Thread 24811333

Thoughts on this book? Are humans responsible for their actions, or are they constrained by factors beyond their control? I found the first half tracing back from proximal factors to events millions of years in the past convincing for arguing there is no room for free expression of the self. However, the second half concerning prison reform was too idealistic. Punishment is necessary as a deterrent to crime, even if the individual isn't responsible for their actions.

>>24811333 (OP)
Despite his claims, he spends virtually no time dealing with the relevant philosophy and continually falls into: "either freedom involves an absolutely magical faculty and is determined by nothing prior or else it doesn't exist." Most philosophers would say this nonsense. Action determined by nothing prior would necessarily be random, and randomness or arbitrariness is not what is meant by freedom.

What he needs to make an argument for is epiphenomenalism, and that is much more difficult, not least because if how the world appears to us and our experience of choosing NEVER effects behavior it could never, ever be selected for by natural selection. But if how the world appears to us and our reasoning are not selected for, and have nothing to do with how science is done, we lose all warrant for believing in science. Donald Hoffman's The Case Against Reality is also philosophically naive but it is a least a good collection of some relevant problems here.

The whole point is normally that people can be more or less self-determining and self-governing. This goes back to ancient philosophy. Making freedom into a binary is ridiculous, it's a contrary opposition like light and dark, not a contradictory one.

He also cherry picks and is guilty of a sort of bad faith (whether he recognizes it or not) metaphysical flip flopping where he constantly flips between assuming smallism (smaller = more fundamental, all facts about large things are fully explicable in terms of facts about their smaller parts) and bigism (there is only one universal process and since there is only mechanistic causation everything is one system going back to the start of the universe and only arbitrarily divided) whenever it suits his argument, leaving a complete mess of the Problem of the One and the Many that, if pulled apart, could probably lead to showing that nothing can be said about anything. It also tends to be guilty of the trend in popular science to just assume a sort of corpuscular/atomic mechanism, i.e., 19th century metaphysics, as a sort of "default" despite such a view no longer being popular in physics or the philosophy of physics itself (where various interpretations of pancomputationalism are all the rage, and process metaphysics, which makes reductionism questionable). How this "world view" limps on as a sort of popular religion in some areas of the academy is an interesting sociological question though.

>>24811333 (OP)
Very Jewish satanic book

BTW, all the ways in which consciousness seems to be set up as a "user interface" (perhaps not the best analogy, but it gets at the core idea) certainly seems to imply a need to prompt us to behave in ways conducive to survival and reproduction.

From a systems perspective, to the question:
>Can a system be more or less self-determining in how it responds to an environment?
And:
>Can memory and computation (rough proxies for thought presumably) direct responses to the environment?

Are unequivocally, yes. This is how we are able to sketch out what it would take to make a successful organism or synthetic lifeform. Obviously, the Hard Problem and metaphysical questions about what makes something more or less unified as a whole such that it is a "system" loom large here, but the evidence is not against relative self-determination. And if thought emerges from "information processing," (computational theory of mind, IIT, etc.) then it can absolutely play a key role in behavior, such that "I asked my wife to marry here because of who she is and because I loved her," is true. I think these reductive formal attempts to define consciousness are fundamentally broken, based on a bad metaphysics and understanding of information, but even in their own terms this works fine. The only thing that is ruled out is some sort of question begging "magical faculty" that, by definition (i.e., violating the "laws of physics") is impossible. If the "laws of physics" are based on observation then this is essentially demanding that observations of freedom be contrary to all observations, which is absurd.

Now I'll drop a vastly superior philosophy of mind text, since, might as well.

>>24811421
thanks

>>24811333 (OP)
Mostly it's all your basic, very old arguments for incompatiblist fatalism. It makes the very common mistake of mounding up citations and thinking this counts as good argument. It's funny how academics on different sides of the same issue do this so often despite the fact that they always tend to cite the same exact papers and claim that they show that their particular camp is right. For instance, Libet has been used as evidence of free will because voluntary adherence to instructions appears to generate spontaneous action.

Worse still, the fluff on stuff like chaos theory and QM gives it this sort of scientific veneer when really it's the same set of old, tired arguments, with citations mounded up over them to try to give them the appearance of a sort of landslide scientific inevitability.

Pic related has serious flaws but is remarkable in the current pop sci environment for delivering hundreds of pages of actual argument and serious consideration of opposition views (even if it is in DBH's trademark baroque, caustic style). And doing it as a dialogue is inventive.

>>24811333 (OP)
Obviously not true

>>24811385
>The whole point is normally that people can be more or less self-determining and self-governing

What is the "self" that's doing the governing and what evidence is there for its freedom? What does "freedom" even entail according to you? This is where I stumble. I reason that for someone to be responsible for anything, in whole or in part, there needs to exist a "self" that exists and influences decision-making independent of all the factors in your life which determine how you act. But humans can't even choose something as fundamental as whether they exist or not, never mind the myriad factors which influence what constitutes an individual. Can you think of an example that demonstrates this "self" in practice?

>>24811333 (OP)
Free will could exist if consciousness causes wavefunction collapse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8EkwRgG4OE

>>24811333 (OP)
>Everything since the big bang can be explained by a complex enough mathematical equation.
>From the formation of stars to the arrangements of atoms in your brain right now.
>If we knew these equations, and had the computing power to solve them, then we could predict the future, including human decisions and actions.
Does this mean free will does not exist? Does free will require pure randomness?

>>24812378
>Le Laplace's Demon
Uh, isn't that a bit dated of an understanding of physics?

>>24811845
That's a pretty in depth philosophical question. How is anything any thing. Do trees exist as organic wholes? What about atoms? Quarks? But they particles are defined in terms of the field and the tree cannot be defined rigidly in terms of some sort of supervenience over particle ensembles.

>But humans can't even choose something as fundamental as whether they exist or not, never mind the myriad factors which influence what constitutes an individual.

Again, this is the reduction to a binary. Either man is absolutely self-generating and creates himself ex nihilo and is God, or no freedom is possible. It's incoherent though because even if man did create himself from nothing he would have to do it "for no reason at all" and so it would be an arbitrary and random action, rather than one understood as good and done for that reason.

>>24811845
Advaita vedanta speaks on this. Upadasaharsi is a good book

He says that everything we do is predetermined, yet he gives no meaningful methodology by which one may actually go about determining what a person will do in the future. He says you can predict when a person will move their finger a second before they move their finger, but this proves he has never read Husserl. Consciousness exists as a blending of the immediate past and future as Husserl spoke of in his phenomenology on time.

Sapolsky's other points only indicate the probability of an action, referencing that such and such thing happened, therefore you are more likely to be this. For instance, you were negatively affected in the womb, therefore you are more likely to have bad impulse control. But probabilities concerning consciousness, itself, are always going to be a flawed endeavor, unfortunately. He might as well have said that you are probably a Boltzmann Brain, therefore you don't have free will.

In the end, it's all a red herring, though, because Sapolsky never argues against free will. He argues against arbitrary will. Arbitrary will, or 'choosing to do whatever you want', is not true freedom. True freedom is aligning one's will with reason and ethics, and this is something Sapolsky would have known if he had read Hegel's Philosophy of Right.

>>24811333 (OP)
He's refuted by basic math. It's impossible to perfectly predict a system while part of it, this is mathematically proven by Georg Cantor.

>>24813218
>He says that everything we do is predetermined, yet he gives no meaningful methodology by which one may actually go about determining what a person will do in the future
This is also a good point, in practical terms there's no way to use what he describes.
>He says you can predict when a person will move their finger a second before they move their finger, but this proves he has never read Husserl.
Even before you factor in Husserl we should stop and appreciate that the process of predicting the finger 1 second before, which is useless, would affect the finger prediction and itself require many other predictions on the predicting process to accurately predict the initial prediction, which again is useless. You can find statistical trends among criminals but they are not absolute, correlation is not causation etc...

Sapolsky is the definition of an over educated bugman. He is learned but not intelligent, he can't use any of his learning for anything but the repetition of what he's been taught.

>>24811333 (OP)
>criminals don't have free will says the Jewish man, you should just let those blacks all out of prison
>NO of course YOU have a choice how you respond to crime, stop choosing to lock them in prison or else you're stupid and racist

>>24811333 (OP)
He's a hippie he thinks it will make the world a better place if we understand its not our fault
You need "i'm gonna get killed if i do this" in the math that makes your brain determine the action it will take.
I think he is purposefully ignoring genetic determinism as well, If one brain is angrier and worse at decisions shouldn't we confine it in hopes that it will mature?

>>24811333 (OP)
Popslop. Read pic-related instead.