Taylor previously held the beauty and style editor title at E News for 5 years where she oversaw the shopping vertical and appeared as an on-air correspondent She's a certified pilates instructor and Cleveland superstar Donovan Mitchell still has something to celebrate from the defeat Mitchell broke a longstanding Michael Jordan playoff record Sunday night's performance marked Mitchell's eighth straight Game 1 with 30 points or more who had two separate streaks of seven consecutive Game 1 outings with 30-plus points Most consecutive Game 1s with 30 or more points Holding such a record demonstrates an incredible display of scoring consistency and generally high levels of play It's one thing to even play that many postseason series—putting up those kinds of point totals in each and every one is remarkable Mitchell would undoubtedly trade the record for a win replacing Jordan's name in the record books isn't too bad The content on this site is for entertainment and educational purposes only Betting and gambling content is intended for individuals 21+ and is based on individual commentators' opinions and not that of Sports Illustrated or its affiliates All picks and predictions are suggestions only and not a guarantee of success or profit If you or someone you know has a gambling problem crisis counseling and referral services can be accessed by calling 1-800-GAMBLER Thrill NBA Fans in Game 1 Win.css-3hcdeq{margin:0;font-size:1.2rem;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;font-family:Proxima Nova,Proxima Nova Fallback Helvetica,Proxima Nova Fallback Arial;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;letter-spacing:0rem;line-height:1.44rem;color:var(--br--palette-foreground__tertiary-mainChannel);}Zach BacharMay 5 1) 0ms;transition:background-color 150ms cubic-bezier(0.4 1) 0ms;transition:fill 120ms cubic-bezier(0.4 1) 0ms;font-size:inherit;}.css-v4v4rs{-webkit-user-select:none;-moz-user-select:none;-ms-user-select:none;user-select:none;width:1em;height:1em;display:inline-block;fill:currentColor;-webkit-flex-shrink:0;-ms-flex-negative:0;flex-shrink:0;-webkit-transition:fill 120ms cubic-bezier(0.4 1) 0ms;font-size:inherit;}@media (min-width:0px){.css-v4v4rs{display:block;}}@media (min-width:1100px){.css-v4v4rs{display:none;}}.css-mps3fk{-webkit-user-select:none;-moz-user-select:none;-ms-user-select:none;user-select:none;width:1em;height:1em;display:inline-block;fill:currentColor;-webkit-flex-shrink:0;-ms-flex-negative:0;flex-shrink:0;-webkit-transition:fill 120ms cubic-bezier(0.4 taking down the Cleveland Cavaliers by the final score of 121-112 in Game 1 on Sunday With the Pacers trailing 102-101 and just under seven minutes left in the fourth quarter Tyrese Haliburton helped spark a 15-4 run that put the game out of reach finishing with 22 points and 13 assists compared to just one turnover He shot 9-of-15 from the field while racking up three blocks and one steal Fans and former players alike were impressed with the performance from Haliburton Fans also praised Indiana's impressive start to the series The majority of the game was a back-and-forth affair featuring 13 lead changes prior to Indiana's late run Andrew Nembhard led the Pacers with 23 points shooting 70 percent from the field and hitting five of his six three-point attempts Donovan Mitchell was exceptional inside the arc for the Cavs scoring a game-high 33 points to go along with five rebounds and four assists Mitchell shot just 1-of-11 from three-point territory Long-range shooting was the difference in the contest as the Pacers connected on 52.8 percent of their shots from behind the arc The Cavaliers will now look to bounce back in Game 2 on Tuesday night while the Pacers will be attempting to take a commanding 2-0 series lead (All persons innocent until proven guilty) Mitchell County Detectives and Deputies arrested Stewart for felony possession of a firearm by a convicted felon possession with the intent to sell/manufacture/deliver a controlled substance maintain a dwelling for the purpose of sell/manufacture/deliver a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia She was issued $85,000.00 bond and scheduled to appear in court Mitchell County Detectives and Deputies arrested Steele for Felony extradition warrants issued by Carter County She is held in secured custody pending extradition to Tennessee Beam cited Hudson for operating a motor vehicle without being licensed by the division of motor vehicles He is scheduled to appear in court on 6/13/2025 No sentences were recorded for this period The Mitchell County Sheriff’s Office is currently housing 15 inmates in McDowell County jail and prearranged detention facilities The Mitchell County Sheriff’s Office had 278 calls for service The Mitchell County Sheriff’s Office logged 10 transports to court so I don't mind pretending to be that name when people call me that," Thompson tells EW of being confused for his "Good Burger" costar Jillian Sederholm is Entertainment Weekly's news director and co-host of EW's 'BINGE' podcast covering every season of 'RuPaul's Drag Race.' Follow her on Twitter at @JillianSed to geek out over 'SNL,' guess every celeb on 'The Masked Singer,' or discuss Christian Bale's entire filmography in intricate detail (have you noticed all the dancing?) Tollin/Robbins Productions/courtesy Everett Collection The Cavs made easy work of the Miami Heat in the first round as they eliminated their opponents in a dominant four-game sweep but there's no denying that the Pacers pose a much different challenge for Cleveland.  Speaking ahead of tip-off on Sunday, NBA on TNT's Shaquille O'Neal had a bold message for Cavs superstar Donovan Mitchell The four-time NBA champ believes that Mitchell is one of the top players in the league today and O'Neal is now calling on the 28-year-old to prove it.    "If he plays the way he's been playing he'll definitely make it to the conference finals and the finals but he needs to play big," O'Neal declared.  but I would like to see a 30-piece every night Cleveland Cavaliers guard Donovan Mitchell (45) shoots while Indiana Pacers guard Tyrese Haliburton (0) defends "I know he's looking for his teammates and all that you've got to have a two or three-minute stretch where you show the people that you are the man in the league and on this team.  the Cavs have a real shot at winning an NBA title this season it will rely heavily on Mitchell's ability to live up to his own extremely high standards he'll definitely make it to the conference finals and the finals .. and possibly be an NBA champion because he's playing phenomenal right now," O'Neal continued There's going to be even more pressure on Mitchell on Sunday after the Cavs ruled Darius Garland out for the series opener due to a toe sprain Cleveland has no choice but to put a heavier load on Mitchell's able shoulders as Garland sits out his third straight game.  he is confident that Mitchell has it in him to take the Cavs all the way this season.  Get the best experience and stay connected to your community with our Spectrum News app. Learn More CLEVELAND — Donovan Mitchell of the Cleveland Cavaliers broke one of Michael Jordan's NBA playoff records on Sunday night The All-Star guard would rather be one victory closer to a championship Mitchell finished with 33 points in the Cavs’ 121-112 loss to the Indiana Pacers his eighth straight game with at least 30 points in a series opener Jordan had two seven-game streaks of 30 points in Game 1s (from 1991 to 1993 and 1997 to 1998) while leading the Chicago Bulls to six NBA titles I always try to be aggressive to start a series.” Jordan was 6-1 during both of his streaks in Game 1 including 2-3 in series openers with Cleveland since coming over in a trade from Utah in September 2022 Mitchell helped Cleveland rally in the third quarter after it fell behind by 12 points He scored nine during a 20-4 run that put the Cavs up 88-84 Cleveland led midway through the fourth quarter Mitchell set the mark with a layup that gave him 31 points with 4:50 left in the game and got the Cavs within 107-104 But Andrew Nembhard buried a 3-pointer on Indiana's ensuing trip but made only one of his 11 3-point attempts The Cavs made just 23.7% from beyond the arc (9 of 38) in one of their worst-shooting games of the season we win games.’ We’ve got to find a way to still win this game Mitchell's streak began with the Utah Jazz during the 2020 playoffs — held at Walt Disney World in Orlando during the COVID-19 pandemic — when he scored 57 points against the Denver Nuggets That remains a Jazz playoff record and the third-highest-scoring performance in NBA postseason history Mitchell is averaging 33.2 points in series openers second-highest in NBA history for a player who has taken part in at least 10 postseason series His playoff average of 27.9 points is seventh-best among players with at least 50 games “We’re fortunate because he missed a lot of ones he’s usually going to make,” Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said The Cleveland Cavaliers lost Game 1 of their second-round matchup against the Indiana Pacers but the Pacers were hitting on all cylinders and could barely be stopped There were times when the Cavs would get close and take the lead in the second half Though some fans may think this may be the end of the world for the Cavs, Donovan Mitchell shared his thoughts on the Game 1 loss “This is nothing to freak out about,” Mitchell said via ESPN’s Jamal Collier and you got to come in and give them credit [It’s] pretty much been the message the whole time understanding that look we didn’t play our best basketball Mitchell carried the Cavs throughout the game but only shot 1-for-11 from the 3-point line The Cavs shot 24% from the 3-point line as a team Everything seemed to be working out for the Pacers in Game 1 and it doesn’t seem like a surprise to many For the Cavs, they’re going to have to play better defense and start knocking down their shots if they want to win Game 2. Another hope is that Darius Garland returns, but it sounds like his toe sprain may be a bigger problem than many think There’s still a chance that he can return in Game 2 but he’s going to need another full practice for the Cavs to believe that he’s good enough to step on the court and fans shouldn’t worry about what’s to come from the Cavs and they have a good chance of doing that next game Malik Brown is a multimedia reporter based in Atlanta who covers the Hawks and Dream for ClutchPoints Malik is also an Associate Editor at ClutchPoints and Cavs Nation MITCHELL — The Mitchell Gun Club hosted its first Mitchell Youth Invitational Shoot on Sunday drawing in some of the top youth shooters in the area The competition hosted 83 trap shooters and 19 skeet shooters from grades 6-12 Each participant shot 100 targets with Platte’s Owen Feiok and Mitchell’s Trell Kaupp tying for the top mark in the trap division with 96 targets hit Platte’s Remington Meyerink and Mitchell’s Jordan Herrlein tied for second place with scores of 95 each Oren Sargent and Ryan Vander Werff all tied for third place with 94 Chamberlain’s Chase Hansen finished in first with a score of 93 He was the only skeet shooter to hit over 90 of his targets Chase McQuirk (89) was second with Mitchell’s Kaupp (84) Kimball’s Chevy Fees (84) and Lyman’s Conor Samco (82) rounding out the top five arrested 21-year-old Travis Bullington after a high-speed police chase involving a stolen red pickup truck reported out of Brookings County The pursuit led officers through city streets and into rural Hanson County ending in a cornfield after Bullington rammed two police vehicles SD Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources Board of Water and Natural Resources meeting As warmer weather increases pet and wildlife activity South Dakota health officials are urging residents to remain vigilant about rabies Though cases have declined over the past 50 years South Dakota Housing’s Grants for Grads program is nearing its May 30th deadline offering recent college graduates up to 5% of their loan amount toward a first home purchase Be sure you have your GPS enabled and try again as all five of their starters scored in double figures The Pacers not only handled their own on the offensive end against one of the best defenses in the league but they also won the game on the defensive end Indiana held the Cavaliers to under 46 percent shooting from the field and only 23.7 percent from beyond the arc but Pacers guard Andrew Nembhard stood out on the defensive side of the ball Nembhard made it tough and nearly impossible on Cavaliers All-Star guard Donovan Mitchell. When Nembhard took on the assignment of guarding Mitchell, he made life difficult for the All-Star guard—and the stats back it up completely "According to NBA.com matchup data Nembhard held Mitchell to two points on 1-of-10 shooting.'  Although Mitchell led the game in points with 33 His teammates were impressed by Nembhard's performance but not surprised one bit but his lock-in level is just unbelievable right now He's just doing a great job of letting the game come to him and stepping into shots with confidence." Nembhard has done it on both sides of the floor for the Pacers during this playoff run He is averaging 16.3 points per game through six games and 1.2 steals while shooting 52.2 percent from the field and 57.1 percent from three in 33.0 minutes of action His numbers across the board are all higher than the regular season he spoke on what's been working for the team and their toughness and resilience in Sunday's match "I think the ball movement was good and they were in the rhythm," Nembhard said The Pacers will look to take a 2-0 lead before they head back for Games 3 and 4 in front of their home crowd More Pacers: Pacers-Cavaliers: Cleveland All-Star in Danger of Missing Game 2 Pacers' Rick Carlisle Offers One-Word to Describe Cavaliers Fans React to NBA Players Voting Pacers' Tyrese Haliburton Most Overrated For more news and notes on the Indiana Pacers, head on over to Indiana Pacers on SI RICARDO KLEIN View Visitation & Service details > Known lovingly as “Gaga” to her grandsons she embraced her role with joy and devotion Never hesitating to sit on the floor and follow their lead Gaga delighted in every moment spent with Justin and Wyatt always on the lookout for the perfect outfit or surprise and she cherished every opportunity to be by their side Whether she was playing golf at Meadia Heights or in Pinehurst or simply sitting outside on the patio enjoying the sun she was always with her husband and best friend of over 52 years They were rarely apart and were known to everyone as the perfect couple She used her organizational skills to plan events at Community UMC and was so happy knowing that she would be united with Christ and her son she had more than enough food for everyone Her all-star recipes were her mac n cheese and sugar & chocolate chip cookies Gail loved music and was a member of the L-S Community Band She hosted the band Christmas parties and everyone loved her lasagna She loved to dance wherever there was music—whether in the kitchen She was a cherished second mom and dance mom to many from “The Fest” community to her children’s friends and countless others she embraced as her own please send contributions to the Jeff Musser Foundation or the Solanco Education Foundation Condolence Message: Be sure to include your name Please note that your condolence will not appear on this page until it is reviewed Condolences usually appear within 24 hours of being submitted Our seven funeral homes in Lancaster and Lebanon Counties makes it easy and convenient to make arrangements and host services close to home Fans and analysts spend more time on the guys who heard their name called on day one and two Those picks have fewer question marks and are expected to be immediate impact players And sometimes those who are selected later in the draft can end up being some of the best players on your team One of those day-three guys who could turn out to be something is Carolina Panthers fifth-round draft pick Mitchell Evans who joins a young tight end room that features Ja’Tavion Sanders and Tommy Tremble Eric Galko of the Shrine Bowl believes he can make an impact early in his career complete TE in Notre Dame’s Mitchell Evans physical tight end who can win in-line and in space as a receiver Should be able to step in and be a key part of the Panthers' TE room with the ceiling to develop into an ideal complement piece to last year’s Panthers pick Evans logged 77 receptions for 903 yards and five scores He won't be asked to shoulder a ton of responsibility right out of the gate but don't be surprised that if at some point Evans becomes the top option at the position What Steve Smith got right - and wrong - about the Panthers WR corps Panthers quarterback Bryce Young slapped with harsh reality check Panthers still considered among NFC’s worst teams despite strong draft Super Bowl champ predicts Bryce Young will have a big year in 2025 (MITCHELLNOW) The Mitchell City Council will meet at 6 p.m SIOUX FALLS — A Mount Vernon man's felony illegal firearm possession case in U.S district court has been postponed to later in 2025 Cory Cumings' case was scheduled to go to trial in federal court in April but has been pushed back Cumings faces one charge of possession of a firearm by a prohibited person the criminal indictment alleges that on or about Dec knowing he was an unlawful user of controlled substances was in possession of excess of 100 firearms and ammunition The maximum penalty upon conviction is up to 15 years in federal prison and/or a $250,000 fine and $100 to the Federal Crime Victims Fund Those firearms are subject to a federal forfeiture case which has been stayed in court until the resolution of the illegal firearm possession case The firearms and ammunition were seized by authorities from his Mitchell Roofing business in Mitchell and his residence near Mount Vernon Cumings answered the federal complaint against him denying the allegations argued that Cumings' Second Amendment and Fifth Amendment rights were violated by the federal authorities seizing his property without a hearing or other due process and violating his right to keep and bear arms MITCHELL, S.D. (MITCHELLNOW) With warmer weather bringing more active pets and wildlife South Dakota officials are reminding the public to stay alert about rabies While cases have dropped significantly over the past 50 years Officials say rabies clinics are a key tool in keeping pets safe The South Dakota Department of Health reports 175 confirmed rabies cases in the past decade out of more than 5,600 animals tested.adButlerLazyLoad("791123240518621956",100,["438081","438081","438081"],"177041"); signing Australian all rounder Mitchell Owen Owen’s immediate availability remains uncertain due to his ongoing commitments with Peshawar Zalmi in the Pakistan Super League (PSL) highlighting the complexities of modern cricket’s franchise driven calendar Glenn Maxwell’s IPL campaign ended prematurely after he fractured a finger during the tournament registering single digit scores in five of his six innings His absence left a void in PBKS’s middle order prompting the franchise to turn to Mitchell Owen a rising talent fresh off a breakout season in the Big Bash League (BBL) emerged as one of the most exciting young players in T20 cricket after a stellar BBL season He finished as the tournament’s leading run scorer with 452 runs at a strike rate of 203.60 including a match winning 108 off 42 balls in the final to guide Hobart Hurricanes to the title.His bold batting and handy medium pace bowling make him a valuable asset fitting PBKS’s high-tempo approach this season is complicated by his current stint with Peshawar Zalmi in the PSL with their final group-stage match scheduled for May 9 Owen’s PSL commitments could extend until the final on May 18 just two days before the IPL playoffs begin This overlap means Owen may miss PBKS’s remaining group stage matches joining only if the team advances to the knockout stages are banking on his potential impact in the playoffs who also serves as Hobart Hurricanes’ head of strategy Ponting’s endorsement played a key role in the franchise’s decision to sign the young all rounder Owen’s recent performances in the SA20 and PSL though modest in the latter with an average of 16.83 in six innings have further cemented his reputation as a dynamic T20 player Owen’s entry into the PSL itself came under unusual circumstances He was signed by Peshawar Zalmi as a replacement for Corbin Bosch who withdrew from the tournament to join Mumbai Indians (MI) as an injury replacement for Lizaad Williams If you are already a paying subscriber to Persuasion or Yascha Mounk’s Substack this will give you ad-free access to the full conversation with Kevin plus all full episodes and bonus episodes we have in the works support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today Set Up Podcast And if you are having a problem setting up the full podcast feed on a third-party app, please email our podcast team at leonora.barclay@persuasion.community Kevin Mitchell is Associate Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin He is the author of Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are and Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will Yascha Mounk and Kevin Mitchell discuss the arguments against free will and how much control we have over our decisions This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity Yascha Mounk: So you have a book which engages with one of the oldest debates in philosophy and in theology which is whether or not humans have free will But you claim to be making a novel argument which is hard to do in a debate that is that old Why do you think that to understand the ways in which humans do in fact have free will we have to think about biological processes like evolution And how is that different from how we've thought about free will so far Kevin Mitchell: If you look at the philosophical or theological literature trying to divine from logical postulates how we could have free will given a particular supposed state of the universe and so on My own feeling is that we don’t have to think about this issue in these really abstract terms or Are we in control when we make decisions?—those are actually biological questions We can get into the neuroscience of decision making and explore how these kinds of systems could have evolved How could it be that living things can act in the world in ways that non-living physical things can’t There are some deep metaphysical questions there but you can get a handle on them by really getting into those biological details and making the discussion a lot more concrete perhaps you could lay out for listeners the 101 of this conceptual space What kinds of answers do they give to this fundamental question of whether we actually the phenomenon that we observe is that we feel like we make decisions but it also seems that other animals are capable of goal-directed behavior—we can see them figuring something out They might be conflicted about something and then they decide So there's a sort of a natural view that we are capable of making decisions The main one comes from what's called “determinism,” and that has various flavors to it Atoms and molecules obey the laws of physics Those laws are deterministic in the sense that it's just the physical state of the system plus the laws of physics which guarantee the next state of the system Mounk: Part of the intuition here is that if the world is purely physical then the moment that the Big Bang happened—or if you're religious the moment that God put the world in place—it is actually predetermined what's going to happen today You might look like you're hesitating about whether to order the salmon or the steak for lunch there is an objective answer to whether or not you're going to order salmon or steak for lunch before you make that decision And if that's the case—if somebody with perfect knowledge about the laws of physics and about the particular atoms and neurons in your brain could already predict what’s going to happen—then surely the idea that we're choosing is an illusion It goes back to the ancient Greeks.The early atomists proposed rightly that everything in the world is composed of atoms things that couldn't be divided any further down But Democritus had a very deterministic view of how things happen His idea was that atoms—to use their phrasing—always fall in straight lines absolutely realized that if that were true then everything that you just said would follow from that all of your actions would be predetermined But secondly—and this is more subtle—there wouldn't be any room for you to do anything All of the causes would be at the low level of atoms and molecules interacting with each other and anything else your thoughts or feelings would just be kind of epiphenomena They wouldn't actually be causal because all the causes are already exhausted by what's going on at the low level So that's the most extreme version of determinism you're having thoughts and feelings and desires and so on but how could a thought possibly push physical stuff around in your brain How could it make neurons fire when a thought is immaterial and neurons firing is a real physical thing and isn't it just that your brain is doing things That's a kind of weird way of thinking because it separates you from your brain as if there's some immaterial you that you would want to be in charge as opposed to the idea that actually when you're making a decision and your brain circuits are active that's you using your brain to make a decision there are very strong influences on our behavior from our psychology and predispositions and so on They're not completely predetermining everything and they leave lots of scope for decisions to be made by you as a holistic entity We know that socioeconomic class determines a lot of life outcomes We know that psychological predispositions determine a lot of outcomes We know that the level of intelligence you happen to be born with determines a lot of life outcomes And that's the argument that Sapolsky takes As listeners who will go back to that episode will see I'm quite skeptical of that for a number of reasons There's a difference between acknowledging the fact that all of those things influence us that we don't completely self-create without any of those influences and saying that therefore you're not morally responsible for anything you do who I've also had on the podcast in the past makes this point very beautifully in his writing—is that you then can't really appreciate people for good things anymore either It might be tempting from a certain kind of progressive point of view to say it's just his terrible childhood and he was born with the wrong genes and his influences were bad that also means that you can't appreciate your partner for the kind things they do your parents for the generosity they may have displayed in raising you your friend for the wonderful virtues or qualities that make you cherish having them in your life it means you can't hold yourself responsible You can't aspire to act in the right kind of way So there are a lot of good reasons to try and resist that kind of determinism So what are the main traditions that try to take on the determinist challenge Let's start with the compatibilist tradition and then go to the libertarian one we have the free will skeptics who just say there are a couple of groups in the philosophical literature who have thought about this problem and defend the idea of free will or at least defend the idea of moral responsibility Some of them actually do so without defending free will think that either free will itself or at least moral responsibility is compatible with the idea that the world is completely deterministic I don't find those arguments compelling at all but it's a major position amongst philosophers and many scientists and it allows them to keep their general commitment to physicalism or materialism or naturalism—that there's nothing supernatural in the world—so they don't have to posit a soul or a spirit or some magic ghost in the machine They can square that view with the idea that we can still defend our moral responsibility The real problem with that is that it doesn't explain how you could have any choice If you accept the real hard physical determinism you would have had different reasons for doing something you were the source of the causation of what happened So it's kind of an appeal to what's called a counterfactual scenario this imaginary scenario in which you could have done otherwise if you had wanted to you never would have because nothing else would ever have been different So it becomes an odd—to my mind slightly tortuous—exercise in motivated reasoning because it's people trying to defend moral responsibility They literally just want to defend moral responsibility against determinism Physics doesn't say the world is like that Mounk: Let me try and steelman that argument for a moment and see how you respond to it I think that the intuition is the following one Why is it that I praise them for their good actions Why do I think that they're a bad person doing bad things in the world it just so happens that this person's character is good and this other person's character is bad it just so happens that they have certain predispositions which make one person inclined to be really altruistic and loving and really thoughtful about the world and the other person knee-jerk and reactive and mean… it's not clear to me that that defeats how I feel about them the object of moral judgment is the person they are is incredibly kind and cleverly altruistic somebody slipped a weird drug into their food and that drug just has the effect of making them act meanly—I might say I’m not going to hold them responsible for that particular action because it doesn't flow from their deeper character And the people who are my good friends are people who I appreciate because I clearly answer that question in the affirmative you might tell me that if they'd had a different mom and dad or if the alleles had somehow aligned in a different way when they were an embryo or if they had gone through horrible experiences as a child that would have permanently psychologically maimed them I'm willing to accept that there's a good amount of luck in having created the person I appreciate—but the person that I judge in a moral way is the person they are And even though the person they are was shaped in all kinds of ways by luck and circumstance that feels to me like the right object of moral judgment is a strength of the compatibilist insight And I think that would be the compatibilist argument there there are a couple of things being mixed up there are there choices available to you in the way the universe could go do you have control over what actually happens And those are questions that you can actually ask and answer without talking about moral responsibility without talking about merit or praise or blame or what we find worthy of praise or blame which are all to me secondary or tertiary kinds of questions layered on top of that one And when they get conflated like that—a lot of the free will literature just takes free will and moral responsibility as the same question almost—to me that leads to some confusion or it leads to people making arguments at one level—like what you find praiseworthy or blameworthy about a person’s character in social settings or relationships—and using that against a premise couched at the level of particle physics But those two things just feel like a mile away from each other because I think what people like Scanlon would say is Perhaps the determinists are right about particle physics Perhaps they're not right about particle physics But the choices we make have a lot of relevance in the world irrespective of that The most trivial example given in the literature should you respect the choices that your customers your diners make for what to order for lunch or dinner let's say that it's true that the world is deterministic that an omniscient being would know in advance that somebody is gonna get the salmon And perhaps it's even true that actually they would enjoy the steak more if it somehow arrived We still have reason to respect the choice of the person ordering one meal rather than another for all kinds of social reasons you then recognize that how I'm going to feel about my friend or how I'm going to feel about my nemesis doesn't actually turn on alleles in the formation of their fetus So it's not an answer to the first fundamental question we don't need to bother with that first fundamental question because the thing we care about doesn't turn on it I think if you could imagine a scenario in which there are people going into restaurants and there are waiters making choices about how to feel about it under determinism I don't care about all the intervening stuff There's no way to get the emergence of beings like us that seem to be decision-making beings with real agency and choices and using the kind of vocabulary that we talk about—choices None of that means anything in a deterministic universe nor do compatibilists ever supply an account of how such agents would emerge They just take that for granted and then say we can still apply these moral arguments as you just did I just don't think we would get there without some indeterminacy it becomes moot because physics just doesn't say that the world is deterministic It's just a misreading of basic physics actually to think that Mounk: Talk us through the libertarian tradition on free will and then I think we'll have done enough setup Mitchell: The traditional libertarian view is defending free will and that leaves some scope for us to intervene in decisions and decide which way things go Part of the problem with that sort of traditional libertarian view is that they have developed a kind of view of the way the universe is—which is what I like to call determinism plus randomness—where it's like things are going along mostly deterministically and then every once in a while a radioactive atom decays or you get some quantum event or some weird little random thing happens And the problem with that kind of view is that it doesn't explain how you are doing anything Either everything is determined at the low level and you're not making any decisions or there are some random things happening at the low level which are the things that determine what happens in which case you as a whole entity are still not doing anything So that's why libertarianism has always been kind of unsatisfactory to a lot of people—because it doesn't yet answer the question of how you go from having some indeterminacy at low levels to the emergence of higher order structures like living systems that have control of things at a high level Mounk: That's really helpful because I was always somewhat confused about the moral intuition behind libertarianism for exactly the reasons that you outlined I assume that it's in contrast to determinism Whereas the determinists think that the world is unfree in the sense that if you know everything about it at point A you could know everything about it at point Z there's some degrees of freedom in that world There's going to be some random events such that knowing everything at point A doesn't actually tell you what's going to happen at point C if you don't know in advance what's going to happen then perhaps we do have free will because somewhere along the way people can make decisions that are different You can't predict how people are going to act Is it the kind of action that actually would make us think that we have free will Let's say that you have a self-conception as having made a really reasoned decision about whether or not to have children You've reflected in a deep way about what your life goals are and what you really want to accomplish And so you feel proud of your decision to have kids or not to have kids the threat comes in from a determinist and they say It was always predetermined that you were going to have kids because it's just a matter of how these atoms hit each other Now here comes the libertarian and they say it wasn't predetermined at point A whether you're going to have kids or not It's because of quantum physics and quantum mechanics there's this one random way in which one atom hit the other in a way that couldn't have been predicted How does that make me feel that that decision comes in any sort of more significant way from what seemed to be my reflection about the world it doesn't seem to be a free will worth having Mitchell: That's always been this sort of classic problem it doesn't matter what the answer to determinism is we can just have these discussions at a high level about moral behavior and talk about that We don't need to think about what's going on at these low levels the problem with the libertarian view is it shows where freedom comes from in the world in the sense that many different things could happen That's the question that's really interesting How does a living being control what happens how do I narrow that possibility space so that the thing that happens is the thing that I want to happen And it turns out that actually that's what being a living thing is all about—making things happen That's almost the definition of life: living things have causal power as holistic entities It's the power of the whole thing to make things happen in the world Generally what they're making happen is themselves Even a simple bacterium is constantly working against the laws of thermodynamics that say all of its parts should go into equilibrium with the universe and it's taking in energy and working to make sure that it doesn’t Mounk: So I think we've gotten people up to speed on some of the basic debates about free will One of the characteristics of this is that for the most part these debates have been armchair debates—whether from philosophers or theologians thinking about the world in an abstract way and trying to grapple with these incredibly complicated questions and so you take a different kind of empirical approach to this There's a bunch of people who've been trying to apply neuroscience and other disciplines to this debate about free will But you come up with an answer that is rather different from what I’ve seen before that somehow through evolutionary processes we have emerged with some kind of capacity for a higher level of reasoning Explain to us first of all what that process looked like and then I'll push you a little bit on what exactly that means for our ability to reason freely if you think about any biological phenomenon taking an evolutionary perspective is always a good idea because that's just how they came into being and it helps to understand them we're having these discussions about human free will and human cognition and consciousness and it's so sophisticated because we have layers of language and sociality and morality on top of it It's just an incredibly complex kind of scenario to try and understand off the bat let's start with just the very simplest kind of instantiation of something doing something The simplest living being that we can say is acting in the world And let's try and understand that and ground some concepts that we're going to need to understand human cognition and then trace across evolution this elaboration from single-cell organisms to multicellular ones to ones with nervous systems to ones with much more complicated levels of cognition and metacognition and so on And it really actually starts with the origin of life all sorts of chemical metabolic reactions are going on there is a sort of a regime of interlocking all these feedback processes that link the whole thing into an ongoing pattern that is the bacterium and it's alive because it continues to be that way through time But the problem is that the world can be a hostile place which means that for organisms to persist for longer it helps if they can take in information about the state of the world and then act on that information in a way that's adaptive Something that is just not present in the nonliving world And its purpose is to persist through time they get selected for functionalities that help them to survive in a changeable world where they can use information and then act on it We've got organisms doing things as whole entities which is what happened gradually over evolutionary time Mounk: It's interesting to think of the bacterium as sort of goal-directive and purposive in this kind of way And I look forward to hearing what new levels of complexity and therefore perhaps freedom are introduced as we go up the evolutionary chain to more complex beings But how exactly does this defeat the determinist argument They'll go left if the sugar is present on the left and they're not going to go left if the sugar isn't present on the left That's different from an atom just sort of randomly knocking into things or a tree leaf blowing in the wind But we know that human beings were capable of those kinds of decisions We know that if you're starving and somebody puts a steak in front of you The point is that the laws of the universe predetermined that you were going to be hungry at this point and that then somebody is going to put that steak in front of you and that those two things being the case And surely the same is true of the bacterium So how is it that this has changed anything about the determinist account of the world Mitchell: There's two sides to that argument One is going back to the idea of physical predeterminism: that actually everything that was going to happen is just determined by physical laws I mentioned that libertarians would argue with that but there's two ways of thinking about that One is “determinism plus randomness,” where the default state is deterministic but occasionally you get these incursions of random events But I don't think that's an accurate way to think about it it's just that you have a kind of a pervasive indefiniteness to the present state of things There's just a limit to how precisely the physical parameters of a system are specified It's nothing to do with observers or uncertainty or anything It's just that the things themselves have a finite amount of information as a physical system at any point So given that there's some fuzziness and some jitteriness at the lowest levels It's not that there are branching paths in the future waiting for us to choose that the whole reason why a bacterium could evolve in the first place is because the causation is not exhausted at those low levels Many things could happen based on the laws of physics The way that a system is organized can have some top-down causal influence and constrain the way that a system is based on the principles of selection in the case of bacteria looking at our computers here—the way that they're physically structured constrains physically what goes on within them The electrons are still behaving as electrons But they're constrained to do what they do because of So we can put the really hard predeterministic thing aside and say it wasn't predetermined from the dawn of time that the bacterium would be here and the food would be over here And it's the concern when neuroscientists look inside you and do an fMRI scan you only made that decision because this part of your brain was active you can say the same thing about a bacterium The bacterium only moved towards the sugar because these proteins within it got phosphorylated and they linked to these other proteins and they linked to the motor that makes the bacterium move and it's just a stimulus/response machine while you can say it's doing goal-directed behavior it's actually much more sophisticated than you might think we have this tendency to control everything We control everything that we're not interested in and we just change one thing in the environment at a time So we have our little bacterium and we either put down some sugar or we don't we can see this biochemical pathway acting But the bacterium never encounters the world like that it always encounters loads of things at the same time that it has to integrate And maybe there's a threat in the same place Maybe there's some bad chemicals where the sugar is It has to integrate with its own metabolic state So it's doing a much more holistic kind of a job that justifies thinking of even a simple bacterium as an agent That's where I think we get off the ground with a very basal kind of agency I reserve free will just for humans just to avoid any kind of confusion I guess the other thing that's really important there is that it's an entity with continuity through time That's why we should think of it as a self a physical thing with a physical state in an instant that responds to things The way it responds depends on its history Then they could learn as an individual about experiences in the world They're pre-programmed to learn as individuals and then they can develop much more flexible and really genuinely more autonomous behaviors Mounk: I love that this conversation is doubling as a remedial lesson in the biological history of the emergence of higher forms of life I have a bunch of responses to this idea about the bacteria And then I'll express where I find what you're saying convincing and where I still have questions So you get a kind of goal-directed behavior in even a single-cell organism there's constraints on the extent to which an organism can reflect on its goals can act on the basis of its own history rather than just the things that through evolution have been baked into its genetic code for how to behave What happens once we get multicellular organisms And what happens once we get higher-order mammals how all of that allows something like free will to emerge so it's interesting that if you think about a bacterium the challenge that it faces in order to survive is to know what's out in the world and what it should do about it which are just little proteins on the surface of the cell It needs to have a motor so that it can move around in the world It needs to have some kind of knowledge about what's the right thing to do given what it senses Most of those control policies are pre-programmed by evolution But as you get multicellular organisms that develop more complex bodies They need to know what's out there and what they should do about it things like vision and hearing and touch and so on which in this case become more sophisticated because they're not just locomoting in the world like a bacterium does like a rowboat where the shape of the boat stays the same They're not just able to move in the world Things with limbs or tentacles or wings or mouth parts or whatever it is So the possibilities for action just became much more open-ended That's really important because it's the open-endedness of the possibilities that makes cognition worthwhile because there were so many opportunities there that evolution couldn't pre-state what you should do in every scenario It's a combinatorial explosion of possibilities I'll give you some basic motivations and some basic policies and along the lineage that leads to humans you go to vertebrates and then mammals and then primates and then humans Those kinds of capacities got more and more sophisticated as the brain got larger The important thing about that is that actually what you get as the brain gets larger is more internal processing You get a greater separation between the sensors and the motors Really simple animals might have either the motors and the sensors might be directly coupled to each other or they might have like one intervening layer of neurons or two intervening layers of neurons So the brain is processing much much more information it's building models of the self and it's learning from experience the last time I encountered something like this It's called reinforcement learning where rewards or punishments based on our past actions can inform future behaviors and much more able to plan for distant things in the future So what they're doing is they're not just acting for reasons They're learning through their own experience in the world who are capable of not just having a model of the world and a model of themselves but also a model of their own mental workings They developed enough levels of the neural hierarchy that the top levels are actually looking down at the workings of the lower ones and they're internally representing thoughts and beliefs and desires and so on we're able to arrive at new reasons by the act of reasoning And we have to think in all these novel scenarios It's just not possible to pre-state every action under every conceivable scenario There aren't pre-set weights that determine the outcome in every scenario is to figure out what those weights should be in this new set of combinations of threats and opportunities and so on Mounk: So help me understand how exactly the complexity that emerges through evolution relates to the question of free will I imagine that somebody like a determinist is going to say we knew that the human brain is complex to begin with All through this armchair debate about free will we started from the premise that the very puzzle is that humans seem to be these incredibly complex beings and when we're reflecting about things it feels like all of these competing considerations are in our mind and we're reflecting on our purpose and our goals in life and all kinds of things if you think that there is some compatibilist element to the world and perhaps we have to get into that part of the argument in greater detail then that just all seems to be an illusion because in fact for all of that complexity what you're ultimately going to do was predetermined and so it seems in some ways to be an illusion Now you're making the argument that actually atoms banging into each other in the world don't have any kind of real agency Already by the time we get to a bacterium there is a real kind of goal-directedness but not something you would call free will and what's going on in their brain when they're trying to figure out what to do is all of these really complicated considerations They seem to be determinative of what we do We've gone from a really simple calculator which perhaps is the equivalent of a bacterium to the highly sophisticated laptop which I'm using to record this conversation And there's obviously a huge difference in scale there the pixels that my laptop displays are just as predetermined by things that are outside of its volition as the number that a much more simple calculator comes to when I type in two plus two Mitchell: I think there's two ways to look at that in terms of freedom You can think about it in terms of autonomy from the environment—how much causal power does an agent or an entity have in the world How much is it pushed around by the world versus how much can it push back And so what I would say is that we—multicellular animals and so on—are more able to push back on the world but you can actually find very concrete ways of measuring that kind of thing how much information can you integrate at once how much sort of higher order abstraction are you doing to think about things in the world What's the time horizon that you're thinking over I can do things right now that will affect events a year from now or two years from now Whereas a little worm that's just wriggling around partly because it has no information about anything that's further away from it than like a centimeter They don't have cognitive systems for planning over long timeframes whereas what happened over our evolution is that we developed those capacities and what that means is that we need the capacities to be able to adjudicate between goals Because we have short-term goals and long-term goals A lot of them will be conflicting with each other So we need to be able to make decisions at any moment and in real time Our behavioral decision-making is not just moment by moment I decided to go to college to get a degree That's four years I'm gonna have to continue holding that goal in my mind and that's going to constrain and inform my behavior on a daily basis So we have agendas and commitments and policies that we build up through time And you could say all of that allows us to be more proactive as agents in the world and less immediately reactive while I think that's a good valid argument it doesn't meet the challenge that people could say you're not being coerced by things outside you as much as more reactive organisms are but you're still being compelled by things inside you You still have all those psychological things I certainly have agency in the way that a bacterium or even a worm does not and I can sort of hold it into the camera and I can open up the book And I know that I am able to do all of those things The question that bothers the free will skeptics is but was it in some ways predetermined or was it in some ways inevitably downstream from my inclinations from the way my brain works that I was going to do that And of course you can extend that argument to something more complex I want to invest into my individual retirement account but that invitation to go out drinking with my buddies is just too tempting And by the time that the end of the month comes around in some ways this is due to my choices and so on but perhaps it's in fact not due to my choices because I just don't have control over myself in the right ways and that's to do with my genes or my upbringing or whatever can invest in the IRA and be really rich when I'm old or I can fail to invest in my IRA and have very limited freedom of action when I'm old because I don't have the money to do anything I can make those choices and they have big consequences in the world 30 years from now possibly but which of these choices I make seems like it may have been influenced by things that are not as fully under my control as I thought Mitchell: I liked the way that you phrased it at the end there because the way that you phrase it is completely uncontroversial It's absolutely true that those decisions are influenced by things that are not under as much control as you thought if you thought you were in complete control and weren't constrained at all by prior influences really far cry from saying no one has any control whatsoever at any moment I had less free will than I thought I had to everyone has zero free will Those are just two extremely different propositions And I don't think that the more extreme version is defensible while the less extreme version is kind of obvious in the sense that everyone agrees that we have these influences on our behavior They just have different views of what that means for things like our own kind of meta-control And this is where metacognition and introspection come in and the question of the emergence of character because you could say we all have personality predispositions which is absolutely true—shaping our psychology in broad patterns like how outgoing you are is very different from saying those predispositions determine precisely what you're going to do in every exact moment They don't have enough information to do that they inform the emergence of our character through time I've had sets of experiences and I've adapted them to them in my way Someone else might have adapted to them in their way and that's fine That's just how we come to be in the world do we ever have any control over that or are we just passive passengers in that process things in the womb and then the accumulated effect of every experience that has happened to you That's the way that he phrases it: has happened to you as if you had nothing to do with it if there's some freedom and we have some control we're building our own niches as we go along We're choosing which friends to go out with the ones that tempt us out at the end of the month So there's a very different view that you can have on that that the way that our character emerges is informed by our experiences which are the result of our own choices throughout our lifetime which is that actually we can very actively ask ourselves Are these the right kinds of motivations that I should have going forward I want to be more responsible in thinking about my future and I'm going to decide to do that And even though I know I can recognize that I'm going to be tempted I'm going to take action by actually putting a hundred euros in my IRA at the start of the month instead of at the end you can build those kinds of things and we do that It's just clear that we think about our own character in this metacognitive introspective kind of a way like some people do it more than others and it can be effortful And so the idea that I wasn’t involved at all in the configuration of my brain and mind right now I'm just totally not convinced by that because there's so much evidence that in fact that's partly the accumulation of my own choices through time Mounk: So I'm going to say something that I think will half make you happy and half make you sad so we don't know exactly what's going to happen I have trouble seeing how it is as different as you claim from the tradition that you were quite dismissive of earlier It seems to me that what you're describing is the ways that make human life worthwhile are the ways in which we do seem to be free I can reflect on whether to put the money in the IRA at the beginning or the end of the month I can reflect on the way my life is going as a whole and say I have great friends but I don't spend enough time with them I actually think that on reflection my friends aren't the right ones they don't share my values and I should go and find new friends that share my values more closely And that is what to me makes human agency important I don't see how your evolutionary argument tells us that this isn't somehow determined or that this isn't subject to some of the worries that some of the skeptics about free will have you might say the fact that this is all downstream from an evolutionary mechanism is one more thing that really constrains how we go into work and how we are in the world because we certainly didn't choose all of those branches in the evolutionary tree that sort of shaped all of those capacities and so on The point is that you're the kind of higher order being that is capable of reflecting about the world whose actions reflect not just the goal-drivenness of a bacterium much more sophisticated sort of goal-drivenness of this really complicated evolutionary process that has given us those faculties So who cares whether or not in some sense it's deterministic What matters is that my decision to meet up with my friend and to have a glass of wine to many in order to connect and to have a wonderful human experience comes downstream from my values my reflection on what I should do in the world is itself somehow causally predetermined just doesn't seem that important And it sounds to me—and you'll explain to me where I'm going wrong—suspiciously similar to what you've been saying Mitchell: In terms of moral responsibility I actually end up in a point that's very similar to compatibilists and the fact that it relies on some indeterminacy to emerge what do we actually judge people morally responsible for So what we're doing is we're ascribing some ownership there's no way that they could have any responsibility for their character because they never were actually in control at any moment because the same thing was always going to happen That's why I find that argument incoherent but I end up at the same point with respect to moral responsibility because we do hold people responsible for their moral character It's the character that we're actually judging a lot of the time And I think the view that I've outlined there which is a naturalistic way that you can have a system that actually has control in the moment and that has meta-control and metacognition that's a scientifically plausible way that you could get a system like that emerging And then you end up in that endpoint where we can think about moral responsibility that way The other aspect I would say is that some people use this term called ultimate moral responsibility But so you can't be held responsible if you weren't the ultimate cause of everything that you did which is to say it's almost a way of saying if there was any prior cause that influenced you Like if you weren't responsible personally for all of human evolution if you personally didn't institute the Big Bang then you can't be held responsible for anything that happened since then We're not after ultimate moral responsibility That's what we care about when we talk about moral responsibility Mounk: But that distinction between proximate and ultimate responsibility is exactly what in my mind sounds like those compatibilist arguments To say that as long as your actions right now reflect your character and your intentions and so on who cares where that character and those intentions came from in the first place I understand that I think you want to respond to that by saying it is important to note that your character and your responses and so on are themselves in some sense self-created—not fully self-created but that you had degrees of freedom in the past actions you took that shaped your character and so on I think here I just haven't yet fully understood your argument So I'd love for you to explain it to me in more detail which is how evolution creates a system that is not deterministic I want to distinguish here between sort of the levels of complexity that might be involved in a physical system and whether or not we should think of the people within that system as having freedom to act We don't really know how to predict how free planets that are orbiting around each other are going to behave But it would be very strange to say that therefore each of these planets or one of these planets has freedom to decide where to move next Clearly each of these bodies are just acted upon in a way that pushes them in one direction to another we find it impossible to predict which way we're going to go But that doesn't mean that they can choose which way to go And isn't that similar to our reflections about what to do The machine that evolution has created in our brain is so incredibly complex that it does have all of these higher order reflections and all of those neurons doing all of this complicated stuff And so we may never be able to predict exactly what action that's going to lead to The fact that we're not able to predict that doesn't mean that we actually have freedom like in one of the planets of free body problem you're either gonna invest in the IRA or not And perhaps that is in fact downstream from those predetermined things which doesn't have to worry a compatibilist because it says but your action reflects the things that you ultimately care about in such a way that that's what matters somehow complexity translates into freedom in a way that I haven't quite followed Mitchell: There's multiple levels of concern There's the real sort of basal physical predeterminism How does a control system emerge from this indeterminate thing where many things could happen and what the organism is trying to do is narrow that down and make certain things happen They're just jittering all around the place little proteins binding and unbinding and diffusing around the place So the problem for the organism is to try and control things as much as it can to the level it needs to So it doesn't need to control where every little protein diffuses control the outcome at a level that is equivalent to its surviving or not surviving its getting some nutrients or not getting some nutrients there's a level that evolution cares about and below that it doesn't have to micromanage Control systems emerge in that way because they can Literally because you could have several different kinds of organization of these things and you're just going to lock into certain ones that tend to persist more and then because they persist more And then they're the next stage of evolution and so on So you get this kind of emergence of control systems that favor the persistence of macroscopic form and pattern they're operating over all kinds of information about the world all kinds of information that we've gleaned from our own experience so we know what to expect we're thinking about the utility of various actions the reward or punishment that we might get from those And so we can say we're really not an automaton We are a holistic macroscopic entity with continuity through time that's acting for individual level reasons the funny thing is that the deterministic view for someone like Robert Sapolsky is almost saying you have so much control that you have no choice biologically realistic view is that we have some control That we're trying to exercise as much control as we can We're still making decisions with uncertain information and ambiguous beliefs and conflicting desires in a world that's dynamic in the process as we're trying to make a decision There's just no way that any of that could be completely predeterministic at the level of cognition unless it were all predeterministic at the level of atoms there's this theory of bounded rationality where we don't make fully rational decisions all the time where there's just one right answer that our brain algorithm has to come to that could in some sense be pre-stated as the optimal outcome because we don't have all the information We have to figure out what are the weights that are appropriate in this scenario for me There's some little bit of randomness at play sometimes in that we totally absolutely would do that thing again we don't know at all and we don't have enough information or we don't care Like maybe some random noise in my brain kind of That's actually a super good way to make decisions when you don't have enough information The important thing is that you make a decision And then we have a conflict where we're like should I ask this girl to marry me or should we break up These are really conflicted and you're going to work through those things with the information that you have and come to a decision and whichever way it goes And you'll be able to defend the reasons that you had for making that decision but the idea that we have so much control that we end up with no choice is just Yascha Mounk and Kevin Mitchell ask if AI could ever have free will and how different approaches to free will affect criminal justice This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers… Thanks for reading! The best way to make sure that you don\u2019t miss any of these conversations is to subscribe to The Good Fight on your favorite podcast app If you are already a paying subscriber to Persuasion or Yascha Mounk\u2019s Substack Subscribe now Set Up Podcast My own feeling is that we don\u2019t have to think about this issue in these really abstract terms or Are we in control when we make decisions?\u2014those are actually biological questions How could it be that living things can act in the world in ways that non-living physical things can\u2019t but it also seems that other animals are capable of goal-directed behavior\u2014we can see them figuring something out The main one comes from what's called \u201Cdeterminism,\u201D and that has various flavors to it then the moment that the Big Bang happened\u2014or if you're religious the moment that God put the world in place\u2014it is actually predetermined what's going to happen today And if that's the case\u2014if somebody with perfect knowledge about the laws of physics and about the particular atoms and neurons in your brain could already predict what\u2019s going to happen\u2014then surely the idea that we're choosing is an illusion His idea was that atoms\u2014to use their phrasing\u2014always fall in straight lines But secondly\u2014and this is more subtle\u2014there wouldn't be any room for you to do anything makes this point very beautifully in his writing\u2014is that you then can't really appreciate people for good things anymore either and it allows them to keep their general commitment to physicalism or materialism or naturalism\u2014that there's nothing supernatural in the world\u2014so they don't have to posit a soul or a spirit or some magic ghost in the machine So it becomes an odd\u2014to my mind slightly tortuous\u2014exercise in motivated reasoning because it's people trying to defend moral responsibility and the other person knee-jerk and reactive and mean\u2026 it's not clear to me that that defeats how I feel about them and that drug just has the effect of making them act meanly\u2014I might say I\u2019m not going to hold them responsible for that particular action because it doesn't flow from their deeper character I'm willing to accept that there's a good amount of luck in having created the person I appreciate\u2014but the person that I judge in a moral way is the person they are And when they get conflated like that\u2014a lot of the free will literature just takes free will and moral responsibility as the same question almost\u2014to me that leads to some confusion or it leads to people making arguments at one level\u2014like what you find praiseworthy or blameworthy about a person\u2019s character in social settings or relationships\u2014and using that against a premise couched at the level of particle physics There's no way to get the emergence of beings like us that seem to be decision-making beings with real agency and choices and using the kind of vocabulary that we talk about\u2014choices Part of the problem with that sort of traditional libertarian view is that they have developed a kind of view of the way the universe is\u2014which is what I like to call determinism plus randomness\u2014where it's like things are going along mostly deterministically and then every once in a while a radioactive atom decays or you get some quantum event or some weird little random thing happens to a lot of people\u2014because it doesn't yet answer the question of how you go from having some indeterminacy at low levels to the emergence of higher order structures like living systems that have control of things at a high level And it turns out that actually that's what being a living thing is all about\u2014making things happen Even a simple bacterium is constantly working against the laws of thermodynamics that say all of its parts should go into equilibrium with the universe and it's taking in energy and working to make sure that it doesn\u2019t these debates have been armchair debates\u2014whether from philosophers or theologians But you come up with an answer that is rather different from what I\u2019ve seen before One is \u201Cdeterminism plus randomness,\u201D where the default state is deterministic looking at our computers here\u2014the way that they're physically structured constrains physically what goes on within them You can think about it in terms of autonomy from the environment\u2014how much causal power does an agent or an entity have in the world And so what I would say is that we\u2014multicellular animals and so on\u2014are more able to push back on the world which is absolutely true\u2014shaping our psychology in broad patterns like how outgoing you are And so the idea that I wasn\u2019t involved at all in the configuration of my brain and mind right now And it sounds to me\u2014and you'll explain to me where I'm going wrong\u2014suspiciously similar to what you've been saying it is important to note that your character and your responses and so on are themselves in some sense self-created\u2014not fully self-created This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers\u2026 MITCHELL – Fans of legendary singer-songwriter James Taylor won’t want to miss “Sweet Baby James,” hailed as America’s #1 James Taylor tribute live at the Mitchell Opera House on Friday Singer-songwriter Bill Griese will bring his acclaimed show to town offering a unique experience that focuses solely on the great music of James Taylor Griese captivates audiences with his uncanny Taylor-like vocals and guitar playing audience members have described Griese as “the next best thing to James,” praising his “spot on” voice and “amazing guitar playing.” Attendees can expect to hear beloved classics such as “Fire and Rain,” “You’ve Got a Friend,” “Shower the People,” “How Sweet It Is,” and “Steamroller,” along with lesser-known gems from Taylor’s extensive catalog Tickets for this performance are $25 for all admissions and can be purchased online by clicking here. The doors to the Mitchell Opera House will open at 6:15 p.m Please note that food and drinks are not permitted inside the auditorium Serving Lawrence and surrounding counties since 1948 - Another transfer tight end is opting to join the Louisville football program Former Oklahoma tight end Davon Mitchell has committed to the Cardinals, he announced Sunday Mitchell is coming off of a visit to campus this past Tuesday Mitchell is the third tight end to transfer to UofL in the spring window Jacobsen and San Jose State's Jacob Steward 259-pound tight end was a highly-regarded recruit coming out of high school native was originally a member of the Class of 2025 but reclassified to 2024 to enroll early with the Sooners Mitchell did not see any playing during his lone season in Norman and entered the portal in the spring window While Louisville has seen a lot of players transfer out losing 24 returning scholarship players to the portal in this cycle they have done a good job at countering their losses They have landed 28 commitments via the portal up to this point Related: Louisville Football 2024-25 Transfer Tracker with a 9-4 overall record including a 35-34 win over Washington in the Sun Bowl Year three under head coach Jeff Brohm is scheduled to kick off against Eastern Kentucky on Saturday (Photo of Davon Mitchell: Sarah Phipps - The Oklahoman / USA TODAY Network) Cavs star Donovan Mitchell accomplished a feat that only Michael Jordan achieved in any Game 1 of the NBA Playoffs In 33 minutes of action of Game 1 against the Indiana Pacers Mitchell finished with a stat line of 33 points He shot 13-of-30 from the field and 6-of-9 from the free-throw line throughout Sunday evening Mitchell has been diligent in making sure he comes out strong on the scoring front, especially in Game 1. With this latest outing, he scored 30 or more points in any Game 1 for the eighth consecutive game. He broke Jordan’s record of seven straight in the process Despite Donovan Mitchell’s historic efforts of surpassing Michael Jordan the Cavs were unable to protect homecourt as they lost Game 1 of the East Semifinals to the Indiana Pacers Mitchell had a rough night shooting the ball from beyond the arc This ended up limiting Cleveland’s overall production making just 23.7% of their attempts from downtown They also missed Darius Garland’s presence taking a 36-25 lead after the first quarter taking the next two quarters by nine points the Pacers went on a key run down the stretch to secure the win and stun the hosts Five players scored in double-digits on Cleveland’s behalf Ty Jerome put up 21 points and eight assists off the bench Evan Mobley followed suit with 20 points and 10 rebounds Jarrett Allen had 12 points and five rebounds while De’Andre Hunter provided 11 points and four rebounds The Cavs will look to bounce back by evening up the series at one apiece They host Game 2 against the Pacers on May 6 at 7 p.m Richard Pereira is an Associate Editor at ClutchPoints and Cavs Nation. Jason Ferguson, general manager and editor at Southern Hills Publishing, was elected the 139th president of the South Dakota NewsMedia Association during the organization’s annual meeting on April 25 in Aberdeen. As GM for Southern Hills Publishing, Ferguson oversees the Custer County Chronicle and the Hill City Prevailer News, two weekly newspapers in the central and southern Black Hills. Also elected to the 2025-26 SDNA Board of Directors were: first vice president Carson Walker, CEO of South Dakota News Watch; second vice president Luke Hagen, editor of the Mitchell Republic; third vice president Mike Brownlee, editor of the Rapid City Journal; director LeeAnne Dufek, publisher of Hamlin County Publishing at Castlewood; director Jill Meier, publisher of the Brandon Valley Journal; and immediate past president Molly McRoberts, publisher of the Potter County News at Gettysburg. “It’s an exciting and challenging time for journalism as we continue to usher in more and more digital, while understanding that for many — both readers and publishers — print remains the bread and butter in terms of medium in which they deliver and consume their news,” Ferguson said. Ferguson has always been an avid reader of newspapers, always grabbing the sports section from his mother’s subscription to the Casper Star Tribune in Casper, Wyo., where he grew up. Ferguson is also president-elect of the Custer Rotary Club and serves on the community's recently formed committee to return West Dam to its original state after draining in 2012. Ferguson added: “We have a great board of directors, and the best association director in the business. We will continue to work hard for the organization and to adapt, grow and advance. As more and more newspapers close and more news deserts form, it is more important than ever to invest in local news and give our readers a place to turn for informed journalism." Ferguson began his journalism journey as a student at Chadron State College in Nebraska when his advisor, the late Andy Elkins, told him it was time to pick a major rather than take electives. Unsure what he wanted to do, Elkins asked him what he was good at. “Spelling,” Ferguson answered. Elkins then asked him what his interests were. “Sports,” Ferguson answered. “So why don’t you be a sportswriter?” Elkins asked. Ferguson worked for the Eagle newspaper during his time at Chadron, as well as the Chadron Record. He landed a job out of college as a reporter for the Custer County Chronicle after graduating from college in the winter of 2000. He remains there to this day, now general manager of Southern Hills Publishing, managing operations of both the Chronicle and Hill City Prevailer News, where he also writes, does layout, builds ads, takes photos and other chores that come along. SDNA, based in Brookings, represents the state’s newspapers and digital news outlets. as their team went 2-0 over the weekend that included a dominant 108-44 victory over the Brazilian National Team on Sunday Anticipation is extremely high heading into the Fever's 2025 campaign as they're expected to be a top contender for the 2025 WNBA championship And given how great the offense was looking against Brazil any championship expectations seem well-founded at this point While the Fever brought several new players to the team this past offseason their priority was re-signing veteran guard Kelsey Mitchell which was the first offseason move that Indiana made in terms of their roster Mitchell did a mid-game interview with ESPN during Sunday's contest she got honest about what went into her decision to return to the team I wanted to create something unbelievable with Caitlin and I'mma take every opportunity I can with these ladies to do the best I can with it." Kelsey explains why she decided to come back to the Fever this season. Kelsey Mitchell is one of my favs…love her answer…and she’s so polite to Ryan and Rebecca. pic.twitter.com/7noG31VfrP Getting to see Mitchell build her bond with Clark both on and off the basketball court last season was one of the year's storylines for Fever fans to follow this dynamic guard duo is looking to leverage their relationship to a new level of success in 2025 And if Sunday's game is any indication MITCHELL — Parker Mandel proved to be a force at the plate for the Mitchell High School baseball team on Sunday Mandel collected five total hits and drove in five runs on the day to power the Kernels to a doubleheader sweep of Brookings at Cadwell Park Mandel’s three-hit game in the opener helped Mitchell win 10-7 before his go-ahead two-run double in the second game was the difference in a 6-5 victory Game 1 saw the Kernels push across runs in every inning beginning with a three-run opening frame after the Bobcats pushed across two runs in the top of the inning Jaxson Hartman plated home Gavin Jones on a single before scoring on Mandel’s base hit Brennan Penne also drove in a run in the first Brookings rallied in the top of the seventh taking advantage of a Kernels miscue in the field to score three times Following Cooper Schneider’s RBI double and Tre Christopherson working a walk to bring the tying run to the plate getting Tyson Antonen to pop out to collect the save Mitchell tallied 11 hits in Game 1 while drawing three walks Hudson Borgan and Landon Soulek each finished with a hit and an RBI Mason Herman collected the win after working six innings allowing four runs (three earned) with four strikeouts Talon Hyde recorded three of the Bobcats’ 10 hits in the contest Tane Friedrich collected two hits and Nolan Wagner was handed the pitching loss after allowing seven runs (four earned) to come across in four innings Game 2 saw Brookings (9-13) use small-ball tactics to jump out to a 4-3 lead after four innings Mitchell came through at the plate with two outs as Mandel laced a two-run double to left field He later scored on Herman’s base hit to complete the three-run frame The Bobcats again threatened in the top of the seventh inning moving runners into scoring position on a pair of singles and a groundout leading to Christopherson scoring on a passed ball lined out to Mitchell’s Jacob Ebert to finish the sweep Mandel and Hartman each recorded two hits in the game Hartman also recorded an RBI along with Herman to back Tyler Christensen who worked around five walks to log six innings and the win giving up four runs (three earned) and fanning seven Bobcats batters Christopherson finished 1-of-3 with two RBIs and scored once but was handed the pitching loss after being tagged with five earned runs in a six-inning complete game Mitchell (12-7) stays home for another twin bill against Sioux Falls Washington The Cleveland Cavaliers dropped the first game of the Eastern Conference Semifinals against the Indiana Pacers The Cavs swept the Miami Heat in four games but the Pacers started off with a win despite the game being in Cleveland All five Indiana starters finished in double figures while the Cavs saw Evan Mobley and Donovan Mitchell combine for 53 points in the loss Mitchell scored 33 points, although he shot 12-of-30 and just 1-of-11 from 3-point land. Mitchell was clearly hampered in Game 1, as Ethan Sands of Cleveland.com mentioned "After dropping 12 points in the third quarter to pull Cleveland within two He was visibly grabbing his knee on multiple possessions because 30-shot nights in May don’t come cheap — especially when you’re chasing pace and creating every shot on the other end This is the scenario the Cavs spent all season trying to avoid." Mitchell played just 31:26 minutes per game while playing in 71 of 82 regular season games The Cavs had limited him intentionally in order to keep him as fresh as possible for the playoffs Mitchell attempted more than 20 shots just once so it will be interesting to see if the Cavs need to rely on him more in this series but Mitchell grabbing his knee is not what the Cavs or the fans want to see Matthew Wadleigh is a freelance writer with The Sporting News He was born and raised in Southern California and grew up a San Diego sports fan (yes Matthew went to Fresno State as a journalism major and got to see Davante Adams Matthew has written for publications including ClutchPoints they found out this isn't the regular season anymore Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Semifinals saw the Indiana Pacers throw the first decisive punch of the series shooting lights out from three-point range to take down the Cavs 121-112 often leaving teams scrambling for answers as they tried to overcome a smothering offense and an immensely deep rotation with the Pacers dictating the pace and getting the Cavaliers scrambling on both ends of the floor It didn't help that the wine and gold couldn't buy a three either the Cavaliers were shooting a season-low 21.6% from three before a Ty Jerome triple made one to push that mark to 23.7% still good for the second-worst three-point percentage of the season the loss was a jolting reminder that real playoff basketball is different Star guard Donovan Mitchell gave credence to that but that's not how this works," he said after the loss Nobody was worse from long range than Mitchell who knocked down just one-of-11 shot attempts from beyond the arc Much of what the Cavaliers do starts with him That's why his demeanor with his team now trailing in the series following a stunning loss on their home floor will set the tone for Game 2 His message was clear: there's no reason to panic "It would've been great to come in here and sweep these guys too Mitchell and his teammates entered the series with an appropriate amount of respect for the Pacers who are just a year removed from a trip to the Eastern Conference Finals They all understood Indiana was capable of something like this The Cavs took their first punch of the playoffs it's about how they respond in what suddenly feels like a critical Game 2 "[The Pacers are] an experienced basketball team," Mitchell added The biggest thing is just how do you respond serving as Secretary at Fairview Middle School for more than 10 years before completing her career at Franklin Special School District She truly loved her work and the students and faculty that she supported throughout the years Patty found joy in nurturing plants and caring for her parakeets Amanda Mitchell and Marcy Mitchell (fiancé Mark Bowman); her sister Sally King (husband Stephen King); and her nephew Family and friends are invited to gather on Wednesday Interment will be held at Harpeth Hills Memory Gardens This obituary was published by Obituaries provided free for the community. and website in this browser for the next time I comment Δdocument.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value" Click Here to Contact Us MITCHELL— A brand-new opportunity has hit the mat in Mitchell with the launch of the Bluejackets Wrestling Club The club offers students in kindergarten through 12th grade a chance to learn the fundamentals of wrestling Open to youth from any community—not just Mitchell—the club meets every Tuesday and Thursday at the Fieldhouse The program is designed to foster discipline and teamwork in a supportive and competitive environment Club founder Reece Freeman won a state championship in high school and is now the Mitchell High School Wrestling Coach He attributes a lot of his success in life as an attorney and member of the community to the lessons he learned on the mat: Participation requires a $15 fee and a valid USA Wrestling (USAW) membership card The club encourages students of all skill levels to join with experienced coaches ready to train newcomers and returning athletes alike For more information, including practice schedules and registration details, visit the Bluejackets Wrestling Club website at www.bluejacketswrestlingclub.com Take a closer look at how Donovan Mitchell is driving the Cavs' success through his leadership Donovan Mitchell has felt fully embraced as a Cavalier In a season that has seen the Cavaliers win 64 games The Cavaliers journey under Mitchell is featured on Episode 5 of “Pass The Rock Season 3”. The NBA Entertainment original provides fans with all-access coverage into the lives of the game’s youngest stars in their on-and off-court endeavors who picked up his love of basketball as a kid has always wanted to be remembered for one characteristic; being a champion “When your best player empowers the people around them that’s a true superstar for me.” Cavaliers Head Coach Kenny Atkinson said Mitchell acknowledges his squad’s historic season but aims to lead with consistency at the forefront “The biggest thing is continuing to be this team come playoff time.” The Cavaliers begin their second round series Sunday against the Indiana Pacers (Time TBD) The All-Star's rise in Cleveland and his family's influence on him are highlighted in the latest episode of 'Pass The Rock' Thunder's Jalen Williams and his family give an inside look on his unlikely path to becoming an NBA All-Star Lakers new star Luka Dončić outlines his path towards NBA greatness in the latest episode The emerging leader of the Celtics shares his ambition in the latest episode of 'Pass the Rock' Breanna Stewart and Jonquel Jones glamour up alongside Angel Reese for the annual fashion event Kenny Atkinson experienced a setback on his coaching journey it fueled the 2024-25 NBA Coach of the Year Follow the NBA Playoffs with our Nightly Pulse blog featuring all the latest news scores and highlights from around the league Atkinson guides Cavaliers to a 64-18 record and the No 1 seed in the Eastern Conference during 1st year at the helm RotoWire highlights the top performers after the 2nd full week of the 2025 NBA Playoffs "He figured out a pattern of success," says Zach Hahn who was coached at Butler by Celtics GM Brad Stevens ®PAPERCITY ©2025 urban publishers, inc. all rights reserved terms & condition // privacy policy // sitemap Bob Mitchell and Crawford Brock (Photo by Carol Vig) Crawford Brock and Laurie Harrison (Photo by Carol Vig) Guests had their pics snapped with two very intimidating longhorns Andrew Mitchell and designer Peter Cohen (Photo by Carol Vig) Shelby Wagner and Claire Emanuelson (Photo by Carol Vig) Richard and Cheryl Joyner (Photo by Carol Vig) Doniphan Moore and Tanner Moussa (Photo by Carol Vig) Rachel Koryl and Keana Meyer (Photo by Carol Vig) Billy Fong and Donald Robertson (Photo by Carol Vig) Niven Morgan and Russ Mitchell (Photo by Carol Vig) Steve and Marcy Sands (Photo by Carol Vig) Chuck Steelman and Lisa Dawson (Photo by Carol Vig) Ben and Maxine Trowbridge (Photo by Carol Vig) and Caroline Harrison (Photo by Carol Vig) Ann and David Sutherland (Photo by Carol Vig) Ali and Chris Mitchell (Photo by Carol Vig) If you haven’t heard the other retails news (yes, we’ve all heard about Neimans + Saks sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g …), that Stanley Korshak’s owner, Crawford Brock, has launched a stragetic partnership with the Mitchell Bros you likely didn’t attend the recent party at the store Much of the extended Mitchell family made their way down to Dallas for a proper Texas-sized soirée and meet and greet the CEO of Marketing for the Greenwich family-run business and I’m lucky – having lived in Connecticut we had lots of things in common — my favorite golf course (Fishers Island) and brunch spot (Daniel Packer Inne in Mystic) “There sure are a lot of you here tonight,” since I had spotted quite a few cowboy hats and had been told all the Mitchells would be wearing one in celebration of their new outpost in Texas I think close to 20 couldn’t make it.” Wow Just before Game 1 of the Cavs’ Playoff series against the Pacers Donovan Mitchell and adidas Basketball teamed up with Mitchell’s Ice Cream to bring joy and flavor to fans in Cleveland The “nIce Cream Shop,” set inside Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse offered a unique fusion of sneakers and sweets — including free scoops of Don’s go-to: Cookies and Cream with rainbow sprinkles The event doubled as a community celebration and early debut of the D.O.N Fans got a first look — and first shot to buy — the upcoming release Decked out with neon lights and sneaker storytelling the activation highlighted Mitchell’s deep connection to Cleveland and his ongoing commitment to giving back As Mitchell continues to lead on the court he’s also proving he’s one of the “nicest” off it — one scoop at a time WE INDEPENDENTLY CHOOSE ALL PRODUCTS FEATURED ON OUR SITE. WE MAY RECEIVE A COMMISSION WHEN YOU CLICK ON LINKS TO THOSE PRODUCTS. YOU CAN LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR AFFILIATE POLICY IN OUR TERMS OF USE Adidas Basketball and Donovan Mitchell Celebrate D.O.N Issue #7 with the “nIce Cream Shop” ExperienceFollow Ahead of the Cleveland Cavaliers’ Game 1 playoff game with the Indiana Pacers, adidas Basketball and Donovan Mitchell gave fans more than just buckets to cheer for To celebrate the on-court debut of the D.O.N the Three Stripes teamed up with Mitchell’s Ice Cream for a community-focused activation called the “nIce Cream Shop” — a playful and personal celebration that fused basketball Set inside the concourse of Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse the “nIce Cream Shop” was a colorful tribute to Mitchell’s roots in Cleveland and his continued connection to the city the pop-up brought the spirit of the D.O.N Issue #7 to life through the lens of Donovan’s favorite dessert: cookies and cream with rainbow sprinkles — which fans enjoyed for free during the event While Spida lit up the hardwood with the new silhouette attendees were also treated to an early chance to purchase the D.O.N Issue #7 ahead of its official release later this summer The moment captured what Mitchell has come to represent — both to adidas and to Cleveland: elite performance The D.O.N. Issue #7 releases July 2025 built for players who move with speed and precision and want to keep things “nIce” while doing it On the ballot are incumbent Renae Mitchell and Trish Smith for Place 3; incumbent Vernagene Mott and Claudia Yañez for Place 4; and incumbent Kelly Daniel and Lee Wallace for Place 5