Hi, I’m curious about you’re arguments against Robert Sapolsky’s “idea of Determinism”.
I think he has made the strongest case there ever has been for determinism, I myself do not agree with him, as I think he starts at the wrong level.
For those not familiar with his works, here’s an introduction:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgvDrFwyW4k
Welcome, Solvreven.
Hope check it out later and comment. Can you post a written transcript here of what is said in the video?
Hello and thank you Boydstun.
The transcript will be hard to track as it’s autogenerated, but here it is:
Sapolsky’s case against free will
0:00
Robert spolski welcome to within reason thanks for having me on so on a scale of 1 to 10 just how
0:07
bored are you of people making jokes about free will to the effect of whenever you do anything they say hey
0:13
it’s not your fault you couldn’t help it oh I don’t know I’ve been telling people for a long long time that I don’t think
0:19
there’s any free will so I’ve been hearing that as a as a response for a long time so by now it has sort of a
0:26
Sentimental Nostalgia so that’s good sure well I mean although what we’re
0:32
talking about today really isn’t any kind of joke I I can understand why to somebody who hasn’t really thought about it before that much it might sound like
0:38
one I mean the the your most recent book determined uh is essentially an attack a
0:44
philosophical attack on what might be considered one of the most fundamental
0:49
elements of of being a human of being alive of being a conscious agent and that is our ability to make choices it’s
0:56
something that I’ve spoken about on uh on my YouTube channel before so I think that people listening will probably have
1:02
a vague idea of the argument surrounding the the existence or non-existence of free will but your book kind of takes
1:07
two parts there’s the part one here’s here’s the bad news and then there’s the part two of here’s what we can do about
1:14
it or here’s how we might respond to this realization that there is no Freedom so I think it would be worth
1:20
going over the first part just a little bit because everybody has a slightly different approach to arguing why there is no free will there are lots of
1:26
different ways to do it uh but hopefully we can jump into the second part fairly quickly so you can make an argument
1:32
against Free Will from from you Neuroscience from from physics about particles bumping into each other from
1:38
just abstract philosophy about the way that thinking Works what approach do you take and uh and why well I am pitifully
1:46
unschooled in both philosophy and physics so I’m coming at it from my profession which is I’m a biologist um
1:54
I’m mostly a neuroscientist but the fact that I’m not entirely one I think is very pertinent um to all of this because
2:01
what I spend my time thinking about is when a human a primate when somebody
2:10
does a behavior we ask why’ they do that where did that come from why did that just occur and what is scientifically
2:18
sort of clear to me by now is that’s a whole hierarchy of questions why did that occur you’re asking which parts of
2:24
the brain did or didn’t do something in the last half second but you’re also
2:29
asking something about the sensory stimuli for that individual in the prior
2:35
minutes were they terrified were they stressed were they aroused were they hungry sleepy whatever because that’s
2:42
going to affect how your brain is responding to stuff but you’re also asking what about your hormone levels
2:49
this morning because that’s going to have been shaping how sensitive your
2:55
brain was to various environmental stimuli what were your last years like and in terms of trauma finding love
3:02
finding God whatever because as the backbone of this whole field neuroplasticity you will get major
3:09
changes in brain function and structure in response to experience like that and then you’re off to your usual suspects
3:17
adolescence childhood fetal life your genes amazingly you also have to
3:22
consider what kind of culture your ancestors came up with parentheses what kind of ecosystems they were living in
3:29
because that had a ton to do with it what does that have to do with any of this because within minutes of birth the
3:35
culture in which your mother was raised will influence her mothering style and you so why did that person just do what
3:43
they did because of everything from one second ago to Millennia ago all of these
3:48
influences and when you look at them there’s two key punch lines the
3:54
first one is when you look at sort of the amount of our Behavior that all of
4:00
those prior events Encompass what you conclude is we are nothing more than the
4:07
sum of our biological luck over which we had no control and its interactions with
4:13
the sum of our environmental luck which we also had no control over um the
4:18
second key point with that which really does in Free Will for me is it’s not a
4:25
punchline here of oh you got to keep in mind a whole bunch of different science ific disciplines because maybe
4:31
Neuroscience doesn’t disprove free will but Endocrinology does or that doesn’t
4:37
disprove but genetics or or physiological ecology or any no the key
4:42
point is all of these different disciplinary approaches turn into the same thing what do I mean by that you’re
4:51
talking about genes and behavior if you’re doing that by definition you’re
4:56
talking about millions of years of evolution of your genes and you’re also
5:01
talking about what your childhood was like when experiences then were causing lifelong epigenetic changes in your Gene
5:09
regulation and you’re also talking about what proteins your brain were making on the direction of your genes 25 minutes
5:16
ago and when you look at how it forms this one continuous Arc of
5:23
influences my two sents is there’s not a crack anywhere in that edifice in which
5:28
you could shoot born in free will tell me about the hungry judge
Why you never want a hungry judge
5:35
phenomenon oh I love this one this this one is is in the realm of like what’s
5:41
been going on in the previous hours and this was this classic study published in
5:47
a very prestigious Journal looking at all of the parole board decisions that
5:53
were made in a particular country over the course of a year and hundreds and
5:58
hundreds possibly thousands I’m forgetting and you know at each juncture a judge either let somebody go free or
6:05
sent them back to jail and the scientists looking for what were their predictors of the decision and they
6:14
found like the single most powerful one was how many hours it had been since the
6:21
judge had eaten a meal see a judge right after they had lunch you had about a 60%
6:26
chance of parole by 3 4 hours later essentially a 0% chance whoa what is
6:33
that about that’s totally bizarre that makes total biological sense because
6:38
like the part of your brain that is required to think about the world from
6:44
somebody else’s perspective to challenge your immediate snap judgments a second
6:50
time a fifth time a tenth time it’s part of the brain the frontal cortex is the most expensive part of your brain
6:56
metabolically when it’s been hours since you’ve eaten your blood sugar levels are low and what’s one of the first parts of
7:02
the brain that’s beginning to get a little sluggish as a response this part of the brain and it’s easier to default
7:09
into a quick snap judgment and you know the the neurom metabolism of that
7:17
occurring is like pretty straightforward what’s astounding to me is the knowledge that you take any one of those judges
7:23
and say whoa this is interesting remember back right after lunch you had a guy who had done X and you red him and
7:30
just now this person seemed to have done the exact same thing but you sent him back to jail what’s the deal with that
7:35
they’re not going to say because my frontal metabolism decreased they’re going to site right some college course
7:42
on emanu k or something that will fill in an attribution when it’s metabolic
7:48
okay it must be said that study got a lot of attention and it got a few
7:53
different groups challenging its statistics its interpretation it is totally Lally held up solid and has been
8:01
effect replicated you do not want to ask for a home mortgage loan at the bank if
8:09
it’s been hours since the person you’re talking to is eating the meal all sorts of versions like that when people are
8:16
hungry when they’re sleep deprived they become less generous they become less
8:21
Cooperative they’re more likely to stab you in the back if you’re playing an economic game with them so just on that
8:27
level wow when you had lunch is going to have a major impact on whether or not
8:35
like you’re going to send this person back to jail or not yeah there’s Machinery humming underneath the surface
8:42
all the time and this when you say this is the biggest predictor of the parole
8:47
decision that the judge makes is this bigger than political affiliation bigger
8:53
than the the the kind of schooling that the judge has this is really the biggest factor that we can use to determine or
8:58
or to take a guess at what their decision is going to be well it’s after controlling for like The Logical
9:06
modulators what is the person from the same in group that you are what’s your
9:12
who appointed you things of that sort um it was it was a Middle Eastern country
9:18
so some some specifics to their sort of Criminal Justice System but yeah of the
9:25
extraneous this couldn’t possibly have something to do with how judges make their decisions list this was at the top
9:32
of the list um fasc fascinating because well especially because most
9:39
people intuitively know this to some degree right if you’re having an argument with somebody you might think
9:45
to yourself gosh maybe I’m just hungry or hangry maybe I’m tired you say well let’s revisit this in the morning I need
9:51
to sleep on it you people are already aware that to to some degree there are
Do we have any free will?
9:56
moments in our lives where uh the decisions that we make seem to be out of
10:01
accord with with our own agency so when asking you know whether we have free will everybody’s going to agree that
10:08
there are certain circumstances where we have less free will or more free will
10:13
there are certain times when our Free Will is diminished and I suppose when the question is asked well where do we
10:18
draw the line as to how far that that can go how far that Free Will can be removed your answer seems to be that
10:24
there is no line yeah these are these are nice liberal reformist edge cases oh we all
10:33
have free will but some of the time all of us have less than it other times and some people really have way less than
10:39
other people my my stance and I’m way out in The Lunatic Fringe on this in
10:46
terms of sort of neurosciences Stephen is that there’s no free will whatsoever
10:52
um that there’s all sorts of points where we think we’re seeing it um
10:58
because we’re looking in the wrong place we’re having a very strong emotional pull towards seeing it but that there
11:04
actually is none whatsoever when you look at the you know
11:10
the you know cumulative ways in which you turned out
11:15
to be who you are and how what came before determined that there there is
11:21
none that’s all we are we are the outcome of the biological environmental luck that started way back when up to a
11:28
second go and there’s no me inside there
11:34
inside your brain that’s in your brain but not of your brain and it’s made of something separate and that somehow is
11:41
immune to things like your blood glucose levels or your genes or what culture you
11:47
were brought up in or whether you’re worrying about paying the month’s rent and that’s like the main thing on your
11:54
mind that that’s there is no separate me in there now people are going to want to
12:00
separate out the micro from the macro here you know they they’re going to want to say okay if it gets cold that will be
12:07
a determining factor in me putting my coat on I’ll go go and put a jacket on and clearly you know that’s somewhat out
12:13
of my control cuz I don’t control the temperature but that’s not going to determine whether I put my left arm through first or my right arm through
12:19
first you know like those minute decisions that seem to be almost trivial it’s almost as if even if you went
12:26
looking for some kind of determinant Factor as to why you the left arm rather than the right arm it seems it seems
12:32
ridiculous to say that that decision might have something to do with you know your ancestors or or or the the how
12:40
recently you ate or any of these kinds of factors so what’s a good way of explaining the the loss of agency in the
12:48
in the minute decisions like that where there doesn’t seem to be even to the person a sort of uh a rational or an
12:53
obvious non-rational reason for for one or the other well let’s let’s unpack
12:59
that a bit um so you get some college freshmen who has volunteered for a psych
13:05
experiment and they show up and the experiment is here’s a button and
13:10
whenever you feel like it push it and you can push it with your right hand or your left hand and just go for it um and
13:18
thus we’re in this Micro World so first off oh is this person left-handed or
13:25
right-handed that’s a biological phenomenon does this person happen to have a sore shoulder on their right side
13:32
not their left whatever it is so that but then you’re sitting there and this
13:37
is a psych experiment you’re wondering oh what do they really want to know about this you start generating a
13:45
hypothesis what is it that they’re looking for you’re having a metal level of you’re saying well I just did my left
13:51
hand three times in a row is that indicative okay let me do right next
13:57
time then you’re wondering if you saw and you thought you saw like a micro expression of a smile on the
14:03
researcher’s face that aha their theory was just are you a jerk at that point saying okay I know what they’re up to
14:10
I’m going to do just the opposite what how do you turn out to be first off the
14:15
sort of person who would be in University and sign up for a psych experiment and the sort of person who
14:20
would show up on time and how do you be the sort of person who was or wasn’t generating hypotheses as to what are
14:28
they looking for here and do I want to confirm that do they do they are they appealing am I going to try to do what I
14:33
think they want me to do or am I going to do the opposite because I’d like to show them that I’m smarter than they are
14:39
because my authority issues and like just unpacking even something as like
14:44
trivial as that is going to have a little bit of this
14:51
viscosity uh coming from everything that came before that made you
14:56
you well people often like to ask me about uh there’s a French philosopher whose name I I don’t know if I pronounce
15:03
correctly um but this concept of Buran is it burdan burdan uh but his donkey or
15:10
his ass and this this idea of a of a donkey stood behind two two hay stacks
15:17
and uh it’s hungry and it needs to eat from one or the other but but because the donkey has literally no reason to
15:24
pick one Hast stack over the other it stands in the middle and ends up starving to death because any reason to
15:32
go for one or the other doesn’t materialize and yet to go for one or the other you need some reason and I had a I
15:40
had someone ask me about this recently I was I was speaking at a school and this this young guy comes up to me and he
15:45
asks me about this this situation and the way that I tried to explain it to him was to say the two options you have
15:52
is that are that either there is some determining factor that makes the donkey go for for stack a or stack b or there’s
15:59
literally no determining Factor now granting that the donkey probably does something right so let’s say it goes for
16:04
stack a if there was some determining Factor then that’s what we’re talking about here you have to ask what BR
16:10
brought about that determining factor and it’s probably outside of the donkey’s control but if even if it were the case that there really were zero
16:17
determining factor and the donkey genuinely randomly picks stack a the
16:22
definition of Randomness entails that you’re not in control of that either a lot of people
16:28
like to think that the place you can shoe horn in Free Will is as as you say is by looking towards elements of
16:34
Randomness in the universe perhaps at the quantum level but often times I think forgetting that Randomness means
16:42
that there’s no determining factor which means that you can’t be the determining Factor so that must be outside of your control too but I wonder how you would
16:48
account for this situation of the donkey between the two haacks and and what might be going on in his in his mind
16:54
well Randomness is a very tricky thing in all this first off is the like holy
17:00
grail or like deepest hole into purgatory of any of this which is
17:06
quantum indeterminacy and does that actually mean the whole universe is indeterministic and is there a way to
17:12
harness indeterminacy to get like Free Will and all and in the book I spent two
17:19
chapters on this that um essentially Quantum indeterminacy has nothing to do with any of this for three reasons the
17:26
first is the subatomic scale it’s so many orders of magnitude that
17:32
these effects would have to Bubble upward and in such synchrony among all
17:37
the different subatomic events going on in one molecule at a time let alone one
17:43
region of the brain that it’s beyond impossible for that to occur the second
17:48
one is exactly what you allude to which is if by some chance it did bubble all the way up to affect the function of a
17:56
neuron or a part of the brain or whatever as you say it’s a prescription for
18:01
Randomness and God help you if say you’re attributing say your moral philosophy to
18:09
Randomness and every free will believer and Free Will skeptic um except for a
18:15
weird sort of subgroup there agree that Randomness is not like the basis for
18:21
free will it’s just as incompatible as as extreme determinism the third one is
18:26
then this sort of desperate hail Mar that people often grab for at that point which is somehow to harness that
18:35
Randomness in some way higher level brain function the the you that’s
18:41
supposedly separate in there in some way is able to reach down a form of downward
18:46
causality that philosophers basically think can’t exist in order to opportune
18:52
that Randomness for your own like Free Will pleasure and stuff and there’s no mechanism for it that works that said
19:00
when you look at the brain neurons do random things neurons will randomly dump
19:07
little packets of neurotransmitters neurons will randomly
19:12
have action potentials now and then and you ask the same question is this like
19:17
the fodder for your like moral philosophy kind of thing very unlikely
19:23
and the randomness turns out not to be all that random um for example so you got you
19:32
know neurons they they talk to other neurons by way of these little fibrous end things called axon terminals that
19:39
have little packets of neurotransmitters in them and when the first neuron gets excited it dumps those neurotransmitter
19:46
pack it out into the space which floats over to the next neuron and gets it excited and occasionally you see neurons
19:54
that will just spontaneously dump their neurotrans transmitters out of their little packets whoa Randomness all of
20:02
that Randomness as in well there’s the usual machinery for dumping
20:08
neurotransmitter when you want to and it’s incredibly complicated and it’s produced a couple of Nobel prizes so
20:15
like something somebody is not looking at the control panel when they should be
20:21
inside that neuron and like something slips by and you accidentally activate the dump the neurotransmitter mechanism
20:28
oh it’s just a hiccup in the system no it turns out spontaneous
20:33
neurotransmitter release has a completely different mechanistic pathway for doing it you evolved a capacity for
20:41
spontaneous release and then you look more closely and it turns out there’s
20:47
certain times when these random events occur in your brain more often than others different physiological States
20:53
all in other words there are points where your brain determines it’s time to be indeterministic for a
21:01
bit that sure is not free will that that’s that’s as much free will as like
21:06
you take a an improv theater class and you sit there and the teacher tells you
21:13
okay so now we’re going to start this scene go for it that teacher has determined that you are going to be
21:19
indeterministic now along some parameters even looking at that level there there’s no actual Randomness
21:26
happening there and there’s no means by which true Randomness is the way in which you turn out to be you know a
21:33
fundamentalist Baptist or a Tibetan Buddhist or a neolist or whatever it’s
21:40
just not the building blocks that you can use to generate
21:47
that so no Freedom no agency no ultimate control over our actions that’s the
21:54
situation we find ourselves in and uh I want to talk about how we should react to this but but just beforehand one one
22:00
more example who’s who’s this guy that got the the pole through his through his skull and it and it and it totally
The man with the hole in his head
22:07
changed his behavioral traits fin Phineas gauge Phineas gauge every neuroscientist while they’re still in
22:14
the crib is forced to hear the story of Phineas Gage because it’s it’s like it’s
22:20
it’s Ground Zero for neuroscientists having something useful to say about Free Will 1840s Phineas Gage was working
22:28
on a railroad construction line somebody screwed up something with some dynamite
22:33
and did what they weren’t supposed to do and it blew a three foot long 13B metal
22:41
rod when it exploded into Gage’s eye and out the top of his head his forehead and
22:47
in the process Landing 13 feet over from there in the process it also took out
22:53
his frontal cortex which was like nicely splattered all over the the acreage
22:59
there so Gage just had it went it went all the way through and came out came out the other side yes yes and if you
23:06
ever find yourself at uh Harvard’s medical school and go into their Library
23:12
they have Phineas gages skull is on display there and you could see the entry point and the exit point and the
23:18
pole that’s on display there also um so
23:25
Gage gets up which is in and of itself this thing went through at sufficiently
23:30
high speed that it cauterized every blood vessel and like he stands there
23:38
and he and some of his construction crew compatriots go into town where a doctor
23:44
looks and you know looks in the empty space there and diagnoses things saying you you have a hole in your brain there
23:51
and as epically described as Gage was no longer Gage he had a massive transformation in
23:59
his personality he was the foreman of this railroad of this railroad construction crew he was the sober
24:06
God-fearing Church attending sobrius reliable self-disciplined guy and
24:13
overnight literally overnight he was turned into this foul mouth profane
24:19
disinhibited guy who wasn’t able to work for years and years afterward Gage was
24:25
no longer Gage um and this was the first very unsettle example that M material
24:33
stuff inside your head is essential to what makes us us and you know gagee is a
24:43
simple case wow here’s Gage who like two years later is cursing loudly in church
24:49
blaspheming all of that why did he do that it’s easy to see because there was
24:55
a metal rods worth of explanation because of that accident that happened to him that’s why that one’s easy for us
25:03
to look at and say oh you know he had no control over that that this part of the brain is it was damaged where we really
25:11
have trouble is not when it is something as much of a sledgehammer as a metal rod
25:16
but having to deal with the fact that who each of us are why did each of us just do what we did sitting there in
25:23
church or in any such why because of a million zil ion gazillion microsc
25:30
microscopic little threads from the past that sculpted us into who we are and the
25:38
thing is it’s easy to see the single Sledgehammer that made gauge gauge and
25:43
it’s so much harder for us to accept that you put all those zillion microscopic threads of your past
25:50
together and it is going to be as powerful as a as a metal rod blasting
25:55
through your head it’s just harder to see distributed causality a lot of it we
26:01
don’t even know about yet how it works a lot of it is just probabilistic a lot of but put all those threads together
26:09
and there’s nothing but the conclusion that you were nothing more than
26:15
everything that came before that turned you into the sort of person that you are right now and sometimes it’s easy to see
26:21
how that happened a metal rod childhood poverty trauma whatever being an
26:28
enormous privilege and sometimes it’s these little threads going back to like
26:33
your hunter gatherer ancestors inventing their culture versus your agriculturalist ancestors and everything
26:40
in between yeah I mean we know that that the the environment of our distant
How your ancestors determined who you are
26:48
ancestors can affect our behavioral traits today I mean you can you can predict there are studies to show this
26:54
if I’m not mistaken You can predict how somebody will behave in a given scenario based on uh the kind of environment that
27:02
their ancestors thousands of years ago were living in absolutely you see contrasts between say child rearing
27:09
practices in collectivist versus individualist cultures you see completely different attitudes toward
27:16
social Norm violations in people who were raised in cultures of Honor
27:21
cultures of honor your ancestors were cow people or camel people or goat
27:27
people people nomadic pastoralists where if somebody affronts you you come back
27:32
and you flatten them with 10 times the retribution because if they take your camel today and you do nothing about it
27:38
tomorrow they’re going to take the rest of your camels and your children as well or something and you see different
27:45
physiology in people in raised in cultures of Honor going back Generations
27:51
the last time that was relevant to how their folks were making a living and that leaves imprints people people from
27:58
rainforest cultures are far more likely to invent polytheistic religions people
28:04
from deserts are more likely than chance to invent monotheistic so whoa that’s
28:10
part of it as well yeah mothers who grew up in collectivist cultures typically
28:16
Southeast Asian rice growing regions versus individualist culture mothers
28:21
typically United States sort of the poster child for that on the average they sing l
28:28
at different volumes individualist culture mothers on the average sing lullab more loudly than
28:36
collectivist on the average they wait a longer time to pick up their kid when their kid’s crying than collectivist
28:43
mothers at what age is the kid weaned at what age is the kid sleeping alone all
28:48
whoo from minutes after birth like that’s already beginning to shape how
28:54
your brain’s being constructed so you put all those pieces together and this
28:59
kind of TAPS into the domain where I think people make their most fundamental
29:05
most intuitive uh mistaken perception of Free Will which is we make choices we sit in
29:14
some split in the road and we form an intent to do X instead of Y we form that
29:21
intent we know that we have that intent we know what the outcome of that is likely to be most importantly we know
29:28
nobody’s forcing us to do that we’ve got Alternatives available to us and for
29:33
most people who think about Free Will and people in the criminal justice system who think about free will is if
29:41
you had a conscious intent and you knew what the outcome was likely to be and you knew you didn’t have to do it that’s
29:46
it Case Closed culpability responsibility we’re done with our trial and for me um This is 40 Years of people
29:56
fighting about the neurobiology of the milliseconds of intent it has nothing
30:02
whatsoever to do with the Free Will debate because it doesn’t ask the only question you can ask at that point which
30:09
is oh yeah how do you become the sort of person who would have that intent at
30:14
that moment and you became that sort of person because of what was happening in
30:20
your neurons a second ago and what was happening a year ago and what your ancestors and everything in between and
30:26
simply looking at from the moment you form an intent and then consciously choose to
30:32
act on it is like trying to figure out what a book is about by only reading the last sentence of the entire book all the
30:40
important stuff is coming be how did you become that sort of person and you
30:46
became that sort of person because biological and environmental factors which collectively you had no control
30:53
over and that’s why you became you now crucially um when we spoke about the
Is it a bad thing that there’s no free will?
31:02
the guge example with the pole through his head and he shows up and and suddenly he is quite a nasty person by
31:09
by all accounts I think people would intuitively look at him and say well okay yeah he’s he’s turned into you know
31:15
a bit of a jerk but it’s not his fault there there’s kind of a sense in which you might feel sorry for him because
31:22
even though yeah he might say profane things about the God that you believe in now and that he seemingly believed in at
31:28
least yesterday uh look you know he had a pole through his head so led him off
31:33
now if you’re right that all human behavior is a result of a similarly
31:40
uh sort of a process that’s similar in the sense
31:45
that you don’t have control over it then this leads to quite a radical conclusion
31:51
that we should probably adopt the same approach to essentially anybody doing anything any of the the time is is that
31:58
your position um exactly that’s the only logical extension it’s the only
32:06
intellectually honest and ethically honest conclusion to reach which is this
32:11
completely nutty stance that blame and Punishment as virtues in and of
32:19
themselves rather than as instrumental tools blame and Punishment never make
32:24
any sense whatsoever in any realm of human life and holding a mirror up to
32:30
that likewise praise and reward never make any sense whatsoever because it is
32:37
that’s a circumstance in which some people are treated better than average for reasons they had nothing to do with
32:43
as opposed to the world of people being treated worse than average for reasons that blame punishment reward praise a
32:50
sense of entitlement a sense that you have earned anything a sense that hating a person is ever Justified
32:57
none of those make any sense whatsoever and in principle you need to run the world
33:04
without any of that stuff which uh ain’t a trivial task to take
33:11
on now it it sounds really nice when framed in terms of look if something
33:18
goes wrong for you it’s not exactly your fault um if if somebody you know has
33:24
things better in life it it’s you know we should take an egalitarian approach to recognizing that it’s not necessarily
33:31
due to Merit but we should be sort of uh considerate of the fact that that you know there go I were for the grace of
33:39
God um however you can also frame it in terms of saying that you know when I
33:44
achieve something when I win a competition when I’m nice to someone in the street there’s no sense in which I should be able to feel proud of myself
33:52
if that’s the case and on a deeper level getting of agency doesn’t just get rid
33:58
of this ability to feel I suppose uh you proud or to condemn other people morally
34:06
speaking it it removes part of what I think many people think it means to be human and so I get a lot of emails from
34:12
people saying look uh it’s really interesting the stuff about Free Will you’ve convinced me that there’s no free will but I don’t really know what to do
34:19
now and I never quite know what to say to them and I imagine that you’re in a similar
34:25
situation where you know you’re kind of ask in in a broad
34:31
sense does this kind of position just lead to a sort of nihilism and if it
34:36
does you know should it yeah now we’re getting into sort of
34:43
the really problematic stuff because as you described you tell somebody there’s
34:48
no free will and you manage to sound convincing with that and um even before the nihilism existential void the the
34:56
usual reflexive stuff is oh my God you can’t tell people that they’ll run a muck there’s a whole science as to why
35:03
that is very unlikely to happen oh my God we’ll have no societal mechanisms to keep murderers off the street that’s
35:10
absurd over and over and over we are able to protect Society from dangering
35:16
circumstances and subtract responsibility out in the process oh my
35:22
God where if you get rid of meritocracies you get a brain tumor and they’re going to pick a random person off the street to do the brain surgery
35:28
on you same thing no we can subtract praise and entitlement and meritocracy
35:36
and still protect Society from incompetent people doing important stuff
35:41
oh my God are you saying nothing can ever change not in the slightest the whole universe of how change works
35:47
completely compatible with there being no free will so you get through all of those sources of panic and then there’s
35:54
the oh my God the the the existential void are you telling me that like the
36:02
ways in which I have worked hard I’ve earned nothing from them that had
36:07
nothing to do with me are you telling me I I love my wife we’ve been married for
36:15
34 years now to 2024 that’s right 34 and nonetheless sitting there saying oh my
36:21
god do I love her in part because of the type of oxytocin receptor genes I have
36:26
because of her pheromones or things like that what what does that do to love what does that do to accomplishment what does
36:33
that do to any of this stuff if you’re a kind person do you actually deserve no
36:38
praise for that and yeah that’s where the the neologistic void suddenly
36:45
beckons and it’s you know potentially you know depressing as hell and what
36:53
took me forever to figure out is that that’s not at the end of the day a
36:59
problem or a problem on the scale of the whole world you’re bummed out because if
37:06
there’s no free will you didn’t deserve your prestigious University degree you
37:11
didn’t deserve your excellent salary you’re a corner office you didn’t
37:16
deserve the fact that people love you and respect you you didn’t deserve the fact that you were able to help people
37:24
and out of kindness you didn’t deserve any of the praise for that any of the sense of entitlement all of that bummer
37:31
bummer and my critical point there is if that’s the stuff that there being no
37:37
free will means to you you’re one of the lucky humans because you’re trying to
37:43
figure out what it means that you may not deserve to be the CEO of your corporation or you may not really have
37:51
earned love by being a kind person or any of those if that’s your problem
37:56
you’re one of the lucky ones for the vast majority of people on this planet the issue isn’t oh my God maybe I don’t
38:04
deserve to have been treated better than average because I really wasn’t responsible for the things that I’m like
38:09
treated well for for most people the problem is that we have a world in which we’re perfectly happy to treat people
38:16
worse than average for reasons they had no control over and for most people like
38:22
getting rid of Free Will is a wonderful thing it makes World more Humane here
38:29
one example that is like so obvious that it’s hard to frame in terms of the Free
38:34
Will issue but like at some point 400 years ago most western cultures figured
38:42
out that people don’t have the free will don’t have the power to control the
38:48
weather and as such if there’s a horrible thunderstorm that destroys everyone’s crops it wasn’t caused by the
38:56
old lady with no teeth at the edge of the Hamlet that nobody talks to Witchcraft doesn’t work you can’t do
39:03
witchcraft to control the weather they don’t have responsibility over that and as a result there was a change in how we
39:09
did criminal justice you don’t burn old ladies at the stake anymore when the weather turns bad because they didn’t
39:16
actually have control over that and it’s a much better world that we don’t burn
39:22
people at the stake now when the weather turns bad it’s a much better world that we figured out about two centuries ago
39:28
that an epileptic seizure is a neurological disorder it’s not a sign that somebody is demonically possessed
39:35
it’s a much better world that in the last 40 years or so we figured out that say
39:41
schizophrenia is a neurogenetic disorder rather than it is caused by
39:47
psychodynamically toxic mothers who secretly hated their child and made them schizophrenic it’s a great thing we
39:54
figured out that like some kids have trouble learning to read not because they’re lazy or unsmart but they have
40:01
like architectural abnormalities in one part of their cortex and they tend to reverse letters they have dyslexia it’s
40:08
a much better World in all those places that we have subtracted a perception of
40:13
Free Will out where there is none and becomes a much nicer place to live
40:21
in and all we have to do is push harder against the next version of that the
40:28
fact that if you get a certain variant of the gene coding for the leptin
40:34
receptor in your brain no matter how self-disciplined you are no matter how
40:40
much you actually love yourself or any no matter what you do you’re going to be overweight because your brain doesn’t
40:46
get satiation signals and when you look at sort of implicit biases in society
40:51
these days one of the only ones that has grown stronger in recent decades is implicit bias against people who are
40:57
overweight because we associated with lack of self-discipline and self-indulgence and they secretly don’t
41:03
love themselves and all and you get that Gene variant and you’re screwed you
41:09
can’t do anything about it and it’s going to be a much better world when we
41:14
subtract Free Will out of that one all that’s going to happen is while a subset
41:20
of us and I bet it’s the subset of people who are like have the you know
41:26
privilege and and opportunity to be interested in subjects like this and thus listen to something like this um
41:34
but for most people who are not worrying about the moral relevance of their like
41:39
egregiously large salary for most people every single time we have subtracted
41:45
Free Will out of our views of why people do what they do the world has become a more Humane place it’s great
41:53
news I can see that being the case when we remove agency from the weather we remove agency
41:59
from you know certain kinds of of performance at school or this kind of
42:05
thing but when we remove agency from the movement of the legs to get one out of
42:11
bed in the morning when we remove the agency from you know the decision to get
42:16
up and go outside and get some sun on your face versus the decision to to lay around in in your bed all day now I I I
42:22
don’t know what the research shows um if it’s conclusive on what kind of effect
42:29
uh the disbelief in free will actually has on on human behavior but a lot of people seem to predict that they’re
42:36
going to become less likely to make that decision to get out of bed and go and get some sun on their face just because
42:42
they’ve become aware that if they did make that decision it wouldn’t really be them that’s you know in in the driver’s
42:47
seat so I think it sounds great up to a point now given the fact that we both believe
42:53
that this is true that there actually is no agency there you know there’s no option for us to just sort of stop at
42:59
the nice bit to say look how look at all these sort of great societal motions that we’ve made and look at some more
43:05
that we could make such as you know dealing with obesity but we have to keep
43:10
going and we have to sort of get into the sludge and it seems much easier much more difficult for me to me to to paint
43:17
this kind of thing in in such a positive light it’s incredibly hard um and all
43:24
that said I’ve I was 14 when I stopped believing in Free Will and for more than
43:31
half a century since I’ve thought blame and Punishment and reort and praise and none of that stuff makes any sense
43:36
whatsoever and I totally utterly am at intellectual peace with that and despite
43:42
that I can actually act on those beliefs for about three minutes once every other month or so because this stuff’s
43:49
incredibly like somebody cuts me off of traffic and I like hate their guts and think they’re a rotten foul human who
43:56
should go to hell or at least for a few or someone says to me you know nice
44:02
lecture did just now and unavoidably for a few minutes afterward I’m going to feel like I’m a better human than
44:09
average because of that and thus deserve to get thus deserve to get to the front of the line for the next great vaccine
44:16
that comes along yeah it’s incredibly hard and you got to like over and over come back and
44:24
say how did this person become who they are and what are the ways in which I can’t understand that in the slightest
44:30
what are the ways in which I’m feeling entitled where when you look at it closely it’s right yeah you got to do
44:36
the hard work with it amid that though a gigantic problem which I cannot see
44:44
easily solved is the one of motivation of ambition and drive and all of that we
44:50
can protect people from damaging individuals
44:56
without invoking Free Will and all sorts of versions of quarantine models and look at what the Scandinavian countries
45:03
do in their criminal justice system or we could do it in like we can have a quarantine model for keeping people from
45:10
being dangerous your kid is sneezing a lot you don’t send them to kindergarten tomorrow because they say please if your
45:17
child has a nose cold keep them home so they don’t get everyone else sick you could constrain their behavior but you
45:22
don’t take their toys away while they’re at home as punish M for their Evil Soul or something yeah that’s a realm in
45:29
which we can protect Society from one type of danger without having any sort
45:35
of ethical attribution or whatever that one we can solve but how do you solve
45:41
the one of get somebody to decide they really really really want to spend 14 years getting trained to be a
45:47
cardiothoracic surgeon or they really really want to go to this party and
45:54
their DM mates are doing it but instead they’re going to study where where’s the motivation come from for that and that
46:02
one’s a much harder one I that one is much less clear out of
46:08
engineer Society so rather than protecting people from dangerous damaging individuals how to engineer
46:16
Society so that motivation is in some way separated
46:22
from attribution that is free will written and all over it yeah I don’t
46:28
know anything I can come up with is like ridiculously utopian or whatever which
46:35
is you got to get people into some sort of mindset where somebody sits down at
46:41
the piano they’re a concert pianist and they play and all of that to get into a mindset where what they will feel is
46:49
Wonder and gratitude that it turned out just by chance that they had hands that
46:55
could do things on a keyboard that will cause people to have emotions they never knew they had wow how lucky am I that it
47:03
turned out to be that way how luy yeah okay how lucky am I that I
47:09
turned out to be smart enough to be able to take out gleo blastomas or that I turned out to have the capacity for
47:15
empathy to do something nice for this homeless person yeah that’s a hard cell
47:21
to turn all of that into just gratitude that Randomness made you into that sort
47:26
of person and thus you’re willing to work with your unearned Gifts of
47:33
intellect and thus study for 47 years to be able to solve this problem or that
47:39
that one’s a tough one I don’t have an easy answer for that and
47:45
little little this is cheating but little
47:50
Echoes of meritocracy really I don’t see a way
47:56
around that one easily I I’ve always uh answered this
What changes if there’s no free will?
48:03
question in terms of thinking about what’s actually changed I mean you know
48:09
yesterday it still was the case that yesterday when I when I believed in free will the the actual in fact reason why I
48:16
got out of bed uh went to get some food was because I was hungry and my brain sort of determined that my legs would
48:23
move and go into the kitchen and and all of the deterministic factors were still there still acting on me the only thing
48:29
that’s changed is I now recognize that that’s why it’s happening
48:35
now in the same way that yesterday I was hungry and then today I sit down with a biologist who explains to me in in
48:41
precise detail exactly why I feel hunger how it works how it’s connected to the
48:47
body I still feel hungry and I still go and get the food I mean sure I I I can sort of on a on a on a meta level now
48:54
reflect more on what I’m doing here but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m hungry so in the same way whatever was
49:00
motivating me yesterday to get out of bed is still motivating me to get out of bed today the only difference is I
49:07
recognize that I didn’t control that motivation I don’t know where it came from and sure I can sit there and I can meditate and I can think okay well
49:14
noticing that motivation coming over me to get up or maybe noticing that there is no motivation maybe I that day I I
49:21
feel depressed and I want to stay in bed all day but it seems weird for me to say
49:27
that the reason I’m going to stay in bed all day is because I recognize that
49:32
whichever decision I make whether to stay in bed or get up is outside of my control because the very fact that it’s
49:38
outside of your control should mean that one of them’s going to happen nonetheless and so I guess what I what I
49:44
ask I mean people often say to me is well you don’t believe in free will but you know you don’t act like you don’t
49:49
believe in Free Will you you act like you believe in free will all the time and you just alluded to that there and in your book you say you know I find it
49:56
very difficult to live as if this is actually true but what does it mean to to live as if it’s true it might change
50:02
the way that you morally assess people but even then does it really I mean you used the word rotten a moment ago you
50:07
said if someone cuts you off in traffic you’re tempted to say well what a rotten person but what does the word rotten
50:13
mean it just means that it’s sort of gone bad I mean an apple can go rotten but that doesn’t make you mean you’re
50:18
making a moral assessment of it it just means that you’re looking at its behaviors and you’re saying that in relation to what I want it to do for me
50:25
it’s gone rotten and and so you know what really has to change just by adopting uh belief in determinism and
50:32
living as if that were true well what we have to go for
50:38
is amid this being incredibly hard work to think that way and to respond that
50:44
way and to feel that way um we have to save that effort for where it really
50:49
counts um almost certainly if it was 400 years ago you and I were both both you
50:56
know articulate and educated or whatever and if we were us 400 years ago almost
51:04
certainly it would have seemed just intuitively obvious that there are such things as witches and they can cause
51:10
lightning storms and you need to protect Society from them and there is a moral Justice in punishing them in the and 400
51:19
years later it is intuitively obvious to you and me that that’s gibberish that makes no sense at all we’re people of
51:26
our place and time now in that some of the things that are intuitively obvious
51:31
to right now to frame in a effortful free will kind of way people are not
51:38
going to believe at some point in the future okay so let’s try to think about people 400 years from now let’s think
51:45
about how each of us each of us has changed when I was a kid if the kid
51:50
sitting next to me in school wasn’t learning how to read um I would have agreed with the teacher and everybody
51:56
else and okay some kids just aren’t smart and they just don’t work hard and all of that and like here we are some
52:04
decades later in the nature of knowledge in our world that we now know there’s this thing called dyslexia like oh we’ve
52:13
been somewhere in the last 20 years or so in the United States um the majority
52:19
of people went from being opposed to gay marriage to supporting gay marriage
52:25
that’s changed during that period sometime during this period people figured out that autism is not caused by
52:32
mothers who are incapable of Love autism is when there’s something screwy and you
52:38
get little islands of unconnected function in the cortex during fetal life but these have happened in our own times
52:45
and what we see is the things that are so intuitively obviously free of Free
52:53
Will now it’s so in obvious we don’t even see it anymore like yeah you don’t
52:59
your kid doesn’t get a nose cold because they have a rotten Soul or because you have a rotten soul and their illness is
53:06
God’s punishment to you for that yeah it’s so obvious we can’t even see anymore we did it we did that one we
53:15
subtracted that one out and what it means is whichever one seem most difficult right now when we’re being
53:21
pulled in that direction it’s not a to ly obvious yet that people who are kind
53:30
are not intrinsically more deserving humans than people who were not because neither had anything to do with it okay
53:37
that one’s going to take some work that one we’re at that challenge at this
53:43
point all save save the effort for the important ones I think that intuition of free will
53:51
actually as well and this might help people too is is is one of the problems of of Free Will and one of the ways to
53:57
to really get into discussing is to is to Simply ask a person well what do you mean by Free Will what this thing that
54:03
you sort of intuitively have describe it to me because what we’re talking about here is you know somebody who says I
54:08
feel nihilistic because I’ve realized that all of my actions are determined and I say okay well what what’s the alternative to that so so so suppose
54:16
that this action that you commit is is not determined by anything at all that means it’s random you wouldn’t be in
54:22
control of that either and if I if I convinced you that you were just random
54:27
events occurring all of the time and that’s what you were that’s all you are as a person wouldn’t that instill a similar nihilistic crisis okay then
54:34
maybe Free Will is kind of being sort of partly determined partly not like who
54:40
like if you try to actually pin down the thing that you that you claim to believe in it actually becomes very difficult to
54:47
do and and I would say I mean this would be my argument and probably yours too that whatever you do land on is an idea
54:53
of what free will could be it usually ends up being either the self-contradictory it doesn’t make sense impossible or it’s describing something
54:59
that’s not really free well like I think we would say the compatibilists do for example and so I don’t even know what
55:05
this this this intuition really looks like like what is it that you want if if
55:11
this is troubling you you know yeah well we we have this tremendous source of
55:18
malaise in that like every other organism out there we’re a biological machine but unlike
55:25
any other organism out there were the only one who could know our
55:31
Machin and be interested in its parameters and boundaries and who could
55:37
be meta enough to try to understand where some of the levers and buttons are in the machine that we are and
55:45
Machinists you know can leave a huge emotional Gap there um when it comes to
55:53
trying to understand like why we like sunsets or why where Love Came From or
55:59
why it feels good to make the planet a better place and and and the notion that
56:04
we’re just observing a machine in action is really challenging in some ways
56:11
that’s the human predicament we’re smart enough to know our Machin this and we
56:17
have the cognitive and affective and cultural tools to try to deny that and
56:24
constrict very elaborate ways of saying that’s not really the case so it’s a it’s not just a problem
56:31
of free will it’s a problem of Being Human yeah um and and you know challenging positions are just uh what
56:38
we what we like to do here on the within reason podcast so uh Robert spolski thanks for thanks for coming on and
56:44
thanks for sharing your thoughts with us well thanks for having me on total fun and uh glad to see we think in such
56:51
similar ways if you enjoyed that conversation you can watch more episodes of the Within reason podcast by clicking
56:56
just here but remember the show is also on streaming platforms like apple podcasts and Spotify don’t forget to
57:02
subscribe thank you for watching and I’ll see you in the next one
I can add that Alex O’Connor (CosmicSkeptic), which has this podcast - and is himself a determinist - will debate Craig Biddle in the comming LevelUp event.
A more clear transcript from a conversation he had:
https://jimruttshow.blubrry.net/the-jim-rutt-show-transcripts/transcript-of-203-robert-sapolsky-on-life-without-free-will/
3 hours ago, Solvreven said:
Hi, I’m curious about you’re arguments against Robert Sapolsky’s “idea of Determinism”.
I think he has made the strongest case there ever has been for determinism, I myself do not agree with him, as I think he starts at the wrong level.For those not familiar with his works, here’s an introduction:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgvDrFwyW4k
That he decided to create and post a video is proof that determinism is false. Whatever the video contains is simply false rationalism and denial of the self-evident while using volition. Volitional consciousness is the faculty that chooses from the available possible options that are available to a rational entity given the context that allowed them to arrive at that moment in the multiverse.
23 minutes ago, EC said:
That he decided to create and post a video is proof that determinism is false. Whatever the video contains is simply false rationalism and denial of the self-evident while using volition. Volitional consciousness is the faculty that chooses from the available possible options that are available to a rational entity given the context that allowed them to arrive at that moment in the multiverse.
Hi EC; and thank you for your answer.
I agree with you, and I posted this to improve my own arguments for free will/against determinism.. as I tend to see more and more determinists..
So I would say he makes the fallacy I like to call “The Dead on Arrival Fallacy” which is what you basically atleast in part argued for here. He uses “the self” to refute “the self”.
It seems to me that the most that one can reasonably do is scrutinize the logic of Sapolsky’s challenge: “What is needed to prove free will: show me that the thing a neuron just did in someone’s brain was unaffected by preceding factors”. This is a common fallacy of rationalism, which can only be countered by a counter-challenge. My counter-challenge is “What is needed to prove determinism is: show me your ability to predict the choices made by men”. (Cognitive) determinism is an unfalsifiable pseudo-axiom. What constitutes a proof is not metaphysically given and is not self-evident. A proof is a presentation of evidence and the disposition of counterevidence. Sapolsky does not get to stipulate what constitutes proof, that is an objective question of logic (does all of th evidence support the claim? That is what a proof is).
Ordinary observation of humans refutes the premise that all choices are predetermined. To refute that refutation of determinism, it is insufficient to cry out wittily “You were predestined to make that argument”, one (Sapolsky) has to provide an actual model of the universe from which we can compute any man’s choices, and one must provide at least a modicum of experimental evidence to support the correctness of that model of the human mind. Needless to say, nobody has come within a light year of that gauntlet, much less ever having picked it up.
The underlying logical premise is based on the law of non-contradiction, which says that being whipped and burned is not the same as not being whipped and burned. The universe exists in a definite non-contradictory state. Alas, certain philosophico-scientists conflate epistemology and metaphysics, believing that if one cannot know whether X is the case or denial of X is the case, then the universe itself has an indeterminate state. More traditionally, existence is binary but knowledge is ternary (or more): we have “true”, “false” and “I don’t know”, but the fact either exist, or it doesn’t.
The Sapolsky-style argument is based on flawed burden-of-proof reasoning, that he who makes the claim must prove the claim. I direct your attention to vast amounts of evidence for free will, but the Sapolsky-style argument rejects the evidence because a particular statement is offered as axiomatic, when in fact it is not an axiom. The burden of proof now rests on Sapolsky or his followers and predecessors to provide a model which predicts human choices at the level that ordinary science would hold to “disprove the null hypothesis” (the .05 level, which AFAIK is actually unacceptably lax in physics which I understand requires 99.7% CL to be “evidence” and 99.9999% CL to be “discovery”).
Up until 2001, there was no explicit physical model of the fact that bumblebees fly, but nobody seriously doubted that they do. Likewise, there should be no serious doubt that humans have free will, even if we can’t reduce it to an equation rooted in sub-atomic physics.
5 hours ago, Solvreven said:
. . .as I tend to see more and more determinists..
You will likely continue seeing even more, since this is the default, or “mainstream” position among popular scientists like Michio Kaku, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Sabine Hossenfelder. Names like these will quickly pop up when you search for “free will” on YouTube.
The meaning that Objectivism attaches to free will is quite fine and useful, namely: that you will not perform at your best in any endeavor unless you monitor yourself: “Will this sentence I’m writing get the meaning across without ambiguity?”; “Did I pick an over-complicated solution to a simple problem?” and so on. This type of self-monitoring is what Rand calls “focus,” and it’s not automatic. Doing it is up to you.
Now, here’s the thing. The ability to make choices, even the choice to focus or not, is not what most (philosopher) determinists typically deny. They make a much more reasonable claim: that all choices have a sufficient explanation. I will illustrate what I mean with a very general example.
Let’s say that you make a mistake. Did you do it on purpose? Of course not. Had you known in advance that you were about to make a mistake, you would have acted fast enough to avert the mistake. Now, onto the next question: what caused that mistake to happen? A sufficient reason will quickly come up: “I didn’t know something like that could happen!”. And what was the reason for that? “I had never encountered such a situation before, either in real life or in my education. But now I have, and will probably make use of the lesson in the future”. And what is the reason for that? “Because I don’t like problems.” This can continue indefinitely.
If one’s definition of determinism aligns with this example, then it becomes clear that arguments like “I can make choices,” or “I can focus” mean absolutely nothing. They do, however, point to the possibility of a compatibilist view (the belief that free will and determinism are mutually compatible).
If you haven’t done so already, check up Schopenhauer’s prize essay, On the Freedom of the Will. It will put any modern arguments for determinism into perspective.
See post below:
12 hours ago, KyaryPamyu said:
You will likely continue seeing even more, since this is the default, or “mainstream” position among popular scientists like Michio Kaku, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Sabine Hossenfelder. Names like these will quickly pop up when you search for “free will” on YouTube.
I don’t think Kaku is a determinist, but Tyson, Hossenfelder and Harris certainly are.
I think Kaku is some kind of quantum indeterminist who blends that with free will. Besides that I agree with your point.
12 hours ago, KyaryPamyu said:
The meaning that Objectivism attaches to free will is quite fine and useful, namely: that you will not perform at your best in any endeavor unless you monitor yourself: “Will this sentence I’m writing get the meaning across without ambiguity?”; “Did I pick an over-complicated solution to a simple problem?” and so on. This type of self-monitoring is what Rand calls “focus,” and it’s not automatic. Doing it is up to you.
Completely agree with this, and “focus” is the precursor - the motor of the mind.
12 hours ago, KyaryPamyu said:
Now, here’s the thing. The ability to make choices, even the choice to focus or not, is not what most (philosopher) determinists typically deny. They make a much more reasonable claim: that all choices have a sufficient explanation. I will illustrate what I mean with a very general example.
I do not think this is true in Sapolsky’s version of it, as I think he is more thorough than most other determinists..
Sapolsky, as in the interview above with O’Connor makes the claim that all we are is reactions. We are reactions to previous reactions from billions of years ago - and thus have no choice. Are consciousness is merely a lens with a view, observing all the reactions of a certain reactive entity. So the consciousness is somewhat in a prison, as to how I can estimate. But you can be lucky/unlucky with the prison you’re granted.
12 hours ago, KyaryPamyu said:
Let’s say that you make a mistake. Did you do it on purpose? Of course not. Had you known in advance that you were about to make a mistake, you would have acted fast enough to avert the mistake. Now, onto the next question: what caused that mistake to happen? A sufficient reason will quickly come up: “I didn’t know something like that could happen!”. And what was the reason for that? “I had never encountered such a situation before, either in real life or in my education. But now I have, and will probably make use of the lesson in the future”. And what is the reason for that? “Because I don’t like problems.” This can continue indefinitely.
In the world of Sapolsky/Harris/Hossenfelder an act do not exist.
12 hours ago, KyaryPamyu said:
If you haven’t done so already, check up Schopenhauer’s prize essay, On the Freedom of the Will. It will put any modern arguments for determinism into perspective.
I have not, thank you very much!
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~
“Ascent to Volitional Consciousness”
Thank you Stephen.
I do agree, but when exercise I listen to podcasts or audiobooks that’s easier to follow.
Also if you didn’t see: https://jimruttshow.blubrry.net/the-jim-rutt-show-transcripts/transcript-of-203-robert-sapolsky-on-life-without-free-will/
Kaku is a String Theorist, and his book Hyperspace and Brian Green’s The Elegant Universe, are what started me on the path to the truth decades ago and they are not determinists.
56 minutes ago, Solvreven said:
Thank you Stephen.
I do agree, but when exercise I listen to podcasts or audiobooks that’s easier to follow.
Also if you didn’t see: https://jimruttshow.blubrry.net/the-jim-rutt-show-transcripts/transcript-of-203-robert-sapolsky-on-life-without-free-will/
Yes, I did see that, and it begins to be something for getting a grip on his view. I have ordered his book, and it should arrive tomorrow.
In the transcript you linked, Sapolsky remarked:
Quote
Okay, so you’re sitting there. Where do you decide to value to think? How do you wind up being able to think rationally instead of how do you be able to reach a decision that could involve something where you then control yourself?
You decide the rational thing to do is punch this guy instead of run for my life. Any other, what made you decide that like, okay, in this moment, yeah, Gandhi was cool, but this son of a bitch is just gonna come back at me the next time if I don’t do anything. Why do you decide that that was the most important thing? Why were you brought up that way? You were in a culture where they said, if the guy comes and steals your camel and you do nothing, next he’s gonna come and steal all your camoos and your wife and your daughter, as opposed to being brought up in a culture where it says turn the other cheek.
Where’d that come from? For this very simple reason that you’re identifying, so you did a cost-benefit analysis and you brought a lot of experience to the table and some nice careful thinking and rationale and you formed the intent to punch the guy instead of the intent to run away. Where did that intent come from?
Here he seems to be making the long-enduring move of thinking that if one has a reason for doing something and there are reasons behind having that reason and so forth on back, then necessarily you didn’t have freedom over whether to do the deed. That is a controversial thesis, and he needs a proof of its correctness.
5 minutes ago, Boydstun said:
Here he seems to be making the long-enduring move of thinking that if one has a reason for doing something and there are reasons behind having that reason, then necessarily you didn’t have freedom over whether to do the deed. That is a controversial thesis, and he needs a proof of its correctness.
I think this can only be done, having all the information of the universe - cause you have to put all previous information together, integrate that information in a correct way (correct model). To make such proof.
I’d very much like to hear your thought on the book. I have not read it myself, as I’m almost done with OPAR, and I’m starting on a book called “Strategy” by Bob de Wit.
I was fascinated by those sophomoronic experiments which were prevalent on Youtube about 10 years ago, supposedly discounting the freedom of will. Something involving the wired-up test subject reacting to lights on a screen and pressing a button, thus ‘showing’ that the relevant part of his brain responded a split second before he made his physical selection–i.e. his brain ‘informed’ him which button to press. i.e. no free will: His act was “determined”.
What? As if the brain will not in every instance show activity prior to and during activities. As if the brain is pre-programmed deterministically to “cause” one’s actions in any and all encounters outside the lab environment.
I recall the young host of the show was thrilled by these superficial findings. He concluded (consistently) that no free will means nothing you do can be held against you legally or morally by others, equally that you do not need to take yourself to task for some failing. A great relief for the amoral. More, the personal choices of undertaking effortful thinking and character building can be dispensed with. Then the individual mind will be under attack. The result, individualism will succumb to collectivism-tribalism-racism (major determining antecedent - “ancestral” - factors used often to claim power through past ‘victimhood’) and self-esteem and pride must suffer since one also cannot be responsible for one’s accomplishments.
If no-free-will has arrived in the broader mainstream the world is heading for trouble, I thought. Sure enough - what we are seeing today. One can count on human nature to take the easy options. Free will demands far too much awareness and thinking work. While valuable in their own area, the neuroscientists (I refer to the popular Sam Harris, notably, who also, I gather, consistently eliminated “the mind” together with free will) have something to be responsible for bringing about this age of pronounced determinism/skepticism. (But who would expect proponents of determinism to take “responsibility” for anything they do? They had no other choice. Or was it due to your free will, Sam?).
Brian Greene explicitly aligns with determinism. Kaku is indeed a defender of free will; I mistook him for someone else.
Solvreven, I think the easiest way to get an opinion might be to provide your own short summary of Sapolski’s view. I’m not familiar with his claims, so I searched on Reddit for a brief overview of his argument. I found one with lots of votes, so I’ll extract the essential premise from it:
“[O]ur bodies are subconsciously (unintentionally without our own input) acting on a series of electric waves in the brain and chemicals and hormones.” (Source)
I take the above to mean the following (which I’ll write as if it were an argument):
I will now give you my opinion on this.
Physical things act lawfully. If a recording device observes reality for a quintillion years, it will only ever record physical things acting in a perfectly lawful manner.
Now, let’s put physical things aside for a moment. We still have one more thing to investigate: subjective first-person experience. For clarity, examples of first-person experience include: controlling how fast I’m walking on the street; deciding whether to get McDonald’s tomorrow; and so on.
Since our recording device can only observe one thing, namely physical objects, it is incapable (by design) to observe first-person subjective experience. It is cut off from some information, it works with incomplete data.
However, human beings are privileged. They are not limited to observing their limbs, skin, toenails, organs. They have access to what is hidden from the recording device: subjective first-person experience. In addition to seeing everything that the device sees, they also know what it feels like to love, to jump, to look at a Raphael painting.
We can now add the finishing touch: what you see introspectively is perfectly real. You really are controlling how fast you’re walking, you really are deciding whether to get McDonald’s. But science will deny this, and indeed, must deny this. Why so?
Science, as it is today, does not consider introspection to be a form of faithfully perceiving something that exists. On the contrary: according to science, only the so-called outer senses (seeing, smelling, hearing, touching, tasting) record that which exists, while introspection is something that must be stripped away from science, to prevent poisoning the data with subjective elements. So for now, we must take refuge in philosophy.
From a philosophical perspective, one possible solution to our problem can be simply stated as follows: the will is something eminently real.
Of course, the will’s existence cannot be inferred from physical objects. From the recorder’s point of view, plants and animals just move in a determinate way, according to electrical and hormonal causes. However, from an animal’s point of view, it acts exactly as it wants to act.
With these results in hand, we can now look at what Objectivism claims, or rather, what Objectivists claim (since Rand wrote very little on free will).
Some Objectivists think that “free will” is a pleonasm: where there’s will, there’s agency; conversely, where there’s agency, there’s will. This must be put to the test. Quoting my own example:
Quote
Let’s say that you make a mistake. Did you do it on purpose? Of course not. Had you known in advance that you were about to make a mistake, you would have acted fast enough to avert the mistake. Now, onto the next question: what caused that mistake to happen? A sufficient reason will quickly come up: “I didn’t know something like that could happen!”. And what was the reason for that? “I had never encountered such a situation before, either in real life or in my education. But now I have, and will probably make use of the lesson in the future”. And what is the reason for that? “Because I don’t like problems.” This can continue indefinitely.
Immediately, a new possibility shows itself to us, and it can be stated as follows: choice does not entail freedom. It just entails choice, period. Choice is choice, and nothing else.
Human beings choose to focus, to live, to eat. This really does happen, it is no illusion_._ However, all choices can be traced to a sufficient explanation. It’s up to philosophy to explain this harmony. I have already suggested compatibilism as a framework worth looking into.
That one was caused to do an intentional act that brought harm to some innocent person does not seem adequate for inferring that one was not responsible for the intentional act. The caused agent caused the act, all the same. Torts may still proceed, and with coercive penalties, all the same.
Sapolsky seems to be claiming he knows that all of the preceding is false. That is, for instance, he seems to claim that determinism of an agent to do an intentional act implies that all liabilities should be removed against the agent of such an act. If Sapolsky is determined to regard as logical inference what others are determined to regard as invalid inference, as mere routine pattern of thought transplanted from other contexts, how can there be an objective fact of the matter? And if there is not objective fact on this issue or any other issue as to correct inference, why bother trying to think together with your fellows? (This objection is in the line of Epicurus and Rand/N. Branden.)