Jenann Ismael: Why Free Will Is Written Into the Laws of Physics
episodePreviously titled “The Physicist Who Proved Free Will Using Thermodynamics” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 3, 2026
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Why does the speaker claim reality is fundamentally incomplete?
reality is incomplete. That is our view of the world can't be complete because reality isn't yet complete. Our common sense has no authority whatever about what the fundamental structure of reality is.
Standard classical physics assumes an initial state determines everything thereafter. However, Professor Janan Ismail found something startling. Relativity makes such determinism impossible. Why? The past light cone of any event never contains sufficient information to predict that event with certainty. In this episode, the professor demonstrates that reality, viewed from within, Is fundamentally incomplete. Ask any system to predict its own next output and watch it fail, not from ignorance, but from an actual logical impossibility. And this is the beginning of the flame of free will. Ismail argues that over evolutionary time, organisms learn to exploit this openness. This is a fascinating conversation that reconceptualizes you as a subject.
Self-curating information structure that constitutes yourself via choices and beliefs. When you die, an irreplaceable pattern of information vanishes forever. We also explore consciousness, why time is experienced as coming into being rather than being revealed, and how thermodynamics grounds the arrow of causation. On this channel, I interview researchers regarding their theories of reality with rigor. and technical depth, Janan Ismill is an expert at making abstract concepts accessible, and this is the clearest explanation of the paradox of identity and free will you'll ever hear. Which idea of yours has faced the most resistance?
It's a really good question. I you know, I don't write a ton, um, but I think of the things that I've written. It might be that so I wrote this book on free will. It's now ten years old, but I think what a lot of people thought was that I have a particular idea of what free will is and that I'm trying to defend it in the book. That it was it was about, it was called How Physics Makes Us Free. But that wasn't actually sort of the way that I tend to approach things. I mean the title was How Physics Makes Us Free, but part of that was You know, I the question was, in what sense does physics make us free make us free? So the book was really about trying to understand in naturalistic terms what sorts of freedoms we really have.
I don't have a dog in the fight at all about conceptual analysis of the notion of freedom. I mean, I tend to be attracted to those questions where you're just looking at the physical image of the world and And you're trying to understand within that image, you know. sort of m broadly philosophical problems. What are we? What is time? What is space? Um, I think, you know, the physics problem, I mean the free will problem was like What the fuck? Like how do we understand if you take seriously? I mean, and really let it land in the sense that this is what the the world is like, how do you understand from within that in a way that you can make sense of? what agency is and your experience of agency and the idea that when you sort of, you know, lie down on one of those dark nights of the soul without any c pre theoretic commitment to what free will is, but just you lie down on one of those dark nights of the soul and you're making a decision with the idea that this was all in some sense set from the beginning of time.
So I was just trying to understand what's going on and and taking it for granted that that's also partly what you know people who are worried about free will are tapping into.
Have you personally had any dark nights of the soul?
thousand of them, of course. I think every time we make a decision, I think from the first personal perspective, every time you make a decision, you really do feel like and the best phrase that um I found for for kind of capturing the phenomenology of it, though in some sense language feels inadequate here is William James's phrase when he says, um You know what one feels when one's making a decision. And in particular on in those times when you feel like, you know, you're making a really pivotal decision.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why does the speaker claim reality is fundamentally incomplete?
0:00–4:20
2
How does relativity undermine classical determinism and spark the free‑will discussion?
4:20–16:22
3
What questions arise when we try to define a ‘self’ and the experience of agency?
16:22–38:37
4
Why can no physical system predict its own future actions, even in principle?
38:37–1:07:24
5
How does the discussion of personal responsibility and risk‑tolerance shape the notion of choice?
1:07:24–1:22:44
6
What do philosophers and physicists say about free will and why do their views differ?
1:22:44–1:38:27
7
How is the self‑identity of a person described as a persistent information structure?
1:38:27–1:54:22
8
What is the block‑universe view of time and why does the host question its existence?
1:54:22–2:14:43
Speakers
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Tim Maudlin: Quantum Nonlocality Explained FROM SCRATCH
Adrian Owen: Awake. Aware. Unable to Move.
Peter Godfrey-Smith: This Scientist Found Earth’s “Alien” Minds