On January 10, 2026, I gave a talk at the local Skepticamp Conference on The Death of Free Will. I am attaching the link to the video below. It is about 25 minutes long, followed by another 20 minutes of Q/A.
Since you cannot see the slides that well, I am attaching a pdf of the slides so that you can follow along.
Enjoy!
if the decision is made before we become aware of it, how is that not just a communication delay? like if i’m on the phone and it has a few seconds of delay, my hearing “wazzaaappp” at 04:10:33 doesn’t mean it wasn’t said at 04:10:31. i also don’t believe in the self, exactly, but i don’t have a hard time believing the cognitive construct of the self also runs decision making in some way. not disagreeing, just looking for clarity, not expecting to understand it at all, heh.
Bébé,
You are correct, it is a communication delay. But this particular communication delay, unlike your example, has profound implications.
The point is that if it is the unconscious part of the brain’s activities that makes the decisions, then it does not make sense to say that we are exercising our free will. We had no choice in the matter.
As another example, the unconscious part of the brain is what runs most of our bodies (blood flow, breathing, hormone secretion), etc.) We do not control much of that. Our ‘decisions’ are just like that, except that the brain also sends a signal to the conscious mind telling it what it had decided to do. This consciousness arrives before the action that had already been initiated, giving us the misleading sense that we controlled the action.
the brain is famously complex. body functions are handled by the autonomic nervous system, mostly in the brain stem area, ok. could there be a part in there that is functionally the decision-making self, and the aware self is just the delayed version of that? there are unconscious thoughts like some biases that don’t reach the level of conscious awareness, but what if the entirety of conscious awareness is just a highly reasonable part of the unconscious mind, that some might term a self, and the conscious awareness is just that on a delay?