Robert Sapolsky on Life and Free Will, interviewed by Pau Guinart

okay so what do I think about life I'm definitely in favor of it it's it's a good thing I'm glad it evolved did I take it it's a very unlikely thing that's happened but the aspect of life that's most interesting to me is behavior behavior of organisms social behavior human social behavior and such and I think what has come out of it is a big paradox which is at least for me which is that intellectually one of the things that's absolutely clear to me when you look at the biology behavior human behavior is there's no free will it's it's an invention when you look at the number of influences on behavior from what your brain was doing one second before and whatever the behavior is to sensory cues that you're not even consciously aware of to what hormones that morning have to do with it to what your childhood was like what your fetal life was like your genes your the culture that your ancestors invented the the evolution of us as a species when you look at all the pieces of that together basically what the science of behavior is spent the last 50 years doing is every week or so coming up with a finding where someone would say oh I had no idea that had an influence on behavior and when you look at all those influences when you put them all together the notion that there's some magical little homunculus man and our heads who's in our brains but not of our brain is made of some kind of non-biological stuff who at the end of the day makes all the decisions about what we do that's that's medieval thinking there's there's simply no scientific basis for it and on a certain level all free will is is biology that hasn't been discovered yet as to where more links are in terms of influencing our behavior and experimentally the easiest way of doing that is when you manipulate sensory information in people or manipulate their hormone levels or immunity manipulate some biological variable and their behavior changes and they never even had a clue you were doing that okay so when you think about that you know I'm totally intellectually comfortable in the notion that there's no free will at all and where the huge paradox comes in for me is I haven't any clue whatsoever what the world is supposed to look like if people actually started accepting that there's no free will I mean the easiest version is the one that comes to mind immediately an easy like unbelievably difficult problem which is what do you do with a whole notion that crime and evil and guilt and punishment and criminal justice and none of those concepts make any sense whatsoever if you're dealing with a biological model and what are things supposed to look like with the people who because they are biologically damaged organisms - horribly damaging things to other people how do we protect society from them amid completely getting rid of the model that we have right now around the notion of crime and criminality so that one's good to keep people busy for a long time to come but the reality is that that one's the easy one in some ways the much much harder one is what do you do with a lack of free will and to truly live that way if somebody comes up to you and says wow nice lecture or Wow nice shirt that you chose to put on this morning or wow what a terrific dinner you made that's you're so good at well what do we do with our good traits because if we are purely biological organ and the organisms when it comes to our worst behaviors it's the same thing with our best ones and my gut feeling is if it's gonna be hard to convince people to think in a purely biological way when you're looking at murderers it's gonna be so much harder to think that way when it comes to considering our own sort of best behaviors so what's very clear to me is I have absolutely no idea what's supposed to be done with that the one thing I take comfort from is there are domains where we have learned to subtract free will out of it if somebody is driving a car and they have an epileptic seizure they've never had one before in their life there was no reason to it and they lose control of the car and they hit someone in the process everyone these days say this is a tragedy no one says burn this person with the stake and no one says this person was obviously dealing with Satan nobody has a intentionality element in it it's just lousy horrible luck of bad biology that happened to the wrong time and we've been able to think that way for about a century and society has not collapsed so we're able to do that in some realms so I'm at least a little bit optimistic that we can figure out how to get a little bit of blame out of when we think about the biology behavior so what does this say about life if it's going to be hard to think differently about when people are criminals if it's going to be even harder to think about the sort of biology when someone comes up and says wow you have beautiful cheekbones and instead of saying thank you you say oh well my zygomatic arch here here in terms of when my skull was formed during this gene accounts from my eye color to just think biologically at the end of the day the hardest thing of all is how do you like avoid complete existential despair if your senses we're just biological machines including our emotions including our memories they they are obeying the same laws of the physical universe as any other thing made up of like atoms or whatever how do you avoid sort of the existential despair of like what's this all for and I sure don't have an answer to that I have absolutely no idea what that should be in terms of sort of the smaller versions of it one worry with the existential despair is so will people just run amok there's no purpose there's no responsibility I'm just a biological organism there's been a little bit of research suggesting that when you prime people towards thinking there's less free will they cheat more on games because I'm not responsible I don't worry about that too much though because there's another group of people who don't think in terms of responsibility a whole lot or epic responsibility which are atheists and a literature shows that atheists are just as ethical as theists are like thinking if there's no responsibility to a deity doesn't make people run amuck deciding there's no responsibility because I'm a biological organism is probably not gonna make us run amok either but that one's that one's trivial compared to just sort of the bigger issue of like what's the purpose then if we're just biological organisms and I sure don't know I mean in an everyday sort of life if you really truly believe there's no free will there's no basis for hating anyone and if people really believed that I would make life rather different if you truly believe there's no freewill forgiveness has to be play a role that's a thousand times more dominant in life than it is now or it even stops being meaningful in the sense that we use it now but at the end of the day like what do we do with the fact that we're just we're one extremely complex nonlinear chaotic unpredictable version of an ant in terms of just biological stuff making us up at the end of the day I mean the only thing that comes through to me as having any meaning is amid all of that pain is painful so it's a good thing to try to reduce the amounts of it in the world in people around you and loved ones whatever that single fact just seems to transcend whatever you might do to turn all of our feelings and longings and everything into their biological substrates pain is painful and even if we're all just biological organisms that's a pretty dominating piece of biology so if we need a purpose out of all of this I guess it's just simply to try to reduce the amounts of it and that's intellectually indefensible because it's no different from anything else biologically yet if there's any domain where I think you need to hold back from there's no purpose there's no anything we're just biological creatures I guess if you're gonna hold back in any domain I think that's that's the last one to hold on to and use that as some sort of imperative for how how you go about life you

Channel: Pau Guinart

Views: 77,961

Rating: 4.8970418 out of 5

Keywords: Sapolsky, Guinart, Stanford, Pau Guinart, Robert Sapolsky, Free Will, Life, PAU talks, Behavior

Id: ihhVe8dKNSA

Length: 10min 40sec (640 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 04 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/moshe4sale]

Robert Sapolsky says the good that can out of knowing that there is no free will is there is no reason to hate anybody. But he worries about causing depression.

i

[u/ChaseMoskal]

if you liked this, you've gotta check out sam harris podcast #39 free will revisited, with daniel dennett, it's one of my favorite podcasts of all time

on the topic, sapolsky says:

"what do you do with the whole notion that crime, and evil, and guilt, and punishment, and criminal justice, and none of those concepts make any sense whatsoever, if you're dealing with a biological model"

sapolsky continues to say that problem is very difficult, however it's probably easier than the problem of sentiment and emotions like "love"

i've always thought this concern is poorly thought-out

it's like saying, in physics, that when we learned that particles don't exist per se, we had to throw out the table of elements

surely, the policies by which we handle crime, evil, punishment, guilt, justice, etc, should all be the same whether the universe is deterministic or not

criminal justice policies should aim to take minimum required action to reliably yield the desired outcome of reducing crime (get dangerous people off the street, dissuade bad actors by threatening and enforcing consequences, etc)

as i recall, daniel dennett and sam harris discuss what free will means for criminal justice in episode 39 that i linked

i for one am sympathetic to dennett's view that we're all just hung up on bad language and terminology on this topic, and things become more simple and clear if we simply drop this baggage

[u/newwavefeminist]

Sapolsky has come around full circle into some very right-wing concepts. Like permanent incarceration of certain offenders because their neurology means they will always be a danger.