Before epilepsy was understood to be a neurological condition, people believed it was caused by the moon, or by phlegm in the brain. They condemned seizures as evidence of witchcraft or demonic possession, and killed or castrated sufferers to prevent them from passing tainted blood to a new generation.
Sapolsky, a MacArthur “genius” grant winner, is extremely aware that this is an out-there position. Most neuroscientists believe humans have at least some degree of free will…
Theirs is very much a minority viewpoint. Sapolsky is “a wonderful explainer of complex phenomena,” said Peter U. Tse, a Dartmouth neuroscientist and author of the 2013 book “The Neural Basis of Free Will.” “However, a person can be both brilliant and utterly wrong.”
Whether or not we have free will and whether this whole existence is pre-calculated, I'm going to go all meta-Pascal's wager on it and suggest that we try to act like we do have free will and try not to think about it.
Maybe I was always going to come to that conclusion. Doesn't matter.
Maybe this makes about as much sense as Wile E. Coyote staying in the air until he actually realises he has run off a cliff. Doesn't matter.
Be the Road-Runner able to run into a painting of a tunnel as if it is real and remain as happy as possible about it.
Yep. On the grand scale it doesn't matter if this comment was pre-determined or if I genuinely made the free choice to write it. What matters is that, to me, the illusion of free will is complete. There is nothing other than my belief that I am free to affect my own existence.
As Rush once said, even if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
Assuming his hypothesis is true I find this rediculous from the article:
"The world is really screwed up and made much, much more unfair by the fact that we reward people and punish people for things they have no control over," Sapolsky said. "We've got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn't there."
How is it made more so. We have no free will over how we reward or punish people. If the world is screwed up and his hypothesis correct then its exactly as screwed up as its supposed to be and our lack of decision neither make it worse or better. It just is.
That is a very good point. It seems like his argument is that, since we have no free will, we should stop trying to do anything to control others' actions... which in itself is suggesting to control others' actions. Furthermore regardless of whether we have free will or not, however you want to define it- punishing bad behavior discourages it and provides better outcomes for the world at large. It's like he's saying people just blindly act according to some non-free-will principle without taking in any environmental input, which just seems ridiculous. And implying that specifically applies only to bad behavior, which just seems like he's being smugly pessimistic as a gotcha. "Ha ha, the world is bad, if you disagree with me you're just a hopeless optimist" sort of thing.
This guy seems to be a bit confused about what free will is.
Does he mean to suggest that he was helpless in writing an entire book on the subject of free will? Does he mean to suggest that because I can't alter my own physical needs such as breathing, eating, and sleeping that I am somehow unable to WANT to change them? The article mentions his religious upbringing. I wonder if he would reach the same conclusion if he was raised in a different environment?
My read on it is this: when we construct ideas in our minds we often create shortcuts to help us process new information faster. In everyday life these shortcuts are quite useful. When considering philosophical questions like free will, we need to recognise that those same shortcuts can be harmful to our ability to consider broader possibilities. This person seems to have forgotten that.
maybe i’m just not smart enough for this, but the idea of free will as a concept has always seemed pretty poorly constructed in the first place. like, what would it even mean to have the will to act freely while existing conditional to your environment? we are placed into chaotic and uncertain circumstances, and have evolved the ability to navigate those circumstances through cognition. simple as that. there is no future that is “pre-determined” for us to follow, just chaos that we must navigate through until we die. i feel like the idea was kind of borrowed from theology and we’ve been ruminating on it ever sense, but its just never been a very compelling thought to me. like, of course our decisions are shaped by our environment and physiology, how else could it possibly work?
i feel like, for the people who argue for free will, its kind of like arguing for the existence of an afterlife. they’re motivated to continue advocating for it because it seems scary not to have it, but nothing about the way we work requires us to be able to make meaningful decisions that are out-of-context to our conditions, just like nothing about how we work indicates we continue to exist outside our physical conditions. if we free willed ourselves to do something that wasn’t constrained by our physical bodies, the stuff we know about the world, and the immediate sensory input we’re receiving, that would look like fucking magic or something, and if it is constrained by that stuff, then its just another word for cognition.
Behave is a great (if fucking beefy) read on a broad variety of influences on human behavior (it's 1B to Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow on my nonfiction list), but one expert's opinion on something as inherently unmeasurable as free will doesn't warrant a news story.
While our lives are largely dictated by situation and environment, this doesn’t equate to a complete lack of free will. We are constantly making decisions based on reacting to information we receive.
Even if we don’t actually have free will, it’s not really a useful argument to make. It just feels like an excuse to dismiss the problems of humanity and ignore opportunities to learn and change.
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