Transcript

I would like to thank my collaborators, Federico, Chris, chaitan, Robert and Manish. You. Each day, we make many decisions. In some cases, our preferences put quite a pressure on our decision. I might like chocolate croissants a little bit more than a stick of celery, but we still feel that even though our preferences affect our choices, there is still some real free will that we exert when we make a choice. Of course, we don't think that we have unbounded free will. I can choose to jump, but I can't choose to jump to the sun. So we when we think of free will, we think of a bounded, but genuine Free Will that's affected by our preferences. But my colleagues in the neurosciences and philosophy have a very different view about this.

They think that we live in a machine world, a deterministic world in which all the cogs are doing their thing. And in fact, free will is an illusion. This is put out by, for example, by Francis Crick, the discoverer of DNA, the structure of DNA. He says, Your sense of personal identity and free will are, in fact, no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons. And that's called the astonishing hypothesis. But to the neurosciences in my the neuroscientists in my field, this is not astonishing. This is just the received opinion. So the idea is that we're not really like that kind of machine that I showed you in the first place. It's more like a neural machine. But you are a neural machine.