Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

Free Will and the Sapolsky Paradox
https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/free-...ky-paradox

INTRO (John Horgan): Not free will again! Yeesh! Is there really more to say about it? Yes, there is, and I suspect there always will be, just as there will always be more to say about what quantum mechanics means and whether God exists.

I’m writing about free will now because I just read Determined: A Life of Science Without Free Will, in which neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky argues that free will does not exist. I also just talked to Sapolsky via zoom in front of a live online audience (I’ll post a link soon).

And I’ve decided that Sapolsky embodies a paradox: when you decide free will does not exist because you have weighed arguments for and against it, you prove free will exists.

To explain the Sapolsky paradox, I need to spell out what I mean by free will: Free will is your capacity to discern different possible paths; weigh their pros and cons; and choose one path because of your deliberations. I believe in free will because I exercise this capacity now and then, for example, when I write a column like this one. I see others exercising the same capacity--including free-will deniers like Sapolsky.

That’s not to say I don’t like Sapolsky’s book. In fact, I love it. Sapolsky documents brilliantly, wittily, entertainingly the many, many ways in which biology and circumstance undermine our decision-making capacity. Our choices, Sapolsky shows, are rarely as rational, let alone free, as we think they are.

But Sapolsky hasn’t proved that free will is illusory; he has merely confirmed that it exists on a sliding scale... (MORE - details)

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Robert Sapolsky is Wrong
https://quillette.com/2023/11/06/robert-...-is-wrong/

EXCERPTS (Stuart Doyle): . . . Robert Sapolsky argues that free will does not exist, and explores how he thinks society should change in light of that conclusion. Sapolsky is a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University [...] In this new book, he makes an effort to address several different ways in which others have proposed that free will could be real, despite the laws of nature acting on our physical brains. But in his efforts to cover the bases, Sapolsky fails to offer an original argument supporting his claim that free will is not real. Instead he serves up a partial and rewarmed version of the argument made by Bertrand Russell in the 1940s...

[...] In 1946, Bertrand Russell claimed that a scientific understanding of human physiology would reveal ordinary physical determinism at work in every human choice. To Russell, where there’s determinism, there can’t be any free will. And determinism seems to work the same way in human physiology as it does anywhere else, without little gaps for magic. So Russell saw no room for free will in a deterministic world informed by science. Sapolsky makes basically the same claim, but he illustrates the point with examples of biological mechanisms...

[...] There seems to be an unstated premise: If an event is determined, it can’t be free. But if that’s simply true, then why write a book instead of a sentence? Rather than arguing that determinism does inherently preclude freedom, the book does two things: it reminds readers that biological processes are deterministic, and it tries to show shortcomings in several theories of free will. In order to do that, Sapolsky states his criterion: “What is needed to prove free will: show me that the thing a neuron just did in someone’s brain was unaffected by preceding factors.” This criterion, and Sapolsky’s use of it, are shot through with self-contradiction. Most of his attacks on theories of free will do not make any sense when examined...

I’ll start an examination of Sapolsky’s self-contradictions with an easy one: the one he recognizes as such himself. [...] “Emotional responses feel real. Are real. Pain is painful. … It is logically indefensible, ludicrous, meaningless to believe that something ‘good’ can happen to a machine. Nonetheless, I am certain that it is good if people feel less pain and more happiness.”

It might seem like this self-contradiction is limited to the moral realm; the forgivable result of having a big heart while also being an unwavering scientist. But there’s more to it. It’s actually just one instance of a recurring logical error that leads to self-contradiction in the supposed “scientific” aspects of Sapolsky’s thought as well... (MORE - missing details)

From above:

HORGAN: "Free will is your capacity to discern different possible paths; weigh their pros and cons; and choose one path because of your deliberations. I believe in free will because I exercise this capacity now and then..."

DOYLE: "To Russell, where there’s determinism, there can’t be any free will. And determinism seems to work the same way in human physiology as it does anywhere else, without little gaps for magic."

As Kevin J, Mitchell indirectly says below in an excerpt from his book Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will, why would you want the autonomy of your body/brain operations invaded or taken over by "magic" to begin with? It's not decision-making conforming to who you are, but an extraneous invader following no governance or pattern at all. If randomness is what's deemed essential for FW, then severely mentally ill people have it in spades with their disorganized and unpredictable behavior resulting from a disruption to regulated, normal functioning. Look no further.

How life evolved the power to choose
https://www.scivillage.com/thread-14906-...l#pid60564

MITCHELL: "We thus absolutely do play an active role in the accumulation of the attitudes, dispositions, habits, projects, and policies that collectively comprise our character. All of that may be seen as constraining our freedom at any moment, and that is true, but it is precisely the continuity of those constraints through time that constitutes our selves. What else would it mean to be you except continuing to be like you?"

Quote:But Sapolsky hasn’t proved that free will is illusory; he has merely confirmed that it exists on a sliding scale. My ability to make good decisions—good for me and, ideally, others—varies from hour to hour, day to day, year to year. I had zero free will when I was drooling in my crib, I will have zero when I’m drooling in a nursing home.

Free will also varies enormously across populations. White male professors like Sapolsky and me have more choices on average than, say, a black American man with schizophrenia or a Palestinian woman in Gaza. Free will depends on factors ranging from genes to geopolitics.

I agree with this. Free will comes and goes imo, certain actions and thoughts being more free than others. And some people are freer than others. There are degrees of freedom as well as degrees of determinacy. Freedom is not digital iow. It is analog, and tends to adjust itself according the given circumstances and bodily states of our lives.

Does science tell us anything about free will? Depends on who you ask.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/11/...o-you-ask/

Quote:The crux of his argument is that, yes, our brains work through action potentials and neurotransmitters and other molecular phenomena. But our psychology can’t and shouldn’t be reduced to those aspects. He writes that the only reason that voltage changes across neuronal cell membranes are important is because of what they mean; they represent our goals, beliefs, intentions, choices, and desires. They are merely the physical instantiation of those causal mechanisms, which impose top-down constraints upon their behavior.

What remains a mystery though is why these physical instantiations should have a subjective inside such that they are experienced, not as voltage changes in our brains, but as various aspects of being conscious. We are left again with the hard problem--why there is this subjective property of brain events. Hence the irreducibility of our experience to the interaction of brain synapses. There is freewill because consciousness is holistically self-generative. It is a strange loop that circles back and causes its its own functioning, much how a storm behaves as one self-determining entity beyond the mere interactions of air and water and dust molecules it is totally composed of. Freedom and complexity "emerge" from the movement of bottom level microevents to top level macroevents.