#360 — We Really Don’t Have Free Will?

Making Sense with Sam Harris

Waking Up with Sam Harris

Samharris, Currentevents, Politics, Ethics, Religion, Neuroscience, Science, Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.6 • 29.1K Ratings

🗓️ 27 March 2024

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sam Harris speaks with Robert Sapolsky about the widespread belief in free will. They discuss the limits of intuition, the views of Dan Dennett, complexity and emergence, downward causation, abstraction, epigenetics, predictability, fatalism, Benjamin Libet, the primacy of luck, historical change in attitudes about free will, implications for ethics and criminal justice, the psychological satisfaction of punishing bad people, understanding evil, punishment and reward as tools, meritocracy, the consequences of physical beauty, the logic of reasoning, and other topics.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast, This is Sam Harris.
0:02.0	Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed,
0:17.0	and we'll only be hearing the first part of this conversation.
0:20.0	In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at Sam Harris.org.
0:26.1	There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't
0:29.8	afford one.
0:30.9	We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our
0:35.0	subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, well, I wasn't going to have much of a housekeeping but just before turning on the mic I learned that
0:57.0	Danny Kahneman has died what a mench he? I didn't know him well. I've really only hung out with him a few times. We did, I think one blog interview a long time ago, I think 2011 or so, that's on my website somewhere.
1:18.0	And episode 150 of this podcast is audio from an event we did in New York at the Beacon Theater,
1:29.5	which I recall being a lot of fun.
1:32.1	Danny was 90 today when he died,
1:34.4	so he would have been, that would have been
1:36.2	about five years ago, he would have been 85.
1:38.8	Just a beautiful mind and really good company. Again, I did not know him well. I have people close to me who were very close to him and obviously I'm quite sorry for their loss. Life is short, even if you make it to 90. So let's use the time wisely.
2:00.0	And that's what I did earlier this week when I spoke with Robert Sapolsky.
2:06.0	Robert is another extraordinary scientist.
2:09.0	He is the author of several works of non-fiction, including a primates memoir,
2:14.8	Behave, which was really a wonderful book,
2:18.0	and most recently determined a science of life without free will.
2:23.0	In addition to being one of the only scientists
2:25.7	who has fully accepted the implications of science
	...

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