Well, please share with me more details about your book.
All right.
So the issues of human free will is something we've been talking about for centuries and
arguing back and forth.
I really tried to take a fresh look at it more from a science point of view.
Arguing about the philosophical issues is not something we can do experiments on, but
it strikes me, I've talked to many scientists who accept the idea of free will and many
who say no, no, there could not be any such thing.
And what strikes me is they have the same understanding of how behavior is produced.
They both believe even that the human mental system by which our minds and brain cause
us behavior, that this is unique in the world.
No other animal has anything like this with understood moral responsibility and laws and
governments and economic systems and all these complicated things that we do.
So they're just arguing about whether this marvelous newly evolved evolutionary system
deserves to be called free will.
So that's the terminological issue I'm trying to get to.
Let's understand the scientific problem is how does this marvelous thing work?
What sets us apart from the other animals?
One for example is we can project into the future and simulate, well if I do this it
will lead to this and then they'll do that and then this and so on.
And ultimately, oh no, I don't want it to end up that way.
So how about if I do something else and then they'll react this way and so on.
Project these multiple simulations of the future and then bring the result back to the
present and use it to guide our behavior.
Being able to do that certainly makes you freer than if you're not able to have this
kind of thinking.
So that's one important advance and understanding how the human mind integrates across time,
that's one aspect of it.
Another is that ideas can cause behavior that we change how we act based on abstract understanding
of moral principles or as I said just the laws of the land or promises you made a long
time ago or religious ideas or political ideals.
So that's another advance that makes us freer in our actions than animals who cannot do
any such thing.
In my own lab work, what led me into it was the limited willpower finding.
I called it in the scientific literature, it's called ego depletion.
And it shows that after you – willpower is – there is such an energy resource in
the self and after you use it, say by resisting temptation or making some hard decisions or
whatever, then you have a bit less for a while so that's a time of vulnerability and you
might give into temptation or let someone talk you into something or do something that
you might regret later on.
So that was sort of the lead in for me.
If you read the philosophy books about free will, they talk about self-control is important
and they talk about rational choice of making good decisions, that's important too.
But they had no way of showing these two are connected because philosophers just work with
ideas and theories very carefully.
Whereas we in the psychology laboratory, we can show that after you make a lot of decisions,
your self-control is worse and vice versa.
After you exert self-control, you start making decisions in a more casual, superficial manner
leading to not doing what's really best for you in the long run.
So that's the kind of thing we feature in the book.
To give a people idea in practice, the moral agent is one.
We all do that.
We know what's right and wrong.
We don't always do it right but often we do.
We let those things influence us.
If we're going to go on something more questionable, we think about how can we justify it and explain
it to other people, things like that.
Economic marketplace is another thing unique to humans where we exchange money.
And Matt Ridley in his recent book said this is not a new thing.
Trade is 10 times older than farming.
We think farming is the dawn of civilization 10 or 12,000 years ago and to think 10 times
that old, 100,000 years ago, there's evidence that humans were already trading things.
So economic agent has to understand ideas of quantity, how many fish for how many beaver
pelts or whatever it is that you're trading.
It's a form of cooperation.
We forget that.
It's easy to think well in the marketplace.
The seller wants a higher price.
The buyer wants a lower price.
So they're fighting back and forth.
But what we miss out in that is that they're both better off.
The seller wants to sell, the buyer wants to buy.
And if they can find a place where their acceptable prices overlap, they're both happy.
They're both better off.
Human evolution, the basis of my thinking is a human mind was made by nature for culture.
It was created by evolution, of course.
But the way we evolved was to organize our society with these things like economic marketplaces
and moral systems, cooperation and communication are the two ways that the human mind is really
far advanced from any other animals.
It's obvious with communication, all human societies have language.
Nobody's ever found an exception.
And no animals have anything that lingers to say, okay, that counts as a language.
They do bark and squawk and then they communicate a little bit with each other, but nothing
like a human language.
So this is one of the essential features that makes us human.
And culture is a system for communicating and cooperating.
Like I said, the marketplace, they're both better off if they can trade.
Yes, yes.
And the book's name is The Science of World Power and Self-Control.
Is that correct?
It's called The Science of Free Will.
The Science of Free Will.
Okay, my apologies.
I apologize.
I actually had an earlier book called Willpower that I wrote with John Tierney, who is the
New York Times science writer.
And the book was actually a bestseller and was on the New York Times charts for a dozen,
a couple months, Amazon and so on.
So that really summarized our scientific work about self-control and limited willpower.
So the free will thing is it's taking the argument a big step further, saying, what
does this tell us about the basic nature of the human mind?
Okay.
And when you decided to write these books, tell me about your vision.
Okay.
So you don't actually mean my eyes.
I can see those.
Okay.
I was saying I had the laser.
No, you mean like the idea vision.
Absolutely.
Well, the exciting thing about a problem like free will is it's one of the classic debates
and it goes to what kind of creatures are we?
And given the unusual career I've had in psychology, I think I'm in an unusually good position
to really ask and try to answer some of those questions.
So because I've studied many different areas of psychology.
I write what scientists call literature reviews where instead of doing an experiment yourself,
which might take a year, you go and read all the experiments that other people have done
and try to put them together and you can address big questions like that.
So what is the essence of being human?
That's one of those.
And certainly whether we have free will in the sense we can choose to act differently
in the same situation and alter and adjust our behavior including based on ideas and
how we imagine the future, things like that.
That's really an important aspect of the human mind.
So that's the vision was to really try to understand that.
I'm sorry.
My security guard is barking.
One more.
All right.
So we're back on.
My sincere apology.
I'm so sorry.
Of course that will be edited out and everything else.
We were of course speaking about your book, The Signs of Free Will.
And we were just talking about how we as humans can utilize free will, willpower to actually
direct us into where we're going or how we see life.
That's what I took from our discussion because I realized that we don't normally think about
things like that.
I think we're just doers.
We're not really sitting here thinking about things like that.
And when you decided to write this book and the other book that you have written, what
more do you want us to learn or people to learn or even the viewers to learn about this?
Well the limited aspect of willpower is important to understand and to manage.
I'm getting someone just on a bad test.
Let me.
We got it.
We're all over the place today, Roy.
How are we?
I know.
My friend from France has been trying to call me.
So let's go back to what else do people want to know.
It's clear as you said, good self-control and rational decision making, enlightened
self-interest, all of these help you to live a better life and to be more successful.
Early in my career for example, I studied self-esteem because there was a period when
we thought the big problem in life is people don't have enough self-esteem and that makes
them not take chances or whatever.
But that didn't work out very well.
Self-esteem is more a result of success in life than a cause of it.
It makes you take a more optimistic spin.
If you have high self-esteem, you like yourself better but you don't actually do any better.
Whereas self-control, very much the opposite.
Self-control measured early leads to success later.
There are these studies in Britain where they track thousands and thousands of people over
many years and the kids who are rated as having better self-control by their teachers when
they were nine years old end up having a better employment history as adults and being less
likely to be cigarette addicted smokers and various other things.
Earn more money in life, more popular, better relationships.
So I came away from all that with my advice to parents and teachers and coaches and things
that forget about self-esteem, concentrate on building self-control.
That's really what produces the best results in the long run.
Roy, I'm so eager to ask you with all of these words and self-control and willpower and everything
that you're saying, how does that play a part now that social media is all in our faces?
Yes, well, a lot of us are thinking about that.
Things have been changing so fast.
We don't have all the data and all the information that we want but I think people are making
a pretty good case that the sustained attention is much more difficult.
It's more of what they call the monkey mind.
It jumps around because you're always getting things clamoring for your attention and anytime
you get bored for a moment, you can go onto your phone and check your social media presence
or play games or text some friends or do email.
So you're always involved.
I'm writing a big review article on that where we've been reading lots and lots of the scientific
studies.
The idea which seems to be holding up is that the human self, the psychological aspect,
isn't fully there when you interact online as much as when you're interacting with a
person face to face.
We spend a lot of time engaged in social interaction when we're physically alone, right, since
that's what I'm doing now.
Nobody else here but we're communicating.
I spend a couple hours a day on email which is even less.
Here you and I can at least look at each other's pictures of our faces and respond in real
time whereas email, you send it off and somebody might respond tomorrow or maybe not until
next week.
So there's less engagement.
It makes people somewhat less inhibited.
So when you're not in person, people are more likely to bring up a lot of other ideas and
criticize and so on.
But the ideas tend to be of lower quality and you're just throwing out a lot more stuff.
I think people are starting to realize too that the physical safety feeling from interacting
online is compensated for a great deal of danger.
If you say the wrong thing or write the wrong thing, it will stay out there forever.
I spent this past semester at Harvard and there's some news stories about people who
were accepted.
It's a big moment in a kid's life to get accepted to the very best universities in
the world and then they found out that they said something objectionable back when they
were 14 or 15 and just clowning around or whatever but they put something on a post
that oh and then Harvard cancels their admission.
That's a lot of responsibility to put on a kid to realize everything I say could come
back to haunt me in the future and really derail my career plans.
Absolutely.
It happens in careers, employment and jobs and it's all over the place and then you deal
with things like that and then as I think about what we're speaking about, self-control
goes out of the window.
I really think that it's going back to that and learning all of this, this would be great
to learn prior to starting to post and saying what you're saying.
But I think it goes back to free will.
How do you define free will?
All right.
Well, a lot of the arguments have been about how to define it.
So I use a scientific definition that a bunch of scientists and philosophers came up with
a few years ago which is just the ability to act differently in the same situation.
That was clear cut and to the point.
I like it.
Yeah.
I mean there are other people think it means a soul reaching into the brain and causing
behavior without any physical action or anything like that and so a lot of scientists don't
believe that when it's defined in those terms and I guess I agree with them.
But in terms of being able to act differently in the same situation to be flexible, that's
really good.
You can see why that evolved and why that's especially important in culture where we're
creating multiple situations for ourselves all the time whether it's recording this
at Christmas, whether you're shopping for presents and deciding what of all the possible
things you could get, what do you want to get for people or you're saving money for
the future so you can buy a house or send your children to college or have enough money
when you retire.
All sorts of things like that require an advanced mental capacity to deal with them and the
same with performing your roles in a society.
I mean chimpanzees are our closest relatives.
They don't have any restaurants.
They like cooked food when we cook it for them, most animals do but no animals have
mastered cooking whereas pretty much all human societies do and cooking is much healthier.
It vastly reduces the amount of energy you need in order to digest the food.
The chimpanzees, I read somewhere they spend six hours a day chewing because they're eating
raw meat and they have to chew it down.
Eating saves us from that and also we can go out to a restaurant and have different
kinds of food and so on but if a chimpanzee went in there, they would just grab food off
of the plates of other patrons, wouldn't understand the rules of how to order and wouldn't pay
for the meal and so on.
The whole business model wouldn't work.
It's our shared understanding of these things that enables us to cooperate in this way.
It's like trade.
The restaurant wants you to buy a meal from them and you want to buy a meal from them
and so if it works, you're both better off.
So it's a form of cooperation but you have to have an advanced enough free will to understand
the rules, to obey them, play your part, do what you're supposed to and take advantage
of it.
Absolutely.
You have such knowledge and experience in this.
What's your why?
What's your big why?
Well a while ago I set myself the goal of trying to understand what human life is all
about.
I was raised by some parents who had certain very strong views and I rebelled against
those and so I didn't feel loyalty to those but they had some good points too so I didn't
just go to the opposite.
I said, people can talk me into things.
I really want to learn to be very disciplined in my thinking.
I want to explore both sides and come away with a big understanding of why we're here
and what we're doing and what we're supposed to be doing and why society is the way it
is.
So that's my quest for the big picture and maybe I'll make it, maybe not.
I've made some progress.
Yes, yes and as you continue on and the world changes, I think you'll have more work to
do because…
Yes, yes, about fascinating new things.
I mean 30 years ago nobody knew we'd be debating whether the internet was bad for kids or new
forms of warfare and all sorts of things.
Other problems go back but the global economy is also a fairly modern development.
Among other things it's done, it's reduced warfare.
As nations discovered it was better to trade with each other than to send armies to destroy
each other's cities.
That itself has been improved.
So anyway, things do keep changing but there is a fundamental human nature that doesn't
change as fast.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show and thank you for giving us your time
and attention.
I hope you have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro
yourself.