Change My Mind

A conversation between Bayan Furutan and Alex Buxeda on whether an "ought" can be derived from an "is," whether free will exists, and what it would take to prove it doesn't.

Alex argues, along Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky lines, that free will is an illusion: we are patterns of matter running a nested hierarchy of priors, from physics to biology to culture, and every choice is ruled by cause and effect. Awareness of the universe, on this view, collapses the is and the ought into one. Bayan holds free will as an axiom, accepted the way we accept that our senses reflect reality, and sets a high bar for disproving it: predict my behavior as reliably as we predict a planet's orbit.

Between those poles the conversation ranges across the thermostat as the smallest unit of decision, natural selection and entropy, poker and game theory, the abortion debate as a case of "a spectrum matching a spectrum," the Mormons as a test of whether a false belief can still be fit, and whether you act as if you have agency, or watching yourself act?

Chapters:
0:00 Can an ought be derived from an is?
1:51 The man hit by a car: same "is," different "oughts"
4:55 Every ought needs an "if": survival as the hidden premise
7:05 Paying back what it took to build you: entropy and natural selection
9:21 "What are you doing" vs. "why are you doing it"
11:53 Deriving the why from the what, and how bandwidth changes the answer
13:47 Co-evolution: black holes, universes, and turtles all the way down
16:16 Why criticism needs an alternative: the Enlightenment proposal
18:47 Free will as the real crux: is it required for an "ought"?
20:34 Hard determinism, Sam Harris, and "if you were Stalin"
22:15 Experience vs. proof: why Bayan holds free will as an axiom
27:43 Defining free will: what would non-free will even mean?
28:39 The thermostat as the smallest unit of decision
29:46 Is consciousness computational? Penrose and the counter
31:07 Poker, game theory, and modeling the other player
32:06 The real dividing line: can you act against your nature?
37:11 Zooming out: the lineage that never jumps into the street
40:19 Signal, noise, and why bigger samples reveal the laws of nature
42:04 Are you a set of instructions? The direct question
45:40 "Yes." Sapolsky and the nested hierarchy of priors
54:36 Diminishing returns toward 100%: chipping at the variance
1:00:07 A thought experiment: what correlation would settle it?
1:01:00 The god-of-the-gaps objection and spontaneous generation
1:03:43 Predictability across a lifetime: fetus, mid-20s, old age
1:07:16 At what point does free will emerge? The abortion parallel
1:10:42 A spectrum must be matched by a spectrum: the speeding-ticket model
1:18:17 Where does a human start having rights and obligations?
1:23:32 A reasonable hypothesis, but not proof: the high threshold
1:26:35 Markets, courts, and how truth is discovered collectively
1:30:11 The beehive: how a spectrum emerges from

I am joined by neuroscientist Karl Friston to discuss, from first principles, what trust is.

The trust we put in others, and in our institutions, is a sociological feature emergent from biology. It is here that predictions first appear.

This conversation inspired an article we co-wrote:
⁠https://schweizermonat.ch/trust-is-a-law-of-nature/

0:00 What is trust, in active inference terms?
1:07 Trust in your own future: planning as inference
2:16 Confidence, precision, and the shape of a belief
3:45 Two ways to minimize surprise: seeking info vs. avoiding surprise
5:48 Epistemic trust: choosing where to get your news
6:24 Scale invariance: from eye movements to which institutions you trust
8:20 Trust as a meta-judgment of your past predictions
9:11 The statistician's view: estimating risk, not just reward
10:56 When second-order inference fails: hallucinations and neglect
12:50 Delusional institutions: the same mechanics in markets and geopolitics
13:45 Precision as attention: what you trust is what you attend to
14:56 Rediscovering natural selection from a different angle
17:20 Bayesian model selection is nature's way of selecting phenotypes
19:58 Why the free energy principle complies with itself
21:14 Donald Hoffman, mortal computation, and neuronal chauvinism
22:31 We are the substrate: predicting ourselves into existence
24:07 Everything is a hypothesis, including time and the self
25:10 Do we see truth? What can be ignored isn't true
26:13 There is no truth, only the best inference for me
27:33 Synchronization of chaos: coupling your brain to the world
28:45 A joint free energy solution: becoming mutually predictable
29:38 Aligned interests: why you trust the table, your liver, and me
31:52 Negative valence: trusting that a lion wants to eat you
32:47 Shorting the BBC: the cost of distrust
33:33 Fake news, epistemic trust, and the pillars of autocracy
34:15 Sharing a generative model: how we become predictable to each other
35:47 Defining yourself by the states you refuse to occupy
38:04 Is this source generated by someone like me?
38:36 Why echo chambers are Bayes-optimal until communities open
39:54 Too many choices: why it's awful for young people now
40:58 Friston: no phone, no social media, no awful uncertainty
41:15 Australia's under-16 social media ban, seen mathematically
42:06 Information like capital: who should handle how much
42:48 The pathology: social media attracts more capital when you lose
43:28 Markets are grown up, social media is pre-adolescent
44:11 Science as selection: theories as surviving hypotheses
44:35 Is religion "true"? The fitness of a simple generative model
46:03 Narrowing choice: why fewer options relieves angst
47:05 "You are your own existence proof"
48:07 Collapsing is and ought: first survive, then philosophize
49:08 "I am, therefore I think"
50:23 The relational aspect: no standalone measure of goodness
53:30 Hardware and software differ only in speed of change
54:33 The renormalization group: same rules at every scale
55:07 Separation of temporal scales: growing slow, learning fast
56:15 What we inherit is learnability, not a finished world model
57:40 Why foolishness was selected for: the reckless years
59:21 "Did evolution fool us?" The value of unsophisticated agents
1:00:24 Variance creates arbitrage: Pinker and common knowledge
1:01:25 Closing thoughts

Lukas Leuzinger and Alex Buxeda interview Cass Sunstein for Schweizer Monat. They dissect the mechanics of liberalism. Sunstein defines a tradition that encompasses Hayek and Burke. He counters the claims of Patrick Deneen. He argues that choice does not destroy faith or family. The dialogue shifts to nudges. Sunstein explains how choice architecture assists humans without it being manipulation. They analyze speech standards. They contrast the First Amendment with the laws of Switzerland and Germany. Sunstein outlines the divisions of power. He warns against the expansion of the executive.

Buy Sunstein's latest book: On Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom
Check Sunstein's books here

Barbara Kolm, President of the Austrian School of Economics, joins Alex Buxeda to dismantle the myths of monetary nationalism, expose the political incentives behind inflation, and explain why trust collapses when money becomes a political tool.

They explore Carl Menger’s legacy, why money is a discovery not an invention, how time and information shape economic order, and why Europe is quietly drifting toward central planning through the “law of rules”.
From Bitcoin’s “don’t trust, verify,” to demographic decline, taxation traps, bureaucratic overreach, CBDCs, nudging theory, and the collapse of competitiveness in Europe, this episode is a deep dive into the institutions that shape freedom, responsibility, and prosperity.  

0:00 Monetary nationalism and why debasing your currency backfires
1:54 What sound money is, and why states debase it
4:01 Menger vs. Knapp: money as discovery, not law
7:52 Time, value, and why information spreads slowly
10:01 Stability, the rule of law, and the "law of rules"
11:59 Brussels, central planning, and the lost subsidiarity principle
15:17 Europe's demographic collapse and falling productivity
17:46 Taxes on labor and why no one works more
20:03 The hidden costs in tax and social security
22:04 Capital flees to where it's best treated: Venezuela
23:31 Price tags on government: making the cost visible
27:08 Social justice, responsibility, and providing opportunity vs. redistribution
32:04 Fractional reserve, cash limits, and destroying property rights
34:35 CBDCs, self-sovereignty, and why cash is the ultimate settlement
38:11 Nudging as central planning: Spain's blackout and Germany's solar
41:52 Closing thoughts

In this episode, Tobe joins me to discuss how consilience collapses concepts, the nature of entropy, markets as anticipation machines, biology as a model of past environments that survives by matching the present and future, the division of labor freeing mental bandwidth, energy as the basis of value, and the provisional nature of all knowledge.

0:00 Defining entropy: not disorder, but the fall toward the probable
2:07 Local order vs. global decay: the zero-sum game
4:19 One model, and the case against synonyms
4:53 Is model-building epistemologically bankrupt?
6:37 "Your longing for capital-T truth is quasi-religious"
7:46 There's no way out of building a model
10:55 Why zero-sum can be rejected empirically
13:24 Entropy, time, and space as the same thing
16:07 Local order: life reversing the global trend
20:00 Big bang, heat death, and where life emerges between
21:23 The coffee and milk: beauty before mixing
23:24 Markets as anticipation machines: shorting the CEO
25:45 Short vs. portfolio: two different activities
27:54 Market makers set the price, not the uncertainty
30:57 Prediction as the wiring of the brain
34:09 Dispelling uncertainty and replacing it with control
36:26 Shepherd and sheep: does the shepherd choose his power?
38:16 Free will underlies entropy: escaping cause and effect
41:15 Dennett and why free will has been a distraction
43:46 Freedom from what? Coercion, violence, and flourishing
48:00 Switzerland's tax on labor and the myth of the simple rule
51:11 The hidden meta-tax of thinking about tax
53:31 Everything is simplification: the laptop and division of labor
56:37 Evaluating worthiness: marginal returns vs. speculation
59:04 The Microsoft vs. Apple mistake: looking deeper
1:01:09 You always build with tools you don't understand
1:04:42 Why complexity is manufactured: people want power over you
1:07:14 Obscure writing, French culture, and Dawkins
1:09:44 Free speech: the purpose of dialogue is to let ideas die
1:11:00 Energy as the basis of value: the 50,000-calorie meal
1:17:03 Why slavery isn't profitable in the long run
1:18:52 Did you arrive at a truth, or just short a bad strategy?
1:23:57 Is the economy zero-sum? Ingenuity as the ultimate resource
1:25:24 Marxism, surplus, and why a free market corrects it
1:29:52 The dot-com implosion: the market, or delusion?
1:33:36 Physics vs. models: the underlying and the error
1:36:00 Silly ideas: religion, Marxism, and the baby with the bathwater
1:39:16 "Isn't this just: knowledge is provisional?"
1:42:13 Two centuries of plummeting costs: the map must fit reality
1:44:04 The religious view vs. the Spinozan empiricist view
1:50:32 Is the heat death empirical, or a conjecture?
1:53:16 The alien who made your bed: the unfalsifiable claim
1:57:02 Bayesian priors and why the hypothetical adds nothing
2:03:28 Past and future as symmetrical in uncertainty
2:06:28 What a hedge actually is: the dangerous street
2:08:41 Managing downside vs. engineering the upside
2:11:46 Taleb's bet: knowing who goes bankrupt, not who gets rich
2:13:05 The engineer who touches reality vs. the abstracted manager
2:16:00 The mechanic and the manager: different data, not a hierarchy
2:19:16 An ever-richer prior, not an ever-simpler model
2:23:05 Wittgenstein: words have no meaning on their own
2:24:09 Why LLMs work: the latent space, not a simple model
2:28:04 Could we rebuild it if it broke? The blueprint survives
2:28:55 Is 10% a good test of importance? Tech, Nvidia, the limit
2:33:29 Subsidizing bad engineers so the good ones stay
2:34:09 Back to entropy: God is dead, humans just do their thing