As I make my way through Robert Sapolsky's lengthy (400 pages of text) book about the non-existence of free will, Determined, I become more and more impressed with both Sapolsky and what he has wrought.
He's a terrific writer and thinker. His talent is reflected in the fact that he's a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant." And his scientific expertise is evident by the approach he takes in Determined.
Usually non-fiction authors are content to make a strong case for their subject. Sapolsky does that in arguing that free will is an illusion. But he goes beyond in identifying the arguments that free will believers make and then systematically dismantling those objections to his no-free-will thesis.
I'm into that section of his book now. After a chapter called "A Primer on Chaos," he moved into "Is your Free Will Chaotic?"
Often the only thing people know about chaos theory is the well-known butterfly effect. You know, a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil and eventually that leads to a tornado in Texas. Chaotic systems are highly sensitive to initial conditions.
A MIT meteorologist, Edward Lorenz, discovered this when he found that when the values of variables in a weather model were rounded off to fewer digits, as in 0.506 instead of 0.506127, that made a big difference.
Lorenz finally spotted that slight rounding error introduced after lunch and realized that this made the system unpredictable, nonlinear, and non-additive... When you have a nonlinear system, tiny differences in a starting state from one time to the next can cause them to diverge from each other enormously, even exponentially, something since termed "sensitive dependence on initial conditions."
In his next chapter, Sapolsky says:
Part of the neglect [of Lorenz's 1963 paper] reflected the fact that chaos theory is a horrible name, insofar as it is about the opposite of nihilistic chaos and is instead about the patterns of structure hidden in seeming chaos.
The more fundamental reason for chaoticism getting off to a slow start was that if you have a reductive mindset, unsolvable, nonlinear interactions among a large number of variable is a total pain to study. Thus most researchers tried to study complicated things by limiting the number of variables considered so that things remained tame and tractable.
And this guarantees the incorrect conclusion that the world is mostly about linear, additive predictability and nonlinear chaoticism was a weird anomaly that could mostly be ignored.
Until it couldn't be anymore, as it became clear that chaoticism lurked behind the most interesting complicated things. A cell, a brain, a person, a society, was more like the chaoticism of a cloud than the reductionism of a watch.
...The growing interest in chaos theory generated the sound of a zillion butterfly wings flapping. Given that, it was inevitable that various thinkers began to proclaim that the unpredictable, chaotic cloud-ness of human behavior is where free will runs free. Hopefully the material already covered, showing what chaoticism is and isn't, will help show how this cannot be.
Sapolsky then describes two forms of the "giddy conclusion that chaoticism proves free will." Here's some key passages in Wrong Conclusion #1: The Freely Choosing Cloud.
But now to the critical mistake running through all this: determinism and predictability are very different things. Even if chaoticism is unpredictable, it is still deterministic. The difference can be framed a lot of ways.
One is that determinism allows you to explain why something happened, whereas predictability allows you to say what happens next. Another way is the woolly-haired contrast between ontology and epistemology; the former is about what is going on, an issue of determinism, while the latter is about what is knowable, an issue of predictability.
...We do something, carry out a behavior, and we feel like we've chosen, that there is a Me inside separate from all those neurons, that agency and volition dwell there. Our intuitions scream this, because we don't know about, can't imagine, the subterranean forces of our biological history that brought it about.
It is a huge challenge to overcome those intuitions when you still have to wait for science to be able to predict that behavior precisely. But the temptation to equate chaoticism with free will shows just how much harder it is to overcome those intuitions when science will never be able to predict precisely the outcomes of a deterministic system.
Sapolsky then moves to Wrong Conclusion #2: A Causeless Fire.
Go back to the figure at the top of page 141 with its demonstration with rule 22 that two different starting states can turn into the identical pattern and thus, it is not possible to know which of those two was the actual source.
This is the phenomenon of convergence. It's a term frequently used in evolutionary biology. In this instance, it's not so much that you can't tell which of two different possible ancestors a particular species arose from (e.g, "Was the ancestor of elephants three-legged or five-legged? Who can tell?").
It's more when two very different sorts of species have converged on the same solution to the same sort of selective challenge. Among analytical philosophers, the phenomenon is termed overdetermination -- when two different pathways could each separately determine the progression to the same outcome.
As one example of this, Sapolsky cites a fire starting in building A thanks to negligence. A separate unrelated nearby negligence led to a fire starting in building B. The two fires merge and converge, burning down building C between them. The owner of building C sues the other two owners, but each argues that if my fire hadn't happened, building C would still have burned down.
As another example, he cites a group of soldiers comprising a firing squad assigned to kill someone. A blank bullet is given to one of the soldiers at random, so it is impossible to tell who wasn't actually a killer. Sapolsky then says:
So you can't do radical eliminative reductionism and decide what single thing caused the fire, which button presser delivered the poison, or what prior state gave rise to a particular chaotic pattern. But that doesn't mean that the fire wasn't actually caused by anything, that no one shot the bullet-riddled prisoner, or that the chaotic state just popped up out of nowhere. Ruling out radical eliminative reductionism doesn't prove indeterminism.
...Where have we gotten at this point? The crushing of knee-jerk reductionism, the demonstration that chaoticism shows just the opposite of chaos, the fact that there's less randomness than often assumed and, instead, unexpected structure and determinism -- all of this is wonderful.
Ditto for butterfly wings, the generation of patterns on sea shells, and Will Darling. But to get from there to free will required that you mistake a failure of reductionism that makes it impossible to precisely describe the past or predict the future as proof of indeterminism.
In the face of complicated things, our intuitions beg us to fill up what we don't understand, even can never understand, with mistaken attributions.
"One is that determinism allows you to explain why something happened, whereas predictability allows you to say what happens next."
False.
Predictability is the Sine Que Non standard to prove a cause. Without predictability you cannot say you have eliminated all other possibilities, nor achieved enough control to confirm what you think was the cause.
"So you can't do radical eliminative reductionism and decide what single thing caused the fire, which button presser delivered the poison, or what prior state gave rise to a particular chaotic pattern. But that doesn't mean that the fire wasn't actually caused by anything,"
It means you haven't proven exactly what did or did not cause the fire. You've got a dead soldier, that is all. It might have been a heart attack from fear. It might have been a live wire on the ground no one noticed. You may know a lot about how guns work but you may know nothing of what actually happened here today.
You don't know enough to make it conclusive.
Your system in this example is closed, however...You have a set number of soldiers and guns, and just one bullet. One of them had to do it. And the working of the guns is a proven entity.
But if you don't really know what is going on, there could be any other factor possible.
Consider quantum mechanic states. The one we talk about alot says there is 50% chance of a particle existing in a location. But what about the probabilities much smaller, under 5%, under 1%?
The determinist insists they don't matter. The Chaos theory expert knows they may mean everything.
But the universe isn't a closed system. We don't actually understand all the variables well enough to draw such a conclusion.
When it comes to the universe, at best we know 5% of it...and 95% is unknown.
So drawing conclusions about what we don't know, and trying to pretend we do, trying to pretend the universe is a closed system is purely unscientific. Just foolishness.
The whole argument for strict determinism is a fool's errand and has largely been disproved.
https://bigthink.com/hard-science/95-percent-universe-mystery/#:~:text=Everything%20we%20know%20%E2%80%94%20everything%20we,%2C%20don't%20yet%20understand.
As pointed out earlier, "random" in-determinate variability must be established in every single hard and soft scientific experiment before causality of a variable can be proven. You prove the in-determinate nature of human understanding, to a calculated degree, in order to establish the level of change needed to conclude you have an effect. And that is a probability. Not a statement of fact.
But you can only prove what you can replicate or accurately predict.
So much of the universe falls outside those two parameters of science that you cannot conclude the universe is a closed system. And therefore the case for absolute determinism fails.
With complex systems, you cannot predict how they will interact with any accuracy over any period of time.
Often unique variations continue to crop up, and that destroys the utility of the argument for determinism. You may say that the inputs appear deterministic, but the power to influence is attenuated to such a degree, by complex factors, that they are not functionally deterministic at all. If you take away any one of those independent factors that were deterministic for individual variables, you may see that they no longer have any effect whatsoever on the outcomes of a complex interaction. Interactions can not only attenuate but entirely nullify the deterministic forces from which they sprang.
But OK, argue from ignorance, argue the linear approach...Do your thing.
I actually don't understand why determinists insist on believing that they know so much about reality they can draw a conclusion of absolute determinism, and a closed system, which is really what arguing for determinism is trying, poorly, to do.
Posted by: Spence Tepper | October 27, 2023 at 02:33 PM
The notion that all the events of one's life are inevitable is an interesting thought experiment. If everything had to unfold as it did, then the weight of the past loses its reality, and peace results.
In that context, I can see how the no-free-will philosophy has a specific, practical value.
That seems to be different from what Sapolsky is arguing. That we have no will.
The problem with Sapolsky's argument is that he needs 400 pages to argue it, and most philosophers do not agree with his radical reductionist take. It's an idea that's been around at least since Spinoza.
But despite the 400 pages, what Sapolsky is trying to prove is unprovable. The idea that there's no such thing as choice, is pseudoscientific.
That which is pseudoscientific attempts to describe the real world by making purely unfalsifiable predictions.
An unfalsifiable prediction is a prediction that defines every conceivable outcome as something that confirms the hypothesis.
Determinism doesn't make falsifiable predictions, only unfalsifiable ones; therefore, determinism is pseudoscientific.
Sapolsky states that 30 billion neurons collectively interact based on everything from what happened at the last minute to all of evolution. He has also stated to prove free will you would have to demonstrate that neurons that caused a particular behavior would be operating independently of all the other neurons that could have influenced it and everything else in its developmental history and evolution. Check out his recent interview in the NYT. There is clearly no way possible to run any type of experiment that could prove this to be false. He has a lot of interesting connections and theories, but his main conclusion doesn't pass a basic test of unfalsifiability to make it good science.
I just don't see any conceivable way of developing an experiment that could disprove determinism, which would render it unfalsifiable. No matter how much-perceived agency an actor could display in an experiment, determinism can always say 'That's simply the only result that would've been and no choice was ever-present'. This also covers all subjective feelings of agency.
Here's another consideration: a theory that makes everything ridiculous is unsound. A theory that reduces choice and morality to dust is likewise unsound. No choice and no morality are the conclusions of Sapolsky's hard determinism.
Posted by: Sant64 | October 28, 2023 at 09:00 AM
I think people are attracted to the theory of no free will when they’re feeling powerless or overwhelmed.
Personally, I would rather take on the suffering of others and hurt when they hurt than to ever throw my hands in the air and just say, “we’ll, there’s nothing we can do.”
It might might be painful as hell, but I’ll go through hell to get to the other side. We have choices. We have power. And we should exercise those things to bring an end to suffering.
Posted by: S | October 28, 2023 at 06:51 PM
Love is the ultimate source of strength. And true love will sacrifice everything to reach a place of peace for everyone.
Today, we live in dark times where certain leaders believe oppression is strength. Oppression is a pathetic attempt to retain power—the weakest kind of power.
Posted by: S | October 28, 2023 at 06:55 PM
I will smile when you laugh,
I will rejoice when you are happy.
I will cry when you cry,
And I will do everything I can to lift your burden.
Because I know that you and I are the same.
Joy is incomplete when God’s souls continue to suffer.
Posted by: S | October 28, 2023 at 07:01 PM