siiky
2024/10/07
2024/10/07
2024/10/07
podcast,philosophy
Episode about free will from a materialistic point of view.
Robert Sapolsky's opinion is that free will does not exist because everything, as a neuroscientist, can be explained by physics -- i.e., no "soul" or extraphysical shenanigans. Each "decision" can be explained by what happened just before it, 1min before, 30mins, 1h, 1 day, 1 month before, &c. This seems to make sense to me.
However, like Adam Conover, I wonder where this feeling that we DO make decisions &c comes from. He tried asking several times, but Robert kinda seemed to dodge it every time... Close to the start of the episode Robert said something that may be related -- from what I can remember, that animals (incl. humans obv.) learn to fool themselves just to get by, to survive -- depression is the inability of fooling oneself, according to him. So in his opinion (it seemed to me) our feeling like we have free will, comes from this survival mechanism.
It makes me itch a little how things can "change". According to him, there's no conflict here, between physical determinism and change. Things obviously do change, because physics doesn't simply stop, of course, but it feels too fatalist or like an excuse to "do nothing" (if we can do anything). His explanation is that, for example, by listening to this podcast, I will (or may) change how I think and behave. That's how change is slowly made real, by the (physical) interactions. I've wondered about this, in particular when I wrote about Tao.
Robert brought up some implications of his conclusion, too. For example, merit ceases to make sense, because everything was physically determined, and the results were not influenced by anyone's "decisions". Punishing someone for their actions also do not make sense, because they had no choice in the matter, they were determined physically.
He quickly brought quantum physics as one opposition to physical determinism just to dismiss it immediatly without explanation...