Determined

A Science of Life without Free Will

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I'm a believer in free will. And (as I've said before) I use the term "believer" because (sigh) I don't have any solid knock-down evidence to throw up against the (so-called) "determinists". Like the author of this book, Robert M. Sapolsky.

Let me quote from page four; I've added some bolding, you'll see why:

As a central point of this book, [biological and environmental interactions] are all variables that you had little or no control over. You cannot decide all the sensory stimuli in your environment, your hormone levels this morning, whether something traumatic happened to you in the past, the socioeconomic status of your parents, your fetal environment, your genes, whether your ancestors were farmers or herders. Let me state this more broadly, probably at this point too broadly for most readers: we are nothing more or less that the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment. You're going to be able to recite this sentence in your irritated sleep by the time we're done.

See the problem? Is it "little or no control" or "no control"? I'm pretty sure that free-willers don't deny the effect of hormones, genes, past history, etc. on our decisions. But they also argue that we have some control over our actions; if Sapolsky is admitting that we have "little" control, then fine, we're reduced to arguing about how much is "some" or "little", not the existence of free will itself.

To be fair, Sapolsky is pretty consistent elsewhere in the book in seeming to argue for "no control whatsoever". Which makes his page-four wording simply sloppy. But there's also a pronoun problem: when he asserts "you" (or "we") have no control, what is "you" referring to? I'd say "our conscious selves", but Sapolsky disposes of that notion in a couple pages. (Starting on page 31, where he says "I don't understand what consciousness is, can't define it.")

But anyway, whatever he's talking about when he says "you" have no control, "you" are most like a toy boat, tossed helplessly around on the vast ocean of your neurons, brain physiology, environment, and history.

For the record, I liked the informal definition of "free will" tentatively offered by Kevin J. Mitchell in his recent book Free Agents: "the capacity for conscious, rational, control of our actions".

Rationality, the accumulation and evaluation of evidence, learning, adjustment of beliefs, application of logic, … all those associated concepts are more or less ignored by Sapolsky. Instead, when he looks at "the science", it is invariably constrained to arbitrary button-pushing and unconscious/subconscious reactions to those "stimuli" he mentions. A typical example: Disgusting smells cause decreased liking of gay men.

Sapolsky is far from alone in concentrating on all the myriad ways our mental processes can fail, or be fooled. But (as he mentions at some point) the existence of optical illusions doesn't mean that you can never trust what you see. Unfortunately, this insight is underutilized.

Sapolsky rebuts various non-supernatural attempts to reconcile "free will" with science. He (correctly, I think) says you don't get free will from quantum indeterminacy or chaos theory. He agrees that this makes human behavior difficult, probably impossible, to predict. But unpredictability is not indeterminacy. He also considers the notion that free will is an "emergent property" of sufficiently complex brains and nervous systems. Much like "life" can emerge by fortuitous arrangements of molecules that area not themselves alive. I think his discussion here was perfunctory and dismissive.

I liked his answer to the challenge: if everything is determined, how does anything ever change? (Specifically, how is reading this book supposed to make me stop believing in free will?)

The answer is that we don't change our minds, Our minds, which are the end products of all the biological moments that came before are changed by circumstances around us.

High marks for this moment of clarity. Sapolsky didn't come to his free-will disbelief by his own rational decision based on evidence; it was caused by the circumstances he happened to encounter. He had no choice.

The latter part of the book is devoted to how this applies to criminal justice. It is strident, repetitive, and overlong. Sapolsky argues that criminals (including the ones committing the vilest acts) are products of the (previously mentioned) brain malfunctions, environment, history, etc.: all factors over which they had no control. It probably makes sense to "quarantine" the violent and dishonest for periods so they can't cause further damage, but the idea of retributive punishment is fundamentally flawed. Moral judgment is off the table, especially if it leads to the death penalty.

It is somewhat amusing to note that while Sapolsky exempts violent criminals from moral judgment, he's perfectly OK with judging other (less violent) folks. People used to have non-biological explanations for schizophrenia; Sapolsky calls those people "psychoanalytic scumbags" (page 329). Bruno Bettelheim was a "sick, sadistic fuck" (page 338 footnote). This is far more moralistic mudslinging than anything Sapolsky aims at Ted Bundy, Anders Breivik, or Timothy McVeigh.

Bottom line: if the anti-free-willers are correct, then there should be an argument out there that would jangle my neurons in precisely the right way to force my agreement; I would literally have no choice but to agree. But that argument is not provided here.


Last Modified 2024-12-22 12:20 PM EST