Free Will with David Pietraszewski
2026-01-06 13:00:00.000 +00:00

I'm David Pinsoff. I'm David Petrozowski. And this is Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast where actual evolutionary psychologists are actually evolutionary psychology. Yeah, they they do it and they talk about it. Enjoy. It's great. David, today we have a very special guest. Uh who is that guest? It's me, David. It's me. Wow. So I'm really not a guest. No, you're one of the co-hosts, but you're also a guest in this episode. Uh and it is our first uh solo episode with just the two of us in a long time. And I really uh I was missing having those because uh I always have a blast just doing one-on-one convos with you. And I think this one uh was no exception to that rule of those conversations being a blast.

Uh and what what do we what do we talk about in this one? We had no choice but to talk about oh, that's a bad joke, free will. Yeah, that's right. All the implications, the philosophy, the psychology, the ethics, uh everything there is that revolves around this topic of free will. It really it it's a topic that energizes people in kind of an unexpected way for how abstruse and technical it is. Like people get really fired up about it and engaged in this question of whether or not we have free will. And so we get into why uh we as humans are. Yeah, yeah. Anybody whose sort of eyes are rolling back in the back of their head and they're like, oh my god, I don't want to listen to this. Um it this I think this is a very different conversation.

It really like it cuts to an adaptationist approach to free will. And as David said, it there's a theory of why people feel strongly or feel anything about this, and that's part of the theory, too. So um, if you if you have any if you think you hate free will as an enterprise of sort of human inquiry, this episode might also be for you. Exactly. I think it's for people who love the free will debate and hate the free will debate in equal measure. Yeah. Um so yeah this was a this was a really fun one. Um you will have no choice but to enjoy it. Thanks David. All right David, I hit record. All right, we did it. It's our first solo episode in a long time. A long time yeah yeah I'm I'm I'm already pre pre uh exhausted from

talking about what we're going to talk about today. Yeah, the the the pre-podcast discussion already uh yeah no but well but no but specifically free will so there's like a quote from I think it's Rumi who's like a Persian poet I mean um if people know I'm sure whatever century he was twelfth century or something I don't know um and it said it's basically like this is a disputation that will you know uh occupy mankind until like the sun explodes. Uh and that and that is against the partisans and necessitarians of uh free will or something like that. Oh man. So it's been millennia. I guess we're fulfilling uh Rumi's prophecy um against our own free will. It's fate. We're doomed to justn't we couldn't do otherwise, yeah.

So, David, I have been I have been foolishly tackling free will. There's two parts to it. One is theoretical, conceptual, the other one is empirical. Um and I'm just gonna let you ask questions because there's so much to talk about. And I'm I only want to take about five minutes. So yeah, we're honestly I'm excited to learn things about this um because I'm I find this topic inherently interesting. I also find your your research and your perspective uh interesting. And so I'm happy to marry these two things. And I didn't I wasn't even aware there was empirical stuff, so I'm excited to learn about it. Yeah, we're in the middle. We're about to run it. Um in fact we actually just started highlighting it, but we have a enormous bank of studies

planned. Yeah. Fantastic. All right. So I guess the first thing I I want to ask is like it's kind of an unusual topic for an evolutionary psychologist. You know, when people think about free will, they think about uh philosophy. Um, it's not usually the type of thing that an evolutionary psychologist would study. So, what business do you have uh uh nosing your way into this uh millennia-long debate? Yeah, no one none. None no. Uh I mean, yeah, that is the actual answer. Um, but it but it in some sense, this is always this goes in the category too of um somebody commented in one of our uh recent um yeah about how many times I say um on YouTube. So I really have to cut out my ums. I don't I don't usually uh say um when I'm teaching, but I think there's something about

the zoom. We all have our ticks. Yeah. I my my favorite is uh. So you know maybe maybe I'll start saying um and you can say uh great. Yeah. So I have no business, is the short answer. The long answer is that as an adaptationist, I have business uh inquirying and inquiring into any aspect of human existence that is caused by adaptations, and specifically any concept that a human being is appealing to ultimately is a product of some constellation of adaptations. So when we talk about, you know, my mother or a chair or free will, part of being an adaptationist is saying, look, there's an organism that has a representation of something. And as an adaptationist, my job, if I want to be responsible for explaining

this slice of reality, is to figure out what slap what slice of all of the adaptations in this organism are causing them to be able to represent the mother or the chair, or in this case, free will. And that's that third one is one I just picked off. So in that sense, I I am allowed as an adaptationist in the sense that all human activity, which includes scientific and philosophical inquiry, is up for grabs when you're an adaptationist. I I love that perspective. Um I I uh I wish it were more common. Um, you know, humans are animals. Uh philosophy and philosophizing is one of the things that we as animals do. Uh animals are bundles of adaptations and their byproducts. Uh and if we want to understand something like philosophy or philosophizing, we need to

understand how it emerges from the adaptations and their byproducts. Uh and I see no alternative to understanding philosophical discourse except in those terms. It it kind of um would be unsettling for the participants in the philosophical discourse to see their own philosophizing explained in those terms. Um I I would suspect. Uh I don't know, do do people get uncomfortable? Do philosophers get uncomfortable with this approach? I mean, you know, psychology is a slow moving boat. Um, you know, it's like I the I think it was some politician used the metaphor of, you know, changing the government is like a steering a cruise ship. Uh, you know, and so if psychology is a cruise ship, you know, philosophy is, I don't know,

a continent or something, I think it's a lot more slow going. I the I I do think, number one, I've only had a little bit of interaction with professional philosophers, like about this free will project. I talked to Christian Liszt, he's been very positive. Um, but the so that's the short answer is because I'm not one of them, there hasn't been too much reaction. But my reading of philosophy is this is sort of the logical consequence of what philosophy has already been doing. So at least since um sounds like really pretentious. Well, I would say like Wittgenstein or even oh yeah, like even um Kant, Emmanuel Kant, I think was an evolutionary psychologist. If you actually look at him, his point is: look, we're you can't there's no perspective

independence in philosophy, and you can't understand what philosophy is unless you understand sort of the psychology that we're bringing to bear. I mean that's sort of his point indifferent. And so I do think that uh this is an inevitable part of adaptationism solidifying itself into human inquiry, is that um the there will be the the additional part of adaptationism entering into philosophy and and yeah, so I so I I I whether or not the individualist analysis is whether or not the philosopher the individual philosophers themselves um would agree or disagree just because you know they're humans and they want they they've had their own they've committed to their own status schemes in your language.

Um I think that you can see a line of psychology generally becoming integrated into philosophy, um, at least in the sense of like Kant and these other folks thinking the we are using our own minds to do this enterprise. Um and and so um so I don't think that it's contrary to philosophy or even revolutionary. I think the philosophers got there first of being like this whole philosophy thing is sort of BS to the extent that we're actually just using our psychology to do it, and antipationism is just the next um part of pushing on that. Yeah, it's the next step of using psychological analysis to uh yield philosophical insight. Right. Um and I I want to actually bolster your point that this is a topic that should be of

interest to evolutionary psychologists. Um and this occurred to me when I was looking at Donald Brown's list of human universals. So we talked about this on our very first episode, I believe, or maybe it was our second episode. Um, how this was inspiring for both of us, seeing a list of things that uh this anthropologist, Donald Brown, uh cataloged uh as as being universal across human cultures, or at least uh uh across the ethnographic record that he looked at uh in his book, Human Universals. And so I happened to be looking at this list uh for a different project. Uh and while I was looking at it, a few items jumped out at me uh, and I had the thought, oh, Dave should know about this. This is relevant to what Dave's working on.

Uh and I started looking through it and I found all these things that make a pretty good case that the conceptual machinery underlying free will may well be a part of human nature, may be a part of the human cognitive phenotype. So here are all the things that I found in Don Brown's list that are relevant to the free will debate. You did your homework. I did my homework. So uh the first one is intention, The concept of intention or intending to do something is universal across cultures, at least according to Donald Brown. Choice making or choosing alternatives, universal. Decision making. This one's really interesting. Actions under self-control, distinguished from those not under control. That I find incredibly fascinating.

That that distinction is made uh in so many cultures. Culture slash nature distinction. The distinction between something caused by culture or nature. Discrepancies between speech, thought, and action. So doing something that is contrary to one's uh words or thoughts. Uh self-distinguished from other. That one's pretty obvious, but it's I think relevant. Uh sanctions for crimes against the collectivity and redress of wrongs. So this is suggestive that there's some notion of deserts in the way we hold people responsible and punish them. Self as neither wholly passive nor wholly autonomous. Self as subject and object. And this one I find incredibly fascinating. Self is responsible. Yeah. So all those things I think are part and parcel of the discourse on free will.

Yeah. Uh and I think this this at least we have a very strong uh prima facie case that uh the way we think about and talk about free will uh is rooted in fundamental aspects of the human cognitive phenotype, or at least the conceptual machinery that we bring to bear, this this is a pretty good candidate for being a part of human nature. So I think you're hitting on something that ought to be of interest to evolutionary social scientists. Yeah, I love that. And there's been a few people who I've talked to who are very dyed in the wool adaptationists who are sort of like, why are you doing free will at all? And in some sense, I say to them, just snip out free will and just say, look, there's a class of adaptations that are really important that you've just covered really nicely, that

there hasn't been enough conceptual work, task analyses of empirical inquiry into that are really fundamental straightforward things that you would expect to be in an organism like us. Um so, yes, that um uh I would argue there's a large swath of the evolved phenotype that hasn't been looked at really. Um, and uh free will is a way into it. So free will has been a point of contention for millennia. You think, correct me if I'm wrong, you have a solution to this age-old quandary. Or at least some kind of solution. I think we have a new idea that moves our understanding of it forward. Um, and I do think there is a solution to it, but it's sort of the the Douglas Adams, you know, the the um what is the Douglas Adams book?

The um maybe it's Hitchhiker's Guide or Life, the Universe, the something like that. But then they in one of the they said this is science fiction, Douglas Adams, where do you do you know Douglas Adams, David? Yes, I'm a fan. Yeah, Um so they make this giant supercomputer and it calculates the answer to life, the universe, and everything, and it spits out the answer. Do you remember what the answer is? Yes, 42. 42, right? Exactly. Yeah. Wonderful, wonderful moment. Yeah, exactly. And in in this, the answer to the problem of free will is sort of like that. Um but but we do think there's an answer, and I do think there's a way to sort of look past it. Um and I uh yeah. So I I think we have something new to say about it.

Yeah. So how do what is mismatch doing here? How what role is it playing? Yeah. so this is true. So there's been two parts to this. So since this has been something people have been worked working on for a really long time, it took some time to do. So there were two parts to this. The first part was um an adaptationist approach to the adaptations that are underlying what people are talking about when they talk about free will. And I have a our there's a and so this is basically a psychological explanation of what people are talking about. and then a psychological explanation of why there have been a there's been a debate about why science is maybe threatening the existence of free will for some people and not for other people.

So it was the psychology of what are people talking about when they talk about free will. And then what's the psychology of the people who are debating the one side or the other, saying there is or isn't free will, or saying that science uh conflicts with free will or not. And then that was that was sort of the main first part um of the project, and that's the one that I've talked about, presented on. But as we were talking before we started recording, what I realized was sort of implicit in that thing was the idea of evolutionary mismatch, And I think the second part of evolutionary mismatch is sort of hitting the nail on the head. And I didn't realize it at first. And it's so it's taken me some time to sort of come around to the big picture

idea where you get close to the language of sort of solving the problem of free will. And I think it's with this idea of sort of evolutionary mismatch combined with the other stuff of what's the underlying psychology. So for those who are unfamiliar, evolutionary mismatch is when the adaptations of an organism is mismatched with the current environment in which the organism finds itself. So because humans evolved in a very different environment than the one we now inhabit because of rapid technological and cultural change, many of our adaptations have failed to catch up to the current environment. The examples that are usually given are, you know, our uh craving for junk food and fast food that you know gives us heart disease.

You know, we talked about this, how it's a bit simplistic in our conversation with Daniel Nettle, but that's uh an example that people uh bring up. Um another example is uh birth control and contraception. Uh I remember Stephen Pinker in his book How the Mind Works said that, you know, maybe give us another uh thousand generations and we'll evolve to um fear uh contraception the same way we fear snakes and heights and predators. Right. Um but to our credit, I think even the Karen Kramer episode and the um Brooks Shelza also sort of made added sophistication to that. That some of the decision making is about investment in the social world competition of your offspring, such that uh humans are not just maxing max maximizing their offspring

numbers. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. And so in some ways I think mismatch, the idea of evolutionary mismatch has been a bit oversold, a bit overstated in evolutionary psychology. It's it's continuing to be revised by um new insights into the variability of uh human ancestral environments. Um Man Vier Singh has done some work on this, that the idea of the small scale uh egalitarian hunter gatherer society is something of a myth, that there is actually widespread variation in terms of the degree of of size of hunter-gatherer groups, their uh hierarchical nature, their centralization. Um, and so I I'm um continuing to be of the opinion that mismatch is has been a bit overrated in evolutionary psychology.

But convince me that I'm wrong in the case of well, I'll say I'll say a really short one, which is also uh sodium sodium vapor lights from Roger Shepherd is a very good example. So these are lights that you know are different than terrestrial sun illumination in your car under a sodium vapor light, they become less prevalent because LEDs now. Um, but your car would look you know purple, but it was red, you know, and it's just because your visual system just sort of makes assumptions about the the the way the light works, right? It's just a mismatch. Um, so anyway. Um so this is right. In order to explain the mismatch part, I think it will be helpful to talk first about what people are worrying about or talking about when they're talking about free will.

What are we worrying about? Yeah. So what is really at stake here? Yeah. So if you look back, so sit down, take it, pull up a chair, kids. Um, so this guy Epicurius, right, from like a long time ago. Um, but basically what happened was people started doing science and philosophy and they started realizing okay look sort of the world is understandable and knowable and the way that um we work ultimately is sort of um predictable maybe mechanical whether or not it's sort of probabilistic or deterministic, you know, that's sort of we can have that. We can talk about that later. But basically as people started talking about the scientific and conceptual analysis of like philosophy, people started to realize, well, maybe the way that we work is

knowable. And then as soon as people started realizing that that might be true, then they realize, well, that might mean we don't have freedom to choose things. So, in other words, I walk around making decisions and I'm free to like do whatever I want to do. So, like right now, I could like close my computer and get up and go get a cup of coffee if I wanted to, you know, like that's something I could do. Um, and so you know, and when I can't do something, like if I got trapped in this office, it would be pretty distressing, you know, like I care about having my freedom, and my freedom is real, and uh that's that's a really important thing. And so we so we all walk around feeling like I can make decisions, I can do what I want to

do, and um and then then comes along this idea, well, actually the way that you work is with a lunch a bunch of different little systems. And even in early days, before they even knew what the systems were, you know, the philosophers sort of decided in principle, somebody someday is going to figure out all the little mechanical doohickeys that make us up. And what they realized, and I think anybody who's sort of thinking clearly arrives at this conclusion is that those little doohickeys don't have free will. Right. So if you look inside any part of my body, there's nothing that corresponds to sort of freedom or decision or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Your liver is not making decisions. Your lungs don't have free will.

Uh your pancreas. Yeah. These are just mechanical systems that are with inputs and outputs. And the brain in theory should be no different. Yeah. So unlike me, so for me, you know, like I can I can look around. There's a bunch of inputs to me, but I ultimately at some point I make a decision, you know. But there's nothing like that. If you reduce me or cut me open or break me up conceptually or literally, you don't find anything like that. And this is then this fundamentally is the problem of free will, which is that is free will real given that either in principle or in practice, if you look into how we work, we don't see anything like freedom at the level of how we actually work. And so then people were saying, Well, look, if you if we don't

find freedom down here, then maybe there's no such thing as free will. And pretty early on, it actually ended up being that some people really felt like that was true. And then other people were sort of like, well, that's okay, but we still have freedom. And this sort of became to be very to gloss over a lot. This became the free will debate, which is that and the free will debate's complicated because So I just I want to make sure that we get the three positions that you've just sketched in the So there are three camps. It correct me if I'm wrong. One is that we have no free will. This is determinism. We live in a clockwork universe with cause and effect where you can perfectly predict everything that's going to happen.

If you have perfect knowledge of each state of the universe, you can predict the next state. That's determinism. Free will is an illusion uh F you. And uh the second camp is uh yes, we do have free will. F you. Uh uh, even though there's clockwork stuff in the universe, we are different. We have souls, we have uh consciousness, we have freedom, and we transcend all that stuff. That's the second position. The third position is sort of somewhere in the middle where it's like, yes, we're part of a clockwork cause-effect universe, and yeah, in theory you could break me down into all my components, but um that stuff is still compatible with me choosing and me having free will. So that is the compatibilist uh camp where yes, things are deterministic, but we still have

freedom, and freedom is compatible with determinism. Yeah. I yes, it's this is why I was gonna, yeah, exactly. And I it it's complicated. So I think for me at least one way to clarify The the sides in the debate are there are some people who who are incompatibilists who think that understanding the world, the mechanical world, quote unquote deterministic world. We'll we'll just glump all these together. We'll we can always it's worth noting that even some people even think that an indeterministic world is also incompatible with free will. Like if stuff was random, like just like quantum fluctuations or whatever, like that's not really compatible with free will either. I'm just behaving randomly as a result of like you know random quantum fluctuations.

That doesn't make me any more free, right? Yeah. So anyway. So there's incom so people who are um who think that there's a conflict, we'll just call it between like m be a mechanical view of the world and free will. Yeah. That that's a whole category people. And you can actually end up on two different places with that. Right. So you accept the premise that they're incompatible. But then you can say, Well, I don't think there's free will. And you go with the world is mechanical. Right. Right. And um, and those are sometimes called like it's uh it's called will illusionism, where it's just you just you just you say it's an illusion, and this would be like Sam Harris or uh why can't I think of his name?

The zebras don't get all Robert Sapolsky, yeah. Uh that's right. So these are people who say, look, you guys who are not hard, we're hard-nosed scientists in FU to everyone who's wishfully thinking out there that food exists, nope it doesn't, grow up. That's their yeah. I don't agree with those people. Um or or the I'm not as as the Aussies would say. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So so those are Willusionists and they they accept that the the conflict, right? The premise that there's a conflict. There's other people who believe in free will. They're called libertarians. It has nothing to do with the political party, but it's that they believe that, yeah, a mechanical view of the world is incompatible with free will, but they believe free will

exists. And so they sort of believe, like kind of, I mean, if you really push on it, it's like sort of almost spiritualist, where it's sort of yeah, there's some uh invisible essence that that is transcendent over the gooey meat stuff. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So those are two different uh results of this of the same accepted premise that the meat and the freedom are incompatible. Yes. That's a really interesting point. That in some sense they uh their disagreement stems from a deeper agreement. Yeah. They both are seeing the world the same way, that there is this fundamental conflict, and they just resolve that conflict in different ways. Completely. Yep, exactly. Okay, cool. Um and then and as you put it, then there's sort of a third category which is

compatibleists, which who reject the that that meat and freedom are are not compatible, or or I don't know too many negatives, but basically they say that look, meat and freedom are compatible, and that everything, you know, like you know, going going to the store, listening to music, um, you know, seeing things, this is all made possible by meat. So why wouldn't my freedom be any different? right? The ability to choose is just made possible. I mean, and so this is somebody like Dan Dennett or Dina Roskies, or like me. I mean, I'm I'm I am a compatibilist. Although, again, upon in doing this project, I also realized, in some sense, what we're saying in this project about the up psych of free will

argues that the compatibilists aren't entirely right either and that the incompatibilists do have a point. So I sort of even transcended my own. But like coming into this, and still to this day, if you if you had to put me in one of these categories, I would be a compatibilist. Cool. It's interesting. I I used to be uh an incompatibilist. I used to be uh in the Sam Harris camp. Uh and I think for bad reasons, it was more for vibes-based reasons. Like I liked the vibe of being like a hard headed thing. Yeah, you're a scientist, you're a rationalist. Yeah, no, no, no. There's a lot of trap. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I fell into that trap. I and I also liked the edginess of it. It was it was kind of cool.

It was politically congenial too. Like, oh yeah, nobody pulls themselves up by their own bootstraps. Yeah. You know, we're all just, you know, deterministic things. Yeah. Um, you know, it it was it was, you know, fit with my like, you know, views on the criminal justice system that we should focus more on rehabilitation and not just desserts. Like it was all just uh uh it was a total vibes-based um decision that I that I regret in in hindsight. But uh I remember at some point I was just just persuaded, I was listening to a bait uh with Dan Dennett and some other philosopher. I think it was Greg Caruso. Yeah, Greg Caruso, yeah, because Greg Cruso is exactly uh well, I don't want to I don't want to paint him too hard, but he is he is very much in what you just said, which is he's

arguing that uh a really strong uh retributive punishing view of criminal justice is sort of foolish in light of what we know. Yeah. Yes. And I remember listening to a debate, or maybe I was reading a debate. I I can't remember. It was a debate between Dan Dennett and him. Yeah, they have a book called Just Just Deserts is is the book of their debate. Yeah. Maybe I was reading that book. Yeah. Um and um it was interesting. I was reading the book, and while I was reading it, I was convinced by Greg Cruz. I'm like, oh, Greg's Greg's right. That's a great Danny. And then like points, yeah. As and then, but like gradually, as I continued to reflect on it, after I had read it, like weeks after, I ended up thinking, wait a second, no, uh, he's actually wrong.

Dan Dan Dennett is right. Yeah, yeah. And I just like it just it was this kind of sleeper effect, or like uh something about Dan Dennett's points just kinda sunk in with me and then I realized, no, no, it it uh he's actually right. Yeah. That uh I and I I remember it was it was something about I was just thinking about like well what do they actually disagree about? Like Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like both sides agree that we should have punishment and we should hold people accountable for crimes and we should have a criminal justice system. So like wha is actually at stake here? Yeah, yeah. And I realize that there's nothing at stake. Yeah. They both have the same opinions about criminal justice policy.

They're both liberal progressives. Like they both, when it when the rubber meets the road, like they're both gonna behave in the world in the same way. So what are they really arguing about? When I realized that, I realized that um of course it's compatible. Yeah. Like uh when when when Greg is talking about, you know, you know, retributivism doesn't make sense, um, well, he uh it's just we can reframe retributivism in the terms of determinism, where what what punishment is is holding a uh a an incentive sensitive being accountable. Yeah. You know, when Sam Harris says, of course we should hold people responsible for what they do. Well, that's that's what the whole debate is. Yeah. Right? You can't just say that, well, of course we should hold people responsible because then

there's no debate. Yeah. I don't know. So I ended up realizing that there's a way to reconcile our language with you know hard-headed facts about us as incentive-sensitive beings, being sensitive to our incentives, and uh distinguishing between um us when we're uh sensitive to our incentives and rewards and punishments, and us when we're not sensitive to rewards and punishments. And obviously it makes more sense to reward us and punish us when we're sensitive to rewards and punishments, that is, when we're freely choosing. And it makes no sense to reward and punish us when we're not sensitive to rewards and punishments. That's that just dissolves the whole debate, I think. That's just that's what we're talking about.

And there's no incompatibility there. So it eventually dawned on me and I changed my mind and I became a compatibilist. Yeah, but anyway. Yeah, but no, no, that's great. And I like what you said there too. it's sort of a rabbit duck illusion. And if you've never the listeners haven't looked at the rabbit duck m uh illusion, you know, go take a look at it and it flips back and forth between a rabbit and duck. And I think free will is like that, where I think all of us at some point, when you start thinking about the Caruso point or the incompatibilist point, some part of us is sort of like, Yeah, I get that. That makes sense. Like if I if you think if you hear it, you're like, Yeah, no, like I'm mechanical, it

doesn't make sense. How could I be free? Right? Like yeah, that's that's real. And like I think everybody feels that. But then you you can also think, well, but yeah, but everything I do is made possible by mechanical stuff, so it must not be incompatible, must be compatible, right? And I think and I think that ability to see both ways and it is part of the paradox of free will. And I think some people um uh lean more strongly towards one side versus the other. There's starting to be empirical work on this where people ask people, you know, do you think uh that uh that you know a mechanical view of the world is compatible with free will? What do you think? And actually, like if you experimental philosophers, when they ask people, most people are

pretty compatibilist, which sort of surprises philosophers. And a lot of philosophers sort of think, well, people don't understand what we mean by free will. And if they actually understood what we meant by free will, they wouldn't be compatibilists. And there, and there's, you know, if you change circumstances, so like if people do something morally wrong, they'll they'll say the person had more free will um than not. So like it's colored by moral evaluation and things like that. But anyway, I don't I don't want to get too far into that. But basically, yeah, uh what you just described of you can sort of sort of see it both ways, but you land on one side. I think that's a very common thing. And that's part of the explanation.

We will explain why that sort of you can see it both ways sort of thing. And I do think this account, which you know, we're gonna like stop in 10 minutes and we're gonna just kind of tease people for for the solution, but not not not really as a joke. But um but I think even the Caruso Dennett thing, I think this account explains what they're arguing about, actually. Yeah. Okay. So let's get into the meat of it. What are they arguing about? What is the account? What are you proposing? Sure, sure, sure. Okay. So let's start with let's start with a concrete example. So um and I sort of alluded to it already, but like like there's just certain things that like I can do as an agent, and then there's just certain things I can't, right?

So, like a good example, I like using this example, is that um, you know, if I wanted to, I could start waking up earlier than I do currently, right? Like I could I could just like set my alarm earlier and I could start waking up earlier. Let's suppose that I broke a bone. Um okay now let's assume I'm already doing everything I possibly can in terms of like allowing it to heal. Um what I can't do unlike the wake up early thing is just sort of convince myself to heal my broken bone right like it's not in my purview or ken or whatever verb you want to use to um to actually like heal my broken bone. Like I can't do that. It's just going to be time, right? I can't convince myself to do it. You can't convince me.

You could hold a gun to my head. It's not going to affect the healing of my broken bone. Unlike the waking up earlier in the morning, right? So I represent, I can uh I can choose to wake up earlier in the morning. If you held a gun to my head, I could wake up earlier in the morning. You wouldn't even have to do that. Um, so that that is a meaningful difference. That's an intuitive difference, But but that's a meaningful difference. Yeah. And certainly I I would add a very adaptively relevant difference that the mind should have evolved to make. It would be disastrous if you got that question wrong. If I tried to like cajole you into healing more quickly and punish you if you didn't heal fast enough, like that would be dis it would destroy our relationship.

It would be absolutely disastrous for me. Correct. Uh on the other hand, if I thought that you couldn't control how early you you you woke up when you actually could, and I could incentivize you with rewards and punishment to change your behavior, and I miss that out, that would also be disastrous. So there are huge costs to getting this distinction wrong. This is of huge adaptive significance of detecting this difference, to use your terminology. That's right. And that's exactly right. It's it's sort of the more subtle version of it would be a disaster for an organism that couldn't fly to think it could, right? Yes. Um, or it just like part of organism design should be like, what can I do? What are the things, what are the outcomes that I can affect in the world?

And whether it's within my body envelope or can I convince you to do that's a strong selection pressure. And if I get that wrong, that's a big cost, right? Yeah. So I think that's like at a deep level, that's what this is all about. So let's take the example of waking up in the broken bone and let's unpack it a little more carefully, okay, and be adaptationist about it. So We we started at a very sort of folk psychological, like I can convince myself, right? Let's make it a little more mechanisms described at more of a functional software level. Okay. So here's what, and this is also work I'm doing with my graduate student, Michael Oswald. Um, here's how we're thinking about it. So the intuitive idea with the waking up in the morning, the idea that I can sort of I can

convince myself to do this, what that means is that there is one of the systems inside of us is is sort of representing it's almost like a meta representation it's sort of representing what outcomes in the world Vary depending upon settings inside the organism. Okay, I'll unpack that a little bit. So just concretely, if so, I have planning and motivational systems inside of me, the state of those planning and motivational systems, if they're in different states, will change whether or not I wake up early or not. Right? So if the planning and motivational systems are in one setting, I will get up at 4 a.m. If they're in another setting, I'll get up at 8 a.m. So what time I wake up in the morning depends on the state of systems within

me. There's another more specifically in your in your brain. So with the bone, like that also determines the same thing. Exactly. No, no, no. That's a really good point. Yes. Yes. So I don't know. I still haven't thought through all of this, but the roughest way I can think about it is that there is a system that is representing can the planning and motivation systems within this body envelope. What outcomes can they affect, or which outcomes are affected by them? And so that system would say, Yes, waking up early in the morning is affected by those systems. Right. The state of those systems. Healing the broken bone, no. It doesn't matter if the the the state of those systems are we really want to

to put it in like folk psychological terms, we really want to heal this broken bone. The bone's not gonna be any different. Right. Right. And so okay, so we can make it even more specific. So it's not so much that the decision depends on something inside you or that it depends on something inside your brain, as that it depends on something it depends on a very specific part of your brain. Correct. And in particular, the planning and motivational systems. Yeah, it might even I and I don't know if that's exactly right, But this is better than what the theory th this is a theory where there hasn't even been a theory. And what w as I will explain, or maybe I don't know, or in a paper if we don't get to it, I

don't know if that's exactly right, but I think this is roughly right. Yes. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. It's almost like if I think you're free to do something, I see a lever sticking out of your head that's connected to your planning and motivational systems that I can pull. Exactly. And if you're not free, then there's no lever that I can pull. Yeah. And this is, I mean, just to go concrete, like another example of this would be something like, why do we think addiction or habit, right? So like free will, people have I mean I don't know people have this point, have the have these intuitions about different situations involve more or less free will. Yeah. And there's almost no theory of it.

Like, this is one of the weird things about the debate. As much as like theorists do the debate, they often just invoke context that they appeal to intuition, but there's no theory of why that's an intuitive idea or why the situation has more or less free will. This is such a theory. So, for example, one idea is that um the maximum amount of free will, and I'm not gonna cite everybody who says all this, this just know that like um this is stuff other people have said. I'm just not gonna like include citations because this is a podcast, so you know. Uh but anyway. So, like an idea would be like if the you if you're facing a decision where you're really roughly indifferent about the choices, that's really a free will situation, right?

And the idea is that well, why would people have that intuition? Well, it's because it's completely dependent on the settings of like the planning, um, uh the planning system, right? Because the um there's well, let's contrast that to the situation where you're addicted to nicotine, right? Um, so the situation where you're addicted to nicotine, or worse, like I don't know, um what did Kurt Cobain do? Um it wasn't cocaine. It was oh heroin or something? I don't know. Yeah, so let's say you're addicted to heroin, right? Yeah. Um uh the planning and motivation system, whatever those states are, right? It doesn't, it doesn't matter because there's some other system in your head that is overriding the planning and the planning or the goal planning and goal-based systems

actually I think is probably more so I have a goal of like not taking my um um my heroin but there's another system that's just taking over right so it's it's it's a planning and means and reasoning yeah so how maybe that's a better way to put it yeah what means can I use to achieve this this end exactly um and uh that system of you know how can I achieve this goal what states of the world are going to affect this goal? That system is disconnected from the thing you're interested in. It's it's disconnected from the heroine behavior. It's disconnected from the bone healing or exactly that's yeah yeah that's the claim that we're not free to choose it. Exactly. And that's and so that's why there's the intuition that the means end system is

fully operational in what I where I go to lunch today. Or if I have two indifferent choices in a experimental game and I'm like, well, yellow versus blue. I don't know. I'll choose blue. Like that's just means end or the the the choosing system, right? The system that just sort of it's fully operative. Whereas for the hero I wan I want to push back a bit. I don't I don't think that indifference really matters. I don't either. So I yeah but so I I I I have the intuition that even if I'm not indifferent, let's let's say I'm considering whether or not to to rob a bank. Like let's say I'm I'm low on on cash and I really need the money and and the thought occurs, oh I could just rob this this cash register.

Is this hypothetical, David? Yeah, this is an autobiography, actually. Um we can we can edit this out later. So I'm um so you know, I I uh you know I happen to be, let's say I happen to be carrying a gun with me, and I see you know there's a cash register, there's lots of cash in it. I think you know, I could just I could just rob this cash register. And I think to myself, no, that would be terrible. That would make me a bad person. Um things could go terribly awry. There are better ways to make money than stealing it. bad David, don't do that. And let's say I'm not indifferent at all. Like it's I really have a clear moral revulsion at the thought, and I instantly reject it. Yeah. And I think that's a that's a really bad decision, and I continue living an upstanding

life. Yeah. Even if I'm not indifferent at all, and the decision is clear that I should not rob the person, I still have the intuition that that was a free choice. Yeah. You know, that that I freely made that decision. So it's not so even if I, you know, if I was indifferent, I was like torn between one thing or the other, I I it doesn't it doesn't seem like I would be that makes me more free. Yeah. You know, I I don't think it's the indifference itself. I think it's it's the it's the mere fact that you have the options available, not how much you weight either option. I I I actually agree with that. Yeah. I I I think that people have made the argument that it's even indifference is sort of the

the maximum thing, but I I agree you don't really need that. And I I and just to make this concrete, um yeah, just to review though, that's the argument, is that it's the means end or goal-based system. I and again, I don't really know how to roughly characterize this. It's not, you know, but but yeah, that's the idea. Is why do we have the intuition that the heroin addict is less free than you not choosing to rob the bank? Or if you don't like the heroin example, you know, if you're um if you're really just in a habit, like let's say you um you you mean to tie your shoes in a new way but you're in just such of a habit that you to tie them the old way but you meant to tie them the the the new

way right you you you would be less like um you kind of didn't do it on purpose but you did it anyway. Yeah it was sort of automatic. Yeah right and so that's that would be less free will like in in that context. Like it's just sort of you were on auto drive, quote unquote. You were on autopilot, you know like you were just sort of it was an automatic thing. Um that's less free will. And again, it's because there's this theory of what it is, what free will is, is this representation of sort of what's within this um the purview of this planning or means ends system or set of systems. Right. And it's sort of the the rewardability and punishability. Like if if you know, if you you tied your shoes, you know, just out of habit and you you

can't really control it, then no matter what I promise to reward you with or punish you with, if you do or don't tie your shoes, it's not gonna change you. Exactly or it's gonna have little effect on you because you're just so uh ingrained to be doing this. Exactly. And so it if for me, it it tells me this is the type of thing that I can reward or punish and change. And this is the type of thing that I shouldn't bother trying to reward or punish. Exactly. And that we we have a term for that. It might be a bad term, but we call it the efficacy of intentional intervention. Where sort of it's the idea that um the and again, the the the precise thing is what we've already said, but the the the kind of intuitive idea is that you're treating the

person intentionally, like you're just giving them your convince. If I want to change your behavior, David, I'm treating you like a person saying, Look, I want to convince you, I want to incentivize you or disincentive, like convince you, give you reasons why you should or shouldn't do something. If that's effective, yeah, then you have free will. But if it's not, then you don't. So I might be able to convince you to choose red over green, but maybe not to not take heroin. And yeah, and that's the difference between free will and not. So basically, what free will is, is the efficacy of intentional intervention for third parties. So it's that I can convince you. Um, but more importantly and primarily, it's also first person.

It's this: is it can I convince myself? Can I force myself to do something? Can I convince myself to not take heroin? Right. And if the answer is no, like no matter what my planning or means-ends reasoning delivers, I'm still taking heroin, then that means I don't have free will. There's sort of no way I can convince myself, even and so that that confuses me. So what does it even mean to convince myself? Yes, and that's an intentional language thing. And then I think it goes back to then we can make it a functional level claim where it's a representation of no matter the states of the means and planning or the goal-based system. So we can say, look, even if the goal-based system says stop taking heroin, and even if the

means and planning is all we're gonna stop taking heroin, and that doesn't work, and that system registers we're still taking heroin, then then it's then that's it. So that's the it's yeah, that's interesting. It's almost like um counterfactual reasoning. For the self, for the for the first person, it's like uh can reasoning about the potential implications or consequences of this change my behavior? If so, I should think through all the different downstream consequences and that's going to change my behavior. But if entertaining all the downstream consequences is going to be useless, then it's just a waste of energy for me to entertain those consequences because not going to do anything. It's not going to shape my behavior.

And so that's a useful distinction to make at the first person level. Where is it worth it for me to entertain all the implications and to consider all the effects of of one uh decision versus another, or should I just not even entertain them and just, you know, do whatever I was gonna do anyway. That's and that should save me a lot of time. Like if if if no matter what I think about or um what my reasoning process is like, it's not gonna change my decision one way or the other, then it's pointless for me to entertain all these different factors. Yeah. Right. And so it's useful for the the individual as well to not waste time going, you know, entertaining all these fanciful scenarios. Uh and and so that's interesting.

I like that. So um Yeah, and counterfactual is the first thing that's a good thing. Yeah. Well, go ahead and then I'll yeah. So like at the third person level, it's more about like what can I do to reward or punish this person? Uh if there if the answer is nothing, then the person isn't free. At the first person level, it's what can I think about, or what consequences or implications can I consider to change my behavior. Yeah. Uh and if the answer is nothing, then I at the first person level don't have free will. Yeah. And this is why and again, there's no there's no there had been no theory about this. But in the literature, one of the the definitions people landed on for free will is reasons

responsiveness. Okay. And that is that is a result. Like that's all people talk about. Like if a person has reasons for what they're doing and they're responsive to reasons, then they have free will. But if they're not, then they don't. Yeah. Right. So like in a and I think a good example would be something like let's say you have like strong political convictions, right? Now, from the third person perspective, like you, I might not be able to convince you that to change your political convictions, right? But you should be able to convince yourself at least of your political convictions, right? Like if the reasons why you support a political party, right, are such that uh you know what they are, and those reasons no longer hold, and you still

can't help but support the political party, then the political party has implanted a chip in your head, right? Like if you're like the reason why I support this party is because I think it's good for my family. And then you learn information of like it's not good for my family. And if you if that's really the reason why you support them, then you should be able to like not support them anymore, right? Like if that's the correct reason. This again, this is this theory is an intentional level, but it's reasons responsiveness, which is that um, and And so I think what we have just been describing earlier explains why reasons responsiveness was a definition of free will people came up with. It's interesting that uh uh being able to say switch

political parties if I'm persuaded that the other policies are are gonna make the country better, it seems to me like that might be a good strategy for me personally, but it also makes me look like a bad ally. Like if I can capriciously change parties at the slightest whiff of an argument that maybe my party is wrong, then I'm a bad ally. I'm a bad political ally. Whereas if nothing is going to get me to change to the other side, then I'm a really loyal ally. And so it's almost like you want to uh destroy your free will to signal that you're a good ally and you're never gonna in the same way that you might want to signal that for a romantic relationship. Like if there's no way that I could ever even possibly consider uh someone else other than

you, uh then that makes me a really good, committed romantic partner. Yeah. Right. And so and there are some cases where we might want to burn our bridges and signal that we don't have free will, uh to to signal that we're gonna be a good romantic partner, a good ally, uh whatever. Yeah. No, I think certain religions sort of have that metaphor of like there's a thing in you that's like constant separate from, and it's either like the bad part of you or it's God or whatever. But this idea sort of that um yeah, and you're getting into the other part of this, which is this is not a neutral thing. So what we've been talking about is ways to intervene upon the world. So it's ways to change my future behavior with respect to myself.

So what is it that um if I if if the settings within my planning and reason based or whatever, however I want to talk about it, systems are in different states, then these are different outcomes that are all within my purview, right? And so for example, like maybe I haven't I haven't gone through the um the systems haven't gone through their operations yet. So it would be reasonable for me to say, well, you know, 10 minutes from now I can do a number of different things because those systems haven't calculated what they're gonna do 10 minutes from now. So it'd be very reasonable and meaningful for me to say that. It's also then what are the things I can do to convince you of to do, right? Can I change the state of those systems?

Is it is it something I can effectively intervene upon? It's getting back to the wake up in the morning versus the broken bone. An organism should not be value neutral with respect to this. And this is where compatibilism or incompatibilism in the problem of free will comes in the first place. So what you have is you have a bunch of people who are saying, look, up until we started doing philosophy, you had this idea that you were free to do certain things, like wake up early in the morning. You already knew you weren't free to like heal your broken bone, but whatever. But even the stuff you were free about, guess what? That stuff, if you look under the hood, is all mechanical. And for an organism that cares about not being

manipulated by others, that's a problem. And I think the concern about manipulation is central to the problem of free will. And it's there everywhere in the literature, but it's not really talked about explicitly. And it's exactly what would fall out from what we've just talked about, which is, For example, if David, your decision making, your goals and outcomes, I could sort of poke on or predict ahead of time or influence directly without trying to convince you, that would be an enormous boon to me, and it would be a horrible problem for you. So think about like a tell and poker, right? Yeah. So if every time you were about to make a decision, I could anticipate your decision ahead of time because I could see, like you just always, I don't know, tugged your ear.

Um then, and you don't know that that's true of you, um, and you feel like you're still making a decision, but I already know what you're gonna do, I can use that to my strategic advantage. If I know how you make a decision, like the extreme version and philosophers rely on this, If I know how your brain makes a decision, then I can go into your brain and I can poke on the right place at the right time. You think you've made a decision, but guess what? I influenced your decision for you. I should that's something in the in the social strategy. Is that a word stra strategy? I believe George W. Bush called it. Exactly. Yeah, no, it's like a it's like it's a joke word. Yeah. Um perfectly cromulent for all the Simpsons uh listeners or watchers.

Um That strategic concern, even at a very evolved prosaic level of like tells and poker, or sort of like every time, I don't I don't know, like you could just think of a mundane example, like not neuroscience, right? But just like a prosaic example, like every time you get upset because you you don't get uh when you hunt and you miss something, you get angry, you know, and I can just predict that ahead or something like that. There's always strategic advantage to understanding or being able to manipulate somebody below the level of an intentional intervention, below the level of goals and means and systems. So this should not be neutral. And the idea is that a large part of what the like if an alien came and was like, what is

this free will debate about? What is this concern? One one thing sort of baked in from the beginning is this concern that if we are mechanical, we don't have freedom. And what that means is that if there's a way to know how I'm free in a mechanical fashion, it means that somebody could poke on it or manipulate it. And that should be a concern for me. Interesting. So is it is the fear that I'm going to out fox you, say in poker, like if I know what you're gonna do then I can predict then I can exploit you in some way? Or is it the fear that if it's mechanical uh then I can manipulate uh the mechanical aspects of it in some way? 'Cause those seem different. Is it is it merely that the the fear of being out foxed or is it the fear of of someone,

say an evil neuroscientist changing the the neurons in my brain uh to make me do something or is it both? I think it's both. Okay. Yeah, I think it's both. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. No, I I think the the point about the fear of being outfoxed or predicted, I think, is a really insightful one. We often like kind of take pride about being unpredictable or doing things that other people didn't anticipate, being unique, not conforming, or mindlessly conforming. Like we almost kind of feel embarrassed if we behave in a way that's too predictable. Like you know, uh if all of my political views can be predicted and advanced based on the uh Democratic Party's political platform. That's kind of embarrassing.

It means that like I don't think for myself like you can just easily predict everything I'm gonna say. Like you know all the talking points I'm gonna go down. Like I I I'm kind of like embarrassed about that sometimes. Yeah. And we're often kind of ashamed or embarrassed about being too predictable. Because it it's it it elicits this fear that we can be easily exploited or manipulated if if people can just see through to the underlying mechanics of everything we do. And I think this fear is often elicited by evolutionary psychology itself. Yeah. Like when we start to get into the underlying mechanics of our decision making and start trying to actually predict how we're gonna do or predict what we're gonna do or like which

mates we're gonna be attracted to in you know which you know uh which stage of the menstrual cycle or you know which life stage or whatever. We can, you know, based on like their facial symmetry or whatever, we can predict all these things. That's kind of uncomfortable. Yeah. It suggests that that that someone could manipulate us or exploit us. Uh so do you think so I it's interesting, it it it almost explains why people uh are uncomfortable by evolutionary psychology. Um so you know, Stephen Pinker in his book The Blank Slate goes through all the reasons why people are uncomfortable with this idea of an evolved human nature. Uh and one of them is the fear of determinism. He has a whole chapter on this.

Um that if we understand all the mechanics, the nuts and bolts of you know our brains and who we are as animals, uh that there's something uncomfy and scary about that. Yeah. Uh and I think what you're saying uh explains why we're so uncomfortable about that. Do you do you buy that? Yeah, yeah. And it actually, but I mean, one of the things, and we might cut, I mean, so Michael Osfeld and I, we have an empirical project plan because we believe that there's this idea that people are incompatibilists or compatibilists about free will. And we actually think that there's a more precise way to carve people up as into individual differences, and it might even be stable. And we think that it's actually related to this issue of um uh

when do people have free will? Um, and we we we almost use the metaphor of like when do they get off the station on like or when do they get off the train? Um and there's three different stops. One is there's a group of people who the fact that the manipulatability, the knowledge itself, even in principle, exists, means that there's no free will, right? So these would be people I suspect who are very vigilant about manipulation or manipulatability. And so there's just certain people who I think, I think like what it is is there, I don't know, there's a probably lots of ways to get to this individual difference. But there's some people who have the conviction that even if in principle people could be manipulated, even if we don't have the knowledge yet, even if we don't have

the means. The fact that it's in principle possible means there's no means we need to be worried about manipulation. So that some some that is one that's so that gets you're getting off the free will train early. That's step one. Yeah. Step two is um you get off the free will train not when um it's just in principle possible, but when something um specifically is known, right? So it might be that like you know something about um the so you do learn like people actually know something about this particular thing or maybe there's even like technology available to manipulate that and then some people like have this idea that then um then we don't have free will at least for this particular thing um

those people um well uh I'm gonna skip that because there's another part to it, but I'm gonna it's gonna be too complicated. There's a third stop, which I think I am, and I suspect you are too, and I think most evolutionary psychologists are, which is the third stop, which is in your stay on the free will train longest. And this is just because in principle something's knowable, it doesn't mean that you don't have free will. And even if we know a lot about the system and how it works, it doesn't mean we don't have free will. But if we know how the system works, and in this particular case, a bunch of neuroscientists actually intervened against somebody's knowledge or will in this case, then the question is: do they have free will?

Well, no, right? Yeah. They were manipulated. So it's sort of like the three stops are sort of is manipulation in principle um possible, in practice possible, or did it happen? And I think most compatibilists get off at stop three. And it's because you say, look, free will is just compatible. So like you know how the system works. Yeah. But unless you manipulate the system, you have free will. Yes. And so I think most compatibilism is an expression of getting off at step three. And that's actually like the evolved, the the the evolved concern is that are you being manipulated? Right. Right. And here manip manipulation is a really precise definition. So if I threaten you with a punishment or entice you with the promise of a reward, that's

not manipulation in your sense, because I'm speaking directly to your means and reasoning planning systems, right? And if I change your behavior by offering those rewards or threatening those punishments and you change your behavior, you freely made that choice and you were affected by the incentives that I were giving you. But if I bypass that and I don't offer you anything, or if I don't threaten you with anything, and I just slip you a pill or you know sneak into your bedroom at night and you know give you uh do some brain surgery on you, then I've manipulated you in the sense that that is that is scarier uh because uh you're not getting anything out of it. I'm just contorting you to my desires, um, and you're not getting anything out of the deal.

Whereas if I offer to pay you money and I give you the money, like we're mutually benefiting in that case. But if I'm just slipping you a pill uh without your knowledge, then you're not benefiting. It's purely in my interest. It's exploitation, uh in the sense that we discussed in our our our previous uh episode uh with Hannes. Um so uh do you buy that that way of thinking I do. I think the system you're exactly right. I think the system is smarter than that though, in the following sense of if if I hold a gun to your head. um, that is still a cost-benefit calculation. And I think most people would say, like, you're you don't have free will. And I think that's because ultimately this is still about interventionism, like it's causal

interventionism, which is just a jargony way of saying that all of these systems are for intervening upon the world and changing the world. So in the case of holding a gun to your head, What's the most effective intervention? It's not saying, David, you don't need to worry about your head, you don't need to care about your head. It would be to like remove the gun, right? Yeah. So in that sense, that's why we think it's about the efficacy of intentional intervention. In that case, it's that the most effective intervention isn't um uh convincing you to not worry about the gun, it's to just remove the gun, right? Right. Um, but uh so every so it's a little bit more of a continuum. This sort of complicates this this a little bit, yeah.

Um, in the sense of, and and I think this is why people have this intuition that the indifferent choice is the maximum free will, because to the extent that you feel compelled, like, oh man, I really have to get this birthday gift for my or Christmas gift or Hanukkah gift or whatever for my kid, it's because like the ambient culture has convinced my child that it's like a thing, you know, like I'm not making that decision, but I feel compelled by the cost benefit structure of the world. It's not sort of up to me, you know? And I think like I'm not free to just choose whatever gift I would want for my kid. Yeah. And I think it does, I think it I think it's still it's still consistent with the underlying thing, which is like to the extent it is up to the means and system,

yeah. Sort of it imbuing its own sort of costs and benefits or like I mean this is where the mismatch will get in. Um but basically to the extent that the valuation is internal or endogenous and not exogenous um to the planning and motivation or goal-based systems or the means and systems, I think it's more free will. So um okay yeah. So I think you're right broadly speaking, but I think it's even more subtle, such that the cost-benefit thing, like if somebody is holding your family hostage, yeah, and that made you rob a bank, you would have less free will than a situation in which you just decided it was be in your interest to rob the bank. Right. But it's still a cost-benefit calculation on your part.

Right. Maybe the way to think about it is that there are some situations that are so extreme in their valuation that they bypass the means-end reasoning system altogether. Like if your survival is at stake, then your fight or flight system kicks in. You're just going to do whatever you need to get out of that situation and survive. And means end reasoning, um, except for the narrow goal of of surviving, is just going to be irrelevant. Yeah. And so it's sort of analogous to slipping you a pill, uh, you know, uh, because um, you know, thinking about the implications of getting your head blown off is just not going to shape your behavior in any way. That's right. That's just a it's just a non-negotiable thing.

Like you have no choice but to get out of that situation. Yeah. Right. And this is also why, I mean, one of the reasons why I think the free will debate has been so difficult is that if you start to unpack it, there are some strong, straightforward answers, and we can get to them about is free will real or what is it? But one uh one part of the questions that have all been lumped together is a value judgment. Like it's a value judgment. So there's no fact in the matter, which is what's the efficacy of intentional interventions or should you care? So for example, uh, let's say somebody's holding a gun to your head, right? Yeah. Maybe what they're asking you to do is so terrible that you shouldn't care about your head.

And if somebody has that evaluation, then they would argue you do have free will. Yes. Because they're actually saying no, this is a situation where actually it should be up to David's means and valuation systems to to choose a different outcome. And so so there's actually no fact of the matter about whether or not it's because it's there's there's strategic reasons why people might say or argue like, you know, the the this you it should be up to the state of your planning and goal-based systems, and other people would say it's not. And so this is this is especially why um there's a one of the findings in the literature is that when you detect somebody has imposed a cost, like they've robbed a bank,

they've done something morally bad, automatically there's sort of more free will. Yeah. And the idea is that that would be what you would expect from like an error management perspective, from the sense of David, if you've done something wrong to the community or to me, I want to make sure that it's not a result of your planning means and systems. So I'm going to err on the side of attributing it to those to make sure that it's not. If you tell me something like, well, somebody was holding a gun to my head, then it'd be like, oh, okay, cool. And let's get the guy who was holding the gun to your head, right? Right. But um, but that's the general idea. And this explains why um that there's if you just hold everything

constant, when there's a negative, morally bad outcome, people ascribe more free will to that outcome. This explains why that would be because there's a bias in the evolved system to sort of target whether or not this was originating out of the thing in the organism that I can change in principle. Yeah. I want to get your thought on an idea that occurred to me a few minutes ago, on a on a possible direction you could take this line of work. So there are certain strategic situations where being predicted or out foxed by your opponent is gonna be really bad for you. So if you're playing rock, paper, scissors, it it's really bad for me if you can anticipate uh what move I'm gonna make. Yeah. Right?

Because then you can take advantage of that and win the game. Right? But if we're playing a coordination game, let's say we're communicating, and it really benefits you to predict uh in advance, you know, what I'm gonna say or what I what I'm gonna intend when I say something, because that's gonna allow us to uh communicate more effectively. If we're working together as a team, it it really benefits me for you to be able to predict what I'm gonna do. If you predict that I'm gonna pass you the ball in a basketball game, then that's gonna help you catch the ball and it's gonna help us win the game. And so there are certain strategic situations where being predictable is bad. And there are certain strategic situations where being predictable is good.

And so you might expect this to be a relevant variable that's affecting people's free will uh uh intuitions. Yeah. Such that in situations where uh it's more of a rock, paper, scissors situation, they're gonna be more threatened and scared of the possibility that we're just predictable meat sacks. Yeah. Right. But if we're in a coordination teamwork situation, the fact that we're predictable meat sacks isn't gonna be as threatening. Yeah. Yeah, I like that a lot. So is that is what is that is that prediction you might make. I love that. Yeah, that's great. I also this also that's fantastic, and I love that. And that's not something we'd thought about. We should do that. Um this also explains like every time we're talking and there's like four things to talk

about. Um this thing about predictability also explains what has been a huge mystery since the beginning of the free will debate, which is that people have focused on determinism, predictability as the problem. And so even the first person, Epicurius, he was he basically came up with this idea of like quantum sur swerve, as people sort of c jokingly kind of talk about it, which is the idea that somewhere in the microscopic or you know really small level, there's some indeterminism. It's like randomness or it's like quantum indeterminacy or something. And that is preventing the predictability. Or like that, that's they don't even say that. I mean, maybe they do, but it's often somehow that's saving you free will.

That's keeping free will alive. And people have that intuition, but again, there's no theory of why would quantum indeterminism for free will? In fact, people have made the observation that why are these people even arguing this? Because it doesn't buy you free will. A random number generator, if I have a random number generator in my computer, which I do, nobody thinks my computer has free will. Right. So here's what I think is going on. This is an idea that just occurred to me. Um, what if the quantum indeterminacy thing it buys you free will from the third person. Exactly. That's right, exactly. Because that's exactly but not the first person perspective. Yeah. So if if people if people's actions are, you know, unpredictable, then I'm less capable of

exploiting them or you know manipulating their their neurons or whatever. But um i if we live in a quantum indeterminate world, then it no longer benefits me to ponder the implications and the consequences of my actions because the it was my actions were already determined by the random quantum die rolls, right? I yeah, I think I understand what you're saying. I mean, I think uh from my the way I think about it is that that's an expression, that is the correct expression of the concern about predictability, but that it's all about microscopic stuff as sort of confabulation, where it's just like evolved organisms are sort of like if I'm predictable, like a talent poker, yeah, then that's a problem.

Yeah. And like even for the first person, like if you already know what I'm gonna do and I know my system inside of me knows I haven't even run through the calculation, then you know, fuck, like I'm in trouble because you already know what I'm gonna do. Yeah. So I don't if it's bad if I'm predictable to you and and it's bad if if uh um uh and it's and it's a concern to you if I can predict you, right? Like so predictability just generally on the victim end is a bad thing, right? Right. So so that's what I think. So I think all in in so this has literally been like from the beginning people are talking about indeterminism. And people are like, well, why are we even talking about indeterminism or determinism at

all? Because indeterminism doesn't get you free will. And the argument is that this theory explains this evolutionary account explains why it's coming up all in free will, because it's actually the evolved system is concerned about predictability and the scientific content about quantum states and blah, blah, blah, is all just confabulation running off of the system that's just worried about being predictable. That's fascinating. Um we haven't gotten to mismatch yet, but yeah, the mismatch. I was just gonna bring that up. Okay. Okay. So let me start with uh um um uh analogy. Okay, so let's say there's a fish. Okay. And a fish that um it has an evolved design such that in its gills is an oxygen detector.

And when that oxygen detector doesn't get oxygen, it triggers a suffocation response that it's suffocating. It wriggles, it's like in distress, right? Okay. So let's say that we take this fish that has this evolved design. And let's say we're sort of weird, um, sadistic or just whatever researchers, and we take this fish and we inject oxygen into its bloodstream just downstream from its gills. So the gills are not getting oxygen, but we're injecting oxygen or oxygen blood into the fish right after the gills. Okay. I will explain why I'm gonna get into this in a second. Okay. So um, why am I talking about this? So the fish is fine, the fish is not suffocating, okay? Right. But its evolved psychology is triggering its it's having a suffocation

response. Right. Fish is in distress, right? Okay. And um, but it's actually completely fine. It would be like if I put an electrode in the pain regions of your brain and turned on the electrode. You're you're not actually in pain, your body is not actually uh being damaged, but you think that you are. Exactly, exactly. So now so now I can ask you the question. So, what we've done as experimenters is we've violated The way that the world worked up until the we took the we we changed the state of the world for the fish. We've dissociated the cue and the concern, right? The situation from the response to it. So in the fish's natural ecology, when the gills lacked oxygen, that meant the fish was

going to be in distress and might die. And that's why it has that response. We have teased those two apart in an evolutionarily novel way. It's an evolutionary mismatch where we're keeping the fish alive, the reason for the distress response we've addressed, but yet the fish is still registering the suffocation response. So now you could have a debate about: is the fish suffocating? Now there's this good sense in which it is. It is having the experience of suffocating. It might be if we if we grant what it would be like for us, it would be it would be torture, right? Right. The fish is in distress. It feels like it's suffocating. But there's another sense in which it's not suffocating. Because the reason why it's having that experience and the reason why that system even

exists is for a particular outcome in the world, and we're not letting that outcome happen. Whoops, we as sorry, I knocked over my bottle here. We as scientists have dissociated the normal conflation of the two, of the cue and the situation. We've teased them apart. Okay. So you could have a meaningless debate, or maybe, I mean, if if you just ask, is the fish suffocating? Period, then you could just have an endless debate when in fact what you're debating is do you mean is it having the experience based on the evolve input, or is it in fact possible? Right? Yeah, okay. That that I that whole metaphor now applies to free will. Okay, okay. So now instead of suffocation, the concern is manipulation, right?

And the idea is that we did not evolve in a world where we know about how the mind works. We evolved in a world where there's like tells in poker, where there's sort of habits or things that we can sort of influence one another or be influenced by one another. We did not, our brands did not evolve in a world where we could know with mechanistic detail how we work. Okay. That is an evolutionary novelty. Okay. So now the idea is that we have this evolved system that's concerned with when the things that I think I'm free to do are knowable, it's a problem. Right? Yeah. And that concern in an evolutionary environment where there's no reductionistic science is meaningful and useful. Yeah. It means that, oh boy, all of a sudden I'm letting David know before I want to let him know

what I'm going to do. It means that David somehow knows something about me that allows him to manipulate me in a way that I'm not even aware of. Right. Those kinds of macroscopic, probably pretty minor, but still substantial for fitness things are really, really important. And that's the reasonable concern of the am I being manipulated? Is manipulation possible concern? Now we have this evolutionary novelty where either in principle or in practice, and maybe not actually, but we know enough now to poke on and manipulate everything. And if you don't, and if you don't think that's true now, which I don't yet, in principle, like, you know, if you know, if science progresses, we might at some point.

Um, or let's just stipulate that that will happen. Then this gets back to like, where do you get off the train, right? You know, in principle, like when do you think it's a concern? When are you worried about it? And the idea is that we are sort of like the floundering fish. And this is where the 42 answer comes in, which is that the claim, and we can start wrapping up all the dangling pieces now. The claim is that free will, when people talk about does free will exist, yes or no? It's a little bit like arguing as the fish suffocating. There's a real sense in which free will exists, in the sense of it is a psychological representation of can I get up earlier in the morning? That is a coherent, reasonable thing.

Yeah. Yeah. It's different than healing the broken bone. And in that respect, I don't agree with like Sam Harris or um uh um my I keep blanking on Greg Crusoe, yeah. Well, Greg Crusoe, but also um Robert Spolsky. Yeah, Robert Spolsky. I don't agree with them where you know Sam Harris is like particularly egregious where he'll just say like it's not even coherent, like, come on, grow up kids, you know. And and I don't I don't agree with that. So so I do think free will is real in the sense of it's an evolved representation talking about a coherent thing, you know, is it up to the state of these planning or means-end systems? Um, but there is another sense in which then if you take this evolutionary novelty of knowing everything that we know, then the question

becomes, well, what do you mean by free will? Is free will or is is manipulation in principle possible? And if that's what you mean by it, you get off the train early, right? And you say there's no free will. So that's Sam Harris or Robert Spolski. Then there's some people who sort of say, well, um, maybe not in principle, but like maybe once we know exactly how a system works, uh, we have um, you know, we have the technology, I get off there. And those people would be sort of incompatibilists. So when the when you know more about how a system works, then you say, Oh, we don't have free will for that anymore. That's done, you know. So, like if I knew how let's just pretend like there was a system that was like the

decision-making system in your head, and scientists like announce we know everything about how the decision-making system works. There would be a class of people who are like, Well, that means we don't have free will anymore, right? Even though nobody poked on it, just knowing enough about it is enough for those people to then be concerned, right? And then there's and then there's like people like me who are like, Well, no, we still have free will, we're I'm compatible. Let's I it's a levels of analysis thing, right? Where you can describe the software, but it doesn't make the intentional level phenomenon any less real. So that's the software that makes it possible to make a decision. There's no problem there.

However, if a neuroscientist poked on the software, then I would be saying, well, yeah, no, that person didn't have free will in that situation because that's a neuroscientist poked on their software. So that's getting off at the last station, station three, when like it's manipulation in practice. And I think everybody would get off then. So those are all about the concern about manipulation. Then it's just this question of like, how quickly do you get off the train? But the thing is, is that that's the evolved concern of the psychology. And because we never evolved in a world to have this much knowledge, there's just this individual difference along this continuum of like, how soon do you get worried about

manipulation? Is it when it's in principle, when it's uh more concretely in principle or actually happening? And so that's the that's the sort of evolutionary mismatch piece where there's a sense in which people who say we don't have free will are right because they're sort of they're sort of saying look our evolved psychology is concerned about manipulation. And is manipulation possible? Yeah. Right. But it's again, there's like no facts of the matter about it. It's sort of like, is this fish suffocating? There's a sense in which it is, in a sense in which it isn't. And there's a sense in which free will is real, in the sense of I currently enjoy free will. It's in a coherent evolved representation.

And then, however, if you get off the train right away, there's a sense in which you're right. Like in principle, I could be manipulated. And if that's what you mean by it, then you're right. I don't. So we can both be right. We're just talking about different things, right? Um, and if you get off the train later, then we most we might both say we both I have free will because nobody has been poking on my um my systems, you know, unless we find out otherwise. So the basic idea is that there's actually been a bunch of different issues all smooshed together. And the idea is that if you tease these all apart, so you tease apart, are you talking about an evolved representation that is distinguishing between like the difference

between getting up in the mur morning or breaking a bone? Then yes, free will is real, right? It's also then the free will representation itself is for the range of circumstances that we evolve to deal with. Like, is somebody are you currently manipulating me? I don't think so. You know, like I have free will, right? Yeah. Um, so that so this is why I think the evolutionary mismatch is really important because there's a sense in which you can say free will is real, because you know, the fish is uh floundering, like it's if it's experiencing, it's suffocating. Um, but there's another sense in which like you could manipulate my behavior, or maybe you you have. Um, and and that's a sense in which you don't have free will.

I I wonder if the relevant uh individual difference variable that's shaping these intuitions is the sense of ownership and how expansive that sense of ownership is. So on the one hand, you could or the sense of self, let's say. So on the one hand, you could have a very narrow conception of self where it's just the conscious me that makes decisions. And the stuff that's unconscious, my genes, you know, my habits that I acquired as a child, that's not me. Just the me that's conscious right now making decisions, that's that's the only thing that's me. Or you could take a more expansive definition of self and say it's all me. My genes, my upbringing, my habits, what's going on at the unconscious level, that's all

me. Yeah. And so for some people, when when you explain to them that uh unconscious forces or genetic forces or childhood forces are shaping your decisions, that reads to them, that reads to their evolved mind as I'm being manipulated. Yeah. I'm being manipulated by something that is not me, that is alien. These genes that I have, they're not me. These unconscious motivations and drives, they're not me. Right? These habits that I've acquired, they're not me. That's right. Uh, and so they register that as manipulation and that I don't have free will. I've it's directly analogous to I've been uh manipulated by an evil neuroscientist who did uh brain surgery on me without my consent. Except it's not the neuroscientist, it's evolution or it's uh the unconscious parts of the

brain or whatever. And so maybe the relevant distinction is do I view evolution in genes and unconscious brain processes? do I view that stuff as the type of thing that could manipulate me as something that's outside of me or external to me? Yeah. Or do I view it as me, as a part of me? Yeah. In which case it's not manipulation, it's just me making a decision. It's funny you say that because how I got into this was from modularity, because the modularity argument was what Fodor meant by module was the stuff that wasn't me. Yeah. So he was drawing a line around and he was making an argument that, like, hey, if you think it's all the homunculus or you inside your head, guess what? You're wrong.

There's like stuff on the periphery like perception where you can't go in and control. You can't go in and change the fact that you see a visual illusion, even if you know explicitly that the lines are the same length or whatever. Yeah. Um you can't control it. And so that was actually my foray into free will because I was like, look, we just went through this whole modular with me with any words. Like we went through this whole thing where what the modularity debate was about was about like this levels of analysis confusion where like fodder was uh operating at this intentional level where there's like the you and then the stuff that isn't you. Exactly what you're saying. And then people were just drawing the lines of like evolution is not you.

It's like the thing that causes you to want to eat sh you know sugar when you don't want to, right? Yes. And or it's you it makes you want to sleep with the person even though you don't think you should, right? Like it's the poking on the homiculus stuff. Right. And that's the way a lot of popularization understands it. And then there was another version, which was the quote unquote sophisticated version, which I am part of, which is sort of understanding evolution at the functional level, which is just like everything you do, like the decision making or whatever, it's all just software. And we just do the evolved software. And so it's not a you versus your mechanism, it's just mechanisms all the way down.

And so this was the argument was that there's a levels of analysis confusion where people were operating at the intentional level, like Fodor, invoking a you, defining mechanisms as opposed to the you. And that's not what evolutionary psychologists meant at all. They were operating at a lower level at the level of mechanisms. And that, and then I so we did that for modularity and said, like, that's why people are having this back and forth debate. Um, it's just people missing each other and at what level they're just talking about modules. Fodor meant module meaning not you. And a lot of people meant foot module is not you, but of psych, most evolutionary psychologists or adaptationists meant just modules are just bits of uh functions

at the functional level, at the software level. It has nothing to do with the stuff that's independent of you one way or another. They're using the same word to operate at two different levels. That was the argument, the modularity paper, And the idea was sort of that I looked over at free will and was like, well, this looks very similar. Like, I like I'm I just went through this whole thing with modularity. And look, people are talking about free will as being incompatible with mechanisms. Some people are, and some people aren't. So maybe it's that people who are incompatibilists are like voter. They're operating at the intentional level. They're sort of saying, look, there's me and my mechanisms, and I'm free, but my mechanisms

aren't. So I'm an incompatibilist, you know. But then if there's other people who are sort of like, well, yeah, you are made up of mechanisms. It's sort of like the evolutionary psychologists. So those are the compatibilists, right? And so that's how I got into the whole debate was realizing that that it at that this level, this deeper structural level, it was a very similar confusion, a levels of analysis confusion. Yeah. I Yeah, but that was before then I got into the mismatch stuff and the figuring that out. But that's that was the beginning of me getting into it. So you're exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. It it almost strikes me that the mismatch aspect is not the unprecedented level of manipulability.

Manipulability, um, but the uh lack of clarity about what the self is and the unprecedented insight into aspects of ourself that are uh not currently conscious. Yeah. Um Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, we're no yeah, we did not evolve for that level of uh yeah, that's a really good way to think about it. Yeah, that's true. Right. Like uh w you know, what to call the self or like how expansive or narrow, that that wasn't really a a relevant uh uh d distinction that you know would have been selection pressures to make sure we get that conceptualization right. And so we're free to vary. Some some have a an expansive definition of self, some have a narrow definition of self. And um and and the mechanism in some sense is up operating correctly.

Like it's it's designed to detect threats to the self or manipulate and uh manipulative attempts to e exploit the self. Um and it just depends on how you think of the self. You know, if you if you think of the self as as the narrow conscious you at at this time, then you really are being manipulated by your unconscious forces and by your genes and by your upbringing. But but if you view the self expansively, then you're not being manipulated by those things because those things are you. And so we evolved to detect, you know, uh m potential manipulation. And um if neuroscientists really did um uh fully unravel everything going on in the brain and could manipulate us by you know giving us pills or or brain surgery or planting

electrode in our brains or whatever. If they could do all those things, that really would be a legitimate case of manipulation that we would have good reason to worry about. And that wouldn't be mismatched. That would be a rational. That's right. That's getting off at step three. Yeah, that's right, where everybody lines up that that's not free will. That's right. Right. But the people who get off at staff step one, um they're already being manipulated by the evil neuroscientist in the form of their unconscious mind, in the form of their genes, in the form of their childhood. Like the evil neuroscientist is already in them. And it's already manipulating. Yeah, exactly. Right? Yeah. Exactly. And so the the difference is just, you know, what are we calling the evil neuroscientist

and what are we not calling the evil neuroscientists? Yeah. And and so this is the answer to what is free will. It's that you don't you this is why the answer is 42, where the whole question assumed that the answer wouldn't be uh it's a representation of an evolved organism, right? Yeah. And the uh and the idea is it is, and that's the answer. And then once you understand that that's the answer, then the question of in a particular case, is this an instance of free will? You can understand why there could be different individuals coming to different answers. So the level of invariance, as we talked about in earlier podcast, to the answer, what is free will, is not what people imagined it to be.

This is why 42 is apt. It's not, it's not a perspective independent definition. It's not an evolved system independent definition out in the world. It's it's a representation of an ad from caused by an adaptation and depending on different things about that organism. And because of this evolutionary mismatch, the same content in the world will arrive at different conclusions about whether or not free will exists or not, or holds in this case or not. So it changes the enterprise from deciding what out in the world counts as free will, to understanding why and the psychology of different evolved critters are arriving at different conclusions. And the thing that is predictable and deterministic is the software that we're

characterizing in our answer of what free will is. So we have a theory, it's almost like a meta-theory of everything we've been talking about is this is what the scientific study of free will is. There's all this labé stuff about um, like this classic study where the question is: is there um neurocognitive signature of making a decision before you experiencing making your decision? And this account says that that's not the study of free will at all. That's that's the expression of the concern of the free will system, looking at the how the neurocognitive systems of decision making, which won't tell you that that labé stuff will not tell us anything. It won't settle the matter at all. Yes. And in fact, what the neurocognitive study of free will is, is the

neurocognitive study of a system that is representing, for example, the difference between getting up early in the morning and healing a broken bone. That's concerned about manipulation and deciding whether or not these circumstances count as this system should be concerned about the possibility of manipulation. So this suggests a completely different way to study free will and a completely different way to understand what free will is. Yeah. No, with the labet stuff, like it it fits what I was saying earlier. So if if the neurosignature of making a decision happens before you're consciously aware of making that decision, you can interpret that in one of two ways. In one way, the neurosignature is this alien force that's manipulating you.

You're categorizing this as a case of manipulation, in which case I don't have free will. Another way to see it is no, that neurosignature is a part of me. That's just the way I make decisions. It's not manipulating me, it is me. Yeah. Right. And so it it depends on how narrowly or expansively you you your definition of of the self is. Yeah. And where you get off on the train. I I like what you're saying, and another way to put it is where you get off on the train, and that's why it's not going to settle it for anybody. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. So um how how how are you approaching uh testing these ideas empirically? That's another thing I was curious about. Yeah, yeah. I mean, so one is we're testing this individual difference thing of like where do you get

off the train, which I really love. Okay. Yeah. Um and that's something we're gonna see. And we've already um you can sort of you can kind of predict where people are gonna get off the train. It seems to be pretty stable. I mean, I don't want to speak too strongly about it, but we're that's one aspect is just sort of giving people, um asking people, giving people scenarios and saying, is there free will or not? And then, you know, and then looking at, for example, are people who get off at step one, are they more likely to confuse levels of analysis, for example, right? Um, you know, and but that's one thing is you can just document that difference. And I think uh in the context of the existing literature, I think, and

and this is not part of the theory, this is just my own personal thinking. I suspect that the compatibilist incompatibilist distinction is conflating those three different, more stable individual differences. And I think that in in analogously like what you were saying about like, you know, people's training on as to whether or not your genes are part of you or not, and if you lump that in or not, these things should all better explain compatibilism or incompatibilism or moving people around in that way. Right. Um so that's one element. The other thing is just sort of looking at um is just testing this idea that the efficacy of intentional intervention, like the question of like is does free will track um the

extent to which you believe you could sort of force yourself or convince yourself to do something, right? Yeah. Um and is that um is that um something too um that that's a prediction, um, right? That that that's so you're looking at the deg the degree to which people say that this person has free will and seeing if that correlates to the same thing. Yeah, or first. Yeah. Or for so you do are you doing third and first person? Yeah, first and type of person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. Um so that's one part. So basically it would be like, could you convince yourself to do something in this situation? And then at a later point, it's like, Do you have free will in this situation? And those two should sort of track each other, but it shouldn't track other things, like

how desirable would it be? Um, the other thing we're doing too, and this is the other kind of funny part of thinking taking this evolutionary step back, is determinism has always been brought up for reasons we talked about, like predictability or manipulation. But one thing people haven't really realized is that, like, for example, like superhero movies Have just as much to do with free will as neuroscientists implanting a brain. Super superhuman or yeah, superhuman abilities or like the ability to like read minds. People love that, right? You're like, that's sign me up, hook it to my veins, right? Yeah. And it that's a case of instinct blindness, where in fact that's more determinism in the world, right?

Like you've you've injected a new deterministic relationship that didn't exist before. But David, you can now read my mind. And if and if I tell you you can do that, you love that, right? And I hate it because for me it's manipulation. But if you're my friend or my partner, I might get more. And so that's a whole other part where we're actually teasing apart what had been conflated, which is determinism where you're the victim of it, where you're the patient as opposed to the agent of determinism, and then manipulating social distance. So this is the other thing where the literature, because it's been so in implicitly focused on the concern about manipulation, that it didn't take it didn't take a

step back and think, well, what does determinism mean? Um, and what happens when you inject new determinism into the world or new deterministic relationships? There's a whole category that people should not only not mind but love. Um, maybe they won't admit to it, but like, could you just, you know, would it be great for you to just like fly anywhere you wanted? That'd be awesome, right? Like, so yeah, people fantasize about that. There's a whole uh genre of fiction that's about the acquisition of new deterministic relationships that didn't exist before. Like I can make fire come out of my arms when I want to. It would be bad if it was like uncontrollable, right? Like I would burn my family. That would be horrible, right?

So like um, but like having new things under your control is awesome for an evolved organism, right? This is also the psychology of free will. So the psychology of free will doesn't just become like worrying about neuroscientists poking on your brain. It also becomes the psychology of power and capability. And we're getting into this idea of sort of the representation of what's possible. And there's that's a whole new interesting area that's that's getting into what we started with, which is sort of like if you took a fox and a bird and you mixed up their planning systems, they would do very poorly because the bird can fly, but the fox can't, you know. So if like the the the bird's like, oh, there's a berry across the canyon, you know, I'm

just gonna go over that way. And if it was in the fox, the fox would die, right? Because the fox can't fly. So, like the ability to represent what you can do and really like it when you can do new stuff you thought you couldn't do, that's awesome, right? Yeah. And so, like the representation of what you can do, and it's not trivial because it changes. Cause like when you're a baby, you can't do very much. Sometimes you get injured, sometimes you get sick. Day to day, it changes. Some things you can do because other people can help you. So it's not even intrinsic within your body envelope. you can be hindered, you can, you know, like you'd be tired. So, like, I think the free will thing is also a part of a much larger set of adaptations

for sort of representing what's possible and constantly monitoring that, and also then assigning valuation to have I increased what I'm able to do or have I decreased it, you know, and that shouldn't be value neutral. Like I should love it when I can do something I thought I couldn't, or if I use you do something and I'm like, oh, maybe I can do that too. You know, like maybe I can catch 20 fish too. A lot of advertising literally is like, here's a thing you can do that you thought you couldn't do. You know, like we should be very attracted to this. Like that's a huge swath of advertising is either showing somebody doing something that you think you want to do, like, oh my gosh, that person did a backflip.

Maybe I should drink a Red Bull. Or, you know, like the the like, have you ever I I for I gave a talk on this and I looked up old um it was like an ATT commercial where it was like, have you ever driven across country without looking at a map? you will. And it was like and it was just showing like a really like crappy, like eight bit, you know, um GPS, you know. And it was like sent a fax from the beach, you will, you know. And so humans just love we're we're just artifact using monkeys, you know, we're just like, give me a new tool, that's awesome, you know, and a a lot of advertising is that. And I think that's part of free will too. Hmm. Yeah. It's also meta advertising. So if I'm trying to advertise to you my ability to advertise your product, I'm gonna want

to appeal to all the the priming research and saying I can subliminally make people buy your soda or whatever, and that's gonna make you hire me. Yeah. So I wanna inflate the power I have to manipulate people against their their will or or beyond their consciousness, because that makes me a more attractive advertiser for you. Like I have tremendous powers over the human mind. Hire me to advertise your soda. Um, the same thing applies, I think, to social scientists. Yeah. Uh it's uh it's attractive or neuroscientists, it's attractive to say that, yeah, if the more knowledge we gain in this area, the more we will have magical powers to just like manipulate people or perform Jedi mind tricks on them.

Exactly. Fund my research. Yeah, no, we talked about that early on. Yeah, yeah, just the selective regime, uh, the institutional selection pressure selects for a version of psychology that says we are the special knowledge holders and sort of the guardians of the flame of the real engine of decision making. And corporation, if you want us to channel it towards your uh lucrative means, let us know and we'll help you out. Yeah. Yeah. Or political campaign are if you want us to help you know get votes for your candidate and hire us the psychologists who know how to do Jedi mind tricks. I think it explains why the unconscious priming stuff was so attractive and compelling to the field. Why we went down this dumb rabbit hole.

You know, it's like it's really, it's a really enticing and exciting idea that you could get you could manipulate someone's judgments by like making them hold a warm cup of coffee. You know, no, if you if you if you basically snip out, if you if you consider like this issue of what's under people's control and not, and that issue and scientists dealing with that, almost all public discourse about psychology is about that. And it's because of this psychology. Like I would argue that's an expression of this, of this psychology. I mean, it's almost, it's almost like too narrow to call it about free will, right? It's sort of like where, where, where I started from, but it's this much bigger set of

adaptations about control and freedom and autonomy and um and manipulation and coercion that there should be super strong selection pressures on. And it's a good example of like there's still really low-hanging fruit in adaptationism or evolutionary psychology. Like, not only is there a lot of stuff to study that isn't just mating, I mean, of course, even within mating, as we talk about, like it's overemphasizing sex differences, is like the the evolved psychology of like what's possible, like how do I represent what I can do? I don't think there's any work on that. You know, like the evolved psychology of have I been manipulated or how autonomous am I? How does that represent it? Like, there's not really much work on that.

I mean, Chris von Ruden alluded to that. Um, you know, that that's an important, like, the sense of autonomy. And, you know, people who are in egalitarian societies really value, you know, not feeling like they're indebted to people. But that's about as far as we've gotten. Like, there's not task analyses of these things, there's not, you know, experimental work as far as I know. So there's just a ton to do. But that's free will in two hours. Yeah. I think I mean we we covered a lot. I mean, is there anything we didn't cover? Yeah, no, I feel like um, I mean, I I mean, I think there's a lot to sort of, I mean, there's so much philosophy about this, and you could kind of go through and sort of

like, you know, we talked about like reasons responsiveness is like one definition. You can kind of go through what I like about this project is nobody ends up getting looking super stupid or super smart. It's sort of like every position in the free will debate, even like Sam Harris, who frankly I'm like annoyed with because he's just so like confident about free will is incoherent. Like there's a sense in which he's right, right. But like even though, like, you know, I but I think he's like kind of um too strong about it. Um, but uh but there's a sense in which he's right, and even even incompatibilists or compatibilists, sorry, would often still be like evoking like or appealing to like a self-like kind of going back up to the intentional level when talking about free will, and

even like the Dennett and Caruso thing, like as much as Dennett kind of originated like the levels of analysis idea, you know, he had the design stance, the intentional stance, the the physical stance. The Caruso and Dennett book, to just wrap that up, like really what that whole book is arguing is the efficacy of different kinds of intervention. Like Caruso is like, we shouldn't do an intentional intervention. We should just change circumstances or the system. Like, not we shouldn't, we shouldn't intervene upon the means-ends psychology of the person. That's like archaic, right? Yeah. And Dennett is saying we should. That's the whole book. You don't even need to read the book. Like that's that's actually what the whole debate is about.

But but I think you can see that once you have this framework, right? Um, but that's what they were debating. Um uh so like yeah, that that's another thing. Like my the the thing I'm saying now to sum up is you can go back through the debate armed with this adaptationist approach, and you can basically see the the value and the perspective that is correct within a delineated scope, that in every area of the argument, you can see in what sense the libertarians are correct, which is that if you're deterministic, you're not free. There's a sense in which that's true. Like I can we can understand now why any human would think that and say that. We can also understand that a sense in which it's not true, right?

Um, yeah. So I like that about this project that, like a lot of adaptationism, it doesn't wade into the muck and mire of the debate, but it takes a step back and it's like, you're all kind of right, you're all kind of wrong. Let's think about this just from a different perspective, and we can understand the value and the reason why everybody is saying what they're saying. And it all fits into a bigger picture. And like the thing I really like is that all of the arguments, there's a theory now of why those arguments are being put forward. Why are philosophers talking about the possibility of neuroscientists manipulating people? There's no theory for why they're doing that. They just do it in their books.

This is a theory of that. Why are we talking about quantum serve? There's no theory of that. There's even theorizing about why it doesn't work, and it's a mystery. Well, this is a theory of that. So I like that this provides a meta theory explaining and contextualizing all the arguments into a coherent whole. It almost suggests to me that all the philosophical debate about whether or not we have free will is kind of pointless and futile, and we should stop arguing about it. Would you go so far as to make that claim? Um yes and no. No, in the following sense, I don't think me, the lazy adaptationist, could have arrived at this without all that work people doing. Like people worked really hard to interrogate their own intuitions and make

conceptual distinctions. That then I can sort of in an armchair way say, I mean, uh it was hard work on my part too, but like to just sort of be like, What's the adaptationism of all of this argument? without all that hard work, like really hard work and very smart people, you couldn't do that. So in that sense, I don't think it was inevitable. Or like I don't think it was a waste of time at all. Um right. But do you think it's a waste of time moving forward? We continue to debate the question. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think this changes. I do think like this might be wrong. I don't think we have a clear idea. Like we even you and I were hemming and hawing about like, is it a goal system?

Is it a means-end? Like, I don't know. Maybe I don't like that's you know, I've only gotten so far in this, and other people should step in and we'll be publishing papers presenting these ideas. But like, so this is not the last word, this is the beginning. But I do think this is an example of adaptationism fundamentally changing the trajectory of a research program. And I do think the study of free will should be really different than it has been since Epicureus till now. Yeah. I mean, would you go so far as to say that um adaptationism should play this kind of role in all philosophical debates, that we should ultimately try to understand uh what adaptations and byproducts are leading to the intuitions that we have in these

philosophical debates. And once we understand that, in some important way the debate will uh uh dissolve or resolve. Yeah, or be transformed into a different uh uh understanding. That's right. I it's a different way to think about what philosophy has been doing. And that I think a lot of philosophers would represent or recognize or even embrace, even if they were not coming from an annotationist perspective perspective, which is again understanding that what I'm doing as a philosopher is a readout of this evolved being. And all I can do is sort of document as best I can one coherent way or perspective from this perspective, and then others can sort of stitch those all together into a more scientific account, like we're doing here for

free will. So, um, so yeah, no, I think I think this should always be an enterprise, and I do think it will uh adaptationism will I think completely transform the way we think about philosophy, and it will make um what philosophy is, I don't think it'll stop doing it'll it won't stop philosophy at all. I think it'll actually invigorate it in the sense of it contextualizes what that enterprise is. Um so yeah. Yeah, it's almost like um philosophy is really just psychology, that but it's but it thinks it's physics. Yeah, like it thinks it's like it's delving into the nature of reality. No, it's just delving into your own evolved intuitions as an ape, right? And just mapping out all the different intuitive responses you have to different fanciful

scenarios. You're not actually getting into reality, you're just getting into the way the human mind works. And but I And once we realize that, like it will help us understand how reality works because then we can f you know figure out like which of our intuitions we should actually trust and which which of them actually make sense and cohere with our best picture of empirical reality and so forth. So I think you're right that it it should uh invigorate philosophy. Yeah, no, and I think that is that point I think was already made by philosophers even before Darwin, right? Like so, I think I think this is just sort of validating or making concrete what d adding Darwinianism or adaptationism specifically into this

enterprise. And yeah, I don't know. I mean, like the the intersection of adaptationism and like philosophy, uh it's not something that I thought I would do. Um, but I guess I'm doing it, but like I it it hasn't I mean we're about to write these papers, we're submitting these papers, we've been trying to publish these papers. Um it should happen and apparently I'm one of the people doing it. You know, Michael and I, um and me and other people hopefully but um but yeah no I mean it's it's a it's a new exciting connection between evolution and other ways of thinking. Yeah. Yeah, no, I agree. I think it's incredibly valuable. Um, it has inspired me personally. Like um your your work on this has inspired me to do the same thing with the debate over

consciousness. Oh, awesome. I think the debate about consciousness can be um uh uh transformed uh in a similar way by taking an adapt adaptationist analysis to you know what the underlying conceptual machinery is, what is causing us to be so confused about this debate. And as soon as we understand that, the debate about consciousness and how our consciousness and what animals are conscious, that it will will be uh utterly transformed once we understand the intuitions that are giving rise to this and what it what it means to an evolved organism for something to be conscious versus not. Um and so I'm I'm maybe we'll do a future episode on consciousness, but um Yeah, I was gonna say we have two minutes, you're sure you can do it two minutes.

Yeah. We'll save it for another episode. That'll be your teaser for future future episodes. Exactly. That sounds great. But David, this was great. I think what it is, there in in behaviorism, there was this thing of when when pigeons or rats would get conditioned to um many, many, many, many, many lever presses before they would get a reward. And then they got a reward, they would sort of be reluctant to push the start pushing the lever because they knew it was a lot of work. And I think that's me with free will, because it's sort of like it's a long exposition. Like we spent two hours and like it's not, you know, like alliance tracking. It's like, yeah, cooperation competition, track cues, everything.

I could do, I could do a I could do an elevator pitch. And and and maybe, you know, I will say, like, to the to an adaptationist credit, like I think this is really changes the way I think about this and I think it will change the science of it. And it's cool you can do it in two hours, but it's still like a couple it's still it's not it's not a one minute thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I often f experience that frustration a lot myself when people ask me about like my work or like what I'm writing about, what my paper's about, or what my theory of humor is. I'm like, gosh, do you have two hours? And the one minute version, I'm like embarrassed because I'm like, yeah, I'm doing free will. And it's like, oh God.

Cause like, you know, then there's just a lot of the shoddy, or like, you know, it's just so derivative. It's the easiest thing to it's like free will is the canonical, like self-important, but sort of paper thin analysis, right? Yeah. Anyway, yeah. But thank you, David. This was it was nice to um get it off my chest and uh and think through this aloud. And I really like the idea um of sort of the mismatch, especially being like sort of where the you and the mechanisms and the variability is. That's that's a really nice uh new idea um as a result of this conversation. So so thank you. No, you're welcome. Thank thank you for um enlightening me on a on a topic that um I I didn't know much about.

I mean I was interested philosophically in the debate, uh uh um and uh you helped um inform the philosophical debate in a in a really profound way. Um and I j I just find this the topic uh intrinsically interesting. Um so yeah, I I had a great time. Yeah, thanks. And I I have no idea what the answer is, whether you have it or not. It's it depends. It's the Clark Ferrett answer. It depends. The correct answer is who cares. No, that's right. Exactly. Yeah, that's that's that's right. Yeah, that's and that's a good that's a good answer. Or there's there's no right answer is is the is the right answer. Or there's a couple answers and yeah. Yeah, depending on the question situation you're in, or yeah.

Exactly. Okay. All right. Well good David, thank you so much. Yep. Thanks, man. Okay. Bye. Well, David, I am uh pretty tired from talking about free will because I was the guest this this episode. That's true. Um, and you as the listener, um if you're still listening, you made the free choice to continue listening. We didn't hold a gun to your head. Something about this must have uh drawn you to the topic. So uh if you made the free choice to continue listening, I would suggest uh intervening intentionally on your psychology and getting you to make the free choice to uh recommend us, talk about us on social media, visit us on Patreon, uh say a kind word, uh or two email us with ideas for topics or questions.

Anything else people can do, Dave, or did I cover it all? Um to just uh refer to some previous bits, they could also send you either a fanny pack or either of us French fries. That's right. Uh ideally uh french fries inside the fanny pack. It's a pretty good vessel uh for for french fries. I like to eat my french fries out of my fanny pack. It's a great image to spend the rest of your week with before until the next episode. All right. Great. Uh it's fun to laugh. It feels good to laugh. Okay. Thank you everybody for listening. Um and have a nice week. Yep.