People seem sort of confused as to what Dr. Huemer's argument was, or whether it was even intended as an argument in the first place (in the sense of an attempt to justify the claim that free will actually exists) as opposed to a mere charge of hypocrisy. So, without necessarily endorsing them, here is my attempt to summarize what I think Huemer's main points were. Huemer's main line of argument seemed to me to constitute a positive argument (whether it is a successful one or not, I leave you to judge) in favor of the actual, real existence of free will. From what I gather, he was saying: *Premise 1)* Our intuitions support the existence of free will. (Note that Sapolsky didn't even dispute this premise. He agrees that at least by initial appearances it seems like free will exists.) (Eg., it seems like we choose among alternatives by way of self-control at least some of the time, and, at least by initial appearances, it seems like to say one ought to do something implies that one can do otherwise. Arguments are implicit ought statements/normative suggestions in favor of adopting certain beliefs given certain evidences, and punishment is in part justified by the sense that the perpetrator could have and should have done differently than they in fact did.) ((You might wonder, "why think that ought implies can?" Huemer's reason is that it seems intuitive and we lack a reason to doubt it. A) it seems like to say "I know you can't, but you should still anyway magically fly through the air like superman and shoot lasers out of your eyes in order to bring about world peace. You ought to do that, so why haven't you? What the heck is wrong with you, a*****e?" is linguistically counterintuitive.) *Premise 2)* In the absence of a defeater, we are justified in trusting our intuitions. (Huemer argued that ultimately Sapolsky's view commits him to accepting Premise 2 because scientific practice relies on beliefs which *ultimately* rely for their support on as-yet-undefeated appearances, such as certain theory confirmation assumptions like "simpler theories are more likely to be true" or "the laws of logic are reliable" or "the future will sometimes be like the past," or "the external world exists," etc. For example, famously as David Hume pointed out, it's hard to justify induction without circular reasoning if you reject intuitionism. For instance. I.e., why think the future will be like the past? Because it has always been like that? In order for that to be evidence for the claim, we would have to assume that the fact that something has been a certain way in the past is evidence that it will continue to be that way in the future, which is the very question under dispute. Hence, many philosophers have concluded that there is no non-circular justification for induction except a form of foundationalism which says that it seems true and we lack a reason for doubting it, and our seemings afford us with defeasible prima facia justification in the absence of defeaters. Huemer also has a more general argument that we should believe Premise 2 because any alternative principle which we preferred to it would ultimately be justified by the very principle it rejects, namely by the fact that it seems true and we lack a reason for doubting it.) *Premise 3)* There is no ultimately successful defeater against (all of) our intuitions in favor of free will. (Eg., Huemer replied to Sapolsky's inductive generalization argument against free will by saying "it doesn't follow that because our actions are often *influenced* by external events, they must be *entirely determined* by external events.") *Conclusion a)* Therefore, we are justified in trusting our intuitions that free will exists. Huemer also argued that Sapolsky was engaged in a self-defeating line of argument because 1) he appeared to cast blame on people for casting blame on people (i.e., he seemed to say that it's *wrong* to condemn anyone's behavior since no one is responsible for their behavior, but calling a behavior wrong is a form of condemnation), and 2) he advanced a series of arguments for thinking that free will doesn't exist, which if we are inclined to accept the "ought implies can" principle leave Sapolsky's implicit "you should believe this because of the evidence" claim hanging in midair. How can it be that we should do anything if "should" requires the option of doing otherwise and there is no option to do otherwise? (This is just my attempt to explain what I think Huemer's argument was and should not be interpreted as an invitation to "fight me." lol) Email exchange the panelists had after the debate: *Dr. Huemer wrote:* "My wife, Iskra, who does philosophy of psychology, said that the strongest point for Robert's side was that the scope of apparent responsibility has been shrinking over time as scientific knowledge progresses. We keep finding more things that people aren't responsible for. By induction, you might extrapolate to a future time when we will think people aren't responsible for anything. I didn't fully address that, but basically I think that's an overgeneralization; the reasonable conclusion is that humans have less responsibility than it appears, but not none whatsoever. There are many cases in which you get absurd results if you project a trend to the absolute furthest extent possible. E.g., if you project current population growth into the future, you conclude that in 2750 years, the Earth's entire mass will be converted into humans. For a less silly example, for a while, estimates of the age of the Earth kept rising (starting at the Bible-derived estimate of 6,000 years). If you extrapolated maximally, you'd have concluded that the Earth is literally eternal. But that's not right, and not what the evidence supported. Or, suppose you notice that most scientific theories that have ever been held were later shown to be wrong. If you extrapolate maximally, you'd conclude that all possible theories are wrong (including this one?). Iskra also says that freedom comes in degrees. We're never maximally free (if such a thing even makes sense), nor do we have zero freedom. But as we learn more about ourselves, including what previously-hidden motives we might have, we become freer. *This exchange is continued in a reply to this comment below.* ------------------------------------------------ Dr. Robert Sapolsky is the recent author of the magnificent Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. Dr. Michael Huemer is most recently the author of Understanding Knowledge, a terrific introduction to epistemology. Buy these books now!!! Amazon to Dr. Sapolsky’s book: www.amazon.com/Determined-Science-Life-without-Free/dp/0525560971?nodl=1&dplnkId=c55ef1a2-973e-4a7f-a4e1-dcfc003bf2de Amazon to Dr. Huemer’s book: www.amazon.com/Audible-Understanding-Knowledge/dp/B0C75N3JKR/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=7XCYBE17D213&keywords=understanding+knowledge&qid=1697591002&sprefix=understanding+knowledge+%2Caps%2C195&sr=8-1
Free will is an illusion and here is the argumentation: From the lense of neuroscience: Marcus Du Sautoy (Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and the Simonyi Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science) participates in an experiment conducted by John-Dylan Haynes (Professor at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin) that attempts to find the neurological basis for decision making. Short summary: The experiment explores the relationship between free will, decision-making, and brain activity. Marcus Du Sautoy participates in an experiment in Berlin where they have to randomly decide to press either a left or right button. Brain scans and computer records track when the decision is made in the brain and when the button is physically pressed. The results reveal that up to six seconds before Marcus Du Sautoy consciously makes a decision, their brain has already made that choice. Specific patterns of brain activity can even predict which button will be pressed. This finding challenges the notion of free will, suggesting that unconscious brain activity significantly shapes our decisions before we become consciously aware of them. The experiment also delves into the nature of consciousness. It argues against dualism-the idea that the mind and brain are separate entities. Instead, it posits that consciousness is an aspect of brain activity. The unconscious brain activity is in harmony with a person's beliefs and desires, so it's not forcing you to do something against your will. Marcus Du Sautoy finds the results shocking, especially the idea that someone else can predict their decision six seconds before they are consciously aware of making it. The experiment raises profound questions about the nature of free will, consciousness, and the deterministic mechanisms that may govern our decisions. From the lense of pysics: In order to question the belief in free will, one can conduct experiments and contemplations. Take an action you are convinced you performed and reverse-engineer it until you realize you had no control over it. This leads to the conclusion that all actions in life are the same, and the notion of claiming ownership falls away, so free will is non-existent. By 'reverse-engineering an action,' I mean tracing back the steps that led you to make a specific decision. Upon close examination, you'll find that your choice was influenced by a series of past events and conditions over which you had no control, and that your choice didn't originate from a single point. One could argue that everything originates from the Big Bang, making us essentially biological robots. This realization may prompt you to reconsider how much 'free will' you actually possess, as your actions are shaped by factors beyond your control, both in the past and likely in the future as well. So you can summarize everything is a happening according to cosmic laws.
The email exchange continued: *Dr. Sapolsky replied:* Thanks for this followup. I totally agree that the history of thinking about these issues (and researching them) shows that the space free will can occupy keeps shrinking, and one might extrapolate that that space will eventually disappear. The issue of how wise it is to run with extrapolation, as I'm obviously heavily doing, is totally valid (like the idea that if it were possible to do computer modeling and urban planning back in the mid-19th century, extrapolation would have shown that cities would become unlivable by the mid-20th century, because of the overwhelming amounts of horse droppings in the streets, from the massive population increases in users of horse-drawn carriages). There's also some interesting studies showing how context-dependent extrapolation can be (for example, in one, they showed subjects a graph showing a straight line of points from a time series [i.e., graphing 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, and then 34]. Subjects would then be asked to put in the next point on the graph, and the question was whether people would view the 34 as just an aberration, and graph something like 40 or 45 as the point, resuming that pattern, or see it as an inflection point, and graph something like 29, 24...after that. And people were very likely to choose one pattern over the other depending on whether the scenario they were given in the story was taking place locally or on the other side of the planet [I've forgotten which direction it goes, and what hand-waving explanation was given, but the point was the really different outcomes depending on that seemingly irrelevant manipulation of what story was told]). So, yes, extrapolation has its dangers, and I'm probably resting too heavily on it when I talk about this. But that's in the context of my lunatic fringe stance that there is NO free will whatsoever -- yes, yes, the science isn't there to prove that yet, but at the rate things are going, come back X number of years from now and it will be irrefutable. And that stance is totally vulnerable to the ways that extrapolating can go off the rails. But that's concerning my very strongly felt but way out in left field stance about no free will. I would settle if what people take away from my song and dance is that we already know that we have vastly less free will than most people think, and that there is so much less so that the only intellectually and morally acceptable thing to do is majorly remake a lot of how things function (as in, say, "If we already know that for every increase in someone's Adverse Childhood Experience score, there is a ~35% increased likelihood of some awful behavior in adulthood [take your pick], we already know enough, we don't need more imagined findings in the future, to conclude that there is something desperately wrong with thinking about that adult behavior from a starting point of free will."). That sort of thing. Does this seem reasonable? All the best, Robert _____ *Dr. Huemer replied:* Hi Robert, Thanks very much for your thoughts. I'm copying Iskra in case she would like to comment on this. Regarding your last paragraph, I can certainly see how the knowledge about the Adverse Childhood Experience score would call into question the degree to which certain criminals are to blame for their actions. However, a) What about criminals who don't have a high ACE score? Surely they are still responsible? b) In the case of criminals who suffered from strong criminogenic influences: I'm not sure how you would propose to revise our practices. Should we not punish them? Perhaps you would propose some kind of psychiatric treatment? But is there in fact any effective treatment? Maybe we would keep punishing them anyway, because that reduces the bad behavior? I suspect that a good deal of the variation in bad behavior is explained by variation in people's experiences -- probably a lot more than people usually assume. I think we tend to over-ascribe evil motives. So I'm not maximally in disagreement with you. Example: I suspect that people who commit violent crimes might just be people who feel a lot more anger a lot more of the time than the rest of us, and the rest of us just don't know what that's like. Factors like this might diminish a person's responsibility, but I doubt that they entirely remove it. I.e., the person might merit a lower degree of blame than someone who doesn't have such influences, but still some blame. Relatedly, I think there are factors that make it difficult for a person to behave benevolently, without making it impossible. Yours, MH _____________________ *Dr. Iskra Fileva replied:* Thank you, everyone, for the stimulating and enjoyable discussion (not least to Jonah for organizing the event). Following up on Robert’s suggestion, I think there are at least two different questions here: (1) Are we generally as free as we think? (2) Do we have free will at all? It seems to me that there is no simple answer to the first question. We overestimate our freedom and that of others in some ways, as Robert argues, as when a person thinks she freely chose to support some cause when in fact, she was just conformist. Or when a child thinks her parents freely chose a style of psychological abuse, when in fact, they absorbed it from their parents unconsciously. On the other hand, sometimes, we deny we have freedom that we do, in fact, have, as when people say that there wasn’t anything else they could do given that an authority figure commanded them to act as they did. But on the whole, we probably make the first type of error more often. Regarding the second question, I think that if some actions are freer than others, then we have (some) freedom. But what would it mean for some actions to be freer than others? Well, I think for agents such as humans, free action basically means forming an intention to act on the basis of reasons you know you have and endorse, and then acting on that intention. The second piece is, I think, clearly in place - we can execute intentions we have. We even have the ability to persist for years in the face of obstacles in order to achieve a goal. That's what it means to have a will. But do we have a free will? This is where we come to the first piece of my formulation. After all, a person may show very strong will in pursuit of a goal, yet the goal itself may not be freely chosen. What I would say is that there is a difference between cases - some are closer, some are farther away from meeting the criteria I mentioned. Why think that? Here is a simple argument: We sometimes become aware of a bias in ourselves, perhaps with the help of other people. Once we do, our freedom increases by a little bit -- we are freer with respect to that particular bias. We may still have many other biases, but we are a little freer with regard to that one. That's all we need for the difference in degrees claim. If freedom sometimes increases, then it exists. So we have (some) freedom. There is, finally, a question about how free any given action would have to be in order for the person to be either morally or legally responsible for it. It could be that we have some freedom but not nearly enough for responsibility. That’s a thornier problem since one has to determine how much freedom is necessary for moral and/or legal responsibility. While I think the threshold is not so high as to be met rarely or never (I discuss this issue in a co-authored article "Will Retributivism Die and Will Neuroscience Kill It?"), I am sympathetic to the idea that we must, in general, guard against overattributing responsibility, especially overattributing it to others for bad behavior though also, perhaps, against underattributing it to ourselves, as when people insist a co-worker started the conflict while it fact, they did. (One may ask here too whether people shifting the blame for starting a conflict are, in turn, responsible for minimizing their own role in it given that there is a strong psychological tendency to absolve oneself of blame. And what I would say is that, going back to my earlier points, that's true, but there is also bad faith + knowing we have such a tendency increases our freedom with regard to it.) Thanks again, everyone. Also, I had not heard about the research on extrapolation Robert mentions. That's very interesting, and I will look up studies. With wishes, Iskra
@@PercyPrior1 Outstanding video- you have gotten the heavy hitters here for sure. For me, Dr. Huemer (along with folks like Dr. Richard Foley) has provided a strong defense of moral realism and free will, EVEN THOUGH I find myself more sympathetic to Dr. Sapolsky's materialism (well, I am an engineer). I wonder if Sapolsky wasn't too right when he said (around 39:00), here are two experts in such different fields in danger of talking past each other. My sense is that if you like metaethics, you may be more sympathetic toward free will, and likewise if you like a mechanistic, materialistic view of the world, you are more likely to be a biologist.
P1) Our intuitions support the existence of free will P2) In the absence of a defeater, we are justified in trusting our intuitions. P3) There is no ultimately successful defeater against (all of) our intuitions in favor of free will. C) Therefore, we are justified in trusting our intuitions that free will exists. Let me generalize the argument... P1) Our intuitions support the existence of X. P2) In the absence of a defeater, we are justified in trusting intuitions. P3) There is no ultimately successful defeater against our intuitions in favor of X. C) Therefore, we are justified in trusting our intuitions that X exists. The core issue is in ANY belief in X wherein X has not been shown to be an aspect of reality. Sapolsky made this point in his historical reviews wherein X was something that was believed to be an aspect of reality but was not the case. Thus, P1 is automatically rejectable when it is the case that X hasn't been shown to be an aspect of reality, since, it is the case that in EVERY instance wherein X hasn't been shown to be substantiated in the context of reality, the conclusions drawn on such were fallacious. Thus, we must SHOW that X is an aspect of reality, BEFORE such can be considered a proper target of intuition or anything else for that matter. If this isn't clear, then consider that any claim of X could be an imaginary psychological/sociological construct as opposed to being a reference to an aspect of reality such that we must make a distinction between what we can imagine to be the case versus what is the case. Sapolsky continually made reference to what has been shown whereas Huemer made reference not to reality, but intuitions which are a product of psychological/sociological tapestries as opposed to being facts about reality. Currently, within the context of what we know.... P1: Processes are tethered (NOT FREE). P2: We are processes at every level of review. C: We are not free. --- Huemer made the comment that reason supports free will, but that is a falsehood, since reason entails the use of knowledge to make an evaluation. An evaluation is a process regardless of whether such is a flawed process or not. The fact of reason being a process is why there is the expectation that we will be able to produce super intelligent AI systems (which is special kind of concern for another discussion). --- This video and the associated links would seem to be extremely relevant to the current debate/discussion. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-24AsqE_eko0.html (New discoveries about the brain) --- We are never free. However, the scope of our knowledge does determine the quality of our evaluations. --- I really enjoyed the debate/exchange.
It seemed to me that Dr. Sapolsky was talking about the rapids while Dr. Huemer was talking about the kayaker. If humans were someday able to account for absolutely every single variable (up to the entire universe, down to the subatomic particles within our atoms) around any given event, free will will be shown for what it is: a recreational illusion that emerged from our inability to fully comprehend reality with the purpose of making life interestingly enough to give conscious beings a desire to go through all the hardships and suffering necessary to continue living for no actual reward other than the belief in free will itself. Free will is the promise that we mice have the skills to find cheese in a labyrinth in which cheese doesn't even exist. A Czech man once explained it much, much better in this little fable: "Alas", said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I am running into." "You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up. --Franz Kafka
I start with the idea that everything I think is imaginary until demonstrated otherwise. I think it’s a mistake to assume things are the way we think they are until demonstrated otherwise. Intuition is NOT a reliable path to the truth.
There are several different claims being made here. 1. Your starting assumption (attitude?) towards all propositions that your mind entertains is one of positive disbelief. 2. It's positively wrong - as in, violating some sort of epistemic norm, to believe any proposition your mind grasps based on seemings and/or appearances. 3. Even if something appears correct to you, and you have no defeaters for it, it is still positively wrong to believe it. In fact, according to you, you should literally positively disbelieve it. 4. Intuition is not a reliable truth directed process. 5. Implicitly, some form of strong internalist-foundationalist and evidentialist epistemology is being assumed. You're clearly trying to say that in order for a non basic belief to be warranted, there must be reasons given that confer evidential warrant which must also be accessible or known by the person in a direct way. However, Huemer is also a internalist-foundationalist. Huemer's thesis is about basic beliefs and how those are justified, which is called phenomenal conservatism. The major problem with the main objection here is that it's just question begging against phenomenal conservatism. I think, arguably, you're also confused about belief and justification more generally speaking. You're also confused about skepticism - confused in such a way that your epistemic standard is likely self-defeating and incapable of leading to justified belief, much less knowledge.
@@Jimmy-iy9pl very well put, I find myself frustrated with people as the commenter above, to clean up confusion of someone else is often difficult, especially if they are confused about the concept of doubt.
This is a disturbing session. Why would you set-up a distinguished guest with an opponent who labels the professor's views as insane, the very first thing? NEVER participate in ANY exchange where you and your ideas are portrayed - dishonestly - as mentally ill. In some legal systems this is considered professional slander. Is this kind of personal attack what is now rewarded in academic philosophy? This and the accompanying comments, except for 1 or 2, show the low level of You Tube knowledge, proprietary and interest in serious discussion.
You are completely right. Continuing a debate after a one-person opening that deems his opponent's primary standpoint (hard determinism) insane should be a cause for an immediate stop of the debate. Sapolsky is a far more patient and thickskinned person than 99 % of humanity who would either immediately quit or degrade the debate further with a tone similar to that of his opponent. It is still shameful that it was allowed to continue after Heumer's opening "presentation".
I agree that was a poor choice of words but this is a debate on a small RU-vid channel so a degree of glibness can be accepted and fortunately for Huemer, Sapolsky is a much wiser more worldly person with a sense of ...ehem ... Huemer. I didn't like the rest of the debate though because I think they were both unintentionally talking past each other.
This is a rough sketch as I try to make explicit my understanding of all the information concerning determinism and free will: 1) To communicate the deterministic interior state of one human to another requires language. 2) Interpersonal communication influences the behavior of individual humans 3) If 2 is true, and it is granted from the outset that hard determinism is true, then hard determinism requires interpersonal communication through language. 4) Language utilizes the semantics of action/free will. 5) Free will reigns over concept formation and word choice which determines what gets communicated interpersonally. 6) If 3 and 5 are true, then hard determinism requires free will. (Or hard determinism is less than it is made out to be) Or something to this effect. I expect some premises may need to be polished up/reworded or even replaced whole cloth. Front running one possible objection: Can free will exist outside a semantics of action? In other words, if we change our language to avoid the semantics of action (as proposed by Churchland), does it therefore follow that there is no free will if we can just stop talking in terms of free will? I don't know.
[4) Language utilizes the semantics of action/free will.] Rejected. Language utilizes the semantics of the individual (who are processes - deterministic). The issue being that at every level of review there are cause/effect linkages such that our will is tethered to these factors which precludes such of being free.
My comments: 1) The moral consequences of whether we have free will or not say nothing about the essence of the matter, and the truth of a statement must be judged independently of the consequences. Someone believing that society would go to hell if it turns out we don't have free will does not contribute at all to clarifying the reality of its existence. This way of reasoning seems despicable to me. As Hume said: 'There is no more common method of reasoning, and yet none more blameable, than, in philosophical disputes, to endeavour the refutation of any hypothesis by a pretence of its dangerous consequences to religion and morality. If the hypothesis is absurd, it is certainly false, but it is not true that an opinion is false because it is of dangerous consequence.'" 2) The assertion that 'if we don't have free will, then why do anything, as things will happen anyway' is an argument that demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of Sapolsky's argument. If you sit in your house waiting and do not move anymore, you will die, but the truth is you lack the freedom to make that decision (or any decision, for that matter). And again, it's an argument based on the intimate moral feelings of the one making the assertion, yet it contributes nothing to the clarification of truth. Feeling bad because one thinks life wouldn't have meaning without God doesn't mean that God exists. It's astonishing that in this day and age of the 21st century, such arguments are still being made. Once again, Hume was very clear: 'Is doesn't come from should be.'" 3) Our intuitions are valid in solving countless problems related to our survival (our daily life, ultimately). But most of the time, they are bad, or very bad, when it comes to establishing the scientific truth of facts. Let me give a very simple example: our intuition tells us that colors are a property of objects, but colors do not exist in nature; they are only the representation produced by our brain of electromagnetic waves of a certain length (waves that, it's important to clarify, lack color). I could provide hundreds of examples of this nature. In summary, intuitions are an extremely poor guide to understand what things really are. In summary, Dr. Huemer's argumentation seemed unbelievably weak to me. Dr. Sapolsky has been extremely polite with him (I´m sure he was expecting much more solid arguments against his position).
Scientists who harbor materialist presumptions are either withholding or unaware of the extensive research and engineering practice on feedback control systems. Living organisms do not simply react to external and internal stimuli, they incorporate multiply-nested feedback systems that work together to maintain biological and psychological homeostasis. In every organism, there are multiple layers of purposeful action employed to continuously monitor their external and internal environments to maintain personal integrity, not simply a unitary spark of consciousness directing everything from inside your head. You may not think you have "free will", but your body would be paralysed without the ability to act on its own free agency.
I didn’t realize you could cut footage out after uploading and was worried I’d have to delete the video and start anew. Thanks for pointing this out to me!
Jeez. Huemer's arguments were just terrible. Well, if FW didn't exist, ppl wouldn't act the way they do. 🙄Yes, because society acts on the assumption that FW exists. That doesn't mean it isn't an illusion. Several qs I wanted him to be asked: does a person have more or less FW when they're sleepwalking or under the 'influence' of drugs or alcohol or does it depend upon the dose? What is they have a brain tumour? If every choice is entirely free, then why have any mitigation in criminal cases? Where does his FW reside? Does he control his own thoughts? What exactly is 'doing the choosing'? A part of his brain? A disembodied soul? Can he freely choose what he will be thinking in exactly an hour's time? Does he have an answer to Sam Harris' 'capital city' test? How you could you scientifically examine the operation of FW?
For starters. Every choice doesn't have to be entirely free to prove that there is free will, we just need one case of a free choice to defeat the claim that it doesn't exist at all. I don't even know what you mean by an illusion. How do we know it's an illusion? Through our intuition? Science? There's a gap in your reasoning.
(Part 1/2) Hey, I love your channel! If you're going to do that, consider reading some of this email exchange that the speakers had the day after the debate: *Dr. Huemer wrote:* "My wife, Iskra, who does philosophy of psychology, said that the strongest point for Robert's side was that the scope of apparent responsibility has been shrinking over time as scientific knowledge progresses. We keep finding more things that people aren't responsible for. By induction, you might extrapolate to a future time when we will think people aren't responsible for anything. I didn't fully address that, but basically I think that's an overgeneralization; the reasonable conclusion is that humans have less responsibility than it appears, but not none whatsoever. There are many cases in which you get absurd results if you project a trend to the absolute furthest extent possible. E.g., if you project current population growth into the future, you conclude that in 2750 years, the Earth's entire mass will be converted into humans. For a less silly example, for a while, estimates of the age of the Earth kept rising (starting at the Bible-derived estimate of 6,000 years). If you extrapolated maximally, you'd have concluded that the Earth is literally eternal. But that's not right, and not what the evidence supported. Or, suppose you notice that most scientific theories that have ever been held were later shown to be wrong. If you extrapolate maximally, you'd conclude that all possible theories are wrong (including this one?). Iskra also says that freedom comes in degrees. We're never maximally free (if such a thing even makes sense), nor do we have zero freedom. But as we learn more about ourselves, including what previously-hidden motives we might have, we become freer. *Dr. Sapolsky replied:* Thanks for this followup. I totally agree that the history of thinking about these issues (and researching them) shows that the space free will can occupy keeps shrinking, and one might extrapolate that that space will eventually disappear. The issue of how wise it is to run with extrapolation, as I'm obviously heavily doing, is totally valid (like the idea that if it were possible to do computer modeling and urban planning back in the mid-19th century, extrapolation would have shown that cities would become unlivable by the mid-20th century, because of the overwhelming amounts of horse droppings in the streets, from the massive population increases in users of horse-drawn carriages). There's also some interesting studies showing how context-dependent extrapolation can be (for example, in one, they showed subjects a graph showing a straight line of points from a time series [i.e., graphing 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, and then 34]. Subjects would then be asked to put in the next point on the graph, and the question was whether people would view the 34 as just an aberration, and graph something like 40 or 45 as the point, resuming that pattern, or see it as an inflection point, and graph something like 29, 24...after that. And people were very likely to choose one pattern over the other depending on whether the scenario they were given in the story was taking place locally or on the other side of the planet [I've forgotten which direction it goes, and what hand-waving explanation was given, but the point was the really different outcomes depending on that seemingly irrelevant manipulation of what story was told]). So, yes, extrapolation has its dangers, and I'm probably resting too heavily on it when I talk about this. But that's in the context of my lunatic fringe stance that there is NO free will whatsoever -- yes, yes, the science isn't there to prove that yet, but at the rate things are going, come back X number of years from now and it will be irrefutable. And that stance is totally vulnerable to the ways that extrapolating can go off the rails. But that's concerning my very strongly felt but way out in left field stance about no free will. I would settle if what people take away from my song and dance is that we already know that we have vastly less free will than most people think, and that there is so much less so that the only intellectually and morally acceptable thing to do is majorly remake a lot of how things function (as in, say, "If we already know that for every increase in someone's Adverse Childhood Experience score, there is a ~35% increased likelihood of some awful behavior in adulthood [take your pick], we already know enough, we don't need more imagined findings in the future, to conclude that there is something desperately wrong with thinking about that adult behavior from a starting point of free will."). That sort of thing. Does this seem reasonable? All the best, Robert
(Part 2/2) Their exchange continued as follows: *Dr. Huemer replied:* Hi Robert, Thanks very much for your thoughts. I'm copying Iskra in case she would like to comment on this. Regarding your last paragraph, I can certainly see how the knowledge about the Adverse Childhood Experience score would call into question the degree to which certain criminals are to blame for their actions. However, a) What about criminals who don't have a high ACE score? Surely they are still responsible? b) In the case of criminals who suffered from strong criminogenic influences: I'm not sure how you would propose to revise our practices. Should we not punish them? Perhaps you would propose some kind of psychiatric treatment? But is there in fact any effective treatment? Maybe we would keep punishing them anyway, because that reduces the bad behavior? I suspect that a good deal of the variation in bad behavior is explained by variation in people's experiences -- probably a lot more than people usually assume. I think we tend to over-ascribe evil motives. So I'm not maximally in disagreement with you. Example: I suspect that people who commit violent crimes might just be people who feel a lot more anger a lot more of the time than the rest of us, and the rest of us just don't know what that's like. Factors like this might diminish a person's responsibility, but I doubt that they entirely remove it. I.e., the person might merit a lower degree of blame than someone who doesn't have such influences, but still some blame. Relatedly, I think there are factors that make it difficult for a person to behave benevolently, without making it impossible. Yours, MH *Dr. Iskra Fileva replied:* Thank you, everyone, for the stimulating and enjoyable discussion (not least to Jonah for organizing the event). Following up on Robert’s suggestion, I think there are at least two different questions here: (1) Are we generally as free as we think? (2) Do we have free will at all? It seems to me that there is no simple answer to the first question. We overestimate our freedom and that of others in some ways, as Robert argues, as when a person thinks she freely chose to support some cause when in fact, she was just conformist. Or when a child thinks her parents freely chose a style of psychological abuse, when in fact, they absorbed it from their parents unconsciously. On the other hand, sometimes, we deny we have freedom that we do, in fact, have, as when people say that there wasn’t anything else they could do given that an authority figure commanded them to act as they did. But on the whole, we probably make the first type of error more often. Regarding the second question, I think that if some actions are freer than others, then we have (some) freedom. But what would it mean for some actions to be freer than others? Well, I think for agents such as humans, free action basically means forming an intention to act on the basis of reasons you know you have and endorse, and then acting on that intention. The second piece is, I think, clearly in place - we can execute intentions we have. We even have the ability to persist for years in the face of obstacles in order to achieve a goal. That's what it means to have a will. But do we have a free will? This is where we come to the first piece of my formulation. After all, a person may show very strong will in pursuit of a goal, yet the goal itself may not be freely chosen. What I would say is that there is a difference between cases - some are closer, some are farther away from meeting the criteria I mentioned. Why think that? Here is a simple argument: We sometimes become aware of a bias in ourselves, perhaps with the help of other people. Once we do, our freedom increases by a little bit -- we are freer with respect to that particular bias. We may still have many other biases, but we are a little freer with regard to that one. That's all we need for the difference in degrees claim. If freedom sometimes increases, then it exists. So we have (some) freedom. There is, finally, a question about how free any given action would have to be in order for the person to be either morally or legally responsible for it. It could be that we have some freedom but not nearly enough for responsibility. That’s a thornier problem since one has to determine how much freedom is necessary for moral and/or legal responsibility. While I think the threshold is not so high as to be met rarely or never (I discuss this issue in a co-authored article "Will Retributivism Die and Will Neuroscience Kill It?"), I am sympathetic to the idea that we must, in general, guard against overattributing responsibility, especially overattributing it to others for bad behavior though also, perhaps, against underattributing it to ourselves, as when people insist a co-worker started the conflict while it fact, they did. (One may ask here too whether people shifting the blame for starting a conflict are, in turn, responsible for minimizing their own role in it given that there is a strong psychological tendency to absolve oneself of blame. And what I would say is that, going back to my earlier points, that's true, but there is also bad faith + knowing we have such a tendency increases our freedom with regard to it.) Thanks again, everyone. Also, I had not heard about the research on extrapolation Robert mentions. That's very interesting, and I will look up studies. With wishes, Iskra
Definitely two people talking past each other. I'm sympathetic to Sapolsky's point of view, though I think he's failing to accurately describe the situation. I doubt I could do better. In my view, free will has been disproven already, and humans are simply clinging to a system or systems that have worked well enough since humans came to exist. I can't seem to get anyone to describe a mechanism that makes free will possible. It appears to be the case that what I think or feel at any given moment emerges from the state of the matter of which I am composed. In order to "make a decision", I need to be able to alter that state "willfully", but this creates a paradox. The only answer appears to be a sort of time fudgery whereby some supernatural element of myself can go back in time and set up my material state to produce a desired outcome in the present. Without that, there just isn't a way for anyone to "choose" in the sense that people believe they can. It appears to be the case that I am not a separate thing from the universe, I am the universe. All the behaviors of matter and energy (same thing really) and all the forces at play affect me just as they affect the gases on Jupiter, or photons traveling through the Andromeda galaxy, or some dust at the farthest edges of human observation. I think compatibilism is dodging the question as well. Nothing in compatibilism maps onto the naive belief in free will that most humans seem to hold.
Absolutely. Having thought about free will for only a decade, it is beyond me how it even is a thing anymore. Free will really is not even wrong, it's an entirely nonsensical concept.
I had an interesting conversation with a co worker who a compatibilist, the conversation led to us taking about someone doing their homework it went like this…. I asked ok why does someone not do their homework He replied, because of the paradigm of their circumstances, the “stuff” that happened to them to create that paradigm. Then I asked, ok why does someone do their homework He replied basically the same thing “because of the paradigm of their circumstances, the “stuff” that happened to them to create that paradigm. “ Finally I asked if that is true and what you think is either individual’s choice to do or not do their homework free? He completely stopped talking… A few moments later he said “if I could just find the words you would say aww I get it.” I tell this story in regard to this part of your statement. “I can't seem to get anyone to describe a mechanism that makes free will possible. It appears to be the case that what I think or feel.” Basically I’m saying I’ve had the utterly same experience.
Do you choose to understand, or does understand simply occur to you? Do you choose to come up with an idea, or does the idea simply emerge in your consciousness? For me the obvious answer is you don't choose for both questions. Then comes the question for Huemer, where is free will in the process of emergence of ideas or the process of understanding?
That assumes everybody has the ability to understand everything and that coming up with an idea is somehow a choice, neither of which is true and has nothing to do with will.
I’ve heard the argument maybe from Daniel Dennett who says that with consciousness and the capacity to understand ethical matters there arises the autonomy which would be considered agency or free will.
The freedom of the will comes in the judgments we make about our thoughts and feelings, what we call our conscience. Unless these judgments and choices we make are simply illusory, and we actually don't make choices and decisions. THe determinist argument is that we only seem to be making choices and decisions. Ok, that is simply an intuition based on an inference about cause and effect being unavoidable. But it in no way proves that we lack freedom of the will to make judgments and choices because we can make the exact same argument from intuition the other way: our choices and judgments only seem illusory because we are all determined by cause and effect. There is no real logically coherent argument to be made either way unless we can somehow prove a) causation necessarily leads to determinism in *all* cases of human thought, feelings, and behavior, or b) causation does *not* lead to determinism in all cases of human thought, feelings, and behaviors.
I would have been better to define the terms being used and agree on them before the 'debate' began. This is all too often a topic where people talk past each other over and over again. Generally, I find that almost everyone will agree that it makes ethical/moral sense to believe we have authorship. The question for me has always been about the possibly of one be wrong over the other and the possible implications of them. I think Sapolsky is a Soft Determinist (as most people are).
I'm not clear what the difference is between a choice that is free, a choice that is random, and a choice that is unpredictable. You can say that your choice is free, but to the extent you can explain why you made it, it becomes more predictable and less random. Software engineers use something that's called a "random number generator." The sequence of numbers it produces, while 100% predictable if you know how it works, is indistinguishable from a random sequence if you don't. Free will is like that, except that the "random decision generator" is astronomically more complicated, having evolved for billions of years.
I think the question should be 'can attribution of moral responsibility be rationally or empirically justified?" while bearing in mind Kant's distinction between pure and practical reason. So, for example, we may not have purely rational justification for attributing moral responsibility, but it might still be argued that we have practical rational justification for attributing moral responsibility.
I think we should distinguish types of responsibility. If someone has a tumor in the front of their brain and misbehaves as a result but goes back to normal once the tumor is removed, we could say they’re responsible in a certain sense for things they did but I doubt most ppl would consider them responsible in all the same ways someone who exhibited the same behavior but without a tumor. Sapolsky (rightly imo) argues that this distinction doesn’t actually make sense & we should instead treat everyone who does anything bad as unlucky and sick on some level if we take this idea seriously.
Yes, just to ask these kind of questions is to perform a rationality that presupposes a freedom.. that we can choose between alternate answers. Those hung up on these kinds of metaphysical questions have not understood the limits of pure reason that Kant outlined so forcefully, and the world went on to ignore.
This Mike guy shouldn't even be allowed to sit on the same podcast as Sapolsky. Unfortunately it was going to happen no mattet what. And for the record, I just realized Mike is vegan so explains this whole conversation. Not by choice unfortunately You cannot choose to choose what you will choose.
I enjoyed this a lot! Both of these guys have great personalities and made interesting arguments. Thank you so much for hosting. Overall, this confirmed what I already suspected. Sopolsky is a very smart man but doesn’t seem to understand what philosophers mean by “free will,” and appears uninterested in correcting his misunderstanding. Nothing against the guy. Nobody’s perfect after all.
The more I've listened to Sapolsky talk about Free Will, the more I've come to recognize that he really hasn't thought about things very deeply. So shallow is his understanding that I don't think he can even define a version of Free Will such that it *could* exist. It's too bad that Dan Dennett has passed as Dennett's understanding of what Free Will is, what it means, and how it came into existence, was head and shoulders above Sapolsky.
Western philosophy has engage in endless debate over this topics due to incapacity to reconcile simultaneous ones and difference. From one perspective free will exist from an other it does n
Oh boy. I was hoping to hear new arguments, but Michael’s opening is not encouraging, and kinda seems like he hasn’t really engaged with the arguments against free will. Though I suppose if there were good arguments for free will I would have heard them by now.
It feels like he’s only ever discussed the issue with other people who believe in free will, so his strategy of “make a bad argument then chuckle as if it destroys the deterministic view” works better with them.
I wonder if an objection to Huemer's example of the scapegoat convict is that, while scapegoating him would act as a deterrent for the general population, it could actually create an incentive for the true perpetrator, who would know that, not only did he get away with the crime, but everyone has satiated their desire for justice and are, presumably, no longer at pains to find him.
Yes, our intuition is that there is free will. However, that intuition is cultural, not innate. If we lived in a world in which culture had evolved with our current understanding of the behavior of the physical world, our intuitions would be completely different.
For me, the fundamental basis of determinism is this and this one thing is enough to establish determinism is this - there is no external "you" outside of your brain and experiences and memories and influences and if you till that point a few microseconds from making a decision is just an amalgamation of all that i said, what does it mean by you making a decision in isolation of all of that? There is no "isolated" you that is sitting outside your brain and mind and controlling your brain and mind like a driver. You are your mind and body and that mind and body are results of all things prior..
Exactly, nuff said. People think there is some magical will outside the universe that can separate itself from the universe to make some free decision.. there simply isn't.
@zulubeatsprince The only thing magical here is the idea that the self is an illusion and that the brain is the mind. Physicalism is dumb and doesn't do justice to the qualitative nature of first-person experience.
I think it's great, but how on Earth did you set this up??!!??? These men are too good for you. I'm not saying you deserve nice things, but I am saying you don't deserve these two men. I'm sure you're a fantastic young man - thanks for a wonderful video!
8 books “you should immediately buy” from Heumer (who is not well know) and 0 out of 28 books not even acknowledge from the very popular and current Sapolsky. What an ignorant way to begin what might have been a seminal interview. 😮
Free will and 'the illusion of free will' are two totally different things. The illusion free free will is something we use as human beings in the day to day life together with the illusion of self. It is constructed by our brain for practical reasons. Without those illusions we cannot function properly. We would be totally passive or guided only by low level desires. But having the illusion of free will and self does not mean that free will actually exists on the biological level. These are just two totally different things.
I disagree I think (unless you’re defining free will very differently from how I do). I don’t feel like I have free will in normal day to day life but I still feel able to make decisions beyond low level desires.
Like the other commenter, I fully embrace the idea we have no free will. My day to day decisions are still beyond low level desires because I’m fully aware low level desires don’t give the right outcomes that will allow me to have a happy and fulfilling life. Everything is based on conditions
@@dooplisssyou do have free will your not reacting to stimuli or prompts your not a robot you make decisions on a daily basis that effect you for the long termS
For me the most obvious question would be the most simple one that has been never asked here or elsewhere in dialogues or other videos, namely: if there is freewill than that will is free of what? Free of WHAT? And this is not just about grammar or semantic because if something is free that means it is not “related” anymore or at all to something right? So freewill is free (and when and how was freed?) of for example phisics or biology or chemistry or math or space or tendencies or trajectories or someone or past/present/future or life or language or brain or processes or causality etc etc or what?? Anyway in my opinion the opposite of free is not determined/predetermined but d e p e n d e n t / d e p e n d e d, so the better question is that is there (any) (completely) independent will or there is not? The answer is obvious. 😉
This question has been asked and answered. The distinction made here is liberty of spontaneity and liberty of indifference, the latter is what you're referring to and has been considered doubtful since it would eliminate causation from the principles and desires of the subject too.
Dr Sapolsky is the explanation that I was not crazy o possessed by a demon when I tell people that there is no free will according to the Bible, if our future is already set by God, how is possible me having free will if before I did born god already new that will go to heaven or hell and whenever I do during my life I am not so powerful to even think about changing gif decision
Though I am warm to Sapolsky's argument (there is ample evidence to support some form of determinism, hard or soft), some conflicts of interest should be pointed out. We live in a landscape of centrally planned habit-training, and a large element of this is the "education" industry. Sapolsky is in the education industry. The entire purpose of that industry is to reliably adjust the habits and behaviors of childen and young adults in line with the desires of government masters. In many cases, this results in the predictable destruction of any form of autonomy or free will in these childer and young adults. Do the goverment masters themselves have free will? I don't claim to know that, but even if they did, their goal would be to manage and control the free will of their subjects out of existence. Sapolsky is clearly knowledgeable and appears an excellent teacher (I've audited his Stanford lectures with much pleasure), but perhaps he would re-visit his approach if he viewed himself in context, as a mouthpiece for the larger aims of his masters. Additionally, many of the studies and examples Sapolsky cites are clearly drawn from market research. What is the goal of market research? To remove sales resistance. To remove autonomy. Sales is one of the largest and most lucrative industries worldwide, and it would be best to understand that this industry *pre-supposes* at least some form of free will or autonomy in some people, and seeks to remove and destroy the same in other people. This point doesn't go to whether there is or isn't free will generally. But it does suggest that Sapolsky lacks understanding of where his information comes from... or else he had no choice in the selection of these examples in the first place;) I am also disappointed there was no discussion of proto-free will, meaning that observing and imagining seems to be able to direct actions. Before a plane flew, it had to be imagined and built. Are we not in a position to direct our focus toward imagining and building a better version of free will? If we intuit or detect even a primitive and limited type of free will, why can that not be developed into a more robust form? I think it can, and why not? Whether this point is right or wrong, the fact remains that Sapolsky's masters *believe* they have some version of free will, but their demonstrable aim is to *make sure his students do not*. To end ramble: not much to say on Huemer, as i don't think either "won" here, but it was an enjoyable discussion. Thanks PercyPrior!
I like your skepticism and it does raise questions. For example, look at Edward Bernays, “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” Bernays didn’t keep it secret either, he wrote the book, propaganda. Also look at “The Prince” by Machiavelli and “48 Laws Of Power” by Robert Greene. If the information is out there, good people can gain knowledge against the Machiavellians of the world. Unfortunately we have a lot of catching up to do, because the elites of the world have known this for generations and generations. The world is messy and I don’t ever see that changing in my lifetime. I believe Sapolsky is correct. But I see a free will hack though. We can change via epigenetics. Knowing this, we can change our lives and are not shackled to our genetic prisons. But one has to have a thought before that happens. And we are not the thinker of thoughts, we are the observers. A thought comes from somewhere, we don’t decide to think a thought. It takes a cause to create a thought. We’re billiard balls getting knocked around and our paths change when we knock into each other and the billiard table. But I don’t think we can change magically out of free will. A cause has to happen, then that creates a desire. Call it epigenetics, call it free will, it’s semantics, but it is a nice life hack if I do say so myself.
I agree. I loved his Stanford lectures, and read "Behave", and loved it. I knew he was a hard determinist and anti-free-willer, and knew he was planning this book. I am definitely not a determinist and I believe in free will of sorts, but I really wanted to read his take. I still disagree with him but I am quite enjoying the book.
@@rosesmitty1206 there is a huge amount of evidence that our actions are determined by biological and environmental factors and zero evidence supporting free will.
The thing is, the assertion that "the whole physical universe follows the laws of physics" requires some assumptions. First of all, we don't even know if there are laws of physics that govern *everything*. We have some pretty good guesses that progress day by day but there are usually some peculiar situations that then pop up and deny those seeming "laws" Let's use gravitation as an example Newton showed it to be one thing but then Einstein figured out that at the speed of light the seeming "laws" differ drastically and gravitation becomes this whole other thing. Then quantum mechanics rolls around and for very small particles gravity is also shown to be this completely other thing as well. Maybe the reason why these peculiar situations very usually pop up is that there are no laws, but there are seemingly true generalizations. Even if we can prove that there do exist laws of physics that govern everything, that's under the assumption that none of those laws can be a non-deterministic law. The counter example is that: what if there exists some law that sometimes produces outcome A based on input X and at other times produces outcome B based on input X. In order to show that that's not the case, we (under the assumption that everything is entirely governed by laws that do exist) need to find ALL of those laws because a law that we don't know could have the property that I mentioned above. So that's "what's hard to understand about the basic argument." It's that the assumptions required to make it are true But if all the assumptions required are true then you're absolutely right
@@FightFilms Every thing that makes up the “mind” is physical therefore the mind is physical. In my subjective opinion the “mind” is a property of complex matter.
The problem with these arguments against Free Will is the misunderstanding of cause and effect treating the past as creating the future you'll get lost in this . Alan Watts does a great job of explaining this
It seems to me that they are not really discussing the same thing and are using one word. Why don't you start off with a discussion of what is Will? Or maybe even better what is will power.
wow, huemer's reasoning was astonishingly poor. basically, 'natural language and manifest image vibes make me feel like 'free will' exists, so it exists.' lol. arguments from incredulity at best signal the person's reaction to comprehending and modelling the weirdness and exploration of hypothetical scenarios. mike entertained some skeletally sketched thought experiments and mental simulations and because of their novelty and seeming improbability, argued that that's somehow evidence against determinism being the case, being the fact of the matter? give me a break. he also used some language that made it seem like we 'have to' use moral, or normative language. we don't. again, mike, wth?? going maximally general and abstract, this just comes down to necessitarianism and mechanisms. everything that ever happens, happens exactly as it does, and there are no ontic possibilities, or potentialities. only that which is ever actual is possible, and we witness the unfolding of reality, everything happening exactly as it does. obviously, if you don't get out of your bed, you will remain in your bed. occurrences need to happen for occurrences to happen. that doesn't mean that the future is a garden of forking paths, or that once it was possible for you to either get out of the bed or remain. it just means that you are considering mental models that are based on data from past actualities. that's all there is to it. possibilities are epistemic. some logical laws can seem intuitive, but they are crystallised through testing them against empirical regularities. it's just an abstract representation of some structures of reality. 'we haven't scientifically proven either'. well, current best physics is deterministic, or maybe mostly deterministic with occasional 'random' events, though that's just probably an artefact of our cognitive limitations, or the math, or both. if you are willing to entertain some non-mechanistic (?) reality, then that's just unintelligible to me and to empirical inquiry. might as well just say whatever, like shlakkor bangural klomo iylahoren sheshmesk klui. QED, i proved free will.
Huemer's main line of argument seemed to me to constitute a positive argument in favor of the existence of free will. From what I gather, he was saying: *Premise 1)* Our intuitions support the existence of free will. (Note that Sapolsky didn't even dispute this premise. He agrees that at least by initial appearances it seems like free will exists.) (Eg., it seems like we choose among alternatives by way of self-control at least some of the time, and, at least by initial appearances, it seems like to say one ought to do something implies that one can do otherwise. Arguments are implicit ought statements/normative suggestions in favor of adopting certain beliefs given certain evidences, and punishment is in part justified by the sense that the perpetrator could have and should have done differently than they in fact did.) ((You might wonder, "why think that ought implies can?" Huemer's reason is that it seems intuitive and we lack a reason to doubt it. A) it seems like to say "I know you can't, but you should still anyway magically fly through the air like superman and shoot lasers out of your eyes in order to bring about world peace. You ought to do that, so why haven't you? What the heck is wrong with you, a*****e?" is linguistically counterintuitive.) *Premise 2)* In the absence of a defeater, we are justified in trusting our intuitions. (Huemer argued that ultimately Sapolsky's view commits him to accepting Premise 2 because scientific practice relies on beliefs which *ultimately* rely for their support on as-yet-undefeated appearances, such as certain theory confirmation assumptions like "simpler theories are more likely to be true" or "the laws of logic are reliable" or "the future will sometimes be like the past," or "the external world exists," etc. For example, famously as David Hume pointed out, it's hard to justify induction without circular reasoning if you reject intuitionism. For instance. I.e., why think the future will be like the past? Because it has always been like that? In order for that to be evidence for the claim, we would have to assume that the fact that something has been a certain way in the past is evidence that it will continue to be that way in the future, which is the very question under dispute. Hence, many philosophers have concluded that there is no non-circular justification for induction except a form of foundationalism which says that it seems true and we lack a reason for doubting it. Huemer also has a more general argument that we should believe Premise 2 because any principle which we preferred to it would ultimately be justified by the principle it rejects, namely by the fact that it seems true and we lack a reason for doubting it.) *Premise 3)* There is no ultimately successful defeater against (all of) our intuitions in favor of free will. (Eg., Huemer replied to Sapolsky's inductive generalization argument against free will by saying "it doesn't follow that because our actions are often *influenced* by external events, they must be *entirely determined* by external events.") *Conclusion a)* Therefore, we are justified in trusting our intuitions that free will exists. Huemer also argued that Sapolsky was engaged in a self-defeating line of argument because 1) he appeared to cast blame on people for casting blame on people (i.e., he seemed to say that it's *wrong* to condemn anyone's behavior since no one is responsible for their behavior, but calling a behavior wrong is a form of condemnation), and 2) he advanced a series of arguments for thinking that free will doesn't exist, which if we are inclined to accept the "ought implies can" principle leave Sapolsky's implicit "you should believe this because of the evidence" claim hanging in midair. How can it be that we should do anything if "should" requires the option of doing otherwise and there is no option to do otherwise? (This is just my attempt to explain what I think Huemer's argument was and should not be interpreted as an invitation to "fight me." lol)
@@PercyPrior1 P1. yes, many people do report experiencing seemings of being able to choose from multiple potentials, possibilities, being an agent, a self, possessing the ability to have done otherwise... humans across cultures are intuitive dualists and essentialists; this is extremely well documented. many people don't share these seemings, and many people, especially those who haven't been trained to use language in particular ways, may not experience these seemings. however, these seemings are neither the evidence base, nor the relevant theoretical virtues in theory comparison in fundamental mathematical physics, or special sciences. as i wrote in my first comment, experiencing mental simulations based on past actualities doesn't justify inferring that some mysterious, entirely unevidenced phenomena exist, such as free-will, or essences. whenever there's a claim of being able to do otherwise, the evidence can never be any actuality, but some allusions to mental simulations and epistemic considerations that generalize from past actualities. i reject that 'ought implies can', or that upon reflection, we don't have reason against this 'intuitive seeming'. the feeling of saying 'you ought'--that 'align with me-itch' is accompanied by imaginative mental simulation that is based on past actualities where people did the things or similar things that i am imagining you 'can' do, but it's all hypothetical and does not tell me anything whatsoever about what can actually happen, only what i am able to imagine in that situation. i also hold that normative language, except in a deflationary, instrumental sense, is unintelligible, or at best understandable through moral expressivism. ps. i'm not trying to fight you, just responding, feeding the internet... whatever! humans humaning, universe universing. tbc
@@real_pattern this comment shows u didnt even understand huemers argument. He literally explained how what you are saying was not what he meant by intuition twice.
@@crab6084 what is 'free-will'? it never 'seemed' to me that 'i have' it. some people who are trained to use language in certain ways talk about it, but it sounds unintelligible word salad to me. can you tell me what free will is?
Agreed. I've never heard a convincing defense of contra-causal free will. With compatibilists I can agree that we have the kind of (deterministic!) cognitive capacities they say we have. At that point it's just a matter of whether calling those capacities "free will" makes sense.
I believe in free will, but also appreciated Dr. Sapolsky's explanations deeply and didnt particularly like Dr. Huemer's approach. I see no reason why these positions have to be mutually exclusive. As a practical Buddhist, the act of self/universal inquiry into Nature opens up gaps where these philosophies overlap. Or does it just seem to be that way . . . ;)
Is dr Huemer confusing determinism as a complex system of causes that lead to a specific event (that Sapolsky alludes to) with predeterminism and linear causation ? he seems to imply that we cannot avoid this or that fatal event because of determinism.. but that is not what Sapolsky's view contends. In simple everyday terms determinism and the non-existence of free will means that in a specific instance we could not have done otherwise because of the complexity of the causes that led up to this specific bevaviour/action.
1. Creatio ex nihilo is incoherent: P1: Creatio ex nihilo posits the creation of the universe from absolute nothingness, implying a state of non-existence before creation. P2: Non-existence is not a state but rather the absence of existence. P3: Minds are events, which means they are temporal occurrences or processes. P4: If minds are events, they cannot exist in a state of non-existence before the creation of the universe. P5: Therefore, the notion of a divine mind or creative consciousness existing in a state of non-existence before creation is incoherent since events (minds) cannot exist in a state of non-existence. 2.Christianity makes a category mistake because minds aren't substances, minds are events: P1: The mind is a nominal concept for a specific set of cognitive events. P2: If minds are events, they are grounded in substances. P3: A living being represent a specific separation within a single substance that behaves in a specific way. P4: Minds are grounded in living beings. P5: Therefore, minds do not exist independently of living beings 3. Substance dualism is false because it encounters the interaction problem. There can be no necessary connections between distinct existences (Hume's Dictum). 4. Necessitarianism is true because logical possibilities do not entail metaphysical possibilities, and it cannot be proven that things could have been or happened otherwise, hence, free will is false. 5. Argument for Substance Monism: P1: If substance dualism is false, then substance monism is true. P2: There is only one substance that things are made out of, making it impossible to conceive of another substance, hence, substance dualism is false. P3: Substance Monism is true. P4: If Substance Monism is true, it can be either Physicalism, Neutral Monism, or Idealism. P5: Idealism makes a category mistake, and physicalism attaches an arbitrary label to the substance. P6: Neutral Monism is true. P7: If neutral monism is true, there is only one substance in reality, and it exists as an ontologically independent brute fact. 6. Argument for Existence as a brute fact: P1: Existence is the totality of all that exists. P2: If an explanation or reason is something that exists, it belongs to the totality of all that exists. P3: Explanations or reasons exist. P4: Explanations or reasons belong to the totality of all that exists. P5: Existence has no explanation or reason. 7. Argument from Functionalism and Nominalism: P1: Mental states are events. P2: If P1 is true, then mental states do not exist. P3: Events are not existents but occurrences. P4: Events have beginnings. P5: Existence is made of a single substance that grounds events. P6: Labeling the substance "God" is tautologous and arbitrary. P7: Such a definition conflicts with the Christian definition of God as a personal creator. Defense of p1. If something involves the unfolding of events to be made coherent, then it is itself an event. Concepts are dynamic and require an unfolding of events to be articulated and conceived, hence, platonism is false 8. Argument against Idealism and Physicalism Labels: p1. Idealism assumes that mental states are independent existences. p2. This assumption commits a category mistake, as, under extreme nominalism, mental states are events, not independently existing particulars. p3. Therefore, labeling them as separate existences is erroneous. p4. Idealism, as well as, Physicalism labels the ontologically independent substance as "physical" or "mind" arbitrarily. p5. Such labeling is arbitrary because the substance itself lacks inherent properties categorically defining it as "physical" or "mind". Conclusion: Under extreme nominalism, the substance can be understood as the ontologically independent brute fact without the need for arbitrary labels. By resorting to occasionalism or parallelism to address the interaction problem, substance dualism engages in special pleading. As a nominalist, I reject the existence of emergent properties in favor of aspects. While a theist may post that God (a divine consciousness) was in a state of existence, pre-instantiation of change, this makes a category mistake since minds are mere concepts for a specific set of cognitive events grounded in living beings and it also makes an existential fallacy. Minds can further be defined as specific divisions within a single ongoing event established by arbitrary boundaries.
Why that guy laughs and smirks all the time? Is he saying something funny all the time? I seem to miss the jokes all the time. But his arguments are so complicated and... theoretical, that maybe that's what's happening.... Sapolsky, on the other hand is brilliant, as usual.
@@monolith94on the contrary, the idea that free will exists is extremely laughable and is not really taken seriously by institutions that actually matter. that's why no philosophers are called to testify as experts on things that matter by the courts.
How can you be middle class in any capitalistic system without exploiting someone, somewhere on the other side of the globe. You have no choice but to just by going shopping
Dr Robert Sapolsky has an immense patience and it so brilliant and intellectually superior. Also why Mr Huemer keeps sort of laughing, is he so insecure?
Determinist cultism is something else. Lol illiterate people can't understand a self defeating position. Leave the politeness crap you are not cut out for philosophy
I'm not sure why Sapolsky is arguing against intuition as evidence when he hasn't demonstrated that he operates on anything more than his intuiton, when concluding the scientific evidence should trump the experiental evidence of free will that MIchael Huemer is giving.
I wish Sapolsky were more familiar with philosophy, as that would have allowed him to formulate much clearer propositions and greatly enhanced his arguments.
philosophy: the love of wisdom, normally encapsulated within a formal academic discipline. Wisdom is the soundness of an action or decision with regard to the application of experience, knowledge, insight, and good judgment. Wisdom may also be described as the body of knowledge and principles that develops within a specified society or period. E.g. “The wisdom of the Tibetan lamas.” Unfortunately, in most cases in which this term is used, particularly outside India, it tacitly or implicitly refers to ideas and ideologies that are quite far-removed from genuine wisdom. For instance, the typical academic philosopher, especially in the Western tradition, is not a lover of actual wisdom, but a believer in, or at least a practitioner of, adharma, which is the ANTITHESIS of genuine wisdom. Many Western academic (so-called) “philosophers” are notorious for using laborious sophistry, abstruse semantics, gobbledygook, and pseudo-intellectual word-play, in an attempt to justify their blatantly-immoral ideologies and practices, and in many cases, fooling the ignorant layman into accepting the most horrendous crimes as not only normal and natural, but holy and righteous! An ideal philosopher, on the other hand, is one who is sufficiently intelligent to understand that morality is, of necessity, based on the law of non-violence (“ahiṃsā”, in Sanskrit), and sufficiently wise to live his or her life in such a harmless manner. Cf. “dharma”. One of the greatest misconceptions of modern times is the belief that philosophers (and psychologists, especially) are, effectively, the substitutes for the priesthood of old. It is perhaps understandable that this misconception has taken place, because the typical priest/monk/rabbi/mullah seems to be an uneducated buffoon compared with those highly-educated gentlemen who have attained doctorates in philosophy, psychology and psychiatry. However, as mentioned in more than a few places in this book, it is imperative to understand that only an infinitesimal percentage of all those who claim to be spiritual teachers are ACTUAL “brāhmaṇa” (as defined in Chapter 20). Therefore, the wisest philosophers of the present age are still those exceptionally rare members of the Holy Priesthood! At the very moment these words of mine are being typed on my laptop computer, there are probably hundreds of essay papers, as well as books and articles, being composed by professional philosophers and theologians, both within and without academia. None of these papers, and almost none of the papers written in the past, will have any noticeable impact on human society, at least not in the realm of morals and ethics, which is obviously the most vital component of civilization. And, as mentioned in a previous paragraph, since such “lovers-of-wisdom” are almost exclusively adharmic (irreligious and corrupt) it is indeed FORTUITOUS that this is the case. The only (so-called) philosophers who seem to have any perceptible influence in the public arena are “pop” or “armchair” philosophers, such as Mrs. Alisa “Alice” O’Connor (known more popularly by her pen name, Ayn Rand), almost definitely due to the fact that they have published well-liked books and/or promulgate their ideas in the mass media, especially on the World Wide Web.
Listening to anyone trying to argue for free will is like listening to a toddler argue that what they say to Dora affects what happens next in the cartoon.
There is a physics argument for determinism. And there are biological and sociological arguments for determinism. The biological and sociological arguments, on which Sapolsky is most expert, are about influence not inevitability. Usually the effect size is a percentage below 50. So yes, it’s important to structure society according to the fact that, say, a person formed in a stressed out womb who grows up exposed to lead etc, had much greater disadvantages than others. But that isn’t the whole story.
If the universe is deterministic everything is the effect of a cause, how do you get out of that_ you dont. we have the illusion of choice, but there is only one path. its pretty straightforward. the other variable causes are the rest of the story, every thing that you are and that happened to you and that is going to happen to you constitute the 100percent of what you are and will be and will do.
@@cihuacoatl1887 If you want to talk about determinism from the physics perspective, you will have to give up the notion of cause. Most theoretical physicists don't find "cause" to be a useful concept at all. On the other hand Sapolsky spends most of his time talking about bio-social effects. Oddly he talks as though they are 100 but as I've already said, they are at best in the 60%. A psychotropic drug that has a 40% effect is considered a treatment. What doesn't make sense, and I think Sapolsky is being a little lax in this department, is helping yourself to the physics certitude while actually talking about the biology and sociology realm.
Yeah it's not clear that biological or sociological arguments mean much at all. What I'm thinking with any physics argument, is that I doubt we understand consciousness, so how can we be sure of whatever rules are applying to consciousness?
How hard is it to write a masters thesis in philosophy these days? I am just asking out of curiosity because I really dont have a career and therapy always crashes into the big questions which the therapist is not able to give sufficient answers for ... therapy seem to always end up in the same solution of "just get a job", but I am not able to find meaning in material pursuits. I allready have a few degrees and am crazily suicidal. I have been researching another option of moving to a vacant farm with no connection to roads to try and get a connection to the fight for survival. I know someone that bought such a place. Thankful for any kind of response.
Sapolsky's presentation was well done, for sure. I am listening to his book, as I write this. But so far, I don't buy it. To me, free will is just as obvious as consciousness (and of course, they are closely linked). Of course, we can't deny consciousness but, through sleight-of-word, clever people can trick themselves into thinking we don't have free will. Nobody denies that genes, epigenetics, and the environment influence our behavior, but "You are more likely to ..." doesn't equal a lack of free will.
that mandelbrot set in your pfp leads me to believe there is still time for you to intuitively get that free will isn't even a part of conscious experience. Sam Harris has helped me immensely in that regard. There is a difference between voluntary and involuntary choices of course, but when you really become aware of how choices are made, there is a fundamental level of mystery that we are confronted with at every step of the way. Once it becomes obvious through meditation/mindfulness then it is realized that free will is not necessary for the way actions and words effortlessly stream out of you.
@@pedestrian_0 I have read Sam Harris, and to say I am not convinced is an understatement. If you listen to people talk about consciousness, they talk about the same mystery. To the point that many throw up their hands and say "panpsychism" as if that solves anything. I don't know if I can succinctly offer my suspicion regarding free will, but here it goes. We know that, despite what determinists say, we live in an incredibly stochastic world. There isn't some magic that makes what we know from the quantum world just disappear in the macro world. Under most circumstances, statistics make this stochasticity invisible. But in some, far from equilibrium systems, it strongly affects the macro world. Of course, as most free-will denialists will point out, randomness doesn't get you to free-will. However, what randomness can give you, in some cases, is creativity. The best, most well-studied example is evolution. Most mutations are truly random (not just apparently random). Then natural selection takes that randomness and puts it to work. Evolution isn't a random process, but it wouldn't exist without randomness as a creative input. I believe that Free Will comes about in roughly the same way. There is no doubt that everything from genetics to development to long-term and short-term environmental influences affect our behavior, and sometimes (perhaps even most of the time), that is the sum total of our behavior. But along the way, we do make choices, we do have agency, and we are, most of the time, responsible for our actions.
@@pedestrian_0Sam Harris like many simply assumes determinism in order to conclude it, thus begging the question. Try listening closely to him on the topic when he discusses prior events influencing our actions and I think this is obvious. Also his analogy to not being able to directly choose our thoughts from an introspective pov can be analogized to extrospection and then is easily seen as not at all a disproof of free will or even any evidence at all against it. His point there amounts to the equivalent of saying that since when you open your eyes, you don’t have a choice about what you see in front of you, that that means you don’t have free will. That is how his introspective argument works. But that’s laughable. Even though I can’t choose what I see in my field of vision but can nevertheless direct my eyes to focus on this or that within it, so it goes with what arises within my mind during introspection.
@@francescaerreia8859 "Sam Harris like many simply assumes determinism in order to conclude it" To conclude what? Sam and Daniel Dennett are in alignment with regards to determinism being irrelevant to the type of free will that is important. In fact he makes it clear that even if the universe isn't deterministic, there is still no free will because you wouldn't know why you finally decided with the decision you ended up with. From a compatibilist perspective it's very easy to say "I do know why I chose what I chose, evolution has gifted me reasoning faculties shaped throughout the years so that I'm able to weigh options more precisely than other animals" to which Sam and I would respond that this is a bait and switch which replaces the first person point of view of free will (which we argue *is* the free will most people actually care and think about) with a trade-off for a third person account for how one ought to operate. "when you open your eyes, you don’t have a choice about what you see in front of you" Yes, you don't choose what is there when you open your eyes. He doesn't directly say "so this proves you don't have free will", he invites you to investigate more deeply how everything is simply appearing in its place. "Even though I can’t choose what I see in my field of vision but can nevertheless direct my eyes to focus on this or that within it" What's important and what separates me from being a compatibilist, aka a believer in free will, is the closer inspection of this 'I' that can direct focus.. To a typical compatibilist a lot of this flies over their head, but I think it's the inevitable future we're heading towards with science.
@@pedestrian_0 you’re right, I made a mistake. Sam doesn’t assume determinism in order to prove we don’t have free will (though many do), rather he assumes we don’t have free will as evidence that we don’t have free will. He just asserts that we can’t choose or invites us to try to see this ourselves. And compatibilism is such a joke it’s hard to grasp how anyone can believe in it in any form for a second. Free will is about the ability to do otherwise by choice. If we don’t have that, we are just automatons with the illusion of free will and our actions are no different than those of billiard balls being hit or dominos falling with the first ones struck trillions of years ago leading up to us now.
When Huemer admits that atomic theory etc... are the most intuitive theories once you take into account the evidence, Sapolsky should have hijacked his intuition argument to conclude determinism is true. Huemer's intuition is merely based on personal experience while Sapolsky's intuitions are based on a life time of behavioral biology. As for Huemer's arguments about rationality, Sapolsky already concedes that we may have an insignificant sliver of freewill (he often uses the "flossing the top row of teeth before the bottom row" example) and since Huemer's argument doesnt address degrees of freewill, we can accept his argument as logically proving only this insignificant free will. Although, i personally dont understands how even that makes sense. The self is constituted in some way and that constitution is determined by biology and environment. I cant control my wants nor can i control my thoughts. I only know the things ive learned, i can only imagine things that my experiences and level of creativity permit for. I cant see the sun shining outside and decide to judge that it is night time where i am. If I learn everything about viruses and nothing about religion, i cant sincerely believe that demons cause the flu.
Freedom doesn't come without effort or habit forming. Thinking of the idea that virtue is a habit. It's not that we have much (if any) freedom when we're in a particular state of mind. We only gain significant freedom(in my opinion), in choosing to alter our state of mind or feelings. If I'm angry, or frustrated, or annoyed, or irritable, then I'm like an input output machine with determined outcomes. If I see that I'm in that state, and reflect upon it, and decide compare it with a state of peace and happiness that I could choose and with effort, release the grip of frustration I'm feeling, then I know I will be a different input output machine with different outcomes. Think of Sapolsky's example of putting people in a room with good smells vs bad smells, and the outcome that produces in people's agreeableness with one another. Of course that's true! The question is not whether we can choose our inputs. Our inputs are what they are. The question is whether you can change the processing of the inputs. And it seems that people have the ability to work on their state of mind, which seems to be several layers removed from direct input/output processing. Has neuroscience studied this aspect of things? It seems they more usually study direct input/output scenarios.
@collin501 the process of reflecting on and regulating emotions takes place in the prefrontal cortex and the temporal lobes. Reflecting upon your emotions, comparing them with other states, and "choosing" them is just as much a neurological activity as being angry or slightly more homophobic. People with damage to either the PFC or the temporal lobe can't do that as well or as consistently. You're genes and environment shape how strongly those parts of the brain activate. Chronic stress might cause your amygdala to overpower the PFC (which shrinks under chronic stress conditions) and make it harder to regulate your emotions.
@dakotacarpenter7702 Yes, that's fine, but the point is whether people can change their emotions, which changes the input output in different situations. Then, we bring in the notion of moral responsibility if people have this power.
@collin501 I mean, yes, we have the power, it's just that our ability to change our emotions is just as determined as the original emotions we're changing. Moral responsibility is a useful concept, and ultimately useful/ optimal concepts are all we can hope for. We can never be completely certain and Kant (plus subsequent discoveries in neurology) basically showed that we have no direct experience of the world as it is, only as our brains represent it.
@dakotacarpenter7702 you said the ability to change our emotions is determined. Did you mean to say that the changing of our emotions is determined? Ability implies power to do or not to do. It is very confusing to say we have an ability when it's just part of the input output machine.
Michael didn’t offer counter arguments …he basically said I feel here is free will…my intuitions tell me so…nothing about how we can think and act outside the chain of causality
That's not a serious deterrence theory objection. People need to know the process was reliable to be deterred in the first place. Otherwise, it can happen regardless of deterrence, even with retributive theory.
I think Huemer's point was that under isolated circumstances in which framing the innocent man *would* truly maximize utility, we have the intuition that it's wrong to frame him. Ergo, maximizing utility cannot be the only relevant consideration for just punishment.
@@PercyPrior1 that's a reductum ad absurdum from a sentence with an iffy truth value. Have you done some courses in mathematics? Because outside of it it's generally a bad argument structure - it's just pointing out a contradiction. We all have conflicting moral intuitions, as Sapolsky rightly pointed out, it doesn't falsify detternce theory. The final call is this: why even give a stage to a political Libertarian (Google moral disposition and psycopathology of libertarians; they are the most horrible people, might give a stage to Nazis while you're at it) but worst of all, to a clueless individual on the topic, which only motivation is defending his political views. They need "free will" for their entire political project from "consent" to "just" desert to Ayn Rand like capitalism. I worked with them in my clinic, they tend to be horrible to-the-very-least sub-clinical psychopathic individuals. Do not let them spread their ideas without proper opposition.
@@Forkroute What are you even talking about? You're saying "It just shows a contradiction" as if it's not a big deal. If by contradiction you mean it contradicts anti-retribution intuitions - yes, yes it does. Saying that thought experiments aren't relevant to philosophy is like saying empirical experiments aren't relevant to science. Math isn't relevant. Jonah is a libertarian and so am I, so I suggest learning serious political psychology before throwing baseless accusations about our psychology. Libertarians are not like Nazis or psychopaths, and there is no evidence for this. We just think the state should be held to the same moral standards as individuals and that the state has no more right to tax than it would be for me to go around and tax people.
@@SolarxPvP A simple contradiction won't tell you which sentence is false. Empirical research on lack of free will shows people's retributive intuitions become much less stronger (see also, Scandinavian society). Thought experiments are intuition pumps. A review by a peer-reviewed magazine of a Thomas Sowell book, asked again and again why he ignores the literature. Decades of literature. Like you ignoring political philosophy on taxation (see Elizabeth Anderson on taxation). Google it. The Psychological dispositions of Libertarians and the paper In Search of Homo Economicus. I can suggest more empirical research, but all point to the bottom line: except for a small subset of psychopaths, no lives up to your libertarian fantasy. Most people are healthy, pro-social individuals. I treated many like you in the clinic, I suggest you attend therapy if you're a Libertarian. You probably had an absent/abusive parent. PTSD is related to pathologies of lower empathy and social issues. Treatment can help you personally and society at large.
@@Forkroute WHOAH, I was about to agree with you until you started slandering libertarians! I don't believe in free will, or objective morality, but I'm politically libertarian, along the lines of David Friedman. I don't believe that people "objectively have rights" to their property, but I'm *subjectively* very much in favor of leaving people alone, not confiscating their stuff, not imposing regulations, etc.
Michael just claimed that we are in control of our beliefs and that arguments against that position are demonstrably false and have overwhelming conclusive evidence. If that is true, does Michael believe it is possible to make himself believe in the Greek pantheon of gods? Are the Greek pantheon of gods demonstrably false with overwhelming conclusive evidence?
I really hope at some point Robert interacts with Marshall Rosenbergs work because it is literally all based on the equation of subtracting out praise and blame
I don't know why I always laugh when Zoom meetings are interrupted with technical issues. I always think, if humans have issues with these simple problems, imagine more complex ones? LOL.
I agree to an extent. Science is the "updater" to philosophical debate. We no longer debate rationally about certain topic because of science ie the shape of the earth or the position of the sun. There will always be abstract topics that science can not answer. But Science can absolutely support most topics. In the free will debate, science has a huge role in the input vs output.
Wait Huemer subcribes to free will? Dang, what a disappointment, I liked his ethics when I found them. Also disappointed by the debate style format. Kind of disappointed by Sapolsky repeatedly using the word "Determinism" when that is just a... worse word than "causality". Causality is the thing that makes free will incoherent.
Heumer's arguments were extremely weak. Im a bit disappointed by that. And before anyone says i just didn't understand him. I haven't seen a single comment that seemed insightful about his points that i haven't noticed. These are all arguments ive heard and have heard answers for. Ive heard better arguments against free will and this was probably the most amateur
After reading the comments I won't give it time especially when I read about the name calling garbage I respect Robert far too much to even listen to such childish degrading behavior
I think Sapolsky's argument is naive and simplistic and just wrong. I've heard the saying there but for the grace of God go I since I was a child. It means, and probably don't need to explain it, that everyone understands that history and environment affects the choices people make given their circumstances but that doesn't mean that people don't have free will. For sure one person is more likely to do A rather than B in a particular situation given their backgrounds but that has nothing to do with free will. Environment and history does not ABSOLUTELY dictate the decision a person will make in a particular situation. I think his arguments are scientifically weak.
Huemer sounds like an apologist for a god, who granted us with this great gift to explain a conundrum. If god knows everything and knows what is going to happen, what is in it for humans? Aha, Free Will. Feel better? Ta Da!
Yes, second speaker wins simply because he is more philosophiocally sophisticated.... but he is up against a rigid paradigm of physicalism in the mind of the first speaker. The twain shall not meet.
Huemer should say 'Like, I don't know' a little bit less if he wants to make a good impression. No one mentioned phenomenology which is crucial to the question of free will, and that is the so-called awakening of self-awareness. There are wild studies currently being done on psychedelic breakthroughs and deep meditation; it will change how we think about agency.
Agreed, the interesting matter that free-will advocates need to address is to identify the actual attribute that is the WE that can make decisions. What is the agent? How can someone be responsible for the agent? Even if we could prove a "soul" existed or some combinations of neurons could fire differently enough to cause a different choice, How do we get to the root of that and take control of it? And still, in this case, what is the self that can do this? It seems to me that no matter what you show about HOW we make decisions, the determinist argument still holds as long as we can't actually pinpoint how someone can alter the part of them that makes decisions.
@@SolarxPvP Oh I definitely agree with you that he should not make any claims he doesn't believe or have evidence for. I didn't mean to agree with OP that he should make something up instead of admitting he doesn't know. My point is just that we run into an Occam's razor when it comes to postulating something beyond the material world having an impact on decisions, if that's where one is leaning. Since determinism simply argues that everything we actually understand about the world at this time suggests there is only the material, and that a convergence of chemical and physical factors seem to be all that ever makes anything happen, someone positing something extra-material (what OP is calling phenomenology) has an extra burden. I am not at all slagging anyone for believing there must be such an extra element. I totally get that. It's a personal belief. But to make the case for "free will" without having evidence for additional phenomenon is necessarily weaker than the case for determinism, which relies only on what we already observe. And as for a material explanation for free will, this would be very difficult -- it would almost have to be a part of the brain that is somehow fundamentally different than the rest of known physics and biology, providing agency in a way that is not determined by our makeup. Again, this is a postulation that goes beyond what determinism requires. I'm leaving wide open that things might not be as they seem, and there might be extra phenomenon at play. I just don't think it makes sense to believe that or make policy based on it.
@@BDnevernind We still don't fully understand our own brains though, let alone brains of many "lesser" beings on our planet. I think that alone leaves room for what you're describing near the end of requiring a part of the brain that's different from what we know. I'm not saying we're like the fiction shows where "we only use 10% of our brain, look what happens when you use 100%!" or anything like that. I think that there doesn't necessarily have to be phenomenon. But you're right though, that as far as we know up to this point in time, we can't really prove anything other than determinism very well. The burden of proof is more on the side of making the case for free will. One thing I always come back to though, which is again getting more into thought and less into the material, is that we often have a bit too much arrogance as humans in my opinion when it comes to ourselves. We just assume that we must know everything or close to everything about ourselves and everything around us, when there could very well still be so much that we don't know. Think of everything throughout the history of humans that we were just so certain about that turned out to be completely wrong.
To find out if free will exists or not, philosophy does not cut it. Devise an experiment to show if it does or does not. If you can't just say is not decidable. A real experiment !!!!
Determinism is true, however the causes are too complex for us to know every detail so it seems we have free will. The evidential examples Dr. Sapolsky gives are the tips of the iceberg. Given that determinism is true it would go as far to the very thoughts we have are determined. However, we are aware of these thoughts which indicates use of language that is determined. Is the awareness itself determined? If it is determined would this be god consciousness? Yet the thoughts that comprise the ability to be aware are themselves determined. So it seems we cannot know what causes determination. In the end could it be that what is, just is. The question who am I, could it be, awareness itself, that is not knowable.
I have just written something on this topic that might also be of interest to you. Here is my translated contribution on (psychological) free will: (nature/ conflicts of interest/ solution) I. In general, psychological functions are by no means "illusory", because that would mean that they are superfluous or even harmful. But the fact of determinacy is of merely "academic" significance for decision-making itself. The capacity for free will has developed evolutionarily because it helps to protect our range of options from potentially harmful influence and/or hindrance by other people. II. It is of course more rational to know whether we should be influenced in ways that are potentially harmful to us and how to avoid this in the future. In this respect, everyone actually wants to be (unfortunately also egocentrically) an "unmoved mover". III. People who could regularly choose what is most useful have more opportunities to provide value to a society (through trade or donations). In all decisions, one would also have to "keep an eye" on long-term effects on the framework conditions. Because it may be in the short-term interest of individuals to maximize their own freedom of will at the expense of others (e.g. through ideological communication), rights to (primarily) physical non-aggression (and secondarily to the pursuit of truth) should (like all others) be universally reciprocal. It should be possible to demand the principle (of reciprocity) from all institutions and citizens.
Too many comments against Huemer exhibit some kind of dogmatism and narrow-minded scientism. Determinism is not a proven empirical truth but a controversial philosophical thesis about the causal structure of the world. There are good arguments for and against it. Scientific experiments are of course a very valuable source of knowledge but they are not the only one. Huemer’s appeal to our common experience can’t be so easily dismissed.
On the macro level, determinism does not appear to be some sort of "controversial philosophical thesis" but rather intuitively sound. For example: I landed on this video. One must assume that something happened before for this to be the case.. Another example: I play a song, eventually the song ends... Our life seems to be dictated by this sense of there being a cause and effect.
@@pedestrian_0 The thesis that our actions and choices can be explained in some way by past events is very intuitive. But determinism is a more specific thesis. According to Peter Van Inwagen's definition, it is "the thesis that the past determines a unique future." If you could do otherwise than watching this video, you could think that your behavior was influenced by multiple factors but was not strictly determined.
@@Serrano-Lobberg31 _If you could do otherwise,_ and who is to say we could have done different? We think we could have, but we'll never get another chance to. Why should we expect that we would choose differently, under free will or determinism, given the same conditions?
@@Rogstin If we have free will, it means that we could do otherwise given the same conditions. As Huemer said, the very common experience of deliberation is a strong evidence for free will. It doesn't make any sense to deliberate if there's only a unique possible future course of action We deliberate when we have to choose between different possible future courses of action. Maybe one could say that the strongest reasons for action determine entirely our decision but the way we weigh our various reasons for action seems to depend on our own thinking.
@@Serrano-Lobberg31 _It doesn't make any sense to deliberate if there's only a unique possible future course of action_ Let's grant that, but _we don't know_ what that course of action is. Deliberation is part of the process of our biofeedback-ness. If we behaved differently under _identical_ conditions, that would indicate we didn't have free will and that the universe is fundamentally random. Why shouldn't I arrive at the same course of action in identical conditions? Ultimately and fundamentally however, what possible mechanism exists for making a choice? It seems to be an action carried out to achieve a goal based on conditions, we just don't always know the goal, the consequences or the conditions.
