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This show goes over the short stories of Michael’s favorite speculative fiction author and notable curmudgeon Harlan Ellison. Each episode Michael pairs (read: forces a friend to read) a short story with a guest that it “applies especially to.” This episode it’s the short story “The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore” and the guest is Alebrelle.

They discuss the moral complexities of intention, action, and outcome, the definition of free will, and the movie RIPD.

Art (above) by LucaBANDA

Michael Swaim: https://twitter.com/SWAIM_CORP

Alebrelle: https://twitter.com/Alebrelle 

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Cyclops giraffe

The story about the rat covered baby. I bet that was his baby from the affair.

Christopher Metzger

PBS has an amazing YouTube channel called Space Time and just this week they put out an episode about the implications of quantum mechanics on free will. TL;DW: It's still an open question, and likely will be indefinitely. But the idea of "superdeterminism" argues that a scientist’s “choices” on when / how they measure a quantum event could be correlated to the event that they’re measuring. The appearance of randomness in quantum mechanics comes from the assumption that the measurement and the event are independent events. If they are actually both effects of a single cause at some point in the past though, then we can resolve the apparent paradoxes of uncertainty and things like faster-than-light communication between entangled particles — by simply sacrificing free will. Unfortunately, as I understand it superdeterminism isn’t falsifiable with known science, because the entire observable universe was causally linked if you go far enough back in time.