Robert Sapolsky On Free Will

[otjm]

I will concede he has arguments,.

Validity is entirely a different matter.

And while he is not alone, there is plenty to the contrary.

“My mother made me do it” ignores the fact that people do make different decisions, and if they had no free will, they could not modify decisions as decisions are “driven” by one’s biology. And there is more than ample work in both psychiatry and psychology to the contrary.

I would be exceedingly surprised to find that he is not an atheist, as I suspect that as a driver.

 

[Wesrock]

And this is where the problem lies. “Our soul does it” is not an explanation. It’s just vague hand-waving, allowing us to hold on to our ideals of free will etc. without any evidence at all that it exists. Nobody has ever demonstrated the existence of a soul. Where does it reside? How does it interact with our physical selves?

I find it striking that some people, not necessarily you, are happy to dismiss the idea of an intellect and a will entirely because they can’t measure it physically, denying their entire experience based only upon their limited experience. The fact that it can’t (possibly) be explained by physical phenomena alone is in itself evidence that there is something more.

Dualistic free will is where, if you could go back in time to a decision point, where everything in the universe is exactly the same as it was the first time, you could make a different decision.

And many people would deny that as free will at all, because I fail to see why the situation should or could possibly play out differently if everything, including the person’s knowledge and desires, are exactly the same. That it would play out the same is not evidence that choices, self, and the mind are an illusion and that we’re nothing more than chemical reactions. That if repeated it played out differently would suggest that our choices are random, lack sufficient explanation, and don’t follow from our own knowledge and desires.

 

[FredBloggs]

I find it striking that some people, not necessarily you, are happy to dismiss the idea of an intellect and a will entirely because they can’t measure it physically, denying their entire experience based only upon their limited experience.

Hmmm, define “dismiss.” I haven’t dismissed the idea of free will, I’ve pointed out that we have no evidence that it exists, and some evidence that it probably doesn’t. For free will to exist, there has to be a means by which it influences our actions. Our brains are lumps of meat and nobody has explained how they defy the laws of physics to be sufficiently non-deterministic. So if free will doesn’t come from within the brain, it must come from outside the brain. And nobody has explained how some non-corporeal “self” also defies the laws of physics to influence the workings of our brain.

So based on what we know, free will is an illusion.

The fact that it can’t (possibly) be explained by physical phenomena alone is in itself evidence that there is something more.

Not at all. That’s like saying, “I can’t explain why I’m psychic, so there must be some cosmic mechanism that we don’t understand.” Er… or actually I’m just not psychic.

And many people would deny that as free will at all, because I fail to see why the situation should or could possibly play out differently if everything, including the person’s knowledge and desires, are exactly the same. That it would play out the same is not evidence that choices, self, and the mind are an illusion and that we’re nothing more than chemical reactions.

Then I think we’re in agreement, and you have a different definition of free will than I (and most people) do. Most people’s definition of free will is that faced with options, they have a free choice. This is dualistic free will. Dan Dennett, for example, has a different definition of free will, whereby intrinsic indeterminism somehow gives us options to consider that we can then apply our intellect to. This is all well and good, but he fails to explain how this would work, so to some degree it’s begging the question.

That if repeated it played out differently would suggest that our choices are random, lack sufficient explanation, and don’t follow from our own knowledge and desires.

Again, I think I agree with this.

 

[po18guy]

If Mr. Sapolsky has somehow forced me to reply to this simply because he wrote the article, I’m going to take the matter up with him some day.

But wait, maybe we are actually controlling him, since he will at some point have to confront opposing views…

 

[tafan2]

We don’t “feel” that we have free will, we experience it, each and every moment of our lives. One asks for physical evidence, the evidence is everytime we make a decision.
The contrary argument, that our brain is playing a huge trick on us is an argument without evidence.
The fact that we cannot understand how our mind is non-deterministic is not convincing in the least. We don’t understand how something works, so we make up a theory that contradicts all of human experience?