As a physicist, I don't really like the anti-philosophy sentiment that is arising in some of the comments. Attacking philosophy as a whole for bad ideas is the same as attacking physics as a whole for string theory.

"You make decisions" and "You are in control of your life" do not have to mean the same thing.

It’s ok you can say Sabine

the thing about the "decisions predetermined in the brain before you decide them" thing is that further research has shown that multiple decisions get queued up, not just the one you end up going with

"If you heard a medical doctor be like, 'No other medical doctors would listen to me! Apple cidar vinegar cures cancer!', you would know that that's a scam, right?"

No! "I know the truth that they don't want you to know" is an extremely common grift in all domains, from law to health to politics. People fall for it very easily.

Angela could only read three books for this one because all her floor space is taken up by Feynman books

"The words make sense in the order that they are written and it's fine."

We can just shut down BookTube right now. Angela's got it all covered.

My quantum chem professor had the best take on free will I've ever heard. We were discussing this in class and he asked us "if you knew the answer to the free will question, would it change the way you lived?". After we collectively said no he followed up with "Then who cares? Lets talk about wave functions".

I'm so sorry that when people get exposed to philosophy, it's usually bad philosophy being critiqued by scientists.

As a biochemist, admittedly not a neuroscientist, I don't think free will is a "brain doctor" question either. We do not currently have, nor can I imagine how we will we ever have, a way to scientifically measure subjective experience. I think this is called the hard problem of consciousness. There's a good Kaplan video about Thomas Nagel's essay "What is it Like to Be a Bat?" That does a better job explaining than I can.

Edited this comment to say I mentioned my biochem background bc ultimately neuroscience measurements are biochemical measurements (are physics measurements).

"It's fine." -Dr. Collier's critique of most things. I'm down for it!

I mean how would actual free will even behave? If the choices aren't based on anything, they are random. If they are based on something, it's determined by it. You can make any choice you want, that is, you are bound by what you want.

I read a book about quantum computing.  The author said that in order to simulate the universe you would need a quantum computer the size of the universe.  It's a bit impractical.

28:00 - t'Hooft: "if we came up with a theory that explained everything, we could explain everything!"

33:02 I’ve never heard anyone say Sabine Hossenfelder with such clarity without saying Sabine Hossenfelder

I think the core issue firstly depends on the way you define: 1. Freedom (to be free); 2. Will.
Secondly it depends on what you get when you negate both (non-freedom, non-will).
It is very common, for example, to treat the two concepts together (e.g. to be free means I can apply my will deliberately). However, this leads us to an endless dispute, since we bind the two concepts in our definitions.
One way to approach the problem is primarily to ask the following question: there could be something that happens without a reason?

As someone with severe depression and adhd who has a lot of difficulties with executive function, I find a lot of the discussion around free will interesting. My subjective experience is that I feel a lot more like I have free will when I'm properly medicated, but when I'm not I feel more like things are just happening and I can't actually control any of it.

2:25 Severino is evidently an adherent of eternalism, a metaphysical theory of time that takes its inspiration from Einstein's theories of relativity. Eternalism states that the subjective experience of the passage of time is illusory since the relativity of simultaneity implies that past, present, and future events all exist on an equal footing.

Einstein himself adopted this view. After his friend Michele Besso died, his letter to Besso's family included this thought:

"Michele has left this strange world a little before me. This means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction made between past, present and future is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion".

18:35 it's so funny to take a theorem of Conway - notorious for making up silly names for things, like "atomic weight (of a game)", "the THERMOSTRAT", and the equation "WINDOWS = TURNIPS×TURNIPS", all of which are concepts in combinatorial game theory - and interpret its name in the most literal way possible without reading the theorem itself

and I agree, I'd say it's more a result in information theory than physics. the statement is logically rigorous and says a very specific thing that probably isn't applicable to actual experiments or to the philosophical question of free will

13:40 I don’t know if this is a problem of language or ego but I’ve always felt it funny that we say we “have” a body rather than we “are” a body. People get too deep into Cartesian modes of thinking too, your brain is part of your body. I’ve always seen consciousness and “personhood” as emergent properties of the reality of being a body. It’s a weird hierarchy to place our conception of self as above our reality as bodies, as great apes. Idk, I think being a body is magical.