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The interview Dawkins had with the Indian metaphysician (I forgot the name) made me realize how blinded Dawkins is by his material-reductionist belief system. D

The interview Dawkins had with the Indian metaphysician (I forgot the name) made me realize how blinded Dawkins is by his material-reductionist belief system. Dawkins appeared to have no idea what the man was talking about because his belief system could not compute the meaning of what the man was trying to explain to him. Sapolsky's Harvard lectures on human biology in particular the fractal nature of the visual cortex changed how I think and understand, what stands out most from those lectures are of the problems reducing a complex system..

code_biologist 3y ago
Sapolsky has a new book coming out literally today called "Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will". Obviously I haven't read the book (yet) but here's the NYT promo interview https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/16/science/free-will-sapolsky.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/16/science/free-will-sapolsk... : In his latest book, “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will,” Dr. Sapolsky confronts and refutes the biological and philosophical arguments for free will. He contends that we are not free agents, but that biology, hormones, childhood and life circumstances coalesce to produce actions that we merely feel were ours to choose.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  But if that holds then he doesn't deserve any credit for writing the book right? Since it was already predetermined.
  - someplaceguy 3y ago
    If you give him credit, it increases the chances that he writes another good book in the future. Just because you don't have free will doesn't mean your behavior is not affected by your environment.
    - confidantlake 3y ago
      The act of me giving him credit or not doing it has already been determined.
      - someplaceguy 3y ago
        And believe it or not, that decision was shaped by your environment as well. Which is why most people give credit when credit is due. It can also be a self-reinforcing behavior, as giving credit can also in turn benefit you later. Again, just because everything is predetermined doesn't mean there aren't complex dynamics in motion, ones which greatly influence behavior and the chances of making a decision. Understanding these dynamics can also influence how you behave in the future. Edit: It seems that I am saying "if you kick a raccoon, it will run away". And you are saying "whether I kick the raccoon or not has already been determined". In this case, my analysis is helpful/useful while yours isn't. My analysis can influence your future behavior (e.g. if you run into a menacing raccoon in the future, it will increase the chances that you will be able to defend yourself properly), especially if you didn't know this before, while your analysis probably doesn't affect behavior (except to promote apathy perhaps, which is likely even detrimental). [ Disclaimer: I know nothing about raccoons, it was just an example ] It doesn't mean you are wrong, it's just that saying "everything is predetermined" is not a useful way of looking at the world. It's like saying "white paint is white", which is not very surprising. Strictly speaking, it's not even quite correct: quantum mechanics tells us that, even though the universe has (deterministic) physical laws, it also behaves randomly at a fundamental level. However, that does not change the fact that we don't have free will (since we have zero control over the randomness). But it's conceivable that some of our decisions might be affected by quantum randomness (this is even obvious in some contrived, but realistic Schrödinger's-cat-like scenarios).
      - lawlessone 3y ago
        >The act of me giving him credit or not doing it has already been determined. Scientific predestination? /j
  - mcphage 3y ago
    Sure, but he's still the person that was determined would get paid.
  - tshaddox 3y ago
    A funny question, since on those terms we’re also not able to choose whether we give him credit for writing the book.
    - neuromanser 3y ago
      (Based on what I've read, it makes sense to me that) we're not. A coin toss outcome seems random only because / as long as some of the initial conditions are unknown.
  - kalupa 3y ago
    I think you make a mistake and assume "predetermined" is the opposite of "free will"
  - The5thElephant 3y ago
    This is an absurd argument because it inconsistently moves the value of giving credit outside of the realm of determinism. Since everything is determined then the concept of credit would become meaningless. It is not meaningless because it exists within the subjective world created from determinism. Just like you can't say a criminal is not guilty of a crime without free will, because the concept of crime exists within the same subjective context as the experience of the criminal choosing to commit a crime. Choice and will still exist, they are just not "Free" in the sense of being determined by something outside of physics and its resulting emergent systems. It would be like arguing that a waterfall does not exist and is not beautiful because if you look closely enough at it all you see are numbers representing the states of molecules and velocities. Meaning does not require "free will", and the very concept of a will being "Free" is absurd since a resulting choice is either completely random (And thus not really anyone's will) or is determined by prior states and circumstances (the things that make you you) and is thus not really "Free".
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      I was going to provide a substantial response, but then I realized it wouldn't matter either way if this is true.
    - s1artibartfast 3y ago
      I think that somehow determinism/choice has been confused with ability to judge in modern philosophy. Calvinists certainly didn't think sinning was good, just because people had no choice. Nobody would say a robot helping you isn't better than one that harms you, simply because it makes no choice. A machine programmed to write a great book is a good machine! Sapolsky should be credited and recognized!
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  Whenever I see some one denying the existence of free will, I feel like punching him in the face, then saying "Why are you so angry at me? According to you, I couldn't help it!"
  - AlexandrB 3y ago
    That's silly. A NOT gate will change state when stimulated by a logic signal. Neither the signal nor the gate have "free will" in any meaningful sense but it happens anyways. Arguably, you're disproving your own point by eliciting a reaction that's not rational according to someone's belief system.
    - Turing_Machine 3y ago
      Then there's no reason for me not to do it, then. Right? We all should do exactly as evolution encourages us to do in any situation.
      - mr_toad 3y ago
        > We all should do exactly as evolution encourages us to do in any situation. What makes you think we don’t?
      - vidarh 3y ago
        This argument is logically incoherent. Whether or not you have free will, punching someone in the face is likely to have consequences. That is your reason to consider whether or not to do it. If we assume you have free will, it provides you with the opportunity to actively make the choice that will get you the best outcome. If we assume you do not, then that won't alter the outcomes, nor the reasons to prefer one choice over the other, the only thing that has changed is whether or not the choice you made was a genuine choice or would always play out the same way if we somehow was able to rewind time. That the outcome would be the same given the same input and same state of your mind does not mean there was no reasons not to act a given way, only that you had no agency in which outcome you actually end up with. But the state of your mind would be a factor in that, and a belief that your decisions has no effect on your future outcomes so it doesn't matter what you choose to do certainly would make you less likely to end up with good ones. Whether or not "rewinding time" would let you make different "choices" does not alter that.
Falimonda 3y ago
Is it this one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17Bcwg5gByU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17Bcwg5gByU
- aerique 3y ago
  I'm going to react to the OP through your post. > The interview Dawkins had with the Indian metaphysician (I forgot the name) made me realize how blinded Dawkins is by his material-reductionist belief system. Dawkins appeared to have no idea what the man was talking about because his belief system could not compute the meaning of what the man was trying to explain to him. I did not see that at all on the above fragment, maybe at the end a little. It was mostly two men having an interesting conversation albeit at different metaphysical levels and, especially Dawkins, trying to find a common ground. The video is called "Satish Kumar schools Richard Dawkins" which is ridiculous and leading.
  - lawlessone 3y ago
    All debate videos on YouTube are like that now to get views. Declaring X won before you even watch. Usually it's video of Ben Shapiro awkwardly reciting some argument he remembered wrong, while the commenters make disparaging remarks about the other parties hair color. Debate's have become less about who made good points etc and more like a pokemon battle of debate tactics. steelmanning, devils advocate, etc
jjoonathan 3y ago
100% of recent posts I've seen discussing reductive approaches have slammed them, so it's time for a reminder about why we do it. Truth. Falsifiable truth. Everyone knows that reductive approaches are limited. It's in the name. They are a tradeoff. Obviously the world is complex and so intuitively you want to embrace complexity, but the more you do this the more your theories become non-falsifiable and therefore not even wrong, severely limiting their scope because most important truths about the world are falsifiable. This is why spiritualism, mysticism, and religious metaphysics failed so completely to discover the wondrous scientific truths underlying our world, even though these things were supposed to be in their weelhouse. The temptation of the non-falsifiable was a poison apple. Once eaten, the plausible overwhelmed and crowded out the true, and they were never able to build physical knowledge reliable enough to stack, let alone stack high enough to discover that we are all made of star stuff and other such wonders. Truth turned out to be stranger and more beautiful than fiction -- the real conceit was in handing the reins to our imaginations when the world around us exceeded our imaginations so thoroughly. Speaking of which, the neuroscientists figured out how engrams work. It's beautiful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5trRLX7PQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5trRLX7PQY
- tech_ken 3y ago
  > most important truths about the world are falsifiable I think it depends on what you deem "important". There are many truths that I relied on just this morning alone which aren't "falsifiable" in the like Popper-derived sense. In my own head I call these "contingent truths", things which are true of the world by mutual convention or by the accumulation of human history. For example, my name or the name of my spouse; the designation of the gravel patch on the corner of our block as an area for my dog to pee off-leash; the presence of paint on the road which keeps my bike separate from cars. In some sense these are all material truths, properties of things in the world which have a falsifiable flavor (like "color" or "mass"). But I do think that their contingent nature, the fact that they are products of human decision making, taste, and history, gives them a different character than what most people keep in mind when they say "falsifiable truths" (scientific statements about the world). On a cosmological sense the latter type of truths are definitely "more important", but on the scale of things that actually determine the quality and shape of my life it's contingent truths which dominate. Spiritualism and mysticism proliferate in part (IMO) because they promise a bridge between the two scales, they reconcile the personal and the cosmic. I feel like Dawkins-era materialism has failed to have similar dominance because it only plays on the cosmic domain, and more often than not scoffs at modern attempts to explore the world of contingent truths (I don't meet many Dawkins-ites who are interested in the modern approach to sociology, which I think has done a pretty creditable job trying to deal with the contingent nature of social dynamics). Moreover, contingent truths are rapidly becoming an important area for multiple fields: many modern problems of engineering and science have contingent faces (infrastructure, big tech, medicine, AI). Being unable to provide guidance for negotiating, or even really a basic vocabulary of, social reality is an enormous hole. I say all this because I do consider myself a material-reductionist, or at least have been aggressively so in the past, but have been left kind of cold by how the movement has developed. It seems too shell-shocked by the culture wars of the 80s-00s and is unable (or no longer able) to act with the sense of openness or curiosity that I think is required by genuine truth-seeking. This is why I'd imagine you see so much criticism of it recently, not because the ideology is fundamentally wrong, but because its standard-bearers are no longer able to push it forward in a way that the meets the needs of the moment.
lawlessone 3y ago
Dawkins is a great evo biologist, but his atheism (outside of arguments from biology) is always kinda layman. I say this as an atheist. Selfish gene is great book. The God delusion is just ok. When he tries to argue about metaphysics or argue through religious arguments on god he's only just ok at it and loses because he's doesn't have the home team advantage he has in biology.
- jddj 3y ago
  I read most of The Greatest Show on Earth and it felt weak but moreso because it felt obvious. It might have been more interesting in a time/culture bubble where evolution wasn't taken for granted or the belief in God wasn't known to come with a lot of cognitive dissonance baggage. A bit of cool trivia here and there but overall it felt like a celebratory piece written for the already converted. Which, ironically, feels a bit like someone releasing a determinist book today.
ravetcofx 3y ago
Not this one eh? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O_mFtQiI0EY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O_mFtQiI0EY If not I'd love if you could find it

code_biologist 3y ago

Sapolsky has a new book coming out literally today called "Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will". Obviously I haven't read the book (yet) but here's the NYT promo interview https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/16/science/free-will-sapolsky.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/16/science/free-will-sapolsk... : In his latest book, “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will,” Dr. Sapolsky confronts and refutes the biological and philosophical arguments for free will. He contends that we are not free agents, but that biology, hormones, childhood and life circumstances coalesce to produce actions that we merely feel were ours to choose.

MichaelZuo 3y ago
But if that holds then he doesn't deserve any credit for writing the book right? Since it was already predetermined.
- someplaceguy 3y ago
  If you give him credit, it increases the chances that he writes another good book in the future. Just because you don't have free will doesn't mean your behavior is not affected by your environment.
  - confidantlake 3y ago
    The act of me giving him credit or not doing it has already been determined.
    - someplaceguy 3y ago
      And believe it or not, that decision was shaped by your environment as well. Which is why most people give credit when credit is due. It can also be a self-reinforcing behavior, as giving credit can also in turn benefit you later. Again, just because everything is predetermined doesn't mean there aren't complex dynamics in motion, ones which greatly influence behavior and the chances of making a decision. Understanding these dynamics can also influence how you behave in the future. Edit: It seems that I am saying "if you kick a raccoon, it will run away". And you are saying "whether I kick the raccoon or not has already been determined". In this case, my analysis is helpful/useful while yours isn't. My analysis can influence your future behavior (e.g. if you run into a menacing raccoon in the future, it will increase the chances that you will be able to defend yourself properly), especially if you didn't know this before, while your analysis probably doesn't affect behavior (except to promote apathy perhaps, which is likely even detrimental). [ Disclaimer: I know nothing about raccoons, it was just an example ] It doesn't mean you are wrong, it's just that saying "everything is predetermined" is not a useful way of looking at the world. It's like saying "white paint is white", which is not very surprising. Strictly speaking, it's not even quite correct: quantum mechanics tells us that, even though the universe has (deterministic) physical laws, it also behaves randomly at a fundamental level. However, that does not change the fact that we don't have free will (since we have zero control over the randomness). But it's conceivable that some of our decisions might be affected by quantum randomness (this is even obvious in some contrived, but realistic Schrödinger's-cat-like scenarios).
    - lawlessone 3y ago
      >The act of me giving him credit or not doing it has already been determined. Scientific predestination? /j
- mcphage 3y ago
  Sure, but he's still the person that was determined would get paid.
- tshaddox 3y ago
  A funny question, since on those terms we’re also not able to choose whether we give him credit for writing the book.
  - neuromanser 3y ago
    (Based on what I've read, it makes sense to me that) we're not. A coin toss outcome seems random only because / as long as some of the initial conditions are unknown.
- kalupa 3y ago
  I think you make a mistake and assume "predetermined" is the opposite of "free will"
- The5thElephant 3y ago
  This is an absurd argument because it inconsistently moves the value of giving credit outside of the realm of determinism. Since everything is determined then the concept of credit would become meaningless. It is not meaningless because it exists within the subjective world created from determinism. Just like you can't say a criminal is not guilty of a crime without free will, because the concept of crime exists within the same subjective context as the experience of the criminal choosing to commit a crime. Choice and will still exist, they are just not "Free" in the sense of being determined by something outside of physics and its resulting emergent systems. It would be like arguing that a waterfall does not exist and is not beautiful because if you look closely enough at it all you see are numbers representing the states of molecules and velocities. Meaning does not require "free will", and the very concept of a will being "Free" is absurd since a resulting choice is either completely random (And thus not really anyone's will) or is determined by prior states and circumstances (the things that make you you) and is thus not really "Free".
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    I was going to provide a substantial response, but then I realized it wouldn't matter either way if this is true.
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    I think that somehow determinism/choice has been confused with ability to judge in modern philosophy. Calvinists certainly didn't think sinning was good, just because people had no choice. Nobody would say a robot helping you isn't better than one that harms you, simply because it makes no choice. A machine programmed to write a great book is a good machine! Sapolsky should be credited and recognized!
Turing_Machine 3y ago
Whenever I see some one denying the existence of free will, I feel like punching him in the face, then saying "Why are you so angry at me? According to you, I couldn't help it!"
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  That's silly. A NOT gate will change state when stimulated by a logic signal. Neither the signal nor the gate have "free will" in any meaningful sense but it happens anyways. Arguably, you're disproving your own point by eliciting a reaction that's not rational according to someone's belief system.
  - Turing_Machine 3y ago
    Then there's no reason for me not to do it, then. Right? We all should do exactly as evolution encourages us to do in any situation.
    - mr_toad 3y ago
      > We all should do exactly as evolution encourages us to do in any situation. What makes you think we don’t?
    - vidarh 3y ago
      This argument is logically incoherent. Whether or not you have free will, punching someone in the face is likely to have consequences. That is your reason to consider whether or not to do it. If we assume you have free will, it provides you with the opportunity to actively make the choice that will get you the best outcome. If we assume you do not, then that won't alter the outcomes, nor the reasons to prefer one choice over the other, the only thing that has changed is whether or not the choice you made was a genuine choice or would always play out the same way if we somehow was able to rewind time. That the outcome would be the same given the same input and same state of your mind does not mean there was no reasons not to act a given way, only that you had no agency in which outcome you actually end up with. But the state of your mind would be a factor in that, and a belief that your decisions has no effect on your future outcomes so it doesn't matter what you choose to do certainly would make you less likely to end up with good ones. Whether or not "rewinding time" would let you make different "choices" does not alter that.

Falimonda 3y ago

Is it this one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17Bcwg5gByU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17Bcwg5gByU

aerique 3y ago
I'm going to react to the OP through your post. > The interview Dawkins had with the Indian metaphysician (I forgot the name) made me realize how blinded Dawkins is by his material-reductionist belief system. Dawkins appeared to have no idea what the man was talking about because his belief system could not compute the meaning of what the man was trying to explain to him. I did not see that at all on the above fragment, maybe at the end a little. It was mostly two men having an interesting conversation albeit at different metaphysical levels and, especially Dawkins, trying to find a common ground. The video is called "Satish Kumar schools Richard Dawkins" which is ridiculous and leading.
- lawlessone 3y ago
  All debate videos on YouTube are like that now to get views. Declaring X won before you even watch. Usually it's video of Ben Shapiro awkwardly reciting some argument he remembered wrong, while the commenters make disparaging remarks about the other parties hair color. Debate's have become less about who made good points etc and more like a pokemon battle of debate tactics. steelmanning, devils advocate, etc

jjoonathan 3y ago

100% of recent posts I've seen discussing reductive approaches have slammed them, so it's time for a reminder about why we do it. Truth. Falsifiable truth. Everyone knows that reductive approaches are limited. It's in the name. They are a tradeoff. Obviously the world is complex and so intuitively you want to embrace complexity, but the more you do this the more your theories become non-falsifiable and therefore not even wrong, severely limiting their scope because most important truths about the world are falsifiable. This is why spiritualism, mysticism, and religious metaphysics failed so completely to discover the wondrous scientific truths underlying our world, even though these things were supposed to be in their weelhouse. The temptation of the non-falsifiable was a poison apple. Once eaten, the plausible overwhelmed and crowded out the true, and they were never able to build physical knowledge reliable enough to stack, let alone stack high enough to discover that we are all made of star stuff and other such wonders. Truth turned out to be stranger and more beautiful than fiction -- the real conceit was in handing the reins to our imaginations when the world around us exceeded our imaginations so thoroughly. Speaking of which, the neuroscientists figured out how engrams work. It's beautiful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5trRLX7PQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5trRLX7PQY

tech_ken 3y ago
> most important truths about the world are falsifiable I think it depends on what you deem "important". There are many truths that I relied on just this morning alone which aren't "falsifiable" in the like Popper-derived sense. In my own head I call these "contingent truths", things which are true of the world by mutual convention or by the accumulation of human history. For example, my name or the name of my spouse; the designation of the gravel patch on the corner of our block as an area for my dog to pee off-leash; the presence of paint on the road which keeps my bike separate from cars. In some sense these are all material truths, properties of things in the world which have a falsifiable flavor (like "color" or "mass"). But I do think that their contingent nature, the fact that they are products of human decision making, taste, and history, gives them a different character than what most people keep in mind when they say "falsifiable truths" (scientific statements about the world). On a cosmological sense the latter type of truths are definitely "more important", but on the scale of things that actually determine the quality and shape of my life it's contingent truths which dominate. Spiritualism and mysticism proliferate in part (IMO) because they promise a bridge between the two scales, they reconcile the personal and the cosmic. I feel like Dawkins-era materialism has failed to have similar dominance because it only plays on the cosmic domain, and more often than not scoffs at modern attempts to explore the world of contingent truths (I don't meet many Dawkins-ites who are interested in the modern approach to sociology, which I think has done a pretty creditable job trying to deal with the contingent nature of social dynamics). Moreover, contingent truths are rapidly becoming an important area for multiple fields: many modern problems of engineering and science have contingent faces (infrastructure, big tech, medicine, AI). Being unable to provide guidance for negotiating, or even really a basic vocabulary of, social reality is an enormous hole. I say all this because I do consider myself a material-reductionist, or at least have been aggressively so in the past, but have been left kind of cold by how the movement has developed. It seems too shell-shocked by the culture wars of the 80s-00s and is unable (or no longer able) to act with the sense of openness or curiosity that I think is required by genuine truth-seeking. This is why I'd imagine you see so much criticism of it recently, not because the ideology is fundamentally wrong, but because its standard-bearers are no longer able to push it forward in a way that the meets the needs of the moment.

lawlessone 3y ago

Dawkins is a great evo biologist, but his atheism (outside of arguments from biology) is always kinda layman. I say this as an atheist. Selfish gene is great book. The God delusion is just ok. When he tries to argue about metaphysics or argue through religious arguments on god he's only just ok at it and loses because he's doesn't have the home team advantage he has in biology.

jddj 3y ago
I read most of The Greatest Show on Earth and it felt weak but moreso because it felt obvious. It might have been more interesting in a time/culture bubble where evolution wasn't taken for granted or the belief in God wasn't known to come with a lot of cognitive dissonance baggage. A bit of cool trivia here and there but overall it felt like a celebratory piece written for the already converted. Which, ironically, feels a bit like someone releasing a determinist book today.

ravetcofx 3y ago

Not this one eh? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O_mFtQiI0EY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O_mFtQiI0EY If not I'd love if you could find it