Episode 62: Dr.

David Kyle Johnson on Free Will and Science Fiction

Host:
JV: Justin Vacula

Guest:
DKJ: Dr. David Kyle Johnson

--

JV: You're listening to the Stoic Solutions Podcast - practical wisdom for everyday life. I'm
Justin Vacula and this is episode 62 – David Kyle Johnson on Free Will and Science Fiction.
We talk about Mr. Spok, emotions, deliberation, neuroscience, changing habits, self-
improvement, and finding meaning in life amidst content presented in his new online course
'Sci Phi: Science Fiction as Philosophy' hosted by The Great Courses.

I last spoke with Dr. Johnson way back in episode 14, The Benefits of Philosophy, and am
eager to have him back as a returning guest.

David Kyle Johnson is a professor of philosophy at King’s College in Pennsylvania who has
three courses for The Great Courses: Sci-Phi: Science Fiction as Philosophy (2018), The
Big Questions of Philosophy (2016) and Exploring Metaphysics (2014). Academically he
specializes in logic, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion. He has articles in journals such
as Religious Studies; Sophia; Philo; Think; and Science, Religion and Culture. Most of his
articles are available for free on academia.edu. Kyle publishes prolifically on the intersection
of philosophy and popular culture. He’s edited four books on the topic: the forthcoming
Black Mirror and Philosophy, Inception and Philosophy, NBC’s Heroes, and Introducing
Philosophy Through Pop Culture. He's written over 20 articles on Star Trek, Doctor Who,
South Park, Tolkien, The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, Family Guy, The Office, and
Battlestar Galactica just to name a few. He maintains two blogs for Psychology Today (Plato
on Pop and A Logical Take), is the author of The Myths that Stole Christmas, and has an
authors@google talk on Inception with over half-a-million views on Youtube.

Visit my website at stoicsolutionspodcast.com where you can connect with me on social

media; find past episodes on many podcast platforms; and join my Discord chat server for
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thoughts – justinvacula at gmail.com.
Onto today's discussion...

JV: Thank you for joining me today. So we’re here to talk about parallels between Stoic
philosophy, free will, and your recent sci fi course that’s been released in the Great
Courses.

DKJ: That’s right. It’s called “Sci-Phi”, phi is spelled P-H-I ‘cause I’m going for a pun here.
Sci-Phi, science fiction as philosophy.

JV: Right. Now before we start about free will, we were chatting a bit off air about Spock,
and some people thinking of Spock as a Stoic figure. Can you talk about that for a bit?

DKJ: Yeah, so this actually isn’t something I actually cover in the course. If I do a sequel to
the course, which I would like to do, one of the things I would cover would be Spock and
Stoicism because it turns out that Mr. Spock is modeled after Gene Rodenberry’s somewhat
very inaccurate view of what a Stoic is, or what Stoicism entailed. It’s like the entire Vulcan
race is supposed to be like a race of Stoics, in Gene Rodenberry’s mind, but of course his
idea of what Stoicism was, wasn’t exactly accurate. And so, that could make for a really
good, good primer kind of on what Stoicism to talk about Spock and what he’s like, and
what it means to be logical in the Spock sense and that kind of stuff, and then compare that
to what Stoics are actually like. And I would need to do a little research and dig down deep,
and also run it past Massimo Pigliucci who’s a Star Trek fan as well and would be able to,
you know, fact check me and that kind of stuff on that. But that’s an idea to do there,
because there definitely is that connection, because it is what Rodenberry intended.

JV: Right, and Massimo was a past podcast guest. We talked about that very briefly.

DKJ: Oh, yeah, yeah. Interesting, like I’m actually staring at a bust of Spock on my desk
right now. Spock actually played a role in me entering philosophy, along with science
fiction. So, I remember - this is something I actually talk about this in the course - I
remember exactly where I first was as a kid when I saw my 1st episode of Star Trek. It was
called Spectre of the Gun and the crew comes across this weird Western town, and they
realize that it’s actually an illusion. And only by recognizing that it’s an illusion, and so it’s
not really there, are they able to guard against the bullets that are being fired at them,
because the bullets aren’t real.

The non-logical crew members, you know Chekov, and Kirk, and McCoy, can’t get past the
way things seem, right. Like, they - Spock can kind of convince them that it’s - right, that it’s
not real - but they can’t get past the way things seem. Only Spock is able to say, “Nope,
reason tells me that the world is this way, therefore it is this way, and I can accept it
regardless of what my senses tell me.”
And as a kid I was like “Hell yeah,” right, like, “that’s the kind of the person I want to be, I
want to be logical, I don’t want to be fooled by the way things seem, I want to know the way
the world really is,” and so Spock was a kind of intellectual hero in certain kind a way. And
that’s a philosophy, an intellectual approach we might call it, that I still embrace today.
That’s why I keep the little bust of Spock on my desk to remind me to be that way, all the
time.

JV: Very good. And a major part of Stoic philosophy, I think, is the dichotomy of control,
thinking that some things are in our power, up to us as they say, and some of those things
are not. There’s also a more modern version from author William Irvine, the trichotomy of
control, adding that some things are partially in our control, and that goes along with what
you were saying: we might think certain things, we might feel certain things, but can we step
back a little bit and question that. What choices might we have? How can we determine
the amount free will, we can say, that we have in our lives?

DKJ: Yeah, so I think there’s a big distinction to be drawn here, though, when we talk about
control and free will. So we can ask questions about how much control do we have over our
life, how much control do we have over what happens to us and that kind of stuff, and then
questions about whether or not we have free will - or even how much free will we have. And
those aren’t the same kinds of questions, right. Especially in terms of Stoicism. At least
Stoicism as I understand it, and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, because I’m not an
expert in Stoicism. Right, like so one of the things that Stoicism encourages us to do, right,
is to not worry about things we can’t control…

JV: Right

DKJ: Right, like to kind of recognize what we can do something about, what we can’t do
something about, and do something about what we can, and don’t worry about what we
can’t. That aspect of control - what we mean by control there, and figuring out what we can
control and what we can’t - really has to do with figuring out what we can causally contribute
to or not, right. Like what can I do anything about, right. There are some things that, no
matter what I do, they’re going to happen anyway, right. I can’t control -

JV: Like the weather, for instance.

DKJ: Right, right. Like, right, like so Wilkes-Barre, where King’s is, just got hit by a tornado
just last night.

JV: Right.

DKJ: Just like a mile down the road from my college, right. There’s nothing I can do about
that, I cannot control the weather and so there is no causal effect I can have. But, I can
causally affect my own actions, right? Like I can get in the basement and play it safe, or I
can - you know - think, “ah, it’s not going to hit me” and do nothing about it, right. These are
actions that I can bring about, right. And so I can causally affect the way my life goes in a
certain kind of way, even if - like that causal effect can still be real, even if I don’t have free
will. The ability - so what free will is - among other things at least, what’s a necessary
condition for free will, at least in most definitions - and we’ll talk about alternate definitions a
little bit later - it’s the ability to act differently than you do. It’s what we call alternate
possibilities, right. Or literally if the future could be different than it is. And if it can’t be
different than it is, then you don’t have free will in that sense. And so if you lack free will,
the way that you act may be inevitable in some kind of way, but that doesn’t mean that what
you do doesn’t causally contribute to how your life goes, right.

JV: Right.

DKJ: And so there’s this distinction. Now how do you determine what’s within your control
and what’s not? That’s tough. In general, I’d say the kind of things that are locally related
to you, we might say, are inside of your control, and - like, grander things aren’t, like the
weather, like government things - that kind of stuff isn’t generally in your control, unless you
happen to get elected to office or something like that. Generally, the behavior of other
people is not in your control, although you might learn to manipulate people or something
like that. But this is not my area of expertise to figure out what you can control or not.

But, as far as free will, if you’re trying to determine whether we have free will, generally the
way I put it - I’ve put it in publications and stuff - there are kind of 3 things that seem to entail
that we don’t have free will in the libertarian sense. In other words, that entail that the future
can’t be different than it is, that what will happen will happen inevitably, in a certain kind of
way. That’s the idea of determinism, and determinism strictly is false on the quantum level.
But what we might call macro-determinism, that what happens in the macro or larger than
quantum world, seems to be determined.

The 2nd thing that seems to indicate that we don’t have free will is what we’ve learned
about the brain, and how it operates, and that our decisions seem to arise from unconscious
parts of our brain, and you could actually predict a person’s decisions before they are made,
in a lot of cases.

And then there are simple logic and scientific facts that entail that - like, from a metaphysical
point of view - the future already exists, and so there is no doing otherwise than what the
future already contains.

JV: A lot of different takes on it, a lot of questions that come out of this, so it’s not as simple
as we think.

But let’s go on to the emotions, as you talked about that, that we might have these
unconscious responses, or maybe these innate responses. Seneca talks about that,
anyway, in his texts. He talks about what he calls the blush of modesty, that even the most
practiced speaker might experience some stage fright, or some anxiety, when approaching
the podium.

There are these reactions, these emotions, within us, that might lead us to think that we lack
free will, in certain senses. Yeah, you talk in your lectures about emotions arising from a
primitive part of the brain, being irrational, not arising from conscious rational deliberation.

DKJ: Correct. Right. So we know that the limbic system is what is most responsible for
emotions, of the generation of emotions. And the limbic system is not actually conscious.
We are consciously aware of our emotions, but the reason that we, like, we feel emotions is
because the limbic system, which again is unconscious, feeds the information to the
conscious parts of the brain, like the prefrontal cortex, the cortex, that kind of stuff - feeds,
essentially the information, that, you know, about what it’s doing, the emotions it’s producing
- feeds that information to the cortex, and then we have the experience of the emotion. But,
like, the origin of the emotion is in this kind of primitive non-conscious part of the brain,
called the limbic system. So there’s a couple of things to say about it.

First, it exercises a great amount of control over us, I mean like literally there are
connections that run up from the limbic system to the cortex, that, like, send signals to the
cortex that kind of tell - that motivate our behavior. And then there are signals that run back
down from the cortex to the limbic system, where those connections can kind of dampen
down emotions, right, so when the limbic system kind of freaks out about something, the
rational part of your brain can send signals to it to kind of settle it down, so you don’t
overreact to something, right? This is when you learn to, like - you get upset, and you don’t
act out, you don’t punch someone, that’s the rational part of your brain sending signals back
down to your limbic system to try to tamp that down.

But it turns out that even in adults the number of connections running up from the limbic
system compared - it dwarfs - the number of connections running from the limbic system to
the cortex vastly outnumbers the number of connections running back from the cortex to the
limbic system. So that the amount of control that the cortex can exercise on the emotions is
very, very limited. You can develop more connections as you mature, and as you age, and
like literally with practice, and so some people can be better at this than others. This is also
why children are notoriously so emotional and cry so easily, is because their limbic system
essentially just completely controls them, and they don’t have the connections from their
rational, you know, cortex, running back down to calm them down. But even in mature
adults, the connections from the limbic system are vastly outweighed, coming up from the
limbic system to the cortex, are vastly outweighed by those going back down the other
direction.

And we see what happens in people’s brains when they’re making decisions, and it looks
like, that the part of the brain that is active first, when the decision is being made, is the
nonconscious emotional limbic system, right. And it’s only - and you can actually - that
Libet, there’s a couple of others that did experiments on this, where they were actually able
to predict what people were going to do by looking at the brain activity before the decision
was consciously made. And so there’s a decent case to be made, at least for the decisions
that we’ve studied, that what happens is the decision is made - when you make a decision,
the decision is made in unconscious parts of your brain. And then the fact that the decision
has been made, that information is sent to the cortex, the conscious parts of the brain, and
then you have the experience of making the decision. And you think, “Oh, well, that thing
that I just experienced, that’s what caused me to do what I did,” when in reality, feeling
that’s that what caused to do is just an illusion, right. The causal work was done by the
unconscious part of the brain, and this conscious experience of making a decision seems to
be only an afterthought. And it gives us the illusion of free will.

JV: Right. Within the Stoic texts, there’s talk of, yes, children maybe being afraid of the
dark, and having this anxiety, but as we grow, as we have experiences, undergo certain
training, we can improve our reactions, our habits, with wisdom and determination, right.

DKJ: Right, right.

JV: They talk about desire, moderation, self-improvement. It might be a difficult journey, it
might take time. We can have a conscious effort at trying to change our reactions to things
and try to improve it.

DKJ: There’s a couple things to say here. One is that sense of stage fright. There’s an
interesting parallel in, kind of, fiction studies. There’s this thing called the paradox of fiction,
where the paradox is - why is it that we cry at a movie? Like a science fiction movie or
something like that. You go see a sci fi movie, and it touches you emotionally, maybe you
get scared, or you - you know - cry when the protagonist dies or something like that. And
you wonder, well why in the world would you do that? Because you know it’s not real. You
know it’s only a movie, that person’s not real, none of that really happened. Why would you
cry? So how can you have an emotional reaction to something while at the same time
knowing that it’s not real. That’s the paradox.

And the solution that William Irwin and I have proposed in print is kind of along this line. It’s
- movies create this kind of, what we might call an emotional illusion for us, right, and that
there are - in the same way that, like, when you see an optical illusion, like the famous
tabletop illusion, where you see the 2 tables and they’re turned differently, and one looks
kind of short and fat, the other one looks long and skinny, and then it turns out the table tops
are exactly the same size. You can know that those are actually the same size. Like
intellectually you can know, and you can even see someone take one tabletop and pull it to
the other and see that they’re the same size. But you won’t be able to help but see them as
different sizes when the illusion is presented to you, right.
There’s this way in which - there are unconscious parts of the brain that are doing things
completely outside of conscious control, and there is nothing that you can do about it.
Intellectually you can know that they are the same size, but you’ll still see them as different
size. Intellectually - in the same way, intellectually you can know that the movie you’re
watching is real [intended not real] but unconscious parts of your brain are still going to
react as if it is, because the intellectual parts of your brain cannot affect those unconscious
parts. Those unconscious parts are just going to do what they do automatically, and you
can’t control them.

And so you can know there is nothing to be afraid of when stepping in front of a crowd, but
you can still have that emotional - you can still have the stage fright. You can still have
those reactions. Now, that said, over time you can learn to dampen down those reactions,
right. Like someone who cries a lot at films might be able to, over time, kind of keep
themselves from crying too much at films by reminding themselves that it’s not real or
whatever with that kind of self control and self-determination, and that kind of stuff, they can
figure out how to do that. Or somebody with stage fright can do the same thing, they can
overcome those.

However, an interesting question that arises from that is, if we don’t have free will, can we
really self-improve in that way? Right? You talk about conscious self-determination to try to
break these habits that we have, in an effort to try to, you know, improve yourself, and you
think, “Well wait a minute, if we don’t have free will, and all of the decision-making is
happening on an unconscious level, can we really do that?”

This can kind of give people - the threat of us not having any kind of free will, can give us
this kind false impression, I think, that like nothing matters. “No matter what happens, I’m
just going to do what I’m going to do, so why bother even trying. Why bother deliberating,
why bother with self-improvement. The way I am is the way I am, and I’m just going to be
that way.”

But that is not entailed by our lacking free will. And, again we can go back to the difference
between control and free will to, I think, make this distinction. Even if we don’t have free
will, we can still make choices. The choices won’t be free choices, but decisions can still be
made. And what decision ends up being made will greatly affect - you know, or could
greatly affect - the way that the rest of your life goes, right. When you reflect on it
philosophically, you can look back and go, “Well, my brain structure is such that I couldn’t
have made any other decision than I did,” right, but the decision was still made, and the
decision still had a causal influence on the rest of your life. And so it’s not like deliberating
about things is worthless. It’s not like making choices about things is worthless, or being
able to weigh the consequences of, you know, possible choices that you might make, right?
Like, think about it this way. When we talk about the illusions, the optical illusions, that are
presented to us, they are still illusions, right. The table tops are the same size, you can’t
help but see them differently.

JV: Right.

DKJ: In the same way, we can’t help but feel the illusion of free will. It is inevitable. In fact,
in and of itself it might be an argument that we’re not free. You are not free to believe that
you are not free. You cannot help but believe, or at least feel, like you have free will, right.
But this is actually a good thing, because that illusion of free will allows us to make rational
choices, deliberative choices, right. Even if ultimately it’s, you know - the motivation for the
choice might come from unconscious parts of the brain, or maybe not all of them are that
way. But we can still make choices and decisions because, from our point of view, there
are multiple possibilities, right?

JV: Right

DKJ: We’re likely wrong about their being alternate possibilities, but it sure looks like that,
to us, when we’re making a choice. And because it does look like that, we can weigh the
different options and think about the different consequences of the choices. And then
make the best choice.

JV: There’s a lot of talk in the Stoic texts about asking what must be traded for what. That
if we’re going to focus our lives on accumulating wealth, the neglect of virtue, selling out, we
could consider that, and well what kind of life do we want to live. Might we go, say, polluting
the environment at an extreme rate to make some profit. We can weigh one thing against
another and make a determination about what we want to do. Might this add to our capacity
for choice, or free will, or whatever we should call it.

DKJ: Right, right. And so going through that kind of process - making the choice to break
certain habits in order to improve yourself, right. That is all still possible. All the Stoics’ talk
about in terms of wanting to do that, and that you should do that, is all still possible, even if
we don’t have free will. Ultimately, like from a metaphysical point of view, ultimately whether
you would or would not do that - whether you will or will not self-improve, or even make the
choice to self-improve, may not really be a free will decision, but the choice to do that is still
possible, even if there’s not free will.

And so, the lack of free will, I don’t think, negates anything in the way that the Stoics make
recommendations about how you live your life, or what kind of choices that you should
make. All it does is refute this idea - and maybe some Stoics endorse this idea - but all it
does is kind of refute this idea that when you make that decision, what’s going on is your
disembodied soul is reaching down from beyond the physical world and causing you to act
one way, rather than another, and that you could really have acted in either way in a
metaphysical sense, right. To the extent that the Stoics would think that, that would be
false, on this kind of view that I’m defending here. All the decision-making and the self-
improving and everything else they talk about, that can all still be done. It’s just not done by
some extra-physical being that is you that’s reaching out from beyond the world.

JV: Yeah, I see them as being materialists, and talking about the reasoning faculty that we
have, our thought processes, and well, we could consider those different possibilities and
come to a conclusion with proper exposure to that wisdom, consideration, and input from
different philosophers, people from all walks of life. Even reading certain texts that can lead
us to take action, and even feel invigorated, and go out into the world and face certain
challenges.

DKJ: Yeah, so like there’s a couple of things to say in regards to that. One is that realizing
that we lack free will in this way can lead us to make better decisions in regards to - and
again they may not be free decisions - lead us to make better decisions in regard to how we
improve ourselves, right. So you realize that, well, I act in accordance with my brain
structure, my brain structure dictates the way I behave, and my brain structure is a result of
my DNA and my environment. If I don’t like the way I’m behaving, then the way I change it
is I change my environment, right. And one of the ways I can change my environment is by
reading different texts, right, like different inspirational texts, that educate me, that - you
know - teach me different ways. And that can actually change my brain structure, which
ultimately will change the way I’m making choices, right.

JV: That self-awareness.

DKJ: And so - yes. It’s all part of that self-awareness.

And the 2nd thing to say about that, in view - in light of the fact that the arguments against
free will in the libertarian sense are so strong, and again in a libertarian sense I mean that
we can do otherwise, that there are alternate possibilities, that is an unrestricted idea, right,
and it really is inspired by this kind of idea that there is a separately existing being that can
reach down from outside the world and cause you to behave as you do.

But in response to the very convincing arguments against that kind of free will, what some
philosophers have done is change the definition of free will, so that they can still say that we
have free will. So for example, Martin Fisher, if my memory serves me correctly - has this
idea - and I’m really rough-shodding this, there’s a lot more to be said about the more
nuanced version of his definition - but essentially what he suggests is that an action is free
as long as it is the result of a rational deliberative process. What Fisher would likely argue
is that, like, in the experience that show that choices arise from our unconscious kind of
emotional parts of our brain, that those are only certain kinds of decisions, but that bigger
decisions could be influenced by the rational cortex, and that we can go through these
rational decision procedures to arrive at conclusions, and then that those conclusions
motivate action. And so he would say that if an action is a result of a rational deliberative
process, it’s free.
Now you might - and then if you were to ask, “Yeah but could that process have gone any
different than it would,” Fisher would say, “No, it can’t.” The process is a physical process
that happens in your brain, it gives rise - we would say - to, you know, conscious activity
and that kind of stuff. The process may very well - in fact, likely is - deterministic, such that
there’s no other outcome that it could have, but Fisher would say that doesn’t matter. What
makes an action free is that it is arrived upon as the result of a rational deliberative process,
and as long as that is true, you’re free! And you’re morally responsible for what you do,
even. All of - that - I think that aligns very nicely with Stoicism. If you want to change the
way that your rational deliberative process goes, then expose yourself to a different
environment, different readings, different writers, you know, different ideas, and that can -
you know - change the way that you reason. And so all the kind of decision that the Stoics
say you should be making, and the things that you should be doing, are still in line with that.

JV: Right. There’s a lot of talk in the texts about being careful when selecting friends, and
which kinds of social circles we should involve ourselves in. And they talk about being a
person around - what was it, coal or a fire, and that if we’re around so much coal, well,
“We’re going to get soot on us, we’re going to get dirty by those we hang around,” is the
explanation that’s given by I think it’s Epictetus, right. We can tend to mimic other people,
especially children will mimic the behavior of others, adults, people that they look up to,
people that they see as responsible, as good decision-makers. And people can even be
slavish, conforming to and mimicking the crowds, the masses, society, right, not questioning
their assumptions. So we can be heavily influenced by others around us, and with an
awareness of that, we can go on to - yes - ask those questions and pick our own path in life,
rather than just going with a plan for life that others have set forth for us, or values that
people have drawn to our awareness. We can break free of some of those traditions.

DKJ: Right, and all the recommendations a Stoic makes for doing that, right, questioning
the influence of the crowd on you, questioning assumptions that you’ve had since you were
born - all of those are still valid. All of those are still things that you should be doing. And if
you think, “Well what’s the use in doing any of that, because I’m not free, so whatever’s
going to happen is going to happen,” is a misunderstanding, essentially, of what those who
deny free will are suggesting.

It’s not that what’s going to happen to you is going to happen to you regardless. The
choices that you make, and the influences that you bring in, and the kind of thinking that you
do, influences the way that your life goes, and so you still need to be careful about all of
those things, even if the choice of whether to be careful or not, isn’t ultimately a free choice.

JV: Right. So we can still work towards self-improvement, we can still be active in the
world, we can still pursue a meaningful life, rather than, “Oh well, I’m just going to give up
and just lay in my bed all day.” And maybe they can even say, “Well, that was a choice.”
DKJ: So, in that regards, like some people - you talk about the meaning of life, some
people think this realization that we don’t have free will makes life meaningless. But I
actually argue this - there’s so much crossover in my courses - so, another course I have for
the Great Courses is called The Big Questions of Philosophy. In The Big Questions we talk
about the big questions of philosophy, like “Do we have free will; Is there a God,” right,
“Does the self exist or is the self even an illusion that your brain creates for you,” all these
kinds of questions. In the last lecture, like the entire kind of course - it’s a 36 lecture course
- kind of sets up this last lecture, that it’s kind of a preview of the Sci-Phi course, because in
the last lecture I talk about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. There is - in The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy there’s this whale which is kind of called into existence
from nothing. How this happens is another story, but in the midst of the story a nuclear
missile is turned into a giant whale above - high in the atmosphere of a planet called
Magrathea. And the whale just pops into existence and then falls to its death. But as it
falls, Douglas Adams tells the story of exactly what it thought. And you literally get to live
the entire whale’s life. And essentially as it’s called into existence, it just immediately starts
asking, “Whoa, who am I, why am I here, what does it mean to ask ‘Who am I’,” and it starts
wondering about the nature of its existence, and it starts asking these kind of big
philosophical questions, till it sees this giant thing coming towards it, decides to call it
ground, wonders if it will be his friend, and then *splat noise*, right, it splats.

But what’s interesting about it is that the whale is not unlike us. It’s just that its existence is
shorter, right. It’s called into existence randomly. It has no control - I should say, it has no
control over the path to which it takes from its existence to its demise. For him, it’s a - for
the whale, it’s a straight line down, but if we don’t have free will, we don’t have control, we
don’t have a choice - a free choice - about the path that we take from when we’re born and
when we die, and of course our death is also inevitable, right. And we ask some of these
same questions.

And so we could think, “Well, if there is no God, and there is no free will, does that make life
meaningless,” right? And in that last lecture of The Big Questions, I argue that it doesn’t
make life meaningless at all. That you can - there still can be, not even just like kind of -
there can be objective meaning to life in and of itself even if there is no God, no free will,
and no afterlife, because there are things that are objectively valuable. And to the extent
that your life contributes to those things, and brings those things about in others, and that
you experience those things yourself, those things can be objectively meaningful. I talk
about it in more detail, you know, in the lecture. But that is to say that us lacking free will
does not make life meaningless. Life can still be objectively meaningful. Doesn’t guarantee
it will be! But it still can be.

JV: Sure. And there’s a lot of talk in Stoicism about what does that good life look like?
What should our aims be, riight? If we can work toward pursuing virtue, or toward bettering
society, ourselves, living a well-examined life, an ethical life, working toward justice, having
courage, right, these are some structures that we can work from, back to even Virtue Ethics
from Aristotle and different approaches from other schools at that time.

Yeah, we’re asking in the modern era, where so many people still seem to be unhappy -
they aren’t finding a sense of fulfillment. Thousands of years ago, well, many people were
still talking about these questions, and society seemed to be far more brutish back then, but
with modern technology, many of the things of this era, a lot of that unhappiness still
continues. People are still searching for a sort of meaning.

DKJ: Right. And notice that all of the things a Stoic says that you can do to seek out that
better, meaningful life, you can still do, if you don’t like free will. Whether or not you will do
them is ultimately - in the ultimate metaphysical sense - either whether you will or you won’t,
and there’s ultimately nothing you can do about it, but you can still do those things. And you
can still have control in the more limited sense.

JV: Right. So maybe it could be even a question of what degree of control do we have. It
doesn’t have to be this all or nothing proposition, as you say. Maybe there’s a case for
compatibilism, as that’s a popular perspective within philosophy.

DKJ: Yeah, and so, I mean, compatibilism is the view that I was talking about before, with
John Martin Fisher, right, who redefines free will in this, you know, this sense of “You’re free
as long as you act in accordance with a rational deliberation.” The compatibilism here
means that free will is compatible with determinism. It’s compatible with the idea that you
can’t act any other way than you will act.

Like, another version of that - Harry Frankfurt, who has the famous Frankfurt
counterexamples. He suggests that one is free as long as one acts in accordance with their
2nd-order desires, and what that means is your desires about your desires. So in other
words, someone who’s addicted to cigarettes does not freely smoke the cigarette - the next
cigarette that they smoke, they do not freely do that - they’re, you know, trapped by their
addiction. But if they don’t want to be an addict any more, and they choose - and they
successfully choose - not to smoke their next cigarette, even though they have the appetite
for it, even though they have the craving, that’s acting in accordance with a 2nd order
desire. And that is what Frankfurt would say is a free decision. Even if whether or not they
act on that 2nd order desire is ultimately not up to them, it’s not, you know - there’s no other
thing that they could possibly do. But if they do act in accordance with a 2nd order desire,
that’s what he would call free.

That’s compatibilism, and if you accept that definition of free will, you’ve got free will all over
the place, and there’s, you know, no question that you can do all the things that the Stoic
suggests that you can do. But even if you reject that definition of free will - which I do, I
don’t think that’s the right definition of free will - but even if you reject that definition of free
will, you can still do all the things that the Stoic says you can and should do for a meaningful
and happy life.
JV: Right, and the desire’s something that can come about through rational deliberation as
we mentioned as, well, we might feel that impulse to eat all that fatty food and gorge
ourselves at the buffet, or go out into hookup culture on Tinder, and not really care about
consequences, but if we think about that and say, “Well, you know, maybe that’s not the
right path” we can have more moderation in life. That’s surely a pillar of Stoicism, right. So
the person who has the addiction, yeah, well, it might be the biology that was altered in a
certain way, but then they can come into the realization that “Well, I have this craving, but
I’m going to combat that.”

DKJ: Right. And notice, though, that - this brings us to a slightly different topic - that this
realization that we don’t have free will, it shouldn’t affect the way that you make decisions.
You should still make decisions in the same way that you always have, because the same
things are relevant to whether or not the decision’s the right decision or a good decision, or
whether it will have a positive effect on your life.

However, the realization that others - that no one is free, can help you treat others in a
better way, right. So, it can - First of all, it can help you understand the way that others
behave, when you realize that the way they’re behaving is not a result of their soul reaching
out from beyond the world but is a result of their brain structure, and that they, you know, in
an ultimate sense can’t have acted differently than they did, and that the choice that they
made is a result of their, you know, their DNA and their environment - their brain structure
which is ultimately a result of their DNA and their environment. That can help you
understand people better, and treat them more humanely, we might say. It makes it easier
not get so mad at someone, when you realize that the way that they’re behaving is
ultimately a result of their brain structure.

And then it can also, like, greatly affect, for example, the way that we would treat prisoners,
right. The criminal is criminal because of the way his brain is structured. And so ultimately
it’s not within his control. In the Fisher sense, yes he might be going through a rational
deliberation or maybe it is just an emotional response, right - there’s a number of different
motivations for criminal behavior - but if we recognize that the criminal behavior is not some
defect in his soul, this immaterial substance, you know, which we cannot affect because it’s
outside the physical world - but it’s a problem with they’re brain, then rehabilitation becomes
the purpose and motivation for, like, criminal punishment, right. And it wouldn’t even really
be criminal punishment at that point because the punishment has a kind of moral dimension
that would not be justified in this realization.

JV: Right, right.

DKJ: So when someone’s a criminal, you could still lock them up, it would be justified to
lock them up, but to do so could only have 2 legitimate motivations. One, protection of
society, if they’re going to misbehave again you isolate them from society so they can’t hurt
someone else, but whatever unpleasantness that they suffer through in prison can only be
for the purpose of rehabilitation. Right, can only be for the purpose of either motivating
them not to do it again or to change the way that they are.

And what studies actually show is that punishing people really doesn’t do that very well, like,
there needs to be actual rehabilitative efforts made, right, in regards - like, interventions, like
moral education, and just general education, and that kind of stuff, right. A lot of times
crime is motivated by poverty, and poverty is due to the fact that they can’t find a job, and so
you educate them and train them so that they can be a contributing member of society, and
then the motivation for criminal behavior goes away, right.

And so - but the idea of a the moral justification for punishing people goes away when you
realize that ultimately they don’t freely decide to behave as they do. They decide to behave
as they do, but they don’t do so freely.

JV: Right. There’s lots of talk in the Stoic texts about having pity for others, that the reason
that they have these behaviors is a lack of training, this lack of wisdom, as you said, but if
they were exposed to the information, they were more reflective about their actions, then
perhaps they would come around. Also if they had some good role models, some reasons
for good behavior and wanting to achieve this virtuous life, they would also see that
destructive behaviors aren’t going to be the path to contentment, that it’s only going to inflict
harm upon themselves and others, it’s a counterproductive behavior in so many cases.

DKJ: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

JV: There’s also a lot of talk of judgments in our interpretation of things, as we’ll be in the
world, see certain events, see certain people, and we’ll have an opinion about it, right. And
the opinion can really be a middle step between the event and our reaction to it, as some
people might act really impulsively, they might see a certain person behaving in a way and
just have this really angry reaction, whereas others will respond differently.

DKJ: Yeah, so I think that the realization that we don’t have free well, I think, can help curb
negative reactions to people’s behavior. It makes you realize that, like ultimately they don’t
have a - they don’t have an ultimate sense of control of what they’re doing, that what they’re
doing is a result of their brain structure, and there’s not something that’s ultimately inside
their control. And so it can mitigate - when you understand the reason that people are
behaving the way they are, it makes it easier to deal with it, it makes it easier not to get
angry with them. And it can also, like - I mean, even if we’re not just talking about criminals,
we’re just talking about other people that behave - you know, that we know in the world - it
can help us alter their behavior because we understand what we need to do to try to correct
that behavior, right? Or what they need to do to correct that behavior.

JV: Right. We can try to instruct others, try to help them even. In productive ways.
DKJ: Right, right, in productive ways. Or encourage them to, you know, expose
themselves to different thinkers, or different ideas, or whatever it is that’s necessary to do
that, right. Like I mean and this comes to - everything from changing someone’s behavior to
- even if once you understand that -

One of the places I think that society - professionals - have actually embraced the idea that
we don’t have free will is with political campaigns. That people realize that people don’t -
certainly they don’t rationally - most people don’t rationally conclude who they will vote for,
that it’s mostly an emotional process, and that emotional process can be manipulated very
easily. And so this is why political ads are the way that they are, they have the ominous
music and that kind of stuff. You don’t see people presenting arguments in political ads,
you see emotional appeals and that kind of stuff. And I think it’s because people doing this
have realized that people aren’t free, they don’t freely decide who to vote for, they let their
emotions do their thinking for them or their deciding for them, and it’s not ultimately a free
action.

The same is true of political debates, or debates about anything. If you’re trying to - you
know - have an argument or trying to convince someone to change their view, most of the
time you’re not going to do it if you just present a rational argument to them. But if you
understand why they believe what they do, and why they drew that conclusion, and you kind
of understand this kind of non-free process that they went through to arrive at that
conclusion, you might better understand how you could actually change their mind.

JV: Yeah, it’s just a quick reaction people have that doesn’t seem to be so productive, like
“Oh so you disagree with me, well you must be this evil person,” or “You must hate this
certain group of people,” right, but that’s not actually aiming at behavior change or really
talking about the issues, but that certain shaming or the language might lead people to
question in some way. Will it be ultimately effective? Why is it that some people would
adopt certain shaming language or nastiness rather than going through the argument.

DKJ: Presenting an argument to someone, it will likely not work because they didn’t reason
themselves into that position in the first place. You can argue till you’re blue in the face, and
it’s not going to do anything, right. Recognizing that they didn’t really decide to have the
position that they did, and they didn’t reason to it, can help you in understanding what you
need to do to change their mind. If you think it’s some kind of emotional reaction that led to
that conclusion, you can explore that emotional reaction - that reaction - and why they, you
know, reacted that way. And they might come to a different realization, a different emotion,
even, that would ultimately change their mind on a topic

JV: Present all the evidence in the world to the Flat Earth Society, right, or the Young Earth
Creationists of the world, and - yes - maybe that won’t change their minds. But maybe for
people who are more in the middle, or really haven’t considered the arguments too much,
maybe - yes, there’s some hope there. And using reason and even being compassionate to
the person that you’re talking to, instead of being nasty, that can lead them in that direction.
Oh, well, we can understand that maybe they had those ideas from their parents, or people
in their local community, or they just happened upon a certain internet forum, but they
haven’t examined the issue really deeply.

DKJ: Right, right. Yeah, but even with people - so like certainly with people who are more
middle of the road, you might be able to present an argument that could convince them. But
I’m even thinking of like people like creationists, right. You’re not going to reason them out
of their position, but you could potentially - if you understand that the reason that they are
creationists is because of some kind of religious devotion, the way to change their mind is to
approach the topic from an air of religious devotion…

JV: Right, meeting them where they’re at.

DKJ: ...and that you can do that more easily when you recognize that they’re not free. The
reason they drew the conclusion that they drew is not because - I mean, free in either the
libertarian sense or the even compatibilist sense, right. They’re not free in the libertarian
sense, they didn’t choose - their soul didn’t reach down from beyond, you know, the world to
decide what they were going to believe, but they also didn’t rationally deliberate on what to
believe. And so they’re not free in either sense, the rationalist or the libertarian sense. But
once you realize that, your hopes of convincing them otherwise, I think, improves because
you know just a little bit better what you need to do to try to convince them.

What I have seen with my students who eventually move away from kind of irrational
positions is - I mean, I teach them how to think in class, but they come to - like, the reason
they believe what they do is because of certain values that they have. And what I do over a
semester is get them to value truth, and to see it as valuable. And once that’s done, then
the arguments start to matter, because they care about knowing the truth, they care about
not, you know, being duped, and they care believing what is true, and then they start to see,
“Well, if I really do care about that, then I do need to give up this other thing which is
obviously false and embrace this other view” And that takes time. You can’t just do that in
a single - to instill the value of truth in someone is not something you can do in a
conversation - in a single conversation. It really does take exposure to a lot of different
ideas and arguments, and readings, and - yeah.

JV: Right, it’s something that’s even mentioned a lot, that change being a gradual process,
that’s a fact about human nature, as the Stoics say - even Epictetus himself is talking about
he had difficulty with anger, and he gradually became less angry. He took upon a writing
exercise, he kept a journal, and he was talking about, “Well, I was less angry today than I
was yesterday, and if I can go so long without these bigger fits of anger, then that’s a great
success,” right. It’s not going to happen overnight, we shouldn’t be angry at others for not
changing their minds, it’s a gradual process. We can expose them to information and
hopefully they can deliberate upon it. Maybe in a free sense, or not.

DKJ: Yeah, good.

JV: What is the overlap between science fiction and free will that you found in your work?

DKJ: Free will is talked about a lot in science fiction. A couple notable examples are The
Matrix and specifically The Matrix sequels, which I think are 2 of the most underrated
sequels, sci fi sequels, of all time. People disagree with me. I make a case specifically in
the Sci-Phi course, that they’re underrated. They’re not perfect, but I think they’re definitely
underrated. And one way I think they’re underrated is philosophically, especially the
sequels, because they do really directly address this idea of free will. And you have
characters in The Matrix sequels that directly argue against the idea that we have free will,
right, so the Oracle mentions essentially what’s known as the Freedom Foreknowledge
Problem: If God knows what you’re going to do beforehand, how could you do it freely?
Because the Oracle’s this being that knows the future, right. And I don’t think there’s any
actually a - there’s not a solution to that problem. If there is a being that knows what you’re
going to do beforehand, you aren’t free when you do it. They don’t make you do it, but
you’re not free because you couldn’t have done otherwise.

JV: Right, the only possible future, sure.

DKJ: Yes, exactly, because that’s the only possible future if they already know it. And then
like The Merovingian in The Matrix literally, you know, says that all that’s real, the only thing
that really has any control over the world, is cause and effect, action-reaction. Makes a
pretty decent argument that that’s the case, and that free will is an illusion.

And the only kind of disappointing thing about The Matrix is that it seems to be an argument
that we are free, ultimately, as I argue in the course. Neo saves the day simply by
exercising his free will at the very end of the film, in a way that Smith cannot see coming,
even though he has the Oracle’s powers, because it’s a truly free decision. And just the
mere fact that he acts freely is what allows him to defeat Smith and saves both the machine
world and the human world etc etc.

But what’s philosophically disappointing about the film is that it presents no argument that
this is the case. Like, it gives us no reason to think that humans actually have free will or
that, you know, give us a reason to think that Neo’s actually free, they just kind of assert it.
Just - Neo just is free, je just makes this free will decision. It’s very limited free will, there’s
only certain things that are free, in the movie, but it gives us no argument to that case.

And then another place this has come up is in Westworld, in fact in the most recent episode
I just watched of Westworld, which if memory serves is Season 2, Episode 8. In Westworld
there are androids, essentially host robots. Really, it’s kind of a story about how these
robots get free will and what it means for them to be free. And there are, you know, definite
arguments in the show that kind of suggest that the robots are just as free as we are, like
they end up - the hosts, the androids - end up being just as free as humans are, but really
that freedom only amounts to a kind of compatibilistic freedom. They are able to control
their actions and have a more - they are able to make decisions, and those decisions
definitely causally affect the way their life goes, but it’s not - they’re not free decisions. And
that ultimately the humans aren’t any more free than the hosts are. And so that’s where we
see this intersection, that where we see these kinds of arguments about free will and even
some suggestions that free will doesn’t exist.

JV: Right, and even the classic Truman Show, I could think of that, the film with Jim Carrey,
right. It was a man who was planted in this environment, watched by everyone throughout
the world, and there were certain incidents in which he was made to be afraid of water, that
led to him not wanting to escape from the set, that they exposure him to certain stimuli, and
well he hadn’t realized what had happened, that was part of his - shall we say -
programming, even.

DKJ: Right, and he certainly doesn’t look very free, whenever he’s programmed in that way
and then behaves in that way.

JV: How can people contact, and find more about you?

DKJ: Listen to my Great Courses. I’ve got 3 of them: Exploring Metaphysics, which is
audio only, which should be on the Great Courses Plus app pretty soon, it’s - they used to
not do their audio only courses, but they’re going to start doing that, so it should be there
soon. Otherwise you can just buy it on the website or get it as an Audible audiobook. The
Big Questions of Philosophy is my 2nd course, that’s 36 lectures, and my Sci-Phi course -
Sci-Phi: Science Fiction as Philosophy.

I’ve poured to much that I am into these courses, so you can find out a lot about me there.
In a certain kind of way, whenever they offered for me to do, the Science Fiction and
Philosophy course, I literally said to myself, “All right, I’ve been preparing for this my whole
life.” LIke, since I was 6, I have been preparing for this course, right, because I’ve been,
you know, steeped in science fiction all my life, and then studying philosophy and all that
stuff, and it all came together in very nice way. Didn’t even cover half of what I wanted to
cover, and so I’d love do a sequel. Who I’d like your listeners to contact if they watch the
course and like it is contact the Great Courses and say how great the course was, and that
you want more of it, and they’ll - if they get enough reaction like that, they’ll have me do
another one.

My academic work, if you want to see my academic work, most of it is available for free on
academic.edu. Just google academia.edu David Kyle Johnson. My page will come up and
my pop - a lot of my pop culture - most of my pop culture chapters are there, my journal
articles and that kind of stuff are there, and then links to my other works like the Great
Courses are there, too, including links to my Psychology Today blogs, A Logical Take and
Plato on Pop.

You can also follow me on Facebook, just go on Facebook and search for David Kyle
Johnson. I should pop up - I have an authors page that pops up there, and I post whenever
I, you know, publish articles, and new courses, and that kind of stuff. It pops up there.

And then on Twitter I’m @kyle8425.

JV: Good, and you even have other books that are available to the public, a lot of the
philosophy and pop culture series. And one is the Inception book, on which you gave a talk
about with Google.

DKJ: That’s correct, that Google talk last time I looked had quarter of - ¾ of a million hits -
750,000 views, which I was kind of proud of. So I have this book on Inception called
Inception and Philosophy: Because It’s Never Just a Dream, that’s still pretty popular
because Inception is a classic, that people still talk about.

And in addition to this, this will be my 1st plug for this because I literally just signed the
contract, I am also going to edit a new online reference work that will also eventually be a
handbook on pop culture as philosophy for Palgrave Publishing. So it’s ultimately going to
be like - we’re going to have 75 ten thousand word chapters, each one on a different aspect
of - a different pop culture item, like Star Wars, Star Trek. We’ll do some stuff on like, like
video games is going to be an option there. There’s going to be sci fi, I intend to have an
article on Fight Club, right, any kind of pop culture that can be addressed - that can be
viewed as philosophy. So not just raising philosophical issues, but that seems to be making
a philosophical argument, taking some kind of philosophical stance. The goal is to identify
what that stance is, and then evaluate it philosophically. And so that’ll be a series that you
can start looking for coming out, and it’ll eventually be published as a handbook. It may be a
few years before that handbook is done, because 750,000 words is going to take a while.
But that’s the idea.

JV: All right, very good. Thanks for your time today.

DKJ: Great! Thanks so much for having me on, Justin. Take care.

JV: Visit my website at stoicsolutionspodcast.com where you can connect with me on social
media; find past episodes on many podcast platforms; and join my Discord chat server for
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