Helen Steward: Do We Have Free Will?

Hello, welcome to MindChat. I'm Philip Goff. Hello, I'm Keith Frankish. How are you doing, Keith? I'm good. I'm well, still COVID free. How about you? I'm not too bad, yes. I think I finally got my microphone working and turned on this week, so I'm going to win all the arguments now I finally got. That's why I've been losing the arguments, because I've got the audio. It's all about the medium, isn't it?

Absolutely. But no, I'm not too bad. Just still on research leave, getting this book together, which has flown nicely. Still on strike again this week. I put in the show notes about the strike of UK. academic staff if people want to learn about that or support that but yeah not too bad so um

We're just running over. We're coming up to the end of season two of Mind Chat. It's actually next month is our anniversary, isn't it, Keith? It's our anniversary. You remembered. I did. I should get you flowers or something, shouldn't I? I think. So, yeah, so next month we have Anne-Sophie Baric talking about Smellosophy in April. Then in May we've got Angela Mendelevici.

i was thinking actually i haven't raised this with you yet key but i was thinking maybe we could we could pitch that as um part two in a way of

how does consciousness connect us to reality? So that was the topic with David Papineau last month, and Angela's got a... a sort of the polar opposite view on but still on this theme of you know how does consciousness connect us to the world around us mental representation yeah absolutely and then um oh yeah we're also having cause causal closure a rematch with sean carroll on causal closure getting the floss for physics

uh barry lower in i think we've i think we've booked may for that as well and then reinforcements absolutely because um yeah i need some well i don't know i don't know where he's which side he'll come down on uh he's going to be an impartial adjudicator um and then we'll have season three and we yeah we're gonna have to have a little little chat aren't we do some planning for season three we're gonna put together but

lots of exciting exciting guests in mind for season three so so yeah as always you know we're not don't ask for money or anything but if you do want to support us help us with youtube algorithm please do subscribe to the channel or the uh the podcast or comment write as a five-star review uh like and so on um do you want to tell us who we've got today yes

We have Helen Stewart, who is Professor of Mind and Action at the University of Leeds in Yorkshire. And Helen's interests include the Metaphysics, the Centre on the Metaphysics of Mind and on... the nature of agency, causation and explanation, and also on the problem of free will, which was the subject of her.

2011, I think, book, Metaphysics for Freedom. A very important book. And we'll be talking a lot about that. In fact, that will be our main topic for... all the discussion so uh shall we bring helen in absolutely hello helen welcome to mind chat hello philip hello good to have you on yeah all right it's very good to be here i'm looking forward to it

Actually, Helen and I have a little bit of a backstory that I'm not sure you're aware of, actually, Helen, because I don't know if I've said this to you before. Oh, God, what's coming now? because helen's um your your old school friends with uh my former teacher uh katherine harrison oh yes i know i have noticed that i've noticed that you and she are on one another's facebook

So, yeah, so Catherine was one of those teachers at high school or senior school, as we call it, that, you know, really inspired me and really helped me out in lots of ways. I'm not at all surprised to hear it.

and then we kind of stayed in touch but you know there's more there's more and then when I was first applying to think about doing graduate study in philosophy she uh she sent me to see you at oxford when you were working at oxford and i uh came and had a chat with you in my op in your office i haven't put you together with that person

um well i think at that point i as a 21 year old i had a i had a very young person's project i told you i was going to um see if we could live out moral nihilism and you were very polite with me and i mean i've changed i'm actually a real hardcore moral objectivist now but um yeah so that was um i think you were very very kind and encouraging and um yeah i didn't put you off clearly because i had a year out actually and then and then came to my senses a bit um

But yeah, so just the format for today. So we're mostly going to be talking about Helen's excellent book, A Metaphysics for Freedom, which is actually a fantastic book. It's a really detailed and... intricate defense of a kind of free agency should say I guess that because there's a broad audience listening to this with it is very much an academic book isn't it it might be it might be

it's not a book aimed at a general audience so it might be a bit challenging if you you know don't have a philosophy degree but um but but if you you know for philosophy graduate students i think it's um A really great book if you're interested in this topic. So we're mainly going to be talking about that. So we're just going to start off with some general get to know get to know Helen Stewart questions.

and then we'll move on to helen's view kind of characterizing the general view exploring um maybe the main argument helen gives in the book for it and then and then exploring a couple of objections and it's a form of It's a defence of a form of what philosophers call libertarian free will. And we'll explore what that means a little more in a moment. Does that sound all right? Sounds good to me.

Okay, I'll leave Dr. Frankish. I don't know why I'm calling you Dr. Frankish. I'm feeling also respectful for some reason. Okay, Keith, would you like to go ahead with the first question? Hi, Helen. Well, we...

like to begin by just getting to know the background of our guests a little bit so i you've spent i guess a lot of your life thinking about the nature of the mind uh an agency and free will how did you How did you first get interested in this topic, in philosophy in general, but then in the mind, the nature of the mind and agency in particular? How did this come to be the central topic you wanted to work on? Good question. I mean I stumbled into philosophy itself.

um completely by accident um i went to university to do ppe which is philosophy politics and economics um for those of the audience who might not know what it stands for because i wanted to do politics and economics or so i thought those were things i thought i'd be very interested in would like to do at university

philosophy was just this sort of third thing that came along with politics and economics and I didn't know much about it at all. But as soon as I started it I loved it, I knew it was my subject immediately.

yeah and so um i've carried on with it really ever since um and so far as you know the mind and free will and those topics are concerned i suppose i just found them fascinating as soon as i came across them i've always been interested in the free will problem always um And particularly in its kind of metaphysical version, I mean, the way I think of it, there's a sort of ethical version of the free will problem, which is all about moral responsibility.

and then there's a sort of more metaphysical one which is well how how on earth is it possible for there to be beings of the sort that we tend to think we are i mean it just seems really hard to understand um how things made out of you know physical stuff could have these powers that we seem to have. So I've always found that issue fascinating.

Not sure why. I just think it's one of those problems that's an old chestnut that people will be continuing to try to sort of crack for many years to come. It's interesting, isn't it, that we're the sort of creatures who can, I guess uniquely in the animal kingdom, we're the sort of creatures who can reflect on our own existence and think about our own lives and our own existence, our own activity.

It's kind of really strange that I'm aware of the world and aware of myself and aware of that I'm acting in the world. And how does all that work? And I think that's probably the root of... The puzzlement that everybody in philosophy of mind, from whatever direction, whatever particular views they take, there is this deep puzzle about how could I...

be here now doing the things I'm doing and experiencing the things I'm doing. Yes, it's that kind of clash between, you know, the third personal view of everything, the objective view, the view from nowhere, and, you know, the subjective view.

you know the point of view of awareness and the point of view of agency i would i would add yeah i guess it's what is what wilford tell us called the the contrast between the manifest image the world and our experiences it presents itself to us and then the scientific image the world of science describes it and how do you how do you reconcile these two or how do you understand the relation between them that's right and i suppose i've i've always been very keen genuinely to reconcile them

that's to say what i mean by that is i think lots of people who feel the who feel the tension and the clash between the two end up sort of consigning one of them to the dustbin and i don't want to do that you know because both of them seem to capture something extremely important about the way things must be um And so I've always been looking for, you know, genuine reconciliation, ways of really understanding how both can be true.

We seem to perhaps have some technical issues that a lot of people are saying they can't see it, but some people are saying they can see it. And the number of viewers says zero when it's definitely not zero. I don't know whether we should just carry on. At least, I mean, it's looking to me like it's up there. But should we just plow on? The tab with YouTube is not... Showing it, saying waiting for MindChat. Yeah, mine is showing it. Is it recording? I've never had this issue before.

The crucial issue is that it's being recorded. Yeah. So Mark O'Brien is saying you'll have the recording anyway. Why do you think that, Mark? I mean, it's up on my tab.

um and youtube somebody is saying youtube is youtube is having issues all over the place ah it's saying 31 it's saying 31 viewers and then it's cut to zero um looks like a problem with youtube i assume that this is being recorded but for some reason some people are being cut off because of problems with youtube shall we shall we plow on i mean i'm looking on you know my connection to it and it's it's appeared should we should we

Assume it's being recorded and continue. I don't think there's anything we can do if it's a problem with YouTube, so I'd suggest we'll go on if that's okay with Helen. Yeah, it's fine with me. Yeah, no problem. Yeah, I'm just hoping it's recovered. I think it should be recording. Okay. Well, I mean, you've kind of answered this question in a way, Helen, but I suppose a lot of people might, of course, these are important issues like the nature of human consciousness, the nature of human agency.

But a lot of people might think, well, aren't these scientific questions? You know, shouldn't it be a scientific question that the limits of human agency, how consciousness comes about or whatever? Why do you think it's important specifically for philosophers? to think about these issues in addition to scientists well i mean i think it is a scientific question too i mean i sort of want to be clear about that i i think that

You know, many disciplines are needed, in fact, to make progress on these issues. They are very difficult and they need the insights and the resources that many different disciplines have to offer. And what I think philosophy can offer particularly is the resources of a discipline that knows that it can matter a lot.

quite exactly how claims are couched you know quite apparently ostensibly quite small distinctions can make a big difference to what it is that you're saying you do need to fuss about some of those little details I mean, a lot of my responses to, you know, various sorts of objection that arise to my position are kind of based on saying, well, look, you're saying this, but I'm saying...

this and this doesn't actually conflict with that other thing that you're saying if you look carefully so I think that kind of precision that philosophy can bring can help steer away through you know knotty thickets that look like they're impenetrable sometimes they're not impenetrable they just take a lot of care and a lot of sorting out and you can get through them in the end

And, yeah, so I think philosophy is important. It stops us being waylaid by oversimple... sketches of the shape of a problem that we need to kind of get rid of so it's the precision and the rigor yeah i've heard people say you know if you If we try to stop doing philosophy, we'll just end up with bad philosophy. I mean, it always makes me think of the book. What was the book Stephen Hawking co-wrote with Leonard Mladenov? And it starts off saying, philosophy is dead.

You know, it doesn't tell everybody. And then in later chapters, they go on to do some really bad philosophy, including about free will. Yeah. Maybe I could just say that.

i think helen's book in many ways is an exemplary piece of philosophy a really good thing for young philosophers to study because of the way she does what what you just said and the way you work very carefully through some problems teasing apart different possible interpretations different views that might be conflated but also because of the way you're very charitable to

opponents people with different views. You always present the opposing view, the alternative view, with full sympathy, full clarity, full awareness of its power. before then going on to say how you respond. And I think that's a model. And in many ways this could be taken as a model of how to do, I think, analytic philosophy.

well thank you i mean i think what to be perfectly honest though one reason why um i'm able to present the opponent's position with power is because i've been the opponent you know i think a lot of the a lot of the positions i'm trying to refute are positions that i at one time or another have held um and have come to think wanting so often i really know what it's like to think those things because i have done

yeah it's very important to get in your opponent's mindset isn't it that's what me and keith spend a lot of time do but yeah to really try and understand how your your philosophical opponent i should say not you

is thinking about things so that you can effectively respond i guess exactly because you're not really going to make any progress otherwise because you're going to be responding to a caricature of their view which and well you know refuting a caricature is is easy and doesn't take us anywhere

and we're not really engaging and moving forward because in the end we move forward together i think but yes we all have the same aim which is try and find the best view of this and we help each other along by pointing out the weaknesses in each other's positions Aww.

um it looks like our technical problems are resolved i think and somebody said if you're having difficulty someone said they tried clicking on another mind chat video and then click back to this one and it worked or or chrome rather than on a mobile any Anyway, all right, well, we move to our quick fire round now, Helen, which is just to give people an overall view of some of your views on the big questions. So not going to get too bogged down in debate.

roughly 30 seconds on each of these three questions number one does god exist um i am an atheist i have to say um i don't really have you know any knockdown arguments for that that's just my gut feeling i guess it seems to me extremely improbable that there's a god um but that's not that's not a view i could or ever have tried to sort of defend it's just my i guess it's my attitude to to the universe um yeah

And it means I don't have to face all kinds of tricky issues like the problem of evil and things like that. So it gets me out of the need to delve into certain intellectual territories. Very good. I mean, it's interesting because sometimes people sort of say, oh, people who believe in libertarian free will is just just people who believe in God or something. There was a big article by Oliver Berkman, who I really like in The Guardian on free will.

And the only mention of libertarianism, he said, some Christians believe in libertarianism. I know, I know. I mean, someone else, my friend Martina Nidorumalan, who's a substance duelist but it's also very passionate that you know this has nothing to do with religion and this is you know um so yeah it's worth worth pointing that out i think yes yes there's no essential connection there nor with one psychism and spirituality um so uh what's our second one um is there a heart where we normally ask

Do we have free will? But that's what we're going to be talking about a lot. Instead, I'm going to say, is there a hard problem of consciousness? I think there is a hard problem of consciousness, yes. I think we are nowhere near to really understanding how consciousness arises. I wonder if we ever will be. I mean, I don't want to be too mysterious about the whole thing, but it does seem like one of those.

issues, it's difficult to see what would count as a satisfactory answer. Where's the satisfactory looking answer going to really come from? I mean, I guess you can never rule it out. You can never rule out the possibility of there being advances in... the imaginative understanding of phenomena that take you in leaps and bounds beyond what you can currently conceive of but i think it's going to take something like that you know something really extraordinary

to enable us to get an answer that satisfies us to the hard problem. But yeah, I think it exists. I think it's there. Didn't you know I've already solved it? Oh, sorry, Philip. Sorry. I'm only joking, obviously. um so mysterion in case people aren't familiar with that word mysterion that was uh associated with colin mcginn's position that he argued that we're sort of set up by nature that we will never understand

the explanation of consciousness, just as dogs can't understand mathematics or something. It was from the New Mysterians, who were a Latino band from the 60s, I think. And that's where Owen Flanagan got the name from. He jokingly referred to McGinn with that term and then it sort of stuck as the name of the position. I remember the Mysterons from Captain Scarlet. Maybe they have the same view as well. I don't know. I think they were the first...

Literally no band to get a number one in the States. I don't know why I know that. Anyway, final question. Is morality objective? That's a hard one, actually. Am I allowed to say I think some bits are and some bits aren't? No. Yes, you are. You are. Yeah, I mean, morality encompasses such a lot of things, doesn't it? And I think there's a kind of heart to it that's kind of culturally nonspecific that it would be right to say was objective.

And then there's this huge, you know, hinterland of other stuff that also gets called part of morality by distinct cultures, but which isn't part of that heart.

uh which couldn't be regarded as objective that's that's my being trying to say yeah anything is the deep puzzles about with the objective bit like deep puzzles about how we make sense of the being objective facts of that kind or or do you think it's not well i mean i think they have to be um rooted in objective facts about human beings it would so it wouldn't be I don't think morality is objective in some transcendent sense that's utterly unconnected with anything that anybody cares about.

But I think there's a perfectly acceptable and sensible version of objectivity which connects it with human aspiration, need and want. All right. That's interesting. That's an interesting take on it. Yeah. So it's objective, but objective facts about human nature or something. Yes. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Brilliant. Okay. Thanks. i think at this point we've we know helen incredibly well or a little bit and we'll move on to discussing helen's book and metaphysics of nature dr frankish

You've got to stop this. I don't know why. Go on. Thank you, Dr. Gough. Okay, so let's maybe start right at the beginning. I guess there are three broad positions in thinking about free will. libertarianism on the one hand and then there's hard determinism on the other and then there's there's the having your kinetic position in the middle which is compatibilism um and i know you

You want to make some very subtle distinctions between some of these versions of these positions. But could you just outline those three basic positions for us first and say where you are on the spectrum from the hard?

libertarian if you like through to the hard determinants do you think we should start off by just saying what those positions are just in case then yeah yeah happy to do that so um all those positions um as usually characterized are about the relationship between free will on the one hand and then something that gets called determinism on the other hand and determinism well there's different definitions but roughly speaking you can think of it as the idea that

everything that happens is the product of the laws of nature together with the initial conditions at the start of the universe. So it's that sort of idea that everything that happens in a sense sort of has to happen given.

given that the laws are fixed and the conditions are fixed. And then the question is well does that allow for free will or not? If you think it doesn't allow for free will and that I would be someone who thought it didn't, you've sort of got a choice because you've said that free will is incompatible with determinism so it's incompatibilism that you're signing up to and within the incompatible is count, you've got this choice because you could either say, well, determinism is obviously true.

There isn't any free will then, in which case you'd be what Keith was calling earlier a hard determinist. You'd stick with your determinism, you'd stick with your deterministic guns and you'd say no free will then. You could say, oh, but it's obvious we've got free will. So, well, it must be determinism that's wrong then, isn't it? So then you would be what Keith was earlier calling a libertarian.

But the other thing, of course, you could say is you could answer that original question about whether determinism and free will are incompatible by saying, no, they're not. Free will is perfectly compatible. with determinism. They can both be true. It can be true both that we've got free will and that determinism is true. So that's compatibilism.

And I guess I would put myself amongst the libertarians. I think determinism and free will are incompatible, but I don't feel terrifically troubled by that because I just don't think determinism is true. No problem there. Could you perhaps just say a little bit more about what we mean by free will here? I know this is part of the whole issue, but is free will just...

Is libertarianism just the denial of determinism, of the hard determinist position that our actions, that our behavior isn't determined by? preceding physical conditions. Or is it something a bit richer than that? It's richer than that, I think. I mean, there's so many different ways of thinking about free will, Keith, that it's pretty hard to say what it is exactly. But I suppose...

For most purposes, and particularly when people are thinking about the potential conflict with determinism, most people are talking about a capacity that we think we've got to do other than we do. right so there's this this chain of things that we do as we lead our lives we do this we do that we do the other and for at least most of those things we tend to think

None of them was inevitable. All of them were things such that we could have chosen to do a different thing at the time of action. It just so happened that we made choice A. But we didn't need to make choice A. It wasn't inevitable, it wasn't fixed, it wasn't settled that we would do so.

That's the sort of nugget by means of which I try to get at the idea of free will. It's what philosophers would call a sort of modal idea. It's an idea about possibility. What could have been the case?

necessary that you do the thing you do or was it actually possible that you might have done other things that shows how there's room for at least it seems in principle to be room for a sort of compatibilism because compatibilists can say, well, this talk, this conception of ourselves as having been able to do otherwise isn't undermined.

by the existence of, by the truth of determinism, the different ways of understanding what it means to be able to do otherwise, and not all of them being compatible with determinism. So that's right. I mean, that's... That's usually the moves that compatibilists make, many of the moves that compatibilists make. Focus on what it is to say.

that you could have done otherwise you know they will have understandings or try to persuade you that you have understandings of that notion of the notion of having been able to do otherwise which don't conflict with determinism at all. So it will be to do with the nature of the processes that cause you to do. Yes, I mean, they might say, well, what it is to have been able to do otherwise, really, in the sense that matters is, for example, not to have been forced by another person, say.

to do the thing you're doing i'm not compelled or prevented by external forces or what it means is that if you'd wanted to you could have done something else um and they'll say look none of these things is um incompatible with determinism so if the if the causes are internal to yourself and of the right kind then they'll say that's okay so your action can be caused as long as it's the right kind of right is what they'll say

Good. So I think it's probably a good point for Philip to move on to the next question here. You're muted, Philip. You're muted.

I guess we've, sorry, I thought I'm getting all technological now with my microphone, but I'm just forgetting, now I'm forgetting to unmute myself. I mean, I guess we've discussed sort of the libertarian position in general, but I think, Helen, there are some... quite distinctive features of your brand of libertarianism um could you maybe talk a little bit about that sure sure um i suppose the feature that

has been sort of picked up on as the most distinctive in a way of my brand of libertarianism is that the kind of freedom that i want to argue is compatible with sorry is incompatible with determinism is a freedom that i want to extend beyond the human race to many animals um i think Throughout its history, for reasons that aren't surprising, people have wanted to talk about free will and connection specifically with human beings. And that's, you know, it's largely because...

people have been interested in free will as a sort of ethical issue. The thought being, look, if it's going to be fair and just to blame me for things and punish me for things. it's got to be the case that i could have done other than i did so the metaphysical issue and the ethical issue sort of get connected together at that point if i couldn't have done otherwise it's just not fair to blame me or punish me or regard me as morally responsible for anything in any way.

And of course, when you're focused on that ethical issue, you're bound to be focused on human free will, because that's where we apply moral responsibility, the notion of moral responsibility. In thinking about the sort of metaphysical free will problem, which I think of as like, you know, the question how it's really how it can be possible for there to be beings that could have done otherwise.

how it's possible for there to be creatures that things can genuinely be up to, as I like to put it, I started to think this, I started to think, look, It's not just human beings that are rather special and exciting from the point of view of looking as though they're creatures that have alternative possibilities available to them.

It kind of feels to me like lots of animals have that too. You know, if you watch a goat or an elephant or a dolphin or something moving about the world, they don't look like... They're just following an assigned trajectory. They look like they have the same kind of basic animal freedoms to do this or that as we do. And so I started to think about the free will problem in that context. I started to think, well, it looks a bit as though animal powers all by themselves raise interesting issues.

with respect to their compatibility or incompatibility with determinism. You don't have to think about moral responsibility at all. You don't have to go that far up the evolutionary scale. to start to think there are interesting metaphysical issues about animals. How are animals possible? Animals seem to be these things that things can be up to. What does that mean and how does it work?

So I suppose that's one distinctive feature. I guess connected to that as well, it's not for you free will. Philosophers always think it's to do with decisions.

like making a moral decision or you know making whereas you you're saying you know a lot of the things that are up to us are just everyday actions like i think you say in your book like you know eating a bit of toast or picking something up off the floor or you know these everyday that we don't sort of think i'm going to decide what to do now but you still think we're expressing off our agency we're moving our bodies in a way you believe is compatible with determinism even in those sort of

as it were trivial decisions is that if i understood you right there absolutely absolutely that's right i mean i i called my position agency incompatibilism yeah because it really is about this basic power that i call agency the power to do things in such a way that we feel you could have done another thing at the same time um i don't mean at the same time i mean

at the time at which the powers ascribed, you could have done another thing. So it's not about making... big decisions about what to do with your life and or decision ethical decisions about whether to move the trolley onto this track or whatever to save somebody's life it's it's much more about just being in the world as someone who's as a as an organism that's really sensitive to the world and responds to it in a very flexible way exactly that i mean of course i think it's relevant to

these bigger and grander questions about you know the decisions that you know give sense and meaning to our lives the big decisions the ones that we do agonize over and so on because i don't there couldn't possibly be a creature that could make decisions like that that didn't have much simpler.

kind of forms of um agency as well you know i think the this sort of simple the basic the basic capacities of agency underlie um these these grander ones um they are at the root of everything but i think they raise issues all by themselves so yes it's about ambling around eating toast you know scratching your head all all that all that basic stuff that we um that we do as we

amble about in all day um all that stuff is activity that seems to be up to us and you know that's again coming back to that that notion of things being up to us if those things really are up to us then we need to understand what that means and how it's possible. And that in itself is a very difficult philosophical problem, I think. Sorry, Philip, I know we've got another question, but just to...

You were saying this more basic kind of responsiveness, this more basic kind of agency is necessary to... be able to be in the world of making moral decisions and ethical decisions and so on um so suppose just just i was just thinking suppose you had uh

a machine, a computer, whatever, was programmed with all sorts of moral principles. You didn't put a lot of philosophy into it and it had given it all these instructions about what to do in moral situations and basically utilitarian principles. And it just acted on these.

or it just executed these principles. So it might seem to be making, it would be, you could use it as an expert guide, as it were, to how to make moral decisions. Still, it wouldn't really be morally responsible because it wouldn't have, it wouldn't be based in this. agency in this it wouldn't actually be really engaging with the world at all it would be just following some abstract principles and wouldn't really be acting at all so it's it's moral decisions wouldn't really be actions

Yeah, no, I wouldn't think of that thing as an agent. Well, as you've described it, the principles have been programmed in, you said. I mean, we wouldn't think of holding it responsible for anything, would we? and I mean you'd have to you'd have to elaborate the description very considerably before it became the description of something that one might think well maybe

You know, maybe this is a machine that is an agent. But just as you described it, Keith, no, I would say that was not an agent. I'm just thinking, suppose I then applied... moral principles in that way suppose I've been brought up by the very strict moral code and there are all these principles have been drummed into me at an early age and pretty much the way the computer has and I just I just you know I just followed them because I've been really

trained very strictly to do that still in my case though that would i'm right in thinking that would be a genuine agency precisely because i was the kind of creature that had this this this kind of uh this freedom yeah you could have done otherwise right you did in fact accept you know these principles um without without questioning them but it's hard to believe of an

adult human being under normal circumstances that they really didn't have any opportunity to question what they had been told and you know maybe read or find out some some alternative viewpoints and think about them and so on. It's those things. It's the fact that you could have done otherwise and that makes you morally responsible. So that's why you focus on the more basic kind of agency.

yeah i mean because i suppose at the end of the day i'm i'm thinking if there's a problem about determinism the problem is about um the problem is about the thought that you know a system where it's just one little thing leading to another little thing leading to another little thing if the system's like that you know and it really is operating entirely deterministically

There is no room there for any could to have done otherwise at all. And that really does seem to me to rule out, you know, it rules out everything of interest. It rules out moral responsibility, but I think it rules out.

agency you haven't got a being there it seems to me you haven't got a being there um that's doing anything um you've just got stuff happening in a place right so i think we're yeah so we're nicely really smoothly moving on to to the motivations for the view sorry i interrupted you i was trying to get in before keith came back but i ended up interrupting you

So I think we're smoothly moving into the motivation. So connected to what we've been saying so far, as I understand it, so your view is not so much that... Free will is compatible with indeterminism, but just agency, just any kind of agency. And that's because your concept of agency is about creatures.

who use this word settle things can settle matters or as you put said there things are up to us and then the thought is you know if determinism were true everything will be already settled there'll be nothing left for us as agents to settle and if that's just part of the definition of what an agent is that they settle things then the universe has to as it were leave certain things

for us to settle is that is that roughly right is that that that's absolutely right that's absolutely right um i mean yes i I don't really like the term free will, although I've been using it a lot because it is the traditional term. it troubles me a bit in well in various ways it troubles me but one thing i i don't like about the literature and the way the literature nearly always goes is that you've got i mean the way many people seem to think about it you've got The big category of actions.

And then within it, there's this kind of narrow band at the top of like the free willed ones. Right. There's some special category of free willed actions, which is such that you could have done otherwise. And then there's this massive range of others that we're supposed to think. what, just are determined? I mean, that just seems like wholly the wrong way to think about actions to me. I feel like all actions, right?

are such that they needn't have happened, they needn't have been executed by us, that's what an action is. and so I really wanted to sort of reconceive that landscape and say no let's not think in terms of the bog standard actions which are all determined and then this sophisticated little

kind of narrow ribbon on the top of the ones that are free willed. That can't be right, surely? No, rather it's a special realm. The realm of action is a special realm in that it's characterised by the possibility of other things having happened. Yeah, so that was very much part of the way I wanted to conceive of things. And I suppose to deepen this argument, our understanding of this argument,

i guess it's important to consider the compatibilist perspective on that issue so i i imagine your average compatibilist isn't going to say oh yeah we don't settle things they might agree they're likely to agree with you yeah of course agents settle things of course things are up to us but they will give a different spin on on what it is for an agent to settle things

Specifically, they'll give an account of that that is compatible with determinism. Could you maybe say a little bit about, to get clear for us, the dispute between you and a compatibilist on what it is for an agent to settle things?

and and how you rule out that compatibilist alternative that might be occurring to many viewers and listeners yeah so i think what many compatibilists would say is something like this look what it is for me to settle things is actually for certain of my mental states to be causally efficacious in bringing about the action so you know perhaps beliefs and desires maybe intentions maybe decisions i mean different compatibilists will have their own favorite

view of quite what the mental landscape has to be that's productive of action but usually they've got some idea of a sort of realm of mental states and events. And what they'll say is, well, what we mean when we say an agent settles things is that certain mental states of that agent uh cause their actions that's that's what we mean and of course that's a picture that's perfectly compatible with um causal determinism you know the states um

can deterministically bring about the action and indeed compatibilists might add isn't that what we want you know don't we want our actions to be brought about by things like our beliefs and desires and intentions and so on and decisions and that sort of thing So I think that will be the usual compatibilistic understanding of settling. As to what's wrong with it, well, I guess I think there are two main arguments that you could... bring to bear against it.

I don't know how easy it would be to explain this line of thinking in a non-technical way, but it's the problem that's known in philosophy as the problem of deviant causal chains. The issue being... that often if you offer a causal account of some phenomenon and you say something like look in order to let's say act In order for agent A to act freely, it's necessary and sufficient for the mental states of A to cause A's action or something like that.

You'll find that your account is vulnerable to certain sorts of counterexamples where you have the causal relationships there in the example. But we still don't feel inclined to say it's a case of action. There are lots of well-known examples in the literature. One example that's used by a philosopher called Davidson is he imagines someone who is climbing a mountain they're kind of clinging on to their partner on a rope their partners below there above and they suddenly have this

uh terrifying thought that they could if they wanted let go of their partner on the road and the partner would crash to the ground okay um now suppose they do in consequence of having the unnerving thought, find that they sort of make an involuntary movement like this. Their hands release the grip on the rope, the partner falls off.

let their partner fall to the ground right and they've done it as a result of a causal result of a want right um but not in the right kind of way The way that the want was operative was not the way that's typically characteristic of action. Then you have to try to fill in the gaps in the description to say what it is exactly that is the right kind of way. What do we require? And that task, for various reasons, turns out to be extremely difficult. Right.

to solve so just to go to make that clear maybe so the so the idea is the compatibus want to say we don't need this kind of strong free will you believe in we just need Like my desire and my belief caused by action, like my desire to have a cup of tea, that mental state causes me to have a cup of tea. But then there are these counter examples where it seems like the relevant desire is there, but we wouldn't want to say the person.

As you say in the book, the different ways you can respond to this, and you said it's almost like a lot of philosophers take this as a kind of parlor game of a game, a challenge, how can we... how can we get rid of these counter examples whereas whereas you give reasons to think um you know actually we should think this is just

a reason to get rid of that whole way of thinking about action, that actions are caused by our mental states. But, yeah, I mean, I suppose it is a very technical debate. But I suppose maybe what might be more intuitive...

for viewers and listeners is the the the other argument you give about so-called the disappearance of the agent on the compatibilist account of agents could you say a little bit about that yes i mean again this is a this is a a complaint that comes up in lots of different guises this idea that in giving causal theories of action, by which I mean theories of the sort we've just described, where you have certain sorts of mental states causing bodily movements.

in theories like that one thing you haven't got is an agent right you haven't got an agent and you haven't got an action arguably I mean one of the one of the things that I always feel gets missed out in these in these pictures where you've got you know desires beliefs intentions and then bodily movements being caused as a result and the whole the whole thing's the action right you know that whole causal structure is the action.

That feels to me all wrong because we already know where the right place is for the action to come. The action has to take you from the desires and the beliefs and the intentions and the decisions. Two, right, stuff actually happening in the world. That's what actions are supposed to do. And they have to be, as it were, enacted, right? There has to be a place in that causal chain that isn't just smooth.

Like, you know, this happened, that happened, that happened. Actions are executive in a special way. And that is missing from this picture. i mean we don't just sit around waiting for our desires and beliefs and intentions and decisions to do it do we we have to do it um and that's That troubles me about that picture. It misses out. It misses out a crucial stage in what we normally take to be the provenance of action, which is the bit that we have to do, the acting.

is not there in the story. I think that's one thing that compatibilists can take from your book. I mean, one thing you really, one very effective thing you do, I think, is to dismantle this.

or show the implausibility of this rather clunky mechanistic view of how action is caused by the belief being activated and desire being activated somehow and they're causing an intention and then an intention. they're causing a decision and then the decision causing an intention and the intention causing the movements. This rather mechanistic picture, which as you say, doesn't really capture our sense of what agency is at all. So I think that...

I think that's all very, very important and something that the compatibilist needs to take on board and recognise that if they're going to provide a compatibilist picture, they need to say something much more sophisticated about the causation of action and something that, as you say, captures... our intuitions about agency too. So I think at the very least you've created a challenge to the compatibilist and shown that the simplistic compatibilist strategies that have been adopted.

uh traditionally really are very unattractive yes i mean i i i worry about the ease with which we reach for these nouns like desire and belief and intention i mean i think they're essentially are abstract nouns and the the root construction is the verb it believes that desires that intends that and that verb goes with a person with a subject with an agent um and the picture according to which you can just get shot of that thing the subject or the agent and just sit around with

that you know the things which are supposed to be referred to by these nouns belief desire intention no that can't be the right way around so what the compatibilist is to do is to show how you can have a believing desiring agent how can you have a belief without a believer i mean it makes no sense i mean to me it just it just feels phenomenologically implausible that this idea that you know i have this like i'm desire desire to have a beer and

i just and that desire causes me to act i mean i want to say no i i feel like a beer and so on that basis i decide to have a bit i i like one of my favorite philosophers is terry haugen who who has these um has a kind of thought experiment where he imagines a creature that lacks what he calls agentive phenomenology the the kind of sense of being an agent you're talking about and they find they're sitting there they find they've got a desire for a beer

oh they're getting up all their arms moving out you know uh but that's not how it feels it feels as though i decide on the basis of my beliefs and desires um Not that my beliefs and desires compel me to act. I mean, maybe sometimes when you're ravenously hungry, your desire might compel you to act. But that's not the norm. The norm is you're looking for a menu and you think.

That would be nice. I'll choose that. Is there a danger, though, that we're now moving back into the realm of the very conscious, explicit decision-making where you entertain the reasons for your act? for acting in a certain way and make and decide to do it what about the just the ordinary everyday stuff like eating toast and brushing your hair and walking around um the agent is doing those things but they're not

considering the reasons for doing them before doing that how does that work in your picture yes i mean i'm very opposed to the idea that um there ever has to be anything in in agency that's a kind of certain sort of mental precursor just because i think there's so many kinds of action um

Well, there aren't those mental precursors. My favourite example, actually, to try to convince people who think you sort of have to have some kind of decision or like mental choice or something before you do anything is speaking.

No, I'm talking to you now. But am I deciding before I speak each word that I'm going to speak that word? No. course i'm not it just kind of all comes out in one big go and like you know that's what actions typically like it's it's a processual flow over which you've got control but the control doesn't consist in causation by

some prior event you know pressing the ignition button and off you go um not at all the control is ongoing and it you know it's it lasts throughout the process you don't just initiate and then

And then, you know, go to sleep while the events take over. But why can't a compatibilist acknowledge that and say, yes, look, what's producing, I use the example about speaking myself all the time. There's some sort of processes involved in producing the words. That's reasonably intelligent, not always intelligent in my case, but there's some sort of causal process that's producing it and it's coming out.

I don't really, do I have control over it? I have control in the sense that I could stop and that I can monitor what I'm saying and I can pause and say, wait a minute, what I just said was stupid, which I do quite often. But why can't that just be another sort of monitoring process, a whole complex suite of monitoring processes that are again operating according to ultimately mechanistic principles?

Why is there something here that fundamentally challenges compatibilism rather than just challenging naive, simplistic compatibilist stories? Well, I think the, you know, the points I was just making what was only intended to be a kind of rejoinder to those more naive theories, which insists that To have action, you've got to have mentalistic precursors. And I think what you're asking now, Keith, is an interesting question, which is sort of, well, suppose we don't bother with this.

sorts of mentalistic precursors then still there's a different kind of compatibilist who might just be thinking Well, look, the kind of compatibilist I am is a sort of compatibilist who thinks that stuff going on in the brain is constitutive of, you know, my... constitutive of the process of producing my speaking say or you know whatever kind of acting it is um and that sort of compatibilist is just going to be wondering whether one couldn't give you know

the kind of deterministic account of all that stuff and whether that wouldn't be compatible with a certain kind of control. I much prefer that version of the question, I think it's a more sensible version of the question and in some ways I'm very much in sympathy with that version.

questions because you know there's a there's a level at which i do think of course you know of course acting isn't magic and of course it's true that you know when i'm speaking there's all sorts of stuff going on in my brain to enable me to do it um the question though is whether an entirely deterministic conception of that processing that's going on in the brain can be consistent with the idea that it really is up to a being I call me.

um rather than just you know a set of processes part and parcel of the maelstrom of stuff that goes on in the world and can be traced back to the dawn of time you know that's that's the worry. Because I suppose there is a sense in which, I mean, we tend to look at determinism as

and they're being more mechanistic and so as being a limitation on our freedom but you know isn't there another perspective from which it actually enables our freedom i mean we know that damage to the brain damage to the mechanisms in the brain, the neural structures, limits, prevents us being able to act. If we're paralyzed, we can't move. If we have those kinds of agnosias and things, if we have depression, if we have dementia also.

Don't we need those mechanisms? Of course we do. So rather than thinking of them as constraining us and forcing us, can't we think of them as enabling us? Well, I think we should think of them as enabling us. I mean, mechanisms are involved in the human body in a big time. And of course, it would be silly to say that we're...

We're not beings that rely on certain sorts of mechanisms and are indeed based on certain sorts of mechanisms. But that's a far cry from the sort of mechanism... what mechanism can refer to is as it were universal mechanism the idea that the universe is one great giant mechanism and that's you know that's a much much stronger thesis you know I wouldn't want to deny that we each locally rely on the mechanisms or yeah mechanisms that go on in our in our bodies and would be lost without them but

that's really different from what you might call mechanism with a capital M which is this kind of vision of the universe which is sort of Laplacian you know such that if you knew the the state the mechanistic system at any given time you'd be able in principle to predict the state at any other time it's that vision you know that universalistic vision um that i would be wanting to quarrel with

I may need to let Philip come in, but so just to finish that off, so is your worry then about determinism a much broader one than just its implications for agency and free will, that you think it's a bad picture of nature in general? I do think it's a bad picture of nature in general. I suppose I've come to think it's a bad picture of nature in general through worrying about agency.

but the more i've thought about it the more i thought we have no reason to believe it there's no reason to believe it i mean maybe there once was you know when When we thought Newtonian mechanics was the be-all and end-all of everything and that the whole universe operated according to those principles, maybe then there was reason to believe it. We've left that behind a long time ago. Most physics...

Most accounts of fundamental physics these days seem to be rather supportive of the idea that there are many indeterministic elements. um in in the universe so there just doesn't seem to be any reason to hang on to mechanism with a capital m indeterminism in that sense though is is rather different from the sort of

the sort of freedom that many libertarians want. They don't just want a lack of determinism, they want some extra self-originating forces in the world. Oh, you're muffling up a bit, Keith. Am I? Oh, sorry. Sorry, I must have wandered away from the microphone. It seems that libertarians, at least many libertarians, want something a lot stronger than just the absence of determinism. They want the self to be some active causal ingredient in the world.

Of course. I mean, it's nowhere near enough to kind of ground agency to just say, oh, well, the world's indeterministic, so there's no problem then. Because, of course... from a certain point of view, indeterminism can look just as worrying or indeed even more worrying than determinism for the possibility of agency. I think actually that's that's the route which leads many compatibilists to their conclusions. So they start off perhaps being a little bit worried about determinism.

but then somebody suggests that indeterminism isn't any better and then they think oh yeah it's not any better oh well I'll, you know, I'll go back to being a compatibilist about determinism and free will then. I think that's a very common route. It's like indeterminism doesn't seem to represent a hopeful route out.

This is probably a good point to mention luck, isn't it? Yeah, I was just going to say this links to the luck objection we'd like to get, but I think Keith's going to ask you about. But maybe just finally, before we get to the luck objection, I mean, we've talked a lot about... whether problems with compatibilism and you thinking you know our concept of agency involves this idea that we settle things in a way that's incompatible with determinism but maybe we should say something like about

the hard to turn this position so a few people in the comments and luke have in different ways said well just because it seems that way doesn't mean it is that way uh that's what katka said and then luke said you know OK, maybe that's our folk concept, but why should we think that pre-theorial concept is correct? So what can you say something about what, you know, the more hard determinist picture who agrees with you? Yeah, our normal concept of agency is this.

I settle things in a way that's incompatible with determinism. But what about that Sam Harris type line? Maybe that's all an error. Well, of course, it could all be an error. But in a way, I'd want to turn that question on its head and say, well, look, this is what we tend to think. Why can't I have it? You know, what is it exactly that you're telling me about the world that means that this is impossible? And that's, you know, that's where I'd really want to press because when you do press.

on that question. What you often find comes back is in various ways unsatisfactory. Someone needs to say exactly Why it can't be true. And I suppose what my book is, in a way, is my attempt to try in very many different ways to say why someone might think it couldn't be true. And then to try to say, hmm, that doesn't work because of this. That doesn't work because of this. So in the end, it's not that I've got a knockdown argument.

for saying that it couldn't be an illusion. It's rather that I'm wanting still an argument for thinking that it must be an illusion. Why think that something that seems a certain way is an illusion? Unless it has to be, right? Yeah, I suppose this comes... The way things were. It comes back to... Sorry. Yeah, then, you know...

It's a question of where the onus of proof lies, I suppose. And I think, well, you kind of start with the way things seem, commonsensically. If someone tells you you can't have them, well then you have to give them up but until someone tells you why you can't have them then no reason to give them up I suppose one thing the hard determinants might say here is, well, okay, maybe it's an open question. Maybe I haven't got conclusive arguments for settling my...

from science or from philosophy or whatever, but still... How would it... Suppose it were an illusion. How... How would things be different? It's a sort of Wittgenstein thing, you know, supposing the, you know, we think the sun goes around the earth, but how would it seem if, what's it, why do we think the sun goes around the earth? Because it seems.

that way well how would it seem if the sun was static and we were going around there it would seem just the same so um from our perspective as you know these you know living organisms reflecting on ourselves and our activity how would it seem different if determinism were true and if if it wouldn't would that would we notice any difference if determinism were true and if we wouldn't when uh

Why does it matter? I think one thing I would say, well, I've got two thoughts here. One thing I would say is that I'm not a fan of approaches to the free will problem which start from first very first personal forms of conviction just it feels to me like i could have done otherwise That's not what I want to be relying on when I say it seems that I have free will. I'm not trying to rely on that. What I've got in mind is something much bigger than that.

conceptual and social framework is premised on the thought that not just not just me but all of you everybody out there is an agent right Someone that things can be up to, someone that can do things, someone that isn't just a sort of place through which matter streams in some... kind of inevitable shape formations no that is not that is not the way things are so one thing i would stress is that i don't mean to be relying on a sort of

just a first personal sense that i you know funny feeling that i could have done otherwise no i'm talking about something massive right something like belief in the external world Giving up agency is as big as giving up that. And just as lots of people don't expect me to be able to prove that the external world exists, but allow me to take it on faith. You know, I think there's a good argument for saying, well...

Same belief in agency. You should be allowed to take it on faith unless someone comes along with a very powerful argument. Me and Keith are always coming back to questions about foundation. How do you start theorising about the world? What's the agreed start? I know. A lot of debates come back to that. What are you allowed to start from?

You know, the only thing we're allowed to start with is maybe just physics or, you know, science more generally. But what... you know you have to make a lot of assumptions to get that far as helen says like there's an external world What if some things seem more evident to me than the assumptions you need to get science going? What if agency seems more evident than the reality of the external world?

If you were a determinist, I don't see that you need to give up this talk of ancient. You could say, well, we can't interpret that. talk in a certain way perhaps we can't see it as being metaphysically grounded in a certain way that maybe we assume it is but we can still continue with it it can still do all the practical work that we do we still think of ourselves as agents in that sense and still interact with each other as agents I guess this is Dennett's view

And for all pragmatically justified, it just doesn't have a certain sort of metaphysical underpinning. And why does it need it? I guess that would be the response. What would there be to stop us just continuing to use this very useful, as you say, very central way of conceptualizing ourselves and our activity in the world? What's to stop us continuing thinking of ourselves in this way?

Well, who would the we be that was continuing, would be my question. I mean, it seems that you have pulled the rug out from under the ground of it. any talk of we or me or personal pronouns requires. It feels like it's unsubstantiated words at that point.

well I suppose they would be useful fictions wouldn't they they would be fictions that help us and we live in a world of of imagination and I don't feel the need to have these things underwritten by in you know in some sort of deep you know metaphysical way in order for them to be useful ways of interacting with there all sorts of things we talk about love and love is a very meaningful thing but if you try to say

actually is love. It's a shorthand for a whole bunch of attitudes and commitments and responses and things. And it isn't a thing. And I guess that's kind of how I think about the self and agency. as being a shorthand, a very useful shorthand, and that we don't need to sort of reify it as, you know, there is this, there is, there are agents, there are selves, there is love as such.

But there are all the things that those words are tracking, obscurely tracking. I guess that's the way I'll come back on it.

yeah i mean i guess i don't really think of it as a reification i mean it's not that i'm you know i'm not a dualist or anything um i don't i don't think there's anything mysterious about thinking there are agents all i'm all i mean is that there are animals that's that's what i mean you know whole animals um that can do things so to to say it requires reification to believe in agents is already i think to have

kind of adopted the belief that any form of libertarianism is bound to be anti-naturalistic and i really don't want mine to be I really am looking for libertarianism that is consistent and compatible with everything we know about science. But I just don't think that we know. from science that the universe is deterministic in fact insofar as science offers a view it seems to me it suggests it isn't so yeah

I said earlier that I think of all the forms of libertarianism I've encountered that yours is the one that I find most sympathetic and I really find hard to pin down exactly.

How much of it I disagree with? I mean, there's a lot of it that I find attractive. Certainly there's emphasis on this rejection of these simplistic, mechanistic... compatible stories in terms of beliefs and desires and of course I'm totally with that and the idea that we need to look at large-scale patterns of activity and large-scale structures in giving causal explanations this is absolutely right it seems to me so

There's an awful lot of what you're saying that I'm aware of. Yes, I mean, as I said, we were chatting before we came on air a little bit, Keith and I, and I was saying to Keith that in a way... I was slightly surprised by the extent to which I've sort of become pigeonholed as libertarian, although that is kind of officially, I suppose, the right term for a view of my sort. do think agency isn't compatible with determinism um i did when i was writing the book very much think of it as um

a kind of midway between libertarian and compatibilist position. I thought I was conceding lots to compatibilism on all sorts of fronts. And, you know, I suppose I still think of it that way in some ways, that it's a view that allows two compatibilists a great deal because I accept that we're physical beings. I just think that doesn't rule out, you know.

our reality as agents okay so i think we we want to carry on not too much longer than the 45 minutes um so i think for the remainder of time i think

What we're interested in is thinking about two objections to this position, one being the look objection and one being, it's come up a little bit in the comments already, is this compatible with... cause of closure of the physical or what physical science seems to be perhaps telling us um i mean helen's sort of

already suggested otherwise but maybe looking into that issue so maybe we could spend uh 15 or 20 minutes or so on each of those issues and also we'd like to get to some uh audience questions at the end if possible so uh so what so Keith, do you want to take us away with the luck objection? We've already touched on this a bit, haven't we? I take the basic idea is that, well, what's the alternative to my...

my behavior being caused by processes within myself, either mentalistic or other kinds of processes. What's the alternative? Is it just... If I wasn't necessitated to act in a certain way, is it just luck that I acted in that way? And so I suppose I... At some point, I've got some very significant choice to make. It could be a moral choice. And I choose it and get praise for it and so on. But I didn't have to do it.

I wasn't necessitated to do it. So was it just luck then that I did the right thing? And that doesn't seem to be making me more free or more responsible or more of an agent. It seems to be... making me less so if anything and i guess that's as you said one of the reasons why why some people feel that that some uh they want to be compatibilist so how do you respond so

My response to that is quite a complicated response. The first thing I would want to say is that I sort of agree with the compatibilist view of those sorts of moral decisions. If you undertake some sort of morally significant action, suppose you could have done A or B and you do A.

It's it might be that you do a for extremely good reasons. Right. You do a. and B is kind of obviously by your lights absolutely unthinkable or something so you know say it was a situation like that then is it important that you you know do we need to say that you could have done B? i know i want to say no you couldn't have done okay if it was really clear to you um that a was the thing to do then there's no gain to freedom and saying

that B was also possible. That's not the reason and the place that we need for indeterminism so that's the first thing to say could we have a concrete example of that helen maybe could you maybe have a concrete example of of such a clear case i think you give one in the book about

somebody who's thinking about whether to move in with their girlfriend and it's the obviously the right choice or something just just to get people a clearer idea yeah so let me give a problem so the example in the book is that this guy there's this guy joe And he's trying to decide whether to move in with his girlfriend. And I describe it as what I call a clear case. So everything.

counts for it right so he's really in love with his girlfriend he wants to spend more time with her her flat's lovely his own horrible bedsit is awful he wants to get out a bit also his horrible bed sits extremely expensive whereas you know he could live very cheaply in his girlfriend's flat you know pile on consideration after consideration until it really looks impossible

Right. Given all those considerations that Joe's going to decide to stay where he is. He's going to move in with his girlfriend, isn't he? And saying that he could have made the other decision. It's not something we should want, is it? Why do we want the power to make really crappy decisions? We don't want it. Compatibilists often say that and I think they're right. So that's the first thing to say.

um for there to be indeterminism in the world um comes in at a completely other level so what i want to say is before we even get to you know situations of moral choice and that sort of thing We need to be confident that we are the sorts of things that can, for example, you know, move about the world in this way or that way.

amble over here, amble over there, do this now, do this later. You know, we need to know that we are those sorts of beings rather than the sorts of beings which run on rails, right, according to a predetermined program. That's what we need in determinism for. It has to come at the level of basic agency, not at the level of kind of moral choice, you know, where I'm facing. moral choice A, moral choice B, it's got to come in at the level of agency.

So I think my view escapes lots of very powerful objections to many versions of incompatibilism because I want to put the indeterminism in as it were much lower down. why do i want to put it in at all you might you might ask um well i think then i just want to reiterate the sorts of intuitions that um I've already started with because I think we need to be settlers of matters because I think unless we are settlers of matters we're just places where stuff goes on and that's

that's not what we are we're more than places where stuff goes on um so i think indeterminism is essential um but i i think it's it's a it's a it's a ground level it's a ground level phenomenon not as it were a moral phenomenon um that's that's important yeah that's really interesting so i think this is the point where i'm more of a libertarian than you i think

um so i'm i think what i'd be inclined to say about the joe case uh if we're thinking of um uh joe you know it's a really clear case what they ought to do i think i want to say we can say both that they were able to make the other decision to not move in with a girlfriend, but in no possible world did they do that. yeah that's right that's right that is also what i would say yeah i was hoping i'd found one thing i disagree with but i actually i'd like to say um

Yesterday I tweeted about this. So the analogy I give is the question could, so hypothetically supposing God exists in the traditional sense, could God have tortured kids for fun? And I want to say both. Yes, because God's omnipotent. God can do anything. So God could have taught your kids a fun. That's part of like the essence of the ability God has. But on the other hand, there's no possible world where God does that because God's also perfectly good.

um and i actually but i tweeted this i thought you know nobody would actually there's been a huge discussion on twitter like nearly 40 000 people have seen this tweet because it was wow it's just really interesting how There is such a, you know, thinking of popular philosophy, you know, there's such an interest in these seemingly abstract questions. But, oh, right, so you do think that's... I think that's totally right. I mean, I do think we need to separate the question.

you know has someone got the power to do a certain thing from is it possible that it will occur those are different questions oh we agree after all yeah Yeah, no, that's the sense in which I am compatibilist. You know, I do think that we need to distinguish those things as compatibilists often happen.

and do you know whether you have the power to fi and whether you will fi um different different questions and the answer to one can be yes and the answer to the other can be no so you're going to need to have an account of what it is to have a power that isn't couched in modal terms then i guess

Modal terms being to do with... In terms of what... Well, certainly if you have a possible world semantics for modality, if you think that to say that something... I guess that's right, that you'd need to... yeah it would to say that you've got the power or the ability to do something would have to be thought about differently from you know there's a possible world in which you know you you do Or you need a different semantics for modal claims that doesn't involve possible worlds.

Yes. Something's got to give somewhere. I mean, I think that's probably what I do think for claims about ability, actually, that a possible world's framework is not well suited to characterising ability. Do you want to push the luck objection anymore, Keith? I think, you know, I'm too sympathetic to Helen's response. Do you want to push it?

and i'm yeah i mean but i'm just i just want to come what puzzles me is i don't see what when we talk about abilities, when we're talking now about powers to do otherwise and so on, what this could consist in, apart from certain, ultimately certain... systems, subsystems.

We want to talk about my having abilities, but I don't quite understand what these, I mean, abilities, say, to monitor, to refrain, to adjust how I behave. I don't sort of understand how to think about these things, except as some incredibly complex.

systems within me that implement these capacities, these powers. And what we could mean by saying that I have the power is that there is some system there that... could have kicked in even if there's well that's almost right keith because that's almost what i think except instead of instead of using the word within i'd say it is me i am

I would say that these systems are not, the reason why I don't feel determined and pushed around and constrained and necessitated by these systems is because they're part of me.

I don't feel constrained by myself. And so it seems to me that taking seriously the idea that I am just a physical being in this physical world, operating ultimately in accordance with whatever laws government... government the world taking that seriously means that the threat of determinism sort of just seems to evaporate when I'm being determined by stuff that's me yeah no I mean I'm not very far off that view at all in that There's two threats from determinism.

One is the one that's got all the press, which is, I think because van Inwagen's argument became so kind of powerful, which is the one about the past, you know, being determined by the past and the laws. But the other one, which in a way is the one I've been more interested in in the book, is being determined by the big things being determined by the small bits inside them.

that's another that's another kind of deterministic threat which I do take very seriously I do feel as though if Everything that were to happen as a result of what I call my agency were in fact just a product of deterministic interactions between, you know.

cells or whatever inside me that would have missed me out but if there can be system down causation which is what i think must be the key um to understanding the metaphysics of agency if there can be top-down causation causation from the whole to the part then we've got we've got the start of what looks to me like a potentially naturalistically respectable story.

indeterminism emerges it's an emergent property it's not like it's not like there's little indeterministic connections in there which are doing the work no no no no that's not the picture right the picture is what happens in the whole

right is determined top down um by the whole the whole system so it's a kind of holistic um holistic picture i try to suggest it could be for all we know and there are reasons for thinking it's not scientifically insane to think that there can be top-down causation well should we that links us nicely to the issue of causal closure i guess which

regular viewers or listeners of mine chat are familiar with so we had a three-hour debate with the business of sean carroll who's and we had a bit a fight about um the cause of closure issue with this which is carried on and we're having a rematch actually in a couple of months we're bringing in the philosopher of physics barry lower to help us out with it but um but it's Yeah. And, you know, it's a very common view, isn't it, that we have strong empirical reason to think really...

all causation is ultimately reducible to underlying chemistry and ultimately in terms of underlying physics. Sabine Hossenfelder, another prominent theoretical physicist, has got a video.

that's got you know huge hundreds of thousands of views defending this line saying you know look we know from physics that ultimately everything that happens in the world is explicable in terms of the basic laws of physics um you know so there might be you know interesting patterns we can talk about at higher levels but ultimately everything's explicable in terms of underlying physics and that does rule out if that's true

does rule out the kind of picture you eloquently described the hell enough top-down causation that it's not um my parts that push me around it's me actually i just have to throw in i think i i think you said i put it on facebook helen helena but uh my i had a conversation with my five-year-old uh daughter on the bus i said do you think the bus has feelings

No, no, it's just a machine. And I said, aren't you a machine? And she said, no, no, I'm a person. And so I don't have... things inside me that make me move I don't know if you've been reading your book or not but anyway so yeah so that's your idea it's not just

It's me. Well, this fits well with a large part of your thing is that you think this does, for what it's worth, does fit with our what psychologists call theory of mind, our hardwired... capacity to interpret the mental states of others you think that that is a kind of wrapped up in agent causation of this kind okay anyway so coming to the point what do you say to the person who says look

physics or science more generally has just proven that everything that happens is reducible to the laws of physics and so you're wrong well i suppose i'd just say i don't think that's true um I think there's an awful lot of stuff that happens in the world that is not remotely explicable by the laws of physics, such as, you know, the outbreak of war in the Ukraine recently, for example. or you know there's hundreds and thousands of social and economic and historical facts um

which are not explicable by the laws of physics. We don't expect them to be and it would be silly to assume that they were. They are of course compatible with the laws of physics because nothing can happen that isn't.

um but you know that's very very far from being explicable by the laws of physics um so i just think it's false i think i think everyone can pretty much i think we can all agree on that i think physics just doesn't have the two of the the concepts the theoretical frameworks just doesn't see these things i mean they're just like There are grand patterns in the world that are just not visible from the perspective of physics. I mean, I think that's the epistemic explanatory.

it's not i think helen's saying more than that yeah well this is something we can all agree on that physics can't explain the behavior of complex systems because it just doesn't see them as systems it just doesn't have the concepts to pick them out the cats appeared i thought i shut her out successfully but she's shown up

Using her free agency. What I'd want to press on though, is I think that, yes, that she's... uh doesn't agree with determinism either um that um that physics or at least uh physics sure these other things are outside its domain but we should defer to physics with regard to its own domain um it's probably the current physics probably isn't right but you know it's our best shot at explaining how things operate at that at that microphysical level and i think what

So we should be wary of supposing or we shouldn't casually suppose that it might be wrong about the way atoms and electrons and fundamental particles and the universal wave function or whatever evolves or whatever it takes to be the fundamental entities.

So if top-down causation just means that we recognize large-scale patterns and that are causally explanatory and that we need to cite in our explanations, I'm absolutely with you. But if the idea is that... there are top-down influences that mean that micro-physical things will behave in ways that physicists wouldn't have expected, then I think we do have reason to balk at that because...

we should let physicists develop their theory, develop their frameworks. So does your view have the consequence that in certain situations... fundamental particles would do things that physicists wouldn't expect them to do on the basis of physical law alone well that's a really interesting question i think i would say the answer to that is no Because the way I think about physical law, I think the right way to think about physical law is that it's a constraint on the way things go.

But it's not a determinant of the way things go. It doesn't dictate one one. but people are listening on the audio version like helen's beautiful cat is wandering around because she thinks it's nearly tea time yeah um yeah no so i think that I mean, you fix a set of physical laws, it seems to me. And there's the question, have you thereby fixed everything? And my answer to that is, well...

Who says so? Physical laws fix what they fix. They fix the fact that things must go in accordance with what they say is the case. But what reason have we, in addition to that, to think that the totality of laws, you put them all together, press a button, outcome, just one result? Just one result? No, why not? You know, why not?

Why aren't there many degrees of freedom left once you fix the physical laws? Do we know that that's not the case? I mean, if somebody came and showed me that the laws of physics did indeed yield a unique result.

Well, then I give up, you know, you know, I'm just a sort of talking machine. I thought I was a new win, guys. But nobody has, to my knowledge, ever shown that. Well, it does mean then that, so we should expect then that it's a prediction of this view that, say, experiments in particle accelerators or whatever, whatever sort of experiments physicists do, shouldn't always produce the predicted result. based on physical law alone is that right um no because um i mean i mean i've no idea whether

you know, unpredictable results might arise in particle accelerators. Well, there will be indeterminacies, but they will themselves be probabilistically predictable. The probabilities will be defined by physical law.

that there should be sort of other influences at work on the way particles behave that are not... within the purview of yes such as the influences that are um involved when agents interfere with systems you know if someone comes along to that particle accelerator and knocks into it things are going to happen to the particles in the accelerator that wouldn't have happened otherwise. biological entities aren't dictated by the laws of physics and we're still waiting to be told that they have to be.

then indeed things are going to be different in the particle accelerator. I mean, isn't part of it, I think, you refer a little bit to my colleague at Durham, Nancy Cartwright, who's a very influential philosopher of science.

got this book how the laws of physics lie and um you know she points out it connected to what keith's saying you know the kind of experiments physicists do are in very specific isolated circumstances often you have to i've been talking to my philosopher physics friend kelvin mcqueen getting some advice on the physics i talk about in my in the book i'm currently writing and you know he's been talking about you know the kind of preparation you go through to do an experiment in particle physics

creates a kind of very artificial situation so i think nancy cartwright's view is um okay this is telling us the kind of things that happen in this very artificial situation but in the in the living biological world And it's not necessarily the case that in that very different context, there won't be other factors going on. And I think I think I remember rightly, Helen, like like Nancy.

You think of the laws of physics, et cetera, as parables laws, all things being equal. So basically they say, you know, this is what happens.

unless there are other factors. So if there is agent causation, as you as you want to defend, it's not that the laws of physics are wrong or violated, because it's in your interpretation kind of written into them.

this ceteris paribus clause that unless there are other factors um yes i mean that seems to me a coherent i mean this is part of what argue with sean carroll he was sort of saying that's not what physicists think um Maybe that's not what physicists think, but it seems to me a coherent philosophical interpretation of physics that the laws have these ceteris paribus clauses built into them. I'm a massive fan of Nancy Cot, I think she's great and I really like her views of the laws of physics.

they're very very exciting and interesting so yes um another another thing i would say about you know when you said um it's not what physicists think i think you have to be very careful to take into account the huge power that the huge power of education and educational experience on intellectual visions. I've got a colleague who works on genetics, who's very troubled by the way genetics is taught in schools.

because he says everybody does Mendel's pea plants and ends up with this incredibly rigid deterministic way of thinking about the way genes operate.

people take on into their adult life because most people never study genetics beyond school level they take on into adult life this very um oversimplified view about how genes work and think there's a gene for this and a gene for that and a gene for the other which of course is just so a million miles from being the case and i think a level and and indeed GCSE, maths and physics.

has a similar role. I remember doing loads of projectiles and pendulums and stuff in A level maths and everything's beautiful and it's all closed systems where one thing leads beautifully to another and nothing ever disrupts.

And I do think those models, beautiful though they are, are a bit pernicious when it comes to how many others then continue to think about the way the physical world is in general that it's all that you know projectile and pendulum stuff but it isn't i think i i think there's a there's a The point you're making here that I absolutely agree with strongly, and that's about the danger of oversimplification. I think that's absolutely right and very important and salutary.

But I don't see why that requires us to make a leap to some metaphysical view that rejects. I don't really like the word determinism, but let's say that ultimately the real sort of causal, the fundamental causal processes are described by physics. There's a way of, there's a middle position between this, which says that there's an awful lot of complexity in these processes, in these physically realized processes, an awful lot of complexity and feedback and all kinds of things.

really complex processes that produce something that is, to all intents and purposes, indeterministic, but doesn't have to involve that. that absolute ground level indeterministic. We can get something that is as near as dammit indeterministic and would look indeterministic even if it were ultimately at that ground level deterministic.

And people have been ignoring that because they've got these simplistic visions that you've been talking about. And it's absolutely salutary to get rid of the simplistic visions. But we don't need to underwrite this with some sort of real, you know, saying that really, you know, atoms do things that...

you know, the individual atoms move in ways that physics wouldn't predict. We don't need that. We just need to recognize the huge complexity of the things that atoms do. So I think there's, I think a lot of what you're saying, the compatibilist can...

And should endorse. In a way, in your last chapter, you say a lot about the importance of taking notice of large scale causal structures and histories and all sorts of things, selectional histories, all sorts of things in explaining what's happened. Absolutely. But then you say, but this isn't just an epistemic point. This isn't an explained point. We've got to underwrite it metaphysically. Yeah, I don't think it is just an epistemic point. Let me tell you about one of the things that...

makes me so resistant to the bottom up picture. And that is the phenomenon of coincidence. So one of the things that is obvious if you're accounting for something like agency is that in order to account for it very very many things have to happen in the brain at just the right time and in just the right order you know to enable me to speak to you now you know my

My balance system's got to be engaged so that I'm sitting upright. My language centres have got to be working properly. My memory's got to be working properly. You know, I've got to be visually focused in the right direction. and masses and masses of stuff has got to be integrated right and now if you if you kind of just look at what's happening with the fundamental particles

It feels to me just impossible to explain how that kind of coordination happens. Absolutely. How does everything happen at exactly the right time in exactly the right order? it's just all this little stuff right banging into each other the harmonization without a view from the top

You absolutely need the top view to explain it, absolutely, because there have been selectional processes over billions of years. Your ability to do this is the consequence of billions of years of natural selection and sculpting these. your neural processes to allow you to do this. And there's a whole picture there that you completely miss if you just look at the...

at what the particles are doing. But it's not incompatible, as I see it, with the particles just doing whatever they do according to them. Nature has, evolution has taken advantage of those.

uh uh regular causal processes to sculpt this thing that now coordinates you in the way you're talking about that would be well at least that's that's the outline of the way i would want to go that you don't you don't need to have particles doing strange stuff in order to get this complexity to evolve this complexity and to explain how it came to be about well of course i don't think they're doing strange stuff keith i think they're doing stuff that

You know, they do when they're in biological organisms, quite, you know, and corralled by the structures that brains are. Well, yeah, but they're not doing strange stuff, quay particles. They're doing strange stuff, quay... constituents of sculpted holes um but as particles they're still doing what particles do just as cells do what cells do but that those cells that happen to be in our brains are doing thinking But they're still just doing cellular stuff at the cellular level.

We seem so close and yet so far apart. And I guess this is something that we're not going to resolve right here and now. No, I feel there's so many of the things you say. I just think, well, I think that too. So, you know, it's interesting that we're... we've cut it from in a sense different directions but we i think agree about a lot it's no i i keep trying to get

Guests on that disagree with Keith and they always end up agreeing. We're supposed to be gang. Everyone always gangs up on me. I want to get people on who gangs up on Keith. I'm sure I agree with you about a lot of things as well. Shall we move to some questions to finish off?

Yeah. Have you got time for a few questions, a couple of questions? Yeah, sure. Okay, so there's a couple here already. If people want to ask, just put a Q and then your question. So regular viewer Queerdo asks, what does Professor Stewart... think of professor akil bill bill grammy's work on agency are you familiar with this well i i haven't read any um bill grammy for a long time um i really enjoyed uh what was he going to become belief

um what was that called but it's old now um so I like his work in general but I'm afraid I don't know his stuff on agency um maybe someone can tell me some more about it and I'll i'll be able to say actually sorry he had an earlier question uh how far does professor thanks helen how far does professor stewart go with the top-down causation are animals the holes

Or do we extend that to the whole universe in a cosmopsychous sense? So this is the view I've defended at some times, that the whole universe is a conscious entity. And what are the reasons for this? Okay, so... are there sort of top-down holes bigger than animals i guess might be there Yeah, I mean, that's a really interesting question that I haven't really taken a view on. I mean, I only see sort of strong reasons to...

believe in top-down causation for biological organisms. I have thought a bit about things like swarms and hives and colonies and things like that. And I can see there are some grounds for saying that there might be... top down phenomena going on there too but on the whole I think the case is not as strong as it is in individual agents in fact because I think a lot of the A lot of the behaviour that you see in hives actually is bottom-up when insects or whatever are doing there.

doing their things and I'm not sure that there's a reason for saying that there's that there's top-down causation in addition in the colony. But, you know, I've got an open mind. I don't really know enough about it to be confident of that. The universe, my instinct is no. But again, I think it's an open question.

it's how you solve the heart problem of consciousness okay so a connected question from luke who's been disagreeing with you a lot i think it's fair to say in the comments can you give one example from current science where researchers posit a mechanism of top-down causation i guess you're going to say no in that case uh what you just said well um

No, I am going to say yes. Well, I don't know if it's a mechanism of top-down causation. That's not quite how I describe it because it's not exactly a mechanism. started to think about top-down causation as a result of talking to a scientific colleague when I was at Balliol whose name was Dennis Noble and he worked on the heart. He was a cardiologist, but a very eminent scientist more generally. And his view of biological systems was that they were hierarchical systems.

and that parts that were lower down the hierarchy were as it were corralled into acting in certain ways by things that came higher up the hierarchy so what what molecules do in cells kind of depends on the cell and what cells do in tissues depends on the tissue and what tissues do in organs depends on the organ and so on and so on um which you know led me to think well you know if we if we are hierarchical in that way why aren't we as it were just the top level

We're the whole animal, the whole animal, the top level of that hierarchical system corralling our parts. In particular, when it comes to action, what we're corralling is parts of our nervous systems. um in order to bring them about so it is actually from a scientist that i first got the idea who thought it made sense um in you know the science that he was interested in, which I guess was physiological science. So yeah, that's my example.

Very good. Thanks, Helen. That's very interesting. Question from Mark O'Brien here. I would just like to say, actually, so Mark is disagreeable me on Twitter, and someone I've been...

arguing with on Twitter for a couple of years, disagreeing about almost everything. And he's just recently happened to move from New Zealand to Durham. And so we met up in person and had an argument in person, which is... so the wonders of twitter connect things up but anyway mark's asking can we stim simulate our model down top-down causation if so how is this not deterministic

if not then it seems the rules or principles of top-down causation are not well defined there's a sort of dilemma there challenge of dilemma well i you know uh

I'm not the sort of person who could write the programme, that's for sure. But I would imagine it could be simulated. And I'm a bit puzzled by... the suggestion that that would make it deterministic because as i understand it simulation is often most valuable and useful um in connection with systems that are thought to be indeterministic you know ones or or at least um full of massive chaos um such as um i would have thought the possibility of simulation didn't

didn't entail that a system was deterministic. We can simulate these things. You can get chaotic systems from very simple deterministic processes.

the equations that generate fractals are very very simple ones um but they're just iterated a lot um and the fact that we can if we can simulate something then ultimately we're doing it by programming a computer that's how you do the simulations but i i i think chaotic and indeterministic are different things chaotic may be practically indeterministic in the sense there's no way you can predict it

That's not the same as saying it's not generated by a deterministic mechanism. And I think that's, in a way, that probably goes to the heart of where we might disagree, that you can get all kinds of... complexity from deterministic mechanism. Anyway, I'll, I'll, I'll butter out how I think because I've had, I've, I've said plenty. Well, maybe a nice question to end on is another question, but by a question by Mark Brewer.

Sorry, it's a different mark. What would it take for you to reject libertarian free will? Well, I guess I'd have to reject the libertarian bit of libertarian free will. If someone were to show to my satisfaction that physics had proven that universal determinism was true. I think it would be a very difficult thing to prove because I think that determinism ultimately, at least in the way I understand it, is actually...

It's not a thesis of physics because it's modal, it's about things being necessary happenings. So I kind of think of it as a metaphysical thesis. and so I'm not sure how a scientific proof of it would ever come about. I guess some people might worry it's unfalsifiable, but maybe you don't think that's necessarily problematic. Well, yeah, I mean, I do think that probably... A lot of theses are unfalsifiable and we just have to, at least by empirical means.

and so we have to we have to look to other resources to try to figure out um whether they might be true or not i mean yeah this this is a bit of a um a bit of a distraction but I don't like the standard definition of determinism, which is in terms of everything being entailed by the laws and the initial conditions, which is the standard definition.

Because I actually think that according to that definition, we should all be compatibilists. I don't think that is a definition which really gets to the nub of the problem. The worry that people have about determinism.

is is nothing to do with you know entailment it's to do with necessitation it's a metaphysical idea not a logical idea that's that's at the heart of the a thesis that's worrying but that's a that's a side issue which we probably don't have time to go into i i saw you give a talk on that somewhere helen yeah that's um i can't remember where now but yeah

It's a very interesting take on it. Okay. Well, we've been talking two hours. That's been a fantastic discussion. It's been so enjoyable. So enjoyed it. And I've got to go away and figure out. Wow, why Keith and I don't agree. If indeed we don't. No. One thing that's been lovely about this is we started by just asking you how you... well you've got interested in in in philosophy and it and then thinking about the mind and it's about this

reconciling this conception that we have of ourselves with what science tells us about the world. And that's exactly what we've been talking about for the whole two hours, about this... seeing how we see ourselves as part of the world, as part of the natural world. And in a way, that's perhaps one of the, I wouldn't say it's the heart of philosophy, but it's certainly one of the central issues of philosophy. And it's one of the things I think that anybody...

Everybody must be fascinated by that question. We're here able to reflect on ourselves and our own existence. And how come we're here in this world? Yeah, it's one of the basic questions of philosophy, isn't it? If that doesn't fascinate you, absolutely. And I think your book is a great contribution to our thinking about that.

Thank you, Keith. Thank you. And thanks to all the audience for coming along and listening in. Thank you, Helen. I'm glad the technical problems resolved themselves eventually. Yes. Yeah, that was a bit of a relief. Yeah.

and thanks to your cat for patiently yeah she was my exhibit number one this free world agent everybody what's her name sushi sushi yes well thanks so much helen thanks so much for giving a couple of hours of your time and i really enjoyed it thank you thank you thank you wow that was fun It was. It was good, wasn't it? Yes. This happened last time, right? David Papenow was supposed to be somewhat a materialist we both disagreed with.

And then the whole thing ends up you saying, oh, actually, we both agree on everything. I'm always the odd man out. I try to see what I... agree with in people's work rather than what I disagree with you see I try to look for what people have got right I mean and I think that's I think it's a helpful We're all trying in the end to understand things and very few people have got it completely wrong. Very few people have got it completely wrong.

There's always something. And in fact, there's often a lot more than you think if you just take the caricature of somebody's views. Whoops, sorry, I just knocked something over. If you take the caricature, the headline of somebody's view, like Frankish thinks consciousness doesn't exist.

Well, you know, what a full frankie she is. But if you try and burrow down a bit into their views and see what they're actually trying to get at, you might find that there's something there that you can really agree with and build on and perhaps integrate into your own view.

That's in the end how we're going to solve problems, not by some individual genius working it all out, but by collectively pooling our resources, gaining insights from each other, and... approaching something like the truth absolutely and uh and you know that's what we're trying to do on mind chat isn't it just this polarized shouting at each other and trying to understand where the other

the other is coming from and um i i'm very proud of it actually i'm i'm i'm joking really about wanting wanting fights at least all the time Yeah, well, I'm actually on another podcast in an hour. We keep not having time for end chats. Busy schedule. I'm looking forward to hearing about your book, but we'll maybe have to leave that to another time. And your discussion, what is the name of your podcast, your other podcast, Keith? My audio podcast. It's Mind to Mind.

mind to mind good is is is is a riff on face to face the famous uh bbc one you see but that's more centered on talking to people and letting them talk about themselves and explain things rather than the more discussion format that we have here. It's more of a straight interview. Well, maybe for our... By the way, which I will be recording early next month with Pete Mending.

Oh, right. Brilliant. Excellent. Excellent. I like meat. Oh, right. Well, maybe for our anniversary, we could have a chat about my thoughts, my reactions to some of those discussions.

we could argue about that a bit and uh talk a bit more generally about what we've been up to and so on um yeah i mean yeah it's not all about fighting is it i think you know there are things we disagree on but at the end of the day we definitely agree that consciousness i've forgotten what it is We definitely agree on the whole that consciousness is wherever it is and nowhere else.