No free will

I both understand where he's coming from and utterly reject it. But maybe that's only because I'm programmed to reject it?

Stanford scientist, after decades of study, concludes: We don’t have free will

You may think you chose to read this, but Stanford scientist Robert Sapolsky would disagree. He says virtually all human behavior is beyond our conscious control.

www.latimes.com

 

[Tarnagh]

His argument falls apart just in this article.

We know we make worse decisions when hungry, stressed or scared. We know our physical makeup is influenced by the genes inherited from distant ancestors and by our mothers’ health during her pregnancy. Abundant evidence indicates that people who grew up in homes marked by chaos and deprivation will perceive the world differently and make different choices than people raised in safe, stable, resource-rich environments. A lot of important things are beyond our control.

If we didn't have free will - if we didn't have a choice - then there would be no people who break the cycle of things like alcoholism or abuse because they grew up with it and it's in their genes.

He seems to be confusing automatic biological processes and core emotional response with lack of choice in decisions. Picking up a pen?

If you reach out right now and pick up a pen, was even that insignificant action somehow preordained?

Yes, Sapolsky says, both in the book and to the countless students who have asked the same question during his office hours. What the student experiences as a decision to grab the pen is preceded by a jumble of competing impulses beyond his or her conscious control. Maybe their pique is heightened because they skipped lunch; maybe they’re subconsciously triggered by the professor’s resemblance to an irritating relative.

To justify someone pulling the trigger on a crowd of innocents because they have no choice but at the same time suggesting that someone doesn't punch that professor in the face because they're triggered seems contradictory. One is choosing to murder a crowd of people, the other choosing not to take their subconscious trigger out on the professor.

This whole thing sounds like a great way to toss hands in the air and deny everyone personal responsibility to me.

ETA: This got a "wow" reaction from me because for someone who seems so intelligent, his arguments are fundamentally very stupid.

ETA2: Returning to this quote, even though I addressed it above -

We know we make worse decisions when hungry, stressed or scared. We know our physical makeup is influenced by the genes inherited from distant ancestors and by our mothers’ health during her pregnancy. Abundant evidence indicates that people who grew up in homes marked by chaos and deprivation will perceive the world differently and make different choices than people raised in safe, stable, resource-rich environments. A lot of important things are beyond our control.

We already knew that desperate people often make bad decisions. Their options are limited, usually due to poverty. We already knew that people in desperate situations often have to make decisions based on their least-worst options. And we already knew that people who come from rich backgrounds, who have never known hunger or privation have no frame of reference for those experiences - no empathy - for them. We already know that we have no choice in who we are, where we were born, who our parents are ... he's technically correct when it comes to those things because so far as it goes he's right - we have no choice in the matter over those things.

But to suggest that our entirety of being lacks "free will" (aka "conscious choice") is absurd.

 

[witsd]

Scientist writes popscience book: gets free advertising.

I'm pretty sure it's in my genes to roll my eyes and not pay any more attention.

Oh well.

 

[Piestein]

Lol. Most of the arguments for and against are intelligently laid out in the article.

Interestingly, this person thîks that if we only accept that nobody has free will, then we would be more compassionate.

I think the reverse is true. If we have no free will, we can be sympathetic to what made a villain a villain - but the logical consequence would be to kill them or send them to prison for all eternity.

Determinism means no redemption is possible (without the relevant external stimulus, meaning you can’t choose to be better, you can only become better if XYZ external thing happens) and that means that at least some bad people stay bad.

 

[Piestein]

Fyi, the Joker would be a huge fan of this guy.
All it takes is one bad day.

 

[Sentynel]

Wow, I wasn't gonna comment but the article is really confusing. Arguing that free will doesn't exist is not at all the same thing as arguing that you can't affect people's decisions, and jumping from one to the other is just baffling. "We reward people and punish people for things they have no control over" - what? It's trivially verifiable that you can affect people's likelihood of taking some action by assigning rewards or punishments; whether or not they have "free will" when they're making the choice is philosophical handwaving that isn't relevant to whether society benefits from encouraging good behaviour and discouraging bad. (Of course, we know, as the article touches on, that many punishments society assigns aren't very effective, but why argue that, say, severe custodial sentences are a bad intervention for unfalsifiable philosophical reasons when you can just prove that they don't work?)