The debate around free will has been raging for millennia and, frankly, isn’t likely to be settled any time soon. But, as this short documentary from BBC Reel demonstrates, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a debate worth having. By interviewing leading thinkers across neuroscience, physics and moral philosophy, the UK journalist Melissa Hogenboom investigates where the intersecting debates over free will currently stand. The film surveys some of the most contentious controversies surrounding free will – from the legacy of the ‘Libet experiment’ to the concept of moral responsibility – to provide a fascinating dive into our current understanding of how and why we make the decisions we make, and what that should mean for how we understand our world.
Video by BBC Reel
Directors: Melissa Hogenboom, Pierangelo Pirak
video
Family life
One family’s harrowing escape from postwar Vietnam, told in a poignant metaphor
10 minutes
video
Film and visual culture
Our world has very different contours when a millimetre is blown up to a full screen
8 minutes
video
War and peace
A frontline soldier’s moving account of the fabled ‘Christmas truce’ of 1914
12 minutes
video
Bioethics
What a 1970 experiment reveals about the possibility and perils of ‘head transplants’
6 minutes
video
Animals and humans
The wild tale of a young animal keeper, an angry tiger and a torn circle net
10 minutes
video
Technology and the self
Why single Chinese women are freezing their eggs in California
24 minutes
video
Beauty and aesthetics
Can you see music in this painting? How synaesthesia fuelled Kandinsky’s art
10 minutes
video
Childhood and adolescence
The police camp where tween girls enter a sisterhood of law and order
28 minutes
video
Astronomy
The remarkable innovations inspired by our need to know the night sky
5 minutes