There's No Free Will. What Now? - Robert Sapolsky

Robert spolski welcome to within reason thanks for having me on so on a scale of 1 to 10 just how bored are you of people making jokes about free will to the effect of whenever you do anything they say hey it's not your fault you couldn't help it oh I don't know I've been telling people for a long long time that I don't think there's any free will so I've been hearing that as a as a response for a long time so by now it has sort of a Sentimental Nostalgia so that's good sure well I mean although what we're talking about today really isn't any kind of joke I I can understand why to somebody who hasn't really thought about it before that much it might sound like one I mean the the your most recent book determined uh is essentially an attack a philosophical attack on what might be considered one of the most fundamental elements of of being a human of being alive of being a conscious agent and that is our ability to make choices it's something that I've spoken about on uh on my YouTube channel before so I think that people listening will probably have a vague idea of the argument surrounding the the existence or non-existence of free will but your book kind of takes two parts there's the part one here's here's the bad news and then there's the part two of here's what we can do about it or here's how we might respond to this realization that there is no Freedom so I think it would be worth going over the first part just a little bit because everybody has a slightly different approach to arguing why there is no free will there are lots of different ways to do it uh but hopefully we can jump into the second part fairly quickly so you can make an argument against Free Will from from you Neuroscience from from physics about particles bumping into each other from just abstract philosophy about the way that thinking Works what approach do you take and uh and why well I am pitifully unschooled in both philosophy and physics so I'm coming at it from my profession which is I'm a biologist um I'm mostly a neuroscientist but the fact that I'm not entirely one I think is very pertinent um to all of this because what I spend my time thinking about is when a human a primate when somebody does a behavior we ask why' they do that where did that come from why did that just occur and what is scientifically sort of clear to me by now is that's a whole hierarchy of questions why did that occur you're asking which parts of the brain did or didn't do something in the last half second but you're also asking something about the sensory stimuli for that individual in the prior minutes were they terrified were they stressed were they aroused were they hungry sleepy whatever because that's going to affect how your brain is responding to stuff but you're also asking what about your hormone levels this morning because that's going to have been shaping how sensitive your brain was to various environmental stimuli what were your last years like and in terms of trauma finding love finding God whatever because as the backbone of this whole field neuroplasticity you will get major changes in brain function and structure in response to experience like that and then you're off to your usual suspects adolescence childhood fetal life your genes amazingly you also have to consider what kind of culture your ancestors came up with parentheses what kind of ecosystems they were living in because that had a ton to do with it what does that have to do with any of this because within minutes of birth the culture in which your mother was raised will influence her mothering style and you so why did that person just do what they did because of everything from one second ago to Millennia ago all of these influences and when you look at them there's two key punch lines the first one is when you look at sort of the amount of our Behavior that all of those prior events Encompass what you conclude is we are nothing more than the sum of our biological luck over which we had no control and its interactions with the sum of our environmental luck which we also had no control over um the second key point with that which really does in Free Will for me is it's not a punchline here of oh you got to keep in mind a whole bunch of different science ific disciplines because maybe Neuroscience doesn't disprove free will but Endocrinology does or that doesn't disprove but genetics or or physiological ecology or any no the key point is all of these different disciplinary approaches turn into the same thing what do I mean by that you're talking about genes and behavior if you're doing that by definition you're talking about millions of years of evolution of your genes and you're also talking about what your childhood was like when experiences then were causing lifelong epigenetic changes in your Gene regulation and you're also talking about what proteins your brain were making on the direction of your genes 25 minutes ago and when you look at how it forms this one continuous Arc of influences my two sents is there's not a crack anywhere in that edifice in which you could shoot born in free will tell me about the hungry judge phenomenon oh I love this one this this one is is in the realm of like what's been going on in the previous hours and this was this classic study published in a very prestigious Journal looking at all of the parole board decisions that were made in a particular country over the course of a year and hundreds and hundreds possibly thousands I'm forgetting and you know at each juncture a judge either let somebody go free or sent them back to jail and the scientists looking for what were their predictors of the decision and they found like the single most powerful one was how many hours it had been since the judge had eaten a meal see a judge right after they had lunch you had about a 60% chance of parole by 3 4 hours later essentially a 0% chance whoa what is that about that's totally bizarre that makes total biological sense because like the part of your brain that is required to think about the world from somebody else's perspective to challenge your immediate snap judgments a second time a fifth time a tenth time it's part of the brain the frontal cortex is the most expensive part of your brain metabolically when it's been hours since you've eaten your blood sugar levels are low and what's one of the first parts of the brain that's beginning to get a little sluggish as a response this part of the brain and it's easier to default into a quick snap judgment and you know the the neurom metabolism of that occurring is like pretty straightforward what's astounding to me is the knowledge that you take any one of those judges and say whoa this is interesting remember back right after lunch you had a guy who had done X and you red him and just now this person seemed to have done the exact same thing but you sent him back to jail what's the deal with that they're not going to say because my frontal metabolism decreased they're going to site right some college course on emanu k or something that will fill in an attribution when it's metabolic okay it must be said that study got a lot of attention and it got a few different groups challenging its statistics its interpretation it is totally Lally held up solid and has been effect replicated you do not want to ask for a home mortgage loan at the bank if it's been hours since the person you're talking to is eating the meal all sorts of versions like that when people are hungry when they're sleep deprived they become less generous they become less Cooperative they're more likely to stab you in the back if you're playing an economic game with them so just on that level wow when you had lunch is going to have a major impact on whether or not like you're going to send this person back to jail or not yeah there's Machinery humming underneath the surface all the time and this when you say this is the biggest predictor of the parole decision that the judge makes is this bigger than political affiliation bigger than the the the kind of schooling that the judge has this is really the biggest factor that we can use to determine or or to take a guess at what their decision is going to be well it's after controlling for like The Logical modulators what is the person from the same in group that you are what's your who appointed you things of that sort um it was it was a Middle Eastern country so some some specifics to their sort of Criminal Justice System but yeah of the extraneous this couldn't possibly have something to do with how judges make their decisions list this was at the top of the list um fasc fascinating because well especially because most people intuitively know this to some degree right if you're having an argument with somebody you might think to yourself gosh maybe I'm just hungry or hangry maybe I'm tired you say well let's revisit this in the morning I need to sleep on it you people are already aware that to to some degree there are moments in our lives where uh the decisions that we make seem to be out of accord with with our own agency so when asking you know whether we have free will everybody's going to agree that there are certain circumstances where we have less free will or more free will there are certain times when our Free Will is diminished and I suppose when the question is asked well where do we draw the line as to how far that that can go how far that Free Will can be removed your answer seems to be that there is no line yeah these are these are nice liberal reformist edge cases oh we all have free will but some of the time all of us have less than it other times and some people really have way less than other people my my stance and I'm way out in The Lunatic Fringe on this in terms of sort of neurosciences Stephen is that there's no free will whatsoever um that there's all sorts of points where we think we're seeing it um because we're looking in the wrong place we're having a very strong emotional pull towards seeing it but that there actually is none whatsoever when you look at the you know the you know cumulative ways in which you turned out to be who you are and how what came before determined that there there is none that's all we are we are the outcome of the biological environmental luck that started way back when up to a second go and there's no me inside there inside your brain that's in your brain but not of your brain and it's made of something separate and that somehow is immune to things like your blood glucose levels or your genes or what culture you were brought up in or whether you're worrying about paying the month's rent and that's like the main thing on your mind that that's there is no separate me in there now people are going to want to separate out the micro from the macro here you know they they're going to want to say okay if it gets cold that will be a determining factor in me putting my coat on I'll go go and put a jacket on and clearly you know that's somewhat out of my control cuz I don't control the temperature but that's not going to determine whether I put my left arm through first or my right arm through first you know like those minute decisions that seem to be almost trivial it's almost as if even if you went looking for some kind of determinant Factor as to why you the left arm rather than the right arm it seems it seems ridiculous to say that that decision might have something to do with you know your ancestors or or or the the how recently you ate or any of these kinds of factors so what's a good way of explaining the the loss of agency in the in the minute decisions like that where there doesn't seem to be even to the person a sort of uh a rational or an obvious non-rational reason for for one or the other well let's let's unpack that a bit um so you get some college freshmen who has volunteered for a psych experiment and they show up and the experiment is here's a button and whenever you feel like it push it and you can push it with your right hand or your left hand and just go for it um and thus we're in this Micro World so first off oh is this person left-handed or right-handed that's a biological phenomenon does this person happen to have a sore shoulder on their right side not their left whatever it is so that but then you're sitting there and this is a psych experiment you're wondering oh what do they really want to know about this you start generating a hypothesis what is it that they're looking for you're having a metal level of you're saying well I just did my left hand three times in a row is that indicative okay let me do right next time then you're wondering if you saw and you thought you saw like a micro expression of a smile on the researcher's face that aha their theory was just are you a jerk at that point saying okay I know what they're up to I'm going to do just the opposite what how do you turn out to be first off the sort of person who would be in University and sign up for a psych experiment and the sort of person who would show up on time and how do you be the sort of person who was or wasn't generating hypotheses as to what are they looking for here and do I want to confirm that do they do they are they appealing am I going to try to do what I think they want me to do or am I going to do the opposite because I'd like to show them that I'm smarter than they are because my authority issues and like just unpacking even something as like trivial as that is going to have a little bit of this viscosity uh coming from everything that came before that made you you well people often like to ask me about uh there's a French philosopher whose name I I don't know if I pronounce correctly um but this concept of Buran is it burdan burdan uh but his donkey or his ass and this this idea of a of a donkey stood behind two two hay stacks and uh it's hungry and it needs to eat from one or the other but but because the donkey has literally no reason to pick one Hast stack over the other it stands in the middle and ends up starving to death because any reason to go for one or the other doesn't materialize and yet to go for one or the other you need some reason and I had a I had someone ask me about this recently I was I was speaking at a school and this this young guy comes up to me and he asks me about this this situation and the way that I tried to explain it to him was to say the two options you have is that are that either there is some determining factor that makes the donkey go for for stack a or stack b or there's literally no determining Factor now granting that the donkey probably does something right so let's say it goes for stack a if there was some determining Factor then that's what we're talking about here you have to ask what BR brought about that determining factor and it's probably outside of the donkey's control but if even if it were the case that there really were zero determining factor and the donkey genuinely randomly picks stack a the definition of Randomness entails that you're not in control of that either a lot of people like to think that the place you can shoe horn in Free Will is as as you say is by looking towards elements of Randomness in the universe perhaps at the quantum level but often times I think forgetting that Randomness means that there's no determining factor which means that you can't be the determining Factor so that must be outside of your control too but I wonder how you would account for this situation of the donkey between the two haacks and and what might be going on in his in his mind well Randomness is a very tricky thing in all this first off is the like holy grail or like deepest hole into purgatory of any of this which is quantum indeterminacy and does that actually mean the whole universe is indeterministic and is there a way to harness indeterminacy to get like Free Will and all and in the book I spent two chapters on this that um essentially Quantum indeterminacy has nothing to do with any of this for three reasons the first is the subatomic scale it's so many orders of magnitude that these effects would have to Bubble upward and in such synchrony among all the different subatomic events going on in one molecule at a time let alone one region of the brain that it's beyond impossible for that to occur the second one is exactly what you allude to which is if by some chance it did bubble all the way up to affect the function of a neuron or a part of the brain or whatever as you say it's a prescription for Randomness and God help you if say you're attributing say your moral philosophy to Randomness and every free will believer and Free Will skeptic um except for a weird sort of subgroup there agree that Randomness is not like the basis for free will it's just as incompatible as as extreme determinism the third one is then this sort of desperate hail Mar that people often grab for at that point which is somehow to harness that Randomness in some way higher level brain function the the you that's supposedly separate in there in some way is able to reach down a form of downward causality that philosophers basically think can't exist in order to opportune that Randomness for your own like Free Will pleasure and stuff and there's no mechanism for it that works that said when you look at the brain neurons do random things neurons will randomly dump little packets of neurotransmitters neurons will randomly have action potentials now and then and you ask the same question is this like the fodder for your like moral philosophy kind of thing very unlikely and the randomness turns out not to be all that random um for example so you got you know neurons they they talk to other neurons by way of these little fibrous end things called axon terminals that have little packets of neurotransmitters in them and when the first neuron gets excited it dumps those neurotransmitter pack it out into the space which floats over to the next neuron and gets it excited and occasionally you see neurons that will just spontaneously dump their neurotrans transmitters out of their little packets whoa Randomness all of that Randomness as in well there's the usual machinery for dumping neurotransmitter when you want to and it's incredibly complicated and it's produced a couple of Nobel prizes so like something somebody is not looking at the control panel when they should be inside that neuron and like something slips by and you accidentally activate the dump the neurotransmitter mechanism oh it's just a hiccup in the system no it turns out spontaneous neurotransmitter release has a completely different mechanistic pathway for doing it you evolved a capacity for spontaneous release and then you look more closely and it turns out there's certain times when these random events occur in your brain more often than others different physiological States all in other words there are points where your brain determines it's time to be indeterministic for a bit that sure is not free will that that's that's as much free will as like you take a an improv theater class and you sit there and the teacher tells you okay so now we're going to start this scene go for it that teacher has determined that you are going to be indeterministic now along some parameters even looking at that level there there's no actual Randomness happening there and there's no means by which true Randomness is the way in which you turn out to be you know a fundamentalist Baptist or a Tibetan Buddhist or a neolist or whatever it's just not the building blocks that you can use to generate that so no Freedom no agency no ultimate control over our actions that's the situation we find ourselves in and uh I want to talk about how we should react to this but but just beforehand one one more example who's who's this guy that got the the pole through his through his skull and it and it and it totally changed his behavioral traits fin Phineas gauge Phineas gauge every neuroscientist while they're still in the crib is forced to hear the story of Phineas Gage because it's it's like it's it's Ground Zero for neuroscientists having something useful to say about Free Will 1840s Phineas Gage was working on a railroad construction line somebody screwed up something with some dynamite and did what they weren't supposed to do and it blew a three foot long 13B metal rod when it exploded into Gage's eye and out the top of his head his forehead and in the process Landing 13 feet over from there in the process it also took out his frontal cortex which was like nicely splattered all over the the acreage there so Gage just had it went it went all the way through and came out came out the other side yes yes and if you ever find yourself at uh Harvard's medical school and go into their Library they have Phineas gages skull is on display there and you could see the entry point and the exit point and the pole that's on display there also um so Gage gets up which is in and of itself this thing went through at sufficiently high speed that it cauterized every blood vessel and like he stands there and he and some of his construction crew compatriots go into town where a doctor looks and you know looks in the empty space there and diagnoses things saying you you have a hole in your brain there and as epically described as Gage was no longer Gage he had a massive transformation in his personality he was the foreman of this railroad of this railroad construction crew he was the sober God-fearing Church attending sobrius reliable self-disciplined guy and overnight literally overnight he was turned into this foul mouth profane disinhibited guy who wasn't able to work for years and years afterward Gage was no longer Gage um and this was the first very unsettle example that M material stuff inside your head is essential to what makes us us and you know gagee is a simple case wow here's Gage who like two years later is cursing loudly in church blaspheming all of that why did he do that it's easy to see because there was a metal rods worth of explanation because of that accident that happened to him that's why that one's easy for us to look at and say oh you know he had no control over that that this part of the brain is it was damaged where we really have trouble is not when it is something as much of a sledgehammer as a metal rod but having to deal with the fact that who each of us are why did each of us just do what we did sitting there in church or in any such why because of a million zil ion gazillion microsc microscopic little threads from the past that sculpted us into who we are and the thing is it's easy to see the single Sledgehammer that made gauge gauge and it's so much harder for us to accept that you put all those zillion microscopic threads of your past together and it is going to be as powerful as a as a metal rod blasting through your head it's just harder to see distributed causality a lot of it we don't even know about yet how it works a lot of it is just probabilistic a lot of but put all those threads together and there's nothing but the conclusion that you were nothing more than everything that came before that turned you into the sort of person that you are right now and sometimes it's easy to see how that happened a metal rod childhood poverty trauma whatever being an enormous privilege and sometimes it's these little threads going back to like your hunter gatherer ancestors inventing their culture versus your agriculturalist ancestors and everything in between yeah I mean we know that that the the environment of our distant ancestors can affect our behavioral traits today I mean you can you can predict there are studies to show this if I'm not mistaken You can predict how somebody will behave in a given scenario based on uh the kind of environment that their ancestors thousands of years ago were living in absolutely you see contrasts between say child rearing practices in collectivist versus individualist cultures you see completely different attitudes toward social Norm violations in people who were raised in cultures of Honor cultures of honor your ancestors were cow people or camel people or goat people people nomadic pastoralists where if somebody affronts you you come back and you flatten them with 10 times the retribution because if they take your camel today and you do nothing about it tomorrow they're going to take the rest of your camels and your children as well or something and you see different physiology in people in raised in cultures of Honor going back Generations the last time that was relevant to how their folks were making a living and that leaves imprints people people from rainforest cultures are far more likely to invent polytheistic religions people from deserts are more likely than chance to invent monotheistic so whoa that's part of it as well yeah mothers who grew up in collectivist cultures typically Southeast Asian rice growing regions versus individualist culture mothers typically United States sort of the poster child for that on the average they sing l at different volumes individualist culture mothers on the average sing lullab more loudly than collectivist on the average they wait a longer time to pick up their kid when their kid's crying than collectivist mothers at what age is the kid weaned at what age is the kid sleeping alone all whoo from minutes after birth like that's already beginning to shape how your brain's being constructed so you put all those pieces together and this kind of TAPS into the domain where I think people make their most fundamental most intuitive uh mistaken perception of Free Will which is we make choices we sit in some split in the road and we form an intent to do X instead of Y we form that intent we know that we have that intent we know what the outcome of that is likely to be most importantly we know nobody's forcing us to do that we've got Alternatives available to us and for most people who think about Free Will and people in the criminal justice system who think about free will is if you had a conscious intent and you knew what the outcome was likely to be and you knew you didn't have to do it that's it Case Closed culpability responsibility we're done with our trial and for me um This is 40 Years of people fighting about the neurobiology of the milliseconds of intent it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Free Will debate because it doesn't ask the only question you can ask at that point which is oh yeah how do you become the sort of person who would have that intent at that moment and you became that sort of person because of what was happening in your neurons a second ago and what was happening a year ago and what your ancestors and everything in between and simply looking at from the moment you form an intent and then consciously choose to act on it is like trying to figure out what a book is about by only reading the last sentence of the entire book all the important stuff is coming be how did you become that sort of person and you became that sort of person because biological and environmental factors which collectively you had no control over and that's why you became you now crucially um when we spoke about the the guge example with the pole through his head and he shows up and and suddenly he is quite a nasty person by by all accounts I think people would intuitively look at him and say well okay yeah he's he's turned into you know a bit of a jerk but it's not his fault there there's kind of a sense in which you might feel sorry for him because even though yeah he might say profane things about the God that you believe in now and that he seemingly believed in at least yesterday uh look you know he had a pole through his head so led him off now if you're right that all human behavior is a result of a similarly uh sort of a process that's similar in the sense that you don't have control over it then this leads to quite a radical conclusion that we should probably adopt the same approach to essentially anybody doing anything any of the the time is is that your position um exactly that's the only logical extension it's the only intellectually honest and ethically honest conclusion to reach which is this completely nutty stance that blame and Punishment as virtues in and of themselves rather than as instrumental tools blame and Punishment never make any sense whatsoever in any realm of human life and holding a mirror up to that likewise praise and reward never make any sense whatsoever because it is that's a circumstance in which some people are treated better than average for reasons they had nothing to do with as opposed to the world of people being treated worse than average for reasons that blame punishment reward praise a sense of entitlement a sense that you have earned anything a sense that hating a person is ever Justified none of those make any sense whatsoever and in principle you need to run the world without any of that stuff which uh ain't a trivial task to take on now it it sounds really nice when framed in terms of look if something goes wrong for you it's not exactly your fault um if if somebody you know has things better in life it it's you know we should take an egalitarian approach to recognizing that it's not necessarily due to Merit but we should be sort of uh considerate of the fact that that you know there go I were for the grace of God um however you can also frame it in terms of saying that you know when I achieve something when I win a competition when I'm nice to someone in the street there's no sense in which I should be able to feel proud of myself if that's the case and on a deeper level getting of agency doesn't just get rid of this ability to feel I suppose uh you proud or to condemn other people morally speaking it it removes part of what I think many people think it means to be human and so I get a lot of emails from people saying look uh it's really interesting the stuff about Free Will you've convinced me that there's no free will but I don't really know what to do now and I never quite know what to say to them and I imagine that you're in a similar situation where you know you're kind of ask in in a broad sense does this kind of position just lead to a sort of nihilism and if it does you know should it yeah now we're getting into sort of the really problematic stuff because as you described you tell somebody there's no free will and you manage to sound convincing with that and um even before the nihilism existential void the the usual reflexive stuff is oh my God you can't tell people that they'll run a muck there's a whole science as to why that is very unlikely to happen oh my God we'll have no societal mechanisms to keep murderers off the street that's absurd over and over and over we are able to protect Society from dangering circumstances and subtract responsibility out in the process oh my God where if you get rid of meritocracies you get a brain tumor and they're going to pick a random person off the street to do the brain surgery on you same thing no we can subtract praise and entitlement and meritocracy and still protect Society from incompetent people doing important stuff oh my God are you saying nothing can ever change not in the slightest the whole universe of how change works completely compatible with there being no free will so you get through all of those sources of panic and then there's the oh my God the the the existential void are you telling me that like the ways in which I have worked hard I've earned nothing from them that had nothing to do with me are you telling me I I love my wife we've been married for 34 years now to 2024 that's right 34 and nonetheless sitting there saying oh my god do I love her in part because of the type of oxytocin receptor genes I have because of her pheromones or things like that what what does that do to love what does that do to accomplishment what does that do to any of this stuff if you're a kind person do you actually deserve no praise for that and yeah that's where the the neologistic void suddenly beckons and it's you know potentially you know depressing as hell and what took me forever to figure out is that that's not at the end of the day a problem or a problem on the scale of the whole world you're bummed out because if there's no free will you didn't deserve your prestigious University degree you didn't deserve your excellent salary you're a corner office you didn't deserve the fact that people love you and respect you you didn't deserve the fact that you were able to help people and out of kindness you didn't deserve any of the praise for that any of the sense of entitlement all of that bummer bummer and my critical point there is if that's the stuff that there being no free will means to you you're one of the lucky humans because you're trying to figure out what it means that you may not deserve to be the CEO of your corporation or you may not really have earned love by being a kind person or any of those if that's your problem you're one of the lucky ones for the vast majority of people on this planet the issue isn't oh my God maybe I don't deserve to have been treated better than average because I really wasn't responsible for the things that I'm like treated well for for most people the problem is that we have a world in which we're perfectly happy to treat people worse than average for reasons they had no control over and for most people like getting rid of Free Will is a wonderful thing it makes World more Humane here one example that is like so obvious that it's hard to frame in terms of the Free Will issue but like at some point 400 years ago most western cultures figured out that people don't have the free will don't have the power to control the weather and as such if there's a horrible thunderstorm that destroys everyone's crops it wasn't caused by the old lady with no teeth at the edge of the Hamlet that nobody talks to Witchcraft doesn't work you can't do witchcraft to control the weather they don't have responsibility over that and as a result there was a change in how we did criminal justice you don't burn old ladies at the stake anymore when the weather turns bad because they didn't actually have control over that and it's a much better world that we don't burn people at the stake now when the weather turns bad it's a much better world that we figured out about two centuries ago that an epileptic seizure is a neurological disorder it's not a sign that somebody is demonically possessed it's a much better world that in the last 40 years or so we figured out that say schizophrenia is a neurogenetic disorder rather than it is caused by psychodynamically toxic mothers who secretly hated their child and made them schizophrenic it's a great thing we figured out that like some kids have trouble learning to read not because they're lazy or unsmart but they have like architectural abnormalities in one part of their cortex and they tend to reverse letters they have dyslexia it's a much better World in all those places that we have subtracted a perception of Free Will out where there is none and becomes a much nicer place to live in and all we have to do is push harder against the next version of that the fact that if you get a certain variant of the gene coding for the leptin receptor in your brain no matter how self-disciplined you are no matter how much you actually love yourself or any no matter what you do you're going to be overweight because your brain doesn't get satiation signals and when you look at sort of implicit biases in society these days one of the only ones that has grown stronger in recent decades is implicit bias against people who are overweight because we associated with lack of self-discipline and self-indulgence and they secretly don't love themselves and all and you get that Gene variant and you're screwed you can't do anything about it and it's going to be a much better world when we subtract Free Will out of that one all that's going to happen is while a subset of us and I bet it's the subset of people who are like have the you know privilege and and opportunity to be interested in subjects like this and thus listen to something like this um but for most people who are not worrying about the moral relevance of their like egregiously large salary for most people every single time we have subtracted Free Will out of our views of why people do what they do the world has become a more Humane place it's great news I can see that being the case when we remove agency from the weather we remove agency from you know certain kinds of of performance at school or this kind of thing but when we remove agency from the movement of the legs to get one out of bed in the morning when we remove the agency from you know the decision to get up and go outside and get some sun on your face versus the decision to to lay around in in your bed all day now I I I don't know what the research shows um if it's conclusive on what kind of effect uh the disbelief in free will actually has on on human behavior but a lot of people seem to predict that they're going to become less likely to make that decision to get out of bed and go and get some sun on their face just because they've become aware that if they did make that decision it wouldn't really be them that's you know in in the driver's seat so I think it sounds great up to a point now given the fact that we both believe that this is true that there actually is no agency there you know there's no option for us to just sort of stop at the nice bit to say look how look at all these sort of great societal motions that we've made and look at some more that we could make such as you know dealing with obesity but we have to keep going and we have to sort of get into the sludge and it seems much easier much more difficult for me to me to to paint this kind of thing in in such a positive light it's incredibly hard um and all that said I've I was 14 when I stopped believing in Free Will and for more than half a century since I've thought blame and Punishment and reort and praise and none of that stuff makes any sense whatsoever and I totally utterly am at intellectual peace with that and despite that I can actually act on those beliefs for about three minutes once every other month or so because this stuff's incredibly like somebody cuts me off of traffic and I like hate their guts and think they're a rotten foul human who should go to hell or at least for a few or someone says to me you know nice lecture did just now and unavoidably for a few minutes afterward I'm going to feel like I'm a better human than average because of that and thus deserve to get thus deserve to get to the front of the line for the next great vaccine that comes along yeah it's incredibly hard and you got to like over and over come back and say how did this person become who they are and what are the ways in which I can't understand that in the slightest what are the ways in which I'm feeling entitled where when you look at it closely it's right yeah you got to do the hard work with it amid that though a gigantic problem which I cannot see easily solved is the one of motivation of ambition and drive and all of that we can protect people from damaging individuals without invoking Free Will and all sorts of versions of quarantine models and look at what the Scandinavian countries do in their criminal justice system or we could do it in like we can have a quarantine model for keeping people from being dangerous your kid is sneezing a lot you don't send them to kindergarten tomorrow because they say please if your child has a nose cold keep them home so they don't get everyone else sick you could constrain their behavior but you don't take their toys away while they're at home as punish M for their Evil Soul or something yeah that's a realm in which we can protect Society from one type of danger without having any sort of ethical attribution or whatever that one we can solve but how do you solve the one of get somebody to decide they really really really want to spend 14 years getting trained to be a cardiothoracic surgeon or they really really want to go to this party and their DM mates are doing it but instead they're going to study where where's the motivation come from for that and that one's a much harder one I that one is much less clear out of engineer Society so rather than protecting people from dangerous damaging individuals how to engineer Society so that motivation is in some way separated from attribution that is free will written and all over it yeah I don't know anything I can come up with is like ridiculously utopian or whatever which is you got to get people into some sort of mindset where somebody sits down at the piano they're a concert pianist and they play and all of that to get into a mindset where what they will feel is Wonder and gratitude that it turned out just by chance that they had hands that could do things on a keyboard that will cause people to have emotions they never knew they had wow how lucky am I that it turned out to be that way how luy yeah okay how lucky am I that I turned out to be smart enough to be able to take out gleo blastomas or that I turned out to have the capacity for empathy to do something nice for this homeless person yeah that's a hard cell to turn all of that into just gratitude that Randomness made you into that sort of person and thus you're willing to work with your unearned Gifts of intellect and thus study for 47 years to be able to solve this problem or that that one's a tough one I don't have an easy answer for that and little little this is cheating but little Echoes of meritocracy really I don't see a way around that one easily I I've always uh answered this question in terms of thinking about what's actually changed I mean you know yesterday it still was the case that yesterday when I when I believed in free will the the actual in fact reason why I got out of bed uh went to get some food was because I was hungry and my brain sort of determined that my legs would move and go into the kitchen and and all of the deterministic factors were still there still acting on me the only thing that's changed is I now recognize that that's why it's happening now in the same way that yesterday I was hungry and then today I sit down with a biologist who explains to me in in precise detail exactly why I feel hunger how it works how it's connected to the body I still feel hungry and I still go and get the food I mean sure I I I can sort of on a on a on a meta level now reflect more on what I'm doing here but it doesn't change the fact that I'm hungry so in the same way whatever was motivating me yesterday to get out of bed is still motivating me to get out of bed today the only difference is I recognize that I didn't control that motivation I don't know where it came from and sure I can sit there and I can meditate and I can think okay well noticing that motivation coming over me to get up or maybe noticing that there is no motivation maybe I that day I I feel depressed and I want to stay in bed all day but it seems weird for me to say that the reason I'm going to stay in bed all day is because I recognize that whichever decision I make whether to stay in bed or get up is outside of my control because the very fact that it's outside of your control should mean that one of them's going to happen nonetheless and so I guess what I what I ask I mean people often say to me is well you don't believe in free will but you know you don't act like you don't believe in Free Will you you act like you believe in free will all the time and you just alluded to that there and in your book you say you know I find it very difficult to live as if this is actually true but what does it mean to to live as if it's true it might change the way that you morally assess people but even then does it really I mean you used the word rotten a moment ago you said if someone cuts you off in traffic you're tempted to say well what a rotten person but what does the word rotten mean it just means that it's sort of gone bad I mean an apple can go rotten but that doesn't make you mean you're making a moral assessment of it it just means that you're looking at its behaviors and you're saying that in relation to what I want it to do for me it's gone rotten and and so you know what really has to change just by adopting uh belief in determinism and living as if that were true well what we have to go for is amid this being incredibly hard work to think that way and to respond that way and to feel that way um we have to save that effort for where it really counts um almost certainly if it was 400 years ago you and I were both both you know articulate and educated or whatever and if we were us 400 years ago almost certainly it would have seemed just intuitively obvious that there are such things as witches and they can cause lightning storms and you need to protect Society from them and there is a moral Justice in punishing them in the and 400 years later it is intuitively obvious to you and me that that's gibberish that makes no sense at all we're people of our place and time now in that some of the things that are intuitively obvious to right now to frame in a effortful free will kind of way people are not going to believe at some point in the future okay so let's try to think about people 400 years from now let's think about how each of us each of us has changed when I was a kid if the kid sitting next to me in school wasn't learning how to read um I would have agreed with the teacher and everybody else and okay some kids just aren't smart and they just don't work hard and all of that and like here we are some decades later in the nature of knowledge in our world that we now know there's this thing called dyslexia like oh we've been somewhere in the last 20 years or so in the United States um the majority of people went from being opposed to gay marriage to supporting gay marriage that's changed during that period sometime during this period people figured out that autism is not caused by mothers who are incapable of Love autism is when there's something screwy and you get little islands of unconnected function in the cortex during fetal life but these have happened in our own times and what we see is the things that are so intuitively obviously free of Free Will now it's so in obvious we don't even see it anymore like yeah you don't your kid doesn't get a nose cold because they have a rotten Soul or because you have a rotten soul and their illness is God's punishment to you for that yeah it's so obvious we can't even see anymore we did it we did that one we subtracted that one out and what it means is whichever one seem most difficult right now when we're being pulled in that direction it's not a to ly obvious yet that people who are kind are not intrinsically more deserving humans than people who were not because neither had anything to do with it okay that one's going to take some work that one we're at that challenge at this point all save save the effort for the important ones I think that intuition of free will actually as well and this might help people too is is is one of the problems of of Free Will and one of the ways to to really get into discussing is to is to Simply ask a person well what do you mean by Free Will what this thing that you sort of intuitively have describe it to me because what we're talking about here is you know somebody who says I feel nihilistic because I've realized that all of my actions are determined and I say okay well what what's the alternative to that so so so suppose that this action that you commit is is not determined by anything at all that means it's random you wouldn't be in control of that either and if I if I convinced you that you were just random events occurring all of the time and that's what you were that's all you are as a person wouldn't that instill a similar nihilistic crisis okay then maybe Free Will is kind of being sort of partly determined partly not like who like if you try to actually pin down the thing that you that you claim to believe in it actually becomes very difficult to do and and I would say I mean this would be my argument and probably yours too that whatever you do land on is an idea of what free will could be it usually ends up being either the self-contradictory it doesn't make sense impossible or it's describing something that's not really free well like I think we would say the compatibilists do for example and so I don't even know what this this this intuition really looks like like what is it that you want if if this is troubling you you know yeah well we we have this tremendous source of malaise in that like every other organism out there we're a biological machine but unlike any other organism out there were the only one who could know our Machin and be interested in its parameters and boundaries and who could be meta enough to try to understand where some of the levers and buttons are in the machine that we are and Machinists you know can leave a huge emotional Gap there um when it comes to trying to understand like why we like sunsets or why where Love Came From or why it feels good to make the planet a better place and and and the notion that we're just observing a machine in action is really challenging in some ways that's the human predicament we're smart enough to know our Machin this and we have the cognitive and affective and cultural tools to try to deny that and constrict very elaborate ways of saying that's not really the case so it's a it's not just a problem of free will it's a problem of Being Human yeah um and and you know challenging positions are just uh what we what we like to do here on the within reason podcast so uh Robert spolski thanks for thanks for coming on and thanks for sharing your thoughts with us well thanks for having me on total fun and uh glad to see we think in such similar ways if you enjoyed that conversation you can watch more episodes of the Within reason podcast by clicking just here but remember the show is also on streaming platforms like apple podcasts and Spotify don't forget to subscribe thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Alex O'Connor

Views: 282,721

Keywords: Alex O'Connor, cosmic, skeptic, cosmicskeptic, atheism, within reason, podcast, within reason podcast, religion, debate, Alex J O'Connor

Id: ZgvDrFwyW4k

Length: 57min 6sec (3426 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 11 2024