Anil Seth

And so everything that I do that is voluntary is just a natural consequence of who I am, of the brain and the body that I have.

And I experience actions as being freely willed when they're not imposed on me by a hypnotist or by somebody moving my arm from the outside or zapping my brain somehow.

And that kind of free will is real.

We can make voluntary actions, and we do, and we experience them as voluntary.

And all that is fine, but it doesn't require any of this spooky stuff that swoops in from another realm and changes the physical flow of events in the universe.

I think a lot I think it's actually in many ways simpler people argue about free will in all sorts of directions people wonder whether like if the universe is deterministic right that everything just unfolds according to a predetermined plan then surely we don't have free will none of this really matters at least in my view none of it matters at all in general for a healthy adult human

We are indeed in control of our actions.

And this, in a sense, is pretty obvious because we are not something that is separate from our brains and bodies.

We are just a collection of experiences that are part of the ongoing flow of conscious experience.

So of course we can be in control of our actions because that's part of what it is to be a self in the first place.

The honest answer to that is that, of course, nobody knows.

And it's a very sensitive question, I think.

We all have...

personal beliefs about this.

We have religious and cultural backgrounds that lead us to think in different ways.

And I think it'd be wrong for somebody to parachute in from science and just say, this is what will happen or this is what won't happen.

But having said that, this experience or non-experience of anesthesia

gives a very strong clue that the kind of consciousness that we have in our daily lives, even though it changes as we age, that does go away when we die.

Everything that we know from neuroscience and from science in general shows that normal conscious experience depends in a very intimate way

on a normally functioning brain and when the brain stops then you stop too.