In his brilliant overview of human behavior , Sapolsky challenges our intuitive sense that there are reasons for the way we behave. This can be taken as a license to challenge the very idea of "free will". It occurs to me that the issue is more subtle. Perhaps we are just very bad at explaining our reasons. We certainly lie about them all the time, using "rationalizations" to explain our actions in a way to place ourselves in the best possible light. There is strong evidence that this tendency is much stronger in some people than others. For example, it's an open question whether the narcissist really believes himself to be super special and immune to accountability. In extreme cases, we see instances of confabulation, where the brain "explains" its action in ways that are transparently wrong. In spite of difficulties with the concept of motivation, we are quick to attribute motivation to others - pretending to peer into their minds and extract reasons...

Sam's latest podcast: " Is Life Worth Living " illustrates Sam at his best and worst. He seems to be getting better and better with his turns of phrase, such as when he characterizes a rhetorical trick as "putting the rabbit in the hat". But Sam is stuck with a couple of very fundamental assumptions that pollute his entire worldview. You won't see it more clearly than in this podcast. The discussion is all about value . What is "good", what is "bad" and whether X is better than Y.  Specifically, whether it is "better" for a hypothetical person to exist or not. Is it "good" to exist? The problem with this is that value is neither  fungible  nor ordinal . In spite of Sam's lifelong, heroic efforts to do so, it is not valid to take two situations, X and Y, and say that there is "more" good in situation X and Y. This is trivially obvious in daily life. While we may say that spinach is "good" and gas...