Quote of the Day
The world is really screwed up and made much, much more unfair by the fact that we reward people and punish people for things they have no control over. We’ve got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn’t there.
Robert Sapolsky
Stanford University neurobiologist
October 17, 2023
Stanford scientist, after decades of study, concludes: We don’t have free will
I’m unconvinced this is true, but I understand how such a conclusion can be defended. Perhaps I should read his book. But what is most interesting to me, as pointed out in the article, is that people who come to believe this claim end make changes in their lives which are detrimental to themselves and others:
Even if the range of potential outcomes is limited, there’s simply too much variability at play to think of our behavior as predetermined.
What’s more, he said, it’s harmful to do so.
“Those who push the idea that we are nothing but deterministic biochemical puppets are responsible for enhancing psychological suffering and hopelessness in this world,” Tse said.
…
A widely cited 2008 study found that people who read passages dismissing the idea of free will were more likely to cheat on a subsequent test. Other studies have found that people who feel less control over their actions care less about making mistakes in their work, and that disbelief in free will leads to more aggression and less helpfulness.
All this makes me wonder… Is belief in free will is an evolutionary survival of the fittest response?
And further more, even if you were to know there is no such thing as free will, you (paradox alert!) should choose to behave as if you have free will.
We live in a world driven by intentional actions and randomness. I think of it as a fractal world. We do have free will at a local level, but overall the patterns of our lives are predetermined.
What is amazing is that everything in our universe is unique, including our perceptions and bodies. No two objects are exactly the same.
Look at the algo used by Chat GPT image generator. It uses randomness to generate each image. In essence, it is a probability distribution of all possible outcomes. If you ask it for an oak leaf, it is going to sample an oak leaf distribution. Each image it generates will be different, but they will all look like an oak leaf.
So yes, we should behave as if we have free will and be responsible for our actions.
What Chet said, absolutely.
“Even if the range of potential outcomes is limited, there’s simply too much variability at play to think of our behavior as predetermined.”
Wait what?!? Didn’t he just blow his NO free will thingy out of the water? I mean, one obviously has some.
To me, Free will is from the level you look at it. One is trapped in a material world, with few macro choices. But on the day to day level we have more than we can reasonably handle.
Ya, your going to die. But there’s a lot of crap you can do in the meantime.
And God of wonders, it’s almost like it was made that way on purpose.
Also I would like to add.
“The world is really screwed up and made much, much more unfair by the fact that we reward people and punish people for things they have no control over. We’ve got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn’t there.”
I used to run into this syndrome when I was shipped to jobs that weren’t going well.
The first word out of my mouth would be. The job is not screwed up. There are only people making poor uninformed decisions about the work being done.
The world is working perfectly. The people in control are making poor decision only from the perspective of the people affected.
Bankers don’t care if you starve to death. And Raytheon executives don’t care how many people die for their bottom line.
Only to people working to pay the vig, or being blown up think the worlds a screwed up place.
Everybody else gets to fly their mistress to Europe for the weekend. Or go hit Epstein Island.
Once we take human decisions out of the equation, the world is a great and beautiful place. Wild as hell, and full of adventure. And working exactly as designed.
“… the world is a great and beautiful place. Wild as hell, and full of adventure. And working exactly as designed.”
Yep. The world is working perfectly. I would even include poor human decisions noting that consequences still apply.
For every action, there is a reaction even if it is a mindless herd reaction. Of course, that does not mean that the individual or the herd will continue to exist.
Ya, and were about to test those instincts again.
It seems the west as the usual herd is not going to make it.
As the good book warns us. “My people perish for lack of knowledge.” And with an Iphone in hand, to whom will we make excuse?
Schrodinger’s free will? If you look in the box and conclude there’s no free will, you’re simply mistaken. Accepting that observation as fact is an act of free will.
This is a weird forum for it, but Marx is an appropriate reference here: according to Marx you have 50% free will — the historical dialectic contains the idea that while many choices are your own, many are determined by the circumstances in which you find yourself. IIRC in college there were a lot of river analogies used, i.e. you can choose to fight the river, swim to one side or the other, fight the beaver for a floating log, but you’re still in the river (the river being the weight of historical choices by other people and nature prior to your existence). After that the metaphor sortof breaks down, since the river’s direction can be changed if enough people in it make similar choices, or a volcano erupts and blocks the river, etc., but you get the idea.
The other issue I have with Sapolsky’s idea is that it ignores the cardinal rule of the universe brought to us via quantum mechanics: shit happens. We did away with the notion of the Newtonian clockworks universe ages ago….
So if I were to walk up to him and kick him dead in the balls, it wouldn’t be my fault- he was destined to get kicked in the pills.
Or he could admit that biochemical processes make us more prone to certain decisions, but the decisions are still ours to make.
Yeah, just another attempt to nullify personal responsibility.
Believe as you like, but reality *will* hold you responsible.
I honestly don’t believe free will is real, that doesn’t mean punishment isn’t a deterrent.
Who knew that Stanford professors were Calvinists.
Call me when this is successfully employed as a trial defense and earns an aquittal.
Did it require free will for a cognitive scientist to come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as free will?
It appears to me that his assertion that there is no free will is a normative one—“most people don’t have it. Those who do are aberrations or experimental error.”
Isn’t the act of seeking therapy itself an act of free will?
“Things aren’t going so great doing what I would do normally, so how can I learn to do something else instead?”