genetic explanation for a phenomenon then this argues that we are a slave to simply execute that algorithm and of course that is profoundly idiotic because for most things not all but for most things as you correctly said we are an interaction of our genes and our unique environments even genes themselves get turned on or off depending on environmental inputs so the correct position that all evolutionist state is the interactionist position so to argue that something is biological based doesn't remove the influence of the environment so anybody who tells you that evolutionary psychology is biologically deterministic is simply advertising I'm a moron who doesn't understand anything that's all he's saying okay so so on that on that issue it's clear the issue of free will I'm kind of puzzled by it and I should mention I haven't done enough reading on all of the different you know schools of thoughts on free will but if I were to summarize given my very limited reading an exposure to sort of the free will debate uh Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne both of whom have been on my show and are good friends basically argue look we are nothing more than basic natural laws and if you unfold all of the cascading you know physical reactions that are all materialist then we arrive at the point that we're at and that's it it could be nothing else that seems profoundly uh unimpressive to me here's another one that they usually say the brain will often time have there's a delay between when you recognize that you're going to do something and the neuronal signature that again doesn't suggest that you don't have free will it literally just means that there is a neuronal lag between you being aware of it and your brain actually manifests manifesting that neuronal activation pattern so to me maybe because I'm not into all of this sort of mental masturbation I see it as a profoundly useless debate because if free will is something that doesn't exist then I'm really wasting my time trying to study psychology of decision-making because what is is let's all go and have a beer right so I might be missing something and I'm sure there will be tons of messages at the bottom of this comment saying I thought that God said what's smart but my god what a moron he doesn't suffer to me uh of course we are bound by physical laws but ultimately when I'm trying to decide whether I'm going to marry person a or b or buy coke or Pepsi I don't understand where the free will conversation comes in maybe you can enlighten well I mean it's a it's it's an ancient conversation it goes back to Greek philosophers and it's it's being debated to know and then I'm not a philosopher so I'm not going to try to to to to give a bit you know that even with the with the neurological issue right so what example do these raising your hand and I'm quite willing to accept that whether I raise my hand and every given point of time is determined by lots of other things that come beforehand so where do you put the essence of what free will is the the engagement of free will I so I start by the fact that first of all I know I have free will because I know I free will I can I can tell that I'm making choices something is is making a choice and by very would that we use choices decisions that means that they're options what's that they will respond to that forgive me for interrupting you they will respond that it's an illusion it's exactly you it's an illusion because it makes sense for you to be deluded in that way via that free will illusion that is the same argument the post modernist give to me when I say this is a pen it's an absolutely I can see it and I can touch it well to me introspection is like seeing and touching just about you about your own nature you cannot the reason doesn't mean anything if if it's not some if it's not if there's no free will it's just a it's just a straightforward physical biological process that we engage in all the decisions have already been predetermined in a sense and even if you have the the environmental component well that's again just deterministic and it's all just deterministic it's it's one big to me they what so so rand's view is that that the essence of free will is this idea of engaging your mind or disengaging it focus like you get up in the morning and you kind of dozed off of it you know you have to sleep and you you actually make an effort okay I'm gonna focus now oh you sit down to write a paper right you sit down to write the research and you say okay I'm really gonna focus now that focus is what is the essence of free will in a sense everything flows from that now can I explain it biologically can I explain it physically in terms of no but there are lots of things I can't explain in science you can't yet explain physically or biologically but I can see it right in a sense I can see it in myself now yes you can say it's an illusion but then we might all be just in a vats right and this could all be a dream that's the same argument it's a silly argument you we have to rely on our senses we have to lie in on our own observations about the world but how and again maybe someone's already proposed this argument so please hold your hate mail I'm a novice on this debate if only because it profoundly I found it profoundly unsatisfying as a as a point of this I don't mean that you bring it up but just as a as something that I'm going I'm willing to spend you know I agree in 2000 year but let's what if I were a machine that simply that so I'm called the Gad machine so that if you present me with two women the the manifest preference that I would choose is woman a in other words if all the cascade of all of the physical laws that would result in me instantiating my preference to woman a I now create a not Gad machine so whatever I was going to manifest as my choice I now choose the opposite of that right so what would so then what would that be would that be that oh but that's that's simply the cascade of neuronal I mean yeah and it's and you see it's you can't from it it might be possible to create a machine that we from the outside cannot tell if it's has free will or not but we're not we have experiences we have a consciousness we experience life right machines don't experience right not they don't they're not conscious animals have experience and maybe they have some free will it's hard to tell if they make choices or not but we through introspection can tell that we're making choices so I I agree with you it it matters because there's no morality if the if we're all deterministic nothing matters if we're all deterministic it's what's the point of studying things if we're all deterministic we you know go to the beach and I don't even know what that matters if but then so let me ask you this so what what is the main reason maybe this is a maybe this is too difficult of a question what is the fundamental intellectual reason for this debate so for example you might say well for some people they want to argue that there is no free will because that serves to excuse people's actions and they want to be softer on crime I'm making this up I don't know so what what is the intellectual pull of this conversation that I'm missing well the intellectual pull is in philosophy certainly moral agency right are you responsible I think that's the fundamental I think for somebody like Sam and I'm speculating here and I you know I'm sure he'll contradict me but it's he wants to be a scientist he wants everything to be grounded in science and he views free will as mystical somehow it's a it's this little spark of God and the truth is that in the past most defenders of free will have defended it on mystical grounds and so when he so he I think he's thrown out the baby with the bathwater when he rejects religion and he's rejected everything mystical and I'm all for that I'm rejecting for everything mystical but I don't think free will has to be viewed as mystical it might be something we still don't understand there's a lot of phenomena in the natural world we still don't understand but it's a natural phenomena that we can all observe just we observe any under scientific phenomena and I think that's what you're saying is like I deal with free will all day I don't call it that because I deal with choices but without choices this is all just mechanistic it would be uninteresting if I was just analyzing the decision-making of robots because always look as an algorithm yeah go ahead so what would he say and again I'm asking you to put yourself in his but it's only because you probably are much more familiar with this debate than I am so when I wake up every day and try to understand the evolutionary roots of human behavior what would Sam say about that exercise is it still worthwhile because notwithstanding the fact that we don't have free will at least it allows me to predict behavior better would that be his position he would say and again this is me trying to channel Sam Abbott which is very hard because he's brilliant and you know and I mean he's a phenomenal mind but my guess is what he's saying is the more knowledge we have the more inputs into our computers the better decisions the better outcomes we will have so while I'm not choosing but the more exposed I am to truth the more information the computer has the better the outcome coming out of it I think that's how he'd explain it I'm not moved but okay thanks for the explanation