Determinism as presented by Dr. Robert Sapolsky

[necrovore]

2 hours ago, Boydstun said:

It says that all things always have complete states in reality, and, given that that is the case for them, they can do only one thing in their complete state at any time.

As far as I know, the claim that determinism is "useless even if true," is my own argument. (I don't see it in the Objectivist literature either.)

A useless determinism does not convert free will into an "illusion." Saying that it does is the same sort of argument that says that, because tables and walls are really made of atoms which are mostly empty space, the solid tables and walls that we see are "illusions." They are not.

The solidity of tables and walls is a fact that arises out of the nature of the entities involved -- the atoms, the forces between them, and the fact that our bodies are also made out of molecules.

Free will is a fact, too, even if it's a fact that arises out of our inevitable lack of the omniscience necessary to exploit the universe's determinism.

[Boydstun]

4 hours ago, necrovore said:

. . .

Free will is a fact, too, even if it's a fact that arises out of our inevitable lack of the omniscience necessary to exploit the universe's determinism.

I'd think that expansion of our knowledge allowing us to expand our exploitations of the physical determinisms would expand our freedom of will. At least in the sense that we obtain a wider range of options over which to exercise our will.

So I'm not inclined to accept the idea that free will arises out of limited knowledge.

I already have the freedom of will to decide what work I'll do first when I go outside to work in a few minutes, and if I had all the knowledge of brain and muscle and things I'll be working on out there, my free will would not vanish. I think, rather, that my free will has an explanation in terms of all those unknown processes within myself; contingencies in physical processes are the house of free will. I do not think my free will is based on my ignorance of those internal mechanisms.

[necrovore]

21 minutes ago, Boydstun said:

I'm not inclined to accept the idea that free will arises out of limited knowledge... I do not think my free will is based on my ignorance of those internal mechanisms.

I'm not really talking about ignorance per se, I'm talking about the unknowable.

In order for your free will to "go away," you'd have to know the unknowable. That's an entirely different thing from learning new facts of which you were previously ignorant.

[DavidOdden]

14 hours ago, necrovore said:

Although nature follows laws, these laws are averages, and there are always sources of noise. The gas laws for example arise from the random motions of innumerable particles. They are an average. There's no way any conscious could "know" the positions and velocities of all those particles. The amount of information is too big, even without accounting for "quantum weirdness."

Knowing the existence of, and disregard for, noise is the fundamental achievement of Galilean science. “Noise” is essentially the epistemological filter that stands between God and man, necessary when dealing with vast amounts of unknown such as molecules in a gas. Only God can do the computation with infinite precision. Man can handle smaller amounts of data in circumstances where we know the relevant data, which we don’t always, cf. Neptune and Pluto. The classic perspective is that the laws of physics are absolute, and not statistical approximations ± some degree of randomness, although more-practical laws dealing with large-scale structures such as the ideal gas law are approximations. Not because the universe is inherently “non-deterministic”, but because it’s impractical to construct a particle-physics level model of the Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment. Non-determinism was classically an epistemological problem, not a metaphysical one.

Things changed with Heisenberg’s argument that God plays with dice. I never really understood the leap of reasoning from “we can’t predict” to “there is no law”, until I thought about what physical laws are. It is generally held that the laws of physics are a fundamental aspect of the universe, that they are real and not just human conveniences. Objectivism interjects an important distinction between epistemology and metaphysics, saying that there is Existence, and has a definite nature independent of consciousness. A grasp of Existence – by a consciousness – gives rise to “fact”, a perceivable aspect of Existence. There is a commonplace observation in anthropology that classification of existents into natural types is seemingly random cultural influences. As English-speaking westerners we feel that our concept “snake” is absolutely correct, there really is a universal snakeness to snakes which we perceive. But other cultures and languages have different principles of classification, where a certain animal is also “a type of snake”, e.g. Ophisaurus which are not taxonomically snakes, but in many cultures are lumped together with snakes; or certain species of Typhlops which are snakes but in some cultures are classified as worms. The cultural aspect that yields these differences of classification is focus. Standard Western classification focuses on evolution of species, but local folk taxonomies focus on immediately-perceivable morphological similarity or utility.

The “laws of nature” are epistemological by nature, in that they grasp the nature of existence. The error that arises in discussions of ‘determinism’ is not being clear on what ‘determinism’ is. Determinism, properly understood, is a claim not about existence, it is a claim about Man, that we have the capacity to fully grasp every fact. I’m not opposed to that premise, I just think that it is important to say more precisely what “determinism” is. Non-determinism refers to aspects of existence which we cannot know.

Of course, the other half of the discussion is being clearer about what “free will” is.

[Boydstun]

On 3/27/2024 at 6:57 AM, Boydstun said:

I find reading compositions more exact and facilitating of serious thought than videos. I've not got Robert Sapolsky's Determined: A Life of Science without Free Will (2023). I may get it to add to the following of mine:

Free Will – Philosophers and Neuroscientists in Conversation, Maoz and Sinnott-Armstrong, editors (2022)

Naturally Free Action by Oisín Deery (2021)

Free Agents – How Evolution Gave Us Free Will by Kevin Mitchell (2023)

A Metaphysics for Freedom(* & on to next page) by Helen Steward (2012)

Laws, Mind, and Free Will by Steven Horst (2011)

Deep Control by John Fischer (2013)

Causes, Laws, and Free Will – Why Determinism Doesn't Matter by Kadri Vihvelin (2013)

Why Free Will Is Real by Christian List (2019)

 

~Also, to the free will side~

"Volitional Synapses"

–Part 1

–Part 2

–Part 3

"Ascent to Volitional Consciousness"

–Abstract

–Article

 

I have repeated the list of modern books above on free will because I have received the book by Robert M. Sapolsky Determined – A Science of Life without Free Will, and it is junk by comparison to those. To get to current top philosophy on free will informed by modern science buy not Saplosky 2023, but from the list above. To that list, I should also add the deep thinking on free will to be found in Robert Nozick's Philosophical Explanations (1981). Let me refer to Sapolsky 2023 by "D". Sapolsky does not argue with the sophisticated, scientifically informed on the issue of free will and determinism. He does not have that sophistication. His writing is horrible for this reader. There are hundreds of unnecessary words, wasting the educated reader's time, to deliver finally some little idea suitable for jr. high. Certainly this author does not deliver with the economy and substance of, say, Dennett's Elbow Room. The discussions by participants in this thread are more weighty than what this author is capable of. 

The subtitle of this book speaks of "a science of life" and that can give the impression the author is going to establish a science of life, which is not his aim. The subtitle should be read as "Among ways of looking at life, scientifically informed, without free will, here is one, mine."

"This book has two goals. The first is to convince you that there is no free will,* or at least that there is much less free will than generally assumed when it really matters." (What does really matter more? That I encounter a bear one evening sitting at my mailbox out on the road and make a decision about what to do or that I wrote the poetry and essays that I did? I'll not be taking on the author's take on what really matters.) The author mentions some of the competent philosophers of our time who are on the determinist side and one of the compatiblists, but he does not really get into their level of thinking and the level of debates other philosophers have with them. The level of neuroscience he parlays is nowhere near what the educated reading public has received from neuroscientists Edelman (The Remembered Present), Damasio (The Feeling of What Happens), or Freeman (How Brains Make Up Their Minds). All of these, by the way, like Sapolsky, know of serious philosophical discussions pertinent to the vistas they are relating, but they do not get into the ring and really wrestle with those crucial deep thoughts.

My own favorite determinist philosopher, informed by the brain science to that time, is Ted Honderich (A Theory of Determinism, Vol. I Mind and Brain, Vol. II The Consequences of Determinism, 1988). I think his Union theory of the psycho-neural relation is likely correct, but his conception of the level of determinism in the subjects of physical science, from natural arenas of physics to interacting living neural networks, is false, an unrealistic projection from isolated systems to the full chorus of nature. A pervasive FALSE from Laplace to our own era.

That usual unexamined presumption is carried forth by Sapolsky, planting the image of a single neuron as required to be not a thing of entirely determined activities if free will (faith in free will, he would say) is to be validated in terms of neuroscience. And of course without the realistic biological context of structure and function the only alternative to the deterministic neuron would be a randomly behaving one (which could, I say, be useful for the generation portion, the generation-of-diversity portion, of the model of some, which is then followed by selection in biological process) useless and not the same thing as free will. The single-neuron image is a strawman for thought about free will as to neurology.

I'll not be reading this book further. If I get to tackle free will big time in my scholarship, I'll be soaking up the books in my list above. The pages of D are of good material quality (at least in the hardback) and a pleasure to turn. I'll not be returning this book to the soil, but retain it for the philosopher who will be inheriting my library. In case he thinks better of it.

[Solvreven]

Bodystun - are you familiar with Sam Harris's work on determinism?
And how would you compare Sapolsky's book with Harris?

I've not read the determinist books that you have mentioned in your earlier post, but I might give them a read over time.
I'm still studying objectivism - as it's so big.. And which is the first philosophy I've ever encountered that just don't have swiss cheese holes in it's logic.

However bad Sapolsky might be, he is by far the most popular "philosopher" at the moment.
Together with the likes of Jordan Peterson, Harris, Hossenfelder and Kaku perhaps..
What I find interesting is that there are non that are philosophers first - but has taken interest in it through their field. I think this is where alot of it tends to go wrong.

[Boydstun]

4 hours ago, Solvreven said:

Bodystun - are you familiar with Sam Harris's work on determinism?
And how would you compare Sapolsky's book with Harris?

I've not read the determinist books that you have mentioned in your earlier post, but I might give them a read over time.
. . .

However bad Sapolsky might be, he is by far the most popular "philosopher" at the moment.
Together with the likes of Jordan Peterson, Harris, Hossenfelder and Kaku perhaps..
What I find interesting is that there are none that are philosophers first - but has taken interest in it through their field. I think this is where a lot of it tends to go wrong.

I'm not familiar with the thought of Sam Harris. I looked him up on Amazon just now and see a number of popular-culture type books he has written. Those are not the sort of books that could be worthwhile for me to really advance my thought rather than dropping in on seeing what was going on in popular culture. Everyone has their own level of background knowledge under which a book might be accessible and have some new frontier for them in an area of interest to them. That is something I've found to be most accurately estimated by having the book in your hands before purchase. (Although, I've found that for fit with me, if a book has an "Author Meets Critics" session at a Meeting of the American Philosophical Association and I look up the book at the publisher or Amazon and the information there points to a fit for me in interest and level, then it is extremely likely to be a right fit.) There are sometimes books written for the general educated public that are a fit for me: Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics (from days of yore); Penrose's The Road to Reality (2006); Deacon's The Symbolic Species (1997); Grossberg's Conscious MIND, Resonant BRAIN (2021); the widely read books of Michael Tomasello (emergence of us with thought and morality from primate evolution and human ontogeny). These books are mainly scientific, not philosophy.

Sapolsky writes that his viewpoint is closest to the views of Sam Harris in that they both reject free will "almost entirely on biological grounds." I notice that Harris's formal training in philosophy was not much.* I don't know if determinists—popular such as Harris and Sapolsky or academy-seated such as Derek Pereboom and Galen Strawson—will have significant cultural impact in terms of views on what man is or how society should(shall?) be structured. But I for one do not think that wide-readership success and its possibility of cultural impact is what is most important about having had a course of life and mind or right measure of worth in one's written works.

Of the populars you mentioned, I've had at least online peeks at reflections of Hossenfelder, and as I recall, at least her physics was sound; I wouldn't know about how good are her representations of whatever she is challenging.

Edited March 29 by Boydstun

[Solvreven]

14 minutes ago, Boydstun said:

Of the populars you mentioned, I've had at least online peeks at reflections of Hossenfelder, and as I recall, at least her physics was sound; I wouldn't know about how good are her representations of whatever she is challenging.

Hossenfelder i basicaly a more coherent variant of Sam Harris in my estimation.
I'm having a hard time taking determinists serious, but I guess there's some usecase to doing so, as in you learn more, and therefore can reach better conclusions (not always).

I've never read Penrose, but I've seen some interviews of him - and he has a fascinating idea of how the universe works. He is rather vague when it comes to his free will premise, and afraid of asserting his views from the videos I've seen.

Also thank you very much for your replies!

Very glad I found this forum.

[tadmjones]

If popular science/philosophy are amenable to one’s level of curiosity and or study, Bernardo Kastrup’s Essentia foundation is a good platform for a non materialist approach. He is a strong Jungian and Schopenhauerian, and in one of the videos featuring Bernardo he speaks to a definition of free will coming from Schopenhauer’s framing.

[Easy Truth]

On 3/28/2024 at 9:53 AM, Boydstun said:

On 3/28/2024 at 5:19 AM, necrovore said:

Free will is a fact, too, even if it's a fact that arises out of our inevitable lack of the omniscience necessary to exploit the universe's determinism.

I'd think that expansion of our knowledge allowing us to expand our exploitations of the physical determinisms would expand our freedom of will. At least in the sense that we obtain a wider range of options over which to exercise our will.

So I'm not inclined to accept the idea that free will arises out of limited knowledge.

Not arise as evolutionarily arises, but it's simply a context or a perspective. 

I also understand as David says that Determinism says something about man, and I have seen that it has political ramifications that I actually can't comprehend. But after all, your nature determines what you ought to do. And your nature is finite and knowable, or is it not?

But determinism is beyond just about man, isn't it the idea that if you were omniscient everything would happen one particular way? It's about the future being determined. It's that idea that you can be certain about EVERYTHING. But you can't be certain about EVERYTHING. Precisely because you are not omniscient. And that does "epistemologically speaking" cause free-will to "arise".

Meanwhile, omniscience does not exist. It cannot exist.

You make choices, but you are something specific and finite. And you and I can't know everything. I remember the case against an omniscient God is that God can't be omniscient because God would know what is going to be chosen by God before choosing it, so there would be no choice to make.

My point is you can't simply push aside the lack of omniscience as being an essential proof of free will.

If biology and evolution give rise to free will, then are we saying that there must be many known unknowable universes because that would be more in line with having choices?

.

 

[Boydstun]

1 hour ago, Easy Truth said:

Not arise as evolutionarily arises, but it's simply a context or a perspective. 

I also understand as David says that Determinism says something about man, and I have seen that it has political ramifications that I actually can't comprehend. But after all, your nature determines what you ought to do. And your nature is finite and knowable, or is it not?

But determinism is beyond just about man, isn't it the idea that if you were omniscient everything would happen one particular way?  . . . 

Determinism is the idea that for us in all our human choices, actions, and controls, we are subject to the physical principle indicated widely in nature: A thing is at each time in a complete state, and in the given complete state a thing is in (regardless of whether anyone knows that complete state or everything about the future), a thing can do only one thing. To affirm Free will is to deny that that principle is operative in all our choices, actions, and controls. Free will is the idea that in some states we (the control system that is us) could have chosen another alternative to the one we chose. In those states, we were free to choose among various alternatives. I use the standard no-ambiguity definitions of determinism and free will in modern times in this post. The advocates of determinism and advocates of free will can agree that there will be only one succeeding actual state. And agree we can come to know more and more about neurology underlying choices and that we are going to get enough understanding of those physical processes to see whether in a given state only one particular next state could obtain or more. That will settle whether any choices seeming to be free have freedom or determinism in their physical bases.

My old paper on this was titled "Volitional Synapses" because I accept that the issue is settled according to whether in the pertinent interactions of neural networks of the brain there are only single next-state potentials or some multiple next-state potentials of which one becomes actual. I argued against those who think we already know that it cannot possibly be that the relevant occasions of interaction are not deterministic, i.e., not single next-state potential. Likewise we can look into the control systems of the somewhat autonomous Mars Rovers and settle if those control systems are entirely deterministic or not (I presume they are). There is a fact of the matter, and it has no dependence on present limits of our state of knowledge of the control systems. And Determinism vs. Free Will is not in some essential dependence on facts about omniscience.

Even without the issue being yet entirely settled by neuroscience, one can go on to think about social and personal-life ramifications should the settlement be determinism. We've seen historically at least the case in which those in power thought that individuals were products of economic determinism. What economic class someone was born into is all one needed to know about them. That was marxist Communism. Other potentials for society might be entailed, given determinism established not by the speculation of Marx. I myself will not be thinking on consequences were determinism correct; Nozick settled that well enough for me anyway. I'll run out my time in this area of philosophy following only pursuits of whether determinism is always the case for we individual human self-control systems or if in some choices our manifest freedom rests on multiple next-state potentials in neural network interactions. 

[Solvreven]

6 hours ago, Boydstun said:

Determinism is the idea that for us in all our human choices, actions, and controls, we are subject to the physical principle indicated widely in nature: A thing is at each time in a complete state, and in the given complete state a thing is in (regardless of whether anyone knows that complete state or everything about the future), a thing can do only one thing. To affirm Free will is to deny that that principle is operative in all our choices, actions, and controls. Free will is the idea that in some states we (the control system that is us) could have chosen another alternative to the one we chose. In those states, we were free to choose among various alternatives. I use the standard no-ambiguity definitions of determinism and free will in modern times in this post. The advocates of determinism and advocates of free will can agree that there will be only one succeeding actual state. And agree we can come to know more and more about neurology underlying choices and that we are going to get enough understanding of those physical processes to see whether in a given state only one particular next state could obtain or more. That will settle whether any choices seeming to be free have freedom or determinism in their physical bases.

What I've always found curious about determinism: So if you reduce it down, determinism is mere reactions to reactions, or behaviours to behaviour if you will. With determinism (if you have all the information of the universe that has ever existed) you can perfectly modell the future and foresee absolutely everything that will happen. So here's the contradiction as far as I see it: How can you have knowledge/obtain certainty when everything that happens is just reactions forcing you to react - there is no "you". I can't see how they can even come to the conclusion of having any form of knowledge.. so it's a claim of "I know this by accerting we cannot know".

Maybe this is wrongthink?

[Boydstun]

2 hours ago, Solvreven said:

. . . so it's a claim of "I know this by asserting we cannot know".

Maybe this is wrongthink?

I think that conclusion about some determinists is correct if one has a correct sense of the agency of animals, which agency is greatly expanded in the human animal due to greater powers of memory, self-reflection, self-control, and free will. However, a determinist need not deny there are animals with agency (including humans) or deny that the Mars Rovers had some agency; he could say simply that there is not such a deeply originative agency for humans as there would be if they truly had free will. Think too of that particular milliliter of water about to go over Niagra Falls that I considered here. On the full deterministic picture, which I argued against there, of that milliliter of water, which is not an agent, a determinist need not conclude that that bit of water does not really exist as a bit of water because of it being fully determined in its current formation from factors in other things a year before (an absurdity and false, I argued) and fully determined in the particulars its future dissolution. Such a determinist, who would indeed reduce all occasions of apparent free choices to fully deterministic factors, we should call a non-eliminative reductionist.

Edited March 30 by Boydstun

[Solvreven]

1 hour ago, Boydstun said:

I think that conclusion about some determinists is correct if one has a correct sense of the agency of animals, which agency is greatly expanded in the human animal due to greater powers of memory, self-reflection, self-control, and free will. However, a determinist need not deny there are animals with agency (including humans) or deny that the Mars Rovers had some agency; he could say simply that there is not such a deeply originative agency for humans as there would be if they truly had free will.

So this no longer then becomes a discussion of Free Will vs Determinism, rather "how much Free Will do we possess"? Which would be an interly different discussion. To be more presise it's a discussion of how the laws of identity applies to identities?

This is why I bring about the likes of Sapolsky, Hossenfelder and Harris - as i view them all as "full deterministic".. maybe open to some variance of indeterminism on the quantum level.. but most only view that as not fully understood yet (seems likely).

But indeterminism has nothing to do with free will.

The full determinist perspective is anti-philosophy and anti-knowledge.
 

 

1 hour ago, Boydstun said:

Think too of that particular milliliter of water about to go over Niagra Falls that I considered here.

I will read and respond to this later. Page 183 to 193 right?

Edited March 30 by Solvreven

[Boydstun]

1 hour ago, Solvreven said:

. . .

I will read and respond to this later. Page 183 to 193 right?

Just pages 183 to 188. Only the inanimate physics picture. There is a rebuttal of my view in this, followed by my rejoinder here.

[Boydstun]

1 hour ago, Solvreven said:

So this no longer then becomes a discussion of Free Will vs Determinism, rather "how much Free Will do we possess"? Which would be an interly different discussion. . . .

No. This IS the discussion of Free Will vs Determinism in the context of modern science, especially brain science. Both sides have always known we have constraints under which our choices are made. To sat that man is man is to say that concerning the given structure and function of his biology, including the distinctive character of his consciousness.

[Solvreven]

19 minutes ago, Boydstun said:

No. This IS the discussion of Free Will vs Determinism in the context of modern science, especially brain science. Both sides have always known we have constraints under which our choices are made. To sat that man is man is to say that concerning the given structure and function of his biology, including the distinctive character of his consciousness.

So as far as I can understand Sapoly, Hossenfelder and Harris, they deny the very existence of free will.
It's not about how much you have.. it's about having non at all.

[Boydstun]

2 hours ago, Solvreven said:

. . . 
This is why I bring about the likes of Sapolsky, Hossenfelder and Harris - as i view them all as "full deterministic".. maybe open to some variance of indeterminism on the quantum level.. but most only view that as not fully understood yet (seems likely).

But indeterminism has nothing to do with free will.
 

It is extremely unlikely that free choices have anything to do with quantum indeterminism. The time scales are way off. I argued the quantum irrelevance in VS. So far as we know, at least in the inanimate world, QM by its own mechanism gives rise to all the determinism, such as trajectory of a baseball, that obtains in the classical regime. This has been studied and has expanded from the inception of QM to this day.

The idea of indeterminacy in some events is ancient; it does not wait on the appearance of QM. It should not be confused with contingency. Aristotle is right in saying that today whether the Russians will be militarily victorious over Ukraine is indeterminate not only in the sense that it cannot be predicted, but in the sense that there is not now any such determinateness of such a matter in reality. Peirce agreed, and I agree. Leibniz and Rand could agree, but only because collections of free wills go into the outcome. 

Physical indeterminism in neural-network interactions with each other (supposing indeterminism occurs at that classical level of physics in this setting) cannot be identical with a neural-network-interaction basis of free will because free will is purposive, directed activity and mere indeterminism does not possess that. This was recognized about potential physical bases from ancient times, long before our modern knowledge of brain and its roles in animal life. The contemporary Aristotelian Roderick Long wrote his 488-page Ph.D. dissertation on some of that story: Free Choice and Indeterminism in Aristotle and Later Antiquity. 

One needs to clear one's head of these confusions: Agency always requires free will (to the contrary, a cat has agency without free will), and contingency requires living agents, indeed ones with intellegence and free will, or it requires chance (to the contrary, it requires only independent causal streams intersecting each other).

Edited March 30 by Boydstun

[Boydstun]

26 minutes ago, Solvreven said:

So as far as I can understand Sapolsky, Hossenfelder and Harris, they deny the very existence of free will.
It's not about how much you have.. it's about having none at all.

Yes, that is what we have all meant by determinism for a long time and still do. And they want to maintain they know there are no occasions of free will because no neural activity could possibly be the support for any such mental occasion. Their claim to that knowledge of possible neural-network interactions is mistaken. They have no such knowledge, and their thinking that they do so is due to a number of mistaken presumptions about the world.

Edited March 30 by Boydstun

[Solvreven]

31 minutes ago, Boydstun said:

Yes, that is what we have all meant by determinism for a long time and still do. And they want to maintain they know there are no occasions of free will because no neural activity could possibly be the support for any such mental occasion. Their claim to that knowledge of possible neural-network interactions is mistaken. They have no such knowledge, and their thinking that they do so is due to a number of mistaken presumptions about the world.

And my claim is that with this, knowledge cannot exist for a determinist.

 

 

36 minutes ago, Boydstun said:

One needs to clear one's head of these confusions: Agency always requires free will (rather, a cat has agency without free will), and contingency requires living agents, indeed ones with free will, or it requires chance (it requires only independent causal streams intersecting each other).

Not sure if I follow. You write agency always requires free will, then procedes to say "a cat has agency without free will".
Isn't this a contradiction? Might be a misunderstanding on my part - not trying to be difficult.



Everything that has no free will is basically the same, no? You have a stone, and you have a cat.. the difference is just the type of motion they make and what makes them react.

[Boydstun]

45 minutes ago, Solvreven said:

. . . 

Not sure if I follow. You write agency always requires free will, then proceed to say "a cat has agency without free will".
Isn't this a contradiction? Might be a misunderstanding on my part - not trying to be difficult.

Everything that has no free will is basically the same, no? You have a stone, and you have a cat.. the difference is just the type of motion they make and what makes them react.

Yes, it is a contradiction. I stated the falsehood "agency always requires free will," and then contradicted that thesis with the truth "a cat has agency without free will."

Descartes or some of his followers might have seen an animal as just a more complex reaction system than a stone. I'd say there is an important qualitative difference between the two even though Descartes was right that the animal such as a cat has no free will.

I don't know in the case of cats, but in the case of some monkeys, their behaviors are not only by habit and reflex, provided their prefrontal cortex is intact. Prefrontal cortex of the monkey can retain some things in mind for several seconds in absence of continuing stimulus. (That is not sensory iconic memory of animals—including us—which is only about a quarter of a second.) That memorial ability of the monkey is some amount of working memory and requires some ability of representation. Although the total abilities of the monkey are in striking contrast to a stone (or the monkey's body as a mass) reacting as in Newton's Third Law, Yes, the determinist maintains that the monkey's actions are all deterministic, predetermined. And the same for us humans with more extensive capacities for representations in the active making of our outputs, some of which some of us (e.g. you and I) say are freely chosen. 

Edited March 30 by Boydstun

[Solvreven]

27 minutes ago, Boydstun said:

Yes, it is a contradiction. I stated the falsehood "agency always requires free will," and then contradicted that thesis with the truth "a cat has agency without free will."

Aha, I was wondering if it was just a typo.

Are we sure that cats don't have free will btw? That it might only be possible in lets say monkeys as mentioned or perhaps dolphins?

Does it requirte the prefrontal cortex to even consider free will existing in an animal?

[Boydstun]

3 hours ago, Solvreven said:

. . .
Are we sure that cats don't have free will btw? That it might only be possible in lets say monkeys as mentioned or perhaps dolphins?

Does it require the prefrontal cortex to even consider free will existing in an animal?

I think the answer to your last question is Yes, but I'm unsure.

I incline to think that cats don't have free will (cf.). Finding the neurological bases of free will in humans could lead to answering the question on cats definitively. Many have remarked that domestic cats don't have remorse, for what it's worth. 

Do All Mammals Have a Prefrontal Cortex?

Edited March 30 by Boydstun

[Solvreven]

13 hours ago, Boydstun said:

I incline to think that cats don't have free will (cf.). Finding the neurological bases of free will in humans could lead to answering the question on cats definitively. Many have remarked that domestic cats don't have remorse, for what it's worth. 

Yeah it's likely they don't have remorse.
However dogs have, and i view them as less intelligent than cats?

[Doug Morris]

What is the definition of free will?