Sapolsky was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household in Brooklyn, the son of immigrants from the former Soviet Union.
Biology called to him early — by grade school he was writing fan letters to primatologists and lingering in front of the taxidermied gorillas at the American Museum of Natural History — but religion shaped life at home.
That all changed on a single night in his early teens, he says. While grappling with questions of faith and identity, he was struck by an epiphany that kept him awake until dawn and reshaped his future: God is not real, there is no free will, and we primates are pretty much on our own.
Oh, look - another person who has decided what they want the outcome to be, and formulates some kind of argument that results in that outcome.
In my opinion, we either have free will, or we have something else that is effectively indistinguishable from free will. The whole debate is a waste of time, and a person should act as if they had free will regardless of the answer.
I may have not had the free will to stumble upon this article and read into it out of sheer curiosity, but I can guarantee you I have the free will to not read this guy’s book.
As scientists age, they begin exhibiting symptoms like takes on why other disciplines are totally doing it wrong, and how whole fields of study are bogus. Please take care of your scientist as they approach end of life. Particularly noticeable in Physicists, but found in most STEM fields.
“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.”
Kind of a weird to ask us to do/not do something in this context, isn’t it?
Scientist concludes highly philosophical discussion years and years after it's already been discussed in depth and studied at length.
But they're a scientist! That means it's news.
And Jesus Christ.
This means accepting that a man who shoots into a crowd has no more control over his fate than the victims who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It means treating drunk drivers who barrel into pedestrians just like drivers who suffer a sudden heart attack and veer out of their lane.
Yea the article doesn’t seem to be philosophically literate enough it seems to speak at that level, unfortunately. IME, neuroscientists and psychologies do a poor job of being aware of when they’re venturing into philosophical territory and then doing a good job of covering their bases. Often times they are cringey about it in how self-conscious they are about their lack of knowledge. But I’d guess it also goes the other way too.
Something I personally took from the article was that the counter provided in favour of free will from a Neuro perspective seemed pretty embarrassing. Neurological variation, ASFAICT, doesn’t necessitate free will, and for that to be the case would require neuroscience to have a complete theory/account of consciousness. Otherwise, all neuroscience would have is a source of randomness coupled with priming by history and state and a pile of complexity that makes the output function tricky/chaotic.
The article just says we don’t have free will over and over again, but doesn’t explain why that would be the case or what research has been done to back it up. Instead just says this dude wrote a book.
So you believe, that if you would rewind time to a specific choice you made, you would be able to make a different choice, even though your brain and your surroundings are in the exact same state as before? Or do you believe your choices to be originating from somewhere else than your brain?
if thought truly is entirely deterministic, then it's surely both sufficient and necessary that you could build a machine that, given the state of the universe as input, could fully simulate what your answer to any given question would be
but if you suppose that, then you basically run into an issue very similar to the halting problem
you put your subject in the room with your magic machine, tell them to disagree with whatever the machine spits out, then tell the magic machine to predict what they're going to say after they've been told the result of said prediction
whatever the machine spits out, there's nothing stopping your subject from just disagreeing
Yeah, that conclusion simply isn't as self-evident as people like to believe. I guess the idea is that we punish people for their choices, and if they can't actually make choices, then you can't punish them.
The problem is, under this framework, there is no 'they' that's making a choice at all, so all that follows is that we need another justification for punishment (or any other kind of differential treatment). The impact of those actions seems a pretty reasonable basis, as well as reinforcing the notion in that person's brain (and in others) that the action is not tolerated or without consequences.
I disagree that that's necessarily a problem and I believe the problem only arises when looking at the perspective of no free will from the basis of the opposite side. The colloquial idea of 'punishment' comes from most people's current perspective of free will; if there's no free will it isn't punishment, it's just solving a problem.
As an example of an analogous perspective irrespective of free will, take chemistry: Say you're reacting two substances which oxidize when exposed to an atmosphere, if you want to react them in their non-oxidized state you have to do so in an oxygen free environment so you pump in pure nitrogen to displace all the air. The air has no free will to choose whether or not it'll react with the substances and ruin your intended reaction so it'd be silly to say you're punishing the air for something it has no choice in. You're treating the air differently simply because it's problematic, not because you're trying to teach it a lesson.
It has a paragraph with the explanation: Basically he says our behaviors are driven by our brain chemistry, genetics, and biases formed by prior events. Every decision we make is a culmination of those things. We think we’re in control, but we’re really just following a pre-ordained script.
Can’t decide if I’m onboard with that. Definitely not onboard with letting criminals off the hook for bad deeds. If your “brain script” leads you to kill, you just need to be removed from society. Sorry.
Under that kind of analysis, there is no 'we' that can even be meaningfully spoken about.
Not to mention, the same brain chemistry that drives someone to commit a crime will also drive someone to seek some kind of justice or retribution, and so if we're considering biology to be holy for some reason, that goes both ways.
While we can identify influences that have common outcomes, the fact that there are different outcomes at an individual level supports free will. Free will does not mean you are free from influence, just that there is an opportunity to make a choice.
Poverty leading to increased crime does not result in everyone in poverty committing crimes.
that there are different outcomes at an individual level supports free will.
Well I think their argument is that this doesn’t follow. To have variation between individuals all you need are different influences over the time leading up to the measured outcome. That basically everyone is assured essentially unique genetics and a unique existence from conception (no two people occupy the same body, apart from twins briefly) guarantees that everyone has unique influences.
So the question then is what is the relationship between influences and behaviours and can we measure whether variations in the former are sufficient to explain variations in the latter.
All of which excludes the argument that many people basically lead to similar outcomes under similar influences.
This is where I suspect the scientist’s thoughts/theories will fall down. In the end, it seems to me we need a complete or at least pretty good theory of consciousness to truly get to bottom of this. We don’t. Arguably we’re pretty clueless on how any sophisticated cognition works all the way up from biochemistry to behaviour. So I’m not sure how certain anyone can be either way.
Different outcomes at an individual level supports the idea that individual humans are not exact copies existing in the exact same environment. If on the other hand different outcomes does support free will then the fact that electrons put through the same process (influences) can end up with different spin-states means that electrons have free will.
Definitely not onboard with letting criminals off the hook for bad deeds. If your “brain script” leads you to kill, you just need to be removed from society. Sorry.
Yea the article wasn’t particularly thoughtful. As you say, justice can simply preventative without being punitive. But on balance, aiming for rehabilitation can still make some sense even without compassionate anti-blame arguments. There are limits to how much we want to keep people out of society and it costs money, so prisoners will return to society at some point.
So what’s the best approach for preventing harm? If a blame-worthiness approach premised on free will is fundamentally false, or at least not correct enough, then ideas about punishment and deterrence would likely be ineffective compared to more rehabilitation based approaches.
I think that we have free will but it’s extremely limited, but we are capable of weighing our emotions and logic to make a choice. I’m always extremely skeptical of people that say we don’t have free will, so when they do they better have some really solid evidence. Otherwise what’s the point of nature evolving consciousness? Merely to be a passive observer in our predetermined lives? Evolution is effective, if it didnt need it then it wpuldnt have evolved it woth so many animals. Consciousness is there to help us make decisions and map out visions that are beyond the capability of simple automatons.
My bone to pick with this article is that there is no talk about the research that was done to reach the conclusion, so I just have to take this dudes word for it. And I don’t feel like reading his book. And based on where we are in science either this is a sensationalized take or this dude is filling in a lot of blanks with his opinions.
There's always been one piece of this that has bugged me. I'd like to hear - from someone who is familiar enough with both neurons and quantum theory - an explanation on why thoughts are physically too big to be influenced by quantum randomness.
The quantum scale is characterized by an action comparable to the Planck constant, hbar=6.6x10^-16^ eV s. A quick wikipedia search tells us that the typical electric impulse needs at least 25 mV (from -70 mV in the resting state to -55 mV in the threshold), and lasts around 1 ms, giving an action of 2.5x10^-5^ eV s, which is 300 billion times larger that the quantum noise.
If your “brain script” leads you to kill, you just need to be removed from society
If you accept strict determinism, the fact that killers should go to prison is one of the “biases formed by prior events” that will determine that most people won’t become killers. Which in turn determine us as individuals in a society to create and enforce justice systems.
I mean, I am on board with that. There probably isn’t free will.
But, we should continue to jail those not following society’s rules. If we could jail hurricanes so as to not cause damage, we would—why is jailing a person any different?
Not sure that’s fair. The basics of his thoughts seem to be outlined … the article clearly states: behaviours are always primed by experience, history, state and genetics all of which are beyond our control, and so if our behaviour is not within our control we have no free will.
I don’t think there’s anything really there about hardline determinism and I’d bet his basic view is pretty compatible with some form of chaos based individualism.
This means accepting that a man who shoots into a crowd has no more control over his fate than the victims who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It means treating drunk drivers who barrel into pedestrians just like drivers who suffer a sudden heart attack and veer out of their lane.
Yeah, no…
Saying that people have no free will is a great way to start an argument. This is partly why Sapolsky, who describes himself as “majorly averse to interpersonal conflict,” put off writing his new book “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will.”
Right… “He holds the truth but doesn’t want to say it” waiting for the conspiracy dude to pick up on it.
Well I think the article author did a poor job here. But the essential question is whether our purpose in justice is to punish and blame or to reduce harm and fix people.
While I think some people are broken well beyond our abilities to help and fix them, such that justice requires removing them from society, many I think are not and I think we all might be surprised how capable normal seeming people are of committing wrongs and crimes.
I think the argument you are making makes sense. Harm reduction and rehabilitation is the way, not this dumb prison system we have.
But it’s a reallllly far stretch if I read the article assuming this is the message. Or at least, he’s being intentionally obtuse about it, specifically causing the conflict he claims to want to avoid. Maybe 40 years is just too long to ponder the same question haha.
This article is saying that none of it is in our control which is just silly. Plenty people having a really rough time not taking their cars while drunk and killing people. And that’s the key difference, where not everyone in the same situation will need the same kind of support from society, or be affected by strife the same way. Some of that is in our control, or at least not inherently a societal/cultural problem we can solve.
I think the argument you are making makes sense. Harm reduction and rehabilitation is the way, not this dumb prison system we have.
I believe you mistake an aspect of his argument. I don't believe he meant to insinuate that prison and harm reduction are mutually exclusive, rather he says that the question is whether prison is punishment or harm reduction. If there's no free will there's no reason to punish, but there's certainly reason to reduce the possibility of harm, and jailing an individual that is causing harm (and will continue to do so) is one way of doing that.
As someone else in this thread put it, if we could jail hurricanes to prevent them from doing harm, we would.
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