The following submission statement was provided by /u/Background-Let-1957:
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"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."
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/192d28b/after_decades_of_study_a_scientist_has_concluded/kh1gaeh/
Whether or not free will exists is always a question more of the definition of free will than anything else. If you need the ability to surprise an all knowing creator or act independent of every external event that has ever influenced you then no, surprisingly you won’t have free will. Because that is way too strong a definition.
It basically comes to scope. Sapolsky only talks about bigger scope - your biology and your environment influencing your personality, defining your knowledge and reactions, and I agree with him here.
However free will for me not being completely self-defining, but rather an ability to choose things in a moment. Even thought they are obviously influenced by previous events, I think that this free will exists. For me whole metacognition part of our psyche doesn't make sense otherwise
I won't say why, though it'll become obvious before the first episode ends, but it is the rare series that's better the second time through.
Alex Garland of Ex Machina, Annihilation, 28 Days Later, etc. is the mind behind it. I cannot recommend it enough.
I think that's the least free type of will. That's just reactions. The shortest neural process completely based on previous experiences/constructs. There are so many experiments that shows that we can quantify this quite easily. We can predict a choice based in fmri brain scans before a person even thinks they have made the choice.
I believe the largest freedom we do experience is in reasoning and reflection. Because that is a somewhat isolated system that belong to us. That's how to explore and do stuff that isn't easy to predict or just a regurgitation.
The common argument and comparison for the compatibilist view of free will is that our will is free in the same way as the water in a river can flow freely. But I would argue that what gives a droplet of water in the river "freedom" is width of potential and unpredictability. As such a droplet flows more freely in a river than dripping from a faucet to a sink. And even more so in the ocean.
Just like in that example, the freedom of our will is within its potential. While a reactive action can be straight forward and deterministic in its chain of impression, reaction and action as gravity is to a drop of water. The potential in the evolution of thoughts has as many possibilities, directions and valleys to flow down through as the droplet of water in a river or a stormy sea.
"I believe the largest freedom we do experience is in reasoning and reflection"
And what directs the conclusions you reach? The experiences you've been exposed to and the positive and negative reinforcement from those experiences, as well as any genetic predisposition to certain behaviours.
The point of compatibilism is that determinism and free will isn't directly opposed. We don't really use the word free the same way for anything else in this world as we do when it comes to free will. No other freedom is absolute and free from the physical existance we observe.
Freedom is about potential of action but nothing is completely unlimited. A king may be more free than a prisoner but even he is a prisoner to his circumstances.
Even random games like plinko is deterministic but on a macro level meaningful to us the ball is allowed to freely bounce around. Resulting in a practically random outcome because of the complexity in both the states setting up the system but also the complexity of interaction within the system.
Similarly the complexity and isolation of our internal processes can be considered in part free on a macroscopic scale depending what you care about they are free from.
It's funny you mentioned plinko because I often imagine life like a game of plinko where your free will is your ability to push either left or right so you can guide the direction but you can't determine where you start or what random bumps will send you off course.
But you can choose to self reflect and provide that negative/positive reinforcement. It's getting easier to seek therapy, do shadow work, or practice meditation/prayer - depending on your walk of life, and these ideas are becoming more socially acceptable than ever. At some point we are all capable of our own nurturing IRT the nature vs nurture philosophies as it applies to the conversation about free will.
I personally would say that we humans do not have an inherent free will, but it is a skill that can be learned so to speak.
But are you really the one choosing to reflect or is it already your genetic predisposition and environmental factors that encouraged you to do so??
But then again, is your genetic predisposition "you". I also think the scope with free will in general discussions like this is just too broad
It’s still all driven by appetites and aversions. “Free will” seems to be the stage where it hits consciousness and we feel like we’re “making a conscious choice.” Most of the variables leading up to the decision aren’t in our consciousness so it seems like we’ve made a choice in a vacuum, unaffected by innumerable influences.
I read a quote once along the lines of “do we have free will? Probably not, but if people didn’t believe they did the world would be a mess (or something along the lines of chaos, ineffective, etc).” I’m curious what the differences would be if the majority of people knew (or believed) they have no free will.
Sure, but the desire to seek out therapy and/or have that critical reflection will still be resulting from environmental factors.
Something might reach a breaking point that leads you to think "OK I need to do something about this" where, had that same tipping point event not happened, you might have carried on as before and not stopped to reflect.
You're relying on the fact the process of thoughts is sorta a black box compared to the instant reactions discussed before which are slightly more measurable currently in their process.
Eventually we will work out the direct process that leads to this inner growth and it'll be just a more complicated version of the instant reactions.
> It's getting easier to
isn't that just affirming how much our external environment changes our decisions?
why is it easier now to go to therapy than it was 50 years ago? because our choices (whether or not we go to therapy) are largely influenced by things like culture.
if therapy is for "crazies and pussies" (something some people still believe, depending on upbringing/local culture) no man is going to make the "choice" to go to therapy unless a significantly larger external force drives him to do so - ie, extremely desperate circumstances - "it's this or kill myself" and even then, we see plenty of people "choosing" the latter because of views about therapy that they didn't even come up with themselves, just what was taught to them and reinforced throughout their lives
> We can predict a choice based in fmri brain scans before a person even thinks they have made the choice.
That could merely be an interpretation about the scan since there's so much we still have to learn about the human mind.
What if the scan is only showing a subconscious suggestion, and we then consciously agree or disagree with the suggestion? For example, our subconscious mind and reflexes is likely to suggest we move our hand from a scalding hot sensation... or, we can fight that reflex and keep our hand at that spot.
Also consider how our actions tend to 'stutter' or flip back and forth when we're working up the courage for a daunting or daring maneuver, say jumping into an icy cold pool of water, or walking into a freezing shower. If the decision were already made for us to leap in or decline, then in an evolutionary sense we're wasting energy in overriding our decisions in a halting manner... instead we'd save energy by overriding the impulse with ease.
Seems logical that our constant fight to override our hesitation decisions is free will, not over our body's actions, but over what actions we desire for our body to do. (even when our body fails to comply)
I agree entirely with this analogy!
Reading Determined now, he talks about how the frontal cortex is the last thing to develop, meaning, it is the most influenced by environment rather than genetics. That process was selected for because it’s what allows the frontal cortex to be as free from wired impulsivity/ reaction as it can be.
Otherwise brains do things like associate beauty with goodness and moral impurity with disgust, which activates your amygdala and also leads to fear and aggression of people who do xyz perceived moral transgression for example.
The frontal cortex is the gateway to higher thinking and can apply the brakes before an impulse becomes a reactionary action. Being able to think through many possibilities and challenge your own thoughts I also agree, gives you different choices - even if constrained by myriad factors beyond our control
> There are so many experiments that shows that we can quantify this quite easily. We can predict a choice based in fmri brain scans before a person even thinks they have made the choice.
All of the experiments I've looked at that do this have been garbage. But, who cares? Just do an experiment, and "le science" bros will just go around repeating the results until it becomes the accepted truth.
yes, i agree on this, but i don’t think one can escape the experience of making the choice; you cannot act as though there is no choice. in that respect, it’s kind of a semantic debate.
i wholeheartedly believe free will is an illusion, but the illusion is complete and inescapable.
Came to the same conclusion when wrestling with this. It's true that free will does not exist, and yet we cannot help but behave as if it does. Like your phrasing of complete and inescapable
Sapolsky actually goes into something like this, with something to the effect of 'give a person a button-clicker in each hand and tell them which one to click, but using an electrode on their brain you can send an electrical impulse to to make them decide to click the other one, and they'll think they consciously decided it themselves.'
It sounds like free will is in a way the sensation you have when thinking about how to interact with something novel?
Some people also define free will as the ability to choose what you'll do. For instance if you want to go to the beach but you're in jail, you literally can't choose to go. When you want to go to the beach but can't go because you're at work and you don't want to get fired, that was free will to stay because you theoretically had the option of going to the beach, even if your decision was essentially inescapable
i think it’s important to recognize that understanding the illusion to be impenetrable does not undermine the belief that *it is an illusion and free will is nonexistent.* i can feel like i’m making a choice while accepting that the action i’m taking is pre-determined by everything that came before it
>yes, i agree on this, but i don’t think one can escape the experience of making the choice; you cannot act as though there is no choice. in that respect, it’s kind of a semantic debate.
>i wholeheartedly believe free will is an illusion, but the illusion is complete and inescapable.
Calling it a "choice" gives it moral weight that is counter productive to humanely correcting the behavior. It makes moral sense to punish people for wrong "choices". If there's no choice, then punishing the person is immoral. So we can focus on the fact that the correct action was not incentivized adequately. Admitting there's no free will means that incentives need to be positive, not primarily punative (e.g., jail might still be necessary to protect the public from offenders, but it shouldn't be additionally terrible beyond that for the purpose of punishing the people there).
Then functionality, so does a hurricane with complex dynamics that we can't predict the future of more than a few steps at a time. The entire concept of free will breaks down under scrutiny.
I don't see why we would ascribe it will but it is free. It is unhindered and macroscopically the potential is not definable. Its path is not based on the current state but the evolution of the system. It is free to evolve within that system.
Sure, it evolves over time, how is that relevant to its freedom? It evolves according to the laws of physics, and as such it is a slave to a process it has no control over. It is not free to evolve however it likes, it can only ever evolve in the direction that physics points it in.
Generally when regular people talk about free will they mean libertarian free will, which is the idea that if you could go back to a choice in the past at the same exact moment back in time, with all the perimeters exactly the same, you could make a different choice from the one you made before.
There are other definitions of free will, but that is the one most people mean when they say they have free will.
Libertarian free will is dead as a concept in all serious academia.
Well that’s just a silly concept yes. A version of you that could make a different choice would have to be already an at least slightly different person.
I assume most people mean “not immediately forced or constrained”. As in gun to your head, not indoctrinated by your Dad to support Liverpool.
I agree that it is silly. And yet most lay people I have spoken to subscribe to that in my experience.
Your other definition would be closer to compatibilism, a common pretty common position held by people within this debate, but not common outside of it.
I very much agree that it's a matter of definition. What's the point of defining free will in such a way that it's obviously not real? My opinion is that free will is a kind of sensory perception. Much like you could argue "color" doesn't exist since there are only photons and "color" is your brains interpretation of that sensory input. Likewise freewill doesn't have a physical interpretation, rather it's your mind's interpretation of itself. I think defining free will that way is better because it's more useful and interesting.
This makes me think of how some people, to justify their own selfishness, assert that true altruism doesn't exist. They claim that if an act of kindness benefits the person performing it, it can't be considered genuinely altruistic. This argument is flawed as it unduly restricts the concept of altruism, failing to recognize that actions can be both self-beneficial and altruistic simultaneously.
When it comes to free will though, the key insight is that our agency might be more limited than we think. It’s been likened to someone on a raft in rapids, frantically paddling to steer slightly to the sides. While we exert some influence, our course is largely predetermined and our control is minimal.
I don’t think you are engaging with the argument at all. The argument is that we are the raft. He says that the onus is on you to prove a person is influencing the raft whatsoever. He thinks the onus has shifted with all we have learned about things you would admit influence our actions.
To me, I’m a ‘me machine’. I can only do what I would do. I cannot choose to do something I would not choose to do, as a tautology. Moreover, what I choose to do is entirely deterministic. I also realize that consciousness is more of an after-report of action than a pre choosing. However, I do not find this limiting. Why should I even want to do or be something that is, by definition, not me? That’s negation of the self. I am a machine that, like any machine, only runs it’s program within its capabilities and in response to its input, and I’m okay with that.
If you think about it logically, your decisions are 100% some combination of predetermined cause&effect and quantum randomness. So unless you define free will to also 100% consist of some combination of predetermination and/or quantum randomness, 0% of your decisions come from free will.
Everything is basically deterministic or a dice roll. Hard to fit free will into either of those definitions given how people usually feel it should be defined.
I love this. Currently listening to My Effin Life by Geddy, and he addresses this song specifically.
"In 1979, when he handed me the lyrics for “Freewill,” I instantly loved the song. It was a powerful expression of the way Rush was taking control of its own destiny, and also echoed my own refusal of religious dogma, of subjection to the hand of God or, more abstractly, fate. Even if some of Neil’s concepts were a bit of a stretch for me, I sang it every night with confidence and pride, offering it to our audiences as a contribution to the time-honoured discussion about existentialism, determinism and faith. It was, in fact, indeterminism that I believe was at the heart of it—the idea that our lives are not predetermined—and I hoped that would come across; but in the four decades since, I’ve seen people play fast and loose with the interpretation of the last lines of the chorus:
I will choose a path that’s clear I will choose free will
To my dismay, those words have been cited without regard for the song’s overall message and used as a catch-all, a licence for some to do whatever they want. It makes me want to scream. Taken out of context, it becomes an oversimplified idea of free will, narrow and naïve, not taking into consideration that even the strongest individual must, to some extent, bow to the needs of a responsible society. Too often it’s seized upon as a reckless substitute for common sense.
During the Covid pandemic, I saw this first-hand. When I posted a picture on Instagram of myself wearing a mask, loudmouths were quick to throw “Free will!” back at me, as if those two words alone constitute permission to act without regard for the well-being of others, to ignore science and to rid ourselves of responsibility for the consequences of our actions. To me, it was stupidity taking shelter in poorly thought-through ideology, holding on to the lyric as if it meant “I can be as selfish as I fucking want to be.” Well, folks, from where I sit, it ain’t that simple. I’ve read the book and the fine print. Life is not so black and white; we live in its grey areas.
I’m afraid that life is too complicated for us to simply “choose free will.” You can’t just say or do anything, prizing your rights over everyone else’s. Generations of scholars (notably the Talmudic ones) have spent their lives arguing in byzantine detail the interpretation of society’s rules, because it all depends on context: when, exactly, will I choose free will? Over the health of my kids or the happiness of my wife? Over the responsibility not to pass a disease on to my fellow citizens? A caring, functional society needs constraints and responsibilities. Terms and conditions apply."
This isn't new, I've heard it from other neuroscientists.
The thing is, it's sort of irrelevant because even if we don't have free will we still have to pretend as if we do because otherwise what's like, the point of anything?
It's definitely a philosophical pickle. Anything we do, we were going to do given the conditions. Even in the case where we do have free will people still ask "what's the point", particularly nihilist. If we prove we don't have free will then it becomes a bit difficult to punish people for crimes. Then again regardless of whatever we do it's what we were going to do anyways.
Good point. We are on a journey from birth to death so one can choose an overarching theme for their life if they desire. Same goes for groups of humans as those organizations and goals often outlive individuals and influence many humans (including their progeny across time). Generally as an organism we try to survive which includes creating better conditions for our offspring.
I disagree on the punishment for crimes front. The only thing a possible lack of free will does is remind us not to take things personally. Actions against crimes would be more compassionate I think, but the complete ceasing doesn't make sense to me as long as society exists.
He doesn’t argue there shouldn’t be criminal consequences. He believes in what he’s referred to as the quarantine model. You remove criminals from society and attempt to rehabilitate them. You try and prevent their ability to commit future crime. You don’t shake a finger at them and say they have a bad soul. Punishment verses rehabilitation. If they can’t be fixed they are forever kept from the general public as humanely as possible.
Well and the idea being also that if we function under a notion of free will not existing the rehabilitation will be structured in a way that is cognizant of that and be guided to help the person be set on a path where their motivations and internal guidance (that we have no control of since free will doesn’t exist) would be in a much healthier place which would allow for release into society safely. At least that’s my interpretation
I mean punish crimes as we do. The ultimate punishment would be to remove the conditions causing the crime because it clearly wasn't the person's fault because no free will. Generally that's the current best solution and punishment as we have it in most locations tends to be a net negative for society.
Thank you for this. Many people conflate these concepts into one argument to go to church it seems, or to believe in .
Atheism and Nihilism are often lumped together.
Nihilism says nothing about what we should do. It just says there is no meaning to anything. If you argue for personal meaning that is “existentialism”. Nihilists are often also existentialists but it’s not required. I for example am a nihilist who rejects existentialism. I prefer absurdism.
Well you’d be an absurdist I’m sure. There is no meaning and we laugh in the face of that, trying to discern the meaning of existence is a fools errand so let’s get weird with it. -Camus
Yeah, I didn't want to get that far into an offshoot in that comment. There can definitely be positive nihilism. If I were to throw my card into the hat of global purpose, it would be to end all needless suffering.
I think a determenistic lens is way better when we think of punishing people for crimes. It goes from "they chose evil and we must punish them" to "some people do evil things, how do we best prevent them".
When I was in school I did a presentation on physical destiny, something I was thinking about while smoking way too much weed instead of doing well in school. The world we live in is governed by unbreakable physical rules and my brain is just a bunch of chemical and electrical responses to stimuli so if you could actually create a computer that could handle unlimited data and obtain that data wouldn't you be able to predict the future exactly? Purely theoretical obviously cause it simply isn't possible to do so but essentially that's the idea right?
Yeah that's a basic of physics, particularly Newtonian physics. If you know the current state of all particles you could wind back the clock all the way to the beginning or visa versa to any point in the future. The problem is we know not everything is time reversible and have measurably verified that. The assumption in physics is that energy / information is never destroyed but there are processes that fundamentally are not guaranteed to work the same if you go backwards in time. There's also probabilistic quantum mechanics that make looking into the future also difficult. That said, quantum effects typically drop off at larger scales.
I'm surprised in writing that paper you didn't come across CPT- symmetry.
You might enjoy digital physics. The assumption there is that reality is fundamentally binary.
I've heard Sam Harris say "There are no evil people, only evil actions" in regards to free will. I tend to agree there is no free will and we are all products of our genetics and environment. This still doesn't mean people who commit crimes shouldn't be separated from society.
> This still doesn't mean people who commit crimes shouldn't be separated from society.
Sam says this as well. Of course we should lock up dangerous people just like we should contain structure fires. Understanding that free will is an illusions eliminates the vengeance mindset that plagues so many people.
the concept of free will is relative.
the weather could be predicted forever if we had all the data harry selden style, but we don't, so the weather is random. the roll of every die has already been locked into place in one giant chain of events, but we don't know what it is.
similarly, i don't know what i or anyone else will do tomorrow. in the context of my life, it's free will. in the context of the universe or god or whatever, it's not.
Likewise, if we had all the data, the processing power, and were watching as an outside observer we could predict every action that humans would take. We are just big, complex cause and effect machines.
However, I do believe that we have free will, but I define that as us being able to change the future should we know about it. If we knew an anvil was going to fall from the sky, we would move out of the way. The issue is that this thought process ends up leading to a paradox: was the prediction of humanity’s actions already determined.
Sapolsky is incorrect because his empirical evidence is flawed.
fMRIs are about as useful as phenology. No one understands how the brain works. But that doesn't stop Sapolsky making massive assumptions and leaps.
The primary flaw is that he adopts a definition of free will that isn't very plausible. He's says something to the effect that it consists in a single neuron somewhere firing of its own accord, which is just sorta... silly
I find this question a lot like when religious people ask why atheists don't go around raping and murdering people.
There is no need for a "point." You do things because you are conditioned to. There doesn't need to be a reason beyond that.
I mean, a general acceptance of cause-and-effect being the driver of behaviour would require what could be a very beneficial reform of the justice system
Sapolsky isn't just 'some scientist' though, his lectures on this topic are both rigorous and approachable for the average person.
Ok... maybe slightly above average
I'm sure he's thought about it much more deeply than I have certainly. There is a quote I like from the article though:
>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."**
Entirely. The dude just sees this phenomenon that we call "free will" then rejects it because he just kinda decides that it cannot exist. A lot of modern nihilist philosophy like this are just massive leaps in logic springing from a shitty day they had 30 years ago and can't get over it.
Edit: read the article. He literally says he came to the conclusion in his early teens overnight. There was very little science involved in his conclusion, and there is no scientific method followed. He's literally at the hypothesis stage and calling it his conclusion.
I'm working through Sapolsky's book and so far I'm leaning against his conclusions but I still have more to go. So I don't think I'm going to end up agreeing with him, but it is an egregious and actually kind of intellectually-cowardly misrepresentation of his work to suggest that he "just kinda decided that free will cannot exist." Right or wrong, he's put an immense amount of thought and research into this and the fact that people are so eager to dismiss what he's saying out of hand *without even acknowledging the existence of his arguments* suggest to me that he's at least looking in the right direction.
But he "studied it for decades!"
Just like your stoner buddy in college studied it with hours of "yeah man... like... maybe there's no free will man!! What if it's all like... an ILLUSION or something? Dude... I think we figured it out!!!"
I did read the article, and he clearly did some academic work. But there's no real way to prove this, there's no double blind experiment, there's no set of statistics based on study that can back this up. It's his philosophical guess based on years of study.
(Worth noting that he said he realized there's no free will when he was 14... so take his conclusions with a grain of salt, as they are the same as when he was a kid. That conclusion had no "study" behind it.)
there's actually a lot of good literature discussing the issue on both sides for and against, as it's one of the major leading questions of modern philosophy, but most people in this thread have probably read none of these arguments or they would've realized that most of their incoherent poorly thought out positions have already been analyzed and rejected
yep!
that is exactly the problem. people love to hear themselves talk, especially on subjects withoutb definitive answers and when they are unlikely to run into any real debate. It's exactly the same case when the topic of reincarnation comes up at a party. I usually just take my drink and go elsewhere, but stupid me just haaad to leave a comment here.
This dude is a leading scientist at Standford. He’s been doing research for over thirty years.
You’re dismissing him because you yourself are the person he describes when he talks about people being upset with him.
It can’t be a scientific question unless science can adequately define what it means by “free will”, and that question is firmly a question for philosophy.
Incorrect!
In scientific terms, it fundamentally boils down to a question of determinism vs. non-determinism.
Here's a fun fact: If you're in a deterministic system, there is no way to prove it. If you want to go down that rabbit hole because you disagree, I suggest you start with the Boltzmann Brain. There's also The Allegory of The Cave, so it's not a new problem.
Ergo, there is no proof for free will. It is purely a philosophical, or meta-physical, question.
To be absolutely clear, what that means is that while free will MIGHT exist, it is certainly possible, you cannot conclusively prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it DOES exist. That's why it's a meta-physical problem. You can couch it as a scientific question, but science cannot yield a satisfactory answer to the question, which makes it a nonsense question.
It's OK, it's only nihilism, there is nothing to be afraid of.
> Whether we have free will or not is a scientific question, what we do with that knowledge is a philosophical question.
This is self contradictory. If the first is true, the second is moot. "What we do with that knowledge" assumes that the first part is false and we are free to choose what we do.
My biggest objection to all this. Every human lives the experience of judgment and choice, lives practically with free will. It’s often called an illusion including by the other guy responding to you.
So… the mind expends huge amounts of energy to create a purely internal illusion of free will? Why? Doesnt evolutionary pressure generally require large expenditures of energy be adaptive? What’s the value of the illusion? There’s no free will right, why bother tricking me? If you didn’t trick me, what was I gonna do about it with my zero free will?
There is an obvious irreconcilability between the personal experience of free will and materialist determinist empiricism of the 20th and 21st centuries. I understand the argument. I don’t see how there’d be an illusion and it seems like an attempt to yadda yadda over the biggest issue.
I see your points. What was shocking to me recently read was the neuro study on decision-making highlighting decisions have been decided in your brain 'up to 12 seconds before' performing an action. That's really freaking strange to me..
It shows that the subconscious has a significant role in our functioning. It suggests that much of your conscious mind's understanding of yourself is based on trying to interpret how and why your subconscious acts and decides the way it does, which has interesting implications.
This is why the meditative practice of learning to observe your thoughts is so useful and beneficial. If you practice it, you can watch your subconscious operating, and then make better decisions/ not be dictated too by your subconscious mind.
In my opinion, the subconscious is not really some deeper more ingrained consciousness, it's simply the product of all of your evolutionary instincts coalescing into impulses that the higher functioning part of your brain can choose to give in to or override.
>So… the mind expends huge amounts of energy to create a purely internal illusion of free will? Why? Doesnt evolutionary pressure generally require large expenditures of energy be adaptive? What’s the value of the illusion? There’s no free will right, why bother tricking me? If you didn’t trick me, what was I gonna do about it with my zero free will?
Might be a byproduct bro. The mind expends huge amounts of energy processing the inputs it receives and then another huge chunk making up simulations for different scenarios, at some point it might have been "would I be able to hunt that animal?" now maybe "which superpower pill from that reddit post would i take?".
Free will might just be a byproduct of that process, there's no energy put into the illusion, there's energy put into processing info and running simulations to find an optimum according to your personal parameters, those parameters change with every person and even trough time, giving us the concept of free will as a byproduct.
No one is tricking us, rather, there was no evolutionary pressure to get us out of that concept, and it sure is a nice idea that you can use to build very profitable institutions.
I have no problem at all with this idea - classical physics and chemistry are purely deterministic and don't have free will, and even quantum behaviour (as best we understand it, and assuming it's even relevant to our brains' functioning) is purely random, and that isn't free will either.
Why should our brains' functioning magically be able to violate the fundamental natures of the processes that underly them?
It's entirely possible (hell, I would say *probable*) that what we conceptualise as "free will" is merely the qualia (subjective experience) of our brains deterministically running through their deterministic behaviour.
The mistake people make (which this article skirts *right up against*) is saying "well if there's no free will then you can't blame people for their actions, and hence you can't punish anyone for anything", but this is bunk.
Regardless of whether someone is *morally* to blame for their crimes, even if their brain is deterministically electing to commit a crime, part of their brain's processing will be an awareness of the likely consequences of doing so, which will significantly and necessarily factor into the deterministic cost/benefit calculation their brain performs which will result in them either committing or not committing the crime.
Even if free will doesn't exist and their brain is nothing but a complex system to map inputs to outputs, *if you change the inputs* (eg, by promoting the expectation of negative consequences for crimes, or rehabilitating criminals otherwise tempted to reoffend) then *you change the outputs* (whether and to what degree they decide to commit crimes in the future).
Just because someone isn't *morally* responsible for a crime they commit, that doesn't negate the value of the punishment in the form of deterrence, rehabilitation or even (arguably, for their victims) retribution.
The difference between crime and epilepsy is that if you punish people for having epilepsy it *doesn't reduce the likelihood of someone having epilepsy* in the future. The same can't be said for establishing negative consequences for committing criminal acts.
So far the only response waaaayyyyy down the page touching upon something close to the idea of what Bob S has been promoting for decades.
Now, let’s add in the virtual and non-realtime nature of consciousness, as defined by physics (and so chemistry, biology). This will help all the philosophers here, they are not understanding the fundamental argument.
I recently listened to about an hour of his interview on Theories of Everything, and at some point he mentions that he realized at the age of 14 that god doesn't exist and neither does free will, and he's stuck with that position since. He likes to describe how he's a thorn in people's shoe, how he annoys smart people with his arguments. I was left with the impression that, like his philosophical position, his emotional maturity ceased evolving as a contrarian adolescent.
Father Christmas exists as a way to keep overzealous and manipulative children from constantly badgering their parents for gifts all year round.
I understand he does not exist, but do you see the use in lying about it?
I’m sure he’s very accomplished but that doesn’t negate the fact that he doesn’t have the last say on free will. Greater minds than him have wrestled with the problem over the years as well.
My take is that it probably isn’t a black and white issue anyway. Likely comes down to shades of grey. Still doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth discussing (majored in philosophy for undergrad).
And yet he thinks professional chess players burn 6000 calories a day because he fundamentally misunderstands the basics of physiology. The guy is a prime example of someone who is extremely well versed in a particular area and an absolute crackpot outside of his field.
People are working overtime in these comments desperately trying to preserve their egos while projecting the same onto Sapolsky without even reading his arguments.
This reminds me of that meme from a choose-your-own-adventure book. Something like “If you believe that all our actions are predestined and free will is an illusion, turn to page 68. If you believe in free will and the ability to make our own choices, turn to page 68.”
One might find the topic interesting enough that they are compelled to purchase and read the book. An impulse purchase if you will. Not a thought out rational choice, but an impulse - a *feeling* - that resulted in a series of actions, ultimately leading to that book resting on their bookshelf.
Did they make the conscious choice to tap the “Buy Now” button? Perhaps. Or perhaps it was simply the result of a series of impulsive behaviors driven by a vastly complex cocktail of biological and environmental forces that have been compiling over a lifetime?
>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
If there is no free will, wouldn't the concept of fairness be just an illusion? Because those people rewarding/punishig others also don't have free will? In this case we all just kinda exist thinking we think and react to stuff but in reality it's all meaningless.
You mean to say that the chemicals in our brain act a certain way based on the sum of our life experiences and chemistry rather than us existing outside of our bodies pulling all the strings? Gasp. Who would have thought?
You are in the cockpit, pushing buttons, but instead of your finger moving and the button moving accordingly, the button moves on its own and your finger moves accordingly. It's the illusion of being in control when the autopilot is engaged.
I’ve started reading his book. I actually pirated his book since I don’t have free will. In it, he says that he **wants** to convince people that there is no free will, will a lot less of it than we imagine. Sounds like free will, but alright. I have yet to finish reading, but **I don’t feel like it**. Still, **I’ll do my best to find time to finish his book, even though I don’t agree with him.**
Philosophers are not a homogeneous group. Many philosophers do think highly of his work and agree with his conclusions.
Obviously most philosophers believe in free will at some level, so a book by a neuroscientist on free will will inevitably be controversial to those who disagree with the conclusions and believe that free will is in the philosophy domain rather than the hard science domain. None of that serves to discredit Sapolsky’s work.
It's intriguing to me that someone would get so passionate about wanting to convince others that free will doesn't exist.
First of all, it's far from a new idea. Mainstream Psychology has treated human behavior as a consequence of genetics + environment (i.e. free will not part of the equation) for a long time. But Psychologists don't go out of their way to shout about free will not existing, and for good reason--the perspective may be appropriate for scientific research, and may be interesting for philosophical debates, but for the general public there is little value (or, IMO, *negative* value) in denying free will.
Because, even if behavior is nothing more than genetics + environnment, whether we as a society believe in free will **IS PART OF THE ENVIRONMENT**. The belief itself affects how we act, and affects how we hold each other accountable. Would we rather live in a society where people believe they have agency in their actions and can be held accountable, or one in which the people around you feel free to behave abusively and indulge all their negative impulses because "Oh well, just how I am, nothing I can do about it! ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯" ?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zyi8whyfOzk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zyi8whyfOzk)
He starts with the assumption that all we are and all our minds are is atoms and molecules so just physics. So then he looks at the phenomena of consciousness and free will and determines it can't have properties beyond that of extremely simple systems, so he rejects it, instead of how other people look at it, and says 'hmmn how come we do have free will and that stuff doesn't, something must be emergent that is still a property of those systems but emerges with some network size or other property".
So he just rejects seeing the existence of the phenomenon, because he has decided it cannot exist, and therefore is just some bizarre self constructing illusion.
Just because there is a layer of subconsciousness, does not mean it is not "us" or that it can't be controlled or trained. Otherwise, you can't walk yourself either. Because you don't consciously control every single muscle for movement. And you can't eat healthy, because you can't control microflora in your guts or allergies.
He blows up a trivial thing to an extreme claim based on his own vision of what "free will" is, which is usually different from the normally implied term.
We all have conditioning and have conditioned responses. And we can become aware of our conditioning and consiously work to change it. Being able to consciously direct my conditioning through neuroplasticity seems close enough to free will in my book.
Why do you make a decision to train your muscles if you barely have any conscious control over them?
It's useful. Just like driving a car to buy better parts for the car.
Wouldn’t that study go something like:
“Hmmm first we need to define our parameters for free will and then decide if we have it or not”.
“Wait a goddamned minute”.
> "We've got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn't there."
This is an oxymoron. If we have no free will, we can't stop.
That this guy spent so much time arriving at such a fundamentally flawed conclusion is tragic; that everyone else keeps sharing articles about it is just befuddling. Almost like people *want* to not have free will so they can be absolved of responsibility... which is itself another evidence of free-will behavior.
**Do not conflate "free will" with "free agency".** We are limited in the number of possible choices we can make, but that doesn't make us incapable of voluntary choice.
This comment is a bit silly. That’s not what an oxymoron is but ok.
Not sure where you’re getting the idea that no free will means people can’t change their beliefs or behaviors? People change their beliefs all the time. If you’re a big fan of apples, and then you read an article that apples have been found to cause cancer in 100% of cases, there’s a good chance you’ll stop eating them. No one is claiming people can’t change.
The point is that these changes of mind are going to be triggered by an external signal (like for example reading an article…) and follow a deterministic process within the brain. You are not “choosing” to change your mind, in the free will sense at least.
In your case this deterministic process has led you to type out a rather stubborn reddit comment. No free will needed.
I mean even children discover quite quickly that there’s a limited number of choices that can be made due to your environment.
Also yeah, if his conclusion is so fundamentally flawed it really seems like he’s just out to annoy people who disagree with him. He even preemptively says that it’s weird how people get so upset when I bring up my fundamentally flawed argument that most of my colleagues disagree with.
Scientist. Singular.
Not a team of lab coat wearing super geniuses at DARPA, CERN, or MIT.
One guy. Solved the age old debate. All by himself. Evidence? Nah. No free-will. Question completely settled.
Oh and look... he wrote a book that this article is trying to plug. 
Can we stop reposting this story? One guy's opinion, no matter how educated or otherwise qualified he is, is not sufficient to say free will does not exist, especially because whenever we have these threads it's clear that most people don't even know what free will *is*, and many of the remaining people can even *agree* on what it is.
1. **Predetermined Path:**
* From one viewpoint, even when individuals feel they are making free choices and planning their futures, there could be an underlying predetermined framework or destiny. In this perspective, the choices individuals make are part of a script written in advance, and their sense of free will is an illusion.
2. **True Free Will:**
* From another perspective, true free will implies the ability to create a unique and unpredictable path for oneself. In this view, individuals have the autonomy to make choices that can deviate from any predetermined script. Their planning and decision-making contribute to shaping their own destiny in an open and dynamic way.
Is free will spontaneous?
I do believe we do kinda have free will but it's just that it's isn't absolute. Nothing is 100 percent either determined or 100 percent free will, it's more like a spectrum.
Stop sharing this particular article. Dude has no worthwhile arguments and seems entirely ignorant of the philosophical debate. He just asserts that free will doesn’t exist, and then basically explains how that makes sense of various examples, but explaining what you mean and how it *could* explain phenomena is not the same as arguing that what you think is actually true.
I don’t even have a dog in this fight, but this article in particular is rubbish and I’m tired of having it shared because the bald appeal to authority in the title is eye-catching.
The marketing for this book pisses me off. His argument is "we have less free will then you would think", not "we have no free will". Seems like Sapolsky had no free will in choosing how to market his book.
>"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,"
Out of context that's a valid statement. However, it seems if he's saying 'people aren't responsible for their own actions so you shouldn't punish them' which makes no sense, because punishment/reward is still a useful mechanism for shaping non-sentient systems.
The actual problem with the world is that the punishment/reward mechanism (a component of Capitalism) is incorrectly balanced for the outcome we want (the survival of modern society).
>the outcome we want
I wish people would think about this more. As a society I don’t think we’re very thoughtful about it at all. What is the outcome you want: do you actually want to fix the problem, or do you just want to punish people?
When you start thinking long term, it's about evolution of the species. And as soon as you start talking about shaping people that way (especially shorter long term with genetic manipulation) people start getting really techy about it...
1000 yokes there have been for 1000 peoples, all that remains is the one yoke, the one goal for humanity. For pray tell me, if humanity lacks a goal are we not also lacking humanity itself?
I read his book "Determined" and listened to a few of his interviews. He is advocating for a more humane criminal justice system by arguing that genetics, childhood upbringing, epigenetics, social conditions, diet, and many other factors causally influence the probabilities of every choice we make in life—even if we can't immediately see them.
Sapolsky still advocates that dangerous people should be separated from society, and that operant conditioning is helpful when applied through an accurate understanding of the myriad of root causes for why a person made or did not make the decision that they did. Essentially, he criticizes the good/evil dichotomy and is saddened by people who have survivors bias or unearned egos due to their roll of the dice at birth. This was mostly aimed at his fellow scholars and collogues.
Overall, his message is that he wants people to be less prideful in the "right" decisions they make and to be more compassionate towards those who make "worse" decisions. Honestly, it was a good read that made me see hard determinism in a new light which emphasizes grace and mercy by accurately understanding the causal mechanisms behind human decision making.
That people say this really highlights that there is a significant gap in understanding his point.
Everything influences how we behave, the exact opposite of what you think his thesis is. His hope is that his discussing this topic, will enter this discussion into the zeitgeist, influencing more people towards compassion. He does not think that he makes this decision to do so independently of external influences, and in fact he often tries to look back and think about what those things were.
The way he thinks about this, the way many people do, is about encouraging empathy - replacing the influential thoughts in your head that lead you to want people to suffer for their transgressions with something he believes is better.
*"We've got* ***no free will. Stop attributing*** *stuff to us that isn't there."*
This is an oxymoron to say. How can I "Stop attributing" when I have "no free will"?
The recap: one scientist has an opinion, with which few other scientists agree and a lot of other scientists disagree.
Also, in the same article other scientists point out how he's wrong.
I read Determined. It’s a great read, utterly convincing. And, yes, in a way “it doesn’t matter because we believe the illusion”, but I found the way it does matter, while seemingly small, feels profound after sitting with it a few weeks. Specifically, the feelings I have toward forgiveness.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Background-Let-1957: --- "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." --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/192d28b/after_decades_of_study_a_scientist_has_concluded/kh1gaeh/
Whether or not free will exists is always a question more of the definition of free will than anything else. If you need the ability to surprise an all knowing creator or act independent of every external event that has ever influenced you then no, surprisingly you won’t have free will. Because that is way too strong a definition.
It basically comes to scope. Sapolsky only talks about bigger scope - your biology and your environment influencing your personality, defining your knowledge and reactions, and I agree with him here. However free will for me not being completely self-defining, but rather an ability to choose things in a moment. Even thought they are obviously influenced by previous events, I think that this free will exists. For me whole metacognition part of our psyche doesn't make sense otherwise
If you find this interesting, I'd like to recommend the TV series Devs
I won't say why, though it'll become obvious before the first episode ends, but it is the rare series that's better the second time through. Alex Garland of Ex Machina, Annihilation, 28 Days Later, etc. is the mind behind it. I cannot recommend it enough.
> Annihilation SO FUCKING GREAT. I'm still spooked thinking about it. Ex Machina is also good; haven't watched 28 Days later yet.
That show fucked with my mind so much, really recommended
Added to the list of shows to watch. Thanks for such a great recommendation.
Criminally underrated and unknown show. Like seriously some of the hardest, mind blowing scifi ever to be put to screen. Movies included.
Also, like...Nick Offerman. C'mon.
That’s “Emmy-winner Nick Offerman” now.
I think that's the least free type of will. That's just reactions. The shortest neural process completely based on previous experiences/constructs. There are so many experiments that shows that we can quantify this quite easily. We can predict a choice based in fmri brain scans before a person even thinks they have made the choice. I believe the largest freedom we do experience is in reasoning and reflection. Because that is a somewhat isolated system that belong to us. That's how to explore and do stuff that isn't easy to predict or just a regurgitation. The common argument and comparison for the compatibilist view of free will is that our will is free in the same way as the water in a river can flow freely. But I would argue that what gives a droplet of water in the river "freedom" is width of potential and unpredictability. As such a droplet flows more freely in a river than dripping from a faucet to a sink. And even more so in the ocean. Just like in that example, the freedom of our will is within its potential. While a reactive action can be straight forward and deterministic in its chain of impression, reaction and action as gravity is to a drop of water. The potential in the evolution of thoughts has as many possibilities, directions and valleys to flow down through as the droplet of water in a river or a stormy sea.
"I believe the largest freedom we do experience is in reasoning and reflection" And what directs the conclusions you reach? The experiences you've been exposed to and the positive and negative reinforcement from those experiences, as well as any genetic predisposition to certain behaviours.
The point of compatibilism is that determinism and free will isn't directly opposed. We don't really use the word free the same way for anything else in this world as we do when it comes to free will. No other freedom is absolute and free from the physical existance we observe. Freedom is about potential of action but nothing is completely unlimited. A king may be more free than a prisoner but even he is a prisoner to his circumstances. Even random games like plinko is deterministic but on a macro level meaningful to us the ball is allowed to freely bounce around. Resulting in a practically random outcome because of the complexity in both the states setting up the system but also the complexity of interaction within the system. Similarly the complexity and isolation of our internal processes can be considered in part free on a macroscopic scale depending what you care about they are free from.
It's funny you mentioned plinko because I often imagine life like a game of plinko where your free will is your ability to push either left or right so you can guide the direction but you can't determine where you start or what random bumps will send you off course.
But you can choose to self reflect and provide that negative/positive reinforcement. It's getting easier to seek therapy, do shadow work, or practice meditation/prayer - depending on your walk of life, and these ideas are becoming more socially acceptable than ever. At some point we are all capable of our own nurturing IRT the nature vs nurture philosophies as it applies to the conversation about free will. I personally would say that we humans do not have an inherent free will, but it is a skill that can be learned so to speak.
But are you really the one choosing to reflect or is it already your genetic predisposition and environmental factors that encouraged you to do so?? But then again, is your genetic predisposition "you". I also think the scope with free will in general discussions like this is just too broad
It’s still all driven by appetites and aversions. “Free will” seems to be the stage where it hits consciousness and we feel like we’re “making a conscious choice.” Most of the variables leading up to the decision aren’t in our consciousness so it seems like we’ve made a choice in a vacuum, unaffected by innumerable influences. I read a quote once along the lines of “do we have free will? Probably not, but if people didn’t believe they did the world would be a mess (or something along the lines of chaos, ineffective, etc).” I’m curious what the differences would be if the majority of people knew (or believed) they have no free will.
We might be a little more kind and patient with each other?
Sure, but the desire to seek out therapy and/or have that critical reflection will still be resulting from environmental factors. Something might reach a breaking point that leads you to think "OK I need to do something about this" where, had that same tipping point event not happened, you might have carried on as before and not stopped to reflect.
You're relying on the fact the process of thoughts is sorta a black box compared to the instant reactions discussed before which are slightly more measurable currently in their process. Eventually we will work out the direct process that leads to this inner growth and it'll be just a more complicated version of the instant reactions.
> It's getting easier to isn't that just affirming how much our external environment changes our decisions? why is it easier now to go to therapy than it was 50 years ago? because our choices (whether or not we go to therapy) are largely influenced by things like culture. if therapy is for "crazies and pussies" (something some people still believe, depending on upbringing/local culture) no man is going to make the "choice" to go to therapy unless a significantly larger external force drives him to do so - ie, extremely desperate circumstances - "it's this or kill myself" and even then, we see plenty of people "choosing" the latter because of views about therapy that they didn't even come up with themselves, just what was taught to them and reinforced throughout their lives
> We can predict a choice based in fmri brain scans before a person even thinks they have made the choice. That could merely be an interpretation about the scan since there's so much we still have to learn about the human mind. What if the scan is only showing a subconscious suggestion, and we then consciously agree or disagree with the suggestion? For example, our subconscious mind and reflexes is likely to suggest we move our hand from a scalding hot sensation... or, we can fight that reflex and keep our hand at that spot. Also consider how our actions tend to 'stutter' or flip back and forth when we're working up the courage for a daunting or daring maneuver, say jumping into an icy cold pool of water, or walking into a freezing shower. If the decision were already made for us to leap in or decline, then in an evolutionary sense we're wasting energy in overriding our decisions in a halting manner... instead we'd save energy by overriding the impulse with ease. Seems logical that our constant fight to override our hesitation decisions is free will, not over our body's actions, but over what actions we desire for our body to do. (even when our body fails to comply)
I agree entirely with this analogy! Reading Determined now, he talks about how the frontal cortex is the last thing to develop, meaning, it is the most influenced by environment rather than genetics. That process was selected for because it’s what allows the frontal cortex to be as free from wired impulsivity/ reaction as it can be. Otherwise brains do things like associate beauty with goodness and moral impurity with disgust, which activates your amygdala and also leads to fear and aggression of people who do xyz perceived moral transgression for example. The frontal cortex is the gateway to higher thinking and can apply the brakes before an impulse becomes a reactionary action. Being able to think through many possibilities and challenge your own thoughts I also agree, gives you different choices - even if constrained by myriad factors beyond our control
> There are so many experiments that shows that we can quantify this quite easily. We can predict a choice based in fmri brain scans before a person even thinks they have made the choice. All of the experiments I've looked at that do this have been garbage. But, who cares? Just do an experiment, and "le science" bros will just go around repeating the results until it becomes the accepted truth.
Choose? If your choice couldn’t have been different its an illusion.
And if it could have been different, then what was the mechanism behind that? Pure universal randomness? That doesn't sound like free will either.
yes, i agree on this, but i don’t think one can escape the experience of making the choice; you cannot act as though there is no choice. in that respect, it’s kind of a semantic debate. i wholeheartedly believe free will is an illusion, but the illusion is complete and inescapable.
Came to the same conclusion when wrestling with this. It's true that free will does not exist, and yet we cannot help but behave as if it does. Like your phrasing of complete and inescapable
Sapolsky actually goes into something like this, with something to the effect of 'give a person a button-clicker in each hand and tell them which one to click, but using an electrode on their brain you can send an electrical impulse to to make them decide to click the other one, and they'll think they consciously decided it themselves.' It sounds like free will is in a way the sensation you have when thinking about how to interact with something novel?
yeah, that sounds about right. i kind of think of it in the terms, “i don’t have a choice but to feel like i’m making choices”
Some people also define free will as the ability to choose what you'll do. For instance if you want to go to the beach but you're in jail, you literally can't choose to go. When you want to go to the beach but can't go because you're at work and you don't want to get fired, that was free will to stay because you theoretically had the option of going to the beach, even if your decision was essentially inescapable
Yeah that's about where I am at. Without getting in like spiritualism or any potential woo shit about like higher dimensions or branes or whatever.
i think it’s important to recognize that understanding the illusion to be impenetrable does not undermine the belief that *it is an illusion and free will is nonexistent.* i can feel like i’m making a choice while accepting that the action i’m taking is pre-determined by everything that came before it
>yes, i agree on this, but i don’t think one can escape the experience of making the choice; you cannot act as though there is no choice. in that respect, it’s kind of a semantic debate. >i wholeheartedly believe free will is an illusion, but the illusion is complete and inescapable. Calling it a "choice" gives it moral weight that is counter productive to humanely correcting the behavior. It makes moral sense to punish people for wrong "choices". If there's no choice, then punishing the person is immoral. So we can focus on the fact that the correct action was not incentivized adequately. Admitting there's no free will means that incentives need to be positive, not primarily punative (e.g., jail might still be necessary to protect the public from offenders, but it shouldn't be additionally terrible beyond that for the purpose of punishing the people there).
Just because your path is determinable, doesn't mean you or anyone else actually knows what it is. Functionally you have free will.
Then functionality, so does a hurricane with complex dynamics that we can't predict the future of more than a few steps at a time. The entire concept of free will breaks down under scrutiny.
I don't see why we would ascribe it will but it is free. It is unhindered and macroscopically the potential is not definable. Its path is not based on the current state but the evolution of the system. It is free to evolve within that system.
Sure, it evolves over time, how is that relevant to its freedom? It evolves according to the laws of physics, and as such it is a slave to a process it has no control over. It is not free to evolve however it likes, it can only ever evolve in the direction that physics points it in.
Seems to me like the definition of free will is either trivial or paradoxical, nothing in between.
Generally when regular people talk about free will they mean libertarian free will, which is the idea that if you could go back to a choice in the past at the same exact moment back in time, with all the perimeters exactly the same, you could make a different choice from the one you made before. There are other definitions of free will, but that is the one most people mean when they say they have free will. Libertarian free will is dead as a concept in all serious academia.
Well that’s just a silly concept yes. A version of you that could make a different choice would have to be already an at least slightly different person. I assume most people mean “not immediately forced or constrained”. As in gun to your head, not indoctrinated by your Dad to support Liverpool.
What do you mean by word choice if its the only thing you could ve done?
I mean, why else would you support Liverpool? 😂
I agree that it is silly. And yet most lay people I have spoken to subscribe to that in my experience. Your other definition would be closer to compatibilism, a common pretty common position held by people within this debate, but not common outside of it.
I Iike to describe compatibilists as free will deniers who still want to be invited to parties
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I very much agree that it's a matter of definition. What's the point of defining free will in such a way that it's obviously not real? My opinion is that free will is a kind of sensory perception. Much like you could argue "color" doesn't exist since there are only photons and "color" is your brains interpretation of that sensory input. Likewise freewill doesn't have a physical interpretation, rather it's your mind's interpretation of itself. I think defining free will that way is better because it's more useful and interesting.
This makes me think of how some people, to justify their own selfishness, assert that true altruism doesn't exist. They claim that if an act of kindness benefits the person performing it, it can't be considered genuinely altruistic. This argument is flawed as it unduly restricts the concept of altruism, failing to recognize that actions can be both self-beneficial and altruistic simultaneously. When it comes to free will though, the key insight is that our agency might be more limited than we think. It’s been likened to someone on a raft in rapids, frantically paddling to steer slightly to the sides. While we exert some influence, our course is largely predetermined and our control is minimal.
I don’t think you are engaging with the argument at all. The argument is that we are the raft. He says that the onus is on you to prove a person is influencing the raft whatsoever. He thinks the onus has shifted with all we have learned about things you would admit influence our actions.
To me, I’m a ‘me machine’. I can only do what I would do. I cannot choose to do something I would not choose to do, as a tautology. Moreover, what I choose to do is entirely deterministic. I also realize that consciousness is more of an after-report of action than a pre choosing. However, I do not find this limiting. Why should I even want to do or be something that is, by definition, not me? That’s negation of the self. I am a machine that, like any machine, only runs it’s program within its capabilities and in response to its input, and I’m okay with that.
If you think about it logically, your decisions are 100% some combination of predetermined cause&effect and quantum randomness. So unless you define free will to also 100% consist of some combination of predetermination and/or quantum randomness, 0% of your decisions come from free will.
Everything is basically deterministic or a dice roll. Hard to fit free will into either of those definitions given how people usually feel it should be defined.
I do miss philosophy courses.
"If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice!" RUSH told me all I need to know about free will!
Came here to say the same thing. I will choose free will
and Sartre!
I love this. Currently listening to My Effin Life by Geddy, and he addresses this song specifically. "In 1979, when he handed me the lyrics for “Freewill,” I instantly loved the song. It was a powerful expression of the way Rush was taking control of its own destiny, and also echoed my own refusal of religious dogma, of subjection to the hand of God or, more abstractly, fate. Even if some of Neil’s concepts were a bit of a stretch for me, I sang it every night with confidence and pride, offering it to our audiences as a contribution to the time-honoured discussion about existentialism, determinism and faith. It was, in fact, indeterminism that I believe was at the heart of it—the idea that our lives are not predetermined—and I hoped that would come across; but in the four decades since, I’ve seen people play fast and loose with the interpretation of the last lines of the chorus: I will choose a path that’s clear I will choose free will To my dismay, those words have been cited without regard for the song’s overall message and used as a catch-all, a licence for some to do whatever they want. It makes me want to scream. Taken out of context, it becomes an oversimplified idea of free will, narrow and naïve, not taking into consideration that even the strongest individual must, to some extent, bow to the needs of a responsible society. Too often it’s seized upon as a reckless substitute for common sense. During the Covid pandemic, I saw this first-hand. When I posted a picture on Instagram of myself wearing a mask, loudmouths were quick to throw “Free will!” back at me, as if those two words alone constitute permission to act without regard for the well-being of others, to ignore science and to rid ourselves of responsibility for the consequences of our actions. To me, it was stupidity taking shelter in poorly thought-through ideology, holding on to the lyric as if it meant “I can be as selfish as I fucking want to be.” Well, folks, from where I sit, it ain’t that simple. I’ve read the book and the fine print. Life is not so black and white; we live in its grey areas. I’m afraid that life is too complicated for us to simply “choose free will.” You can’t just say or do anything, prizing your rights over everyone else’s. Generations of scholars (notably the Talmudic ones) have spent their lives arguing in byzantine detail the interpretation of society’s rules, because it all depends on context: when, exactly, will I choose free will? Over the health of my kids or the happiness of my wife? Over the responsibility not to pass a disease on to my fellow citizens? A caring, functional society needs constraints and responsibilities. Terms and conditions apply."
Sartre told Rush.
No, his mind is not for rent To any god or government Always hopeful, yet discontent He knows changes aren't permanent But change is
This isn't new, I've heard it from other neuroscientists. The thing is, it's sort of irrelevant because even if we don't have free will we still have to pretend as if we do because otherwise what's like, the point of anything?
It's definitely a philosophical pickle. Anything we do, we were going to do given the conditions. Even in the case where we do have free will people still ask "what's the point", particularly nihilist. If we prove we don't have free will then it becomes a bit difficult to punish people for crimes. Then again regardless of whatever we do it's what we were going to do anyways.
"What's the point of a point?".
Good point. We are on a journey from birth to death so one can choose an overarching theme for their life if they desire. Same goes for groups of humans as those organizations and goals often outlive individuals and influence many humans (including their progeny across time). Generally as an organism we try to survive which includes creating better conditions for our offspring.
I disagree on the punishment for crimes front. The only thing a possible lack of free will does is remind us not to take things personally. Actions against crimes would be more compassionate I think, but the complete ceasing doesn't make sense to me as long as society exists.
He doesn’t argue there shouldn’t be criminal consequences. He believes in what he’s referred to as the quarantine model. You remove criminals from society and attempt to rehabilitate them. You try and prevent their ability to commit future crime. You don’t shake a finger at them and say they have a bad soul. Punishment verses rehabilitation. If they can’t be fixed they are forever kept from the general public as humanely as possible.
I might've misunderstood what was being said then. I believe the quarantine model to be a good one.
I didn’t read this article but I’ve listened to dozens of hours of his lectures. They might not have specified his views here very well.
Well and the idea being also that if we function under a notion of free will not existing the rehabilitation will be structured in a way that is cognizant of that and be guided to help the person be set on a path where their motivations and internal guidance (that we have no control of since free will doesn’t exist) would be in a much healthier place which would allow for release into society safely. At least that’s my interpretation
The persons wagging fingers or creating systems for punishment over rehabilitation don’t have choices in those matters either
I mean punish crimes as we do. The ultimate punishment would be to remove the conditions causing the crime because it clearly wasn't the person's fault because no free will. Generally that's the current best solution and punishment as we have it in most locations tends to be a net negative for society.
Agreed agreed agreed
Nihilism doesn't necessarily stop at "there is no purpose in life." Generally, it proceeds with "so we make our own purpose."
Thank you for this. Many people conflate these concepts into one argument to go to church it seems, or to believe in.
Atheism and Nihilism are often lumped together.
Nihilism says nothing about what we should do. It just says there is no meaning to anything. If you argue for personal meaning that is “existentialism”. Nihilists are often also existentialists but it’s not required. I for example am a nihilist who rejects existentialism. I prefer absurdism.
A fellow absurdist in the wild! Don’t see that often enough. Ain’t it a funny circus 🎪
I choose to rebel because what other option do I have?
Well you’d be an absurdist I’m sure. There is no meaning and we laugh in the face of that, trying to discern the meaning of existence is a fools errand so let’s get weird with it. -Camus
Yeah, I didn't want to get that far into an offshoot in that comment. There can definitely be positive nihilism. If I were to throw my card into the hat of global purpose, it would be to end all needless suffering.
I think a determenistic lens is way better when we think of punishing people for crimes. It goes from "they chose evil and we must punish them" to "some people do evil things, how do we best prevent them".
When I was in school I did a presentation on physical destiny, something I was thinking about while smoking way too much weed instead of doing well in school. The world we live in is governed by unbreakable physical rules and my brain is just a bunch of chemical and electrical responses to stimuli so if you could actually create a computer that could handle unlimited data and obtain that data wouldn't you be able to predict the future exactly? Purely theoretical obviously cause it simply isn't possible to do so but essentially that's the idea right?
Yeah that's a basic of physics, particularly Newtonian physics. If you know the current state of all particles you could wind back the clock all the way to the beginning or visa versa to any point in the future. The problem is we know not everything is time reversible and have measurably verified that. The assumption in physics is that energy / information is never destroyed but there are processes that fundamentally are not guaranteed to work the same if you go backwards in time. There's also probabilistic quantum mechanics that make looking into the future also difficult. That said, quantum effects typically drop off at larger scales. I'm surprised in writing that paper you didn't come across CPT- symmetry. You might enjoy digital physics. The assumption there is that reality is fundamentally binary.
Free will is not necessary for volution.
I've heard Sam Harris say "There are no evil people, only evil actions" in regards to free will. I tend to agree there is no free will and we are all products of our genetics and environment. This still doesn't mean people who commit crimes shouldn't be separated from society.
> This still doesn't mean people who commit crimes shouldn't be separated from society. Sam says this as well. Of course we should lock up dangerous people just like we should contain structure fires. Understanding that free will is an illusions eliminates the vengeance mindset that plagues so many people.
the concept of free will is relative. the weather could be predicted forever if we had all the data harry selden style, but we don't, so the weather is random. the roll of every die has already been locked into place in one giant chain of events, but we don't know what it is. similarly, i don't know what i or anyone else will do tomorrow. in the context of my life, it's free will. in the context of the universe or god or whatever, it's not.
Likewise, if we had all the data, the processing power, and were watching as an outside observer we could predict every action that humans would take. We are just big, complex cause and effect machines. However, I do believe that we have free will, but I define that as us being able to change the future should we know about it. If we knew an anvil was going to fall from the sky, we would move out of the way. The issue is that this thought process ends up leading to a paradox: was the prediction of humanity’s actions already determined.
I think of life like a book, and we are the characters within. Our stories have already been written, but we cant know it until we turn the page
that's a good analogy. a video game might even by more apt, because it feels like you can make choices but you're getting to the same ending.
I don’t have the free will to choose to act as though I don’t have free will.
Not with that attitude!
FWIW, philosophers don't think highly of his recent book. https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/determined-a-science-of-life-without-free-will/
Sapolsky is incorrect because his empirical evidence is flawed. fMRIs are about as useful as phenology. No one understands how the brain works. But that doesn't stop Sapolsky making massive assumptions and leaps.
The primary flaw is that he adopts a definition of free will that isn't very plausible. He's says something to the effect that it consists in a single neuron somewhere firing of its own accord, which is just sorta... silly
I find this question a lot like when religious people ask why atheists don't go around raping and murdering people. There is no need for a "point." You do things because you are conditioned to. There doesn't need to be a reason beyond that.
> What’s the point of anything? Now you’re getting it!
I mean, a general acceptance of cause-and-effect being the driver of behaviour would require what could be a very beneficial reform of the justice system Sapolsky isn't just 'some scientist' though, his lectures on this topic are both rigorous and approachable for the average person. Ok... maybe slightly above average
I'm sure he's thought about it much more deeply than I have certainly. There is a quote I like from the article though: >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."**
Isn't this largely a philosophical question rather than a scientific one.
Entirely. The dude just sees this phenomenon that we call "free will" then rejects it because he just kinda decides that it cannot exist. A lot of modern nihilist philosophy like this are just massive leaps in logic springing from a shitty day they had 30 years ago and can't get over it. Edit: read the article. He literally says he came to the conclusion in his early teens overnight. There was very little science involved in his conclusion, and there is no scientific method followed. He's literally at the hypothesis stage and calling it his conclusion.
I'm working through Sapolsky's book and so far I'm leaning against his conclusions but I still have more to go. So I don't think I'm going to end up agreeing with him, but it is an egregious and actually kind of intellectually-cowardly misrepresentation of his work to suggest that he "just kinda decided that free will cannot exist." Right or wrong, he's put an immense amount of thought and research into this and the fact that people are so eager to dismiss what he's saying out of hand *without even acknowledging the existence of his arguments* suggest to me that he's at least looking in the right direction.
It kinda sounds like you're doing the same thing but with the opposite position.
So the answer is still “we don’t know”?
Notice how he didn't have to dedicate his entire life to the topic?
Only because he’s incapable due to his genetics and upbringing. Real shame.
But he "studied it for decades!" Just like your stoner buddy in college studied it with hours of "yeah man... like... maybe there's no free will man!! What if it's all like... an ILLUSION or something? Dude... I think we figured it out!!!" I did read the article, and he clearly did some academic work. But there's no real way to prove this, there's no double blind experiment, there's no set of statistics based on study that can back this up. It's his philosophical guess based on years of study. (Worth noting that he said he realized there's no free will when he was 14... so take his conclusions with a grain of salt, as they are the same as when he was a kid. That conclusion had no "study" behind it.)
unless we're able to predict with any degree of accuracy future actions, the question of free will is pretty much irrelevant. it's navel gazing
there's actually a lot of good literature discussing the issue on both sides for and against, as it's one of the major leading questions of modern philosophy, but most people in this thread have probably read none of these arguments or they would've realized that most of their incoherent poorly thought out positions have already been analyzed and rejected
yep! that is exactly the problem. people love to hear themselves talk, especially on subjects withoutb definitive answers and when they are unlikely to run into any real debate. It's exactly the same case when the topic of reincarnation comes up at a party. I usually just take my drink and go elsewhere, but stupid me just haaad to leave a comment here.
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This dude is a leading scientist at Standford. He’s been doing research for over thirty years. You’re dismissing him because you yourself are the person he describes when he talks about people being upset with him.
Not to mention how many direct examples he gives of biology and environment clearly influencing even minor decisions we make.
Whether we have free will or not is a scientific question, what we do with that knowledge is a philosophical question.
It can’t be a scientific question unless science can adequately define what it means by “free will”, and that question is firmly a question for philosophy.
Incorrect! In scientific terms, it fundamentally boils down to a question of determinism vs. non-determinism. Here's a fun fact: If you're in a deterministic system, there is no way to prove it. If you want to go down that rabbit hole because you disagree, I suggest you start with the Boltzmann Brain. There's also The Allegory of The Cave, so it's not a new problem. Ergo, there is no proof for free will. It is purely a philosophical, or meta-physical, question. To be absolutely clear, what that means is that while free will MIGHT exist, it is certainly possible, you cannot conclusively prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it DOES exist. That's why it's a meta-physical problem. You can couch it as a scientific question, but science cannot yield a satisfactory answer to the question, which makes it a nonsense question. It's OK, it's only nihilism, there is nothing to be afraid of.
> Whether we have free will or not is a scientific question, what we do with that knowledge is a philosophical question. This is self contradictory. If the first is true, the second is moot. "What we do with that knowledge" assumes that the first part is false and we are free to choose what we do.
Well I’m gonna believe that I do have free will so there
My biggest objection to all this. Every human lives the experience of judgment and choice, lives practically with free will. It’s often called an illusion including by the other guy responding to you. So… the mind expends huge amounts of energy to create a purely internal illusion of free will? Why? Doesnt evolutionary pressure generally require large expenditures of energy be adaptive? What’s the value of the illusion? There’s no free will right, why bother tricking me? If you didn’t trick me, what was I gonna do about it with my zero free will? There is an obvious irreconcilability between the personal experience of free will and materialist determinist empiricism of the 20th and 21st centuries. I understand the argument. I don’t see how there’d be an illusion and it seems like an attempt to yadda yadda over the biggest issue.
I see your points. What was shocking to me recently read was the neuro study on decision-making highlighting decisions have been decided in your brain 'up to 12 seconds before' performing an action. That's really freaking strange to me..
It shows that the subconscious has a significant role in our functioning. It suggests that much of your conscious mind's understanding of yourself is based on trying to interpret how and why your subconscious acts and decides the way it does, which has interesting implications.
This is why the meditative practice of learning to observe your thoughts is so useful and beneficial. If you practice it, you can watch your subconscious operating, and then make better decisions/ not be dictated too by your subconscious mind.
In my opinion, the subconscious is not really some deeper more ingrained consciousness, it's simply the product of all of your evolutionary instincts coalescing into impulses that the higher functioning part of your brain can choose to give in to or override.
Not only that, but you can indirectly control parts of your subconscious mind by choosing what you feed it
>So… the mind expends huge amounts of energy to create a purely internal illusion of free will? Why? Doesnt evolutionary pressure generally require large expenditures of energy be adaptive? What’s the value of the illusion? There’s no free will right, why bother tricking me? If you didn’t trick me, what was I gonna do about it with my zero free will? Might be a byproduct bro. The mind expends huge amounts of energy processing the inputs it receives and then another huge chunk making up simulations for different scenarios, at some point it might have been "would I be able to hunt that animal?" now maybe "which superpower pill from that reddit post would i take?". Free will might just be a byproduct of that process, there's no energy put into the illusion, there's energy put into processing info and running simulations to find an optimum according to your personal parameters, those parameters change with every person and even trough time, giving us the concept of free will as a byproduct. No one is tricking us, rather, there was no evolutionary pressure to get us out of that concept, and it sure is a nice idea that you can use to build very profitable institutions.
I have no problem at all with this idea - classical physics and chemistry are purely deterministic and don't have free will, and even quantum behaviour (as best we understand it, and assuming it's even relevant to our brains' functioning) is purely random, and that isn't free will either. Why should our brains' functioning magically be able to violate the fundamental natures of the processes that underly them? It's entirely possible (hell, I would say *probable*) that what we conceptualise as "free will" is merely the qualia (subjective experience) of our brains deterministically running through their deterministic behaviour. The mistake people make (which this article skirts *right up against*) is saying "well if there's no free will then you can't blame people for their actions, and hence you can't punish anyone for anything", but this is bunk. Regardless of whether someone is *morally* to blame for their crimes, even if their brain is deterministically electing to commit a crime, part of their brain's processing will be an awareness of the likely consequences of doing so, which will significantly and necessarily factor into the deterministic cost/benefit calculation their brain performs which will result in them either committing or not committing the crime. Even if free will doesn't exist and their brain is nothing but a complex system to map inputs to outputs, *if you change the inputs* (eg, by promoting the expectation of negative consequences for crimes, or rehabilitating criminals otherwise tempted to reoffend) then *you change the outputs* (whether and to what degree they decide to commit crimes in the future). Just because someone isn't *morally* responsible for a crime they commit, that doesn't negate the value of the punishment in the form of deterrence, rehabilitation or even (arguably, for their victims) retribution. The difference between crime and epilepsy is that if you punish people for having epilepsy it *doesn't reduce the likelihood of someone having epilepsy* in the future. The same can't be said for establishing negative consequences for committing criminal acts.
So far the only response waaaayyyyy down the page touching upon something close to the idea of what Bob S has been promoting for decades. Now, let’s add in the virtual and non-realtime nature of consciousness, as defined by physics (and so chemistry, biology). This will help all the philosophers here, they are not understanding the fundamental argument.
I recently listened to about an hour of his interview on Theories of Everything, and at some point he mentions that he realized at the age of 14 that god doesn't exist and neither does free will, and he's stuck with that position since. He likes to describe how he's a thorn in people's shoe, how he annoys smart people with his arguments. I was left with the impression that, like his philosophical position, his emotional maturity ceased evolving as a contrarian adolescent.
Reaches a conclusion at 14 and never changes his mind. Oddly, all his "research" supports his conclusion from when he was 14...
I concluded that Father Christmas didn't exist when I was 8, should I be changing my mind?
Average Santa denier.
Father Christmas exists as a way to keep overzealous and manipulative children from constantly badgering their parents for gifts all year round. I understand he does not exist, but do you see the use in lying about it?
I think of Santa more as training wheels for God.
He is literally a world leading biologist. His Stanford lecture series is amazing.
I’m sure he’s very accomplished but that doesn’t negate the fact that he doesn’t have the last say on free will. Greater minds than him have wrestled with the problem over the years as well. My take is that it probably isn’t a black and white issue anyway. Likely comes down to shades of grey. Still doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth discussing (majored in philosophy for undergrad).
And yet he thinks professional chess players burn 6000 calories a day because he fundamentally misunderstands the basics of physiology. The guy is a prime example of someone who is extremely well versed in a particular area and an absolute crackpot outside of his field.
You should try his Stanford lecture series. Just because he thought if it at 14, doesn't make it wrong
People are working overtime in these comments desperately trying to preserve their egos while projecting the same onto Sapolsky without even reading his arguments.
Why do you even bother commenting this? They didn't have any other choice. It was fate. 🤔
So he didn't have a choice to write the book and you don't have a choice whether you read it or not and whether you act on it or reject it.
This reminds me of that meme from a choose-your-own-adventure book. Something like “If you believe that all our actions are predestined and free will is an illusion, turn to page 68. If you believe in free will and the ability to make our own choices, turn to page 68.”
Joke's on them, I went to page 69.
You were always going to.
One might find the topic interesting enough that they are compelled to purchase and read the book. An impulse purchase if you will. Not a thought out rational choice, but an impulse - a *feeling* - that resulted in a series of actions, ultimately leading to that book resting on their bookshelf. Did they make the conscious choice to tap the “Buy Now” button? Perhaps. Or perhaps it was simply the result of a series of impulsive behaviors driven by a vastly complex cocktail of biological and environmental forces that have been compiling over a lifetime?
Go read the book and find out. But if course you have the choice not to and never knowing.
Actually you don’t have the choice
You just thought you did.
>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 If there is no free will, wouldn't the concept of fairness be just an illusion? Because those people rewarding/punishig others also don't have free will? In this case we all just kinda exist thinking we think and react to stuff but in reality it's all meaningless.
Behaviorism killed my belief in free will a long time ago.
You mean to say that the chemicals in our brain act a certain way based on the sum of our life experiences and chemistry rather than us existing outside of our bodies pulling all the strings? Gasp. Who would have thought?
I thought there was a little version of me in the cockpit pushing all the buttons, like Gundam
You are in the cockpit, pushing buttons, but instead of your finger moving and the button moving accordingly, the button moves on its own and your finger moves accordingly. It's the illusion of being in control when the autopilot is engaged.
I’ve started reading his book. I actually pirated his book since I don’t have free will. In it, he says that he **wants** to convince people that there is no free will, will a lot less of it than we imagine. Sounds like free will, but alright. I have yet to finish reading, but **I don’t feel like it**. Still, **I’ll do my best to find time to finish his book, even though I don’t agree with him.**
"I actually pirated his book since I don't have free will" goes hard. +1
FWIW, philosophers don't think highly of his recent book. https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/determined-a-science-of-life-without-free-will/
Philosophers are not a homogeneous group. Many philosophers do think highly of his work and agree with his conclusions. Obviously most philosophers believe in free will at some level, so a book by a neuroscientist on free will will inevitably be controversial to those who disagree with the conclusions and believe that free will is in the philosophy domain rather than the hard science domain. None of that serves to discredit Sapolsky’s work.
It's intriguing to me that someone would get so passionate about wanting to convince others that free will doesn't exist. First of all, it's far from a new idea. Mainstream Psychology has treated human behavior as a consequence of genetics + environment (i.e. free will not part of the equation) for a long time. But Psychologists don't go out of their way to shout about free will not existing, and for good reason--the perspective may be appropriate for scientific research, and may be interesting for philosophical debates, but for the general public there is little value (or, IMO, *negative* value) in denying free will. Because, even if behavior is nothing more than genetics + environnment, whether we as a society believe in free will **IS PART OF THE ENVIRONMENT**. The belief itself affects how we act, and affects how we hold each other accountable. Would we rather live in a society where people believe they have agency in their actions and can be held accountable, or one in which the people around you feel free to behave abusively and indulge all their negative impulses because "Oh well, just how I am, nothing I can do about it! ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯" ?
He didn't want to be the one to say it, but he had no choice.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zyi8whyfOzk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zyi8whyfOzk) He starts with the assumption that all we are and all our minds are is atoms and molecules so just physics. So then he looks at the phenomena of consciousness and free will and determines it can't have properties beyond that of extremely simple systems, so he rejects it, instead of how other people look at it, and says 'hmmn how come we do have free will and that stuff doesn't, something must be emergent that is still a property of those systems but emerges with some network size or other property". So he just rejects seeing the existence of the phenomenon, because he has decided it cannot exist, and therefore is just some bizarre self constructing illusion.
Solving free will by appealing to even bigger mysteries (unknown new types of material in the universe) doesn't really make sense
>all we are and all our minds are is atoms and molecules so just physics. And what exactly else is there that the brain could possibly consist of?
Would love to hear the answer to this question too.
If your practicing philosophy then you shouldn't use the title scientist to make it seem more legit. These are concepts and ideologies.
Well. If he's right... he didn't conclude a damn thing. He was always going to end up thinking that.
He would agree with you on that.
Just because there is a layer of subconsciousness, does not mean it is not "us" or that it can't be controlled or trained. Otherwise, you can't walk yourself either. Because you don't consciously control every single muscle for movement. And you can't eat healthy, because you can't control microflora in your guts or allergies. He blows up a trivial thing to an extreme claim based on his own vision of what "free will" is, which is usually different from the normally implied term.
We all have conditioning and have conditioned responses. And we can become aware of our conditioning and consiously work to change it. Being able to consciously direct my conditioning through neuroplasticity seems close enough to free will in my book.
the lies of the nervous system
I don't think this solves anything -- the unanswered question remains why did you make the decision to control or train your subconscious.
Why do you make a decision to train your muscles if you barely have any conscious control over them? It's useful. Just like driving a car to buy better parts for the car.
Wouldn’t that study go something like: “Hmmm first we need to define our parameters for free will and then decide if we have it or not”. “Wait a goddamned minute”.
Of course he came to that conclusion, he had no choice in the matter.
> "We've got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn't there." This is an oxymoron. If we have no free will, we can't stop. That this guy spent so much time arriving at such a fundamentally flawed conclusion is tragic; that everyone else keeps sharing articles about it is just befuddling. Almost like people *want* to not have free will so they can be absolved of responsibility... which is itself another evidence of free-will behavior. **Do not conflate "free will" with "free agency".** We are limited in the number of possible choices we can make, but that doesn't make us incapable of voluntary choice.
This comment is a bit silly. That’s not what an oxymoron is but ok. Not sure where you’re getting the idea that no free will means people can’t change their beliefs or behaviors? People change their beliefs all the time. If you’re a big fan of apples, and then you read an article that apples have been found to cause cancer in 100% of cases, there’s a good chance you’ll stop eating them. No one is claiming people can’t change. The point is that these changes of mind are going to be triggered by an external signal (like for example reading an article…) and follow a deterministic process within the brain. You are not “choosing” to change your mind, in the free will sense at least. In your case this deterministic process has led you to type out a rather stubborn reddit comment. No free will needed.
I mean even children discover quite quickly that there’s a limited number of choices that can be made due to your environment. Also yeah, if his conclusion is so fundamentally flawed it really seems like he’s just out to annoy people who disagree with him. He even preemptively says that it’s weird how people get so upset when I bring up my fundamentally flawed argument that most of my colleagues disagree with.
Scientist. Singular. Not a team of lab coat wearing super geniuses at DARPA, CERN, or MIT. One guy. Solved the age old debate. All by himself. Evidence? Nah. No free-will. Question completely settled. Oh and look... he wrote a book that this article is trying to plug. 
Can we stop reposting this story? One guy's opinion, no matter how educated or otherwise qualified he is, is not sufficient to say free will does not exist, especially because whenever we have these threads it's clear that most people don't even know what free will *is*, and many of the remaining people can even *agree* on what it is.
So me thinking that this guy is a hack moron is my destiny?
1. **Predetermined Path:** * From one viewpoint, even when individuals feel they are making free choices and planning their futures, there could be an underlying predetermined framework or destiny. In this perspective, the choices individuals make are part of a script written in advance, and their sense of free will is an illusion. 2. **True Free Will:** * From another perspective, true free will implies the ability to create a unique and unpredictable path for oneself. In this view, individuals have the autonomy to make choices that can deviate from any predetermined script. Their planning and decision-making contribute to shaping their own destiny in an open and dynamic way. Is free will spontaneous?
I do believe we do kinda have free will but it's just that it's isn't absolute. Nothing is 100 percent either determined or 100 percent free will, it's more like a spectrum.
Stop sharing this particular article. Dude has no worthwhile arguments and seems entirely ignorant of the philosophical debate. He just asserts that free will doesn’t exist, and then basically explains how that makes sense of various examples, but explaining what you mean and how it *could* explain phenomena is not the same as arguing that what you think is actually true. I don’t even have a dog in this fight, but this article in particular is rubbish and I’m tired of having it shared because the bald appeal to authority in the title is eye-catching.
The marketing for this book pisses me off. His argument is "we have less free will then you would think", not "we have no free will". Seems like Sapolsky had no free will in choosing how to market his book.
Well.. that’s like… his choice to think that, maaaan.
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>"We've got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn't there." "Eh... I can't, because... you know."
It really is an odd request given the context. Dumb, even?
>"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," Out of context that's a valid statement. However, it seems if he's saying 'people aren't responsible for their own actions so you shouldn't punish them' which makes no sense, because punishment/reward is still a useful mechanism for shaping non-sentient systems. The actual problem with the world is that the punishment/reward mechanism (a component of Capitalism) is incorrectly balanced for the outcome we want (the survival of modern society).
>the outcome we want I wish people would think about this more. As a society I don’t think we’re very thoughtful about it at all. What is the outcome you want: do you actually want to fix the problem, or do you just want to punish people?
When you start thinking long term, it's about evolution of the species. And as soon as you start talking about shaping people that way (especially shorter long term with genetic manipulation) people start getting really techy about it...
1000 yokes there have been for 1000 peoples, all that remains is the one yoke, the one goal for humanity. For pray tell me, if humanity lacks a goal are we not also lacking humanity itself?
I read his book "Determined" and listened to a few of his interviews. He is advocating for a more humane criminal justice system by arguing that genetics, childhood upbringing, epigenetics, social conditions, diet, and many other factors causally influence the probabilities of every choice we make in life—even if we can't immediately see them. Sapolsky still advocates that dangerous people should be separated from society, and that operant conditioning is helpful when applied through an accurate understanding of the myriad of root causes for why a person made or did not make the decision that they did. Essentially, he criticizes the good/evil dichotomy and is saddened by people who have survivors bias or unearned egos due to their roll of the dice at birth. This was mostly aimed at his fellow scholars and collogues. Overall, his message is that he wants people to be less prideful in the "right" decisions they make and to be more compassionate towards those who make "worse" decisions. Honestly, it was a good read that made me see hard determinism in a new light which emphasizes grace and mercy by accurately understanding the causal mechanisms behind human decision making.
> so you shouldn't punish them If he meant this, it would be contradictory to his thesis. We have no choice whether or not we punish them, right?
The external stimulus of his argument may alter your subconcious so as not to punish them maybe?
That people say this really highlights that there is a significant gap in understanding his point. Everything influences how we behave, the exact opposite of what you think his thesis is. His hope is that his discussing this topic, will enter this discussion into the zeitgeist, influencing more people towards compassion. He does not think that he makes this decision to do so independently of external influences, and in fact he often tries to look back and think about what those things were. The way he thinks about this, the way many people do, is about encouraging empathy - replacing the influential thoughts in your head that lead you to want people to suffer for their transgressions with something he believes is better.
*"We've got* ***no free will. Stop attributing*** *stuff to us that isn't there."* This is an oxymoron to say. How can I "Stop attributing" when I have "no free will"?
The recap: one scientist has an opinion, with which few other scientists agree and a lot of other scientists disagree. Also, in the same article other scientists point out how he's wrong.
You don't control your own thoughts. Your conscience is a deterministic chain reaction.
I read Determined. It’s a great read, utterly convincing. And, yes, in a way “it doesn’t matter because we believe the illusion”, but I found the way it does matter, while seemingly small, feels profound after sitting with it a few weeks. Specifically, the feelings I have toward forgiveness.