A Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert Sapolsky | Hacker News Reader

A Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert Sapolsky

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31 pointsz7141 comments

Ignosticism 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.

Exactly. 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?

While 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.

I 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.

But that assumes that with the same inputs, the outputs are always the same. As far as I know this hasn't been proven for quantum mechanics. I'm just a layman but in my understanding you can only predict a probability of the result.

That's why with exactly the same inputs, the output can actually differ. Whether or not that's free will is another discussion, but the "we are a very complex yet in theory predicable computer" argument doesn't hold.

If you're willing to accept inputs that are only almost exactly the same, there's already a class of deterministic systems that can provide you with wildly different outputs.

Moreover, in such systems, the output might be impossible to predict based on the input (other than by running the system).

Deterministic doesn't necessarily imply predictable.

I'm just saying, you don't need to reach for quantum mechanics here, living organisms (and computers) are quite capable of being unpredictable even without it.

For the rest I agree with you.

Nope, there is randomness. Similarly I can run a rand() function. But is that free will?

It is true that a computer will take inputs and compute outputs, and that is all it ever can do. However, this statement does not quite end up explaining Space Invaders. There's a couple of steps in between that might have been glossed over slightly. [1]

A computer is entirely capable of generating novel (enough) output. Elsewhere I point to the trivial-seeming python function math.random(). Good luck predicting what that will do!

In reality, it turns out that math.random() and the theory behind PRNGs is not so trivial at all, and is actually quite interesting to dive in to. [2]

[1] This particular argument inspired by https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo... . It mentions using neuroscience to try to understand space invaders, which I think is funny. :-)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandom_number_generator , or eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map being used as an early PRNG

Well, funnily enough rand() isn’t all that random, but that’s beyond the point. I don’t think randomness is a good argument for free will, that’s just nature. Does a flipping coin have free will? An electron before it decoheres?

Well, randomness is definitely novel output though.

PRNGs are not-quite-random, they're actually chaotic functions.

Which is actually a bit closer to how I think free will functions if you look at it empirically from the outside. (At least: if you were to use your <free will> to try to generate 'random' numbers; which will also not be perfectly random!)

Of course, it does sort of depend on your definition of <free will>.

Oh shoot, I see why I made the error, but on checking more sources to back me up, it turns out only some PRNGs are considered chaotic, and the most used ones are not necessarily viewed with that lens in literature. Eh, it would have been easier. In future I'll have to switch to a different set of algorithms to make my argument,.

oops, python has random.random() of course.

Your argument boils down to assuming there is true randomness in the universe. You need hardware level rng with a natural source of entropy to generate non-predictable random numbers, but even then you're just at the point where maybe we could predict the randomness if we could go low enough.

We can't, so at the moment it looks as though the universe might have true randomness (I'm very sceptical of this).

But even then, so what? Does that mean free will is just decisions with some true universal randomness thrown in? How does that give you free will if it is just random? And then we're back to, what does free will even mean.

For me the crux of it is where's the boundary of 'self'. Regardless of how it came to be, we can define a bounded self (whether bio or software) that runs freely taking energy (but not decision input) from outside. Then we can say that that self produces outputs that have internal sources as being 'free'.

To me it basically comes down to infinite butterfly effects where the knowledge of past/current states of the environment can't be effectively used to predict the output of the self.

Another fun way to imagine it is to say 'I' is the complex gut microbiome that's interchanged and evolving and it's the 'source' of decisions more than anything else. It would also solve the problem of how the human population keeps increasing but souls are discrete and countable--even with reincarnation the number of creatures varies greatly. With microbiomes they can be cultivated and/or subdivided, and mixed. Of course this doesn't work out, but it's easy to see there are things that we haven't considered yet to be ruled out.

> might allow space for Free Will

Space for what? What is free will? Is it just throwing some randomness into decision making?

Today I Learned about the world Ignosticism! Thank you, I love it!

I 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.

No, 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?

You'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.

This 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.

I 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.

> 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.

You're kinda committing a conjunctive fallacy w/ some anthropic bias. The thing you're not seeing is the infinite similar multiverses that would look indistinguishable to you and you need to remember that the known universe is, very big and the rest of it could be infinite. I don't know how big that number is, but its a lot more complicated than 'this is the only way this could have happened'.

I certainly thought about that, but it seems a lot more believable to me that there's something missing from our current understanding than that this impossibly large number of interactions happened resulting in the just so universe we live in. That we live in the most absurd of all possible universes, the one where pre-determined clumps of matter post on Hacker News, typing each character one by one without choosing to do so, is harder to conceive of than that we just have free will at some level. And it's not at all hard for me to imagine that any supposed evidence, scientific or philosophical, is more than likely just flawed or limited in some way, so I have trouble buying in to arguments like this.

You're just kicking the can down the road. Where does the "god entity" come from?

It's the exact same question as "why did the universe have such and such initial conditions?". We've added a new variable, "God", to the mix, but have gained no explanatory power.

Heh, I want to disagree but I can't!

I get a similar intuition from ethology. No matter how crazy someone acts, all I can do is think "Yup, this organism is most definitely exhibiting a form of behavior" .

This gives you a level of objective detachment towards people and their words, which helps with keeping a cool head and resolving the actual underlying issues.

Isn’t writing a book that hopes to persuade people that free will doesn’t exist actually a testament to belief in free will.

No. 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.

I reply because I have no choice.

You 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.

A ball doesn’t choose to roll downhill. Would a sentient ball believe it is choosing to roll downhill?

Depends 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.

> 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.

He had no choice but to state the motivation he stated.

Non sequitur.

It 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.

Then 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.

I 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.

Free 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.

What are “belief” and “arguments” in a world without free will?

A 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.

There is indeed a tension of one defines free will in terms of thoughts and behaviors.

You're going to have to spell it out because it's not obvious.

How 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.

Well, physical actions come in many different flavors. One of those flavors is beliefs, i.e. a particular neural configuration with a certain semantic relationship within its host and the outside world. E.g. one that disposes further relevant neural configurations and relevant behaviors. I don't see the problem.

The same as it's always been. You've just been redpilled. Just as usual, as it's always been since you were alive; its the way your brain is shaped and connected.

Not 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.

How 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.

And 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.

Stating 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.

> 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.

Ya, I mistyped. I meant "doesn't." Not being predictable =/= free will. It just means there's some randomness.

It'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".

What do you mean by “realize”. What does “realize” mean in a world without free will?

Right. 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.

Human history would certainly have been different if the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs hadn't free-will'd itself into an extinction event I guess.

> Right. And let's not forget that any such 100-line program would not be—in any meaningful sense—written by anybody,

Its perfectly meaningful. If I'm hiring a programmer I know that the mindstate of the one who did the physical action of typing that program is arranged such that they can write useful code for me. Whether that is the result of free will or a chain of causality leading back to the big bang doesn't matter.

The universe is not deterministic because it has a constant stream of fundamental randomness (quantum noise) running through it. This is how you end up with the deterministic-random dichotomy.

We do not know that for sure. Yes, it looks like that, but there could be determinism all the way, we're just not equippted to measure it.

The common definition of free will is just supernatural.

I believe free will exists. It's simply not supernatural.

I don't think that's possible.

If there is no supernatural, if matter and the laws of physics are all that exist, then all you can be is matter that obeys the laws of physics. You have particles that obey the quantum laws, making up atoms that obey the laws of atomic physics, making up molecules that obey the laws of chemistry, making up neurons that obey the laws of neurology. There is nowhere in that stack for free will - it's all determinism plus noise.

The only way free will is possible is if there is more than the pure materialist position says there is.

Every time this comes up, I want to tell people they're in the lucky 10000 [1], because I get to tell them about Chaos Theory.

For a while Chaos theory was very popular. But this died down a just a little bit because who is happy with a theory that says you can't know things even in a perfectly deterministic universe? It's still a very useful and important thing to know about though.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1053/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory

But that still doesn't give you free will, because you don't control the chaos.

More like you are the chaos.

(To compress an insanely long story into a pithy but awesome oneliner)

Expanding slightly: You being [deterministically] chaotic in nature pretty much gives you all the properties of having free will afaict imvho. It covers both the ability to act with a will as well as the fact that your behavior is not practically predictable. I can live with that!

Chaos is just an arbitrary level of complexity on a deterministic/random system. It doesn't come into play here because a chaotic system is still just a stack of deterministic/random micro actions.

I can write a computer program that produces a chaotic output. However, nowhere in the computer or program will you find any free will.

Well, if I take a Mercedes apart, nowhere in any part of the car will I find the ability to comfortably cruise at 160 km/h on the autobahn. Not in the engine (it just makes funny noises), not in the suspension (it's just a bit springy when compressed) , and not in the tires (which just bounce up and down and roll off if you throw them).

Only when I put all the parts of the car together in the right order and in the right places does that property emerge.

...which is an entirely deterministic output of the design of the car. Literally the reason why the car was made the way it was.

I'm failing to see your point here, but it seems you are alluding to the idea that chaos theory produces a black box of complexity, and therefore free will exists there. Which isn't really an explanation so much as an exercise in moving goal posts into unlit corridors of knowledge.

Which doesn't even make sense because chaos theory is a theory that deals with system evolution when incomplete knowledge is known about the systems starting conditions. No where in chaos theory is there talk of supernatural phenomena. It's purely a theory of practical constraints, no physical ones.

The Mercedes example is just strictly in response to the idea that property X of a system must somehow (already) be present in one of its sub-components. It doesn't.

So a concept like free will could exhibit itself in the output of -say- a turing machine, (or turing-like entity, like a DNA strand - think tape and multiple read heads), even if none of the components has that property.

I do actually think that certain [deterministically] chaotic systems have a lot of the properties we associate with free will (the ability to make some sort of sensible choices that still seem 'random'); so I tend to see them as very similar concepts. You might have a different definition though!

> 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?

You have just proved the opposite. For a 100 lines program, you will never even know whether it will terminate or not, and what would be the result of computation.

Free will is the complete opaqueness of the thought process to you, where the only way to get the result is to run the program.

The n'th digit of pi is also opaque to me without running a program.

That's why it is a transcedental number. Maybe it becomes sentient after some digit. In fact, it certainly does.

An infinite stream of numbers does not -by necessity- contain every possible permutation.

Therefore it is not automatically proven that pi becomes sentient after some particular digit [1]

Though it's a fun thought!

[1] (eg. by way of containing a permutation that exactly describes the mind-state of thriftwy if fed to a near-future sci-fi 3d printer) .

This is patently absurd. If I did this, I would not be exercising free will but follow your instructions. Guess what, I'm choosing not to do that.

You don't chose to do anything. Your brain makes decisions and you take full credit for them. This is plainly visible too.

If I ask you to think of a car manufacturer, your brain just served up a name. No conscious input from you, no choice made, your brain decided what car maker to think of.

Maybe you think of a few and then decide from those which one to "think of" (even though you already thought of one) in effort to inject "choice". But if you pay attention to the process here, its clear that its not even you selecting. It's your brain moving the selector of which one to "think of". It's your brain that served up those other names.

Free will isn't even an illusion. It just straight up isn't even there. It's just that 99.999999% of people never even pay attention to how their head works. But it's obvious when you observe it.

And, if I go back in time and ask again, you'd choose the same manufacturer every time.

However, if I go back in time, ask you to roll a die first (or some other minimal perturbation), and THEN ask again, you might actually answer differently already; depending.

Determinism comes in a couple of flavors, one of which is "chaotic". I think that most interesting behavior lives under the header of "chaotic". Insofar as we experience free will, I think it's chaotic behavior.

I think time loop stories are one of the gateway drugs to this mode of thinking ( a time loop thought experiment is an easy way to say "repeatedly resetting the world to a known set of parameters") .

In these stories; when the protagonist goes back in time, (s)he doesn't get knocked over by people robotically acting out what they did in the time loop. But neither do events unroll completely at random.

Instead people react to the protagonist's actions, and then other people react to their reactions, etc. So what starts out in one corner with the protagonist arriving with their time machine will spread out to affect everyone else's behavior over the next few days. After a week or so this effect has spread out such that the future of this particular time line is no longer easy to determine.

Chaos is a funny thing. It's technically deterministic, but can sometimes feel like randomness.

Time loop stories themselves aren't real. But they make an interesting thought experiment that gives one an intuition on (how I think) the world works.

Assuming that the universe functions like a deterministic/stochastic machine, and that our understanding of said universe is 100% correct and complete. Except, we know for certain that our understanding of the universe isn’t 100% correct and complete. Our math and physics (which assume that the universe is a deterministic/stochastic machine) work fantastically well up to a point, then fail. Our two primary theories for physics are incompatible, so clearly there is a gap in our understanding.

Free will seems to me to be intimately tied to consciousness. Without free will, consciousness is pointless. Why be conscious if you have no choices? Yet we are conscious. Lots of things are conscious. Making conscious choices must provide evolutionary fitness value. It seems to be extremely important. And the view of the universe as a deterministic/stochastic machine has absolutely no explanation for consciousness, and it doesn’t seem like we’re getting any closer to a theory using that framework.

There are a few scientists who actually think that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of the universe. Apparently, Max Planck and some early quantum theorists thought it was. I’m not convinced yet, but I think it’s an interesting perspective, and I think it’s worth considering. But I’m definitely not convinced that there’s no free will.

The universe has a fundamental source of randomness that comes through all over the place. The universe is in no way deterministic.

But the opposite of deterministic isn't free will. It's randomness.

Programming lets you mash determinism and randomness together to arbitrary levels of depth and complexity. Yet not even the slightest hint of free will anywhere in anyone's program. Or even theoretical research into programming "free will".

In your thought experiment, you basically say, “Let’s model the universe with the assumption that there’s no free will” and use that assumption to show that there’s no free will. If you assume that the universe functions like a computer, you’ll get that result, but I need more proof to accept that the universe functions like a computer. I highly doubt that it does. If this was the seventeenth century, the argument would be that the universe functions like clockwork. That was a decent approximation at the time, but clearly not true.

I can’t say that there IS free will, but I think trying to make the determination that there isn’t with today’s level of understanding is premature. Since free will (whether real or illusory) is either an effect of consciousness or at least deeply tied to consciousness, I think we need a coherent theory of consciousness before we rule out free will. We don’t have that theory. That’s why it’s called The Hard Problem of Consciousness.

Technically chaos is deterministic, so technically correct, though a chaotic function (like a PRNG) will act in funny ways. Here's what I mean in python

    # If you use the same seed twice the 
    # outcome is predictable in some sense.

    >>> import random

    >>> random.seed(1234)
    >>> random.random()
    0.9664535356921388

    >>> random.seed(1234)
    >>> random.random()
    0.9664535356921388


    # But good luck predicting in general, 
    # especially if you don't know the seed 
    # or your  position in the sequence. 

    >>> random.random()
    0.4407325991753527

    >>> random.random()
    0.007491470058587191

.

If 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.

> a cackle of scientists

a gaggle, perhaps?

Maybe not theoretically, but practically it matters what you think of it: https://medium.com/p/4fecf8095812

> Ever wondered why the 1% define the status quo? Why we idolize and follow their dogmas?

The premise is Idealistic nonsense.

Free 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.

This is perhaps why many frame this debate around what free will is: "free will is an illusion" vs "free will does not exist." It bends away from fatalism. The science and theory behind determinism seems plausible to me, nonetheless I feel like I can make decisions in my life. That's what matters, and that's what will keep society from unraveling were this to be truly realized by the masses.

Love this take, and I agree. Where do you think this monorail proclivity comes from (assuming it wasn't "predetermined")? My hand-wavy first guess is an interwoven legacy of patriarchy, trauma, and power structures including theological ones that reflected and reinforced it.

Or maybe it's just that we tend to grab shiny things, just like crows and monkeys, and a sense of singular certainty just seems particularly shiny.

I think it is a fairly universal human desire to seek understanding of the world and make sense of it. Accurate modeling of the world and how it works confers safety and power and comparative advantage. This is why philiosophers and religionists have ask the question "why?" Even (especially) children like predictable rules.

> I think it is a fairly universal human desire to seek understanding of the world and make sense of it.

Not remotely universal, and not even related to the desire to seek an understanding of the world. Everyone has an intuition about “free will”; for most people it’s whatever, a given. But then a small minority has a totalizing idea because X means that Free Will is impossible. Then they start this campaign to “disabuse” everyone of that intuition.

There’s very little desire to learn there—people who have the “free will” intuition already “understand”; likewise with the Determinism people. Everyone is certain about the way things are.

I think we might just disagree. As far as we can determine, humans have tried to understand and predict how things work. How and when game migrates. What causes plants to grow, and how we can induce it. What makes a good growing season. We are naturally causal detectives, connecting the idea that eating prevents hunger, or that clothes provide comfort.

Sure, not everyone may care about esoteric questions like the origin of the cosmos, but nobody is free from seeking to understand causality. The former is an offshoot of the later.

> Sure, not everyone may care about esoteric questions like the origin of the cosmos, but nobody is free from seeking to understand causality. The former is an offshoot of the later.

An idea/debate that immediately and violently runs into contradictions when you query for its practical applications is not at all an offshoot of the latter.

They share the same engine of curiosity and desire to understand the world.

I dont think humans could have to cognitive drive to discover practical applications of truth or causality without sometimes running into tough questions.

I think it is evolutionarily and culturally impossible for people to only make practical discoveries when the utility is not apparent until the discovery is made.

Knowledge is power, both socially and evolutionarily.

> Where do you think this monorail proclivity comes from (assuming it wasn't "predetermined")?

I am not a History of Ideas guy (or any guy). But,

1. Some people get very afraid of certain ideas because of the tenuous so-called implications. See Mindfulness (already mentioned): this is very bad according to some because if you believe in it then you necessarily (the monorail) stop fighting any kind of injustice against yourself and others. Because it is apparently impossible to both practice mindfulness as well as to not be a complete doormat to Circumstance.

2. Western thought is very ideas-oriented, to the point of becoming afraid of ideas as primary agents in themselves (what causes things (not as in intentional agents))

3. Western thought absolutely abhors contradiction. Or apparent contradiction. It can’t live with it. It can’t just say “ah, this is impossible for me to explain but it seems that this box can be green and orange at the same time”—nope

4. Related: One often mistakes “contradiction” with “there’s a gap here I can’t explain...” (see next point). This is equally insufferable. Many would rather “resolve” the apparent contradiction by way of some absolutely naive and idiotic theory rather than having to live with this gap of understanding or comprehension. See the popularity and interpretation of what the Turing Test is: Many would apparently rather believe that intelligence is a sufficiently advanced computer program even though they have absolutely no knowledge about the subject of intelligence whatsoever because simply not-knowing is too uncomfortable

5. I hate the “Death of God” idea but it is true now that it is harder to hide behind the God of the Gaps in a secular age; thus in turn apparent contradictions become harder to live with

6. Eventually you end up with very totalizing ideas like Determinism because you are a physicist or a biologist or something; you understand the “substrate” of everything important to humans and everything that seems “extra” to that is just complete idiotic, human-invented nonsense.

Great comments. My short version: Watching yet another neuroscientist driving boldly off a 3 meter board into an empty pool. The most impressive SPLAT was that of Sir John Eccles—-with his incredible idea of “critically poised neurons” that were sensitive detectors to quantum signals from the spirit world.

The original post does a great job of dissecting the many problems of Sapolsky’s arguments and his lack of dealing with definitions of words he would like to debunk. Read Daniel Dennett instead of Sapolsky.

Thanks, I love the Chomsky meta-critique above.

Sapolsky’s book cover should include be a DALL-E rendering of Alfred E. Neuman and Napoleon discussing “their” battle plans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_E._Neuman

How does this have anything to do with Sapolsky's argument that free will doesn't exist? What does mindfulness have to do with being a doormat? Why are scientists not philosophers? Why doesn't biology have anything to do with free will?

> How does this have anything to do with Sapolsky's argument that free will doesn't exist?

It doesn’t per se because I stated that the debate itself is irrelevant (see Chomsky’s point).

> What does mindfulness have to do with being a doormat?

This is an unrelated example.

> Why are scientists not philosophers?

They haven’t been philosophers for more than a hundred years.

> Why doesn't biology have anything to do with free will?

Biology is the study of life.

> 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.

You 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.

> “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.

True, 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.

In 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...

Are 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.

I 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.

I'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.

"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.

What'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.

I 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".

Moral responsibility isn't the same as responsibility. Leprosy isn't a moral failing, although people still will discriminate against lepers.

Is discrimination against lepers a moral failing?

But the judgment of character is central to how our society conceptualizes its response to bad actors, and it informs the space of justifiable responses towards bad actors, that it matters whether the judgment of character is based on fact.

Moral responsibility as we currently conceive of it has been responsible for untold atrocities throughout human history. The problem is the concept has blanket justificatory power. People who are deemed to be moral degenerates by society become authorized targets of heinous behavior with a clear conscience of the perpetrators. Undermining the concept of moral responsibility breaks the connection between a bad actor and cruelty towards them. Taking a quarantine model limits the space of allowable behaviors; heinous reactions no longer have justification. So while the result can be similar in broad strokes between the two systems, the details can end up being very different.

Simply because something has been responsible for bad things does not make it worthy of doing away with motivated reasoning. Also, sometimes bad actors deserve cruelty.

>Also, sometimes bad actors deserve cruelty.

So you do recognize a substantive difference between a justice system based on the concept of moral responsibility and one without. But those of us that are against cruelty are motivated to look more closely at the justifications for it. Hence we get arguments like the one I presented.

A justice system without the concept of moral responsibility is one that has abolished itself. It is impossible for it to exist because justice is a concept that inherently requires morality to function. What you suggest is, again, a reconstruction of a justice system pretending it does not make moral judgement. "You were not in control of your actions, yet we have decided to lock you in a cell - for the greater good, of course".

the choice of a "quarantine model" vs cruelty is orthogonal to the question of free-will vs determinism. A cruel extermination model is just as rational of a response to bad actors with no choice.

The difference is not made by understanding of choice, but the values held by the one with power.

>A cruel extermination model is just as rational of a response to bad actors with no choice.

I don't think this can be supported. There is no contradiction in destroying an entity that gets in your way, but presumably there is more at stake when it comes to humans engaging with humans. We recognize that other humans, at least those in good standing in our social community, have interests that should not be interfered with without strong justification, enough to overcome their rights as members of the community. But given a lack of free will/moral responsibility, the interests of the bad actor cannot be completely disregarded. For example, their interest in their life isn't forfeited simply for being a nuisance.

>We recognize that other humans, at least those in good standing in our social community, have interests that should not be interfered with without strong justification, enough to overcome their rights as members of the community

This belief is the one that is impendent of free will. If you believe in minimizing suffering before refuting free will, you will believe it after. If you dont before, you wont after. The question is orthogonal.

The whole premise that free will is a justification for inflicting suffering seems like a strawman from Sapolsky.

I havent seen him or anyone else explain why the existence of free will provides rational support for inflicting suffering. Yet, people somehow claim that refuting free will refutes inflicting unnecessary suffering.

>The whole premise that free will is a justification for inflicting suffering seems like a strawman from Sapolsky.

It's definitely not something Sapolsky came up with. The connection between free will and moral responsibility has been a central focus of the debate about free will since philosophers took up the issue[1]. One then only needs to recognize the connection between moral responsibility, moral indignation, and cruelty towards bad actors to see the relationship go through. You can certainly question whether free will provides genuine rational support for cruelty, but it doesn't take much to notice that people have historically used free will as a rationalization for cruelty, whether legitimately or not.

I do agree that its unlikely any one person will be moved to change their behavior after accepting a lack of free will/moral responsibility. But we are in a much better position to construct society in a way that takes this knowledge into account, for example by greatly improving prison conditions, having a stronger focus on the conditions that give rise to criminal behavior, and so on.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/#FreeWillMoraRes...

I think I see where you are coming from, and where our differences lie. Putting the cards on the table, I basically agree that multiple future free-will doesnt exist, but dont agree with Sapolsky's conclusions or your optimism.

For one, I dont think there are impactful moral differences between what Sapolsky's determinism, and what is referred to in the OP as Actual-sequence free-will, So I dont think the rational case for compassion is any stronger.

Moreover, I am also a lot less optimistic that this puts society in a better position. I think it is a more dangerous and precarious position full of pitfalls. I think it likely provides less motivation for constructing a more compassionate society, and more for providing a less forgiving one, because our ability to actually change people is quite low. For example, it can bolster the argument for longer sentences or the death penalty, given the lack of rehabilitative capacity. e.g. we simply dont have much capacity to correct deep seated developmental and psychological errors.

From the social perspective, history is all full of determinism and causality being used as rationale for cruelty, ranging from eugenic extermination to Calvinist forsaken. Determinism also lies at the heart of racism and bigotry. It is a short steps from "this person cant help it" to "these people are the problem".

On an individual level, I also think the idea of determinism conflicts with views of self-agency and impact, and can be highly de-motivating.

I dont think it avoids the moral judgement, it just obfuscates it, or replaces it with a comparable concept.

You dont need free will to rationally have disgust, indignation, and retribution. You can rationally punish someone who contracted a contagious illness.

All you need for rationale is switching from the idea that someone makes bad choices to the idea that someone is a bad machine.

Would you "punish" your computer for crashing? Seems absurd. Presumably we don't want to engage in absurdities and irrational behavior. We want to do what is "right", for various conceptions of right. So getting clear on whether we have moral responsibility is important to getting things right.

Why do we punish anything?

I might punish my computer by replacing it because it crashes. I might punish it with a hammer after because it is cathartic. None of that relies on the computer having choice in the matter.

Free will is independent of moral responsibility. you can hold someone guilty of "being bad" just as easily as making "bad choices"

>None of that relies on the computer having choice in the matter.

Most normally functioning people would not feel the need to punish a tool for being a bad tool. Some may find catharsis in damaging some object that has frustrated them, but usually they later recognize the absurdity of their outburst. The point is that we all generally recognize that there are legitimate and illegitimate targets for "punishment". The question is whether people are actually legitimate targets for punishment despite our intuitions on the matter.

>you can hold someone guilty of "being bad" just as easily as making "bad choices"

Sure you can; nothing is going to stop you from smashing your PC to bits next time it crashes. The issue is whether it is the all things considered correct choice.

I think I make the point more clearly here [1], but the question of legitimate targets and if it is "correct" to damage my computer does not turn on it having on free will or not. There are questions of if it is satisfying. If it is a bad habit that could become maladaptive.

Nobody can seem to articulate how free will is central to the "legitimate target" question.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38461744

He may believe that people can't be held "morally" responsible for it but that doesn't necessarily mean that he thinks that we can't punish people or censure them. Like, you might not think that a 4 year old is morally responsible or "evil" for breaking his little sister's toys, but you still send them to time out anyway.

I find this to be a simple reconstruction of moral responsibility without the language associated with character judgement - essentially just word games.

The problem is that word games have real consequences. Word games can dehumanize groups and make it easier to justify atrocities. If free will exists, then retributive torture is easy to morally justify.

I think atrocities and retributive torture are easier to justify without free will.

lack of free will confirms that someone didn't just make a bad choice, but they are an inherently bad human that performs bad actions.

We can punish people for a plurality of reasons:

- for moral enforcement (requires free will doctrine)

- for retribution (tit for tat)

- to balance society out

Even if free will doesn't exist, we can still punish people who cause harm to society, in the interest of the group. It's just society balancing itself out.

If free will doesn't exist, we can't *not* punish people. By definition.

Those arguing against it also can't not argue. But they will lose the argue (it is inevitable), and then society will continue to punish, because it can't not do so.

Determinism, whatever the logic of its premise, it intellectually bankrupt.

> If free will doesn't exist, we can't not punish people. By definition.

What? You can still change your mind/update beliefs after being presented with new evidence, in fact if you're being rational, you actually have no choice but to do so. I suppose in some sense, the most 'free will' action is to choose to ignore evidence that would change your beliefs.

> in fact if you're being rational,

Rationality implies free will. I am a clockwork robot, and even if the cogs and gearsprings mechanically approximate rationality, it is really only the affectation of such. For irrationality would also just be obeying the same mechanical pathways encoded in my brain, thus neither is superior, or preferable. I can't even really have preferences, in a meaningful sense.

Also, the encoding of my personality is quite strong, and easily able to ignore the absurd snickerings of your arguments, so you won't win and change my mind, or enough minds of others to make it the dominant paradigm.

Punishment for wickedness remains. You lose.

I had no choice but to conclude based on evidence that the threat of punishment causes a change in the behavior of others, and since I had no choice in deriving a goal of self preservation, I have no choice but to support laws that punish others for risking that.

Believing these things is no more intellectually bankrupt than believing that the Moon has no choice but to revolve around the Earth.

Even if free will doesnt exist, we can punish people for moral enforcement.

Morality doesnt disappear if you remove free will. You still have humans with a diverse set of values, and a diverse set of responses when confronted with decisions.

If you have values and morals, you can compete to force compliance from others, and punish deviation.

> Is it crazy to not believe that he actually believes this?

It's merely misguided. There is no belief so atrociously stupid that someone, somewhere doesn't sincerely believe it. In fact, I am quite certain that for any given belief, at least three people believe it, and if we are so unfortunate as for them to discover each other, they'll form a stupidity cult and attract others to the thing.

If you fail to understand this, you are in great peril. Such people will attempt to re-engineer society itself so as to make their stupidity foundational the civilization you are forced by circumstances to live within. They will do so with the passion of zealots and the blissful unawareness of imbeciles, and if you are to have any chance at all of stopping them, you have to do so quickly. On this particular inanity, we are certainly too late.

> cannot legitimately be held morally responsible

It's weasel words. Cannot legitimately be held responsible. He's saying, I accept that I/we will be held morally responsible, but in my head I'm calling shenanigans.

What 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.

That 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.

> 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.

Buddhist take: there is no free will nor you are determined. Solved!

If 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.

Ah yes the crystal palace, yawn.

This 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.

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