Do We Have Free Will? with Robert Sapolsky & Neil deGrasse Tyson

0:00 all of a sudden I I said to myself is everything in society explainable in this way and then I realized oh my gosh if it is then our entire moral code has to [Music] shift this is Star Talk Neil degrass Tyson here your personal astrophysicist and I got Chuck nice with me Chuck how you doing man I'm doing great Neil thanks for asking okay Chuck Nice a professional standup comedian and actor here's a subject we haven't yet tackled okay it's the subject of Free Will yes it came up in the edges I was gonna say

0:45 we've we've tinkered around the edges just the edge we couple conversations with Brian Green couple conversations with Heather Berlin a couple uh Neuroscience conversations that we we got another neuroscientist here here Robert sapolsky a neuroscientist biologist he's a professor of biology neurology and Neuroscience and neurosurgery can you be any more neuro than that I think that's all the neuros I think that's all the neuros or neurotic that's the one at Stanford University uh best-selling author of eight books right I have one in my hand right now came out just months ago wow determined a science of life without Free Will wow and that's

1:33 going to be a major subject of our conversation today welcome to the show Rob well thanks thanks for having me on before we continue here let me just tell our audience you captured so much of this life's profile in a memoir that you write just tell us briefly about your Memoir then we're going to pick up the Free Will discussion oh sort of one of my not even marginally scientific books that I cranked out it's called a primates Memoir and basically just stories of the 30 OD years hanging out with both the baboons but sort of places there in East Africa I was there for one coup attempt I was there for one Civil War I was so you know a interesting

2:19 colorful place to be a Kid From Brooklyn who knows nothing about the outside world so that that was a fun thing to write I'm glad you you documented that because if if it's a story that others will never have or can't even imagine that's got to be in print somewhere so that we can access it yeah so so tell me so this is a fascinating birthplace for the ideas that maybe we're not entirely in control of our own behavior so how did this rise up to become your central Focus thinking when thinking about Free Will well actually just to just to undo all of that um I already didn't believe in free fre will I was 14 when I had this incredibly epipal night where I

3:05 suddenly decided there's no free will um I also as long as I was at it that night decided there's no God and there's no purpose and it's just a big empty and different Universe it it was interesting stuff going on the days before were there were there mushrooms involved in this no no but there there was there was religious trauma instead which I think is a much more effective way of ING with your head um so it was it was a wonderful sort of clarity of oh I get it became nihilist this I think that's yes that's when that word applies nihilism nistic yes so I I have not believed in Free Will since then so all all baboon ecological physiology and all rat

3:51 monkey mice Neuroscience did was just add more factoids to like we're just machines we're biological machines wow all right so so give us your the the central points of your thesis then um you can't just say well I don't think we're have free will anymore um give me some give me some foundations for this well it's this basic deal where like somebody does something and you wonder like why that happened why they did what they just did and like if you want to unpack it part of the answer to that is is cuz this was going on in this part of the brain a second before while this part of the brain went silent or that sort of thing but you're also asking wow

4:41 well the person hadn't eaten yet today they were sleep deprived they were happy they were stressed they were in pain whatever what's what's the hungry judge effect that that reminds me oh it's the I love it the hungry judge I remember something like 10 years ago like if you get convicted before lunch your your senten is higher than after lunch yes exactly it was it was this classic study preceding National Academy of Sciences they looked at every parole decision made in this this judicial County or whatever over the course of a year like a thousand of them looking at what predicted the judge letting the guy walk versus sending him back from more jail and the single best predictor was how many hours it had been since the judge had eaten the meal oh I I I thought it

5:28 was definitely how black the guy was standing oh well that that's after we that get get the one that explains about 99% of the variability once once that's sorted out the other extraneous another variance in the for of okay all right so so that's shocking and disturbing just simultaneously and so if the judge presumably the judge is thinking the judge is making the right decision in that moment but in fact they don't even know influenced because they can't even if you were maybe you could correct for it by the way that that got challenged for its statistics and they they responded adequately and I it's solid science and it's been replicated do not

6:14 go and apply for a home loan in a bank if the person you're talking to hasn't eaten for four hours other versions of that interestingly the more hours a medical resident is Gone without sleeping if they're white the more implicit bias they show on tests by the end of their sleep deprived lunatic work period so yeah that's what's up with the judges all sorts of stuff like that mild effects these are not but they're just part of this picture of stuff going on underneath the surface so that's that's like how many hours it's been since you've eaten that's but then you got to figure like what have hormones been doing in the last 24 hours because they're marinating your brain and having influences and then you got to figure

7:02 what have the recent months years decades been like did you get traumatized did you find God did you find love did you lose either what because that changes the brain and by the way the food thing that became an entire commercial line for Snickers candy bar yeah are you hangry hangry oh what a great and the most amazing thing is it makes sense like O blood glucose levels are low when you haven't eaten and it turns out the part guys are craby they're all in a car on a road trip and one guy's just completely crab and and actually it's usually some other famously crabby famous person right so that's who they turn into and then

7:49 they give them a Snickers bar and then they're back to their back to their normal self that's oh finally science influencing commercial America so reasonably and it makes perfect you know you're looking guy he looks nothing like you he's got a background that has nothing in common with you and you're deciding is this a person who has reformed or and it takes some work to see the world from this person's perspective it takes some work to try to think about how they turned out to be different from who you are it takes work brain work and the most expensive part of your brain is the one that you're working at that point and if your GL glucose levels are low in your bloodstream what the hell let's just go with an easy answer it's very mechanistic and it's exactly what you

8:34 say you sit the judge down at that point and say whoa that's really interesting remember just after lunch you pared this guy and this guy just now did the same thing and you set him back for another 50 years in jail what's up with that and they'll quote freshman year philosophy they're not going to say oh because I was mildly hypoglycemic in my frontal cortex delusional delusional in their own intent yes yes exactly yeah so the the big takeaway here is if you are ever before any judge make sure that you offer them cookies before they exactly exactly and the other advice is find a way to mention that it's your birthday there's even been a study showing judges give slightly shorter sentences if they're aware to the defendant not if

9:20 yesterday was or tomorrow was it's got to be the day terrible social conflict conflict number one we need to protect Society from d dangerous rapacious people conflict number two be nice to people on their birthday and somehow it balances out and you get a slightly shorter sentence by the way I fully Embrace everything you've said and I did I've done some recent amateur thinking about Free Will and I want to share some of those ideas with you um but they will fully resonate with everything you said thus far but I have to bring in sort of the physicist perspective of Free Will where if every action has a a preceding

10:07 action to it you just take that all the way back till it's no longer in your Consciousness right and then something set those series of synaptic trips in sequence and then you end up saying something or doing something so this so the the physicist's cause and effect argument um how does what you say tale with that or are you are you saying something slightly different philosophically um actually very similar I you know Behavioral Sciences biology whatever discovered made this major discovery recently by which I mean somewhere in the last couple of centuries which is something happened because of what came just before that and that happened because of what CH and you know that whole deal I freak out

10:53 when we've gotten anywhere near the Big Bang because I understand zero about that but at the very least to and how do you turn out to evolve into the sort of species you are yeah you look at everything and it had a deterministic fruit yeah but okay so there's the there is the physics physiology philosophical argument that you just gave uh and I don't think there's a good argument against it um and let me just expand a little bit for those catching up uh the concept of chaos is not just disorder right you can you can there's certain chaotic systems where you set them into motion with certain initial conditions and you'll get a result and it's a repeatable result with causes and

11:40 effects determin from start to finish however if the system is truly chaotic an arbitrarily small shift from those initial conditions can produce an infinitely different result at the other end and so the so what it means is you can't realistically predict a future based on these starting parameters you give because of how sensitive the future is to those starting parameters so like a hurricane yeah exactly hurricane it's why you can't really predict weather more than like a week in advance it's get goes completely chaotic so all they can do with the hurricane is give what the models all say and you pick the middle one and and work it from there

12:26 but every day you get closer to that the models converge because you're it's less chaotic so my question back to you which you've surely gotten this before is okay philosophically you can say what you did was predetermined but the way we experience life we feel we have free will and isn't that good enough um no and not only isn't good enough scientifically it's an awful thing for how life is for lots of people to believe in free will that isn't there because you give somebody a sense that they had control over how things turned out forget predicting the future it changes Society it justifies an awful lot well

13:13 put it put it this way one once you buy into my deal that there's no free will um and when you look at all the biological stuff going on from like when you were a single fertilized egg cell and everything thereafter when you look at all all that stuff there's no that's the beginning right there that just when you were born no no you yes because that actually has a huge influence on stuff um when you there there's not a crack anywhere in that edifice in which you could push in something that is completely free of the last like centuries of Science and how we understand the world to work so that's great if you buy into that you suddenly realize

13:59 there's something very wrong in that we run the world on the notion that it's okay to treat some people way better than average for things they had nothing to do with and other people we worse than average for things they had nothing to do with and then slather on nonsense about this being a just World afterward and what getting rid of a notion of Free Will is about is saying actually that's stuff you had no control over o I had no idea by not just an academic point is what you're saying to be debated slightest in journals it has very real consequences in our social cultural fabric hello Star Talk averse Neil degrass Tyson here your host of the Star Talk podcast I'm here to announce that

14:47 we just opened a brand new channel on YouTube called Star Talk Plus and that's where we're going to bring all kinds of innovative content that doesn't quite fit on our Flagship Channel but they will involve experiments in what we create what your reaction might be to what we create and it's going to be our Skunk Works as it were to borrow a term from Aerospace so I look forward to sharing all of this new content with you and check it out if you have a chance I get what you're saying and I agree with it I'm not sure if I'm completely there with the total no free will just being honest and and so explain to me this all

15:33 right so here's why I agree with you saying I have a friend of mine Dr Mike uh had a patient who tried to sell their baby okay and they were a drug addict they were drug addict so and his these are your friends these are your friends just want to be clear no not not the drug addi sorry Who Am I who am I sharing am I sharing a a podcast with here okay so anyway uh you know said to me um yeah that they could not help doing that and I said you got to be out of your gourd like what kind of hippie dippy commi liberal crap is that that you're saying look this person tried to sell their child and and then he gave me all this

16:21 information on how drugs hijack the dopaminergic system and how your dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex and your nucleus accumbens and all this crap comes together and basically you have no control over what you're doing you you decision tree has been hijacked yes you are just responding to these things this this Cascade that's happening in your brain and it's really kind of like a neurosynaptic response to something that says hey go do this because we need this and you'll do anything so you're agreeing with Robert I thought you started this I am okay now here's why I that's why I agree because I did all the reading and it makes perfect sense perfect sense

17:07 however here's what here's what I want to know what about just your regular everyday decisions that has nothing to do with this outside force coming in and hijacking a system of your brain it's just I want vanilla ice cream right now I just want vanilla ice cream some you know so what's I want pepperoni on my pizza I want pepperon on my pizza because Robert these are I want to see this movie tonight instead of this other movie right these are the these are the the the power we have over our lives small small examples that they are all right this is the power over our lives that gives us this illusion that we have free will and we're perfectly content thinking that you're saying there's some

17:54 physiochemical biomolecular thing that makes me choose strawberry instead of in all tonight yeah which is also saying there's this cultural thing which is also saying how you were raised and what lullab were sung to you have a neuro that it's all one of the okay let me let me give you a a sense of this with the the drug guy um if you happen to make a really stupid rash decision and pick the wrong womb to spend nine months in and your mother was very stressed during the pregnancy as a result your brain would develop fewer of those dopamine neurons and as an adult okay so this an epigenetic thing going on epigenetic

18:40 exactly a part of the brain called The frontal cortex has to do with reigning in your like imprudent urges and stuff by age five yeah your par your mother's socio economic status by age five has already influenced the rate at which this part of the brain has developed every step thereafter and it's just one piece leading to another to another okay so something like you pick vanilla instead of strawberry or what we're caught in there is exactly what you like we're alluding to you sit there you make a decision you have a moment of intent you're consciously aware of the intent you know what the outcome's likely to be most importantly you know you don't have to do this there are alternatives and that sure seems

19:26 like Free Will and that is nothing nothing to do with free will because the only thing to ask at that point is so how do you turn out to be the sort of person who would want vanilla over strawberry at that's you know I'm gonna do Robert next time I'm in an ice cream shop I'm gonna say let me see do I want vanilla no I want Strawberry in that then right when they're ready to scoop it I I walk out and say I don't want any ice cream at all and that'll totally confound your entire Theory no not at all because how do you want to being the sort of person saying screw that with trying to say this is how I'm gonna show them or whatever I'm gonna show you if you wound up exactly like your parents there was a certain absence of free will if at some point you said oh my God

20:13 shoot me if I wind up having anything in common with my parents I'm going to do just the opposite it's the exact same appen for you and any version of that you just happen to be someone who decides oh I have a theory what this researcher is up to this psychologist I'm going to intentionally tell the opposite because I've got authority figure issues or because I'm cranky today and my underwear is too tight or who knows whatever the impinging what made you who you are at that moment okay Robert I okay so so first let me just preface all this was saying I completely agree with you and all of my recent thinking aligns with this and I want to share it with you just so I can hear you say Neil you're you're like right on Q I want to be able to hear you

20:59 I need that that encouragement but if this is an hypothesis that is strongly supported by observations what would have to happen for you to say I guess my hypothesis is wrong because if anything anybody says or does you count as evidence in support of your your theory then the theory isn't testable and if it's not testable you you're accepting everything as evident oh that he did that I'm right they did the opposite I'm still right you chose a vanilla I'm right if you're right for everything how am I going to know if you're ever wrong here's how you falsify it show me and at this point like everyone oh prove to us there's no free will prove to us there's no Easter Bunny

21:46 prove to us that like there's till you turn around there's somebody creeping up behind you o they disappear that absence proed proof of absence that whole deal um by now the onus is on people saying there's free will and this is what would falsify all of this show me a neuron or a network of neurons or a brain that just did something and show me that it did that completely free of its history it wouldn't matter what quantum physics that happens all the time I mean you have particles popping in and out of existence there's no there's no known cause for it it just is right yeah this is this is where I get conniptions when quantum physics is wonderfully relevant to quantum physics it's got squat to do

22:33 with free will issues because it's like what this this this physicist at at MIT Max tag Mark is calculated we had ma we're friends with Max Go on okay he's car 23 orders of magnitude that an indeterminist subatomic effect would have to scale up to influence the behavior of a molecule it doesn't very very important I did not know that that should shut everyone up who's trying to explain Consciousness with quantum physics exactly and the next because if they find a way where somehow magically it bubbles up what you've just explained is a mechanism for Randomness for random Behavior not like the moral

23:20 system you've had since you were in your diapers and the consistent and even if we went there it's not it's it's random okay and still it's still not really in our control because it's random that's not what we're looking for with we're looking for you know you get somebody's funeral and what do they do is they Trot out their oldest friend who gets to say wow even when we were in kindergarten they were already like this consistent you're not going to get consistency like that you're not going to get like a stable moral compass or something out of quantum r Randomness and every you get Randomness exactly that's not where the issue play best

24:05 explanation I've heard ever okay so are you saying neurologically because I'm I'm still stuck on the vanilla ice cream I mean I appreciate the quantum physics but I'm I'm trying to figure out I'm trying to figure out yes and no up and down so are you saying that our brains are ramped up with intention before we even enter the circumstance to say vanilla or chocolate there is something happening neurologically that has already put us at that precipice and then pushes us to that place from stuff that went on a second ago to back when

24:52 you were a fetus and everything in between and that's that's exactly it because all you are okay here's here's my like embroidery this on doilies we we are nothing more than the biology over which we had no control and it's interactions with environment over which we had no control and that's why we are who we are like if I go into a supermarket I'm not going to buy cheddar cheese how come because probably because some of the genetics of my taste buds but also because when my wife and I first got together because I had been a vegetarian in college and thus all you ate was like large blocks of cheddar cheese because they had not discovered vegetables yet at that time like this

25:38 was my and she said oh my God that's a saturated fat that's incredibly bad for your health and I was changed as a result and what we know is the biology of it even involves like change the makeup of my gustatory receptors in my tongue as to what tastes good now all of this stuff all of these pieces come into place and the challenge winds up being show me that this person would have done the exact same thing if all those if they had different genes they had a different fetal life if they got raised in a different neighborhood by different parents with different culture all of that and if they had had a different breakfast this morning and all that stuff and okay I to get this this compliment from you so here are my

26:24 recent thoughts okay here we go okay I because I was following the Free Will argument and I was just wasn't the arguments were just not um enlightening to me to this this every neuros synaptic firing has a precedent and that you'll do things that you you will make up the reason afterwards for why you did it but in fact it was predetermined fine okay you can argue that philosophically why that must be so but I I came to that the same conclusion differently in a in a more restricted sense I asked myself the person who is depressed chemically depressed do they have the free will to not be depressed

27:12 Absolut let's back up if you look if you look at if you look at at culture one by one things people have done in the past have fallen by the by the way of the person is not accountable okay now an early one of these would have been epilepsy okay the devil got you you're not it's not your fault let bring the priest okay we got that but if you were I'm old enough maybe you're old enough the the skidrow bum the drunker every all blame was placed on that person no okay we find out that alcohol is addictive and when you're addicted you can't get off of it and there there's a homeless community

27:58 where circumstance have put them there and so Society has changed in its response to this okay the people who are risking their who are depressed and on the brink of suicide we're not saying oh just cheer up no we're saying there's a neurological problem and they're not in control and the person the instant before they jump off the bridge do they have the free will to not jump off the bridge and as I went through this mental exercise more and more more of society ended up folding into this mindset and I got more and more depressed not depressed angered I got angered by it and you find out what is it 70% of people in prison grew up below

28:45 the poverty line so poverty is correlated with being in prison maybe the problem is poverty not do they have the free will to not have committed a crime and end up in so so then I thought might this explain everything everything anybody the bully in the yard do they have the free will the person who wants to invade a country is that their testosterone we all grew up saying can't have female leaders because they have hormonal shifts and we don't know what they're going to do mean but men don't but men have testosterone okay and with testosterone you know violence is our I I I I check this uh at a at an intersection okay if someone Cuts you off in an intersection if some say you how did you chances are it's a guy okay

29:34 with testosterone out of control not in my neighborhood we got some we got some rough women around here that it is so the men historically have not been honest about what role testosterone plays in their proclivity to commit violence for example okay and so so all all of a sudden I I said to myself is everything in society explainable in this way and then I realized oh my gosh if it is then our entire moral code has to shift it has to uh it's not a matter of punishment it's a matter of of of nurturing and

30:21 understanding so let me pivot now to you and say if we agree and I think we do that you're right how does society need to change massively totally um because when you think this The Compassion machine has to be put into effect and you're not getting that in conservative politics right yes exactly but if you're really going to test it you got to see if somebody's willing to feel compassionate about how Donald Trump became the person who he is because it's the same issue there I mean if you really this out you mean being the best of the best of the absolute best how did this happen I don't know I

31:06 believe I believe God chose me wow that's scary that's really good and it blame and Punishment make no sense praise and reward make no sense meritocracies makes no sense criminal justice makes no sense feeling like you have earned anything makes no sense hating somebody makes as little sense as hating an earthquake all of that that's the only logical point you can get to and I've been thinking this way since I was 14 and I can actually function this way about three minutes every other month because it's incredibly hard yeah because we're but I've done it in some ways I don't believe when there's a lightning storm that some old woman with

31:53 no teeth at the edge of the Hamlet caused it with her witchcraft that easy now I subtracted respons that that the old days that that was not the case right right exactly and when you and I Chuck you appeared to be too much of a young for this but Neil when we were both young if if you know when we were in elementary school um if you had the kids sitting next to you was just not learning how to read and they just weren't paying attention and you know what the attributions were then this kid they're not motivated maybe they're not so smart they're lazy they're they just don't pay put in a slow class with the short bus you know EXA and then people discovered oh there's this biological thing called dyslexia like the

32:40 architecture of one layer of your cortex is screwy and as a result you flipped closed loop letters around and oh just In Our Lifetime we have learned that's not a lazy kid who we've done that one that one didn't take 300 years of getting rid of witchburn that one or you know people have figured out in our lifetime who you love is a biological phenomenon it's not some like oh I had no idea biology had to do with so we're slowly getting better and at each one of these steps we figured out schizophrenia is not caused by mothers who unconsciously hate their child autism is not caused by mothers who are incapable of love oh it's a neurog genetic developmental disorder we figured that

33:27 one out and hundreds of thousands of women who spent their whole lives being told by every expert out there that they they were the cause of their child schizophrenia suddenly oh this isn't depressing this is liberating every time we've done this it's become a more Humane place yes yes and and even uh and of course I remembered seeing a film uh from the 19 early 60s where someone was addicted to drugs and it was a drama he was addicted to drugs and he said I'm a junkie and I can't stop it but the resolution of that story was the cops came and arrested him today that's Unthinkable right if someone says I'm a junkie I can't stop

34:12 it you don't arrest them you you help them right and that's a compassion wait what what country are we talking about here exactly what well if you say that from your men's club where you've had a little bit too much vault then then they send you to a nice expensive rehab program uh if it's out on a street corner maybe maybe something different you ever wanted one of your questions on the universe answered we all have questions about the universe black holes to quazars quantum entanglement wormholes there is no end to the depths of cosmic curiosity well the entry level of patreon membership with Star Talk get you just that I think

34:59 it starts at $5 a month you have access to the question line that reaches our Cosmic query programming and not only that we produce a special Cosmic queries installment just for patreon members if you weren't the director of the Hayden planetarium what do you think you would be doing what but this have to be another Universe it wouldn't happen in this universe okay I'd be I'd be a a song for Broadway musicals o so that's the entry level and the perks ascend from there uh there's a level in fact where we send you a an autographed copy of one of my latest books uh right now

35:44 it's Star Messenger Cosmic perspectives on civilization and it's signed with my fancy fountain pen with purple ink so I invite you to just check the link below and all of that money goes to our ability to experiment with new ways of bringing the universe down to earth so thank you for those who have already joined and we welcome others to participate in this Grand Adventure of what it is to bring the universe down to earth as always keep looking up someone is self-aware that they need help that we don't deny them the help I mean this is an evolution of our cultural response to people who are not entirely control of their own fate so you know and I I

36:31 get it I mean I I don't disagree um I think as I think I think what scares people is they start thinking about the consequences of this and because I was just thinking about okay so what about responsibility and what do you do if people can just do what they want but then it just popped into my head while you guys were talking what if I were able to do anything I wanted anything if you told me can go out and do anything I want with Cons with no consequence what would I change and the truth is very very little I would not go out and kill anybody I would not start doing drugs I would not start I would I pretty much still be the exact same person I am right now even if you gave me the

37:18 ability to do anything that I wanted it wouldn't lead me down this path of and now I'm just going to become the most decadent most evil bad Boon like person that I can possibly become I mean like the laws are the only thing preventing you from crime yeah it's not just the laws it's it's my place in society it's my commitment my commitment to being a citizen it's it's all these other things that make me me okay so Robert we can split the kingdom here by saying there are forces that are societal and cultural and then there are forces that are purely biological and physiological and yes there's overlap I get it but but if we're going to prevent religious factions from killing each other I

38:03 refuse to think that that's biological this is a trained thing from birth where you where your religion is better than someone else's religion and they're the wrong religion and so this a kind of a brainwashing there in not accepting the diversity of what exists around us so maybe if we can't change the biology we can change the culture how far will that get us in a world with no free will um it's G to make a spectacular place to live in about 600 years it's going to be long it's a long first off um I'm I'm obliged or I have to give up my my pedantry license to say oh Neil that's a false dichotomy between culture and bi it's one and the same like you come from

38:50 you come your mother was from a collectivist culture versus an individual no I say there there's overlap there's overlap of course I'm not denying that but what I'm saying is what has to happen in this world if we cannot change our physiology to make it safer for us all and more of a Utopia that you have imagined change the educational system let everybody free from the prison system no of course not of course not you can't have dangerous people running around but we've figured out ways to deal with dangerous people who are damaging for reasons out of their control and to protect Society from them here's a great example your kid is sneezing your kid has a nose cold

39:35 and what you do is you keep them home from kindergarten tomorrow because there's a preemptive law please if your guy if your kid has a cold don't send them to they don't get everybody else sick you quarantine you constrain your child's Behavior but you don't then tell them that they can't play with their toys that day because they're a rotten person for sneezing you subtract responsibility out of it and you still can protect and we do that in all sorts of airline pilot airline pilot is taking anti-histamines because of they're cold and it makes them a little drowsy you can't work you can't fly for X number of days if you're taking antihistamine we can build a world in which we protect people from damaging folks and hopefully

40:20 along the way recognizing how people became damaging and you while subtracting out responsibility and moralizing and sermoning at them and because you could see biologically where things went wrong and you can see where culture comes in okay so like great example the schizophrenia thing people started figuring out in 1950s scientist that schizophrenia wasn't caused by bad mothering it was caused by neurochemistry and it had zero impact on Psychiatry and family members of people it had no impact at all until something amazing happened in the 1980s Phil Donahue Phil Donahue was the Oprah of the time um who turned out he had a relative with schizophrenia and he

41:07 invited on host very yeah um very very persuasive biological psychiatrist who did something amazing he held up some of the first brain scans that were just being published at the time showing structurally there's differences in the brains of people with schizophrenia and but whoa look you can look at the picture of it and that was the transformative moment so you could say okay so why do we have a culture where it took someone like Phil Donahue to have us rethink this why do we have a culture where it takes Caitlyn Jenner appearing on the cover of whatever magazine that was for people to say oh this transf sometimes

41:52 people just feel like they're a different sex than what their biology and that why' we are why' we wind up being that kind of culture why' we wind up having a culture in which you know certain values are glorified and other SI culture is exactly the opposite how were you raised depending on what culture is a difference in how many seconds on the average you would cry before your mother would pick you up were they training you to be tough or were they training you to feel s and just each time that happened your brain got constructed a little bit differently and at each one of these steps it goes on like that and how do you like what makes somebody an ex white supremacist

42:38 what went into that all of these things can change and the cultural changes and the biological changes are totally intertwined and what we're getting at here is like the worst conclusion to come out of this with is oh there's no free will nothing can change things change enormously you have to do is understand where the buttons are and where the levers are and where the irrationality is and where the post Haw rationalizations are to explain something that in fact was a pure gut instinct it makes no sense at all and had do people get that way and how do you get people that way to stop being that way and just to be clear post Hawk explanation is you see something happen and you after the fact account for why

43:25 it happened without real evidence for what actually caused it and so you have a post Haw accounting and there's there's been a lot of that in the history of civilization so if I'm hearing you correctly you're kind of saying let's look at these social ills um and maladies with an eye towards uh restoration and compassion compass and and compassion and giv and restoration as opposed to punitive measures only which is what we do now we just go we're gonna punish you and that's it thr and and and and normally people go to jail and come out worse criminals better trained right they're

44:10 trained to become criminal criminals yeah exactly um and like you can use punishment and you can use reward as Like Instrumental tools because that's a that's a good way to make organisms change Behavior but the notion of them being virtues in and of himself are ridiculous and yeah it makes no sense to hold somebody responsible either for the fact that their unbelievably awful upbringing resulted in someone with a really impaired capacity for empathy and feeling somebody else's pain or the fact that somebody's really privileged upbringing produce somebody who gets really good SAT scores and know how to write a five paragraph essay and get

44:56 into a prestigious is college like and both there's no intrinsic virtue in how any of us turned out and there's no intrinsic earned or entitled and that's hard as hell to subtract that out and what I've seen is yeah yeah yeah that's really scary in terms of saying oh what are we we got have criminals running around in the street and what do we do with criminal justice it's going to be a lot harder for people like us to instead say oh I actually haven't earned anything with my work ethic I actually haven't earned anything with my good SAT scores or my corner office or my amazing Sal it's going to be much harder to undo the meritocracy end of it because anyone who's sitting and listening to like

45:41 ridiculous stuff about cosmology and stuff they're one of the lucky ones they learned how to read they're probably not homeless they're they're we're the lucky ones and if there being no free will means bummer my TV maybe isn't as impressive as I used to think it was and doesn't indicate I'm a much better human than average and we're the ones who we're we're in the subset where we are treated better than average in society like when they come well I worked hard for this I worked exactly you you had that roommate who no doubt went out and got falling down drunk that Saturday night and you studied instead and you earned this and yeah you learn something different you're brain did gratification

46:28 postponement differently because of this that and the other thing here's something I do tell people people say how do you write so many books I my answer is I probably watch less football than and there and why how' that turn out how I I watch less football than average because there was one stage where I decided that bullies would like me if I memorized every stupid factoid about the Green Bay Packers because they were in ascendency at the time and that turned out not to work yeah and that turned out not to impress them in the slightest they didn't and okay so football is not the route towards like so like I lost interest in football that's why I don't watch football because like knowing you know Vince

47:16 Lombardi and his like Golden Rule or whatever what yeah all of these things come from somewhere and we turned out who we are and for most people um we claiming they're responsible for stuffs that didn't turn out very well that they in fact had no control over by the way I watch football because I have to support anything that keeps what could be murderous barbarians off of the streets of our country because I don't know if you've seen these guys but they are scary and the fact the fact that we give them lots of money to you know run into each other instead of us is fine with me just a a couple of more sort of points to close this out so you would

48:02 say then that people might have a susceptibility biophysiological susceptibility to addiction to joining Cults to belief systems and there's a certain to working hard in it might not be the right word but a certain unaccountability to that would that's a fair statement correct yeah and other people wind up with a proclivity for feeling other people's pain or being able to look past superficial explanations or reflect on things and respect the process of reflecting on things and yeah the good sides the bad sides it's all how we turned out and it's stuff we had no control over okay so

48:49 what's if people read your book determined okay just came out a few months ago do you really think it would take 600 years to reach that I mean if I look at the pace of social cultural change it's faster than that I would I would like to believe that the depths of compassion that a society without Free Will promotes is something that would come to us much sooner than that than 600 years well maybe I'm more pessimistic than you I it's very we figured out you know witches don't control the weather and it's a bummer to burn old women the Stak yeah weed out we sorted that one out it was 50 years ago that figured out epilepsy

49:35 we figured that out we fig we're kind of figuring out that there's a biology to obesity and people who have trouble feeling a satiation signal and it's not because they secretly hate themselves they've got screwy receptors for some satiation hormone and they hypothal and we're doing that stuff all the time but we got a long way to go with it and you know as I said I think this way all the time but I can actually act on this for two seconds at a time somebody cuts me off in traffic I think they are a vile human who deserves to burn in hell someone tells me like o nice sweater and for a few seconds afterward I think I am intrinsically a better human than average as a result and then think about it a second time and a fourth time and a tenth time and when

50:22 you next feel like judging somebody do that and when you next feel like you earn the right to be at the front of the line for the next vaccine think about it a second and 10th time as well and baby steps well for those only listening to this uh podcast Our Guest Robert has a full up Santa Claus beard so I'm trying to think given your free will hypothesis would you make a good Santa Claus or a bad Santa Claus what kind of Santa Claus is this man gonna make uh you know you you you kind of look like smart Santa you know it's the it's the because because the hair you got to remember Santa you know you you have the professor hair and the Santa beard so

51:09 you're you're you're more professorial Santa all right it's just say Santa says were you were you naughty or nice did you deserve this gift that's right this would be the worst Santa ever say no you don't have free myp actually now I take it back you're Oprah Santa it's like you get a gift and you get a gift and you get a gift yes I'm I'm Santa biological and in fact I don't care because all I care about now is if my parents were still alive they'd be totally irritated by the fact that I have this beard still that's why I have a beard not because I want to seem like a good Santa or bad because it irritated the hell out of them in the middle 1970s and sure that work operating on it yeah ex okay so I'm gonna end on a on a question to you that

51:55 might Short Circuit your brain and steam will come out of your ears like every episode of Star Trek where Captain Kirk outsmarts the computer okay so um if I tell you that I don't agree with you that we all have free will then I'm not in control of the fact that I am telling you we all have free will it's predetermined that I think that everyone who thinks we have free will that we have free will that's predetermined and there's nothing we can do about it yeah until you get educated until somebody you can't get out of yeah like somewhere along the way

52:40 you figured out the kids sitting next to you having trouble learning to read there's this thing called dyslexia and you changed you changed as a result and like you're brain changed when you look at somebody who has like a lot of spelling errors or whatever their writing and like they mentioned somewhere yeah I got a learning difference whatever a part of your brain that would have had some aversive responses and told another part of your brain that has something to do with judgment and doesn't activate anymore learn okay and social Enlightenment turns out to be neurobiology and neurobiology turns out to be different social behavior it's completely intertwined like thank God we CH you can cure people who think there's

53:26 there is Free Will there's yeah it's not their fault we exactly we pray for their souls but [Laughter] still all right dude Robert this has been a delight uh this book oh my gosh um you know some people write books just because they can write a book this one has the power to shift the center mass of civilization in ways that it's already moving in that direction but maybe too slowly and with an a deeper understanding that you're providing us all uh perhaps we can achieve this Utopia much sooner than I don't have to wait another 600 years analogizing today to what to the witch

54:12 burnings of 600 years ago I'd like to think we're on a faster track than that let's hope so uh Robert spolski thanks for being on Star Talk Chuck always good to have you man always a pleasure this is Neil theg grass Tyson Star Talk this is a an addition on Free Will a long overdue conversation thanks for [Music] [Applause] [Music] listening