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Stupid Questions: Free Will

27 Dec 2025

Nothing changes if free will isn’t real. The world is so intractably complex that it doesn’t matter, and we can shape behaviour either way. Why bother asking?

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Show Notes

Further reading

References

Pattern

Speechnotes

Intro

Welcome to the btrmt Lectures. My name is Dr Dorian Minors, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned as a brain scientist, it’s that there’s no instruction manual for this device in our head. But there are patterns to the thing. Patterns of thought, of feeling, and of action. That’s what brains do. So let me teach you. One pattern, one podcast. You see if it works for you.

So, we are officially past the introductory lectures and into the full swing of things. This is my shorter intro, I’ll by curious what you think.

Now, to get things on the straight and narrow, I’ll do a series of bits that I have on questions that seem important, but actually don’t really end up mattering for most people. Certainly not in the way they’re typically deployed.

Typically they’re deployed like stupid questions which make you seem smart.

Let me tell you about one.

Assumption

There has always been a question around whether free will exists. It’s probably as old as dual-process models of mind—there are obviously some actions that are under our control, because there are just as obviously actions that aren’t. Hot and cold thinking, fast and slow thinking, passion and logic, emotion and reason, conscious vs unconscious and rational vs irrational processes, or as I like to call them, thinky versus non-thinky motivations.

The question is, more or less, how much control do we have over our behaviour? Indeed, more specifically, the question is do we have any control at all? Is there such a thing as free will? Or is our behaviour deterministic—entirely determined by aspects of our environment. It’s a debate with a great deal of history. Just consider the concept of fate for example, or the logical consequences of believing in an omniscient god.

In modern sciences of mind, things started to heat back up with Benjamin Libet’s famous experiment. He had people make a voluntary action, and report when they became aware of the urge to make that action. He reliably detected brain waves that predicted their conscious awareness by something like 350 ms. And if brain activity predicts ‘voluntary’ decisions before we’re aware of their voluntary nature, then how could they possibly be voluntary?

Libet’s study is old as hell, and has been picked over for meat hundreds of times, but we actually regularly find stuff like this. I link there to stuff that interested my lab, where you could predict people’s brain activity five seconds into the future, never mind predicting their behaviour. More generally, there is now an entire field called the neuroscience of free will. We find brain shit that predicts ‘voluntary action’ in all sorts of places, which again raises questions about just how voluntary it is.

Subversion

Determinism and free-will aren’t exactly opposites

Perhaps surprisingly, this actually isn’t really that interesting in the context of the free will debate. At least for me. As I say elsewhere:

I don’t really think this is very helpful. Unless you’re a really strict non-materialist—you think that there’s some soul or psyche that’s distinct from the stuff sloshing around in your body—then it’s probably obvious to you that if you’ve had a thought … something needed to precede the thought

Some people interpret this as necessarily deterministic. The case goes something like:

Is mental activity determined or not? Is it determined by something else, or is it undetermined by anything? If it’s undetermined, then it’s random, and you can’t be in control of something that’s random. If it’s determined by something, then is that further inside the mind or external? If it’s external, then you’re not in control. If it’s internal, then you’re simply deferring the problem. You need to answer the question of whether it’s determined or undetermined.

A similar argument goes something like:

Who are you? You give your name, but that isn’t you. That’s a word. So you might point to your body, but you aren’t your body, are you? You don’t say “am hand” or “am head”, we say “my hand” and “my head”. So you point to your spirit, or your mind. But this is your spirit and your thoughts, they aren’t you. And so on.

Put this way, it feels rather inescapable, but this is a bit of a mislead. It treats the brain like a kind of passive transformer of events into action, ignoring the possibility that at least some of this might actually be determined by the agent. It well could be, in some complicated manner. Assuming you don’t want to defer to some kind of soul, it’s not hard to imagine some kind of foundational mental state or states, or even some web of interconnected mental states with none overly privileged over the others. On this line of thinking, the very same infinite regress we’re using to deliver a punchy account of determinism can be used to illustrate the opposite—personhood could rely on this regressive structure. Acting in accordance with desires, even if those are determined, when everything is determined by everything else… why is this inadequate?

Mental states can be both caused by prior mental states and constitute genuine mental agency because they form an integrated system. The person is that system. This is why most contemporary free will defenders are compatibilists: people who accept determinism but argue free will is compatible with it. Determination, for them, doesn’t undermine control.

Implication and outro

And anyway, it essentially never matters!

Which brings me to my point. If we have to get this far into the weeds to even debate this, then what’s the fucking point! As I mention elsewhere:[^3]

this world is so intractably complex that for almost all practical purposes, it doesn’t matter.

It’s not even clear to me that if we could prove it then it would matter. Neuroethicists think so—if our behaviour is determined, then how can we justify punishing people for crimes, for example. But to me, that’s the wrong way to think about things. Like I point out with the nature vs nurture stuff, all it does is highlight the critical importance of the environment and socialisation.

Free will or no, behaviour is something we can change. If it’s not, then we’re stuck at the Fatalist’s Idle Argument: if you’re fated to behave in a certain way, then it doesn’t matter what you think or do, it’s fated. So why bother asking the question?

Edited Transcript

Below is a lightly edited transcript. For the article that inspired this one, see Stupid Questions.

Welcome to the btrmt. Lectures. My name is Dr Dorian Minors, and if there’s one thing I’ve learnt as a brain scientist, it’s that there’s no instruction manual for this device in our head. But there are patterns to the thing—patterns of thought, of feeling, of action. That’s what brains are for. So let me teach you about them. One pattern, one podcast. You see if it works for you.

We’ve finally passed the introductory lectures and into the real thing. Shorter introductions now. The last one went pretty well, turned out pretty short. I’ll be curious to see what you think of shorter lectures, whether we prefer them one way or the other.

But I’m going to continue now on my series of bits that I have on questions that seem important but don’t really actually end up mattering for most people. Certainly not in the way that they’re typically deployed, because usually you’ll find that people deploy these like stupid questions that make them seem smart.

And I’m going to tell you about one.

The Ancient Question

There’s always been a question about whether free will exists. It’s probably a question that goes back as far as people have been thinking about dual-process models of mind. And this is more modern terminology for a very old idea—that there are obviously some actions that are under our control because there are just as obviously actions that are not under our control. If I ask you what’s two plus two, you’re going to say four. But if I ask you what’s 36 times 74, you’ve got to stop and work that out. One of them is automatic, happens, not really under your control. And the other is more deliberate, more effortful.

And this has been called a lot of stuff: hot and cold thinking, fast and slow thinking, passion and logic, emotion and reason, conscious versus unconscious processes, rational versus irrational processes. I’ve called them before thinky versus non-thinky motivations. I’ll put a link to an article that talks about that in more detail.

But there is this question that comes out of it about how much control we have over our behaviour. And indeed, more specifically, the question is: do we actually have any control at all? Is there even such a thing as free will? Or is our behaviour completely deterministic? Is it entirely determined by aspects of our environment?

And it’s a debate with a great deal of history. You just have to consider the concept of fate to really get a flavour for it. If you believe in fate, then you believe that there’s no such thing as free will in an important way. You’re a fatalist. The world unfolds as it will. Or if you’re the kind of person who believes in an omniscient God, then the logical consequence of that is to grapple with this question of whether you have free will. If God or gods know what you’re going to do at any given moment in time, then are you in control of that process?

Libet’s Legacy

And in the modern science of mind, things started to heat up with a guy called Benjamin Libet. He has this famous experiment. He had people make a voluntary action and then report when they became aware of the urge to make that action. And when he got people to report when they were aware that they were going to make an action, he reliably detected this brain activity—brainwaves specifically—that predicted their conscious awareness by something like 350 milliseconds.

And that doesn’t sound like a lot, but in brain science it’s quite a substantial prediction. And more to the point, if brain activity predicts voluntary decisions even before we’re aware of their voluntary nature, then how exactly could they be voluntary? That’s the question that Benjamin raised.

Now his study is old as hell and it’s been picked over hundreds of times, but we actually regularly find stuff like this in brain science. I’ll link you to an article that we were particularly interested in in my old lab at Cambridge, where you could predict people’s brain activity something like five seconds into the future. So now we’re not even predicting behaviour any more, we’re actually predicting how the brain activity is going to unfold.

And indeed, more generally, there is an entire field now called the neuroscience of free will, because we find brain stuff that predicts voluntary action in all sorts of places, all over the brain, which again raises these questions about just how voluntary it is.

And what I want to do now is get into how I’m just not really sure that any of this matters.

The Infinite Regress

As I said—and maybe this is surprising at the outset—this isn’t actually really the interesting thing, even in the free will debate. Now I’ll link to a place that talks about this more, but unless you’re a really strict non-materialist, unless you really think that there is some kind of soul or psyche that’s distinct from all this stuff sloshing around in your body and your glands, then it’s probably obvious to you that if you’ve had a thought, something in your body needed to precede the thought. It doesn’t just arise from nowhere.

And some people interpret this as necessarily deterministic. So I’ll give you a case. I’m quoting this from somewhere—I wouldn’t be able to tell you where—but it goes something like this:

Is mental activity determined or not? This is the question you need to ask yourself. Is it determined by something else, or is it undetermined by anything? Because if it’s undetermined by anything, that mental activity is random. And you can’t be in control of something that’s random.

And if it’s determined by something, then is that thing further inside the mind, or is it external to the mind? If it’s external, then you’re not in control of it. And if it’s internal, then you’re simply deferring the problem. What you need to do is go back to the start again and answer the question of whether it’s determined or undetermined.

And you get this sort of infinite regress. It’s either determined or undetermined. And if it’s undetermined, it’s random. And if it’s determined—if it’s determined externally, it’s not you. And if it’s determined internally, then you return to the question. And on this model, there can’t be free will.

There’s another cut on this that I actually like—I think it’s a bit more poetic and a bit less ruthless. Again, I’m quoting somebody. It’s probably Instagram. I’d be happy to add it in the show notes if somebody sends me an email about who this is from. But it goes something like this:

Ask yourself who you are. You might give your name to answer that question, but you’ll notice that your name isn’t you. That’s just a word. So you might point to your body, but of course, you’re not your body. You don’t say “am hand” or “am head.” We say “my hand” and “my head.” So then you say, okay, well, I’m going to point to my spirit or my mind. But again, this is your spirit, your thoughts—they aren’t you. And so on and so forth.

And put in either of these kinds of ways—the cuter one or the more clinical one—determinism feels kind of inescapable.

Agent Causation

But this is actually a bit of a mislead, because what it’s doing is treating the brain like some kind of passive transformer of events into action. And what it’s ignoring is the possibility that any of this could actually be determined by the agent itself.

If it’s determined externally, it’s something else. If it’s determined internally, you ask again. Maybe that is actually not the right question to ask, because internally generated mental activity could well be determined by the agent in some complicated manner.

So let’s again assume that you’re not getting around all this messiness with a soul or a psyche or some kind of non-materialist answer. It’s not actually that hard even to imagine some kind of foundational mental state or states—some sort of resting state of the brain, of mental activity. And you can also imagine a web of interconnected mental states. Marvin Minsky has this beautiful idea called a society of mind that I’ll link to in the show notes.

And the idea is, if you have this web of interconnected mental states, none of them necessarily need to be privileged over any of the others. There’s no one mental state in control determining the others. They all sort of determine and are determined by the others.

It sounds kind of messy, but essentially what I’m saying is the very same infinite regression that our clinical example before used to deliver this sort of punchy account of determinism can be used to illustrate the exact opposite—that personhood could rely on this regressive structure. Acting in accordance with our desires, even if those desires are determined, but in a structure where everything is determined by everything else—why is this inadequate to explain free will?

Mental states can be both caused by prior mental states but also constitute genuine mental agency because they form this sort of integrated system. The person is the system.

And honestly, that is why most contemporary free will defenders are what are called compatibilists—people that accept determinism but argue that free will is in some way compatible with it. So for them, determination doesn’t undermine control.

Why It Doesn’t Matter Anyway

Now, that’s all very complicated and messy, but I want to get into one final point before I wrap up, and that’s about how none of this matters anyway.

So this all brings me to my final point. If we have to get this far into the weeds to even debate this, then what’s the point? As I talk about elsewhere—and many people agree with me on this point, I’ll link to those in the show notes—this world is so intractably complex that for all practical purposes it doesn’t matter whether we have free will or determinism.

And it’s not even clear to me that if we could prove it, then it would matter. Neuroethicists obviously think so. If our behaviour is determined, for example, then how can we justify punishing people for their crimes? If they have no control over their behaviour, then it’s not up to them to behave differently. It’s up to us or the environment or the structures that we build.

But to me, that’s the wrong way to think about things. Like I often point out—and the previous podcast in this series on nature versus nurture is on the same point—all it does is highlight the critical importance of the environment and of our socialisation. And if we act on those, then we change our behaviour, even and in fact especially because our behaviour is determined.

And if it’s not something that we can change, then we’re stuck at what’s called the Fatalist’s Idle Argument. I think it was Cicero who talked about this. But it says, for example, if it’s fated for you to recover from the illness, then you’ll recover whether you go to the doctor or not. But if you’re fated not to recover from an illness, then you’re not going to recover whether you go to a doctor or not. Either you’re going to recover from the illness or you’re not, if you’re fated. So it’s futile to consult a doctor.

In the same way, if you’re fated to behave in a certain way, then it doesn’t matter what you think or do. It’s fated. So why even bother asking the question?

I’ll leave you with that.

Transcript

[00:00] Welcome to the btrmt

[00:12] Lectures. My name is

[00:13] Dr. Dorian Minors, and if there is one thing I’ve learned as a brain scientist, it’s that there is no instruction manual for this device in our

[00:19] head. But there are patterns to the

[00:21] thing. Patterns of thought, patterns of feeling, patterns of

[00:24] action. That’s what brains are

[00:26] for. So let me teach you about

[00:28] them. One pattern, one

[00:29] podcast. You see if it works for

[00:30] you. And we finally pass the introductory lectures and into the real

[00:35] thing. Now, shorter

[00:36] introductions. The last one went pretty well, turned out pretty

[00:40] short. I’ll be curious to see what you think of shorter lectures, whether we prefer them one way or the

[00:47] other. But I’m going to continue now on my series of bits that I have on questions that seem important but don’t really actually end up mattering for most

[00:59] people. Certainly not in the way that they’re typically

[01:02] deployed. Because usually you’ll find that people deploy these, like, stupid questions that make them seem

[01:07] smart. And I’m going to tell you about

[01:09] one.

[01:15] Now. There’s always been a question about whether free will

[01:17] exists. It’s probably a question that goes back as far as people have been thinking about dual process models of

[01:26] mind. And this is a more modern terminology for a very old idea, that there are obviously some actions that are under our control because there are just as obviously actions that are not under our control,

[01:40] right? If I ask you what’s two plus

[01:41] two? You’re going to say

[01:42] four. But if I ask you what’s 36 by

[01:45] 74? You got to stop and work that out,

[01:49] right? One of them is automatic, happens, not really under your

[01:53] control. And the other is more deliberate, more

[01:55] effortful. And this has been called a lot of

[01:59] stuff. Hot and cold thinking, fast and slow thinking, passion and logic, emotion and reason, conscious versus unconscious processes, rational versus irrational

[02:09] processes. I’ve called them before, thinky versus non thinking

[02:13] motivations. I’ll put a link to an article that talks about that in more

[02:16] detail. But there is this question that comes out of it about how much control we have over our

[02:24] behavior. And indeed, more specifically, the question is, do we actually have any control at

[02:29] all? Is there even such a thing as free

[02:32] will? Or is our behavior completely

[02:34] deterministic? Is it entirely determined by aspects of our

[02:39] environment? And it’s a debate with a great deal of

[02:43] history. You just have to consider the concept of fate to really get a flavor for

[02:49] it. If you believe in fate, then you believe that there’s no such thing as free will in an important

[02:54] way. You’re a

[02:56] fatalist. The world unfolds as it

[02:58] will. Or if you’re the kind of person who believes in an omniscient God, then the logical consequence of that is to grapple with this question of whether you have free

[03:07] will. If God or gods know what you’re going to do at any given moment in time, then are you in control that

[03:15] process? And in the modern science of mind, things started to heat up with a guy called Benjamin

[03:21] Labay. So he has this famous

[03:24] experiment. He had people make a voluntary action and then report when they became aware of the urge to make that

[03:31] action. And when he got people to report when they were aware that they were going to make an action, he reliably detected this brain activity, brainwaves specifically, that predicted their conscious awareness by something like 350

[03:46] milliseconds. And that doesn’t sound like a lot, but in brain science it’s quite a substantial

[03:53] prediction. And more to the point, if brain activity predicts voluntary decisions even before we’re aware of their voluntary nature, then how exactly could they be

[04:05] voluntary? That’s the question that Benjamin

[04:08] raised. Now his study is old as hell and it’s been picked over for me hundreds of times, but we actually regularly find stuff like this in brain

[04:18] science. I’ll link you to an article that we were particularly interested in in my old lab at Cambridge, where you could predict people’s brain activity something like five seconds into the

[04:27] future. So now we’re not even predicting behavior anymore, we’re actually predicting how the brain activity is going to

[04:34] unfold. And indeed, more generally, there is an entire field now called the neuroscience of free will, because we find brain shit that predicts voluntary action in all sorts of places, all over the brain, which again raises these questions about just how voluntary it

[04:51] is. And what I want to do now is get into

[04:55] how. I’m just not really sure that any of this

[04:58] matters. So as I said, and maybe this is surprising at the outset, but this isn’t actually really the interesting thing, even in the free will

[05:13] debate. Now I’ll link to a place that talks about this more, but unless you’re a really strict non materialist, unless you really think that there is some kind of soul or psyche that’s distinct from all this stuff sloshing around in your body and your glands, then it’s probably obvious to you that if you’ve had a thought, something in your body needed to precede the thought,

[05:34] right? It doesn’t just arise from nowhere, you know, and some people interpret this as necessarily

[05:39] deterministic. So I’LL give you a

[05:42] case. I’m quoting this from somewhere, I wouldn’t be able to tell you

[05:45] where. But it goes something like

[05:46] this. Is mental activity determined or

[05:49] not? This is the question you need to ask

[05:51] yourself. Is it determined by something else or is it undetermined by

[05:56] anything? Because if it’s undetermined by anything, that mental activity is

[06:01] random. And you can’t be in control of something that’s

[06:03] random. And if it’s determined by something, then is that thing further inside the mind, or is it external to the

[06:10] mind? If it’s external, then you’re not in control of

[06:13] it. And if it’s internal, then you’re simply deferring the

[06:17] problem. What you need to do is go back to the start again and answer the question of whether it’s determined or

[06:24] undetermined. And you get this sort of infinite

[06:26] regress. It’s either determined or

[06:29] undetermined. And if it’s undetermined, it’s

[06:31] random. And if it’s determined, if it’s determined externally, it’s not

[06:35] you. And if it’s determined internally, then you return to the

[06:39] question. And on this model, you know there can’t be free

[06:42] will.

[06:42] Right? There’s another cut on this that I actually

[06:45] like. I think is a bit more poetic and a bit less

[06:48] ruthless. So again, I’m quoting

[06:51] somebody. It’s probably

[06:51] Instagram. I’d be happy to add it in the show notes if somebody sends me an email of who this is

[06:56] from. But it goes something like

[06:57] this. Ask yourself who you

[07:00] are. You know, you might give your name to answer that question, but you’ll notice that your name isn’t

[07:05] you. That’s just a

[07:06] word. So you might point to your body, but of course, you’re not your

[07:09] body. You don’t say am hand or am

[07:12] head. We say my hand and my

[07:14] head. So then you say, okay, well, I’m going to point to my spirit or my

[07:18] mind. But again, this is your spirit, your thoughts, they aren’t

[07:23] you. And so on and so

[07:25] forth. And put in either of these kinds of ways, the cuter one or the more clinical one, determinism feels kind of

[07:33] inescapable. But this is actually a bit of a mislead because what it’s doing is it’s treating the brain like some kind of passive transformer of events into

[07:43] action. And what it’s ignoring is the possibility that any of this could actually be determined by the agent

[07:50] itself. If it’s determined externally, it’s something

[07:54] else. If it’s determined internally, you ask again, maybe that is actually not the right question to ask, because internally generated mental activity could well be determined by the agent in some complicated

[08:07] manner. So let’s again assume that you’re not getting around all this messiness with a soul or a psyche or some kind of non materialist

[08:17] answer. It’s not actually that hard even to imagine some kind of foundational mental state or states,

[08:25] right? Some sort of resting state of the brain of mental

[08:29] activity. And you can also imagine a web of interconnected mental states,

[08:35] right? Marvin Minsky has this beautiful idea called a society of mind that I’ll link to in the show

[08:40] notes. And the idea is if you have this web of interconnected mental states, none of them necessarily need to be privileged over any of the others,

[08:50] right? On this same line of

[08:52] thinking. And if you have this web of interconnected mental states, none of them necessarily need to be privileged over the others,

[08:58] right? There’s no one mental state in control determining the

[09:02] others. They all sort of determine and are determined by the

[09:06] others. It sounds kind of messy, but essentially what I’m saying is the very same infinite regression that our clinical example before used to deliver this sort of punchy account of determinism can be used to illustrate the exact opposite, that personhood could rely on this regressive structure, you know, acting in accordance with our desires, even if those desires are

[09:30] determined. But in a structure where everything is determined by everything else, you know, why is this inadequate to explain free

[09:38] will? Mental states can be both caused by prior mental states, but also constitute genuine mental agency because they form this sort of integrated

[09:48] system. The person is the

[09:50] system. And honestly, that is why most contemporary free will defenders are what are called compatibilists, people that accept determinism but argue that free will is in some way compatible with

[10:03] it. So for them, determination doesn’t undermine

[10:08] control. Now, that’s all very complicated and messy, but I want to get into one final point before I wrap up, and that’s about how none of this matters

[10:20] anyway. So this all brings me to my final

[10:33] point. You know, if we have to get this far into the weeds to even debate this, then what’s the point,

[10:39] right? As I talk about elsewhere, you know, many people agree with me on this point and I’ll link to those in the show

[10:46] notes. But this world is so intractably complex that for all practical purposes it doesn’t matter whether we have free will or

[10:56] determinism. And it’s not even clear to me that

[10:58] any. If we could prove, then it would matter right now Neuroethicists obviously think

[11:04] so. If our behavior is determined, for example, then how can we justify punishing people for their

[11:12] crimes? If they have no control over their behavior, then it’s not up to them to behave

[11:17] differently. It’s up to us or the environment or the structures that we

[11:21] build. But to me, that’s the wrong way to think about

[11:24] things. Like I often point out, and the previous podcast in this series on Nature versus Nurture is on the same

[11:32] point. All it does is highlight the critical importance of the environment and of our

[11:37] socialization. And if we act on those, then we change our behavior, even and in fact, especially because our behavior is

[11:45] determined. And if

[11:47] it’s. If it’s not something that we can change,

[11:50] then. Then we’re stuck at what’s called the fatalists idle

[11:53] argument. I think it was Cicero who talked about

[11:56] this. But it says, for example, if it’s fated for you to recover from the illness, then you’ll recover whether you go to the doctor or

[12:03] not. But if you’re fated not to recover from an illness, then you’re not going to recover whether you go to a doctor or

[12:09] not. Either you’re going to recover from the illness or you’re not if you’re

[12:13] faded. So it’s futile to consult a doctor in the same

[12:17] way. If you’re fated to behave in a certain way, then it doesn’t matter what you think or

[12:21] do. It’s

[12:22] fated. So why even bother asking the

[12:24] question? I’ll leave you with

[12:26] that.

Anthologies: Betterment, Thought Architecture, Narrative Culture, Neurotypica, On Being Fruitful, On Ethics, On the Nature of Things, On Thinking and Reasoning

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