Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford academic, took decades—decades, he says—to conclude he does not have free will. He chose now as the time to tell us of his decades-long, fruitless search for himself. I was going to begin this with a joke about Sapolsky’s choice of hairdo, but even I had to acknowledge the man has a magnificent head of hair. Put a sword in his hand, die his face blue, and he’s ready to invade London. He made the right choice.
Years back, for a short time, I was interested in the question of Free Will, and tried to read a bit about it. Nothing was really interesting, as the main question was never answered satisfactorily for me: what is the definition of Free Will?
It is usually used more in the sense of "everything has a cause, and "everything is connected".
From that it usually follows: no one is really to blame.
And then of course: give the state a lot of money to deal with it. (If in doubt, the answer is always: expand the state bureaucracy.)
I doubt it will be much different in the book from the hair guy.
The Amazon blurb alrady indicates it: "challenges us to rethink the very notion of choice, identity, responsibility, justice, morality and how we live together."
The hair guy is smart, and tries to make some money by walking in the footsteps of philosophers like Plato, Leibniz, Hegel, who denied Free Will, and celebrated the collective over the individual, the state over the independent man.
Funny how those philosophers so often turn out to be the darlings of the respective regimes.
I chose to go with Hemingway: "Everything is your fault, if you are man."
The best argument against free will denialists is to just credibly threaten to shoot them. Very few will stoically face their impending "bricking", very unlike a computer you are threatening to submerge in water. The computer does not care about its imminent demise. Sapolsky, on the other hand? Something tells me he would.
Oct 25, 2023·edited Oct 25, 2023Liked by William M Briggs
As long as Sapolsky enjoys living among the top 1% (being a Stanford professor is a rather exclusive club) he will tout his theory that diminishes the individual autonomy and freedom of humans. But put Sapolsky in the 99% and I'm pretty certain he would change his tune.and demand consideration that people should be treated as individuals and be recognized as capable of making choices that separate the one from the other.
Take Saplosky, and any of his many thousands of fellow travelers, out of their isolated, insulated, cloister. Place them in a real world. With kids to feed, mortgages to pay, or payroll to meet. Curse them with the scourge of bureaucratic interference in their every endeavour.
Then see if they perhaps might perceive some slight advantage in individual responsibility.
If there is one thing that makes no sense to me it is this kind of Evangelical Determinism. It is vitally important that we spread the good news of nothing matters. I am very passionate about indifference. Our battle cry is 'Apathy!!' Rise up citizens you have nothing to lose but your giving a damn about life!
Seriously. I worry about the peasant in China who hasn't heard the Good News yet. Then I read these guys who are sure they can be Good Without God and they are DRIVEN to tell us how... and I'd say they have a bigger problem than me, or the peasant in China.
He is not apathetic, though. He cares very much about "humane" treatment of violent criminals. Why? I do not think even he could justify it without appealing to metaphysical values.
What is the cause? Bad metaphysics? Porn, Prozac, and Pain killers? The despair of living under a system too broke to fix? Inquiring minds want to know.
A lack of life threatening challenges, probably. This is intellectual obesity. A total indulgence.
Sapolsky's work on primates is good, so he is not a lightweight. He has made a contribution to the world.
It may be a Chomsky move. No one cares about primates. But he may be remembered for grappling with the Big Issues, like condemning us primitives for wanting to lock up criminals.
“we are never morally responsible for our actions in the sense that would make us truly deserving of praise and blame, punishment and reward” - reprehensible, deserving of much reprehense. The logical conclusion is there is no basis for Law, social structures, faith, performance reviews at work, and salaries and bonuses.
He presumably believes in a strictly regimented and controlled managerial, therapeutic, global State, rather than total anarchy. Humans are to be managed as though they were nodes in a server...yet are also irreplaceable and each one is extremely important even if it is malfunctioning and jeopardizing other nodes.
I wonder just how serious they are about the "no punishment, no blaming" part. Are they interested in not blaming and not punishing "insurrectionists" who took a blasphemous stroll in the temple of "are democracy"?
"Free will? who cares. You can only do what is allowed, and the smart-city environment itself makes sure you only do what it allowed, when it is allowed, where it is allowed. Free will moot"
"The Smart City allows certain bio-machines to commit minor crimes to rectify the eternal legacy of institutionalized disadvantages based on traits which do not exist because they have less free will than other bio-machines and must be allowed certain principled exceptions."
Cut the guy a break. He’s proud of his intellectual and spiritual vacuity; it’s probably his crowning achievement, his moral get-out-of-jail-free card. Never mind the glaring contradiction -- it’s all about feelings.
Not hard to see how this line of thinking is attractive to - for example - those who might have done some questionable things in the past that they're worried might become public in the future. No doubt he'll have plenty of influential people backing him up. After all, they have no choice!
It's the stupidity of this crap that forms the strongest argument that they are psyops. (Are they actually psyops? I have no idea. But it sure feels like there's a cultural power center somewhere that's intent on blaring out this sort of demoralizing propaganda.)
Thomas Ligotti, horror writer extraordinaire, pulls this bullshit in his book "The Conspiracy Against the Human Race." But before he hits you with the No Free Will rap, he spends some time with antinatalist philosophy, trying to claim that you are responsible for all of the suffering all of your descendants will ever experience, simply by virtue of the fact that you had kids.
But if that were true, it can't be my fault, it has to be my parents' fault. But actually it's not theirs, it's my grandparents' fault. And so on, and so on....
Then a hundred pages later Ligotti literally argues that murderers aren't guilty of their crimes, and at no point admits the contradiction. It is a truly abusive book, in that it was written to undermine and replace your worldview with Ligotti's own demented perceptions.
For those who can't help themselves but have babies, they can pick up a copy of the Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to parenting and assuage their guilt by following the rules therein. They have no choice.
Materialism is post-hoc reasoning by a subset of Leftists for dysgenic and chaotic policies. Any materialist who has attempted to iron out inconsistencies in their worldview would end up like Nietzsche, one of the few hard atheists.
Every few years we get a fresh pronouncement of the impossibility of free will.
The argument usually goes something like, we do not have absolute fee will, hence, we ha we no free will, or cannot know when we do or do not act by habit or cultural intention etc. So, functionally we are without will.
This s just resentment for being limited beings. Addictions, habits, social norms are all reasons we surrender our higher will. Yet, only in a context of our personal history of choices and our society do we choose to continue the addiction. repeat the habit, or take the vaxx because we perceive this is easiest or best for us: still choices
The notion of tabula rasa at birth is wrong enough, but that we should maintain this empty liberty into adulthood, and that if we don't we are no longer free choosers is infantile.
Oct 25, 2023·edited Oct 25, 2023Liked by William M Briggs
How can anyone believe that Sapolsky with that choice of coiffure lacks free will? Those beautiful ringlets suited to any 19th century girl of property, the carefully groomed beard (we men can spot a narcissistic beard like that a city block away) . . . it all speaks volumes about the many choices the "philosopher" makes every single day. Smart money says Sappy is using TRESsemme shampoo and conditioner.
And of all the pictures from Sappy's photo shoot, how did he choose this lovely one without, you know, the free will thing? Why did he nix the one, a la Saint Sebastian, with the faux arrows?
Amazing Sappy could make all those tres elegant choices while completely lacking free will. It's almost like it's just an elaborate joke on all of us. Either that or Stanford is now the epicenter of stupid, having wrested the title away from Yale . . .
The problem, as usual, is an inability to actually *think* about a problem, rather than rushing to pick a position on a controversial issue. A doofus like Sapolsky is just looking for academic Pokemon points and is not a serious thinker. This is what happens when you set up an academy inside a culture devoted to novelty: Eventually it's just a parade of freaks and weirdos.
The problem of ontology is always epistemology. Saying 'humans have no free will' and 'humans have free will' are epistemologically equivalent unless you can construct a test (or series of tests) that everyone will agree could provide a definitive result. Good luck with that.
The Academy is mostly welfare for neurotics at this point. If you could find 100 well-adjusted people amidst the totality of the professoriate, I'd be really surprised.
I must confess that when I was 17 years old I also believed in Saploskyism (but of course I had no choice); I eventually grew out of it because life forced me to.
How many Free Wills can dance on the head of a pin?
“Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.” George Orwell
"Some ideas are so stupid only those filled with foolish intellectual pride believe them."
Belief in Free Will is a lot like Believing in God. You either believe IT or you don't.
Hopefully one will believe before one dies.
Best to take Pascal's wager, even if one doesn't "believe".
Orwell was BASED.
Who knew!
Years back, for a short time, I was interested in the question of Free Will, and tried to read a bit about it. Nothing was really interesting, as the main question was never answered satisfactorily for me: what is the definition of Free Will?
It is usually used more in the sense of "everything has a cause, and "everything is connected".
From that it usually follows: no one is really to blame.
And then of course: give the state a lot of money to deal with it. (If in doubt, the answer is always: expand the state bureaucracy.)
I doubt it will be much different in the book from the hair guy.
The Amazon blurb alrady indicates it: "challenges us to rethink the very notion of choice, identity, responsibility, justice, morality and how we live together."
The hair guy is smart, and tries to make some money by walking in the footsteps of philosophers like Plato, Leibniz, Hegel, who denied Free Will, and celebrated the collective over the individual, the state over the independent man.
Funny how those philosophers so often turn out to be the darlings of the respective regimes.
I chose to go with Hemingway: "Everything is your fault, if you are man."
Even the hair.
The best argument against free will denialists is to just credibly threaten to shoot them. Very few will stoically face their impending "bricking", very unlike a computer you are threatening to submerge in water. The computer does not care about its imminent demise. Sapolsky, on the other hand? Something tells me he would.
Everything is your fault also has the supreme benefit of being actionable. It can animate us to get moving, to change and improve.
Great comment 👍
Plato did not deny free will.
https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/14031/what-was-socrates-platos-view-on-free-will#14066
As long as Sapolsky enjoys living among the top 1% (being a Stanford professor is a rather exclusive club) he will tout his theory that diminishes the individual autonomy and freedom of humans. But put Sapolsky in the 99% and I'm pretty certain he would change his tune.and demand consideration that people should be treated as individuals and be recognized as capable of making choices that separate the one from the other.
Take Saplosky, and any of his many thousands of fellow travelers, out of their isolated, insulated, cloister. Place them in a real world. With kids to feed, mortgages to pay, or payroll to meet. Curse them with the scourge of bureaucratic interference in their every endeavour.
Then see if they perhaps might perceive some slight advantage in individual responsibility.
Or force him to live among some of the violent, malfunctioning meat robots who have no free will yet must be treated with kid gloves for some reason.
Or send him to Ukraine or Gaza. We'll soon see what he thinks of fate then, lol.
👍My first thought was another clever cacademic intellectual pitching in with his input to deepen social confusion.
If there is one thing that makes no sense to me it is this kind of Evangelical Determinism. It is vitally important that we spread the good news of nothing matters. I am very passionate about indifference. Our battle cry is 'Apathy!!' Rise up citizens you have nothing to lose but your giving a damn about life!
Seriously. I worry about the peasant in China who hasn't heard the Good News yet. Then I read these guys who are sure they can be Good Without God and they are DRIVEN to tell us how... and I'd say they have a bigger problem than me, or the peasant in China.
He is not apathetic, though. He cares very much about "humane" treatment of violent criminals. Why? I do not think even he could justify it without appealing to metaphysical values.
The defining characteristic of our age - terminal complacency.
What is the cause? Bad metaphysics? Porn, Prozac, and Pain killers? The despair of living under a system too broke to fix? Inquiring minds want to know.
A lack of life threatening challenges, probably. This is intellectual obesity. A total indulgence.
Sapolsky's work on primates is good, so he is not a lightweight. He has made a contribution to the world.
It may be a Chomsky move. No one cares about primates. But he may be remembered for grappling with the Big Issues, like condemning us primitives for wanting to lock up criminals.
“we are never morally responsible for our actions in the sense that would make us truly deserving of praise and blame, punishment and reward” - reprehensible, deserving of much reprehense. The logical conclusion is there is no basis for Law, social structures, faith, performance reviews at work, and salaries and bonuses.
He presumably believes in a strictly regimented and controlled managerial, therapeutic, global State, rather than total anarchy. Humans are to be managed as though they were nodes in a server...yet are also irreplaceable and each one is extremely important even if it is malfunctioning and jeopardizing other nodes.
I wonder just how serious they are about the "no punishment, no blaming" part. Are they interested in not blaming and not punishing "insurrectionists" who took a blasphemous stroll in the temple of "are democracy"?
Completely serious. It is a consistent theme with this crowd.
"Free will? who cares. You can only do what is allowed, and the smart-city environment itself makes sure you only do what it allowed, when it is allowed, where it is allowed. Free will moot"
"The Smart City allows certain bio-machines to commit minor crimes to rectify the eternal legacy of institutionalized disadvantages based on traits which do not exist because they have less free will than other bio-machines and must be allowed certain principled exceptions."
i am actually wondering who among them wants to turn everyone including "marginalized folx" into cattle and who's just plotting revenge.
Probably a mix. There are some who just want to destroy White people's societies. There are some who want to rule the world as technological gods.
Has there ever been a group of people less deserving of the title of "elites" than what we in the West are suffering through?
This is all prep work to get the enlightened meat machines to kill the benighted meat machines mote easily.
Cut the guy a break. He’s proud of his intellectual and spiritual vacuity; it’s probably his crowning achievement, his moral get-out-of-jail-free card. Never mind the glaring contradiction -- it’s all about feelings.
Not hard to see how this line of thinking is attractive to - for example - those who might have done some questionable things in the past that they're worried might become public in the future. No doubt he'll have plenty of influential people backing him up. After all, they have no choice!
Paving the way for more Lolita Express reveals, no doubt.
FREE WILLY must have made him very uncomfortable.
Ha!
It's the stupidity of this crap that forms the strongest argument that they are psyops. (Are they actually psyops? I have no idea. But it sure feels like there's a cultural power center somewhere that's intent on blaring out this sort of demoralizing propaganda.)
Thomas Ligotti, horror writer extraordinaire, pulls this bullshit in his book "The Conspiracy Against the Human Race." But before he hits you with the No Free Will rap, he spends some time with antinatalist philosophy, trying to claim that you are responsible for all of the suffering all of your descendants will ever experience, simply by virtue of the fact that you had kids.
But if that were true, it can't be my fault, it has to be my parents' fault. But actually it's not theirs, it's my grandparents' fault. And so on, and so on....
Then a hundred pages later Ligotti literally argues that murderers aren't guilty of their crimes, and at no point admits the contradiction. It is a truly abusive book, in that it was written to undermine and replace your worldview with Ligotti's own demented perceptions.
Agree; the power centers are catechizing youth.
For those who can't help themselves but have babies, they can pick up a copy of the Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to parenting and assuage their guilt by following the rules therein. They have no choice.
Materialism is post-hoc reasoning by a subset of Leftists for dysgenic and chaotic policies. Any materialist who has attempted to iron out inconsistencies in their worldview would end up like Nietzsche, one of the few hard atheists.
Every few years we get a fresh pronouncement of the impossibility of free will.
The argument usually goes something like, we do not have absolute fee will, hence, we ha we no free will, or cannot know when we do or do not act by habit or cultural intention etc. So, functionally we are without will.
This s just resentment for being limited beings. Addictions, habits, social norms are all reasons we surrender our higher will. Yet, only in a context of our personal history of choices and our society do we choose to continue the addiction. repeat the habit, or take the vaxx because we perceive this is easiest or best for us: still choices
The notion of tabula rasa at birth is wrong enough, but that we should maintain this empty liberty into adulthood, and that if we don't we are no longer free choosers is infantile.
Resentment is one of the few motivators of yeast life.
Relax, he can't help being a moron.
That right there is funny, no doubt.
How can anyone believe that Sapolsky with that choice of coiffure lacks free will? Those beautiful ringlets suited to any 19th century girl of property, the carefully groomed beard (we men can spot a narcissistic beard like that a city block away) . . . it all speaks volumes about the many choices the "philosopher" makes every single day. Smart money says Sappy is using TRESsemme shampoo and conditioner.
And of all the pictures from Sappy's photo shoot, how did he choose this lovely one without, you know, the free will thing? Why did he nix the one, a la Saint Sebastian, with the faux arrows?
And that sweater, is it a $500 Shephe item?
https://www.amazon.com/Shephe-Cashmere-Collar-Cardigan-Sweater/dp/B00G882OR0
Amazing Sappy could make all those tres elegant choices while completely lacking free will. It's almost like it's just an elaborate joke on all of us. Either that or Stanford is now the epicenter of stupid, having wrested the title away from Yale . . .
We are a long way from the true Cynics. Diogenes would urinate on this man's designer shoes.
The problem, as usual, is an inability to actually *think* about a problem, rather than rushing to pick a position on a controversial issue. A doofus like Sapolsky is just looking for academic Pokemon points and is not a serious thinker. This is what happens when you set up an academy inside a culture devoted to novelty: Eventually it's just a parade of freaks and weirdos.
The problem of ontology is always epistemology. Saying 'humans have no free will' and 'humans have free will' are epistemologically equivalent unless you can construct a test (or series of tests) that everyone will agree could provide a definitive result. Good luck with that.
The Academy is mostly welfare for neurotics at this point. If you could find 100 well-adjusted people amidst the totality of the professoriate, I'd be really surprised.
Welfare for neurotics? That explains the decline of male students!
Welfare for neurotics. Perfectly put.
I have often said that freedom and responsibility are two sides of the same coin. Conversely their is slavery and absolution of responsibility.
We do NOT get to choose between the two coins.
Like most things produced by the elites, '...saying, don't make it so...'
I must confess that when I was 17 years old I also believed in Saploskyism (but of course I had no choice); I eventually grew out of it because life forced me to.