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A Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert Sapolsky
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y agoIsn’t writing a book that hopes to persuade people that free will doesn’t exist actually a testament to belief in free will.
- lern_too_spel 3y agoNo. He had no choice but to write it. You had no choice but to interpret it incorrectly, and I had no choice but to correct you.
- block_dagger 3y agoI reply because I have no choice.
- ImHereToVote 3y agoYou simply have a supernatural belief about choice. What if choice is material. Then you do have choice, the problem is that someone could calculate what your choice will be. But it's still your choice.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- criddell 3y agoA ball doesn’t choose to roll downhill. Would a sentient ball believe it is choosing to roll downhill?
- ImHereToVote 3y agoDepends on the form of computation the ball possessed and at what scale. If it had sufficient computation for agency then I would call it choice. Choice is an emergent property. Just like the ability to freeze is an emergent phenomena of a set amount of particles.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- avgcorrection 3y ago> He had no choice but to write it. “I had no choice but to write the book” is not a coherent response to the claim that he betrays a personal belief in Free Will via his stated motivation for writing the book.
- lern_too_spel 3y agoHe had no choice but to state the motivation he stated.
- avgcorrection 3y agoNon sequitur.
- lern_too_spel 3y agoIt follows directly from lack of free will. Lack of free will does not mean that the author makes correct statements about his beliefs all the time.
- avgcorrection 3y agoThen you are making an irrelevant statement about the causality of him writing a book. Not about how his apparent belief is incoherent or not. Thus a non sequitur.
- lern_too_spel 3y agoI understand what you're saying now. Thanks for spelling out what you meant by your previous comment. A better response would have been if I spelled out that persuading people not to believe in free will does not require the persuader to believe in free will.
- hackinthebochs 3y agoFree will skepticism doesn't mean the future can't be altered by changes in present circumstances. Presenting arguments changes one's circumstances and so can change future belief states. Free will generally means more than just making choices. I can't vouch for Sapolsky's presentation, but what science tells us is that branching dynamics, the substrate of choice, supervenes on non-branching dynamics. What that means for free will/moral responsibility isn't so obvious.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y agoWhat are “belief” and “arguments” in a world without free will?
- hackinthebochs 3y agoA state of mind that disposes one to various thoughts and behaviors. There doesn't seem to be any tension between belief and a lack of free will.
- qez2 3y agoThere is indeed a tension of one defines free will in terms of thoughts and behaviors.
- hackinthebochs 3y agoYou're going to have to spell it out because it's not obvious.
- qez2 3y ago[dead]
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y agoHow are arguments different from physical actions (for example what is the difference between telling someone something and applying electric shocks to them) in a world without free will? Aren’t they all purely physical stimuli that produce a certain response? I am sure an electric shock also produces a certain state of mind.
- 303uru 3y agoNot at all. What do you think free will is? Unless you think there is something beyond the physical world, the belief in free will makes absolutely no sense.
- avgcorrection 3y agoIf there ever was a Western Philosophical mind-disease then it would be the idea that you monorail your whole entire—absolutely all of it—personal philosophy by believing in one single thing. - Do you like Buddhist mindfulness? Well then you must necessarily commit yourself to the idea that people should be happy doormats for other people and for their circumstances - Do you believe that sociological factors are a thing? Well then you must necessarily think that poor people and other “poor people” have no agency and are only a victim of circumstances (conservative rebuke) - Do you believe in Science (waves hands)? Well then you necessarily commit yourself to a certain kind of Determinism that me and a cackle^W gaggle of scientists (who aren’t philosophers) find to be Obvious Doing biology while factoring in Free Will sounds nonsensical. So don’t do it. But what you do outside of biology (on your free time)? Well, that’s something different. I think Chomsky said something like this about the Free Will debate: if Free Will isn’t real then debating it won’t matter, per definition. Unless you are fine with the discourse devolving into “I am making these moral arguments because I am compelled to by circumstance”, in which case everything you are saying is—by your own admission—vacuous.
- rvbissell 3y ago> a cackle of scientists a gaggle, perhaps?
- mgh2 3y agoMaybe not theoretically, but practically it matters what you think of it: https://medium.com/p/4fecf8095812 https://medium.com/p/4fecf8095812
- avgcorrection 3y ago> Ever wondered why the 1% define the status quo? Why we idolize and follow their dogmas? The premise is Idealistic nonsense.
- visarga 3y agoFree will is a confusing term. If you mean in the sense of physical indeterminism and supremacy of will over nature, it probably doesn't exist. But if you mean "taking decisions for your own reasons" it's another thing, perfectly ok to exist. People mix the physical sense with the psychological sense of "free will", making a salad of the whole debate. If they made it clear what they mean probably there would be much less to disagree about.
- sickofparadox 3y ago"Much of the book is devoted to establishing that our behavior is determined in this sense, and thus not free. Sapolsky holds that this implies we cannot legitimately be held morally responsible for it." Is it crazy to not believe that he actually believes this? It feels like a kind of purely academic position that you can only take and come to because you live in a world and a society that already holds people morally responsible for their actions. And through that has created an environment where a quirky academic can pose such a nonsensical thought as "neuroscience" with no real consequences because he is not involved in keeping the ship right.
- hackinthebochs 3y agoWhat's nonsensical about it? Determining that we can't rationally hold people responsible doesn't mean that society is powerless to defend itself against bad actors. What it does is undermines the justification for moral indignation and our retributive tendencies. If someone contracted a contagious illness, we would quarantine them despite the fact that they're not responsible for their illness. There's no contradiction in defensive behavior and recognizing a lack of moral responsibility.
- sickofparadox 3y agoI am reminded of the phrase "The easiest way to prove a nihilist as a hypocrite is to point a shotgun at his head." You have reconstructed moral responsibility in no responsibility land, possibly only removing the judgement of character that comes with "defensive behavior".
- graphe 3y agoMoral responsibility isn't the same as responsibility. Leprosy isn't a moral failing, although people still will discriminate against lepers.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y agoIs discrimination against lepers a moral failing?
- zingababba 3y agoAh yes the crystal palace, yawn.
- Workaccount2 3y agoIt's trivial to solve the debate over free will: Given a computer of infinite computing power, write a program that exhibits "free will". You quickly realize that the only decision making tools you have are either deterministic, random, or some mix of the two. There is no "free will" tool. And if there is, it has to be some kind of extra-dimensional transcendental property. Or perhaps if you're loose with definitions, you'll consider a stack of deterministic and random processes of arbitrary complexity to be "free will".
- The_Colonel 3y ago> write a program that exhibits "free will". A bit more detailed spec would be really helpful here. What are the test cases? How can QA validate if the program exhibits "free will" or not?
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y agoWhat do you mean by “realize”. What does “realize” mean in a world without free will?
- karaterobot 3y agoRight. And let's not forget that any such 100-line program would not be—in any meaningful sense—written by anybody, but instead predetermined by the initial conditions of the universe 14 billion years ago, give or take. Something bounced off something else (as it had to) and, presto, these particular tokens were arranged just so. Remember, of course, that the same initial position and velocity of particles during the big bang implied the inevitable and precise creation of the compiler, the processor, the memory, the keyboard, the particular arrangement of letters on that keyboard (and the language they represent, which itself does not communicate anything that wasn't ordained before the first stars coalesced), as well as the office chair you sat in—with its 7 points of articulation!—and the Homer Simpson coffee mug that nobody decided to fill with coffee, but which was in all important ways filled with coffee by the universe itself. At no point did anything ever happen except by predetermined interactions, and the initial conditions of the universe caused all of human history to play out exactly as it did. I think we can all agree that that just makes intuitive sense, and isn't preposterous at all. In fact, we have to.
- baggy_trough 3y agoThis claim is like saying that because the laws of physics are time reversible, that there is no difference between going forward and backwards in time.
- alecst 3y agoI identify with Sapolsky's position. Plus, there's a shift in perspective which comes from adopting it. For example, instead of blaming someone for "freely making a bad choice" you can shift your attention to the circumstances that allowed for those bad choices to arise in the first place, and try to tackle those. I think it makes for a less blameful world.
- visarga 3y agoNo, this is naive. See game theory, the "tit-for-tat" problem. Can't empower agents who would later betray you, or society would stop functioning. Punishing those to exploit the system is in the interest of everyone else. Would you set free a raper or killer (it wasn't his fault, it's society, culture, etc) and let the next victim pay the price?
- kaibee 3y agoYou're misunderstanding. You can hold that the killer isn't 'morally' responsible, ie: deserves to be tortured for their crime, but still imprison them indefinitely for the good of everyone else.
- The_Colonel 3y agoThis is more or less already the case in the western judicial systems, where punishment is not meant to be a revenge. The harsher punishments (like executions) are meant to deter. I think there are exceptions like Nuremberg trials where the executions were more of a revenge.
- karaterobot 3y agoI think you'd have to believe in something like an omniscient and omnipotent force (e.g. God) to really accept a fully deterministic universe. You'd have to believe that the initial conditions of the universe were just so that all of history would happen to lead to you typing that message, and me responding to it, solely by the physical interactions of particles. It just seems so unlikely to me. It's a bullet I'm not willing to bite. It's actually less ridiculous to me to believe in God determining every action, which I also can't bring myself to do either. All that's left is some form of free will or compatibilism, neither of which are fully satisfying.
- gilbetron 3y ago> “This book … is both about the science of why there is no free will and the science of how we might best live once we accept that.” Well, if there's no free will, we can't help how we live, nor can we choose to accept if we believe in free will.
- jadbox 3y agoTrue, but even without free will, you can still be deterministically programmed by the book to personally operate in a way that's less illusionary. The acceptance arrives [the book claims] as a mechanical process of undergoing the reading and understanding.
- 0xbadcafebee 3y agoThat is some really heavy-handed cherrypicking to justify an opinion. The entire concept is nonsense, summed up in one sentence: This book … is both about the science of why there is no free will and the science of how we might best live once we accept that First of all, if you have no free will, then it doesn't matter how you live, or want to live, or try to live, because you aren't in control. Right off the bat we can stop reading. But more than that, this suggests that you can decide how you live, despite not having free will. So what's the point of free will? Practically speaking there must be no point, so there's no point to this book. Second, the definition of "free will" is always subjective, because the concept is imaginary. There is no such thing as "will". It's a word used to describe the resulting actions which can be derived from a biological being's desire to act. It's not an action in itself, nor a physical thing; it's metaphysical. It's nonsense humans made up, like morality, ethics, right and wrong, God, etc. And the "freeness" of this imaginary concept is, again, subjective, based on what constitutes "freedom" to you. So what you consider to be "free will" is different than what I consider it. And even if we came to the same conclusion, it still doesn't matter, because you can't eat metaphysics. Third, like the second, is that how we might "best live" is again subjective and based on not just ethics, but practical considerations. How you "best live" is gonna be different from someone halfway around the world. Even if you have free will, your form of "living" is subjective. Science really has nothing to do with this discussion other than to provide the tailoring for this Emperor's new clothes. If you want to talk about living well, or free will, just make anything up you want. It will have the same validity.
- shitter 3y ago> First of all, if you have no free will, then it doesn't matter how you live, or want to live, or try to live, because you aren't in control. Right off the bat we can stop reading. But more than that, this suggests that you can decide how you live, despite not having free will. So what's the point of free will? Practically speaking there must be no point, so there's no point to this book. I don't get your argument. Of course you can decide how you live, despite there being no free will. It's just the confluence of genetic + environmental factors and life experiences that went into shaping you which determines your decision (and whether or not you ever get to make a decision in the first place). The point Sapolsky is making is not that we can't make choices. It's that each of us makes choices within constraints we never set ourselves, and those constraints determine our choices. And this is important to realize because society is currently structured in a way that assumes we are mostly free agents who bear the ultimate responsibility (whether that results in punishment or reward) for our actions, when that's actually mostly not the case.
- dotsam 3y agoHow could you know what a perfect simulated version of me would do in advance, without first running the code? Even if you found a more efficient algorithm for getting the exact same end states faster, at some point you will reach a computationally irreducible limit, where you can’t predict what the improved simulated agent will do without first actually running the code. When you run the code it will freely decide to do one thing over another, and no one can know what this will be in advance, even in principle.
- Kim_Bruning 3y agoAnd even if we make an exact duplicate of you, it would immediately start to diverge from you, as it started accumulating its own experiences. The rate of divergence would not be steady or linear. Particular events would accelerate it or lead to sudden insights or changes of approach for either of you.
- 303uru 3y agoStating there is no free will does mean we can predict everything you'll do. The only way to simulate the universe is to produce another universe and even then the reality of quantum physics is that future states have randomness not perfect determinism. That said, saying you have free will is saying you have some "magical" extension of self beyond the physical.
- dotsam 3y ago> Stating there is no free will does mean we can predict everything you'll do You can only predict it after you've run the simulation once, and after you have let the simulated person do what they want to for the first time. During the first run, free will is unpredictable. Only after you have run it can you say "if I run the simulation again with the exact same parameters, I know what they will do next". And if you find a way to create a faster version of the simulated person algorithm, then the problem just devolves to the faster version. How can you predict what the fast-free-will person will do before you let it do what it wants to do? And so on.
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- photochemsyn 3y agoWhat Sapolsky promotes here is a useful philosophy for those who've tied their career prospects and financial futures to authoritarian systems of control that are also deeply corrupt. Case examples of individuals whose consciences could be eased by adopting this philosophy could include an aspiring junior scientist working under Trofim Lysenko in the USSR, an accountant who answered to Adolf Eichmann in Nazi Germany, and perhaps also an ambitious tenure-seeking academic in today's highly corporatized American academia environment. If the cognitive dissonance gets too high, well that's what the alcohol and antidepressants are for.
- The_Colonel 3y ago> we need to accept the absurdity of hating any person for anything they’ve done What does the author mean by that? People have no control of hating others or any other thoughts. It sounds like author is guilt-tripping readers into believing people can't be blamed for what they do.
- hackinthebochs 3y agoYou might feel anger towards your toaster if it burned your toast. But presumably you would catch yourself and realize that the toaster isn't a proper target for anger, indignation, etc. Sapolsky wants you to think of other people in a similar way.
- Tempest1981 3y agoI'm going to interpret the title as "You have _less_ free-will than you may think". Things are rarely 100% one way or another, unless you're on social media.
- alienicecream 3y agoAre you the thing that decides between courses of action you will take given a situation? If you are, then you have free will. If you aren't then you don't. In practice, there is no one who doesn't identify with it, except maybe schizophrenics. So, the choice is yours.
- criddell 3y agoI think the argument revolves around whether choices are real or just what you experience. If I build a rock-paper-scissors playing robot that has total access to your brain, body, and environment, do you think it would be possible for it to make one that never loses? I think it's probably possible because it can detect your intention to play scissors and in the milliseconds it takes for you to deploy them, it can deploy rock. Through constant improvements, maybe I could increase detection time from milliseconds to seconds. What if I could get it up to a day? If I build a rock-paper-scissors robot that could beat you 100% of the time using a list printed out the day before, what would that mean? Your experience is still that you made a choice but that choice was caused by everything that lead up to the moment you play scissors.
- sambapa 3y agoBuddhist take: there is no free will nor you are determined. Solved!
- AndrewDucker 3y agoIgnosticism is the only approach that works for me when discussing Free Will. "I will not discuss this with you until you tell me what you mean by 'Free Will'" Anything else leads to endless semantic quibbling and ducking from one argument to another to defend an ill-defined idea that the person is attached to defending.
- 303uru 3y agoExactly. Tell me what free will is? If it's a soul, god, etc... fine, no need to debate, I don't need to be that atheist. If it's not any of that, then why do you think the brain is the only physical object which doesn't work the same way as every other physical process in the universe?
- NeuNeurosis 3y agoWhile I totally agree with the defining of a subject first, I am curious about some of your implicit assumptions inherent in your statement/question. While everything works on the same rules we definitely have not arrived at the completion of a list of those rules especially when it comes how biologic systems take advantage those rules to build systems. Its inherent in systems that they allow for increased complexity beyond what the base components allow. Its not a stretch to theorize that increased complexity and the opaque nature of physical interactions might allow space for Free Will or independence of consciousness in certain circumstances.
- 303uru 3y agoI definitely lack the words to be super eloquent on this front, but I boil it down to a computer comparison. No matter how complex a computer we make it will take inputs and compute outputs. I now of no evidence of a level of complexity at which this is no longer true. I think the idea of free will is enticing, I'd love to look at a situation in which I prevailed and say "yes, I overcame everything to make that happen." But I think the only supported conclusion is that I made the decision and action I made due to a complex, lifelong history of things that happened internally (biology) and externally to me. Comparatively, I think free will is essentially asking that a computer take inputs and it's programming and shrug that all off to come up with a completely novel output.
- haswell 3y agoIf you find these ideas bizarre and impossible to accept as useful as I did when I first encountered them, it's well worth a deep dive into the subject. And I think it must go hand in hand with a deep dive into the oddity that is our experience of self, which doesn't seems to really exist in the way we tend to think it does either. Another idea that I found bizarre and impossible to accept as useful when I first encountered it. But the deeper and harder you look, the less reasonable it seems to accept the idea of free will as people commonly understand it, and the more obvious it becomes that the experience of being a self is a real experience, but one that has an illusory quality and is backed by deep, unquestioned beliefs that don't hold up under scrutiny. I was raised by extremely religious parents in a church that took much of the bible literally. I realized in my teens that I was not compatible with these views, but what I took away from the experience is that many of society's deeply held beliefs about personal responsibility, retribution, shame, vengeance, etc. all have their roots in religious dogma. While a growing portion of the world has moved beyond this religiosity in most aspects of daily life, it remains embedded deeply in our legal system, and in how we treat other people who "wrong" us. I don't think it's helpful to assume that free will absolutely doesn't exist in any way shape or form, or that it absolutely does. But I do think it's useful to look at the reasons that our common conception of it can't be accurate, and to look at the resulting implications of that inaccuracy. I've personally started to see myself more as an expression of a much larger process. I'm inseparable from the history of humanity before me, from the environment that sustains me, from the evolutionary processes that led to this moment, from the circumstances of my birth and family, etc. And I find this perspective to provide - paradoxically enough - a kind of freedom from the ideas beat into me from a young age about my personal responsibility for things that in retrospect, I had zero control over. It has helped me understand the actions of others more charitably, even if those actions still require some corrective. As others have mentioned, none of this means we don't put dangerous people in prison, or that the corrective mechanisms built by society aren't useful. It just frames the picture differently, and points to the need to shift attitudes about people who break societal rules. Personally, it's helped me stop incessantly blaming myself for things that I can't possibly be responsible for, which was the gift that kept giving after I left the church. Looking back, the reason I couldn't even entertain these ideas at first is that the thing we call "free will" absolutely exists as something that we experience, but we've layered thousands of years of deeply ingrained religious thinking and interpretation on top of the experience and then let the fact that we experience it justify the layers of interpretation, without questioning the interpretation itself. More people than ever have left the explicit religious beliefs aside, but haven't really examined the source of the remaining imprints. Once you start questioning those beliefs and start a rational examination of their implications, it all starts to dissolve.
- yaris 3y agoIn all these discussions pro or contra existence of Free Will I always miss the "Will" part. If we take Sapolski's definition about a neuron being a causeless cause - ok, this would confirm (or deny) the "Free" part, but where does the "Will" part come from? Will assumes that some outcomes are more desirable than others (otherwise it is Brownian movement), but why? And here my thought stops...