Is the Future Unknowable? Uncertainty, Free Will, and the Limits of Science

What if uncertainty isn't a temporary problem science will eventually solve, but a fundamental feature of reality? Neuroscientist Stuart Firestein joins Michael Shermer to make the case that the universe may be far less deterministic—and the future far less predictable—than we like to imagine.

Firestein and Shermer discuss chaos and complexity, Darwin and randomness, free will, scientific progress, the replication crisis, COVID and the problem of communicating uncertainty, why humans are so bad at probability, and why even enormous amounts of data can fail to predict individual people or events.

Stuart Firestein is a professor of neuroscience at Columbia University and a member of the Santa Fe Institute. He has published over one hundred scientific papers in journals such as Nature, Science, Cell, and Neuron. He is a Guggenheim fellow, a member of the advisory committee for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His new book is It Could Be Otherwise: Science in the Age of Uncertainty.