Emily Adlam
speaker
1,263 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 20 Jul
Emily Adlam’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
y it's it's not just that it's hard to define, it's just that it just turns out to be the wrong thing and not we w what we were looking for.
Well, I think there's a I think there's a a sort of a fundamental conflict inherent in the ne the notion of free will because what people want free will to be is somehow unconstrained by the physical world.
They they want to make choices which were not dictated for them by physical reality and the laws of nature and all these kinds of things.
But at the same time, people want to make their choices for reasons.
People don't want their choices to just kind of randomly happen out of the blue.
You want to think that I
Emily, because of who I am, made my choices.
And I think those two things are just fundamentally in conflict.
Um uh you you can't can't reasonably say that your choice that you want your choices both to be unconstrained by anything else and also made for reasons.
Um so you well you you can perhaps imagine a choice that is some sort of some mixture of being made for reasons and s sort of some kind of arbitrary uh non
physical thing that's happening that's not based on any reasons.
Um but all all that seems to be happening there is that you're you're making the choice more random or more arbitrary.
You're not really adding in f freedom in any s any sense.
So I think it's not just that individual definitions don't work, but more that there's this sort of fundamental conflict at the heart of what people people mean when they talk about wanting to have free will.
Yes.
Yeah, I do think I think a lot of these arguments about free will, as you say, there's there's a sort of implicit assumption about time that's going into them.
Um there's this m this model of of the universe that's starting at the beginning and rolling forward to produce the course of history.
And I think if that's the picture you have in mind, then I guess yeah, this determinism does sound quite scary that it was all fixed long ago at the the beginning.
Um whereas I uh you know, I think if you have a view of time where you don't think the
initial state is that special, the kind of of of suggestion you make seems much more compelling, that there's no particular reason to be worried about what the initial state is because it's no more special than what happens now.
Showing 581–600 of 1,263 · page 30 of 64
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