Sean Carroll

That doesn't mean that long-term possibilities aren't important.

It means that the way to handle long-term possibilities is to handle the short-term possibilities.

Now, obviously, that's not true in cases where we do have a good handle on the long-term possibilities.

Like if we keep dumping fossil fuels into the atmosphere, the Earth's going to heat up.

That's very predictable.

That's not a small percentage chance of happening.

But these really weird speculative science fiction scenarios are not very much of that character.

And so for them, I think that moving carefully step by step is the right strategy to take.

Okay, I'm going to group, let's see, three questions together.

They're all long questions.

So I'm going to have to read them all and you'll have to decide whether or not you can remember them as I read them.

So Dan R. says, I really enjoyed your Christian List episode.

As I consider myself a good Bayesian, I was hoping you could briefly discuss how much credence we should assign to determinist arguments such as those put forward by neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky, who was, by the way, was a Mindscape guest.

We did talk to him here if you want to listen to the conversation.

For the listeners, he argues that human behavior is nothing more than an unbroken chain of biological and environmental luck.

He specifically rejects immersion complexity as a loophole for free will on the basis that a complex system is still entirely constrained by the deterministic laws of its basic parts.

What I find to be his strongest philosophical argument is when Sapolsky asks, even if we operate with intent at the macro level, where did that intent come from if not an unchosen lottery of genes, hormones, and prior environment?

Then Ian Carey says, I enjoy your talk with Christian List since I am one of those people who stubbornly find the issue of free will and determinism confounding.

One point I had a hard time wrapping my brain around was when List talked about the possibility of having different levels of description for a system where some levels are deterministic and others aren't.

If my mental states, including my choices, are the result of the underlying state of atoms, et cetera, that make up my brain, and those atoms and particles follow the fundamental laws of physics deterministically,