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The Ancient Greeks believe that our fates are chosen by the Greek gods.
Morgan Freeman says that some scientist see the Buddhist teaching about Anattā (non-self) to mean that the mind and body aren't separate. Retrocausality means that future affects the past. In The Astonishing Hypothesis, Francis Crick states that we are the behavior of our assembled cells.
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Morgan Freeman says that some scientist see the Buddhist teaching about Anattā (non-self) to mean that the mind and body aren't separate. Retrocausality means that future affects the past. In The Astonishing Hypothesis, Francis Crick states that we are the behavior of our assembled cells.
Thanks for watching. Follow for more videos.
#cosmosspacescience
#throughthewormhole
#season4
#episode9
#cosmology
#astronomy
#spacetime
#spacescience
#space
#nasa
#spacedocumentary
#morganfreeman
#freewill
#greekgods
Category
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LearningTranscript
00:00Do we control our destinies?
00:05Or are we prisoners of fate?
00:10We may all be at the mercy of our biological programming.
00:15Our actions may not determine the future.
00:21And the future might reach back to change the past.
00:27Is freedom of choice just an illusion?
00:31Or do we have free will?
00:40Space. Time. Life itself.
00:47The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.
00:57The ancient Greeks believed everyone's path is set at birth.
01:12No matter what we do, there is no escaping the fate the gods have chosen for us.
01:18Freedom of choice is an illusion.
01:21Today, some scientists believe the Greeks were right.
01:25Our courses really are predetermined.
01:29Not by the will of celestial beings.
01:31But by the workings of our brains and the fundamental laws that govern time and space.
01:37Do we have free will?
01:40Or are we just puppets dangling from invisible strings?
01:54When I was in grade school, I got into trouble in class one day.
01:59Morgan!
02:01I fled the classroom and ran full tilt into a teacher.
02:08Who then introduced me to my first drama teacher.
02:12Where are you running off to, son?
02:14It was the beginning of my acting career.
02:17It might have happened differently.
02:21Or was it meant to happen?
02:28The answer may lie in the heavens.
02:37Like many athletes, Dennis Schaefer wants to know what makes his opponents tick.
02:43And as a research psychologist at Ohio State University, he's finding the answers.
02:50Dennis studies the hidden forces that control the way we move.
02:56I started studying how baseball fielders catch fly balls.
02:59And from there, it was just the confluence of my love for visual perception and sports.
03:04Studying how people navigate in the environment.
03:07Few of us are conscious of the underlying mechanisms that guide our behavior.
03:16Most of the processes that we use to catch and throw baseball we're unaware of.
03:20So where I put my arm when I throw it, how exactly I get my glove to a certain spot to catch the ball, we're not aware of.
03:28And it's very important to get as many processes automatic as possible.
03:32That way you have to spend less time actually with it in your consciousness, thinking about it, trying to remember what you're supposed to do, and that sort of thing.
03:41We like to think our conscious minds have the final say over our actions.
03:46But is the conscious mind really in charge?
03:50Does what you think you are doing match up to what you actually do?
03:57Dennis and his students have set up an experiment to find out.
04:01Today, they have rigged nine cameras to track the movements of a man, a woman, and a dog.
04:09Okay, we'll want to face it in a little bit more toward the field where they'll be running.
04:14Each will take turns chasing a frisbee.
04:19They all have different strategies to catch it.
04:22Jason plans to rely on speed.
04:24Once I catch the frisbee in my sight, then I slow my speed down accordingly or speed it up a little bit faster.
04:33Jamie plans to run parallel to the frisbee.
04:36I tried to stay under the frisbee when I was running to catch it.
04:39So I could be ahead when it started to come down.
04:42Presumably, Merlin the dog does not have a conscious plan.
04:55Using the data from the cameras, Dennis plots the movements of the chasers and their target.
05:01He chooses a background point for reference, then maps how the flight path of the frisbee appeared to the chasers.
05:11A familiar pattern begins to emerge.
05:14So what we're seeing now is the view of the frisbee from the perspective of the chaser.
05:20And what we see at each point in time from this perspective is that the frisbee is rising relative to the background scenery.
05:27And you can see it moves in relatively a straight line and at a constant speed until the pursuer gets close enough to catch it.
05:36No matter what they believe they're doing, all three pursuers follow the same pattern.
05:42Dennis has seen this happen in trial after trial.
05:45What was most surprising about that is that dogs use the same strategy to catch frisbees that baseball outfielders use to catch fly balls.
05:54So it shows that the basic underlying mechanism that guides behavior is kind of a universal.
06:01It's not species specific. It's not target specific.
06:04So with a baseball or a frisbee or something like that, it seems to be universal across these domains.
06:09When you try to catch a flying object, you believe you're in charge.
06:12But beneath the level of consciousness, your body executes dozens of programs that control your actions.
06:20We think we consciously control our movements, but we do not.
06:28My findings show that we have no free will. We want to pursue targets.
06:32People think they're great at it and they're awful at it.
06:34And the reason is because their conscious awareness doesn't lock up with the mechanisms that guide their behavior while they're intercepting flying objects.
06:43Imagine if you had to consciously control all the muscles you need to move, to take a step or draw a breath, or to eat and digest a piece of food.
07:06Your brain is able to do all of this and more simultaneously, without it commanding your attention.
07:17But how many of the actions we think we consciously decide to take are actually automatic and predetermined?
07:23What if the belief that we have any control is just an illusion?
07:30Until recently, Berlin-based neuroscientist John Dylan Haynes would have rejected this idea.
07:39Then he began scanning people's brains, looking for the roots of free will.
07:44What he found made him question everything he took for granted about his life.
07:51Humans tend to be dualists, meaning that they think that the mind and the body are to some degree independent.
07:58What modern brain scanners show is that there seems to be a one-to-one correlation between what happens in our mind and what happens in our body.
08:07Today, John is going to scan the brain of a man named Dennis, while sets of three random letters flash on the screen.
08:17Dennis will respond to the letters by pressing a red button, either right or left, it's up to him.
08:24The scanner will show when he decides to press the button, and a computer will record exactly when the button gets pressed.
08:31The subject is doing the task. This is what they're seeing on the screen.
08:38So they're seeing a sequence of letters, and at some point they can freely decide to press either a left or right button.
08:45And then they have to tell us which letter was on the screen when they made up their mind.
08:49So here the subject is now seeing this letter stream.
08:53They haven't made their decision yet, now they just made a decision, and now they have to tell us which letter was on the screen when they made up their mind.
09:02The brain scans show that again and again Dennis decided to push the right or left button about a second before he acted.
09:11But there's another pattern of brain activity here, unconscious activity, that occurs even longer before he makes a conscious decision.
09:19So what you can see here is brain images coming in. The decisions begin to arise here in prefrontal cortex and in this medial parietal region here.
09:30And then what happens is the information seems to stay there for a few seconds, and then moves on to a supplementary motor area located here, and then from there goes into the motor cortex where it directly controls our movements.
09:44So we can see a whole cascade of processing steps, first the unconscious activity in these areas here, and then the conscious activity in these other brain areas.
09:56Dennis is supposed to be making a random decision, but it appears that up to 10 seconds before he decides to push a button, his subconscious mind has already made its choice.
10:10So we think, when I make my decision now, I'm free to choose one or the other alternative, but if my brain has already become active and started preparing my decision 10 seconds before, this suggests that this is an illusion that we're making up our decision now.
10:27It's actually the brain activity leading up to this that has made the decision.
10:32You can make decisions, but you can only choose what your unconscious already decided for you.
10:40So we control ourselves, but we can only control ourselves in one way. That's the way in which our brain was destined to behave.
10:48John concedes that exceptional decisions such as whether to get married or buy a house aren't easily tested in brain scanners.
10:58Nonetheless, he believes the experiment leads to an inescapable conclusion.
11:04We are not in control.
11:07We have this impression we make a decision that we're completely free to take different options.
11:12And what our experiments show is that this idea, this is an illusion.
11:17We're not free to make one or the other decision.
11:19We're already pre-programmed by our brain activity and it's already clear what's going to happen to some degree.
11:25We're running around with an illusion.
11:27Is free will nothing more than a fantasy?
11:32This neuroscientist believes there is more to us than automatic systems.
11:38And if we take things to the next level, we can find an escape route to freedom.
11:45Two and a half thousand years ago, an Indian man named Siddhartha Gautama had an idea.
11:53The idea is captured in the word anatta, not self.
11:59It means that our brains and bodies are just a collection of physical parts.
12:03And the self is an illusion that emerges when all those parts work together.
12:09Siddhartha was later given another name.
12:13Buddha, or Enlightened One.
12:17And his way of looking at things is strikingly familiar to modern neuroscientists.
12:22Mike Gassaniga has been called the father of cognitive neuroscience.
12:33After four decades of exploring the workings of the mind, Mike has concluded the inner you is the product of electrical impulses coursing through neural tissue.
12:45Nothing more, nothing less.
12:47It is the brain that is producing our mental life.
12:51There's no question about that.
12:53It's coming from this stuff.
12:55The relationship of the mental life to the stuff that produced it is interactive.
13:02A metaphor that helps think about it is the hardware-software distinction.
13:06The computer hardware is nothing, it just sits there, unless there's software.
13:09And the software then makes the computer hardware work to produce function.
13:15And the argument that I think for the brain is similar, that the mental and the physical layers are interacting in some way to produce these wonderful things of consciousness and cognition.
13:27So we're all just biological machines.
13:33The worst word in the English language is just, right?
13:38Just machines.
13:40We're fabulous machines.
13:41But can machines, biological or mechanical, control their fate?
13:47Mike believes so.
13:50We may be filled with automatic systems, but at a higher layer of brain function, we are capable of making free choices.
13:59To understand how, Mike says we need to look at ourselves the way physicists look at nature.
14:07As a set of complex systems that emerge from the layers of systems beneath them.
14:13Knowing how one layer works won't necessarily help you understand another layer.
14:18The concept of emergent is how physical entities such as water at one level can explain the next level of organization, which is how water at the sea forms into waves.
14:33That is a different sort of set of principles that are involved.
14:37And no way by understanding water are you going to understand wave formation and execution.
14:42And our multi-layered brains are not isolated systems.
14:48In fact, our brains are like cars.
14:52Cars are machines filled with networks of precision parts.
14:58Each with a specific function, but together forming one complete system.
15:03But cars are not meant to be stand-alone objects.
15:06They are meant to share the road with other vehicles.
15:17Just as our brains are designed to interact with other brains.
15:22And this, Mike feels, is the layer where free will exists.
15:28The level of personal responsibility.
15:30If you were the only person in the world, there's no concept of personal responsibility.
15:36What's it mean?
15:37It doesn't mean anything.
15:38There's no one else to be personally responsible to.
15:41So, it is developed out of the interactions that occur when there's more than one person.
15:48Whenever we make a decision, our choice has a ripple effect on the people around us.
15:54And those people will punish us if we fail to follow the rules of society.
16:00We may not have many options, but we are responsible for our actions.
16:07Any network, the elements have to be held accountable for their actions, or the whole thing doesn't work.
16:13We follow sets of rules, but we are free to make choices within those boundaries.
16:18Or to completely ignore them.
16:28Freedom means getting more information so we get smarter and smarter and wiser and wiser about all the things that are going on around us.
16:36That's how you can define freedom.
16:38But it's done through this very beautiful mechanistic machine that accomplishes all these things.
16:48It's pretty cool.
16:50But what happens when we go beyond one-to-one personal interactions and out to the next layer?
16:58The layer of mass social behavior.
17:01A new kind of science is finding the societies we live in follow rules as predictable as those guiding the movements of the planets.
17:12This man is using them to see the future.
17:15And to see whether we have any hope of changing it.
17:19Many Christians say God gives us freedom to choose between good and evil.
17:34We are all responsible for our actions.
17:38But some denominations believe God sets our course from birth.
17:44How much freedom do we really have?
17:46Society puts limits on our free will.
17:51In fact, a new science contends that we can use equations to accurately predict what groups of people will do in the future.
18:00Are we all prisoners of fate?
18:07Sean Gourley is a two-time New Zealand decathlon champion.
18:11He understands that mastering certain fundamentals leads to a desired outcome.
18:18Sean is also a physicist.
18:22After working in nanotechnology, he turned his keen mind to the troubled world around him.
18:29Why do we have diseases and epidemics that spread across the globe?
18:32Why do we have financial market crashing?
18:35Why do we have conflict and insurgency that we can't seem to wrap our heads around?
18:38So they were, for me, were the really, really big questions.
18:41And I guess it was just coming at a point when there was enough data coming online
18:45that we could start to actually take the techniques from experimental physics
18:48and apply them to understanding the world around us.
18:56Physicists describe nature using the language of mathematics.
18:59Human behavior may seem to live outside of this realm, but Sean says it, too, can be reduced to mathematical predictability.
19:09So, you know, when you're out running hurdles, you're obeying a set of physics equations.
19:13It's very predictable.
19:15If you measure the force at which you drive across the hurdle, you'll be able to predict the time that you finish the race in.
19:19And so, on the track, there's Newtonian physics.
19:21When we work into the world of insurgency or financial market crashes, it's the world of nonlinear physics.
19:26It's chaos.
19:28And it's a different type of physics, but it's a physics nonetheless.
19:31Up close, the behavior of birds seems chaotic.
19:36But when we stand back, we see patterns at work.
19:39The same applies to groups of people.
19:43So, when you look at people moving in the crowd, they've got a few basic equations they want to optimize.
19:50Now, they're not necessarily consciously aware of these equations.
19:54It's things like they want to get from A to B as quick as possible, but they want to do it in a way that avoids obstacles.
20:00So, they tend to follow people in front of them and let the person in front sort of act as a buffer.
20:03So, we start to see these channels form of people kind of almost forming little trains as they move through the environment.
20:12And these trains last for maybe a few seconds or maybe a few minutes, and then they break apart again.
20:17So, when you put the variables of reaction, speed, and kind of a goal in mind, and you put a large group of people together,
20:26you can kind of start to model this with three or four variables.
20:28And with those three or four variables, all of a sudden, that swarm of people ceases to become random and starts to become predictable.
20:36The way Sean sees it, simple social rules give rise to global patterns.
20:42If you can understand the patterns, seemingly chaotic events become predictable.
20:48And you can find ways to change the patterns.
20:51Wars have plagued humanity for the whole of human history.
21:01But what if we could see them coming?
21:04What if we could predict a flashpoint and take steps to stop it from happening?
21:10Sean and his colleagues at the data analytics company Quidd collect all available information about conflicts around the globe.
21:18Then they look for patterns that emerge from the seeming chaos.
21:24They gained a reputation in the defense community, tracking the growth of the insurgency in Iraq.
21:31So you've got the collective actions of literally tens of thousands of different individuals, and also on the U.S. side as well,
21:38coming together to create a statistical signature that none of them are aware of.
21:42Sean has found a strict mathematical relationship between the number of attacks and their size.
21:51It's a very, very clean, straight line.
21:54Out of all the different things that it could be, it shows this.
22:00And the same patterns of violence show up in armed conflicts around the world.
22:04From Iraq to Colombia to Afghanistan to Indonesia.
22:11We can actually start to very accurately predict the likely size of an attack for any given time period within the conflict.
22:18It's almost as if somebody came and placed every dot.
22:21But, of course, no one's placing every dot.
22:23This is people that are out there to try and kill each other.
22:25But once you see this pattern, when you know what the future will bring, can you change it?
22:33If we want a different kind of future, we want to engineer the conflict to end up in a different direction.
22:41We, as humans, need to make decisions.
22:44We need to target different groups.
22:46We need to think, is it going to attack big groups or small groups?
22:49Should I take things out at the top level, or should I take things out at the bottom level?
22:52We've found patterns that show how the world is.
22:56What we really want to get to is patterns that show how the world will be, based on the decisions we make.
23:02The more data we have, the better we can control our fate.
23:08But will we ever have enough data?
23:11Over the course of human history, empire after empire has discovered that altering the course of world affairs is not easy.
23:20It may be that, as the ancient Greeks suspected, we can change small things about our lives.
23:29But ultimately, we are all in the grip of an unavoidable fate.
23:34I think when you've got free will, it's not an either or, it's a yes but.
23:43And you have free will, like I had free will at the running track, to move the hurdles up or down.
23:48I can choose what hurdle I want to go over, but I can't choose to turn off gravity.
23:57And when I go into a war, I can choose on some level my actions within, you know, Iraq.
24:03But I can't change the mathematical signature that underlies the way I'm likely to die.
24:07And I think that's a really difficult thing for us as humans to wrap our heads around.
24:13Because on the one hand I can choose, and on the other hand I have no choice.
24:16No matter how wild we might be at heart, individual actions can rarely change the course of human history.
24:29The power of free will depends on what layer of existence you examine, society or the individual.
24:37There are layers in the natural world too.
24:41The motions of galaxies, stars and planets follow strict laws of cause and effect, with no room for free will.
24:51But down at the subatomic layer of existence, is the universe also wild at heart?
25:03Isaac Newton saw the universe as a giant clock.
25:08Beautifully intricate, but utterly predictable.
25:12With enough information, you could know everything that would happen until the end of time.
25:18In the 20th century, as we dug down into the subatomic world,
25:24the predictability of Newton's universe fell apart.
25:28In the quantum world, nothing is determined until you look at it.
25:38But what if there's an even deeper layer, on a scale far smaller than the quantum world?
25:46A layer just as predictable as the universe Newton imagined, but following laws we don't yet understand.
25:53Dutch physicist Herard Tooft suspects it might be true.
26:02Herard won the Nobel Prize for his part in developing the standard model of particle physics, our best description of the quantum universe.
26:10If physics is like a game of chess, Herard is a grand master.
26:17But if you don't know the game, chess pieces seem to move in completely unpredictable ways.
26:22And the same can be said of quantum objects.
26:27Quantum physics suggests it's impossible to ever know the precise location of a particle and the movement of a particle at the same time.
26:36This effect is called quantum uncertainty.
26:43A particle can be here or there or there, but not in between.
26:47Or a particle is here or it isn't here.
26:51That's fine, but there is an other aspect of quantum mechanics which is very strange.
26:57And that is that you can have what you call interference.
27:02So particles can be in a position like this or in a position like this or here.
27:09And then they also say the particle can be in all these positions at the same time.
27:15It is in an undecided position.
27:18As strange as this sounds, quantum uncertainty has been tested and proven again and again.
27:25Quantum mechanics is a superb theory, but it's not good enough to my taste.
27:30And that's because it somehow defies ordinary logic.
27:35To find logic in the quantum world,
27:38Herard is proving the mathematical fundamentals of quantum theory.
27:42Working at a level few can comprehend,
27:45he has come to believe that despite the seeming unpredictability of quantum particles,
27:50the whole of existence follows a strict unbending set of rules.
27:53And the universe really does control our fate.
27:58I like to view the universe as a computing instrument, as a gigantic computer.
28:06A computer not different from your laptop or from any other computer except its size and its speed.
28:14The universe calculates extremely fast and extremely gigantic memory unlike any man-made object.
28:25Computers here on Earth operate using a binary code of zeros and ones.
28:32So, where do we find the zeros and ones of the universe?
28:37It's a matter of scale.
28:40With normal vision, most of us can spot a penny on the ground.
28:44But for Herard to spot a miniature coin on the sidewalk of this miniature street is nearly impossible.
28:50And Herard towers above something exponentially smaller than this miniature coin.
28:58A scale trillions upon trillions of times tinier than the width of an atom.
29:03This is the Planck scale.
29:08The basic level of measurement of the universe.
29:12It's here at the very bottom layer of existence that Herard believes we will find the basic bits of information at the heart of creation.
29:21What he calls beables and changeables.
29:26Binary particles that can only give yes or no answers, not maybes.
29:32This layer exists far beneath the quantum layers we see today.
29:38So we believe that is the scale where everything actually happens, where everything becomes deterministic.
29:43Herard's calculations indicate that at the Planck scale, the universe is not a game of chess where pieces move in strange ways and jump across vast terrain.
29:56The universe is a game of checkers.
30:00A binary world where one frame can only affect an adjoining frame.
30:05Think of a checkerboard with billions and billions of squares.
30:11When I look at a checkerboard from a great distance, you can no longer follow in detail what happens.
30:17It looks to you as if chaos takes over and as if things are undetermined.
30:22So what I believe is that's the origin of quantum mechanics.
30:25We can no longer predict things with infinite precision because you're not under control at all of what happens in all extreme details as you would like it.
30:36At its deepest level, the universe may be an enormous checkerboard.
30:43And everything happening in it is a product of its moves.
30:47But at the layer of reality we perceive, these basic patterns can't be seen.
30:55Although our actions are ultimately determined by the universe, it feels like we have free will.
31:02But one physicist feels the fuzziness of quantum mechanics allows for genuine free will.
31:08He says cause and effect may not be what we think they are.
31:14Because the future can reach back in time and affect the present.
31:26The Hindu concept of karma maintains every act, good or bad, no matter how insignificant,
31:34will eventually return to the doer with equal impact.
31:39Karma is the moral law of cause and effect.
31:44What if this works in reverse?
31:47What if the things we will do in the future affect what happened in the past?
31:53This physicist has a new way of looking at quantum mechanics.
32:05A way that shows free will is written into the fundamental structure of the universe.
32:15Ken Wharton is a professor at San Jose State University in California.
32:19Since he was a little boy, he has been fascinated by the idea that fundamental laws of nature can explain nearly everything in our day-to-day existence.
32:32When I was a kid, my parents took home movies and we watched them on actual film.
32:37And the thing about actual film is, after you play it, you have to rewind the film.
32:41And you could leave the projector running while you did this, and we often did, and we laughed at how funny everything looked running backward.
32:51But my father was a physicist, and he would tell me, I distinctly remember,
32:55Ken, everything you're seeing here still obeys the same laws of physics running either direction.
33:01And I've always tried to grapple with this question of how something that could look so different might still obey the same laws of physics.
33:10Can the laws of physics also predict the choices that people make?
33:15Are there fundamental rules that, when everything is set in motion from a given starting position, lead us inevitably to one and only one possible outcome?
33:31Einstein thought so.
33:32His theory of relativity tells us we live in something called a block universe, in which all of space and all of time are laid out like a roll of film,
33:46where the past, present, and future all existed once.
33:51This, Ken says, means the future can affect the past just as the past affects the future.
33:59The future is not just some series of random events.
34:04There are correlations between the present and the future that we can predict.
34:07That's what science does.
34:09And in the course of making these predictions, it's more natural to think of the universe as being one continuous structure,
34:18rather than being a bunch of frames cut up and spread all over the floor.
34:21Ken believes that all events, even quantum events, have a definite starting point and a definite ending point.
34:34But there is uncertainty in what happens in between.
34:38The way to make sense of this is retrocausality. The idea that it is our future choice that causes that uncertainty.
34:49Retrocausality means the future affects the past.
34:55The beginning and ending of events are fixed in time.
34:59But Ken argues quantum physics creates flexibility in the middle.
35:05And that flexibility offers us the chance to control our fate.
35:11In the Newtonian clockwork universe, the initial state and the laws determine everything there is.
35:17There's no freedom given the initial state.
35:19In a time-symmetric universe, it's not obvious that that's true.
35:24Because if something is dependent not only on the initial state, but equally on the final state,
35:30now those intermediate events aren't predetermined in the sense they're not determined by the initial state.
35:38They might eventually be determined, but there's more wiggle room for free will.
35:45In other words, the end points of our fates may be fixed, but we don't know how precisely we will reach them.
35:58I don't know what I'm going to decide in one minute.
36:01And yet, that decision will be made. It will be determined.
36:05So there's a perfect example of something that I don't know, and is not possibly not determined just by the past,
36:12but nevertheless will eventually be determined.
36:21As we sail into the future, do we really have the freedom to set our own course?
36:27This man thinks the fate of humanity hangs on how you, me, and everyone else answers this question.
36:38Because if we give up on free will, humanity could be doomed.
36:43The debate over how much or how little freedom we have to choose our fate has raged for thousands of years.
36:53It may go on for millennia to come.
36:56No matter who is actually right, it certainly feels like we have free will, doesn't it?
37:02What if believing we have a choice is necessary for the survival of the human race?
37:09In 1994, a young man named Jonathan Schooler picked up a book by Nobel Prize winning scientist Francis Crick.
37:23In it, Crick wrote,
37:25You are, in fact, no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.
37:38Jonathan Schooler eventually became a neuroscientist.
37:42Today, he's a star professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
37:47But he's still troubled by Crick's book.
37:51I was really taken with Francis Crick's The Astonishing Hypothesis for several reasons.
37:56First off, he said in absolute terms that science had conclusively ruled out the existence of free will.
38:02And I just wasn't really persuaded that that degree of certainty was merited.
38:07Crick's beliefs have only become more popular over time.
38:11So, a few years ago, Jonathan began running experiments to see how this message of strict determinism affects people's behavior.
38:21In today's experiment, a series of students will have their morality tested.
38:27But only after they are exposed to messages about the nature of fate and free will.
38:32At the end of the experiment, they will fill out a short survey and then be paid with a dollar coin taken from this jar.
38:42Some of the students read statements designed to induce a feeling that they are pawns of biology and fate.
38:49Other students read statements that boast of their belief in free will.
39:08Then all of the participants are given a cognitive test.
39:12But before they can finish, Jonathan pretends to be called away.
39:16Oh dear, I'm late. I'm going to need you to grade the test yourself.
39:23I'll give you the key and then score yourself one dollar for every one that you got correct, okay?
39:31Will the messages the students saw earlier affect their behavior?
39:39Most students only get a question or two correct.
39:42Some pay themselves accordingly.
39:48But other students take more than their share.
39:51Those people who are told there's no such thing as free will consistently took more coins than those who were not given that information.
40:01In other words, telling people there's no such thing as free will to some degree undermines their capacity to act in a moral manner.
40:16Jonathan suspects believing you are just a pawn in a cosmic chess game gives people an excuse for bad behavior.
40:27Don't blame me. I don't have free will.
40:30Another possibility is it kind of pulls the rug out from underneath them, that they have this experience of will normally, but when you tell them they have no such thing as free will, they just don't have the oomph to be able to prevent themselves from resisting the temptation of avoiding cheating.
40:45Like all thinking people, Jonathan has his own views on free will.
40:52He accepts that we are shaped by genetics, society, and the deep workings of the universe.
41:00But he also sees a place for conscious choice.
41:03From my vantage, free will is a lot like sailing.
41:07When you sail, you're buffeted around by the currents, by the weather, by the wind.
41:12Nevertheless, you're able to set a tack, and even though you can't control where you are at any given moment necessarily, if you set your tack right, you can end up largely where you want to go.
41:22This is what Jonathan believes.
41:25But neither he nor anyone else can prove it.
41:28Although we've learned a great deal about the nature of human consciousness, about the nature of reality, about physics, and so on, given what we don't know, I think we need to be very cautious about ruling out the existence of something as so fundamental as free will.
41:42And keeping that option open, allowing people to be free, to believe in free will, seems to be a really good idea, because free will, at least the belief in free will, seems to be of great value.
41:53Whether or not the universe controls our fate, humans will always be compelled to ask, why is this happening?
42:10We will always work for change, because even if our courses are predetermined, we don't know them, and probably never will.
42:20For us, every day is a new chance for discovery, a new opportunity to take control of our destiny, illusion or not.
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