Has Neuroscience Debunked Free Will?: Response to Robert Sapolsky

In this episode of New Ideal, Mike Mazza responds to an episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson's StarTalk, in which neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argues against the existence of free will.

Among the topics covered:

● The meaning and stakes of the free will debate;
● Why determinists are wrong to focus on atomistic choices about preferences:
● How free will is established philosophically and presupposed by science.

The podcast premiered on June 27, 2024.

0:00:00 Introduction
0:01:01 Importance of the free will debate
0:07:25 Atomistic choices about preferences
0:12:43 Establishing free will philosophically

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[edbonz]

Great podcast. Thank you ARI & Dr MM. $

[stockfeeder]

Thank you. I have been waiting for someone to challenge this ridiculous assertion. Looking forward to this.

[tycobrahe]

Sapolsky: “I have surveyed the various formulations regarding how human consciousness and choice works and I have *chosen* to declare determinism as *the* correct solution. I will not take credit for it because I was deterministically going to arrive at that conclusion anyway.” The fact that some people believe in free will and some in determinism proves free will (some choose to evade the issue and support determinism) and disproves determinism (not everyone arrives at the same conclusion).

[iuvalclejan]

Sapolsky is far behind on the latest in agency research (See Richard Watson, Erik Hoel and Michael Levin). Of course we are connected to our environment and respond to it, but not like a clock, because we have several causally efficient levels of organization in our bodies/minds, each somewhat insulated from lower ones, whereas lower ones get coarse grained info from higher ones (and have less agency). There is still an issue, of how deterministic our agency and deliberation are, even if they are mostly internal. It has some stochasticity, whether from lower levels, or deterministic chaos, and to that extent, we could have chosen differently, or rather many simulations of us would not all choose the same.

[madlynx]

Of course we have free will. He can trim that beard any time he wants.

[Mr.Witness]

This video was excellent and the format is awesome!

[DinkSmalwood]

According to determinism I have no control over wether or not I "choose" to treat other people better or worse based on their "choices". Christ Sapolskys statement in first clip is apparently and obvoiusly self-refuting.

[jessewallaceable]

If there was no free will, you wouldn’t know about it. There would be no purpose, for being aware of the feeling of choice, for this mechanism to be selected for in evolution.

[marvingourapa]

If you deny freewill, you are in essence saying the world is meaningless.

[draco-amercon]

So the neurological equivalent of BF Skinner's beyond freedom and dignity.

[eristic]

Did Phineas Gage freely choose to become a vulgar individual after the accident? Instead of having the frontal cortex taken out by a pike, would an individual with a massive tumor in the same brain region freely choose to be a vulgar person? Or, did a guy with Huntington's make the same decision? Did the woman with Alzheimer's? The dude who was soaked in alcohol in the womb? The veteran with PTSD? The bum whose prefrontal cortex never fully developed due to extreme childhood poverty? Or an individual whose environment and genes led to a similar cortical deficit?


Did any of them freely choose their ancestors, parents, prenatal conditions, childhood poverty, childhood exposure to toxins, the traumas, the viral infection, the brain disease, neocortical accidents, etc? It's easy to see the correlation between the vulgarity and the huge hole in Phineas Gage's head. Or that huge brain tumor in the MRI scan. Or the inherited condition that causes the brain to deteriorate. Maybe even with the soldier's enlarged amygdala. But the football player's concussions, the folks who grew up poor, those who had an addict for a mom, etc? They must've freely chosen to have an underdeveloped or damaged prefrontal cortex? Therefore, they freely chose to be vulgar individuals?

[Wingedmagician]

I still agree with Robert Sapolsky but I got a lot of this

[JohnPaquette]

Excellent criticism. Very clear and well worded.

[cliffordcameronmusic]

I think the critical thing missing in this refutation and the comments is that Sapolsky's claim is not that you do not choose, or that nothing/no one can be changed. Instead his argument is: the things that change you, or the factors that made you into the person that makes the choices you make, are ALWAYS external. Even when you are employing "rational" thought, you are using parts of your brain that developed in a way that you had no say in and you are utilizing language that was taught to you and concepts that were introduced to you, from an external source. You cannot change yourself but you can be changed. Whether or not you even act on this new information will be "determined" by all the things that have happened to you in your life, as well as genetics etc.

We can do what we will but we cannot will what we will.

Everything you do will be either something you are forced to do or something you want to do and you cannot choose what you want.

[Eddie_of_the_A_Is_A_Gang]

Free will is a material reality, so it would take form in neurological processes. The description of those process, does not negate free will, just like the description of the process of the organs partaking in Homeostasis, does not negate the fact it exists.

Love is just chemicals in your brain, it does not undermine or disprove the emotion of love, that we experience.

Both Religious people and Scientisms people do this exact thing. They take a physical description of a process we experience as a means to disprove it. It's nonsensical.

Objectivism has the only correct view of Free Will that both discards ''spiritual'' non-determinism and Determinism as the invalid concepts they are.

[jocr]

we either have free will or we're unconscious. we are conscious therefore we have free will.

[prettysure]

I had no choice being born to begin with. Nothing has convinced me that i signed up for this.

[dotbasing]

Great topic. But again, a brief "fundamental" answer needed. Eg AR would answer such a question in 3-4 lines I think..

[cb]

There is something very weird that happens in conversions about free will especially arguments against it. It drives me insane because nobody ever addresses the elephant in the room. I’ll give you an example. In all of Sapolsky’s interviews he keeps using words to describe a kind of distaste he has for people who foolishly believe in freewill. He will congratulate himself and his guests for being the smart ones and judging others for not getting in line. It’s not out and out judgement he seems like a genuinely nice guy but he doesn’t address the fact that he is still making a kind of moral argument - moral arguments assume choice!!!!

[tomkoziol]

Lee Pierson and Monroe Trout. What is consciousness for? in New Ideas in Psychology 47 (2017)😎