Massimo Pigliucci

So you're on a trip somewhere, let's say, near the national parks out west, and you have a car.

where the gauge for the gas is broken.

You don't know how much gas you have.

You can estimate.

You can say, well, I started out with a full tank three days ago, so perhaps it's around here, but you don't know for sure.

Now, at that point, you need to make very careful decisions about where you're going.

You can't just take all sorts of detours for all sorts of reasons or for no reason at all because you might get stuck in the middle of nowhere.

You might not get to do what you actually want to do

Yeah, it was a very disturbing episode, which thankfully has not repeated itself.

Basically, I was there trying to write an email to my students, and all of a sudden I realized that I...

My fingers were hitting the keyboard, but I wasn't writing what I thought I was writing.

I did not know what I was writing.

So I called my wife and I said, you know, I think there's something wrong here.

And we went immediately to the emergency room.

They couldn't find anything wrong.

Neither cardiologists nor neurologists could find anything wrong.

But nevertheless, it had happened.

And so that was a wake-up call.

that there is also your mind that it's not up to you, right?

So one of the things that the Stoics insisted, as we said, was that your decision-making, your ability to make sound decisions, that's up to you.