[00:00:00] Sam Harris Create clip Well, I just got back from Vamp. Where attended the Ted summit. I brought a portable recording device to the conference on the odd chance that I might find someone worth talking to who wanted to record a podcast. Needless to say, there were many people worth talking to, but not much time to sit down and do a podcast. But I did record one conversation with the philosopher Dan Dennett, who probably needs no introduction here. As many of you know, Dan and I have been brothers in arms for many years, along with Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens as a so called new Atheists or the Four Horsemen. After a video by that name that we recorded in Hitches Apartment some years back, Dan and I once debated together on the same team, along with Hitch at the CIA donde los e days conference in Mexico, where we were pitted against Danish de Souza and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Jack and Robert Wright, I believe, and I seemed to lab got in there somehow. I hope it doesn't seem to self serving or contemptuous of our opponents to say that we came out none the worse for wear on that occasion and, needless to say, that video is online for all to see until the end of the world.

[00:01:12] Sam Harris Create clip But as many of you know, Dan and I had a very barbed exchange on the topic of free will some years later, and that was a little over two years ago, and we never resolved it. I came out with my short book on Free Will and Dan reviewed it. And then I responded to his review, and the matter was left there in a way that no one found satisfying, least of all our readers. There really was an outpouring of dismay over the tone that we took with each other, and I must say that was totally understandable. I want to begin by reading the the first few paragraphs of my response to dance review, which includes a quotation from him so you can hear how vexed and vexing things got. And if you're interested, you can read the whole exchange on my blogged. In fact, when I post this podcast on my website, I'll provide the relevant links. So this is near the beginning of my response. Written is a letter to Dan. I want to begin by reminding our readers and myself that exchanges like this aren't necessarily pointless.

[00:02:11] Sam Harris Create clip Perhaps you need no encouragement on that front, but I'm afraid I do. In recent years have spent so much time debating scientists, philosophers and other scholars that have begun to doubt whether any smart person retains the ability to change his mind. This is one of the great scandals of intellectual life, the virtues of rational discourse, air everywhere, espoused and yet witnessing someone relinquish a cherished opinion in real time is about as common as seen. A supernova explode overhead. The perpetual stalemate, one encounters in public debates is annoying because it is so clearly the product of motivated reasoning, self deception and other failures of rationality. And yet we've grown to expect it on every topic, no matter how intelligent and well intentioned the participants. I hope you and I don't give our readers further cause for cynicism on this front. Unfortunately, your review of my book doesn't offer many reasons for optimism. It is a strange document of ocular in places, but more generally sneering. I think it fair to say that one could watch an entire season of Downton Abbey on Ritalin and not detect a finer note of condescension than you manage for 20 pages running. And now I have a quotation from Dan's review. Here, this is Dan. I'm not being disingenuous when I say this museum of Mistakes is valuable. I am grateful to Harris for saying so boldly and clearly what less outgoing scientists are thinking. But keeping to themselves. I have always suspected that many you hold this hard, determinist view are making these mistakes, But we mustn't put words in people's mouths. And now Harris has done us a great service by articulating the points explicitly, and the chorus of approval he's received from scientists goes a long way to confirming that they have been making these mistakes all along. Wolfgang Pauli is famous dismissal of another physicist work as quote not even wrong reminds us of the value of crystallized in an Ambien cloud of hunches into something that could be shown to be wrong. Correcting widespread misunderstanding is usually the work of many hands, and Harris has made a significant contribution End quote.

[00:04:07] Sam Harris Create clip So this is back to me, I say. I hope you will recognize that your beloved Rappaport's rules have failed you here. As an aside, I should say, for those of you who are not familiar with them, these rules come from Anatol Rappaport, the mathematician, game theorist and and social scientists. And Dan has been a champion of these rules of argumentation for years, and they are one attempt to re express your target's position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your target says thanks. I wish I thought of putting it that way to listen. Any points of agreement, especially they're not matters of general or widespread agreement. Three. Mention anything you have learned from your target four. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of her buttle or criticism. So those are the rules, and Dan has often said that he aspires to follow them when criticizing another person's point of view. So back to my text, I hope you will recognize your beloved Rapid ports. Rules have failed you here.

[00:05:04] Sam Harris Create clip If you have decided, according to the rule, to first mention something positive about the target of your criticism, it will not do to say that you admire him for the enormity of his errors and the recklessness with which he clings to them. Despite this sterling example you've set in your own work. Yes, you may assert quote. I am not being disingenuous when I say this Museum of mistakes is valuable. End quote. But you are in fact, being disingenuous. If that isn't clear, prevent me to spell it out just this once. You are asking the word valuable to pass as a token of praise, however faint. But according to you, my book is quote valuable for reasons that I should find embarrassing. If I valued it as you do, I should rue the day I wrote it as you would had. You brought such a value into the world, and it would be disingenuous of me not to notice how your prickliness and preening appears. You right, as one protecting his academic turf behind in between almost every word of your essay. Like some toxic background radiation, one detects an explosion of professorial vanity end quote.

[00:06:07] Sam Harris Create clip So that's how snide things got. And I must say this is really a problem with writing rather than having a face to face encounter. If any of you have ever had the brilliant idea of writing a long letter or email to a friend to sort out some relationship crisis rather than just have a conversation, you've probably discovered how haywire things could go through an exchange of texts, and the same could be true for intellectual debates among philosophers and scientists. And it's especially likely to happen if either or both of the people involved our writers who get attached to their writerly maneuvers. I remember writing that quip about Downton Abbey, and it made me laugh at the time. I knew it would make many readers laugh, and so I kept it in. But lines like that just amplify the damage done. So as I told Dan at the end of our podcast, I very much regret the tone I took in this exchange, and I'm very happy. We got a chance to have a face to face conversation and sort things out. I don't think we resolved all the philosophical issues, but we spoke for nearly two hours, but there were several important topics that never came up. As you'll hear, we were speaking in a bar using a single microphone, and this was at the end of a long day of conferencing. So this isn't us at our most polished or prepared, but I thought it was a very good conversation. I think those of you who are interested in the problem of free will and its connection to ethics will find it useful. I still think there's some sense in which Dan and I are talking past one another. The nature of our remaining disagreement never became perfectly clear to me.

[00:07:41] Sam Harris Create clip So perhaps you guys can figure it out. And now I give you Dan Dennett in a bar overlooking the Canadian Rockies. So I'm here with Dan Dennett at the Ted Summit in Bam, and we have stolen away from the main session and we're in a bar and about to have a conversation about the misadventure we had in discussing freewill online in a series of articles and block posts. You and I are part of a community, and you have a pretty visible part of the community that prides itself on being willing to change its opinions and views, more or less in real time, under pressure from better arguments and better data. And I think I said in my article in response to your review of my book free Will, that that this is a very rare occurrence to see someone relinquish his cherished opinion more or less on the spot under pressure from a an interlocutor that's about as rare as seeing a supernova overhead. And it really shouldn't be because there's there's nothing that tokens, intellectual honesty Maur than a willingness to step away from one's views once they are shown to be an error. And I'm not saying we're not gonna get there in this conversation about free will. But there was something that went awry in our exchange. Are written exchanges tonally, and neither of us felt good about the results. And so again, we'll talk about free will as well. But this I think this conversation is proceeding along two levels where there's the thing we're talking about philosophically, which is free will. But then there's just the way in which I want us to both be sensitive to getting hijacked into unproductive lines that make it make it needlessly hard to talk about what what is just a in purely intellectual philosophical matter and one of great interest, surprisingly great interest to our audiences, are you? There's no topic that I've touched that has surprised me Mawr in the in the degree to which people find it completely captivating to think about. And I know you and I both think it's a very consequential topic. It's unlike many topics in philosophy. This one really does meet ethics and public policy in a way that is important. So But what? One thing you all should know and listening to this is that we have one microphone. Perhaps this is a good thing because we really can't interrupt each other. And we're just gonna pass this microphone back and forth and I now give you Dan Dennett.

[00:10:19] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip Thanks, Sam. This is a beautiful setting. If we can't agree on some things here, way shouldn't be in this business. I'm gonna go back. What? Step further in how this got started. You sent me the manuscript of your book for you will, And that's the for my advice. And I didn't have time to read it. I just told you know, I'm sorry. I don't have time. And then when the book came out, I read it that Oh, I wish you'd I forgot that we had that. Except that I wish you showed it to me because I think you made some big mistakes here and I would love to have tried to talk you out of them too late. And then we time pass. And then we had the you said you wanted me still to say what? What I thought the mistakes were. And that's when I wrote my peace fear for your flag and for naturalism. And it's certainly struck you wrong. And I guess I get ah, a few bits of telling there. But I think everything I said there is defensible and in particular I did use rapid course rules. Ah, contrary to what you say. If you look at the first paragraph of my piece, I applaud the book for doing a wonderful clear job of setting out a position which I largely agreed with. And then I said You went off the rails a little later. So, uh, I did tried to articulate your view, and I haven't heard you complain about that articulation of your view.

[00:11:46] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip And I said What we agree about and I even said what I've learned from that book. So I did follow rapper voice rules quite well, but we could we could just set that aside if you want and get down to the toe what remains of the issue? One thing in particular, which are I know it came off awfully preachy, but I really think it was most unwise of you two, Uh, declare that my position sounded like religion sounded, you know, satellites, theology. You have to know that you're insulting me. And that was pretty deliberate insult. And that was in the book. I am a god. Come on, Sam. So you can't expect kid gloves. If you're going to call me a theologian, then I'm gonna call you on it and say, As I said, I tell my students when a view by a apparently senior, you know, unauthorized reading looks that bad. Maybe you've misinterpreted. And, of course, the main point of my essay was Yes, you you have misconstrued my brand of compatible ism. You've got a sort of a caricatured version of it. And in fact, as I say late in the piece, your you are a compatible. Listen, all that name you and I agree on so many things. You agree with me that determinism and moral responsibility are compatible.

[00:13:25] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip Do you agree that a system of of law, including punishment and justified punishment, is compatible with determinism That's were just that close three compatible ism. I've actually toyed with the idea, in part provoked by you and I'm some others, Jerry Coyne and others to say, All right, I don't want to fight over who gets to define the term free will, and I see it there, too completely intention themes out there. But what free will is one is that it's incompatible with determinism, and the other is that it's the basis of moral responsibility. I think it's the 2nd 1 That's the important one. That's the variety of free will worth wanting. And I think the other one's a throwaway and I agree with you in determinist freewill. Libertarian Free Will is a philosopher's fantasy. It's is not worth it. It is just It's just a fantasy. So we agree on so much we have no love for a libertarian, uh, in determinism for agent causation. For all of that metaphysical gobbledygook, we're both good naturalists, and we both agree that the truths of neuroscience and the truth of physics physics doesn't have much to do. It actually are compatible with most of our understanding, our everyday understanding of responsibility, taking responsibility, being morally responsible enough to be held to our word. I mean, you and I both agree that you are competent to sign a contract.

[00:15:14] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip Me too. Well, you know, if you go and sign a a, a deed or ah mortgage very often, if it's notarized, the notary public will say, Are you signing this of your own free will? I recently did. I said, Yeah, I am. That's the sense of free will that I think is important. I have it. You're a lot of people that don't have that free will, and it has nothing to do with in determinism. It has to do with their being disabled in some way they don't have. They don't have a well running nervous system, which you need. If you're gonna be a responsible agent, I think you would be with all of that.

[00:15:56] Sam Harris Create clip So I I certainly agree with most of that. I think there's some interesting points of disagreement on the moral responsibility issue, which which we should talk about, and I think that could be very interesting for listeners. Thio first unpack those differences. I am needless to say, very uncomfortable with the idea that I have misrepresented your view. And if I did that in my book, I certainly want to correct that here. So we should clearly state what your view is at a certain point here. But I want to step back for a second before we dive into the details of the philosophy of free will. What I was aware of doing in my book Free Will and again, I would recommend that our listeners just go back and you know, you don't have to read my book, but you can read Dan's review of it on my block and you can read my response, which is entitled The marionettes lament, I believe. Then you can see the the bad blood that was generated there, and I don't know if Dan, if you're aware of this, we don't squander as much of your time on social media or in your inbox. But I heard from so many of our mutual readers that they were just despairing of that contre temp between us. It was like, you know, mom and Dad fighting, and it was totally unpleasant. The thing that I really regret, which you regret that you didn't get a chance to read my book before I published it, which we had. That would've been a nice thing for both of us. But what I regret is when you when you told me that you were planning to write a review of it, I kept urging you, and ultimately they were badgering you to not do that and have a discussion with me because I knew what was gonna happen, at least from my point of view, is that you would. He hit me with his 10,000 word volley, which emit a dozen points arm. Or I would feel you had misconstrued me gone off the rails and there would be no chance to respond to those and respond in a further 10,000 word volley in a piecemeal way would just lead to this exchange. That was very boring to read and yielded a much bigger sense of disagreement than was necessary. Right? So if I have to spend 90% of my energy taking your words out of my mouth, then this thing begins to look purely adversarial. So what? One thing I've been struggling for in my professional life, is a way of having conversations like this, even ones where there's much less goodwill than you and I have for one another, because you and I are friends and we're on the same side of most of these debates, and so we should be able to have this kind of conversation in a way that's productive. But I I've been engaging people who, you know, think I'm a racist bigot as a starting point and one, and I want to find ways of having conversations in real time where you could be as nimble as possible in defusing unnecessary conflict or misunderstanding. And writing is an especially bad way to do that, certainly writing the 10,000 word New York Review of Books piece. Then someone has to react to it in an angry letter, you know. So in any case, I wish we'd had that conversation, but we're having it now, and this is instructive in its in its own way. Feel free to react to that. But I guess I want you to also express what compatible ism means to you. And if you recall the way in which I got that wrong, feel free to say that. But I'll then react to your version of compatible ism.

[00:19:16] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip Well, um, my view of compatible ism is pretty much what I just said, and you were nodding on you. We're not considering that a serious view about free will. Although you were actually almost all of it. You were agreeing with Andi. You also I think, made this, uh, I'm serious strategic or tactical error of of saying this is like theology. It smells of theology. Well, assuming, as you said that you just don't understand what compatible is a visits the opposite of theology. It's a attempt to look at what matters to look at the terms and their meanings and to recognize that sometimes ancient ideology gets in the way of clear thinking so that you can't just trust tradition. If you trusted tradition on the everyday meanings of words, we would have to say all sorts of silly things we've learned. In fact, one of the abiding themes in my work is there are these tactical or diplomatic ChoicePoint's you can say, Uh oh, consciousness exists just isn't what you think it is, or you can say no, consciousness doesn't exist. Well, if you've got one view of consciousness. If it's this mysterious, magical, ultimately insoluble problem, then I agree. Consciousness in that sense doesn't exist.

[00:20:53] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip But there's another sense, much more presentable, I think, which, of course, consciousness exists. But it just isn't what you think it is. That was a central theme in elbow Room, with regard to free will and in consciousness explained with regard to consciousness. My, my view, my tactic, and notice those two views, they look as if they're doctrinally opposed. They're not. They're two different ways of dealing with the same issue. Destry will really exist. Well, if if we will means what Dennett says, it means, yes, and you agree. If it means what some people think, then the answer is no.

[00:21:36] Sam Harris Create clip Yeah, I understand that. But I would put to you the question There is a difference between explaining something and changing the subject. So there's my gripe about Compatible is, um and this is this something will get into. So I assume you will admit that there is a difference between purifying a real phenomenon of its folk psychological baggage, which I think this is what you think compatible ism is doing and actually failing to interact with some core features that are just inimitable from the concept itself.

[00:22:13] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip Let me surprise you by saying, I don't think there's a sharp line between those two, and I think that's quite obvious that whether I'm changing the subject, I'm so used to that retort about any line along this. So no, I think that's that's just a debater's point. We should just set that aside saying You're just changing the subject is a way of we're declaring, Ah, hole manifold a whole variety spectrum of clarification Torrey views, which you're not accepting because you're clinging to some core part of what free will is. You want to claim that free will the core of free will is it is. It's denial of determinism, and I made it clear saying, That's not the core. In fact, let me try. Let me try a new line onion because everything. Why why doesn't he see this? The way I see it and I think that big source, a likely big source of confusion about this, is that when people think about freedom in the context of free will, they're ignoring a very good and legitimate notion of freedom, which is basically the engineering notion of freedom. When you talk about degrees of freedom my arms, my wrist on my shoulder, my elbow, those joints that there's three degrees of freedom right there and in control theory, it's all about how you control the degrees of freedom.

[00:23:47] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip And if we look around the world, we can see that some things have basically no degrees of freedom that rock over there. And some things like you and me have uncountable many degrees of freedom because of the versatility of our minds, the capacity that we we can be moved by reasons on any topic at all. This gives us a complexity from the point of view of control theory, which is completely absent in any other creature. And that kind of freedom is actually I claim at the heart of our understanding of free will because it's that complexity, which is not just complexity, but it's the competence to control that complexity. That's what free will is what you want. If you've got free will, it is the capacity, and it will never be perfect to respond to the circumstances with all the degrees of freedom you need to do what you think would be really the right thing to do. You may not always do the right thing, but let's take a dead simple case. Imagine writing a chess program, which, stupidly it was written wrong so that the King could only move forward or back, or left or right, like a rook, and it could not move diagonally. And this was somehow hidden in it so that it was never even considered moves. Bagnall moves by the King completely disabled chess program. It's missing in the very important dignity of freedom, which is should have and be able to control and recognize when to use and so forth what you want.

[00:25:27] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip I mean, let me ask you the question about what would be ideal from the point of view of responsibility. What is an ideal responsible agent have? Uh, not mainly true beliefs, well ordered set of desires, the, uh, cognitive adroitness, too, to be to change one's attention, to change one's mind, to be moved by reasons the capacity to listen to reasons the capacity for some self control. These things all come in degrees, but our model of a responsible adult, someone you would trust, someone you would make a promise to, or that we would accept a promise from Is somebody with all those abusive and control of him. Now, what removes freedom from somebody is if either the degrees of freedom don't exist. They're blocked mechanically or some other agent has usurped them and has taken over control. I'm marrying that and the puppeteer. And so I think, with the our model of a free agent says nothing at all about indeterminacy. Weaken, distinguish free agents from UN free agents in a deterministic world or in an Indian deterministic world. Determinism and in determinism make no difference to that categorization. And it's that categorization, which makes the moral difference.

[00:27:05] Sam Harris Create clip So yeah, I agree with almost all of that. I just need to put a few more pieces in play here. I think there is an important difference. Nevertheless, I I agree that there is no bright line between changing the subject and actually purifying a concept of illusions and actually explaining something scientifically aboutthe world. But in this case, the durability of free will is a problem for philosophers, and now scientists is based on people's first person experience of something they think they have people feel like they are the authors of their thoughts and intentions and actions. And so there's a There's a first person description of this problem, and there's 1/3 person description of this problem. And I think if we bounce between the two without knowing that we're bouncing between the two, we are losing sight of important details. So people feel that they have libertarian free will. And when I when I get emails from people who are psychologically destabilized by my argument that free will doesn't exist. These are people who feel like something integral to their psychological life, and wellbeing is being put in jeopardy. And I can say this from from both sides because I know what it's like to feel that I could have done otherwise. So let me just for for listeners who aren't totally up to speed here, Libertarian Free Will is this is anger to this notion of I could have done otherwise, So if we rewound the universe to precisely as it was a few moments ago, I could complete this sense of the sentence differently than I did. You know, whether you throw in determinism or determinism or some combination thereof. There's no scientific rationale for that claim. Your if you rewound the universe to precisely its prior state with all relevant variables intact, whether deterministic were in deterministic, these words would come out of my mouth and exactly the same order. And there's there would there would be no change. I would I would speak this sentence a trillion times in a row with its with its errors with its glitches. So people feel that if they rewound the movie their lives, they could do differently in each moment. And that feeling is the thing. That is what people find so interesting about this. This notion that free will doesn't exist because it is so counter intuitive psychologically. Now, I can tell you that I no longer feel that subjectively my experience of myself. I'm aware of the fact that it is a subjective mystery to me how these words come out of my mouth as I'm hearing these words. You're hearing these words, right? I'm thinking out loud right now. I haven't thought this thought before. I thought it right. It's just coming. And I am subjectively aware of the fact that this is all coming out of the darkness of my unconscious mind. In some sense, there's the sphere of my mind that is, that is illuminated by consciousness for for lack of a better word, and I could be subjectively identified with it.

[00:30:07] Sam Harris Create clip But then there's all the stuff that is simply just arriving a period in consciousness, the contents of consciousness, which I can't notice until I noticed them. And I can't think the thought before I think it and my direct experience is compatible with a purely deterministic world. Right now, most people's isn't or they don't think it is. And so that's where, when, when, when you change. The subject of the analogy I used in my article that responded to your review, which I still think captures it for male picture to you once more is the notion of Atlantis. So people are infatuated with this idea of Atlanta's, I say. Actually, Atlantis doesn't exist. It's a myth. There's nothing in the world that answers to the name of Atlanta's. There was no underwater kingdom with advanced technology and all the rest, and whoever was Plato was confused on this topic or just spinning, spinning a yarn and you compatible ism your variant, and perhaps every variant takes another approach. It says No, no, Actually, there is something that conserves much of what people are concerned with about Atlantis. And in fact, it may be the historical and geographical antis eat into the first stirrings of this idea of Atlantis. And there's this island of Sicily, the biggest island in the Mediterranean, which answers too much of what people care about with Atlanta's. And I say Well, but actually, what people really care about is the underwater kingdom with the advanced technology, and that is a fiction. So you and I are going to agree about Sicily. 99% of our truth claims about Sicily are gonna converge. But I'm saying the whole reason why we're talking about Atlantis in the first place is this other piece the people are attached to which by you purifying the subject, you're actually just no longer interacting with that subjective piece.

[00:31:55] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip Yeah, that's that's well put. I I think the analogy is, uh, let's instructive. I don't think it's entirely fair, but let's leave it at that. Um ah, the your position is that you can see very clearly that what people really care about is that free will should be something sort of magical. And you're right. A lot of people, that's what. If you don't think free Will's magical, then you don't believe in free will. And that's what I confront him and say, Well, I got something which isn't magical, which is perfectly consistent with naturalism and gives us moral responsibility, justification for our the way we treat each other, the distinctions that matter to us. Like who? Who do we hold responsible, who don't who do we excuse? Because they don't every will. It gives us all of the landmarks of our daily lives and explains why these are what matters. And indeed, though, if if the mystery, if the magic is that important to people, I've Ilya does that magic doesn't exist. And if that's if we're gonna tie free will to that, then that I would say no free will doesn't exist Now you said something very interesting. You said that the reason people believe in this is because they, they feel it. They are they think they do. They sort of into us.

[00:33:36] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip They could have done something different in exactly the same situation. I agree with you that they That's what they think. But I don't I think that it is a forlorn task to show them that that's not really what they should think about this, about the very feelings they have. Their sense, it there a sconce is acting under the idea of freedom. That's right, they are, and that's the only way an agent can be. This is a fairly deep point that, uh, an agent has to consider some things fixed and something's not fixed. You can't decide otherwise. The whole setting of decision making depends on their being that kind of freedom. And so it's no wonder in a way, that people are impressed with that. Decide that what what they experience is a sense of utter freedom. They don't need utter freedom. What they need and I can have It is the sense that in many very similar circumstances circumstances which differed maybe only in a few atoms they would admit another decision. And and that hasn't as soon as you allow any tiny change in the when you rewind the tape, the whole business about determinism falls out of the picture, and that's why in in, uh, actually several places. I've got a considerable length probably too long to trot out examples where we have a decision maker, which is in a demonstrably deterministic world.

[00:35:34] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip It's playing chess and it loses the game. And its designer says, Well, it could have castled. What do you mean? It could have castled? What the designer means is it was just the luck of the draw Chess program, like any complicated program, is going to consult a random number generator or pseudo random number generator at various points. And this time, it chose wrong, however, chose wrong, because when it I got a number from the pseudo random number, generator got a one rather than a zero. Flip a single bit and it would have made the other choice. In other words, it's not a design flaw. The agent could be, as it were impeccably designed. You couldn't improve the design of the agent. So that's what justifies saying, Yeah, I could have done otherwise half the time, or it would have done otherwise. This is just bad luck on this occasion. Normally it would have done otherwise,

[00:36:42] Sam Harris Create clip so I agree with all that. I think you're not acknowledging, however, how seditious that those facts are, how did the degree which they undermine people's felt sense of their own personhood? So if you tell me that but for a single charge at a synapse, I would have decided I didn't want to have this conversation with you or I wouldn't have proposed to my wife, right? And my entire life would be different, acknowledging the underlying neurophysiology of all of those choice points and how tiny a difference can be that makes the crucial difference that suddenly brings back the marionette strings. Now no one's holding the strings. The universe is holding the strings. But that is not what people feel themselves to be. This for this feeling that if you had had just one mouthful Maur of lunch, it's something very different. You would make a radically different decision six hours from now. Then you are going to make that is a life that no one virtually no one feels they're living.

[00:37:55] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip This is going in good in good directions. I think you're, uh, largely right and exactly wrong in what you just said. Um, I think you're right, that this is a subversive idea. Too many people, they're so used to the idea that unless they're completely, absolutely undetermined, uh, then they don't have free will. Now, the trouble with that is, if you look closely at that idea, you see, if they were absolutely determined, that wouldn't give him free will, either. So So there, there, that's a red herring. So let's look at what does matter. Um, it's interesting that you say that that, uh, if if I thought that, you know, some tiny atomic change would have altered the course of some big important life decision. Uh, let's look closely at that, because what I think we should say it is. It is indeed true that there are times when a decision is a real toss up. When you've thought about it, thought about it, thought about you're gonna have to act pretty soon, and you just can't make up your mind in cases like that. And it may be something that's morally very important.

[00:39:22] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip The idea that when you do make the decision, I had a few Adam's been slighted, you would have made the other decision. I don't find that upsetting at all because that's one of those situations, and it doesn't mean that when the evidence and the reasons air preponderantly on one side. Uh, no. Then you'd you'd have to make a very large change in the world for a different decision to come out. Sometimes the indeterminacy, the libertarians. In fact, it's a sort of signature, a lot of their views. You say that there has to be an absolutely undetermined choice of some importance that somewhere in the causal chain of your life for your action to be responsible now. Thus, I I had long thrust into the into their faces example of Luther, who says I can do no other. He's not ducking responsibility. He's saying, Believe me, you know, it wasn't had the light been different or wind not been blowing? I wouldn't know. He's saying I was determined to do this on Yet He's not saying is not a free decision.

[00:40:44] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip They, some of them, amazingly to me fall for the bait and say, Oh, well, that's only because it must have been the case. But somewhere in lieu, Luthor's life. It was a moment it might have been in his childhood, when there were £2 A and B, and he chose a which led to him putting, mailing the feces on the door, and at that moment it was absolutely undetermined that he chooses. I think that's the craziest fantasy imaginable. It doesn't depend on that, Um, so I agree with you that when we I think about how chance look enters into our lives, that could be very unsettled. And we should not hide from the fact that there are times when it's a toss up and we may rejoice in the decision we make or we may bitterly regret it. And the fact that we couldn't do that it was not in our control. It's maybe it's a tragic fact, but it's not a fact which disables us for responsibility. You're playing chess to take a deliberately trivial case.

[00:42:20] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip You considering two possible moves for the life. You can't see what the better one is. It's sort of mentally flip a coin you don't know works out great. Yeah, that's right. That's what I'm very likely to retrospectively decorate that with the claim that that's what you determined. You're kidding yourself. You're just taking responsibility for a little bit of lucky random coin flip in your decision process. That does not, in fact, not only does that not disable you for free will. I think an important human point about free will visit free. Responsible agents recognize when they act, they're going to be held responsible, whether or not they are in complete control of. And they can't be in complete control of the decision making that goes to making up their minds.

[00:43:23] Sam Harris Create clip Well, now I think we're getting into some very interesting territory where we might actually disagree, because I think perhaps your notion of moral responsibility is something that I don't agree with. I think I can do a kind of compatible ist maneuver on moral responsibility and get most of what we want out of it. But I think something changes with my view of free will. But I want to unpack 11 point you made earlier that might have blown by people too quickly. The reason why in determinism doesn't give you freedom is that if you made a choice that was truly not determined by your past conditioning, your past attitude, it would be the precisely the occasion where you would say, I don't know what came over me that wasn't it wouldn't be representative of who you've been up until that moment. So it has to be in part of the causal stream that you recognize to be your lawfully you in each moment. But I want to ask you one question before I talk about why I think it might all be a matter of luck all the way down, and that moral responsibility is something we have to redefine in the way that you are eager to redefine free will. I want to ask you this notion that the tiny micro adjustment in the universe on Lee really spells the difference in cases where it's a decision that could go either way. That is, it was 50 50 anyway, and you just, you know, you flipped a bit and you know, it wasn't a a diversion of that great consequence because it was not something that you were fully committed to. But I think there probably are many actions, maybe decisions or the wrong category, but certainly actions where the difference between a life changing action and not is just a matter of a tiny piece of real estate in the brain being otherwise. So the difference between thinking something and saying it out loud to the person you're thinking it about, or the difference between sending that angry email you wrote to your boss or to your best friend and just decided to scrap it. That can be one of these tiny moments where, but for a little more sleep the night before, your life would be very different

[00:45:29] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip on that very point. Imagine how many Brits there are today who didn't vote and didn't vote for the most tiny and trivial reasons. They just Oh, I think I'll just have another piece of toast instead. I don't really need to vote, and they're kicking themselves, of course now, and life has those moments, and we factored that in when we consider what it is to be responsible. And, uh, some people, uh, do better on that sort of self control and others. I think that regret plays a big role in our thinking about free will when we have done something that we bitterly regret and that we do view as that wasn't really what I or at least the ideal I would do when we when we're ashamed of something we've done, we often hide behind second rate ideas. I think that's part of the the sort of emotional distortion, the waves of distortion that mean that we really can't take, You know, the folk notions at face value. They've got a lot of baggage on.

[00:46:50] Sam Harris Create clip So yeah, it's interesting. It's seeming to me at this moment that we have been talking past each other to some degree S. O u. You decide to redefine freewill. Here's here's the free will worth wanting and then you talk about degrees of freedom and agents that can operate lawfully and meet their aims. Whereas I talk about free will being an incoherent concept. The libertarian notion of free will doesn't map onto determinism. It doesn't map onto in determinism, and it doesn't map onto any combination thereof. And we both agree about that. But we have a different response to it. But I think what my response is that the free will you think you have doesn't exist, and then let's Then we could go on to talk about all these other things that we care about. But here's where I'm gonna push into this area of more responsibility where we may find a disagreement s. So you take the classic case of, uh, Charles Whitman, the shooter in the clock tower killing. I think 14 people at the University of Texas and, you know, one of the early and famous mass shootings in American history.

[00:48:00] Sam Harris Create clip And it turns out that he wrote this essentially suicide note saying, I don't know what's wrong with me, but I've been flying into a rage. And he killed his wife first before he went and killed all those people. And he's I don't know why I did this. I love my wife. You might wantto do an autopsy on my brain after you kill me, too, to find find out what's wrong with me. And in fact, that's what was done. And they found a, I think was a glioblastoma that was pressing on his amygdala. And it's just the sort of tumor in the sort of place where you think, okay, that there's something exculpatory about that, right? He was not. He was a victim of his biology, And that wasn't Charles Whitman shooting. That was Charles Whitman, plus brain tumor shooting. So when you when that kind of case emerges in court, it effects are ethical notion of what if he had survived and it was time to punish him. We would have given him brain surgery, had the surgery been available and not put him in prison for the rest of his life. Because he was he was yet another victim of this bad luck incident.

[00:48:58] Sam Harris Create clip Now my argument in my book free will, which I think you I don't agree with Is that a complete understanding of neurophysiology Should we ever attain It is exculpatory in that same sense that basically is it is brain tumors all the way down. So if you can tell me that you fully understand the charge on me on that one sin abs that led me to hit send on my email as opposed to restraining myself. That charge is something which I didn't author. That charges is the tiniest brain tumor ever found. And that is the reason why I hit Send.

[00:49:39] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip Oh, that's ah, very useful. Um, Tom Wolfe has this passageway. Says what we've learned from neuroscience. Is it? We're wired wrong. Don't blame me. Were Don't blame us. We're wired Wrong. You know what neuroscience shows is? We're wired, doesn't show we're wired wrong. Some people like poor Whitman wired wrong. So what you're basically challenging me to say, Well, doesn't that mean that everybody's wired wrong? There's no such thing as being wired right for free will. That, I think, is what you're now claiming. You're saying it's it's it's brain tumors all the way down. Well, I find that extrapolation completely. I'm not moved by it all. I don't I don't think it is a logical argument. I think it is. It is a, uh, mistaken extrapolation. It's like a mathematical induction going wrong. The fact that equipment and and I find it, in fact, fascinating that this is a very standard argument from the Libertarians. They'll take a case of somebody with horrible brain damage on say, Well, surely this is a case of person. Isn't is a victim, as you say. Not not. Not unaided, right? I agree. Well, then we're all that way. We'll know we're not mean.

[00:51:03] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip That's That's precisely what we way understand is that we're not all disabled. Some people now, nobody's an angel. Nobody's perfect. So if anything short of perfection counts, is being disabled to the point of exculpatory really disabled, then you're right. But that's a very strange view. The idea that you couldn't be able enough to be held responsible is, uh, the crux of the issue right now between us, I say that the boundaries are always porous, that as we learn more about neuroscience as neuroscience teaches this more we may very well and probably will move some people that are now exculpated into the guilty, not excusable category, and others will move. But we'll still keep the distinction between those who are basically wired right and those that are wired wrong.

[00:52:09] Sam Harris Create clip So I'm not disputing the fact that people have different capacities rights, that people have different degrees of freedom, and if you have a brain tumor in the wrong place, your capacities could be undermined. So there's nothing that I said thus far that ignores the very important difference between voluntary and involuntary action or the ability to restrain your impulses are supposed to just acting out everything that arises in your mind as at the level of intention. So there are different capacities. But here's the ethical problem. And then the reason why I think Maur information begins to make every case look more like Charles Whitman because everything is as it is in a way that no one can take responsibility for. So you didn't pick your parents. You didn't pick your genes. You didn't pick the environment in which your nervous system was sculpted in response to its inputs. The only variables there are in the system are your jeans and the way in which they're played upon by the environment. And this includes ideas. It's includes conversations had and not had. So to bring us back to this conversation. You are not in control of how persuaded you are or not by what I say. So I say something here that strikes you is stupid or incredibly incisive or somewhere on that continuum, and you don't pick that right. It is entirely dependent on the state of your brain, which is entirely dependent on every moment proceeding. So we are being played by the universe. We are we're little corners of the universe that are just like the rest of the universe, except for all of these other functions that we can talk about, like voluntary behavior and involuntary behavior, impulse control, et cetera. And there is something exculpatory about that. So again, just to give you a little more information here, you can take the evil is person, the most easily incriminated person you can think of. Leslie. I think I use Saddam Hussein or one of his sons. In my book, This is the prototypical mustache twirling the evil person. If anyone is responsible for his actions, he is.

[00:54:18] Sam Harris Create clip But if you just just roll back the timeline of his life at one point he was the four year old who was destined to become Saddam Hussein, Right? So you look at that four year old and he might have been. He might have the genes for psychopathy, say might have bad parents. He's got a bad society, or certainly one that's destined to influence him in ways that predispose them to psychopathic violence. So you have an unlucky four year old that is fully exculpatory, that four year old. If we could help that four year old, we would we would intervene. We would put him in a new family, would give him the right drugs if we had them to combat his psychopathy, right, and you guys roll forward in his life. At a certain point, I think, as if by magic, we hold him responsible for being the true author of his actions. And yet at no point does he actually become the author of his jeans and his environment and all of the causal connections. And so I'm saying to use that we might want to still hold people responsible. I think we do. I think you and I should sign contracts and which we should keep promises, and we should be held responsible for breaking those promises.

[00:55:22] Sam Harris Create clip But the reason yet because it's pragmatically useful to do that it punishment makes sense if it actually influences people's behavior in a way that on balance, leads to human flourish in. So I don't think we throw out everything that you're worried we throw out in the criminal justice system. But I think there is something I think the role of luck goes all the way down

[00:55:45] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip your, um, examples. Ah, I think I have a flaw, and I'm trying to think of the cleanest way of saying what I think it is. Let's talk about control. One of the things you said is you can't control your jeans. You can't control your environment. That's right. And as a sailor I can't control the properties of the water I can't control the wind, but I can control the boat. I can't control how hard the wind blows, but given how the wind blows, I can control the boat now. Maybe you couldn't control the book because you don't know you know about how to control about. But I do. And I can control the boat and it's on. And your argument is trying to remove the very idea of control from the world. Say nobody ever controls anything, not really. And I think that's a reductive lot absurd. Um, of course, we control things and for that matter, uh, on airliner can be controlled by a computer. The computer is really controlling it.

[00:56:56] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip And and if and if then if the pilot turns off the computer than the pilot is controlling the airplane and the idea that you can't control all the factors, that's irrelevant. I mean, of course you can't. That's why that's what control theory starts with. The premise that there are factors is they're not in your control. The whole point of control is to respond to the factors that are out of your control by, you know, doing the right thing and the same thing goes for moral education, you're exactly right. Poor Saddam Hussein. Terrible beginning and all that. And if we could treat him, we would. Why would we treat him? Because if we treated him, if we could get in there early, we could turn him with some chance of success. There's good evidence of this into a an autonomous, self controlling adult. That's why we have moral education and it works. And if if you don't morally educate your kids, then they're gonna be out of control. And if they are, then shame on you as a parent for not doing that moral education because you could have made them. It was self controlling, autonomous adult. And you, you, you let down the side and it's too bad for them. It's too bad for you.

[00:58:18] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip I agree. These are cases where, where, Uh, adults are not fully responsible, and I think again way don't need to talk about absolute moral responsibility. Nobody could be absolutely morally responsible, but you can be non absolutely practically responsible for who you are. After all, you make a robot. You made it. You thought about it. You said it out. It's your artifact and then kill somebody who's responsible. You are. You made it. You should've known better. All right, You 20 year old. You made 21 year old you, which made 28 year old you, which made 40 year old you. We do. Part of being an adult is recognizing the part of our responsibility to the rest of the world is too make it is to keep ourselves as self controlling autonomous ages, not to lapse into. We have a responsibility. We have a duty to maintain ourselves a self controllers. Some people fail miserably, and it's very interesting that we've had a sea change in the way the public thinks about this.

[00:59:48] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip When I was a kid drunk drivers were routinely excuse me. Oh, Sam, He was drunk out of his mind. He wasn't responsible. Now we holding doubly responsible and we hold the bartender and his friends responsible for letting and get in that state. And I think the same thing. I think that's I think that's a wise change. And I think that's something we don't want to give up. We want to keep the idea that part of getting a moral education is inculcating in an individual. The goal, the motive to become a reliable self controller, and most people succeed pretty darn well. They're not perfect. And what you get for that is the freedom of the state. You get to drive a car, run around and signed contracts and little life, and you're allowed to have a free, politically free life. And if you can't do that, you're in the soup and you're gonna you're gonna suffer

[01:00:56] Sam Harris Create clip well again. I agree. There is this practical distinction and an important one between people we can we can treat as responsible agents who can behave themselves and people who are, you know, wild and unpredictable and can't be influenced by reasons and our expectations, etcetera. So there's an obvious difference between toddlers and older kids and older and adolescents and adults, and we understand a fair amount about that, the physical basis of those differences. But there's something actually came up in my response to your review, which I had never thought of before. It's just something I haven't thought about deeply, but it seems to me ethically interesting where you brought up Austin's putt and you brought it up as a an example of how you really don't want to think about free will and in my review or in mind responsible review. I owned it as though this is actually is in line with how I do want to think about free will. And one thing that came out of Austin's putt for me is what strikes me as a bit of a paradox. So you take the most competent agents you take your Tiger Woods or your Tiger Woods, as he used to be, putting Tiger Woods in his prime, attempting to sink a two foot putt. Now this is a putt that he will make 999 times out of 1000 I would think, at least so when he misses this. But we're now the one occasion where he misses it.

[01:02:23] Sam Harris Create clip On its face. He is the person you can hold most responsible on Earth for missing this, Putt said, Because because if I miss the putt, you know, you don't you'd expect me to miss it 20% of the time, right, because I'm not a good golfer, so I am less culpable than he is. He is the most culpable of any person on earth for missing this putt. And yet his missing the putt says the least about him because he's someone who always makes this. But so the role of luck here, the role of does this. The mirror, you know, cosmic ray bombardment of his synapses seems the most salient because for Tiger Woods to miss a two foot putt, that is just bad. Look, that is not. That's not the Tiger Woods we know. And that's not the Tiger Woods he knows. And his subjective experience of missing the putt will be presumably. I don't know what the hell happened because I should have made that putt and I would make that. But I'll make that point watch. I'll make it 1000 times in a row now. So the paradox. I wantto and I wish I had a name for this paradox. But the paradoxes in a case where you have a lapse in behavior and I would argue even a moral lapse, even a crime committed right by someone who should be the absolute best candidate for responsible self governance. In that instance, it suddenly becomes the least good case for freedom of

[01:03:45] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip will. That's glad you brought that up because I wanted to raise that to, um, the reason Let's take a moral case, a moral Tiger Woods case. There's a reason why there's a reason why we expect the best from some and not from others in her were more condemnatory if the Supreme Court justice shoplifts or something like that than if somebody some poor kid in the neighborhood does. Um, I don't think there's any paradox. I think that there's no paradox because the Supreme Court justice or any serious moral agent has taken on, in effect, the obligation to be that good people are counting on him. People are making plans that could be life wrecking If he doesn't come through. They're not doing that with everybody. They're doing it with the ones that have the particular competence and advertise that particular competence so that it is particularly bad when they don't live up to their own self advertisement. And you say it's just like, Well, it may be just like it or they may look in their hearts and think, Well, I don't know where the just like there's always look randomness or pseudo randomness. Chaos infects every moment of our lives, but very often there are other factors that we can point to if we go looking.

[01:05:43] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip So maybe Tiger Woods shouldn't stayed out so late last night. And he may realize that. And he may say, I can't imagine how I misstep, but, oh, he can, indeed. And he will think it through very carefully, and he will try to improve his his mental game the next day. You see, I don't think the case is a simple as you make it out to. I don't think there's any paradox here it all.

[01:06:09] Sam Harris Create clip Well, I think you're not connecting with the first person side of what it's like to deviate from your own internalized norms and competencies. So you're the Supreme Court justice, right? Who's just fully committed to ethics and law, the rule of law. And then all of a sudden, you find that you've gone on a shoplifting spring right that is so unreflective of who you've been. That is a failure of of some part of your system, which seems the most Advantis is, it says. It says the released about who you've been up until that moment. It is a departure from the norm, and as it is with Tiger Woods missing a putt that even a terrible golfer would would make some significant percentage of the time. Going back to prior causes doesn't really resolve the issue. So if you ask, you know why they stay out late the night before. Well, then we're back to him. Not offering himself because of the explanation for why he decided to stay out late was because he happened to see that pretty woman across the bar. If he hadn't seen her, he would have been in bed by 10. But because he's a serial philanderer, he had to stay out before.

[01:07:21] Sam Harris Create clip But I'm just saying that each one of those moments becomes a missed putt when you look closely at it. So what? One thing I hear here and one thing I've definitely detected in your writing about this is you're very concerned about these social, the societal implications of most people getting the wrong message about free will. So if Jerry Coyne and I won the argument here and we just announced that free will is an illusion, and in some sense everyone is not guilty by reason of insanity, there's no there is no control. That's good enough for free will. No one has that kind of control. Everyone is just part of the universe. Everyone is a force of nature. Everyone is a wild animal. Something very important would be lost. And But what I'm saying is that you can conserve. I have a compatible ist maneuver for many of the things you're afraid would be lost. So it's the holding people accountable, holding people to their contracts, their promises, putting people in prison who are too scary to let out of prison. I think we can do all of that in a way that doesn't preserve an illusion that anyone actually truly authors themselves any more than Charles Whitman did with his brain

[01:08:37] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip tumor. Nobody ever actually truly absolutely authors himself or herself. But that doesn't mean there aren't people that author themselves they use found objects that they find, uh, you know, do it yourself. Um, there's a limit to do it yourself. Uh, and indeed, there's a lot of luck involved, and I think that people understand this. People understand that the best game in town is to be a moral agent who lives by the communities, ideas off moral agency and takes punishment gracefully when it's deserved and may secretly harbor things like thoughts like, Well, I was just really unlucky today. I was just really, really, like, tough. I was really unlucky, but the last thing I'm going to do is plead I just cosmically unlucky, your honor. Okay, so what? You did it. You hold yourself. You declare yourself to be a responsible agent on this occasion, you let down the side, and it's quite irrelevant whether you were unlucky today.

[01:10:06] Sam Harris Create clip But again, I think the subject their changes to the pragmatics of holding people responsible and how our courts function and how our relationships need to be. But again, I just think it's this is vulnerable to Maur information so that Tiger Woods is miss. But let's say we had full knowledge of all of the variables, right? So we find that actually, it was the chirp of a bird that got into his head that, you know, his auditory cortex did its little dance. And that was enough to get him to miss this putt. The game of golf wouldn't necessarily change because there is no way to incorporate that the influence of birds into the rules of the game. So that s o. What golf would have to say at that point is listen, sometimes you get lucky, and sometimes you don't get lucky with the birds, right? But we're not gonna kill all the birds that just deal with it. But that is a pragmatic response to a situation that is just too complex. And yet it is still a fact that the bird caused him to miss that putt. And he's not actually responsible. We're just using the heuristic here. Tito hold him responsible. He's responsible in the sense that next time we will expect him to make that putt rightfully based on his skill, and he probably will make it

[01:11:26] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip well, you're covertly sliding back into absolute responsibility, right? He's He's not absolutely responsible because the bird played an unexpected causal role in this case. But But as long as you're not holding out for absolute responsibility, he's still responsible. And you say this is just pragmatic. Well, the whole idea of free will is ultimately, I think, pragmatic. That's we're gonna have a consequential ist account of why we why we hold people responsible and it's actually it's not a simple deterrence and rehabilitation idea. It's the idea that if we have a, we won't have a secure society where there's respect for law, then the law has to be reasonable because we're pretty reasonable people and unreasonable laws will not be respected. So the law has built into it lots of excusing conditions. But it says not everything is an excuse. We draw the line here. Now where do we draw that line? We draw it somewhere, and it's not a metaphysical line. It's a pragmatic line. And what determines where that line is is something about what human nature is like in general, and setting it higher would excuse to many people and would lead to disrespect for the law.

[01:13:07] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip Setting it lower would be too punitive on people that we intuitively feel we're really not that responsible for what they did. And so we we have this artifact, this wonderful human artifact, which is law and order, and it's a human. Well, it's not. It was not intelligently designed so much by human. So much is it evolved by cultural evolution to be a system which people can appreciate its value even if they can't entirely explain how the working parts working why they're as good as they are.

[01:13:44] Sam Harris Create clip So so take the prototypical psychopath, right? So that the evil person who is as responsible for his evil as possible because he's he's a sadist. He gets pleasure from it. He he's now in prison. But, you know, he says, if we let him out, he would do it again because of what he really likes to do is kill little girls and boys, and he has no regrets. This is as culpable persons were ever gonna find. But you Well, he is in the sense that he's He's not Charles Whitman, saying, I don't know what came over me. He's saying, This is who I want to be, you know, You can tell you can talk about neurophysiology all you want. I'm happy to be who I am, right? I love this, and this is how I wanna live So you might have some reason to think that he's not as responsible as you and I are. But I think this would push most people's buttons in terms of judging him to be the author of his evil. As much as anyone's the author of Anything, This guy is satisfied to be who is. And he was just a violent, sadistic person. Hui who we should lock up now. If we had a cure for this condition, let's call it psychopathy. But maybe this is something beyond that. And we could just give him the pill that made him have the epiphany. Oh, my God. I can't believe I was this evil Faster. I'm so regretful. I'm so sorry for everything I've done. I won't spend the rest of my life making it up to you people. We would rather than punish him in a retributive scheme and just let let him rot away in prison for the rest of his life. We would have a name for this condition that we now call evil. But let's say it's called psychopathy Plus and we would just give this pills all the people who are at risk for being this sort of evil person in the same way we give insulin to diabetics. We would just view these people who, for whatever reason, genes and environment were destined to become these evil bastards. We would give them the anti evil pill, And wouldn't that be, in some sense, exculpatory?

[01:15:38] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip Yes, it would, but I want to look at a case which I think is better. Um, not a psychopathic torture, but, um a a Bernie Madoff, eh? Com. Calculating, greenie, heartless, fraudulent person with a fine education, good upbringing and no clear signs of any pathology psychopathology.

[01:16:15] Sam Harris Create clip I I think that's the same cases. Just he's a more normal person, but I'm gonna invent something that was called Madoff Syndrome is the kind of person who, even with the benefit of of an education and a great upbringing and good relationships and all of the right environmental influences, he still is malignant Lee selfish enough to show up like Bernie Madoff. He can lie to people with alacrity, and he can pursue his own. Ames has a kind of time horizon for his gratification, which allows him to forget about the fact that he's running a Ponzi scheme that is guaranteed to blow up. And he's he's he's really not motivated by that is discounted, that future pain to the point where he's no longer motivated by it. So if we could completely understand the neurophysiology of what it was to be Bernie made off and just by dent of luck, there was a intervention that could cancel it. There's now a pill that is the anti made off bill that maybe it's just a designer bill just for Bernie Madoff. Maybe it would work for no one else, but it will work for him and you give it to him and he becomes as regretful is you'd ever want him to be and no longer capable of that behavior, he says. I cannot believe who I was. I watched I just watch that documentary about me and I I do not recognize that guy. It seems to be the same case to me,

[01:17:35] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip but you're leaving out a lot of the recursive cycles of the whole situation. If we had a maid off pill, then people would know that was a maid off pill. And so a lot of people who knew that they could do this until they had to take the maid off pill would would factor that into their behavior. And so let me, let me let me know. I don't think it is. I think I think it's important to not to shield off the calculations of all the effects on respect for the law and the sense people have about the security that respect for the law gives them. You have to factor that all in. And the fact that there's a maid off syndrome doesn't change that. And it's small comfort to the rest of the citizenry that when we diagnose a maid off syndrome case, we give him the pill, and then he's better not good enough. We want tohave the threat of punishment there so that the people that have made off syndrome behave themselves. Now consider in this fight, most psychopaths never commit a crime.

[01:19:03] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip Why they're deterred by the penalties, Dan. And here's where it by homely comparison with penalties and sports comes in. You want to play football? Soccer? You wanna have a yellow card in a red card and you want to use them sparingly. But when you use them, you want to meet him and it's gonna hurt and they're really penalties. And with the game be better without them? No. Do we even stopped toe? Ask whether the players could control themselves better? No, If you want to play soccer, you're gonna live by these rules. And don't even think about coming up and say Oh, not me. I'm a hotheaded Latin type who can't control is the most tough. You play by the rules. So you catcher, or you get your red card. And this is an enabler for a past time that many people enjoy. And that was a pretty good thing. Football. You can't play football without rules, and you can't play football without rules that have penalties. And those penalties are not just it's off of rehabilitation.

[01:20:18] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip And it's not just to deter that individual in the future. It is to preserve the common mutual knowledge of what to expect on the pitch. And that's the way the law works. In general, there's the implacable ity of the law is a very interesting feature because it means that, say, judges are often put in the position of wanting to temper justice with mercy on they often do. But there must not be a law that says, and by the way, judges under various circumstances you out of temper justice with mercy that subverts the law. That's averts the respect for the law, which is one of its one of its main features. And I think if you look at it in terms of the rules of the game or law and order criminal behavior. Then you can see that that's simply heightens or clarifies the situation in all moral behavior, holding people responsible there. Is this curious that you might think it's paradoxical. I don't like it is that way. I don't want people to count on the mercy of their judges way. Want them to be grateful when they get mercy

[01:21:57] Sam Harris Create clip again. I think we're having two conversations here. There's two topics in play, and we're not necessarily noticing when we're bouncing between them so that there are just the practical constraints of jurisprudence or the criminal justice system or the world as we currently understand it. And we have to, we have to figure out how to function in it. We have to figure out how to play the game in a way that makes sense. So I I fully agree that punishment makes sense. If it deter is any significant number people from crimes and even in a state of total information, we may still want to reserve certain punishments because that's just those of the best levers to pull in terms of influencing human behavior. But then then there's just the ethical case and what is true of the world and and how those to interact. And I think just to go back to made off for a second if we understood made off syndrome, and this was a really condition, which could be easily cured. And families who were aware of Madoff syndrome were giving their teenage boys the maid off bill before they went to business school.

[01:23:07] Sam Harris Create clip Well, because it's gross negligence. Otherwise, it's like strapping your child into a seatbelt when it's your as apparent, is your responsibility to do that? You're you're unleashing your maid off prone children on the rest of society. If you don't give them this pill, well, everything's optional. You could starve your kids to death, but then within that society will hold you responsible for that. What I'm saying is it because we don't understand made off syndrome and we have no cure for it Made off looks like a fully culpable moral actor who just belongs behind bars. But if the state of our knowledge of his condition changed radically and there was a way to intervene, it would begin to look like neurosurgery for Charles Whitman just a different case of it. And I'm saying that on some level everything becomes like that. Abel, from Tiger Woods is put to your reaction to my making this point. I'm making this point and you are underwhelmed, right? That is a state of your brain, which we dimly understand. But it's not one that you are responsible for you as the center of your subjective life. And this is just a down to connect this conversation back to where I think the illusion of free will or the sense of free will is really the motivating force on this topic for everyone.

[01:24:31] Sam Harris Create clip If we connected you to the right brain scanning technique of the future and we could know in advance everything you were going to think and do before you subjectively could write, so you're you're you're about to utter something which we have in the lab. Already transcribed to be confronted with that pre cognitive record of your behavior, moment after moment would be fundamentally undermining of people's felt sense of what they are as agents. If the guy with the white coat knows what you're going to do before you're going to do it from my point of view, we have every reason to believe that is a neurological fact about us. You are not the first to know what you're about to think and do. If we can get a hold of your neurophysiology in any real detail. Well, then that will completely shatter this sense for people that they are the authors of their actions. And it brings us back to the psychological case for free Will not the pragmatics of it not. This is how you have to design a game so that it's fun or that so there's order layers so that we know what to expect. It's this is who people feel they are in each moment.

[01:25:45] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip Sam, I think you're just wrong about the effect. Yeah, I think so. Um, uh, we have to look more closely and here's where actually, uh a what looks like a empirical but boring detail matters. Some people think that the difference between prediction in real time and prediction about the discovery of things that happened in the past that the difference between them is important to science. It really isn't. People sometimes say that you know, you use no predictive power to evolutionary biology. No, there's plenty. For instance, I predict that if we go to any island in the world and start examining the birds there, we can say a lot about what their DNA is going to show us, predicting the future in any interesting sense or predicting that we'll find certain fossils in the ground. It's about the past, but it's so what happens in neuroscience right now. For instance, in the soon and on a tall experiments and Patrick Haggard's experiments, that's not real time prediction. They have to emphasize that data with the soup with member country program for quite a while, in order to generate the so called prediction would say, then check against what the person actually did. They get it right, you know, 60 80% of the time, but they can't predict in real time. If they could.

[01:27:20] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip Then, of course, they could make real money, but playing rock, paper and scissors. Would the person with their head in the scanner they can't do that, But suppose they could.

[01:27:30] Sam Harris Create clip But that's just a technological wrinkle. There's no reason to think they couldn't. But let me just ask you one question. Is it sharpen this up, which I think I'll make it clear if I showed you my phone now and I had a transcript. Everything we said in this conversation rights I knew in advance everything you were going to say. I knew what I was going to say. I knew what you were gonna say down to every syllable and on some level, we know that's true of us. The perfect mind reading instrument would get it a few, uh, 500 milliseconds early, right before you have a sense even how you're gonna form the word. That's the undermining case. And I think there's just as a matter of determinism and in determinism. However, you want to admit those together at the level of cells we know that's true of us consciousness. Just just not get involved early enough for us to feel like it's we're pushing the river.

[01:28:23] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip I think there's to confusions in that. One of them is that your example has it's sort of irrelevant, but it's since you tried it out. The example many years ago, Donald Mackay damn Mukai showed that, as it were, the plastic and demon can't predict your behavior if he's gonna interact with you because then he's had it predict his own behavior to And to do that, he's gonna have to have a complete description of himself, which you can't have as a touring show. So there is a theoretical limit to how good that. You know, if your phone had the whole transcript, uh, on it, then I guess what it would show is that make it a conversation with somebody. Well, we'd have to We'd have to be very careful how we wrote that. But you say that you think that would really undermined the idea that we had free will. I think it really depends on details of the context. Let me let me build up with a simple case. You give me two simple arithmetic problems to do.

[01:29:38] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip I do them. I hand you the result and you say Tena and you show a piece of paper you written down the very results that I've written that there's no that doesn't cut any ice because it sort of obvious. And, you know, I'm pretty good at arithmetic. You predicted I'd get the answers right? I did. Now if you ask me, you know, to write a poem and I sit down to write a poem, and when I handed to take out a you know, a piece of paper and show that you you've got the same problem has already been written has already been written down on the piece of paper. Well, but I'll be sure is that you play the magic trick of some sort on the But that would be, Yeah, that would be very, very unnerving because I believe and believe for good reason that the sort of complexity of the cycles going on in my brain are such that it is beyond feasibility to be able to make that kind of prediction.

[01:30:44] Sam Harris Create clip But even just 500 milliseconds in advance, If we had the poem reading technology hooked up to your brain and we got the poem, we got each word of the poem half a second before you got it. And we could prove that to you. Isn't it the same case?

[01:31:01] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip No, I don't think it really is. First of all, let me let me just I don't want to get into a lot of science fictional imaginings about very, very extreme and physically dubious possibilities in principle. So let's sort of set that aside, I think we should. But if you want to go back to the weekend, the idea that a conscious author it has to be conscious of the creative process that generates each word. That's a extraordinarily extreme and unlikely view of authorship. And if we look at history, we see that Mozart and other great artists they say, No, it's not like that at all. You know, these Mozart says the these twos come to me and I write them down. So But he claims authorship for him. And so he should. Why should he? Well, because no, nobody else wrote him and they were processes in his brain, and he controls them. To some degree, he controls them, not at the micro level. He controls them at a temporally macro level. Thus, when uh when Venus Williams returned service, she's gotta put that stroke in motion before it's fully reached full consciousness. I don't like that we're speaking, but she's got, you know, a couple 100 less than a couple 100 milliseconds to shape her response. As she's waiting for the serve, she's making conditional plans and those air those air delivered. She's already she's decided that if if she can, she's setting up to do to do a backhand lob down down the lane.

[01:32:57] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip And she's not diluted in thinking when that when she gets to serve. She was expecting and does that that that she planned that. But But the fact that her response happened so fast doesn't show that that this was not a conscious act of hers. I picked this up in your book, and I thought it was one of the things I wanted to talk to you about, too, because I think you had a unrealistically demand and what a conscious decision or a conscious bit of authorship would be. Musicians, let's take jazz improvisation on the piano. So, uh, I'm playing around midnight, and I decided the next course. I'm not quite sure why, but I'm up the tempo unusual in that piece, but I wouldn't try it fast. Now do I know exactly which notes they're gonna come out when? No. In fact, I know what I'll be doing is setting in motion some control circuits that I can't control directly. But I've honed them. I've practiced things like this. They may be bad musical habits But they're my habits, and I know how to get a characteristic damn it cliche to come out of my fingers at that moment.

[01:34:30] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip I'm the author of that that I'm not. You seem to be holding out for a kind of authorship that would that would deny that that was authorship.

[01:34:40] Sam Harris Create clip I think there is this shift between first and third person views of free will, and I think the first person is primary in terms of describing what people think they're gonna lose psychologically when they give up this notion of free will. And I think they lose it to some significant degree under your compatible ism, because it But we both repudiate Libertarian Free Willy will think the I could have done otherwise. You think it's just not important and it's untrue. I think most people think it's important and it's untrue and so that we were playing a slightly different game there. But the punch line is the same from both of us know you couldn't have done otherwise.

[01:35:20] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip Um, I have to dimmer slightly. I think there's a perfectly good sense of could have done otherwise. Well, yes, you could have done otherwise in that you're competent to do a range of things. You have that degree of freedom on this. On this particular occasion, you did one thing, but you could have done the other. It might be just the flip of a bit that makes a difference. That is a perfectly legitimate sense of could have done otherwise because the only reason you're ruling it out is because you're going for absolute Adam for Adam physical replication. But that just is irrelevant to the real world of causation.

[01:36:05] Sam Harris Create clip Well, I would say that what years actually promising there is not that they could have done otherwise, but that they can do otherwise next time. It's so so like to bring it back to Tiger Woods. Putt. Tiger Woods couldn't do otherwise because the bird caused him to miss the putt, or a glitch in his nervous system caused him to miss the putt. And he's if you return the universe of that state exactly, he's gonna miss that putt a trillion times in a row. But he can do otherwise, the sense that he could be expected to make his next, but because within his range of competency to do that,

[01:36:38] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip there's a paper that kid Taylor and I wrote together called Who's Afraid of Determinism? And in it we argue that, uh, this is a common confusion about determinism, that this idea really in the tape back and playing it exactly the same way. Um, let's take our canonical example of a random event. A coin flip for the fair coin? Well, it's not actually random. It's determined that it's determined by the position of every particle in the visible universe, but so what? It could have been otherwise. That's what we mean when we say that we use coin flips to implement could have done otherwise when we need it. And that's a perfectly legitimate sense of could have done otherwise. Even though determinism rains, coins, coming up heads is in an important sense, uncaught caused. It's determined by the whole state of the universe at that moment, but it has no more salient cause Now, if you make a coin flipper that is no balance in the mercury bath and has very carefully calibrated arms, and you put a coin and flip it and you can probably make a device which will flip it 1000 times, and it'll always come up heads, then those aren't random. And those air caused waken contrast cases like that with cases where they are random, all without touching determinism.

[01:38:25] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip So deterministic world some coin tosses a random in some art, the ones that are random could have been otherwise.

[01:38:32] Sam Harris Create clip Well, in that case, a coin flip is a surrogate for true randomness. It's It's me. We're talking about a chaotic system where you can't predict the outcome because you don't know the the initial conditions and you couldn't do the math even if you did. But it's a prosaic version of randomness. If I want to randomize a decision, I'm gonna flip a coin and take the outcome. The issue is psychologically and again, you and I agree that people don't have this freedom. I just think people put a lot of stock in the illusion that they do. And you might. You and I might disagree about this. People can't own the micro causes and they can't. They can't go all the way upstream and be the author of their actions in the I am making a unrealistic demand on their subjectivity that no one has ever had this kind of control or this kind of ownership of their actions. But the felt sense of libertarian free will does presume it. And if if I would save you that if something like this new imaging experiment we talked about were available, people would find it a total challenge to their sense of their authorship of their poem or their authorship of their music, where there are authorship of their volitional action, if everything could be predicted prior to their conscious awareness of any of the relevant elements it before you heard the sentence in your mind to speak before you use you thought for a Knauer about which word you were gonna choose here. And I can show you that that at every point you thought you were deciding several seconds earlier we knew what your brain was going to do. That gives you the marionette feeling, even if those strings are attached on Lee to the universe and of cause allergy, not to the hands of some other person.

[01:40:28] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip Well, it would take quite a while for me to unpack everything in there, but I do want to disagree. Um, I want to suggest that when you say well, the coin flip. That's just a surrogate for real randomness. Your making that move again, that's that's not really free will or that's not really consciousness. That's just a cheap substitute. Well, no. In fact, it's not a cheap substitute. The difference between the way the world runs if we've merely got deterministic chaos and the way it runs if we have quantum indeterminacy makes no moral difference at all. I

[01:41:09] Sam Harris Create clip wasn't saying that it makes the moral difference. I was just distinguishing between those two, his physical fax

[01:41:14] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip well, But then, if it doesn't make a moral difference, people are simply deluded if they think it does so. In other words, people are deluded to think they need what you call what you call free will. They don't they could be. They can have the kinds of free will worth wanting, a perfectly compatible with determinism.

[01:41:39] Sam Harris Create clip We completely agree about that. So this might be a good point to end on because you and dinner is calling and our brains are inclining toward it through perhaps no free will of our own. But I just want to say I'm very happy that we had this conversation in the spirit of collegiate ality that I hope all of our conversations would happen. And because you and I being the control systems that we are, we're up to the task in most context. And so I just want to say that if there was any point in that exchange, the written exchange on this topic that offended you, that made me seem less of a reliable ally for you or a friend. I regret that, and it's been a great pleasure to collaborate with you in all the ways that we have thus far, and I'm very happy we have this conversation

[01:42:32] Daniel C. Dennett Create clip and I'll have the same sentiment back to you. This has been instructed for both of us. I think

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