I saw this article on the Vox site: Do human beings have free will? - Vox
Stanford University professor of biology and neurology, Robert Sapolsky, has written a book, "Determined: A Life of Science Without Free Will". He attempts to make the case that free will doesn't exist. Columnist Sean Illing interviews Sapolsky in the article:
Sean Illing
"How do you define “free will”?
Robert Sapolsky
"Maybe the best place to start is to point out how most people define it, because that immediately starts getting you into trouble, and it’s probably best displayed in a courtroom. You have some defendant sitting at the table and everybody agrees the guy did it. And now there are three questions that strike everyone intuitively as covering the entire universe of free will."
Robert Sapolsky
"In theory, yes. This was an idea put forward a couple of centuries ago. This notion that you could rerun the tape with everything held constant and you’d always get the same exact outcome. In reality, it doesn’t work that way because there’s randomness thrown in, Brownian motion, so that you release a little bit more of this neurotransmitter rather than less, and collectively at 15 gazillion synapses, that winds up making a difference. And the basic chaoticism of systems means that tiny, tiny differences due to randomness get amplified, the famous butterfly effect. So in effect, this makes this thought experiment impossible to do. But if you could control for all the random little molecular hiccups going on, yeah, you’d get the same outcome if everything else in the universe was held constant also."
"First off, did the guy intend to do what he did? Did he understand what the outcome was likely to be? And did he realize he didn’t have to do it, that there were alternatives available? And if the answer is yes to all of those, the guy’s responsible. He knew what he was doing. He exercised free will....amid those [questions] — did he intend, did he know he had alternatives, all of that — it’s not asking the only question that now has to be asked, which is, “How did he wind up being the sort of person who would intend to do that? Where did that intent come from?” And that’s where free will sort of withers on the vine."
Sean Illing
"So let’s put it this way: If I rewound the movie of my life and I held every little thing constant, right down to the breakfast I had every morning, down to the amount of sleep I got every night, could I have done otherwise at any moment in my life or do you believe everything would’ve unfolded exactly as it did the first time around?"
Sean Illing
"Philosophers often make the case for some kind of compatibilism by arguing that the same inputs in different individuals don’t always produce identical outcomes. It’s more like the world and all these factors impose parameters on us, which does leave some room for agency. For you, is this just an attempt to redefine free will in order to salvage the concept?"
Robert Sapolsky
"Yeah, exactly. It’s trying to get a little bit of wiggle room by saying, “Okay, okay, some stuff about us is determined, but there’s a whole other domain where it isn’t.” And the version of that that is most seductive to people is they will admit that there’s stuff about us that we had no control over — how tall we are, what our memory span is like, if you’re a runner, whether the muscle fiber makeup in your thighs."
Sean Illing
"The use of the word “tenacity” there is revealing because this is the argument one hears constantly in these sorts of conversations. Someone will point to people who faced equivalent or near-equivalent challenges and life circumstances and note that some of them flourished in spite of those challenges and some of them didn’t, and this is supposed to be an argument in defense of the power of will and grit and that sort of thing."
Robert Sapolsky
"I fail to resist this sort of argument all the time because it’s so damn inspirational. You’ve got some 7-foot-4 guy who’s in the NBA and nobody’s surprised. And then you get this guy Muggsy Bogues, who was 5-foot-3 and played in the NBA and he did that out of nothing but tenacity and gumption and Calvinist focus. It’s so hard not to be totally moved by that, at this display of willfulness, but there is no willfulness in the free will sense going on there."
At this point Sapolsky is losing me. The article encourages us to follow the audio link for the rest of the interview. I decide to put in my earbuds and listen to that, since I need to do some chores in the kitchen.
Sapolsky uses the terms determinism and compatibilism a lot. Determinism is defined as the philosophical view that events are completely determined by previously existing causes. Compatibilism is defined as the "...the belief that free will and determinism are mutually compatible and that it is possible to believe in both without being logically inconsistent.[1]Compatibilists believe that freedom can be present or absent in situations for reasons that have nothing to do with metaphysics.[2] In other words, that causal determinism does not exclude the truth of possible future outcomes.[3] Because free will is seen as a necessary prerequisite for moral responsibility, compatibilism is often used to support compatibility between moral responsibility and determinism."
I find myself most in sympathy with compatibilism. Sapolsky defines himself as a "hard determinist. But he undermines his own argument when he talks about randomness and Brownian movement, and that it is actually impossible to hold things constant.
He gets irritated by Calvinist ideas of free will. And Horatio Alger type stories of people lifting themselves by the bootstraps. But it seems to me that he actually believes in a neo-Calvinist sort of predestination, except that it's not determined by God, but about physical and biological things such as nerve synapses and the frontal cortex, and countless other facts of our bodies and evolution. Missing is any kind of spiritual dimension to our actions.
Sapolsky believes that we would be a more enlightened, more humane society if we didn't believe in the myth of free will. But no one believes that free will is absolute, or that one's circumstances don't have a bearing on it. He is attacking a straw man, because free will can't exist in a vacuum. He says that we don't have free will, but that we can make choices. which seems like a contradiction.
At this point, I am 25 minutes into the audio link. It goes on for about 54 minutes. but my eyes are glazing over, and it is time to take the pizza out of the oven. I close out of the link.
I looked up some background information on him, and found this quote: "I turned fourteen years old, at one point, and had a somewhat existentially unnerving experience and, that night, woke up at around two in the morning and say, “Aha, I get it. There’s no God, there’s no purpose, and there’s no free will,” and it’s been, kind of, like that every since."
Well, there you go. Alrighty then.
Wow. I can sit back and relax and let the atoms do their thing. Ok, boys, get to it.
ReplyDeleteI have never been interested in grand theory whether in theology, philosophy, sociology of psychology. Therefore I have had little interest in Augustine, or Aquinas, or Plato and Aristotle, of Weber and Marx, or Freud, and the behaviorists. I agree with Francis that both ideas and realities are important but that ideas must give way to realities. I did take a two-semester course on the history of philosophy, another two-semester course on sociological theories, and a one semester course on the history of psychology. It is good to know something of the history of ideas, their origins and development, but keep focused on realities.
ReplyDeleteThinking above free will and determinism seems to me useless and boring. It gets more interesting if we become more concrete and empirical. Is my behavior influenced more by my thinking or by the social realities about me? Social psychological research suggests current social realities are more important than our beliefs, values and attitudes, even though those are also shaped by our past social history.
Concrete thought experiments are more interesting. What would have happened if I had professed vows and continued as a Jesuit after novitiate? It is difficult to image that I would not have left some years later. Perhaps like many other priests and religious I would have met the idea woman (probably a nun) who would share my interests.
Even more concretely Betty and I actually were in the same room for about a day back when I was about forty years old. She was a student at the University of Toledo, unmarried and a recent convert. We both loved John Michael Talbot’s music, were at his large Masonic Hall concert on a Friday night and took a one-day course with him exploring his music the next day. There were probably a hundred or more people at that event which introduced his new songbook. But Betty and I did not interact.
What would have happened had we met? Would we have begun a life-long relationship then? Would we have married and had children? Would we both have stayed in Toledo? This is more interesting speculation, since we both would have had the same past history before that event, but very different histories since that event. How would NOT having those additional years changed the relationship that we have now.
My understanding of God’s relationship to probability and our lives suggests that if God had wanted it, we would have interacted, and could have married. Maybe in the randomness of the universe that was God’s first choice. On the other hand, at about age forty, I was only beginning on the long path of spiritual development that has characterized my life since then. I have doubts that would have happened if I had gotten married and especially if we had had children. I have always been open to children as the result of a best friendship, but I have never felt called personally to be a father.
So maybe beginning the relationship with Betty almost forty years later was God's best answer. Betty now has had two marriages, two divorces, and two children that were very difficult to raise. A rich spiritual development parallel but very different than my own. We now share a relationship that might not have been possible if we had spent those intervening years together.
My belief is that God always has a better solution in the chaos game of chance that God has set up.
"I have never been interested in grand theory whether in theology, philosophy, sociology of psychology. Therefore I have had little interest in Augustine, or Aquinas, or Plato and Aristotle, of Weber and Marx, or Freud...".
DeleteI feel the same way, Jack. I pretty much have zero interest in philosophy. Which is probably why I couldn't make it through more than 25 minutes of this guy's ramblings. And I don't base very much, or anything, on what came into my mind during insomniac moments when I was 14.
I did take a philosophy course in college to fulfill a requirement. It was Symbolic Logic; it dealt with Boolean algebra, among other things. It was really more mathematics than philosophy, and it transferred as a mathmatics credit when I transferred colleges as a sophomore. I chose it in the first place as the philosophy course least likely to have to deal with Plato, Sartre, Hegel, etc.
My husband was talking yesterday with the young man from our parish who is studying for the priesthood. He was home for the holiday. Next year will be his 5th year of formation, so he will be in major seminary. He said he will breathe a sigh of relief to be finished with philosophy, and going on to theology.
ReplyDeleteI don't think I understand what he means by the term "free will". I think he's using it in the sense of willfulness and determination: even though what I want to do is difficult, and the odds are stacked against me, and others seem more gifted than I at getting this particular thing done, if I work hard enough and refuse to quit, I can accomplish it. Kind of like the film "Rudy". I agree with him that physical gifts count more than sheer will and determination. No matter how determined I am and how much I train, I won't be able to run 200 meters faster than Noah Lyles.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Lyles
But that sort of thing isn't how I understand free will. I can choose to eat too many sweets today, or not. I may have biological and chemical things happening in my body that bias me toward eating sweets. And if I choose to eat sweets over many days, months and years, I will become obese. All of that may be true, but it doesn't therefore follow that my being obese is strictly biologically determined. I can still choose not to eat sweets, in spite of what my brain's pleasure centers are urging me to do. That's free will. Or so it seems to me.
Jim, that's how I understand free will too. But I think that when Sapolsky describes himself as a "hard determinist" he really does believe in a kind of predestination
DeleteI haven't read his book so hesitate to comment too much. Ever since I've been an adult, and probably for many years before that, conservatives have been blaming poor people for their plight. If only they would work harder, or finish school, or not get pregnant before marriage, they wouldn't be poor.
DeleteI am not saying those accusations are completely baseless; I do believe in free will. But I also think that some people who were born on third base, or even first base, lack the imagination on how someone else might struggle to make it out of the batter's box.