Episode 1: Brains, Robots, and Free Will (Fre...

David and Tamler consecrate their podcast with a discussion of "The Sacred and the Profane" by Mircea Eliade. We focus on the first chapter on sacred spaces, where the divine breaks through (or irrupts) our homogenous and chaotic reality, creating a center that gives us meaning a ...  Show more

David and Tamler dive into Plato's Euthyphro, part of our intermittent Back 2 Basics series. A young cocksure priest, confident in his holiness, bumps into Socrates on his way to court to prosecute his father for a wrongful death. After a few rounds with Socrates on the nature of ...  Show more

Does anyone have any real agency? What do McDonald’s and Oxford University have in common? And why did Angela give up on philosophy?

Sam Harris speaks with Robert Sapolsky about the widespread belief in free will. They discuss the limits of intuition, the views of Dan Dennett, complexity and emergence, downward causation, abstraction, epigenetics, predictability, fatalism, Benjamin Libet, the primacy of luc ...

In this episode, we examine the timeless question of "free will": what constitutes it, what is meant by it, what ought to be meant by it, and, of course, whether we have it at all. We start with the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky who begins to deflate the widely held ...

What is the relationship between free will and religion? Historically, theistic religions have been dogged by questions concerning the nature of human agency. Do we make the choices we have in life because we can freely choose or does God somehow map life for us? If we don’t have ...  Show more