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
And what's there to understand? An ivory tower of connected ideas which are not falsifiable!
On the same note: I'm glad I don't understand the nuances of zodiacal signs.
Thankfully I was born an Aries so I'm rational enough to not believe in that junk.
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.
You are either a scientist, and live in the perpetual darkness of never knowing anything for sure, only occasionally pierced by a pale ray of weak light of uncertain knowledge; or in the land of the mystics who conquer the god-given truth with their every breath. Make your choice.
And stop bragging for dog's sake. We haven't got a clue how the world works. And we are busy destroying it so fast we'll never know.
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-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.
Just because you don't have free will doesn't mean your behavior is not affected by your environment.
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).
Scientific predestination? /j
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".
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!
Arguably, you're disproving your own point by eliciting a reaction that's not rational according to someone's belief system.
Right?
We all should do exactly as evolution encourages us to do in any situation.
What makes you think we don’t?
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.
At a high level, the argument is that free will is an illusion that is highly constrained by your environment. In fact, your own example of punching him in the face only serves to support their case. You’re not free to randomly punch people in the face in most places on earth.
Now, I will likely be punished for that, but that doesn't make me incapable of doing it.
People commit crimes all the time, dude. If they have no free will, there is absolutely no justification for punishing them.
I think they are conflating free will with freedom and capability and it sounds a bit off the rails.
Even organisms that clearly lack free will (like bacteria) will respond to stimulus.
This presumes a very specific sets of views on morality. One might argue that it makes whatever reaction you feel like justified, because it was not a choice. Certainly if we can't punish you for hitting someone, we can't punish the person you hit if they hit back.
Others would argue that while it would remove the moral justification for retribution, free will or not does not need to affect the moral argument for punishment as a means to reduce the chance of reoffending or even general effects on the rest of the population.
Free will only affects whether or not you had any immediate control over what you did, not on the effects it had on society, nor to what extent you pose a future risk or whether failure to punish you affects the future risks to society from others, all of which are factors in peoples views on the extent to which punishment is moral.
Convince yourself that you actually do have free will by not feeling that urge.
I dont give my water-heater a pass for staring fires because "it cant help it". The water-heater is the problem and fully to blame. It should be fixed or replaced.
By what metric would I be a "bad machine". And who put you in charge of deciding what "bad machines" are?
> The water-heater is the problem and fully to blame.
Nonsense. Water heaters are not sentient beings with free will and cannot be "blamed" for anything. Perhaps the designer can be blamed, or perhaps the homeowner who didn't maintain the water heater can be blamed, but the water heater itself, having no free will, can't be blamed (or punished) for any behavior it exhibits.
I mean, you don't see people putting defective water heaters in prison, right? Why not? Because they have no free will, and are thus deemed incapable of committing crimes..
My metric is machines that punch me in the face are bad, and I put myself in charge of deciding it. If enough people agree with me, we can make rules and hire cops to stop the machines behavior we don't like.
>I mean, you don't see people putting defective water heaters in prison, right? Why not? Because they have no free will, and are thus deemed incapable of committing crimes..
I'm not proposing putting it in jail, just repair or replacement. On the other hand, people don't ignore their water heater starting fires because "it was designed that way" or "it is a product of its environment and mistreatment".
I saying it is irrelevant if the water heater has choice or not. It is simply a problem that needs to be delt with either way. Blame isnt mutually exclusive. The water heater could have a defective design, poor maintenance, and as a result be defective itself.
I don't have to believe it has choice or there is a tiny man inside it to go about fixing it and stopping it from burning down my house
If you don't have any free will, you're not "deciding" anything. "Deciding" implies that you have choices, and that is just what you do not have.
Right?
> On the other hand, people don't ignore their water heater starting fires
Of course they don't. But they don't blame it in the same way they'd blame a person who intentionally set their house on fire, or even a rat that chewed wires and caused a fire. The person would be imprisoned, and the rats would be exterminated. Neither of those makes sense unless there's free will involved.
Not in the free will sense. It is a decision in the sense that when presented two or more options, I take and action and select one based on my preferences. Free will isnt required to take an action when presented options. I can program a robot to go towards the light, and then put it in front of a light and dark hallways. It doesn't need free will so select/choose/decide to go down the one with the light.
>Of course they don't. But they don't blame it in the same way they'd blame a person who intentionally set their house on fire, or even a rat that chewed wires and caused a fire. The person would be imprisoned, and the rats would be exterminated. Neither of those makes sense unless there's free will involved.
I think that depends a lot on the person assigning blame. I think both of those make perfect sense. If the rats were robots with no free will, I would still want them exterminated because they are destructive robots that chew wires. If some arsonist lit my house on fire, I might still want them improsoned. Not because they chose to commit arson, but because they are an arsonist. They are just another destructive robot, like the rats, or the water heater. Fix, replace, and sometime make an example for the other destructive robots.
If none of them have free will, "making an example" can't possibly make any difference.
Arguing that changing these inputs can't make any difference without free will is equivalent to arguing the output of a deterministic function can't change if its input changes.
Here is an example of a function for which that is wrong:
f(x) -> x
It's a 100% deterministic function, yet its output changes with its input.And? If there's no free will, there's no choice about "changing the state of the world", either.
Right?
> It's a 100% deterministic function, yet its output changes with its input.
Not if there is no choice about the value of x.
There is no choice only doing.
There is no choice involved, but what is the current state of the world over time still changes. You don't even need mutable state to model this, just the progression of a calculation where the output of one step becomes the input of the next.
> > It's a 100% deterministic function, yet its output changes with its input.
> Not if there is no choice about the value of x.
Here is a program using the earlier definition of f:
result = f(1)
result2 = f(result + 1)
This program is purely deterministic, yet the value of x in the application of f is different at two different points during the execution, and so the output it produces is different at different points in time. Furthermore it also shows how output in a purely deterministic manner can affect subsequent input, and so affect the output again.This is what is meant above with "yet its output changes with its input". Perhaps you're struggling with the use of "changes" to apply to multiple different executions of the function.
The point is the same: If you assume a purely predetermined universe, it by no means means behaviours can not be different at different points in time, because inputs to a given process are different because of what has gone on before.
No change or choice in the sense you're using it is required.
If I put shade in front of my light seeking robot or a plant, it will change what it is doing.
For that matter, a soccer ball doesn't need free will to move when I kick it. It goes from being at rest to in motion because something new happened to it.
Nonsensicality, criminality, judgment, quality, all go out the window if we are all just puppets on strings.
You seem to assume that a lot of judgements we make of actions require that the actions have been made "freely". But we judge things that we all agree does not have free will behind them all the time. E.g. we judge the weather.
> Nonsensicality, criminality, judgment, quality, all go out the window if we are all just puppets on strings.
None of them go out the window. The morality of how we approach some of them are affected. E.g. I do strongly believe that any judgement of peoples actions morally should account for their lack of ability to act otherwise, and that this e.g. makes punishments or reactions based out of a desire for vengeance entirely immoral, and that punishment in general should be based on an assessment of how to minimise the harm to society as a whole - and that includes taking into account harm to the person you're punishing, but that does not remove the need for judging criminals because criminals still affect society irrespective of how they make their decisions.
It does mean that from my point of view a punishment is only justified if you can show that the harm from imprisoning someone sufficiently mitigates risks of harms to society that sufficiently outweigh the harm we do to the person we imprison, and that would certainly affect how you deal with those you imprison, and when you use prison sentences, but it would not end imprisonment.
And we are just puppets on a string. I feel comfortable making that statement firmly, because nobody has ever even come up with as much of a definition of "free will" that isn't compatibilist (that is, an illusion over predetermination, though many compatibilists would get irate at me describing it as an illusion) or otherwise does not in any meaningful way make actions "free", much less posited any remotely testable hypothesis for what such "free" decisions even would be that would let our minds influence them without any cause and affect that isn't some mix of deterministic and randomness that we have no meaningful influence over. The burden is on those who believe in free will to, for starters, define it in a logically coherent way other than just arguing in the negative by insisting we're somehow different from all other matter and energy we've observed.
If you can give me an example of someone putting "the weather" in jail or forcing it to pay a fine, please do so.
> criminals still affect society irrespective of how they make their decisions.
That's entirely not the point. If the criminals have no free will, punishing them has no effect whatsoever on society. They had no choice but to commit their crimes, and they will have no choice as to whether or not to commit future crimes, regardless of what punishment is given to them.
Irrelevant. We don't put every human we judge in jail or make them pay a fine, or indeed have them put in front of a court either. Most of the time we either just glare at them or tell them off or otherwise express our disapproval.
> That's entirely not the point. If the criminals have no free will, punishing them has no effect whatsoever on society. They had no choice but to commit their crimes, and they will have no choice as to whether or not to commit future crimes, regardless of what punishment is given to them.
This is blatantly absurd. What you are arguing here is effectively that a different input applied to a deterministic process can't affect the future output of that deterministic process. You can disprove that by flicking a light switch and observing that the light comes on. The light has no free will, and the process is deterministic, and yet the output is different when you apply a different input.
In a fully deterministic universe, you were always going to flick that light switch, and so seeing it as a "change" is a point of view not an actual argument for agency. But when you do the light did not have a choice to remain off. With an entity - like a human - with more state, the relationship is not always remotely as predictable, but the notion that changing an input can't produce a different output than would have been produced if the input hadn't been changed given a deterministic universe is equally absurd.
[If we add space for actual randomness as one of the inputs or state, we may not be able to say it was "always what was going to happen" but we would be able to say it'd always be what was going to happen given the same set of randomness (and randomness does still not help with the free will argument, so that distinction is not particularly relevant to this subject)]
I am arguing nothing of the sort. If there is no free will, there is no choice about the value of the input.
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.
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.
If not I'd love if you could find it
> 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.
Debate's have become less about who made good points etc and more like a pokemon battle of debate tactics.
steelmanning, devils advocate, etc