June video (Free will with bonus content)

Before I go – I'll be cancelling my subscription now, as I am also a Nebula subscriber & need to cut costs – just want to say thanks for these extra videos. I appreciate your ability to discuss matters largely off-the-cuff (along with the accompanying relief of not having constant jumps, as most such video essayists do). Incidentally, this has long been my own opinion on the Free Will question also. The videos I liked the most were the ones about Feinman, billionnaires – which I still find endlessly enjoyable, such worthwhile take-downs of hubris – & the former reminded me of the "Nietzsche bros" that would haunt the halls during my time at university in the 1990s (no doubt they still do), with their arrogance & eternally, painfully sophomoric takes on any & every philosophical question, such as free will. Again, thanks for your work.

I agree when some YouTube science personality talks about freewill I am not sure what do they mean by that, some kind of philosophical argument or a physics analogy that is of little meaning.

As a theoretical neuroscientist, I really appreciate that you called out the dualism at 13:14. Because of neuroscience’s Cartesian roots (which trace back through psychology (including psychoanalysis) back to philosophy), and the cultural/religious inclinations of many scientists at the time, there’s still a strong tendency, both in neuroscience and in popular culture, to treat the mind and body as fundamentally separate. Maybe it's because I study physics and applied math, but even from a philosophical perspective, I’ve always seen the mind as an emergent property of biological systems; in other words, you can think of consciousness as the flow in a "higher-dimensional state space" that emerges from patterns or configurations across many layers of biological systems (e.g. genetic, molecular, cellular, circuit-level etc). It's not something entirely distinct from your body. It’s like how muscular movement, or even more, nonverbal communication or dance, arises from the past and present state of your musculoskeletal system. We don’t interpret tapping our feet to music before we consciously notice it as proof that we’re somehow detached from our bodies. You ARE your body, not just your conscious awareness of it. That awareness is only the tip of the iceberg. Everything we think of as “you” (e.g. your interests, preferences, dislikes) is shaped by the past and current physical state of your body (at I find that to be the most tractable way to model it in a scientific context). It’s proven to be entangled with your genetics, neural activity, and environment. So to cling to a rigid mind-body split (or even the fundamental separation of the brain and the rest of the conductive tissues or dynamical processes in the human body) feels pretty outdated to me.

I find that many of my friends are totally bored by discussions of free will, yet they will talk endlessly about sports teams or golf or tennis. So strange.

Thank you for the bonus content! Also, I really liked the Car Talk video. I used to listen to them every weekend. Brought back good memories.

Quantum randomness does not provide free will, but it might eliminate the main argument against it. Though my no free will friend argues that quantum randomness averages out and disappears on the macro scale. Is there any truth to that?

If there is no free will, would it be right to punish someone who had no choice but to commit their crime? If there is no moral issue with the crime, then in the same way it would not be wrong to punish them. You had no choice but to punish them.

I really appreciated the bonus content Angela - that was swell. Re the 10K subscriber vid, I've looked everywhere for that vid as I saw a thumbnail somewhere with the oscilloscope - is there a link somewhere? Anyone?

Why did Angela post 15 minutes of black text on white background that says, "Hi Patreon, this is bonus content?"

Good video. I agree the answer to the free will question is not important to how people live their life because the notion of having agency is at the center of living your life, not necessarily in the jury box but in simple things like what you do to stay in your lane when driving on a curvy road: of course at all moments, Newton's law isn't being violated, and yet you can navigate and go where you need to go.

I feel like some psychology people like the free will question in a similar way to how some physics people like the dark matter question. I agree that it isn't really a physics question.. Unless you are talking about exploiting a lack of it in some way to obtain funding for research perhaps. I think it's interesting that when detached from the question of determinism free will and agency basically become interchangeable terms. That makes it even less about physics and more about psychology, sociology, politics, marketing, propaganda, chemistry and just about everything but physics.

Free Willy on the other hand is very much a physics question.

sentience does not exist, free will does not exist. We are meat puppets that do random stuff unless it benefits eating, pooping and having sex. We are not special. the end.

A commenter on the youtube video (and probably others here - I haven't read them all yet) posted a version of my general take on free will: the question is moot. If you have it, you don't need to worry about it. If you don't have it, there's nothing you can do about it.

I don't think randomness implies free will at all, but I think what people are trying to get at with arguments in that space can be expressed better. I think the thought is that if there's randomness or things that cannot be measured with certainty, then it leaves room for - let's call it an extraplanar entity - to be controlling the outcomes of events without us being able to tell. So if this extraplanar entity is the real "you" or "your soul" or whatever one might want to describe it as, then free will can be your extraplanar-self-entity deciding how the wave function collapses in your brain. I'm not saying I agree with the explanation, but I think that's what the quantum->freedom argument is trying to lean on. I do think there could be an interesting mathematical analysis about whether such an extraplanar entity could exist and how hard it would be for that entity to go undetectable while still exerting its will. For example- could it not do it at all? or could it do it but only if it knew when and how humans were choosing to look for it? or could it do it but it would be more restricted in its output than the laws of physics? or is it so easy that it can do whatever it wants and doesn't even have to try to hide itself?

We had a FLYING FUCKING SQUIRREL in our apartment last year. We're in a fairly quiet neighborhood in the city of Chicago, but who ever heard of a flying squirrel in the city?! I thoght those things were in David Attenborough nature shows, not in my house.

Oh no the chipmunk in the attic... I had a raccoon get into mine and it about broke me until we got it out (I also called a guy). I hope yours is easier to resolve than mine was! And the 4th of July stuff sounds exciting! Can't wait to see how that goes!

@acollierastro: Is there any place you list the resources you used for this video? For folks that enjoy this sort of stuff, a couple of recent recommendations: Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind -- Annaka Harris Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will -- Robert Sapolsky

If the brain isn't a physics problem because you're not a neuroscientist, how do you avoid "bridges are not a physics problem because you're not a material sciences engineer"? If the components of the brain are entirely physical in nature, how can it not be a physics problem? Complexity doesn't change that, nor does our ability to explain or reproduce physical effects.

Wait a minute.... if it's obvious the bacteria in my body is "me", then you're drawing a line I don't see how you can defend: what about foreign bacteria sitting on the skin? What about bacteria I breathe in? OK, then, it's all one system, and you're left arguing that bacteria sufficiently far away has diminishing effects on "you", which seems like the same argument Harris makes when he stops at the top of the spinal cord.

One piece of the Free Will question that's interesting to me is -- if the universe is deterministic, then what's the evolutionary utility of us having conscious minds that are deluded into thinking we're constantly making decisions? Everything from choosing today's lunch to big political debates about how society should allocate our resources -- if all of that is decided by chemical reactions doing what they were predestined to do by a chain of causality going back the Big Bang... Well, for me that's a pretty big mindfuck.

There’s a thought experiment I like that I’m sure many others have thought of before. I want to preface it by saying I really don’t think this is a deep idea or has bearing on reality. It’s more of a proof of concept that people will always be able to believe in god and free will if they want. A sufficiently chaotic brain would allow a deity or soul to interfere undetectably by say collapsing wavefunctions in a particular way or even just doing classical nudges. I don’t think that’s happening (because it’s stupid) but I do think it gives free will and god a corner to hide in that experiment can’t shine a light into. The chaotic dynamics you mentioned are the perfect place to sneak a god or a soul in. Worst case just do it when no one is looking, because idk man you’re god you can probably avoid a sneaky physicist. While the hypothetical is dumb, I do think it’s sufficient to show that you can’t possibly disprove free will from physics, and not even from neuroscience. There will always be some philosophical or even religious component. The whole resource limitation thing is also weird to me. Like we’re talking about a god designing a universe. Whenever I’m in the unenviable position of hearing we-live-in-a-simulation bros talk about their belief it feels like it’s always “well if it was a simulation, you’d have to do this, and this is indeed done so clearly it’s a simulation”. Idk bro maybe it’s just like that. I think they’re cool questions and fun to think about but also prime territory for grifters to use arguments like that to say quantum mechanics proves consciousness or whatever the hell t’Hooft is on about

Pretty sure a computer that can do a realistic simulation would collapse into a black hole.

I think maybe in the future, you could massage the patreon topics even more to suit your interest. It's totally cool to not be interested in this question, but I think the video really felt like it was made by someone with no interest in the question, which is a huge contrast to your other videos.

We must use our free will, we don't have a choice

I thought my Pocket Aquinas from grammar school pretty much summed all this stuff up. Philosophy since the Protestant Reformation has seemed to me somewhat detached from reality. Although agnostic about almost everything these days, I'm pretty sure god wouldn't put executables in his simulation. Loved the Car Talk video. Tom and Ray are the kind of people you want to hang out with, as are you. I'm guessing the oscilloscope is a Tectronics, although not exactly like the ones I remember. I've been to Fordsville, KY. People there just sat outside staring up at the Milky Way, so bright one could reach up and touch it. If you go there wear long socks.

Hi Angela! About the universe being eternal in general relativity, I think I know what they mean. It is called "block universe theory". The starting point is that we have this intuitive gut feeling that only the present "is real". The past has disappeared, and the future has not been realized yet. Thus, if you are a philosopher studying ontology, you may ascribe a stronger notion of existence to the present, which past and future do not have. Now, let's do it in relativity. You need to take your 4D spacetime manifold, and define a 3D slice inside it which defines what is "real". As this slice travels from past to future, our experience of reality unfolds (since we can only experience real things). In particular, as I am writing, I see on the screen that it is 7:28 am Nashville time. I should thus argue that the portion of 3D slice that covers Nashville is currently localized upon the t=7:28 am portion of spacetime. If you are used to working with general relativity, this does not feel right. Due to relativity of simultaneity, the existence of a PREFERRED foliation in 3D slices breaks general covariance. Of course, there is the 3+1 formalism of general relativity, where one introduces slices of this kind. But they are ARBITRARY. They are not fundamental objects. Hence, in general relativity, it is natural to argue that the whole 4D manifold shares the same "degree of existence" (whatever this may mean). The past has not disappeared, and the future is not uncertain. They are just inaccessible to us at this point in our existence, in the same sense that the Andromeda Galaxy is inaccessible (but still exists).

This video was grounding for me. Like the YouTuber, miniminuteman, dispelling me of Graham Hancock; this dispelled me of the physics grift. It's fun to wonder, but healthier to not get wrapped up in it.

If existence is deterministic, why do we need to determine what will happen? Presupposing a chaotic world is reasonable if humanity wants to effect the future. If people want to know the future to be prepared for it psychologically, this knowledge will adjust their affective responses, which are physical responses and modifying them will effect reality.

I used to study this stuff, and it's been a while, but a factor that you don't mention is genetics. And we don't like to talk about genetic determinism because it inevitably leads to talk of eugenics and that's never cool, but we have to talk about it or else you get sneaky eugenics which is even less cool. Anyway, twin studies have shown that there is a degree of heritability to human behavior, and adopted twin studies even show heritability of things like alcoholism, which has implications for how our behavior effects our genetics and what gets passed on. I see a lot of people in the chat saying free will is a waste of time to study, but doesn't that imply that all genetics is worthless? Why would we study genetics as it applies to the body but not the mind? In the video you talk about Sam Harris and the way he talks about consciousness being somehow separate from the body. It's called the mind-body problem and it's real. I always explain it by pointing out that we think of our bodies as our possessions rather than "us." If someone took your brain out of your body and wired it into a robot, you would think of the robot as you. You would look at your body and think "that was my body". So even though your body IS you, paradoxically you also see it as something separate. I want to go on but I feel like I'm pushing the length. So maybe I'll just say that while free will isn't a physics problem, it's by no means a simple yes or no

Yeah, I think of it the same way I think of hard solipsism - it's kind of a dead end. We don't have any information to progress further than "might be, mightn't it?" and it seems unlikely we'll be able to get the info we need to resolve it any time soon if at all. So once you understand the concept there's not really anything to talk about.

funny how this video has so much comments and discussion in "defiance" of Angela mainly saying that she doesnt understand why this question is even interesting. Feels like an eternal "is Pluto a planet?" kind of situation.

This "mundus sine caesaribus" shirt is fire. Bluesky ftw!

I really like what you say here and I’m a professional philosopher. So I’m thinking if you want to know philosophers’ views on free will I can tell you it’s wildly divergent. But I think ethicists approach it most thoroughly and a great writer on it (now sadly passed) is Mary Midgeley. Her ‘Are You an Illusion’ written in her 90’s about 10 years ago is great and accessible. One other thing: does quantum physics mean free will, coz chance? In my view: no, absolutely not. That’s Diceman territory. (Weird book from the 70’s). The philosopher I like on it is Richard Taylor - another 70’s book I got - again, called Determinism and Free Will - has a nice paper by him on it. Short and I found it clear and meaningful

I enjoyed the video, especially your reaction to philosophical word salad.

It's not whether it's a physics question, it's whether it's a meaningful one. Free from what? Physics? It made some kind of sense when people were wondering "if God is all powerful, how can you still be free to make your own decisions?" But outside of that context it has no clear meaning, at least not to my understanding.

I wouldn't know from your video that you didn't find the question interesting if you hadn't said it directly at the end. I do find the question interesting while also finding it inconsequential and moot. Why that is I don't know. I'm not a stoner. Maybe I missed my calling? See you next time, friend! Don't go changing on me!

I read that Sam Harris book and a few other authors a long time ago. I'm sure I talked to people about it. I feel like I thought it was a thing. As I was watching your video, I was realizing it's been wiped. I don't remember anything about any of the books. I don't remember anything about what my thoughts were. Really enjoyed your delivery of your conclusion (before the patreon credits), nice mic drop.

Yeah, FW is moot. Good video, thx! Did you send the chipmunk to live at a farm upstate? Did you learn to solder for the telescope?

Free will is the kind of subject that Carl Sagan could do a decent bit on. I can imagine him in turtleneck, sitting in the dunes of Tunisia or something drawing in the sand and talking about the history of the idea. From ancient philosophers first musings all the way to Eugene Wigner proposing that consciousness collapses the wave function as an ultimate expression of free will. It really isn't that interesting a question though. I don't know how the universe is functionally or mechanically any different with or without free will. Maybe I'm just a dullard.

Oh, and one more thought: please try not to worry so much about how people will react if you say you like or don't like something. I know this is impossible, because I can't do it myself either -- I've had articles published and in the comments section, a hundred people commented that they loved it, and two people said they hated it, and I would obsess over those two people for weeks. But please try to stick to your own instincts about what you want to discuss.

It's kind of hilarious to hear people try to make the argument that: "Oh, you shouldn't punish this person for what they did, because that person had no free will." I mean, couldn't you just respond that the people writing the laws that specified the punishment, the judges who confirmed that the laws were broken, and the police who enforced the punishment, had no free will either? It seems like whether or not free will exists has precisely zero to do with anything that happens in society. We still have to think about what laws are just and what laws are unjust, and whether or not we could improve society by providing more help and assistance to people. Saying that free will doesn't exist doesn't eliminate these problems, nor the difficult choices people make to try and solve them.

The biggest problem with free will debates is that they are a back and forth between two people talking like Jordan Peterson. No one can agree on the definition of what free will means and therefore it's an endless battle between strawmen in which both sides have endless wiggle room. I did find neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky's take to be a far better one that Sam Harris's even though they have a similar conclusion. His argument is also really about criminal justice reform a la restorative justice, and that we should have empathy for the circumstances that create criminals while also having more accountability for elites who have similar brains that allow them to hurt people but the circumstances that allow them to be CEOs or politicians instead. He also notes the problem of the replication crisis and only cited replicated studies in a way that was surprising for a pop science book. Also, one of the better random arguments is that judges are statistically more lenient in sentences given right after lunch and harsher at the end of the day. Despite this the rationalizing side of the brain will allow them to always justify their actions on legal precedent regardless.

LOVE this, so absolutely true, I’ve read some of these books, and ughhhh….

Happy Data collecting. And I liked that the Nebula version is the same as the YouTube. And the 'special' version is just here. Now I have to go get stoned with by friend in the quad and talk about the color blue...

Thank you, Dr. Collier. The bonus footage is appreciated. It's great. I like your points about PSI. I found a long time ago that a PSI existed between me & my favorite teachers. In something like recent memory, Prof Susskind gave me an unexpected pat on the back, metaphorically. He confided to me one-on-one, "I remember you." LOL. So many students & classes have sat in front of him, for so many years, that I might be a needle in a haystack like that, is a miracle of modern physics. And, of course, of no consequence. I tend to agree with you on many things. We can add free will to the list. Your reframing of the question is apt. Your humor, & the fact that you find so much of what we say & do, as well as the way the world is, to be funny, or if not quite that but then gallows humor, I see myself as like that. Your captions are jewels. You've asked for feedback on a bunch of your decisions lately, & even apologized for some of them. I hereby give you my hearty, blanket approval on all of them.

I care about the question of free will but only because I believe it is useful in looking at social class and outcomes. I still hold to the belief that 99% of where you are in life, at any given moment, can be traced back to two basic factors, where you were born and who your parents are. The idea of free will seems to feed the "just world bias" allowing people to feel justified in judging the less fortunate as being less fortunate because of their "bad choices" rather than acknowledging that much of our circumstance is completely out of our control. So the idea of it being a physics question, I agree with your conclusion and enjoyed the video, but for me I do find the implications of believing free will is a thing to be far reaching.

i also don't care if free will exists. it is a useless question. you feel like you have free will, you feel like you exist. that's the important part.

Letting the main channel video run on my phone while I watch so you still get the ad rev 👍🏾

Building a radio telescope would be really cool! But dont stress out please. And if the results are null or errors or problems, I'd like to hear that just as well. And regarding the question how I'm doing ... the main things I am worried about most is a) whether the US society, institutions and constitution will be able to stop the Republican fast track to fascism, and b) if, when and how the international community will be able to stop Putin. It's really devastating to see that large parts of us don't give a shit about people losing their lives and instead get enraged about pronouns or genitalia or race or "socialism". The one thing this always leads me to is that our most powerful tool (sadly) is probably to call people out. To tell people we see how despicable they are, and that a few years later, they won't be able to claim ignorance.

how dare you talk about parasocial relationships. you've changed 👍 good video.

One thought on the aspect of computing power demands on god's laptop: wouldn't a machine able to compute the development of the whole universe be necessarily bigger than it? Or: it would need more parts / memory cells / etc. than the universe has particles? In other words, it seems that a much more efficient approach to this computing challenge would be simply the universe itself. It already does that. Universe.exe is still running, the jury's still out. Or: the jury might never reconvene to pass final judgement, because the universe might not be finite (in time).

The free will discussion reminds me a lot of the "is a taco a sandwich" discussion in my vibes-based taxonomy of discussions. It's interesting to the type of person that enjoys debate without having anything really important come up in said debate. I say that as someone who does enjoy these sorts of discussions because it's fun to see how people argue in favor of their beliefs in low stakes situations. It doesn't really matter if we have free will, it doesn't really matter if a hot dog is a taco, it doesn't really matter if Pluto is a planet, and it doesn't really matter if we live in a simulation. I believe these topics come up anyway because the concepts are accessible to everyone, so anyone can talk about them, and debating them can be fun for some people.

I cannot accept the notion that Sabine Hossenfelder does not have a choice whether to make these "I am Galileo and the only one daring to speak the truth" videos or not. She has to be held responsible for this.

Please publish the full version for everyone. Thank you so much!

Personally, I'm very thankful for the light take on the subject. I don't know why, any time "free will" is mentioned, the intellectual within me starts to scream like "free will is a very technical concept of Thomas Aquinas who was not able to accept predestination is the only conclusive solution for monotheism (see Calvin's double predestination (which implicitly implies the concept of God is necessarily murky and limiting and crippling, which is indeed hard to swallow)). Leave that bastard child alone!!!". Gosh, we got over it without any pain. (+1: in this month "Bertolt Brecht's Writing the Truth, Five Difficulties" is spreading within my circles, in case you don't know that essay ...) (+2: The Car Talk video was great, that reminded me the three steps of problem solving a lot, like 1. do something 2. do something you enjoy 3. do something you enjoy and effective against the problem. People always forget 2 then they just don't get why they don't get to anywhere.)

I know many physicists who have flooded the field of neuroscience. I wonder if it's because of the free will issue. I think you might enjoy existentialist view on free will, because they are not so much concerned with any metaphysical concept of free will (or whether it exists or not), but rather with the choices that people have to make and the consequences of those choices.

Brilliant video - thank you for saving us from having to read those tedious books. Please do post this to your main channel because I'd like to send it to a lot of people who do like the whole Free Will debate. BTW, you didn't mention it but I presume you have seen Sabine Hossenfelder's typically forthright video on free will?

Great video, love how you tackle these topics. Looking forward to the telescope project in good ol' Kentucky.

Am I misunderstanding what you mean by free will not being a physics question? Let's say I believe in FW and think that I can decide between raising my right or left hand. That decision has an effect on the physical world, so true FW can only exist if there are things, like my ego or whatever controls my FW, that are outside of the laws of physics whether they are deterministic or quantum or whatever. Isn't that the real meaning of Free is in FW? So IMO you can only believe that there is real FW if you think there is something greater than physics that influences what goes on in the real world. And that sounds nuts to me. ps: IMO the ability to actually calculate the future is irrelevant.

It doesn't matter to me if you end up posting the video to the main channel. You still made what we voted for and gave it to us.

To me it has a lot to do with scale. The position of the earth in 3 years is pretty well determined, but the brownian motion of a molecule is 'sensitive to initial conditions.' The weather is a good chaotic example of something that's so sensitive to initial conditions that it's impossible to predict more than a few weeks out. In a way our atmosphere has free will because not matter how accurately we try to model it, it's going to surprise us on a long enough time-scale. To model it, we would have to model every quantum field involved at every scale. I see a person's decisions as similarly predictable on a large scale, but moment to moment, it's sensitive to a lot of environment and internal-to-the-body chemical processes that we perceive as free will. Pretty much what you're saying, but just tied to chaos. Och... exactly what you're saying at 26 minutes. I should have watched the whole video! Good stuff Angela.

"Do people equate probably in quantum mechanics with free will?" Well, people like Chopra who don't actually understand quantum mechanics do.

In case no one has mentioned, I think the handheld microphone really adds to the vibe! 🙂

I’m a Patreon to provide support and I see time spent on Patreon exclusive content against my wish for content being available for everyone to enjoy. I love your video about Nuclear energy and I wish it was public. 🌷❤️

I actually prefer you put it up on YouTube. I don't share the exclusive patreon video links to people cause they didn't pay and I feel that's cheating you out of a subscription, but at the same time I want to share it with people most times. Maybe I'm in the minority and it's not financially savvy to gatekeep content, but I'll support you either way with my extremely tiny subscription lol.

Thanks!

Only speaking for myself, but I have zero interest in Patreon exclusive content. Things like the raffle are cool, but I support your work because you're the type of educator I want to see representing scientific topics in media. Withholding content from larger audience runs counter to that goal

Thanks for so much quality content!

My problem with discussions of "free will' is that no one can provide a clear definition of what "free will' is supposed to mean. At least, no one can provide a clear definition that doesn't either make it a) a completely trivial question, or b) a purely empirical question of psychology. This is just one example of the muddled thinking and nonsense that constitutes a lot of philosophical writing, both ancient and modern, which you identify at the beginning of the video.

You have no control over whether you hate this video anyway.

Haven't watched this one yet but personally I just really enjoy all the videos and like supporting your channel, and am not super concerned about anything being patreon exclusive or not. So I think you should do whatever drives the most interest to the channel.

Thanks Angela 🙏