From the Vault: Bandersnatch

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

And I am Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. So we're going into the vault for an older episode of the show. This time we're going back several years to an episode we did on the Black Mirror episode Bander Snatch. This was before Weird House Cinema. Not a Weird House Cinema episode. We featured it in a We featured it in a core episode and talked about all kinds of things connected to the plot. This sorry, this was not a Weird

Now why are we talking about it right now? Well, it's my understanding that Netflix is set to remove Bander Snatch from its platform on May twelfth, And unlike most films, you know, when it leaves one platform, or it can just pop up on another, right, some other streaming service can offer it, or it'll come out on physical media maybe, or you know, or if you can find a stream somewhere. But of course the thing about Bandersnatch is that it's interactive.

Going to be a shame to lose it, but it seems like a fitting end for an episode of Black Mirror to actually just be destroyed by the kind of whims of a technological behemoth.

It does, it really does. So Yeah, so you've got you've literally gotten like what a couple of days, maybe even down to hours at this point by the time you're listening to this episode. So jump in there experienced Bandersnatch, or re experience it while you have time and enjoy our thoughts from the year twenty twenty about it.

And the Banker Inspired with a courage so new it was a matter for general remark, rushed madly ahead and was lost to their view in his zeal to discover the snark. But while he was seeking with thimbles and care, a bender snatch swiftly drew nigh and grabbed at the banker, who shrieked in despair, for he knew it was useless to fly. He offered large discount. He offered a check drawn two bearer for seven pounds ten.

But the bandersnatch merely extended its neck and grabbed at the banker again without rest or pause, while those frumiest jaws went savagely snapping around. He skipped, and he hopped, and he floundered, flopped till fainting he fell to the ground. The Bandersnatch fled as the others appeared, led on by that fear stricken yell, and the bellman remarked, it is just as I feared, and solemnly told on his bell.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, A production of Iheartradios How Stuff Works.

Hey, Welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

And I'm Joe McCormick. And Robert are you feeling more frabjess or more frumious today.

I guess more frumious frumious would be my answer. That was, of course the poem The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll, But I guess a number of people are probably more familiar with the Bandersnatch from another poem by Lewis Carroll, that being the jabberwock Jabwacke, Yes, where the Bandersnatch is just alluded to as another monstrous creature that my i'd be running around the woods.

I love it when a poet first named something in a kind of in a listical kind of way, you know, poem as listical, and then later it comes through in another poem with more force. I think that sort of happened with the demogorgan, right.

Yeah, yeah, I think so. And in this case, yeah, the Bandersnatch. There's not a lot really said about it

Read the whole of the poem. That was just an exerpt from it. I think where the like who's the banker? The banker is one of these people who goes on a voyage hunting the snark. I've read that that poem has been interpreted by some as metaphorical of you know, that it's supposed to be an allegory about the search for human happiness and contentment. But then also I think i've heard it alleged that the poem actually has no allegorical meaning, that it's just kind of silly.

Yeah, I mean, in that sense, it's kind of enigmatic. And the creature itself is enigmatic, scarcely described, but certainly best avoided at all costs. There's no way to outrun it, no way to escape its intensity. And by the way, frumius is a combination of fuming and furious. Carroll just ran these two words together to make a nice new adjective for a strange monster is.

A perfectly cromulent word, very frabjous. And I was wondering, do you need a vorpal sword if you go up against a vander Snatch or is that only for the jabberwock Well.

It certainly worked on the Jabberwockie. I don't know about the vander Snatch. There are no tales of slaying it, are there, at least not in Lewis Carroll's original work.

Does the vorpal sword show up as an artifact in D and D It does?

Yeah, it certainly does. Yeah, pretty good sword. Oh yeah, yeah, very good sword. Now, the name Vandersnatch has been evoked many times over the years and works of fantasy and science fiction. I've seen it pop up as a space slug and other such creatures. Sometimes it's just kind of an enigmatic name for like a government project or something, because it's a great it's a great name. In depictions of Lewis Carroll's work, it is often take on a

Oh, the Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland? Is that what you're talking about?

Yeah, yeah, I have, I've seen the first one.

I never ventured that far into late Burton.

Well, it had some things going for it. It had had a really good cast, it had some interesting character designs, I'll say that, and a very monstrous looking Bandersnatch. Okay, Now, just a couple of other interesting tidbits about Lewis Carroll. He was a mathematician. He worked in geometry and new ideas in algebra, logic, machines, ciphers. So between this and other details of his life, there's a lot of black

Yeah, I guess the extension of the lightheadedness that comes on with the aura and all that.

Yeah.

You know, there's actually an asteroid named bander Snatch.

Oh I didn't know this.

Yeah, I look this up. Nine to seven to eighty Bander Snatch. It's a Main Belt asteroid, so it's out beyond the orbit of Mars. Discovered in nineteen ninety four by Japanese astronomers Takashi Urrata and Yasuhiro Shimizu at the Nachi Katsura Observatory, and it was named, of course after the Frumias Bandersnatch.

Awesome. Now, one of the this is just sort of the introductory material on the Bandersnatch, because for the vast majority of this episode we're going to be talking about what as I guess the most recent cinematic invocation of the bandersnatch, and that is the Black Mirror episode. Well, it's not even an episode. It's a Black Mirror film that came out on Netflix December of what was it, twenty eighteen, so a little over a year ago, and there's a lot to unpack here.

I actually didn't watch it until this week, so I knew you wanted to do an episode about it, and I was like, Okay, I'll finally see what all the fuss is about.

I was very impressed.

Yeah, I'll get I'll certainly get more into my very thoughts on it later. I was impressed with it when it came out, and then since we were going to do the episode, I rewatched it for the first time since its original release earlier this week, and I have to say it, I thought it held up. I even got a different ending and a different dead end at

Yeah, now we're going to be exploring today some of the science and the ideas and philosophy that are alluded to in Vanderson. But in doing so, of course, this will involve some spoilers for this strange film. So I would say, there are a couple of places we're not going to like go through and explore every possible ending

Please. However, some of you may be asking the question, what are you talking about? What is Black Mirror? So we should probably take a few minutes to just refresh you on what this is. It is a is the word refresh? Would that be the word? We should shock you to the bone? All right? So Black Mirror is in essence a sci fi anthology television series in the same vein as The Twilight Zone, the Outer Limits, these various shows we've discussed in the past.

I might call it pretty often techno horror. Not every episode is the same, but there's essentially no horror movie as scary as the scariest episodes of Black Mirror, especially the ones that manage to take fairly plausible technological scenarios and follow them to their logical conclusions. I mean, it's it's a show that's very good at conjuring up the worst possible nightmares of like the intersection of capitalism and technology.

Yeah, definitely, episodes tend to have a technological swing to the story, and they tend to deal on some level with contemporary anxiety about current technology and emerging technology. What are these technologies doing to our lives? What may they do to our lives in the future, And you know, sometimes they take varying specuative leaps there, of course, since it is science fiction. But you, I would say, you typically leave an episode of Black Mirror feeling a little

Apart from one very sweet, very nice episode, there's essentially nothing that makes me feel as bad as Black Mirror.

Well, you know, I was thinking. I was thinking about this because there are definitely some very bleak episode. There are episodes of Black Mirror that I admire that I will never watch again. But then I look back at my some of my favorite episodes. My favorite episodes are probably san Ju Napero, The Uss Callister, and metal Head. Two of those, one of those is still pretty bleak, but two of those are actually pretty upbeat, probably the

I feel like two thousand and eight was sort of like maybe two thousand and seven. Two thousand and eight was like peak zombie satire movie.

Yeah. And the thing about this one, though, the premise sounds like a comedy, and so I acquired a copy of it, thinking, oh, this is a comedy, and this is a guy that worked on Brass Eye. This is going to be hilarious. And it is not a straight up comedy. It is a pretty terrifying film. But you see shades of that in Black Mirror. Sometimes there is a premise that could sound like a joke, but then it is taken and considered with such intensity that it works. Yeah.

What if like a major tech company used eye tracking software to make sure you were always watching their ads and if you didn't watch them, they would ring sirens in your brain and deduct money from your bank account until you started watching the ads. Again, sounds like a joke, but like if you just said take that seriously for a bit and explore that becomes like a nightmare of technoci fi.

Absolutely. Now. Black Mirror began in twenty ten two seasons in a holiday special came out and ran on Channel four in the UK. Then Netflix started carrying it, and Netflix became the owner of the main pub We'll share the program however you want to look at it, starting with season three in October of twenty sixteen. All in all, it has thus far gone five seasons twenty one episodes, and that's not counting the film Bandersnatch, which again came out in December of twenty eighteen.

These bits of publisher information will actually become relevant later on as we discussed the story.

Because the the ideas there.

Yeah, because at the end we definitely get into some citiz scenarios where we have to consider the fact that Netflix is the business daddy behind Black Mirror.

So Vandersnatch the film. The Black Mirror film was actually directed by David Slade, who I was like, where do I know that name from? He's done several things, but one of them was he did one of the Twilight movies.

Yes, and I've seen that that particular one. It was the second one, I think, and it's that's a I'm not a huge Twilight fan, but that is a very watchable Twilight movie and it has a great soundtrack. It's got Tom York on it. Oh yeah, yeah. He also directed the Black Mirror episode metal Head that I alluded to earlier, and there are some callbacks to metal Head in the Bandersnatch episode.

Now, I guess one thing we haven't gotten fully into so far is the fact that the Black Mirror movie Bandersnatch is it's an interactive movie, which makes it very unique.

Right. This was the big selling point on it, and indeed is one of the mean it's a key part of the way you consume it, but it is also very important thematically, like you know, true to form, The creators here really thought long and hard about how to utilize an interactive system within the work and make the work comment on that system as well.

Right, the interactive system being Netflix, like the fact that the user can make inputs on the movie.

Yeah, basically, that's what it amounts to is you start off watching it, it seems like a normal Netflix presentation, but then your in my case, my Xbox one controller would suddenly vibrate and then this little the screen at the

With this interactive piece encouraging unhealthy obsessive behavior.

Yeah, exactly, I mean it is black mirror. Now, as far as the choices you make in Bandersnatch, you start off making very small choices, it seemed very consequential. For instance, choosing the main character's breakfast series he's presently his father shows two boxes and you decide which one he's going to have for breakfast. Yeah.

I think it was what like frosted flakes or sugar puffs or something. I remember what I realized after I made that choice was I was like, oh no, I think I chose the brand that I was more familiar with.

Ah, we'll come back to that later. That is an important point that we'll come back to later on in the episode. But yeah, at first, it's it's what kind of cereal does he want? All right? It doesn't doesn't seem to matter much, and it also gives you a chance to try out the technology low stakes. But and then also later on, you choose what music is going to listen to in when he's on the bus, which is kind of fun. I think you get to choose

I think it's Thompson Twins.

That's it. Yeah. And then later on he's in a record store and you get to choose which record he's going to buy. And this is also pretty great because one of the choices is Tangerine Dreams excellent nineteen seventy four album Phaedra, which is incredible.

Absolutely.

In fact, I was listening to that again this morning while I was doing some prep for this episode.

Yeah, it's excellent stuff. However, this time around I forced myself to choose the other album instead, the other album being a Seo Tamita's the Bermuda Triangle, which very strange. Yeah, very strange work, but very good. I was really not that familiar with this artist or this work, which is apparently kind of hard to come by on streaming unless you just find like a YouTube full album rip. But yeah,

Now, in my experience, it wasn't that they chose for you at random. It was that whichever one of the two options was highlighted, and it was like a you know, on off toggle, like you couldn't select neither one. You were just selecting one or the other, and then you could and you could go with it or you could not go with it in whichever one you had highlighted would just proceed. So there's this kind of there's this horrible sense of like helplessness that that poses on you as the viewer.

I have not seen it. Sometimes I'll go into a restaurant or a bar and they'll have Netflix on playing some show. I've never seen them showing Bandersnatch. Probably for this.

Reason, letting all the bar paytrens vote to decide.

Well, yeah, or just going crazy like why is nobody clicking a button? Why is nobody interacting with this? Don't let don't let that choice go through. So eventually, as you as you interact with Bandersnatch, a warping of time occurs. You find yourself coming back around to pass choices like a wanderer or lost in a maze. And of course, befitting of a maze, there is a sort of minotaur in all of this. There is the bander Snatch.

Wait is it the Bandersnatch or is it the Demon Packs?

It is the Demon Packs, yeah, but I also it is also the Bandersnatch. Like it's design. Okay, it's design is roughly based on that illustration of the Bandersnatch we talked about. Okay, cool, All right, We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back we will get into the themes of bander Snatch and into the nature of choice and free will. All right, we're back.

Yeah, it takes place in the eighties with eighties music, eighties fashion, all that stuff. But they're also programming you know, old school adventure games for like the Commodore sixty four and stuff.

Yeah. Another huge part of it are Choose your Own Adventure books which are directly referenced. And then there is a book within Bandersnatch titled bander Snatch that is this enormous tone that we're told is essentially a choose your own adventure type scenario. Do you have any fond memories of choose your own adventure books?

I was obsessed with them.

I loved them when I was in elementary school, and I would love them despite the fact that you know, you die in most of the endings, like it imposes a kind of horrible paranoid fatalism on a child. I think, where you know, oh, this is a book about exploring the Arctic, but almost no matter what you do, you get eaten by a polar bear, or you fall beneath

Way, right. For instance, one film that we've talked about on the show before, William Castle's Mister Sardonicus from nineteen sixty one, was presented was marketed as having an interactive element in that at the end of this you got to choose the fate for the villain would it be, you know, justice or mercy? And the thing is, audiences

Okay, well, I mean I would say there are many reasons why this format doesn't always work. For some reason, it worked for me as a kid with to choose your own adventure books. I loved those. But I mean, one problem I think is that it's hard to make all the narrative branches as good as each other, but another one is just the like.

Yeah, like, for instance, when you finish it, I don't think there was ever a sense where I'm like, Okay, that's the ending I got. No, I want the good ending, or I want the robust ending you go.

Back and do it again. It's more like a video game or.

So I don't want the ending where I randomly die, Like the story of Super Mario is not that he's killed by a mutant turtle three minutes into the game, you know, I mean, that's not an epic tale.

So in some ways, I think the choose your own adventure books are sometimes better thought of as like a puzzle to solve than as like a narrative to be experienced. And another big difference I will say is that one of the great pleasures of watching a movie or reading a book, or you know, engaging in any kind of narrative with an author's storyteller and you as the passive audience, is a surrendering of responsibility for what is about to

Yeah, this was definitely my experience with my first viewing a Banterer Snatch is that when the decisions start start hitting you, like later on they become like this horrible choice or this horrible choice and becomes harder to play this game. But earlier on there are moments where you're like, are you going to do the sensible thing or the more rebellious thing, or even the more dangerous thing? And

Well yeah, it almost kind of gives you a little slap on the wrist for making that choice, you know. So so I don't want to spoil anything, but yeah, there's like a slight shaming of the viewer for choosing the safe option.

Yeah, and this is very early on, so we're not really you know, spoiling anything, I think nature, But yeah, I would do that a lot. I would take I would make safe choices. And in fact, it ultimately ended up reminding me a little bit of the Spacing Guild and Doune, who of course used the spices to see into the future to figure out how to navigate the dangers of space, which is helpful if your navigating the

Yeah, So I think that tension is definitely there with the movies, and I wonder if it's more the case in a movie than in a book, just because a movie is more sensorily visceral. The fact that you know that it's actually visually presented to you in video and audio makes it harder to just pursue, you know, your sort of lust for drama and weirdness and whatever it is you want to see as opposed to making the

I don't know, Yeah, maybe, So I finally finally remember the Choose you Own Your Adventure books as well, in part because they had them at the library and I could check them out. Yeah. But also another series that I finally remember, the Lone Wolf series. Were you familiar with these? So these there's a series of these. The first one was by Joe Deaver and Gary Chalk, and this is they're like a Choose your Own Adventure series, very much fantasy Dungeons and Dragon style high fantasy, but

It's more like a one player D and D module.

Yeah, exactly. It's like imagine it's like a Choose your Own Adventure book and a one player a D and D module come together into this one little tone. So I finally remember those, and I might be misremembering here, but I think I did get turned off later on when I reached an artificial dead end in one of them, like there was something broken and I couldn't go back. Oh no, yeah, but again my memory may not be

The Choose your Own Adventure book that I brought in today for you to look at Robert is called You Are a Shark by Edward Packard. It has a kid turning into a shark. He's like mid animorph sequence, oh man, but he also looks like he's slipping sliding as he turns into a shark.

Is pretty good.

That's pretty brilliant too, like channeling something that children, especially of that time, would have been familiar would have likely done, and giving this fantastic spin on it.

But the story is essentially the fingle doppling scene from Overdrawn at the Memory Bang, where he just gets transformed into various different animals. Do you know you get turned into an elephant or a seagull, or of course a shark. I think I recall one death where you get turned into a squid and you're being chased by something, maybe it is a shark, and you run out of ink to disguise yourself with and you're doomed.

All right. Well, coming back to Bandersnatch, we mentioned the video game aspect nineteen eighty four Choose your Own Adventure books. There are a number of other elements and homages in there as well. It deals with mental illness, it deals with LSD. There are allusions to Philip K. Dick. There's mention of alternate timelines, and of course it spends a lot of time contemplating this idea of a free will and the potential illusion of choice.

Yeah.

I think that's the main theme of it, is interrogating the idea of what it means to be in control of one's own actions.

Yeah. And the basic plot is as follows. A young programmer named Stephan Butler is obsessed with a choose your own adventure style book titled Bandersnatch that was written by the late troubled writer Jerome F. Davies, and he really wants to turn this into a computer adventure game, and he's begun work on it on his own. So he ends up falling in with this video game company called Tuckersoft and meets its lead creative, this programmer named Colin Rittman.

Yeah, there's a great moment where the game appears to give you an option to either deny worshiping packs or submit to worshiping packs.

Oh yes, this is the game within a game.

It made me want to play the game.

Yeah, yeah, it looked really cool.

So something that.

Made Bandersnatch different from most of the choose your own adventure books that I remember reading. I'm sure there are probably exceptions, but in the classic books I remember reading, the story is written in the second person. The protagonist is an unnamed you. You know, you go down the left hall, you get eaten by a swarm of feral pigs. You go down the right hall, you get turned into

Yeah. Likewise, in the Lone Wolf books, as I recall you, you kind of make choices regarding how this characters put together. You have a fair amount of control. It is your character.

But band ver Snatch challenges this formula a little bit by making the protagonist a third person character with a name and pre existing individualized circumstances. You've got Stefan right. But then this is where it starts getting even weirder. So not only is it this definite third person character with their own characteristics and not just a second person protagonist, there are moments where the options are you choose, not what Stefan does. That's how it mostly is. You know

Yeah, it's not really the voice of God. It is is it is something coming from inside your brain that you are perhaps imagining or interpreting as the voice of God.

But is you more synonymous with your whole brain and everything it does, or is you more synonymous with the part of your brain that you identify as yourself.

That's going to be very key to some interpretations of the base theme explored in Bandersnatch right, and they do explore this theme amazingly. Well, I felt the second time I watched it, I found all these additional layers. You know, again, I'm I'm tempted to make the best choices for a protagonist, or at least there's still that inclination that I want to do that. And at one point there's this song playing with the lyrics doing what's best for Nigel, and

Well, yes, and in a weird way, it kind of brings you back around to this question of wait a minute, is he is he a third person narrator or are you supposed to identify as him. So when these choices are in some cases things coming to him apparently from the outside, you know, they might be messages he's receiving from some kind of otherworldly source or hallucinations, are you

And in this we come to the subject of free will, which is a huge topic that we return to time and time again on stuff to blow your mind. And we're not going to try to encapsulate everything about that here. You know, we've talked about in the past, we're talking about it today, We're going to talk about it in

Yeah, it's a problem that it is such a huge topic and that almost all discussions about free will that I encounter in the wild are an absolute mess.

This is my personal take.

I noticed, do you ever notice how conversations about free will almost never seem to clarify anything. They almost never seem to provide any more focus or clarity than you had to begin with.

Yeah, Like sometimes it's at times it feels like having a conversation with somebody in a swimming pool about whether water is wet. Yeah, because it does get down to like, like it seems wet to me, I am in it.

I mean, I feel like some dilemmas having to do with free will or like they force you to choose between two options that.

Are both tautologies or both absurdities.

And any time you encounter a problem like that, I think there's a pretty good chance that the underlying disease causing that is poorly defined terms.

Right, Yeah, and yeah, to your point, the extreme versions of this are to tend to come off as kind of loony, Like if someone is just like I am a completely free moving soul, Like no, you're not dummy.

You know.

It's like when we discussed in the Thankfulness episode that we put out, you know, like everybody's life is shaped by these other factors. These are other individuals in their life to some extent, and I feel like to argue against that is just lunacy. On the other hand, if someone is saying I am a just a pure automaton, I mean, there you can back that argument up with some very intriguing arguments, and we'll get into some of those.

I totally agree, But I think even talking about it at that level, that's already like a level up, like having accepted some terms as unproblematic more than I think they should be. So like anyway, I mean, I think the main problem with free will is people aren't being clear what they're talking about before they start talking. And I'm totally guilty of this as well. This is usually the case when it comes to free will, and this happens even when we're not aware that we're being unclear,

What is free?

Will A common understanding is I am in control of my own actions. And I think most of the time for most people this feels true, though curiously, of course, not all of the time and not for all people. We can come back to that, but I would argue that it only feels true in a general way, and it gets stickier and thornier the more you try to think about it, and the more precisely you try to define those terms. So, if I'm in control of my own actions, who is I.

We brought this up a minute ago. Is I my whole brain?

I mean? Also, I think there's a good case to be made that other parts of your body gets some kind of vote in your decision making. So is it my whole body? Is it everything with my genome? Even then, I would say your microbiota sort of gets a vote. I think there are questions about what the eye is. But then also what counts as control? If I am in control of my own actions, does it mean that

You mean, like if you go to a restaurant where there's, say there's a drink menu, and you always tend to order something that is made with a base of say rum or bourbon or whiskey, and instead you throw caution to the wind one day and you get a mescal or a vodka drink.

Uh, does that actually make you feel more free or does it seem like something you know, something.

Got into you. Where does that phrase come from?

I don't know. When I do things like that, I think it does make me feel more free, because I'm like, no, I'm not gonna be the same person I've been every time I'm gonna try I had a different direction. You know, I'm going to I'm going to get a different type of drink, I'm going to try a different type of food, I'm going to walk a different way to the train station, et cetera.

Well, I mean, I would say that this just highlights that neither branch either acting in character where your character has been shaped by everything that ever happened to you, nor a by acting out of character where you know something got into you. Neither way really cites the origin of decisions or the origin of actions in something that's out without outside influence. So a lot of the arguments about whether we have free will actually seem to me to reduce to the question of whether we feel we

Oh or fate. Now that that brings me back to this demon Packs, the thief of destiny, I find myself. I found myself with the second viewing of Bandersnatch, returning to that title and trying to figure out exactly what it means. Because destiny, on one hand, means like, you're predestined, right, There is a destiny in place for you, and you perhaps don't have any real control. It is the thing that the gods have laid out for you. That's like one way of looking at But another way of looking

Well, the funny thing about it choose your own adventure is that even though you are making the choices on each page about which page to turn to next. Somebody else wrote the whole thing.

That's true, and I mean, to a certain extent, like you can. You can apply that to life, like as rebellious as you might seem, ordering something else on the menu that you normally don't get, it's still on the menu. And other things in life are like that too. Like you were large, you are constrained by the possibilities of your culture, of your station in life, of you know, political realities, et cetera.

But even then, is the unpredictability of a behavior at all evidence of your control or your personal volition.

Of that behavior. I don't know.

I mean those things seem perhaps unrelated to me.

Actually, yeah, I mean you can also be predictably unpredictable.

Yeah, But anyway, coming back to this definition, the one that's you know, acting without constraint of necessity or fate.

So I think it can be.

Hard to pin this down to a concrete claim, but I think what it comes closest to is saying that for any given action or moment in my life history, anything I do or think or say, given the exact same inputs, I could have produced different output than I actually did, And this would be I think, some way of making free will a kind of like a physical proposition. Right, If exactly the same inputs went into you, everything was exactly the same, you could have done something different than

Though we certainly love ruminating on this in our fiction. Yeah, Like any kind of time travel film, any kind of Groundhog Day scenario is exploring this subject.

Yeah.

Though, even with most of those time travel things where people want to go back and relive it, what they actually are imagining is they want to go back and relive a moment with the wisdom and knowledge that they have now that they didn't have then. So it would be funny to just like replay the same instance over and over again with exactly the same physics involved, and see if anything different happens without having.

Any new knowledge or whatever.

Oh yeah, but even then, I mean imagine maybe you could do that somehow, You know, you could just watch the same period of time play out over and over again and see if anything different happens. Even if it were true that you could have produced different outputs given the exact same inputs, would this really mean you were free? Would this be what people mean when they see free will,

That's interesting. You bring up a randomization via some sort of technology like dice or a casting of bones, because

It's funny.

I mean either way you go there. So yeah, say you're doing the etching or throwing bones. Does either or not doing that either way is one making you more the author of your own destiny than another? I'm not sure. I mean, they have differences in outcomes, right, but does that actually change what people mean when they say when they say free will?

I don't know. I mean, even if you randomize your choices, you are the one that will then enact that choice, Like you're still the actor in your narrative.

And the randomization is still an input on you.

So I don't know.

So anyway to sort of sum it all up, I've got a theory here, and it is that I think what a lot of us are actually circling around when we're trying to figure out how to articulate our concept of free will is this claim. And the claim is our consciousness dictates our choices of how we act, or in other words, we're conscious of the process by which our choices are made or by which our actions are generated.

So this is, of course, this is one of the big riddles of the human experience. And so people have been thinking about this and you know, essentially banging their head against the wall about this for thousands of years. The philosophers Democritus and Lucippus saw the universe as wholly governed by natural laws and composed of you know, essentially indivisible atoms. They took the determinist view of life of

Sure, I would say the most basic one, right is just the science of physics, Right.

Physics is very predictable.

You can, you know, given given the inputs of forces and energy and all that, you can determine what's going to happen as an output of that action. And if we assume that applies to everything, then why doesn't it apply to us?

Right?

And it basically comes back to Democritus and Lucipus, right, the idea that their natural laws and they that are in place, and we are not above those laws.

Sure.

Yeah, So we're acting on the inputs that come in and you know that be being pushed in one way or another by our life history and our brains and all that we're going to act a certain way as physically reactive objects. Now this is an argument, of course, it's the most common argument I think against free will. But one question is our free will and causal determinism

Will, right right. Another take on this that I came across, and this goes back to something we were talking about earlier, contemporary British analytic philosopher Galen Straws, and their argument is that that basically free will is impossible because we act the way we are right in this argument, This argument always makes me think of Yates in the poem No Second Troy. There's that line what could she have done?

Right?

I mean, this is That's a very good way of putting it. It almost like it maybe emphasizes the fact that free will is a difficult concept because of some of the baggage brought by the word free. Yeah, to act in accordance with your nature and your circumstances is not necessarily not.

Free, right, Like it was in my nature to responsibly come to work this morning, and so therefore I did. Could I have decided not to come into work? Could I have gone to the local at an arcade or something, or whatever whatever one does when one skips quirk, I guess I could have.

In theory, there's nothing stopping you.

Yeah, nothing at all, except that is not my nature, and that is not what I did. Because of my.

Nature, given the circumstances of who you are and who you were, this morning and what was going on this morning. You didn't do it, and that's all we know is that you know you acted the way you were at that time because that's who you were at that time.

Yeah. Now that being said, yes, events could have been different. We could have had an email from our boss saying that there was going to be like a rock concert in the in the office today. That would never happen, and it might make me think, well, maybe I don't want to come into work today, and maybe the easiest

Yeah, I think this very much complicates the idea that Again, what I think people are actually really getting at with their idea of free will is that they have conscious control over their actions and thoughts.

And another one, and this is again we've been touching on this the whole episode, but myriad causal influences at least guide our decisions, if not make them for us.

Yeah, hard to deny.

All right, So here are some arguments for free will. The big one, of course, is that subjectively, we tend to feel like we have rational, reflective control over our choices and actions.

Sure, I mean, I can decide to do anything that occurs to me to do right now. You know, I could throw my computer across the room if I really wanted to.

Yeah. And and the idea, the way that that our brains enable us to simulate these possibilities really I think allows us to lean into that interpretation because it's like the Choose your own adventure book. The other choices are in there, and if we want to, we can cheat, and we can check one out and then back up. And in a way, you know, we can't do that in real life except through our ability to simulate possible futures. And and of course that has an important evolutionary role,

Unfortunately, I would say about this argument, it does often feel that way that you know, like I could have done anything a minute ago, but you didn't. You did what you did. So again, this comes back to the untestability of this one, like there's just never any way to prove that you could have done differently than you did in the moment.

Like if you ever had a like a close call where say you're almost in a wreck or you almost do something that could have conceivably gotten you killed, and then you have that moment of reflection granted. On one level, like it may get you just bodily you're excited, right because this has happened and your body's on high alert.

Yes, it makes you suddenly you come face to face with how dependent you are on moment to moment circumstances and awareness. Though I would say a lot of times when I get that like that, like oh, you know, catch your breath about what could have happened. It wasn't because I narrowly avoided something really bad happening. It's because I suddenly, out of nowhere, imagined something really bad happening.

Oh yeah, oh yeah, I do that. This is of course, this is one of my pitfalls, is to almost constantly, essentially fantasize about bad things that could happen. And I think a lot of us do that you know, and part of that is your mind is exploring possibilities, sure of what is happening or could happen or has happened.

It seems like the curse of all this confusion about whether we have free will or not and what that actually means, could just be rooted in the fact that we can consider hypothetical alternative scenarios. The fact that we're able to imagine counterfactuals is what makes is what gives rise to this whole argument.

So another thing I have in the list here, and this basically is just an extrapolation of everything we're talking about right now, is Philosophers Stephen Cave and also Bruce Waller have both argued that animals evolved with the capabilities we tend to associate with free will in order to survive, such as opinion generation, deliberation, will, power to stick to a choice, and the large human brain has all of

I do think that's possible, but I also think that that would be subject to a lot of debate about exactly what.

It is you're measuring.

There as a lot of these actual you know, human or animal quotients are I mean, when you measure human intelligence, there's debate about what exactly are you measuring, And I think the same thing would be true of freedom subject to all of these you know, crazy caveats we've been talking about so far.

What do you mean when you say freedom?

Yeah. Another take on this that I had read in the past was something that neuroscientists David Eagleman called the principle of sufficient automatism. And the idea here is that the more that we map the human genome and study the brains many subconscious machinations, the more it becomes clear that a free will exist. It's only a hitching a

But it might only be a very very little bit of something.

Yeah, it might, And it's interesting to sort of do that, to do a little self reflection and think about that, Like, yes, I had choice in the Senate situation, but really, how much choice was there?

Yeah, and I think for me at least some of the definition problems would still remain, Like, I'm not sure that even then that's clarifying what the concept of freedom means. There, So we can't test whether it's possible for a person to produce different outputs given the exact same inputs. That just seems beyond the bounds of empiricism. You could believe that if you want, but I don't think there's any evidence for it. But this might not be what we

This is a study that really intrigued me. I remember when it came out because it's basically this idea where I think that I'm the lightning, but perhaps I am the thunder, or at least my experience is that of the thunder. But then the other question is, well, does that mean I'm not the lightning? Am I not? Both? And maybe just like I have a thunder level awareness of what I am, but there is this lightning that precedes this experience of me.

Well, I mean, I don't know, I mean the decision is generated by the brain. So again you're back to this question of what free will means. But if it does have something to do with consciously being a participant at the moment that a decision is made, there's pretty good evidence that that's not going on. The brain is making decisions before the person thinks I have made a decision. But okay, that was two thousand and eight. Is there

That comes back to something we talked about recently.

Yeah, As the decision of what to think about is made, executive areas of the brain choose the thought trace which is stronger. In other words, if any pre existing brain activity matches one of your choices, then your brain will be more likely to pick that option as it gets

So again, kind of a thunder and lightning scenario right now.

Of course, this stuff we've been talking about is true of typical human brains. Once you start looking at atypical neurological situations, you can find all kinds of evidence of

Right, which can be a dangerous exercise.

Absolutely, I'm not advising that as a good strategy. I'm just saying people do it to look quickly at one more study.

I found.

This was published in twenty eighteen in PNAS by Darby, Jautza, Burke, and Fox called lesion network localization of free will. Very briefly, the authors here define the neurologically relevant parts of free will as having two parts. So first of all, there's the desire to act, that's volition. You got volitional control, and then a sense of responsibility for that action, which is the feeling of agencies. So you got volition and agency.

It moves, but you don't feel like you did it.

And then they basically found that brain lesions that disrupt volition occur all over the brain, but they're within a brain network that is connected in some way to the anterior cingulate cortex. And they found that lesions that disrupt agency also occur in different locations around the brain, but they tend to be defined by connectivity to a part

Now, obviously we could keep going here. We could keep discussing free will and what feels like free will and how it matches up with neuroscientific data, etc. But at this point the podcast, we probably do need to bring it back around to Bandersnatch and the question like, Okay, given all this stuff that we've talked about, what does

I would say a thing that is a theme that is hammered home about free will, and it is the more we look at the concept of free will and think about whether we have control over our actions, the less we feel we have it.

Yeah, Like I was thinking, I'm trying to list, like all the various factors and agents that are influencing Stephan in the story. I mean, we have his mental health, his past trauma, his father, his therapy, the work and tragic life, the influence of Jerome F. Davies, his boss at Tuckersoft, his mentor slash hero slash friend Colin Rittman,

Yeah, the story really brings home this paradox, which is that I think it is the case that the closer we look at free will, and the more we bring our sharpest scientific tools and philosophical instruments to understand it, the less it seems to make sense, and the less it seems to be there. And yet at the same time that we acknowledge that to feel like your actions are not under your own control is not a heightened state of consciousness, that is still a problem. Yeah, and

Absolutely, now, this seems this may seem like a logical place to end the conversation, but one of the things that's really interesting here is that is that we were talking about an episode of Black Mirror that deals with free will and our choices in life. And certainly again Black Mirror frequently comments on our unease regarding new technology, but then band or Snatch itself this show on Netflix

Yes, you know, I would say one of the things that is a legitimate concern about free will, however you

Does that make sense?

Yeah? Yeah, And we've we've discussed some of these in the past. We've discussed a number of these in the past, but technologically speaking, we have discussed advertising and we have discussed social media, which are good things to keep in mind as we continue here. Because there might not be a band or snatcher, a demon awaiting you in the maze of future interactive media technology. But there there might

Nice.

But it turns out this was an actual UK product. It was just a UK only product, so Americans such as ourselves were perhaps not privy to it. But again, both were real products, and neither one was a paid inclusion, so it was not a official product placement or product integration. And Netflix, of course is like an ad free system anyway.

Oh no, I did too. I feel so vulnerable right now.

I don't remember what I did the first time around the first time I watched it, I also watched with my wife, so we were voting on which choices. You know, we're having a discussion. I guess I should have mentioned that earlier, because that has a whole other wrinkled as a scenario of making communal choices and voting on something. But on my own, I chose the Quaker thing just because I thought it looked weirder. Okay, but again I'm

Now.

She writes that while Netflix doesn't run commercials and has stated that it would not use bandersnatch information for anything like this, others outside the company do see the potential, namely, in quote, the possibility of inserting brand name products into streaming shows based on data generated by interactive programming. Now, Shoe stresses that the technology to roll this out isn't here yet. But I suppose we have to consider two

Those are also sort of failed.

Yeah, you know, I would have there are certainly deeper dives and say the history of things like what Telltale Games I think was the company maybe that did a number of these things that were again not really released as they weren't marketed as interactive movies so much as they were interactive gaming experiences. So that's one thing to consider.

I can really see this kind of thing being used as a as a major data mining I mean, I don't know, it seems very possible to get psychologically salient information through this.

Yeah.

Now, of course that they're already getting information through all kinds of things. You know, the tech business can get your information through through what you buy online, through what websites you visit, through what you do on Facebook or other social media.

Right Like, a website like Netflix already knows what kind of movies you have watched, what kind you like, what kind of movies you want to like, and then also you know how you have rated things as well, and then they can serve you a recommendation of what you might want to watch in the future.

Right now, This is so, of course we're talking about this and possibly going multiple ways. One is using interactive choices in a film to gather data about you, and the other side would be giving like specially user tailored media experiences, which we already get somewhat of course on websites, you know, you get websites loading with the ad of

Right right, Like, you know, they know that given the serial scenario, like potentially the master of the content, be it Netflix or some other company, Hypothetically, they might know that you are, say more inclined towards, you know, healthy lifestyle choices, and therefore some sort of granola, you know, health wrapped content would be ideal for you in that scenario.

Now, that would be, of course, something we're more familiar with, just like inserting ads. And you might imagine a character walking past a billboard or something in a movie like happens all the time now except that billboard can be you know, dynamically inserted with new imagery or something.

Right.

I think things start getting even creepier when you imagine something more like Band or Snatch Itself, where there are alternative versions of a film that are specially tailored to you,

Or I don't know, I guess you could make an argument for awards season Academy Awards bait as well.

Right, yeah, sure, you know, just like sort of cheap attempts to exploit the specific desires or value interests of a specific target audience.

Right, And so you can imagine.

Okay, well, now if a movie is made and it wants to pander, it needs to at least make a choice. Right, It's hard to pander to everybody at the same time. But you can imagine, Okay, what if somebody just starts making more like a Bandersnatch kind of thing where maybe you don't make the choices, the choices are made for you based on what is known about your user profile. And so what I was imagining beforehand was you could have different versions of the movie Independence Day.

You remember that speech Bill Pullman gives before they all get in the planes and go fly off and fight.

Oh yes, So it's.

This rousing moment where Bill Pullman gives this kind of innocus speech that could appeal to basically anybody. But you can make that speech a much more tailored, specific interest group pandering kind of thing, where you could have one version of the film that plays for somebody that's that's very inclusive. He gives a speech he's like, humans will join arms together around the world. There will be no

Right, I mean, and that that kind of personality profile or worldview profile would be pretty easy to acquire. I mean, basically websites like Facebook have that information. Like sure, they're not feeding you independence day to a tailored speech in it, but they are feeding giving you a feed that that reflects your world views and values.

And people are very invested in like the values of what media they consume these days. I can imagine it being judged a very profitable enterprise by some studios to say, well, let's just cover all the bases. You know, we'll have way less trouble if we make a movie, you know, a version A of the movie for you and a version B of the movie for you. It doesn't have to be a coherent vision or picture of the world.

Yeah, this is you know. I can't help but think on past films, like, for instance, we talked about Conan the Barbarian on the show in the past, like that is a film that has a has a very particular view of what strength means and what, uh you know, how power works, et cetera. And it's not everybody's political or philosophical cup of tea. Sure, I mean you can. I think you can enjoy that film without focusing on

Right Yeah, I think you could say that about a lot of like war movies, especially. I think that might be sort of true of Platoon, right yeah, is that like an anti.

War movie or a patriotic movie?

You know, you sort of have some elements of each you can latch onto what you want to see there, But yeah, I don't know. I'm somewhat disturbed by the idea of like of media filling up with these like personally tailored options that are designed to make a sort of like generic media template individually palatable to the user, as opposed to standing for something on its own and allowing you to judge it.

Yeah, or having some level of ambiguity, like does the as the modern audience and like the near future audience, do they want ambiguity in their work or do they want like a clear cut view that is expressed clear cut values not only of the film, but of like the creator or creators behind it, like they you know,

You know.

The twenty twenty eight relaunch of the platform then you will get what is tailored to you. It's treatment of masculinity and power will be exactly what you want to see. And I mean that opens the door to just a big question of like what art is and what does that do to you know, to the role of these narratives in our culture.

I remember many years ago how much of like the new Internet and the new media landscape was being sold to us. It was so often on the selling point of customization and individualization. You know, get what's right for you, get an experience that's personally tailored for you. And somehow I just feel like we were not able to anticipate how scary and messed up that would feel when it actually happened.

Yeah, Yeah, I like to come back to Bandersnatch. The first time I watched it, I think it probably was over two hours that I spent questing after the happy ending, and I got it, and I have to admit I felt a little empty when I reached it. The second time, I tried to just again make more dramatic choices, make a choice here and there that were just different from

Had to find a good bleak note to end on. I think that's it.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, if we're talking about black Mirror, that's where we have to leave it. All right, Well, we covered a lot of ground in there. I imagine listeners will want to chime in, certainly on Bandersnatch if they have experienced it. I'd love to hear from anyone who's like, how much time did you spend on Banderstatch? How many viewings have you given? Did you do like Joe and go in and try and find every golden Easter egg?

I didn't get all of them, but I got a lot of them.

Or did you do like me? Did you sort of go through it once and maybe go through a second time? And maybe you haven't seen or haven't read about the other endings. And of course free will you all have it or maybe you all don't have it but you think you have it, which however you want to look at it. You all have some thoughts about free Will. You all have some experience to share about this, and we would love to hear from you in the meantime.

Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson, who is doing a heroic quick turnaround on today's episode, So praise him, everyone, praise him. If you would like to get in touch with us with notes on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hi, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.