I’ve mentioned before Robert Sapolsky’s recent book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, a 528-page behemoth that at times is a bit of a slog and at other times an inspiration. (See here, here, here, and here for previous posts about it.) I found his argument against libertarian free will convincing, but of course I already believed that there is no good argument for libertarian (“you-could-have-done-otherwise”) free will (LFW), so I was on his side from the outset. I’m a hard determinist, and that’s based on seeing that the laws of physics obtain everywhere. But people are still maintaining not just that we can confect some form of free will despite the truth of determinism (these people are called “compatibilists”), but that we have real libertarian free will. They are wrong.
The video below, arguing for LFW, came in an email from Quillette touting their most popular articles of 2024. But this was a short (4.5-minute) video, not an article, and I don’t think the video was one of the top items. Perhaps the note referred to a Quillette article by Stuart Doyle (below) on which the video is based, but that article was published in 2023.
At any rate, listen to the video first, and then, if you want to see what I consider an unconvincing argument against free will (though it does make some fair criticisms of Determined), click on the headline below to read Doyle’s argument that we have “not disproven free will.”
The narrator of the video isn’t named, but she pretty much parrots what’s in Doyle’s essay, emphasizing an argument for free will that Doyle considers dispositive, but to me seems irrelevant.
You may notice some problems with the “rebuttal” described in the video. For example, it seems irrelevant to argue that “just because a neuron doesn’t have free will doesn’t mean that the bearer of a collection of neurons (a person) doesn’t have free will.” This is an argument that the emergent property of LFW can still appear even if neurons themselves behave according to physical law (a large argument in Sapolsky’s book). Also, if quantum physics is truly and fundamentally unpredictable (and we don’t know this for sure), that itself, says the narrator, poses a problem for free will, because it means that, at any given moment, a quantum event may change your behavior.
There are two problems with the quantum-indeterminacy argument. First, nobody ever maintained that quantum events like the movement of an electron can result from one’s volition (“will”), so unpredictability at a given moment does not prove volition. Further, we don’t even know (and many of us doubt) that a quantum event can change human behavior or decisions on a macro level. Some people have calculated that it can’t. So the whole issue of quantum unpredictability is irrelevant to the main problem: whether, at a given moment, you can, through your own agency, have behaved or decided differently.
This brings up the problem of predictability. The narrator’s (and Doyle’s) argument is that if you cannot predict someone’s behavior or decision—even with perfect knowledge of everything—then we have free will. As I just said, quantum physics may cause such fundamental unpredictability, but doesn’t support the notion that we have LFW Yet the video and Doyle suggest there is another form of fundamental unpredictability that can cause a lack of predictability despite perfect physical knowledge: computational undecidability. Both the narrator and Doyle accuse Sapolsky of complete ignorance of this concept, which, they say, constitutes “a major flaw in Sapolsky’s argument.” The narrator says that if human behavior is fundamentally unpredictable, then it supports the idea that free will exists. The premise of this criticism is, of course, is that if you can’t predict human behavior and decisions, even with perfect physical knowledge, then you can’t say that we lack free will. But these arguments using predictability are flimsy arguments against determinism, and, in fact, we’ll never have the perfect knowledge we need to predict behavior.
The problem is that quantum mechanics can in principle wreck perfect predictability of behavior, but that possibility doesn’t support free will. So does “computational undecidability”, another thing that impedes prediction, leave room for free will? I don’t think so (see below).
The essay by Stuart Doyle on which this video is based can be accessed by clicking the link below, or you can find it (archived here). Doyle is a graduate student in psychology at the University of Kansas.
Let me start by saying that Doyle’s essay, while it makes its points clearly and strongly, seems almost mean, as if Doyle takes great joy in telling us how stupid Sapolsky is. And this is coming from someone (me) who’s been accused of the same thing. (I plead not guilty, at least for my published work.). But for a scholar publishing a rebuttal on a major site, it seems to me uncharitable to say stuff like this:
Sapolsky’s conclusions about morality and politics stand on nothing beyond his personal tastes. His book was marketed with such authoritative headlines as “Stanford scientist, after decades of study, concludes: We don’t have free will.” In contrast to the hype, Determined is ultimately a collection of partial arguments, conjoined incoherently. And Robert Sapolsky is to blame.
Sapolsky is to blame? Well, yes, of course he is, he’s the author, but the concept of blaming someone for writing a book they don’t like, and and accusing them of incoherence (I disagree) is not civil discourse. But let’s move on.
The observation that every object in the universe obeys physical law does directly imply that there is no amorphous “will” that can affect the laws of physics, something that physicist Sean Carroll (a compatibilist) has emphasized. To me, this puts the onus on those who accept LFW to tell us what aspect of human volition is independent of the laws of physics.What form of nonphysical magic can change the output of our neurons? So far, nobody has done this. Thus, to a large extent, I think, one can tentatively accept determinism simply from knowing that every physical object obeys well-known laws and, as Carroll has written, “The laws underlying the physics of everyday life are completely understood.” Carroll:
All we need to account for everything we see in our everyday lives are a handful of particles — electrons, protons, and neutrons — interacting via a few forces — the nuclear forces, gravity, and electromagnetism — subject to the basic rules of quantum mechanics and general relativity. You can substitute up and down quarks for protons and neutrons if you like, but most of us don’t notice the substructure of nucleons on a daily basis. That’s a remarkably short list of ingredients, to account for all the marvelous diversity of things we see in the world.
So yes, Carroll is a determinist in a way that refutes libertarian free will, but in the link saying he’s a compatibilist, you’ll see that he says that we have a sort of free will instantiated in the emergent properties of humans acting as agents and expressing preferences. (Of course our tastes and preferences are also formed in our brain by the laws of physics.) Well, there is no real emergence that defies the laws of physics: emergence may not be predictable from lower-level phenomena, but it is consistent and derives from lower-level phenomena. Saying, as Doyle does, that “The ‘mechanism’ that produces deliberative choices is the whole person” is to say nothing that refutes determinism.
As I reread Doyle’s paper, I realized that although he does point out some contradictions in Sapolsky’s arguments, Doyle does nothing to dispel determinism. What appears to be the central contention of his essay is that there is another way that physical objects can behave unpredictably beyond quantum mechanics, and that way is computational decidability. But that supports LFW no more than does any unpredictability of quantum mechanics.
Here’s what Doyle says:
So what could give us the ability to surprise Laplace’s demon? Computational undecidability. This is a term describing a system that cannot be predicted, given complete knowledge of its present state. This fundamental unpredictability shows up in algorithmic computation, formal mathematical systems, and dynamical systems. Though an unpredictable dynamical system may evoke the concept of chaos, undecidability is a different sort of unpredictability. As described by one of the greatest living information theorists, C.H. Bennett:
For a dynamical system to be chaotic means that it exponentially amplifies ignorance of its initial condition; for it to be undecidable means that essential aspects of its long-term behavior—such as whether a trajectory ever enters a certain region—though determined, are unpredictable even from total knowledge of the initial condition.
If a system exhibits undecidability, then it is unpredictable even to Laplace’s demon, while a system that is merely chaotic is perfectly predictable to the demon. Chaos is only unpredictable because the initial conditions are not perfectly known. So it would be fair to dismiss that kind of unpredictability as mere ignorance—an epistemological issue, not an ontological reality. But the delineation between the epistemic and the ontic falls apart when we talk about what Laplace’s demon can’t know. An issue is “merely” epistemological when there is a fact of the matter, but the fact is unknowable. There actually is no fact about how an undecidable system will behave until it behaves. For a fact to exist, it must be in reference to some aspect of reality. But nothing about present reality could ground a fact about the future behavior of an undecidable system. In contrast, the exact actual state of present reality grounds facts about the future of chaotic systems. We just can’t know the exact actual state of present reality, thus unpredictability is “merely” epistemological in the case of chaos, but not in the case of undecidability.
Arguably, human behavior is undecidable, not just chaotic. And that would mean that human choice is free in exactly the way we’d want it to be; determined—by our own whole selves, with no fact of the matter of what we’ll choose before we choose it. But Sapolsky seems unaware of undecidability as a concept. He mislabels cellular automata as chaotic, rather than recognizing the truth that they exhibit undecidability. This is a major factual error on Sapololsky’s part.
First of all, from what I’ve read of computational undecidability, it is a phenomenon not of physical objects, but of philosophy combined with mathematical concepts and models. As Wikipedia says (and yes, I’ve read more than that article):
There are two distinct senses of the word “undecidable” in contemporary use. The first of these is the sense used in relation to Gödel’s theorems, that of a statement being neither provable nor refutable in a specified deductive system. The second sense is used in relation to computability theory and applies not to statements but to decision problems, which are countably infinite sets of questions each requiring a yes or no answer. Such a problem is said to be undecidable if there is no computable function that correctly answers every question in the problem set. The connection between these two is that if a decision problem is undecidable (in the recursion theoretical sense) then there is no consistent, effective formal system which proves for every question A in the problem either “the answer to A is yes” or “the answer to A is no”.
Two points here. First, Doyle gives not one example of a biological system in which “computational undecidability” would obtain. If there was one, why didn’t he mention it? It seems to me solely a mathematical/logical concept, and my (admittedly cursory) readings have turned up nothing in biology or physics that seems “computationally undecidable”, much less in a way that would give us free will.
Second, even if there is a fundamental and non-quantum form of unpredictability in physics and biology, that doesn’t open up the possibility of free will. That would depend on whether our “will” could, in some non-physical way, affect the behavior of molecules. If it cannot happen with quantum mechanics, then how can it happen with computational undecidability? Unless Doyle tells us how this mathematical/logical idea can somehow affect our behavior according to our “will”, he has no argument against determinism and thus has no argument for free will.
Now it’s true that belief in “physical determinism—folding into that term quantum and other unpredictable effects not affected by our volition)—is largely a conclusion from observing nature. But just because we cannot absolutely prove determinism of behavior from science, we can still increase determinism’s priors by various experiments. These include recent studies showing that you can predict, using brain scanning, binary decisions that people make before they are conscious of having made them. For example, if people are given a choice of adding or subtracting two numbers, scanning their brains shows that you can, with substantial probability (60-70%), predict whether they’ll add or subtract up to ten seconds before they are conscious of having made a choice. And this is from crude methods of measuring brain activity (e.g., fMRI). Perhaps by measuring individual neurons or groups of neurons we could predict even better. But the experiments so far imply that decisions are made before people are conscious of them, and that raises the Bayesian priors that people’s behaviors are determined by physics, not by their “will”.
And there are various other experiments showing that you can both increase or decrease people’s sense of volition. Electrical stimulation of the brain can make people think that they made a decision when in fact it’s purely the result of stimulating certain neurons. This causes people to make up stories of why they did things like raise their hand when a part of their brain is stimulated (“I decided to wave at that nurse”). But that sense of volition is bogus. This kind of post facto confabulation, which occurs very soon after you decide something or do something, is what makes us think what we have LFW. Further, there may be evolutionary reasons why we think we have libertarian free will, but I won’t get into those. Suffice it to say that I think that our feeling of having LFW is merely a very powerful illusion—an illusion that may have been installed in our brains by natural selection.
On the other hand, you can make people think that they didn’t have volition when in fact they did. A Ouija board is one example: people unconsciously move the “cursor” around to make words when they think that it’s moving independently of their will. There are other experiments like these, all showing that you can either strengthen or weaken people’s sense of volition and will using various psychological tricks. And they all go to refute the idea of libertarian free will
So yes, I think Sapolsky is right. His determinism agrees with nearly all the scientists (including compatibilists) who think that the notion of libertarian free will is bogus. To think otherwise is to believe that there is some kind of non-physical mental magic that can change the laws of physics.
One final point. Arguments about free will are not just philosophical wheel-spinning, for they play directly into an important part of society: reward and punishment—especially punishment. If the legal system truly embraced determinism of behavior, we could still have punishment, but it would be very different. We would punish to keep bad people off the streets, to give people a chance for rehabilitation (if they can be rehabilitated), and to deter others. But what we would not have is retributive punishment: punishment for having made the wrong choice.
Legal systems are grounded on the notion that we are morally responsible, but under determinism we’re not. Yes, we can be responsible for an act, but “moral” responsibility is intimately connected with libertarian free will; it’s the idea that we have the ability, at any given time, to act either morally or immorally (or make any any other alternative decision, even if it doesn’t involve morality). Yes, I know there are some who think that the justice system already implicitly accepts determinism, but they are wrong. For if it did, we wouldn’t have any form of retributive punishment, including capital punishment.
As for rewarding good behavior, well, yes, you couldn’t have done otherwise than, say, saved a drowning person. But rewarding people who do good is a spur for other people to do good. Even if the rewarded people don’t “deserve” plaudits in the sense that their accomplishments didn’t come from LFW, handing out rewards for things that society approves of is simply a good thing to do—for society.
Oh, a p.s. Because people feel so strongly that they do have libertarian free will, I have faced more opposition when touting determinism than when touting the truth of evolution. As I always say, “It’s much harder to convince a free-willer of the truth of determinism than to convince a creationist of the truth of evolution.” People feel so strongly that they have LFW that I have suffered two unpleasant consequences for touting determinism. I’ve told these stories before, but a big jazz musician nearly attacked me for implying that his solos were not truly extemporaneous, and that he could not have played a different solo, and on another occasion an old friend kicked me out of his house because he couldn’t abide the notion of determinism. No creationist has ever treated me in those ways!
I am a hard determinist yet assert that we can also be ‘fated’ – although in a particular way – and this leads many people to believe (wrongly) in Free Will.
When you observe a baby and conclude that they will grow up to be (say) a postman (or a serial killer etc.) that does not mean they are ‘fated’. When the baby grows up and accepts a job as a butcher their immediate fate is to be a butcher. But this ‘fate’ is the result of previous circumstances and consequences stretching back to before their birth. It could easily have turned out differently.
So when a person says they ‘chose’ to be a butcher they have very little insight into the all the previous influences (physics, genetics, development, birth, diet, schooling, attitudes of their friends and friends’ friends, relatives, let alone employment opportunities). Rather than try and comprehend the incomprehensible they reach for the Useful Fiction called ‘Free Will’ which enables them to press on with ordinary life rather than subject themselves to a paralysis of analysis.
Free Will is a story we tell ourselves (and others) to excuse our analytical inability. It generally works well enough… but that does not mean the fiction is true and exists.
You sound alot like Dan Dennett with his ”useful fictions” like the reality of ”selves” or the real value of a dollar bill. He, of course, is a combatabilist, but still a strong committed determinist. Ahh , semantics, but there is a comfort in the wide embrace of biology, chemistry and physics as really running the show. This too is a story we tell ourelves, but as stories go, it is preferable to the silly and lethal fictions about higher divine authors that so many people cling to for comfort. By the way, that is a bit of poetic genius…”a paralysis of analysis”.
IMHO a practical model for “free will” is doing groceries.
There could be traffic, construction, or other events, that could determine the store you shop at.
Once in the store, the produce might be iffy, etc., which could determine what food you eat that night or next day, etc.
“there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”
-Humpty Dumpty
(That’s for a laugh, but I’m serious about my theoretical model which is mine.. that was also for a laugh).
Nice piece, thank you. Not sure I agree with your and Sapolsky’s argument that absence of LFW obviates the logic of reward and punishment. Imagine you program a robot in a game-theory competition (like Axelrod’s in which a version of tit-for-tat won). Those robots can increase or decrease as a result of a kind of punishment/reward from making the wrong choice within the social system. So, if you want a particular kind of prosocial behavior (the right choices) to be favored and become common, within some society, then punishment of the wrong choices is logical and meaningful even under strict determinism. This is true even if the intent is revenge or retribution, as fear of retribution can motivate making the right choices. Doesn’t really matter that the subject has no control, what matters is what becomes selected for. Retributive justice can be favored both at the individual and the group level, even in a competition among automatons.
You are mixing up revenge and deterrence. It may be okay to punish to deter others (though Gregg Caruso, a hard determinist, disagrees, and he has a point). But if your rationale for punishing is wrong (i.e., the person made the wrong choice), it will lead you to all kinds of punishments that don’t accomplish anything except satisfy the desire for revenge.
Deterrence works, at least in some cases. I am careful to drive very close to the speed limit; not because that’s safer, but because I don’t want the fine. I don’t believe I could have done otherwise, but I am definitely trying to avoid the fine.
Thank you for hosting, once again, such an interesting, edifying discussion.
The reason Gregg Caruso doesn’t like punishment used for deterrence is because he says (and he’s right), you’re punishing a person not for what they did, but to keep others from doing the same thing. That is, you are using a person as a means rather than as an end.
I agree with you in rejecting LFW (though I’m a compatibilist), but I find Caruso’s stance incoherent. After rejecting notions of morality, he then declares that it is immoral to use a person as a means.
Not what I’m thinking: punishment for any reason is a learning experience for the bad-actor automaton, which changes its behavior as a result. The person is not a means, its learning response is an end result. Revenge/punishment is part of the environment that is experienced and adjusted to, even in a hard deterministic world. It may backfire certainly, but it may not; it’s not intrinsically irrational.
The logical step from computational undecidability to belief in free will taken by Doyle seems to me to be the same as that taken by compatibilists like Carroll. Richard Posner explained it well in Problems of Jurisprudence, where he quotes Quine for his view that an act is “free insofar as the agent’s motives or drives may themselves be as rigidly determined as you please.” Thus, an act is “free” so long as the act is not completely determined by forces external to the actor.
I agree with you that Doyle has failed to refute Sapolsky. The move from physical determinism to computational decidability simply moves the goalposts. “No supernatural forces or homunculus is making decisions, but I am still free because nobody (including me) can predict what I’m going to do!” Fine. But if you’ve conceded that much then what have you got left that isn’t there in compatibilist notions of free will like Quine’s?
Regarding the postscript: Hoping this is a temporary problem that will abate as AI makes it more and more obvious that our consciousness is simply a mechanism for collecting and processing information. People were initially very distressed when they realized how their perception of three dimensions was reconstructed by their brains from two two-dimensional images, a realization aided by experiments with perspective in drawing and painting. Nowadays nobody gets fussed about it, even if nobody is consciously aware of how the three dimensional reconstruction is happening in their brains.
I think that Doyle’s argument for free will works for animals with brains, not just humans.
OTS, Pinker thinks Sapolsky is wrong on free will. I asked him once about it, and Pinker seems to think that neuronal complexity and chance lead to freedom.
But this doesn’t hold water. Certainly randomness can make one twin different than another. But that difference isn’t the same thing as free will.
Saying that “neuronal complexity and chance” lead to freedom doesn’t really say much to me except that it leads to the illusion of freedom. I wonder what Steve would say if you asked him if he believes in libertarian you-could-have-done-otherwise free will.
I read Sapolsky’s book when it came out, so I don’t have it at my fingertips. I thought the book was very good, but I thought that it could have been better. A great deal of the book is about empirical evidence that events—including events in the brain that we often ascribe to “free will”—have physical antecedents that argue against the consequent actions actually being “free.” This is good as far as it goes. But there is a sense in which Sapolsky only succeeds in narrowing the conditions for the operation of free will rather than proving it false. Sapolsky seems to recognize this problem of proving a negative—the non-existence of free will—in the statement that Doyle cites: “You can’t disprove free will with a ‘scientific result’ from genetics or any other scientific discipline. But put all the scientific results together, from all the relevant scientific disciplines, and there’s no room for free will.”
Adducing empirical evidence that brain activities are preceded by or mediated by ongoing molecular processes doesn’t eliminate all possible sources of free will, since not all brain activities have been so studied empirically nor will they ever be. Hence there may be little room for free will, but not none. It seems to me that Sapolsky has advanced the argument against free will a great deal but has not ended it.
I suggest a different approach, which is to put the onus on those who claim that there is free will* to explain how ongoing molecular processes in the brain leading to an outcome can be stopped or altered such that it is possible to “choose” a different outcome. Effecting such a change by “choice” would seem to require stopping what’s already going on—and then while everything is stopped—deciding on a different outcome and then—still with everything stopped—altering molecular configurations in the brain such that, when the brain is restarted again, the changed molecular configuration brings about the “chosen,” rather than the original outcome. How can all of that happen? Who or what can operate out of the realm of physics to undertake what is required to alter the original outcome? It seems to me that it’s up to the proponents of free will to provide an answer. I stand ready to believe it when I see it. But, until then…
*I am referring to free will in the “hard” sense here.
The approach you suggest is in fact in the piece where I say that the onus is on those who say there is libertarian free will to say or show how a nonphysical process can interact with a physical one to make you have more than one possible behavior given identical sets of molecular circumstances. It seems to me that physicist Sean Carroll has already decided himself that there isn’t room for some magical “will”. And if it’s truly free in the sense that most people think it is (yes, there have been surveys), then it must be magic!
Totally agree, and your way of putting it is more succinct. I don’t see this point being made often enough or strongly enough.* Given what we know today about physics, chemistry, and biology, the claim that there is such a thing as “free will” is the extraordinary claim. That’s the claim that needs defending, not the ordinary claims from physics, chemistry, and biology. Under the latter, thoughts and behaviors don’t require magic.
*I don’t pretend to have read all the literature, so I’m almost certainly missing some important exceptions.
I thought Sapolsky’s section on how his views apply to criminal justice was strident, repetitive, and overlong. Sapolsky argues that criminals (including the ones committing the vilest acts) are products of the (previously mentioned) brain malfunctions, environment, history, etc.: all factors over which they had no control. It probably makes sense to “quarantine” the violent and dishonest for periods so they can’t cause further damage, but the idea of retributive punishment is fundamentally flawed. Moral judgment is off the table, especially if it leads to the death penalty.
It is somewhat amusing to note that while Sapolsky exempts violent criminals from moral judgment, he’s perfectly OK with judging other (less violent) folks. Examples: (1) People used to have non-biological explanations for schizophrenia; Sapolsky calls those people “psychoanalytic scumbags” (page 329). (2) Bruno Bettelheim was a “sick, sadistic fuck” (page 338 footnote).
This is far more moralistic mudslinging than anything Sapolsky aims at Ted Bundy, Anders Breivik, or Timothy McVeigh.
I’m not sure that calling people names, which could act to condition other peoples’ view of them, counts as a judgment that those people were either immoral or had a “choice” to behave.
Is calling anybody a name the same as implying that there is free will?
Calling Bettelheim a “sick, sadistic fuck” implies (to me, anyhow) a certain accusation of moral responsibility: that BB could have, and should have, made other choices. But (you’re right) that’s me.
But I’m struck that Sapolsky doesn’t “call names” for actual mass murderers. (I don’t think so, anyway; the book’s back at the library now.) The disparity seems odd. But I guess he had no choice in the matter either.
Did Sapolsky actually call Bettelheim a “sadistic fuck” or was he quoting Richard Pollack?
Someone provided a fuller context for the SSF allegation at Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11917263-bettelheim-had-another-domain-of-fraudulent-self-aggrandizing-blaming-that-evokes
I read it as Pollack providing the quote of Bettelheim’s repulsive remarks to Jewish students, and everything else is Sapolsky.
I should have provided the entire sentence: “I have to try to go through the same thinking process that this whole book is about to arrive at any feelings about Bettelheim other than that he was a sick, sadistic fuck.”
That (arguably) can be read as absolving BB from moral responsibility for being a SSF, since denying the concept of moral responsibility is what his “whole book is about.”
It seems so obvious to me that our conscious thoughts are downstream of unconscious processing that I struggle to understand why so many people can’t see it. “I just thought of something” is a misinterpretation of “a thought just occurred to me.” You are a witness to your brain’s products, not its director. It’s crazy but true.
I like that – it’s such a clear way of expressing the process. Thank you.
Agreed! Sam Harris makes this point repeatedly in his meditation app. And of course he wrote the first modern popular attack on free will.
FWIW, I wrote a meditation on Coyne’s and Sapolsky’s (and my) rejection of free will here, https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2023/10/do-we-have-free-will.html, when the book came out. I have, alas, still not read the book itself.
Good piece; I hadn’t read it. I’ll add one thing to your view of how quantum randomness could lead to unpredictability: in evolution. If mutations are in any sense affected by quantum phenomena, then the raw material for evolution could be changed by those phenomena, and thus evolution itself could have differed in a rerun. I wish Gould had mentioned this in Wonderful Life; as far as I know, I’m the only person to call attention to it. Now I have to add that we have no idea whether quantum indeterminacy could affect which mutations could occur.
Radioactive decay is quantumly random, and radiation is a source of mutations. Ergo….
Not really ergo, because it takes a bunch of radiation to cause mutations, at least as far as I know.
Well, technically exactly one instance / unit / particle of radiation causes one mutation most of the time. It is not that a lot of radiation needed to cause a mutation, but there is a statistical probability of each event causing a mutation, so more events means more chance for mutations.
At least this is the case for lower radiation levels. Higher radiation levels are going to produce a bunch of free radicals beyond the neutralizing capacity of the cell, so secondary damage to the DNA will increase nonlinearly, but then we are beyond the point of just some mutations.
BTW, the normal background radiation probably causes a significant portion of our mutations during our life, both in our reproductive cell-line and otherwise. Maybe not the majority, but a notable part of it.
Thanks! It is a good thought: assembling molecules is surely quantum mechanical. I unfortunately do not know enough about molecules or DNA to be able to offer any insight.
Oy, oy, oy, not only have I read the book; I reviewed it on The Panda’s Thumb here, https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2023/12/do-we-have-free-will-1.html, about a year ago.
Sapolsky’s argument comes down to ’cause and effect.’ Sam Harris’s attack on free will is the same – every cause is really an effect of something else, for us, for other people we interact with, for everything in the world, hence at any given moment everything is an effect of something else. Sounds convincing, until you get to the first cause (if there is such a thing), but it’s either the Big Bang or some form of creationism/intelligent design. Or ex nihilo, in other words. If so, then we do not know that every cause is an effect of something else, and the chain of causation that Sapolsky and Harris rely on is not proven to exist, hence they have not disproven free will. I can’t prove free will exists, but they have not proven that it does not exist.
You are parroting the article. I don’t like throwing around the word “prove”, though I did use it, but one doesn’t really have to go back to the Original Cause to rule out free will NOW. Using Bayesian priors combined with the value of methodological naturalism, I think the evidence is on the side of determinism.
You don’t have to worry about the first cause. Try explaining how one is free from the state of the universe, environment, your body, brain, and chemistry five minutes ago.
Well done, professor!
I would just add this: What Sapolsky has done, magisterially, is establish that there is no need to invoke libertarian free will to explain or understand any aspect of human behavior. Ordinary biological processes (subject to physical laws) can account for it all.
But Doyle does not even come close to showing that libertarian free will plays a role in producing human behavior. To show that would require evidence that the mind can move molecules–specifically, that qualia can move objects having physical mass. Psychokinesis. And there has never been any credible evidence of that
An excellent article, as usual.
I was amused by Doyle’s assertion that “Determined is ultimately a collection of partial arguments, conjoined incoherently. And Robert Sapolsky is to blame.” If you accept Sapolsky’s argument (as I mostly do), then he isn’t to blame: he couldn’t have done otherwise! (And nor does he “deserve” any credit – as he himself makes clear in the book, nobody “deserves” praise any more than they “deserve” blame).
Just one small addendum to my previous post.
The truly depressing thing about all this is that literally millions of people are being made to suffer under deplorable conditions of life based on arguments (about Free Will and, hence, just deserts) that are even weaker than those that are made by Doyle.
Why does Doyle quote Bennet if Bennet affirms the that “…dynamical systems…though DETERMINED, are unpredictable…” Yes, they are determined, and so they leave no room for free will. Doesn’t Doyle shoot himself in the foot using that quote? Unpredictably isn’t free will.
Agreed. He just adds one more form of fundamental unpredictability, which to me seems like what Doyle considers the Sapolsky-killer. But it doesn’t look like that to me.
Good (and long!) article. Here’s a nit: I would not say that “quantum physics is truly and fundamentally unpredictable…” It predicts, but in a probabilistic or statistical way. Indeed, one interpretation of it is that it really only applies to ensembles of quantum objects and it is the probable value which is observed when measuring a large number of the objects in the ensemble.
To me, Sapolsky’s thesis is very compelling. It probably helps that his writing has a great sense of humor (unlike Doyle’s).
I just finished reading Doyle’s piece in Quillette, and I don’t think he’s a libertarian. He doesn’t seek a violation of determinism, therefore he’s not a libertarian. Instead he seeks a violation of (in-principle) predictability:
And there, he just disagrees with Sapolsky (and Coyne) about what free will requires. Sapolsky thinks free will is incompatible with a chain of deterministic relations that goes “all the way down” (as Sapolsky said in an interview with Robinson Erhardt, but he could just as well have said “all the way back” in a person’s life). There are common-sense intuitions about causality that make Sapolsky’s criterion plausible, and Doyle just fails to address them. (Those common sense intuitions are in fact mistaken, but that’s another story.)
Well then what is Sapolsky WRONG about in the title of the article by Doyle?? It sure sounds like free will to me, for the subtitle is that Sapolsky does not make a convincing case for free will.
Doyle thinks Sapolsky is wrong about free will, sure; but Doyle is some (unusual) variety of compatibilist. Doyle thinks the real issue is predictability, not determinism. IMO, Doyle fails to make the case that the real issue is predictability. (Not that Sapolsky did a great job arguing that the real issue is determinism, but at least he has the excuse that many previous philosophers have certainly thought so.)
Re the emergent property of LFW appearing, it does. Where it appears is in our subjective experience, which I very strongly believe is an illusion. It is a compelling near-universal illusion, regardless of one’s view of hard determinism. Instead of beating this drum further, here’s a filk:
I’m illu-u-u-usion
I’m illu-u-u-usion
And I’m not what I appear to be
I’m illu-u-u-usion
And I lost someone who’s near to me
I’m illu-u-u-usion
And I’m not what I appear – to – me
© 2024, no charge for noncommercial use, all other rights reserved.
A few musings on this issue…
On principle I want to reject a view of hard determinism that says that Critical Social Justice (CSJ) theory is inevitably a deterministic product of the universe – there just seems to be a yawning gulf between physics on one level and social and emotional behaviours etc on another. To go from the standard model of physics all the way to CSJ and assume this is inevitable, seems a real stretch.
We think physics describes all of reality but there are still significant gaps. While we think everything is accounted for in the standard model it still fails to give us any understanding of some observable physical mysteries such as why matter predominated over antimatter. This strongly suggests our understanding of physics is incomplete, so physicists seem to be assuming a pretty big leap in logic from ‘we understand all physical laws, humans are physical beings, these laws are deterministic, so humans are deterministic’, when in fact we don’t understand all physical laws and we still don’t fully understand quantum uncertainty or undecidability.
When we look at computational undecidability, it is not just a theoretical mathematical system – it’s exhibited in the behaviour of very simple cellular automata exchanging state information. It’s not unreasonable to look for similar behaviour in cellular systems and neuronal networks.
As a former psychologist, I agree that much of the brain study literature you cite shows interesting effects, but these are entirely to be expected if you believe that free will is emergent from the brain. Due to its massive complexity and incredible parallel interconnectedness, there will be processes and structures in the brain that respond exactly as described – this is practically guaranteed by the speed with which neurones conduct signal processing, but yet this still doesn’t preclude higher order processing that is compatible with free will, it just says that much of the pre-processing is subject to these effects.
When using the word “emergent” how would the meaning be different if you said “… free will is results from the brain”.
“Emergent” is pretty much a device for a semantic shell game.
I don’ think its a shell game, rather an attempt to understand some observations that don’t neatly mesh with our understanding of how reality is constructed.
I guess emergent in this context means that an outcome is evident in a complex system that is not predictable from first principles. As per my example above, you can predict say Iron as a metal, but can’t predict CSJ theory from physics.
Re computational undecidability, as mentioned above this concept applies only to solving an infinite set of decision problems. The classical example (by Alan Turing) is the “halting problem”: there is no algorithm that can decide for each algorithm in the infinite set of possible algorithms whether or not it halts after a finite time, i.e. this decision problem is “undecidable”. (Sorry for the tortured prose; this is why mathematics is done in its own symbolic language.)
But, for any particular algorithm in the infinite set, there always is a decision algorithm (The proof of this is annoyingly simple.) And for any finite set of algorithms there is also such a decision algorithm (also annoyingly simple).
So, for any deterministic finite automaton, including cellular ones, there are no undecidable problems whatsoever. There are however very many unpredictable behaviours from even simple algorithms — the only way to find out their behaviour is to let them run and see what happens.
Thus computational undecidability is of no value for actually carrying the weight of LFW.
A well known paper in Social Psychology has some bearing on this question. The paper, “Telling More Than We Can Know” by Nisbett and Wilson (https://home.csulb.edu/~cwallis/382/readings/482/nisbett%20saying%20more.pdf), references experiments where subjects were presented with stimuli of which they were unaware. They were then asked to explain their responses and basically made stuff up. The pop culture version of such experiments is Allen Funt’s old TV show Candid Camera.
Jerry’s belief that he is “seeing that the laws of physics obtain everywhere” strikes this reader, at least, as quite naive. What kind of “seeing” would this require? In any case, people should at least read two essays by William James before embracing the “hard determinist” position: “The Sentiment of Rationality” (1879), and “The Dilemma of Determinism” (1884). Links here:
“The Sentiment of Rationality”: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Will_to_Believe_and_Other_Essays_in_Popular_Philosophy/The_Sentiment_of_Rationality
“The Dilemma of Determinism”:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Will_to_Believe_and_Other_Essays_in_Popular_Philosophy/The_Dilemma_of_Determinism
I think Jerry’s assessment is pretty much spot on.
But I disagree that the reason we don’t have free will is due to the laws of physics. I believe there is a fundamental principle of logic that makes free will a non-sensical idea. A free will action would require something to come from nothing. It would require an action to have a non-random direction with nothing giving it that direction. But if that action is to be meaningfully credited to a self, the self must determine the action. Then, if it is to be an act of free will, the self must act independently of its own properties or be able to self-determine its properties. Both of those would require the self to meaningfully and non-randomly act based on nothing.
Even if an immaterial entity were possible it would still exist only by virtue of having properties of some sort. Those properties would have to be determinant of everything that entity does. Any action it carried out not determined by it’s own properties would be determined by nothing. Nothing, being that which does not exist, can give no direction to anything.
Finally, Doyle seems to make a mistake that Daniel Dennett also made. Doyle says:
“Arguably, human behavior is undecidable, not just chaotic. And that would mean that human choice is free in exactly the way we’d want it to be; determined—by our own whole selves,”
And in a conversation that Dennett had with Sam Harris, Dennett agreed with Harris that his brain activity was fully determined but later he explained his compatibilist view by way of example, paraphrasing he said something to the effect of:
When I’m out on a boat I can’t control the wind or the water but I can choose how I handle the boat.
There is a mistake in both of those statements. They imply that entities are internally determined but that they can act independently of external entities and that this amounts to free will. This is not so. If an entity is internally determined it must also be externally determined. In other words, when entities interact they do so logically as a single entity – materially separate but logically inseparable.
Been channelling St Thomas Aquinas?
Well I’m not sure. I haven’t read him but if he agrees with me I must assume he knew what he was talking about. What choice do I have?
I think you’re misinterpreting Dennett and being unfair to him. Dennett accepts that “choices” are determined by the prior state of the system. Dennett can then “choose” how to control the boat in the same way that a chess-playing computer “chooses” a move or an aircraft auto-pilot chooses the angle of the rudder.
The word “choose” here, which pretty much means the same as “compute”, is not intended to imply that the choice is uncaused or magic, it is just a useful concept to adopt about the output states of complex decision-making entities such as humans or chess-playing computers.
But, you might object, the concept “choose” only applies to uncaused/magic choosers. Except that you’ve explained that that concept doesn’t exist and indeed is incoherent.
So what is the concept “choose” actually about in the real world? Why do we find it useful? As just explained, pragmatically, “choose” is a way of describing the output states of complex decision-making entities such as humans or chess-playing computers, where, yes, that computation of the output state is indeed entirely the product of the prior state of the system.
The latter half of that sentence does not negate the usefulness of the first half.
Thus, when 10-yr-old Tom “chooses” chocolate gateaux from the menu while his mother chooses the fruit salad then these choices are important to people. (Swap the desserts round and see how Tom reacts!)
What word do you want to use about it? Do you want to say “when 10-yr-old Tom made the appearance of choice of the chocolate gateaux …”? You’ll very quickly get bored adding that multiple times a day, and thus drop the addition.
You perhaps might then accept that, while Tom’s choice is indeed entirely the product of the prior state, he is still “choosing” (= “computing”) in the only sense in which choices are actually real in the real world.
You might then conclude that this sense of the concept “choice” is the underlying one (and that notions of uncaused/magic choosing are mistaken commentary about the concept, not the core of the concept). At that point you’d agree with Dennett and be a compatibilist.
I agree with this comment, Coel. I’d like to add a further point in favour of compatibilism. It makes sense of our reactive attitudes. If someone acts in a way that’s contrary to my interests, I want to know if they willed it or not. The fact that in either case their action was determined and couldn’t have been otherwise doesn’t mean my reaction is the same. If they willed it, I feel resentment. If they didn’t will it, I don’t. In other words, if someone ‘freely’ wills to damage my interests – that is to say, their action was deliberate, intentional – then I know what their attitude towards me is and I have reason to resent it. But if the damaging of my interests was accidental, or if they were somehow coerced or manipulated into damaging my interests when they didn’t really want to, I need feel no resentment; their attitude to me is not hostile. It works the same with gratitude. If someone freely (ie deliberately, intentionally) does me a good turn, I have reason to feel grateful. But if they only did me a good turn by accident (or if they were trying to do me a bad turn but their action misfired) I have no reason to feel grateful. To be a compatibilist is simply to hold that ‘free will’ means the agent acts willingly, intentionally, deliberately; and when an agent acts freely in this sense, reactive attitudes are appropriate. But compatibilism does not mean the agent could have acted otherwise. Compatibilists are determinists, that can’t be stated too often. But compatibilism allows us to have reactive attitudes to certain kinds of cause (intention on the part of the agent) while ignoring other kinds of cause (blind, unintentional causal factors).
I have never been able to will myself not to have my very next thought.
I wonder what happened to the comment I made yesterday evening. It seems to have disappeared.
I said it was a nit, but I would not have said “…quantum physics is truly and fundamentally unpredictable…” (and you don’t). It’s probabilistic. One rather current interpretation is that QM predictions only apply to ensembles of events. It allows us to calculate the most likely value of an observable, measured across many events of the ensemble.
I’ll admit I’m not familiar with all the scientific and philosophical intricacies of this debate, but it seems to me that just because we may not be consciously aware of the full process by which we make decisions, doesn’t mean everything must be predetermined. How do we know it’s not still essentially us deciding things, with our decision-making process simply beginning before we’re consciously aware of it?
If everything IS predetermined, I think we should recognize this as unjust and seek a way to overturn it and realize our rights and potential as sentient beings to truly choose our own actions and control our own destinies.
But whether it’s true or not doesn’t seem to have any meaning in relation to criminal justice. I think we have to treat individuals as capable of making rational decisions, whether or not they do actually make them.
To act as if we cannot do this means throwing out not just the concept of punishment, but the concept of deterrent as well. If someone has no free will ability to choose to behave any differently, this means that they cannot actually be deterred from any behavior they may exhibit, since they were going to engage in it anyway, regardless. A deterrent can only work against something or someone that is capable of being deterred. It cannot work against the inexorable.
Yet most of us recognize that throwing out any efforts to deter bad behavior or reward good behavior would make society a much less pleasant place. We can see from day to day, minute to minute, that what we do does effect the actions of others, and we regulate our own behavior accordingly.
Unsurprisingly, society as a whole generally operates on the premise that people have control over what they do. If true free will is an illusion, it appears to be an illusion so powerful that we – even those who intellectually argue against it – have no choice but to accept its existence as a practical matter and act accordingly. Almost as if it was pre-determined that we are to have free will whether our science can make us believe in it or not. Now there’s a paradox!
If you’re not deciding things consciously, then it’s not “will”. If it’s being decided without you knowing it, it is simply the results of the mechanical workings of your brain. As for determinism throwing out the concept of punishment, you don’t appear to have read my post. There are at least three reasons to punish people even if determinism be true, and society would be better if we got rid of RETRIBUTIVE punishment.
More fundamental than having no free will is that there is no such thing as a “self”. Therefore there is no “I”, no “ego”… and so there is nothing that “free will” can apply to
Ka-ching!
Although he does a great job in pointing out the incoherence and impossibility of libertarian free will, Sapolsky sometimes leaves the impression that determinism undermines responsible agency and control, when in fact it’s an essential ingredient. For actions to be up to us, we have to determine them in accordance with our character, motives, deliberations, and intentions, so any indeterministic causal slack in the choice-making machinery would attenuate, not augment, our control over and responsibility for action.
But it’s understandable that folks dislike determinism given the bad press it’s gotten, so they appeal to arguments like Doyle’s in trying to carve out some sense in which they could have done otherwise in a way that was up to them and not chance. But the libertarians haven’t been able to spell out how indeterminism, probability, undecidability, or an open future make an act more up to you than it already is under determinism. All told, it’s irrational to want to be able to do otherwise than what your choice-making machinery determines in a given situation, since any departure from that machinery wouldn’t be your doing. Of course you might wish you had done otherwise, and you can learn from bad choices and perhaps do otherwise in the future. But having the capacity to choose other than what your very own choice-making processes determine wouldn’t get you anywhere in making better choices or in being more responsible for them.
My pretty positive review of Sapolsky is at https://naturalism.org/resources/book-reviews/whats-wrong-with-determinism-review-of-determined-by-robert-sapolsky
The best part of an excellent comment.
I am pretty sure Doyle is a compatibilist, not a libertarian. He has previously written articles in defense of compatibilism (like this one: https://philpapers.org/archive/DOYSUF.pdf).
In the Quillette article, he does not criticize Sapolsky for believing in determinism. He criticizes him for believing in reductionist determinism, and it’s pretty clear from his arguments that he thinks it’s the “reductionist” part that’s the problem, not the “determinism” part. He seems to believe that the focus should not be on determinism/indeterminism, but on predictability/unpredictability. His main argument is that determinism at a micro level (the level of the neuron, say) is compatible with fundamental unpredictability at the macro level (the level of the whole agent).
There are probably problems with this argument, but it is not an argument for LFW.