Sean Carroll

That's true.

But I do think that it's essentially entirely unconscious.

When we had Puck, our little stray cat, who we eventually found a home for,

with our Mindscape listener who took in Puck.

Puck was very expressive with his tale.

And in particular, you know, we had him, he had a room here in the house when we were taking care of him.

And we, a couple of times, we tried to let him out of the room and put Ariel and Caliban away so that Puck could explore a little bit.

and if he if he went outside his room his tail became like five times the size it puffed up hugely he was very very expressive and you could actually over the course of time over the course of about 15 minutes you could see the tail gradually shrinking as the the puffiness of the tail as he calmed down and you could you could totally judge exactly his level of nervousness from the tail but i don't think that that was intentional i don't think he was trying to send us a signal i think it's just his immediate bodily response

Anders Marchsteiner says, is it just animals and people that have free will or can plants and mushrooms be said to have it to any degree too?

Or is it what they do always a reflex to the environment?

I think, you know, you can...

You can listen to the episode that I did with Christian List, and he spelled out what in his mind are criteria for having free will.

And no, plants and mushrooms do not have them.

Or he wrote a book.

You can buy the book if you're very interested in these questions.

The point is that free will has something to do with freedom.

rational control over decision-making, right?

You do things for reasons that you can articulate and exist in your brain.

You cannot ask a mushroom why it is growing in a certain way, and it cannot give you an explanation for that.

That is part of what his definition of free will is, and I think that part makes perfect sense to me.