Meryl Horne

speaker

1,206 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2025 last heard 30 Jul

Meryl Horne’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Science Vs · Free Will: Does It Exist? · 30 Jul 2026 podcast

Because for a long, for centuries, there have been challenges to this idea.

So basically, as soon as we started discovering the laws of physics, you know, the fact that we have gravity and all these forces that can explain why things do what they do,

We've gotten this picture of the world that's like a clockwork.

You know, the reason something happens is because something right beforehand made that happen.

And you could also kind of predict what's going to happen next by looking at these forces and you can explain like why things do what they do.

Yeah.

Well, so there is a lot of dots to be connected there.

But our bodies, you know, your body choosing that ice cream flavor is just made of a bunch of molecules were made as the same stuff as that ball.

And so in theory, couldn't we predict like what our bodies are going to do next just by looking at those molecules and then like applying the laws of physics, biology, neuroscience, whatever?

I talked about this with John Dylan Haynes.

He's a professor at a neuroscience center in Charité, a medical school in Berlin.

And he had a sort of visualization for how to imagine this in this clockwork.

So going back to that ice cream decision, you know, ideally you'd be able to see like what's going on in my brain as I'm trying to make this choice and see like, can someone just looking at my brain sort of figure out what I'm going to choose in advance?

So John told me about this experiment that kind of changed everything.

So it's the 1980s and there is one scientist, a neurophysiologist, who ends up doing this pretty famous experiment.

So this guy, Benjamin Libet, he wants to kind of see what's happening in our brains as we're making just one stupid little decision.

That's the idea.

Yeah.

Like, what's the order of events here?

Can you see any signs of chocolate neurons firing before people are like, I made my decision to get the chocolate ice cream?

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