Oct 10, 2026 · 43 min · 11 segments
Do we truly choose our actions… or does the brain decide before we become aware of the choice? In this episode of **GL Deep Dives**, we explore one of the deepest questions in philosophy…
We are on a massive mission today, pulling from a huge stack of sources spanning, you know, cutting edge neuroscience, cognitive psychology and centuries old philosophy.
And we're trying to answer one of the oldest, probably most fundamentally disruptive questions in human history.
Do we actually have free will or is the experience of choice just a like highly convincing, beautifully orchestrated biological illusion?
Right.
And the stakes attached to this single question for you, the listener, they are astronomically high.
They dictate everything.
They really do.
Yeah.
How we answer this dictates the foundation of our entire justice system.
It
defines our sense of moral responsibility.
Our capacity for praise and blame, right?
Exactly.
And our fundamental identity as human beings.
I mean, if we are just biological machines running complex software, the way we hold people accountable has to be completely reimagined from the ground up.
OK, let's unpack this, because, I mean, for millennia, this was purely a philosophical debate.
People sitting around in togas.
Yeah, exactly.
Sitting around in togas, arguing about destiny in the cosmos.
But we are going to start our investigation in 1983.
a very good place to start.
Because a neuroscientist named Benjamin Libet essentially dragged this concept of free will out of the armchair and well, strapped it into a laboratory chair.
He really brought empirical, measurable science into the debate in a way that had literally never been done before.
Right.
And to understand the modern neuroscience of free will and why scientists are suddenly questioning human agency, we have to understand the physical mechanics of what Libet actually built in that lab.
We are on a massive mission today, pulling from a huge stack of sources spanning, you know, cutting edge neuroscience, cognitive psychology and centuries old philosophy.
And we're trying to answer one of the oldest, probably most fundamentally disruptive questions in human history.
Do we actually have free will or is the experience of choice just a like highly convincing, beautifully orchestrated biological illusion?
Right.
And the stakes attached to this single question for you, the listener, they are astronomically high.
They dictate everything.
They really do.
Yeah.
How we answer this dictates the foundation of our entire justice system.
It
defines our sense of moral responsibility.
Our capacity for praise and blame, right?
Exactly.
And our fundamental identity as human beings.
I mean, if we are just biological machines running complex software, the way we hold people accountable has to be completely reimagined from the ground up.
OK, let's unpack this, because, I mean, for millennia, this was purely a philosophical debate.
People sitting around in togas.
Yeah, exactly.
Sitting around in togas, arguing about destiny in the cosmos.
But we are going to start our investigation in 1983.
a very good place to start.
Because a neuroscientist named Benjamin Libet essentially dragged this concept of free will out of the armchair and well, strapped it into a laboratory chair.
He really brought empirical, measurable science into the debate in a way that had literally never been done before.
Right.
And to understand the modern neuroscience of free will and why scientists are suddenly questioning human agency, we have to understand the physical mechanics of what Libet actually built in that lab.
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