Reading it and playing it can be a different thing. 

One of the wonderful things about sheet music is that you have geniuses down the ages communicating things to you. For example, Beethoven writing: "Don't play a cadenza, play this instead" and then he writes out a cadenza. And you feel connected to Beethoven through him being so human and irrational.

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I recently heard a podcast hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson where it was described in this way: first you’d see a dot that, as it moved closer to you, would be a bigger and bigger circle, until it begins shrinking again back into a dot, before disappearing. Interestingly, Tyson argues that we live in four dimensions due to our reliance on requiring knowledge of both the where and the when to function. 

As far as time travel goes, I suppose it’s as impossible for us as it would be for a hypothetical two-dimensional being to determine how to not move forwards, backwards, or side-to-side, but up or down. But I wonder if “impossible” is simply a matter of having enough information. 

Regarding free will, Peter, a lot of Sapolsky’s reasoning remind me too much of the kind of modern philosophy I studied at university in the ancient, halcyon days of the turn of the millennium - a lot of arguments over the inherent meaning of words, rather than the meaning of intent. “Free will.” Yes, not only does all thought have a specific moment of formation, but we can even observe when and where the synapses fire in a way that predicts action before it occurs. It might be the first time in science where someone is arguing that if something existed, then we wouldn’t be able to measure it!

On a personal level, I especially agree with his conclusions related to how humanity should change its behaviour in consideration of the undeniable fact that we’re all of us born into a world where we very much are shaped by all the factors of our environment, long before we’ve formed the grey matter to consider the titanic, entrenched inequity inherent to that world. 

But it ultimately feels to me that he’s arguing that “free will” is only true if a person acts with spontaneity in a way that can’t be predicted or measured by observable brain activity. Reading a little more into it, he specifically states the only conclusion that would prove free will, which happens to be something we could not possibly even create an experiment of which to meet the criteria. 

I feel like this is a lot of effort on his part to present evidence that we live in an inherently unjust system and should treat each other far more compassionately than we do at present.