Watch this video of Sapolsky talking about accepting no free will

Here's a thought-provoking video of Robert Sapolsky speaking about how difficult it is for him, and others, to experientially live as if free will doesn't exist, even though he's spent fifty years not believing in it.

I've made the video start at this point of the interview. The next 20 minutes or so are interesting, as is the entire interview, since the conversation moves into atheism and other subjects. Enjoy, whether or not you agree with Sapolsky.

Comments

[wooohoo 🥳]

Well, the cool thing about this perspective is none of us can be judged “guilty” of anything. 👍 👍 👍

[woo hoo]

Free will is folly. We’re here to learn that… free willl is SELFISH ago the core.

We all deserve nothing more or less than love. We are all the same… in the grand scheme of things we are one being.

[Awareness]

Free Willy
https://youtu.be/HeGvkzEl4W4?feature=shared
Lol

[um]

Did he say anything about ....emerging??

The way he uses the word EMERGING reminds me of something to be found in psychotherapy ..ALL forms.

In their teachings manuals, somewhere in the beginning, one will find a remark that the effectiveness of the therapy depends on "the presence of a therapeutic relationship."
BUT
That is all, ....nowhere in the remaining part of the manual is explained what such an relationship is all about and how its to be created.
In modern lingo it is called .."a click"

So ..how is emergency created out of chaos.

[Spence Tepper]

That we are the product of creation and act as we were made are pretty obvious things.

Sapolsky admits he rarely is able to live according to his own philosophy, and perhaps because, while the elements make sense objectively, we are subjective beings who must make decisions, must raise children, must hold ourselves accountable to our own standards in order to meet our commitments, etc. And all this in a condition of relative ignorance. Our senses and awareness are limited.

We must choose teachers and leaders and colleagues all the time. Must determine what is helping and what is hurting for ourselves and in our community.

The very basis of Faith is an understanding of our wretched biological condition (St. Paul famously wrote about this... About the limitations of "The body" and the compulsions of the body to do what we know is hurtful and wrong).

We can do all this knowing we are the product of creation, being humble knowing that we should not judge or blame anyone, given our state of relative ignorance, and learn to love everyone.

These are actually spiritual qualities once we realize how small we, physically, actually are. That's what spirituality is, an acceptance that there is something greater, even a concept, an idea, greater than these bags of chemicals allow. But we can strive for that. And actually science demonstrates that can be very healthy.

Then what is the fruit of such an understanding?

Humility, compassion, love, acceptance, helpfulness.

We are all on the same sinking boat, but at night, we can see the stars. And dream.

That is also part and parcel of our condition, and we can honor that in everyone, whatever beliefs help them get there. We can encourage dreaming and believing and faith in more precisely because of our limitations. No need to argue over our limited capacity to understand.

Most religions contain such ethics, but they are often entirely lost in the parochialism of those same religions. The humility they teach as a lifestyle that is more functional is lost in their exclusivity.

Once we start thinking we know more than we actually do all the humility that accrues from submitting our will to a higher will, even the very will of reality, is lost.

When Sapolsky discusses the limitations of our biology he points out the struggle adults have from the conditioned brain molded by childhood. It's a permanent condition, though we can move our experience to other parts of the brain through meditation. Then we can rise above fight and flight, beyond worry, fear, hatred, anxiety and move to peace. We can indeed become the people we need. We can become our own best friend.

But for that to happen we must believe in it long enough to practice. We must believe in something more, in whatever form we can. And so through practice and discipline we rise above the limitations of the body and its conditionung.

We make for ourselves our environment.

As I quoted from Freud,
"The son is the father of the man."

And in this notion is the hope of change.

You can call it free will, you can call it responsibility, you can call it conditioning. You can call it God's will vs my will.

We are able to learn to see other options and to take them.

It's a beautiful thing.

So there are elements in the human brain that help us overcome our compulsions and anxieties. And we should help each other believe in, explore and mine that capacity. It's a discipline and a practice. We can grow that in stages.

When Sapolsky discusses Atheism and ethics he argues that the two are highly compatible. Just as with the spirituality behind most religions.

These things are not different. They are understood in the culture bound concepts we live under.

When you want to change, expose yourself to the environment conducive to it.

And avoid environments that don't help your journey.

And learn to see that both such environments exist within yourself.

[Ron E.]

I’ve watched some of the interview and will watch more later. As one who also realises that here is no such thing as free will it made me question in the past, why people still cling to the belief in free will. Sapolsky talks of the psychological benefits of believing in free will which are of course understandable. Also, in my experience very few people ever get to the point in their lives to even question free will, it is simply accepted without question.

I’ve mentioned previously that to have free will there needs to be an independent, autonomous soul or self, some sort of non-physical entity within us. Yet, it’s comparatively easy to observe that there is no self (or anything like a separate self) that influences our choices.

The idea of a self with free will naturally follows from the way we feel ourselves to be separate, free thinking/acting individuals, able to make decisions and choices, whereas our choices can be observed to arise from past (and any useful new) experiences that becomes the information influencing the vast networking of neurons and synapses in the brain.

Neither the self, free will or consciousness should really be described as illusion, they are just not ‘things’ in their own right. We are creatures that are conscious; to view consciousness as a thing only arises because we add the adjective ‘ness’ making it into a mysterious entity separate from our natural biologies. In similar vein we habitually feel the self (with a free will) to be a thing, instead of a property of the biological brain/body processes.

I would say that to believe in an entity that is a separate a self with free will and is responsible for consciousness, may arise from spiritual or religious beliefs and thinking – and of course, from the intuitive assumption of being a free agent, something that underwrites our survival instincts.

[um]

@ Spence

Without further comment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahiya_doctrine