369 | Gregg Caruso on Living Well Without Free Will

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. I want you all to appreciate uh how much I care about What the people want when it comes to podcast topics. The people love talking about free will. I don't always love talking about free will. I sort of feel like I get dragged into it a little bit. I appreciate that the topic is important, but I appreciate that it's important in a very particular way. There are a whole bunch of things that can be said and argued about concerning free will Which really just come down to disagreements about definitions about what things mean. And to me that's like extremely tedious. Again, it's important we should have definitions for our words, but you don't want to spend hours talking about them.

But there's also a substantive side, which is why it is actually important to talk about, because there might be implications for believing. That you have free will or you don't? Where do you locate moral responsibility? How do you arrange systems in society to Put praise or blame on people for doing things that might matter if you believe that people have free will or don't. So Uh even though I kind of sometimes roll my eyes, sometimes we have to have these conversations. We had um Christian List, who is one of the leading compatibilists out there on the podcast recently. The compatibilist is someone who believes in free will and also determinism underneath the surface. Uh one way you can tell that someone is not giving you a very sophisticated discussion of free will is if they keep talking about determinism. Determinism and free will are two completely different questions. You can believe in determinism or not.

and believe in free will. And you can also believe in determinism or not and not believe in free will. So if you want to talk about free will, Talk about free will. Don't talk about determinism. So Christian gave us the sales pitch for believing in determinism if you want to, but still believing in free will. That's the compatibilist line. Today we have Greg Caruso, who's a philosopher who is an advocate for The hard incompatibilist line, as he calls it. Uh this is a a point of view that says that e you know, again, Greg is smart enough to know that the argument is not an ap about determinism. He wants to say that it doesn't matter whether it's determinism or not determinism. In either case, you don't have free will in the real world is the argument that he wants to make.

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