I mean it sounds like they are arguing there is no free will and whatever component of our behaviour is not determined… is just completely random.
INTERVIEWER: Welcome to the show, Dr. Sapolsky. Let’s start with this question: Why did you choose to write this book now?
SAPOLSKY: I didn’t. I had no choice.
INTERVIEWER: Well… Of course. I should have realized. Okay, then. What is it that you are trying to convince your readers of regarding free will and determinism?
SAPOLSKY: Nothing. I’m just an organism that is expelling this book out into the world, thereby affecting just one variable in my readers’ environments. I hold no value in any particular outcome for them over any other.
INTERVIEWER: There you have it. Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a thoughtless organism who shits out words for the digestion of other thoughtless organisms. Dr. Sapolsky, thank you for joining us.
SAPOLSKY: I didn’t agree to this.
If it’s random, what is randomness if not uncertainty? I think of it in terms of probability. Your environment and experiences stack the odds. But anything is still possible and it’s up to you.
I can choose to jump off the Bourne bridge tomorrow. I’m not likely to, but I could. I could choose to quit my job on Monday. I could instead take a sick day because I feel like being lazy, or I could just go to work. It’s all my choice, and one of those choices is more likely than the others.
Is that free will or just playing the odds?
If I go beyond that, I am actually doing all those things. There’s a slice of reality where I quit on Monday. There’s 1000x more slices where I take the sick day, and even 1,000,000x more slices where I go to work. And it’s all happening simultaneously. High Everett’s many worlds hypothesis.
If I am doing all those things did I even choose at all or am I just slotting myself into the most likely reality? Am I driving this soul-car or is it on autopilot? I think I’m driving…
They would say they had to
edit - dammit, Nightgaunt did it better, lol
The trick is to figure out what people really mean by “free will”. I think that most people imagine that there’s some “me” that makes decisions about what they (i.e. their body) does, and causes physical events that result in e.g. my arm moving or whatever. However, the problem is that there’s really no physical mechanism that we know of that permits this, and it’s unclear what this would even mean. And we have a pretty good idea about all the physical mechanisms that there are (fundamental forces, standard model particles, etc).
Quantum uncertainty doesn’t help because it’s perfectly random. There’s no way for a “me” to influence the outcome of a measurement because then the result wouldn’t be random, and as far as we can tell (and it’s pretty damn far), quantum measurement results are perfectly random. (Which is not to say 50/50, just that whatever the odds are, the outcome is still determined randomly.)
Conversely, you can’t build up a system of random outcomes and somehow have a “me” that influences the final outcome. As much as people hate on physics for being extremely reductionist, it is so because it works.
Now you might say that there’s some other physical force through which this “me” influences the world, but (a) we sure as hell haven’t seen anything like that, at a fundamental level and (b) if we did, it wouldn’t be quantum uncertainty because we know pretty well what uncertainty is and isn’t.
This is not to say that we understand everything or even have reasonable theories for everything. There are lots of unsolved problems in all scientific fields. We could have a major breakthrough tomorrow.
But there is another explanation that does fit with what we know about how the world works. It’s certainly possible to create something that makes “decisions” based on input–for example, simple (or complex) computer programs and robots, and bacteria and plants and animals. Animals that make better decisions are more evolutionarily successful. Animals that can consider their own decisions seem to be the most successful of all! Perhaps a sense of “me” that’s making the decision is just the most evolutionarily successful way to make decisions.
The end result is not that different from free will. There’s still an incredibly complex thought process that goes into making a decision. It’s just that it’s predetermined (or, possibly, subjected to some true randomness if there is a mechanism for quantum effects to affect the brain), and when you give it the same inputs, you’ll get the same output (or distribution of outputs, were you to do repeated trials).
In fact, I would argue it’s indistinguishable from free will. There’s still an organism with a sense of self that’s making decisions, with reasons and flaws and emotions all that jazz. It’s still “responsible” for its decisions–it has a brain that came to that conclusion. It can still learn from past behavior.
Anyway. I also feel like I just walked out of my philosophy 105 class.
No you can’t :)
I think the author, and people who believe similar things, would say that while you can imagine making those choices, the reality is that what you will actually do is predetermined. Even if to you, or the rest of the world, it seems like you made a random choice, it wasn’t actually random. Even if you decided that a coin flip would determine what you would do, these people would say that decision was predetermined, as was the outcome of the coin flip.
It’s fascinating to think about in an abstract way, just like the question about whether we’re actually in a simulation. And I applaud scientists who are coming up with ways we can actually test these theories!
It’s fun / challenging to work through the implications of it; a deterministic universe is complicated enough to make a self conscious being aware enough of the existential angst of determinism they’ll make bad choices to disprove determinism being predetermined.
Weirdly enough for whatever reason, Penrose Tiling, of all things, makes me believe that it’s possible and likely free will exists.
I guess that’s what the show Devs was about. That a sufficiently powerful device could predict the deterministic future, or even rewind from the present to show anything/everything that happened in the past.
I think the “secret” to Free Will is accepting that there are some structures that are amathematical - ie, they can’t be described mathematically. If everything is math from the bottom to the top, then reality (much less free will) is deterministic. But it is possible for some patterns of organization to exist that by definition cannot be described mathematically - and in fact we have those structures right now - then all of reality can’t be deterministic because it can’t be completely mathematical. And the fact that these patterns can emerge from otherwise deterministic systems is kind of the proof in the pudding.
Yeah, that’s about where I am. Pretty much in line with what Dennett wrote in Elbow Room, I think.
There might be no free will but you pretty much have to pretend there is.
When you have to pretend there is because no aspect of human (or animal) social evolution makes sense otherwise, you’re not pretending. The phenomenon we describe as “free-will” exists, we just can’t describe it’s underlying mechanism in detail yet.
Interestingly, analogy with generative-AIs implies that randomness might have a role-- although quantum randomness doesn’t seem to play a part; humans get non-quabtum random inputs all the time: the volutes of a cloud, the timing of a breeze or the twitter of a bird. Generative-AIs have different outputs based on applying randomness, although there overall output is based on the training data
I agree that it’s stupidly reductive to assert that we don’t have… well I don’t really like the phrase “free will”; I prefer “the ability to make decisions.” Obviously every decision we make is contingent. Duh. And the reductionism that Sapolski seems to be hinting at (I haven’t read the book, so can’t say for certain) is even more dumb. Determinism arises from randomness arises from determinism all the time as an emergent property. I really hate to bring quantum observations into the discussion because I think they’re entirely irrelevant, but as an analog, quantum observations appear to be truly random. Wavefunction collapse has a probability associated with it, but is not pre-conditioned otherwise. And yet, it happens so frequently that the central limit theorem holds sway and our physical laws above the quantum scale are all reliably deterministic. But the determinism inherent in classical physics also gives rise to enormously complex systems like, say, molecules in gasses that interact with each other so often that their individual motion is functionally random. But there are so many of them that an aggregate gas behaves stochastically in ways that are predictable by the laws of thermodynamics. Randomness begets determinism begets randomness begets determinism. It is absolutely stupid to suppose that deterministic materialism holds sway at the level of human minds and cultures. That’s like 1000 layers deep. We make choices and are responsible for them.
Even within a purely deterministic framework, the laws and customs of a culture that reward virtue and punish malfeasance are also deterministic and thus “justice” has no place in discussion. They’re already baked into the cake.
At this point, I believe that if you and I switch ‘souls’, you would make every single decision exactly the same as I had, that our choices are merely the extension of our biology/environment, pretty much as described in @Matt_W’s quote. We’re all one, as they say.
But there is a point where you can “insert a freedom”, as @antlers just wrote. It’s the randomness of a coin flip right? I assume your soul will make the exact same choices as mine, in my shoes, but if you based any action on the literal flip of a coin, I can’t assume that the coin would land the same every time in any combination of time and space. So doesn’t randomness equal free will?
If we don’t have free will then decision anxiety is a truly creul joke.
I’d say that we can’t actually perform that experiment and we have to live with the world/timeline/reality that we have, so it’s interesting to think about but irrelevant for the purposes of designing systems of justice.
You’re correct but I have no interest in designing a system of justice. :)
I didn’t read the book or even the article so that’s my bad, just thinking out loud.
I wasn’t trying to shut you down :) Just giving you my perspective. I tend to distrust philosophical thought experiments because they’re specifically meant to remove the context that actually matters when making choices. The trolley problem, for instance, is nonsense because in any real situation where you’d have to decide between negligent harm and active harm, there would be a host of contextual factors that would affect your decision. And those factors would almost certainly matter more than any determination you made by examining the problem without them. It’s kind of like saying “if you ignore the effect of air resistance, an airplane can’t fly.”
Sorry for this but,
